“Have You Not Heard of Baptiste?”: Educating the Reader in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Jeannette”

Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short story “Jeannette,” first published in Scribner’s Monthly in December 1874 and the following year included in the anthology Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches, has attracted little notice, despite the vigorous Woolson revival over the past few decades.¹ Very early critics who mentioned “Jeannette” typically did so only in passing and treated it as a love-gone-awry tale. For instance, Lyon N. Richardson, in his 1940 article on Woolson (whom he dubs the “‘Novelist Laureate’ of America”), acknowledges the story in one sentence of plot summary: “At Fort Mackinac, in ‘Jeannette,’ a young Boston physician, in spite of his sophisticated rationalizations, is falling an unwilling victim to his love of an impetuous native maid of French, Indian, and English ancestry; but though the young man’s reason fails to guide him, her instinct easily rescues them—for she gives her hand to a local fisherman.”² In his book on Woolson, Rayburn S. Moore allots one slim paragraph to “Jeannette,” which he reads as a study of contrasts. He describes it by saying that “a French half-breed girl is the central character. Her beauty and coquetry attract the attention of Rodney Prescott, the scion of an old New England family and an officer in the army at Mackinac Island. . . . The contrast between Jeannette’s ignorance and natural grace and Prescott’s culture and acquired polish is skillfully developed in this sketch, and her scornful rejection of his suit in favor of one of her own kind is brought off nicely.”³ Neither critic mentions either the narrator whose perspective shapes the story or the work’s conclusion, which takes place long after the events of the main plot. These critics’ lack of engagement with Woolson’s themes or techniques in “Jeannette” suggests none are worth mentioning, helping to account for the absence of attention to this piece even after the revival of interest in Woolson’s writing that began in the 1980s.⁴

The story has received its fullest treatment from Sharon L. Dean, one of those most responsible for Woolson’s return to public attention. In her book Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound, Dean discusses “Jeannette” and other early Woolson stories in her chapter on “Regional Bias and Ethnic Diversity,” a title that reflects her reading of this narrative as being not about thwarted lover Rodney or nature/culture contrasts but about the tensions caused by Jeannette’s ethnicity. Dean rightly puts the narrator Sarah, not Rodney or the French-Indian young woman, at the center of the story, and does a fine job of situating “Jeannette” within a context of nineteenth-century attitudes towards and actions against Native Americans. Dean recounts Woolson’s career-long interest in ethnocentrism, but her analysis of “Jeannette” remains in the service of her book’s focus on the writer’s sense of home and rootedness.⁵

A recent Woolson anthology, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Selected Stories and Travel Narratives (2004), edited by Victoria Brehm and Dean, includes “Jeannette” in its section entitled “The Great Lakes.” Despite Dean’s earlier interest in Sarah, here Brehm and Dean focus their introduction’s paragraph on “Jeannette” on setting and on the title character, described as “an idealized primitive . . . who chooses to remain in her insular French and Indian culture rather than marry an army surgeon who offers her education and travel.”⁶ Although the editors acknowledge this to be a complex story, they leave it to readers to mine its complexities.

Other critics perhaps ignore “Jeannette” because it doesn’t easily fit into the categories that form the bulk of discussion about Woolson’s work. For instance, despite its Mackinac Island location, landscape functions differently here than in the other Great Lakes sketches of Castle Nowhere; nor does “Jeannette” focus on an artist figure, as some of Woolson’s most studied works do; and its pre-Reconstruction setting excludes it from the attention of those Woolson scholars interested in the author’s depictions of a nation coping with the aftermath of civil war.

The fact that “Jeannette” is...