Class as Performance in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven

It has been noted that Sarah Orne Jewett’s texts resist easy classification in form and structure. Are her book-length works Deephaven and The Country of the Pointed Firs novels? Collections of short stories? Sketches? Jewett’s slipperiness extends beyond the issue of structure, however. Majorie Pryse, in her influential article “Sex, Class, and ‘Category Crisis’: Reading Jewett’s Transitivity,” argues that Jewett’s resistance to easy categorization and classification causes some critics to misread Jewett’s treatment of issues of gender, race, and class as well. Indeed, Jewett, known for writing women-centered texts that focus on the representation of communities in her native Maine, has alternately been praised for her celebration of women and questioning of gendered categories and criticized for her alleged promotion of racist and classist ideas that reinforce the privileges of being of the white and middle- or upper-class. This latter reading of Jewett undercuts the idea of her being truly inclusive in her work.

I am particularly interested in looking at how Jewett’s depiction of class resists easy classification, recognizing, of course, that class cannot be considered without an awareness of how this issue intersects with gender and race. The issue of class itself is complicated. Clearly, it has associations with economic power, but it is also culturally defined; being well-educated and having certain manners, for example, are associated with class, and, indeed, Jewett seems often to play with the idea of manners as a class marker. In this paper, I am interested in all these aspects of class. Specifically, I am interested in how Jewett plays with the issue of class in Deephaven in ways that sometimes seem contradictory. At times, she clearly defines the class differences between the novel’s two main protagonists, middle- and upper-class young Boston women, and most of the residents of the Maine country town they are visiting for the summer. At other times, however, there is a blurring of this class divide, which occurs when the young women are able to react to other characters with compassion, sympathy, or genuine emotional engagement. Additionally, I would argue, the issues of class are problematized when the protagonists “perform,” or act out, different social class roles. The young protagonists become more than mere observers, or “tourists,” even if they do not fully transcend class boundaries.

It was Jewett’s focus, in works like Deephaven, on relationships between women, her women-centric communities, and her creation of characters who often did not fit gender stereotypes that resulted in renewed attention to her work in the 1970s by feminist critics. However, while Jewett continues to have her champions, some later critics point to what they see as problematic patterns in her depiction of race and class. Critic June Howard notes the divide and has described the separate critical impulses as being divisible into those that are “historicizing” and those that are “feminist,” with feminist work tending to be more “celebratory” of Jewett’s work and historicizing work more often a source of critique (qtd. in Pryse 38).

One of the criticisms leveled against Jewett, which would be more consistent with what Howard would term the “historicizing” category, is that her characters sometimes behave as “tourists,” outsiders who temporarily enjoy a simplified and sentimentalized version of quaint village life without truly experiencing the hardships the villagers, most of whom occupy a lower socioeconomic position, must endure. Amy Kaplan is one who levels this criticism, pointing to the narrator in The Country of Pointed Firs as one who engages in “literary tourism.” Kaplan notes the narrator is an urban woman of a higher social class than the townspeople she engages with, and because of her position, she is able to visit the rural countryside and then withdraw whenever she chooses—she is merely an observer absorbing the interesting local culture (qtd. in Pryse 31). Other critics make similar charges. Although Kaplan is referring to The Country of Pointed Firs, the protagonists in Deephaven, one of whom is also the narrator, share a background similar to that of the narrator of The Country of Pointed...