Rethinking Regionalism: Sarah Orne Jewett's Mental Landscapes

This essay proposes a new account of regionalism, one that views the movement as an epistemology rather than as an ethnography. It takes seriously Horace Garland's championing of regionalism as a global form, reading the work of Sarah Orne Jewett in the context of attempts by American and European writers to depict the imaginative freedom enjoyed by consciousness in the lives of even seemingly the most provincial of characters. In the process community for Jewett is revealed to be less a matter of people seeing one another than of people thinking of one another. In its most radical form, this practice involves externalizing one's own experience, turning it into something that can be viewed from the outside—as if one's own life belonged to someone else.