Louise Dickinson Rich’s: Middlebrow House in the Big Woods

In the 1933–34 academic year, a Malden High School sophomore English class in the town of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, just south of Boston, lost its teacher suddenly over winter break. The teacher was Louise Dickinson, and the previous summer she had fallen in love with a person, Ralph Rich, and a place, the Rapid River, that led her to drop everything to live in a remote outpost in the western woods of Maine. This romantic story, dear reader, would form the backdrop of her life as a prolific writer; much of her work would be focused on Maine narratives, and much of it directed at those who were, like herself, white middle-class metropolitans “from away.”¹

The Maine book that launched Louise Dickinson Rich’s decades-long career was We Took to the Woods, first published in 1942. It proved to be a literary touchstone, garnering serialization in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club, a feature in Life magazine, multiple translations and reissues, and even an Army edition. It was read eagerly throughout the twentieth century and remains in print to this day. We Took to the Woods is a rustication memoir, blending humorous anecdotes about living off the grid with observations about Maine woods culture, flora, and fauna; general advice on rural life; musings on contemporary society; charming dog and skunk stories; and the occasional recipe. While autobiographical, We Took to the Woods is also quite selective about the narratives it provides, eschewing confessions about the emotional and physical challenges of this lifestyle, which were myriad, in favor of breezy optimism and a firm conviction that living “naturally” and away from the materialistic and violent aspects of civilization were among the most fulfilling and healthful things a white middle-class person could do. Such characteristics rendered it a favorite of wartime critics. The book was clearly directed at middlebrow readers, assuming a certain level of education and knowledge in its literary and other cultural references, and projecting lifestyle advice for those interested in self culture. This essay focuses on how Rich’s representation of Maine woods living negotiated gender and class in ways that were simultaneously traditional and liberatory, embracing and rejecting of familial domesticity, and transcendent and accepting of white middle-class values. Arguably, the genre of the rustication memoir, a largely feminized form that has received little critical attention to date, allows Rich a great deal of latitude when it comes to negotiating gender, especially in areas concerning culinary prowess, clothing, and housekeeping.² But, as a solidly middlebrow genre, the rustication memoir is less progressive in terms of its class politics, as an examination of Rich’s adoption of thrift and parsimony reveals.

Sarah Louise Dickinson, a self-professed relative of the poet Emily Dickinson, was born in 1903 into a financially struggling middle-class household in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Although both her parents worked at the weekly newspaper her father ran, they were not particularly liquid, and the family rented a series of houses without electricity or plumbed bathrooms at a time when such things were common in their community. She was to comment in a 1955 memoir about her childhood that the Dickinson family “lived almost primitively in a time and place that was not primitive and not geared to primitive living” (Innocence 43). This primary education in basic living notwithstanding, Louise attended Bridgewater Normal School (now Bridgewater State University) and trained to be an English teacher. After an early failed marriage, she taught in New Jersey, which allowed her to visit New York City regularly on the weekends; there, by chance, she met Alfred Stieglitz, who invited her to his studio and introduced her to Georgia O’Keeffe (Arlen 19). According to biographer Alice Arlen, while Louise found life in the New York metropolitan region stimulating, by 1933 she had moved back to Bridgewater, and it was on a canoe trip with her sister that summer that she met Ralph Eugene Rich. Rich was a recently divorced engineer who had elected to remove himself from the stresses of the...