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6 Women’s Charity vs. Scienti¤c Philanthropy in Sarah Orne Jewett Monika Elbert Women’s greater involvement in gift-giving today is not simply an effect of their immediate experiences in the household. Rather, it is a consequence of their participation in a discourse of relationships. Through that discourse the present generation of women, and their predecessors, have created their own relational cultures. . . . The dominant social de¤nitions of the gift economy today are derived from a feminized ideology of love. —David Cheal, The Gift Economy (183) “Women are, in all ordinary cases, by far the best visitors of the poor. A true woman carries with her an atmosphere of in®uence which makes itself felt. She can go, without offence [sic], where men would not be welcome.” —Rev. R. E. Thompson, Manual for Visitors among the Poor (176) In many of Sarah Orne Jewett’s stories, women express their interconnectedness through gift-giving, and the gift becomes a symbol that looms large in the pastoral settings of Jewett’s landscapes. One should not consider the exchange of gifts a simple and inane nostalgic activity, but rather a gesture that re®ects a type of moral economy prevalent among Jewett’s feminine communities. In his extended study about “gift economy” (see epigraph above), David Cheal, drawing from anthropological studies by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss, concludes that men and women have always “given” differently—that men are involved in a notion of “political economy” because of their outside/public employment , whereas women, through their domestic roles, are more familiar with “the discourse of moral economy” (183). Cheal maintains that in modern times, even with women’s changing roles, women still equate gift-giving with intimacy, and certainly, the “predecessors”of the present generation he talks about are those women who have an intimate connection to the home and to the household, women like those who inhabit Jewett’s New England settings. Focusing on several wellknown stories by Jewett, namely “The Flight of Betsey Lane,” “The Town Poor,” “Going to Shrewsbury,” “Aunt Cynthy Dallett,” and “Martha’s Lady,” and several uncollected works, one can explore the rami¤cations of Jewett’s female-centered and communal (or extended family type of) charity. In these stories, there are often attempts by the larger male community or bureaucratic, patriarchal institution (the selectmen, or the town council, or a greedy male relative) to suppress a woman’s individuality by having her sequestered in an almshouse or claustrophobic small space, or by making her move from her ancestral home to smaller quarters or shared lodging. However, with the help of more benevolent women in the community, the poor, homeless woman is able to transcend the limited and sparse vision of life, at least momentarily, and to indulge in a quest that would grant her dignity—ironically enough, by her own ability to give. Thus the image of the “gift” takes on profound signi¤cance in the Jewett woman’s quest for self-respect and selfreliance , as it also shows the need for women to bond and to enjoy the intimacy of sharing. An understanding of contemporaneous philanthropic practices is essential for a proper understanding of Jewett’s revolutionary women, who resisted the urge to bureaucratize giving and loving. It is true, as recent Jewett critics like Alison Easton and Sarah Way Sherman have pointed out, that Jewett was not able to overcome fully all her prejudices (in her ¤ction) against women born of a lower class than she.1 But Jewett did try to show the higher moral ground as that of being charitable to women of even the most modest means, and the benefactresses who help women of the underclass are exalted in her ¤ction. This attitude was in contradistinction to two movements at the end of the nineteenth century that succeeded in dehumanizing, even demonizing, the poor, and in distancing the ¤nancially solvent individual (the upper or middle class) from the poverty-stricken individual. Social Darwinism, which grew out of Herbert Spencer’s notion of the “survival of the ¤ttest” (indeed , he coined the term), suggested that the poor deserved what they received as their lot in life and attributed the poor’s misfortune to physi158 Monika Elbert cal sloth or moral lassitude. Applying Darwin’s theories of evolution to the structure of society, the British sociologist Spencer facilitated laissez-faire capitalist thinking in economics, which was welcomed by many in the United States. Based on Darwin’s ideas of natural...

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