Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs

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Index

Overview
For the Instructor
Brainstorming
Mapping
Textual Analysis
Theoretical Approaches
Supplementary Assignments
Bibliography Overview

Having decided not to participate in Mrs. Begg's funeral procession, the narrator in Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs states, "I began to wonder if I ought not to have walked with the rest, instead of hurrying away at the end of the services. . . . but I had now made myself and my friends remember that I did not really belong to Dunnet Landing" ("At the Schoolhouse Window"). Jewett situates her protagonist on the threshold between two worlds: she is both an outsider and a friend, a sojourner and a resident in a small New England community.

Yet, through journeys, the community works diligently to include her in their personal and historical landscapes. Through his blend of historical and imaginative storytelling, Captain Littlepage takes the narrator on a journey into the past as well as to the improbable. Similarly, Mrs. Fosdick and Mrs. Todd include her in the circle of family history by narrating the story of Joanna's decision to isolate herself on Shell-heap Island. Furthermore, the narrator's literal (?) journeys to Green Island and to the Bowden reunion also work to slowly incorporate her into the community. For example, when she meets Mrs. Blackett upon arriving at Green Island, the narrator feels as if she"were an old and dear friend [even] before you let go her cordial hand" (Green Island); and when Mrs. Todd takes her to the pasture where she shares her memories of her late husband, the narrator "felt that we were friends now since she had brought me to this place" ("Where Pennyroyal Grew"). Similarly, at the end of her journey to the Bowden reunion with Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Blackett, the narrator states, "I came near feeling like a true Bowden, and parted from certain new friends as if they were old friends; we were rich with the treasure of a new remembrance" ("The Feast's End"). Thus while extended journeys away from Dunnet Landing by characters like Captain Littlepage and Joanna lead to isolation, travels to this setting reconfigure familial and community bonds. (is this last statement always true? how can I clarify it)?

Like the narrator, the reader gains a similar insider-outsider double-consciousness. The reader remains detached because of the limits of the printed text. Yet, through the reading process, s/he becomes part of Jewett's imaginative and picturesque linguistic landscape. Now, through the use of this electronic text, readers may journey into the text by making annotations and initiating discussion forums, which in turn may appease the double consciousness and help readers to "c[o]me near feeling like a true Bowden, and [part] from certain new friends as if they were old friends," and become "rich with the treasure of a new remembrance" ("The Feast's End").

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This site is designed for instructors interested in pursuing the "journey" theme in Jewett's novella. The following activities build critical thinking: from personal experiences and brainstorming to theoretical discussions. However, the activities can also be used independently of each other to meet individual class needs and levels. Included are several longer assignments designed to develop students' critical thinking and writing skills through a variety of scholarly approaches.

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Brainstorming

1. Ask students about their travel experiences. Where have they traveled? Why? What was the trip like? Did they learn anything new?

2. Have students begin to decipher the significance of "journeys" by brainstorming responses to the basic journalistic questions. Below is a sample chart:

WHO	Who goes on the journey? What is the impact of this departure on the person(s) left behind?
WHEN	What significance is there in the timing of the journey (symbolic season, day of week, holiday, year etc.)? To which important historical events might the trip be a reaction against?
WHERE	Does the person go to another place (city, state, country etc.)? Compare this new setting to the one the individual left. Explain the importance of the differences. A journey might not involve the person to physically travel to a new location, but rather, to travel deep within the self. What is the importance of the inward journey?
WHY	What are the reasons for the journey? vacation to escape a problem need for spiritual, personal, or psychological growth desire to learn about different places or people to colonize/discover a new setting
HOW	How does the individual "journey"? boat, plane, by foot, etc. mental/spiritual self-exploration by talking (exchanging stories) with others self-initiated (proactive) vs. forced
WHAT	What is the consequence of the completed journey? learns a life lesson learns a truth undergoes growth, change, or rebirth (positive or negative) experiences a "death," a form of destruction, or no growth gains new knowledge of self, others, etc. (re-definition) no result/stagnation gains new faith in self, other, God

3. Once students have completed the above chart in general terms, divide the class into groups, if the class is not already divided as such. Give each group a specific journey from Jewett's novella and have them work together to apply the above questions to the text. Or, you may give two groups the same journey, so that they can debate the discrepancies in their interpretations when they share their findings with the class.

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Mapping

1. Have the students look at maps of the real places to which Jewett refers. Discuss why she blends literal and imaginative landscapes.

Some links to maps relevant to the novella:
Map of Maine
South Berwick, Maine
Map of Tobago
Map of the Northwest Territories

2. In "Going in Circles: The Female Geography of Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs," Elizabeth Ammons describes the web-like nature of Jewett's journeys. She states:

Jewett's structure in [the novella] is, in contrast [to the typically linear male narrative], webbed, net-worked. Instead of being linear, it is nuclear, the narrative moves out from one base to a given point and back again, out to another point, and back again, out again, back again, and so forth, like arteries on a spider's web. Instead of building to an asymmetric height, it collects weight at the middle: the most highly charged experience of the book, the visit to Green Island, comes at the center of the book. . . not toward the end. . . . The narrator does not go through a series of people; she adds new friendships onto her life multidirectionally. (85)

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1. Although the narrator and Captain Littlepage do not go on a literal journey, the Captain's storytelling serves as a means to take her on a seafaring trip into the past and even to the Arctic. What is this voyage like? What does the narrator learn on this "trip" partly into the Captain's imagination?

2. What insights can you glean if you use the "Captain Littlepage" chapter as a ruler against which to compare the other journeys in the novella? Consider especially means of travel (literal vs. traveling through another person's storytelling), settings, fellow voyagers, and lessons learned.

3. In chapter 5, Captain Littlepage argues that "a community narrows down and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled newspaper." In what ways do the various journeys facilitated by shipping foster a movement out of the community, especially since there are many references to families traveling together? How does, in turn, the narrator's journey to Dunnet Landing make her "acquainted with foreign lands an' their laws" and help her to "g[e]t some sense o' proportion"? Consider this question especially in light of the narrator's reaction when William takes her to the great ledge at Green Island:

there above the circle of pointed firs we could look down over all the island, and could see the ocean that circled this and a hundred other bits of island-ground, the mainland shore and all the far horizons. It gave a sudden sense of space for nothing stopped the eye or hedged one in, -- that sense of liberty in space and time which great prospects always give. ("William")

5. Discuss the significance of the long procession during the Bowden reunion, about which the narrator states:

The plash of the water could be heard faintly, yet still be heard; we might have been a company of ancient Greeks going to celebrate a victory, or to worship the god of harvests in the grove above. It was strangely moving to see this and to make part of it. The sky, the sea, have watched poor humanity at its rites so long; we were no more a New England family celebrating its own existence and simple progress; we carried the tokens and inheritance of all such households from which this had descended, and were only the latest of our line. We possessed the instincts of a far, forgotten childhood. . . . ("The Bowden Reunion")

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Historical

1. The chapters surrounding Captain Littlepage's narrative may be an important place of departure for studying the moment in which Jewett was writing. The recurrent references to explorers and their expeditions in the Canadian Northwest Territories not only reveal Jewett's interest in journeys, but also perhaps her knowledge of the nineteenth-century's renewed interest in exploration. Jewett may have been interested in this topic because by 1815, there was a new initiative to explore this Canadian region by a new generation of adventurers: John Ors (1815), Lieutenant William Parry (1819), and John Franklin (1845). Between 1847 and 1887, there were several expeditions to locate the lost Franklin, but all were unsuccessful. Considering this information, discuss how such "current events" may have impacted Jewett.

2. Terry Heller states that Captain Littlepage's comment, "Oh yes, shipping is a very great loss. . . . It always gave credit to a town" (in "The Outer Island"), may be a reference to the Embargo Act of 1807 . . . which "devastated the smaller New England ports. Its purpose was to punish England and France for capturing neutral ships and impressing sailors for use in their fiercely contested war, but it was a costly, much-resented strategy" (345). Discuss how through such nostalgic reminiscences Jewett encodes her criticism of the impact of the Embargo Act on the Maine economy.

3. In Maine: A Bicentennial History, Charles Clark offers historical background that may connect historical events to Jewett's decision to have the narrator travel to Dunnet in the summer. Ask students to discuss Clark's observation and then apply it to the narrative. Clark states:

By 1900 at the latest, the Maine folk who still lived on farms south of Aroostook or made their living from the sea were conscious that time had somehow passed them by. The textile and paper industries were in a different world from theirs, and in any case were not enough to maintain the relative position in the Union in population and wealth with which Maine had begin her life as a state and which had been declining almost every since. . . .

And it was just then that the summer people began to come. . . .The first summer visitors of modern times came to Maine precisely to enjoy the past. Not that they know or cared much about history, most of them, but they were aware that away to the northeast of Boston, neither the beauties of nature nor the pace of life had yet been spoiled by the sudden industrialization and urbanization that were now transforming their home cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. (152-153)

1. Discuss the psychological dimension inherent in Mrs. Todd's journey to the pasture on Green Island. You may also want to consider how this journey influences the narrator.

2. Discuss how the concept of a journey can be personal as well as geographical. How do journeys into the self help characters gain new understanding or increased consciousness about their past, their feelings, or their sense of self?

Feminist

1. Do men and women differ in the type and/or purpose of their journeys in the novella?

2. How does Jewett challenge nineteenth-century ideologies of gender by writing what may be called a woman's "travel narrative"? How do the feminist dimensions of this narrative compare and contrast to the journeys which female characters under-take in works such as: Knight's The Journey of Sarah Kemble Knight, Rowlandson's captivity narrative, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Wharton's The House of Mirth, Chopin's The Awakening, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Petry's The Street, and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day?

3. Using the Elizabeth Ammon's theory of Jewett's web-like structure:

Writing Projects contains assignments that range from short projects on annotation and transcribing/analyzing an author's letters. The longer assignments relate to close textual analyses and longer theorized comparison-contrast arguments.

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Below are critical works about the literary and/or theoretical aspects of journeys, travel, and colonization in works by Jewett and other American authors.

Articles

Moreno, Karen K.
   "'A White Heron': Sylvia's Lonely Journey."
   Connecticut Review. 13.1 ( Spring 1991):81-85.

Erol, Sibel
   "Beyond the Divide: Lasky's Feminist Revision of the Westward Journey."
   Children's Literature Association Quarterly. 17. 1 (1992 Spring ):1992. 5-8.

Daugherty, Sarah B.
   "The Ideology of Gender in Howells' Early Novels."
   American Literary Realism. 25. 1 (1992 Fall): 1992. 2-19.

Hedrick, Nancy L.
   "Travel as Reflected by Pioneer Women of the West. "
   Kansas Quarterly. 18. 3 (1986): 1986. 23-29.

Books

Adams, Percy G.
   Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel.
   Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1983.

Bridgman, Richard.
   Traveling in Mark Twain.
   Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.

Brown, Sharon Rogers.
   American Travel Narratives as a Literary Genre from 1542 to 1832 : the Art of a Perpetual Journey.
   Lewiston N.Y. : Mellen P, 1993.

Campbell, Joseph.
   The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
   Princeton, N.J. : Princeton UP, 1972.

Christie, John Aldrich.
   Thoreau as World Traveler.
   New York, Columbia UP with the cooperation of the American Geographical Society, 1965.

Foster, Shirley.
   Across New Worlds: Nineteenth-Century Women Travelers and Their Writings.
   New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.

Frawley, Maria H.,
   A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England.
   Rutherford, [NJ]: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1994.

Greenblatt, Stephen Jay.
   Marvelous Possessions: the Wonder of the New World.
   Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

Greenfield, Bruce Robert.
   Narrating Discovery: the Romantic Explorer in American Literature, 1790-1855.
   New York: Columbia UP, 1992.

Islam, Syed Manzoorul.
   The Ethics of Travel: from Marco Polo to Kafka.
   Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996.

Kagle, Steven E., ed.
   America: Exploration and Travel.
   Bowling Green, Ohio : Bowling Green U Popular P, 1979.

Kaplan, Caren.
   Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement.
   Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

Lueck, Beth Lynne.
   American Writers and the Picturesque Tour: the Search for National Identity, 1790-1860.
   New York: Garland, 1997.

Mills, Sara.
   Discourses of Difference: an Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism.
   New York: Routledge, 1991.

Phillips, Richard.
   Mapping Men and Empire: a Geography of Adventure.
   New York: Routledge, 1997.

Porter, Dennis.
   Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing.
   Princeton, N.J. : Princeton UP, 1991.

Robertson, George ... [et al.], ed.
   Travelers'' Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement.
   New York: Routledge, 1994.

Smith, Evans Lansing.
   The Hero Journey in Literature: Parables of Poesis.
   Lanham, Md.: UP of America, 1997.

Stout, Janis P.    New York : St. Martin's Press, 1997.
   The Journey Narrative in American Literature: Patterns and Departures.
   Westport: Greenwood P, 1983.

Stowe, William W.
   Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture.
   Princeton, N.J. : Princeton UP, 1994.

Wright, Sarah Bird.
   Edith Wharton's Travel Writing: the Making of a Connoisseur.
   New York : St. Martin's P., 1997.

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