Jewett's fiction is commonly identified with a genre known as local color writing. As with Stowe's early works, nineteenth-century women's local color writing developed from a reaction against sentimentalism and the cult of domesticity, and later prefigured its own version of realism (Donovan 3).

In her book New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition, Josephine Donovan defines this emerging realism as distinct from realism in male fiction:

The New England local colorists...presented the first women's literary tradition which moved beyond a negative critique of reified male-identified customs and attitudes. The New England women created a counter world of their own, a rural realm that existed on the margins of patriarchal society, a world that nourished strong, free women. The culmination of this tradition is to be found in Jewett's master-work The Country of the Pointed Firs. (4)

Writers like Jewett used the genre, and its sensitivity to setting, to develop a unique, imaginative and gendered space. While realism proper often insisted on stark pessimism, Jewett's realism required a fictional community in which women could live more authentically (although not necessarily more happily).

The suggestion in Jewett's day (and even now) is that works written in the local color genre are essentially quaint depictions of an area, bereft of grand ideas which allegedly distinguish great and worthwhile works of literature from insignificant works. This definition of local color from A Handbook to Literature gives a good sense of the modern appraisal of the genre:

A subdivision of realism, local color writing lacked the basic seriousness of true realism; largely it was content to be entertainingly informative about the surface of special regions. It emphasized verisimilitude of detail without being much concerned about the truth to the larger aspects of life. ("Local Color Writing")

Even if this definition makes allowances for a minority of local color works, it does suggest that the genre is some sort of unfortunate stepchild of realism and travel writing, concerned only with the surface of life.

Is it fair to say that Jewett is interested in merely lighthearted descriptions of Dunnett Landing and its inhabitants? If not, is her classification as a local color writer a kind of limitation of the significance of her work? Is Jewett unfairly tethered to her genre, does she provide an example of the genre's potential, or does she transform the genre altogether?

The answers to these questions may not be binary. Jewett seems to simultaneously draw on and expand the local color genre. The inherent distance between the narrator and her community is typical of local color fiction, as is the narrator's use of standard English contrasted against the local's use of dialect. Donovan argues, however, that the narrator's marginality is more conspicuous in The Country of the Pointed Firs than in other local color works, perhaps suggesting an increasing distance between late 19th century women and a martriarchal figure like Almira Todd (Donovan 105).

Jewett's work articulates two major tropes of local color literature: "The conflicting attractions of rural and urban life," and "the tension between individualism and the participation of the self in a community identity" (Donovan 103). In The Country of the Pointed Firs, the narrator's occasional refusal to participate in established community roles and ways of thinking sometimes provides her with a perspective which is not available to the other characters (as with her conversations with Elijah in chapter 20).

The Country of the Pointed Firs raises important questions about how we define and evaluate genres. While the low appraisal of the local color genre may, in some ways, be justified, Jewett's work perhaps expands (rather than transcends) the genre's provincial boundaries, and reveals its previously untapped resources. Jewett's expansion is so vigorous that we're left to wonder if, in the process, the genre itself is altered by her presence.

Refer, if you haven't already, to some of the preceding paragraphs for some useful questions.

As any good consumer knows, packaging matters. Imagine if the Maine Board of Tourism distributed this book. Would you be clamoring to visit Dunnet Landing?

Travel narratives often permit the reader to imagine that she or he experiences what the narrator experiences. To what extent does Jewett make this experience available in that way?

If this book were turned into a movie, what might the promotional preview look like? For whom would the movie be marketed? What part(s) of the novel would the preview/film exploit?