A History of American Literature

Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 235

writing with a political purpose, satire that mixes humor with anger: it comes as no

surprise to learn that Posey liked the work of Riley and Dunbar, but his favorite poet

was Robert Burns. It is also dialect writing that tries, more earnestly and successfully

than Posey does in his poetry, to catch the timbre and rhythms of the language he

heard spoken among his fellow tribesmen.

Regionalism in New England

“It is difficult to report the great events of New England; expression is so slight, and

those few words which escape us in moments of deep feeling look but meager on the

printed page.” The words are those of Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), from the

book that secured her place in American literature, The Country of the Pointed Firs

(1896). As it happens, she made her subject, not the “great events” of her native

region but little nameless acts of community, memory, or love. But she always tried

to capture the speech and silence of New England: the language in which, she said,

“there is some faint survival ... of the sound of English speech of Chaucer’s time,”

and the avoidance of any “vain shore of conversation” between people habituated to

quiet and solitude – who, perhaps, “spoke very little because they so perfectly under-

stood each other.” Jewett always, too, attempted to mine the deep feelings laconically

expressed in this speech and surreptitiously conveyed in this silence. “Such is the

hidden fire of enthusiasm in true New England nature,” the reader is told in The

Country of the Pointed Firs, “that, once given an outlet, it shines forth with almost

volcanic light and heat.” One of the many achievements of her fiction, in fact, is the

way Jewett subtly maneuvers her way between what another, later New Englander,

Robert Frost, was to term the fire and ice of the New England soul. This she does, not

least, through her adept use of metaphoric and dramatic contrast. The remote farms

and fishing towns she writes of are set between the vastnesses of the sea and the

woods, “the unconquerable, immediate forces of Nature.” That is part of the spirit of

their inhabitants: when one of the characters speaks, for instance, we are told that it

is “as if one of the gray firs had spoken.” But so is a “simple kindness that is the soul

of chivalry,” a domestic affection and a neighborliness that transforms a “low-storied

and broad-roofed” house, the site of a local reunion, into the likeness of “a motherly

brown hen” gathering together “the flock that came straying towards it from every

direction.” And so, too, is “love in its simplicity,” caught in the voiceless gestures of

her New England rural folk: “so moving,” as we learn in The Country of the Pointed

Firs, “so tender, so free from their usual fetters of self-consciousness.”

Jewett’s subject and setting was also, for most of her life, her home. She was born

and raised in Maine, near York, a place that supplied the model for Deephaven, the

harbor town of her early stories. Traveling with her father, a doctor, she observed the

isolation and decay of the dwindling farms and depopulated towns of the locality.

Reading the New England stories of Harriet Beecher Stowe, she began to discover

her vocation. Her first stories appeared in the Atlantic Monthly; and then a collection,

Deephaven (1877), established her reputation. This was followed by two novels, and

further collections of stories, including A White Heron (1886), two books

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