236 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900for children, a historical romance, and a collection of poems. She formed several
important and close friendships with other women, among them Annie Fields
(1834–1915), the wife of James T. Fields (1817–1881), the publisher and editor of
the Atlantic Monthly. And she encouraged the young Willa Cather to write as she
did, about her own remote homeplace. She traveled occasionally, to Boston in par-
ticular to visit Annie Fields, but she always returned to her home territory in Maine.
And all her best work focuses on that territory, its life, language, and landscape. This
is local color writing, to an extent, but it is also writing that discovers the elemental
in the local. The Country of the Pointed Firs, for example, uses a device common in
stories normally described as regionalist or belonging to the local color school: the
visitor from the city, who is gradually educated in the ways and habits of a remote
community – and who encourages the reader to accompany her, to share in
this sentimental education. What the unnamed female visitor and narrator of
Jewett’s book learns, though, is not just the peculiar customs of a particular place.
She learns too, and so do we, of the deep feelings beneath the distances, the placid
surfaces of communal life. She learns about the problems of women and of aging –
for this is predominantly a community of old people – and about love in a cold
climate. Above all, she learns about her and our kinship with those initially strange,
distant people, and the further lesson they can offer her, and us, in essential humanity.
“I saw these simple natures clear,” the narrator declares at the end of the story: “their
counterparts are in every village in the world, thank heaven, and the gift to one’s life
is only in its discernment.”
For the narrator, the growth in understanding is also a “growth in true friendship.”
Arriving in the small harbor town of Dunnett Landing, she is gradually included in
the lives of the townspeople; in particular, she forms a close bond with Mrs. Almira
Todd, her landlady, a “herb-gatherer, and rustic philosopher,” Almira’s brother
William, and their mother Mrs. Blackett. Her sojourn in Dunnett Landing involves,
among other things, a process of healing for her. Long distracted by “the hurry of life
in a large town,” she begins to rediscover simplicity, security, coherence, to feel “solid
and definite again, instead of a poor, incoherent being.” “Life was resumed,” she
explains, “and anxious living blew away as if it had not been.” She owes this res-
toration of self and spirit, this growth of knowledge and affection, to many people
in Dunnett Landing. There is a woman called the “Queen’s twin” because she was
born at the same time as Queen Victoria, who teaches the narrator about true
nobility, the grace of natural aristocracy. There is a local woman she hears about
called Joanna the hermit, who reveals to her the poles of solitude and companionship
between which we all make our lives. There is Esther, the woman whom William
Todd loves and eventually marries, who reminds the narrator of how much heroism,
passion, and glory can be found behind the simplest, quietest, least immediately
striking exterior. As she walks with her beloved William, the narrator tells us, Esther
“wore the simple look of sainthood and unfeigned devotion”; “she might have been
Jeanne d’Arc returned to her sheep, touched with age and gray with the ashes of a
great remembrance.” Above all, there is Almira Todd. Slowly, the narrator learns
about Almira’s past: the man she loved but never married (“he’s forgot our youthfulGGray_c03.indd 236ray_c 03 .indd 236 8 8/1/2011 7:54:18 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 18 AM