Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 237feelin’s, I expect,” Almira confides, “but a woman’s heart is different”), the man she
liked and married, and who then died at sea before he could discover where her
heart truly lay. She learns about what she calls Almira’s “peculiar wisdom”: her habit,
for instance, of explaining people by comparing them to natural objects or vice versa
(“Grown trees act that way sometimes, same’s folks”). What she learns, in sum, is to
see and appreciate Almira as an “absolute, archaic” embodiment of the life and
landscape of Dunnett Landing. “Life was very strong in her,” the narrator observes
of Almira, “as if some force of Nature were personified in this simple-hearted woman
and gave her cousinship to the ancient deities. ... She was a great soul.” This sense
that Almira Todd and her surrounds belong to each other is never as strong as at the
conclusion of the story. Departing from Dunnett Landing at the end of summer,
the narrator looks back from the boat carrying her away and sees Almira on the
shore. “Close at hand, Mrs. Todd seemed able and warm-hearted,” the narrator
observes, “but her distant figure looked mateless and appealing, with something
self-possessed and mysterious.” As earthy and yet as strange, miraculous as her
environment, Almira Todd then vanishes into it: the narrator loses sight of her,
finally, as she “disappeared ... behind a dark clump of juniper and the pointed firs.”
The note of passing away, departure, on which The Country of the Pointed Firs
finishes gathers up intimations of sadness and loss that quietly circulate through the
entire narrative. This is a book about the aging of life and communities. Almira
Todd vanishes at the end of the story; and, equally, the life she rehearses, in all its
homeliness and heroism, is vanishing too. Even the narrator, for all her affection for
Dunnett Landing, is returning as she must to the city. The subtle beauty of this
narrative stems, in part, from Jewett’s ability to achieve a balance between emotional
contraries. A lively account of a great “out-of-door feast,” for example, is shadowed
by the sense of the loneliness, the isolation that is the norm for those gathered there,
from various parts of “that after all thinly settled region.” Moments of union and
communion, times of happiness, are caught as they pass, but the eventual stress is
always on their passing. “So we die before our own eyes,” the narrator comments on
one such passing; “so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.”
All we have left then, while we live, is the feeling of being “rich with the treasures of
a new remembrance.” What comments like this suggest is that, in her best tales like
this one, Jewett manages something quite remarkable: something that other great
fiction commonly called regionalist, like that of her disciple Willa Cather, also
sometimes manages. She weaves together the great theme of pastoral, that the best
days are the first to flee, and a major theme in American thought and writing at the
turn of the century, that an older, simpler form of society is dying. Her work is
elegiac, singing of old, half-forgotten things, and also strenuously, perceptively
social. Jewett, perhaps better than any writer of her time, catches a world as it passes,
and then places it, sadly, sympathetically, within the long procession of history,
the whole story of human passing. That mood, that inclination, is beautifully
encapsulated in a moment when the narrator accompanies her new neighbors and
friends along a wide path cutting through a field near the sea, to a place where they
are going to have a party. “We might have been a company of ancient Greeks goingGGray_c03.indd 237ray_c 03 .indd 237 8 8/1/2011 7:54:18 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 18 AM