Innovating the Early Modern: Pastoral Cycle and Epiphany in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs

• Published in: Studies in American fiction 2024-03, Vol.51 (1), p.25-53
• Main Author: Olson, Kristen L
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 19th century; 20th century; Adaptations; Artists; Early modern period; Farming; Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849-1909); Literary history; Modernism; Pastoralism; Regionalism
• ISSN: 0091-8083; 2158-5806; 2158-5806; 2158-415X
• DOI: 10.1353/saf.2024.a932799

Art historians called her style groundbreaking, "resonant with the long-celebrated styles of more famous male artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian,"1 a "body of work that invites a reevaluation of modernism and its development. Likening its episodes to "arteries on a spider's web," Elizabeth Ammons traces the narrator's experience through the forming of relationships, a structure that is both "inclusive and accumulative" in its momentum, sustaining focus on the narrator's development through the "aggregation" of cumulative emotional connections.12 Though differing in their visions of Pointed Firs' structural form, these analyses all offer tacit acknowledgement of the narrator's importance to its design. In the work that most deeply realized her project as a writer, she rediscovered, for realistic fiction, the form of the eclogue book.15 This approach is shared by most historicist readings of Pointed Firs, which center on the detailed representation of turn-of-the-century coastal Maine and its relation to the changing American cultural landscape. Throughout the story cycle, Jewett marks changes in the narrator's perspective in relation to the stability of the pastoral locale, drawing here on a key principle of Shakespearean comedy: its reframing of the large-scale social disruption of the medieval carnivalesque into a challenge to the perspective of the privileged class, achieved in the transformation in the protagonist's perception through the green world experience.19 This shift in its protagonist's perception is fundamental to Pointed Firs' design.