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

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• Innovating the Early Modern:Pastoral Cycle and Epiphany in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs
• Kristen L. Olson (bio)

In its sixtieth anniversary year, the Guggenheim Museum ran a retrospective on Hilma af Klint (1842–1944) that became the most-attended exhibition in its history. 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."² Though Sarah Orne Jewett is more established than af Klint, her fiction tests similar boundaries. Her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), has found a comfortable niche in the American literary canon, admired for its naturalistic acuity and its nuanced revelation of late-nineteenth-century class division. Yet Jewett has still more to show us about the literary imagination of her time. As Marjorie Pryse observes in her introduction to the 1981 Norton edition, "we have allowed Pointed Firs to fall into an abyss between nineteenth-century themes and twentieth-century technique."³ Jewett's writing has felt modern to us, but we have not clearly understood why. I want to suggest here that a closer examination of Jewett's use of literary pastoral in her experiment with the story cycle form reveals innovation that not only reinforces her place as a formative voice in the tradition of local color regionalism but also situates her work on the vanguard of Modernist fiction.⁴

To follow Pryse's inclination, reassessing Pointed Firs' technique means examining the key element defining the modern in the Modernist story cycle: the emergence of the protagonist's experience in a series of epiphanic moments, "the revelatory instant in which characters' perception of themselves or their position in the world is transformed."⁵ For the cycle's protagonist, these revelations occur as moments of connection with an [End Page 25] individual or idea in each story, linking together across the collection of episodes to build the protagonist's growing self-awareness. My assertion is that Jewett uses the story cycle form to ground her narrator's epiphanic experience in the framework of transformation typical of sixteenth-century pastoral drama. While it may seem archaic from a twenty-first-century perspective, pastoral is a richly varied genre, and Jewett's adaptation of literary pastoral is progressive, anticipating the development of twentieth-century story cycles using epiphanic moments as an organizing principle.⁶ Jewett draws particularly on Shakespearean pastoral, the hallmark of which is the transfiguring experience of the protagonist's sojourn within a play's "green world," an isolated natural environment defined by its own set of governing forces.⁷ Pointed Firs' narrator enters a series of green worlds among Maine's remote islands and inland communities, experiencing within each visit a moment of epiphanic connection that transforms her perspective. The story cycle framework enables each pastoral episode to be discrete but also integral, forming part of a broader pastoral sojourn extending through the full arc of stories that define the narrator's Arcadian summer. A deeper understanding of Pointed Firs' pastoral tropes clarifies this emphasis on the narrator's epiphanies and her role in the story cycle as its protagonist.⁸

While the narrator's voice predominates throughout Pointed Firs, her development has been undervalued in much of its critical history. Analyses tend to interpret the narrator's function as practical rather than thematically essential to Jewett's project, as in Robert Luscher's influential reading of Pointed Firs, which sees the narrator as a device used to enhance its coherence: "In chronicling the narrator's visits to various residents of Dunnet Landing … Jewett adapts the travel-book format, using the narrator's personality and temporal frame (as well as repeated characters and images) to unite her volume."⁹ Stronger implications of the protagonist's narrative importance emerge in Luscher's analysis, however. He remarks frequently on the narrator's prominence, and his designation of Pointed Firs as a "story sequence" suggests a linear momentum underpinning the stories' continuity; he observes that the stories are integrated, that there is interplay between part and whole, and that...