The Massachusetts Medievalist meets Sarah Orne Jewett (alas)
Last month, the Massachusetts Medievalist indulged in a literary road trip to South Berwick, Maine, to visit the home of Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), the author most well-known for The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).
Like many female authors, Jewett was "reclaimed" by the white academic feminist movement of the late twentieth century, celebrated as a major voice in American letters who had been unfairly relegated to "regional" status by the patriarchal literary establishment. In a Boston Marriage with Annie Fields for most of her adult life, Jewett has also become a minor LGBT icon, and Historic New England offers a "Pride Tour" as one of its offerings at the house. And in addition to some references to the Middle Ages in her fiction, Jewett also published a popular history book, The Story of the Normans, Told Chiefly in Relation to their Conquest of England, in 1887.
So I really wanted to like her -- a late-nineteenth-century queer feminist author interested in the Middle Ages!
In The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett emphasizes the inherent nobility of the residents of her fictional Dunnet Landing, Maine with a simile that uses the Middle Ages to describe the Bowden family reunion: “So, I said to myself, their ancestors may have sat in the great hall of some old French house in the Middle Ages, when battles and sieges and processions and feasts were familiar things” (192); they act “with a simple kindness that was the soul of chivalry” (180).
All well and good -- but then I turned to the "history" book and lost my burgeoning enthusiasm for Jewett. The Story of the Normans makes painfully clear that Jewett believed in racist concepts like "national character," and saw the book's intended audience as rightfully successful imperialists descended from the Normans.
Jewett romanticized the Vikings: “From the fjords of Norway a splendid, hardy race of young men were pushing their boats to sea every year” (62) as the precursors not only to the Normans but to the implicitly white English and American audiences of the entire "The Story of The Nations" series.
Jewett promises her reader that “everywhere you will catch a gleam of the glorious courage and steadfastness that have won not only the petty principalities and dukedoms of those early days, but the great English and American discoveries and inventions and noble advancement of all the centuries since” (65). She sees nineteenth-century British imperialism as admirable: "We cannot help thinking that the readiness of the Englishman of to-day to form colonies and to adapt himself to every sort of climate and condition of foreign life, was anticipated and foreboded in those Norman settlements along the shores of the Mediterranean sea" (197).
By the end of the book, however, she has cast the English aside entirely and focused simply on the United States: The Normans "were gifted with sentiment and with good taste, together with fine physical strength and intellectual cleverness. In the first hundred years of the duchy they made perhaps as rapid progress in every way, and had as signal influence among their contemporaries, as any people of any age,—unless it is ourselves, the people of the young republic of the United States, who might be called the Normans of modern times” (486).
This coming holiday weekend celebrates Indigenous Peoples Day, and I found the timing oddly appropriate to be reading this paean to violence and settler colonialism from 134 years ago. The Story of the Normans is yet another uncomfortable reminder of the ways that celebrations of the "American character" have long been entwined with subjugation and oppression of marginalized people. Her house is lovely-- but her legacy is deeply complicated.
Note: While writing The Story of the Normans, Jewett corresponded with E.A. Freeman, author of the six-volume History of the Norman Conquest (1867-1879). One of his letters to her is in the Jewett archive at Colby College library. Stay tuned.