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    Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender
    Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender
    Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender
    Ebook286 pages4 hours

    Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender

    By Margaret Roman

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    In this study of Sarah Orne Jewett, Margaret Roman argues that one theme colors almost every short story and novel by the turn-of-the-century American author: each person, regardless of sex, must break free of the restrictive, polar-opposite norms of behavior traditionally assigned to men and women by a patriarchal society. That society, as seen from Jewett’s perspective during the late Victorian era, was one in which a competitive, active man dominates a passive, emotional woman. Frequently referring to Jewett’s own New England upbringing at the hands of an unusually progressive father, Roman demonstrates how the writer, through her personal quest for freedom and through the various characters she created, strove to eliminate the necessity for rigid and narrowly defined male-female roles and relationships.
     
    Roman traces a gender-dissolving theme throughout Jewett’s writing which progresses through distinct phases that roughly correspond to Jewett’s psychological development as a writer. Ahead of her time in many ways, Sarah Orne Jewett confronted the Victorian polarized gender system, presaging the modern view that men and women should be encouraged to develop along whatever paths are most comfortable and most natural for them.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity Alabama Press
    Release dateMay 16, 2017
    ISBN9780817391553
    Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender

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      Sarah Orne Jewett - Margaret Roman

      perspective.

      Introduction

      Jewett’s Housebreaker versus Ruskin’s Queens: Liberation from the Victorian Home and Garden

      Sarah Orne Jewett was a Victorian woman, subject to the socialization process of her time. Yet she repudiated the belief of her era that women could occupy only a narrow, separate sphere. In her life and work, Jewett rejected the Victorian concept of the angel in the house, a term coined from Coventry Patmore’s poem of the same title, which has come to mean a vaporous upholder of spiritual values and familial bliss within the confines of the home. John Ruskin enlarged upon this definition in his 1865 essay Of Queens’ Gardens, which Walter E. Houghton assessed as the most important single document . . . for the characteristic idealization of love, woman, and home in Victorian thought (343). Basically, woman’s work to Ruskin entailed providing a haven of moral and spiritual values away from the money-hungry commercial world. In order to accomplish the task, woman had to be protected from any contact with that outside world so she could remain untainted. Her sphere was a place apart, a walled garden, in which certain virtues too easily crushed by modern life could be preserved, and certain desires of the heart too much thwarted be fulfilled (Houghton, 343).

      Yet unrestricted by patriarchal fences, Jewett’s women characters break out of the Victorian home and garden. True, Jewett regrets the passing of the Puritan grandmothers’ gardens, which for her signified the passing of rural life. In From a Mournful Villager, she thinks sorrowfully of the impending extinction of the front yards and the kind of New England village character and civilization with which they were connected (CB, 116). Yet Jewett’s yearning reflects her fear of the imminent destruction of country life by industrial progress. It does not signify her belief that woman’s position in society should remain unaltered. In fact, later in this same essay, Jewett clarifies her support of woman’s advancement from the symbolic, attenuated garden into the wider world in exhilarating tones:

      The disappearance of many of the village front yards may come to be typical of the altered position of woman, and mark a stronghold on her way from the much talked-of slavery and subjection to a coveted equality. She used to be shut off from the wide acres of the farm, and had no voice in the world’s politics; she must stay in the house, or only hold sway out of doors in this prim corner of the land where she was queen. No wonder that women clung to their rights in their flower-gardens then, and no wonder that they have grown a little careless of them now, and that lawn mowers find so ready a sale. The whole world is their front yard nowadays! (121)

      It is no accident that Jewett made reference to queens in the preceding paragraph about gardens. She was familiar with John Ruskin’s 1865 essay Of Queens’ Gardens and quoted from it in her own Miss Sydney’s Flowers. Although the quote is a flowery passage typically depicting woman as administering angel, Jewett is applying the words to Miss Sydney, isolated by her own choice in a shell-like existence devoid of human warmth. It in no way implies that Jewett agreed with Ruskin’s definition of woman’s place. She has called that definition into question in From a Mournful Villager, published after Miss Sydney’s Flowers, and she would subsequently refute it throughout her work. Jewett refused to present woman as elemental nature—a simple, virtually mindless embodiment of fecund Mother Earth, who existed to bear fruit for others to consume.

      While Ruskin in his garden appears to glorify woman’s place and power by disclaiming the idea that woman . . . is not to guide, nor even to think for herself (84), he succeeds in promoting the constriction of every facet of a woman’s development. And he disguises this reduction by presenting his argument in an appealing flowery, lush language akin to the Victorian garden itself. Woman and the garden are one, and their job is the same—order, comfort, and loveliness (99). Ruskin uses this metaphor to advance the three major points of his essay: woman’s particular sphere and her power therein, her education for this role, and her duty to the state. In each section, Ruskin equates woman with the natural world, which exists only to give service to man.

      In part one of Of Queens’ Gardens, Ruskin states that woman’s power is a "guiding, not a determining function that consists primarily of praise (86). Although man is always hardened (87) by his experience in the world, he is the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender (86). Meanwhile, man protects woman in her confined status in his home from all danger (and experience). Ruskin declares, This is the true nature of home—it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division (87). Woman is the rock in a weary land, and light as of the Pharos in the stormy sea. . . . And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. The stars only may be over her head; the glow-worm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot: but home is yet wherever she is . . ." (87).

      Next Ruskin outlines the type of education a girl should have in order to prepare for her duty. While advocating a serious, similar program of study, he makes it quite clear that the boy must learn his subjects thoroughly, but a girl needs to learn only so far as may enable her to sympathise in her husband’s pleasures, and those of his best friends (92). In the process of procuring this education, Ruskin pictures the young woman as the proverbial flower, as well as the young, innocent animal. The girl has been set loose in the library like a fawn in the field (94). Ruskin may say: She grows as a flower does,—she will wither without sun; she will decay in her sheath, as the narcissus does, if you do not give her air enough (94); yet, the library has been purged of any injurious selections, and the only narcissistic activity that will be allowed the young woman is to provide a reflection of man to himself.

      For his final point, Ruskin asseverates a broadening of woman’s horizons from mere housewife to queen, but the text is the same. It is delightful to see her go out in the morning into her garden to play with the fringes of its guarded flowers, and lift their heads when they are drooping, with her happy smile upon her face, and no cloud upon her brow, because there is a little wall around her place of peace (103), but she must do the same for all the needy, not just her family. Ruskin makes it clear that there is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but . . . women are answerable for it . . . (101). Shifting his point of view, Ruskin appeals directly to woman’s conscience:

      flowers only flourish rightly in the garden of some one who loves them. I know you would like that to be true. You would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them: nay, more, if your look had the power, not only to cheer, but to guard them—if you could bid the black blight turn away, and the knotted caterpillar spare—if you could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind, in frost—Come, thou south, and breathe upon my garden, that the spices may flow out. This you would think a great thing? And do you think it not a greater thing, that all this (and how much more than this!) you can do, for fairer flowers than these—flowers that could bless you for having blessed them, and will love you for having loved them. . . . (103–4)

      Ultimately, Ruskin, spokesperson for Victorian society, has restricted woman under the pretense of a glorified profession. The world is reduced to an opulent garden of self-sacrifice and service. Woman’s loveliness, like the evanescent loveliness of a flower, can embrace and support others’ lives, but not her own. She is frozen in perfection, a part of the landscape—a landscape at the beck and call of men, to be used, conquered, and, consequently,

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