Country of the Pointed Firs

I just finished Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs and, beyond being a truly excellent book, it seems to me, like The Rise of Silas Lapham, to have enormous usefulness as the standard bearer for an alternative to naturalism, in this case local color (although I need to read up on Donna Campbell's thoughts on this to make sense of it).

My primary observation - begun by a metaphor for people as trees in Cather's My Antonia - is that if in Realism people are people, and in naturalism people are animals - "human beasts" - in local color people are definitively plants. This idea is shaped not just by the fact that Jewett's narrator defines the country of her title in terms of "pointed firs" but in constant reference to plants and plant metaphors. The narrator's friend, Mrs. Todd, is an herbalist, constantly growing plants; Mrs. Todd's friend Sarah Tilley is referred to as a "plain flower" (124). In reference to Sant Bowden, a throwback to the Bowden's French military stock who was unfit for American military service, Mrs. Todd says "There's a great many such strayaway folks, just as there is plants" (103). This is an especially interesting observation - Mrs. Todd does have a theory of evolution, and what sounds even like degeneration, in the case of Sant Bowden, but it's put in terms of plants instead of animals.

In many more ways, the people of the country of the pointed firs seem like plants. Outside of the narrator, and a few others who are mentioned, they seem rooted to their spots; Mrs. Todd's mother still lives on Green Island, motionless, and a relative, Joanna Todd, lived, completely cutoff from all society, on Shell-Heap island for decades after her betrothed left her. This brings me to my next point: the men of the country of pointed firs fish and sail (as do a few of the women), but it may be that women are rooted to the ground, while the men are not - Joanna's betrothed, after all, fled to Boston, rooting her even more permanently in the back. This would set up for me (again, Campell needs to be consulted) a gender based binary, in which men are animals, women are plants in Jewett, but also in which naturalism might be the genre of men/animals, while local fiction is the literature of women/plants. Campbell, again, would complicate this in interesting ways.