I've been falling behind on my classics, so this week when I went to the Mid-Manhattan library and realized that the new Zoë Heller book had over two hundred holds on it, I decided to do a little catching up.
Hence,
The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett, which is about a writer who goes to spend a summer in a village on the coast of rural Maine, and the people one finds there. Structurally it’s basically a series of vignettes; there really isn’t any plot, just good storytelling. Good stuff. I mean, on one level it's a little trying because it is quite sentimental, and the language describing the landscape and even the simple country folk gets pretty overtly romantic. But it stopped bothering me because there’s something else there—the whole book is infused with a slow sense of melancholy that’s never made explicit but is definitely present; most of the characters are old and physically isolated from everyone else, and there are all these quiet but gorgeous images: women going to live alone on isolated islands, sailors whose wives have died and left them alone with their memories. I felt proud to be a New Englander, and it’s clear that Jewett does too.
But what I ended up finding even more interesting was another novel that was bound up with it in the same volume.
A Country Doctor is about a young girl who decides to enter the medical profession. Absolutely no one around her thinks this is a good idea. Conflict! There are some pretty amazing insights on people’s attitude toward men vs. women deciding to enter a career, use of "strong-minded" as an insult towards a woman, etc. As the main character constantly has to explain, she would never advise entering a profession in lieu of marriage to everyone, but she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that to do so is absolutely right for her. I was reading the inside front cover before I started the book and found myself wondering why it's necessary to forego marriage to be a doctor: why can't she marry too? The way the book answers this is pretty fascinating.
The most amazing thing, for me, is when the book was published:
1884. I.e., thirty-six years before women's suffrage, and much earlier even than that more famous yes-a-girl-can-be-as-good-as-a-boy treatise,
Anne of Green Gables (1908), which, incidentally, is way the hell more conservative than this, since Anne eventually settles down, gets herself a feller, and gets down to bearing tons of children. Tangent: I don't know if anyone else like me was stubborn and read through all eight books out of sheer mulishness, but for me they went downhill really fast after the second book, when fricking Gilbert Blythe becomes a major part of the story and Anne grows out of having a personality. When she told Marilla she found herself not wanting to use big words anymore, that was it for me.
Not that
A Country Doctor is perfect. It's slow in parts, especially at the beginning, when for lack of anywhere else to start it opens describing the activities of the main character's mother at the end of her pregnancy. I have to avoid the temptation to skip pages when authors start with their protagonist's birth, because it usually means way more information about the parents than you ever wanted followed by a clunky series of flash-forwards, which is kind of what happens. There's also a scene--actually the analogue of a scene in
Anne of Green Gables, now that I think about it--where a neighbor does something horrible to his shoulder, and Nan, as the first on the scene, singlehandedly pops the bone right back in the socket and saves the day. This scared me a little bit, and I wish it had been built up more: I mean, what if you misread the situation and ended up making it worse? Surely your dreams of a medical career come to an end right there. So that scene bothered me because no one seemed to realize what was at stake.
Sarah Orne Jewett never married herself, so I think there’s a little bit of autobiography here. She also lived with a woman for the last half of her life, which I guess has given rise to some speculation, but if there is a queer sensibility in
A Country Doctor it's not in the strong bonds depicted between women or in the protagonist's conscious choice never to marry, but in this idea that choosing a career enables the protagonist to opt out of the entire paradigm, the entire list of Things It Is Right for a Woman to Do, and her perception and acceptance of the fact that she is different from other women for wanting to do this.
In short, awesome. Ideological commitment, historical insights (women could go to medical school in 1884! Who knew? Although this element of the plot gets a little hazy—we cut away the second she leaves for medical school, so I guess the author didn’t really want to get into describing what might have happened there, which is too bad since I’m sure it would have been interesting), good fun. She should be up there with Hawthorne and Dickinson.
