The Kitchen Economics of Sarah Orne Jewett's <em>The Country of the Pointed Firs</em>

Abstract

The Kitchen Economics of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs Thomas Strychacz One irony about the reception of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is that its most idyllic passages have, of late, inspired the most combative debates. Such has been the fate of the Bowden reunion, the grand feast that provides a measure of symbolic closure to the narrator’s long sojourn at Dunnet Landing; and such has been the fate of the pleasant, peripatetic, four-chapter excursion to Green Island, when the narrator, accompanying Mrs. Todd on a visit to her mother, participates in the serene activities of the “old kitchen” where Mrs. Blackett performs something of a latter-day loaves-and-fishes miracle for three unexpected guests (71). Here, she creates a satisfying chowder from one haddock, one onion, and her own potatoes, aided by the narrator, who labors happily without remuneration to dig them up. “There is all the pleasure that one can have in gold-digging in finding one’s hopes satisfied in the riches of a good hill of potatoes,” announces the narrator, seeming to discover a form of pure use-value in her substitution of potatoes for gold (73). In the making of that miraculous chowder lies the substance of the debate about Jewett’s domestic idylls. Do they represent an emptily utopian turn from the era’s actual economic tribulations, what Richard Brodhead rather disdainfully characterizes as a “counterworld to 1890s modernity” (146)? Or do they oppose the dislocations and “waste” of the modern world and the ideologies of Economic Man underpinning them (Jewett 122)? Counterworld thinking, in fact, runs deep on both sides of this debate. When it comes to Jewett, most scholars take economy and kitchen—the realm of chowders and feasts, women’s work and women’s communities—as contradictory terms. It is this structuring assumption that my rubric of “kitchen economics” challenges by referring us to the compelling moments in Jewett’s work when it becomes possible to rescript mundane domestic tasks in an abstract economic idiom. [End Page 53] Many feminist scholars have celebrated the sense that one finds a critical break from male-dominated capitalist relations in places such as Mrs. Blackett’s old kitchen and in activities such as digging potatoes for free. To early second-wave feminist writers, Jewett’s fictional terrains could represent a “matriarchal community” running “counter to the urban, upper-class, capitalist, industrial, male-dominated civilization” of the late nineteenth century (Donovan 56); they produce under conditions of patriarchy “female relational reality” (Ammons, “Going in Circles” 89).1 Over the last decade this approach has been updated in theoretically sophisticated ways. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse realize the counterhegemonic possibilities of female regionalism through the trope of decenteredness. Places such as Green Island, situated on the very margin of the state of Maine and the mainland United States, exemplify the art of writing “out of place,” as the title of their book puts it, if “place” is understood to be a socioeconomic realm dominated by white men and subject to their ideologies of nation, property, and power. Catriona Sandilands’s queer, ecofeminist reading of Jewett likewise emphasizes the notion that it is only when “apart”—apart, that is, from a “dominant (male) society” (69)—that “women together can develop a critical and reflective distance on processes of social and natural change” (72). To Fetterley, Pryse, and Sandilands, Mrs. Blackett’s kitchen is perhaps more queer than sanctified, less the sustaining metaphor of the matrifocal family than a site of challenge to discourses of nationhood and to rationalized attitudes toward the environment. But all three scholars read spaces such as Green Island as being uncompromisingly oppositional; they manifest a “prop-ertyless condition” in a “location, space, and place that is disconnected from ownership” (Fetterley and Pryse 267). For many New Historicist scholars skeptical about such tidy distributions of power, that aversion to the exchange relations of the marketplace is precisely the problem with such scenes. Requiring for their preparation neither money nor alienated labor, the miraculous feasts on Green Island and at the Bowden reunion seem out of step with the material and...