‘Where tide and river meet’: the estuarial imaginaries of Sarah Orne Jewett, H.D., and Louise Bogan

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is situated in the brackish intersections between river studies and oceanic studies. Comparing the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Louise Bogan, I argue these three authors engage a ‘trialectic relationship’, to borrow Ling Zhang’s term, between river, sea, and nation. This mimics the form of an estuary, a layered site for negotiating nationhood, industrialisation, and placelessness, that, for these authors, flows from the local to the global, but always returns to estuarial flow. For Jewett, famous for her American literary regionalism, I look at the globally/nationally expansive imaginary of her short story, ‘River Driftwood’, with its local context of river/harbour and historical moment of shifting maritime industry alongside river technology. Next, the modernist poet H.D.’s ‘Leda’ – with its abstract layering of the same Maine harbours, the industrial Lehigh river, and a palimpsested mythological place – forms an estuary whose resistance of Zeus (the industrial) is rooted in its natural movements. Finally, working from theories of planetarity and hydrology, I suggest that Bogan in her poem ‘Night’, localises planetary systems within the immediate movement of tidal mixtures. Thus, these literary estuaries emerge as sites of layered movement, rather than singular points of connection or separation; they produce, like river and ocean flowing together, an estuarial imaginary.