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universe as a human being" as she begins "to recognize her relations
as an individual to the world within and about her." This smacks of
psychobabble. But these lapses are minor seen against her powerful
evocation of Grand Isle and New Orleans, her psychological
astuteness, her use of the sea as the novel's commanding symbol, at
once sensual, life-giving, and destructive, and her profound sense of
moral complexity. What she might have written if
The Awakening
had
not been vilified as poison is impossible to guess, but one can only la–
ment the silence that was not of her own making.
It would be difficult to imagine a woman and a writer who of–
fers a starker contrast to Kate Chopin of St. Louis, Missouri, than
Sarah Orne Jewett of South Berwick, Maine. They stood at the an–
tipodes of female American experience in the late years of the nine–
teenth century, and they had little in common beyond the regional
labels pinned on them by literary historians and their admiration for
Flaubert. Though Mrs. Chopin, who began writing much later than
Miss Jewett, studied the latter's stories for what they could teach her
about style and technique, she could not have found them very
useful, for the two women regarded the world in utterly dissimilar
ways, and the experience and attitudes they brought to their work
were as different as the landscapes of Louisiana and Maine.
Sarah Jewett was born and died in Berwick, and she could not
conceive a life that was not rooted in her rural hometown, though
she spent part of every winter in Boston and made several trips to
Europe. A spinster who seems never even to have toyed with the
idea of marriage, she was the daughter of a well-to-do doctor and a
mother whose ancestors were sea captains and shipbuilders. Unlike
Kate Chopin, who had no interest in the past, Sarah Jewett gave her
strongest allegiance to the generations older than her own, for she
grew up "with grandfathers and grand-uncles and aunts for my best
playmates."
But she knew, with a sense of regret that informed every corner
of her art, that the world of those grandfathers and grand-uncles was
dying in her lifetime. The wharves in the coastal towns of Maine
that, before the Civil War, had been thriving centers of shipping,
were rotting, the up-country farms were being abandoned as the
country moved westward, and the tranquil villages, already trans–
formed by textile mills and railroads , were now being invaded by
immigrants and summer tourists. As she wrote to Mr. Whittier,
with a characteristically familial image, "Nobody has mourned more
