250
PARTISAN REVIEW
The various stories that unfold in
The Country oj the Pointed Firs
are given a tenuous unity by the nameless narrator, a young woman
who arrives from the city to spend the summer in this peacefully
isolated backwater, and learns to cherish its tranquillity along with
its idiosyncratic and endearing inhabitants . The summeF visitor
lodges in the house of a widow, Almira Todd, who dominates the
book as the embodiment of man's unity with nature , though she does
not appear in each story. An herb-gatherer and gardener, she turns
her "rural pharmacopoeia" into soothing remedies that even the local
doctor respects . A massive woman of sixty-seven, with "the look of a
huge sibyl ," she tells her lodger one day about the man she long ago
loved and lost because he was "far above her." (This is all we ever
learn about class differences in Dunnet Landing.) As she talks, over–
come by grief at this painful memory, Mrs. Todd acquires a classic
majesty in the eyes of her listener: "She might have been Antigone
alone on the Theban plain .... An absolute, archaic grief pos–
sessed her, she seemed a renewal of some historic soul , with her sor–
rows and the remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities
and the scents of primeval herbs ."
Yet Mrs. Todd is as down-to-earth as the herbs she grows, and
she knows everything about everyone in the village; they form the
landscape of all her days. She shares them with her lodger: the an–
cient sea captain whose memories have slipped a cog, and whose
grave face is "worn into appealing lines, as if he had suffered from
loneliness and misapprehension"; the shy fisherman who waits pa–
tiently for forty years to marry his beloved shepherdess; the lonely
farm-woman who calls herself the Queen's Twin because she and
Victoria were born on the same day. Mrs. Todd takes her lodger on
a visit to her eighty-seven-year-old mother, a.spry little woman who
has spent most of her life in contentment on a tiny island across the
water. Another day Mrs. Todd , her mother, and the visitor take
part in a huge family reunion that seems to link the islands and the
scattered farms into "a golden chain of love and dependence," and
late in the summer they row out to the barren island where "poor
Joanna," jilted by her lover, hid her sorrow and humiliation in the
silent loneliness of an anchorite for the rest of her life.
Yet, though Dunnet Landing has borne its mortal weight of re–
jection and loss, madness and withered expectations and eccentric–
ity, it does not remind us of the many rancorous American novels
that expose the horrors of small-town life. Sarah Jewett is not Sher–
wood Anderson , and the people of Dunnet Landing, however odd
