The Country of Pointed Firs
Saturday, January 14th, 2012 at 11:47 amI was going to come to The Country of Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett with no preconceptions, but after stumbling (not for the first time I think) onto Laura Miller’s Salon review of Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers, I read:
“…she will, when needed, chart the rise and fall of the reputation of someone like Sarah Orne Jewett (who wrote about late 19th-century life in the small towns of coastal Maine), a trajectory that went from being “patronized as the epitome of the little woman writer” in her own time to being touted as a “recovered” feminist pioneer in the 1970s and ’80s, and finally, in the ’90s, to being “excoriated and banished by feminist critics for her endorsement of bourgeois values and her political thought crimes.”
Oh dear.
I swear, if anything of my work survives to be studied after my death, and them as studies it co-opt my stuff for their own political agendas, ignoring the spirit of the work and/or the context of my times, I will haunt their houses with blood dripping from the ceiling, breaking crockery, and hideous apparitions in the night. For starters.
From the book’s first couple of pages: “…a lover of Dunnett Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilisation of which her affectionate dreams had told.”
Seems promising.
January 14th, 2012 at 12:59 pm
I am sore tempted to co-opt your work for my own political agendas right now, just to see what happens. I shall, of course, do it under a name.
January 14th, 2012 at 1:12 pm
But, but I’m not dead! How can I haunt you if I’m not dead? I’d have to just bitch at your nom de guerre on the internet, and that wouldn’t be as cool as making blood drip from your ceiling. I hear you saying that you could make me dead. But there’s the matter of distance — unless you’re gonna point the bone? XD
January 14th, 2012 at 4:14 pm
‘I shall walk up wall and drip green slime on them, Daddy!’ Not sure where that quote, or approximation of a quote, comes from. But it comes from somewhere, someone. Sturgeon, perhaps. If that doesn’t sound too fishy.
January 14th, 2012 at 4:34 pm
I used to have slime! It was in a bucket. I remember how hard it was to keep clean…
January 14th, 2012 at 10:31 pm
will haunt their houses with blood dripping from the ceiling, breaking crockery, and hideous apparitions in the night. For starters.
Promise? XD
The benefit to academic researchers of their subject being dead is that you can’t argue with them or show up on their blog dragging minions in tow, which they fear far far more than mere poltergeists. This is, of course, of great value to the researchers, but sucks for us, since minions are highly resourceful and come handy in a pinch. Like when there’s no axes lying about.
I propose we buy axes. Lots and lots of axes!
January 16th, 2012 at 10:59 am
If we could start a cult, Knights Protector of Writers in Perpetuity (Knights PWP), who would defend our honour and protect our dignity, unto the end of days, and they could use the axes…
January 26th, 2012 at 1:18 am
I read Jewett a while back in a collection of supernatural tales by 19th century female authors (Haunted Women, ed. by Alfred Bendixen, who was far more sensible and circumspect in his commentary than Jewett’s critics… CONTEXT, people, CONTEXT). While hers is actually one of the stories about which I remember the least, I did very much enjoy the collection as a whole. Hope Pointed Firs continues promising!
I think I’ve also read that Laura Miller piece before, and was subconsciously looking to read it again, after having a discussion recently about male and female artists. Thanks for the link!
January 31st, 2012 at 10:42 am
I’m actually a bit (pleasantly) surprised at how gothic, thus far, Pointed Firs is, what with the white-witchy landlady and the sailor’s ghost story.