Consciousness and Communication in Jewett

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 3 Number 2, August 2002

_______________________________________________________________

Consciousness and Communication in Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs

The trance states induced by mesmerism and closely associated with spiritualist practices in nineteenth-century America offered writers ample ground for creating sensational and romantic stories. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville and Henry James all took their turn at producing novels and stories that featured the darker and other-worldly sides of mesmerism and spirit communication, and these representations have come to dominate our historical perceptions of these practices. But late in the nineteenth-century, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) produced a very different sort of tale that offers a different picture of spirit communication--one that moves beyond the trance paradigm to an alternative kind of communication.

Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is a work highly informed by spiritualist practices, yet it does not feature the seances, the spirit rappings, or stage-show trances utilized by Jewett’s earlier literary colleagues. In fact, the presence of spiritualism is so subtle that the novel has rarely been examined in the context of spiritualist practices. This article offers a new way to read The Country of the Pointed Firs--through the historical lens of Jewett’s fluency with spiritualism--and argues that in writing the novel, Jewett herself offered Americans a new way to think about the altered states of concsiouness produced through spiritualistic practices.

Americans had been thinking about altered states of consciousness at least since the introduction of mesmerism on the lecture stage in the early nineteenth century. Itinerant lecturers and their “somnambules” demonstrated mesmeric practices in the 1830s, and by the 1850s, the country had seen the emergence of the spiritualists, a socially, politically and religiously oriented group of people whose understanding of their world and its practices were highly informed by communication with the spirits of the dead. Although participants in spirit mediumship were both men and women, it is women who have been most intimately connected with spiritualism as mediums of communication, as demonstrated by historian Ann Braude (Braude, 1989). Literary works of the period reiterate this association for good and for ill, frequently portraying--with varying degrees of credulity--women as central figures in the practice of spirit communication.

Spirit communication did offer women a means to prominence that was otherwise restricted from them. Trance mediums could become prominent reform lecturers, could earn a healthy income by holding séances, and could exert significant political influence beyond the boundaries of the domestic sphere to which they were conventionally limited (Braude, 1989). Thus it is not surprising that much of the literature that features women mediums demonstrates the on-going social tension over the role of women in American society. Jewett’s representation of spirit communication in the 1890s differs significantly from those of Hawthorne and James in earlier decades. The differences may be due to Jewett’s contemporaneous situation, in which Spiritualism and its many variants had become a common part of the American cultural conversation. No longer considered the latest fad—indeed by the time The Country of the Pointed Firs was published the Fox sisters had lost their fame and their credibility—extrasensory communications were highly researched practices. Viewed within its cultural context, Jewett’s novel reflects the period in American history when mesmerism, spiritualism and their descendents had become so incorporated into the cultural conversation that Americans no longer considered them oddities or sideshow entertainment.

Thus, it would be overstated to say that The Country of the Pointed Firs is a Spiritualist novel, but it is clearly a work that was highly influenced by its culture's and its author's interest in Spiritualism. In the strictest terms, Jewett's involvement with spiritualist practices--that is, her visits to mediums--was short-lived. However, her affinity for the underlying beliefs of Spiritualism and the idea of spirit communication had been nurtured from early in her adult life. Spiritualism's ideas and practices had permeated nineteenth-century culture, and Americans had incorporated many elements of spirit phenomena into its cultural lexicon. By the end of the century, when The Country of the Pointed Firs appeared, the initial excitement over rappings, materializations, and other spirit messages had diminished. Spiritual and mesmeric phenomena had been rigorously researched and psychic phenomena were accepted in a number of religions as integral aspects of spirituality.

Jewett's own religious experience followed a steady evolution away from traditional religions. Raised a Congregationalist and confirmed as an Episcopalian, she also took serious interest in Eastern religions and Transcendentalism. It was her association with Theophilus Parsons, a Swedenborgian, however, that convinced her of the interconnection of the spiritual and material worlds and the permeable boundary between life and death. Jewett was influenced by Parsons’ belief that a person’s soul continues to exist after death in a spiritual body and can communicate with other souls, living or dead, a concept he called the “transmigration of consciousness” (Blanchard, 1994, 95-96). Some time after her discovery of this concept, Jewett visited numerous spirit mediums.

Several years after the death of her father in 1878, and still distraught over his absence, Jewett visited a medium at the urging of her friend, author Celia Thaxter. Thaxter had lost her mother some time earlier, and had sought to communicate with her in seances with Spirit mediums. Jewett also visited a Boston medium in 1882 and was convinced of her genuineness (Blanchard 181-182). During the seance, the medium apparently transmitted the message from Jewett’s father that he approved of her friendship with Annie Adams Fields and along with the spirit of James Fields had even orchestrated their coming together. In an 1882 letter to her friend John Greenleaf Whittier, another believer in spirit communication, Jewett wrote that the medium "told me wonderful things about my father and about his death and our relation to each other, and what he said to me was amazing. There was a great deal that came from him and from Mr. Fields that is the most capital advice, the most practical help to me, perfect 'sailing orders' you know!" (quoted in Blanchard 182).

Not wanting to be entirely credulous at first, Jewett nevertheless attended the séance with some caution. Her letter to Whittier continues: "I still have 'an eye out' for tricks of the trade and yet I cant [sic] help being ashamed as I write this, for it was all so real and so perfectly sensible and straightforward, and free from silliness" (Blanchard 157-58, 181-82). Unlike Hawthorne and James, who observed spirit mediumship but never actually attempted to communicate with spirits, Jewett's experience with the phenomenon was very much participatory. Although she was clearly prepared for a "performance" as evidenced in her stated alertness for the "tricks of the trade," she describes the experience in very nondramatic, nonperformance-like terms such as "sensible" and "straightforward." It was for her a worthwhile endeavor made believable because of her previous interest in Swedenborgian mysticism.

Jewett's companion Annie Adams Fields also visited a medium at approximately the same time, and reportedly communicated with her recently deceased husband, publisher James T. Fields, who allegedly also confirmed the importance of the friendship between the two women. This positive message may have increased Jewett’s faith in spirit communication. Jewett and Fields eventually stopped patronizing mediums at the urging of a friend, but the practice of spirit communication continued to resonate with Jewett and emerge in her writing (Blanchard 96).

The spiritualist allusions in The Country of the Pointed Firs are extremely subtle. Unlike the works of Jewett’s predecessors, namely Hawthorne and James, her novel lacks a central mediumistic figure around whom most of the supernatural events take place. Instead, it contains a community in which the features of mediumship--the ability to communicate non-verbally with living or dead beings, the ability to understand unspoken messages, the questioning of the boundary between life and death--are found in many of its members. Significantly, the members of this community who are most prominently featured in The Country of the Pointed Firs are women, among whom exist the ability to communicate without speaking or sometimes even seeing one another.

Almira Todd is the first of these women to appear in the novel after the narrator arrives in Dunnet Landing. Todd is imbued with extrasensory abilities when portrayed in connection with other women in the novel. She communicates with other women in her community non-verbally and sometimes at a great distance, a phenomenon very much like the "transmigration of consciousness" Jewett learned about from Parsons (Blanchard 96). Marcia McClintock Folsom explores this aspect of The Country of the Pointed Firs thoroughly in her article that takes its title from a line in the book, "tact is a kind of mindreading." Folsom argues that Todd’s non-verbal communication is a result of Jewett's own "empathic style" which means that her characters identify so closely with one another that they are able to understand each other's thoughts and interact even with those people who exist only in the memory of other characters such as a dead friend or family member (Folsom, 1984, 89). Such a relationship shapes the reader's understanding of the characters, yet it does not affect the outcome of events in the novel. Folsom's attribution of this sort of communication to an imaginative ability of the author and her characters is a compelling reading of the narrative for twentieth century readers; however, this theory separates Jewett's writing from her personal experience with spirit communication and her beliefs in the "transmigration of consciousness."

Almira Todd is the primary character endowed with the ability to communicate through extrasensory means, and the reader's initial exposure to this comes in a scene soon after the unnamed narrator has taken up residence with Todd, the herbalist. One morning the narrator is awakened by the voice of her hostess talking with someone outside her window. The narrator says:

I knew that she wished I would wake up and come and speak to her.

In a few minutes she responded to a morning voice from behind the blinds. "I expect you're going' up to your schoolhouse to pass all this pleasant day; yes, I expect you're going' to be dreadful busy," she said despairingly.

"Perhaps not," said I. "Why, what's going to be the matter with you, Mrs. Todd?" For I supposed that she was tempted by the fine weather to take one of her favorite expeditions along the shore pastures to gather herbs and simples, and would like to have me keep the house.

"No, I don't want to go nowhere by land, she answered gayly,--"no, not by land; but I don't know's we shall have a better day all the rest of the summer to go out to Green Island an' see mother. I waked up early thinkin' of her." (31-32)

As Folsom points out, one might easily miss the fact that Todd has responded to the narrator's thoughts rather than her spoken words, which simply ask about Todd's plans for the day (Folsom, 1984, 78). The communication is subtle and brief, not calling attention to itself as paranormal but building on a belief in the ability of souls to respond to another without words. Almira Todd foreshadows further evidence of the “transmigration of consciousness” in her final comment, “I waked up early thinkin of her.”

Incidents of such communication emerge among other characters in the novel as well. Soon after Todd and the narrator set out on their journey to Green Island, they can see Todd's mother’s figure in the door of house, as if she has been expecting them. "I looked," says the narrator, " and could see a tiny flutter in the doorway, but a quicker signal had made its way from the heart on shore to the heart on the sea" (Jewett, 1994, 35). With no modern means of communication in place the mother and daughter create their own systems, transferring thoughts from one consciousness to another with no other signals or warnings about the visits. Their ability to communicate this way is further evidenced upon the travelers' arrival when Todd says to her mother "I've brought an onion with me that was layin' about on the window-sill at home." Mrs. Blackett replies "That's just what I was wantin'" (Jewett, 1994, 36), seemingly unsurprised at her daughter's ability to know this and act on it. This woman-to-woman communication with her daughter contrasts to that she shares with her son William, who had forgotten to stock up on onions the last time he was in town. This was a regular duty which he had failed to complete, yet Almira, of whom fewer such duties are expected because her visits to the island were infrequent and unplanned, had sensed her mother's need without having seen or talked to her in many months.

In contrast, William's relationships with his mother and sister are more dependent on verbal communications. When Mrs. Blackett receives the onion, she declares that she will need more potatoes from the field and Mrs. Todd suggests, "Land sakes alive! Let's blow the horn for William. . . . He needn't break his spirit so far's to come in. He'll know you need him for something particular, an' then we can call to him as he comes up the path" (Jewett, 1994, 43). She recognizes that communication with William requires an external system--the ringing of the bell--to indicate to her brother that they need something at the house. He will recognize the bell as an indication of their need, but unlike his sister, he relies on verbal communication ("we can call to him as he comes up the path") in order to understand that need. This is not to say that William is not without his sympathies, because he does show up at the potato patch when the narrator has insisted on gathering potatoes herself; however, the narrator, who has noted every other instance of non-verbal communication in the novel, makes no significance of that fact. The two return to the house together and then take a walk to a nearby overlook. There is clearly an affinity between them, demonstrated by their easy conversation and similar interests, but that affinity is not described in the same terms of psychic affinity as among the women in the household.

As the women prepare to leave the island, the narrator and Mrs. Blackett also share a moment of thought transference. The narrator has already stated that "sympathy is of the mind as well as the heart, and Mrs. Blackett's world and mine were one from the moment we met," thereby establishing an intimacy between them (Jewett, 1994, 46). As the day develops, so do their intimacy and their ability to communicate with each other. The narrator sits in the old woman's room as she prepares to leave and says, "I looked up and we understood each other without speaking. 'I shall like to think o' your setting' here to-day,' said Mrs. Blackett. 'I want you to come again. It has been so pleasant for William'" (Jewett, 1994, 54). Although the older woman deflects the pleasure experienced to her son William, she clearly has found some affinity for the narrator, and through their ability to communicate via the heart and mind without the aid of the voice, these three women have formed a small community that is joined to the world of souls that transcends the material world. Scholar Elizabeth Ammons argues that Jewett

seems to have believed that there existed a type of therapeutic female psychic energy which could be communicated telepathically and which could operate both to bond individuals and to create a spiritual community--or occult sisterhood--among women in general. A key pattern in Jewett is the initiation of one woman, usually younger and sometimes a girl, into the powerful, extrasensory, and usually ultraterrestrial female knowledge possessed by another. (Ammons, 1984, 168)

This initiation, Ammons continues, is that of one witch indoctrinating a younger recruit, and Jewett was "less interested in mesmerism and seances (at least in her fiction) than in witches." Ammons's argument, however, is unconvincing given the extent of Jewett's interest in and embracing of Swedenborgian and Spiritualist ideas surrounding the soul and its continued existence after the death of the material body. There is, indeed, a telepathic communication among the major women figures in this novel, but it is not one facilitated by witchcraft. It is instead a telepathy among souls who inhabit the material and non-material worlds.

Ammons’ identification of the woman-centered nature of the “spiritual community” does seem right to me, however. The Country of the Pointed Firs illustrates the fact that within nineteenth-century American culture, spirit mediumship and its related ideas had the most profound implications for women. All of the characters with the extra-sensory communicative ability are women: Almira Todd, Mrs. Blackett, the narrator. Male characters are sympathetic to and aware of this communication, but not privy to it themselves. It is perhaps most significant that Jewett's portrayal of this communicative ability in her women characters does not rely on the control or manipulation of any other character, male or female as do some of the more prominent portrayals of spirit mediums in American literature.

Although nothing in Jewett’s letters suggests that she believed this altered state of consciousness and its accompanying communication was a particularly gendered experience, her portrayal of women with this ability conforms with her own social world as well as with the larger culture. Despite the fact that most of her professional and spiritual mentors were men (Whittier, Parsons and William Dean Howells) she invariably chose women as intimate companions. She never considered marriage, nor showed any romantic interests in men, and she formed her most significant domestic bond with Fields and surrounded herself with women friends. The women of Dunnet Landing share a similar experience, not rejecting men, but seeking other women as intimates and finding with them a type of communication that moved beyond the more popularly understood trance-state spirit communication.

Unlike Priscilla of The Blithedale Romance or Verena Tarrant of The Bostonians, the men and women of Dunnet Landing do not exploit this communicative ability for any public purpose. There is no enterprising character, male or female, lurking in the shadows to get these women on stage as entertainment. Spiritualist communication was for Jewett not an “altered state,” but a perfectly normal and beneficial one. The women of Dunnet Landing represent a community that has incorporated the principles of spiritualist communication into their daily lives for practical use. They interact with one another in such a way as to increase the value and application of their communicative ability (to communicate messages of need, to understand the world beyond their immediate existence, to sympathize with the experiences of others) rather than diminish its value by relegating it to the stage. The Country of the Pointed Firs thus made a significant contribution to the culture of altered states in nineteenth-century America because it envisions such experiences as not alternative at all but rather mainstream and useful to the everyday success of communities.

Works Cited

Ammons, Elizabeth, 1984, “Jewett’s Witches,” Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Gwen L. Nagel, Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984.

Blanchard, Paula, 1994, Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work, Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Braude, Ann, 1989, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

Folsom, Marcia McClintock, 1984, "'Tact Is a Kind of Mindreading,': Empathic Style in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the pointed Firs," Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Gwen L. Nagel, Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984.

Jewett, Sarah Orne, 1994, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories, New York: Norton, 1994.