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A New Spiritual Biography: Domesticity and Sorority in the Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett

In her discussion of local color fiction, Ann Douglas observes that "the Local Colorist's imaginary territory is dominated by the laws of scarcity: the wherewithal of life has somehow been withheld."1 The "wherewithal of life" in the economic sense had evaporated in the late nineteenth century as rural New England became increasingly removed from the mainstream development of the nation. However, the energy of the inner life that had defined New England from its beginnings remained, embedded in the ritual values of the women's community. Drawing upon and portraying the strength of this community through her emphasis on realistic details of the domestic sphere, Sarah Orne Jewett reasserts the significance of the values enacted in women's rituals. The women's community is central to Jewett's vision of an underlying realism and is reflected in what Josephine Donovan has called "the yearning . . . for a transcending community and a sense of loss at its lack" that characterizes Jewett's fiction.2 Through her short stories, Jewett endeavors to demonstrate that the power of this community, strengthened by an inner grace, is a force equal to the challenge of the decline wrought by economic failure. One means of revealing this power and the love which energizes it appears in Jewett's transformation of a literary form long familiar to New Englanders, the spiritual biography. Jewett, using elements of the domestic sphere, develops a new code for identifying signs of grace in an individual life and makes the older women of her fiction, whose age and experience have enriched their vision of individual lives, the interpreters of these life stories. The narrative pattern that Jewett develops in two of her short stories, "Miss Tempy's Watchers" and "The Passing of Sister Barsett," indicates Jewett's experimentation with a narrative form that later gives shape to The Country of the Pointed Firs, which many readers perceive as a key work in the tradition of female realism.3