{"id":12191,"date":"2016-11-23T15:22:56","date_gmt":"2016-11-23T20:22:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=12191"},"modified":"2017-03-02T09:04:18","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T14:04:18","slug":"desire-under-the-firs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/desire-under-the-firs\/","title":{"rendered":"Desire Under the Firs"},"content":{"rendered":"

December 2016 | view this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

Society chronicler Annie Adams Fields<\/strong> played muse and Tory lover for <\/span> Sarah Orne Jewett, author of <\/span> Country of the Pointed Firs.<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"love-letters-dec16\"Terry Heller<\/strong>, Ph.D., had never been to the small Maine town where Sarah Orne Jewett<\/strong> lived when he first fell in love with her books about the people and life of her rural New England world. But Jewett\u2019s stories made the young teacher living in 1970s Iowa yearn for the 19th century South Berwick, to know Jewett herself, and to be a part of her intimate circle of friends.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, Heller is a world authority on Jewett (1849-1909) and has spent decades amassing The Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project<\/strong> from his base at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Like most everyone fascinated by the life and times of this writer, he knows all about Jewett and Boston aristocrat Annie Fields: they were close friends, deeply and even passionately connected, travel companions, and life partners. But even today, Heller is unwilling to definitively comment on the suggestion of romantic involvement that hovered over the women\u2019s relationship between 1882 and 1909. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no doubt about the deep and abiding affection between Sarah and Annie,\u201d says Heller, in a recent visit to South Berwick. \u201cBut there is plenty of doubt about an erotic component because so far there is a lack of unequivocally persuasive evidence.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The signs are everywhere. There are the stories of intimate intrigues sprinkled through two of Jewett\u2019s best-known works, Deephaven<\/em> (1877) and Country of Pointed Firs<\/em> (1896), relationships between women that often mirror her own life stories and friendships. Indeed, there are love poems directed quite startlingly to women, dozens of them, in fact. Jewett wrote in the opening of an 1880 poem:<\/span><\/p>\n

Do you remember, darling,<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

A year ago today <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

When we gave ourselves to each other\u2026<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Most telling of all are the myriad letters written back and forth between Jewett and Fields, a Boston author whose relationship began while Fields was still married and continued for 30 years after Fields\u2019s husband, Atlantic Monthly<\/em> publisher James Fields, died in 1881. Jewett wrote to Fields in 1882:<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh my dear darling I had <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

forgotten that we loved each other <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

so much a year ago\u2013for it all seems <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

so new to me every day\u2013there is so much <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

for us to remember already\u2026<\/em><\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

A Cover-up Uncovered <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Nina Maurer, regional administrator for the Jewett House in South Berwick and several other historic New England properties in the 1990s, recalls that even at a Jewett conference in 1995, no one was willing to go out on a limb and say Jewett was gay.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAt the time, the people I talked to said they didn\u2019t have any evidence or documents that would corroborate the fact or supposition that she was gay,\u201d says Maurer, a South Berwick resident.<\/span><\/p>\n

Enter Portland playwright Carolyn Gage<\/strong>, who includes Jewett and Fields\u2019s relationship in her show \u201cTheatrical Journey Through Maine\u2019s Lesbian History.\u201d<\/strong> According to Gage, the two women \u201cattended s\u00e9ances to gain approval [for\u00a0 <\/span>their relationship] from the spirits of a dead father and former husband.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Gage, both as a playwright and a member of the lesbian community, feels it is the responsibility of the academic community as \u201cthe gatekeepers of history to incorporate [Jewett\u2019s] lesbianism. And that would require an understanding that there is a culture associated with lesbianism. Jewett and Fields were part of several networks of upper- and upper-middle-class lesbian activists and artists who only recently have begun to be uncovered and studied. Jewett\u2019s life and work should provide a proud lesbian legacy for all Mainers. She is one of the few women authors in the canon of what are considered the \u2018classics\u2019 of 19th century American literature. The Country of the Pointed Firs<\/em>, focused on the lives and the relationships between older, rural women in Maine, is quintessentially lesbian, but it has been historically closeted along with her life by both academics and docents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cultural Context<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

What we do know of the intimacies that passed between Jewett and Fields became an iconic example of a \u201cBoston marriage,\u201d the name given to intimate friendships between women in the 19th century, not to mention a celebrated 1999 play by David Mamet.<\/p>\n

\u2018Improper\u2019 Bostonians<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Jewett\u2019s friend and contemporary Henry James was so intrigued by her friendship with Fields that it was a springboard for his 1886 novel The Bostonians.<\/em> Josephine Donovan writes in The Unpublished Love Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett<\/em>, \u201c<\/em>Helen Howe suggests that Henry James was unnerved by the pair. \u2018What Henry James, whose The Bostonians <\/em>was published in 1888, found to \u2018catch at\u2019 in the friendship between the Charles Street ladies we can only guess.\u2019 The implication here is that the latent lesbian relationship between the characters Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant which James satirized in the novel was based on the Jewett-Fields liaison. There are in fact some parallels between the two couples: Olive was older than Verena, more aristocratic; Fields was also older and more urbane than Jewett, a native of rural Maine. Without commenting on this possibility, Leon Edel claims that James was merely reflecting the attitudes of his time in depicting the women so harshly. Nan Bauer Maglin argues that The Bostonians <\/em>was an attempt to discredit the suffrage movement \u201cwith the charge of `lesbianism\u2019 or perhaps only `intense relationshipism.\u2019\u201d Jewett in fact knew of the intense relationship that existed between Henry\u2019s sister Alice and Katherine Loring, commenting in a letter how \u2018Alice James\u2019s going has made a great empty place in [Katherine\u2019s] life.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Voicing the Silence<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

issing from our 21st-century vantage is the atmosphere in which passions of the times operated. Victorian society left little room for expression of even heterosexual love, let alone passion, except quietly in the privacy of a marital bedroom. But while physical relationships between men were considered an outrage, physical intimacies between women did not carry the same stigma.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFemale homosexuality was almost inconceivable to the public mind until the term \u2018sexual inversion,\u2019 a coinage by sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, was popularized,\u201d says Heller.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jewett and Fields sensed a growing suspicion towards the nature of their relationship towards the end of Jewett\u2019s life. Although Fields was willing to publish the full extent of their intimate correspondence following Jewett\u2019s death in 1909, there are indications that her editors chose to eliminate incriminating details from the letters before publication in 1911.<\/span><\/p>\n

Definitions of sexuality were far less black and white, explains Sarah Way Sherman, associate professor of English and American studies at the University of New Hampshire and author of Sarah Orne Jewett, An American Persephone.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAssessing these unions is difficult from a 20th-century perspective,\u201d Sherman says. \u201cRelationships like the one between Jewett and Fields were true unions: intimate life-long commitments that can serve as models for loving relationships today.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The friendship between Fields, a Boston sophisticate, and Jewett, a relative country girl, turned intimate after the death of Fields\u2019s husband, according to Sherman. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSometime in the winter of 1881 in the wake of James Fields\u2019s death, Annie Fields and Sarah Jewett fell in love,\u201d she wrote. For the rest of Jewett\u2019s life the two would live much of the time in Fields\u2019s homes in Manchester-by-the-Sea, New Hampshire, or on Charles Street in Boston, where they were part of a literary crowd that included Willa Cather, Sarah Whitman, Alice James, and other writers and intellectuals of the time.<\/span><\/p>\n

D<\/span>uring his recent visit to Jewett\u2019s hometown, Terry Heller canoed the Salmon Falls River, walked along the Ogunquit coast, and was received at the historical society\u2019s Counting House Museum, enjoying much of the scenery captured in Jewett\u2019s books. <\/span><\/p>\n

Remarkably, Main Street today is not all that different from when Jewett lived here. Heller and his wife stayed in a house with an apple orchard Jewett frequented that is just doors away from the historic house where she lived, and which is open to the public for tours.<\/span><\/p>\n

While Fields\u2019s sexuality may be an academic question to, well, academics, Heller knows it could have relevance for individuals today whose sexuality is marginalized, namely the LGBTQ community.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt helps if you feel like an excluded minority to point to people included in the fellowship, especially famous people through history,\u201d Heller suggests. <\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, <\/span>towards the end of the interview, Heller notes with seeming surprise that in all his years teaching classes on Jewett he never addressed the subject of her sexuality.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cStudents never knew to bring it up, and I didn\u2019t know how to answer the question, so I didn\u2019t,\u201d says Heller.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just as our country\u2019s relationship with homosexuality has evolved over the years, Heller has noticed his own feelings about this question of Jewett\u2019s sexuality. He once worried this already marginalized writer would be judged. Now, though, he\u2019s ready to embrace whatever truths may be uncovered. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI loved Jewett and still do, so when people said things that lacked evidence my first reaction was to back off\u2013not because it was bad,\u201d he says, \u201cbut in protectiveness, like why do we want to invade her privacy?\u201d Today, the label of homosexuality may enrich the reputation of his literary hero. For love\u2019s sake; for art\u2019s sake.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe world has changed, and I\u2019ve changed with it,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Online Extras: Go to portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/2016\/10\/sarah-orne-jewett to read the fully transcribed version of Jewett and Fields\u2019s correspondence, provided by Maine Women Writers <\/span>Collection, University of New England, Portland. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

December 2016
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