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'Characters ... Worth Listening To': Dialogized Voices In Sarah Orne Jewett's 'The Country Of The Pointed Firs', Margaret M. Strain

English Faculty Publications

Since its publication in 1896, critics of Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs have disputed the work's claim to be a novel. Feminist critics in particular have defended the fiction's nonlinear structure, some claiming that its circularity and nondramatic development characterize a novelistic mode that is distinctively female. Yet even such defenses of Pointed Firs are limited. Resting as they do on binary polarities (male/female; linearity/nonlinearity), such oppositions reduce discussion of Pointed Firs's genre to issues of engenderment and plot variation. I believe that the work of Mikhail Bakhtin offers another way to address the question of …