Sarah Orne Jewett and the purpose of fiction

Some critics place Sarah Orne Jewett alongside the domestic novelists of the previous generation. Before deciding whether that comparison works, we need to know what they have in common. The author grants a real similarity: both concentrate on women, their domestic activities, and their relationships, while men remain in the background.

That gives the comparison a starting point. It doesn't settle it. Two writers can choose similar subjects for very different reasons.

The differences arrive immediately. Earlier domestic fiction revolves around children and the challenge of raising them with their mothers' values. Picture a mother trying to teach a child the importance of hard work or religious belief. That effort supplies the drama. In Jewett's fiction, children and child rearing are almost entirely absent. Religion is another contrast: the earlier novels are insistently Protestant, while her fictional world is almost wholly secular.

Keep the references straight. When the author says the world of “the latter” revolves around children, that means the antecedents—the earlier novels. Latter refers to the second item just mentioned, not the writer whose work appeared later in history.

Why would the books differ this way? Perhaps the writers simply have different interests. Perhaps their circumstances changed: young people moved from rural areas to cities, and society became more secular. I can see how such changes might affect what someone writes about. But those are possible contributing explanations, not the author's final answer.

The more fundamental difference concerns what fiction is for. The domestic novelists treated a story as part of moral, religious, and household instruction. One book could be a novel, a child-rearing manual, and a guide to Christian duty all at once. The boundaries between those kinds of writing were blurred because they shared an instructional purpose.

Jewett's writing has a different aim. It treats fiction as valuable in itself. We might initially describe that as writing an interesting story rather than a guide to living. The author makes the distinction more precise: the work is valued as art, especially for the arrangement of its elements. Entertainment might come to mind, but the claim isn't that amusement is its only value.

This artistic conception didn't suddenly appear with Jewett. It was already one of several views in the 1850s and 1860s, then became dominant later. The historical explanation helps us see the conception she embodies without crediting her with inventing it.

The ending tells us how to weigh the comparison. The domestic novelists use fiction to accomplish something beyond the work itself, such as moral instruction. Jewett treats the work as an end in itself. That difference in purpose matters more than the surface similarity of writing about women.

So our prediction should go beyond the topic of Jewett and earlier novelists. The point is how they differ and why that difference matters: treating her as simply aligned with domestic fiction misses her fundamentally different view of what a novel should do.