English Faculty Publications

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-1994

Publication Source

Colby Quarterly

Abstract

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 whether Pointed Firsis a novel, a way that avoids the dichotomized nature of previous criticisms. Bakhtin's theory of the novel rejects traditional definitions of the genre as a homogeneous form and of language as a unitary, centripetalizing system. Unlike his structuralist and linguistic contemporaries, Bakhtin recognizes that stratifications within language extend to include not only a variety of dialects but socio-ideological languages as well. In redirecting our attention to the realm of language, Bakhtin situates interanimated discourses and contesting voices at the heart of all novelistic fiction.

Inclusive pages

131-145

Document Version

Published Version

Comments

This open-access article is made available by Digital Commons @ Colby.

Publisher

Colby College

Volume

30

Issue

2

Download

Share

COinS