Beyond Stateless Literature? Practices of Democratic Power in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Regionalism

Is the state still relevant as a tool for critical analysis?  Until recently, the state has largely been understood as a foil, as if the whole of nineteenth-century US fiction were caught up in a project against state-building. The book in progress from which this paper is drawn questions this hitherto dominant paradigm and explores nineteenth-century US literature in light of recent revisionist studies in sociology, political science, law and history that have challenged the Marxian and Weberian conceptions of the state and proposed a less ideal conception of democracy and a more pragmatic conception of the state that depart from the logic of a zero-sum game – more state, less democracy; more democracy, less state. While literature has remained largely outside this investigation, the project builds on these novel epistemological frames to ask: how can nineteenth-century US literature be reread in the light of this new State-Democracy articulation? In particular, the project explores how the need for democratic regulations were not just the prerogative of a (largely male) judiciary but also widely relayed in women’s fiction. My case study in this talk is Sarah Orne Jewett’s regionalist fiction.

Granted, the transformation of the State, social legislation, public utility are not usual keywords associated with Jewett’s regionalism, which usually evokes resistance to “the beginnings of a new American police state” and a “more generalized policing of the social norms.” While this is true, the problem with most scholarship, I suggest, is its tendency to throw the social provision and social welfare part of Progressive reforms with the bathwater of the police state. This talk proposes to read Jewett’s understudied industrial story “The Gray Mills of Farley” (1898) as a fictional engagement with the problem of democratic action in a capitalist society in transition, away from the myth of the “well-regulated” society.