Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Scholarship on late-nineteenth-century US regionalism has undergone a startling series of changes. The major feminist reclamation project of the 1980s yielded in the 1990s to a major reassessment of white female regionalists’ racism, classism, and nationalism. In response to a series of indictments that at times lacked nuance, critics have begun to reconsider female regionalists’ challenges to restrictive social categories. Marjorie Pryse, for example, has focused on Sarah Orne Jewett’s unique “transitivity.”

Complicating and extending this approach, I argue that Jewett’s regionalism does, indeed, “move across and between borders,” but it also deploys exclusive, normative categories in surprising ways. I root this argument in a new reading of “The Circus at Denby” chapter from Jewett’s first novel, Deephaven (1876). Led by their guide, the aptly named Mrs. Kew, Jewett’s urban protagonists leave their summer haunt, an archaic, disappearing region, for industrial Denby. At the circus, they navigate a maze of under-awing spectacles before arriving at the side-show tents. Through a pattern of allusions, Jewett links this journey through the heart of mass culture to Dante’s progression through hell. The episode intensifies when the Virgilian Kew—a native artist and lighthouse keeper—introduces the heroines to a former acquaintance. This encounter with Marilly, the ersatz “Kentucky Giantess,” bears strikingly similarities to Dante’s encounter with Ciacco in the Inferno’s circle of the gluttons. With Kew’s guidance, the heroines penetrate the aura of publicity that has defined Marilly as a “freak.” In the process, they simultaneously rupture this painful category and secure distinction from the credulous mass. More problematically, the travelers insulate themselves from responsibility for those at the social margins by deploying a logic of sin and punishment. In fact, the three use Marilly’s status as a glutton to enact their own contrapasso—Marilly, they reason, cannot be invited to the lighthouse because she would sink the boat. This apotropaic remark frees the women to enjoy their journey home.

This episode at once affirms regionalism’s touristic function and fleshes out Jewett’s more radical vision. Indeed, Jewett’s interpolation must be read as an engendered act of appropriation. With her friend Annie Fields, Jewett was excluded from Longfellow’s celebrated Dante Club, which met at the Fields’ house. Jewett’s promethean allusions, then, challenge what June Howard describes as the historical dismissal of regionalism as a feminine, “minor literature about unimportant people in unimportant places.” But Jewett’s commentary on gender is not limited to subtle maneuvers in the rare air of high culture. The “Circus” chapter closes with a satirical description of a second “public entertainment”—a traveling lecture on True Manhood. The freak-show “lecturer” who broadcasts Marilly’s exceptional qualities returns in the form of a ridiculous exhorter of American manhood. Through her description of this lecture, Jewett underscores the perversity of dominant gender categories.

Jewett’s regionalism is worth revisiting (again) both for its commitment to new gender identities and for its uneven exploration of the unique possibilities found at regionalism’s crossroads.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Dante is often portrayed as a theorist who is deeply concerned with the virtues and with justice in particular, including moral, divine, and political justice. Yet, Dante's most overtly political work, the De Monarchia, contains no real discussion of justice as a virtue. In fact, his description of political justice - giving all power and all material goods to a single individual to enable him to rule justly without greed - is both bizarre and at odds with the notion of Aristotelian political virtue, with which he was quite familiar and employed in his other works. As such, scholars have struggled to explain how De Monarchia can fit comfortably with Dante's cannon. Given Dante's penchant for humorous social and political commentary, we propose that De Monarchia be read as a political satire. Understood in this manner, Dante's aim was not to advocate an absolutist world monarchy, but rather to poke fun at the papacy's claims to absolute power by presenting parallel and exaggerated versions of arguments being promulgated by papalist thinkers at the time. Thus, although De Monarchia may be lacking as a theory of political justice, it does provide an insightful and satirical critique of the papacy and its political supporters.