| Spacious Places of Spiritual Autobiography: The Paradox of Pilgrimage in Sarah Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs argues that Sarah Orne Jewett's sketch masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs, is a fictive, literary spiritual autobiography. Jewett artifacts, her Bible (annotated within) and her rosary (a meditative model), along with the influence of Phillips Brooks, whose religious philosophy and linguistic imagery appear throughout CPF, provide biographical evidence of her spiritual pilgrimage. Jewett's spiritual autobiography is represented in five biographical character sketches, five pilgrimages within the narrator's autobiographical sketch of her journey to the metaphoric country of the pointed firs, a spacious place of redemptive friendship. The sketch mode, useful for spiritual narrative, permits a flexible merging of historical, spiritual and literary intention. In addition to "little pilgrimage" spiritual analogues of visiting, CPF affirms the idyllic realism of Mitford's Our Village, the New England village sketch tradition, and the "wise woman" characterization, but transforms that literary heritage into a moral and spiritual representation modeled on Jesus-as-Friend. Jewett uses the words "interest" and "delight" to convey this spiritual capacity. Multiple sketches form a larger sketch that is "history-like" and a "revelatory poesis," Paul Ricoeur's language for understanding text as "witness and testimony" to sacred truth, in Jewett a radical call to spiritual freedom. The "world in front of the text" becomes a salvific community, a spacious place in which the reader participates in spiritual pilgrimage. Jewett's lifelong physical, suffering is both context and text for CPF. The five spiritual biographical sketches portray trauma, understood in Elaine Scarry's terminology as an "unmaking of the world"; the narrator's little pilgrimages of visiting provide the remedy, a "making of the world" through empathy. Jewett offers a paradoxical social gospel, a vocation of sainthood in ordinary life through "transfiguring powers" of friendship. This is, in Charles Taylor's depiction of the modern, an "affirmation of the ordinary," which in Jewett's CPF becomes a theology of the ordinary. The paradox of pilgrimage forms at the nexus of the modern secular experience of the ordinary and the historical Christian spiritual search for the Trinitarian God. |
