Literary Analysis of Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor (1884)

Narrative Overview and Biological Foundations. Through the pages of this coming-of-age novel (bildungsroman), Sarah Orne Jewett traces the early life of Anna (Nan) Prince, who is orphaned in infancy and overcomes social opposition to become a country doctor. Nan Prince's childhood unfolds on the farm of her maternal grandmother, Mrs. Thacher, where she enjoys unlimited access to the fields, streams, and forests of rural New England and in the process develops a love of freedom and independence. After her grandmother dies, Nan enters the home of Dr. Leslie, who attended her mother in her final hours and who has played a role in Nan's life from the moment her mother took her to her grandmother's farm.

Even before she moved to Dr. Leslie's comfortable home in nearby Oldfields, Nan had expressed an interest in the healing arts, which Dr. Leslie immediately recognized as an expression of natural ability. After she becomes his ward, he takes her with him on visits to the homes of patients and nurtures her native talent. In the chapters that recount Nan's late childhood and young adulthood in Oldfields, Jewett draws extensively from her own experience growing up as the daughter of a doctor in rural Maine, who, as Dr. Leslie did with Nan, took Sarah Orne Jewett with him on patient rounds and had a profound influence on her development.

Despite the resistance Nan encounters from conservative members of the Oldfields community, she decides to go to medical school and dedicate herself to the healing arts. It is during this period that she arranges a visit to her father's sister, her aunt Nancy Prince, a proud woman who has remained strangely detached from Nan's life. This visit to her aunt in the seaside village of Dunport proves the occasion of Nan's greatest trial. During the few short weeks of her stay, Nan faces aggressive social opposition to her medical aspirations at the same time that she feels a romantic attachment to George Gerry, a handsome young attorney and close friend of her aunt. After a period of serious soul searching, Nan emerges with renewed dedication to her chosen vocation and the conviction that for her marriage is not the path to true happiness.

Structural Oppositions and Gender Roles. Jewett structures the novel around several core oppositions, which include the contrast between town and country, as represented by pronounced differences between Dunport and Oldfields, and the contrast between natural self-expression and social conformity, as represented by Nan's rejection of the dominant social code that limits female ambition to marriage and the raising of a family. Jewett is very careful to present Nan's childhood as shaped by extended exposure to the natural world, so that the decisions she makes as she grows into adulthood surface as the unimpeded expression of her true self. This is what enables Nan to rebuff the charge of being unnatural by telling the domineering Dunport matron Mrs. Fraley: "Nobody persuaded me into following such a plan; I simply grew toward it" (Jewett 327).

By means of such language, Jewett draws attention to the artificiality of social expectations that are at odds with the growth process. An underlying theme that runs throughout the novel, and is repeatedly supported by scenes like this one, is the belief that American culture has advanced to the point where the differences between the sexes that were so essential to species survival in earlier times no longer apply with the same force. As a consequence, to restrict the free expression of female ambition by insisting on a continued division of labor is to risk thwarting the advance of culture. Jewett is at great pains to stress that women should be allowed to choose their futures and that for some women this will continue to include marrying and managing a home. This is why Nan tells her suitor, George Gerry, how aware she is that most women would not choose to act as she has:

"I know better and better that most women are made for another sort of existence, but by and by I must do my part in my own way to make many homes happy instead of one" (355).

Jewett's aim here and elsewhere is to show readers that the change she advocates through her protagonist applies only to a small segment of the population and therefore poses no threat to the institution of marriage or the continued importance of the family.

The Town and Country Binary. The contrast between town and country is established early when Nan's mother, Adeline, expends her last ounce of strength carrying her baby to the safety of the family farm situated outside Oldfields. Her suffering and eventual death appear to be the result of alcoholism and an advanced case of tuberculosis, both of which are linked to the corrupting influence of town life and the hostile presence of the Prince family, who are associated with the town of Dunport. Adeline's dying words to Dr. Leslie convey her regret at not having returned to her rural roots long ago and make clear her wish that Nan live with Mrs. Thacher as long as possible: "She must stay here with mother, long as she wants her. 'Tis what I wish I had kept sense enough to do" (169).

Adeline goes on to say that her sole aim is seeing that "the baby is well placed" and given "a good chance to grow up a useful woman". The importance of being useful that is mentioned here is central to Jewett's argument that women be allowed to decide for themselves which direction their lives should take.

The Prince family represents the opposite of this vision of expanded female choice, and it is probably no coincidence that Jewett selected Prince as their family name. Doing so links them to male-centered dynastic aims, and the Prince family is concerned chiefly with control of family wealth achieved through marriage and female conformity. What little we know of Adeline's marriage to Jack Prince is that she was perceived to be an unsuitable match and that her husband's loyalties lay more with his family than with her. Her final words to Dr. Leslie are that Nan be kept out of Prince hands: "And most of all . . . keep her out of their hands, I mean her father's folks. I hate 'em, and he cared more for 'em than he did for me".

Jewett closes the chapter in which Adeline dies with the observation: "There was no love lost between the town and the country household" (174). According to Jewett's construction of town and country, then, the town is conceived of as a destructive influence, particularly for women, because the town is where wealth is accumulated through trade, consolidated through profitable marriages, and perpetuated through respect for social traditions. In the country, where nature has a greater influence on the course of life, women are granted more independence, and social change is easier to achieve because families have not acquired the wealth that requires the protection of fixed traditions.

Character Typologies and Social Criticism. Miss Nancy Prince is the principal character associated with Dunport, and it is appropriate that she sets the tone in general for the other characters we meet during Nan's stay at her aunt's home. During her first days at that house, Nan wonders at the "implacable hostility" that "had lasted for years in the breast of a person" she now discovers to be so "friendly and cordial in her relations with her neighbors" and so welcoming to her (298). In response to Nan's perplexity, the narrative tells us what the young woman is "slow to recognize in her relative": that "Miss Prince's acquaintances called her a very set person" and though she possessed the "traits of character which are necessary for . . . an enterprising life, . . . her gifts of persistence and self-confidence had ranked themselves for the defense of a comparatively unimportant and commonplace existence". This dedication to stability and the continuation of life as it has been rather than as it might be is the cornerstone of the society Nan enters through Miss Prince.

This dedication to the status quo is fully embodied in the person of George Gerry, the young man Miss Prince would like Nan to marry. His instinctive devotion to traditional male and female roles emerges most forcefully at the point in the novel when Nan sets the dislocated shoulder of a farmer she and George encounter while on a picnic.

"I'll be hanged if she didn't set it," declares the grateful farmer, who goes on to express his admiration, telling Nan that she is "the smartest young woman I ever see" (317).

The narrative then reveals George's inner thoughts so that we see how uneasy he is at being upstaged by a woman: "He was stout-hearted enough usually; as brave a fellow as one could wish to see; but he felt weak and womanish, and somehow wished it had been he who could play the doctor" (317). The perception that George sees his manhood as dependent upon his ability to subordinate Nan is reinforced when we are later told that to his way of thinking, "all his manliness was at stake, and his natural rights would be degraded and lost, if he could not show his power to be greater than her own" (336). As readers, we increasingly agree with Eunice Fraley's opinion that while in Dunport Nan resembled "a caged bird at a window" that watches with envy the free flight of a lark (321). For this reason, we begin to see that marriage to George Gerry is not right for Nan, and we are relieved when she at last rejects his suit. As Nan states to Dr. Leslie upon her return to Oldfields, her commitment to medicine is greater as a result of having been tested: "I shall work better all my life for having been able to make myself so perfectly sure that I know my way" (363).

Pedagogical Prompts and Discussion Topics. The primary pedagogical questions generated by the source text for academic review and student writing include:
1st step: Look closely at the argument that takes place between Nan and Mrs. Fraley near the end of the chapter titled "A Serious Tea-Drinking". Explain why Jewett pays so much attention to determining what is or is not natural behavior for a woman.

2nd step: Near the end of the chapter titled "A Sunday Visit," Nan is described as enjoying the sights and sounds of Dr. Leslie's summer house instead of going to church. Compare Jewett's description of Nan with the speaker in Emily Dickinson's poem "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—". To what extent do you think Dickinson's poem accurately expresses what Jewett is telling us about Nan?

3rd step: Can you explain why Jewett decided to have Nan fall in love and be tempted by marriage? Do you think her novel would have been just as effective if Nan had not experienced the romantic encounter with George Gerry?

4th step: Look closely at the way Jewett presents Nan's thoughts about marriage and her future profession at the end of the chapter titled "Friend and Lover". Explain how Kate Chopin's work "The Story of an Hour" might be thought of as representing an outcome Nan might have experienced if she had yielded to the temptation to marry.