Curator’s Note: This is Part II of a virtual ‘exhibition’ examining America’s self image during the Gilded Age, Mark Twain’s derisive term for a period of U.S. industrial and cultural expansion during the last quarter of the 19th century. It offered rich material from some of America’s best-known artists and writers.  This exhibition focuses specifically on the cities of the Northeast and here, their rural and coastal environs.  The art selected for inclusion in not intended to illustrate the text in any direct or literal sense; any more than the narrative excerpts are meant to be descriptive of the meaning or intent of any painting.  Rather, they combine to provide a contemporaneous view of the painter’s visible world and writer’s literary sphere.  The pairing of  ‘narrative’ painting with a ‘painterly’ narrative yields a multi-sensory experience for the virtual gallery visitor which will hopefully prove larger than the sum of its parts.

The Waterfront
“The seaside is a good place to rest in, especially if one can control his surroundings. The quiet, the calm, the peace, the pleasant color, the idyllic sights and sounds, all tend to allay nervous irritation, to tranquilize the soul, the repress the intellectual, and to invigorate the animal functions in a very remarkable degree.  But this is not rustic life; it is only the waterfront retreat of the city resident.” xxxxxx

The social scientist who wrote this in 1895 recognized two opposing views of New England’s ocean side villages and towns.  On the one hand were city residents, who viewed seaside escapes as a recreational, aesthetic and spiritual resource.  On the other were the fishermen and farmers who viewed the sea and adjoining land as an economic necessity.  For one the sea was a place of leisure; for the other, a place of work.  Uniting the two was the widely shared conviction that the balm of sea air promoted morality through contact with nature, whereas the city fostered corruption.  A pathologist summed up that belief in 1888: “Once let the human race be cut off from personal contact with nature,” he warned, “once let the conventionalities and artificial restrictions of so-called civilization interfere with the healthful simplicity of nature, and decay is certain” [Larkin, ‘Impressionism: The Beauty of Work’]

Right: Edward Henry Potthast, ‘Boy Sharpening a Sickle’ (1887-92). Probably a European painting, the featureless face of the boy symbolizes ‘Country’ and is a modern study in light and shadow. After 1897, Potthast worked as a lithographer for various New York print publications.

While the role of men who take to the sea for their livelihood is deeply rooted in American culture, the idealization of the fisherman co-existed with condescension toward the lifestyle their trade demanded of them.  Their unremitting toil, meager income, family sacrifice, omnipresent danger and limited opportunities for recreational pursuits earned them a meager position on the social hierarchy of an upwardly-mobile Gilded Age society. With numbers of young men willing to engage in maritime occupations dropping, a downward spiral of prosperity for many coastal towns was heightened by threats of international trade in fish and fish products, motorized vessels were able to speedily transport larger fish, from deeper waters and more distant shores, to wholesale markets in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and points south, where demand that was growing nearly exponentially.
The exodus from coastal villages, up and down the coast, to the city was most dramatic in New England, as compared to more southern climates.

In particular, the rocky, hilly terrain made farming—which provided vital subsistence crops for seasonal fishermen—more difficult.  Because of the vast influx of crops from the fertile, flat fields of the Midwest, on the one side, and the encroachment of urban wholesale markets with canned and salted seafood from Canada, Newfoundland and the warmer waters of the South Atlantic on the other, seafood and rural land values plummeted.  Overfishing was resulting in smaller catches, smaller boats could spend less time at sea, and retail prices made small fishing enterprises unprofitable.  Many abandoned their businesses altogether and moved westward with their children in search of cheaper land to farm ,or to manufacturing towns and cities for better wages.

Right: Rockwell Kent, ‘Toilers of the Sea’ (1907). For Kent the sea was captivating. “[Monhegan Island] is enough for me. It is enough to start me off to such feverish activity in painting I have never known.” Note the dory in the distance, tossed by the waves.

Even so, idealization of the rough-patch life of the seaman intensified in the mind of gentrified New Englanders, as images of isolation and sacrifices arising from life in seafaring coastal communities gripped their imagination and fancy.

In a partial reversal of the exodus of natives to these communities, city dwellers began to seek out seaside retreats for rest, relaxation and to ‘take the salt water and air,’ believing them to have a palliative effect on many ills. New-found wealth and a realization of the wonders of  America’s natural vistas prompted the construction of magnificent oceanfront homes and beachfront resorts in the 1880s and 90s. Prominent families and middle class vacationers began to treat their time at nearby waterfront communities as a salve to what a Connecticut Board of Agriculture executive described as “turning from their busy lives and the rasping friction of the world to the cool, regenerative contact with natural things” [McCray, in Larkin, ibid].

Jewett’s, ‘The Country of the Pointed Firs’

The narrator in The Country of the Pointed Firs arrives by boat on the island of Dunnet Landing as though floating in on a dream.  The purity and pristine aspects of the land and its people are beyond earshot of the distant drums of progress.  Superstition and witchcraft abide here unquestioningly, and  fantastical tales about the great world beyond its shores go unchallenged.  Considered by some a  local color work (and others more Regionalist), Jewett’s 1896 short story establishes an authorial tone of verisimilitude reflecting a sense-of-place like so many other New England towns, frozen in a pre-Industrial Era time capsule.

Left: Robert Henri, ‘Storm Tide’ (1903). A member of The Eight, Henri was a founder of the Ashcan school, dealing with topics considered less authentic or artful by many. Here, life and property are in peril as sky and sea close in on a small coastal village.

Captured here, too, are a wide range of characters, bound to the land—both physically and emotionally—by their traits and features: “There’s sometimes a good hearty tree growin’ right out of the bare rock. […] Every such tree has got its own livin’ spring; there’s folks made to match ‘em.”  There is Mrs. Blackett, whose character is described by the landscape around her: “gray rocks,” “rough pastures,” and “rough sheds.”   Mrs. Todd is portrayed as, “something lonely and solitary about her great determined shape.”

In her story, signs of the city are embodied in the barely-defined character of the visiting writer.  Her metropolitan origins are reflected in a few brief observations suggesting advanced education, refined social status and a life of privilege.  She is, after all, a woman of accomplishment (writing for pay and working with a publisher back home) and means (visiting briefly during a yachting trip).  By focusing on the residents and settings of Dunnett Landing, Jewett takes realism to a level which crowds out the harsh realities of urban living, just a day’s boat ride away to the south. Instead, she develops her genteel characters, living in a self-isolating environment, where caring and neighborly concern were still possible and purity-of-thought and noble emotions were the order of the day.

Left: John Joseph Emmeking, ‘Duxbury Clam Digger’ (1892). This image of a country boy digging clams in the low-lying marshes where agriculture meets the sea, is a time-honored subsistence activity on the New England coast. The tools are simple, the protein source is free, the work, backbreaking.

Jewett’s voice of gentility and escapist prose chose to avoid the rushed city streets, superfluous social pretentions,  slums, torturous factory working conditions and aggressive business practices that were defining the Industrial Age for growing urban populations of that time, alternatively constructing a dream-like Arcadia, inhabited by fiercely selfsufficient women living close to nature.

Jewett had come under the influence of William Howells early in her career.  Under his ‘realist’ banner, she was encouraged to write about the land, people, speech patterns and life styles of the people of her native Maine.  The noble characters and lush island settings of Dunnet Landing assume classically-heroic proportions for the reader. Her narrative goes beyond mere local color storytelling to become a personalized tale of regional New England hardihood, if not the pervasive American spirit.

And in terms of shaping the national identity, Howells was in no small way committed to Jewett’s form of prose.  He considered the ‘real’ to be a value touchstone, an antidote to “the pride of caste [that] is becoming the pride of taste ; but, as before, it is adverse to the mass of men; it consents to know them only in some conventionalized and artificial disguise” [Trachtenberg: ‘Culture and Society in the Guilded Age’].  Eschewing  the superficiality and Howells’s “deeply incorporated civilization,” she sought to democratize her writing and offer her readers a slice of the world as it might be if not encroached-upon; to create a fictional work congruent with her own vision of ‘real life.’

At the time Pointed Firs was written, ‘real life’ was much more likely to be found outside the window of the city-dweller, or the factory worker living a streetcar ride away from her assembly line or retail responsibilities. As noted earlier, Howells’s Lapham manifests the difficulty many found in bridging the divide between rural existence and the realities of urban living.  Twain afforded the dubious title of the ‘Gilded Age’  to this post-Civil War build-up of urban population and industrial output.

The American economy was in the process of transitioning from a predominantly selfemployed work force, producing only what was needed for family consumption, with some margin for sale or barter, to one of manufacturing for an anonymous, broad(and growing) consumer base. While Jewett surrounds the story’s narrator with a veil of mystery pertaining to her urbanity, social station and professional career as a writer, she clearly portrays the aging and isolated Maine community as doomed to fade into history for wont of its ability to adapt to modernity, with its new social and economic configurations and cultural perspectives.

Left: Maurice Prendergast, ‘The Stoney Beach, Ogunquit’ (1901). New wealth and tourism combined to breathe fresh life into New England coastal communities. Commercial cruise lines and rail made day trips and waterfront escapes a realistic possibility for city dwellers.

Jewett was writing at a time when the cultural and economic gap between rich and poor was widening and bitterly felt.  As the new American industrial elite were setting aside any vestiges of Puritan austerity, Jewett is constructing a fictional destination where Victorian principles of faith (a secular variation), hope and charity continued to matter; where a pre-industrial way-of-life could still be celebrated and a maternal culture, founded on love and abiding friendship, could stand steadfast in the face of a male-dominated empire of industry and global commerce.

In the opening chapter of Pointed Firs, the narrator “returns to find the unchanged shores…all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the center of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told.”  By establishing the island setting as dream-like, Jewett offers the spectral reality into which her characters could easily fade, like a departing ship into a Maine coastal fog.  Here, Jewett is embracing her mentor,  Howells’s, feared ‘shift in consciousness,’ where the ‘abiding sense of reality’ posed by urbanization threatens to destabilize—and eventually consume—the fragile, dream-like and mystical qualities of Dennet Landing.

Left: John Bradley Hudson, Jr., ‘White Head, Cushing Landing, Maine’ (date unk.). Side-wheelers plied the Maine coast to a “Down-east” port-of-call. Recreational and working sailing vessles co-mingle in the distance.

The antidote for what Howells saw as the “faulty vision” of the late 19th century, urban reader—and what Jewett ultimately portrays in Pointed Firs, is the indelibility of spirit, native strength-of-character and gentility which her influential editor considered a literary principle “nothing less than the truthful treatment of material…made for the benefit of people who have no true use for their eyes” [Trachtenberg: ibid].

The Countryside
Tensions had long existed between rural and urban America.  The nation was overwhelmingly rural and agrarian for most of its existence, but as industrialization shifted the demographic balance toward urban areas, society became more fragmented.  As new technologies quickened the pace of change in American life, the gap between urban and rural communities widened into a chasm.  Change came slowest to rural and small-town regions, what historian Robert Wiebe called “island communities” dominated by local elites or multi-generational bastions of their communities; where people clung to local traditions, customs and superstitions, and life went on with only the occasional intrusion from the storm of change engulfing seemingly distant cities [Wiebe: ‘Self-rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy‘].

Right: The McCormick Reaper appears in an 1875 ad.

The drawbacks of life on the farm had been felt for several generations.  For example, the introduction of Cyrus McCormick’s reaping machine in 1831 did more than any machine, since the lowly steel plow, to revolutionize the way farmers worked.  With hundreds sold in the decades of the 1840s and 50s, with a move to Chicago in 1848, the numbers of reapers jumped to the thousands.  It was estimated that, with the reaper, nine hours of a farmer’s labor in clearing an acre of grain could be reduced to one-half hour.  Unfortunately, the rolling hills and rocky soil of New England, with an average farm size of 3-5 acres, rendered the McCormick reaper inefficient. As a result, the exodus for farm families to the Mid-west in response to cheap land promotion programs, like the Homestead Act (1962), offered by the government, bled many New England farm communities of vital manpower and output.

America’s rural Northeast could not compete with the risky westward migration of many farmers seeking wealth and opportunity on the millions of low-cost acre being made available there. Even the introduction of the Morrill Act in 1862, granting each state land for the purpose of building agrarian colleges, where skills would be taught to enhance crop yields and train students in new farming technologies, was not enough to reverse the trend. A frequent criticism of the schools was that they were too theoretical, that they turned out too few ‘dirt farmers,’ and that men with bachelor degrees in agriculture exhibited an unwillingness to return to agrarian life [Kirkland: ‘A Study of New England History, 1829-1900’].

Still, there was a role for the rural community as it confronted the industrial age.  The secret to their continued economic vitality rested in their water power—and New England villages and towns were often blessed with ample dam-able lakes, rivers and streams.  As they had since the country’s founding, factories would continue to rely on proximity to flowing water, throughout most of the 19th century, moving the wheels and turbines that would animate the spinners, looms, lathes, saws and grinders necessary for turning out finished products.  “In mid-century, the factories and small shops on the Atlantic coast, stretching to the mid-Atlantic seaboard, produced practically every variety of manufactured goods made in the nation.  Seventy-one percent of all wage earners were engaged in manufacturing” [Kirkland].

Right: J. Alden Weir, ”Willimantic, Connecticut’ (1903). A model factory in the center of town, Willimantic Woolen was spared labor strikes, but hit by the depression of 1893, when Weir helped raise funds for workers. A benign-appearing, but powerful stone structure–symbolic of the Industrial Age.

In addition to water power, rural manufacturing sites were never too far from urban centers of commerce and finance to invest in growth; systems of roads, rivers, canals and railroads leading inland from the coast; the ocean, itself, as a means of distribution; and an under-employed native population, supplemented by a steady stream of immigrants arriving in New York and moving up the coast by inexpensive and readily-available train and steamer to ports-of-call, where they could find factory work while living, inexpensively, in factory-built housing.

Wharton’s ‘Ethan Frome’

Ethan Frome seems the personification of the landscape he inhabits.  Early in Wharton’s narrative, the visiting engineer observes, “I simply felt that [Frome] lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and had the sense that his loneliness…had in it…the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.”  The economy of Warton’s prose captures the terse austerity and emotional repression that many readers would have associated with an isolated New England town in economic decline, and caught in the grip of one-too-many long, harsh winter.

Still, the melancholic sentimentality which her rich imagery evokes would have appealed to readers of the day.  It envisioned a slower-paced, pastoral American countryside, bereft of urban blight and the crush of industrial and social progressivism that seemed to be holding ever-growing numbers of rapidly-expanding communities in its grip. And, emblematic of the dilemma that residents of many small, isolated villages faced,  Ethan Frome, himself, becomes a study in frustrated desire and ambition.

The very name ‘Starkfield’ has connotations of bleakness. There is a sense that the fate of the characters is shaped by the geography and climate of the place—as if the landscape enters and shapes individual consciousness. Starkfield is portrayed in images of snow, ice, cold, isolation, and death. The location is, in itself, an important theme and is an outward expression of the despair and hopelessness that blights the lives of Ethan and his neighbors. “When winter shut down on Starkfield, and the village lay under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale skies, I began to see what life there – or rather its negation – must have been in Ethan Frome’s young manhood.”

Left: Edward Rook, ‘Swirling Waters’ (1917). Along Old Lyme, CT’s Lieutenant River, depicting the essential proximity of flowing water to mill production, in this 18th c. grist mill.

Starkfileld serves as a microcosm for many of the issues confronting small new England villages and towns at the time: economic bleakness, matched not only by the winter weather, but by the despondency and hopeless of the principle characters; by technical and industrial progress which has bypassed the town, leaving the farms and cottage industries, like Frome’s sawmill, in ruinous condition; obligations to care for the present generation, in the form of incapacitated family members; and conjoined to memories of those long-passed—a recognition of those interred  in the church burial ground, where he imagines joining Mattie, someday.

Right: Willard Metcalf, ‘Hauling Wood, February 1910.’ Said a reviewer of this scene, “Good old Yankee land, a jolly party in the barn and the psychical odor of Maine pie mother made.”

Like the emotional tethers that once bound Silas Lapham to his parents’ graves in Vermont, Frome is unable to disconnect from his past and incapable of constructing a meaningful future for himself, away from this town. Local resident, Harmon Gow, tells the narrator that Ethan has been in Starkfield “too many winters,” adding that the smart people leave. The fact that the upgrade of the railroad has resulted in Starkfield’s being “side-tracked”, with very little passing traffic, is another sign that life and opportunities have passed by Ethan and the community.

Because he is unable to act decisively enough to change the trajectory of his life, he gives himself over to fantasy and daydreaming. Daydreams become the only outlet for his hopes. Memories of times away from Starkfield (Florida) “I was down there once, and for a good while afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it’s all snowed under.” He could be referring to the landscape or his memories; the two seem interchangeable, but either way, the image is one of life frozen, buried and ultimately extinguished.  His thoughts of career ambitions (engineering) meld into an emotional mix of passive aggressiveness, sullenness, child-like anger and fantasy.  Mattie, too, is criticized for being “a dreamer,” as she becomes ensnared in the surreal and delicately-choreographed game of cat-andmouse with Ethan that eventually leads to their undoing.

Left: Currier & Ives print, ‘Winter in the Country’ (1884). Mass-marketed lithographic prints, using new color technology reinforced the joys of country living.

Wharton contrasts the vitality of the climate, with its blue skies and white snow, with “the deadness of the community.” The atmosphere seems to retard even more “the sluggish pulse of Starkfield.”  The state of Ethan’s farm and sawmill reflects his fortunes. The shed roof sags under the weight of snow; the paint is worn; and the sawmill wheel sits idle. The “black wraith” of a creeper hangs by the door, reminiscent of the black streamers that people used to hang by the door as a sign of mourning. “Wraith” also means “ghost,” adding to the theme of death. Most significantly, the “L” part of the house that normally forms the “center, the actual hearth-stone” of a New England farm, and which protects the family from the elements on their way from the house to the cow-barn, has been demolished. The narrator sees the loss of this building as symbolic of the diminishment of Ethan himself.

Summary

Dreams become the crucible for unfulfilled wishes.  Dreamlike states serve as a refuge for those that cannot find satisfaction in everyday reality.  In the fine line that distinguishes dreams from waking fantasies rests the raw material of our imagination.  Writers like Howells,  Jewett, and Wharton imagined places that were close enough to our experience to be ‘believable,’ but removed enough from reality to allow their principle character to metamorphose into symbols  of their time.

Right: John Sloan, ‘The Wake of the Ferry, II’ (1907). Isolation and subtle danger are the subtext of this city scene on the Staten Island ferry. The fogged-in, vertiginous horizon and rolling vessel appear unstable, as a lone female figure sits contemplatively.

Silas Lapham was an allegory for overnight riches, social striving in a judgmental world and a fall from grace that proved redemptive.  The narrator in Pointed Firs alighted on the island of Dunnet Landing from an unnamed magic kingdom—a modern city-of-lights, just over the horizon.  The land she entered was populated by powerful, enigmatic  women filled with stories of rich, full lives, lived long ago and a natural world of light, color and sensation that seemed, like its residents, both impermanent and immortal. The writer’s dream-state was defined by her tenuous understanding of the physical and emotional boundaries of this island world, and when it sank below the horizon on her departure, the narrator was left to question its ultimate survival in a modern world.  Then, only by returning, could she assure herselfthat it was not a dream, but a tenuous reality.

Ethan Frome is, on the surface, stoic, yet insecure. He is “aware of the huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things,” and because he is “by nature grave and inarticulate,” is warmed by Mattie’s presence in his life.  Frome’s dream is to have a life without the burdens’ of caring for his invalid wife and to spend the rest of his life (and death) with this young charge.  She, too, is  “quick to learn, but forgetful and dreamy,”

Right: Winslow Homer, ‘The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog’ (1894). A 1932 critic wrote: “There is an order and grand formation, force of the sea, resistance of the rock, an integrity of nature in Homer’s seascapes.”

Frome had always wanted to “live in towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and fellows doing things,”  but is held captive by his circumstances. Death becomes a fantasy that will provide a release for them both—but it is not to be.  Wharton’s morality tale confirms the pitfalls of fantasies and dreaming, and portrays a life of frustration lived in a world of the author’s own creation, where human tragedy is blanketed beneath idyllic wintery scenes, like those conveyed in the crystalline confines of a desktop snow globe when shaken.

American visual art of the same period under consideration had moved well beyond the romantic motifs and luminist styling of mid-century.  It would be several more decades before the voice of the American School would rely less on European influences and speak stylistically to the uniquely American issues of urban life, the immigrant community and the psychological state-of-mind of the artist, himself.

Left: Albert Pinkham Ryder, ‘Moonlight Marine’ (1870s or 80s). Ryder’s strong tones and geometric forms, combined with traditional themes merge romantic terrors of the sea with dream-like qualities of escapism in a modern dream.

But, at least by the 1880s selected American painters began to adapt their European training to reflect the realities of their native surroundings.  Principle among them were Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, whose human figures played significantly in the foreground of their paintings, and Albert Pinkhan Ryder, who developed a unique, introspective and dreamlike style of landscape painting.  Inspired by their French counterparts, other American painters came late to Impressionism in the last decade of the 19th century, and extending into the early 20th century, including Weir, Twachtman, Pendergast, Hassam, and others.

Right: John Sloan, ‘Hairdresser’s Window’ (1909). Caricaturing life in the crowded city, Sloan portrays even the most personal pursuits as public spectacle, prone to jostling and ridicule.

By the late 1910s, and through the period of World War I, John Sloan and The Eight would lead the way with a vigorous realist movement, focusing on gritty urban subjects.  This was the beginning of the so-called Ashcan School— in reaction to the conservative standards of the National Academy of Design.  The Modern Era in the visual arts would clearly be underway in the second decade of the 20th century, reeling from the dramatic influence of New York’s 1913 Armory Show and the profound, universal impact of the Great War on aesthetic principles of cultural evolution.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Read Part I of ‘Spectacle and Dreams’ here: http://www.artesmagazine.com/2015/04/in-the-realm-of-spectacle-and-dreams-19th-c-artists-and-writers-shape-a-new-america/

Opening Image: ‘Exhibition’ catalogue cover. Winslow Homer, ‘A New Novel’ (detail), 1877. Social critics of the time worried that females reading novels would corrupt their gentile, feminine qualities, triggering strange, amorous impulses and ideas.