14 minute read
The Mantle of Love and Friendship
TOP LEFT: Sarah Orne Jewett photographed reading a book, date unknown. TOP RIGHT: Southworth and Hawes daguerreotype portrait of Annie Adams Fields, 1861. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of I. N. Phelps Stokes, Edward S. Hawes, Alice Mary Hawes, and Marion Augusta Hawes, 1937.
by LIBBY BISCHOF Professor of History, University of Southern Maine
At the very core of what we do, historians offer interpretations of the past. Even as we strive to remain objective in these interpretations we must be ever conscious of contemporary issues, our own biases, and our relationship to the materials we are working with. We constantly seek to arrive at an ever-richer understanding of those we write about—to narrate our subjects' lives with their own words when possible; to highlight the significance of their lives, their relationships, and their work; and to bring to light new primary and secondary evidence. Despite our aspirations toward objectivity, the past can still feel very subjective, and at times, very personal. That feeling is not always a bad thing; indeed, historical empathy is an important part of seeking a greater understanding of the past.
In reading letters and diaries, historians encounter intimate details of relationships alongside the banalities and trivialities of daily life. We hone in on an image, a word, a phrase, a reference, and ponder what it might mean, what it reveals about our subject, what it can tell us about her life. Thus we find at the center of our historical interpretation the often messy process of reinterpretation—of the work of our subjects, the work of other historians and scholars, and even of our own work. The past then is never really settled; it is in a constant state of reinterpretation.
The past felt very present to me when I recently returned to the house where Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) lived in South Berwick, Maine. (Historic New England acquired this 1774 house and the adjacent 1854 Jewett family residence in 1931 and operates the site as Sarah Orne Jewett House Museum and Visitor Center.) When asked by Historic New England to pen an article on the relationship between Jewett and Annie Adams Fields (1834-1915), a relationship I have interpreted and reinterpreted on and off for over a decade, I did what any good photo historian does: I started with images.
While many of the literary scholars who have written about Jewett and Fields have rightly concentrated on the pair’s published and unpublished writings, correspondence, and diaries, I chose to explore the visual record of their relationship— specifically through a close reading of photographs and objects in Jewett’s bedroom. These photographs hint at the intimacy of their relationship, as well as the important role each woman played in the life of the other. The images also reveal the tensions between public and private spaces in the nineteenth century and invite a reinterpretation of Jewett’s home as a space peopled by women, as a central site of friendship, love, and mentorship.
In 1870, Sarah Orne Jewett, a twenty-one-year-old author from South Berwick, met thirty-six-year old Annie Adams Fields, wife of publisher James T. Fields, who famously edited The Atlantic Monthly literary magazine. The Fieldses had a summer home in Manchester-by-the-Sea on the North Shore of Massachusetts and Jewett spent time visiting the couple in the summer of 1870; James had published some of Jewett’s early stories in The Atlantic.
Over many subsequent summers, the women established a friendship, and then, according to Jewett’s biographer, Sarah Sherman, “sometime in the winter of 1881, in the wake of James Fields’s death, Annie Fields and Sarah Jewett fell in love.” Judith Roman, Fields’s biographer, concurs, noting, “Annie and Sarah’s relationship was more reciprocal than Annie’s marriage had been; in it, Annie received as well as gave the kind of emotional support which she had given James.” Roman continues, remarking that the second half of Fields’s life actually was what editor and author Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe, who knew them personally, called “a union—there is no truer word for it.”
Annie Fields has too often been pigeonholed as only a literary hostess (though she was, certainly, a famous one); she was also a writer, a club woman, and eventually, founder of Associated Charities of Boston. She was also the most important presence in Jewett’s life from the 1880s until Jewett’s death of a stroke in 1909.
A relationship with Fields provided Jewett access to the leading literary lights of Boston’s Golden Age, with a metropolitan home base outside of her beloved coastal Maine, and the deep and abiding female companionship she sought and cultivated throughout her life. A relationship with Jewett provided Fields with a model of a successful woman writer, a partner who respected her influence and her talents, and a companion who provided love and support during a time of profound loss. Their relationship, as many have argued, was deeply reciprocal, and complex. It was also transformative for both. With Fields, Jewett was able to travel abroad for the first time; they went to Europe in 1882 and took many subsequent trips to Italy, Greece, England, and France among other destinations over the course of the next two decades.
Beginning in 1881-82 and lasting until the injuries Jewett suffered in a 1902 carriage accident, the two women lived together for most of the year at Fields’s home at 148 Charles Street in Boston. Notably, Fields often referred to the Charles Street residence as “our home” in letters to Jewett and others in their circle. Jewett would spend the autumn and winter there, returning to South Berwick in the late spring and staying there through early summer. Fields would briefly visit her in Maine and then go open the summer house in Manchester-by-the-Sea; Jewett would join her later in the season. After the accident, although Jewett recovered some of her strength, she spent far more time in South Berwick, wintering in Boston only occasionally until suffering a stroke in January 1909.
In what is probably the most published photograph of the two women together, Jewett and Fields can be seen in the library of 148 Charles Street—Jewett by the window, Fields closer to the door—reading in companionable silence (above). This picture, while it reveals a well-appointed Victorian library where such literary celebrities as Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne were entertained, is not an intimate one. It does not display the closeness of the two women nor their abiding love for one another. Indeed, the figures play an almost secondary role to the innumerable books, paintings, heavy furniture, long drapes, and grand piano in the foreground.
In a multitude of ways, the photograph reflects the propriety and decorum of the era in which it was produced. It stands in stark contrast to the loving and affectionate letters—filled with pet nicknames (Jewett was “Pinny,” Fields was “Fuff”), signs of physical affection, and true companionship—that Jewett and Fields sent to one another. Their relationship was far more intimate than the Charles Street portrait suggests.
While the close and loving friendship Fields and Jewett shared at times stretches the confines of the ways we tend to categorize and define twenty-first-century relationships, it is typically categorized by the nineteenth-century term “Boston marriage.” By all accounts, the label was used at the turn of the twentieth century (first by Henry James) to describe the association between two unmarried women living together in a long-term, committed relationship; it could certainly mean a lesbian relationship, though that was not always the case. In the late 1800s and into the first years of the 1900s, Boston marriages were most often found among middle-class, educated, financially independent white women. These unions were considered quite socially acceptable. One reason for their respectability was the widely held Victorian-era assumption about women as asexual and passionless.
To truly understand the depths of the Jewett-Fields relationship, we must shed our twenty-first-century sensibilities and beliefs and enter into what Josephine Donovan, another Jewett biographer, called in a 1979 article “a lost world of female behavior,” a world where, as historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg reminds us in a 1975 journal article, “such deeply felt, same-sex friendships were casually accepted in American society,” particularly in New England and especially so in Boston.
Although Fields was Jewett’s senior by fifteen years and sometimes took on a mothering or mentoring role, it is clear from their correspondence that the pair frequently interchanged the roles of caregiver and mentor. They encouraged one another’s work, widened each other’s horizons, and respected each other’s literary ambitions. The relationship also allowed the two women a great deal of independence in terms of pursuing separate interests—Jewett’s increasing prominence as a writer and Fields’s growing concern with charity, urban reform, and social work—than would ever have been possible in a heterosexual Victorian marriage, no matter how sympathetic one’s male partner might have been. Frequent glimpses into the loving intimacy of their relationship can readily be found in their published and unpublished correspondence and in their written work. If one looks closely, it can also be found in photographs.
Historic New England has many photographs of Sarah Orne Jewett House, including images from 1931 that document each room. These photographs play a central role in the current interpretation of the house museum for visitors. Among them are various views of Jewett’s bedroom. By studying her quarters, both in terms of the photographs and while actually standing in the room, we can see that she shared this space with Fields, virtually if not physically. The space is organized around Fields’s visage; everywhere one turns she is present. During their three decades together, Jewett and Fields were so much a fixture in one another’s lives that when they had to be apart, photographs, letters, and objects stood in as necessary talismans of love and friendship.
Clearly depicted in photographs of the house in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewett’s bedroom fireplace and mantel were typical of a Victorian-era woman of her class and stature.
Above the fireplace, books (including many volumes written by one of her favorite authors, Sir Walter Scott), antiques, candles, ceramics, riding crops, handicrafts, a crepe paper and wood owl (representing one of the nicknames Jewett’s friends called her—“Owl” or “Owlet”), and bric-a-brac commingle with photographs, embroidered samplers, and statuettes. There can be no doubt, however, that the central focus of the fireplace, mantel, and the wall is a rather large framed photographic portrait of Fields. In this photograph Fields, in profile, hair swept-up, is forever young. This image is a later-printed variation of a daguerreotype made by the Boston photographic firm of Southworth and Hawes when Fields was just twenty years old and had recently married the widowed James T. Fields, who was fourteen years her senior.
There are many famous portraits of Annie Fields, photographs as well as paintings, but none showcases her youthful beauty to the extent that the daguerreotype does. Taken nearly two decades before they met, it is significant that this image of Fields was so central to Jewett. This photograph would denote to Jewett, and to anyone who viewed it, that the two women had been in each other’s lives decades longer than they actually had. We do not know how Jewett came into possession of this photograph—if Fields gave it to her, or if Jewett asked for it. I can also imagine that Fields was fond of this portrait and may have wanted Jewett to have the very best image of her in her possession. (There is another, much smaller version of this Fields portrait in Jewett House. It rests in a small wooden and glass case displayed outside Jewett’s bedroom.)
By studying her quarters … we can see that Jewett shared this space with Fields, virtually if not physically. The space is organized around Fields’s visage; everywhere one turns she is present.
The way Jewett arranged her bedroom and her mantelpiece assured that, upon waking and looking straight across the room, Fields’s portrait would be in her line of sight. A small mirror angled over Jewett’s bed also reflects the portrait. Jewett could look everywhere around the room and sense her companion’s gaze despite her absence—an absence Jewett felt very profoundly when they were apart.
Jewett constantly surrounded herself with ephemera from her friends, her travels, her writing career, and her passions. This is true throughout all the rooms in the house, as well as the way in which Jewett arranged materials on her writing desk, located right outside her bedroom on the second-floor landing where she could look out the front window onto the street.
One need only glance at the photograph of a middle-aged Jewett writing at her desk to know and understand how she curated spaces for herself wherever she took up residence; her bedroom and her desk were her most personal spaces. While photographs and items representing friends and close relatives were important to Jewett, she believed, however, that pictures were poor stand-ins for the presence of those she loved. She missed hearing the voices of her loved ones as much as she missed seeing their faces; photographs were an inferior but necessary substitute. In a letter dated January 1900 to her friend Dorothy Ward, Jewett wrote: “But one must look at it often in these conditions, and finally gather a good bit of companionship out of a photograph, it being all that one can get! If somebody would only invent a little speaking-attachment to such pictures, a nicer sort of phonograph,—it would really be very nice.”
Bedrooms are intimate spaces. Jewett’s bedroom, visitors to her house are told, looks almost as it did when she passed away more than a century ago. Extant photographs support this interpretation. Jewett occupied her bedroom from 1887, when she moved into the house, until 1909, when she died. In the Victorian era the homes of the middle and upper classes were strictly gendered, marked as separate spheres of influence for men and women, as well as divided into public and private spaces. Second-floor spaces, like Jewett’s bedroom, would not have been seen by most visitors, who would have been confined to the public spaces on the first floor, such as the library or the parlor.
Today, visitors to Jewett House have much more access to the intimate spaces than a nineteenth-century visitor ever would have had. We must be conscious, then, of what this access, this intimacy, would have meant at the turn of the twentieth century. In an era when everything was covered, corseted, overstuffed, and overdone, the bedroom offered a respite. One could let down one’s proverbial hair and be oneself. One could decorate the space in accordance with personal preferences rather than adhering to the dictates of social convention. An individual could store and display items of particular significance without worrying about who might see them, or how such items might be interpreted.
Jewett’s bedroom, and the photographs and objects contained within, reveal what the author treasured most and that included her thirty-year relationship with Annie Adams Fields.
If you have not visited Jewett House in a few years, I invite you to engage in Historic New England’s newly reinterpreted tour and to immerse yourself in the central female relationships that are so important to understanding Sarah Orne Jewett’s life and work.
