"[T]he cobweb shapes of the arctic town": Ghosts of Alaska in The Country of the Pointed Firs

When the U.S. purchased Alaska in 1867, many believed that white Americans would thrive in the Alaskan climate. However, the prolonged inability of the U.S. to develop the territory in subsequent years would put a damper on... [ view full abstract ]

When the U.S. purchased Alaska in 1867, many believed that white Americans would thrive in the Alaskan climate. However, the prolonged inability of the U.S. to develop the territory in subsequent years would put a damper on their enthusiasm. Though the Klondike gold rush of 1897 would allow white Americans the opportunity to once again imagine the far north as a frontier for the rehabilitation of Anglo-Saxon manhood, in the three decades following the purchase, the failure of the U.S. to establish significant settlements in Alaska fed anxieties regarding white racial decline and the emasculation of American men. Not incidentally, Alaska remains all but absent from the regional fiction that dominated U.S. literature during this period. Although fictional accounts of life in the Alaskan wilderness would come to captivate U.S. readers in the years following the Klondike gold rush, writers of fiction did not see Alaska as a literary resource until the turn of the century. And yet, when U.S. writers of the late-nineteenth century imagined the Arctic, it was often as a space through which to contemplate racial and national decline.

In this essay, I will argue that in order to fully comprehend the anxieties shaping Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, we must read the chapters relating Captain Littlepage’s tale of “a country ‘way up north beyond the ice” in light of the Alaska purchase. Although long relegated to the margins of critical debate, Littlepage has come to assume a more prominent role in critical readings of the text, as scholars of regional writing have grown increasingly attuned to the genre’s participation in nationalist—and often nativist—discourses of the late nineteenth century. Stephanie Foote and Holly Jackson have both noted striking parallels between Littlepage’s disappearing village of “fog-shaped” men and Dunnet Landing, Jewett’s fictional New England village. By recognizing the ways that Jewett’s Arctic subnarrative is shaped by the perceived failure of the U.S. in Alaska, we can better understand how Alaska’s uncertain future came to embody broader national anxieties in the minds of nineteenth-century Americans.