\u27Characters ... Worth Listening To\u27: Dialogized Voices in Sarah Orne Jewett\u27s \u27The Country of the Pointed Firs\u27

Since its publication in 1896, critics of Sarah Orne Jewett\u27s The Country of the Pointed Firs have disputed the work\u27s claim to be a novel. Feminist critics in particular have defended the fiction\u27s nonlinear structure, some claiming that its circularity and nondramatic development characterize a novelistic mode that is distinctively female. Yet even such defenses of Pointed Firs are limited. Resting as they do on binary polarities (male/female; linearity/nonlinearity), such oppositions reduce discussion of Pointed Firs\u27s genre to issues of engenderment and plot variation. I believe that the work of Mikhail Bakhtin offers another way to address the question of whether Pointed Firsis a novel, a way that avoids the dichotomized nature of previous criticisms. Bakhtin\u27s theory of the novel rejects traditional definitions of the genre as a homogeneous form and of language as a unitary, centripetalizing system. Unlike his structuralist and linguistic contemporaries, Bakhtin recognizes that stratifications within language extend to include not only a variety of dialects but socio-ideological languages as well. In redirecting our attention to the realm of language, Bakhtin situates interanimated discourses and contesting voices at the heart of all novelistic fiction