Sarah Orne Jewett’s China

Abstract

Abstract This essay reads Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877) to show how chinaware could be used to delineate American identity in late nineteenth-century fiction. As I show, china’s aura of exoticism—reflected in its very name—could be deployed by regionalist writers to prop up local identity. Importantly, Jewett’s characters make china the centerpiece of their bequeathals so that the foreign is the vehicle by which generations exert influence over the present. Chinaware’s utility reifies the association of Asian identity with objectification. The town more generally appropriates Chinese signifiers and objects in their creation of a distinct spirit. I argue that towns perform this subsumption of the international in the service of the regional to position themselves in an intriguing position with regards to the national: distinct but also useful. Authors like Jewett show how the regional can, in part, deviate from the national by offering a tame and safe version of exoticism. The stakes of materiality thus include the determination of American belonging.