Names of the Flowers: Ruby Hemenway's Redemption of History, The

Frontiers, 2004 by Hoberman, Michael

New England offers endless possibilities for the practice of local history; every one of its small villages, towns, and urban areas abounds in records, both written and material. New England history is, of course, American history, too, but not every local historian necessarily cares about this fact, and manyRuby Hemeiiway included - are happy to write about Yankee life with very little or no thought given to its national context. If ignoring history in favor of antiques is one method of exploring a past unencumbered by national context, so too is looking past the history of material culture in order to gaze at the abstract history of New England, or some subsection of it.

Even Hemenway occasionally elides the focused realm of local history in favor of minute details that defy all manner of categorizations. Readers interested in turn-of-the-century New England would have read the column "Ice Harvesting was Big Business" with interest. "There are some very interesting Currier and Ives prints of ice-harvesting on a small woods pond," she writes, conjuring up the picture from the outside in of the outside from within, a picture that any American in any region of the country might have seen. She quickly moves on to noting in one print, "the dog lying on the men's coats thrown down on the ice," and from there to a discussion of the sleds employed by the harvesters and various other ice-related details. She closes the column with a comment that reflects back on her overall interest in integral facts and depictions: "Life [today] is easier, but not more interesting."24

The primacy of local, even microcosmic interests suggests a notable parallel between Ruby Hemenway and her near-contemporaries, the New England local colorists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Attentive readers will find echoes in Hemenway's descriptions of berry-picking, Ladies Aid ice cream suppers, and unmarried schoolteachers also found in the world-apart aspects of the works of local colorists Sarah Orne Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Hemenway's reconstitution of turn-of-the-century New England in her newspaper columns offers insight into a female- and region-specific literary and historical sensibility. She deliberately locates meaning and historical consequence in the lives of farm women who were a cultural and demographic mainstay of life in rural New England one hundred years ago. In an age that had so consistently privileged the grand narrative-in either its Romantic or Realist incarnations-local colorists examined the activities of kitchens, farmyards, and villages rather than those of whaling ships, commercial centers, and cities. Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, for example, calls our attention to the novelty of this interest, and contrasts such local interests with the grander, male-oriented adventure fantasies that it replaces.25

As Josephine Donovan points out, the local colorists promoted a "marginal, local alternative knowledge that [was] cast in opposition to unifying translocal disciplines." Writers like Jewett created fictional worlds in which the monopolizing influence of "dominant, colonizing, mathematizing disciplines," as cultural theorist Michel Foucault has described them, were challenged by particularized, localized knowledge. While any number of well-intentioned critics might hold up Pointed Firs and other works of New England local colorists as only superficially provincial and, perhaps, "timeless" in spite of themselves, the works' authors might have resisted such notions; to be local and idiosyncratically so could well have been their intention. Historian Nancy Hewitt writes, "The question is often asked of those who focus on local histories, how typical is this case? " From certain quarters, however, comes an unanticipated response, "that the importance of a community can lie in its atypicality, its dissonance from what is considered the normal . . . pattern." Particular knowledge, as Hemenway's writing suggests as well, deserves attention not because it can be homogenized but because it resists attempts at integration. Like the distinct figure of Mrs. Todd at the end of Jewett's novel, the specific facts of rural life might best be appreciated because our totalizing impulses cannot quite encompass them. They look "mateless and appealing ... strangely self-possessed and mysterious."26