Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was first published in 1903, on the threshold of the twentieth century.ⁱ Its instant popularity suggests that the novel spoke eloquently to its first audience. Contemporary reviewers celebrated Rebecca for its wit, its characterization, and its sensibility, and compared it to novels by acknowledged masters such as Charles Dickens, Tobias Smollett, and Mark Twain. The Atlantic Monthly review, for instance, singled out Aunt Miranda’s “grim” and “tragically humorous” deathbed scene as a rival to Smollett’s portrayal of the death of Commodore Trunnion.ⁱⁱ Other reviewers focused on Wiggin’s character delineations: Olivia H. Dunbar, writing for The Critic, noted that “what mars the beautiful child characters of classic fiction is their consistency,” whereas in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Rebecca is “human” because of her “delightful inconsistencies” and the fact that she is never a prig.ⁱⁱⁱ Editors of subsequent editions remarked on the novel’s staying power. Noting that Rebecca had sold 337,000 copies over the first seven years of its existence, the editors of a 1910 illustrated edition commented that “No book of recent years has succeeded in pleasing so many classes of readers,—the youthful and the aged, the discriminating critic and the reader who reads for sheer pleasure.”^iv In its first decade it was translated into several languages and, according to the editors of the 1910 edition, became part of the English-language curriculum in Berlin schools. On the American front, a 1909 adaptation for the stage established its success in New England before heading to New York and, later, to London. In 1917 Mary Pickford starred in a film version.

As this reception suggests, early readers did not assume that Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was suitable just for children. It was only gradually that the novel—despite its confirmed appeal to a wide general audience—came to be regarded as a novel specifically for young people.^v One reason for these changes lies in the expanding opportunities twentieth-century audiences had for entertainment. In 1903 movies were a new invention, not yet widely available, and television lay far in the future. Reading, especially reading aloud, figured far more prominently as a means of group entertainment than it does today. The families that now watch television or go to movies together would have read together in 1903, and they would have chosen works appealing to all members of the family. Although children’s literature as a genre was not new, the “niche marketing” emphasis that developed in the twentieth century encouraged the production and marketing of literary works designed exclusively for children, and by the second half of the century “children’s literature” had become a major industry of its own.^vi As a consequence, twenty-first-century parents, although they may read children’s novels to monitor their offsprings’ activities, or read to preliterate children, seldom engage those books in the same spirit as they do works marketed specifically for their own age and interest groups. Moreover, few families actively read aloud to each other. With the expansion of entertainment options, then, also has come significant shifts in the culture of reading itself.

Recent critical attention, however, has given us new ways to appreciate Wiggin’s novel, especially regarding its intersections with early twentieth-century culture. For instance, Patricia Hill reads the missionary scene in Rebecca through the history of the missionary movement in American Protestantism,^vii while Jerome Griswold examines Rebecca’s maturation through a Freudian lens.^viii Meanwhile Peter Stonely, in a work focusing on consumerism and American Girls’ literature, reads the Romantic elements in Rebecca as one way the novel participates in the development of consumer culture.^ix These new approaches not only help us understand how Rebecca functioned for its earliest readers, they also help us understand how it continues to have meaning for us, more than a century later. Both thematically and structurally, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm demonstrates its pivotal position at the border between nineteenth- and twentieth-century sensibilities, especially regarding the choices open to women as they contemplated their own futures.

As a story of a girl’s maturation, written by a woman, Rebecca entered a literary arena that women writers, and female protagonists, had long dominated. Although much of the twentieth century chose to “remember” predominantly male-oriented nineteenth-century American writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain, in fact, nineteenth-century readers avidly consumed novels featuring women. In the antebellum period Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, Fanny Fern, E.D.E.N. Southworth, and other women writers had so firmly established the interest in female protagonists that many male writers of the postbellum period, such as William Dean Howells, Henry James, and, later, Theodore Dreiser, followed their lead. Within this literary realm, writers tended to focus on white, middle-class, adolescent women—girls who possessed, by virtue of their race, class, and age, the optimal amount of freedom permitted females in their society. For a large part of the nineteenth century, it was clear that their freedom gave them limited choices. During most of this period, white women were citizens in the social realm but not in the political; they were expected to be “under the protection” of their male relatives, and although they possessed nominal power in the domestic arena and were told that they held moral influence in the public one, they still had no recognized political existence. Moreover, most educational institutions and avenues to financial independence were closed to them. While women of the lower classes worked outside their homes as servants and other minimally paid laborers, cultural demands that women preserve their delicacy blocked most middle- and upper-class women’s access to gainful employment.

Nineteenth-century American women’s fiction, as well as numerous essays, poems, and other forms of writing, dramatized this situation. While best-sellers such as Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1851) embraced the subjugation of women, seeing women’s relationship to male mentors as a reflection of mankind’s loving but subordinate relationship to God, other works protested women’s secondary status. Novels such as E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Deserted Wife (1850) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Story of Avis (1877) explored the plight of artistic women confined to domestic detail, while novels such as Louisa May Alcott’s Work (1873) surveyed the range of employment possibilities available to middle-class women. With these explorations, most novels also reflected the cultural investment in the “marriage plot”; that is, most of the protagonists at some point (usually, although not exclusively, at the end of the novels) married, thus reinforcing the cultural mandate that women’s primary job was to marry and devote themselves to their families.

Late in the nineteenth century this image of what the media called the “true woman” gave way to another media image, the “new woman.” In fiction at least, the new woman did not necessarily consider marriage her final destination or domesticity her true vocation. Rather, novels featuring this figure showed her earning diplomas, leaving home (often to live with other young women), and working. Such novels reflected a very real cultural shift: By the end of the first World War, not only had women shortened their skirts, begun smoking in public, and dispensed with chaperons, they also were an increasing presence in the middle-class work force. In 1920 American women got the vote. All these were visible signs of progressive social changes that would, by the end of the twentieth century, give white, middle-class American women more choices than any comparable group in world history.

Rebecca plays into this changing scenario in a number of ways. First, by focusing primarily on a prepubescent girl it avoids confrontation with the marriage plot. Even though the character Adam Ladd (“Mr. Aladdin,” as Rebecca calls him), is, as Griswold has noted,^x a male mentor whose own plot trajectory strongly indicates that he will marry Rebecca once he has finished overseeing her maturation—a configuration common to works such as The Wide, Wide World and Southworth’s Beulah—in fact, Wiggin concludes the novel before the marriage is certain. Moreover, in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm the male mentor has competition. Mr. Aladdin is not Rebecca’s only guide; Miss Maxwell, Rebecca’s teacher at Wareham Academy, has other plans for her pupil, plans that would lead Rebecca away from marriage and out into the “wide world” of increasing professional opportunity and decreasing dependence on men. As she tells Adam Ladd, Miss Maxwell wants Rebecca to have a career (297),^xi and it is clear, in this interchange and in others, that the two mentors envision radically different futures for their protégé (254-55).

The fact that Wiggin ends the novel before either competitor can tip the scales indicates Rebecca’s temporal location: Wiggin did not know how the twentieth century would play out, and her novel lays out her heroine’s choices without determining their outcome. Although her contemporaries were sure that Rebecca would eventually marry Mr. Ladd and begged Wiggin to write a second novel cementing the fact, Wiggin wisely refused to satisfy their demands, offering instead a collection of short stories, New Chronicles of Rebecca, which supplemented the novel without taking Rebecca into adulthood. In a form letter that she returned to requests for a sequel, she explained that she did not want to disappoint her readers, commenting that “there always is a sequel to every story, but it is thought out by each of its readers for himself.”^xii And she takes as her authority William Dean Howells, the most influential editor of the period: “ ‘The true story never ends,’ ” she quotes Howells as saying, “ ‘The close of the book is simply the point at which the author has stopped, and if he has stopped wisely, the reader takes up the tale and goes on with it in his own mind.’ ”^xiii If Wiggin’s contemporaries assumed that Rebecca would marry Adam Ladd, today’s readers, basing their “sequels” on equally valid textual clues, can also imagine Rebecca forming a partnership with Miss Maxwell or exploring the world for herself, alone—leaving the narrow confines of Maine, or even of New England. For us, Rebecca’s choices remain open-ended; through her we can “read” the history of women in the early twentieth century backward through the several life patterns she has open to her.

Wiggin’s overlapping designs for her novel show us how turn-of-the-twentieth-century women were positioned to face the new century. Although the novel was marketed nationally and even internationally, it is set in a very specific geographical location, references very specific cultural and social phenomena, and follows a very traditional form for telling its tale. Throughout, Wiggin negotiates context and form to tell her story of Rebecca’s coming of age. For instance, the novel’s setting, a small town in rural Maine, signals that Wiggin has chosen to engage one of the best-known modes of late-nineteenth-century American fiction, New England Regionalism. Although the regionalist movement in American fiction had its roots in “local color” writing popular before the Civil War, this offshoot of realism was one of the most visible forms of postbellum writing, addressing a need on readers’ part to experience, vicariously, the peculiarities of people living in the different geographical areas of a country that was beginning to realize just how large and variegated it was. George Washington Cable’s tales of Louisiana Creoles, Mary Austin’s stories of the California desert country, and Jack London’s stories of gold miners in the Klondike all emerge from this impulse. The regionalist tradition of New England had its roots in writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier, of an older generation, whose delineations of small-town New England life contained lasting images of characters, morals, and mores.

Rebecca reflects its regionalist roots in its character studies and depictions of the environment, placing Wiggin squarely in the late-nineteenth-century field dominated by writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Although Rebecca and Mr. Ladd themselves belong as much to romance traditions as to realist ones, the other characters, especially Miranda and Jane Sawyer, the Simpsons, the Cobbs, and the collective entity known as “the town” itself, are pure literary New England. First, the depiction of the town, where few incidents from the outside world break the monotony of the daily round, gives us the background for understanding just how remarkable Rebecca is. Unlike Concord and Stockbridge, towns famous for their learned inhabitants, Riverboro does not house a collection of luminaries; rather, its citizens are marked by the intellectual and spiritual poverty of a region whose religious origins as a haven for persecuted Calvinists had long since degenerated into sterile pieties and narrow self-righteousness. The general level of ignorance is demonstrated by the fact that ten-year-old Rebecca knows more about general history and geography than most of the town’s adults; and the poverty of local education is amply attested to by the sympathetic, but still critical, presentation of Miss Dearborn, Rebecca’s eighteen-year-old teacher. Moreover, as the story of Delia Weeks’s escape from Riverboro attests, gossip is almost the only vehicle for excitement in this town. Within this scenario, characters such as Miranda Sawyer and Jeremiah Cobb lay out the spectrum of character types. Mr. Cobb’s warmth of heart, coupled with his unsophisticated tastes, represents the best of New England’s limited emotional possibilities, while Miranda Sawyer’s grim severity, her inability to bend and to show love even when she becomes capable of feeling it, represents its worst. Jane Sawyer, whose fiancé was killed in the Civil War, demonstrates one of the region’s harsh realities: More than 40,000 New England men died in the War, nearly 10,000 of them from Maine alone, depriving the region of a large part of its young manhood and creating a generation of women for whom marriage was unlikely.^xiv The dearth of young men is not thematized in Rebecca, but the novel still suggests how female-centered the region had become: Although traditional families are assumed as backdrop, a part of the environment, few are actually featured. In the Sawyer sisters’ past, only three men are mentioned: their father; Jane’s fiancé, who died in the war; and Lorenzo de Medici Randall, who courted Miranda but married Aurelia. By the time the story opens Lorenzo, too, is dead—though not before leaving seven children—and his widow, Rebecca’s mother, is struggling to manage the farm alone. As in most other New England regionalist fiction of the turn-of-the-twentieth century (Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs is probably the best-known example), this Maine landscape is peopled by women who, despite their powerlessness in the political and economic realm, have learned to manage in the absence of male providers.

If the literary construction of “New England” frames the novel, other contemporary issues permeate it. Most readers note the “missionary” episode as both an illustration of the declension of religious zeal in New England and a reminder of the energies still exerted by the American Protestant missionary movement, which had, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, actively expanded its cadre of workers spreading the gospel in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.^xv Contemporary readers would have also been familiar with debates over the missionaries’ complicity with American imperialism. One of Wiggin’s many literary friends was Mark Twain, and Rebecca’s reference to spreading civilization and the gospel among the “people who sat in darkness” (183), in addition to its origin in the New Testament book of Matthew (4:16), also directly invokes Twain’s controversial attack on missionaries and imperialists in his essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” published in 1901.^xvi For the young Rebecca, the missionaries’ descriptions of “blue skies and burning stars, white turbans and gay colors” (184) introduce brilliant new images to her dark winter routine; overtly at least, the novel’s narrator treats the missionaries as agents in Rebecca’s own religious maturation.

At the same time, however, Wiggin leaves just enough traces of the language in which the debates were cast to suggest that Rebecca’s faith may be pure despite, rather than because of, the motives of Christian imperialism. Later she would write a short story, “Daughters of Zion,” in which dialogue over why and how “the heathen” (especially heathen of color) are to be converted shows that the author was actively questioning the movement’s means and goals.^xvii At the very least, the missionary episode in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm demonstrates how even a novel about a young woman’s coming to maturity in an isolated region of the United States is imbricated in global economies of religion and imperialism.

Racial differences also appear in this novel, even though no nonwhite character actually makes an appearance. The missionaries’ stories may give Rebecca material to dream about exotic landscapes, but she is herself an exotic to the people of Riverboro, and not only because she has more imagination than anyone else. When the child first descends from Mr. Cobb’s stagecoach to the street outside the brick house, Mrs. Perkins, watching from her window across the road, comments that “she looks black as an Injun what I can see of her; black and kind of up-an-comin’. They used to say that one o’ the Randalls married a Spanish woman, somebody that was teachin’ music and languages at a boardin’ school. Lorenzo [Rebecca’s father] was dark complected, you remember, and this child is, too. Well, I don’t know as Spanish blood is any real disgrace, not if it’s a good ways back and the woman was respectable” (22). Speaking for the town in general, Mrs. Perkins compares Rebecca first to a Native American and then raises the possibility of a Spanish progenitor. Even though she concludes that Spanish ancestry is no disgrace to the family, the fact that she has to think about it exposes the community’s racial paranoia, a fear that the Anglo-Saxon strain might be polluted. For many nineteenth-century writers, suggestions that characters had Spanish or Italian forebears were covert references to the possibility that African blood had entered the family line, a racial mixture that would instantly drop the family to the bottom of the social hierarchy. Similarly, as Mrs. Perkins’s exclusion of Native Americans from her exculpation of shame suggests, Indian blood would also mark the family as racially inferior. Rebecca’s darkness then, while never seriously challenged (as it might be were the novel set in the South), nevertheless raises issues of race that transect most of the other themes the novel tackles. On the one hand, Rebecca’s transformation from scrawny darkness to glowing maturity is a standard trope in coming-of-age stories: She is the ugly duckling who turns into a swan. On the other hand, the fact that other characters constantly remark on Rebecca’s darkness illustrates how standard tropes can be used to serve particular ends: here, to highlight racial anxieties. In terms of literary regionalism, we can see how the national obsession with racial hierarchies affects small New England villages as well as southern communities. Thinking in terms of authorial intent, we can ask why Wiggin chose to mark her heroine in this fashion. And thinking about cultural constructions of race and intelligence should lead us to ask why Wiggin chose to construct Rebecca’s intellectual opposite, Emma Jane, as blue-eyed and blond. If the ugly duckling trope in Rebecca demonstrates anything about its contemporary culture, it is that Americans’ preoccupation with racial difference affects even the inhabitants of remote, seemingly homogeneous, towns.

Popular culture, economics, and consumerism also play major roles in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. As the endnotes to this edition testify, both the Randall family’s names and Rebecca’s own speech are permeated with references to popular culture, manifested both in literary modes (such as her having been named after both heroines from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe) and artistic ones (such as her sisters being named after contemporary singers and dancers). Rebecca herself constantly references the literature generally featured in school texts and private libraries of the period: Bunyan, Wordsworth, Lowell, Craik, Yonge. Like the missionaries, these cultural references work in more than one way: On the one hand, they show us how readily Rebecca absorbs the imaginative literature her environment allows her; on the other hand, they signal the author’s opinion of the level of sophistication of what passed, in the early twentieth century, for “culture.” Other harbingers of the outside (i.e., the non-Maine—or for the Sawyer sisters, the non-York county) world operate similarly: “Excelsior soap,” the product that Rebecca and Emma Jane help the Simpsons sell, is both a sign of the early twentieth century’s obsession with cleanliness and an index to the extent to which American capital had permeated even isolated regions. As a satire on American consumerism, the scene depicting the impoverished Simpson family’s pleasure at the “banquet lamp” that the children earn selling the soap rivals episodes in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age. And the railroad—not to speak of Alan Ladd’s influence over the route it takes— that rescues the Randall family’s finances by running through their farm, brings us into the role of transportation and capital in the changing American landscape of the early twentieth century.

If regionalism, race, consumerism, capital, and popular culture are some of the cultural contexts in which Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm participates thematically, the novel presents itself formally as a Bildungsroman, a story of a young person’s education. Like almost every other facet of the novel, however, its genre navigates between recognized forms, suggesting that the formulaic patterns of the conventional Bildungsroman may be misleading, and asking readers to read as much against the plot lines as with them. Ostensibly constructed as a domestic novel, with readily identifiable figures such as deceased parents, cruel guardians, and helpful guides, it nevertheless undermines both those figures and the ideologies they represent by its regionalist-inflected realism and the satiric tone of much of its narration. For instance, despite her “wicked godmother” qualities, Miranda Sawyer is also a comic character, whose pungent comments on Rebecca specifically and on the world in general brilliantly portray both her rigid limitations and her personal pain—the pain, spiritual and psychological, of willful perversity. Similarly, the Simpson family, whose numerous children, struggling mother, and thieving father draw Rebecca’s sympathies—perhaps because they remind her of aspects of her own family—play both comic and realist roles in the novel. And as noted before, even the missionaries function both as a vehicle for Rebecca’s religious awakening and as a critique of American Christianity’s imperialist mission.

Wiggin’s narrator is central to these dual messages. Although Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm bears a traditional third-person narrator, one who not only controls the action and sets the scene but also tells the reader what to think about the characters and their acts, she also suggests disparities: first, between what the characters think about themselves and how they should be viewed (a standard function of an ironic narrator), and second, between the traditional values of the female Bildungsroman and modern notions of female development. In other words, underneath the “Bildung” element in Rebecca is a subtle critique of many of the values the traditional Bildungsroman represents, especially as it pertains to women. Again like her friend Mark Twain, Wiggin expertly manipulates popular forms, but only, in the end, to encourage us to think beyond the values those forms embody. This is where the ambiguities—often manifested as binary opposites—of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm enter. Like her name, Rebecca Rowena, which figures her as both the dark and the fair heroines of Scott’s novel, with all their overtones of choice between the exotic and the conventional, Rebecca’s environment is rife with opposites that she (and her readers) must learn to negotiate. Rebecca’s own darkness is countered by Emma Jane’s fairness; Miranda’s sour nature by Jane’s kindness; the “marriage plot” trajectory of Mr. Ladd by the “new woman” trajectory of Miss Maxwell. Similarly, Rebecca’s “angel child” qualities of generosity and benevolence, especially regarding other children, are countered by the fact that she is also complicit in the consumer values that motivate the Simpson family to accept a fancy table lamp rather than cash as compensation for their labors. Even Rebecca’s devotion to and facility with babies is framed by the harsh reality of a society in which babies come—and go—with tragic frequency. And while the narrator tells the tale, and eulogizes Rebecca’s maturation process in appropriately moral tones, she also lets us know that the values that sanction large families for impoverished parents (both the Randall and Simpson families illustrate the consequences of not having birth control) and misplaced generosity (i.e., Rebecca’s desire to “help” the Simpsons by cooperating in capital’s exploitation of its most vulnerable workers) are dysfunctional in both New England and the modern world. In the end, Wiggin’s refusal to resolve thematic tensions by granting Rebecca a traditional marriage forces readers to think beyond the values the novel purports to honor, to the cultural critique that its structures and multiple points of view suggest. In this turn-of-the-century Bildungsroman, issues of region, gender, and social practices combine to suggest that twentieth-century women will see their lives play out along unpredictable lines.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, then, is a novel we can read on a number of levels. First, its intelligence and wit, its comic depictions of New England character and of early twentieth-century culture, remain every bit as funny and as penetrating today as they were one hundred years ago. Second, its structure, which points in opposite directions at almost every turn, shows us how formal issues can embody thematic ones. And finally, those very thematic issues give us access to the shifting values of early twentieth-century America—on gender, religious, and economic grounds. We read Rebecca because it is charming and funny, but we also take from our reading an enhanced understanding of the ways that Wiggin’s novel embodies the conflicts of a society moving from the accepted values of the nineteenth century into the unsettling challenges of the twentieth.