Country Of Pointed Fir Character Analysis

Masterpieces are created either for the audience’s entertainment or for the creator's sake to be able to design their feelings into the novel or into the artwork. An author from the 1840s, named Sarah Orne Jewett, expresses her feelings that she establishes through her novel, The Country of the Pointed Fir, which makes it piece of art. She is able to express her feelings through the diction that she picks for her main character to use. Her main character is a writer who has ventured to New England in order to find the inspiration she needs for her novel. Jewett directs her feelings of writing and life through her main character. When another author named, Willa Cather, reads The Country of the Pointed Firs, 40 years later, she notes how Miss.

Jewett expresses her feelings through the choices of diction she stretches throughout her novel and she wanted to justify the meaning of art using Jewett’s work as an example. In the essay, “Miss Jewett”, Willa Cather reveals the diction used to create art reflects one’s ability to express their feelings through the diction they choose to write in.

In Willa Cather’s essay she unfolds Sarah Jewett’s ability to express her feeling for writing through her diction to form art. In Sarah Jewett’s novel, her feeling for writing is shown through her main character who came to New England to write her own novel. Jewett shows the struggles she feels when writing her own novels through her character. In one of the passages she writes, “Literary employments are so vexed and uncertainties at best and it was not until the voice of conscience sounded louder in my ears than the sea on the nearest pebble beach that I said unkind words of withdrawal to Mrs. Todd”(18). Miss. Jewett uses antagonizing diction in this passage from her story, in regards to expressing her feeling towards writing. She shows her main character struggling with trying to write when using the words “vexed” and “uncertain” to show how irritated and unsure what to write about. Expressing her feelings through the diction she uses creates the art in her novels, and when Willa Cather reads what Miss. Jewett writes, she notices the feelings Jewett portrays with her diction and writes it in her own essay, “Miss. Jewett”. In Cather’s own words she writes, “One can, as it were, watch in the process the two kinds of making: the first, which is full of perception and feeling, but rather fluid and formless; the second, which is tightly built and significant in design. The design is, indeed, so happy, so right, that it seems inevitable; the design is the story and the story is the design” (1). This passage from the essay, “Miss Jewett”, justifies how diction is used to create art in writing. Willa Cather uses words like, “design”, “full of perception and feeling” and “two kinds of making”, to justify how authors’ have the ability to express their feelings through their writing. Authors like Sarah Jewett, who was able to portray her feelings towards writing.

Willa Cather reveals the diction Sarah Jewett uses to express her feeling for life to create the art in her novel.

In The Country of Pointed Firs, the main character was writing in the schoolhouse when their was a funeral happening outside. Her character sat in there thinking about people who were walking behind the casket. While doing so a man walked into the classroom she was in. They started talking and he told her something that shows Jewett’s feelings towards life. “We shall know it while yet below,’ insisted the captain, with a flush of impatience on his thin cheeks. ‘We have not looked for truth in the right direction. I know what I speak of; those who have laughed at me little know how much reason my ideas are based upon.’ He waved his hand toward the village below. ‘In that handful of houses they fancy that they comprehend the universe” (30). This passage from the novel expresses Sarah Jewett’s feelings about life and she uses words like “right direction” and “comprehend the universe” to express how she feels about life. She is questioning what will happen in the future and what will the outcome will be with the choices she makes in the present. While reading Country of Pointed Firs, Willa Cather caught Sarah Jewett’s feelings towards life and points out how the diction that is used expresses the feeling of life in Jewett’s novel. So in her essay, Willa Cather explains on how authors use the feelings that haunt their minds and use diction to help express it. “ The artist spends a lifetime in pursuing the things that haunts him, in having his mind ‘teased’ by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to, him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character; trying this method and that, as a painter tries different lightings and different attitudes with his subject to catch the one that presents it more suggestively than any other”(2). Willa Cather goes into depth explaining how creators of art try to

express the feelings that are deep within their minds, which the diction helps expresses the feeling. In this passage from “Miss Jewett”, Cather uses words like “trying to get these conceptions down on paper” and “having his mind ‘teased’”, to explain author's’ ability to express the feelings that are deep within their mind with the diction they use. The same way Sarah Jewett used to express her feelings towards life with the use of her diction.

In the essay, “Miss Jewett”, Willa Cather reveals the diction used to create art reflects one’s ability to express their feelings through the diction they choose to write in. Sarah Orne Jewett was an author from the 1840s who loved to portray her feelings through the use of diction in her novels. One of her novels, The Country of the Pointed Fir, she expresses her feelings for life and writing which are found in her main character. 40 years later, another author named Willa Cather reads what Miss. Jewett writes and recognizes Jewett’s ability to express her feelings with the diction she uses. Cather wanted everyone to know about Miss. Jewett’s ability and wants to justify what art is so she writes an essay, all about art, called “Miss Jewett. For the duration of the essay, Willa Cather takes examples from The Country of the Pointed Fir clear up what makes art art. Nowadays art still appears in the books that people read, they all portray the author's feelings towards the subject of the book.