“Bedtime” for a Boston Marriage: Sarah Orne Jewett's Illustrated Deephaven

Abstract

The illustrations in 1893 edition of Deephaven crosse conventional boundaries, arresting the objectification that is often inherent in portraits and landscapes. Jewett and the illustrators preserve felt lesbian passions as they become portraits' subjects, and produce a kind of queer, visual keepsake album that effectively stops the hands of time.

What Was Boston Marriage? Sarah Orne Jewett and Biography

“…The 1893 illustrations, then, surface what was already in the text, "a veiled nineteenth-century Boston Marriage." 14 In a bracing queer reading of A Country Doctor (1884), Travis Foster aims to claim Jewett as "a historian and theorist in her own right" rather than making her "speak as evidence for the histories and theories of others." He briefly quotes a letter in which Jewett touts the "many excellent ideas" in A Country Doctor, and he also notes she "spent most of her adult life at the epicenter of New England intellectual culture."…”