Material Culture, Empire, and Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs

Sex, Class, and "Category Crisis": Reading Jewett's Transitivity

“…However, as Josephine Donovan has convincingly argued, Jewett's A Country Doctor (1884) 44 In her depiction of the transvestite Captain Dan'el Gunn in her 1880 story "An Autumn Holiday," Jewett seems to anticipate the work of both Josephine Donovan and Marjorie Garber. The 'third' is a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility" (11). 45 Garber notes that "category crises can and do mark displacements from the axis of class as well as from race onto the axis of gender," and she reads transvestism in particular as "the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself" (17).…”