The Braided Rug, Pennyroyal, and the Pathos of Almira Todd: A Cultural Reading of The Country of the Pointed Firs

The braided rug with its rings and the herb pennyroyal are two symbolic materials associated with mysterious powers and secrecy in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs.[1] Both rug and pennyroyal are identified with Almira Todd, the book's dominating figure who invokes our compassion despite her sibylline presence. Both materials are inextricably a part of the cultural and folk histories of northern New England and Jewett seems to have utilized them for structural and spiritual value. They serve as powerful intangible forces in her Dunnet Landing community as they are woven into the story with great skill and relied on by the characters and by the reader in ways too subtle to ignore.A modest body of critical discussion favors and defends Pointed Firs, and so newer readings of it can consider Jewett's references to cultural materials and practice and what meanings these have in northern New England. Mrs. Todd has somewhat escaped notice as a character whose commanding appearance and manner in fact do much to obscure a figure of pathos. The black and gray rings of her braided rug, together with her secret garden of pennyroyal, a widely acknowledged "female herb," are elements reaffirming her being described as a person of great sadness (49). Her rug, in the middle of which she stands when she first speaks freely about "the other man" she loved, dictates the structure of the novel's action and relationships; at the center of the action is the pennyroyal episode on Green Island. Of the many stories Mrs. Todd either tells the narrator or serves as the catalyst for the narrator to hear, not even the story of Joanna on Shell-heap Island is as pathetic as her own, an experience of triple loss that includes the book's deepest secret. A reading of Pointed Firs emphasizing the braided rug and the herb as significant cultural coordinates is timely.Elizabeth Ammons argues that both Mrs. Todd and the novel exemplify a webbed and nuclear construct, moving "out from one base to a given point and back again, out to another point, and back...like arteries on a spider's web" (85). Perhaps Ammons's structural interpretation is irrefutable; however, her argumental basis for a nuclear design shifts by the end of her essay to language describing the novel structurally as concentric and centrifugal, its "emotional energy...like rings spreading out when a stone is dropped in a pool" (91). Taken literally, this lacks the configuration of a spider's web. Mrs. Todd standing in the middle of her rug is more analogous to the novel's design; she easily dictates a radiation construct, and as Ammons would know, the pennyroyal chapter (X) is further analogous to her central position and dominating emotional energy. I prefer to revise Ammons's interpretive strategy of nuclear centrifugality in a spider web, since the web is here and there as irregular as it is perfectly marvelous, in favor of viewing the structure and meaning of action in Pointed Firs as a series of radiating cores linked by braiding as one would connect the braids in a rug. This would amplify the nuclear radiating thesis by drawing on specific details about braided rugs and the use of herbs in New England folk practice. Furthermore, this point of view can explain how the narrator and the reader come to feel sorry for Mrs. Todd. Jewett refers to these materials casually. Yet the questions their functions imply she coyly, and perhaps respectfully for the sake of women's intimate affairs and because she is also an artist, leaves unexplained, treating rug and herb in a profoundly subtle manner. Jewett intends these materials to be representational in this story of local color realism. Not the rug but the pennyroyal is heavily laden with sexual meaning. Each material has been relegated critically to secondary importance (except for Ammons's essay on Jewett's "Female Geography") and this is understandable because their symbolic roles in the novel are immersed in the intangibles of cultural practice and meaning. …