Recent scholarship addresses a deeper significance to Jewett‟s female characters than was previously attributed in canonical history. Jewett imbues her women with complexity, but intentionally avoids portraying her females as disproportionately heroic. Indeed, a pervading recurrence of abortions and otherwise lost children among the predominately female community of Dunnet Landing creates a framework of death by which to interpret the actions and motivations of Jewett‟s characters. My thesis explores the larger metaphor Jewett establishes by juxtaposing the literal abortions of her female characters and the figurative abortion of Dunnet Landing‟s future; moreover, the aborted futures of Jewett‟s female characters mirror the decay of the town itself which has not recovered from the loss of its once-vibrant shipping economy. Jewett‟s intermingling of these two themes unveils a sense of lost innocence which is cemented by the historical context of nostalgia for something lost that was setting in all over the country during Jewett‟s era.
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