“In a fascinating essay, ‘The Confessions of a HouseBreaker,’ written when she was just beginning her relationship with Fields, Jewett writes of breaking out of the house in a predawn walk through the village. Even so small an act of defying convention causes her to look over her shoulder: ‘I had a desire to go out farther into the world, and I went some distance up the street, past my neighbors' house; feeling a sense of guilt and secrecy that could hardly be matched. . . . But if any one had suddenly hailed me from a window I should have been inclined to run home as fast as my feet could carry me. In such fashion are we bound to the conventionalities of existence!’ Central to the experience is a clairvoyant connection to a distant friend—a feeling that another person is awake and close to her in spirit: ‘an understanding between us sprang up quickly, like a flame on the altar to Friendship, in my heart’ (239). I imagine her in love with Annie Fields, unable to sleep, still struggling inwardly with what such an attachment means in a society that doesn't even have a word for love between women besides the euphemism ‘Boston marriage.’ Breaking through the bounds of convention causes her extreme anxiety: she ‘steals’ out of the house, feels ‘astray’ as she goes farther down the street, but soon is overcome by a sense of exhilaration at her daring. She jumps the fence on her return home (a decorous woman in her thirties) instead of opening the gate, then feels ‘dismayed afterward at such singular conduct’ (243). I can imagine her stealing back upstairs in the dark house to her room, falling asleep in the dawn to awaken hours later still ‘delighted and puzzled’ about the implications of her symbolic breakout (243)” (Schachinger 281-282).
Schachinger, Carol. "Sarah Orne Jewett's Maine: A Journey Back.” Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, edited by Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards. UP of Florida, 1999, pp. 277-286.
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