The nineteenth century American literary history has long been represented by such canonical male writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Mark Twain. However, the nineteenth century was the period in which many American women began to emerge as serious female writers. Catherine Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Wilson and Harriet Jacobs are some examples of the nineteenth century American female writers. At the end of the nineteenth century, Sarah Ome Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman portrayed the declining New England villages on the east coast. Since they were categorized as local color writers by such critics as V. L. Parrington and Van Wyck Brooks, these women writers had not been included in the American anthology until the end of the 1970s. Their writings had been reduced to regional writing as opposed to serious realism literature produced by male writers in the second half of the nineteenth century.<BR> However, local color writings by female writers were realism literature which created the counter-narrative in opposition to the patriarchal discourse pervasive in the nineteenth century. The second half of nineteen century in America witnessed a volatile social change as America advanced toward the period of industrialization, modernization and urbanization. It was also the period of massive immigration which resulted in the contact and conflicts among heterogeneous social groups and cultural values. These social changes led to questioning of the binary oppositions and borders which were the basis of conventional patriarchal systems.<BR> Sarah Ome Jewett"s works, as representative of local color writings, clearly demonstrate how women writers envision different social structure and human relationships from those of male writers in the nineteenth century. She juxtaposes the boundaries between femininity/ masculinity, city/ village, individual/ community in order to expose the artificiality and constructedness of these boundaries. She also presents a female community that is not destroyed by industrialization and urbanization and that provides the psychologically sustaining power of sympathy and love. While male characters in her novels are isolated and ravaged by the decline of sailing and fishing, women are survivors and keepers of the community with the female ethics of caring and emotional bonding. They coexist with nature instead of being alienated from it. They are very different from the female characters idealized by such male writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe. They refuse to be the projection of male desires. While male characters are resistant to the social changes and foreign influences, women are more open to the introduction of heterogeneity and foreignness. This paper explores how Sarah Ome Jewett brings to light the constructedness of the social, cultural, and sexual boundaries and how she envisions a different community that is open to heterogeneity and hybridity as the modern phenomenon.
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