American Realism and Naturalism in The Country Doctor   Annmicha Blugh College

Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country Doctor (1884) is classified as a local color fiction because of the encapsulated elements of time, space, memory, romanticism, stock characters, language, and the predominant city versus country theme. Local color fiction concentrated on the ideal pastoral life of the South before upheavals and paradigm shifts change its face entirely. Modernity’s threat stimulates the production of local color as preservation of daily life becomes primordial.

One of the prime features undoubtedly of local color fiction is location – temporal and spatial. The locus in time is the Reconstruction Era of the United States which spanned the 1860s to the 1880s where there was radical infrastructural evolution since the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. The South transforms from a village in rural isolation to one open to drastic alterations. Jewett takes meticulous care in detailing the rural village of Oldfields, Boston. The very name of the novel, A Country Doctor, already gives the book local color character for its rural setting. Oldfields is situated in a quiet wilderness inhabited by a few residents where the characters’ movements are confined to this space. The permanence of nature and the landscape...