One of the many things an American literature should do is explain why a family’s “best room” is so much less comfortable than the kitchen. Ironically, welcomed guests are shown to this room, though it’s as uncomfortable for them as for family members.
This is a feature of American life. A literature that reflects American life should get into these kinds of questions about baffling behavior.
Some writers have done it with genius. Here’s Sarah Orne Jewett, whose unnamed narrator is visiting Elijah Tilley, an old fisherman whose wife had died eight years before:
The best room seemed to me a much sadder and more empty place than the kitchen; its conventionalities lacked the simple perfection of the humbler room and failed on the side of poor ambition; it was only when one remembered what patient saving, and what high respect for society in the abstract go to such furnishing that the little parlor was interesting at all.
Tilley called his late wife “poor dear.” The “best room” had her best tea things, the furniture she’d save for and the family daguerreotypes. The kitchen, on the other hand, had Elijah Tilley’s knitting gear. Tilley, though old, still fished and checked his lobster traps, but he got serious about knitting when January set in.
I think this passage should clarify our thinking about where our guests belong. I also think Ms. Jewett was the best kind of writer — one who rewards readers.
• Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1896. I found a copy through Project Gutenberg. The quotation is on p. 161.
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