Pack your bags for Mount Desert’s gilded age
Such remote alternate social world is revealed in the utterly charming anthology, a revisit to the romance of old Bar Harbor which spawned an avalanche of short stories and writings called Bar Harbor novels about Mount Desert Island in the 19th century.
The water that surrounds the island is not, the anthologists tell us, the only key to its charm and popularity. “It is also circumscribed by mystery, legend, romance. For centuries, this island paradise has attracted explorers, seafarers, farmers, artists, tourists.” And, too, the island has been “a fertile place for the pen as well as the brush … to the point of establishing a unique literary genre. “One writer called it “the finest sanatorium for flirtations,” all set in an aura of “love in idleness.” The eleven excerpts included here are magazine stories or excerpts from novels that proliferated from the “Gilded Age Pilgrims as they discovered the beauty of the island and the gaiety of its social scene.” Chronologically arranged (there is even a play and a poem), we see the island as a tourist mecca, “from the post-Civil War invasion of steamships to the height of its extravagant hotel and cottage life…”
The language floats out of some bygone sphere, genuine, yet of a decidedly different kind of spontaneity than that we know now. In the first story, Caleb comments to his wife his need for a trip to the mountains or the seashore. “Anything that pleases you, my dear,” she meekly replied.
She tells him she has just been reading a glowing account of Mount Desert Island Off the coast of Maine-“lofty mountains, deep ravines, forests, precipices, gorges, echoes, fresh mackerel…all the delicacies of the season, including the prettiest women in the union, who are there collected…”
“Go pack your truck,” the lordly Caleb commands.
It was an era in social history when the island, and especially its chief community, Bar Harbor, became a summer play ground for wealthy out-of-staters, where the rich courted the rich for future wives and husbands along the shores of Frenchman’s Bay.
It was common at the time for novels to be published as serials in national magazines, intensifying the Maine coast’s popularity. The rich, in suspenseful installments, were falling in and out of love with each other in their frequent sojourns, dressing elaborately for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, picnics, dancing the evenings away on hotel and cottage verandas.
There is spark to the more outgoing female protagonists, and a deep sense of demure mystery to the quieter damsels, while the gentlemen all seem to be competing for the utmost in utter manliness. Though seemingly stilted and repressed, there is something awesomely wondrous in their excruciating exactness in manners and allowable thought.
The anthology is edited by the Muethers, two librarians, who live partly in Florida and partly on a Maine island. They lead their rusticators through the bewildering and bewitching traditions of romps and excursions common to the daily planned adventures that were part of the social endeavors.
The Bar Harbor fire of 1947, plus the advent of automobiles and income tax, would end a way of life and much of the literature that described it. The Mount Desert literary imagination lives on, though, in this colorful rendezvous with an island that still reverberates with its vibrant communal history.