SOURCE: Nettels, Elsa. “New England Indigestion and Its Victims.” In Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment, edited by Lilian R. Furst and Peter W. Graham, pp. 167-84. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Nettels discusses the consumption or rejection of food and its relationship to self-assertion and manipulative behavior in New England novels.]

Prominent in American realistic fiction is the victim of what William Dean Howells called “New England indigestion,”¹ a morbid physical and psychological condition manifested in eating disorders such as dyspepsia, willed starvation, and secret gorging. In novels of New England life by Howells, Elizabeth Stoddard, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Edith Wharton, among others, characters seek through the rejection or consumption of food to assert themselves and manipulate others in the face of perceived indifference or rejection. Victims of eating disorders were not confined to New England. In Howells's view, dyspepsia and loss of appetite afflicted so many Americans, particularly women, that American society in the 1870s seemed “little better than a hospital for invalid women.”² But the majority of dyspeptics in American fiction are New Englanders, often lifelong inhabitants of isolated villages where Puritanism, bred in the bone, survives in stubborn will, guilt-ridden conscience, and repressed emotion—conditions that betray themselves in emaciation and physical pain.

With such characters, Puritanism acts like a lens magnifying symptoms and intensifying morbid impulses not confined to one time or place. Even when religious faith no longer animates the Puritans' descendants, their pathologies are aggravated, if not caused, by the heritage of Calvinism: a mistrust of sensual pleasure and fear of satiety; a conviction of personal sinfulness, often coupled with spiritual pride; and a compulsion to exercise one's will even as one felt powerless in the grip of one's predestined fate. “Inherited Puritanism,” as Howells termed it,³ so hospitable to morbidity, is preserved and strengthened by the entrapment of characters in remote villages where isolation fosters “diseased and abnormally exaggerated self-consciousness,” as one analyst noted, and inbreeding results in the “exaggeration of personal characteristics” and “premature arrest” of physical and mental development.⁴

Howells observed that even a temporary affliction like a sprained ankle “intensifies [the] whole character” of the sufferer.⁵ Deep-rooted physical and emotional disorders like chronic dyspepsia and anorexia reveal far more of the hidden life of the victim. When literary characters afflicted by such disorders are members of a particular national or racial or religious group, their maladies assume cultural significance that raises certain questions. We may ask which characteristics of the “New England indigestion” are traceable to the environment and the heritage of the characters. Are its manifestations determined by the sex, age, class, or marital status of the victim? Do its victims exemplify or subvert the traditional paradox that spiritual strength is achieved through physical weakness and suffering? What does the portrayal of their maladies reveal of their society—its values, beliefs, and assumptions about the roles appropriate to men and women?

To seek answers to these questions, we may examine works by four novelists—Howells, Stoddard, Freeman, and Wharton—who view New England characters from different perspectives. Two were born and raised in New England, in Massachusetts: Stoddard in Mattapoisett, on the coast; and Freeman in Randolph, south of Boston. The two outsiders lived for extended periods in New England: Howells in Cambridge and Boston; Wharton at the Mount near Lenox in the Berkshires. All four writers dramatize the importance of food in the lives of their characters, anatomize the kinds of power the invalid commands, and illuminate the legacy of Puritanism in the victories and defeats of its inheritors generations later.

Elizabeth Stoddard was the first American novelist to dramatize the link between Puritanism and eating disorders. In her first novel, The Morgesons (1862), set in pre-Civil War Massachusetts, she presented in Veronica Morgeson the most detailed portrait of an anorectic to be found in nineteenth-century American fiction. By portraying Veronica from early childhood to her wedding day, the novelist shows the interplay of temperament and family relationships in the etiology of an illness rooted in the conditions of the victim's early life. Stoddard's novel, published in 1862, predates by eleven years the publication of case studies by the English physician William Withey Gull, who is credited with identifying anorexia nervosa and naming the disease.⁶

The protagonist of The Morgesons is not Veronica but her older sister, Cassandra, the narrator, whose moral and mental growth is the subject of the novel. But as the title suggests, characters are defined by their place in a family history, in which Veronica is second only to her sister in importance. As the most abnormal of the characters, Veronica functions like a Rorschach test to expose the attitudes of other characters. In turn, the sisters, belonging to the youngest of three generations of Morgesons portrayed in the novel, are shown to be shaped by their cultural heritage and the conditions of their time and place.

By the 1830s, the years of their childhood, the spirit of Puritanism is waning in Surry, the Massachusetts coastal town of their birth, although ministers from the Andover Theological Seminary continue to preach the Calvinist doctrines, and evangelical fervor periodically sweeps provincial congregations. For the sisters, the authoritarian repressive spirit of Puritanism is most powerfully embodied in their maternal grandfather, whose dark and silent house is the physical counterpart of a religion hardened to a “formal, petrifying, unyielding system.”⁷ The failure of his generation to imbue the young with the spirit of his faith is symbolized in a grotesque scene when Cassandra watches her grandfather try to read the family prayers, his teeth gone, unable to articulate the words. His death, coming early in the novel, marks the end of an era, but the effects of his harsh discipline survive. He has driven one of his daughters, the mother of Cassandra and Veronica, to reject the tenets of Calvinism altogether. Her sister, the children's Aunt Merce, who remained unmarried in her father's house totally submissive to his will, exemplifies for her nieces the fate of the woman unable to resist the authority of a patriarch and his church. Veronica, who refuses to visit her grandfather or attend his funeral, declares that he “nearly crushed” her mother and her aunt when they were girls and asks them: “Did you know that you had any wants then? or dare to dream anything beside that he laid down for you?” (64).

Cassandra escapes the confines of provincial Puritan culture by leaving her native village to live for extended periods with worldly relatives near Boston. Veronica rebels within the family circle, so uncontrollable as a child that 150 years earlier her parents might have thought her possessed by witches. She tears out her hair when angry, frightens the family by hiding, pulls an ugly bonnet off a servant's head, and burns herself: “A blazing fire was too strong a temptation to be resisted” (13). When commanded against her will, she becomes “so violent in her opposition” (87) that she is confined to her room. She suffers mysterious illnesses or “spells,” when she lies paralyzed and speechless. Repeatedly she forces responses from her family by her refusals to eat. Obsessed with food, she commands the family cook to prepare elaborate meals, which she will not taste but which she insists the family must eat and describe to her.

The narrator offers no interpretation of her sister's behavior, but merely describes her as “strange,” “baffling,” and “mysterious.” She could say of Veronica, as she says of her mother, “I make no attempt to analyze her character. I describe her as she appeared, and as my memory now holds her” (17).⁸ By presenting Veronica through the view of a narrator who can say only that her sister has a “peculiar constitution” (238), Stoddard avoids a clinical diagnosis, but critics have classified Veronica as a sadomasochist (according to one),⁹ an exalted hysteric (according to another).¹⁰ Veronica also resembles the typical anorectic, although some of the distinguishing signs are missing. She is not the acquiescent child of innumerable case studies. She does not dwell on her appearance except to admit that she cares intensely about dress. But she exploits her peculiar eating habits to get attention, particularly when another member of the family threatens to eclipse her, and to assert her superiority, especially to Cassandra, who relishes food and eats heartily. The night Cassandra arrives home after a year's absence at her grandfather's, Veronica, aged thirteen, commands the scene in the dining room, where the family's life is centered, by announcing that she will henceforth “live entirely on toast” while her sister, she supposes, will “eat all sorts of food, as usual” (51). When Veronica diverts the family's attention from her newborn brother to herself by refusing food and falling ill, she is rewarded for her “mysterious disorder” by the solicitude of the maiden servant, Temperance, who assuages her own needs too as she weeps over Veronica and calls her “deary and her best child” (147). Even as Veronica is about to be married, she and Temperance still find their account in each other as Temperance prepares to “[turn] myself inside out to keep up her appetite” (237). When Cassandra asks wistfully, “Do you ever feel worried about me?” the servant squelches her appeal: “You great, strong thing, why should I?” (237).

Cassandra is strong, in part because she feels secure in her parents' love and knows that their mother “did not love [Veronica] as she loved me; but strove the harder to fulfill her duty” (13). Veronica's conviction that “mother was always against me” (23) drives Veronica to behavior that further alienates her parents and thus intensifies her need of their attention. In early childhood, she learns to associate food and adult concern when Temperance stayed with the children at mealtimes, as the narrator recalls, “to comment on our appetites, and encourage Veronica, who was never hungry, to eat” (13). In a family where both parents are remote from the children's daily lives—the father absorbed in his shipbuilding business, the mother uninterested in the management of her household—Veronica exploits what seems to be an inborn repugnance to food.

Also characteristic of the anorectic is Veronica's determination to cling to her childhood state, symbolized by her refusal to leave her parents' house even when she marries. “I never was a child,” she tells Cassandra, “but I am always trying to find my childhood” (217). To others, however, she has never ceased being a child. A perceptive friend prophesies that Veronica “will be a child always. … She stopped in the process of maturity long ago” (150). When Veronica refuses to wear bombazine after her mother's death, Temperance indulges her: “She's a bigger child than ever … and must have her way” (210). Even Veronica's suitor, Ben Somers, who feels safer with a child bride than with a mature woman like Cassandra, wonders whether Veronica is “grown a human woman” (233). (Marriage seems inconsistent with her refusal to assume the duties and privileges of adulthood, unless she seeks in her husband another protector.)

No one in the novel connects Veronica to the saint whose name she bears. The narrator merely notes that their paternal grandfather insisted that the “Morgeson tombstones” not be consulted for the sisters' names (10). By early adolescence, however, Veronica is clearly imitating the life of a monastic. She pastes a picture of Saint Cecilia on the wall of her room, which she keeps in “orderly perfection” (136). In winter she refuses to have her bed warmed by heated bricks and endures the freezing cold rather than light a fire. She restricts her view of the world outside to the square of landscape visible from a single pane of glass, which she calls her “wicket,” and at night she reads by the light of a single candle.

In certain ways her life even parallels that of the seventeenth-century saint, Veronica Guiliani, who in her autobiography recalled herself as a troublesome willful child, given to putting her hand in the fire and otherwise injuring herself in the presence of her family.¹¹ Her description of herself might have been written by Stoddard's Veronica: “I was stubborn and if I wanted something I would not quiet down until I won. I was the smallest, but I wanted to command everyone and I wanted everything done my way; and in effect everyone gave in to me.”¹² Veronica in the novel undertakes no fasts such as chronicled by Sister Veronica, who in the convent repeatedly defied orders to eat and for years tried to exist on diets of bread and water. But Stoddard's Veronica welcomes suffering: “I need all the illnesses that come,” she says, and she seeks to define herself in ascetic denials that set her apart from everyone else. As Sister Veronica eventually conquered her near fatal self-induced illness to recover her health and rule as abbess for eleven years, so her namesake, according to the narrator, wills “the darkness in her nature to break” and slowly gains health and serenity: “a spiritual dawn had risen in her soul” (60).

Whether or not Stoddard intended parallels between her Protestant character and the Catholic saint, her narrator insists that Veronica gains power through suffering. “Educated by sickness,” Veronica acquires “the fortitude of an Indian” (59). Depriving herself of food, she “fed on pain … and at last mastered it” (60). The transports of suffering apparently fuel “the fires of her creative powers” (141), expressed in surreal paintings and performances on the piano of “wild, pathetic melodies” that move her listeners to tears while her own face remains “calm, white, and fixed” (62). She claims the advantages of her confined space, as Thoreau boasted of traveling widely in Concord. When Cassandra wonders that her sister can restrict her view to the “limited, monotonous” view from her wicket, Veronica answers as Emily Dickinson might have done: “If the landscape were wider I could never learn it” (135).

By romanticizing Veronica's illness as the fount of creative power or “genius” and spiritual beauty, Stoddard sought to present Veronica in a positive light. But that effort is continually compromised by the mere presence of Cassandra, whose contrast with Veronica informs the whole novel. Veronica's restricted life, “kept sacredly apart” (224), seems self-induced entrapment, her obsessive dread of the sea a life-denying fear, when compared with Cassandra's eagerness to move outward, journey to new places, ride, sail, and walk by the sea, where she utters her cry of longing for life: “Its roar, its beauty, its madness—we will have—all” (215). Beside Cassandra's healthy recognition of her sexual nature and its needs, Veronica's “delicate, pure, ignorant soul” (226), in which Ben Somers hopes to find “eternal repose,” seems the morbid price of stunted growth. Her refusals of food appear regressive when compared with Cassandra's unfailingly hearty appetite, expressive of delight in the signs of her womanhood. “I had lost the meagerness of childhood and began to feel a new and delightful affluence. What an appetite I had, too!” (46-47). In Cassandra, Stoddard repudiated the convention that condemned a woman's appetite as a sign of licentiousness and moved writers to make their heroines “so indifferent to good eating … so impervious to all the creature comforts.”¹³ To her question “Is goodness, then, incompatible with the enjoyment of the senses?”¹⁴ Cassandra gives the decisive answer.

In their childhood and adolescence, Cassandra and Veronica rebel against authority that would thwart their desires, but in the end Stoddard herself succumbed to the force of literary convention, forcing both sisters along the prescribed path, into improbable courtships and marriages to handsome degenerate brothers, fortunate chiefly in their family's wealth. Nothing in the novel suggests that the youthful self-assertion of either sister will flower in mature self-fulfillment. Veronica's musicianship may be genius, as several characters assert, but in her society a woman of genius is “an anomaly sphered between the sexes” (242) who has no orbit of her own except in solitude.¹⁵ And yet, in the world of the novel, women surpass men in psychological strength and powers of survival. All the main male characters are casualties—bankrupts, libertines, alcoholics, and invalids, whose deaths outnumber female deaths by five to one. In the Morgesons' world, tradition and convention still empower men, but only women are strong in the power of the self.

Illness separates Veronica Morgeson from the vigorous active women that dominate the world of Stoddard's novel. In Howells's fiction, invalid women are so numerous that the completely healthy female character is the anomaly. Scarcely any of his thirty-seven novels lack a stricken woman suffering a physical or mental ailment. Bedridden women, attended by doctors and surrounded by family or friends, appear in more than half a dozen of the novels. Typical of the country place frequented in the summer by genteel city women is the New England farm in Mrs. Farrell (1875-76), more sanatorium than resort, where illness is the women's main topic of conversation and “two or three … were nearly always sick in bed.”¹⁶ The observer in A Foregone Conclusion (1875) who reflects that “all his countrywomen, past their girlhood, seemed to be sick” scarcely exaggerates.¹⁷ Unlike Stoddard, whose female characters grow strong in resisting repressive authority, Howells portrayed women, members of a “sex which is born tired,”¹⁸ as further debilitated by restrictive conventions (“our version of the Chinese foot-binding”¹⁹) that confined women to lives of idleness or vain social duties, deprived them of the physical and mental exercise enjoyed by men, and denied them the health-giving satisfactions men find in productive work and professional success.

From the beginning, Howells viewed the mental and physical sufferings of women as purely negative in their consequences, inducing unhealthy dependence, morbid egoism, and warped perceptions. That he should see no redemptive value in women's illness was inevitable once the deteriorating health of his eldest child, Winifred, stricken at the age of sixteen, became the source of the greatest anguish he would ever know. A classic case of the gifted and tenderly nurtured child who breaks down in adolescence, Winifred during her last nine years sank into total invalidism; her symptoms—vertigo, anorexia, melancholia, intense pain after eating—defied diagnosis and cure by any of the doctors Howells consulted. In the fall of 1888, when Winifred was twenty-five, Howells as a last resort placed her in the care of the Philadelphia neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, whose patients would later include Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton. At Mitchell's clinic, where Winifred engaged with the doctor in a prolonged “tussle of wills” (as Howells wrote to his father), force-feeding had by January 1889 raised her weight from fifty-eight to seventy-one pounds.²⁰ Two months later, in a sanatorium in Merchantville, New Jersey, where she seemed to be gaining strength, she died suddenly of heart failure. John Crowley, who has analyzed Winifred's case in the most detail, argues persuasively that she was trapped by the very conditions that seemed most to favor her.²¹ Fearful of disappointing her own and her parents' dreams of literary success, she would escape through illness the demands of adulthood and remain in the protected world of her childhood.

Howells never made his daughter's illness the subject of his fiction, but in his later novels he gave the figure of the invalid woman even more prominence.²² Eating disorders are but one sign of physical and mental illness in the invalid characters—they suffer from enervation, hypochondria, insomnia, anxiety, and depression as well—but of all their symptoms their abnormal eating habits have the most visible effect on their appearance and their behavior and thus function best as the symbolic expression of moral or psychological weakness.

The results of a “New England indigestion” are most apparent in the character described by the phrase: Adeline Northwick, the unmarried elder sister in The Quality of Mercy (1892). “Thin and tall,” Adeline is starved to the point that “each rib” of her “bony waist … defined itself to [the] hand” (49). Her “weak frame” bespeaks psychological as well as physical deficiency: she is timorous, fearful, guilt-ridden, and given to fits of hysterical weeping. Her neurotic symptoms are aggravated by the collapse of her father, the treasurer of a New England milling company, who after years of embezzlement is exposed and flees to Canada, where he eventually dies. But Howells indicates that Adeline's physical and mental condition is rooted in inherited tendencies reflective of a degenerative Puritanism that helped turn her mother into a “timorous creature” ridden by “manifold anxieties,” psychologically as well as financially dependent on her husband, and ruled by her “instinct for saving” even after he became a rich landowner (7). Adeline, a generation older than her sister, Suzette, seems a prolongation of her mother's meager life on a reduced scale. It is significant that she keeps her mother's watch, “that had never been wound up since her death” (155). The narrator's statement that in her behavior she adheres to “an earlier country fashion of self-repression” (19) implies the stifling of feelings and impulses that in her beautiful younger sister find expression in courtship and marriage. Adeline has never had a suitor, and her sister has always been their father's favorite daughter. In Adeline the “New England indigestion” that wastes the body signals emotional deprivation as well.

Within the novel, Adeline is also deprived through the attitude of the other characters, who habitually refer to her as “that poor old maid” and can see her in no other way. Although the narrator credits her with “the inborn New England love of justice” (49), he collaborates in the reduction of the woman to a stereotype, repeatedly designating her “the old maid” and characterizing her speech by such modifiers as “nervously,” “feebly,” “tremulously,” “meekly,” “submissively,” “forlornly,” and “guiltily.” Unlike Veronica Morgeson, Adeline is virtually eclipsed by a spirited and self-confident sister whose beauty impresses others as “extraordinary,” “superb,” “magnificent,” and “regal.” When male characters inquire about the sisters, they unthinkingly speak only of Suzette, allowing Adeline to “[drop] from the question, as usual” (147). Adeline can command others' attention only by becoming so ill that the family doctor must be called repeatedly. Her feeble strength gives way entirely, and she dies soon after her sister becomes engaged to the most exemplary young man in the novel.

The Quality of Mercy also presents Howells's most important example of the male dyspeptic, an impoverished young journalist and aspiring playwright named Brice Maxwell, who brilliantly analyzes the social significance of Northwick's defalcation and later becomes engaged to a socially prominent Boston girl, the sister of the man who marries Suzette Northwick. The difference in Howells's depiction of dyspepsia in its male and female manifestations is noteworthy. Failing health increases rather than diminishes the romantic appeal of the “sick young man,” who has a “thin, delicate face” and at first meeting impresses the girl he will marry as “very handsome, and interesting, and pale and sick” (145). His repugnance to food seems evidence of superior refinement and sensitivity when in a railroad station restaurant he nibbles a bit of toast “like a man of small appetite and invalid digestion” (90), while a fellow reporter, well-meaning but vulgar and crude, downs baked beans and mince pie. Maxwell's chronic indigestion, headaches, and fatigue result not from starved emotions but from overwork. He labors to support himself and his widowed mother as a journalist, all the while struggling to write his first play. A “ravenous reader of philosophy and sociology” (119), he draws his strength from ideas, compelling even his fiancée's class-conscious mother, who opposes the marriage, to admit: “He makes you feel his power more than any young man I've met” (293).

In Howells's fictional world, men are sustained in times of personal crisis by their work; women lacking such defense against depression and melancholia slide quickly into invalidism. The difference is dramatized in April Hopes, in which a New England couple—Alice Pasmer and Dan Mavering—suffer through misunderstandings, quarrels, and two broken engagements before they finally marry, at the end of the novel. Without Dan, Alice languishes, emerges from a long illness with “thin cheeks and lack-lustre eyes,” and convalesces at a summer hotel called the Hygeia, where, unrefreshed by the sea air, “she grew more listless and languid.”²³ When Dan is cast off, he suffers keenly, but work in his father's manufacturing business dispels even “the idea of being sick.” Despite pangs of anguish, “he kept a good appetite” and found himself “hungry three times a day with perfect regularity” (153-54).

Gender differences are equally marked in the portrayal of the Landers in Ragged Lady (1899), Howells's twelfth novel set in New England. Husband and wife suffer contrasting metabolic disorders after he retires from his boys' clothing business, she gives up housekeeping, and they live a transitory life of “luxury and idleness” in expensive hotels.²⁴ “She had constantly grown in flesh, while he had dwindled away until he was not much more than half the weight of his prime” (15). The implication that she has fed on him is confirmed as Howells makes her gluttony the visible sign of her selfish craving for attention and sympathy. She secretly consumes candy “with childish greed” (19), and she feeds as voraciously on the energies of Clementina, the young country girl she hires as her companion. Until her death from “cumulative over-eating” (194), she exploits her gastric attacks as her only means of compelling the girl's pity and obedience. Such power as she commands is short-lived, however, and she remains too repulsive and too helpless to inspire in the reader either pity or fear.

For most of Howells's characters, illness means unredeemed suffering, thwarted hopes, and often death. Their lives could illustrate the text of Henry James's letter to Grace Norton: “Try not to be ill … for in that there is a failure.”²⁵ Only Howells himself offers in his own life testimony of the vitalizing power born of suffering. As his biographer, Edwin Cady, observes, the anguished years of Winifred's decline were the years of her father's greatest productivity, issuing in nine novels, including two of his best, The Rise of Silas Lapham and Indian Summer. In Cady's words, “it was as if the suffering he had once feared might destroy him instead unlocked new powers to create within him.”²⁶ But Howells could not save his daughter, and he did not transfer his creative power to the characters of his imagination.

In the New England mill towns of Howells's fiction, vestiges of Puritanism have all but disappeared, surviving only in the “Puritanized consciences”²⁷ of superseded figures like Adeline Northwick. But in the fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman, whose characters inhabit isolated villages untouched by industrial growth, Howells noted the survival of Puritanism “in the moral and mental make of the people almost in its early strength. … A people are not a chosen people for half a dozen generations without acquiring a spiritual pride that remains with them long after they cease to believe themselves chosen.”²⁸

No work of fiction better illustrates Howells's point than Freeman's novel of New England village life, Pembroke (1894), described by the author as “a study of the human will in different phases of disease and abnormal development.”²⁹ Stiff-backed pride and unswerving resolve drive the members of three Pembroke families—Thayers, Berrys, and Barnards, who, in the absence of all outside influences and interests, allow petty grievances to possess their minds and consume their energies. The action of the novel begins when the tyrannical Cephas Barnard provokes his daughter's suitor, Barnabas Thayer, into a quarrel about politics and then drives him from the house. Barnabas vows never to return, and neither man relents until the final pages, after the quarrel has blasted the lives of young and old in all three families.

On the farms of Pembroke, where the kitchen is the center of family life and the raising of crops and the getting of meals are the primary occupations, food is the pivot on which almost all the action turns, the instrument through which characters seek to maintain their authority and control over others. Deborah Thayer punishes her son, Barnabas, for refusing to obey her command to return to Charlotte Barnard by forbidding him to “sit down to a meal in your father's and mother's house.”³⁰ Cephas Barnard, who believes that salvation lies in diet, not in God's grace, forces his family to subsist on rye meal or garden greens, forbidding them food that “might strengthen the animal at the expense of the spiritual” (53). Passive victims of others' wills strike at themselves, as does an impoverished cousin, Sylvia Crane, who, when forced to beggar herself to serve her relatives a lavish tea, tells herself fiercely that “she did not care if she never ate supper again” (263), then bruises her hand on the chimney bricks as though to prove “her own freedom and power” (264).

The grimmest, most protracted struggle ensues between the implacable Deborah Thayer and her sickly son, Ephraim, a rare case of a male dyspeptic, who early in life recognizes in his sickness his one source of power—“power of a lugubrious sort, certainly, but still it was power, and so to be enjoyed” (107). When thwarted by his mother, he employs his most potent weapon, the ritual formula “I dunno as I want any supper, I've got a pain” (147), then writhes and moans “with attentive eyes upon his mother; he was like an executioner turning an emotional thumbscrew on her” (147). When he ate forbidden sweets on the sly, “his stomach oppressed him, his breath came harder,” but in defiance “he had a sense of triumph in his soul” (100).

The contest of wills enters its final phase when Deborah loses control over her two older children and vows “to have one child obey me” (147). Convincing herself that she acts for the good of Ephraim's soul and not for the relief of her frustration, she deprives her son of all pleasure, including every food he likes, and forces his mouth to open to bitter medicine without sweetening, as if “[her] will were a veritable wedge between his teeth” (222). Like a warrior in battle, she thrusts the feeding spoon at him “as if it were a bayonet and there were death at the point” (222). Her harsh discipline, kept up in defiance of the doctor's warnings, eventually drives Ephraim to fatal rebellion. He steals from the house one night to coast in the moonlight, returns home to consume a mince pie in secret, and dies the next day. His mother's death, in an agony of remorse, follows soon after.

Whether Freeman's characters give food or withhold it, whether they deny themselves food or consume it in secret, they seek, like Sylvia Crane, to prove their own “freedom and power.” Even characters so poor that they can scarcely provide for their next meal are moved by forces other than bare necessity. If nothing else, pride impels characters to go without food rather than accept charity from neighbors. But self-denial often springs from more complex feelings. In “A Taste of Honey,” for instance, Inez Morse thinks she is motivated solely by her duty to her dead father when she asks her suitor to postpone their marriage and forces her mother to sell all the honey they raise until the mortgage on their farm is paid off. But postponing the pleasures of food and love affords Inez intense satisfaction. As the anorectic rejoices in each pound lost, so Inez feels a “keen delight” with each payment made.³¹ She loses her suitor, who eventually marries another woman, but she seems resigned to the price she pays for three years of mastery, when she governed the lives of two people, succeeded where her father had failed, and was captive only to the force of her own will.

Characters in Freeman's stories deprive themselves to shield their egos as well as to assert their wills. In “A Solitary,” Nicholas Gunn reasons that if he places no value on himself, nothing that happens to him can hurt him. To convince himself that he cares nothing for himself he becomes “a stern anchorite” who lives on uncooked cornmeal and water and in winter sleeps on the bare floor in a freezing cabin without a fire. In another culture, the narrator observes, Nicholas Gunn might “have been revered and worshipped as a saintly ascetic,”³² but for Freeman's characters salvation comes through love, offered and received, often expressed in the giving and acceptance of food. Nicholas is freed from the prison of his ego when he participates in the saving economy of “need and supply” (235) by building a fire to warm a sick man and cooking a meal to nourish them both.

The lives of characters like the Thayers and the Barnards are far more limited and circumscribed than the lives of Howells's and Stoddard's well-to-do New Englanders. But Freeman's village characters have a kind of sturdy determination—grit, as Nicholas Gunn calls his power to endure—that ease and wealth have dissipated in the Morgesons and the Northwicks. Of Freeman's characters Van Wyck Brooks observed: “Those who prefer to starve rather than say they are hungry are living as the well-fed seldom live.”³³ A perverted will can harden the heart, chain the mind, and warp the body. But the resolute will can empower the most submissive and sustain the meanest and poorest.

In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton claimed that she wrote Ethan Frome (1911) “to draw life as it really was in the derelict villages of New England,” a reality she believed was “utterly unlike that seen through the rose-coloured spectacles of my predecessors, Mary Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett.”³⁴ One wonders which of their works she had in mind. Her description of the western Massachusetts villages as they were in Freeman's day—“grim places, morally and physically,” where “insanity, incest and slow mental and moral starvation were hidden away behind the paintless wooden house-fronts of the long village street, or in the isolated farm-houses on the neighboring hills”—might be a description of Pembroke. But Wharton acknowledged Freeman only as a model to be dismissed, one of the “authoresses” who falsified life in their “rose-and-lavender pages.”³⁵

The reader may consider whether E. A. Robinson, who admired Pembroke for its “tragic background of subdued passion” and believed that “to one who knows anything about Puritanism the book will be interesting and impressive,”³⁶ is a fairer judge than Wharton of the verisimilitude of Freeman's work. The reader may decide whether the spectacle of Zenobia Frome driving her husband and her cousin to the suicide attempt that cripples them for life is more or less horrifying than Deborah Thayer's blind destruction of her invalid son. But whatever the relative merits of the two works as tragic realism, Ethan Frome remains, after The Scarlet Letter, the most famous novel of New England life.

The narrative is powerful in its intensity and simplicity. Where Stoddard, Howells, and Freeman expand and amplify, creating subplots and dozens of minor characters, shifting scenes and stretching time to months or years, Wharton concentrates on the three principal characters, the setting of the Fromes' isolated farmhouse and its environs, and the single action that builds to a climax within two days. Within this stripped-down world, nothing mitigates the effect of the paradox that gives Ethan Frome its peculiar horror: that energy resides only in the vengeful will of a sick woman, who alone of the characters conceives and executes a plan of action.

At first glance, Zenobia would seem to lack every advantage possessed by the invalid characters considered thus far. The Fromes are trapped in a kind of poverty never known by Stoddard's and Howells's characters. No family network like that portrayed in Pembroke supports Ethan and Zenobia or eases the pressure of poisoned relationships within their household. Without beauty or talent, Zenobia is not only the most physically repellent of all the characters—and Wharton spares nothing, not even the sight of her false teeth reposing in a glass of water at night; Zenobia alone of all the invalid characters is sexually repulsive, viewed as she is through the eyes of her husband, who never loved her and has come to love another woman. Zenobia alone so blights her world that others longingly fantasize her death. Her one interest is her failing health, which creates her only contacts with the outside world: her patent medicines received through the mail and her visits to doctors in neighboring villages. But despite, or perhaps because of, her deprived state, she commands a power of will that nothing diverts from her purpose—to drive her attractive young cousin, Mattie Silver, from her house, when she perceives her husband's attraction to the younger woman.

The only invalid character seen thus far who determines the outcome of the action, Zenobia uses her illness as her most powerful weapon to control others and work her will. Her habitual complaint—“I don't feel as if I could touch a morsel”³⁷—is, for her husband, “the consecrated formula” (116) that signals her determination to manipulate him through his sense of guilt and duty to an ailing wife. When he attempts to resist her on Mattie's behalf, her “shooting pains” send her to bed. When she returns from an overnight journey to a nearby town where she has hired a girl to arrive the next day to replace Mattie, her appetite returns, and at supper she “helped herself largely to pie and pickles” (134). The next noon, “she ate well,” at what she thinks is Mattie's last meal with them, although her dyspepsia sends her to bed again when Ethan insists that he, not the hired man, will drive Mattie to the railroad station. Feeding or fasting, she exudes, to her husband's sense, “an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding” (118).

Had Ethan simply hated his wife he might have defied her, but his power to resist her will is crippled not only by guilt but also by compassion. A true grotesque, she is at once hateful and pitiful in her exposure of Ethan and Mattie, as she tearfully confronts them with the fragments of the broken pickle dish, her prized wedding present that she never used. The barren marriage of the Fromes, symbolized by the empty pickle dish, is outwardly marked by a corresponding image: “a dead cucumber vine [that] dangled from the porch like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death” (51).

Ethan Frome magnifies the themes and images of the earlier novels: the isolation of the characters is more profound, the winter cold is more intense, the impoverished landscape is more bleak than in the other novels of rural New England. In starkest terms, Ethan Frome limns the situation of men and women represented in the fiction of Stoddard, Howells, and Freeman. The plight of Mattie Silver and Zenobia Frome, unable to support themselves and dependent on husband or relatives, could be the fate of all the women whose only hope of security and happiness appears to lie in marriage. The emasculation of Ethan Frome, who feels his wife's words “like a knife-cut across the sinews” (117), typifies the failure of male authority figures in other works: the bankruptcy of Locke Morgeson, the defalcation and exposure of Northwick, the fixations of the men in Pembroke, trapped by their blind wills. In the works of the three women, the vacuum created by the collapse of male authority is filled by the power of women determined to assert their needs and desires. In Howells's novels, men of integrity and strong purpose, like Eban Hilary in The Quality of Mercy and Elbridge Mavering in April Hopes (1888), sustain the power of masculine authority. But in the works of all four writers, female characters—denied entrance to the male worlds of business and the professions—discover in illness a way to define themselves and work their will. That illness should be their means to self-expression and power exposes dysfunction in the social order. That food should be their chief instrument of manipulation symbolizes the primacy of their need.

Notes

1. William Dean Howells, The Quality of Mercy, introduction and notes to the text by James P. Elliott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 19. Subsequent references to this text are given in parentheses.

2. William Dean Howells, Suburban Sketches (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1872), 96.

3. William Dean Howells, “Puritanism in American Fiction,” in Literature and Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1902), 282.

4. Rollin Lynde Hartt, “A New England Hill Town,” Atlantic Monthly 83 (April 1899): 564, 468, 569.

5. William Dean Howells, A Chance Acquaintance, introduction and notes to the text by Jonathan Thomas and David J. Nordloh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 74.

6. For a detailed account of Gull's work in defining and treating anorexia nervosa, see Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia as a Modern Disease (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 115-25.

7. Elizabeth Stoddard, The Morgesons and Other Writings, Published and Unpublished, ed. with critical introduction by Lawrence Buell and Sandra A. Zagarell (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 28. Subsequent references to this text are given in parentheses.

8. What Howells said of Stoddard's second novel, Two Men, is true of The Morgesons: “The author seldom vouchsafes a word of comment or explanation on anything that her people do or say; and yet, from their brief speeches and dramatic action, you have the same knowledge of motive which you acquire from the philosophization of some such subjective romance as “The Scarlet Letter.” “Two Men,” The Nation, October 26, 1865, p. 537.

9. Sybil Weir, “The Morgesons: A Neglected Feminist Bildungsroman,” New England Quarterly 49 (1976): 430.

10. Mary Moss, “The Novels of Elizabeth Stoddard,” The Bookman 16 (1902): 260.

11. Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 59-61.

12. As quoted in ibid., 63.

13. Elizabeth Stoddard, Daily Alta California, October 7, 1855, as quoted by Sybil B. Weir, “Our Lady Correspondent: The Achievement of Elizabeth Drew Stoddard,” San Jose Studies 10 (1984): 85.

14. Ibid.

15. The inferior status of women in The Morgesons is analyzed by Lawrence Buell and Sandra A. Zagarell in their introduction to The Morgesons and Other Writings, xvii-xix, and by Maurice Kramer, “Alone at Home with Elizabeth Stoddard,” American Transcendental Quarterly, nos. 47-48 (Summer-Fall 1980): 159-70.

16. William Dean Howells, Mrs. Farrell, with an introduction by Mildred Howells (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921), 13. The fullest treatment of Howells's portrayal of invalid women is Sidney H. Bremer's “Invalids and Actresses: Howells's Duplex Imagery for American Women,” American Literature 47 (1976): 599-614.

17. William Dean Howells, A Foregone Conclusion (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1875), 126.

18. Howells, Suburban Sketches, 96.

19. Ulrich Halfmann, “Interviews with William Dean Howells,” American Literary Realism 6 (1973): 326-27.

20. Selected Letters, Vol. 3, 1882-1891, ed. and annotated by Robert C. Leitz III et al. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 235 n. 1; 243 n. 4.

21. John W. Crowley, “Winifred Howells and the Economy of Pain,” Old Northwest 10 (1984): 41-75.

22. Invalids in Howells's later fiction include Mrs. Mavering (April Hopes), Mrs. Dryfoos (A Hazard of New Fortunes), Mrs. Meredith (An Imperative Duty), Adeline Northwick (The Quality of Mercy), Mrs. Camp (The Traveller from Altruria), and Mrs. Lander (Ragged Lady).

23. William Dean Howells, April Hopes, introduction and notes to the text by Kermit Vanderbilt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), 347. Subsequent references to this text are given in parentheses.

24. William Dean Howells, Ragged Lady (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1899), 14, 15. Subsequent references to this text are given in parentheses.

25. Letter of July 28, 1883, Henry James Letters, Vol. 2, 1875-1883, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 425.

26. Edwin H. Cady, The Realist at War: The Mature Years, 1885-1920, of William Dean Howells (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1958), 58.

27. Howells's phrase in Heroines of Fiction (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901), 2:253.

28. Howells, “Puritanism in American Fiction,” 281.

29. Quoted by Edward Foster in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (New York: Hendrick House, 1956), 128.

30. Mary E. Wilkins, Pembroke (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894), 103. Subsequent references to this text are given in parentheses.

31. Mary E. Wilkins, A Humble Romance and Other Stories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1887), 94.

32. Selected Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, edited with an introduction by Marjorie Pryse (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1983), 225, 235.

33. Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1940), 472. The power and strength of Freeman's characters are also emphasized by Susan Allen Toth, “Defiant Light: A Positive View of Mary Wilkins Freeman,” New England Quarterly 46 (1973): 82-93.

34. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Appleton-Century, 1934), 293.

35. Ibid., 293-94.

36. Letter to Harry Smith, October 28, 1894, in Untriangulated Stars: Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson to Harry DeForest Smith, 1890-1905, ed. Denham Sutcliffe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), 174.

37. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911), 116. Subsequent references to this text are given in parentheses.