Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

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Invariably set in the rural areas of Massachusetts or Vermont, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s most engaging stories focus on troubled characters who encounter situations that jeopardize their quest for happiness and personal fulfillment. In prose as angular and unornamented as the characters she portrays and with masterful detachment from them, Freeman typically develops a story around the main character’s response to a personal crisis. Depending on the degree of resoluteness that they possess and the seriousness of the circumstances that they face, her characters react in several ways: Some openly rebel, exerting their will with great courage and determination; others passively accept their lot, preferring to continue what may be a meaningless existence; still others act self-destructively, revealing a masochistic tendency toward self-punishment. Although she wrote about men, her most fascinating characters are women, especially older ones, and in her best work, A Humble Romance, and Other Stories and A New England Nun, and Other Stories, from which the following stories are taken, Freeman’s heroines are depicted with extraordinary sensitivity and insight. The major theme running through all her fiction is the struggle of every human being to preserve his or her dignity and self-respect when confronted with difficult decisions.

“The Revolt of ‘Mother’”

As its title indicates, “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” has as its protagonist a character who boldly asserts herself. Freeman’s most widely anthologized story, it humorously dramatizes the clash of wills between Sarah Penn, a dutiful, God-fearing wife, and her stubborn husband, Adoniram. One spring on the very spot where he had promised to build their new house when they got married forty years earlier, Adoniram begins erecting a new barn for their small New England farm. Having patiently and quietly endured the cramped and outdated quarters of their old house for all these years and wanting her daughter, Nanny, to be married in a new house in the fall, Sarah confronts her husband, accusing him of “lodgin’” his “dumb beasts” better than his “own flesh an’ blood.” Adoniram refuses to honor his long-standing promise. In fact, he obstinately refuses even to discuss the matter, continually replying with Yankee terseness, “I ain’t got nothin’ to say.” Tearfully reconciling herself to the situation, Sarah chooses not to force the issue, content at present to continue her role as an obedient wife.

When the barn is completed in late July, Adoniram plans to transfer his livestock from the old barn on a Wednesday. On the day before, however, learning of an opportunity to buy “a good horse” in neighboring Vermont, he decides to defer the move until his return on Saturday. Convinced that his absence is an act of “providence,” Sarah and Nanny pack the family’s belongings and carry them into the spacious new barn. Within a few hours, with a little imagination and ingenuity, Sarah begins to transform the barn into the house of her dreams.

News of her rebellious activities soon spreads, and by Friday she is the main subject of village gossip. The minister, hoping to persuade her to undo the deed before Adoniram returns, tries to reason with her, but his efforts are in vain. When he returns the following day, Adoniram enters the house shed first, only to discover that one of his cows has taken up residence there. In a state of disbelief he then enters the new barn and is flabbergasted when he discovers what has happened during his absence. Assuring him that she “ain’t crazy,” Sarah releases her pent-up emotions, justifies her actions, and, to his amazement, orders him to complete the conversion. After being served his favorite supper, which...

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he eats silently, Adoniram retreats to the front step and cries. Later comforted by Sarah, he obediently promises to finish converting the barn and humbly confesses to her, “I hadn’t no idee you was so set on’t as all this comes to.”

Like other characters who are constitutionally unable to endure the role that they have been forced to play by family or society—for example, Candace Whitcomb in “A Village Singer”—Sarah Penn ultimately resorts to open rebellion as a means of expressing dissatisfaction. Their self-respect threatened, Freeman’s psychologically healthy characters refuse to accept the intolerable situation that causes their unhappiness. Most of her protagonists, however, are not as successful in dealing with crises, for their twisted and lonely lives are so devoid of purpose and meaning that they do not even realize that they are partially or wholly responsible for their plight. The tragic vision set forth in these stories is far more typical of her fiction than the comic mood seen in “The Revolt of ‘Mother.’” In this regard “A New England Nun” and “A Poetess,” two of her most critically acclaimed stories, are more representative in tone, incident, and artistry.

“A New England Nun”

In the title story of A New England Nun, and Other Stories, an illuminating study of self-imposed spinsterhood, Freeman analyzes the crippling emotional paralysis that prevents the heroine, Louisa Ellis, from marrying her fiancé of fifteen years, Joe Dagget. For the first fourteen years of their engagement, Joe had worked in Australia “to make his fortune.” Faithful to each other but seldom exchanging letters, Joe and Louisa assume that nothing has happened during their separation that would stop the wedding from taking place as scheduled upon his return. Much, however, has happened to Louisa, and her first reaction to Joe’s return is “consternation.” His biweekly visits with her are marked by stiff formality, banal conversation, and emotional uneasiness. He is puzzled by her lack of passion; her cool behavior toward him makes him uncomfortable. During one of their awkward meetings for example, Joe unintentionally tracks in some dust, nervously fidgets with her carefully arranged books, and accidentally knocks over her sewing basket, all of which irritates her.

With remarkable insight, Freeman traces the development of Louisa’s emotional paralysis and neurotic meticulousness. Following the deaths of her mother and brother while Joe was in Australia, which “left her all alone in the world,” Louisa had steadily drifted into the private world of her house and garden. Rather than seeking out the company and friendship of other people, Louisa has retreated into her self-imposed convent and over the years has found comfort and pleasure in growing lettuce “to perfection,” keeping her bureau drawers “orderly,” cleaning her windowpanes, and “polishing her china carefully.” Her sewing apparatus has become “a very part of her personality,” and sewing itself one of her great obsessions. Hopelessly inured to her soul-killing routines, Louisa wants nothing to disturb her placid, well-ordered life, including Joe Dagget.

Freeman skillfully employs three important symbols to represent the futility of her life and the potential unhappiness that Joe would face being married to her. One of Louisa’s favorite pastimes is distilling aromatic essences from her roses and mint. The numerous vials of essences that she has collected over the years serve no purpose whatsoever and are clearly a tangible measure of the meaninglessness of her life. Marriage would destroy this self-indulgent hobby, for in being responsible to someone else “there would be no time for her to distil for the mere pleasure of it.” What would happen to Joe if he married her is symbolized in part by her caged canary, which always flutters “wildly” when he visits as if to warn him of his fate. The most important symbol of bondage, however, is the chain on which for fourteen years she has kept her supposedly vicious dog, Caesar. “A veritable hermit of a dog” and kept “a close prisoner,” Caesar has been “shut out from the society of his kind and all innocent canine joys.” Joe, knowing that Caesar is not really mean and subconsciously reflecting on what might happen to himself, continually tells Louisa that he will one day set the dog free. For Louisa, too, the chain has symbolic significance: Joe’s promise to set the dog free represents a threat to the continuance of her secure, reclusive existence.

Joe does not fully understand the changes that Louisa has undergone and politely continues to tolerate her icy attitude toward him. Louisa, feeling obligated to marry the man who has sacrificed so much of his life for her, is unwilling either to alter her life or to tell him frankly that she prefers monasticism to marriage. Impassive, she does nothing. Having received no passionate responses from Louisa, Joe finds himself becoming attracted to Lily Dyer, a beautiful, warmhearted woman who is helping his sick mother. Lily grows fond of Joe, but neither of the two lets the relationship become serious since both feel that the fifteen-year-old engagement should be sacredly honored. One evening about a week before the wedding, Louisa, who knows nothing about Joe and Lily, takes a walk and inadvertently overhears them talking. Lily is about to leave town to prevent further complications; with mixed emotions Joe agrees with her decision. Realizing that Joe and Lily love each other and sensing an opportunity to get out of the marriage gracefully, Louisa frees Joe the next night. Without mentioning Lily, Louisa finally admits that “she had lived so long in one way that she shrank from making a change.” While Louisa does confess to her inadequacies and while her decision is in part a noble one, it is also self-serving for it allows her to avoid any long-term responsibility to another human being. To achieve this desire, Louisa condemns herself to a life of seclusion.

Freeman’s profound understanding of the atrophy of the human will is revealed in a number of stories, most notably “A Symphony in Lavender,” “A Lover of Flowers,” “A Village Lear,” “A Kitchen Colonel,” and “Sister Liddy.” As in “A New England Nun,” Freeman carefully avoids passing judgment on the paralyzed characters in these stories, but she leaves little doubt that total passivity is one of the worst of human failings. The unwillingness to take command of one’s life, Freeman demonstrates in these stories, eventually leads to the fatally mistaken assumption that one cannot and should not alter one’s pattern of living, even if that life has lost purpose and meaning.

“A Poetess”

If some of Freeman’s protagonists aggressively assert themselves or passively accept the status quo, others react in ways that show a tendency toward self-punishment. Such is the case with Betsey Dole in “A Poetess,” which traces the invidious effects of gossip on a person who ends up lashing herself rather than the author of her humiliation, the village minister. Fifty-years-old, unmarried, and consumptive, Betsey has acquired a modest reputation in the town as a writer of poetry, which is every bit as saccharine as the sugar cubes that she feeds her canary. Like Louisa Ellis, Betsey has created a world the source of whose meaning is not other people. Betsey lives only for her poetry. Poor, she has never made any money from her writing. Her only income for the past twenty years has been the interest generated from her deceased father’s modest savings account. Impractical as well as poor, she prefers growing flowers rather than the vegetables that she needs for her very nourishment. Her life is characterized by eccentricity.

One summer morning she is visited by Mrs. Caxton, who is dressed in mourning because of the recent death of her young boy, Willie. Wanting her son to be commemorated in verse, she asks Betsey to write a fitting obituary poem. After they weep together for several minutes, Mrs. Caxton informs Betsey that she is going to have copies printed for friends and relatives. Betsey, promising to do “the best” she can, tells her that the poem will be written in the afternoon.

Raptly working through lunch and even experiencing visions of little Willie as a human and as angel, Betsey looks “like the very genius of gentle, old-fashioned, sentimental poetry.” She lies awake all that night mentally revising her sixteen-verse poem; and on the next day she delivers the final copy of the maudlin tribute to a very appreciative and tearful Mrs. Caxton. Having been promised a printed copy, Betsey feels “as if her poem had been approved and accepted by one of the great magazines.”

Too poor even to have it framed, she pins the printed copy on her living-room wall and subtly calls attention to it when visitors come. Only two weeks later, however, “the downfall of her innocent pride came.” The key word is “innocent,” for Betsey has naïvely assumed that everyone in the village appreciates her poetry. She is informed by Mrs. Caxton that Reverend Lang, who has some literary taste and who has had some of his poetry published in magazines, has called her poem “poor.” Worse, he is reported to have said that Betsey has never written anything that could rightly be regarded as poetry. Stunned, she says nothing. After Mrs. Caxton leaves, Betsey begins talking as if there were a listener in the room:I’d like to know if you think it’s fair. Had I ought to have been born with the wantin’ to write poetry if I couldn’t write it—had I? Had I ought to have been let to write all my life, an’ not know before there wa’n’t any use in it?

Her listener is God, and her bitter questioning reveals the extent to which she is overly dependent on her poetry for any meaning in her life. Thoroughly humiliated, she proceeds to burn all of her poems: “Other women might have burned their lovers’ letters in agony of heart. Betsey had never had any lover, but she was burning all the love-letters that had passed between her and life.” Unable to forget the poems, she puts the ashes in her blue china sugar bowl. Burning the poems symbolizes not only her disillusionment with God but also the destruction of her reason for existing. The almost perverse pleasure that she takes in burning the poems and then keeping the ashes as a painful reminder of them suggests the unhealthiness of her will.

Having destroyed the only activity that has ever meant anything to her, she steadily loses her desire to live. By fall she is bedridden and on the verge of death. Shortly before dying, she requests that Reverend Lang visit her. The minister, assuming that Betsey wants to clear her conscience before dying, is unaware that her real purpose is to embarrass him, to make him feel guilty. She asks that he bury the ashes of the poems with her, gets him to admit that he has some literary pretensions, and says that none of her poetry was ever “good.” Bewildered by the nature of her death-bed conversation, he remains oblivious to her real intention. Her final request is that he write an obituary poem for her. As Betsey had told Mrs. Caxton, the minister promises to do “the best” he can. Even after this pointed reference, he is completely unaware of the connection between Betsey’s behavior and the comments he had made about her poetry several months before. Ironically, Betsey dies falsely believing that Reverend Lang will live with a guilty conscience. Rather than passively living with her limitations as Louisa Ellis chooses to do or boldly asserting her dignity as Sarah Penn ultimately decides, Betsey Dole follows a self-destructive path.

Thoroughly familiar with the conscience and the will, Freeman created a wide range of literary portraits that are remarkable for their psychological verisimilitude. While most other regional writers represented in their fiction little more than the surface of New England life, Freeman consistently tried to bare the very mind and soul of her compatriots. With the possible exception of Sarah Orne Jewett, none of her contemporaries was as successful in delineating the character of New Englanders. At her best, particularly in A Humble Romance, and Other Stories and A New England Nun, and Other Stories, her fiction transcends “local color.” Although her characters and settings are clearly regional, the underlying subject of her stories—the human condition—is universal. Freeman is not overtly didactic, but the reader may readily infer from her stories that happiness and self-fulfillment are the result of the often difficult struggle to secure and maintain dignity and self-respect. Her fiction is a forceful reminder that while some people succeed, many others fail.

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