[In the following excerpt, Donovan surveys the various mother-daughter relationships and strong female characters in Freeman's short stories.]

Something is dying in the fictional world of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. A way of life—the woman-centered, matriarchal world of the Victorians—is in its last throes. The preindustrial values of that world, female-identified and ecologically holistic, are going down to defeat before the imperialism of masculine technology and patriarchal institutions. In Sarah Orne Jewett's vision the world of the mothers holds its own against the historical forces that impend its demise. With Mary E. Wilkins Freeman the mothers are taking a last stand, going down to apparently inevitable defeat. The hopelessness of their prospect drives many of them to a kind of obsessive protectiveness of their daughters; at times their behavior becomes almost perversely destructive.

Freeman, the last of the New England local color school, came close to a modernist sensibility. In many of her stories she seems to have distilled the local color topos down to its essence. One has often a sense of a script of gestures reduced to mechanical repetition, as if the heart or soul had been removed, as if somehow the meaning had vacated. The sense of the absurd, of a metaphysically sparse environment is very strong in these works. But it is not “God” who is dead or dying in the world of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman; it is the Mother and a woman-centered world.

Like Jewett, Freeman employed “imaginative realism” (although perhaps less consciously so); she turned rural New England into a symbolic landscape whose moral events signified the state of women entering the twentieth century. Many of her stories have an aesthetic purity that give them great power. At her best Freeman created master stories equal to those of Chekhov, or indeed, of her teacher, Sarah Orne Jewett.

“The Tree of Knowledge” (The Love of Parson Lord and Other Stories, 1900) is a paradigmatic mother-daughter script. In this case the relationship is between sisters Cornelia, an older, protective figure, and Annie Pryor.

For years Cornelia had written fictitious love letters to Annie, signing them “David Amicus.” Her idea was that she would create so pure an ideal of manhood in Annie's mind that she would never succumb to ordinary men's wiles. Her plans are thwarted, however, when Annie, in the fashion of the female quixote, naively greets a prowler as her ideal beau. Cornelia manages to repair the situation by revealing her scheme to the intruder (another “burglar in paradise”), who is so moved that he vows to prove himself worthy of Annie's faith. This he does, and they marry, much to Cornelia's chagrin. She then wonders “if it might not sometimes be better to guard the Tree of Knowledge with the flaming sword, instead of the gates of a lost Paradise.”¹

Once again we find a woman writer of the late nineteenth century using biblical images of the fall to convey the historically induced ambivalence women were feeling about leaving their traditional female sanctuaries and going out into a male-dominated world. … [T]he female sanctuary was perceived as a paradise and the threat to that paradise was male intrusion. That Freeman presents the paradise as “lost” and the threat as “the Tree of Knowledge” correlates with the historical transitions noted above. In Freeman's view, however, these transitions are much further along than heretofore; the situation is much more desperate and much more extreme measures are required to deal with it—perhaps an accurate expression of her historical moment.

While some might be tempted to impose a sexual interpretation on this imagery, and construe the women's resistance as a fear of male sexuality, such a reading does not explain why this imagery appears at a particular historical moment and not before. For it is only in the late nineteenth century, beginning among these writers with Phelps (and not seen in Cooke or Stowe), that one begins to sense a fear that the female sanctuary may be destroyed—not so much by male sexuality per se but by the forces of masculine knowledge, by industrialism, by patriarchal governmental and educational institutions. This is quite different from the rape-and-destroy motif seen in the “heroine's text.” Consequently it seems that the only valid explanation for the emergence of the “destruction-of-paradise” theme in women's literature must lie in these historical factors. The backwater matriarchal pockets of rural New England are being destroyed by rapid transportation and communication systems, and women in significant numbers for the first time in history are entering male educational institutions, bastions of androcentric analytic knowledge—the antithesis of the kind of matriarchal and holistic knowledge promoted in, for example, The Country of the Pointed Firs or “A White Heron.”

Freeman's attitude toward this dying world is ambivalent. On the one hand the mothers—perhaps in some sense a part of every woman's psyche—are trying to keep their daughters “home,” in a female world. The daughters, however, at least sometimes are interested in exploring realities beyond the home. The daughters' feelings are perhaps best summed up in a semi-autobiographical story Freeman never finished: “I am a graft on the tree of human womanhood. I am a hybrid. Sometimes I think I am a monster, and the worst of it is, I certainly take pleasure in it.”² Indeed one senses that the author's ambivalent insider-outsider status, which is endemic to local color literature, here takes on the added dimension of a mother-daughter rift. Perhaps this was always the case: the daughter-author positing herself in relationship to her own mother, who was inevitably the quintessential insider.

Freeman, more than the earlier local colorists, distanced herself from her own environment, and wrote more as an outsider, even though she knew that rural world from within. In her 1899 Introduction to Pembroke (1894) she demonstrates her dual focus, noting that only “the initiated” can know the inner realities of rural life, to which “the sojourner from cities for the summer months cannot often penetrate in the least.” For: “There is often to a mind from the outside world an almost repulsive narrowness and a pitiful sordidness which amounts to tragedy in the lives of such people … but quite generally the tragedy exists only in the comprehension of the observer and not at all in that of the observed.”³

More than a score of Freeman's stories and novels deal with the mother-daughter bond or with similarly intense relationships between women. Although unnoted by earlier commentators, it is one of the dominant themes in her work. Four stories in her first published collection, A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887), deal with such relationships.

“A Modern Dragon” concerns parental blockage of a young couple's romance—another dominant Freeman theme. One of the mothers, however, becomes so worried about her daughter's welfare that she dies of exhaustion. On her deathbed her daughter cries: “Oh, mother! mother! mother! … I do love you best! I always will! I never will love him as much as I did you. I promise you” (77).

In “Brakes and White Vi'lets,” a particularly touching story, an elderly spinster, Marm Lawson, is deprived of a beloved granddaughter whom she has tended for ten years, when her father decides the Lawson house is too damp for the girl, and removes her. It is a plot that anticipates Freeman's tragic story “Old Woman Magoun,” discussed below. The girl is, therefore, taken out of a female sanctuary “for her own good,” against the wishes of the matriarchal figure. Marm thus has to choose whether to move with the child into alien surroundings or to remain in her familiar and dear world, signified by the “brakes and white vi'lets” that grow around the house. Reluctantly she decides to move in order to be near the girl, but death claims her before that can be accomplished.

“A Gatherer of Simples” is also about a threatened mother-daughter relationship. Aurelia Flower, a “yarb-woman,” or herb gatherer, has unofficially adopted a neighboring orphan. Both are very happy with the arrangement, but one day the child's natural grandmother comes to take her away. Heartbroken, Aurelia hands her over; however, the tale ends happily when the girl runs back to Aurelia and the grandmother dies.

Like the preceding two stories “A Far-Away Melody” is a simple, sad, and touching story that seems stripped down to a moral essence. It concerns twin sisters who are devoted to one another. When one of them dies the other is desolate. “This sister-love was all she had ever felt … all the passion of devotion of which this homely, commonplace woman was capable was centered in that, and the unsatisfied strength of it was killing her” (217).

Two of the stories in Freeman's next collection, A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891) also concern mother-daughter relationships. “An Innocent Gamester” shows how an overprotective will can become tyrannical. Aunt Lucinda, with whom Charlotte has come to live, forbids her her favorite pastime, fortune-telling by cards. Charlotte, nearly overcome by Lucinda's nagging, runs away, which scares Lucinda into realizing how oppressive she has been.

In “Amanda and Love” Amanda is the older sister, but she is old enough to be Love's mother, and the two have lived together alone since Love's birth. Amanda breaks off a courtship between Love and Willis Dale, but guiltily restores it after she realizes that Love is pining away. As the two resume courting, Amanda leaves the room and weeps silently in the kitchen.

Several other stories recount the self-sacrifice of one woman's happiness to ensure the happiness of another. In these painful cases the ties between the women are often stronger than those between the woman and the intruding man, or the “beau.” Where Jewett's women would have resisted the man, affirming thereby the validity of their own bond, Freeman's seem driven by another moral compulsion: they assume the male imperative is the greater. And where they choose to resist, they are driven to adopt measures far more extreme than any imaginable in Jewett's world (see especially “Old Woman Magoun” and “The Long Arm”).

In “A Moral Exigency” (A Humble Romance, 1887) Eunice Fairweather relinquishes her suitor to another woman, Ada Harris, after she remembers how she had played with Ada as a child “and that golden head had nestled on her bosom” (231). When she announces her decision Eunice draws “that golden head” against her again and says, “Love me all you can, Ada … I—want something” (233).

Araminta White is similarly noble in “The Chance of Araminta” (The Givers, 1904). She gives up her beau when she learns he had earlier been engaged to another. There is in this story, as in “A New England Nun,” the suggestion that she is better off without him. “I told her maybe she'd never have another chance, and she said if she did she'd never take it …” (225). “‘Well, marriage ain't everything,’ said the cousin” (226). …

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Two other minor stories develop these themes. “The Reign of the Doll” (The Givers) deals with the reconciliation of two sisters, and “Lucy” (The Givers) is about two grandparents' dismay when their granddaughter is lost on a visit to Boston. The tension between urban and rural is marked here and the journey of the young girl is in some way symbolic of the “journeys” women are making from their rural sanctuaries into urban “modern” civilization. This girl returns safely to her rural retreat. …

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“Sister Liddy” (A New England Nun), one of Freeman's classics, is also of paradigmatic significance when seen in the context of women's literary traditions: it is perhaps the ultimate ironic portrayal of the sentimental heroine. For, what give meaning to the lives of the women in the poorhouse are the stories they tell of past glories.

One woman, Polly Moss, who is old and badly crippled, speaks rapturously of her sister, Liddy. Liddy was everything that Polly was not; she was beautiful, she had married well, she had a big trousseau, lived in a fashionable apartment in Boston, etc. She was in short a personification of the sentimental ideal. When pressed as to why Liddy has allowed her sister to fall into such unfortunate circumstances, Polly acknowledges that she is dead. Nevertheless, she remains for Polly a kind of deity, a justification for her own misery. “Old Polly Moss, her little withered face gleaming with reckless enthusiasm, sang the praises of her sister Liddy as wildly and faithfully as any minnesinger his angel mistress” (96). On Polly's own deathbed she acknowledges further that Liddy was a creation of her own dreams.

That the sentimental ideal has been reduced to a fantasy in the mind of a pathetic old woman brings to a rather grim conclusion the anti-romance tendency we have traced through this study. And that the sustaining sister/lover is now perceived as but a fabricated illusion is another and powerful expression of the process of “the fall” that was happening in women's culture. …

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Freeman was interested in the psychology of otherwise good persons being driven to criminal acts, usually robbery, under the pressure of (usually) economic circumstances. Other stories that depict this phenomenon include: “Calla-Lillies and Hannah” (A New England Nun), “A Stolen Christmas” (A New England Nun), “The Last Gift” (The Givers), and “The Winning Lady” (The Winning Lady and Others, 1909). …

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“Evelina's Garden” (Silence and Other Stories 1898) is one of the most significant stories in this study. As a reversal of the theme of Jewett's “A White Heron” it serves as a further and powerful illustration of society's shifting values. An elderly woman, Evelina Adams, has maintained her garden for years as a kind of female sanctuary. When she dies she bequeaths it and the rest of her estate to her niece, also named Evelina. The terms of the will, however, are that young Evelina must perpetuate the garden and must never marry. Evelina is willing to forgo her inheritance in order to marry her suitor, but he is poor and refuses to allow her to do so. She decides that the only way she can win him over is to destroy the garden, thereby being disinherited. This she does by ripping up all the plants—pouring boiling water and salt on the roots—“all the time weeping, and moaning softly: ‘Poor Cousin Evelina! poor Cousin Evelina! oh, forgive me, poor cousin Evelina!’” (179).

Here we have a painfully graphic image of destruction of a natural realm which is a quintessentially female world. That this destruction is deemed necessary in order for the girl to go over to the male world suggests that “Evelina's Garden” is a symbolic representation of the fundamental historical transitions that are happening in women's lives; it is a repetition of the destruction-of-paradise motif.

“The Love of Parson Lord” (The Love of Parson Lord) is another of Freeman's stories that seem to have many conflicting stands that do not entirely knit together. Nevertheless, it also depicts a strong mother-daughter bond. In this case the mother-figure is a neighboring woman who is something of a beneficent benefactress and benign deity combined. When Love Lord (that is the girl's name) first sees the woman in church she becomes “conscious of nothing except that mother-presence, which seemed to pervade the whole church. The inexorable fatherhood of God … was not as evident to [her] as the motherhood of the squire's lady. She continued to gaze at her … with … eyes of adoration …” (14). She felt “a sort of ecstasy, as of first love” (23). Love's father was a typical Calvinistic minister, a throwback to some of Cooke's and Stowe's caricatures, harsh, unbending, given to a meager Spartan life. Under the influence of the woman, however, he relents. The story devolves into a romance between Love and the woman's grandson, Robert, whose main attraction to the girl seems to be his connection to his grandmother. …

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Three final Freeman stories will conclude this discussion of the mother-daughter relationship in her work. Each of them provides a paradigmatic resolution to the psychic dilemma we have seen as endemic to the female sensitivities of the time: whether to leave the female sanctuary, how to keep it intact, how to protect the mother-daughter bond, how to keep relationships between women from being destroyed by the male intruder, himself emblematic of the turn-of-the-century reassertion of destructive patriarchal knowledge.

The title character in “Arethusa” (Understudies, 1901) like her namesake in classical mythology is a shy, reclusive girl, unresponsive to suitors, who does not want to leave her mother. “I don't like men. I am afraid of them. I want to stay with you” (155). Her favorite pastime is to visit the arethusa flower, which grows only in a sheltered, reclusive area of the swamp, another image of the female sanctuary. Under the pressure of circumstances she finally agrees, reluctantly, to marry. On her wedding day she is missing; they find her on one last visit to the arethusa in the swamp. She does marry and has children, but every spring she sneaks away alone to visit the arethusa. Her husband indulges this whim, never “dreaming that it had its roots in the very depths of her nature, and that she perhaps sought this fair neutral ground of the flower kingdom as a refuge from the exigency of life” (169).

“The Long Arm” (The Long Arm, 1895) is a detective story that presents another, more chilling response to the female dilemma. Phoebe Dole, a spinster dressmaker, has lived with Maria Woods for over forty years. Phoebe is overprotective of Maria to the point of being tyrannical. When a neighbor, Fairbanks, is found murdered, no one suspects Phoebe until evidence accumulates that points in her direction. She finally confesses. Maria and the neighbor had been engaged forty years before and Phoebe had forced Maria to break off the engagement. The neighbor had then married another, who had recently died. Fairbanks was evidently pressing his suit again when Phoebe felt compelled once more to interfere, this time by murder. In her confession she notes: “[Maria] was going to marry [him]—I found it out. I stopped it once before. This time I knew I couldn't unless I killed him. She's lived with me in that house for over forty years. There are other ties as strong as the marriage one, that are just as sacred. What right had he to take her away from me and break up my home?”⁴

“Old Woman Magoun” (The Winning Lady), a justly celebrated tale, brings to tragic culmination the issue of the paradisiacal female sanctuary. The plot concerns a confrontation between “Old Woman Magoun” and Nelson Berry over custody of her granddaughter, Lily, who is his daughter. Lily's mother had died when Lily was an infant. The father, who allegedly had married the mother and deserted her, had paid little attention to Lily for fourteen years. The old woman had brought her up and loves her dearly. Together they form a female home. The old woman is zealous about maintaining that home free from men, and is somewhat overprotective of the girl. She sees men as the enemy:

“It seems queer to me … that men can't do nothin' without havin' to drink and chew to keep their spirits up. …”

“Men is different,” said Sally Jinks.

“Yes, they be,” asserted Old Woman Magoun, with open contempt (244–45).

Later she thinks, “… they air a passel of hogs.”

(258)

One day Nelson comes to demand custody of the girl. The grandmother suspects that he is going to turn her over to a gambling partner to pay off a debt; in other words, that he is going to turn her over to prostitution—a suspicion that is somewhat corroborated by Berry's behavior. The grandmother desperately tries to have the girl adopted by a wealthy couple in a nearby town, but to no avail. On the journey over, the old woman says, “Grandma … wouldn't hurt you for nothin', except it was to save your life …” (266). On the way home, the girl eats some poisonous berries of the deadly nightshade plant; the grandmother does nothing to stop her, knowing full well that the child will die. As Lily is dying, her grandmother describes the paradise she will enter at death. It is another image of the female sanctuary: “… a beautiful place, where the flowers grow tall” (273). There “you [will] find your mother, and she will take you home …” (275).

In addition to her treatment of mothers and daughters Freeman carried on a local color tradition by creating a gallery of strong female characters, some of whom adopted traditionally masculine professions, some of whom exerted themselves in “unfeminine” ways, often to the point of personal rebellion or revolt.

One of the most outstanding of these is “Christmas Jenny” (A New England Nun). The title figure is of the local colorists' breed of matriarchal nature-women. Jenny Wrayne lives up on a mountain in a “weather-beaten hut” which she shares with scores of injured wild animals and birds and with a deaf-mute boy she has adopted. Like Sylvia in “A White Heron,” “Christmas Jenny” is at home in the woods and protects its inhabitants against destructive male intruders. When asked what Jenny does with all the birds and animals in her house, a friend explains her mission:

“Does with 'em? Well, I'll tell you what she does with 'em. She picks 'em up in the woods when they're starvin' and freezin' an' half dead, an' she brings 'em in here, an' takes care of 'em an' feeds 'em till they gets well, an' then she lets 'em go again. … You see that rabbit there? Well, he's been in a trap. Somebody wanted to kill the poor little cretur. You see that robin? Somebody fired a gun at him an' broke his wing.”

(172)

The town patriarchs become suspicious of Jenny and her menagerie and talk of institutionalizing her, but a woman friend strongly defends her and deflects the men from their purpose. The narrator observes that the men perceive Jenny as a witch and their attack on her is a witch-hunt. “Everything out of the broad, common track was a horror to these men. … The popular sentiment against Jenny Wrayne was originally … a remnant of the old New England witchcraft superstition. More than anything else, Jenny's eccentricity, her possibly uncanny deviation from the ordinary … had brought this inquiry upon her. In actual meaning … it was a witch-hunt” (174).

The story repeats the pattern of the woman preserving her natural, female sanctuary against patriarchal destruction. As in “A White Heron,” such destruction is posed in terms of hunting and trapping, mechanized masculine operations that destroy that natural life with which the women identify. Freeman dealt with the witch craze in other works, notably “Silence” and “The Little Maid at the Door” (both in Silence and Other Stories) and in Giles Corey, Yeoman: A Play (1893).

Several stories of less importance also depict memorable women engaged in heroic tasks. “A Humble Romance” (A Humble Romance) portrays a woman who successfully adopts her husband's trade of tinpeddling. “An Old Arithmetician” (A Humble Romance) is about a woman obsessed with “ciphering.” “A Wayfaring Couple” (A New England Nun) presents a Sisyphean image of a woman who, to save her husband's life, puts the traces of a sulky carriage on herself and pulls him three miles to a doctor. “Louisa” (A New England Nun) is about a woman who does men's field labor to support her family. Madelon (1896) concerns a woman who kills a man but whose lover is imprisoned in her stead because no one believes a woman could have committed the deed. Madelon then spends her time securing her lover's release.

In several stories the woman's heroics consist in rejecting a suitor. The most celebrated of these is the much-anthologized “A New England Nun” (A New England Nun). This story, too, recounts the preservation of a male-less female sanctuary against a male intruder. Louisa Ellis and Joe Dagget have been engaged for fourteen years while he made his fortune in Australia. Upon his return she realizes that he will destroy the order and neatness of her peaceful existence, and they agree mutually to break the engagement. The author's ambivalence is clear in this story; a caged canary and a tied-up dog symbolize the price Louisa must pay for order and security: eternal restriction to a limited sphere.

“A Symphony in Lavender” (A Humble Romance) also concerns a spinster who rejects a suitor. She does so because of a prophetic dream in which a man approaches and asks for one of her flowers. She is about to give him one when a white dove lands on her shoulder. The man suddenly looks “at once beautiful and repulsive” (45); she flees. Later, when a similar episode happens in real life, a “horror of him” comes over her, and she chooses to live her life out alone. Here as in “A White Heron” a white bird seems to symbolize a female force, one that urges the preservation of the female realm. We have noted that in the Grimm version of “Cinderella” the white bird is the spirit of the girl's mother.

“A Taste of Honey” (A Humble Romance) also involves the rejection of a suitor, but for other reasons. Inez Morse has vowed to pay off her father's mortgage and refuses to marry until she does so. Her suitor waits for a while but gives up and marries another just before her debt is paid. She refuses to mourn, however, and is proud of her accomplishment.

A number of Freeman women are moved to active rebellion in order to protect their own interests. The most famous of these stories is “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” (A New England Nun), which portrays a male-female confrontation in which the woman wins her way through a tactic of nonviolent resistance. Adoniram Penn is a silent patriarch who will listen to no reason other than his own. His wife, Sarah, has been promised a new house for forty years. When Adoniram begins to build a new barn, she is enraged, and while he is away moves all her furniture into the barn, does some remodeling, and turns it into the new house she has always wanted.

Significantly, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman recanted this story in 1917. She wrote: “There never was in New England a woman like Mother. If there had been she certainly would not have moved into the palatial barn. … She simply would have lacked the nerve. She would also have lacked the imagination.”⁵ How far we are in 1917 from the heroic mothers of Stowe and Jewett.

Two stories from A Humble Romance (1887) also depict minor revolts. One is “Cinnamon Roses” where a woman prevents a man from destroying some favorite roses; the other, “A Mistaken Charity,” concerns the flight of two elderly sisters from a poorhouse back to their own home. Two later stories—“Bouncing Bet” (Understudies) and “The Elm Tree” (Six Trees, 1903)—similarly portray successful resistance to the poorhouse. “A Village Singer” and “A Church Mouse,” both in A New England Nun, also concern spirited and successful tactics of revolt.

“One Good Time” (The Love of Parson Lord) relates the humorous fling of Narcissa Stone, who, after scrimping and saving all her life and after years of paternal oppression, takes off for a “good time” in New York City before settling down to marriage. Her fiancé is mystified but she explains: “If I had to settle down in your house, as I have done in father's, and see the years stretching ahead like a long road without any turn, and nothing but the same old dog-trot of washing and ironing and scrubbing and cooking and sewing and washing dishes till I drop into my grave, I should hate you, William Crane” (213).

The momentary repudiation of the female role is really an assertion of her own spirit of independence and quest for knowledge. “I 'ain't never done anything my whole life that I thought I ought not to do, but now I'm going to.” And: “I've just drudged, drudged ever since I can remember. … I don't know anything but my own tracks, and—I'm going to get out of them for a while …” (210). “Love ain't enough sometimes when it ties anybody. Everybody has got their own feet and their own wanting to use 'em, and sometimes when love comes in the way of that, it ain't anything but a dead wall. … I tell you … I've got to jump my wall, and I've got to have one good time” (213). So, significantly, Narcissa rejects the traditional female world of love and drudgery in favor of another, more exciting world, and of new knowledge. This is the daughter speaking.

Another strong story of revolt is “The Balsam Fir” (Six Trees). Martha Elder, an embittered spinster, has over the years developed a “strong … spirit of rebellion against the small-ness of her dole of the good things of life” (104). “Her own tracks, which were apparently those of peace, [were] in reality those of a caged panther” (111). Her one possession is a beautiful balsam fir that grows in front of her house. One evening shortly before Christmas a woodsman comes to chop it down. She tears out of the house, grabs his axe, and threatens to kill him if he does. Wisely, he departs. The episode helps to open Martha up to a deaf woman who has been visiting; she invites her to remain for an extended stay. Though the story is presented through Christian symbolism, we see once again that the underlying pattern is of a female realm being threatened with destruction by a male intruder; and once again the natural world is preserved by the woman in a nearly violent gesture of revolt.

In most of Freeman's stories one has a sense of a world that has outlived its time and of people who have been too long isolated from the communal mainstream. We noted a similar sense of disenchantment with rural life as early as Rose Terry Cooke, but in Cooke and Jewett the meager circumstances at least sometimes combined to create admirable strength of character. In Freeman's view, however, there is often no mitigating justification for the emptiness of these lives. In her relentless depiction of the vanity of these existences she is strikingly modern.

“A Traveling Sister” (The Winning Lady) and “A Patient Waiter” (A Humble Romance) could perhaps be grouped with “Sister Liddy” to signify the death of the romance tradition. In the first story two of the three Allerton sisters have always vacationed together while the third has always gone off on a secret romantic voyage which for years has mystified the other two. After she dies they discover in her diary that she has always stayed home; her “voyage” has been to put on old dresses and to stare at mementos of her long-dead lover. “A Patient Waiter” is a kind of local colorist version of Samuel Beckett's twentieth-century drama Waiting For Godot. Fidelia Almy had gone to the post office twice a day for forty years for a letter from her lover, Ansel Lennox, who had gone West to earn money for their marriage. Finally she dies, having spent her life waiting for a redemption that never came.

“A Poetess” (A New England Nun) is another classic and tragic story about pathetic waste. Betsey Dole is an impoverished, half-starved spinster whose entire obsession in life is with writing poetry. Her confidence in her calling is completely undermined when she learns that the local minister, also an amateur poet, thinks her poems are worthless. Betsey is devastated by the cruel irony of it: “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? Would it be fair if that canary-bird there, that ain't never done anything but sing, should turn out not to be singin'?” (154–55). However, despite this painful protest, she burns all her work, puts the ashes in a jar, and when she is dying asks that it be buried with her. The story anticipates Kafka's “A Hunger Artist,” which also suggests the problematic nature of religious devotion to any calling. But it also seems peculiarly representative of untold numbers of failed women artists whose works have been lost to history.

“An Honest Soul” (A Humble Romance) similarly depicts a woman compelled to complete her craft properly, but in this story the compulsion comes more directly from her inherited Calvinistic conscience. Martha Patch, another impoverished spinster, survives by making quilts and doing odd sewing jobs. Once, while doing a quilting job for two people at once, she gets the wrong squares in the wrong quilt and has to take them off. When she finds she has repeated her error, she painstakingly repeats the whole laborious process. Meanwhile her stores of food are low, and her task has severely exhausted her. The narrator comments that it is her own false pride—which derives from a Calvinistic sense of paying one's way—that has led to this impasse. “There was really no necessity for such a state of things; she was surrounded by kindly well-to-do people, who would have gone themselves rather than let her suffer. But she … felt great pride about accepting anything for which she did not pay” (86).

Most critics of Freeman's work have focused on the theme of the intractable New England will become destructive. In her Introduction to Pembroke Freeman gives a brief anecdote to illustrate how she perceived the calcification of the will as a central “disease” in the New England of her day:

There lived in a New England village … a man who objected to the painting of the kitchen floor, and who quarreled furiously with his wife concerning the same. When she persisted, in spite of his wishes to the contrary, and the floor was painted, he refused to cross it to his dying day, and always, to his great inconvenience, but probably to his soul's satisfaction, walked around it.⁶

Freeman carried on the anti-Calvinist tradition of her predecessors. Implicit in her work is a plea for a relaxation of such mindless tyrannies as depicted in the above anecdote and for the establishment of a more humane treatment of self and others. In Freeman's work, nevertheless, the authoritarian figure is less often a Calvinistic minister and more often a patriarch within: an exacting conscience that forces one to live up to a compulsive standard. Freeman detected the fundamental paradox in Calvinism—the idea that grace could somehow be forced by an exertion of individual will. Freeman shows, in her later works especially, that grace occurs independently of the will and, as often as not, only when the will ceases and desists. In this sense she brings to culmination the local colorists' concern with the issue of grace versus works. Unlike her predecessors she is clearly skeptical about the efficacy of works. Again one may tie this to the sense of a fall, a sense of resignation, or a failure of nerve that seems to characterize the female psyche of the time.

In Freeman's view the overpowering will is a destructive force. Often the form taken by stories with this theme is that of a romance thwarted by parental tenacity. One of the most interesting of these from the point of view of continuing women's traditions is “The Buckley Lady” (Silence and Other Stories). This story is somewhat reminiscent of Stowe's classic repudiation of the European romance, “A Yankee Girl.” Set in Colonial times, it concerns the attempts by parents, Ichabod and Sarah Buckley, to turn their daughter into a “lady” so that she may marry a wealthy European aristocrat. “All the Buckley family seemed to have united in a curious reversed tyranny towards this beautiful child” (70). She is no longer allowed to go barefoot, she must keep her hands and face shaded from the sun, she learns the piano and how to dance, she is given Clarissa to read—all preparation for becoming a lady. The years wear on and no gentleman appears. It begins to look as if all the efforts have been in vain. However, the girl finally subverts her parents' will: she and her American suitor arrange that he arrive in a coach and four, dressed as a gentleman. This fools the father and so the young couple marries.

Many of the Freeman stories that deal with this theme, of course, are more than just romances. Like Jewett, Freeman seems concerned to present a kind of moral humanism. The softening of the tyrannical patriarchal will leads to a rebirth of human potential, to a renewal of the human community, which is sustained by such maternal values as charity and compassion. Three stories seem to best illustrate this important theme. Significantly, perhaps, two of them concern men. The first, “An Innocent Gamester,” discussed above, shows how the relaxation of a tyrannically condemnatory conscience leads to the renewal of a relationship between two women.

The second, “A Solitary” (A New England Nun), is about a male version of Jewett's hermit-woman, Joanna. Nicholas Gunn had lived a life of self-flagellation ever since his wife ran off with another man. He eats nothing but cornmeal and refuses to heat his cabin in the depths of winter. Stephen Forster, a feeble consumptive, staggers by regularly on his way to town. Only reluctantly does Nicholas even let him rest in his cabin. One night, however, Stephen comes to the door; he is freezing and in need of immediate attention. Somehow the sight of this pathetic soul opens Nicholas up. He starts a fire, feeds him, covers him with blankets, and begins to “rub him under the bedclothes. His face was knit savagely, but he rubbed with a tender strength” (226). Stephen had been running away for fear of being sent to the poorhouse. Nicholas agrees to take him in permanently, and to share his life with him. The relaxation of Nicholas's rigid regime allows him to experience once again the warmth of human companionship.

“The Great Pine” is another of the symbolist stories in Six Trees (1903) which show the moral effect of natural objects on human behavior. In this work a ne'er-do-well man, wandering in the woods, becomes angry with a great pine and decides to set it afire—another example of male destructive violence against the natural world. Something calls him back, however; he puts out the fire and saves the tree. Shortly after, he returns to the family he had deserted years before. He finds his wife dead, her second husband barely alive, with his children. All are starving, the house is in total disrepair. His experience with the tree has awakened in him some sense of the interconnectedness of all things and of his own obligation to the preservation of life. He commits himself to the unorthodox family he has inherited, fixes up the old house, and earns money to feed them.

One could perhaps have entitled this story, too, “The Tree of Knowledge,” for when later the man discovers that the pine has been felled in a winter storm, it seems to symbolize the masculine patriarchal destructive knowledge so hated and feared by women local colorists. It is this knowledge that has died in the man in his assumption of the role of homemaker. But earlier, when the man had encountered the tree in its natural setting, the tree had yielded a knowledge of the sacredness of all things and of their interdependence. It is this matriarchal knowledge rooted in the world of nature—most fully expressed in the works of Sarah Orne Jewett—that Freeman believes must prevail. In the end, she urges, even men must learn it. For, as she concludes in this wise story: “Who shall determine the limit at which the intimate connection and reciprocal influence of all forms of visible creation upon one another may stop?” (79–80).

Notes

1. Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman], “The Tree of Knowledge,” The Love of Parson Lord and Other Stories (1900; reprint ed. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), p. 139. Freeman's main collections of stories include the following: A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887; New York: Garrett Press, 1969); A New England Nun and Other Stories (New York: Harper, 1891); Silence and Other Stories (New York: Harper, 1898); Understudies (New York: Harper, 1901); Six Trees (New York: Harper, 1903); The Givers (New York: Harper, 1904); The Fair Lavinia and Others (New York: Harper, 1907); and The Winning Lady and Others (New York: Harper, 1909). Further references to these editions follow in the text. While Freeman continued to publish until the 1920s, I am limiting this study to that majority of her works published before 1910, on the theory that the New England local color tradition had run its course by then.

2. Cited by Edward Foster, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (New York: Hendricks House, 1956), p. 143.

3. As cited in Foster, p. 95.

4. Wilkins [Freeman], The Long Arm, and Other Detective Stories by George Ira Brett et al. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1895), pp. 60–61. See also Kathleen L. Maio, “‘A Strange and Fierce Delight’: The Early Days of Women's Mystery Fiction,” Chrysalis, no. 10 (n.d.): 93–105.

5. As cited in Foster, p. 92.

6. As cited in Foster, p. 94.