SOURCE: Donovan, Josephine. “Rose Terry Cooke: Impoverished Wives and Spirited Spinsters,” in New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition, pp. 68-81. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1983.

[In the following essay, Donovan examines Cooke's short stories, claiming that the author rejected romanticism and sentimentality and chose instead to depict the grim reality of rural life in New England and its devastating effect on women.]

Born to an inheritance of hard labor … fighting with … the instinct of self-preservation, against a climate … rigorous [and] fatally changeful; a soil bitter and barren … without any excitement to stir the half-torpid brain, without any pleasure … the New England farmer becomes in too many cases a mere creature of animal instincts … hard, cruel, sensual, vindictive. … And when you bring this same dreadful pressure to bear on women … the daily dullness of work, the brutality, stupidness, small craft, and boorish tyranny of husbands, to whom they are tied beyond escape, what wonder is it that a third of all the female lunatics in asylums are farmers' wives?¹

In these tragic terms Rose Terry Cooke, in her story “The West Shetucket Railroad,” characterized the miserable lives of rural New England women in the nineteenth century. How far we are from the sentimental romance. How far even from the comparatively Utopian vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The best of Cooke's stories exhibit this kind of grimly authentic realism. At times her vision anticipates that of the naturalists: a bleak, uncompromising view of humanity, and particularly of men, as dull brutes. Of the local colorists only Cooke and Freeman reach this level of realism. Cooke may well have had a direct influence on Freeman, for many of Cooke's most powerful stories were published in Harper's in the 1880s—just at the time when Freeman was beginning to publish, also in Harper's.

Not all of Cooke's work is, however, of this caliber. Indeed, Cooke's progress as a writer is erratic; her literary production, which includes nearly 200 stories, is inconsistent, ranging from derivative Sunday-school moral tales to strange romantic fantasies to some of the finest literature produced by the local color school. This study will focus on her local color works.

Cooke created a fictional universe analogous to Stowe's rural New England and Edgeworth's rural Ireland. As with her predecessors', Cooke's Connecticut is a moral centrum, a kind of ideal community where characteristically local people go about their daily business. Like her predecessors Cooke consciously rejected romance conventions (though she erred, herself, occasionally in the direction of sentimentalism) and she produced critiques of the “belle” and the rake. Like Stowe she was decidedly opposed to Calvinist tyrannies (recall that she was educated in Catherine Beecher's Hartford Female Seminary) and she presented a world where strong women thrive. Usually they are spinsters. In several stories Cooke revealed a suspicion of urban civilization (in this case, New York City) and clearly believed that purity of heart and strength of character were nourished in the rural village.² But Cooke did not seem to have the same resistance to industrial progress as the others; indeed, in “The West Shetucket Railroad” she suggests that the railroad may be a boon to the region in that it is breaking down the isolation of rural farmers' families.

Where Cooke differs from her predecessors, however, is in her acknowledgment of the depth of evil that exists even in the rural world and in her refusal to attribute that evil to foreign influence. As the opening citation indicates, Cooke fully realized that evil could be homegrown; indeed, she perceived that it may be fostered by the bareness and hardness of New England's physical environment. For Cooke the worst conditions were often found within a marriage.

Cooke carried further the critique of Calvinism offered by the Beecher sisters by urging that the repressions occasioned by harsh religious strictures, combined with the brutal hardships forced by the environment, created people who were impoverished economically, emotionally, and spiritually. With Rose Terry Cooke the romance of the idyllic New England village is over, and while versions of it persist in Jewett and Phelps, it is Cooke's vision that comes to prevail in women's literature: in the works of Freeman and later in Edith Wharton's classic study of New England, Ethan Frome.

Several of Cooke's stories are set in the same place, though its name may vary, and the same characters reappear in several stories, so that even though obviously not written in sequence, they present a kind of continuing saga of Connecticut village life. Four of her early stories are set in Cranberry. These were all published in Putnam's Monthly and include her first important published story, “The Mormon's Wife” (Putnam's June 1855), which is narrated by a Parson Field, who tells his own story in “Parson Field's Experience” (Putnam's April 1856). “Love” (Putnam's March 1857, Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills 1891) and “Joe's Courtship” (Putnam's May 1857) are also set in the same locale and include some of the same characters. Many of Cooke's thematic concerns and stylistic characteristics are evident in these early stories.

“The Mormon's Wife” is the first of many Cooke stories to deal with the oppression of wives in marriage. While Stowe touched on the subject, Cooke came to be nearly obsessed with it, although, ironically, she never endorsed the women's rights movement, which she criticized in some of her stories. Nevertheless, the oppression of wives is a dominant Cooke theme. In “The Mormon's Wife” the evil is attributed in Stowe fashion to exotic foreign mores; the story also includes its share of trappings from the romance, including a shipwreck and an orphan. The plot is that an innocent orphan, Adeline, marries John Henderson, who adopts Mormonism, seen as a “delusion” by the narrator. After moving to Utah he takes two new wives—which is the beginning of the end for Adeline, whose heart then “turned to a stone” and who soon died of consumption. The betrayal by the husband and the emotional withering of the woman are typical Cooke themes. Adeline eventually realizes, “I should not have married him; it was an unequal yoke, and I have borne the burden.” “Parson Field's Experience” also deals with a woman whose love is thwarted, in this case by misguided religious principles and male inattention, also perennial Cooke concerns.

The third of the Cranberry stories, “Love,” is well-crafted and significant in many ways. It is one of the first to use what became a staple local color format: a group of locals sit around reminiscing as they perform some chore together. On this occasion they are sorting apples; often they are quilting or shelling peas. After some chitchat one of the characters is sparked to narrate the central story. In the case of “Love” it is Aunt Huldah Goodwin, a strong, down-to-earth, cheerful soul, who tells the story in dialect. This is Cooke's first use of dialect.

The story itself is unimportant, but the narrative style includes examples of one of Cooke's greatest achievements as a writer: her ability to forge metaphors drawn from authentic local detail, metaphors that are as indigenous to the personality as the locale. With this device, which Stowe used and which Jewett carried to the point of brilliance, the authentic integrity of the local color story was accomplished.

Aunt Huldah, for example, observes: “Lovin' some folks is jest like pickin' chestnuts out of the burr,—you keep a-prickin' your fingers all the time, and the more you try and keep on, the more it pricks” (Huckleberries, 238). Or:

But now she acted for all the world like my scarlet runner that Old Red trod acrost one day when the boys left the gate open, and crushed it down into the mud; and there it lay, kind of tuckered out, till one of the feelers got blowed against the pickets, and cotched hold, and lifted itself up, ring by ring, till the whole fence post was red with its blows, and covered with the green leaves

(Huckleberries, 243).

Cooke's genius is, I think, evident in these passages; she is able to make universal comments about human nature through the use of metaphors drawn from her own environment, and yet appropriate to the speaker. Aesthetic consistency is a hallmark of great literature, and at her best Cooke created several masterpieces that can stand with the best of world literature. Indeed, this brilliant use of authentic imagery is one of the important distinctions one may make between the local colorists and the sentimentalists, whose figurative language was often trite.

In addition to the Cranberry stories Cooke wrote several set in Bassett, Connecticut. Most of these were published in Harper's Monthly; they include “About Dolly” (Harper's March 1877), “Squire Paine's Conversion” (Harper's March 1878, Somebody's Neighbors 1881), “Cal Culver and the Devil” (Harper's September 1878, Somebody's Neighbors), “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience” (Harper's December 1880, Somebody's Neighbors), “Miss Beulah's Bonnet” (Somebody's Neighbors), and “How Celia Changed Her Mind” (Huckleberries).

Another set of linked stories are those in which Polly Mariner, Cooke's great spirited spinster, appears as a character. Many of these were first published in the Atlantic Monthly. They include “Ann Potter's Lesson” (Atlantic Monthly September 1858, The Sphinx's Children 1886), “Lizzie Griswold's Thanksgiving” (Atlantic Monthly March 1859), “Polly Mariner, Tailoress” (Galaxy February 1870, Somebody's Neighbors), “Clary's Trial” (Atlantic Monthly April 1880, Huckleberies), and the aforementioned “How Celia Changed Her Mind.”³ A curious Indian woman, Moll Thunder, addicted to tobacco and alcohol, recurs in several stories, notably “Doctor Parker's Patty” and “Too Late” in The Sphinx's Children (1886), and “A Town Mouse and a Country Mouse” in Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills (1891).

Cooke's uncompromising realism and her significance as a ground-breaker in women's literary realism can be best seen in the stories in which she documents the grim realities of marriage. The Cinderella myth meets its demise in these relentless depictions of what happens after the marriage vows are taken: there is no happy ending.

“The Ring Fetter” (Atlantic Monthly August 1859), subtitled “A New England Tragedy,” is one of the earliest of these. The story, although set in western Connecticut, has some of the earmarks of the sentimental romance: an innocent whose parents have died, Mehitable Hyde, is courted and wed by an unscrupulous drunkard, Abner Dimmock. Unlike the earlier works, the story does not hinge on Mehitable's premarital chastity. That is not an issue. Rather the story concentrates on the marriage itself. The narrator consciously rejects the vision of the sentimentalists, who tend to fade out at the moment of marriage, considering it the happy ending. Rather, she notes, in a lengthy and rather sarcastic aside:

Here [at the wedding], by every law of custom, ought my weary pen to fall flat and refuse its office; for here it is that the fate of every heroine culminates. For what are women born but to be married? … But life, with pertinacious facts, is too apt to transcend custom and the usage of novel-writers; and though the one brings a woman's legal existence to an end when she merges her independence in that of a man, and the other curtails her historic existence at the same point, because the novelist's catechism hath for its preface this creed—“the chief end of woman is to get married”; still neither law nor novelists altogether displace the same persistent fact, and a woman lives [on] … when she binds herself … to another soul.

Mehitable Dimmock's postmarital fate is a grisly one. Her husband, as they are escaping from the law, kills their infant to silence it by throwing it under the wheels of their carriage. He later chains her up to keep her from escaping, which she nevertheless later does, only to commit suicide by drowning.

Another early story, which is probably Rose Terry Cooke's but which has been attributed to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,⁴ is “'Tenty Scran'” (Atlantic Monthly November 1860). This story, while not about wife abuse, is nonetheless an unromantic look at a failed courtship, an early adumbration of Sarah Orne Jewett's “A Lost Lover” and of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's much anthologized “A New England Nun.”

Content Scranton waits twenty years for her fiancé, Ned Parker, to return from sea. By the time he returns she has grown resentful: “Ned Parker! poor, selfish cre'tur', just playing with me for fun. … He let me know what kind of cre'turs men are. … I haven't had to be pestered with one all my life, I'm thankful.” When she sees him she realizes how lucky she really is. He had become “a coarse, red-faced, stout sailor-like man, with a wooden leg … [who] swore like a pirate, chewed, smoked a pipe, and now and then drank to excess.” Another character, Aunt 'Viny, who had brought up 'Tenty, is described as being “hard of feature, and of speech, as hundreds of New-England women are. Their lives are hard, their husbands are harder and stonier than the fields they half-reclaim to raise their daily bread from.” There is nothing sentimental or romantic in Cooke's sharp view.

Cooke's indictment of male tyranny in marriage is presented most forcefully in three stories later included in her collection Somebody's Neighbors (1881): “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence” (Atlantic Monthly July 1877), “Squire Paine's Conversion” (Harper's March 1878), and “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience” (Harper's March 1880).

“Freedom Wheeler” is about the taming of a tyrant by the women who must deal with him—not before, however, his behavior leads to the death of his first wife, Lowly Mallory, “a feeble piece,” who bears him child after child, all of them daughters except the first. He rejects the girls, hoping for another son. Aunt Hannah and Aunt Huldah, spinster sisters, see that Lowly's constant pregnancy and continual exhaustion are leading to her death. The narrator notes: “This is the life that was once the doom of all New-England farmers' wives; the life that sent them to early graves, to mad-houses, to suicide; the life that is so beautiful in the poet's numbers, so terrible in its stony, bloomless, oppressive reality” (331). Freedom, however, will not relent, and Lowly dies. His second wife, Melinda Bassett, is more than his match: “Land of Goshen,” she announces, “do you s'pose I'm goin' to hev a man tewin' round in my way all the time, jest cos he's my husband? … I ain't nobody's fool, I tell ye, Aunt Hanner” (345). Melinda and the two aunts finally get Freedom under control.

“Squire Paine's Conversion” is somewhat similar to “Freedom Wheeler.” Squire Paine is a Calvinist, capitalist tyrant and a hypocrite: he runs a store and cheats his customers. He too marries a meek woman, Lucy Larkin, in this case for her money. The narrator comments sarcastically: “Perhaps … Mrs. Paine … did not experience all that superhuman bliss which poets and romances depict as the result of matrimony—but then who does?” (103). The squire's “conversion” comes after he learns, mistakenly, that his daughter had been killed in a railway accident. When he learns she is alive, he repents.

The most powerful of these stories is “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience.” The Widow Gold, who had lived in her daughter and son-in-law's home for the fifteen years since the death of her husband, longs to have her own home and husband, and so marries the only man available, hypocrite tightwad Deacon Flint. This turns out to be a serious mistake. Flint is a harsh tyrant. Her life becomes unmitigated slavery: “… she toiled on dumbly from day to day, half fed, overworked, desperately lonely, but still uncomplaining …” (395). Her predecessor, the deacon's first wife, had been “a silent and sickly woman, who crept about and worried through her daily duties for years, spent and fainting when the last supper-dish was washed. … She did not complain: her duty lay there … then she died. This is a common record among our barren hills, which count by thousands their unknown and unsung martyrs” (372-73).

Under the encouragement of two assertive spinsters, Mabel Eldredge and Polly Morse, Mrs. Flint, by this time barely alive, leaves her husband—in a plot that anticipates Freeman's less serious “The Revolt of ‘Mother.’” However, in Cooke's story the community does not support Mrs. Flint's rebellion. In those days, the narrator tells us, “to find fault with authorities was little less than a sin, and for a wife to leave her husband, a fearful scandal. … Conjugal subjection was the … principle and custom …” (407). (Cooke occasionally sets evil ways in the past somewhat as Stowe roots them abroad. “Freedom Wheeler,” for example, is subtitled “A Story of Old New England.”)

The parish, therefore, demands that Mrs. Flint repent and return to her husband. With all the pressure, she is unable to present her side properly. “As in the case of many another woman, her terror, her humiliation, and a lingering desire to shield her husband from his own misdeeds, all conspired against her. Her testimony was tearful, confused, and contradictory …” (414). Polly and Mabel say they would far rather be single than endure such men, and attempt to shore her up. But Mrs. Flint, by now too beaten down to persist, recants only just before dying.

Occasionally Cooke turned the plot of the oppressed wife into a sentimental homily on Christian martyrdom. In these stories her point is that men are the crosses women must bear in order to achieve sainthood. Typical of these is “Saint the First” (Root-Bound 1885) and “One of Them” (Independent 20 November 1879). The latter is about Sarah Barton, who redeems her alcoholic husband through a kind of dogged masochism. When he roams the fields in a stupor, she would “follow him through swampy valleys and rock-strewn hills, her feet pierced and bleeding.” One night “she rose up, and, lifting her husband in her arms, brought him home.” Eventually her husband reforms: “… at last James crept up to his feet, lame for life, and weak as a man can be.” This story is very much in the vein of the dominant American sentimentalist tradition analyzed by Helen Papashvily and Nina Baym, in which women enjoy spiritual triumphs over worthless men after enduring years of suffering (see chapter 2).⁵ I mention it here to point up how very different Cooke's local color stories are from the sentimentalists'.

But, despite her occasional lapses into a kind of lachrymose Christianity, Cooke's dominant bent from her earliest stories is away from the hackneyed romance or sentimentalist conventions and toward authentic realism. In her first story published in the Atlantic Monthly, “Sally Parson's Duty” (which was in fact in the first issue of the magazine), Cooke debunks novelesque “heroines” by noting of her protagonist: “Sally was weeding onions in the garden,—heroines did, in those days.” “Before Breakfast” (Harper's August 1860), another early story, also decries inauthentic fictional treatment of women. “The mass of men, and therefore the mass of novel-writers, puzzle their brains hopelessly over the nature of a woman, and finally describe her as a moral and religious doll.” And “Poll Jenning's Hair” (Harper's October 1861, Somebody's Neighbors), while it presents a Cinderella plot, nevertheless opens with an antiromance preface: “It is sometimes a relief to have a story without a heroine, and this distinction alone can I claim for mine. Nothing heroic or wonderful casts its halo about little Poll Jennings” (286).

Cooke's most succinct antiromance statement is in her opening to “Miss Lucinda” (Atlantic Monthly August 1861, Somebody's Neighbors), where she apologizes: “So forgive me once more, patient reader, if I offer to you no tragedy in high life, no sentimental history of fashion and wealth, but only a little story about a woman who could not be a heroine” (31).

Several of Cooke's early stories involve a critique of the “female quixote” or the “belle” type, or of the evil rake. As these topoi had become quite conventional by then I need only mention their titles. The belle is reformed in “Snip-Snap” (Putnam's March 1856), “Number Two” (Harper's September 1873), “How She Found Out” (Galaxy October 1875, The Sphinx's Children), “Will's Will and His Two Thanksgivings” (Harper's December 1879), and “Mary Ann's Mind” (Huckleberries). The coldhearted, manipulative rake is the target in “Martha Wyatt's Life” (Harper's May 1856), “The Assassin of Society” (Harper's May 1857), “Match-Making” (Harper's November 1859), and “Odd Miss Todd” (Harper's October 1882, Huckleberries).

“Clary's Trial” (Atlantic Monthly April 1880, Huckleberries) which brings to culmination Cooke's disposal of these romantic motifs, is a highly significant story. For, it combines a typical sentimentalist plot with a typical local color character, Polly Mariner. Polly intervenes in the seduction/abandonment script and saves the victimized woman from her fate.

The plot is set in a tavern on a turnpike between Hartford and Litchfield. Clary Kent is an innocent orphan who had been taken from the poorhouse at ten as a bound servant to Goody Jakeway, who ran the local tavern. Goody's son, Alonzo, is a sensualist rake who begins harassing Clary as she comes of age. Clary falls in love with him, and it looks as though marriage is imminent. Polly Mariner, the local seamstress, who is temporarily in residence at the tavern making shirts, discovers that Alonzo has a wife in England whom he deserted. Polly obtains a copy of the marriage license. In revenge Alonzo plants some property in Clary's trunk. When it is discovered, she is accused and later convicted of theft. Her sentence is a $100 fine or thirty lashes. Until she chooses, she must remain in prison. Polly manages to obtain the money just as the lashes are about to fall.

This is an important story when seen in the context of women's literary traditions, for the classic heroine's “dysphoric” text is interrupted by a New England spinster who outwits the would-be seducer and saves the girl. Polly's role in this story anticipates that of the eccentric female detective, such as Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, that later became so popular.

Cooke carried on the tradition initiated by Stowe of the powerful single woman character. Polly Mariner is perhaps the most notable example. Her own story is told in “Polly Mariner, Tailoress” (Galaxy February 1870, Somebody's Neighbors), one of the most popular of Cooke's stories.

Polly, left alone after her parents die, decides to learn a trade in order to support herself. Neighbors suggest that it would be more proper to live with relatives and work within their homes (for no pay). But Polly emphatically rejects this option: “Whilst I live by myself an' take care of myself, I a'n't beholden to nobody; and I know when my work's done, and what's to pay for't. I kin sing, or laugh, or cry, or fix my hair into a cocked hat, and nobody's got right or reason to say, ‘Why do ye do so?’ Fact is, I've got my liberty, 'n' I'm goin' to keep it” (233-34). The narrator rightly observes that had she lived later (the story is set around 1830), she would have been a prime mover in the women's rights movement. Polly's attitude implies, too, a clear rejection of Calvinist preordination. She believes that “folks's luck is generally their own makin'.” Her behavior shows how people may shape their lives by their own decisions. She exemplifies a philosophy of free will and salvation by works, as do most of the spinster characters in local color literature.

One of the most powerful of Cooke's spinster stories is “How Celia Changed Her Mind” (Huckleberries). This story is also one of the most overtly critical of men and marriage. Set in Bassett, Connecticut, the plot concerns Celia Barnes, an orphan who had been bound out as “a white slave” to a “hard imperious woman” (288) until she reached eighteen; then she “apprenticed herself to old Miss Polly Mariner, the Bassett tailoress … and when Polly died, succeeded to her business” (289). She has rejected various unsuitable suitors; to one she said: “Ef you was the last man in the livin' universe I wouldn't tech ye with the tongs” (290).

However, she comes to envy the respect paid married women. “A woman that's married is somebody; she's got a place in the world; she ain't everybody's tag …” (284-85). Acting on her desires, she helps one young woman, Rosabel Stearnes, to elope, and then herself marries Deacon Everts. This is a mistake. “As her husband's mean, querulous, loveless character unveiled itself … she began to look woefully back to the freedom and peace of her maiden days” (307). “Now, admitted into the freemasonry of married women, she discovered how few … were more than household drudges … worked to the verge of exhaustion.” Furthermore: “There were … some whose days were a constant terror to them from … intemperate brutes …” (308).

Celia learns that Rosabel's life has ended in this miserable fashion: in “poverty and malaria and babies” (310). She feels “almost like a murderess” when she learns of Rosabel's death. Soon her own husband, the deacon, dies—which elicits jubilation from her. After that, each year she turns Thanksgiving into a celebration for all the town old maids, and adopts two young girls, vowing to bring them up spinsters.

Another innovation in the treatment of women characters that Cooke pioneered was her recognition that women have feelings of passion, even sexual passion. Part, indeed, of her criticism of Calvinism was for the repression of passionate expression it enforced. In several of her early stories—“The Mormon's Wife,” “Parson Field's Experience,” “Martha Wyatt's Life,” “The Assassin of Society”—women were depicted as victims of hardhearted or ignorant men who did not realize the depths to which the women's feelings went.

One of Cooke's stories about wild youthful passion concerns a love affair between two young women, “My Visitation” (Harper's July 1858). The narrator recounts an attraction she had for a sister boarder when she was in her teens. She notes that even in memory she “reeled” and “trembled with electric thrills” at the thought of this past adventure. Finally, after her friend Eleanor left her, a sober mature man courts her, but she feels that she has loved the woman too much to love a man. Eventually, however, she comes to appreciate his steadiness and they marry. Another story that has a homosexual subtheme is “Number Two” (Harper's September 1873). In it a Jonathan-David relationship develops between two men who work together in the western wilderness.

Women are often seen by Cooke as dying for lack of pleasure or entertainment. In “Uncle Josh” (Putnam's September 1857, Somebody's Neighbors), for example, a central female character, “Miss Eunice,” languishes and dies from too Spartan an existence. She had “no recreation. … She did not know … that humanity needs something for its lesser and trivial life; that ‘by all these things men live,’ as well as by the word and by bread” (274). A curious early fantasy, “Maya, the Princess” (Atlantic Monthly January 1858), is a parable about the power of women's passion and how it turns bitter and destructive when not allowed an outlet.

Various minor characters in Cooke's work exhibit the damaging effects of emotional repression. In “The Forger's Bride” (Lippincott's March 1870, The Sphinx's Children) Mrs. Tyler, Sally's mother, keeps her heart like the front parlor, held in reserve. (One of Cooke's and Stowe's pet peeves was that people saved their front parlor room for guests.) Sally aches for the “deep, real love that lay hidden away in her mother's heart, very much as the best parlor and bed-room were shut up …” (326). “Odd Miss Todd” (Harper's October 1882, Huckleberries) suffers by falling in love with a younger man who jilts her. She struggles with jealousy and loneliness and “toward men … became pitiless and almost fierce” (120).

Probably the most intense tale of repressed passion is “Too Late” (Galaxy January 1875, The Sphinx's Children). Cooke set the story appropriately “in one of those scanty New England towns that fill a stranger with the acutest sense of desolation, more desolate than the desert itself, because there are human inhabitants to suffer from its solitude and listlessness …” (229).

Hannah Blair is brought up by very strict Calvinist parents, David and Thankful. Her mother has always withheld any expression of love for her child for fear of making of her an idol (a Calvinist injunction). Finally, however, Hannah and Charley Mahew fall in love and plan to marry. Moll Thunder, a local eccentric and a “born witch,” predicts misfortune. Just before the wedding Hannah receives a mysterious letter that charges Charley had fallen from virtue. Under her strict religious code she therefore cannot marry him, and cancels the wedding at the last minute, refusing to see him. The agony of this decision is conveyed by the dying Hannah many years later to her daughter (she had later contracted a loveless marriage with another): “When he stood under my window and called me I was wrung to my heart's core. … I was upon the floor, with my arms wound about the bed-rail and my teeth shut like a vice, lest I should listen to the voice of nature” (255-56). Hannah's confession—“I loved him so!”—has been elicited by the discovery that Charley died a lonely drunken pauper. The story is a clear indictment of the Calvinist will that denies the power of intense passion and ends by destroying people's lives. This becomes a central concern in the works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.

Cooke's opposition to Calvinism may be seen in several other stories. In “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience,” as we have seen, a niggardly Calvinism is presented as a male tyranny that eventually destroys the woman. In “A Lay Preacher” (Independent 24 September 1874) Desire Flint, an orphaned servant girl, is seen as the true Christian in the household of a Calvinist theologian lost in doctrinal abstractions and low on charity. In “Liab's First Christmas” (The Sphinx's Children) a mean-spirited farmer tyrannizes his meek, repressed wife, and refuses to allow any joy into their grim existence. After a brush with death, however, he repents and even acknowledges the value of the Christmas celebration.

Probably the most forceful indictment of Calvinism is in an early story, “Alcedama Sparks; Or, Old and New” (Harper's July 1859, The Sphinx's Children), which relates the generational transition from strict Calvinism to a more compassionate creed, a further example of the “feminization” of American religion.

Deacon Sparks, a straitlaced clergyman, has a wild-spirited son, Alcedama. Mrs. Sparks rejects the deacon's notion of infant damnation and human depravity and exhibits a liberal, tolerant philosophy of child-rearing. She is another of those hardheaded but compassionate matriarchs who populate local color literature, “no heroine of novel or story. … Not a particle of sentimentality tinged her nature. She neither screamed nor shrunk at a hoptoad. … She never cried all night over her own troubles or anybody else's …” (192).

The climax of the story occurs when Mrs. Sparks's parents, bankrupt and destitute, come to the area with their granddaughter, Hannah. The deacon refuses to take them in (“she made her bed, and she's got to lie on't …” [196]). So the family is auctioned off to the lowest bidder—a New England custom for dealing with welfare cases which Cooke compares to the auctioning of blacks in the South. Hannah too is “bound out” but the Sparkses hire her. Eventually, she and Alcedama fall in love, marry, and take in the old grandparents. A “new school” liberal minister takes over the local church, and the old regime has been vanquished.

Cooke's penchant for realism led her to present probably the most authentic view of women's lives yet to appear in literature. In her most significant stories she rejected the conventions of romance and sentimentalism, refused the Cinderella ending, and stuck to the grim, stubborn realities about poverty of means and spirit that characterized the New England scene.

With Cooke one notes a new ambivalence toward country life: on the one hand, there are the egalitarian villages like Bassett, centered in western Connecticut, where strong, active, usually single women work their positive ways; on the other hand, there is the recognition that women are dying on rural farms for lack of food, lack of love, and lack of freedom. This ambivalence will continue in the later local colorists, shaping the works of Phelps, Jewett, and Freeman.

Notes

1. Rose Terry [Cooke]. “The West Shetucket Railroad,” Independent 24:2 (12 September 1872). The Cooke bibliography prepared by Jean Downey has been invaluable to me for this chapter: “Rose Terry Cooke: A Bibliography,” Bulletin of Bibliography 21, no. 7 (May-August 1955): 159-63, and Bulletin of Bibliography 21, no. 8 (September-December 1955): 191-92.

2. Seen in such stories as “Betsey Clark,” Putnam's (August 1856); “Joe's Courtship.” Putnam's (May 1857); “Rachel's Refusal,” Harper's (November 1857); and, especially, “Home Again,” Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills (1891; reprint ed. New York: Garrett Press, 1969).

3. Other than Huckleberries (see note 2), Cooke's main collections were: Somebody's Neighbors (Boston: Osgood & Co., 1881); The Sphinx's Children and Other People (1886; reprint ed. New York: Garrett, 1969); and Root-bound and Other Stories (1885; reprint ed. Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1968). Further references to these editions follow in the text.

4. Mary Angela Bennett, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939), p. 21, notes that the Atlantic Monthly Index lists this story as Phelps's; however, Phelps herself does not claim it as hers in her autobiography, Chapters from a Life. The story has all the features of a typical Cooke story: it begins ab ovo; it is set in Connecticut; the dialect is typical, as are the plot and characters.

5. Helen Papashvily, All the Happy Endings (New York: Harper, 1956), and Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America 1820-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).