THE QUEST FOR FORM:
THE FICTION OF MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN

Thesis {Or thc Degm of Ph. D.
MiCHIGAN STATE UNNERSETY
Thames R. Knipp
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This is to certify that the
thesis entitled
THE QUEST FOR FOR}:
THE FICTION OF
i-‘iARY E. WILKINS FREEI-BN

presented bg
Thomas. R. Knipp

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

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Major professor

Da‘e April 12, 1906

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THE QUEST FOR FORM:
THE FICTION OF
MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN

by

. l
\

Thomas R? Knipp

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1966

ABSTRACT

THE QUEST FOR FORM:
THE FICTION OF
MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN

by Thomas R. Knipp

This dissertation examines the themes and tech-
niques of the fiction of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. To
do this it first portrays Mrs. Freeman's girlhood in
Randolph, Massachusetts, and Brattleboro, Vermont,
because her best work emerges from this personal back-
ground. Then, after examining the early development of
regionalism in New England and the vital role of Lowell
and Howells in pioneering a realistic aesthetic and in
providing an outlet for the literary products of the
New England regionalists, it traces the evolution of a
New England regional tradition through the works of
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, and Sarah
Orne Jewett. The dissertation reveals the realistic
strengths of these regionalists while demonstrating
their continual search for a form suitable to their
themes. This search proved successful in the short
stories of Mrs. Cooke and Miss Jewett, but unsuccessful
in their novels.

The dissertation then examines the short stories

of Mrs. Freeman's early collections, demonstrating the

2. Thomas R. Knipp
success with which Mrs. Freeman worked within the limits
of New England ”doubleness"--that is, within the con-
fines of Puritanism and down-east humor. It also argues
that her great talent lay in her remarkable powers of
observation and her ability to make carefully observed,
realistically rendered details of ordinary New England
life serve as symbols of the life and history of the
region. It further argues that Mrs. Freeman's vision
was essentially tragic.

In following chapters, the dissertation examines
Nms. Freeman's achievement as a novelist. It first

considers her regional novels, Jane Field and Pembroke,

 

and demonstrates the success with which she solved, in
Pembroke, the problem of form that plagued the women
of the New England tradition. This success, which was
achieved by the development of a "tapestry" technique,
was only momentary, however. Madelon reveals Mrs.
Freeman's unfortunate retreat into the conventions of
Dickensian melodrama which mitigate against her tragic
vision.

Along with the early collections and Pembroke, Mrs.
Freeman's major achievement lay in her two economic
novels, Jerome and The Portion 9£_Lab2§, The disserta-
tion analyzes her portrayal of the class war in these
two novels. Jerome portrays that moment in New England

history when the agrarian order had disintegrated and

3. Thomas R. Knipp

the industrial world was about to be born; The Portion

 

Q; Lagg; depicts a world in which class lines are drawn
and factories dominate the landscape. The novels fail
structurally because Mrs. Freeman, without a world view
or an intellectual system, was forced to rely on the con-
ventions of Dickensian melodrama provided by the market
place.

The later chapters of the dissertation trace Mrs.
Freeman's career as a popular novelist and short story
writer. Each novel and collection is examined and the
realistic virtues are stressed. The chronic failure of
form in the novels is noted, as are Mrs. Freeman's
unsuccessful experiments with external unifying devices
in her short story collections. It is also noted that
she was forced by her need for commercial success to
abandon the subjects and themes she knew so well in favor
of more easily marketable material. In her last two
novels and collections Mrs. Freeman did regain some of
her early excellence. In them she returned to the
themes and scenes of her earlier works.

Relying on her letters, particularly those to
Hamlin Garland, the last chapter studies Mrs. Freeman's
aesthetic and reveals her determination to write what
she kggw and what was pggg, At the same time it points
out her willingness to be guided by her editors and

other successful figures of the literary market place.

A. Thomas R. Knipp
The dissertation concludes with a description of Mrs.
Freeman‘s literary reputation from H. M. Alden's mis-
taken enthusiasm for her genteel qualities through H.
S. Canby's praise of her realism to the near-oblivion

that confronts her now.

Contents

I. Background
II. The Tradition
III. The Great Collections
IV. The Search for the Complex Form
V. The Economic Novels
VI. The Popular Novelist
VII. The Later Collections
VIII. The Final Phase
IX. Reprise: Aesthetic and Reputation
Bibliography

1.
28.
73.

120.
160.
199.
23A.
267.
300.
320.

CHAPTER I
BACKGROUND

A. Personal Background

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was born in Randolph,
Massachusetts, in 1852. In that year, Hawthorne pub-
lished The Blithedale Romance, and Emerson, Prescott,
Parkman, Whittier, and Lowell were the major literary
figures of ante-bellum New England. Thoreau's flglggg,
the masterpiece of the Transcendental Movement, was
still two years away. But with this New England of
metaphysical elevation, moral vigor, and artistic
productivity, Mrs. Freeman had little to do, in Spite
of the fact that, as Edward Foster points out, she did
indeed later preach the Emersonian doctrine of self-
reliance to aspiring young writers and was a literary
chauvinist in the best New England tradition.l Her
world was a different world, one of desolation and
decay, which Babette M. Levy describes as consisting

. . . of a number of extremely unpleasant

older people, some in poor-houses, some

still making life miserable for their rela-

tives; a great many middle-aged women, a few

of them married to somewhat nebulous hus-

bands, more of them widowed or single; some--

but not too many--attractive women in

their twenties, most of them on the verge of
a "decline" because of a misunderstanding

1. Edward Foster Mary E, Wilkins Freeman (New
York, 1956), p. 53. ’

l.

2.

with their wooers . . .2
This is not flattering, but it is accurate. There
are several reasons why Mrs. Freeman never wrote about
genteel New England. One of the reasons is, of course,
that she never lived in it.

Society in 19th Century New England, like society
everywhere, was a vertical structure; and the Wilkins
family inhabited a plane much lower--economically and
culturally-~than that occupied by the Emersons, the
Lowells, the Holmeses, and even the Jewetts up in
Maine. Both the Wilkinses and the LothrOps were old
New England families, but neither was a family of
much achievement or culture. There was no history in
either family, for instance, of college education or
professional life.

Mrs. Freeman's mother, Eleanor Lothrop, came from
a family of hard—working, uninSpired peeple. If there
was any sensitivity for the child to inherit from this
side of the family, it was exemplified in her maternal
grandfather, Barnabas Lothrop, who had a neurotic fear
of winds and storms so strong that, in defiance of the
architectural styles of the day, he built a low, rambling
one-storey house. The house contained, in the center, a
windowless room into which he would retire at the coming

2. Babette M. Levy, "Mutations in New England

Local Color," New England Quarterly, XIX (September,
19h6). 353.

3.
on of a violent storm. But Eleanor LothrOp seemed to
be free of all this fear. She has been described as
cheerful and practical.3

The author’s father, warren E. Wilkins, was a
carpenter. He was, apparently, a diligent and competent
workman; but his career was somewhat checkered because
he seemed to possess an excessive sensitivity. Com-
bined with this sensitivity and the "dark" moods con-
sequent upon it were an ambition to climb socially and
economically and a definite inability in business matters.
These three qualities determined, to an important ex-
tent, the family environment in which Mrs. Freeman
matured.

It was in this family and with these people that
she grew up in relative tranquility and prOSperity before
the Civil War. Her father, though moody at times and
perhaps tense in his drive upward toward gentility, en-
couraged her in her reading, her schooling, and later in
her earliest attempt towrite.h She attended the town
grammar school and apparently did well enough. She did
not play much with other children, but rather Spent
most of her time with the adult women of her family--

with her mother, grandmother and others-~listening to

3. FOSter, p. 50
Ho Ibido, p. 230

A.
their conversations and observing their activities.
And what she heard and saw-—the soul-killing littleness
of their world and the intensity within that world--
later became the stuff of her best art. Edward Foster
suggests that

the girl sensed that these women even in

their cattiness were holding on to life,

that she recognized that their endless

chattgr about seeming trifles was impor-

tant .

It was not a rich life, but it was a secure enough life
for a child. It lasted until she was ten; and then
almost simultaneously came the shoemaking machines, the
war, and the loss of markets for shoes made in Randolph
sheps. Mary Wilkins Freeman's world would never be the
same again. There is no way of knowing what the young
girl's reactions were; but in Randolph she did see the
coming of the big factories, the change from village to
suburb, and the loss of the foreign shoe trade and with
it the loss of Randolph's prosperity.

Having failed to achieve prOSperity in carpentry
and in Randolph, Warren Wilkins moved his family to
Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1867. There he entered into a
partnership in a dry goods shOp. His daughter Mary was
not quite fifteen.

In Brattleboro Mrs. Freeman went to high school and

seemed to do well. However, for the first time she

5. Ibid., p. 21.

5.
encountered isolation-~in two distinct forms. Although
she found her dearest friend, Evelyn Sawyer, in Brattle-
boro, the meeting did not occur until her schooling had
been completed. Her four high school years and her
additional year at Mount Holyoke were lonely, with few
close friends, no boys, and no family to take up the slack.
There was intellectual isolation, too. Brattleboro was
a self-contained town on the Connecticut River, and un-
like Randolph, which was an hour from Boston, the Vermont
town was prOSperous with an insular prOSperity that
looked no farther than the agricultural valleys which
surrounded it.

This prosperity did not last long after the Wilkinses
arrived. The panic of 1870 shook the town and the family
resources. The next twelve years were bleak ones. Mrs.
Freeman's father tried a variety of schemes designed to
bring prOSperity to the family, with no other result than
what Foster calls "shabby gentility."6 Toward the end of
the decade they were forced to take rooms in the house
of a more prosPerous neighbor, for whom Mrs. Wilkins
acted as a housekeeper. In the meantime, the father
had returned to carpentry. Mrs. Freeman's lessons in
"upward mobility" and the economics of the gilded age
were completed by the embezzlement of the local banker,

Colonel Wait, who was to turn up years later as Bolton

6. IbidO, P0 37.

 

6.
in an._lab§§ter Box.

These were also years of personal grief for Mrs.
Freeman. Her only sister, seven years younger than she,
died in 1876. In 1880 her mother died suddenly. Then
in 1882 her father, his hopes of gentility in ruins,
like many other New Englanders of the time, emigrated
to Florida as a construction worker. Of this departure
from the native soil and the grief it brought, Mrs. Free-
man was to write often. But she wrote even more often of
those who, like herself, did not leave--of the women who
stayed behind. In 1883 her father died in Florida. Mrs.
Freeman was 31 years old. She was alone and nearly
penniless, but she had begun to write. In 188h she re-
turned to Randolph, where she made her home with friends
for the next eighteen years.

These first thirty years were the preparatory years
for Mrs. Freeman as an artist. Though they did not con-
tain all the things that she attempted to write about,
they did contain mpg; of the situations and experiences
about which she wrote well. The boundaries of this
early world were pretty well the limitations of Mrs.
Freeman the artist. Sixty years ago Charles M. Thompson
provided an accurate list of them-~environment, educa-
tion, sex--and pointed out their consequences in her

work:

The fact is not surprising that of the
twenty-eight stories in A Humble Romance
[sic] every one is told from the point

7.

of view of some woman--and that there are
very few which do not deal with one of those
family or neighborhood quarrels which have
been referred to as the staple of women's
gossip in small country towns.

B. Economic Background

Certain literary works acquire significance because
they have the good fortune to partake of and to capture
the tempo of great historical movements. Mrs. Freeman's
best stories are of this kind. The movement that she
depicts is a decline. Consequently the stories have a
bleakness about them that an ascendant movement would
not produce. Nevertheless, they are "mythic"; they
depict the going to seed of a great cultural flowering.
They do this because the life that she lived, saw, and
wrote about, though as narrow as Thompson suggests, was
nonetheless typical of a whole region.

The decay of rural New England did not come about
quickly; in fact, the forces of decay were at work for
many years prior to the Civil war.

Summer for this country was the period 1790

to 1830--the Opening of new farms, the de-

ve10pment of small industries; 1830 to 1870

brought autumn--a thriving sheep industry

and the stimulus of railroad building but

also the competition of the West and tge
cities. By 1877 . . . it was winter.

7. Charles Miner Thompson, "Miss Wilkins-~An
Idealist in Masquerade," Atlantic Monthly, LXXXIII
(May, 1899), 670.

8. Foster, p. #7.

8.
Emigration from rural New England really began in ear-
nest when the Erie Canal was Opened in 1825 and by 1830
had become such an issue in New England that Senator
Foote of Connecticut wanted congress to restrict the
sale Of land in the West.

Emigration, however, was not unchecked through the
rest of the 19th Century; rather, it was accelerated--
eSpecially by the construction of railroads.

The railroads, . . . did not bring to the

hill country [inland New England] the new

lease Of life that had been anticipated.

Instead of being checked, the decline in

rural population intensified.

Harold Wilson describes this accelerated decline as
"selective migration," a process whereby the aggressive,
the venturesome, and the intellectually active left for
regions of greater Opportunity. The men who remained

were those least able to bring about the changes necessary
for prosperity. The women also remained. This selective
migration is extremely important to an understanding of
Mrs. Freeman's work, for the world she wrote about was
inhabited by these shadowy men and by women without men.

The railroads carried away many things. Many tra-
ditional economic and social customs were rendered
either unattractive or impossible by the presence of the
railroad. Further, the isolation in which the Calvinistic

9. Harold P. Wilson, Egg Hill ggunt y gthorthern

New En land: Its Social and Economic Histogy (New York
1936Tjg57*28. ""I'"'"’"“'_F Sifl— ‘ ’

9.

ethic flourished was destroyed. The self-sufficient
village and the self-sufficient farm disappeared in the
path Of the tracks that led to Boston, to New York, and
to points west. Emerson and his doctrine Of self-reli-
ance were swept from the New England scene-~if not from
the soul-~by the railroads. But most importantly, the
people left so that by lyOO New England "was covered by

10 In such circumstances, what could

abandoned farms.”
the abandoned women do but turn inward upon themselves
and produce, not Emerson‘s self-reliant moral sweet-
ness, but the grimness and eccentricity of New England,
and of Mrs. Freeman's blighted world?

Along with the lure of the West, the other great
attraction which caused New Englanders to leave their
rocky soil was the lure of the cities-~New England's cities
as well as others.

With the gradual loss Of commerce and with

the aid of the tariff, New England Opened

up a new economic era for itself, particu-

iifiifirinbthieiii’8n‘i’nhaiis°£afifiiaflifiiifi“if

Y P g l g.

The factories of Boston and the mills of Lynn and Lowell
had been eXpanding since well before the war. A labor
union, the New England Workingman's Association, was
established as early as l8h5. A further key development

‘ 10. Edward F. Humphrey, 4Q_Economic History 9; Egg
United States (New York, 1931), p. #37.

 

ll. Seymour E. Harris, The Economics gprew'England
(Cambridge, M3830, 1952)) P0 .56.: I

 

10.
in the histories of Brattleboro and Randolph--e5pecially
Randolph-ewes Lyman R. Blake's invention in 1858 of a
machine for sewing shoes. Within twenty years the
factories of Lynn had made 200 million pairs of shoes,
and Randolph had become a suburb of industrial and
Sprawling Boston and a very minor shoe town as well.
The Irish and other immigrants had come.12 As a girl
Mrs. Freeman saw it all, and though her imagination di-
gested it only imperfectly, she tried heroically to
make what she saw the stuff of her art. She did not
succeed as she did with rural decay, but she was among
the first to make industrialization, labor-management
relations, and the ethics of the golded age her themes.
In fact industrialization and rural decay are her two
chief social themes, and in the former she was a pioneer
in the new lands that Herrick and Dreiser and Norris were

to chart later.

C. Literary Environment and Background

Randolph, the self-sufficient manufacturing town be-
coming an industrial suburb, and Brattleboro, the self-
sufficient country town going into decline-~these pro-
vided Mrs. Freeman with the setting for her art. The
LothrOps and their neighbors along with the Spinsters of

BrattleborO--these were the prototypes of her most

12. Humphrey, p. 332.

11.
memorable characters. In other words, the world of her
first thirty years provided her with the matter of her
art. The fggm_was a different problem. This came from
her response to what might be called her literary en-
vironment and background.13

At different times in her career Mrs. Freeman deli-
berately conveyed the impression that she was not influ-

enced by the literary scene in which she found herself.
She claimed that she refused to read any work that might
affect her style and in 1913 she had this advice for
aSpiring authoresses: "It is a great mistake to listen
too much to individual criticisms of literary efforts
and to be swayed by them."lA However there is consi-
derable evidence that she was influenced-~greatly influ-
enced--by the literary scene and background and that she
knew it. Two examples should suffice here. In an 1889
letter to Hamlin Garland she admitted the possibility
that she might have been a realist because of the real-
istic literary environment,15 and in 1899 she sought out
the influence and advice Of the genteel editor, Richard

13. It might be argued further that it was her
knowledge of this literary environment and background
that provided assurances that her subject matter was
marketable; and marketability was important to her, as
her letters to Harper and Brothers show.

14. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "The Girl Who wants to
Write: Things to Do and Avoid," Hggper's Bazaar, XLVII
(June, 1913), 272. _

15. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Hamlin Gar-

land, March 1, 1889 (Huntington Library, San Marino,
California).

 

12.

Watson Gilder.16

Mary Wilkins Freeman was a wide-ranging and avid
reader through the early and most productive years of
her career. An interviewer commented on her reading
in 1891:

She has been a great reader of English liter-

ature. Thackeray is one of her favorites;

Dickens she likes because he amuses her.

Miss Jewett and Miss Catherwood are eSpecially

admired by her, and I99 is particularly fond

of "Border Ballads."

In 1898, J. E. Chamberlin wrote of her sitting room in
Randolph that he saw Scott's novels "On the high mantel-
shelf in the chimney," and added that she also was read-
ing Hardy, Tolstoy and "even" Dostoievsky at the time.18
Two years later M. W. Welch quoted her as saying, "If I
could write a book like Lorna Doone, or Anna Karenina, or
9
Que Vadis, or the story of Gasta Burling by that new
Swedish writer, I should be happy."19 She had, in fact,
been an avid reader since her girlhood. In addition to
the writers mentioned, as a girl she read the works of
Auerbach, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe, and Mrs.

16. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Richard
Watson Gilder, Au ust h, 1899 (Columbia University
Library, New York .

l7. "Miss.Mary E. Wilkins " The Book Buyer VIII
(March, 1891), 53. ’ ’

18. J. Edgar Chamberlin, "Miss Mary E. Wilkins at
Randolph, Massachusetts," Critic, XXIX (March 5, 1899),

19. M. H. Welch "Mary E. Wilkins " Harper's Bazaar
XXXIII (January 27, 1900), 69. ' “““’

13.
Stowe.20

She was aware of §11_the parts of the literary en-
vironment of her era. She was familiar with the New
England tradition, and with the local color story,
through Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Mrs. Stowe, and
Miss Jewett. She also knew great panoramic novelists of
EurOpe: Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray.
They furnished, significantly, vast repositories of tra-
ditional techniques and devices for her use. She was
also familiar with the realistic movement around her as
her letters to Garland in the 1880's indicate.

Mrs. Freeman's relations with the realistic movement
of her time and her dependence on the techniques of
Dickens and Scott will be discussed later. That is im-
portant now is to consider her position in the tradi-
tions Of New England. And she did consider herself as
a part of traditions of which she was conscious. Fur-
thermore, she recognized the variety of strands which
were woven together in her time to comprise the fabric
of the post-war New England literary tapestry.

One strand which ran back thirty years was feminin-
ity, the contemporary interest in woman, not simply her
rights, but her temperament, potential, and future. Mrs.
Freeman was not just a writer who happened to be a woman;

she was g woman writer. Her sensibility was feminine,

20. Foster, p. 33.

14.
her insight was feminine, her characters (for the most
part) were feminine, and her world was feminine. Fiction
for women is as old as Pamela, but in America, fiction :9;
and by_women did not become an important force on the

21 Most of this early

literary scene until the 1850's.
feminine fiction was extravagently romantic and grati-
fied a taste for sentiment, melodrama, and moral in-
struction. One of the most successful periodical pur-
veyors of this fiction was Robert Bonner's Nggjlggk,

Led er, which featured the genteel and melodramatic work
Of such women as Fanny Fern and Mrs. Sigourney. When
these "damned scribbling women," as Hawthorne called
them, and their male counterparts of the 1850's wrote

with moral earnestness, they produced such things as

Uncle Tpm's Cabin (1852) and Ten Nights ig g Barroom by

 

Timothy Shay Arthur (1854).

Not all the feminine fiction of the Fifties was

22

this kind of inferior Dickens. The best of it was of

of a different sort because Of the interweaving of
several more strands, including the strand of native
humor or frontier humor, which became reSpectable in the

1350's and out of which the local color movement seemed

F 21. F. L. Pattee, The Femining_Fifties (New York,
1740), p. 740

22. In subject matter, sensibility, attitude and
technique, it is Dickens that these writers imitate.
Even the better writers--Mrs. Freeman and Mrs. Stowe
among them-awhen in doubt fall back on the narrative
dev1ces of what might be called the Scott-Dickens tradi-

tion.

 

 

.§

15.
to grow.23 The other strand was the New England tradi-
tion itself, which had already, in the works of Whittier
and Lowell, absorbed frontier humor and made it reapect-
able. Speaking of women and the later New England tra-
dition F. L. Pattee said:

The literary sons of the Brahmins were all

daughters. Note in the period after the war

the recorders in fiction of the New England

decline: Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne

522:3: fifieEirfiifiisélgiififi?3§h

:
The one woman he does not mention who is a vital link
in the developing tradition of New England local color
is Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose first important piece of
literary genre painting, The Minister's Wooing, was
published in 1859.

Regionalism was one of the dominant qualities of
American literature throughout the entire 19th Century
and especially of New England literature of the 1850's
and before. The attention scholars have given to the
regionalism of the local color movement has caused them
to neglect this fact; but it is true, as B. T. Spencer
points out, that "the fact that the literary mode of the

day was romantic rather than realistic . . . does not

invalidate the regional impulse and temper everywhere

23. Pattee, p. 57.
2&0 1229:» P- 303-

16.
present in ante-bellum American letters."25 This re-
gionalism went everywhere hand in hand with strong
elements of humor. As Constance Rourke pointed out,
"Localism had been the very basis of the comic in
America,"26 and in New England as elsewhere the quality
and nature of the locality determined to a great extent
the quality and nature of the comic.

This tradition, which is, then, both regional and
comic can be traced through three or more decades before
the Civil War. Among the earliest writers working in
the tradition were Seba Smith, the creator of the rural
sage Jack Downing, and Thomas C. Haliburton, the
creator of the crafty itinerant Yankee Sam Slick. Both
of these men were writing in the 1830's. Downingville,
Jack Downing's home, was the first of a long line of
Yankee towns to appear in the regional literature of the
next seventy-five years.

Downingville prefigures the Jalaam of Lowell's

Biglow Papers, the Poganuc and Oldtown of Mrs.

StoweTs novels, the Deephaven of Miss Jewettb

stories, the Tilbury Town of Robinson's poems,
and so represents a large forward step in the

25. Benjamin T. Spencer, "Regionalism in American
Literature," Regionalism ig America (Madison, Wisconsin,
1951), p. 228. In this essay Mr. Spencer distinguishes
three phases in 19th Century American regionalism: the
period of ante-bellum sectionalism; the period of local
color (1865—1890); and the period after 1890 when region-
alism though still present became subservient to other
purposes and principles of form.

26. Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Stud of
Egg National Character (Garden City, N.Y., 1931), p. I30.

l7.

develogment of New England's regional liter-
ature . 7 ’

He might well have added Mrs. Freeman's Pembroke and
Barr. These two literary pioneers were followed by
Lowell‘s Hosea Biglow, B. P. Shillaber's Mrs. Partington,
and Frances M. Whiteher's Widow Bedott. These last two,
writing in the 1850’s, brought on the stage in comic

mode the shrewd, wise Yankee women who were to occupy

so many of the pages of the later female regionalists.
These were the prototypes of Almira Todd, Jane Field,

and the rest.

The themes of the later regionalists are almost all
found in the pages of the early purveyors of Down-East
humor. The confrontations of urban and rural values,
the cunning that triumphs over hostile nature and "the
system," the isolation that twists personalities into
singular shapes, the "faculty" that enables generations of
New Englanders to make do with little, the pride, and
the Calvinism-~they all are here. The point of view
changes, the style changes, the mode changes; but the
themes of the New England regional tradition are all
established before the Civil war. So too are some of
the technical virtues of the later regionalists, part of
whose excellence is due to the fact that, like the

. 27. Daniel G. Hoffman, Form and Fable ;Q_American
Fiction.(New York, 1961), p. #8.

l8.
humorists before them, they did observe and rggggd the
habits, gestures, sounds, and similes of the folk.

There are differences, however, between the down-east
humor of the 1830's and the local color of the late 1850's
and early 1860's. Among the differences are the greater
accuracy of language, background, and characterization,
and the greater specification of person and place among
the later writers. The undifferentiated New England of
the earlier writers becomes the Maine coast of Mrs.
Stowe's Ih§.2gggl_g§,0rr's Island and the Massachusetts
shoe town of Mrs. Freeman's Portion 9§_L§bgg, Claude
Simpson, in wrestling with the definition of the elusive
term "local color," said that it resulted from the
author's fidelity to locale, dialect and mores. And in
defining the purpose of the local colorist, he said, "The
ultimate aim of the local colorist is, as Garland indi-
cates, to create the illusion of an indigenous little
world with due regard for those qualities that differ-

'"28 This aim and

entiate it from the world 'outside.
these techniques together with the qualities of pic-
turesqueness and nostalgia might well stand as a defini-
tion of local color.

Certainly the second of the four women who consti-
tute the central tradition of New England regionalism,
Rose Terry Cooke, reflects these local color qualities

. 28. Claude M. Simpson, The chal Colorists: Amer-
ican Short Stories, 1852-1200 (New York, 19505, p. l.

 

l9.

and goals.

In the first five volumes [of The Atlantic]

appeared eleven short stories by Rose Terry

(Cooke), pioneer work in local color a decade

before Bret Harte and George W. Cable. She

had begun as a writer of the Sylvanus Cobb

type with idolized heroines and supernaturally

black villains, but the influence of Lowell

seemed to awake in her new powers. The New

England Yankee she portrayed in all his vul-

garity and meanness and all his strength of

character.2
Rose Terry Cooke, then, writing twenty years after Seba
Smith, is a full-fledged local colorist of merit.

Her talent was not only recognized but actually
shaped by James Russell Lowell; and Lowell, the great
arbiter of taste with the powers of both critic and
editor, is the watershed of New England local color and
regional realism. He encouraged both Mrs. Cooke and,
before her, Mrs. Stowe. And he published them because
they conformed to his aesthetic criteria.

Howells said of Lowell, "He was a man of very
catholic taste,"30 but this is really a friend's char-
itable view of a man filled with self—contradictions.
Because of these contradictions, he was, in the long
view, a poor critic as Van wyck Brooks has suggested.
At times he was flagrantly genteel; in one speech he
anticipated Howell's chaste young girl by declaring

Fielding to be unsuitable reading for young ladies. He

29. Pattee, p. 328.

30. Wm. Dean Howells Literary Friends and Acguain-
Eégggg (New York, 1902), p: 232.

20.
oscillated—~both as a critic and a creator-~between po-
sitions of extreme gentility, Gothicism, and romance
on the one hand and chauvanistic enthusiasm for contem-
porary regionalism on the other.

However, Lowell Egg a major force in American
letters, and it was as a regionalist that he made his
most important contribution. Among his creative efforts,
it is his regional work that survives.

The Biglow Papers remained as a permanent

landmark. No other work compared with it,

either then or later, for showing the

homogeniety of New Englagf, its common

stock, its common faith.

But it is Lowell the critic more than Lowell the poet
who served well the cause of regionalism and realism.

Whether he was praising Fielding because the novelist
"32

"realized the actual truth around him, or encouraging

Howells to enter the field of realistic fiction,33 or

praising Sarah Orne Jewett's work as characteristic of
rural life in New England, Lowell always seemed to be

drawn to the regional and the real. He felt that--in

America at least-~the real hgg_tg_pg regional. "The

literature of a peeple," he said, "should be a record of

31. Van W ck Brooks, The Flowering 9f New England
(New York, 1952 , pp. 330-331.

32. James R. Lowell, Letters and Political Addresses
(Boston, 1895), p. 65. 9“

33. Robert S iller, et a1, Litera History 9:
£_g United States New York, 1953 , p. O.

 

21.

its joys and sorrows, its aspirations and its short-
comings, its wisdom and its folly, the confidant of its
soul."3h He then went on to Speak of the tremendous
variety in America, a variety so vast that it could be
encompassed only in regional pieces. In another context
he claimed that "we cannot produce a national satire or
character, because there is no butt viable to all parts
of the country at once."35

Lowell was a man of letters--a man of words-~and it
was to words that his reSponse was most profound and most
definite. He always loved the language of a plagg. In
1859 he wrote, "No language, after it has faded into
diction, none that cannot suck up feeding juices from the
mother-earth of a rich common-folk talk, can bring forth
a sound and lusty book."36 A year later he was praising
Trowbridge's now-forgotten novel The Old Battleground
for "marvelous fidelity of dialect."37

Lowell's immediate and immediately favorable reaponse
to folk Speech and folk life can be seen everywhere
through his long career. When, in the sketches of Rose

Terry Cooke, he encountered old ladies in the hinterland

34. Lowell, Letters and Political Addresses, p. 228.

35. Lowell, quoted in walter Blair, Native American
Humor (San Francisco, 1960), p. 117. 3*—

36. Ibid., p. 53.

37. Lowell "Review of The Old Battleground " Atlantic
Eflgfifllx, VI (September, 1860):—I2. ’

 

22.

complaining, "I can't do it. I can't: I'd as lief root
out twitch-grass out o' a ten-acre lot,"38 he liked it
and guided it into print. Before that he had written
happily to Whittier concerning "Skipper Ireson's Ride,"
"I like it all the better for its provincialism--in all
fine pears, you know, we can taste the old puckers."39
Less linguistic but equally regional was his praise of
Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing: "What
eSpecially charmed me in the new story was that you had

taken your stand on New England ground."40

As the first editor of Ihg.Atlantic, Lowell's values
and judgments were important. More than any other man,
he had the power to make or break a tradition; and he
made one. Because he liked language, characters, and
situations which "realized actual truth," he published
stories and sketches which contained them. But he did
more than that. He set The Atlantic on the path of
realism-~genteel, of course, but realism all the same.

He prepared the way for a number of successful imitators
and competitors, especially for Harper;§_MOnthly and Th2
Centugy. And he is the first of a whole series of edi-
tors who, whether they guided public taste or followed it,

38. Rose Terry Cooke, "Amandar," Somebody's Neigh-
223g (Boston, 1887), p. 21A.

39. H. E. Scudder James Russell Lowell: A Biography
(Boston, 1901), p. 417.’ ”

. . 40. "Introduction" to Harriet Beecher Stowe Egg
ggnister’s‘Wooing (Cambridge, Nassachusetts, 1895),
0 12!, x.

23.
provided reputable and profitable outlets for regional
writers and who travelled with these writers from the
world of Whittier to the world of Sherwood Anderson.
Among the editors were Howells, Scudder, Alden, and even
Richard watson Gilder. All of which is to say, as Brooks
has already said, "As an editor, he played a historic
e."hl

Lowell, then, was the first of a series of editors

rol

who encouraged the lady regionalists.

The new realism was admitted freely into the

magazine and the short story, which had been

brushed up anew in France and was coming

again to be a ruling literary form, Lowell

admitted in unprecedented quantity. During

the four years of his editorship there ap-

peared in the magazine some eighty-seven 42

short stories, nearly half of them by women.
This editorial position was maintained through the decades
by succeeding editors. Matthiessen points out, "Miss
Jewett thus found her niche virtually carved for her.
All she had to do was step gracefully into it."[+3 While
it is the accepted thing to stress the magazine's influ-
ence in the direction of the short story, it should be
pointed out that most of the New England regionalists
Wrote novels too and that The Atlantic and other maga-

zines serialized these novels. Both Mrs. Stowe and Mrs.

41. Brooks, p. 635-
42. Pattee, p. 328.

43- F. O. Matthiessen Sarah 0 J
1929), pp. 62-63. : __,__ rne ewett (Boston,

2h.

Freeman wrote for serialization.

Because the key editorial figure after Lowell was

William Dean Howells, a brief analysis of his attitude

will make clear the conditions of the literary market

place in which Mrs. Freeman tried to sell her wares.

regionalism, gentility,

lways found Howells its

Howells stood for and realism.

Students of local color have a
"The concerns of Howells

"In

Constance Rourke says,
and to this Simpson adds,

friend.

were largely regional,""h

the course of his reviewing for The Atlantic, Harper's

Monthly and Harper's Weekly he gave discriminating atten-
tion to virtually all the important work of the local

colorists.""5 He bestowed this discriminating attention

for two reasons. First, he thought much local color
writing good. He encouraged Sarah Jewett to contribute to
The Atlantic and praised Mary Wilkins Freeman's work; and

in after years he always referred to them together--"the

exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins."46

le 0 NOting
he

Secondly, he thought regionalism was inevitab

the lack of social texture and density in America,

thought that naturally "we excell in small pieces with

three or four figures, or in studies of rustic communi-

hh. Rourke, p. 206.
#5. Simpson, pp. 15-16.

p 9[‘46. Howells, Literary Friends and A9

quaintances,

25.

ties, where there is propinquity, if not society.""7
In their critical biography of Howells, Clara and
: "What

Rudolf Kirk describe his editorial policy thusly

Howells was looking for in the thousands of manuscripts

that passed under his eyes was the writer's sense of

' freshly perceived-~whether humorously, subtly,

'reality
""8 His critical

chingly hardly mattered.

little justifications and

starkly, or tou

writings are studded with
Most famous is his statement,

the truth-

definitions of realism.
"Realism is nothing more and nothing less than
ful treatment of material.”9 To this he added elsewhere
the significant statement that the realist "finds nothing

"50 Finally he required organic relation-

insignificant.
ships if not organic structure; "The novel ends well that
ends faithfully."5l Certainly these are the demands the

New England regionalists tried hard to meet, although they

found the virtue of organic structure to be elusive in

their longer work. These are the demands which they did

meet; otherwise Howells wouldn't have published them.

The final requirement of Howells the editor was a

#7. Clara and Rudolf Kirk, Wm. Dean Howells (New

York, 1962), p. 87.

#80 Ibido, p. 660

#9. Howells, Criticism and Fiction and Other Essa 5,
Clara and Rudolf Kirk, eds. (New York, 1959), p. 38.

50. Spiller, p. 879.

51. Howells, Criticism and Fiction, p. #3.

26.

certain degree of gentility. The gentility that he de-

manded was not something inherent in the nature of man

or in the nature of realism. It was, he thought, inherent

in the nature of young girls and of magazines. His famous

statement about material suitable for young ladies does

not need repeating. The lady regionalists-~most of them

either sexless or repressed-~were more than willing to
stay far distant from the great Victorian taboo of sex.

It might also be added that their stories were, for the

most part, free of violence. The one lady who sometimes

broke through the barriers was Mary Wilkins Freeman.
H. M. Alden of Harper's Monthly was one of the most
important editors of his time; and like a good Harper's

editor, he followed a trail pretty well blazed by The

Atlantic. William Allen White called him a "guardian of

the hearthstone."52 And indeed he was. He encouraged

realism and regionalism; his support of and guidance to
Mrs. Freeman at a time when she needed it was proof of

that. But he also subscribed to the theory of the limiting

nature of the magazine.

We do not say that everything that could be

published with propriety in a book could
fitly be published in a magazine. The pur-
chaser chooses his book; the magazine goes
to an aggience to which it is committed by a

pledge.

_ 52. wm. Allen White, "Fiction in the Eighties and
Nineties," American writers 9g American Literature (New

York, 1931); Po 390-

33. Henry Mills Alden, Magazine writigg ggg_§hg
Kg! Literature (New York, 1908), p. 68.

 

27.
He was Mrs. Freeman's editor, and she knew, or soon
learned, his "pledge," which is to say that she, like

Mrs. Stowe, Miss Jewett and others before her, knew her

market.

CHAPTER II
THE TRADITION

Lowell published works by Harriet Beecher Stowe and
Rose Terry Cooke before Bret Harte had written anything

but his name, and in doing so he established a tradition--

or at least made it possible for one dating back to Seba

Smith to move down neW'paths. There is little doubt that

there was a tradition--a continuity that was both tech-

nical and thematic. It has been so recognized and so

treated by a wide variety of critics including William

Dean Howells, F. L. Pattee and Van wyck Brooks. Brooks

is most explicit.

Before these admirable realists [Mrs. Stowe
and Mrs. Cooke], with their homely art, no
one had truly conveyed its [New England's]
color and savor, its rude strength and

depth of feeling. . . . In Mrs. Stowe's
books one found most of the "chestnut
burrs" that became the stock—in-trade of
New England fiction, the phiIOSOphical sea
captains, the stubborn farmers and wild
young men, the regiment of Yankee Spin-

sters, infinite in variegation.
Further on he adds, "Rose Terry Cooke was the founder of

the school that produced Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins and

Alice Brown."2
The work of Mrs. Stowe, Mrs. Cooke, Miss Jewett

1. Van wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer

(New York, 1950), p. 87.

2. Ibid., p. 88.
28.

29.
3

and Mrs. Freeman has certain characteristics in common.

" details, dialect, and similar

They all use "local color
led

story patterns. They all write about certain gnar

Yankee types with an emphasis on women. They all draw

freely from the long tradition of Yankee humor and move

pole of this sly Yankee humor on the one hand

between the
I.

and the stern moral vision of the Puritans on the other.

But their stories stretch across the years from Mrs.

Stowe's early work in the 1850's to Edgewatg; People

in 1918, a period of over sixty years. And in that time

they work within a living and changing tradition, not a

Regionalism is only re-

petrified convention or cliche.
ich the

gionalism after all; it is the material upon wh

artist draws-~it is the stuff of art, and the art will

change as the stuff changes. As New England went to seed

after the flowering, so the tone of its writers changed.

The idyllic and joyous note that swells through The Pearl
9; Orr's Island is not found in the later ladies, not even

in the work of Sarah Jewett, who was forced by Maine's

neglected piers and abandoned boats into a mood of melan-

3. This is not to infer that there were no other New
Elizabeth O. B. StoOd"

England regionalists; there were.

dard, Annie Trumbull Slosson and Rebecca Harding Davis

are among them. Although they are all "of the tradition"
of the four women dis-

none of them achieved the quality
cussed here, and a discussion of their work would add
nothing to an understanding of the tradition of which

they are a part.

A. Babette M. Levy, "Mutations in New England Local
Color," New England uarterl , XIX (September, 19A6), 338-

3h0.

30.

Taine suggested a critical approach which in-

lg milieu, and lg moment.

including that

choly.
cludes scrutiny of lg_ggggJ
h helps define regionalism,
changing condi-

Such an approac
Under the pressure of
e changed, and the

Of New England.

tions the quality of New England lif

these changes twisted the durable Puritan

pressure of
Therefore, in

unexpected shapes.

y Wilkins Freeman's

race into singular and

order to be able to evaluate Mar
ssary to trace

achievements and her limitations it is nece

briefly the changes in this tradition.

A. Harriet Beecher Stowe

In the middle '50's when Harriet Beecher Stowe

turned her attention to the New England which was to be

her fictional preserve for over twenty years, she was

Uncle Tom's

already the most famous writer in America.

in 1852 and Dred in 1856. These two

Cabin had come out
ion of New England region—

novels lie outside the tradit

alism and outside the scope of this chapter, but they do

reveal one characteristic of Mrs. Stowe's writing and the

writing of all the ladies who follow her. They are the

result of gbservati9g_and experience.
5 to identify herself with Hamli

(Forty years later

Mrs. Freeman wa n Garland's

Charles Foster eXplains Mrs.
peaking, were products

"veritism.") Stowe's sources

this way: "Her books, generally 5

of her own experience and observation buttressed by

family reminiscence and a wide and deep knowledge of New

31.
England intellectual history."5 Her main contributions
to New England regionalism, The Minister's Wooing (1859),
The Pearl g£_0rr's Island (1862), Oldtown Folks (1869),

Oldtown Fireside Stories (1869) and Poganuc People (1878),

 

 

flow from the same sources.
One thing that Mrs. Stowe observed and experienced

is what Charles Foster called "New England doubleness."
This doubleness might be described as the movement of the

New England character between the poles of Puritan moral

fervor and sly Yankee shrewdness. The genuine regional

characters that Mrs. Stowe created tended to come from

one or the other of these two extremes.6 The strength of

the growing movement of regional realism is revealed by

the fact that it was for her humorous regionalism that

her contemporaries praised her. In 1872, T. 8. Perry,

writing in the North American Review, said, "With all her

faults she is a humorist. . . . Sam Lawson . . . is an

extremely amusing person . . . an admirable c0py of an

original that can be found in almost any New England

Harriet

5. Charles Foster, The Rungless Ladder:
N.C.,

Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism (Durham,

1954), . 2A2.

6. One is tempted to see this as inevitable. Among
the folk sources on which she drew or, at least, to which
she reacted unconsciously, the two strongest traditions
were the moral and fervent tradition of mysticism and the
"special providence," dating back through the Mathers to
Bradford's miraculous meeting with Squanto, and the humorous
tradition of sly Yankees like Jack Downing and Sam Slick,
which had such wide exposure in the newSpapers of the day.

32.
village."7 Walter Blair quotes Howells who praised the
short tales which "lure us to read them again and again by
their racy quaintness and the charm of the shifty Lawson's
character and manner."8

But this is only one pole. For Mrs. Stowe there was
always the other:

The author of Uncle Tom's Cabin was . . . too

stern a daughter of Puritanism to write solely

from what she diSparagingly called "a merely

artistic point of view." The daughter, sister,

wife, and mother of ministers, she rarely wrote
without a moral purpose. "It is the moral

bearings of the subject involved," she de-

clared, "which have the chief influence in its

selection."7
Here is the "doubleness," the vital "doubleness" which is
important because it is the characteristic of the whole
tradition. All the authors of the New England tradition
write about characters clustered around these two poles.
When the humorous and the moral fuse in a single char-
acter and a single scene, as they do in Mrs. Cooke's
Freedom Wheeler and Mrs. Freeman's Thayer family, some-
thing approaching a masterpiece is produced.

A. H. Quinn calls Mrs. Stowe a transitional writer,
that is, one of a group of writers who are partly romantic
and partly realistic. The question is, which parts are

7. T. 8. Perry, quoted in walter Blair, Native

American Humor (San Francisco, 1960), p. lAO.

. 8. mm. Dean Howells, quoted in Blair, Native Amer-
lsan H_umor, p. 141.

9. Herbert R. Brown, Thg Sentimental Novel lg
Marisa-41824860 (New York, 1959T, p. 133.

33.

which? In Mrs. Stowe's case and in the case of the later
ladies, this distinction must be made because the rela-
tion of the real to the romantic~-and the relation of the
good to the bad, for that matter-~depends on the type of
thing they wrote; Claude Simpson has expressed the widely
held view by saying, "The short story was the characteris-
tic medium of the local colorists." He goes on to say:

Almost all the local colorists seem to have

tried their hand at indigenous novels, al-

though the results were seldom successful.

Their difficulties may suggest reasons why

the short story was a better vehicle for

their aims: either their long fiction was

episodic~~almost resembling a collection

of tales-~and so lacked unity, or they

achieved an organic structure by subordinat-

ing local color integests to some other

unifying principle.l
Since Mrs. Stowe wrote six novels and Mrs. Freeman thir-
teen, local color writers clearly did more than try their
hand at the longer form; yet the above quotation reveals
the heart of the problem: the regional novelists' quest
for form.

Provincial manners, or universal situations given a
special regional coloring, provide unity enough for the
short story. (Mary was obviously aware of the latter in
such stories as "A Village Lear.") But the novel was
something else. Again and again, after striking out on
the road to critical realism and the comedy of manners,

10. Claude Simpson The Local Colorists: American
Short Stories, 1852-1900 New York, 1960). p. 2.

34.
the regional writers would retreat to the safe confines of
the Dickensian plot. The result was that most of the
novels-~the most serious efforts, after allo-were romantic
at the center. And the romance was melodramatic and bad.
Mrs. Stowe's main plots are love stories; her heroes are
conventional and her heroines (sublimations of her own
girlhood, perhaps) are tender, pale, intuitive, noble,
and conventional. It is on the periphery of the story
that Mrs. Stowe's realistic virtues are found. Her old
women (usually comic), sea captains, town handymen and
her subplots are her greatest successes.

In this "doubleness," her search for form, and her
peripheral realistic excellence, Mrs. Stowe is character-
istic of the whole tradition. She is also representative
of it in her themes and values: her analysis of domestic
virtue and domestic crises, her concern with the lot and
role of women, her WOrdsworthian fascination with the moral
power of children (though Miss Jewett may be exempted
here), her belief in the power of innocence, and her
interest in the contrast between the rural and the urban.

She stands at the beginning. The world she portrays
is one of ripeness. As she writes, New England is going
into decay, and she catches the last sweet, whole moment.
She is, as Miss Levy points out, "the only one of the

local colorists thus to stress the intellectual side of

35.
New Engiamd."ll She does a better job with male char-
acters because there were better men to observe. A weak
will and gnarled reticence were not qualities of a Henry
Ward Beecher.

She describes large and fairly prOSperous
families, although everyone needs to work
hard. While there are eccentrics and village
characters, they are relatively few and not
extreme types. Compared with other fictional
New Englanders, many of her men and women

lead well-rounded lives with political, social,
intellectual, and religious interests. The men
vote and take part in village political squab-
bles. There is much social life, with the
various levels of society well recognized.12

This is a pleasant vista, but it was a view looking back-
ward from the top of the hill. From there the road went
down.

The Minister's Wooing, which Harriet published in

 

1859 after it was serialized in The Atlantig Monthly,

 

is a good example of the New England local color tradi-
tion and its search for the solution to the problems of
the transition from romanticism to realism. As is gen-
erally true of all the literary ladies, Mrs. Stowe's
"realism" is better than her "romance" although she makes
better use of conventional plot and character devices than
do her successors.

The novel is rich in local color virtues. Mrs.

Stowe uses dialect with restraint, humor, and wisdom. She

ll. Levy, New England Quarterly, pp. 3A3-3h4.
12. Ibid., p. 3A1.

36.
portrays with light satire, eSpecially in the opening
chapters, the social structure, social relationships, and
class distinctions of New England society. She writes with
obvious technical knowledge of regional occupations and
working conditions--the dressmakers, the ministers, the
seamen, etc. She writes with great perception of the
special qualities of the New England mind. In Mrs. Scudder,
the heroine's mother, is embodied that rare quality called
"faculty," which enabled poor, proud peOple to maintain
their pride and their place in society on the slenderest
of resources. Mrs. Marvyn, the hero's mother, is a fine
example of the kind of gloom that settled over the New
England personality after a careful search for the "signs
of salvation" proved fruitless. And all of the local
characters-~the minister eSpecially-—reveal the Puritan
preoccupation with theology.

There are brilliant scenes rooted deeply in the
region. When Mary Scudder and the hero's mother, Mrs.
Marvyn, learn that young Jim Marvyn is lost at sea, they
search the past together for signs of his salvation. But
for every brilliant scene there is a bad one in which Mrs.
Stowe is guilty of sentimentally bad writing:

And then Madame de Frontignac broke out into

a caroling little French song which started

all the birds agound into a general orchestral
accompaniment.

13. Harriet Beecher Stowe The Minister's Wooipg
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1896), p. 225.

37.

She is also cursed with the Victorian affection for the
generalization. She cannot resist proceeding from her own
particular to the general through some kind of discursive
discourse. Every few pages "one sometimes sees . . .," and
she is off.

In The Minister's Wooing Mrs. Stowe deals with some

 

success with the pepular regional theme of the conflict
between indigenous and external values-~in this case moral
values. Dr. HOpkins' theology and moral fervor, Mrs.
Scudder's practical virtues and Mary Scudder's Edwards-
like mysticism (she is curiously like Sarah Pierpont)
pretty well run the complete Spectrum of Puritan virtue.
And against them are set two kinds of evil: a negative
evil as found in the Browns, the local rich family who
fail to live up to their Puritan beliefs; and an active
evil found in the characters of the "French" sub-plot.

In Madam de Frontignac and her American lover, Aaron Burr,
are found all the wickedness of the world, the flesh, and
the devil, against which the virtues of the minister and
his allies do battle.

In many ways the presentation of this confrontation
of values is quite good, but the presence and nature of
the "French" sub-plot reveal the central weakness of this
novel and the central problem of the New England local
colorists. Not knowing what story to tell, they fell

back on telling the old melodramatic story of the senti-

38.

mental tradition.lh The Minister's Wooing is basically

 

the love story of a faithful young girl and an irres-
ponsible young man. They are temporarily separated. A
great deal of sentiment is expended on his supposed death
in a shipwreck. He returns and marries, reformed by
wealth and a good woman's love. The girl, Mary Scudder,
is also loved by the minister, an interesting variant in
that the older lover is a man of God, rather than a rake,
who nobly steps aside into what we are assured will be
future happiness. The other complication is Aaron Burr's
attempt to seduce Mary. Not only do Mary's virtues thwart
him, but they also inSpire virtue in his French mistress,
who returns to her husband and makes the birds sing.

Charles Foster, the sympathetic critic who has
charted the path of Puritanism in Mrs. Stowe's work (it
is very wide in The Minister's Wooing), says, "It is only
in the superficial outlines of plot that we can make Thg
Minister's Wooing accord with the thousand and one nine-
teenth century novels in which the young lady's lover is
apparently lost at sea."15 But this is not the case. The
lost lover is at the very center of the story, as are the
minister's love and Burr's lust. Right there in the middle,

14. Mrs. Stowe's concern over the problem of what
story to tell and how to tell it is revealed in her state-
ment, "strictly speaking, it is necessary to begin with
the creation of the world in order to give a full account
of anything." Ibig., p. 11.

15. Charles Foster, Th; Rungless Ladder, p. 126.

390
the story is just one more variation on a theme from
Charlotte Temple. It is the realistic virtues which are

peripheral. And because this is so, The Minister's Woo—

 

igg is a prime example of the New England regionalists' un-
successful search for a viable form for accurate and co-
casionally profound realistic observations.

The Pearl of Orr's Islapg, which came out in 1862,
reveals the same strengths and weaknesses, the same suc-

cesses and failures, as does The Minister's Wooing.

 

It contains fine descriptions of the Maine coast and suc-
cessful, restrained down-east dialect. It is sprinkled
with the indigenous metaphors which are the special de—
light of regional fiction. Captain Kittridge, just before
dinner, says he is as "hungry as Time in the Primer."16

As in The Minister's Wooing, the secondary characters--

 

Aunt Roxy and Aunt Ruey, Captain Kittridge and others—-
are good, though they and the strong scenes in which they
prevail are more richly comic than in the previous novel.
(Here Mrs. Stowe is dealing with a less refined group of
peOple living close to the wilderness.) Charles Foster
says they "erupt realistically, humorously, and vigorous-

1y."l7

But again Mrs. Stowe loses her way in the search for

16. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Pearl of 0rr'§_I§1and:
A £221 of. the Coast 9;; Maine (Boston, 1331,)? p. 140. ...._..

17. Charles Foster, The Rungless Ladder, p. 146.

40.
form--a search which comes down eventually to the funda-
mental question, "What story shall I tell?" She says,
"Now I cannot think of anything more unlikely and unin-
teresting to make a story of than that old brown "linter"
house of Captain Zephaniah Pennel down on the south end

of 0rr's Island."l8

Having made this decision, she de-
cides, reasonably enough, to tell another kind of story
that won't be so "unlikely and uninteresting." She tells
the melodramatic story of the star—crossed love of Mara,

a mystical and consumptive orphan, and Moses, a headstrong
castaway whose Gothic origins are filled with passion and
Catholicism. The story, which is structurally loose,
marred by great lapses of time, and by the awkward in-
sertion of additional stories within the main plot, follows
the hero and the heroine and their dear friend Sally
through childhood, past the sentimental and redeeming
death of Mara and the redemption of Moses to his marriage
to Sally, a marriage, the main purpose of which is to keep
pure the memory of Mara.

The novel falls into two parts. The central char-
acters are not conditioned by lace; their personalities
are not defined in terms of region. Consequently they are
simply part of the accoutrements of the Scott-Dickens
tradition which fills the vacuum at the center. In the

first half of the novel, while the central characters are

18. Stowe, The Pearl of 0rr's Island, p. 10.

 

41.
children and delightful minor characters hold the stage,
the effect is good, strong, comic, and regional, though
the children themselves are drawn badly enough.19 As
they grow up and dominate the action, however, there is a
great falling off both in regionalism and in quality. And
the failure is again caused by the fact that the central
statement of the novel is not regional-~it is not about
certain peeple in a certain plggg at a certain gygg.

Oldtown Folks, (1869) published the year before Ihg

 

Luck pf Roaring Camp, is probably Mrs. Stowe's most suc—

 

cessful regional novel.) And it is so because she had been
speculating on the problems confronting her and, as a
result, had worked out a fairly comprehensive regionalist
aesthetic.

Henceforth my story must be a cord with three
strands, ineXplicably intertwisted, and appear-
ing and disappearing in their regular intervals,
as each occupies for the moment the prominent
place. And this threefold cord is composed of
myself, Harry and Tina. To show how the pecu-
liar life of old Massachusetts worked upon us,
and determined our growth and character and des-
tinies, is a theme that brings in many personages,
many subjects, many accessories. It is strange
that no human being grows up who does not inter-
twist in his growth the whole idea and Spirit of
his day, that rightly to dissect out his history

19. The children--Moses and Mara--are only stereo-
types representing Harriet's child psychology. She ex-
plains Moses by saying, "Seldom do we meet sensitiveness
0f conscience or discrimination of reflections as the in-
digenous growth of a very vigorous physical deveIOpment."
Mara, on the other hand, was too sensitive and discrimin-
ating for earth. She died of an excess of virtue, a rare,
fatal malady. Ibid., p. 178.

42.

would require one to cut to pieces and analyze

society, law, religion, the metaphysics and

the morals of his times; and as all these

things run back to those of past days, the

problem is still further complicated. The

humblest human being is the sum total of a

column of figures which go back through

centuries before he was born.
Earlier she had had her narrator, Horace Holyoke, say,
"My object is to interpret to the world the New England
life and character in that particular time of its history
which may be called the seminal period."21

Although Oldtown Folks is generally considered her
best novel and although she Speculated with insight and
accuracy on the problems of the regional writer, she
didn't really solve these problems. She didn't find the
prOper form. Her narrative persona is colorless, her
central characters sentimental and melodramatic, her
heroine a ghastly girl in the pattern of Mary and Mara—-
sexless and genteel. Mrs. Stowe also provides those two
staples of sentimental fiction, the foul rake (Ellery
Davenport) and the tragic fallen woman (Emily), who serve
as object lessons to maidens. There are also other melo-
dramatic elements--buried pasts, family secrets, surrepti-
tious meetings, etc.

Still it was her best novel. One reason is that in

20. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks and Sam
Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories (Cambridge, Massachusetts,

1396) , p0 2290

21. Ibid., p. xxiii.

43.
it she makes her best use of the Dickensian tradition.
Many of her regional characters are in reality carica-
tures, and good ones too. Among the finest creations in
the whole of New England local color are the gnarled
Calvinists Crab Smith and his sister Asphyxia (note the
talent for names), who belong among the most chilling
portraits in all New England literature.

Another reason why it is a good book is that it is
a very long one--so long, in fact, that the melodramatic
central story plays a minor part. She may not have found
the right story to tell, but she tried at least to get
away from the wrong one. The result is that while the
realistic virtues are peripheral and the center is weak,
here the center is smaller. Constance Rourke said, "ng-
town Folks--now too little known-~was ostensibly a novel
but actually a crowd of small, episodic sketches on a
colorless string of story, full of pawky humor and packed
with the spare hard background out of which that humor
had sprung."22 Charles Foster agrees by saying, "It must
be admitted that its sketch aspect, evident in such
chapters as "The Old Meeting House," is perhaps its chief
delight, its primary claim on our attention."23

"The Old Meeting House" is a digression, moving away

 

22. Constance Rourke, American Humor:
the National Character (Garden City, N. Y., 1931),u p.7

23. Charles Foster, The Rungless Ladder, p. 173.

 

44.
from the central story toward brilliant genre painting.
In Crab Smith and ASphyxia Mrs. Stowe provides us with one
of several environmental studies; that is, she really
shows the "peculiar life of old Massachusetts" working on
character. With great success she handles what must be
called comedy of manners, providing various portraits of
Calvinists and Anglicans, the latter chiefly satiric.
The confrontation of Anglicanism, an urban and foreign
faith, and the old time religion provides one of the most
important and successful digressive themes. In no other
book are so many of the themes of New England local color
presented with such skill. The only problem is that Mrs.
Stowe hasn't found a way to make them fit.

In the same year that she brought out Oldtown Folks,

 

Mrs. Stowe also published Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside
Stories. These stories contain all the required local
color ingredients--dialect, regional eccentrics and eccen-
tricities, regional mores and values, local humor. And,
interestingly enough, they are framework stories, collected
through the unifying agency of the narrator, Sam Lawson,
who is an excellent example of Mrs. Stowe's superiority

in creating male characters. Although they seem to point

the way toward Deephaven, The quntry_p§_the Pointed

 

Firs, Pembroke, and Edgewater People, they are only a

 

minor achievement because of the nature and quality of the
stories themselves. They are loose, rambling tales and

sketches possessing none of those unifying qualities that

45.

characterize the structure of all first rate short stories.

Mrs. Stowe's last major effort in the field of re—
gional fiction was Poganuc P§0ple (1878). It contains all
of the strengths and weaknesses of her earlier work--but
in a minor key. The sentimental central story and the
sentimental heroine (Dolly, the most autobiographical of
her girls) are here. So are the eXpert little vignettes
of genre painting, the humorous characters, and the pre-
occupation with theology. And importantly, the idyllic
note is here as it is in all her work (it's in Sarah
Jewett too, separating her from Mrs. Freeman and Mrs.
Cooke)--an idyllic note coupled with nostalgia. She said
in a letter to her son Charles, "In it I condense my
recollections of a by-gone era, that in which I was brought
up. The ways and manners of which are now as nearly obso-
lete as the old England of Dickens' stories."2" Whether
this is the nostalgia of an old lady for her lost youth or
a perception of decay doesn't really matter. Others were
to see clearly. One such, whose lower position on the
social ladder gave her a sterner vieWpoint and whose
greater technical control made her a better short story

writer, was Rose Terry Cooke.

24. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Introduction," Poganuc
ieogle and Pink and White Fancy (Cambridge, Massachusetts,
9 g p. Vii.

46.

B. Rose Terry Cooke

Mrs. Cooke, who did most of her writing before her
late marriage and whose short stories were not collected
until quite late, was hardly one to look upon herself as a
pioneer. Coming from an unprepossessing background, she
revealed early a strong streak of the genteel in any number
of sentimental poems. It is here, as F. L. Pattee points
out, that the importance of James Russell Lowell is made
abundantly clear.

She was surprised to find that Lowell, the

editor of the new and exclusive Atlantic,

preferred it [her fiction] to her poetry.

For the first volume of the magazine he

accepted no fewer than five of her homely

little sketches and praised them for their

fidelity and truth.2

Thus, with Lowell showing the way, she became a
pioneer in the field of regional realism.

Many of the subjects treated in one way or another in
Mrs. Stowe's work are found in Mrs. Cooke's work too,
especially in two collections of short stories, Spmebodylg
Neighbors (1884) and Hpckleberri§§_Gathered from Ne
Englapg Hills (1891), and several novels, the best of

which is Happy Dodd (1887). The characters are similar

 

 

to Mrs. Stowe's but come more exclusively from the region's

lower classes.

She dealt more and more with New England
farm and village characters, with common
laborers and nondescript types found in

. 25. F. L. Pattee, A Histo of American Literatu
Since 1820 (New York, 1935 , p. 235: ~ re

47.

country towns--with tight-fisted farmers

and rural deacons and the wgmen they ruled

with patriarchal deSpotism. O
This emphasis was deliberate; her preface to Huckleberries
reveals her concern with the region and its effect on the
individual:

I have called this latest collection of New

England stories by the name of a wild berry

that has always seemed to me typical of the

New England character. Hardy, sweet yet

Spicy, defying storms of heat or cold with

calm persistence, clinging to a poor soil,

barren pastures, gray and rocky hillsides,

yet drawigg fruitful issue from scanty

sources.2
The metaphor cloys a bit today, but as a statement of a
regionalist aesthetic it does not differ substantially
from Mrs. Stowe's.

F. L. Pattee says of Mrs. Cooke's work, "0f the great
mass of fiction dealing with New England life and char-

acter her work excels in humor-~that subdued humor which

"28 0n the other

permeates every part like an atmOSphere.
hand Blair makes reference to "Rose Terry Cooke, who
wrote tales in which humor was an occasional, grim, inci-
dental intrusion."29

26. F. L. Pattee, The Development 9; the American

Short Story: 53 Historical Survey (New York, 1923), w“
p0 175-

 

 

27. Rose Terry Cooke, Huckleberries Gathered from
ng England Hills (Boston, 1891), p. vi.

28. Pattee, American Literature Since 1870, p. 230.

29. Blair, Native American Humor, p. 140.

48.

Together, these partial views present the complete
picture of the characteristic New England doubleness of
the regionalists-~that body of fiction which moves between
the poles of frontier humor on the one hand and grim
Calvinism on the other. And it is eSpecially in diSplaying
the gnarled products of Calvinism that Rose Terry Cooke
displays what Miss Levy calls "an amazing streak of
realism."30

Mrs. Cooke's regional realism goes one important step
beyond Mrs. Stowe's. She is able to bring her realist
point of view into the center of her story. Harriet's
realism remains external; the sentimental tradition still
reigns over the main plot and the central characters. In
Mrs. Cooke's work the central characters are the hypo-
critical deacons, self-righteous farmers and grim Spinsters
of a dying region; the main plot concerns their struggle
for survival while "clinging to a poor soil." The great
distance she travelled down the road of realism can be
seen in her treatment of women-~eSpecially in her willing-
ness to probe--gently, of course-—in areas guarded dili-
gently by Victorian taboos.

People may have their eyes on heaven, but

there is such a thing as physical passion,

even in the so-called gentle sex. Mrs.

Cooke approached this last problem cautiously,

but beneath her careful reticence may be felt

the force of young Sybil Saltonstall's tragic
desire for a man she knew to be unworthy or

30. Levy, New England Quarterly, p. 346.

49.

of "odd" Miss gidd's for a man young enough
to be her son.

After Mrs. Stowe's Mara and Dolly, this is a major step
in the direction of realism.

Mrs. Cooke, genteel as she was, was able to hold
sentiment at bay in many of her stories by keeping them
short and by avoiding love stories. But this is not to
say that she solved the problem of form that plagued Mrs.
Stowe's short stories; for she did so only partially.
Many of her short pieces could more preperly be called

sketches and tales than short stories. They often cover

 

great periods of time-~whole marriages, whole lifetimes.
Although particular scenes are built well, the stories
themselves are diffuse and thin, existing only for the
sake of the particular scenes. They are filled with coin-
cidence and conventional happy endings. Her best stories,
however, show greater control. There is contraction of
time and point of view; there are fewer characters. In
her later stories she finally breaks away for the curse of
the discursive tale, the long narrative beginning. Nine
out of the eleven stories in Huckleberries begin with
direct Speech.

Mrs. Cooke's other big problem was language, and to
this she never really found a solution. Simpson says

"stylistically her work was an interesting combination of

31. Ibid., p. 347.

50.
schoolmarm correctness and well-rendered dialect Speech."32
But there is no "interesting combination" at all. There
is the jarringly imperfect discord of prose moving uncer-
tainly between two idioms. There are fine folk-metaphors.

"I thipk he's small pertaters and few in a
hill."

There is excellent, restrained writing.

Nothing very serious seemed to ail the old
man. He had been rheumatic, taken cold,
gone to bed, and found it was a warm, com-
fortable place, and lain there till the
unused muscles and dulled ci culation be-
came a fixed physical habit.

There is refreshingly accurate observation and description.

She had a long nose, a fallen-in and yet
wide mouth, a distinct chin, and a pair
of weak gray eyes with red lids; all
overshadowed by a severe front of galse
chestnut hair set in stiff puffs.3

But for every passage that exhibits the control of the
realist there is a passage of baroque prose in the worst
genteel tradition.

But Spring at last kissed the land: the

brown sad fields softened in tint, the

brooks laughed, the winter grain Sprung

up afresh on hill and dale, the bluebirds

ventured to call out their gmall encourage-
ments from leafless trees.3

32. Simpson, The Local Colorists, p. 87.

 

33. Rose Terry Cooke, Somebody's Neighbors (Boston,
1884’), p0 2450

 

34. Ibid., p. 232.
35. Ibid., pp. 193‘1940
36. Ibid., pp. 222-223.

51.
Again.

The trees were his conquerors; he knew them
individually. It was his delight to lie at
length under their aerial canOpy and see the
golden fleks of sunshine dance gshwart their
perfect grace and verdure . . .

Inexplicably, Huckleberries has received most of the

 

scant attention that has been paid to Mrs. Cooke's work.
Somebody's Neighbors is a better collection, and it is
so chiefly because of two stories, "Freedom Wheeler's
Controversy with Providence" and "Mrs. Flint's Married
Experience." Freedom Wheeler is, perhaps, the most im-
pressive character she created. He and his wife are
genuine rural New England Calvinists; "The Assembly's
Catechism had been ground into them both . . . and they
quoted its forms of speech by 'an automatic action of

1:138

the unconscious nerve centers. Freedom's defiance of
the Lord and his final humility before the Lord's grace
strike one as genuine. So does his reaction to the deaths
of his children--deaths which are a judgment on and a
cross for Freedom Wheeler-~deaths which are "special pro-
vidences" of a kind that Solomon Stoddard would have
recognized one hundred and fifty years before.

"Mrs. Flint's Married Experience," marred as it is

by a shift in emphasis from the daughter (Mindwell) to

the mother (Mrs. Flint), is still the strongest piece she

37. Cooke, Huckleberries, p. 85.
38. Cooke, Somebody's Neighbors, p. 321.

52-

wrote. The daughter, with all individuality drained out
by her upbringing, the mother, willing to accept the con-
solations of this world, the monstrously hypocritical
deacon she takes as a second husband-~these are all ably
drawn. The themes are hypocrisy and the defenseless
position of women. But most important in addition to this
success in handling character and theme is the mastery of
tone--a mastery achieved but not maintained.

Well, Mindwell [says Mrs. Flint], I have

counselled a good deal about it. I was

happy as the day is long with your father.

I don't say but what I cleaved to this

world consider'ble more than was good for

my growth in grace. He was about the best.

But it pleased the Lord to remove him, and

it was quite a spell before I could really

submit: the nateral man rebelled, now I

tell you. You can't never tell what it is 39

to lose a companion till you eXperience it.
This is right. The hinted dialect, the word "companion,"
the suggestion of sexual pleasure and her ambivalent
attitude toward it, the catechetical language and the
consciousness of God's will all combine to form a rich,
subtle portrait of the rural New England mind. But
this was a tone and a quality she could not maintain. It
is not until the later work of Sarah Orne Jewett that
writing of this quality is maintained.

Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills is

inferior to Somebody's Neighbors. The humor and the

stern realism are there but in smaller doses, and the

390 Mo, p. 368.

53.
sentimentality and gentility of the time are evident
everywhere. Some of the stories in the collection-~"Old
Fashioned Thanksgiving" is an example--are holiday pieces.
Like most holiday pieces, they are very bad. "How Celia
Changed Her Mind" is possibly the best story in the col-
lection. It is a good study of family relationships in
rural, Puritanical New England. In Celia we have a sym-
pathetic,rather than a comic, portrait of an old maid
drawn with great feeling and restraint. She and her more
comic companions in "Ammander" and "Odd Miss Todd" are
certainly closely related to the women who inhabit the
pages of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman.
In fact, like them and unlike Mrs. Stowe, Mrs. Cooke
writes best and most frequently of middle-aged and old
women-~the lonely widows and Spinsters who, in this
regional tradition, become symbols of the region decaying

around them.

C. Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) was always a conscious
and even self-conscious stylist and artist. One thing of
which she was conscious was the tradition from which she
drew her themes and materials; and she was as willing as
anyone else to point out her debt to it--eSpecially to
Harriet Beecher Stowe, who first showed her the way.

A strong motivating force in the career of

Sarah Orne Jewett . . . was Mrs. Stowe's
Th3 Pearl p§_0rr's Island (1862), which

54.
showed her that the familiar Maine village
and country folk were worthy of literary
treatment. 0
She came early to this book; Cary says she read it when
she was thirteen."1
Her debt to Mrs. Stowe was extensive. Not only did

she find in The Pearl p§_0rr's Island and other stories

 

 

proof that literary material lay all around her as she
accompanied her father on his medical rounds; she also
found there the nostalgic tone and the aristocratic point
of view.

The other similarity in Mrs. Stowe's and

Miss Jewett's delineations of New England

has to do with class distinctions. Here

the later writer is more emphatic, for in

her tales the social levels of New England's

democracy stand out with painffii, occasion-

ally almost ludicrous clarity.
Which is to say that Mrs. Stowe and Miss Jewett were
Brahmins while Mrs. Cooke and Mrs. Freeman were of the
folk; and also that Mrs. Stowe and Miss Jewett were more
sentimental, while Mrs. Cooke and Mrs. Freeman tended to
look upon the New England scene with a colder, more
critical eye.

It was, as we have seen, the fate of New England

regionalists to wrestle with certain literary problems--

of language and of form. Mrs. Cooke and Mrs. Stowe never

40. Simpson, The Local Colorists, p. 21.

41. Richard Cary, Sarah Orne Jewett (New York,
1962), p. 23.

 

42. Levy, New England Quarterly, p. 351.

 

55.
discovered an idiom. Miss Jewett did. Horace Scudder
once remarked, "Both Miss Wilkins and Miss Jewett recognize
the very subordinate value of dialect. They give just
enough to flavor the conversation.“3 But this flavor was
genuine.

She [Miss Jewett] had not only the eye, she

had the ear. From childhood she must have

treasured up those pithy bits of local

Speech, of native idiom, which enrich and

enliven her pages. The language her peo le

Speak to each other is a native tongue."*2
And what is equally important is that this native speech
is integrated with the rest of the prose. She is free of
those violent extremes of localism and gentility that mar
the pages of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Cooke.

Although she was able, for the most part, to avoid
the pitfalls of Dickensian imitation, Sarah Jewett was
not so successful in solving the problem of structure as
she was with developing a style blended of the native and
the literary. She was capable of subtle character revela-
tion. One aSpect of this subtlety most attractive to
modern readers is, as Cary points out, that "the ironies

of self-revelation appeal strongly to Miss Jewett.""5

But he is forced to conclude, somewhat reluctantly, that

43. Horace Scudder, quoted in Helen McMahon, Criticism
of Fiction: A_Stud p£_Trends ip_the Atlantic Monthly_ ‘_*
(New York, 1952 , p. 22.

44. Willa Cather, in Sarah Orne Jewett, The Best
Stories pf Sarah Orne Jewett, preface by Willa Gather
(Boston, 1925), p. 10.

 

45. Cary, Sarah Orne Jewett, p. 53.

 

56.
”her defect of narrative skill and vigor is the commonest
critical complaint.“+6 Her short stories, with exceptions
like "The White Heron" and "Miss Tempy"s Watchers," tend
to be diffuse and sketch—like. Her novels are charming,

but vegy thin. Even her masterpiece, The Country pf the

 

Pointed Firs, with its series of sketches strung on the
worn string of a woman's summer adventures, is, for all
its merits, structurally insignificant.

Her strength lay, rather, in her ability to depict
New England characters at a moment when they were "dwind-
ling downward from competence to poverty.”7 She depicts
more men than she has been given credit for, but many are
not carefully drawn. Those which are like Dan'l Gunn and
Almira Todd's brother William are old and emasculated.
They are, however, not her main business.

The primary subject of Miss Jewett's stories

is women: young, middling, and old; depen-

dent and self-sufficient; grim and commercial;

impecunious and well-to-do. They usually face

untenable situations and accept them meekly,

fight them vehemently or simply laugh them

off. The two most numerous groups are the

self-reliant matrons and thi impoverished or

lonely Spinsters or widows. 8

If her strength lay in her characterization, her
significance lay, partially at least, in her ability to
make symbols of her characters. Van wyck Brooks said,

"Her vision was certainly limited . . . but her people

[1'60 Ibid., p. 880
47. Ibid., p. 38.

 

48. Ibid., p. 103.

 

57.

were genuine Yankees and stood for the rest.""9

In the
light of the final (or at least semi-final) statements on
symbolism made by Tindall and Feidelson, this comment

needs qualification. To accommodate realists like Miss
Jewett and Mrs. Freeman, one must distinguish among the
kinds of symbols. There are of course the kinds of sym-
bols that Melville and Whitman used and Hawthorne almost
used. These suggest meanings and relationships apprehended
in non-rational ways. They might, for purposes of this

discussion, be termed transcendental. They somehow involve

 

the world of moral values and the Spirit, and they bring
one to the verge of truths beyond the realm of articula-
tion.50

There are in more realistic work, on the other hand,

what might be called naturalistic symbols. They deal with

 

social values, and they function within social rather than
metaphysical dimensions. They are capable of full or nearly
full explication. Thus, Dreyfoos symbolizes the ignorantly
destructive forces of capitalism in A_Hazard p§_Npp;Fppf
tppgp. It is with Symbols of this second type that Miss
Jewett-~and Mrs. Freeman--succeed. The barren marriages

of impotent old men and their aging sweethearts, the rot-
ting boats on the Maine shore, and the grim old maids
waiting with courage and resignation as their fruitless

lives flicker slowly out are all part of a symbolic history

49. Brooks, New England: Indian Summep, p. 356.

50. This is descriptive and in no 8 '
. . ense exhaustiv
or definitive. e

58.
of northern New England--a history told, fugue-like, in a
series of counterpointed Symbols.
But there are limits to Miss Jewett's picture, in-
herent in the very real talent of a woman who always

51

worked within narrow limits. These limits are, para-
doxically, her greatest strength and her greatest weak-
ness. For while they are the source of her wonderfully
smooth style and her sweetness of tone, they keep her from
the tragic heights and depths that her younger colleague,
for all her faults, occasionally achieved. Cary says,

Voluntarily addicted to graciousness, affa-

bility, and resignation, Miss Jewett never

develOpS a competence to deal with the trag-

Efiiefiifiikéé’i‘fiufiiié‘ STEM???” "hi“ mark
Cary claims however that Miss Jewett deals with the
wretched and the wicked, and he cites such stories as
"The Courting of Sister Wisby" and "The Town Poor." The
limitation is not in the subject matter; it is in the tone,
which is also "the bedrock of Miss Jewett's continuing
appeal."53

Scudder saw the problem eighty years ago. "Sarah

Orne Jewett has difficulty making her characters 'act for
themselves.’ At present . . . they cling to her skirts

51. Francis Otto Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett
(Boston, 1929), pp. 89-90.

52. Gary, Sarah Orne Jewett, p. 49

53. 19;g., p. 48.

59.

and she leads them about with her."54 What he means is
that everything she treats becomes part of the pattern
imposed by her unifying tone and style, which are them-
selves the product of a single emotional reSponse. Com-
pared to this, Mrs. Freeman's inquiring mind puts her on
the side of--if not the angels--at least George Eliot.
The emotional reSponse of Miss Jewett's is nostalgic, and
the effect is romantic and genteel.

A faint odor of rose leaves emerges. You

are reminded of her inability to portray

passion in her books. She always paints

the gentler emotions: blinding hates and

jealousies, the fever of lust gnd the thirst

of avarice never throb there.5

Throughout a productive career that stretched almost
thirty years from the 1870's into the first decade of the
twentieth century, iiss Jewett tried her hand at a wide

variety of literary forms--sketches, short stories, frame-

work stories and novels. Old Friends and New (1877),

 

her first collection of short stories (she produced nine)
was not very good. Though it contained many of the ele-
ments of her later, better work, most of the sketches are
unsatisfying for two reasons. They are too diffuse;

there is simply not enough structure on which to hang her
reflections. tore important, however, there is a failure
in tone--a failure to escape the danger against which she

fought all through her career, that is, the patronizing

54. McMahon, Criticism pf_£iption, p. 49.

55. Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett, pp. 144-145.

60.
tone of the ariStocrat. There are, however, redemptive
qualities such as the Hawthorne-like Gothicism of "Lady
Ferry" and the fine genre painting of "A Bit of Shore
Life."
At the beginning of "A Late Supper" she states what
is to be a lifetime awareness, revealing that she had

indeed learned well the lesson of The Pearlpf 0rr's

 

Island:

One never hears much about Brookton when

one is away from it, but for all that,

life is as important and exciting there

as it is anywhere; and it is like every

other town, a miniature world, with its

great peOple and small peOple, bad peOple

and good peOple, its jealousy and rivalry,

kindness and patient heroism.5
Notice that the story is not only interesting (an impor-
tant justification of local color), it is representative--
"like every other town." This is the naturalistic symbol
of the realist.

Among the best of her later collections are The King
pf Folly_I§land, and Opher Pepple (1888) and A Native pg
E1291, and Other Tales (1893). In the former the stories
range from very loose sketches like "Low Lane" to very
tightly structured stories like "Miss Tempy's Watchers."
These short stories reveal Miss Jewett's lifelong preoccu-
pation with the technical problems of point of view and

with the relation of point of view to tone. "The Courting

of Sister Wisby" is a frame story; "The Landscape Chamber,"

- 56. Sarah Orne Jewett, Old Friends and New (Boston,
1879), p. 81.

61.
among others, uses the first person narrator, a device she
used frequently to capture subtle contrasts among char-
acters, classes, and cultures.

Two of the best stories in the collection are "The
Landscape Chamber" and "Miss Tempy's watchers." The first
is what Miss Jewett calls a "glimpse of a defeatedlife."57
It is the story of a well-bred girl and her father, who
"fears want, yet seems to have no power to provide against
it."58 They live in--in fact, are almost imprisoned by--

a shabby, once magnificent, old house. This is an ob-
viously Hawthorne-like story of people imprisoned by the
past and defenseless against the future. And because the
Flowering is past, there is no Holgrave--there is no solu-
tion. The vision here is unusually bleak for Miss Jewett,
who is usually more wistful and nostalgic.

In "Miss Tempy's Watchers" several old ladies sit up
through the night with the body of their late friend, Miss
Tempy. In excellent dialog they reveal Tempy's character
and their own. The story reveals Miss Jewett's ability to
depict the subtle relationships between characters and her
fine artistic restraint in dealing with the elemental. One
of the watchers says of death, "'Tis a great thing for any-
body to have got through, ain't it?"59

57. Sarah Orne Jewett, Thp_§ipg_p£ Folly Island, and
9&22§,Pe0ple (Boston, 1888), p. 95. —-—

58. lpiQ., p. 100.

59. Jewett, The Countpy pf phg_gpinted Firs and
91311521: Stories (Garden City, N. Y., 1947), p. 239.

62.

A_Native pf Wippy contains, along with rambling and
sentimental stories like "Decoration Day" and several bad
stories about the incoming Irish (she never wrote well
about new and foreign groups), three stories that diSplay
the durable elements and themes of New England regionalism.
They are "A Native of Winby," "The Failure of David Berry,"
and "The Flight of Betsey Lane." The first, which is one
of her best, deals most explicitly with emigration as a
central fact of New England's decay and contains Sarah's best
insight into the relationship of decaying New England to
the brash, successful West it had spawned. The whole
village, but SSpecially Abby Hender, a typically heroic,
middle-aged Jewett heroine, await the return of a native
who had gone west and found fortune. They await him with
ambivalent feelings--with both pride and resentment. And
then the native, Laneway (note the significant name),
arrives and reacts first with disappointment but then with
joy as he finds the old values submerged, perhaps, but
Still intact. An example of significant detail at work
in a realistic study occurs when he says to Abby of his
boyhood home, "It was difficult at first to find exactly
where the house was; even the foundation had disappeared."60

"The Failure of David Berry" is not a typical Jewett
story; it is more like a Freeman story or one by Rebecca

Harding Davis. It deals with the gradual destruction by

60. Jewett, g_Native pf Winby and Other Tales (Boston,
1893), p. 90

63.

the impersonal forces of industrialization of an indivi-
dual, a shoemaker, who represents the old, self-reliant
order. In Sam wescott, Miss Jewett depicts, as She seldom
does, the new breed of man--the corporate man-~who is
capable of destroying an individual with no remorse at
all.’ The confrontation of values is well conceived and
points the way that realism is to go. However, the story
is marred, almost ruined, by the sentimental ending. It
is almost as though Miss Jewett and the other ladies of
the New England regional tradition suffer a failure of
nerve when they finally confront the conflict at the center
of the cultural decline. They fall back on sentimental
cliches. They leave the center hollow, and the failure
of nerve becomes a failure of form.

"The Flight of Betsey Lane" has always been one of
Miss Jewett's most popular stories. It is rich in humor
and folk Speech. There is no condescension here. The
tone is affectionate, and the reader sees in Betsey that
success in failure and dignity in poverty that mark so
many of the best New England heroines. Betsey becomes an
egalitarian symbol in the way that Huck and Jim are egali-
tarian symbols. Aunt Lavinia can say of her, "She'd been
a very understandin' person, if she had the advantages

some does."61

One story of Miss Jewett's which has always been

61. Jewett, The Country pf the Pointed Firs, p. 197.

64.

admired is "The White Heron," which presents representa-
tions or symbols that do not fit into the historical and
social limits of the other stories. Here she is most like
Hawthorne, as she tells of a young girl who must choose
between a heron and a young man who is hunting the bird.
The young girl keeps the birds secret; "she is truer to
nature than to the potential lover she is dimly conscious

62

of in the young hunter." Whether one agrees with

Matthiessen's choice or not (and one is tempted to see
negative patterns in so sterile a choice), one can see the
complexity and psychological involvement of the symbol.

Matthiessen points out that Mrs. Freeman eSpecially liked

this story.

Mary E. Wilkins, who had just printed her
first book of New England stories, "A Hum-
ble Romance," and had received from Miss
Jewett an enthusiastic letter of appre-
ciation, now answered: You are lovely to
write me so about my stories, but I never
wrote any story equal to your "White
Heron." I don't think I ever read a short
story, unless I except Tolstoy's "Two
Deaths," that so appealed to me. I would
not have given up that birg any more than
you would if he came back. 3

However, Miss Jewett did not often write this way, and when
Mrs. Freeman tried, she did it rather badly.

Like the other New England regionalists who searched
for a viable mode for their matter, Miss Jewett tried her

hand at novels. She wrote three: A QQEQEEY 22§£2£.(1884),

62. Matthiessen, Sarah Orng Jpwepp, p. 83.

63. 1pm., pp. 83-81..

65.
A_Marsh Island (1885), and The Tory Lover (1901); the last

 

 

one a historical novel of no consequence.

In g CountryDoctor Miss Jewett recalls with nostalgia
and precision an older day when men were closer to each
other and to nature. In contrast to the new jerry-built
New England in which she lived, she points to the old,
honest days when everyone knew "the workman and the work."
And these were the days and this was the place where life
was more rhythmic and elemental:

While death seems far more astonishing and
unnatural in a city, where the great tide

of life rises and falls with little apparent
regard to the sinking wrecks, in the country
it is not so. The neighbors themselves are
the ones who dig the grave and carry the
dead, whom they or their friends have made
ready, to the last resting place. With all
nature looking on,--the leaves that must
fall, and the grass of the field that must
wither and be gone when the wind passes
over,--living closer to life and in plainer
sight of death, they have a different sense
of the mysteries of existence. They pay
homage to death rather than to the dead.64

It is in such tones and moods that She is at her best.
The central theme of A Country Doctor is a girl's
decision to become a doctor. It is, as Cary points out,
"as close to a problem novel as Miss Jewett ever comes."65
The alternative to a medical career is, of course, mar-

riage. Miss Jewett makes an attempt to deal with the con-

flict as a social question, but she doesn't really succeed.

_ 64. Sarah Orne Jewett, A Country Doctor (Boston,
1884): Pp. 38‘390

65. Cary, Sarah Orne Jewett, p. 141.

66.

Of marriage her heroine is able to say with ease (perhaps
speaking, more than was intended, for the author), "It
does not belong to me."66 And in the end Miss Jewett is
guilty of evading the problem after she has brought it
up. The girl treats her own choice as socially irrele-
vant. "I know better and better that most women are made
for another sort of existence."6

Here on the verge of finding a valid longer form--
one step away from the realistic novel--Miss Jewett draws
back and says she doesn't mean it. The novel has other
faults as well. The plot is thin and occasionally sus-
pended for genre painting; parts of it are melodramatic,
and the love story anemic. While the lower class char-
acters are uniformly strong, the aristocratic characters
are poor. George Gerry, the lover, is so colorless that
the heroine is not be to blamed for her choice. The doctor,
an idealization of Miss Jewett's father, is impossible and
is the source of lapses into fine writing--lapses that
Miss Jewett seldom makes. "The benefaction of his presence
was felt by every one," she says. The heroine, like Mrs.
Stowe's Dolly, is a sublimation of the author, and not
very successful.

A_Marsh Island is much thinner than A Country Doctor.
Its central situation is one with which Miss Jewett liked

to deal, the contact of the rural citizen and the sophisti-

66. Jewett, A Country Doctor, p. 325.

670 Ibid., p. 3270

67.
cated summer boarder. The main story is a love story,
and.Miss Jewett didn't write them very well. Her heroine,
like Mrs. Stowe's, is antiseptic and terribly deficient
in sexuality. The hero, Dick Dale, is an urban painter
"familiar with the rural interiors in England and France."
Here as always she is at her best with characters who are
eccentric or who can be caricatured or who can be identi-
fied with regional characteristics, such as Farmer Owen
and Jim Fales, who are salty enough down-easters. In
such characters, in their dialog, in folk humor, and in
certain passages of genre painting her sure hand is at
work. But these are partS--fragments. There is no whole;
only the vacuum at the center.

Form and tone combine most successfully for Miss
Jewett in Deephaven (1877) and The Country pf the Pointed
Ei§§_(1896). They are both episodic stories in which
summer visitors visit the rural Maine coast and record the
highly impressionistic patterns of their experiences.

The region is revealed to and through the eyes of the
visitors, and the interplay of urban and rural values is
subtle and fine. Cary points out of the young visitors
of Deephaven:

They have the advantage of coming freshly and

reacting originally to an unfamiliar com-

munity. The local plight is more apparent to

them, for it contrasts sharply with the urban,

Brahmig surroundings to which they are accus-
tomed. 8

68. Cary, Sarah ane Jewett, p. 134.

68.

In Deephaven she is especially conscious of wanting
to get the picture straight. She refers to her "uncon-
scious desire to make some sort of explanation to those
who still expected to find the caricatured Yankee."69
To get the accuracy she wants, she includes carefully
detailed descriptions of old Maine houses and extended
discussions of local occupations and customs. And of
course she uses skillfully her fine ear for native idiom
and metaphor. She has Mrs. Bonny, a superb comic char-
acter, say:

That's my oldest brother's wife, Clorinthy

Adams that was. She's well featured, if

it were not for her nose, and that looks

as if it had been thrown at her, and she

wasn't particular about having it on firm,

in flopeiooisgifiging.gobetter one. She sets

y er 0 g
Earlier Miss Jewett had said, "It was curious to notice
in this quaint little fishing village by the sea, how
clearly the gradations of society were defined."71 And
she observes them, getting fine comedy-of-manners effects
depicting the contrasts between the older generation and
the new, the high-born and the poor, the rural and the
urban. The structure made the contrasts eSpecially
available.

But Deephaven is more than a picture of social con-
trasts; it is the picture of a peOple and of a place and
of the movement of a society. The people and the place

69. Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven (Boston, 1893), p. 3.

70. gp;g,, p. 40.

710 Ibid., p. 810

69.
stand as symbols that depict the social movement. Matt-
hiessen says, "She was aware now, as she commenced to
fill in the outlines of Deephaven, of how many things in

nature stood as symbols to her mind."72

But it was not
only nature but people and places that stood "as symbols
to her mind." One of the finest passages in the book
deals with the discovery of Brandon House and the story

of Miss Katherine Brandon. The Spinster was beautiful,
correct, kind, useful, and sterile--a nobility with
nothing following after. And the house--, "It was impos-
sible to imagine any children in the old place; everything
was for grown peOple; even the stair-railing was too high
to slide down."73 But for all its virtues Qggphgygp is

a thin book, as Miss Jewett, in after years, admitted. It

shies away from deep emotion and is content with sentiment

and gentility.

 

The Country p§_the Pointed Firs is Miss Jewett's
masterpiece. It was written twenty years after Deephaven,
and its superiority to that earlier work lay in its maturity
of tone. Matthiessen points out:

The key to the difference between her early

and her late work lies rather in a remark

she made afterwards to Willa Gather: The

thing that teases the mind over and over

for years and at last gets itself put down

rightly on paper--whether ittle or great,

it belongs to literature.

72. Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett, p. 49

73. Jewett, Deephaven, p. 25.

74. Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett, p. 103.

70.
And when she got it down, it was free of the gentility
of the earlier work; and the sentiment had been refined
to a kind of nostalgic but courageous lament for the old
days and the old values--a lament that was also an in-
dictment of the new, industrial age. Nrs. Fosdick (speak-
ing for Miss Jewett) says:

There, it does seem so pleasant to talk with

an old acquaintance that knows what you know.

I see so many of these new folks nowadays,

that seem to have neither past nor future.

Conversation's got to have some root in the

past, or else you've got to explain every

remark you make, and it wears a person out.75
And again:

What a lot 0' queer folks there used to be

about here, anyway, when we was young,

Almiry. Everybody's just like everybody

else now; nobpgy to laugh about and nobody

to cry about.

The characterization is superb. One after another the
characters are brought forth until they become a medley
of counterpointed Symbols telling the story of a region
and of the durable human qualities that shine through any
conditioning of time and place. One such character is
Captain Littlepage, who, like the ancient mariner, is a
compulsive talker; and he talks of the decline of New
England which he himself represents. There is Joanna,
who lives alone on Shell Heap Island, "a dreadful small
place to make a world of." Mrs. Todd's brother William

lives a life significant both in its dignity and its

75. Jewett, The quntgy pf_the Pointed Firs, p. 58.

 

76. Ibid., p. 600

71.
futility. Mrs. Todd says of him:

He ought to have made something 0' himself

bein' a man an' so like mother; but though

he's been very steady to work, an' kept up

the farm, an' done his fishin' too right

along, he never had mother's spap an' power 0'

seein' things just as they be.

Most important there is Almira Todd-~strong, proud, dig-
nified, noble; but forsaken, lonely, and childless. In
her dignity and Emersonian self-reliance she stands for
New England's past; in her isolation and childlessness
she predicts its future.

Willa Gather was an enthusiastic admirer of The
Countpy pf_the Pointed Firs. She said it is "so tightly
built and significant in every design. The design is,
indeed, so happy, so right, that it seems inevitable; the
design is the story and the story is the design."78 One
is tempted to agree, but then much depends on the meaning
of the word design. Certainly the design--"scaffolding,"
Matthiessen called it--is not a plot. Miss Jewett's re-
curring themes of man and nature, the present and the past,
and the rural and the urban are there, but they are not
in the plot. Gary's analysis is excellent:

Several unifying factors are continuously

at work in this para-novel and an over-all

pattern, though imprecise, is discernible.

A speculative kind of unity is furnished

by the peripatetic presence of the narra-

tor. . . . A firmer integration emerges

from the establishment of two symbolic

77. Ip;d., p. 6.

78. Gary, Sarah Orne Jewett, p, 147.

 

72.

focal points, the school house and the Bowden

Place. . . . A third tissue of unity grows

out of the Spaced ceremonials of funeral,

visits, tribal reunion, and wedding. 7
So in the last analysis this masterpiece achieves unity
externally~-through tone and symbol-—but not organically.
The unity is in the artist not the art; it is empathic
not sympathetic. Thus, Kiss Jewett did not solve the
problem of form; she simply avoided it.

The New England regional tradition was a limited
tradition. Perhaps its chief limitations were intellectual.
In place of a coherent political and social philOSOphy and
in place of a comprehensive world view, it came equipped
only with nostalgia and, in mrs. Cooke's best stories, an
honest but uncritical talent for realistic observation.
Even these observations were limited by the genteel
values of society in general and the magazine publishing
world in particular. These intellectual limitations
became structural flaws. The tradition produced short
story masterpieces ("Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with
Providence," "Miss Tempy's watchers"); but in the longer
form, to which all the writers aSpired, this failure of
intellect became a vacuum at the center of the story. Be-
cause these women reSponded to the declining world around
them, in a sense, without thinking, they never wrote a

really vital regional novel. They never discovered what

story it was that they had to tell.

79. ibido, pp. lh9’1500

CHAPTER III
THE GREAT COLLECTIONS

Speaking of the literature of the last thirty years
of the nineteenth century, Rudolf and Clara Kirk say, "By
operation of the law of supply and demand, the short
stories, abundant in quantity and excellent in quality,
are forthcoming because they are wanted [by the magazines]."1
Another way to put it is to say that the magazines, in
setting up criteria for publishable material, created a
working aesthetic. The New England regionalists, by con-
forming to these criteria and by sharing with one another
both problems and themes, created a tradition. Mary
Wilkins Freeman belonged to this tradition because she
conformed, encountered technical problems, and develOped
regional themes.

She began writing seriously around 1880; and, at the
beginning of her career, had some success writing child-

ren's literature for magazines like Wide Awake. In 1881

 

she wrote and sold her first story for adults-~a poor,
atypical piece she later tried to forget. Henry Lanier
quotes her as saying:
I wrote my first adult story, a fifty dollar~
prize tale, for a Boston paper. It was called

"A Shadow Family," and was a poor imitation of
Dickens. I loaned it and it was never returned,

1. Clara and Rudolf Kirk, William Dean Howells
(New York, 1962), p. 63.

 

73.

7h.

and no c0py exists.2
It was printed in January, 1882. After this false start,
she found her way fairly quickly. In 1883 Harper's Bazaar
published two of her better stories, "Two Old Lovers" and
"A Tardy Thanksgiving." Finally in June, 1884, she reached
the "big time." H. M. Alden, who was to be her literary
adviser for many years, accepted "A Humble Romance" for
Harper's.3 The long partnership between author and
journal had begun. Occasionally she demanded more money;
once or twice she engaged in minor defections; frequently
she published elsewhere what Harper's didn't want. But
for forty-five years she was basically a Harper's writer.
In 1887 almost all of the short stories of the period
1881-86 were gathered into a collection called g Humble
Romance and Other Stories. In 1891 Harper and Brothers
brought out a second collection, g_New England Nun and
Other Stories. These two collections contain almost all
her first-rate short stories.

The ladies of the New England regional tradition
had produced many fine short stories before twenty-seven
of Mrs. Freeman's were gathered into g Humble Romance.
Mrs. Cooke's "Freedom Wheeler" and Miss Jewett's "Lady
Ferry" and "A White Heron" had been printed. Diffusion,

2. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Best Short Stories
g§_Ma E. Wilkins Freeman, ed. Henry W. Lanier (NeW'York,
1927 , p. ix.

’ 3. Edward Foster, Nagy E. Wilkins Freeman (New York,
1956), PP. 55-59.

75.

description, and summary narration--the faults of the
sketches and tales of an earlier period--had been over-
come. For the most part, the technical difficulties had
been solved. The form, as she read it in 1hg_Atlantic
and elsewhere, lay ready at hand; and she used it well
from the beginning.
Babette Levy claims that Mrs. Freeman lacks restraint.“
On the other hand, Claude Simpson says, "With.Mary E.
Wilkins Freeman . . . the short story achieved a degree
of artistry and controlled form seldom found in her nine-
teenth century contemporaries."5 They are, of course,
both right in different times and different places.
There is naturally a wide range of quality and technique
in a collection of twenty-seven stories which, in the
first edition, ran to more than four hundred pages. Some
stories, like "Two Old Lovers," are temporally loose and
tend to wanderthrough the years; others, like "A Tardy
Thanksgiving," have tremendous concentration. In many,
like "A Taste of Honey," there are unflinching glances at
what Canby calls "the influence of a hard unlovely life
upon temperament,"6 while others, like "An Honest Soul"
and "A Moral Exigency," are thin, slight, and sentimental.

h. Babette Levy, "Mutations in New England Local
Color," 32! England Quarterly, XIX (September, l9h6), 354.

5. Claude M. Simpson 22g Local Colorists: Americgg
£9512. $2222.51. 1852-1200 (fiew York, 1950), p. 64.

6. Henry Seidel Canby, §_Study g; ghg_Short Stag!
(New York, 1943), p. 58.

76.
In some cases it isn't so much that she loses artistic
control of her material as that she loses emotional con-
trol of herself. She averts her eyes from the forbidding
scene, and the result is a loss of tone which is almost
always serious because she had no intellectual foundation
to rely on.

Part of the control that Simpson Speaks of can be
seen in her occasional mastery of point-of-view. Although
many stories-~including some good ones--are told from the
traditional omniscient point of view, others, like "A
Tardy Thanksgiving" and "A Mistaken Charity," achieve an
objectivity and impersonality that point in the direction
of Hemingway and other twentieth century writers. In "A
Symphony in Lavender" and other stories she uses first
person narrators. Edward Foster singles out "Gentian"
as an example of another important modern technique:

In "Gentian" Miss Wilkins moves far toward

one of the shrewdest devices of the modern

writer--restriction of subjectivity to the

chieanctor. "Gentian" is the stary of one

woman, 1t 18 finely concentrated.

Many of her techniques are of the kind Howells
praised. Her stories are character studies; the emphasis
is on character not plot. And the characters are revealed
dramatically not analytically or descriptively. many of
the stories, like "A Tardy Thanksgiving," begin with dialog;

others with the characters caught in revealing action or

7. Foster, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, p. 72.

77.
attitude. The first story, "A Humble Romance," begins
with the following dramatic picture:

She was stooping over the great kitchen sink,

washing the breakfast dishes. Under foster-

ing circumstances, her slenderness of build

might have resulted in delicacy or daintiness;

now the harmony between strength and task had

been repeatedly broken, and the result was

ugliness. Her finger joints and wrist bones

were knotty and out of proportion, her elbows,

which her rolled up sleeves diSplayed, were

pointed and knobby, her shoulders bent, her

feet Spread beyond their natural bounds . . .8
The sentences are direct and tend to be short. Every-
where the language is idiomatic, pointed, and controlled.
Dialect is controlled and significant.

"You have always been very fond of math-
ematics, haven't you, Mrs. Troy," said the
minister in his slow retreat.

"Lor, yes. I can't remember the time
when I wa'n't crazy to cipher."y

Here is Speech used to distinguish both character and
class.

These last two points about description and Speech
reveal the source of Mrs. Freeman's great strength--her
powers of observation. Her art was the art of seeing all
the little details and selecting from them those which
would carry her insights and themes. Scudder saw this in
his review of g_flgy England Nun. "Her art lies in her
selection," he said. She achieves her effects by "holding
steadily before the mind the central, vital idea to the

8. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, A Humble Romance and
9mm $2222.82, (Boston, 1887), p. 1.

9' M': I30 369°

78.

n10

exclusion of all by-thoughts. Henry Lanier was de-

pressingly genteel and excessively lauditory, but he did
reSpond to what was fundamental in her art.

Comprehendingly viewed, there's no such thing

as an insignificant detail, whether of a but-
terfly's wings or a human being--as the Chinese
painter has known for thousands of years, and
Count Keyserling has recently discovered.

These individual minutiae grow from something
inside. They flare with beauty and signifi-

cance when they take their place in the pattern.11

That this was the source of Mrs. Freeman's strength has
always been recognized. After the publication of A New

England Nun, the Bookman reviewer said, "Her gift is that

 

of Jean Francois Millet, to see the symbolism of homeli-

ness, the sacred pathos of the daily toil of dutiful

lives."12 Forty years later Arthur Hobson Quinn said,

"What attracted attention was the art with which she pro-

ceeded to take the very humblest forms of life and interest

her readers by embuing these characters with some quality

that made them memorable."l3
Lanier provides the label for Mrs. Freeman's art--

and for that of the other regional realists as well. It

is "realism of the significant detail." The details,

which are at the basis of this art, are, of course, care-
10. Horace Scudder quoted in Helen McMahon, Criticism

9§_Fiction: A_Study Q£ Trends in the Atlantic Mgnthly (New
York, 1952). pp. 33-3a.

ll. Freeman, Ih§_Bes§_§tpries gf_fiary Wilkins Free-
m, an, p0 Viiie

12. "Mary E. Wilkins," Bookmgg England , I (Decem-
ber, 1891), 103.

 

13. A. H. Quinn, American Fiction, gg Historical and
QEItical Survey (New York, 1936), p._K33- ‘“'“—‘

 

 

fully observed and faithfully rendered. They are Signi—
ficant for two reasons: they are indigenous and they are
representative. They are particular to the region and to
conditions in the region, and they reveal the effect of
the region on character. By revealing the interplay
between region and person and among regionally—conditioned
persons, the details become a symbolic statement of and
judgment on the indigenous culture. Finally by diSplaying
fundamental emotions and virtues and vices within a re-
gional context, this art achieves universal statements or
insights through and within the regional. Foster put it
this way:

One of the quiet sources of richness in the

earlier stories and novels was the restrained

employment of symbolism. . . . it is felt

lightly in virtually all of Miss Wilkins'

writing. The symbols work their way pre-

cisely because they seem to emerge from

ordinary observation and casual reflection;

they blend easily with surface realism be-

cause, for the most part, they do not suggzst

a conscious striving for symbolic effect.

Among those few who have concerned themselves with
the question, there is some agreement on the nature of
Mrs. Freeman's major themes. Charles M. Thompson pointed
out, "At least seventeen of the stories are tales of hap-

piness postponed, or misery caused by an unbending will."15

Years later Babette Levy saw in Mrs. Freeman's short

lh. Foster, Mayy E, Wilkins Freeman, p. 1A7.

 

15. Charles Miner Thompson, "Miss Wilkins--An
Idealist in Masquerade," Atlantic Monthly, LXXXIII (May,
1899), 671.

80.
stories a great interest in the "rebellion of the weak."16
Foster interprets many stories as conflicts resulting from
the character's need for personal fulfillment on the one
hand and the pressure to conform to the "village code" on
the other. I. H. Herron considers the mind's fight
against the forces of evil as a major theme. To these
she adds the themes of decay, environmentally retarded
growth, revolt from convention.17 Perhaps to get a clear
picture of Mrs. Freeman's thematic range and to see the
areas of common reSponse it elicited from critics it is
necessary to distinguish in leQ among her themes. The
distinction can be made between historical (or cultural)
themes and psychological themes. Of course it must be
recognized that the distinction is a critical convenience
and does not reflect any dichotomy in her work.

One of Mrs. Freeman's chief psychological concerns
is with the problem of personal fulfillment within the
limits of the regional environment. This personal fulfill-
ment is sought in terms of others-~in terms of the seeker's
place in the community. Her heroines need to love someone
or something, and they need to be loved. They also need
to function in the community; they need to serve and be
served. And finally they need respect or recognition--

recognition of their talent or their dignity or their

16. Levy, New England Quarterly, p. 355.

17. Ina M. Herron, The Smgll_lgwp lp_American Litera-
ture (Durham, North Carolina, 1939). PP. 91-95.

8l.
place. When these necessities of self are threatened by
the code by which the community lives, the characters
revolt. But it should be noted that they revolt—~as they
lie and connive--for personal not ideological reasons.

In Mrs. Freeman's moral perSpective the greatest
psychological barrier to love, service, and reSpect is
pride, envisioned as a compulsive convolution of the will.
This pride is her second major theme. Another barrier,
closely related to pride, is duty. Many of her heroines,
like the central character of "A Taste of Honey," are so
encircled by their own compulsion to duty that they are
cut off from those who offer love and fulfillment. Thus,
the tragic consequence of both pride and duty is isolation.
And the isolated life is a blasted, wasted one. Foster's
comment is illuminating.

We now Speak of the alienation of man from

the universe, from other men and from him-

self, and usually in existential terms. But

this sense of the human predicament is not a

new thing. Marylgilkins knew it but not as

deeply as Kafka.

Some of her strongest stories are of peeple who, in their
isolation, must resort to subterfuge and deception-~of
self or another--to escape, into insanity if necessary,
from the unbearable consequences of isolation. In her
concept of isolation as the product of internal rather

than external forces she comes closer to the tragic

vision of Hawthorne and Melville than do any of the other

18. Foster, Mayy E. Wilkins Freeman, p. 160.

 

82.
New England ladies.

Mrs. Freeman's historical or social themes grow out
of her psychological ones or, at least, are represented
by the characters depicted in all their psychological
twists and deceptions. Her characters are prisoners of
place and time. Simpson describes it this way: "Her
distinctive tone derives from the sense of decline and
narrowed Opportunity in small New England towns now past
their peak of importance and vigor."19 The place was
small and the means were meager. Over and over she was
to note in a character the need to perform on a bigger
stage. She saw clearly and she recognized what she saw.
The tenets of environmental determinism, had she known
them, would have been most congenial.

And she was aware of time. Both Mrs. Stowe and Miss
Jewett were nostalgic. They looked back with affection
to what Mrs. Stowe called "good old catechising, church-
going, school-going, orderly times."20 Mary Wilkins Free-
man, however, is like Mrs. Cooke. She observes the re-
§gyt. But no New Englander is devoid of a sense of the
past and she sees the present as a consequence of the
past. Foster argues that she was aware of the interplay
of past and present because she lived in both.

Spiritually she was obliged to live in at

least three ages--the Puritan village of

the late eighteenth century which still

19. Simpson, The Local Colorists, p. 64.

20. Levy, New England Quarterly, p. 344.

83.

survived to a degree in Randolph; the vigorous

idealism of Concord in the l8hO's in books and

faintly in the spirit of Brattleboro and in

the minds of her editors; and the relative

rigidity and decadence2$f her immediate en—

v1ronment in Randolph.

She sees the present as a consequence of the past
chiefly in two ways. First, the past had set up the
moral limits within which the present Operated. Her
people are Puritans. Their faith may be weaker; their
fervor may have subsided, but the moral habits of Puri—
tanism--the pride, the wilfulness, the sense of sin, the
compulsion to truth in the face of mercy and the compul-
sion to duty in the face of love--these all remain.
Secondly, her characters are encircled by the past because
the present was a constriction of the past. Her people
are the thin, poor bearers of noble names, the ends of
noble lines, and the hoarders of what was left of fortunes
and honors. Many of her eccentrics are driven to their
strange ways by the demands made of them by their own
sense of the past.

These themes are communicated through the characters
and the situations in which they find themselves. And
the characters were based frequently on peOple she knew.
She denied this of course; J. E. Chamberlin reported the
following after an interview with Mrs. Freeman:

She does not go about at all looking for

"material" for her stories. She never puts
Randolph people into them; though she has,

21. Foster, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, p. 80.

8h.

indeed, put into them dead and gone peOple.
Barnabas, in "Pembroke" with the awful will,
was a man who had livedua

But this was piety and not true at all. Her neighbors
later in Metuchen, New Jersey, knew what she was doing

and got mad about it. And Foster says of her earlier

work:

For characters and situations, Miss Wilkins
went directly to her own experience and that
of her family and friends. She and her own
peOple were at the center: her own exper-
ience of life and death, her disappointment,
her phantasies often projected into middle-
aged and elderly women, her mother and father,
Grandfather LothrOp and his wife, and the
aunts and uncles of Randolph--eSpecially the
pattern of weak husband and strong wife. In
herself and in her immediate family, she
knew the life, the cultural ideal, the char-
acter traits of the middle-class New Englang
villager. She wrote of what she knew best.

Elsewhere Foster says of these relatives of Mrs. Freeman,
"Work, Thrift, Family, Gentility, the righteousness of
the Ten Commandments--her men and women folks agreed

in worshipping at these altars."24

Which is to say of
both her point of view and her material, as Pattee said,
"When she approached literature, therefore, it was as a
daughter of the Puritans, as one who had been nurtured in
25

repression."
22. J. Edgar Chamberlin, "IuiSS Mary E. WilL. :ins at
Randolph, rassachusetts," Critic (biarch 5, l8 8), p. 156.
23. Foster, figyy_§. Wilkins Freemgp, pp. 64-65.
2hr. lflg’e, p. 200

25. F. L. Pattee, A Hi of American Literature
Since 1870 (New York,l ,‘53 T‘s-£24

 

 

 

0(3

 

85.

As one would expect in a volume of twenty-eight
short stories, there is great variety--not only in theme
but also in quality. The stories range from masterpieces
to very bad popular fiction. Most of the inferior stories
are so not because of any failure iners. Freeman's acute
powers of observation but because, usually through con-
trived endings, she slides over into sentimentality. A
few of these minor stories deal with courtship. They
include "A Symphony in Lavender," "Robins and Hammers,"
"Cinnamon Roses," "A Lover of Flowers," "A Moral Exigency,"
"In Butterfly Time," and "A Conquest of Humility." Some
deal with young lovers, some with old; some with requited
love and some with unrequited. Most of them have some
good things in them, but they are not major and deserve
little comment. The ending of one, "A Moral Exigency,"
underscores a vital theme. The heroine Eunice renounces
a man in favor of her dear friend Ada, but she knows the
price she will have to pay. The story ends with the
line, "'Love me all you can, Ada,’ she said. 'I want--

something.”26

"Robins and Hammers" is interesting
because it gives a picture of the subsistence-level
economy at work even among the professional classes. And
it is especially interesting because, as a story of love

delayed by a vow made in anger, it is a prelude to 22!?

br kg.

26. Freeman, A_Humble Romance, p. 233.

86.

Other stories deal in other ways with the need for
love. The heroine of "A Gatherer of Simples" fights to
keep a child to whom she has no legal right. In "An Un-
willing Guest" a crippled woman resorts to strategem to
get back to her "place" and her "things." "An Object of
Love" tells Of an old woman who loses her cat. In her
desolation she defies God. The cat's return humbles her.
"The Bar Light-House" is another story Of thwarted peOple
who defy the Lord in their pride and anger and need. So
is "An Old Arithmetician."

Even the least consequential of the early stories
have delightful touches made possible by the author's
sensitive powers Of observation within her milieu. In
the Gothic "A Far-Away Melody" Mrs. Freeman presents two
old sisters who, on wash day, hang the best things on the
line nearest the street. "On Welpole Road" is full Of
fine dialect and of folk-knowledge such as the fact that
"barns full of fresh hay are likeliest to burn." But in
the early pieces there is no need to search through senti-
ment and formal failure for good patches. There are stories
that are uncompromising in theme and statement.

The first two stories in the book, "A Humble Romance"
and "Two Old Lovers," have certain features in common.

They are both sentimental tales Of lovers past their
prime. The first is a story of the love of a hired girl
and a peddler. The story Opens with a vivid description

of the girl; it deteriorates quickly, however, into a

87.
sketch with great chunks of melodramatic action. After a
short period of happy married bliss ("I wouldn't_go with
the king, if—-it wasn't to--go honest--"),27 the peddler
is forced to leave by the reappearance of his supposedly
dead first wife. During his absence lgyg_enab1es Sally,
the wretched little hired-girl wife,to "bear up." After
a suitably prolonged separation the evil first wife dies,
and the couple are reunited. Although it is obviously a
sentimental cliché, the story is satisfying--in a curious
way. Mary succeeds here-~and in only a few other places--
in setting a conventional plot in realistic circumstances.
Perhaps its the shock attendant upon this juxtaposition,
the shock of confronting a romantic heroine with splayed
feet and rough, red elbows; but there is a melding here
rather than just a vacuum at the center.

"Two Old Lovers" is a better story, and one with
richer overtones. Maria, a spinster of sixty, is called
to the deathbed of David Emmons, who had courted her for
forty years. Holding out his hand to her, David says,
"Maria, I'm dyin', an'--I allers meant to--have asked you--
to-dmarry me."28 The kindly, ineffectual man, the patient
deserving woman ("She, although the woman, had the stronger

character of the two."29), the unconsummated love, the

27. lgid., p. 6.
28. Ibido , p. 360
290 Ibide , p0 32o

88.
sleepy shoe-town in which the story takes place,--all
these combine to provide a moving statement on the decay
which surrounded the author.

But David and maria are gentle, and for all its
futility they had had love. Mrs. Freeman is capable of
selecting more significant details to tell more harshly
stories of the present's painful obligation to the past.
"An Honest Soul," which.Mrs. Stowe liked so much when the
great Henry ward Beecher read it aloud to her,30 Opens
with the description of a small house set way back on a
very large lot. The house has no windows facing the
road.

Not much remained to Spend on the house after

the spacious lot was paid for, so he [Simeon

Patch, the builder] resolved to build as much

house as he could with his money, and complete

it when better days should come. . . . That

time never came. He died in the courgi of a

few years, after a lingering illness.

After his wife's death, his daughter is left with pride,
independence, no skills, no money-~and with a house that
has no windows facing the road.

Martha Patch, the daughter, supports herself by'
sewing. The crisis of the story occurs during a slack
time when.Martha, too proud to beg, collapses from star-
vation.

30. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Letter to Mary E. Wilkins,
written for her by her daughter (American Academy of Arts
and Letters, New York).

31. Freeman, A Humble Romance, pp. 78-79.

89.

She kept making efforts to rise, but
she could not stir. . . .

She saw some dust on the black paint
of a chair which stood in the sun, and she
eyed that distressfully.

"Just look at that dust on the runs of

that cheer!" she muttered. "What if any-

body came in! I wonder if I can't reach

it

The chair was near her, and she man-

aged to stretch out her limp old hand and

rub the dust ff the rounds. Then she let

it sink down. 2
Although the story slides off into sentimentality, this
picture remains--an old lady in a blind, little house on
a big lot warding off the notes in the sunbeams. The
scene functions symbolically, set as it is in the house
which is all that she has left of the grandiose dream of
her father's-~a dream represented by the large lot in
which her meagerness and that of the house are accen-
tuated.

The two stories which best reflect New England's
twdn heritage of pride and poverty are "Old Lady Pingree"
and "A Taste of Honey." Old Lady Pingree lives in a
decaying old mansion which had once been the headquarters
of a noble line of which she was the very last. She has
been reduced to taking in poverty-stricken boarders and
accepting neighborly gifts of food surreptitiously offered
to avoid wounding her delicate pride. Her one great
desire is to be buried with her own money in the Pingree
lot.

I want to be put in that vacant place at the

320 Ibide, pe 87’880

 

90.

end of the Pingree lot, an' have a flat

stone, like the others you know. If I

leave it with you, you'll see that it's

all done right, won't you, Mis' Holmes?

I feel pretty perticklar about it. I'm

the last of the hull family, you know,

an' they were pretty smart folks. It's

all run out now. I ain't nothin', but

I'd kinder like to have my buryin' done

like the others. I don't want it done by

the town, gn' I don't want nobody to give

it to me.3

The plot moves through a series of confrontations
of pride with generosity. ,Miss Pingree Offers her poor
boarders an egg although she has only two. The boarders
pay the rent although they have neither work nor food.
Finally when the elderly boarder dies, Miss Pingree
forces on the daughter her own burial money-~the sav-
ings of twenty years--insisting that she has more. She
makes the gesture and protects it with lies because she
is generous but also because She is a Pingree. "She
felt for herself the reSpect that she would have felt for
an Old Pingree in the palmiest days."3h One can also see
in this proud, inevitable gesture toward the past another
of mrs. Freeman's favorite themes: the need for respect
in the community. The story has been criticized for its
sentimental ending. Miss Pingree is saved the final
shame of burial by the town through the almost divine
intervention Of the railroad, which is to be built through

part of the crumbling Pingree estate. In the context it

33. Ibide, Po 1520
34. Ibid., p. 157.

‘tJ.

91.
;§_sentimental and coincidental, but it is apprOpriate
at least on a symbolic level. If salvation is to come,
surely it is to come from that direction--from indus-
trialisation.

"A Taste of Honey" relies rather more than it should
on coincidence, but it is one of Mrs. Freeman's strongest
stories because it does not soften the blows. Inez Morse
lives on a mortgaged farm.with her widowed mother. She
works the farm alone and goes to great lengths to earn a
few'pennies. She says, "cents are my dollars."35 She
even keeps bees, but only as an investment; she and her
mother never eat the honey. When the mortgage is paid,
they promise each other, they will enjoy the honey. One
night Willie Linfield calls on her, and, never having
had a lover, she does not understand his intentions at
first. When he preposes, she makes him wait until the
mortgage is paid although she risks losing him. Her
commitment is to the past-~to her dead father.

"Finally I told him one day--it was when he

was able to be about, just before he gave up;

I was out in the garden picking peas, and he

was there with his cane. 'Inez,‘ says he,

'I've got to die an' leave that mortgage un-

paid, an' I've been workin' ever since I was

a young man to do it.’ 'Father,‘ says I, '

'don't you worry. I'll pay up that mortgage.

'You can't, Ines,’ says he. 'Yes, I will,

says I; 'I promise you, father.' It seemed

to cheer him up. He didn't fret so much

about it to me afterwards, but he kept'aSking36
me if I really could. I always said, 'Yes.

35. Ibid., p. 91%. ‘
36. Ibid., PP. 101-102.

92.

When the mortgage is finally paid--when the obliga-
tion to the past and to duty has been met--Hflllie has gone
to marry a girl in another town. Inez returns home, and
her mother asks:

"Where's your beau. . . ."

"He ain't coming, mother.- He's gone
over to west Dorset to get married. . . ."

Mrs. MOrse sat down and began to cry.

Inez had taken her things off, and now
she was getting out the moulding-board and
some flour.

"What air you doin' on, Inez?"

"I'm making the warm biscugg for supper,

mother, to eat with the honey."

Here again it is the past that robs the present by imposing
on it obligations which drive out happiness. Pride and
duty are the two chief ways in which the prosperous,
Puritan past imposes itself on the decaying present in the
stories. In "A Taste of Honey" there is an added rich-
ness-~a successful, controlled use of irony, something
rather rare in the regional realists.

Inez and Old Lady Pingree in their isolation are
bent and twisted by the past, but they are not driven
to ggglgggg of their heritage by it. Others are. Two
stories of defiance or rebellion are "A Conflict Ended"
and "A Tardy Thanksgiving." The two stories form a nice
contrast and in their 0PP°3ing modes display the author's

considerable range. "A Conflict Ended" is a humorous

Story. As in "Robins and Hammers" and 2399:9523 the hero,

Marcus, makes a vow in anger and keeps it out of pride.

370 Ibid., pp. 105‘1060

93-

His vow is to sit on the church steps during Sunday service
as long as the minister of whom he disapproves is settled
in the parish. Esther, his fiancee, refuses to marry him
so long as he makes himself look foolish in his defiance
of the community. Things are at an impasse until Esther
changes her mind and decides to sit with him. The thought
of her looking so foolish brings him to his senses, and
they enter the church together. The rebellion here is
rooted in pride, but the consequences are comic rather
than tragic. Esther says of Marcus, "No, he ain't crazy;
he's got too much will for his common sense, that's all,
and the will teeters the sense a little too far into the
air."38

"A Tardy Thanksgiving" is the dramatic, tightly writ-
ten story of Jane Muzzy, who defies not the community but
God himself.

"I ain't agoin' to hev any Thanksgivin' to

hum. I ain't got nothin' to give thanks

fur, as I see on. I s'pose if I could go to

meetin' Thanksgivin"mornin' an' hear the

searmon, an then set down to turkey an

plum-puddin', an' be a-thankin' the Lord

in my heart for lettin' my hqua d fall off

the scaffold in the barn an' git killed

last summer, an' for lettin' my daughter
Charlotte die of quick consumption last .
Spring, an' my son John two years ago this
fall, I might keep Thanksgivin aS'well asi ‘
other folks. But I can't an' I ain‘t a-gign-
to purtend I do. Thar's one tagggnabout

' ' ocrite an never .. n
I aln"ah:th£r you again' to do, 1313'! Missy?

"Do!" Hrs.‘Muszy sniffed. Do ‘m

38. Ibid., p. 388.

9A.

a-goin' to stay to hum, an'--do my pig work."39
She is true to her word; but in the process of making lard,
she spills hot grease on her foot and sustains painful
burns. She knows with Whom she has had an encounter.
When her sister brings her some turkey, Jane insists on
eating it before her foot is tended.

"I want to eat some turkey an' plum-

puddin' afore I'm an hour older, an' keep

Thanksgivin'. I said I wouldn't but the

Lord get ahead of'me, an' I'm glad he has.”0

Hers is a solemn defiance and one which separates her
from her fellows. In fact, its correction requires a
special providence in the best Puritan tradition. Like
all rebellion rooted in pride--be it comic or tragic-~it
must stOp and the pride must be humbled before the indivi-
dual can find his place in the order again. Pride brings
isolation--from God and man; isolation is terrible. Jane
Muzzy has no more to be thankful for at the end of the
story than she did at the beginning, but at least she is
no longer alone.

Another story of rebellion is "Gentian," but here
the problem is somewhat different. Lucy, a timid wife,
defies her husband and brings down his wrath and pride
and also the author's wry comment on a favorite tapic--

the role of women in the New'England society she knew;

Lucy's defiance lies in her disobelience of her husband's

39. Ibid., p. 500
#0. Ibid., p. 590

95.

commands. She puts gentian in his food to act as a tonic
after he has expressly forbidden it. That she does it
out of love and because she is concerned for his health
is of no consequence. He forces her to leave him. She
accepts the separation (a separation imposed by pride and
by social patterns inherited from the past) because she
is a lover and no true rebel at all. She not only accepts,
she defends his action. "I deceived him, and it's been
'most killin' me to think On't ever since.”1 Finally
love takes her the step beyond acceptance. She asks to
be forgiven. Her plea enables her husband to overcome the
male pride that is part of his Puritan heritage. He not
only takes her back but asks her to prepare more gentian
for him.

.Mrs. Freeman sees--and this is something that most
New England regionalists never saws-the igggy_in the rather
complex.situation. The wife, Lucy, is both right and
wrong--right in caring for her husband and wrong in dis-
obeying. That she had to disobey in order to care for him
only intensifies the irony. He, of course, is profoundly
wrong. He reacts in the traditional way out of pride.
And the wrong can only be righted by the elimination of
pride. The resolution is a comic delight. Only when,
by begging forgiveness, Lucy admits that he is right, can
he admit that he is wrong and ask her to come back on her

0'11 terms o

#1. Ibid., p. 257.

 

96.

.Mrs. Freeman's picture of the woman's role is senti-
mental in "A Humble Romance" and "Robins and Hammers"; it
is comic in "A Conflict Ended" and "Gentian." But in "A
Patient Halter" it is tragic. The tragedy is that of the
isolated soul driven to insanity by loneliness. Fidelia
Alny's lover Ansel had left town to seek his fortune-~the
fortune with which he would marry her. He had promised
to write. For forty years Fidelia has made daily trips
to the post office. She has also raised a niece who, in
turn, has had a lover who leaves, promising to write.
After enough time has elapsed for the parallel to be
established, the girl's letter finally comes.

"Oh, Aunt Fidelial" she cried, "the
letter' 8 come!"

". . . Ansel's--letter'"

Lily sobbed right out in the midst of

her joy: "Oh, poor Aunt Fidelial Poor Aunt

Fidelia! I didn't think--I forgot. I was

awful cruel. It's a letter from valentine.

He's been sick. The folks wrote, but they

put on the wrong state-eMassachusetts in-

stead of Vermont. He' 8 comin' right home,

an' he's goin' to stay. He's goin' to settle

here. Poor Aunt Fidelia! I didn't think."

Fidelia lay back on her npillow. "You

dear aghild, " she whispered, "you won't have

to."

Fidelia, in spite of her name, is no genteel heroine.
She is a half-crazed unattractive old woman with bad
color, yellowegray hair and a compulsive nod to her head
caused by a nervous disease. She waits for something that
will never come because there is nothing else a woman can

do. Suggestive of the whole historical drift of the

#2. Ibid., p. 413.

1 97.

region and representative of thousands of her sisters who
clung to self—deceptions in the face of isolation, she
is real and completely believable down to her final death-
bed request. "The evenin' mail . . . It's time for it.
You'd better hurry or you'll be late."l"3 It is women
like Fidelia who justify van wyck Brooks' observation:

She was "a sort of sordid Aeschylus." There

was something fierce and primitive in her

view’of life, and the Furies existed for her.""

A_Humb1e Romance was fairly well received both by the
critics and the public. A British edition appeared three
years after the first publication; and in 1897, a second
American edition appeared. Among the important pe0ple
who liked it was the critically benevolent Howells, who
said, "They [the stories] are good through and through,
and whOever loves the common face of humanity will find
pleasure in them.""5 A N9! England Egg, however, (1891) is
a better-~or at least a deeper--collection. Blair refers
to Mary'Wilkins Freeman as the writer "who better than
any other in the period, perhaps, reproduced the sharp
comedy and the tragic irony of New England repression."46

It might be truer to add "isolation" to "repression," but

#30 Ibid., p. All}.

At. van ck Brooks fig!;Englan : Indian Summer
(New York, 1950 , p. £75.,

#5. we. Dean Howells "The Editor's Study " Hayper's
£393.11. Luv (September, i877), 61.0. ’

A6. Halter Blair, Native American Humor (San Fran-
cisco, 1960), p. 1&0.

98.

the statement is nonetheless valid as it stands. 0f the
two major collections it is true to say that in A_Humble
Romance the emphasis is on comedy, frequently sharp but
just as frequently blunted by sentiment; in A_Ng! England
. Egg the emphasis is on tragic irony. This emphasis was
recognized by the reviewers of the time. zhg_Atlantic
review said, "There is, indeed, a common character to the
whole series, an undertone of hardship, of loss, of re-
pressed life, of sacrifice, of the idolatry of duty."h7

Structurally the stories in the two volumes are
quite similar. Foster sees no advance.

It is hard to discover any real technical

growth as one moves from the first to the

second collection. Like so many of the

local colorists, Miss Wilkins had hit pay

giitffggg :gg°::ulg never greatly surpass
In both, the raw material is the same and so is the un-
blinking observation and the resulting realism of the
significant detail. There is, in contrast to Sarah Orne
Jewett's work, the same casual attitude-~often casual
excellence--to the problems of point of view. Occasionally
there is controlled, partial omniscience and occasionally
a narrator. The fondness for parallel action-~the repeti-
tion of the same kind of action as in the repeated offer-
ing of gifts in "Old Lady Pingree"--is found here in "A
LXHIhTIMaijI‘SréI‘Ifglé .9191 England App," Atlantic Monthly,

A8. Foster, Lazy g. Wilkins Eggeman, p. 89.

99.
Village Lear" and elsewhere. But the use of parallel
plots, as in "A Tardy Thanksgiving," "A Conflict Ended,"
and "A Patient Whiter," is not found in the second volume.

But there are technical advances in the second book.
First Hrs. Freeman developed the skill to use objects
within the story as symbols underscoring the main theme.
Thus in "A Poetess" a pet canary's ability to sing pro—
vides a counterpoint to the poetess's inability to do so.
And the scent of roses in the story of that name represents
lost years and lost sexual fulfillment. Secondly, she
writes with greater composure and compression. She re-
lies less and less on the passing of decades to tell the
story. She is more capable of beginning with the central
dramatic situation, developing background through narrative
and returning to the action.

Finally, although she still likes to start with drama
and dialog ("The Revolt of Mother," "A Church Mouse"), she
shows a leisurely fondness for setting the scene. The
result is, in "A Gala Dress," "A New England Nun," and
elsewhere, that the stories fall nicely into two parts.

In the first part the scene is deve10ped with careful
attention to significant or symbolic details. This is
often the best part of the story because here the symbols
and representations are free to work their own will. The
second part of the story, the plot, is often conventional
and artificial, or at least weakened by sentiment, coin-

cidence, and convention.

100.

Like its predecessor A_flg! England Egg runs well
over four hundred pages. It contains twenty-four stories,
many of them.of little consequence.‘P9 Among the minor
stories are several examples of that ominous occasional
form that was to torment mrs. Freeman all through her
career-~the Christmas story. Two of them, "Christmas
Jenny" and "The Twelfth Guest," are especially weak.

"A Stolen Christmas" is more interesting without being
better. It tells of an old tailoress, pauperized by the
new factory system, who steals gifts for her grandchildren's
Christmas. But it's Christmas; and rather than deal with
the questions of personal and social guilt thus raised,

Mrs. Freeman lets the story trail into sentiment and coin-
cidence. But it is an important theme, and she was to
return to it again and again. "Gala-Lilies and Hannah"
deals with the same theme almost as ineffectively.

Several of the minor stories deal with the dominant
theme of isolation and the need to love. They remain
minor because they remain sentimental. Among them is "The
Scent of Roses," which deals with two sisters in love with
the same man who returns from the West, where he had found
his fortune. "A Gentle Ghost" tells of a little child who
sees ghosts which are the imaginative outgrowth of her

#9. It is interesting to note that of the stories
she wrote between 188h and 1891 only two-~"The Story of
Little nary.Whitlow," and "A wandering Samaritan"--were
not included in the two collections. She was, in these

years and those immediately following which brought Jane
Figld and Pembroke to the press, at the peak of her powers.

101.
need for a loving family. When "she had found her place
in the nest of living hearts,"50 (an appalling image) she
no longer sees the ghosts.

Of course, everywhere in the minor stories as well
as the major ones there is evidence of Mrs. Freeman's
accurate eye and ear. The opening passages of "A Wayfaring
Couple" paint a vivid picture of the life of the indus-
trial working classes in "a long row of little cheap
houses."51 The picture in "A Discovered Pearl" of the
whining, senile old man picking out bastings for his
seamstress granddaughter is as chilling a picture of age
as she ever produced. And in "A Pot of Gold," James
Amesbury's mother is a vivid symbol of the New England the
author knew.

His mother, a dark sallow figure, sat on the

upper one [step]. She held herself rigidly,

and did not lean against the door casing.

She was very tired but her will would not

323%” °idvb°niioan§d§u§Slifieriifiéa $332

ury e er PP

One story that depicts Mrs. Freeman's view of New
England is "A New England Nun." It is the story of
Louisa Ellis, who has waited for her man Joe Dagget to
return from the'West to marry her. When he does return,

she doesn't want him and gladly turns him over to a more

ardent rival. Louisa is unlike most Freeman heroines

50. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, _A_ 3;! En and L ___<_1_
Other Stories (Boston, 1891), p. 251.

 

51. Ibid., p. 1210
52. Ibid., p. 50

102.
whose need for love is great, but like them she is a
product of environmental pressure. Privation and habit
have made her emotions dry and thin--so thin that she is
willing to substitute habit for passion.

The story contains examples of two of'Mary's tech-
nical strengths--her ability to construct internal symbols
(those whose symbolic nature and function are not imposed
upon the story but rather emerge from it) and her ability
to make one significant detail bear the weight of a com-
plex insight. Louise's reaction to the world and to
passion is neatly underscored by her canary's panic at
the sight of Joe. And in the back yard Louisa keeps
chained the big, phlegmatic dog which has not been dan-
gerous for years and which she has persisted in feeding
corn cakes instead of meat. Nothing could make the con-
ditions of her emotions clearer.

After Joe's first visit in years, which violates
her parlor and terrifies her canary, comes to an end,
the following scene takes place:

Then she set the lamp on the floor and began

shar 1y examining the carpet. She even rub-

bed er fingers over it and looked at them.

"He tracked in a good deal of dust,"
she murmured. "I thought he must have."
Louisa got a dust pan and brusgBand

swept Joe Dagget 3 track carefully.

The gesture reveals the woman, and the woman represents

a group, and the group stands for a given region at a

given time. The technique is typical of what The Atlggtic

53' M's P0 5'

103.

critic called "the disposition of.Miss Wilkins to single
out for her subjects highly accentuated phases of New
England life. "5"

"A Gala Dress" is a tightly constructed story in
Mrs. Freeman's best comic vein. Elizabeth and Emily
Babcock are two elderly, spinster sisters who never go
together to any important functions--not even to church.
The reason is simple; they have only one good black dress
between theme When one sister comes in, she carefully
removes her hem decorations. Then the other sister just
as carefully sews on hers. Matilda, a lowborn neighbor,
suspects the plight of the poverty-stricken sisters and
tries to confirm her suspicions. The proof is important
to her because she has always chafed at the Babcock's
superior status, of which the dress is a constant reminder.
By allowing the dress to be burned by an Independence Day
firecracker, she gets the proof she wants. The story ends
with an uneXpected windfall of good dresses from a rich
Babcock in the west. There are enough even for Matilda.

The dress is a particularly rich symbol of New Eng-
land's decadence. It is both of great age and great
quality. It serves to distinguish these who come from
glory from the lower classes--the Babcocks from.the
Matildas. But like New England’s Puritan and patrician
past, it restricts the activities of its possessors.

3 3‘». "Review of A N21 England Nari." W lioaahlz.
Po 1+ . -

10h.
They cannot go anywhere without it and they spend most
of their time trying to maintain it. And there is only
one dress, so that while it distinguishes them and is the
badge of their superiority, it also limits them and is
the badge of their failure. Only when salvation comes,
significantly enough, from the west, can they escape the
burdens and limits of the dress and share its glories
with.Matilda, who having exposed it now gratefully accepts
it although it has been "mended nice."

"The Revolt of Mbther," possibly the most pepular
story Mrs. Freeman ever wrote, deals with the question of
the role of women in this decaying society. The theme is
explicit; Mother says to her daughter:

You ain't found out yet we're women folks,

Nanny Penn . . . You ain't seen enough of

men-folks yet to. One of these days you'll

find it out, an' then you'll know that we

knOW'only what men-folks think we do, so

far as any use of it goes, an' how'we'd

ought to reckon men-folks in with Provi-

dence, an' not complain of what the; do

any more than we do of the weather. 5
But women have rights; matrons are entitled to decent
kitchens and maidens to parlors where beaux may call.
Mother's revolt isn't doctrinaire and it isn't radical.
It is personal and conservative; she rebels to protect
her place. She must, ironically, rebel against her place
in order to maintain it. When her husband, a prosperous
farmer, builds a new barn instead of a much needed new

house, she moves the family into the barn.

55. Freeman, A Ne); England _N_u_r_1_, pp. 1.51452.

105.

Here Mbther is driven to revolt by, among other
things, New'England reticence. The author points out,
"There was never much conversation at the table in the
Penn family."56 Mbther Penn humbly assaults this silence,
which on her-husband's part is a species of the pride that
is the root of evil.

Sarah Penn had not sat down; she stood before

her husband in the humble fashion of ascrip-

ture woman-~"I'm goin' to talk real plain to

ou; I never have ence I married you, but

'm.goin' to now.59
To her eloquent plea his only reply is a refrain, "I
ain't got nothin' to say." When the deed is done, the
husband is shocked out of his pride; and with the return-
ing consciousness of love, he weeps. Mother Penn weeps
too; "Sarah put her apron up to her face; she was overcome
by her own triumph."58 This is a good woman winning her
point against a good man--her man. But she is no rebel,
and she has no cause other than the parlor and the kitchen.
As will be seen in her later works, Mrs. Freeman never
liked the new, "emancipated" women.

"A Church.Mbuse" is also a story of rebellion, in
which old Hetty Fifield moves into the church because she
has no place else to go, taking over the job of the re-

cently deceased sexton. She argues that she can do the

56. Ibido , p. (#53 o
57. Ibid., p. #550
53- Mo. Pa #63-

106.
job better than a man. "Men git in a good many places
where they don't belong, an' where they set as awkward
as a cow on a hen-roost, jest because they push in ahead

of women.»9

By defiantly moving into the church, she
forces the community to define its relationship to her.
Like Mother she finds her place by rebelling against it.
In each case the rebellion is a gigantic step to the woman
involved. Mother is likened to Wblfe at Quebec, Hetty to
Joshua.

"A Church.Mouse" is inferior to "The Revolt of
mother," but it does include an additional vital theme--
the theme of isolation. To Mary Wilkins Freeman, no
stranger to loneliness, that isolation which prevented the
individual from filling the need for love and human con-
tact and which was caused by the fact that the individual
was himself not needed-~that isolation was the most ter-
rible of fates. Against it her heroes and heroines fight
‘with every resource at their command.60

One who fought against her loneliness is Candace
Whitcomb in "A Village Singer" who, after being the church
soloist for forty years, is turned out in favor of a

younger woman. After being dismissed she stops going to

church. Instead, on Sunday morning she Opens the windows

59. Ibid., p. 407.

60. That these stories of the isolation of indivi-
duals can be read as analogues of the condition and drift
of the whole region makes them richer stories.

107.
of her house next door to the church and waits.

When the bell had stopped tolling, and all
the peeple entered the church, Candace went
over to her organ and seated herself. She
arranged a singing book before her, and sat
still, waiting. Her thin, colorless neck
and temple were full of beating pulses. Her
black eyes were bright and eager; she leaned
stiffly over toward the music-rack to hear
better. When the church organ sounded out
she straightened herself; her long, skinny
fingers pressed her own organ-keys with
nervous energy. She worked the pedals with
all her strength; all her slender body was
in motion. When the first notes of Alma's
solo began, Candace sang. She had really
possessed a fine voice, and it was wonderful
how little she had lost it. Straining her
throat with jealous fury, her notes were
still for the main part true. Her voice
filled the whole room; she sang with won-
derful fire and eXpression. That, at least,
mild little Alma Way could never emulate.

She was full of steadfastness and unquestion-
ing constancy, but there were in her no
smouldering fire of ambition and resolution.
Music was not to her what it had been to her
old rival. To this obscure woman, kept re-
lentlessly by circumstances in a narrow track,
singing in the village choir had been as much
as Italy had been to Napoleon--and now on beg
island of exile she was still showing fight. 1

This is a fine comic paragraph. First there is the scene
rendered vividly with attention to detail. Then comes
the defiant and comic act. The reader is then permitted
to savor the act while he contemplates the qualities of
Candace's voice. It is interesting, too, to note the
explicit reference to the conflict between personality and
circumstances. This near-naturalism.becomes a growing
element in Mrs. Freeman's work.

Candace begins slowly to die in her bitterness and

61- Freeman. i122: mama Nita. pp. 29-30.

108.

rejection. She wonders sourly where "the Christianity
comes in." On her deathbed she finds out where, and she
forgives the community and even Alma for the wrong they
have done her. As her final request, she asks Alma to
sing "Jesus, Lover of My Soul." The whole final scene,
in danger of melting into a pool of Dickensian sentiment,
is saved by Candace's final words to Alma, "You flatted
a little on----sou1."62 I

"A Poetess" is a minor story, vastly inferior to
"A Village Singer," but it deals with the same theme.
(One feels that when Mrs. Freeman became aware that she
had a good thing she was not above trying to tell the same
story twice.) Betsey, a spinster village poetess, achieves
status and a sense of place in the community from her modest
reputation as a poet, her volume of privately printed
verses, her occasional appearance in the local newspaper
and her pOpularity as a writer of epitaphs. When she
discovers the true value of'her doggerel, she receives
a blow from which she cannot recover. And in her own way,
she poses the question of determinism already raised in
the better story:

"I'd like to know if it's fair," said she.

"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 539w
before there wa'n't any use in it?

62. Ibid., p. 36.
630 Ibid., Pp. 15"1550

109."

.Mbther and Hetty are forced to rebel in order to
assert,their claim and place in society. Candace and
Betsey are forced to lash out at a society that would
take from.them.their place, function, and dignity--and
ultimately their raison gigggg. Betsey says to the
minister who disillusions her:

If you would jest write a fewb-lines about

me--afterward--I've been thinkin' that--

mebbe my—-dyin' was goin' to make me--a

good subject for--poetry, if I never wrote

none. If you would jest write a few'lines.6#

There are others, however, who deliberately turn
their backs on society--who because of pride and will,
those twin burdens of their Puritan heritage, deliberately
cut themselves off from their fellows. Two such are
Nicholas Gunn in "A Solitary" and Luella Norcross in
"Life-Everlastin'." .

' Nicholas Gunn had been terribly hurt by his wife's
desertion. His response is to cut himself off from all
affection and pleasure in order to guard against the re-
turn of pain. "I figured out that if I didn't care any-
thing for anybody, I shouldn't have no trouble from 'em;
an' if I didn't care anything for myself, I shouldn't
have any from myself."65 During a severe winter frail
Stephen Potter asks to rest in Nicholas' unheated house

as he passes by. At first Nicholas refuses; then he

relents gracelessly. The scene is repeated several times

6‘}. Ibid., p. 1590
65. Ibid., DO 231.

110.

as Stephen makes his way from his sister's rooming house

to the market. Then in the middle of a cold night Stephen

comes with the terrible news that his sister plans to send

him to the poor house. He hopes to stay the night only.

Nicholas lets him in and-~symbolically--lights the fire.

Then--

"Look a-herel" said be, "you might jest as
well understand it. You ain't a—goin' to
any depot tonight, an' you ain't a-goin' to
any train, an' you ain't a-goin' to any
depot tomorrow nor any train, an' you ain't
a-goin' the next day, nor the next, nor the
next, nor the next after that."

"What be I a-goin' to do?"

"You are a-goin' to stay jest where
you are. I've fought against your comin'
as long as I could, an' now you've come,
an' I've turned the corner, an' you're a-goin'
to stay. When I've been walkin' in the teeth
of my own will on one road an' havin' all I
could do to breast it, I ain't a-goin' to do
it on another. I've give up, an' g'm a-goin'
to stay give up. You lay still."

Stephen falls asleep "leaning on the will of another."

Ironically, he is leaning on a will that has grown strong

through capitulation. Nicholas had withdrawn from.men;

but that was the way of death.

"Well, I was all wrong . . . I've give it
all up. I've got to go through the whole
of it like other folks, an' I guess I've
got grit enough. I've made up my mind that
men's tracks cover the whole world, and
there ain't standin'-room outsgge of 'em.
I've got to go with the rest."

Luella Norcross in "Life-Everlastin'" is the village

atheist and eccentric. Through intellectual pride she

66. Ibid., P0 2290
67. Ibid., p. 2320

lll.

cuts herself off from both man and God. The goodness at
the’center of Luella's nature finds expression in her
kindness to itinerants and a few elderly crabs. While
taking a pillow she had made to an irritable old man she
discovers a murder, and later she discovers the murderer
hiding in an empty house she owns but has refused to let
the town use. Her problem is to determine how to help
John Gleason, the murderer, without betraying the murdered
man and the townspeOple from.whom she had cut herself off.
The answer has to combine the elements of justice and
mercy. She turns Gleason over to the sheriff-~and prays
for him.

"I don't believe in a lot of palaver about

things like this--I've made up my mind that

I'm.goin' to believe in Jesus Christ. I

ain't never, but I'm goin' to now for"--

Luella' 8 voice turned shrill with passion--

"I don't see gg§_otherm Jout 2§,it_§gg,

JEhg.Gleason."
Here is a character standing on the brink of Dreiser's
universe of Godless flux, confronted with evil and the
demands of justice and charity. She draws back from the
void and embraces Christ. She believes because belief
is necessary--because God and, through God, communion with
one's fellows are the bases on which life is predicated.
Isolation, hers and John Gleason's, is intolerable. It has
been traditional to describe Sarah Jewett as a disciple
of Hawthorne. Mary Wilkins Freeman, however, is the most

Hawthorne-like of the New England women writers. Nicholas

68. gig” p. 312.

112.
and Luella, forlorn in their pride and self-induced iso-
lation, are direct descendants of Chillingworth, Coverdale
and others.

Many of these short stories were praised in the author's
own time and later, but always the praise was restrained
and often it was for the wrong things. Charles M. Thomp-
son complained about the absence of "charming peeple
charmingly drawn."69 Years later van Wyck Brooks could
call her sterner portraits "morbid symptoms."7o Such
critics were deceived by not seeing in a New England
regionalist what they expected to see. Consequently,
they failed to see in Mary Wilkins Freeman's work that
vital quality that set her apart from-~and, in a few
stories, above--her fellow New Englanders. Matthiessen
saw it. He said she "had a deeply rooted feeling that
life was a tragedy."71 Perhaps the feeling was intermit-
tent rather than deeply rooted; but when it underlay a
story, that story had an intensity unmatched by any of
her contemporaries' or predecessors' stories. Among
the few'stories that have this feeling of tragedy are
"Amanda and Love," "A Village Lear," and'Sister Liddy."

‘ “Amanda and Love" is the simple story of a middle-

69. Thompson, Atlantic Monthl , p. 67#.

70. Brooks, N2!;Englan : Indian Summer, p. 482.

71. F. O. Matthiessen, "New'England Stories,"
American Writers on erican Literatgge, ed. John Macy

(New York, l931),"i3'. 40 .

113.

aged, ungainly virgin who has raised her younger sister.
Possessing "faculty," Amanda has been able to prOSper
modestly, but the graces are beyond her. They are so far
beyond her that she frightens off her younger sister's
suitor. Dimly realizing the consequences to her sister's
more delicate nature, she swallows her pride—-a big
swallow for a New Englander--and asks the young man to
return. He does.

Willis came at eight o'clock. Amanda let

him in and left him with Love in the sitting-

room. She herself sat down at the kitchen

window in the deepening dusk, and stared out

over the shadowy fields. She could hear the

voices of her sister and her lover, now fair-

ly started on that path of love which was as

strange to this rigid-lived single woman as

that of death, and whither she was far less

able to follow. Amanda sat there and wept

patiently, leaning her head against the

window-casing.
This is a rich scene in Spite of the younger sister's
name and the unfortunate word "whither." The aging,
unattractive New England Spinster sits in the twilight
and weeps for many reasons--because she has had to humble
her pride, because she will lose her sister and be alone,
especially because she perceives in the awkward rural
courtship a dimension and beauty in life that she will
never have or even understand. This isolation is terrible
and consciously accepted; therefore it is tragic. It is
also representative. In her isolation and tears Amanda is
Mrs. Freeman's tenderest and truest picture of what Holmes

called "the great army of the unloved."

72. Freeman, A New England Nun, p. 301..

11h.

Barney Swan, the village Lear, is a man from whose
life all the barriers to desolation have been or are being
removed. He has been deprived of his function, his status
and, most important, the love to which he has a right. He
had been a shoemaker, but several shoe factories have come
to town and prospered, depriving him of his livelihood.
Then his daughters decide to tear down the shoe shop
itself--an eyesore to them but a refuge and a source of
dignity to him. He has long since ceased to function as
a father and to receive the respect due to fatherhood.

His daughter Malvina "saw to it that his clothes were
_comfortably warm and mended, and he had enough to eat,
although his own individual tastes were never consulted. . . .
She did not like to have him in the house and showed that

she did not."73

The story Opens with a powerful and pathetic scene
in which Barney is reduced to trickery and bribery to
get a kiss from his grandson. He greedily consoles himself
with this purchased affection. He speaks to the hired
girl, Sarah. "Jest look at him," he said, admiringly.

"I tell you what 'tis, Sary, that little feller does like
candy. I can allers toll him in with a stick of candy."7"'
He has to clutch at such deceptions; they are all that

he has. He has ceased to exist as an individual for those

around him. The servant girl doesn't listen to hhm.

730 we, p. 2760
71.. gig” p. 271.

115.

"Sarah, in her brown dress, with her fair rosy face,
stood waiting until the old man should finish talking."75
His daughters don't consult him. And on the day of his
granddaughter's wedding he is exiled to the cobbler's
shop. When he tries to see the ceremony, his daughter
Ellen "shut the door upon Barney.”6

Having spent his entire savings on a present for his
granddaughter Annie's wedding, he finds himself and his
present totally ignored. Annie goes away without it.
"Old Barney's piteous cry of 'Anniel Annie! jest come
here a minutel' was quite lost." From this moment Barney
begins to fail. Then some weeks later when he discovers
the plan to tear down the shoe shop, his destruction is
complete and he flees in desperation. The only mitigating
circumstance in this bleak picture of a ruined, isolated
old man is the willingness of Sarah the servant to take
him in his last agony. She performs the function of
Cordelia. But the picture is not softened much. Even as
he dies his daughter ignores his individuality and his
need. Sarah's husband speaks:

"He's all upset because his shep's going
to be torn down," said he.
"'Tain't that," replied.Malvina. "He's
dretful careless; he's been goin' round7in his

stockin'-feet, an' he's got more cold."

Barney dies, unfeelingly misunderstood by his daughter

75. Ibid., p. 271.
76. Ibid., p. 283.
770 Mo, pp. 286’287.

116.
and hugging the illusion that his granddaughter had
finally come for her wedding present.
"Sister Liddy" is the story of Polly Moss, who lives
in the almshouse, which, together with its inmates, seems
to function as a symbol of New England.

There were no trees near the almshouse; it
stood in its bare, sandy lot, and there were
no leaves or branches to cast shadows on its
walls. It seemed like the folks whom it
sheltered, out in the full glare of day,
without any little kindly shade between it-
self and the dull unfeeling stare of curio-
sity. The almshouse stood upon a rising
ground, so one could see it for a long dis-
tance. It was a new building, Mansard-roofed
and well pointed. The village took pride in
it: no town far or near had such a house for
the poor. It was so fine and costly that the
village did not feel able to give its insane
paupers separate support in a regular asylum;
so they lived in the almshouse with the sane
paupers, and there was agpadded cell in case
they waxed too violent.

The people in it are representative.

Many and many an afternoon the almshouse old
women sat together and bore witness to their
past glories. . . . Their present was to

them a state of simple existence, they re-
garded their future with vague resignation;
they were none of them thinkers and there

was no case of rapturous piety among them.

In their pasts alone they took real comfort,
and they kept, as it were, feeling of them

to see if they were not still warm.with life.79

Here is New England, well-built and visible to all. It
is supported by its inmate's children who are outside—-
that is in the West. It accommodates both the sane and

the insane (the eccentrics that Puritanism.seemed to

78. gig” p. 31.
79° Mn P0 92-

117.
produce in such numbers), all of whom, like good New
Englanders, live in the glories of the past. Two hundred
and fifty years after Winthrop had launched New England
‘ with the ringing metaphor of the "city upon a hill,"
one of its most perceptive daughters sees it as alms-

house on a little rise of ground.

It is in this setting that Mary presents characters
and incidents of intense realism unsurpassed in the
nineteenth century. Following is a scene in which Polly

responds to a pauper child's request that she play with
him.

"I'll tell you what Polly an' Tommy can do.
We'll jest go out in the hall an"we'll roll
the ball. Tommy go run quick an' get his
balls”

Tommy raised a shout and clapped out of
the room; his sweet nature was easily diverted.
Polly followed him. She had a twisting limp,
and was bent so that she was not much taller
than Tommy, her little pale triangular face
seemed to look from the middle of her flat
ChBSte e e e

In the corridor Polly Mess played ball
with the children. She never caught the ball,
and she threw it with weak, aimless jerks; her
back ached but she was patient, and her face
was full of simple, childish smiles. There
were two children besides Tommy—~his sister
and a little boy.

The corridor was long; doors in both
sides led into the paupers' bedrooms. Sud-
denly one of the doors flew open, and a little
figure shot out. She went down the corridor
with a swift trot like a child. She had on
nothing but a woolen petticoat and a calico
waist; she held her head down, and her narrow
shoulders worked as she ran. Her mop of soft
white hair flew out. The children looked
around at her;88he was a horrible caricature
of themselves.

80. Ibide’ pp. 85-860

118.
This last is poor mad Sally who compulsively tears her
bed apart every day. It is such scenes that Matthiessen
had in mind when he said, "Mary Wilkins is unsurpassed

among all American writers in her ability to give the

breathless intensity of a moment.”81

Amid such surroundings and such incidents, Polly
listens to the others vie among themselves with refer-
ences to past glories. Polly, like Mrs. Freeman's other
heroes and heroines, has to have something. So she
lies, and, in her lie, invents a Sister Liddy whom she
invests with all virtues and all luxuries. The story
ends with Polly's deathbed confession.

"I want to tell you somethin'," Polly re-
peated. "I s'pose I've been dretful wicked,
but I ain't never had nothin' in my whole life.
I s'pose the Lord orter have been enough,

but it's dretful hard sometimes to keep holt
of him, an' not look anywheres else, when you
see other folks a-clawin' an' gettin' other
things, an' actin' as if they was wuth havin'.
I ain't never had nothin' as fur as them
other things go; I don't want nothin' else
now. I've--got past 'em. I see I don't want
nothin' but the Lord. But I used to feel
dretful bad and wicked when I heard you all
talkin' 'bout things you've had, an' I hadn't
never had nothin', so--" Polly Moss stopped
talking, and coughed. The matron supported
her. The old women nudged each other; their
awed, sympathetic, yet sharply enquiring eyes
never left her face. The children were peeping
in at the open door; old Sally trotted past--
she had Just torn her bed to pieces. As soon
as she got breath enough, Polly.Moss finished
what she had to say. "I--s'pose I--was dret-
ful wicked," she waispered; but--I never had
any sister Liddy.”

81. Mltthiessen, "New England Stories," American
EEL22£§,2g_American Lite ture, p. h06.

32. Freeman, 5 .1193. England Egg, pp. 97-93-

119.
Certainly a chilling slice of life is sliding off here
into sentiment. But it doesn't slide too far. The
Puritan fear of God is genuine and the dialect is real.
Above all, at the most sentimental part of the speech,
the author interrupts Polly to refocus our attention on
the nudging of the inquisitive old ladies and the undres-
sed meandering of crazy Sally.

In a handful of these stories--in "A Gala Dress,"
”Sister Liddy," "A Village Lear," "The Revolt of Mother,"
and perhaps one or two others-~the New England regional
tradition in fiction reaches its highest achievement.
Mrs. Freeman's stories with their dramatic beginnings in
the middle of the central incident, their succinct narrative
interpolations of past action and background, their terse
sentences and closely observed details are the products
of a talent which had solved the structural problems
plaguing her predecessors. With their irony, their subtle
symbolism, their tragic insight, and their thematic den-
sity, these stories reveal an artistic sensibility of
greater depth than either Mrs. Stowe or Mrs. Cooke and
of much greater breadth than Miss Jewett. But she was
never to write so well again. Like her predecessors, she
responded to the lure of the longer form. For the re-
mainder of her career her chief interest was in the novel,
a form.in which she wrote many things of interest but
nothing of greatness. Like her literary sisters she was

to fail in that genre to solve the problem of form.

CHAPTER IV
THE SEARCH FOR THE COMPLEX FORM

The first half of the 1890's must have been a happy
period for Mary Wilkins Freeman--possibly the happiest
of her life. She continued to live with her friend Mary
Hales in Randolph; friends and relatives were all around
her in the town. She made occasional trips to Brattle-
boro especially to see her dear friend Evelyn Sawyer
Severance. She made other trips as well-~to Boston, to
New York, and in 1893 even to far-away Chicago, where she
stayed for ten days. It was on a trip to New'York and
Metuchen, New Jersey, to visit the Aldens in the early
nineties that she first met Dr. Charles Freeman. She
was just forty years old.

Her professional life seemed as placid and pros-
perous as her personal life. In the late eighties she
had had a flattering correspondence with Hamlin Garland.
She had met Howells, who praised her work, and who, in
1891, wrote to solicit contributions from her-~very high
praise, indeed.l There was a friendly exchange of letters
witthiss Jewett, and both James Russell Lowell and the
Beechers wrote their admiration. The Rudyard Kiplings up
in vermont became her friends and admirers. And praise

l. wm. Dean Howells, letter to.Mary E. Wilkins,
December 20, 1891 (American Academy of Arts and Letters,
New York) .

120.

121.
came from England too. In 1893 Sir Douglas Straight
asked her to contribute to Th3,§gll_M§ll_Magasine.
She was never ostentatious or aggressive (except in
financial matters), but she was obviously and genuinely
pleased with the demand for her work.

She was pleased also with the increasing strength of
her economic position. Having known slender circumstances
and even poverty, she enjoyed the things her new pros-
perity enabled her to do. She enjoyed buying good clothes,
taking trips, and helping friends. But she was careful
with her money and willing to fight to earn more. In
May, 1893, she wrote to her editors and thanked them for
their praise of Pembroke. She devoted the last paragraph
of that letter to a request for a raise. In a followbup
letter of June 9, 1893, she requested that her royalty
be increased from 10% to 15%.2

Mrs. Freeman was not only active socially and econ-
omically between 1890 and 1895; she was also very active
creatively. And while she continued to write short
stories all her life, this creative activity tended to
take the form of a search for a longer form. The fruits
of that search were Giles 99231, IQQQQQ; A §l§y_(l893),
Jane m (1893), Pembroke (1895), and Madelon (1896).

F. O. Matthiessen called Mrs. Freeman's vision of

 

life tragic. Giles Corey, for all its faults, lends

2. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Harper and
grothers, June 9, 1893 (Columbia University Library, New
ork .

122.
support to this position; it is a tragedy in six acts.
Based on the records of the Salem.witchcraft trials of
1692, it is the story of Giles Corey, his wife Martha and
his daughter Olive, victims of the witch-hunters. Martha
and Olive are arrested as witches. Although Olive is
eventually released, her mother is burned as a witch.
Part of the evidence that convicts her consists of her
husband's own words flagrantly misconstrued. For the
'rest, it is her own good sense in a world of madman that
brings about her doom. Stricken by his own unwitting role
in his wife's conviction, Giles vows not to speak when he
is arrested as a wizard. To force him to speak, the
authorities resort to "pressing," that is, to placing
heavy stones upon his chest. But he keeps his vow and
is crushed to death.

Here was an indigenous New England story with a
powerful theme and rich overtones. ‘Mrs. Freeman brought
to it her clear intelligence and her moral passion.

But she was not Hawthorne, and the results were not happy.
What she finally produced was not a major tragedy or even
a good drama, but rather an object lesson. She learned
that she could not write plays. She never tried again.

The play has many faults. Her characters are not
individualized. The dramatic focus shifts from Olive to
her mother to Giles and back to the daughter again--a
novelist's trick but not a dramatist's. The trial scene

is bad, especially the shifting of testimony, the quick

123.
retractions, and the presentation of written depositions
by characters who never appear on the stage. The last
act, in which a series of messengers run on and off stage
reporting on the slow death of Giles Corey, is not ef-
fective at all; it proves only that she must have read
Antiggne. A special word must be said about her dialog.
In this play, as in her historical novel (Th2 Heart's
Highggz) and her occasional historical short stories,
her dialog achieves a level of badness rarely matched in
published American fiction.

Among the play's few virtues are its psychological
validity, or at least its insight in keeping with the
modern temper. The "victims" of witchcraft are apiteful
and neurotic. Those who actually attempt to practice it
are weak-minded. The authorities are autocratic, self-
seeking, and self-righteous. Among them common sense,
science, reason, and integrity do not have a chance.

In fact Mrs. Freeman's view of the trials is much like
Arthur Miller's in Thg_Crucible. Another of the play's
virtues is that it is indigenous; it is about the history
and psychology of New England. It is about that special
kind of will that can feed on itself and remain strong

 

enough to hold the entire community at bay Deborah and
Barney Thayer in Pembroke could be descendants of Giles
Corey.

For all its weaknesses, there were those who wanted

to produce Giles Corey, Yeoman. Out of this desire arose

12A.

one of Mrs. Freeman's continual financial disputes. She
was concerned about the financial possibilities of pro—
ductions in New York and Boston and especially about her
rights in a production at the Theater of Arts and Letters.
Pride, fear, and financial instinct were all involved.
Apparently the weaknesses of the play were obvious enough
even to its supporters in 1893. They had it revised by
Eugene‘w. Presbrey. Mrs. Freeman didn't know'whether to
permit his version or not, although she claimed that she
liked it very much. It would have entitled her to a much
smaller share of both the money and the glory if it were
successful. But she pointed out:

There is of course no doubt that in a way in

case of a failure, it would be better to have

his version presented Saturday night, since

it would not reflect so strongly upon the

original.
It was this last attitude, this timidity in the face of
possible criticism, that prevailed at last. This timidity
was part of her general attitude and not confined to Giles
Corey alone, for over a year later in a different context
entirely she wrote to a Mr. Wilcox:

I confess to being a little cowardly. . . .

It does seem rather senseless to expose one's

self to scathing remarks about something that

is over and gone, and one cannot help, no

matter how necessary they may be in the in-

teres s of truthful and conscientious criti-
Giana

3. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Harper and
Brothers March 27, 1893 (Columbia university Library,
"3' Iarki e

A. Mhry E. Wilkins Freeman, Letter to Mr. Wilcox
August 20, 189A (Columbia university Library, New'Yorkf.

 

125.

Giles Corey, Yeoman was a minor business; it was the

 

result of thesearch for a form. But 1893 found mrs.
Freeman involved in a major piece of business as well.
The major business was ggg3_§19;g, her first novel. van
wyck Brooks has described Mrs. Freeman as the creator of
"practical widows and sedate old maids."5 Jane is a
*practical widow” cast in the role of a tragic, naturalis-
tic heroine.

Jane Field of Green River is a reserved, undemon-
strative widow living with her only daughter, a consump-
tive school teacher, whom poverty seems to have put beyond
the reach of recovery. Just when her daughter's case
becomes acute, Jane receives a letter directed to her own
dead sister. The letter, from an attorney in the distant
town of Elliot, states that the dead sister, Esther Maxwell,
has inherited a small fortune from an in-lawt Jane, who,
despite a facade of indifference, is suffering greatly
because of her daughter's illness, goes to see the lawyer,
intending to ask him to return to her from the Maxwell
estate a sum borrowed from her own husband many years
before. She hopes to provide for her daughter's recovery
wdth the money.

When she appears in the lawyer's office, he mistakes
her for her sister and bestows upon her the money and the
house which constitute the estate. Because the house and

5. van Hyck Brooks, 1h; Confident Ygg;§_(New York,
1952), p. 37-

126.
town are in a much healthier location than Green River,
Jane remains silent and allows her daughter to follow
her. Although Lois, the daughter, scorns her mother's
illegal action and rejects all the ill-gotten wealth, she
keeps silent, remains in Elliot and recovers. Jane
doesn't use any of the money either. The result is that
the town thinks of her as a miser, condemns her for not
taking better care of Lois, and finally leaves her pretty
much alone--so alone that when she is visited by three
old friends from Green River, she is not found out. Howe
ever, the guilt becomes too great to bear. She confesses
her deception and in confessing frees her daughter to love
her once again and to marry an Elliot suitor. But she
does not free herself. For the rest of her life she is
the victim of a neurotic compulsion to stop strangers and
tell them, "I ain't Esther Maxwell." ‘

Here is a novel free from the vacuum at the center
that marred Mrs. Stowe's stories. Here is a realistic
regional study which does not have to fall back on the
cliches of Dickensian melodrama. Mrs. Freeman deals here
with problems that are both indigenous and elemental,
and she keeps the problems firmly in the central situation.
Howells saw this and praised her for it--for graSping, as

”6

hefput it, "the wolfish problems of existence. But the

problem of form.was not completely solved. The novel

6. Clara and Rudolf Kirk,‘William Dean Howells
(New York, 1962), p. 337.

 

127.
has one serious structural flaw. It is thin; there is
simply not enough action and complication in the central
situation to warrant a novel 267 pages long. The result
is a work so padded that the central story keeps blurring
out of focus.

gggg_fliglg is not without certain structural virtues.
The author is careful to reveal her central characters
through an introductory chapter of conversation between
two minor characters. She also presents with insight and
accuracy the details of the hard life of rural New England.
In this way she uses the first third of the book to set
the scene.

Of her secondary characters, the two most important
areers. Maxwell and her daughter Flora, to whom the money
should have gone in the event of Esther Maxwell's death.
They serve a dual purpose. First, it is against their
need and their right that Jane Field's action is to be
judged. Secondly, they form a relationship parallel to
and contrasting with the mother-daughter relationship of
Jane and Lois. Between Flora and her mother there is a
reticence and a failure to communicate that leads finally
to Flora's sudden and unannounced marriage to a man her
mother disapproves of. The two relationships also comment
on one another in many other ways, often ironically.

There are many contrasts: one mother is silent, the other
garrulous; one daughter is sick, the other robust; one

daughter rejects her mother for violating society's norms,

 

128.
the other for following them; one daughter refuses to
marry with her mother's permission, the other daughter
marries without it. And old Jane, the silent one, in the
moment of greatest mental stress, cracks and speaks com-
pulsively while garrulous old Mrs. Maxwell in her moment
of truth is able to stare down the inquisitive town and
keep her own counsel. Those, of course, are virtues:
the division of the story into two parts, setting and
action, the parallel sub-plot, and the use of one char-
acter to comment on another. They are the structural
virtues of her short stories. And that is what gggg
Eiglg_is--an inflated short story.

Because of the thinness of the main plot and the
paucity of incident, Mrs. Freeman was forced to elaborate
details that focused attention outside the center. The
detailed eXposition of the relationship between Mrs.
Babcock and Amanda Pratt, Jane Field's two Green River
friends, is fine character study; but it shifts the focus
or at least impedes the action. In chapter IV twenty-two
pages are devoted to the painful details of a dinner
disaster in Elliot. New England manners, character and
character relationships are revealed, but none of them
have anything to do with the main action. The best
humorous passage in the book is the one describing Amanda
Pratt's preparation for her trip to Elliot, but it too
is irrelevant.

Another flaw that results from the paucity of inci-

129.

dent is Mrs. Freeman's habit of inserting excesses of
observation into the relevant incidents. For instance,
chapter II introduces us to Lois Field. We see her
collapse along the road from fatigue, clearly in the inci-
pient stages of consumption. She is brought home in a
neighbor's buggy.

Lois' pale face and little reaching hands

appeared around the wing of the buggy. Aman-

da ran around to the horse's head. He did

not offer to start; but she stood there, and

said, "Whoa, whoa," over and over in a plead-

ing voice. She was afraid to tough the bridle;

she had a great terror of horses.
The main points of chapter VI are Flora's unexpected and
defiant marriage and Lois' fear of discovery at Mrs.
Maxwell's tea party. Yet here is the scene as the late
tea party guests are awaited:

Presently Lois, at the window, saw Mr. Tux-

bury's sister, Mrs. Lowe, coming, and the

minister's wife, hurrying with a voluminous

swing of her skirts, in her wake. The min-

ister's wife had been calling, but Mrs.

Lowe, who was a little deaf, had not heard

her, and it was not until she shut the iron

gate almost in her face that she saw beg.

Then the two came up the walk together.
In each case the observation is fairly made; however,
Amanda's fear of horses, Mrs. Lowe's deafness, and the
minister's wife's haste have nothing to do with the main
action. In fact they--and many other bits of like
writing--delay the action. They are simply a species of
7. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, igne,£iglg (Boston,
1899), Po #5.

80 Ibid., Po 15°

130.
high-grade padding.

As with the incidents, so with the characters. Many
of the secondary characters are well drawn, but they are
not relevant. Lawyer Maxwell's pomposity is amusing.
Amanda Pratt and Mrs. Babcock are also amusing. Mrs.
Freeman's eye and ear were functioning perfectly when she
recorded Mrs. Babcock's unconscious cruelty of victory
in chapter VII.

"well, I s'pose women that have men folks to
do for 'em ought to be kind of obligin' some-
times to them that ain't."

And later:

"well, if you ain't a double and twisted old
maid!"

Her apology makes it worse.

"Land, Mandy, . . . don't get mad. I didn't
mean anything. Anybody knows that old maigs
is jest as good as them that gets married.

Amanda's lonely timidity as she resolves to visit Elliot
is touching.

Amanda went into the house and shut the door.
She stood in the middle of the parlor and
looked around. There was a certain amaze in
her eyes, as if everything wore a new aspect.
"They can talk all they've a mind to," she
muttered, "it's a great undertakin'. S'pose
anything happened? If anything happened to
them whilst they were gone, there's folks
enough to home to see to things. S'pose
anything happened to me, there ain't any-
body. If I go, I've got to leave this house
jest so. I've got to be sure the bureau
drawers are all packed u , an' things swept
an' dusted, so folks won t make remarks.
There's other things too. Everything's got

90 Ibid., p. 196-1970

131.

to be thought of. There's the cat.10
This is quite good, but it interposes itself between the
reader and the main business at hand, which is Jane Field's
moral confrontation. The result has been that the novel
has either been ignored or disparaged. Foster says:

The illusion is overwhelming when we are in

the mind of her heroine; but the representa-

tion of the struggle in action and dramatic

:gggelis commonplace, implausible, uneven in
This is a wrong-headed critical judgment. The action is
not implausible, and its commonplace quality is its
strength. But the uneven tone is there, and it is caused
by these digressions.

One of the sources of strength in Mrs. Freeman's
short stories is her use of symbols--the dog and canary
in "A New England Nun," the poorhouse in "Sister Liddy."
In gagg_fliglg_this is not the case. Although the story is
longer and the incidents and characters more numerous,
she has not found a way to make her symbols function
throughout the story. Consequently they appear unex-
pectedly, function briefly, and are discarded. The
thunderstbrm which burns down the barn across from.Mrs.
Field's illegally occupied house in Elliot is an old-

fashioned providence. It is treated as such. "The Lord

will overrule it all; it is He speakin' in it." says the

10. Ibid., p. 206.

ll. Edward Foster, Mary E, Wilkins Freeman (New
York, 1956), p. 117.

 

132.
visiting Hrs. Green.12 Mrs. Freeman treats these rather
Gothic intrusions, these residue of her heritage from
Hawthorne, rather solemnly. The result, in a novel which
tends to be equal parts realistic character study and
genre painting, is the unevenness of tone Foster complains
of.

Jane Field treats a number of the author's favorite

 

 

themes. It treats the themes of love and loneliness
especially, and in its essential treatment it is rich in
the ambiguities and ironies of tragedy. Jane does what
she does out of love for her daughter. But in performing
the act of love she violates both her own conscience and
the mores of the community. Speaking to Lois, she says,
"I'm a-followin' out my own law an' my own right . . . I
ain't ashamed of it."13 But she pays the price. She
becomes isolated and guilt-ridden. When a character
comments on the loneliness of the big old house Jane has
just moved into, the author feels compelled to comment,
"Of the awful lonesomeness of it truly, this smiling, com-
fortable young soul had no conception."lh

The theme of isolation is reinforced in several ways
through both character and setting. These are inarticu-

late people--pe0ple on whom the region and its mores have

12. Freeman, Jane Field, p. 237.
13. Ibid., p. 169.
14. Ibid., p. 89.

 

 

133.
placed the burden of silence. Amanda is unable to explain
her fears to her friends. Jane is unable to articulate
her love to her daughter. Mrs. Maxwell greets the curio-
sity of the town with her only weapon--courageous silence.
Jane's symbolic slowness of Speech allows the lawyer to
mistake her for her dead sister. When forced to Speak,
the characters can only stammer. In prOposing to Lois,
Francis can only mutter, "I like you." Jane when quizzed
about her knowledge of Elliot can only repeat, "I guess
I don't remember it," as later she is forced to repeat,
"I ain't Esther Maxwell."15 And of course, it is because
Jane cannot speak in Elliot that her motives and actions
are misunderstood by the town. The setting also helps
to intensify or underscore the theme of isolation. Jane
travels to an unknown town where she is the stranger.
In bringing together the peOple from Green River and the
peOple from Elliot and giving comic treatment to a comedy

16.Mrs. Freeman also underlines Jane's

of manners theme,
isolation.

Mrs. Freeman's attitude toward Jane Field's actions,
guilt, and isolation is by no means simple. Jane pays a
high price for her deeds because she "took it on myself to

do justice instead of the Lord, an' that ain't for any

15. Ibid., pp. 58-61, 260-267.

16. Jane's Green River friends observe defensively,
"There's considerable more dress here, but I guess, on the
whole, it ain't any better a place to live in than Green
River." Ibid., pp. Ztl-tho

134.

human bein' to do."17 Her sanity gives way. But she
pays for success. She permitted herself to be involved
in the original deception in order to save her daughter's
life. Her daughter lives, forgives her mother, and
marries happily. Any alternative to Jane's action is
unthinkable.

Most interesting of all, however, is the fact that
Jane is not so much guilty of action as of inaction or
’reaction. At the beginning of the novel Jane watches
with surface stoicism and secret agony as Lois is stricken
with consumption. When Mrs. Green says, "She hadn't
ought to teach school another day, Mis' Field," Jane can
only reply, "I dun'no how it's goin' to be helped."18
Then just as Lois becomes worse, the letter comes addressed
to Jane's dead sister. It announces the death of a man
who, morally at least, owes Jane Field fifteen hundred
dollars. Lois's illness forces Jane to journey to Elliot
to ask the estate lawyer for the money. Mr. Maxwell, the
estate lawyer, thinks Jane is the heiress, Esther Maxwell.
Jane does nothing to support or deny his conviction. She
allows him to persist in his mistake, but the initiative
is his, not Jane's. When Lois follows her, Jane does not
ask her help. When Elliot townspeOple test her memory,
she denies any recollection of having been there before.

And finally, although she inhabits the house and thereby

17. Ibid., p. 2590
18. Ibid., p. 310

135.
allows Lois to recover in the more healthy environment of
Elliot, she never touches a penny of the money. In fact
she and Lois almost starve themselves. Coincidence and
fate conspire to offer to Jane the great gift of Lois's
health, asking of her only silence. Jane complies, knows
ing that the money she will receive is morally hers. But
her New England conscience cannot bear the weight of this
justice which is paradoxically wrong. Here is a woman
clearly at the mercy of the conflicting forces of coinci-
dental circumstances, maternal emotion, and environmental
pressures. She is finally destroyed by these forces and
in this destruction becomes very nearly a naturalistic
heroine. Jane, who appeared in 1892, the year before
Crane's Maggie: A_§i§l,9§_the Streets, is not Mrs. Free-
man's only "naturalistic" character. This naturalism will
be discussed later.

Jane Field has been out of print for fifty years. It
never received the attention paid to Jerome, The Portion
2£_Labgg, or Th9 Shoulders g§_Atla§. Its faults are many;
but its virtues are genuine, as Foster recognized.

Deepite the amateurishness of the complica-

tions, the struggle at the center of Jggg

Eiglg_is meaningful and potentially dramatic.

332 3332322233132?.fiihao‘iil’ffimd m“

The word "amateurishness" is not quite fair. Although the

padding is excessive and although the incidents are fre-

quently interrupted by unnecessary details, they are,

19. Foster, Mary E, Wilkins Freeman, p. 116.

 

136.

nevertheless, the very professional habits of a short
story writer feeling her way uncertainly in the longer
form. They reveal the virtues that Hamlin Garland admired.

As a student of minute forms of conduct, she

had no superior. The amazing part of her

genius lay in her ability to see the near-by

life of her neighborhood in artistic per-

spective. In her ability to chargaterize

elderly folk she had no superior.
The key word in the Foster quotation is the word "center."
For the first time in the forty-year history of the New
England regional tradition a piece of long fiction had
been written with a meaningful struggle at the center.

In 189k Harpers published Pembroke. From the time
that it first appeared it has been recognized as Mary
Wilkins Freeman's masterpiece. It was well received by
the reading public and stayed in demand for thirty years.
The critics were kind to it too; some were extravagant
in their praise.

He [Sir Arthur Conan Doyle] had just read

Pembroke. His admiration for her previous

work was unbounded but "this novel," he said,

"is the greatest piece of American fiction

since The Scarlet Letter." I have found his

opinion shared by other eminent critics since

then, and in England especially is her name

heard mosg frequently in connection with Haw-

thorne's. 1
This hyperbole is gone, but the novel remains highly re-
garded. Foster, her biographer, considers it her finest

20. Hamlin Garland, Roadside Meetings (New York,
1930) 9 p. 3‘}.

21. ”Mary E. Wilkins Freeman " Hggper's'Weekly
XLVII (November 21, 1903), 1880. , ’

137.
long work.

Mrs. Freeman had failed to make Jane Field a signi-
ficant novel because she had been unable to provide her
central situation with sufficient complexity of incident
and wound up with an extravagantly padded short story.
But she learned from the process of writing it. She found
the solution to this essentially technical problem in an
external principle of unity-~thematic unity. In her pre-
face to the first edition of Pembroke she said:

Pembroke was originally intended as a study

of the human will in several New England

characters, in different phases of disease

and abnormal development, and to prove,

especially in the most marked case, the

truth of a theory that its cure depended

entirely upon the capacity of the indivi-

dual for a love which could Sise above

all considerations of self.2
She followed her plan with admirable success.

Pembroke is the story of a town. It contains a
number of plots and a great variety of characters, all
of whom are woven into a rich tapestry of New England
village life. Mrs. Freeman said, "Pembroke is intended
to portray a typical New England village of some sixty
years ago."23 But she did not intend to write a his-
torical novel and she was certainly free of the nostalgia
that marked the works of Mrs. Stowe and Miss Jewett. She
said in her preface that many little towns like Pembroke

22. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Pembroke (New York,
1899) 3 F. iii.

23. Ibid., p. v.

138.
still existed, still inhabited by eccentrics. One is
tempted to think that she placed the story in a bygone
age to avoid the unpleasant naming of actual names such
as took place after Thg Debtor came out.

The main story in Pembroke is the story of Barney
Thayer and Charlotte Barnard. One night Charlotte's
father Cephas orders Barney from his house in the midst
of a political argument. Barney refuses ever to return.
His own mother Deborah orders him from her house for
refusing to marry Charlotte. He goes to live in the half-
finished farm house he had been building for Charlotte.
He lives alone for nine years; but when he falls ill,
Charlotte braves the censure of the town to nurse him. Her
act of self-denying love redeems him. He returns to
Cephas Barnard's house and marries Charlotte.

Because of Barney's wilful conduct, Deborah refuses
to let William Berry court her daughter Rebecca. Caught
between the diseased wills of Deborah and the miser Silas
Berry, the young couple make love secretly. Rebecca
conceives a bastard child, and Deborah drives her from
the house. Although the bastard dies and a legitimate
child is born to the hastily married Berrys, Rebecca lives
out her life in shame.

Deborah then turns on her invalid second son, Ephraim.
Fearing that he might lose his soul, she beats him, not
knowing that he had secretly gone sledding for the first
time in his life and overtaxed his weak heart. He col-

139.
lapses and dies. As Charles Thompson says, "She loses
all her children rather than yield to them the least
shadow of her authority."2‘ She suffers agonies of
remorse, thinking she had killed him. When she discovers
his sledding escapade, she collapses and dies.

The third main story is that of the middle-aged
courtship of Sylvia Crane and Richard Alger. Richard,
who has called every Sunday night for twenty years, finds
Sylvia not at home on a fateful Sunday. He refuses ever
to return. He is finally brought to his senses by the
sight of Sylvia in the town wagon being taken to the poor
house. He relents, repents, and marries her.

This tapestried structure was neither new with Mrs.
Freeman nor confined to the New England tradition; in
fact it is still popular with regionalists. Pembroke is
reminiscent structurally of Oldtown Folks and Cable's
Thg_Grandissimes and it looks forward to Winesburg, thg
and Faulkner's Light_i§,gugu§§, But Mrs. Freeman uses
the form well. She weaves many characters into the various
plots, making each character's position in relation to
'wilfulness and love comment on the position of the others.
These two concepts of wilfulness and love underlie all
the interlocking plots, but out of them grow Mrs. Freeman's
comments on isolation, the relation of the present to the

2#. Charles M. Thompson, "Miss Wilkins-~An Idealist

gESMasquerade," Atlantic Monthly, LXXXIII (May, 1899),

140.
past, and the role of women in New England society. Thus,
in a complex series of interrelated plots and characters
she is able to touch on all her favorite themes.

The village of Pembroke is portrayed through the
interrelated lives of three families: the Thayers, the
Barnards, and the Berrys. In each family, lives are
ruined by a species of wilfulness which either forces love
into abnormal or illicit channels or smothers it altogether.
Each family is dominated by a character so twisted by the
combined pressures of strong psychological drives and
rigidly circumscribed environment that he becomes what
Sherwood Anderson was to call a grotesque. Silas Berry
is a miser whose cunning and shameless greed brings
near-ostracism on his children. Cephas Barnard is a
zealot and an addict of Specious reasoning. In the finest
comic scene in the book he reasons wildly to the conclu-
sion that it is meat that makes men mean. In his Search
for more Spiritual food he bakes sorrel pies and forces
his family to eat them. Confronted with the ghastly food,
his wife resists by pointing out that horses eat no meat,
yet many of them are mean. Cephas counters with logical
sureness.

"Ain't I told ye once horses were the ex-

ceptions?" said Cephas, severely. "There

has to be exceptions. If there wa'n't any

exceptions, there couldn't be any rule.

Wbmen can't never get hold of things

straight. Their minds slant off sideways

the way gheir arms do when they fling a
stone."2

25. Freeman, Pembroke, pp. 54-55.

1A1.
The most important family in the story-~the most

important thread in the tapestry--is the Thayer family.
They are the most important for a variety of reasons:
Deborah Thayer and her son Barney are the most extreme
cases of diseased wilfulness in the story; the Thayers
are involved more intricately in the various plots; all
the plots save one, the love story of Sylvia Crane and
Richard Alger, flow in one way or another from Deborah
Thayer. It is from her that Barney inherits his diseased
will. He looks like her, Mrs. Freeman says; and when
Rebecca assures her father that Barney will relent, the
old man answers, "No, he won't . . . no, he won't. He's
jest like your mother."26 It is Deborah who drives her
daughter out of the house and into William Berry's arms.
It is She who drives her invalid younger son to rebellion
and death. In fact she is the ultimate cause of Sylvia's
anguish. It is Barney's inherited diseased will that
causes Sylvia to miss her appointment with Richard. It
has been almost a tradition to praise Pembroke and then
add quickly the statement that it could just as easily

have been a collection of short stories.27 The thematic

26. Ibid., p. 104.

. 27. That this is a critical commonplace can be seen
in the following statement: "Easily breakable into a suc-
cession of short stories. Excellent as a study until mar-
red by a happy ending." This is the complete entry on
Pembroke in Crawford, Kern, and Needleman, American Liter-
§£§£g, p. 18A, the Barnes and Noble outline. F. L. Pattee
also reflected this common judgment on Mary's talent when
he said, "She is strong only in short efforts. She has
small powers of construction." While true as a generality,

 

142.

unity, the tapestried structure, and the controlling causal-
ity of Deborah Thayer all indicate that this is an unfor-
tunate and superficial judgment.

Without ostentation or undue force, Mrs. Freeman
gives added unity and density to the story by the use of
parallelism of plots. The Sylvia-Richard story is a
counterpoint to the Barney-Charlotte story, and they work
against one another like movement in a piece of music.
Chapter I introduces the Barney-Charlotte story and
chapter XIV (the final chapter) concludes it. Chapter II
introduces Sylvia's Story and chapter XIII concludes it.

Sylvia's plight is conventional enough in the senti-
mental fiction that abounded in the '90's. What gives it
texture and quality is the complete reality of the setting
and the accuracy and bite of the dialog, together with the
fine descriptions of the decay of her resources--both
Spiritual and material--until she is defenseless against
the pain she finds everywhere. In terrible isolation
which she finally can no longer fight, she drifts into
poverty, starvation, and repressed sexual fantasy. And
her sisters, separated from her by the chasm of matrimony,
batter her with words. Sarah Barnard says:

"Women don't worry much on their own ac—

counts, but they've got accounts. . . .
You're gettin' older, Sylvy."

this statement is not true of Pembroke. See F. L. Pattee,
A Histo gf_American Litegature since l§ZQ (New York,
1917 p p. 2390

 

lhB.

"I know it," Sylvia had replied, gith
a quick shrinking, as if from a blow.2

Her other sister, Hannah Berry, wounds her with the words,
"You ought to be mighty thankful you ain't got any man
at all, Sylvy Crane."29 Later she strikes from the other
quarter. "Well, two old maids in the family is about
enough, according to my way of thinkin'."30 Sylvia reacts
with as much patience and forbearance as possible, on one
occasion saying shyly to Charlotte, "I guess you ain't
got all there is to bear."31

Mrs. Freeman's use of parallelism is not confined to
the broad counterpoint of plot and sub-plot. It is also
employed in the detail of Specific action. In chapter I
Barney is sent away from the Barnard household.‘ In chapter
II Richard is sent away from Sylvia Crane's by the big
stone placed in front of the door. In the end both men
are brought back by the action of the town. Richard is
Shocked into an act of self-denying love by the sight of
Sylvia being tranSported to the poorhouse. Barney is
brought back to the Barnards by the town's attempt to
censure Charlotte for staying with him during his illness.
This parallelism, which makes the novel almost symetrical,

can also be seen in the first chapter where Charlotte

28. Freeman, Pembroke, p. 27.
29. lbig,, p. #7.

30. lpig., p. 268.

31. ig;g,, p. 39.

 

 

let.
pushes past her father to call Barney back, an action
which is repeated in the last chapter when she pushes
past him and his threat to bar her forever to tend the
stricken Barney.

An outgrowth of Mrs. Freeman's need to convey
structurally the unity of her theme is her use of parallel
characters--characters whose conduct casts light on the
conduct of others. The contrast between Rose Berry, who
will marry anyone to fulfill her need for love, and Char-
lotte, who has the pride to remain single, is enforced in
several scenes in which the two engage in extended con-
versation. Barney is contrasted with Thomas Payne, the
squire's son who wants to marry Charlotte. Barney,
chained to the past and to Pembroke where, in the beginning
of the novel, he contentedly anticipates dying, is in-
capable of escaping his inheritance of corrosive stub-
bornness. Thomas, on the other hand, having been to
college-~that is, having escaped Pembroke--is free of the
limiting and punishing effects of the place. He is free
to be courteous and self-sacrificing. Finally, Rebecca's
sin is seen in contrast to the plight of Mrs. Sloane, the
only prostitute in the area, in whose house she coinci-
dentally finds shelter and in contrast to the minister's
wife who aids her in her time of trial.

Pembroke diSplays many other virtues of the author
in addition to her fine controlled use of parallelism.

The dialog is excellent. So are many of the dramatic

 

1&5.
scenes. In the scene in which Deborah discovers Rebecca's
pregnancy, Mary comes close to melodrama--in fact she
deals with the classic melodramatic situation, even to
the falling snow; But the indirection, restraint, and
Simplicity of the writing carry it off.

She worked assiduously; by the middle of the
forenoon the dress [which she was making for
Rebecca] was ready to be tried on. Ephraim
and his father were out in the barn, she and
Rebecca were alone in the house.

She made Rebecca stand up in the middle
of the kitchen floor, and she began fitting
the crimson gown to her. Rebecca Stood dr00p-
ing heavily, her eyes cast down. Suddenly her
mother gave a great start, pushed the girl
violently from her, and stood aloof. She
did not Speak for a few minutes; the clock
ticked in the dreadful silence. Rebecca cast
one glance at her mother, whose eyes seemed
to light the innermost recesses of her being
to her own vision; then She would have looked
away, but her mother's voice arrested her.

“Look at me," said Deborah. And Rebecca
looked; it was like uncovering a disfigurement
OI~ a sore.

"What--ails you?" said her mother, in a
terrible voice.

Then Rebecca turned her head; her mother's
eyes could not hold her any longer. It was as
if her very soul shrank.

"Go out of this house," said her mother,
after a minute. »

Rebecca did not make a sound. She went,
bending . . .

There is also good genre painting. The tavern scene
and the cherry-picnic in Silas Berry's orchard are de-
tailed, vivid, and charming. The Opening scene of the
novel is also good regionalism. In it Mrs. Freeman de-
picts the Thayer kitchen and the family-~Caleb, Deborah,

Rebecca, Ephraim, and Barnabas-~assembled around the fire-

32. Ibid., pp. 192-193.

 

146.

place on a Sunday night reading the Bible. This is so
right, so apprOpriate, so significant a detail that it
functions as a symbol. So does the scene later on where
Barney walks down the road past the old Crane place.

It appeared scarcely more than a lane; the

old wheel-ruts were hidden between green,

weedy ridges, the bordering stone walls

looked like long green barrows being over-

grown with poison-ivy vines and rank shrubs.

For a long way there was no house except

Sylvia Crane's. There was one cellar where

a house had stood before Barney could re-

member. There were a few old blackened

chimney-bricks still there, the step-stone

worn by dead and forgotten feet, and the

old lilac-bushes that had grown against the

front windows. Two popular trees, too,

Stood where the front yard had met the road,

casting long shadows like men.3

Everett Carter, in his study of Howells and realism,
says that realists were not very interested in symbolism.
Such is clearly not the case with Mrs. Freeman in Pem-
broke. She uses various kinds of symbols and she uses
symbols in various ways. Here more than elsewhere the
influence of Hawthorne can be found. The unfinished
house in which Barney goes to live and Barney's illness
at the end of the book are Hawthornesque. So is the re-
lationship of Barney's physical and psychological condi-
tion. As Barney's fixed attitude grows stronger, he
looks more deformed physically. When Thomas Payne meets
Barney on the read, he stares at him.

A horror as of something uncanny and abnormal

stole over him. Was the man's back curved,
or had he by some subtle vision a perception

33. Ibid., Po 1660

 

lh7.

of some terrible Spiritual degzrmity, only
symbolized by a curved Spine?

This is like Hawthorne--even to the authors ambivalent
attitude. Unfortunately it is the poorest section of the
book. Barney's reaction to Mrs. Sloane, the prostitute,
as a symbol is also like Hawthorne.

To this young man brought up in the extreme

thrift and neatness of a typical New England

household, this strange untidiness, as he

viewed it through his strained mental state,

seemed 39 have g_deeper Significance, and

ggyeal the very Shame and sgualor Q; the soul

itself, and its own existence and tggughts,

by material images. (italics mine)

These symbols remind us of Hawthorne because through
them Mrs. Freeman is trying to do what Hawthorne did. She
is trying to make the narrative bear the weight of her
psychological insights--her insights into the nature of
the "diseased will." But because She is saying other
things as well, her symbols also work in other ways. For
instance, they function in a historical or social context,
Pembroke is a comment on the relation of the present to
the past in New’England--of the crushing burden of the
past weighing down on the present. In each of the three
main families in the story, the younger generation is
forced into unnatural paths and into permanent or tem-
porary unhappiness by the older generation. The presence

of Silas Berry, Cephas Bernard, and Deborah Thayer makes

314-0 Ibid., P0 2980
35. Ibid., p. 205.

 

148.
the free development of a happy life impossible for their
children.

Silas is the sly Yankee turned mean by poverty.
Cephas is almost a caricature of the Calvinist theolo~
gian. However, it is Deborah who is the great naturalis-
tic symbol of New'England Calvinism; in fact she is Mrs.
Freeman's most explicit and detailed picture of the ter-
rible pressure of New England's Puritan past. She has
three children. Each of the children has a weakness--
Barney a psychological one, Rebecca an emotional one,
Ephraim a physical one. In each case Deborah's moral
rigidity drives the child from her and contributes to the
destruction of the child. Barney and Rebecca are driven
from their home and Ephraim is driven to his death by a
woman whose reSponse to human failing is, "I shall be just
as hard on him as the Lord for it."36

Deborah is possibly Mrs. Freeman's greatest creation.
She is a successful creation to the modern reader because,
among other things, she is presented ironically. While
accusing other characters of being prisoners of the past,
she is herself the epitome of the past. Her most dramatic
scene, the one in which she punishes Ephraim, is richly
ironic. Ephraim had always been forbidden any physical
activity and rich food because of his bad heart, and he
had always been afraid of his mother. One night unknown

to Deborah he goes sledding and, on returning, eats half

36. Ibid., p. 580

‘—._« 2v ‘

- —-——-

149.

a mince pie. The next day he fails to communicate a
message of Deborah's to her husband Caleb. Breeding
over the moral failures of her other children, she decides
to punish him; and Ephraim, for the first time, is not
afraid. He has become free of her. She persists in pun—
ishing him when it is too late and for the wrong thing.
After she strikes him once, he collapses, not from the blow
as she thinks but from the exertions and food of the pre-
vious night. Then she prays:

It was a strange prayer, full of remorse,

of awful agony, of self defense of her own

act, and her own position as the vicar of

God upon earth for her child. "I couldn't

let him go astray too!" she shrieked out.

"I couldn't, I couldn't! O Lord, thou

knowest that I couldn't! I would--have

lain him upon-~the altar, as Abraham laid

Isaac! Oh, Ephraim, my son, my son, my

son!"37
Here is the neurotic identification with the Lord's will,
the ironic willingness to offer that which is no longer
hers, and the tragic determination to strike at Barney
and Rebecca through the child. The scene closes with
Deborah praying compulsively in her room while a neighbor
‘woman and the doctor's wife keep the vigil with the corpse.

About two o'clock Mrs. Ray tiptoed into the

pantry, and brought forth a mince-pie. "I

found one that had been cut on the tap shelf,"

she whispered. She and the doctor's gife ate

the remainder of poor Ephraim's pie.3

In this last scene and others like it Mrs. Freeman writes

370 22.1.9" p. 21*00
38° EDI-.9.” Po 242°

150.
with a sureness and skill unsurpassed by any novelist of
her time o

Pembroke provides Mrs. Freeman with an Opportunity to
touch on another favorite theme--the role of women in New
England society.39 It was the rather unhappy role of women
to accept as best they could the conditions created by
men. Sylvia can only wait for Richard to come to his
senses. Mrs. Barnard has no choice but to accept her
husband's culinary foolishness. And Charlotte has to live
in a world made jointly by Cephas and Barney. "Charlotte
had acquiesced forlornly; there was nothing else for her
to do."l+0 Mrs. Freeman's attitude toward the Situation is
somewhat ambivalent. Charlotte and Sylvia are clearly vic-
tims, but because of the constancy of their loves, they
are noble and admired. Deborah, who usurps the man's
role in her own house, is destroyed by the dimensions of
her own will. This clearly is not the woman's way. How»
ever, women may break out of the confines of their role
in the name of love--that self-denying love that overcomes

39. This Special concern with the impact of New
England upon women was detected as a major motif even by
the earliest critics.

"She draws many pictures of the American girl-~not
the rather attenuated smart person which.we may meet fresh
any month in Mr. Howells' pageS--not the brilliant omni-
potent belle of fashionable life, but the fair, delicate,
nervous, independent flower of New England, the girl who
"teaches school," works at dressmaking, or on the farm,
whose slender form and pink and white complexion cover a
resolute will and sensitive nerves." Mary E. Wilkins,"
Bookman [England] I (December, 1891) 102.

#0. Freeman, Pembroke, p. 10.

 

151.
will. Charlotte does.

Women in Mrs. Freeman's fiction pay a price for the
role they are forced to play. It is one of the strengths
of Pembroke that the writen refined if not reticent, deals
more honestly than any other writer of the New England
regional tradition with the sexual part of that price.
She presents the strong sexual attraction between Barney
and Charlotte and pain that denial brings. Her awareness
of sexuality is also shown in Rebecca's illicit relations
with William Berry, in Rose Berry's pathetic pursuit of
sexual fulfilment with any husband, and in Sylvia's
poignant, Spinsterish fantasies.

Pembroke is pervaded by a mood of naturalism. The
major characters are compulsive people driven to untenable
positions by uncontrollable forces. When Thomas Payne
tells Barney to mend his ways, Barney's answer is as
follows:

"I can't help it," he said.

"Can't help it, you ----"

"I can't, before God, Thomas."4l
Rebecca and Ephraim are driven to their tragic situations
by circumstances they cannot control. Mrs. Freeman's
‘women are victims. They are passive in the face of situ-
ations over which they have no control. And surrounding
these compulsive characters and these victims is a world

essentially indifferent to them. This indifference is

41. Ibid., p. 297.

 

 

152.
diSplayed in chapter XIV through a manipulation of point
of view. Years having passed since the initial compli—
cations and Deborah's death, the author has the tragedies
retold in summary form by a neighbor woman driving through
the village with a visitor from out of town.

After the door had slammed behind Rebecca

the two women drove home, and the guest was

presently feasted on company—fare for supper,

and all these strange tragedies and histories

to which she had listened had less of a savor

in her memory, than the fine green tea and

the sweet cake on her tongue. The hostess,

too, did not have them in mind any longer;

she pressed the plum-cake and hot biscuits

and honey on her cousin, in lieu of gossip,

for entertainment. The stories were old to

her, except as She found a new listener to

them, and they had never had any vital in-

terest for her.

Mary Wilkins Freeman was neither a biological deter-
minist nor an environmentalist. But she did record in-
sights that approached these positions. This extreme
realism--this approach toward naturalism--can best be
considered as resulting from her attitude toward place,
the effect of time on place, and the effect of a time-
laden place on character. The customary way of consider-
ing Mary Wilkins Freeman is to consider her in relation
to Sarah Orne Jewett. Simpson says in making his compari-
son, VMiss Jewett is the more mellow and genteel in that
her psychological realism is seldom pushed to the point

of grimness or morbidity."l"3 “Mellow" is a particularly

42. Ibid., pp. 308“309o

 

#3. Claude M. Simpson, The Local Colorists: Ameri—
can Short Stories, 1857-1900 (New York, 1960), p. 21.

 

153.

apt word because it connotes a seasoning--a comfortable
attitude toward the past. She had made her peace with her
ancestors and created out of her fondness for them a kind
of golden age. In other words, Sarah looked upon the past
with nostalgia; and because her attitude toward the past
was nostalgic, she did not see her characters as ”pushed
to the point of grimness or morbidity" by it. I

Mrs. Freeman presents time in terms of place. That is,
She portrays New England's past in terms of its effect on
the diminished present of a Specific locality. Her char-
acters' relationship to their environment is their relation-
ship to the past. She views this relationship ironically
and tragically. She is free of nostalgia and, therefore, a
realist. F. L. Pattee has said, "For external nature she
cares little. The backgrounds are meager . . . There is
no Mary E. Wilkins country as there is a Sarah Orne Jewett
country."44 This is not really true. There is a Mary E.
Wilkins country, but it is viewed realistically, not
nostalgically. It is also viewed functionally, as an agent
shaping the lives of characters. H. S. Canby points out:

Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman, whose pen is far more

skillful [than that of Miss Jewett] goes

further. With her the setting is interesting
only for its effect upon the dwellers of her

hill configry. . . . She is a conscious
realist.

 

. #4. F. L. Pattee, A_Histo of American Literature
£9.99. £3.72 (New York. 1917 , p. 233':

#5. Henry Seidel Canby, A_Stud1 g: the Short Stogy
(New York, 1913), p. 58.

 

 

15h.
Pembroke-~restrictive, burdensome, diminished Pembroke--
is Mary E. Wilkins country. Because she sees it for what
it is and sees what it ig_in terms of what it wag and
because she is able to project this insight into several
short stories, Jgg§_giglg, Pembroke, and parts of several
later works, her work constitutes, at its best, the far-

thest advance and finest achievement of the New England

regional tradition. It is this vision of time and place

that enables her to do more than her predecessors.

The author of "A Humble Romance" had come
to grips with many more sides of life than
the author of "Deephaven," and she set them
down unflinchingly. She had observed the
New England character and could record its
peculiar traits. Her early storiig burn
with the life of hard eXperience.

It was Mary Wilkins Freeman's fate, however, to share
‘with many greater writers an almost total inability to
develop a critical perSpective about her own work. She

never knew’what her best work was, and she never knew the

difference between her good and bad work. Most unfortu-

nately, she never seemed to know when she had worked out a
form eSpecially adapted to her talent and needs. Conse-
quently, after finishing Pembroke, a novel which had solved
the problem of form that had plagued her predecessors--
after telling a genuine regional and realistic story with
no vacuum at the center-sshe began almost at once to follow

false lights.
Her first misfortune of this kind was a collaboration

#6. F. O. matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett (Boston,
1929)) p0 1460

 

155.
'with J. E. Chamberlin, the genteel editor of The Youth's

Companion. Together they wrote The Long Arm (1895), a

mystery story which won a publisher's prize in England
where it first appeared. Mrs. Freeman enjoyed the prize
(she was always very appreciative of recognition), but
she became upset when the British publisher, Bacheller,

Johnson, and Bacheller, issued a cheap paper edition over

which she had no control. The situation was further com-

plicated by Mrs. Freeman's demand that the American edition

be in Harper's hands. Chamberlin stayed in the background

and let Mrs. Freeman direct the battle. The result was a

long and rather unpleasant correspondence over money.

Several things emerge from the correspondence. First, she

was pepular in England-~popular enough for publishing houses

to consider her an investment. Secondly, as the years

passed, she became financially sharp and quick to do battle

in defense of her profits. This is only to be expected;

she was Single and had to make her way.

The Long Arm can be considered a momentary diversion

which achieved its purpose, the British prize. Madelon

(1896) is a more serious sign of the failure of the

author's critical intelligence. In it she seems to have

forgotten all that She learned about the construction of

a regional novel. All of the hard-won progress that can

be traced through Jane Field and Pembroke seems to be lost.

 

On the brink of a masterpiece, with a near masterpiece
behind her, she abandons the realistic pose almost entirely

156.
and plunges unhappily into romantic melodrama.

Madelon is the story of Madelon Hautville who is
loved indifferently by Burr Gordon, her heart's desire,
and relentlessly by Lot Gordon, Burr's rich evil cousin.
One dark night Lot Gordon forces his attentions on Made-
lon, who is dark and passionate because of distant Indian
ancestry. She stabs him. Burr takes the blame and is
indicted for attempted murder. Lot promises to free Burr
if Madelon will marry him. She agrees. He has a change
of heart, releases them both and dies, leaving all his
money to Burr.

The novel is weak from almost every point of view.
The characters are unidimensional and melodramatic. Burr
does not develop, and Lot's reversal is completely unbe-
lievable. The main action is thin--hardly more than a
short story. Consequently the novel is padded. Mrs.
Freeman frequently interrupts the action-~even the most
dramatic confrontations-awith long passages of genre
painting. The central situation is a triangle. The author
keeps the story going simply by adding complicating lovers
on either end. One such character, Jim Otis, is carefully
develOped, dominates two chapters, and then drops out of
the Story completely. The lovers' dialog, which takes up
considerable Space, is almost invariably bad. Most seri-
ously, Mrs. Freeman begins to drift away from the stark
sentences, which seemed to come so naturally right from

the beginning, and into undergraduate fine writing.

 

157.

Describing a horseback ride she says, "Then she Spared
not the mare for nigh three miles on the New Salem road.”7
She was also guilty of many other flights like the follows
ing.

All that day, and many days after that, poor

Madelon Hautville, who had been striving like

any warrior against the powers and principal-

ities of human wills and passions, and had

grounded her arms after a victory which had

left her wounded almost to death, carried her

bleedigg heart and walked her woman's tread-

mill 0

The novel does treat in its own way several serious
and recurring themes. One of these is the role of women
in a man's world. Some of the best scenes in the book
deal with Madelon's inability to make men believe her
and to take her seriously. When she tells her father the
truth about the stabbing, he replies, "You have done
nothing worse than go daft, as women will, to shield a
fellow that's used you ill."l“9 Earlier she had been
driven to impotent range when "David smiled down at her
convulsed face. 'She's nothing but a woman' he thought
to himself."50 The theme is not focused throughout the

story as it is in Pembroke and in a number of Short

Stories. Madelon's rebellion is not really successful or,

7 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Madelon (New York,

# o

1896), p. 600
#8. Ibid., p. 171.
#90 Ibid., p. 1710

50. Ibid., p. 56.

 

158.
in the last analysis, relevant. It is through her sacri-
ficial willingness to marry Lot, not through any rebellion
against the woman's role, that She provides the basis for
a happy ending.

In its own way Madelon also reflects Mrs. Freeman's
continuing interest in determinism. In this novel, as in
Pembroke, heredity is offered as a basis for action. Made-
lon's charms are explained as a "grace, inherited from a
far-away French grandmother."51 Her stabbing of Lot is also
explained as heredity. "The mixed blood of two races, in
which action is quick to follow impulse, surged up to
Madelon's head."52 This is conventional stuff, found in
much of the woman's fiction of the time, as is the con-
trast between the dark, passionate Madelon and the blond,
demure Dorothy Fair. There is other evidence in the novel,
however, that she was thinking seriously about the rela-
tion of heredity to character. Lot explains his malevo-
lent conduct this way:

But we've got to swing our Shoulders one way,

whether we will or no, because our father and

our randfather did before us. Good Lord,

aren t men in leading-Strings, no matter how

high they kick? . . . You never can get out

of this one gait that you ggre born to except

in your own looking-glass.

Later when Madelon tells him that his plans are mad, he

51. 122$}: p. 11.
52.‘ Ibid., p. 38.
53. Ibid., P0 560

 

 

159.
answers "No madder--than--my ancestors made me."5# It
is interesting to note that Mrs. Freeman was reading Ibsen
in the '90's.

Some of the recurring themes are there, but they are
not enough to save the mood. Foster's analysis of the
author's intention is probably correct.

Clearly Miss Wilkins was attempting strong

incidents and a frankly romantic tone even

as she sought to preserve some of the sobri-

ety in observation and character delinea-

tion of her earlier stories.

The attempt, however, was not successful. Mrs. Freeman
was apparently not aware of the dimension of her failure,
and She gratefully accepted whatever praise the novel
received. Among those who liked it was Hamlin Garland.
In a letter to him dated October h, 1896, she says, "I
am delighted that you are pleased with Madelon."56 She

did not, however, try to repeat it.

54. Ibid., p. 160
55. Foster, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, pp. 138-139.
56 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Hamlin Garland,

October.h, 1896 (University of Southern California Library,
Los Angeles).

 

CHAPTER V
THE ECONOMIC NOVELS

Although Mrs. Freeman never develOped the critical
intelligence to become discriminating and selective in
organizing and exploiting her own literary virtues, she
was able to recognize rank inferiority when it confronted
her. She came to recognize Madelon for what it was and
never wrote anything like it again. But she did continue
to write--voluminously. A. B. Maurice said:

The years between 1897 and 1904 were fever-

ously productive. To that period belong

"Jerome: a Poor Man," "The Heart's Highway,"

"Understudies," "The Wind in the Rose Bush,"

and half a dozen others. These novels are

histories of New England localities, uncom-

prom131ngly faithful to fact.
Maurice omits The Portion g§_Lgpgg, calls Understudies a
novel and claims that Th2 Heart's Highway is faithful to
fact. After such a diSplay, one doubts that he ever
read Mrs. Freeman's work. However, he is right in this
regard: it was a period of feverish activity--activity
that produced, in addition to the works mentioned, 1h;
People 2£_ng Neighborhood, Silence gpg_0ther Storigg,
Egg L2y§_gf_Parson Lgyg_gpg_gghgy Stories, Th3 Homecoming
9; Jessica, _S__1'_.; 1‘_r_e_e_§, Try; Givers, _T_l_1_e_ Jamesons, and, in
1905, The Debtor. The decade after Madelon, during which

1. Arthur B. Maurice, "Makers of Modern American

Fiction," The Mentor, VII (August 15, 1919): 1-
160.

 

161.
time she married and moved to Metuchen, New Jersey, was
indeed productive.
Of these many books, the most interesting--that is,
the ones that reveal an advance as well as a falling off--

are these novels: Jerome, g_Poor Man (1897), The Portion

 

g§_Labor (1901), and Egg Debtor (1905). The first two

 

novels bear an important relationship to Pembroke. 'With
Pembroke they can be viewed as a trilogy of New England
regionalism. Pembroke deals with "old" New England, the
rural hinterland which lay under the heavy yoke of Calvin-
ism and subsistence agriculture. Jerome deals with the
same hinterland in a time of transition. In this novel
the old rural code and way of life confront the new,

urban code and its values. The time is the moment of
impact when agriculture and cottage industry begin to
retreat before the powerful march of the industrial revo—

lution. The Portion Q§_Labor deals with the "new" New

 

England after the shift from an agricultural to an indus-
trial economy. The story is set in a provincial mill town
where the class lines are drawn, the class war is being
fought, and the Calvinistic conscience wrestles with the
values of the Gilded Age. Part of Mrs. Freeman's Strength
as a realist can be seen in her treatment of these two
ways of life. Confronted by the sephistries and Jerry-
built ethics of the Gilded Age, Sarah Orne Jewett and even
William Dean Howells tended to treat the old rural order

nostalgically and romantically under the Species of the

 

162.
"good old days." The intellectual privation of Pembroke
and the povertyrstricken boyhood of Jerome Edwards, however,
are not sentimentalized; Mrs. Freeman had no illusions
about the life of the proletariat. (This is not to say
that sentimentality is not a flaw in these novels; it is.
But it is the result of Mrs. Freeman's failure to solve
Structural problems, not a failure in her powers of obser-
vation.) One can pursue the idea of the trilogy only so
far, however, because there are significant differences be-
tween Pembroke and the two later novels. Mrs. Freeman was,
apparently, aware of this difference. She said:

I am delighted at Jerome's [sic] pleasant

reception, and to tell the truth--astonish-

ed--I never felt so nervgus and doubtful

about a book in my life.

This difference which caused some doubt resulted from
what might be termed a relocation of emphasis. Pembroke,
Jggg_£iglg and the early short stories revealed primarily
a psychological and personal concern. In them the author
writes chiefly of the relation of an individual to another
and to his own soul. Although She treats economic and
social forces and relationships, she keeps them in the
background. In Jerome and Egg Portion 9§_Lgpgy, however,
the emphasis is placed on these economic and sociological
forces. The novels reflect what Leon Howard called "the
growth in social consciousness;" because of this growth,

2. Mary E. Wilkins, letter to H. L. Nelson of
Harper's, August 31, 1897 (New York Public Library).

163.

Mrs. Freeman becomes a critical realist. Her limited
knowledge of economic theory, her undeveloped critical
intelligence, and her difficulties with the longer form,
however, keep her from becoming a successful one.

Speaking of Jerome, Edward Foster said:

warned presumably by the failure of Madelon,

Miss Wilkins returned to the subject She

knewe-New England middle class character

represented with minimal sensationalism.3
"Middle class" is not a fortunate term. Jerome deals
more with a relationship between squirearchy and peasantry,
and the best parts of the book deal with the lives and
thoughts of the rural poor. She was, however, writing
about characters she knew well; and the central story is
of Jerome's great "middle class" journey from poverty and
the lower classes to wealth, honor, and the hand of the
squire's daughter. It is Mary Freeman's version of what
Trilling called "the young-man-from-the-provinces theme."

Mrs. Freeman is not really serious in recounting
Jerome's rags-to-riches story. (She is simply using a
convention which everyone from Horatio Alger to Mrs.
E.D.E.N. Southworth was using in the popular magazines
and best sellers of the day. It is in character, char-
acter relationships, and occasional symbolism that she

makes her important thematic statements. In other words,

having abandoned the tapestry technique of Pembroke, she

 

is once again, under the limitations of New England re-

3. Edward Foster, Mayy E, Wilkins Freeman (New
York, 1956), p. ILA.

16h.
gionalism, allowing richness of matter to be dissipated
by weakness of form.

Among the characters who constitute part of the
thematic statement, the lower class characters are the
most successful. Jerome's parents and Uncle Ozias are
developed in more detail than most of the others, and
all three of them are naturalistically conceived. For
example, after Abel, Jerome's father, disappears and is
presumed dead, Ozias says of him:

He ain't been a-lookin' forward to eatin',

but to payin' up the interest money when it

came due; he ain't been a'lookin' forward

to heaven but to clearin' off the mortgage.

It's been all he's had. It's bore down on

his body and his soul, an' it's braced him

up to keep on workin'.

Here is a life constricted by economic circumstances. The
limits of this life are made explicit and poignant by

Mrs. Freeman's use of the significant detail. While going
over her missing husband's clothing, Ann Edwards comes
across a silk scarf.

"His father thought so much of that necker-

chief," said Mrs. Edwards, catching her

breath. "It was most the only thing he

bought for himself for ten years that he

didn't actually need."5

Ann, the hypochondriac mother, is also a naturalistic
figure--a victim. After her husband disappears, she strug-
gles to keep the farm on which the heartless Doctor Pres-
cott holds the mortgage; but she is ignorant of law and of

[to Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Jerome A Poor Mgr;
(New York, 1899), pp. 38-39. ’ ’

5. Ibid., p. 520

165.

the world of finance. However, Ann is a "naturalistic"
character not only because she is a victim at the mercy
of the economic system but also because Mrs. Freeman
portrays her without the softening effects of sentiment.
She points out that, "In spite of her fierce independence,
a lifetime of poverty and struggle against the material
odds of life had given a sordid taint to her character."6
Poverty had made her neurotic, defensive, querrulous,
and unattractive. "So hostile had been all her condi-
tions of life that she never laid down her weapons."7

Uncle Ozias Lamb, a shoemaker, is also conceived
naturalistically as a victim.

He was almost resolved into a statue illus-

trative of his own toil. He never stood if

he could help it; his knees felt weak under

him if he tried to do so. He sank into the

first seat and settleg heavily forward into

his one pose of life.
He differs from Abel and Ann in that he has both self and
social consciousness. He is aware that he and his class
are victimized. He warns Jerome,

You've got to work for the breath of your

nostrils; and not for the breath of your

mind or your soul. You'll find you can't

fight your lot in life, J'rome Edwards;

yougain't got standin' room enough outside

it.

Elsewhere he says of the class in general, "They ain't

6. Ibid., p. 2390

 

7. Ibid., p. 239.
8. bid., p. 38.

 

H

 

9.

H

bid., p. 206.

 

166.

got any natural weapons. Providence ain't looked out for
'em."10

‘Scattered through the novel are other, briefer por-
traits of the victimized poor. In chapter IV Abel's
funeral is attended by women "worn and old before their

"11 Elsewhere Mrs. Freeman

prime, their mouths sunken.
introduces us to the inmates of the poorhouse and to the
repressed, Spinster school teacher who starves on her
salary "until she died, some ten years later, being of a
delicate habit, and finding no place of comfort in the
world."12
The upper-class characters are not so successfully
portrayed. Because she does not see them as victims of
the system and because she will not view them as the
agents of exploitation, the author does not treat these
characters naturalistically. As van wyck Brooks says,
"She became unreal and self-conscious in the presence of
high life."13 In Jerome this "unreality" takes the form
of the Anglicizing and sentimentalizing of the Merritts,
the family of gentry into which Jerome eventually marries.

The three women in the family are all disappointingly

asexual. The squire himself, with his heroic upper class

10. Ibid., p. 190.

 

11. Ibid., p. 54.

 

12. Ibid., p. 182.

13. van W ck Brooks, Egg Englan : Indian Summer
(New'York, 1950 , p. 476.

 

167.
cronies, his constant joviality, his cloying affection
for his daughter and "Englished" speech (he is forever
saying "By the Lord Harry") is as unsuccessful a character
as Mrs. Freeman ever created.

The only interesting upper-class character in the
novel is Dr. Prescott. He has all the conventional char-
acteristics of the villain. Selfish, unfeeling, and
proud, with punctilious habits of church attendance and
religious observation, he is a typical, Pharisaical
Puritan hypocrite. He is graSping, which is to say he
is a Yankee gone sour. After Jerome has witnessed his
threat to foreclose on a man who was indebted to him for
medical services, the doctor tells the boy, "Don't give
and don't take; then you'll make your way in life."14
Conventional as he appears, he serves well enough in the
role of capitalistic antagonist in the class war. He
is also the antithesis of Jerome.

The character of Jerome himself is presented unevenly.
At times he reveals the author's insight into the tastes
and values of the poor. When he first sees the squire's
den, he is shocked. "'No carpet,’ he thought, 'and no
haircloth sofa, and no rocking chair.'"15 But for the
most part, he is sentimentalized; Mrs. Freeman was always
coy in writing of children. Jerome is wise beyond his

years, Lucinda Merritt, the squire's daughter, is virtuous

1h. Freeman, Jerome, p. 130.
15. Ibid., p. 87.

168.
beyond belief, and as they grow up together and fall in
love, no comedy of manners, of which Mrs. Freeman is so
capable, deve10ps. There is only sentiment.

As the story unfolds, Jerome becomes a strikingly
obvious Christ figure. He suffers poverty and engages in
hard work with heroic resignation. As he matures, he
discovers in himself the capacity to heal the sick. In
one extensively developed scene he significantly breaks
the Sabbath to heal a sick woman. He vows to give away
any money that might come to him; and when he uneXpectedly
gets wealth, he does just that. The parallel is not per-
fect, however. For all his generosity Jerome has one
unchristian flaw--he is unable to receive. In his willing-
ness to give everything to others coupled with his in-
ability to receive even the smallest gift, he is actually
a caricature of Emersonian self-reliance rather than a
symbol of Christian charity.

Foster says, "DeSpite its surface realism, Jerome is

"16 Although he

virtually an allegory of unhealthy pride.
overstates the case, Foster is right; the hubristic alle-
gory is there, as it is intended to be. Three characters
represent different states of the soul. The doctor is
completely self-centered and self-reliant; he neither gives
nor receives. Jerome is incapable of reciprocal love be-

cause pride will not let him receive. The squire, with

his easy exchange of love among his family and friends,

16. Foster, Magy_§, Wilkins Freeman, p. 14h.

169.
represents the prOperly poised soul. None of these char-
acters thinks or acts in economic or social terms; they
function chiefly in terms of personal relationships and
virtues. The character who puts these relationships and
virtues in an economic perSpective (and who, for all his
rant, seems to possess the same poise as the Squire) is
Uncle Ozias.

Uncle Ozias Lamb, the most richly comic character in
the novel, is, like most of the other elements in the book,
not completely successful. He is a major character in the
first half of the narrative; in the second half he ceases
to have any relevant function. This is true of many char-
acters in many novels, but it creates Special problems for
Mrs. Freeman. She doesn't know quite what to do with him
when he occupies the center of the stage, and she doesn't
know hOW’tO get rid of him.when she no longer needs him.

He is a variety of things. A shoemaker, he also is the
village atheist-—a common figure in the fiction of the

time. Another example is Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, who
appeared only three years earlier. Ozias had stOpped

going to church when he was silenced for criticizing rich
and influential members of the congregation. But he is

more than a conventional "village atheist;" he is a social-
ist--a vocal militant in the class war. It is largely
through him that Mrs. Freeman brings into focus the economic
themes of the novel.

He is only vocally militant, however. Mrs. Freeman

170.
never had an economic theory of her own, and she was never
certain of her handling of economic theory--e8pecially
radical theory--in the context of a novel. Her solution
was to place potentially dangerous theory in the mouths
of characters who were either weak or evil. The radicals
of Th§_Portion Q; Lgbg§_are evil; Ozias is weak. "Ozias
Lamb would deliver himself of riotous sentiments but . . .
he would have pegged there through a revolution."17 The
author sympathizes with Ozias; but in making him ineffectual
she makes his views trivial. This ambivalent treatment
of radical sentiments and character stems from.Mrs. Free-
man's basic flaw as an economic novelist. Everett Carter
defines critical realism as "literature which truthfully
reports warped and maladjusted social relationships so

that men may study and improve them."18

Mary Wilkins Free-
man was not certain who was warped and maladjusted because
she was not certain where, in the economic order, truth
lay. Unlike Howells, Henry Fuller, and Norris, she had
no system.

Jerome asks the key economic question--the question
which many characters in other novels were also asking
in this waning decade of the Gilded Age--

He thought of the one poor, little bit of

soil which he was going to offer him [the

doctor], to keep a roof over his head.

Why should this man have all this, and he

17. Freeman, Jerome, p. 192.

18. Everett Carter, Howells and the Age 9§_Realism
(Philadelphia, 195A), p. 171.

171.

and his so little? was it because he was
better? Jerome shook his head vehemently.
was it because the Lord loved him better?
Jerome looked up in the blue sky. The
problem of the rights of the soil of the
old earth was upon the boy, but he could
notlsolve it--only scowl and grieve over
it.

Ozias' provides one answer--an answer rooted in the concept
of class-war. Ozias is quite explicit. "I tell ye that is
the reason for all the sufferin', and the wrongs, and the
crucifixion on this earth. The rich are the reason for

it all."20 Earlier he had given a vivid picture of the
town's two successful capitalists.

You've heard about cuttle—fishes, J'rome,
ain't ye? . . . Well, I'll tell ye what

they be. They're an awful kind of fish.

I never see one, but Belinda's brother that
was a sailor, I've heard him tell enough to
make your blood run cold. They're all head an'
eyes an' arms. Their eyes are big as saucers,
an' they're made just to see things the cuttle-
fishes want to kill; an' they've got a hundred
arms, with suckin' claws on the ends, an' they
just search an' seek, search an' seek, with
them dreadful eyes that ain't got no life but
hate an' appetite, an' they stretch out an'
feel, stretch out an' feel, with them hundred
arms, 'till they git what they want, an' then
they lay hold with all the suckers on them
hundred arms an' clutch an' wind an' twist an'
overlay, till, whether it's a drownin' sailor
or a ship, you can't see nothing but the cut-
tle-fish--—- -an'-by these ain't nothin' but
cuttle-fish.2

Ozias' solution to the class—war is explicitly socialis-

tic. He suggests a complete redistribution of wealth,

19. Freeman, Jerome, p. 12h.
20. Ibid., p. 216.
21. Ibid., p. 195.

172.

although he allows that with the "graSpin' qualities" of
the rich and the "spillin' qualities" of the poor the
same group would tend to regain control.

"Well," returned Doctor Prescott, "what then,

N . Lamb."

"Give it back again," said Ozias, shortly.22

Ozias articulates the class war, but many other
characters and scenes also exemplify the theme. Ann and
Abel Edwards and all their naturalistically conceived
relatives are victims of the class-war. So are the vari-
ous townSpeOple who are driven by foreclosure into the
poorhouse. One of these is John Upham, after whose an-
cestors the town of Upham Corners was named. The defeat
of John Upham by the doctor might well stand as a symbol
of the defeat of the old rural order by the new urban
capitalists.23

Jerome's relations with the doctor also develop the
theme of the class-war. Throughout chapter V Jerome's
mother repeats as a refrain the terrible phrase, "Doctor
Prescott has got the mortgage." When Jerome goes to nego-
tiate the mortgage, the doctor keeps him waiting because
he won't leave his dinner for a poor man. Having completed

his painful negotiations with the doctor, Jerome Speculates

on his own fate in a cruel world.

22. Ibid., pp. 216-217.

23. Suggestive in the same way is the manner in
which the doctor--the capitalist, technician, Yankee--
dominates the minister. The old Calvinist values disin—
tegrate under the impact of the Gilded Age.

 

173.

"He [Jerome's father] said that a poor
seller was the slave of a rich buyer; but I
think--" Jerome hesitated. He was not used
yet to eXpressing his independent thought.

"Go on," said the squire.

"I think it works both ways, and the
poor man is the slave either way, whether
he buys or sells," said the boy, half de-
fiantly, half timidly.

"I guess you're about right," said the
squire.2

In statements like this one Jerome is clearly thinking
and Speaking along lines articulated by his uncle. But
when he tries to establish his own relationship to the
class war, he fails. Speaking to his uncle, he says:

"The rich have everything-~all the land, all

the good food. The poor have nothing. It

is wrong." Then he said, "If ever I am rich,

I will give to the poor."25
In this answer Jerome takes an economic problem-~a class
problem-—and makes it a problem of private virtue and
morality. He feels no loyalty to a group or a movement
but rather an obligation to traditional virtue. Foster
has said that "Jerome, despite its diatribes against the
rich and avaricious, is in no sense a proletarian novel."26
It is Jerome's solution and the book's solution to the
economic problem that makes Mr. Foster's statement true.

Here in this answer Mrs. Freeman's two artistic

weaknesses come together. Her first weakness might be

called a failure of intellection; the second, flowing from

24. Freeman, Jerome, p. 9A.
25. Ibid., p. 1980
26. Foster, Mary E, Wilkins Freeman, p. 145.

174.
it, is the failure of form. Having created a vivid setting,
having brought all her powers of observation to bear on
the position of the poor at the moment of confrontation
between the old and the new values and having created two
worthy antagonists in Ozias Lamb and Dr. Prescott, she
could offer no better a system for solving the incipient
class-war than little gestures of private philanthrOpy.
Without a system or rationale she was unable to put her
good economic characters into the central conflict and
keep them there. She was left then with the old problem
of the New England regional tradition—~the vacuum at the
center. Into this vacuum, like Harriet Beecher Stowe be-
fore her, she poured all the various cliches of Dickensian
melodrama. The central story is simply one more tale of a
poor boy's climb to wealth and the hand of a rich man's
daughter. Maidens grow faint; lovers have premonitions;
long lost loved ones are returned to their families; stray
youths are appropriately married off; crises are solved
by the appearance of sudden wealth.

Those individual scenes which are not rooted in the
class-war are usually overdone. In one scene Jerome
kisses the squire's boots. As a result the book is in-
credibly uneven. Fine, vivid scenes growing out of Mrs.
Freeman's wonderful gifts of observation are followed by
scenes of pathetic treacle. The final result is not one
but three novels of varying degrees of badness. As a

psychological novel and an allegory of pride it is in—

175.
ferior to figmbggkg, which was less encumbered by sentiment
and melodrama. As a Dickensian melodrama it is on no
higher a level than the works of Mrs. Southworth. As an
economic novel it begins with great possibilities; but in
its tepid solution of philanthroPy and in its forced, con-
ventional solutions to problems of private wealth and
marriage, it evades the important questions that it raises.
In this evasion lies the central failure of the book.

Jerome was followed in 1899 by The Jamesons and a
year later by The Heart's Highway, but neither of these
can be considered a major effort. The next important
novel was The Portion 2f,Lgpgg.(l901). Under the title
of Ell§p_it began to appear serially in Harper's in late
1900. A letter from the editor, H. N. Alden, to Mrs.
Freeman in August, 1900, indicates her ever-increasing
stature in the literary market place. In the letter he
praised Ellgg and offered $6,000 for the serial rights.
Mrs. Freeman accepted happily.

From the time of its publication Th§_Portion 9§_L§g9§_
has called forth more critical comment than any other Free-
man novel except Pembroke. Howells, who ten years before
had written of unionism and the class-war in A_Hazard g;
.flgw'Fortunes, praised the book for portraying the psysiog-
nomy of the American poor.27 A generation later Arthur
Hobson Quinn said, "The Portion 9§_Lgbgg_(l90l) belongs

27. Clara and Rudolf Kirk, William Dean Howells
(New York, 1962), pp. 3h2-3h3-

176.
28

to the fiction of protest." In Economic Criticism,ig.
Amggigag,fiigtign_(Philadelphia, 1936) Claude Flory offers
a brief defense of the novel for its realistic view of
the conditions of the working man.29 More recently Babette
Levy has said:

The Pg;tigg,gf,§gbgg, a novel published in

1901, has its setting in a factory town. . . .

In this one novel the newer aspects of the

class struggle, labor versus capital, unions

versus paternalistic owners, stand out clear-

ly; eSpeCial%6 sad is the fate of the over-

aged worker.

These brief comments establish two points: first,
that Mrs. Freeman was writing an economic novel; second,
that the novel's merits result from her powers of obser-
vation as they are focused on the plight of the working
classes. What these comments don't establish is the
novel's merit gua novel. This merit can best be deter-
mined by an examination of its themes and techniques, a
consideration of Mrs. Freeman's solutions to the problems
raised, and a study of the relationship of the main theme
to the structure of the novel.

The central story in The Portion 9§_Labor is simply
a variation of the main plot of Jerome. In this novel
Ellen Brewster, a poor, talented girl, grows up in a

28. Arthur H. Quinn, American Fiction: An_Historical
and Critical Survey (New York, 1936), p. 437.

29. pp. 219-220.

30. Babette M. Levy, "Mutations in New England Local
Color," New England Quarterly, XIX (l9h6), 353.

177.
working-class home, temporarily works in a factory, and,
after a suitable display of nobility, marries the rich,
young factory owner. Because the main plot is such a
cliché, it is in the subplots and secondary characters
that we find the important economic themes developed.

As in Jerome, mrs. Freeman presents here a number of
characters who are victimized by life and fate. Foster
sees "Calvinist determinism" in The Portion 9§.Lgb2§,31
That Mrs. Freeman is a determinist is evident. What is to
be questioned is the Calvinism involved. Mrs. Freeman
never formulated an economic theory and her thinking tended
to drift in religious matters, for theological speculation
was not characteristic of her habit of thought. Her
determinism grew out of her close observation of the life
of the poor of Randolph and Brattleboro and out of her
sympathy for the unfulfilled lives she saw on every side.
She had said as early as 1885:

Nobody knows how some of the country women,

with large families and small purses, do work.

0, they are the ones I would help, if I were

rich. Nothing, hardly, touches me so much.3
Considering this sympathy and her lack of theoretical
Speculation it might be most just to call her an emotional

determinist. But because she viewed her characters as

victims of economic forces, her emotional reSponse is most

31. Foster, Mary E, Wilkins Freeman, p. 155.

_ 32. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Mary Q. Booth,
April 21, 1885 (Columbia University Library, New York).

 

178.

like that of the contemporary naturalists.33 She had said
that she didn't know she was a realist until someone told
her She was. It is unfortunate that no one told her she
was a naturalist; it might have helped her overcome the
problems she never solved.

Among the naturalistically conceived characters is
Joe Atkins, a co-worker of Ellen's father. After the
factory has been shut down because of falling prices, the
workers begin to congregate in the Brewster kitchen. When
the door Opens, the comment is made, "I do believe it's
Joe Atkins; sounds like his cough."3" His co-workers
sympathize with Joe, who is obviously dying of consumption.
Joe takes consolation in the fact that his family will pro-
fit from his death.

"My life is insured for two thousand dollars,"

Joe Atkins said with an odd sort of pride.

"I had it done three years ago. My lungs was

sound as anybody's then, but that very next

summer I worked up under that tin roof, and

came out as wet as if I'd been dipped in the

river, into an east wind, and got a chill.

It was the only time I ever struck luck--to

get insured before that happened. Nobody'd

look at me now, and I dunno what they'd do.

I ain't laid up a cgnt, I've had so much Sick-
ness in my family." 5

33. This is not to say that any emotional reSponse
to material is implicit in any kind of naturalism but
rather that certain American naturalists--Dreiser and
Norris among them--tended to view their victimized char-
acters with a kind of Olympian pity.

3h. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Thg_Portion gf Labor
(New York, 1901), p. 97.

35. Ibid., p. 990

 

179.
Joe, whose family is kept poor and who is killed by the
conditions under which he is forced to toil, is clearly
a casualty of the class-war.

So are Ellen's Aunt Eva and her husband Jim Tenny.
After the birth of their daughter, Jim is laid off; Eva
is able to work, however. Because of this role reversal,
Jim slides through stages of cynicism and bitterness into
a kind of moral vacuum and finally runs away with another
woman. Grieving for her lost husband, Eva loses her mind
but not before she has laid the blame at the prOper
doorstep.

"It's the tyrants that's over us that's to

blame." Eva's voice shrilled higher. "Curse

them!" she shrieked. "Curse them all!--every

rich man in this gold-ridden country."

And later in the same scene:

"He wouldn't have made that movg if the man-
ufacturers hadn't made theirs." 6

There are many other victims of exploitation, such
as Granville Joy, the intellectual young factory worker,
whose economic circumstances prevent him from deveIOping
his capacities; and Sadie Peel, the ignorant shop girl
whose love of the finery she sees in the lives of the rich
makes her vulgar and eventually causes her to betray her
class. But the most important and carefully drawn victim
of the economic system is Andrew Brewster, Ellen's father.

Andrew Brewster is a victim in several important ways.

As a victim of the frequent factory shut-downs, he shares

36. Ibid., pp. 286-287, p. 289.

180.

with the other workers a very circumscribed and precarious
existence constantly at the mercy of the manufacturers.
His great love for his daughter causes him to invest his
small savings in hOpes that he will be able to provide
Ellen with "advantages." The stock is a swindle. Penni-
less, he is unable to pay for the luxuries he has given
Ellen. One fine scene, in which he is harassed by his
creditors, becomes a nightmare of money. He is victimized
by Speculators and merchants as well as by manufacturers,
and then he is discharged because he has slowed up. "'Oh,
my God, I'm too old, I'm too oldl' he sobbed; 'I'm out of
it! I'm too oldl'"37 His humiliation is complete when
Ellen goes to work to support the family and to pay his
debts for the gifts he has given her. Here as in the case
of Eva and Jim, the system forces on its victims a reversal
of role, and the psychological consequences are tragic.

The Portion 9§_Labg§_is not a successful novel. One
of the chief reasons for its failure lies in the character
of its heroine. Mrs. Freeman frequently sentimentalizes
the innocence of children. She did in Jerome; she does
again with Ellen. In childhood her characters are wise
beyond their years; in adolescence they remain incredibly
innocent. Consequently that most p0pular of American
themes, the rite of passage, in Mrs. Freeman's hands comes
to nothing.

In her maturity Ellen seems to be the author's answer

37. Ibid., p. 332.

 

_ 181.
to the "new woman." In Howells' A_H§g§rd of New Fortunes,
Garland's A_§pgil_g§ Office and elsewhere we encounter
intellectual women involved in social reform—-that is, we

encounter the "new woman." In The Portion 2: Labor Ellen

 

becomes involved in a strike and sets out to be a leader,
but in mid-strike she has a change of heart and marries
the boss. She rejects the role she had created for her-
self and agrees with her lover who had said, "It is not
for a little, delicate girl to worry herself over the

"38

problems which are too much for men. Ellen is as close
as Mrs. Freeman ever comes to a sympathetic portrait of

the feminist; all her other "new women," like Margaret

Edes in The Butterfly House, are drawn unsympathetically.

Mrs. Freeman sentimentalizes the intra-class personal
relationships of her upper-class characters. Risley's
self-abnegation before Miss Cynthia and old Mrs. Lloyd's
sacrificial devotion to her husband are sentimental clichés.
But as in Jerome, these upper-class characters in Thg
Portion Qf_L§bQ§_are convincing in their roles as exploiters--
that is, in their inter-class relationships. The relation-
ship between rich and poor is characterized by a lack of
communication--an economic variation of the isolation
theme touched on so often in the short stories. The rich

are guilty of romanticizing their own economic function--

old Mrs. Lloyd sees her husband as a benefactor; Miss

38. Ibid., p. 278.

 

182.
Cynthia worries about little Ellen Brewster because she
does not think that the poor love their children as the
riCh do.

More serious consequences attend the rich man's con-
tempt of the poor-~his conviction that the workers need
to be told nothing of their own futures. Mrs. Freeman
says this of the elder Lloyd, who never came into contact
with the men:

His reasons for action were in most cases

self-evolved and entirely self-regulated.

He had said not a word to anyone, not even

to his foreman, of his purpose to close the

factory, until it was quite fixed; he had

asked no advice, explained to no one the

cougge of reasoning which led to his doing

so.

Much later his nephew follows the same path when he re-
duces wages because of a business Slump and encounters
the workers' Opposition.
"Did you explain all this to the commit-
tee?" asked Risley.
"Explain? No! . . . They are all alike;
they are a different race. We cannot help

them and they cannot Eslp themselves, because

they are themselves."

In Upham Corners and Pembroke there are rich peOple
and poor, squire and peasant; but the relationships are
chiefly of a personal and moral nature. There may be
classes and even class-war, but there is little or no

class consciousness. Consequently Ozias Lamb is a revo-

lutionary, uttering new and dangerous ideas. Here in the

39. Ibid., p. 120.
1&0. Ibid., p0 [#990

 

mill

183.

town, however, class lines are clearly drawn and each

character knows what side he belongs to in the class war.

The rich have a definite view of the poor as a group apart

from themselves. In the following passage Risley reveals

the rich man's awareness of distinctions and of distinc—

tions within distinctions:

"Cynthia," he said, "you do not realize that
pride finds its native element in all strata
of society, and riches are comparative. Let
me inform you that these Brewsters, of whom
this child Sprung, claim as high places in
the synagogue as any of your Lennoxes and
Risleys, and, what is more, they believe
themselves there. . . . The Lands, on the
other side-~the handsome aunt is a Land-~are
rather below ciite, but they make up for it
with defiance"

Later Risley, a democrat at heart, paraphrases the general

attitude of his class.

When

There she [Ellen] is in her Sphere of life,

the daughter of a factory operative, in all
probability in after-years to be the wife of

one and the mother of others. . . . NOW'Why

do you want to increase the poor child's hori-
zon farther than her little feet can carry her.
Fit her to be a good female soldier in the

ranks of labor, to be a good wife and mother to
the makers of shoes. . . . The System of edu-
cation in our schools is all wrong. It is both
senseless and futile. Look at the children
filing past to school, and look at their fathers,
and their mothers too, filing past to the factory.
Look at their present and look at their future.
And look at the trash taught them in their text
books-~trash from its utter dissociation with
their livezé You might as well teach a Zulu
lace-work.

young Lloyd, the manufacturing heir, begins his

[+10 Mo, pp. 81’820
#2. Egg-O, p0 1650

 

184.
uncertain courtship of Ellen, he becomes painfully aware
of the gap between classes.

Young Lloyd saw the mother coarsely perSpiring
and fairly aggressive in her delight over her
daughter, when poor Andrew hOped he saw him
well, and Mrs. Zelotes eyed him with sharp
approbation, and Eva, conscious of her shab-
biness, bowed with a stiff toss of the head."3

The poor are as conscious of class distinctions as

the rich. They are obsequious in the presence of the

he

factory owners, and they hate themselves for it. Most

clearly of all, they see the rich as their natural
enemies and themselves as natural victims. Mrs. Freeman
says that when the workers look at Lloyd they see

. . . an aristocrat by birth and training,
who was in trade because of shrewd business
instincts and a longing for wealth and power,
but who deSpised, and felt himself wholly
superior to, the means by which it was ac-
quired.

"We ain't anything but the rounds of the
ladder for Norman Lloyd to climb by, and he
only sees and feels us with the soles of his
patent leathers," oni of the turbulent Spirits
in his factory said. 5

The poor, then, are not only aware of class distinc-
tions, they are aware of class Struggle. One of the most
interesting themes of the novel is the consideration of
the nature of this struggle. Chapter IX is the key chap-

ter in Mrs. Freeman's consideration of alternatives avail-

43. Ibid., p. 203.

an. They are aware of language differences. Ellen
compares young Lloyd's elegant language with that of Gran-
ville Joy, her worker lover, who said "wa'n't" instead of
"wasn't." Later her co-workers in the shoe factory accuse
her of being "stuck up" because she uses grammatical English,

45. Freeman, The Portion of Labor, p. 76.

 

185.
able to the poor in the struggle. As the workers assemble
in Andrew Brewster's kitchen to discuss the possibilities
of collective action, Mrs. Freeman uses them to exhibit
the various reSponses to the condition of the poor. Jim
Tenney says that he is not interested in the plight of
labor in general. His only concern is to get back his old
job at Lloyd's. Andrew tries to bring the conflict into )

the realm of metaphysics and at the same time defend indi-

 

vidual bargaining and self-reliance. Arguing against them )
is Nahum Beals; as they put forth arguments he refutes
them. Jim Tenney says:
"I guess there's work in this world for
them that's willin', and don't pick and
choose."
"There ain't," declared Nahum shortly.
Later Andrew offers a weak defense for Lloyd.
"Well, he's earned his money, I suppose,"
Andrew said slowly. . . .
"Earned his money? He didn't earn his

money," cried Nahum Beals. "We earned it,

every dollar of it, by the sweat of our brows,

and it's for us, Rgt him, to say what shall

be done with it."

As the novel proceeds, Mrs. Freeman considers the
various aSpects of the problem of unionism as a weapon in
the class war. She discusses scabs, strikes, strike-
breaking, solidarity, and the firing of union employees.
But at two crucial moments she evades the interesting and
complex questions that she raises. During the course of

the novel she introduces two "labor organizers," Nahum

46. Ibid., p. 102, p. 103.

186.

Beals and Amos Lee. During one crisis Nahum assassinates
Norman Lloyd. During a later crisis, the strike in which
Ellen takes part, Amos (in an inept plot repetition) tries
to assassinate Ellen. Thus making these characters melo-
dramatic villains, she discredits their point of view
with a kind of fictional argumentum gg_hominem.

In place of economic realities (Nahum, murderer or ‘

not, is right; there is no work for Andrew in his age or

 

for Jim Tenny in his youth), Mrs. Freeman offers only vague )
ideals and sentiment. Ellen Speaks thusly of work:

Since I have been at work, I have realized
what work really is. There is a glory over
it, as there is over anything which is done
faithfully on this earth for good motives,
and I have seep the glory; and I am not
ashamed of it. 7

Then having become a scab, she becomes strike-breaker,
urging the men to accept a pay-cut and return to work on
the owner's conditions. That is, she embraces the prin-
ciple of exploitation as being an integral part of the
universe.

"I wonder," she said to herself, "if, after

all, this inequality of possessions is not a

part of the system of creation, if the right-

ing of them is not beyond the flaming sword

of the Garden of Eden? I wonder if the one

who tries to right them forcibly is not med-

dling, and usurping the part of the Creator,

and bringing down wrath and confusion not

only upon hig own head, but upon the heads
of others?"

The book doesn't really come to an end; it drowns finally

Z{'70 Ibid., p. 3890

48. Ibid., p. 5190

 

 

187.

in a sea of sentiment. Ellen wanders off to marry the
factory owner, and her father, wealthy at last because of
the unexpected rise in his stocks, discovers the conven-
tional moral justification for Oppression.

He seemed to see that labor is not alone for

itself, not for what it accomplishes of the

tasks of the world, not for its equivalent in

silver and gold, not even for the end of human

happiness and love, but for the growth in

character of the laborer.

"That is the portion of labor," he said.49

Vernon L. Parrington accused Mary Wilkins Freeman of
intellectual dishonesty and of failing to indict indus-
trialism because "the Yankee was profiting enormously from
this fouling of the Puritan nest."5O In making such an
accusation Parrington allowed his moral indignation to
cloud his critical intelligence. The Portion pf Lgbg;
is not an intellectually dishonest book; it is a non-
intellectual book--a book which fails because its author's
intellectual failure in the central Situation brings about
a structural failure. Mrs. Freeman had no formal exposure
to economic theory. Her schooling provided her with none;
and there is no evidence that she read either the ortho-
dox economists of her time or the radicals like Henry
George, with whose work Garland was acquainted. There is

no evidence that she read the "literary" figures who con-

cerned themselves with the problem--Carlyle, Morris,

A9. Ibid., p. 563.

50. Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents i3 American
Thought, III, "The Beginnings of Critical Realism in Amer-

ica" (New York, 1930), p. 68.

 

188.
Ruskin and others. In the America of her girlhood and
her creative years, there were two groups of writers who
dealt with the encroachments of industrialization: the
realistic socialists like Edward Everett Hale (Hgy:lh§y,
Liy§g_ig_Hampton—-l888) and Howells, and the UtOpians
like Bellamy, William Simpson, and, again, Howells. None
of these writers deals Specifically with the problems of
labor unions in the way that Mrs. Freeman attempts to
deal with them. Without a guide and without a theoreti-
cal background, however, she was unable to see anything
between fatalistic acceptance and anarchistic revolt ex-
cept resignation, luck and philanthropy.

The insertion of these elements into the center of
the novel made of her potentially fine realistic studies
little more than sentimental and melodramatic tales of
pluck and luck. As in Mrs. Stowe's work, realism becomes
peripheral, the focus blurs (Mrs. Freeman begins conflicts,
like that between Andrew and his more vulgar wife, and
then drOps them), and the emphasis dissipates (she begins
a number of times to show the acute effects of privation,
but she backs off). The net result is that for all her
gifts of observation and her ability as a symbolist of
Significant realistic detail, she achieves little more
than did Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Rebecca Harding Davis
in short stories written over a generation earlier.

One can say of Mary Wilkins Freeman what Bernard

Duffey has said of Joseph Kirkland, "Kirkland confined his

189.
realism largely to setting and character, Spinning his
plots out of sentiment and melodrama."5l The dimension
of Mrs. Freeman's failure is made clearer when one consi-
ders how peOple of lesser gifts wrote more powerful novels
because of the cohesion of their intellectual values. In
1893 Henry Fuller wrote Thg.gliffwaellers. The novel
lacks the realistic details of Mrs. Freeman's work, its
characterizations are less subtle, and its dialog is much
poorer. But it is a superior novel. Fuller saw life in
Chicago as a confrontation of values-~the civilized values
of the old order and the raw, crude, values of money and
power which characterized the Chicago of the 1880's. Since
he kept that confrontation in the center of his story, he
was able to use the skyscraper, with its defiant upward
thrust out of the mud of the prairie, as a controlling
image of Chicago and its values. The centrality of this
image (or symbol) gives added richness to many scenes and
much incidental dialog.52 Mrs. Freeman, the master of the
significant detail, approached this kind of structural
symbol with the uncompleted house in Pembroke. That she

51. Bernard Duffey, The Chicagngenaissance lg
American Letters (East Lansing, Michigan, 19537, p. 95.

 

52. Sitting in the basement coffee ShOp of the sky-
scraper, the waitress Cornelia McNabb reflects of a society
matron, "Course I don't want that she should come down here
and wash my dishes, but wouldn't I like to go up there and
eat off of hers." Later as she marries a prOSperous banker
with Offices higher up in the "cliff," the richness of the
central image comes into play again. -This is no senti-
mental story of Cinderella; this is the movement of a
society. Henry Fuller, Thg_Cliff-Dwellers (New York,
1893)) Po 117.

190.
‘was unable to make the shoe factory function in the same
way in The Portion g; Lgb2;_prevented her from writing
"economic novels" of the caliber of those of Fuller,
Herrick, and Norris.

Having failed to achieve an integrated form while
using materials with which she was thoroughly familiar,
Iary Wilkins proceeded to use materials with which she
was totally unfamiliar. The cause of this shift was a
profound change in her personal life. On New Year's Day
1902 she married Doctor Charles M. Freeman of Metuchen,
New Jersey. She had met him some ten years earlier in
the New York home of her publisher and friend, Henry M.
Alden. The courtship was neither precipitous nor passion-
ate. Even allowing for the retiscence of a New England
maiden (albeit, one of forty-nine), there are surprisingly
few references to the doctor in her correSpondence in the
1890's. It almost seems as though the two of them drifted
toward marriage, although the lady did not drift without
qualms. She postponed the marriage several times. It is
unfortunate that she overcame her misgivings; the marriage
was not happy. It lasted twenty years, during which period
Dr. Freeman was institutionalized three times for alcho-
holism. In 1922 he made a will cutting off his wife and
Sisters. After his sudden death in 1923, Mrs. Freeman
and the Freeman sisters contested the will and succeeded
in having it set aside. In her last years with all this

misery behind her, Mary Wilkins Freeman was wonderfully

191.
free of recriminations and even willing to Shoulder part
of the blame for her husband's unhappy life. She lived
in Metuchen until her death.

Her marriage was an artistic as well as a personal
misfortune. It took her away from the region in which
her art was rooted, put her most treasured themes beyond
the pale of her observation, and brought her into contact
‘with a new region and new peOple. At first she was bored
by life in Metuchen, and boredom is not an attitude out
of which good literature Springs. She Said in a letter to
Carolyn Wells:

I have not a blessed thing to write about.

Live in Metuchen, N. J. and see if you would

have. I read a crazy diary in a paper last

night which just about fits a Metuchenite.

It was something like this. Jan. 8, shook

my head 17 times. Jan. 9, shook my head

twenty times. We have little bridge parties

which do vary the monotony.5
When the boredom wore off, She tried heroically to master
this new material but with little success. Hawthorne once
said that New England was quite as large a lump of earth
as his heart could take in. The same is true of his
literary descendant; and The Debtor, Mrs. Freeman's first
Metuchen novel, is, like Ihg_Marble Eggn, the work of an
uprooted talent.

Although The Debtor sold well enough, its appearance
in 1905 caused more of a stir in Metuchen than in the

53. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Carolyn

Wells, n.d. (University of Virginia Library, Charlottes-
v1lle, Virginia).

192.

literary world. The peOple of the town thought the story
a kind of expose and claimed to recognize one another in
Mrs. Freeman's fictional characters. There was a consi-
derable amount of gossip and hostility when the book
first appeared, but the hostility eventually died down
and its author went on to become a pillar of Metuchen
society. The book failed to attract critical attention
because, although it attempted some interesting and novel
things, it was not successful. It was not successful be—
cause Mrs. Freeman did not know enough about the interesting
aSpects of her subjects to treat them with consistency,
accuracy, and confidence.

The Debtor is an early novel of suburbia--and the
suburb is pretty clearly Metuchen although she called it

Banbridge.

All winter long there were luncheons and teas
and dances. There was a whist club and a
flourishing women's club, of course. It was
the women who were thrown with the most en-
tirety upon the provincial resources. But
they were a resolved set, and they kept up
the gait of progress of their sex with a good
deal of success. They improved their minds
and their bodies, having even a physical
culture club and a teacher coming weekly from

the city. That there wgze links and a golf
club go without saying.

There are patches of finely observed detail and good
comedy of manners in The Debtor. But Mrs. Freeman didn't
know NeW'Jersey and she didn't know barber shops. Several

key scenes in The Debtor take place in Banbridge's barber

54. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Debtor (New York,
1905), p. 1.

 

193.
shOp where the humbler characters of the town gather. One
is an Irishman given to Malapropisms; another is a German
who fractures the English language. The others are also
stereotypes. She was forced to these "Mister Dooley-
isms" by her unfamiliarity with the area. She was even
less familiar with New York and the world of offices and
stock manipulation, the locale of several key scenes.

However, in one way the book marks a technical ad-
vance over Jerome and The Portion gf_Lgbg§, In The Debtor
Mrs. Freeman is able to make her major economic theme re-
volve around her central character, whereas in the other
two novels the main plot contradicted the main theme.

This novel is the story of the life, sins, and final change
of heart of Captain Carroll, who is Mrs. Freeman's rather
belated personification of the ethics of the Gilded Age.

It is with him that we are primarily concerned. The con-
ventional love story between Carroll's daughter Charlotte
and Randolph Anderson is of subordinate interest. These
lovers, like the lovers in the two preceding novels, are
separated by economics.

Because the author is not sure how to present Captain
Carroll, she is inconsistent in her presentation. He is
both a confidence man and a dead-beat, an amoral gold-
seeker of the Gilded Age and a tormented victim of uncon-
trollable drives. When asked about his wickedness, he
replies:

As well ask a shot fired from a cannon how

194.
it likes being hurled through the air. I was
fired into this. . . . There are forces for

every living man for which h; has no power
of resistance. Mine hit me. 5

Yet he is cynical and calculating until his change of
heart and atonement.

Mrs. Freeman is much more successful in portraying
the women of the Carroll family and through them the
morals of the Gilded Age and of the new urban society.
The women are thoughtlessly amoral, as in the following
search for a dressmaker:

"How about Miss Sargent? She was very
good."
"Miss Sargent, Amy dear!"
"Do we owe her much, Ina?"
"Owe her much? we owe her everything!"
"Madam Rogers?"
"Madam Rogersl. The last time I asked
her to do anything she insulted me. She told
me to my face she did not work for dead-bgats."
"She was a very vulgar woman, Ina."5 1
Clearly they are also snobs. They Spend a great deal of
time considering their obligation to their "position."
When Charlotte describes Anderson as handsome, her siSter
asks:
"Who?"
"b’IiSter Anderson. 0 o 0"
"Why, Mr. Anderson is the grocer! That's
the man you mean isn't it, honey?"
"Yes," replied Charlotte with defiance.
"Oh, well, that doesn't count," said Ina.57

That Mrs. Freeman's portrait of the women is much

55. Ibid., p. 191.
56. Ibid., pp. 184-185.
57. Ibid., pp. 25h-255.

 

 

195.

stronger than that of the men is natural enough. With
them she was on familiar ground. The best piece of char-
acterization in the whole novel is Mrs. Carroll, the
flighty, innocent, amoral wife and mother, whose pgg
seguiturs and thoughtlessness make her the most success-
ful symbol of the uncertain age. It is she who articulates
the rootlessness that in the author's eyes was reSponsible
for the decay in values and virtues.

"I never can remember the date," said Mrs.

Carroll, "and I never can remember whether

3.111%: Efiibiiiéeofirtfiimidge’ 59.11, “83%

p ace, e1 er.

In her rootlessness and innocent cruelty, she is the pre-
decessor of Scott Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanon and a whole
host of fictional, twentieth-century women.

Mrs. Freeman presents two characters that contrast to
the Carrolls and their amorality. The first is the young

son and heir of the Carroll family, Eddy. Here as in

Jerome, The Portion Q§_Labor, and By_the Light 9; the Soul

 

she purveys her "true" values through the character of a
child. This is unfortunate. Unlike Twain, Mrs. Freeman
had no insight into the lives and attitudes of children.
Because her powers of observation failed her, the boy is
a sentimentalized prig.

She is not much more successful with Randolph Ander-
son, the hero who places first things first-ébut always

with Yankee manliness.

58. Ibid., p. 233.

196.

Randolph Anderson had a large contempt for

money used otherwise than for its material

ends. A dollar never meant anything to him

except its equivalent in filling a need.

Generosity and the impulse of giving were

in his blood, yet it had gone hard several

times with peOple who had tried to oyer-

reach him even to a trifling extent. 9
But Randolph (and it is tempting to Speculate about his
name) is a lawyer who has become a grocer. AS such he
seems to represent the decline in fortune of the old
families and the old values in the new world of Carrolls
and confidence men. At one point in the story he coun-
sels a young lawyer to keep up the fight and not accept a
lower position. This contradictory attitude together with
several digressions of the author's on the submerged
dignity of grocers indicates that she shares the Carroll's
class-consciousness and snobbery without knowing it.

Like Jerome and A_Portion 9§_Labor, The Debtor is an
uneven novel. It has good scenes like those among the
Carroll women and the one in which Captain Carroll is con-
fronted by servants, dressmakers, merchants and other cre-
ditors, who, using his own Gilded Age values, drive him to
the wall. There are several fine satiric portraits of
suburban values and mores. But it is a poorer novel than
its predecessors, not because it is less integrated than
they, but because the author was less certain of her

material. She, like the Carroll's, was uprooted. As a

result The Debtors is a talky novel with too much exposi-

590 MO, 700

197.

tion and too few good dramatic scenes. Her "comic" men,
the barber, milkman, etc., are stereotypes, lacking the
stamp of authenticity that make Uncle Ozias and Nahum
Beals memorable. Finally, Mrs. Freeman is guilty of an
excess of sentimentality which she equals in no other
novel. At the end of the story, Captain Carroll, finan—
cially ruined but morally regenerated, disappears and gets
a job as a song-and-dance man doing "nigger" dances. In
this way he intends to pay his debts and once more be
restored to the bosom of his family. On a cold winter
night he returns secretly to Banbridge and gazes in the
Anderson window at the happy hearth of Charlotte's and
Randolph's. He then goes away exaulted.60 In this scene
and the others like it lies Mrs. Freeman's failure as an
economic novelist.

In these three novels--eSpecially in The Debtor--
Mrs. Freeman has moved in theme and subject matter and in
time and Space a long way away from her predecessors in
the New England tradition. But she brought with her to
this consideration of the confrontation of Puritan and
industrial values, the class-war, and the ethics of the
Gilded Age the virtues of that tradition--refined powers of
observation, sensitivity to the rhythm of the Spoken
language, great skill in the develOpment of individual
dramatic scenes and in the manipulation of the symbolism

of the significant detail. But she also brought with her

60. Ibid., pp. 562-563.

198.

their failure to solve the problem of form. The vacuous
central story that marred the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe
was Still with her, more because She didn't recognize the
solution Pembroke offered than because she had not worked
out a solution for herself. Another reason was, of course,
that she had neither the will nor the desire to withstand
editorial demands for sentimental edification.

She inherited the intellectual as well as the artistic
limitations of her tradition and her sex. She reSponded
to the most complex social and economic change in history.
In this reSponse she diSplayed an affinity with academically
oriented novelists like RObert Herrick and Frank Norris and
‘with journalist-novelists like Harold Fredrick and Theodore
Dreiser. Because of her narrow intellectual background,
her limited circle both in Randolph and in Metuchen, her
indifferent schooling, and her ignorance of the world of
men--of offices, stocks, production--she was much less
equipped than they to put the problems in perSpective and to
provide a systematic solution or even to use an economic
system as a means of imposing unity on her material. As a
result her reSponse was uncertain and sentimental. F. L.
Pattee had said of the Brahmins, "All their sons were
daughters." In the heroic failure of this daughter to deal
successfully with the problems of the twentieth century one
can see the end of the whole tradition-~the real Indian

Summer.

 

CHAPTER VI
THE POPULAR NOVELIST

Late in 1887 Mary Wilkins Freeman wrote the following
significant sentence in a letter to her new-found friend,
Mary Booth of Harper's: "I begin to see very plainly that
there are rocks ahead, in my literary course, that I may
Split upon, though I cannot just define their nature to
myself."1 During the next three decades Mary failed to
develOp either the faculty of self-criticism, a compre-
hensive and s0phisticated view of the world, or a unifying
vision. Any one of these would have been enough to redeem
her work, but they escaped her as they escaped so many of
her countrymen who wrote one or two good books only. This
is her tragedy-~as it is the tragedy of Bret Harte and
Edgar watson Howe among her contemporaries and later on
Floyd Dell and others.2 The result is that after Pembroke
her whole career is a kind of falling off. F. 0. Matthies-
sen says, after praising her two early collections:

But She never went beyond them. Her long

list of pictures of other regions and ro-

1. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Mary Booth,
November 5, 1887 (Columbia University Library, New York).

2. It is also true of Mrs. Cooke and Mrs. Stowe.
Miss Jewett's unity of tone serves to raise her longer
work above that of her sisters although it doomed her to

a permanent performance in a minor key.

199.

200.

mantic novels is disappointingly pale, and
also reveals an unexpected sentimental Streak.3

Although it is necessary to point out that this sentiment
appears more by default than by design, Matthiessen's
assessment is just.

Although Mrs. Freeman never surpassed the achievement
of her early works, she tried hard enough to find a way.
Pembroke can be seen as a maturation, a develOpment of the
themes and patterns of Jane Field; and the other novels
are not imitations. Madelon is very different from its
predecessors. So is Jerome. She does not repeat herself,
but the results are either inconsequential or actually
bad. This badness results ultimately from the failure of
intellect just described. The requirements of the long
form forced her beyond limits of New England doubleness
within which the short stories were developed with such
sureness of touch. And beyond these boundaries of the
Puritan and the Yankee--the moral and the comic--she
needed some system, some vision, to impose order and form
on the detailed items of observation of which she was such
a master. Wanting this, she was forced to take up the
device that lay nearest at hand in the market place. The
result was the Species of inferior Dickensian melodrama.

Of the novels written before the turn of the century,
two have not been discussed, Thg_Jamesons (1898) and $22.

Heart's Highwgy (1900). Their humble place in the Freeman

 

3. F. O. Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett (Boston, 1929),
p. 1&6.

201.
canon is revealed by the fact that neither one was pub-
lished by Harper's, who always had first claim on her work.
Th2 Jamesons was published by Curtis of Philadelphia, for
whose Saturday Evening 29§p_she wrote a number of short
stories in the following two decades. The Heart's Highway
was published by the American News Company.

The Jamesons is a charming and genuinely amusing
little book (177 pages), but it is the kind of book Mrs.
Freeman could write only once. It is a comic idyll, in
which she says all the nostalgic things about village
life that her realistic observation did not permit her to
say in the other books. The action takes place in a
remote village which, unlike the villages in most Freeman
stories, basks under a sun of continual prOSperity. The
narrator says, "we were all comfortably provided with all
the necessities of life."" Into this comfortable world
nothing unpleasant is allowed to intrude, not even death.
The story ends with a reference to Grandma Cobb, "who does
not seem to grow feeble at all."5 The matriarchical
village is inhabited almost exclusively by women, the
husbands either being dead or surviving timidly on the
fringes of the matriarchy. None of the pain and passion
of life has survived. Unlike most of Mrs. Freeman's_
stories, Ih§_Jamesons is told in the first person-Aby a

h. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Thg_Jamesons (Phila-
delphia, 1898), p. l.

5. lb;§,, pp. 176-177.

202.
very feminine narrator with a slightly bad heart, a sym-
pathetic ear, and a safely dead husband.

Mrs. Freeman writes more like Sarah Orne Jewett in
this novel than she does in anything else she ever wrote.
Her main theme here is the confrontation of, and conflict
between, the new values of Boston—-the urban, industrial
world-~and the old values of the village. The narrator,
who is of the village but sufficiently detached from it
to see the humor in rural provincialism, is successful
in maintaining the proper tone of the confrontation. She
is amused both by urban literary taste and rural decora-
tive art. The tone is gentle, but where in Miss Jewett's
'work the gentleness is nostalgic, here it is comic. This
comic tone makes the work Mrs. Freeman's own in Spite of
the fact that the conflict centers around the permanent
residents and summer boarders in a seaside town.

The novel contains the usual village types that the
author knew so well. There are the women of "faculty"
whose gentility is maintained more by will than by money, the
reticent farmers who proffer no more advice than is asked
for, and the Puritan mothers whose consciences are so
narrow that they almost squeeze the joy out of their
children's lives. The story contains in addition, however,
Mary's only full-length portrait of the "new woman." Mrs.
Jameson is a Puritan bluestocking who accepts with loud
humility the self-imposed task of updating and upgrading

the mores of the village. She is physically large (as

203.

her obsequious husband is small) and vocally large. She
trods heavily on flowers and habits and comes near to
carrying all before her by sheer momentum. She is super-
cilious and confronts all the village women with the
greeting, "My good woman." She attends all the meetings
and tries to dominate each one. "She rapped with the
scissors on the table. 'Ladies,"she said, 'Ladies, at-
tention.'"6 Mrs. Freeman never liked "emancipated"
women, but here her dislike is mitigated by good humor.

The novel is really just a collection of comic scenes
and events hung together on the character of Mrs. Jameson
and on the conventional love story of her daughter and a
rural suitor who are united after a melodramatic fire (the
only intrusion of melodrama into the idyll) helps their
mothers overcome prejudice. The comic incidents, all
told at a leisurely and savoring pace, include a false
fire alarm turned in by Mrs. Jameson which causes the
flooding of a rural parlor and its carefully itemized
treasures, and a picnic ruined by Mrs. Jameson's enthu-
siasm for health foods. However, the finest comic scene
in the book is the meeting of the village ladies' literary
society highlighted by Mrs. Jameson's loud and inaccurate
reading of one of Browning's casuistic poems while the
supper burns in the kitchen. In this mellow mood Mrs.
Freeman does not let the satire get too harsh, and the‘

result is one of the finest comic scenes she ever wrote.

6. Ibid., p. 61.

20A.

The second half of the book concerns the adventures
of the Jamesons on their newly acquired farm. This section,
inferior to the first, is an only partially digested col-
lection of jokes and folk sayings on the common subject of
the city dweller‘s ineptitude on the farm. It includes
jokes about the planting of improper crOps and the wearing
of imprOper attire and an overly long section about Mrs.
Jameson's determination to have her chickens wear shoes.
The story ends with Mrs. Jameson's domination of the vil-
lage's centennial celebration. Having obtained the ser-
vices of Representative Elijah M. Mills and Lucy Beers
wright, the lady novelist who ggygg spoke in public, Mrs.
Jameson talks so long that they never have a chance to
speak.

Throughout the novel Mrs. Freeman's fine eye for
comic realism is everywhere evident. Among the subjects
here satirized with perception is the literary world it-
self. Lucy Beers Wright reveals the author's awareness of
the comic potential of the trinomial lady novelist and of
her own foibles in particular. The Browning meeting is
excellent, and the novel ends on a literary note with
Grandma Cable's eXplanation of Mrs. Jameson's changed
attitude toward her daughter's marriage.

My daughter became convinced that Robert

Browning would have been in favor of the

match,--and that settled it. My daughter

proves things by Browning the same way as

peOple do by scripture-~it seems to me some-
times.7

7. Ibid., p. lhl.

w, _ - -__.—-___...—---;. “2” .m. I"? -

205.

The Heart's Highway is as atypical as The Jamesons,
but in a very different way. In his biography, Foster
says:

During the last Randolph years the struggle

between the tendencies roughly named roman-

tic and realistic was clearly evident. The

Portion 9: Labor had its element of accurate

documentation of lower middle class worker

life; The Heart's Highway was frankly roman-

tic in subject and inner feeling . . . Each

of these works expressed real impulses though

the deepeg may well have been romantic and

symbolic.

This last sentence is a hasty judgment. That Mrs. Free-
man is a symbolist is true enough, if one considers her

use of significant details; but this is a kind of symbolism
found in realists from Howells to Steinbeck. However, it
is highly doubtful that romance is a "deeper impulse."

Certainly The Heart's Highway is not good evidence that

 

this is so because it is not a good book and--importantly--
it is not a "deep" book. It is superficial. Those aspects
of the work of Mrs. Stowe and Miss Jewett that may be called
romantic were not always successful but they were always
indigenous. The Minister's Wooing deals with the New
England of 1800. Oldtown Folks deals with the "good, old
catechising days." Miss Jewett wrote with fondness of the
happy days before the "Jerry-built" present in which she
was forced to live increasingly alone. These writers were
exploiting their own "usable past." The romanticism of

their treatment lay in their tone, which was one of nos-

8. Edward Foster, Mayy E, Wilkins Freeman (New
York, 1956), p. 162.

 

206.

talgia. Out of this nostalgia grew the tendency to
idealize moral, social, and economic aSpects of the past.
It is this idealistic view and presentation of the past
that enabled them to use it as a criterion against which
to judge the present. The same might be said of the
realistic Mr. Howells, who found the yardstick with which
to judge the moral growth of his characters either in the
past or in those rural areas that preserved the values of
the past. This is a legitimate and, in the best passages,
a deep romanticism; and, importantly, it doesn't break the
circle of New England doubleness.

Mrs. Freeman never had this idealized view of the past.
As seen in Pembroke and elsewhere, her view is much more
ambivalent and ironic. And The Heart's Highway is not
about this usable, indigenous past at all. It is a tale
of seventeenth-century Virginia. Insofar as it deals with
any theme that Mrs. Freeman treats seriously, it treats
of pride and the need of the soul to be purged of pride
before it can love. It is the very conventional story of
the saving of a young maiden from her own impetuosity and
pride. It is told by a first-person narrator, a nobleman
fallen on evil days through Quixotic noblesse oblige, who
must overcome humility (for variety's sake, perhaps) before
he can save and finally marry the girl. These and the
other characters bear no resemblance to anyone living or
dead, though there are many counterparts in the pOpular

fiction of the time and in the historical films of the

207.

present.

The Heart's Highway has the distinction of being the
only one of Mrs. Freeman's longer works that is completely
unreadable. It is filled with melodramatic devices and
contains three hundred pages of simulated archaic language
(the first person narrator makes it necessary even in the
pages free of dialog) which has never been surpassed for
unreality and unreadability. One example should serve:

"'Tis sheer folly, lad," I burst out then,
"and let us have no more of it. 'Tis but
the idle prating of a lovesick girl. . . ."
"So said I to Cicely," Sir Humphrey
cried, eagerly, too interested in his own
cause to heed my slighting words for his
sister. "'Tis the rankest folly, I told
her. Here is Harry Wingfield, old enough
almost to be Mary's father, and beside,
beside--oh, confound it, Harry," the gen-
erous lad burst out. "I would not like
you for a rival, for you are a good half
foot taller than I, and you have that about
you that would make a woman run to you and
think herself safe were all the Indians in
Virginia up, and you are a dark man, and I
have heard say they like that, but, but,--
oh I say, Harry, 'tis a damned shame that
you are here as you are, and not as a gen-
tleman and a cavalier with the rest of us."9

This is not the deep, nostalgic romance of idealism; this
is the shallow romantic cliche of the market place.
If there is a deep and genuine romantic impulse in
Mrs. Freeman not to be found in her attitude toward and
use of the past, it must be found by looking in another
place. Her editor gives us a hint of where to look.
Anyone supposing that Miss Wilkins derives

her Stories from studies of New England life

9. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Heart‘s Highway
(New York, 1900), pp. lh8-lh9.

208.

and character is grossly mistaken: she is,

first of all, an impressionist, with a dom-

inant subjective motive, her fiction taking

on outward shape from an inward prompting,

having only such connection with lifs as

there is in the texture of a dream.
Here again we have an example of the wrongheadedness that
characterizes the remarks of so many of Mrs. Freeman's
friends, editors, and early critics that one wonders if
they actually read her. But Alden does point to the place
and nature of whatever "romanticism" characterizes her
work. The subjective element is revealed in the char-

acterization of Ellen in The Portion 9; Labor and in the

 

heroines of "Doc" Gordon, The Shoulders pf Atlas and The

Alabaster Box. In such characters Mrs. Freeman romanti—

 

cized parts of her own past and qualities of her own per-
sonality subjectively perceived. These genteel sublima-
tions of her own girlhood are almost without exception
failures as fictional characters, who function as nothing
more than the romantic heroines of pOpular fiction. The
total failure of the intellectual and "sociological"
dimensions of Ellen in The Portion Qf_Lghg§ is a caSe in
point, as is the ending in which Ellen fulfills the funda-
mental requirement of all heroines of pOpular fiction-—
upward mobility—-by abandoning gll_princip1e and marrying
the boss.

The most extended and serious and, in some ways, the
best autobiographical heroine is Maria (a romantic variant

10. Henry M. Alden, "Fifty Years of Harper's Maga-
zine," Harper's, C (May, 1900), 956.

209.

of her own name) in Ey the Eight g§_the Soul. Foster says

 

of this novel:

The serialized novel, Ey_the Light 9§_§hg_
Soul (1906), is Mrs. Freeman's boldest at-
tempt to realize the possibilities of the
subjective and religious elements of Jerome,
Ihg_Portion g§_Labor, and "The Apple Tree."
For precision and fullness of detail in the
treatment of minor characters and of the New
Jersey and New England setting, it is a
realistic and regional novel-~another Egg:
broke; in the development of the inner life
of its heroine, Maria Edgham, it appears to
be lightly disguised Spiritual autobiography.ll

This is a very general statement which overlooks the struc-

tural differences between Pembroke and Ey the Light g§_the

 

Egg;_and the idealization of the heroine; but in stressing
the subjective, autobiographical element it does point out
the source and nature of Mrs. Freeman's romanticism.
Ey_the Light g§_§hg Egg; is the author's most exten-
sive study of the place of women in society--of the pos-
sible responses to life available to women in the society
of the time. But her interest is not just sociological;
it is also psychological. She is interested in what she
calls at various places in the novel "soul truth," "soul-
growth," "straightness of body and soul," and "the seasons
of the human soul." To achieve these two goals she con-
trasts various female characters with one another. (In

no other novel of hers are male characters so unimportant.)

Among the various important secondary characters are Lily,

Maria's neighbor, and Evelyn, Maria's sister. These two

11. Foster, Mary E, Wilkins Freeman, pp. 169-170.

210.

girls have the reSponses and vision of typical fictional
women of the time. They are chaste, modest, sweetly
disposed. They have all the reputable virtues. But
they are clearly women living in a man's world. They
are passive and dependent and deeperately eager to marry
a man on his own terms and funCtion contentedly in a second-
ary role for the rest of their lives. Though their lives
and goals are honorable, they are clearly not capable of
the richest kind of "soul-growth."

In this novel, which begins with the death of Maria's
New England mother while the child is very young, one of
the most complex and interesting characters is the step-
mother Ida. There is no one else quite like her in Mrs.
Freeman's work; but she is, nevertheless, one of the
Species of "new women" that Mrs. Freeman so disliked. She
is characterized chiefly by two traits. First, she has
the ethical and economic values of the Gilded Age. She
is concerned with "possession" and is agressive in the
acquisition of material objects and vulgar in their diSplay.
Secondly, she is cold and unfeeling. "She was so unemo-
tional as to be almost abnormal, but She had head enough to
realize the fact that absolute unemotionlessness in a woman
detracts from her charm."12 What was in Mrs. Jameson a
comic insensitivity to the situation becomes in Ida a cruel,
masculine ability to exploit others for her own chiefly

12. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, By the Eight Q§_the Soul
(New York, 1906), p. 890

 

211.
economic purposes. This coldness, it would seem, is the
very antithesis of what Mrs. Freeman felt a woman should be.
The most interesting and best drawn of the secondary
women is Maria's Aunt Maria, a spinster from New England.
Mrs. Freeman is very sure-handed in her treatment of the
aunt; here she is on familiar ground. Aunt Maria is poor,
but she has "faculty" and is able to maintain her self-
reSpect on only one hundred dollars a year knowing full
well that "it takes a little extra money even to keep
clean."13 Because in drawing Aunt Maria the author is
dealing with patterns of life in which her own life is
most firmly rooted, she is able to provide significant
details in a way which her reportorial skills were unable
to provide for the New Jersey characters.
"I am glad you have come, Maria," said
she. "I have been standing quite a while.
You are late."
"Yes, I am rather late," replied Maria.
"But why on earth didn't you Sit down?"
"Do you suppose I am going to sit down
more than I can help in this dress?" said
her aunt. "There is nothing hurts a iilk
dress more than sitting down in it."1
Mrs. Freeman treats Aunt Maria in both a comic and a
pathetic perSpective. The old maid's girlish vanity when
She comes down to New Jersey to care for her dead sister's

child--her naive attempts to attract her younger brother-

in-law's attention--is movingly funny. But there is more

13. Ibid., p. 236.
14. Ibid., p. 288.

 

 

212.

to this woman's life than that which warrants a gentle
chuckle, and She herself knows it. She says of her niece,
"Oh, Lord . . . to think that child has got to go through
the world just the way I have, when she don't need to!"15
Here then are three feminine responses to the man's world
in which women are forced to live: meek and passive ac-
ceptance, unfeminine calculation, and courage and "faculty"
in the face of thwarted needs.

In contrast to these women and these reSponses stands
the heroine, Maria Edgham. In this long novel (A98 pages
in the first edition) there is ample Space to portray the
develOpment of Maria's soul and her ability to reSpond to
the world in her own feminine terms rather than in patterns
imposed upon her by men. Maria's childhood is portrayed
with more skill than was that of Jerome or Ellen. The
scenes of agony and hostility between the girl and her
stepmother are well-done. But as Maria grows--and grows
into the author's most fully-depicted valedictorian woman--
she grows tiresome. Mrs. Freeman is trying to depict an
intense passional, intellectual, and moral nature which
works out a principle of self-containment and contentment.
Maria is, in other words, her most Emersonian character.
The fact that in her other and better work she clearly
rejects this principle might go a long way toward explain-

ing the failure to make Maria a successful fictional char-

15. Ibid., p. 306.

213.
acter. The best She can have Maria do is deve10p an at-
titude of morally superior philanthrOpy toward the poorer
classes of New England and the "poor whites" of New Jer—
sey. Her other chief activity is bestowing the men who
love her on her more dependent friends and on her sister.
At the end she finds joy in a manless world, in renuncia-
tion, and in the friendship of a deformed companion named
Rosa. Her soul receives this final illumination while she
Stands unobserved outside her recently married sister's
‘window'(a device of which Mrs. Freeman was unfortunately
fond) and observes "the sweet docility which Maria re-

16

membered." "She Seemed to suddenly sense the highest

quality of love: that which realizes the need of another
rather than one's own."17
Foster is right in saying that Ey the Light g§_the

Soul is autobiographical. First, Mrs. Freeman is trying

 

to embody in Maria her own attitude toward the world and
her personal concept of a noble pattern of action. In
this sense Maria is Mary Wilkins Freeman as She would

like to be. It is also autobiographical in the sense that
Maria's activities and attitudes are those of the author
herself, filtered through the lenses of sentiment and
memory. The following passage clearly romanticizes her

own experience.

Maria, little, slender, trembling girl, with

16. Ibid., p0 A97.
17. 11314.” p- #98-

214.

all the hysterical fancies of her sex crowd-

ing upon her, all the sufferings of her sex

waiting for her in the future, and with no

mother to soften them, slipped out of bed,

stole across her room, and opened the door

with infinite caution.1
Where she could, she softened the pains of memory, "In
spite of her prettiness, she was not a favorite even among
the boys. . . . Without knowing it, they were envious."19
This being the case, several passages in the novel take
on significance for the biographer. One such passage is
an extended description of the rite of passage in which
"she had lost her dreams."20 Another section describes
Karla's religious attitudes. Among the comments made are
the following:

Religion had never impressed her with any

beauty, or sense of love. Now, for the first

time, after her father had died, she seemed

all at once to sense the nearness of that

which is beyond, and a love and longing for

it.
In the same passage she describes Maria's distaste for the
emotion of fundamentalist religion.

Although this is the most "interior" and the most
feminine of Mrs. Freeman's novels, it still manages to

touch on several of her favorite social themes. The treat-

ment of the lower class characters--eSpecially those in

18. Ibid., p. 185.
19. Ibid., p. 38.

 

20. Ibid., p. 1990
21. Ibid., p. 367.

 

215.
New Jersey—-is less compassionate and naturalistic than
in the other novels. What determinism there is here is
biological rather than environmental, and the "deserving
poor" are portrayed as an inferior Species. "Maria,
although her strength was inferior, had Spirit enough to
COpe with any poor white."22 It is also interesting to
note that the degenerate New England family that Maria
tries to defend is a maison de' trois, an example of Mrs.
Freeman's only partially successful struggle against
gentility. There are also extended passages of dialog
devoted to discussions of the economic questions of the
day. In one rather curious scene Maria's dying father
advises her always to buy bonds rather than stocks because
"bonds are always safer for a woman."23

Technically Ey the Light 9: the Soul is interesting

 

in one way. It is a story told chiefly through the con-
sciousness of its heroine, a young girl.21+ For the rest,
many of the crises are forced and artificial, and as the
novel wears on the author relies more and more on coin-
cidence. Consequently, although she chooses not to reward

her heroine with a man, a hearth, and upward mobility,

22. Ibid., p. 107.
23. Ibid., p. 207.

24. Although this restricted point of view is not
always controlled or successful, it does lead one to
wonder when Mrs. Freeman read The Portrait Q£_§ Lady.
One reason for the failure is that the action is episo-
dic--almost picaresque.

216.
Maria is just one more of those heroines of sentimental,
Dickensian fiction on which.Mrs. Freeman, because of her
failure either to find a form or to deve10p a coherent
system of thought, was forced to rely.

All through the years of transition from New England
Spinster to New Jersey housewife, Mrs. Freeman continued
to work hard. She had volumes of short stories published
in 1900, 1901, 1903, 1904, and 1907 in addition to the
novels of 1900, 1901, 1905 and 1906. She was tired and
felt that she needed a rest. But she kept at it all through
1905 and 1906 in Spite of occasional complaints about her
health. Early in 1906 she wrote to her friend in Randolph,
Miss French, "I am straining every nerve to write a fright-
ful novel, to be finished by March 15th. . . . I fear the
work is pretty bad."25 She went on to say that she had
hOpes for its saleability. She was right about its quality,
but She was mildly disappointed by its sales.

The book she was writing was published late in 1906
by the Authors and NeWSpapers Association as "Doc" Gordon.
It was reissued the following year as Doctor Gordon. It
is a poor book--poorer than its predecessors. It has many
good things in it, but nowhere is Mrs. Freeman less suc-
cessful in integrating the good results of her observa-
tional skills with the melodramatic framework she was com-
pelled to use. A further weakness is her inability to

25. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Miss French,
January 27, 1906 (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York).

217.
sustain and deve10p serious themes and materials, once
she introduces them, as if she were too tired to keep up
the effort.

The Opening two chapters illustrate this artistic
dilemma perfectly. The novel begins with young Doctor
Elliot walking twenty miles to his first job as assistant
to Doctor Gordon. AS he walks along he passes through a
grimy industrial town where he encounters a sullen working
man with a cough and a surly railroad worker who hates
the philanthrOpy (indicative of a possible advance in the
author's social thought since The Portion 9§_Eghg§) and
the hypocrisy of the rich. This worker, who has remained
single because of the difficulties of raising a family in
industrial America, does not trust the doctor because his
English is too good. When the young doctor stOps for
lunch, he encounters a waitress who is "pretty and pathetic
with a vulgar, almost tragic prettiness and pathos--she

was anemic and painfully thin."26

This is an auSpicious
beginning to what is, in a senSe, the most naturalistic
book Mrs. Freeman ever wrote, but she is not able to sustain
the quality of the doctor's journey. After he leaves the
restaurant, he encounters a girl passing a lonely stretch

of wood where she is set upon by a dark, mysterious

stranger. As she faints the doctor saves her only to

discover that She is Doc Gordon's niece. And so melodrama

26. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "Doc" Gordon (New York,
1906) p. 7. _

218.
and coincidence take over.

The plot is absurd. Doc Gordon and his wife accept
reSponsibility for the daughter of Mrs. Gordon's sister
and her brutal degenerate husband after the sister dies
and the husband disappears. They move to a strange town
where Mrs. Gordon poses as the girl's mother and Doctor
Gordon's sister. When the girl reaches marriageable age,
her father returns and tries to dominate her. Doc Gordon
allows his dog to injure the degenerate father who dies of
an infection. The girl then marries young Doctor Elliot.
The escapes, captures, midnight maneuvers, kept secrets,
and other Gothic devices almost justify Foster's decision
to ignore the novel entirely.27

But the book is not without its significance both as
fiction and as an example of the impasse to which the
author and the whole New England tradition had been
brought. The melodramatic nonsense is interrupted from
time to time by a series of events and characters right
out of frontier humor and reminiscent of Georgia Scenes.
There is a shooting match in which wooden pigeons sub-
stituted for clay pigeons are the undoing of a local
"hustler." There is a detailed presentation of a horse
trade in which Doc Gordon gets revenge on an overly-shrewd
local farmer. The doctor's friends, the innkeeper and the
various farmers, are presented in a more traditionally

regional way than any of Mary's characters since Jerome.

27. Foster, Mary E, Wilkih§.Freeman, p. 169.

—I——

219.

The best of these indigenous characters is Mrs.
Slocum, the miserly and hypocritical keeper of a boarding
house. Mrs. Slocum is, in one sense, a Dickensian cari-
cature of greed, but she is firmly rooted in the soil;
her frequent mutilations of the language belong in the
tradition that stretches back through the neWSpaper
humorists to Seba Smith's Jack Downing. Above all, it is
her reality that convinces us, as when she says to young
Doctor Elliot, "Doctor Gordon took away my boarder. And
if I'd had him Sick and die in my house, I could have got

"28 Thwarted in her

extra. Now what I want is jest this.
economic ploy but determined to miss nothing, Mrs. Slocum
attends the stranger's funeral where she "sniffed audibly
through the service which was short."29 In such char-
acters hrs. Freeman's talent, tired as she was, was as
sharp as ever.

However, these characters are islands in a sea of
melodrama. The main characters are of another order en-
tirely. Dr. Elliot is a conventional young lover, and the
niece, Clemency, is one of Mrs. Freeman's high-strung,
sentimental heroines like Ellen in ihg Portion g: Lghgy.
Mrs. Ewing, who is in reality Mrs. Gordon, is one of the
author's magnificent older women--large, statuesque, and

ennobled by the fact that she is suffering bravely from

cancer. The degenerate father functions melodramatically

28. Freeman, "Doc" Gordon, p. 211.

29. Ibid., p. 216.

220.

as a mysterious stranger addicted to midnight rambles and
peering in windows. One serious weakness of the novel is
that it is around him that much of the naturalistic theme
revolves.

The figure with which Mrs. Freeman attempts to hold
together these worlds of regional realism and melodrama
is Doc Gordon. But rather than.hold these worlds to-
gether, she only succeeds in tearing the doctor apart.
With one set of characters he is shrewd, genial and gar-
rulous.

He no longer looked even a gentleman. He had

become of the soil, the New Jersey soil. As

they drank and played, he told stories and

roared with laughter at them. The stories

also belonged to the soil, they wergofolk lore,

Wlld, coarse, but full of humanity.

With the other set of characters, he is an aristocratic
gentleman and a Conradian hero, given to Speculation, who
concludes sadly, "A soul is a horribly lonely thing in the
worst places of life."31 Young Doctor Elliot wonders

about his employer, "Why should a man be one hour a country
buffoon, the next an absorbed gentleman?"32 The central
weakness of the book lies in the fact that the author does

not and cannot answer this question. As a result, the

book consists of two unequal and unintegrated parts.

30. Ibid., pp. 54-550
31. Ibid., p. 253'

 

 

32. Ibid., p. 77.

 

 

 

221.

In this most naturalistic of her novels, Mrs. Freeman
shows her preoccupation with determinism in various ways.
Not only does she portray incidental characters, such as
those young Doctor Elliot encounters in chapter I, as
victims of circumstances and of the economic System; she
has Doctor Gordon comment on the effect of environment on
character. He says Of his patients, "After all, they are
a harmless, good lot, but stiffened with hereditary ideas,
worse than by rheumatism."33 Elsewhere the doctor says of
one of his poor patients:

That girl has had Symptoms of about every known

disease. . . . Call it hysteria or what you

will. I call it injustice on the part of the

Higher Power. I suppose that is blaSphemy, but

I am forced to it. Can that girl help the long-

ings for her rights, her longings which are ab-

normally acute because of her over-fine nervous
system? Those longings, Situated as She is,

can never be satisfied except for her own harm.3"
This last is as Specific a statement as Mrs. Freeman ever
made concerning the pressures of both environment and
heredity on the individual. The theme of heredity also
appears in the central love affair. Doctor Gordon fears
that young Elliot may wish to call off the engagement
upon discovering Clemency's real father. "You may fear

heredity," he suggests.35 Elliot denies this, and the two

doctors reassure themselves that the girl has inherited

33’ M0: 13' 60°
31+. Ibido , pp. 282’283 o
35. Ibid., p0 2711-.

 

 

222.
all her traits from her mother.

Doctor Gordon not only comments on, but exemplifies
in himself the control that circumstances have over the
fate of the individual. The author says of the doctor,
"Thomas Gordon was a man whom a happy and untroubled life
would have kept from all worldly blemish."36 But his life
was not untroubled. His first serious encounter with
evil had caused him to disguise his marriage. The second
encounter-~the return of his evil brother-in-law--forces
him to violence. In a long intrOSpective scene (pp. 166-
177) the doctor evolves and analyses his plan to have the
dog attack Clemency's father. At first he recoils in
horror from the act of violence; but as he thinks of ya-
action and its consequences to his loved ones, his mind
and emotions harden and he becomes capable of murder.

Later in the story he is driven by circumstances to
turn the hand of violence toward his wife. Mrs. Freeman
uses Mrs. Ewing's acute suffering caused by cancer, to
raise late in the novel the serious social theme of
euthanasia. Although it Shows her ungenteel willingness
to investigate any theme in her fiction, it comes too late
to save the novel, already swamped by melodrama. Doctor
Gordon brings the issue into focus somewhat bluntly:

She has suffered more lately. . . . There

has never been the slightest possibility of

a surgical operation. From the very first

it was utterly hopeless, and if it had been
the dog there, I Should have put a bullet

36. Ibid., p. 174.

223.

through his head and considered myself a
friend.3

The issue is dissolved, however, in the sentimental ending.
Both Doctor Gordon and Doctor Elliot think that they are
reSponSible for giving Mrs. Ewing the fatal injection for
which, in her last final pain, She pleads. Clemency is
horrified at the prOSpect. But it turns out that neither
one is reSponSible. The old townswoman whom they had
hired as a nurse conveniently performs the function of
Eggg gg machina, kills Mrs. Ewing, accepts reSponSibility,
and announces that She is going to leave town. This leaves
Doctor Elliot and Clemency free to marry. Thus, inter-
esting themes are raised but nothing comes of them; and
because of the failure of characterization, the inability
to integrate the main plot and the regional characters, and
the inept sentimentality of the ending, "Doc" Gordon ranks
with Madelon and The Heart's Highway as the poorest work
to come from the pen of Mary Wilkins Freeman.

Tired and busy as She was in the first decade of the
new century, Mrs. Freeman seemed to catch her Second wind
after EEOC" Gordon. The Shoulder§_9§_gp;g§_is a much
better boOk--and one in which she returned, significantly,
to the shoe towns of New England where her artistic roots
had always remained firm. It is the story of Henry and
Sylvia Whitman, a childless couple living a stern existence

on a shoe-factory worker's wage. Sylvia inherits money,

37. 113313., p. 226.

224.
comes to believe that the money rightfully belongs to
Rose, a young girl living with them, and finally confesses
her guilt only to discover that the money is really hers
after all. It is also the Story of Henry's inability to
adjust to prosperity and leisure. A second plot involves
the mysterious death of the local teacher--either murder
or suicide-—and the threatening conduct of an unstable
young girl.

Clearly, Mrs. Freeman has told much of this before.

 

Sylvia and her secret guilt are a re-creation and re-
examination Of Jane Field and her Calvinistic sense of
virtue and sin. Henry is really Andrew Brewster of Eh;
Portion g; EgEgy_in disguise. There are also other, less
noticeable restatements. Lucinda, the hotel prOprietreSS,
is replaced as the church soloist in a reworking of "A
Village Singer." This is not a very serious criticism,
however, because there is surely room for more than one
study of the relationship of the Puritan conscience to
poverty and prOSperity.

The striking Similarity of the central character and
plot to Jane Field affords us the Opportunity to see
just what Mrs. Freeman had done in the fifteen years be-
tween that novel and The Shoulders 9E_E§Eg§, £§B§.Elglé.
is a thin story padded by the insertion of extraneous but
often excellent local color. The Shoulders 9E_E§Eg§_
reveals the dimension of the author's failure to learn.

Having failed to solve the problem of form and having

225.
evolved no integrated world view or "system" like those
borrowed and used as Eggg by her contemporaries, Jack
London and Frank Norris, she can rely only on melodrama.
The story is filled with mysterious characterizations,
secret pasts, midnight walks, and various other Gothic

38 It contains chunks of melodrama

devices of suspense.
together with comedy of manners, moral and psychological
analysis, and economic observation all held together on
the two story threads of the murder-suicide and the
secret will. This was 1908. Edith Wharton, Robert Her-
rick, Zona Gale, Ellen Glasgow, among others, were all
publishing some of their best work; but Mrs. Freeman's
resources were limited, and She never acquired any skills
except those inherited from the New England tradition and
those found quickly in the market place.

The main love story is conventional as are the lovers
themselves. Horace, the young man, is a schoolmaster, of
all things. The girl, Rose, is a poor little rich girl
‘with a reasonable amount of romantic suffering in her
past. Her urbane manners provide a contrast to Sylvia's
rusticity. But Mrs. Freeman, always uncertain of the
urbane, is not successful in her attempt to make the girl
innocent and urbane at the same time. More interesting
are several of the secondary characters, especially Lucy

38. figggfi_Gordon and The Shoulders of EEEgg, her
most Gothicized novels, together with The Wind in the

Rose Bush collection, reveal an affinity *for Hawthorne' a
‘world which lay dormant in her best work.

226.
Ayers, the young paranoid, and her fiercely protective
mother. Although they are only partially successful, they
Show a willingness to attempt characters and themes beyond
the realm of the genteel. Also interesting is Miss Farrel.39
Horace says Of her:

She seemed to have a feeling, poor soul,
that, beautiful as She was, She excited
repulsion rather than affection in every-
body with whom She came in contact. "I
might as well be a snake as a woman."
Those were just her words, and God help
her, I do believe there was something true
about them."

The most important characters in the story, of
course, are Henry and Sylvia Whitman, who live the life
of toil and privation which finally drives Sylvia to defy
her conscience in an attempt to escape. The story begins
with an extended portrait of Henry providing the economic
framework within which the central moral drama takes place.

Henry [felt] the sad and bitter resentment,
which was his usual mood, instead of joy.

He was past middle-age. He worked in a shoe-
ShOp. He had worked in a shoe-Shop Since he
was a young man. There was nothing else in
Store for him until he was turned out because
of old age. Then the ffiiure looked like a
lurid sunset of misery.

39. Irma H. Herron says of Oliver Wendell Holmes,
"Certain of his inhibited and sensitive characters might
have served as models for Mrs. Freeman's repressed vil-
lagers." Miss Herron also accepted the myth that Mary had
served as Holmes's Secretary. She never did, and there is
no evidence that she even read Holmes's fiction. But Miss
Farrel and Lucy Ayers do resemble characters in Elsie
Venner and E Mortal Antipathy. Irma H. Herron, Ihg_Small
Town ;h_American Liteggture, Durham, North Carolina, p. 113.

40. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Shoulgers g§_Atlas
(New York, 1908), p. 77.

41. Ibid., p. 1.

 

227.

His house had "come to him from his father encumbered with
a mortgage," which he was paying together with doctor
bills. "Once he had saved a little money; that was twenty-
Odd years before; but he had invested it foolishly, and
lost every cent." The result of all this is a resigned
bitterness that enables Henry to say, "Well, if you can
give me any good reason for saying grace, you will do more

5."42 The irony of Henry's life

than the parson ever ha
is that when prOSperity does come, he finds that he is
psychologically incapable of leisure. Broken to harness,
he finds that labor is the portion of labor.

Sylvia, who fights her own conscience to keep her new
found prOSperity, is the most brilliantly created char-
acter in the book. Through Sylvia, Mrs. Freeman partially
succeeds in bringing the melodrama within the pale of
regional realism. When her friend Lucinda is suSpected of
murdering Miss Farrel, Sylvia retorts:

"Arsenic in the peppermint! . . . You needn't

tell me Lucinda Hart put arsenic in the pepper-

mint though I dare say she had some in the house

to kill rats. It's likely that old tavern was

Overrun with them and I know she lost her cat

a few weeks agoJ"

She then proceeds to blame herself for not finding Lucinda
a kitten. Her folk wisdom, however, won't let her dismiss

Miss Farrel as a suicide.

"A woman don't kill herself as long as She's

1+2. Ibid., pp. 1-9.
43. Ibid., p. 73.

228.

got Spirit enough to fix herself up . . . I
saw her only yesterday in a brand-new dress,
and her hair was crimped tighfi enough to
last a week and her cheeks--" 4

The dialog between Sylvia and the other village women is
as good as the best exchanges in the early Short Stories.
The following exchange takes place after Henry returns to

his job at the factory.

"I thought," said Mrs. Jim Jones, driven to
her last gun, "that you and Mr. Whitman had
inherited enough to make you comfortable for
life, and I felt real bad to find out you
hadn't."

Sylvia turned a little pale, but her
gaze never flinched. She grunted again.

"I suppose," said Mrs. Jim Jones, mouth-
ing her words with intensest relish, "that
there wouldn't be any need for Mr. Whitman to
work any more, and when I heard he was going
back to the ShOp, and when I saw him turn in
there this morning, I declare I did feel bad."

Then Sylvia Spoke. "You needn't have
felt bad," She said, "Nobody asked you to."
Mrs. Jim Jones stared.

"Nobody asked you to," repeated Sylvia.
"Nobody is feeling at all bad here. It's
true, we've plenty, so Mr. Whitman don't need
to lift a finger, if he don't want to, but a
man can't set down, day in and day out, and
suck his thumbs when he's been used to working
all his life. Some folks is lazy by choice,
and some folks work by choice. Mr. Whitman
is one of them."

Mrs. Jim Jones felt fairly defrauded.
"Then you don't feel bad?" said she, in a
crestfallen way.

"Nobody feels bad here," said Sylvia.
"I guess nobody in East Westland feels bad
unless it's you, and nobody wants you to.""5

And finally, Sylvia is a rich character because the

writer is able to surround her with genuine, closely-

44. Ibid., pp. 74-75-
45. M., p. 241.

 

229.
observed details, some of which function symbolically.
Sylvia, anxious to get rid of her fine old furniture and
replace it with flashy, cheap new merchandise, tries sell-
ing Calkins Soap. The involvement in the new commercial
age, the rejection of the past, the substitution of false
values implicit in this little Situation stand not only
as a comment on the central moral crisis but on the whole
drift of life in New England. This is also part of a fairly
complete picture of a rural New England aesthetic. Mrs.
Freeman points out Sylvia's fondness for novels whose
heroines had "a distinctly different personality from one

.46

chapter to another, and her disapproval of china that

portrayed animals in other than their natural colors."7
Mrs. Freeman touches on a number of themes in The

Shoulders 9; Atlas. One of these is the plight of Single

 

women. In trying to console her psychotic daughter, Mrs.
Ayers says:
It's all because you are a woman, and the
natural longings of a woman are upon you. . . .
It is right that you should have what you
want, but if the will of God is otherwise,
you must make the best of it. There are
other théngs in life, or it would be mon-
strous.’+
Sylvia tries to convince Rose that the single life is
best; but she doesn't believe it, her ulterior motive

being fear of the discovery of the will. Lawyer MeekS,

46. Ibid., p. 127.

 

47. Ibid., pp. 41 and 181.

 

is. Ibid., p. 154.

 

 

230.
lamenting his own single state, comments on the Spinster's
lot with a reference to the Whitmans' dead benefactress:

She had a mean, lonesome life of it. Some-
times now, when I go into that house where

she lived so many years, I declare, the weight
of the burden she had to bear seems t2 be on
me. It was a cruel life for a woman. 9

Mrs. Freeman's consideration of the consequences of
loneliness and Spinsterhood lead her to a rather distant
treatment of homosexuality. Part of Miss Farrel's problem
is that "She loved women better than a woman usually does,
and women could not abide her."50 In her role of Rose's
secret benefactress, this same Miss Farrel acts in the fol-
lowing way:

Rose had not been sent away to school for two

reasons. One was Miss Farrel's, the other

originated with her caretakers. Miss Farrel

had a jealous dread of the girl's forming one

of those erotic friendships, which are really

diseased love-affairs, with another girl or
teacher.

The strangest scene in the book is the one between Rose
and the mentally disturbed Lucy Ayers.

She [Lucy] remained quiet for a few moments,
leaning against Rose, her blue-clad shoulder
pressing lovingly the black-clad one. Then
she moved away a little, and reared her pretty
back with a curious, snakelike motion. Rose
watched her. Lucy's eyes fastened themselves
upon her, and something strange happened.
Either Lucy Ayers was a born actress, or She
had become actually so imbued, through abnor-

49. Ibid., p. 206.
50. Ibid., p. 77.
51. Ibid., p. 158.

 

231.

mal emotion and love, with the very Spirit
of the man that She was capable of project-
ing his own emotions and feelings into her
own soul and thence upon her face. At all
events, She looked at Rose, and slowly Rose
became bewildered. It Seemed to her that
Horace Allen was looking at her through the
eyes of this girl, with a look she had often
seen Since their very first meeting. She
felt herself glowing from head to foot. She
was conscious of a deep crimson stealing all
over her face and neck. Her eyes fell before
the other girl's. Then suddenly it was all
over. Lucy rose with a little laugh. "You
sweet, funny creature," she said. "I can
make you blush, looking at you, as if I were
a man. Well, maybe I love you as well as
one.‘

Perhaps the homosexuality here is latent, but Mrs. Free-
man, in her willingness to explore characters beyond the
limits of conventional gentility, is here confronting a
psychosis long taboo in a manner that is daring and ex-
plicit for the time. Finally avoiding the theme, however,
the author packs the Ayers family off to the West where
Lucy regains emotional composure and marries.

So there are many virtues in this fundamentally weak
novel. Probably the most important virtue is maturity.

In The Shoulders g§_At1aS, which is not an eSpecially

 

naturalistic book, Mrs. Freeman diSplays a "naturalistic"
compassion for her troubled and victimized characters that
is revealed in Mrs. Ayers' defense of her daughter.
Sometimes, quite often, it may happen that
too heavy a burden, a burden which has been
gathering weight since the first of creation,

is heaped upon too Slender shoulders. This
burden may bend innocence into guilt and

52. Ibid., p. 140.

 

232.

modesty into Shamelessness, but there is no

more reason for cgndemnation than in a case

of typhoid fever. 3
In the climactic scene conscience and compassion meet face
to face. Sylvia reveals the secret will that takes away
her inheritance saying "I tried to hide from God and my-
self what I was doing, but I could not."5" When She finds
that the money is really hers, She Still acknowledges
guilt.

She stared helplessly at the worthless will

which she Still held. A young girl tittered

softly. Sylvia turned toward the sound.

"There is no occasion to laugh," said She,

"at one who thought she was sinning, and has

had the taste of sin in her soul, even though

she was got doing wrong. The intention was
there."5

It is part of the maturity of Mrs. Freeman's view that She
can acknowledge the guilt while recognizing in the guilty
person's circumstances the basis for compassion. That
compassion is expressed in Henry's contemplation of Rose's
future:

Thank the Lord that She will never get so

warped and twisted as to what is right and

wrong by the need of money to keep body and

soul together, that She will have to do what

my wife has done, and bear such a burden.5

One indication of Mrs. Freeman's place in the pantheon

of pOpular novelists at this time is her participation in

53. Ibid., p. 178.

 

 

 

 

233.
the absurd and interesting SXperiment which produced Ehg
Whole Family (1908). The Whole Family is a novel, each
chapter of which was written by a different popular
novelist ranging in Skill and posthumous fame from Howells
and James to John Kendrick Bangs and Mary Shipman Andrews.
Each novelist was supposedly writing of an area of Special
knowledge, but Henry James commenting on the married son
gives one pause. The plot concerns an engagement and
marriage as seen by various members of the family. The
fact that each chapter is told by a different first
person narrator makes this an interesting technical ex-
periment, if nothing else. Mrs. Freeman writes chapter II,
"The OldéMaid Aunt." It is an extremely able early example
of stream of consciousness. The character of the aunt is
a subtle blend of vanity, eccentricity and deSperate sad-
neSS--a sadness that stems from her and Mrs. Freeman's
knowledge of her emptiness. She whiSpers to herself the
author's final judgment on the Spinster's lot, "I have

everything except-~well, except everything."57

57. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in wm. Dean Howells et al.,
The Whole FamiEy; E_Nove1 Ey_Twe1ve Authors (New York, 1908),

P- 1+3-

CHAPTER VII
THE EATER COLLECTIONS

In 1917 F. L. Pattee said Of the then still very

popular Mrs. Freeman:

From her first story She was a realist, as

enamoured of actuality and as restrained as

Maupassant. She seems to have followed no

one. . . . But to her realism Miss Wilkins

added a power usually denied her sex, the

power of detachment.
After the publication of E_Humble Romance and Other Stories
(1887) H. M. Alden had said:

Miss Wilkins'work could hardly have given a

wider sense of life in a Yankee village and

the outlying farms if it had greater struc-

tural unity. It has unity of Spirit, of

point of view, of Sympathy; and being what

the aughor intended, we ask no other unity

of it.
These two quotations attribute to Mrs. Freeman's short
stories a wide variety of virtues: Spiritual unity,
sympathy, realism, restraint, and detachment. To the list
might be added those of humor and Symbolism, among others.
But the list of virtues is taken from, and the favorable
judgments are based on, the early short Stories that make
up the first two collections. The later collections--
and there were nine of them between Egmh§9E§_and 1910--

1. F. L. Pattee, E_Histor 9E American Literatpyg
Since 1810 (New York, 1917), pp. 235-236.

2. H. M. Alden, "The Editor's Study," Harper's
LXXV (September, 1887), 640.

234.

235.
represent a falling off.

There are two apparent reasons for this, both of
which are rooted in Mrs. Freeman's relation to the literary
market. In 1895 She was a forty-three-year-old Spinster
living with friends and had every reason to expect to
remain Single. She had received from her parents none of
the financial security that made Sarah Jewett's life so
tranquil. The Stories and collections were her livelihood,
and she was willing to do whatever she could to increase
her earning potential. AS a result, she tried to deve10p
groups of Short stories held together by some thread of
unity external to the stories themselves. She employed
devices of structural, symbolic, and thematic unity, all
of which tended to get between her great powers of obser-
vation and the finished product. Her eye was too often
on the collection and its potential sales and not often
enough on her subject. Secondly, in writing Specifically
£2; the market, she abandoned all too frequently the re-
straint and detachment that Pattee praised and indulged in
the kind of sentiment that characterized so much of pOpular
fiction of the day.

PeOple ;g_0ur Neighborhood (1895) appeared four years
after A New England Nun and Other Stories. The basis of
unity for the collection is clear enough; it consists of
eight studies of the people and customs of an unnamed New
England village. The conception is fine enough, and Mrs.

Freeman was to return to it with greater success twenty

236.

years later. But here three significant faults tend to
obscure the valid conception. The first fault lies in the
structure of the stories. There is very little dramatic
action. For the most part, they are sweeping, descriptive
reminiscences more like Mrs. Stowe's sketches than her own
best stories. Two of them, "A Quilting Bee in Our Vil-
lage" and "A Christmas Sing," are pieces of genre painting
without any plot at all. Secondly the stories employ a
narrator-~an interested observer. This device fails be-
cause Mrs. Freeman does not keep her narrator's observa-
tions objective and lets her Stray into the private con-
sciousness of the villagers. The narrator is also inef-
fective because, while She is supposed to be a villager
herself, her diction is clearly superior to that of her
neighbors, and her attitude toward them patronizing. She
is not really a citizen of "this humble village of humble
folk."3 Finally the collection is weaker than its pre-‘
decessors because it does not portray the "grotesques"
through which the author gives real insight into the psychol-
ogy of the region. It deals rather with the sentimental
Stereotypes of popular fiction.

"Timothy Samson: The WiSe Man," "Little Margaret
Snell: The Village Runaway," "Cyrus Emmet: The Unlucky

Man," "Phoebe Ann Little: The Neat Woman," and "Lydia

Wheelock: The Good Woman" are all sentimental and lacking

3. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The People _§_Our Ne1gh-
borhood (New York, 1898), p. 43.

237.
in distinction, although occasionally they contain the
significant details which Mrs. Freeman uses so well.

Poor Lydia has not had a new carpet in her

Sitting-room Since She was married. It is

a dreadful thing in this villfige not to have

a carpet 1n the Sitting-room.

In a strong, tightly-constructed story this carpet would
have become a symbolic detail. Here, however, its signi-
ficance is dissipated in a sentimental and diffuse tale.
"Phoebe Ann Little" has possibilities. Phoebe is a com-
pulsive housekeeper who Spends her life cleaning and re-
cleaning her already immaculate house. Here is a poten-
tially rich situation--a "grotesque" which can stand as a
symbol of Puritanism--, but it is a Sketch, not a story,
and told in a very patronizing tone.

These stories also diSplay the deterioration of Mrs.
Freeman's style. The pungent, direct style (Foster has
discovered that forty-four percent of the Sentences of
"A Gala Dress" are simple sentences) disappears before
the determination to court the market. We begin to en-
counter such sentences as the following from "Timothy Sam-
son:"

So much peppermint and sassafras and winter-

green, indeed, does Timothy infuse in his

remedies that the doctor has been known to

be very sarcastic over it.5

The length, the inversion, and the indirection of this

1+. Ibid., p. 1050
50 Ibid., p. 90

238.

are all hallmarks of a "popular" Style and not at all what
Mrs. Freeman does well. And She never wrote a more senti-
mental or inept sentence than this one from "Little Mar-
garet Snell:"

There are other children, but she is the one

all-pervading Spirit of childhood which keeps

us all fretting but powerless under its tyr-

anny, and yet, if the truth must be told,

ready enough to cut for it the sweet cake,

which lg loves, when it runs away into our

hearts 0

The best story in the collection is "Amanda Todd:
The Friend of Cats," which is also the best example of

the reasons why The ngple g§_0ur Neighborhood is not a

 

successful volume. The first paragraph holds out a high
promise.

Amanda Todd's orbit of existence is restrict-
ed of a necessity, since She was born, brought
up, and will die in this village but there is
no doubt that it is eccentric. She moves apart
on her own little course quite separate from
the rest of uS. Had Amanda's lines of life been
cast elsewhere, had circumstances pushed her,
instead of hemming her in, She might have be-
come a feminine apostle of a new creed, have
founded a sect, or instituted a new System of
female dress. AS it is, she does not go to
meeting, Sh? never wears a bonnet, and She
keeps cats.

This is good enough prose; the insight and the significant
details and the implicit naturalism are there. This woman
whose pride keeps her from church and whose craving for

love and fulfillment compels her to share her life with so

many cats is obviously a fictional lens which Mrs. Freeman

6. Ibid., p. 38.
7o lbido, p. 870

239.
can focus on a number of her major themes. But Amanda is
not a major portrait and the Story is not a major Story
because the £23.15 missing. The loose, Sketch—like qual-
ity, the absence of drama and plot, and the overstatement
of the obvious through very unprofessional repetition
weaken a potentially strong portrait.

Mrs. Freeman's next collection, Silence and Other

 

Stories, appeared in 1898, a very uneven collection con-
taining two interesting stories and Several pieces of
very inferior writing. One thing worth noting is the
increasing length of the Stories. She was beginning to
write more and more to fit the market, and one thing She
had learned was that long stories paid more than brief
ones. Her native gifts of economy and compression were,
therefore, not to her economic interest. The collection
also reveals her determination to mine for gold in the
difficult terrain of historical romance. It also reveals
by default the contemporary and realistic nature of her
art. The farther back in time Mrs. Freeman goes, the
worse She gets and the more She is willing to borrow in-
eptly from Hawthorne.

"The Little Maid at the Door" has for its theme the
HawthOrnesque idea that the sins of the fathers are visited
upon the children. The reappearance of the "little maid"
who had died is clearly a Special providence; but where
such devices are often powerful Symbols for Hawthorne,

they are only sentimental tricks ianrs. Freeman's hands.

240.
"Silence" is a better story of the same type. The first
half of it is filled with graphic details of an Indian
massacre. The massacre as seen from a woman's point of
view, the reactions of various individuals to horror, and
the psychological after-effects of the terrible night are
well done. But the story breaks into halves, and in the
second half these virtues fade into a very conventional
love affair. Hawthorne’s influence can be seen in the use
of such Gothic devices as witches, providences and pro-
phesies ("I have seen blotches of blood everywhere all day.
The enemy will be upon us."8). One lamentable weakness
in these stories is monstrous, archaic dialog of the same
kind that makes The Heart's Highway unreadable. Two other
stories (there are only Six in the collection) are conven-
tional love stories that require no comment.

Of the sentimental stories of young lovers and mar-
riage, the one that has merit is "Evelina's Garden," which
was reissued separately in 1899. (Evelina loved Thomas
Merriam in her youth but did not marry him because of his
inferior social station. While he married later and had
a son, she remained a Spinster. Her rejection of love and
withdrawal from life are symbolized by the high hedge she
builds around her garden. Within its narrow confines, how-
ever, She finds some joy. "She had lost the one way of
human affection, but her feet had found a little single

8. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Silence and Other Stories
(New York, 1898), p. 124.

241.

sidetrack of love, which gave her still a zest in the
journey of life."9 Relying on the use of parallels, Mrs.
Freeman presents Thomas's son, a minister, and Evelina's
niece who confront the same situation. This time the girl
does not turn aside from the "one way of human affections;"
and neither does the minister, although old Thomas warns
him of the hazards inherent in class distinctions.

She ain't never eat in the kitchen, nor been

Scairt to set down in the parlor. And satin

and velvit and silver Spoons and cream-pots

ain't never looked anything out of ths common

to her, and they always will to you.
The central problem is genuine, the observations are right
and rich in implication, and the parallel is successfully
maintained; but the story falls off badly at the end.
Because of inherited wealth and the upward mobility in-
herent in the ministerial calling, the young people are
able to marry and live happily ever after. The ending is
not only conventional; it is abrupt and technically crude.
The reason is that "Evelina's Garden" was rapidly turning
into a novel. Had She continued the story as an investi-
gation of the inter-class marriage, Mrs. Freeman might
have written something to rival Ehg_E;§g_2§_§11g§_Lapham.

The one atypical story in the collection is "A New
England Prophet." Marred as it is by the forced insertion

of a romantic relationship, it is still one of Mrs. Free-

man's finest comic stories. It is the story of a religious

90 MO, p0 1240
10. Ibid., p. 136.

 

242.
fanatic who prOpheSies the end of the world and who is
believed by a small band of followers. His brother, who
does not believe him, persuades him to Sign over the farm
effective the day after doomsday. The dialog between the
two brothers, the Puritan and the Yankee, is as comic aS
any Mrs. Freeman ever wrote. The prOphet himself is one
of her finest grotesques, revealing the strange channels
that repressed Puritan emotion tended to carve for itself.
In the fine, Twain-like conclusion, the author makes good
comic use of anti-climax. After waiting in prayer on a
hilltOp all night for the coming annihilation, the be-
lieverS--eyes averted-~slowly and Silently drift home in
a chill, grey dawn. The prOphet himself Sits "brooding

"11 Meanwhile

over the ashes of his own prOphetic fire.
his wife uses all the "faculty" at her command to save
the farm. She finally retrieves the title by agreeing to
bake for the Yankee brother all the mince pies that he
demands——a small price for an apocalyptic vision.
EggrEgyg_Q§_Parson Lord and Other Stories, a hap-
hazard collection of five fairly long sentimental tales,
appeared in 1900. Four of the stories are only women's
sentimental fiction. "Catherine Carr" is a story of the
American revolution, characterized by the archaic language
which is the hallmark of Mrs. Freeman's failure as a his-

torical romancer.

"The Love Of Parson Lord" has more to recommend it.

11. Ibid., p. 224.

243.

It is a fairly conventional story marred by looseness of
structure and shallow characterization, but it is redeemed
partially by the characterization of Parson Lord and by
the significance of his relationship to his daughter Love.
The parson is a man whose normal human reSponses have be-
come twisted by the harshness of his Puritan faith. In
this regard, he is one of Mrs. Freeman's grotesques. Having
vowed in the days of her infancy that the girl would be-
come a missionary, the parson is tormented by his con-
flicting desires to rear her to her stern destiny and yet
to gratify her childish desires with gifts and demon-
strations of love. His irrational compromise is to play
the stern father overtly while covertly providing her with
dolls and treats. Here is a man driven to neurosis by
the pressures inherent in his environment. And the minis-
ter's dilemma is not without its consequences on the per-
sonality of his daughter. Little Love (her name and the
attempts of Calvinism to repress her are symbolic), vic-
timized by the past, has ambivalent reSponses to the tra-
ditional delights of childhood.

She felt unutterably guilty. Still there was

a sweet comfort from the feeling of the doll

in her arms which she could not helg realizing

1n Sp1te of her conViction of Sin.
The scene is reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn's crisis con-
cerning the restoration of Jim to Miss watson. The altered
dimensions of the crisis make this a lesser story, of

12. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman The Love of Parson Lord
and Other Stories (New York, 1900;.” p. l .

2hh.

course, but not necessarily a less valid one. The fatal
flaws in the story lie in the author's patronizing tone
and in the conventional love affair which provides the
story's resolution.

The best story in the collection is "One Good Time,"
a tale which reminds one of Garland's "Mrs. Ripley's Trip"
and Miss Jewett's "The Hilton's Holiday." Narcissa, the
wife and mother and the central character in the story,
is, like "mother" in "The Revolt of Mother? basically con-
tented with her place in the patriarchical family. But
she is neither foolish nor unaware of the wonders of the
great world beyond. Aware vaguely of her right to some
little portion of excitement and beauty, she rebels against
the dullness of her life and goes to New York. When she
returns, she returns more or less contentedly to her place
in the family and community. Her account of her adventures
provides the author with a number of opportunities for
comic observations. The theme of urban-rural contrast is
nicely focused in the country woman's view of city life.

Understudies appeared in 1901, just before Mrs. Free-
man's marriage and migration to New Jersey. It consists of
twelve stories: six about animals and six about flowers.
The collection is held together by a common symbolic
structure. Each story is about an animal or plant which
functions symbolically and about a human parallel. Most of
the stories are not successful. The reason is not hard to

find. Mrs. Freeman was a realist. Her best gift was her

 

 

2&5.

faculty of observation. She was able to transform the
observed situation into a sign (symbol) of a deeply felt
moral and social insight. But she was not an intellectual;
she had no integrated system of values or pervasive world
view. Thus when she reversed the process, when, instead
of allowing symbol to grow from observation, she tried to
impose an external device on her observations, she was
building a fictional structure without an intellectual
foundation. She was able to summon up no controlling
image like Fuller's skyscraper or Norris's railroad. The
result is not a controlling metaphor or symbolic situation
of power; it is a coy and conventional trick of the market
place. Mrs. Freeman herself was not completely happy with
the two—fold division of the book. She wrote to Alden:

Somehow the flowers and animals seem to me

not to combine very well. They are so es-

sentially different, onelgeing symbolic,

the other phySiological.
But for economic reasons she bowed to the wishes of her
publisher. The result is a collection of twelve senti-
mental stories devoid, for the most part, of the fruits
of observation, held together by an external unity device
which doesn't really unify.

The first six stories about animals are little more
than sentimental personifications. In one we encounter

13. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to H. M. Alden,
October 6, 1900 (Columbia University Library, New York).

 

2L6.
"the poor monkey's desire for liberty."ll+ In another a
dog is accused of achieving "another level in the spiri-

"15 "The Squirrel" achieves

tual evolution of his race.
a kind of whimsical charm.
The squirrel lived with his life-long mate
near the farm-house. He considered himself
very rich, because he owned an English-walnut
tree. Neither he nor his mate had the least
doubt that it belonged to them and not to the
farmer.
But whimsical charm is fragile stuff and not the sort of
thing that realists can handle much without damaging--
as the previous quotations indicate.

(The strongest and most successful story in the col-
lection is not whimsical. "The Parrot" is the story of a
parrot, who is imprisoned in a wire cage, and of his
mistress, Martha, whose passions are imprisoned by the
mores of the village and the morals of Calvinism. Here

the parrot is the heroine's alter ego, and its curses are

 

her protest against life. When the minister she had hOped
to marry comes with his new bride to visit her, Martha
sits in an environmentally imposed silence while the bird
attacks the new bride. Later as they sit powerless in
their reSpective prisons, Martha thoughtlessly asks the
bird if it wants a cracker to eat. The bird replies:

1h. mary E. Wilkins Freeman, understudieg (New
York, 1901) p. 23.

15. lb;d., p. 58.

16. lbig., p. 39.

 

247.

What was that? What was that, Martha, Martha,

Martha, Martha, Martha. Polly doesn't want a

cracker; Polly will be damned if she eats a

cracker. You don't want a cracker, do you

Martha? Martha, Martha, Martha, want a

cracker. What was that, Martha? Martha

want a cracker? Martha will be damned if

she eats a cracker. Martha, Martha, Marthall7
Here in the final words of a strong scene--words which
are possibly an hallucination-sMrs. Freeman stands on the
threshold of insights and techniques that do not fully
deve10p for another decade or more. But unaware of the
new psychologies of her time, and cut off pretty much
from the critical and aesthetic dialog of her time, she
did not have the resources to repeat or develop these un-
fortunately isolated moments.

The second group of six stories, those built around
flowers, are poorer than the first. The comparison be-
tween man and flower is forced, and the tricks used to get
the flower planted somewhere in the story are all but un-
professional. The gaudy prince's feather relates to a
flamboyant man, the morning glory to a promising boy who
never amounts to much. Occasionally the insight is there
as in the case of the forlorn clump of bouncing bet which
struggles on in a semi-wild state much like the story's
heroine. The author says wryly, "The last survivor was a

"18

woman, of course. "Peony," also a story with possibi-

lities, is the story of a gaudy, over-blown woman (a peony)

17' 1322-9.” P0 710
18. Mo, p0 1070

2h8.
with great generosity of soul and of her thin, grasping,
self-righteous niece. However, Mrs. Freeman is so busy
'with her flower symbols that she never develops the per-
sonality clash which, had it been developed through obser-
vation, might have been a relationship symbolic of the
conflicting values of the New England of her day. No
other story better illustrates the fallacy of the principle
of organization.

Mrs. Freeman had been writing ghost stories for 51231:
body's magazine since before the turn of the century. All
of these except "A Christmas Ghost" were collected into a
volume called Ihg_fligg_;g.th§_Rose Bush and Other Stories
2§_the Supernatural (1903). The stories had such titles
as "The South-west Chamber," "The Shadows on the Wall,"
and "The Lost Ghost." The title piece is about a little,
neglected girl, who, after death, returns to haunt her
evil stepmother. Most of the ghosts haunt houses, and most
of the houses are inhabited by sisters—~one soft sister who
cries and trembles and one hard sister who denies the super-
natural but is equally afraid. In "Shadows on the wall"
the following description appears:

He cast a covertly sharp, comprehensive

glance at Mrs. Brigham with her elaborate

calm; at Rebecca quietly huddled in the cor-

ner of the sofa with her handkerchief to her

face and only one small, reddened ear as at-

tentive as a dog's uncovered and revealing

her alertness for his presence; at Caroline
sitting with a strained composure in her arm-

2h9.

chair by the stove.19
Were the author not burdened with supernatural tricks,
she could write a fine short story about this collection
of sisters.

A quick summary of the weak points of "The Vacant
Lot," the longest of the stories, reveals the essential
flaw of the collection. A number of interesting situa-
tions--the plight of the unattractive daughter, the search
for a husband, the sensitive wife versus the tough-minded
husband--are touched upon but not develOped. The various
preternatural phenomena have no connection with one
another or with the main plot; they just scare people.

An old murder is forced into the story, apparently for the
sake of atmOSphere.

Hawthorne used various devices of this kind to wander

"20 Mrs. Freeman uses them for

in "byways of the Spirit.
their own sake. Where Hawthorne used "Special providences"
to probe ethical questions, she uses Gothic tricks to
produce superficial sensations. In Pembroke and Ihg_§hgul-
g§;§_9§_gtl§§_she went to Hawthorne for more serious help
than this. He served her no better there. Nothing under-

scores the basic realism of her talent so much as her in-

ept handling of the paraphenalia of romance.

19. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Wind in the Rose

Bush and Other Storie§_g§_the Supernatural (New York,
1903), p- 57-

20. Charles Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism ang_American
Literature (Chicago, 1953), P. 2.

250.

The one story that rises above all these weaknesses
is "The Lost Ghost." The tale is marred by the unnecessary
apparatus of a frame story. A family moving into one sup-
posedly haunted house is entertained by an account of an—
other. There is no other connection between the frame and
the main story. (This looseness is not found in Mrs.
Freeman's earlier work.) The main story tells of the
ghost of a little, neglected girl who, even after death,
continues her search for a mother. This search is counter-
pointed by the childless Mrs. Bird's search for a daugh-
ter. In the sentimental denouement they are united in
death. The search, however, is genuine and touches on the
need for love, which is one of the author's most consistent
themes.

Another collection which came out in 1903 is Six
Egggs, Like Understudies it is a collection on which
unity has been imposed from without, in this case by the
repeated use of trees. The trees perform two functions.
First, they act as symbols and parallels. In "The Lom-
bardy Poplar" the author says, "As the tree was the last
of his immediate family, so the woman who lived in the
house was the last of hers."21 Secondly, they are in-
volved in the action of the plot. In "The Elm Tree" an
old man lives and hides in a tree.

Edward Foster has high praise for this collection.

21. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Six.Trees (New York,
1903), p. 132.

251.
He says:

A better volume [than Thg_Wind in the figgg.
Bush] Six Trees, appeared in the same year.
In thought and feeling the stories return
to moments of nature mysticism . . . and to
the doctrine of symbols expressed by Ozias
Lamb in Jerome: Everything on earth means
somethia' more'n itself if we could only
see it. 2

He goes on to say, "'The Apple Tree' and several others

"22 and to describe

in this volume are lovely stories.
them as in the Spirit of Emerson. Building on Alden's
reference to Mrs. Freeman as an impressionist, Foster here
tries to tie her to Transcendentalism rather than to the
New England regional tradition. "The Elm Tree" is one
story which he can use as testimony. Mrs. Freeman does
build the tree into a symbol of transcendental unity and
of the spiritual powers of nature, as the following quote
shows.

It [the tree] became . . . something akin to

a testimony of God. . . . Something there

was about the superb acres of those great

branches curving skyward and earthward with

matchless symmetry of line which seemed to

furnish a3 upward lift for thought and ima-

gination. 3
Later she says:

Out of the great Spread of the tree, that

majesty of green radiances and violet shad-

ows and highlights as emeralds-~out of this

fairy mottle as of jewels and shadows and

sunbeams, stared the face of old David Ran-
som, and the face was inexpressibly changed.

22. Edward Foster, Magy E. Wilkins Freeman (New
York, 1956), pp. 163-16h.

23. Freeman, Six Trees, pp. h-S.

252.

All the bitterness and rancor were gone.2h

This is faintly Emersonian, but one story does not
make a pattern. Mr. Foster's attempt to "romanticize"
Mrs. Freeman is unfortunate for two reasons. He fails to
distinguish among the kinds of symbols. Speaking of what
he calls Symbols and signs, Tyndall says, "The difference
seems to be that a Sign is an exact reference to something
definite and a symbol an exact reference to something in-
definite."25 Working with this distinction, we can see
that Mrs. Freeman employs signs most of the time-~signs
or significant details within a historical and social
framework. That is to say, she writes like a realist mpgg

9§_the time. So the attempt to see her as a romantic

 

writer is based very much on a minority report. Secondly,
Foster fails to make the necessary qualitative judgment.
As the second excerpt from "The Elm Tree" shows, the
author's more romantic writing is her poorer writing.
This is the case from Barney's symbolically twisted shoul-
der in Pembroke through all of her unhappy excursions into
the world of historical fiction. What she can't see, she
can't write about.

The converse is also true; when she writes from ex-
perience and observation she writes well. "The White

Birch," "The Great Pine," "The Balsam Fir," and "The Lom-

24. Ibid., p. 37.

 

)25. gm. York Tyndall, Th2 Literary Symbol (New York,
1955 , p. o

253.

bardy Paplar" are all weak, sentimental stories onto which
the symbolic function of the various trees has been forced.
But even in these stories there are flashes of good realism.
0f the heroine of "The Balsam Fir" she says:

Martha had very little money, but somehow she

always managed to keep her house in good or-

der, though she had never had any blinds. It

fiad afigaygsbggn the dream of Martha's life to

ave ln .
It is the imposed symbol of the tree that comes between
Mary and the telling of the tale of Martha's forlorn little
dream. In "The Lombardy POplar" the realistic dialog
achieves fine, vivid little scenes. Lonely old Sarah's
cousin belittles the "popple."
"It ain't a tree. It’s a stick tryin'
to look like one."
Sarah answered, "That's why I like it."27

But in these sentimental tales of the triumph of one or
another of the domestic virtues, these are only flashes.

Two stories stand out in the collection, "The Elm
Tree," whose Emersonianism has been noted, and "The Apple
Tree." "The Elm Tree" concerns a lonely old man who re-
sists the town's attempts to take away his independence.
He is a tough old individualist. "He was in Spirit a revolu-
tionist and anarchist. The mention of banks sent him into

"28

a white heat of rage. The bank has taken away his home,

26. Freeman, Six_Trees, p. 103.
27. Ibid., p. lh3.
28. Ibid., p. 8.

254.

and now the town wants to take away his freedom. The
struggle for reSpect, the dialog, the relation of old
David to his former property are all precisely observed
and rendered. So also is the Symbolic function of the
tree .

"The Apple Tree" compares two families: the Blakes
'with their trimmed pear tree, their Thanksgiving prepara-
tions, their cane chairs, and their dead children; and the
Maddoxes with their apple tree, their indolence, their
love, and their children "grouped in a charming little
cluster."29 The point of the story is that life is re-
deemed by love. At the beginning we see the Maddoxes
through the eyes of the Blakes, and their poverty is
slovenly and repellent. At the end, however, it has been
redeemed by their own mutual love; and it is their life
which is rich in comparison to the cold, Calvinistic life
of the Blakes.

The PeOple 2: Our Neighborhood was unified by geo-
graphy; Understudies and Six Trees by a controlling Sym-

bolism. The Givers (1904) is united by the common theme

 

of gift-giving. Six of its eight stories are Christmas
stories. Three of them, "Joy," "Lucy," and "The Chance
of Araminta" are unexceptional. Araminta's chance is a
chance at marriage, which, as all of Mary's characters
know, is the fulfillment of a woman's life. "Joy" is the

story of a girl who returns after many years to the farmer

29. Ibid., p. 203.

255.
who loves her. The old unpainted farmhouse which the
jilted farmer had shut up through the years room by room
serves as an effective symbol of the ever-diminishing
life of rural New England. These stories are not un-
pleasant but "The Last Gift" is aggressively bad. The
story of a man whose "love of giving amounted to a pure
and innocent but unruly passion"30 and whose last gift is
his honesty, about which he is also pathological, it is as
poor a story as Mrs. Freeman ever wrote.

The Givers is a minor book, but, with the exception
of "The Last Gift" and "Eglantina," it is not a bad book.
In fact two of the Christmas stories, "The Givers" and
"The Reign of the Doll," are very fine examples of this
sub-genre. "The Givers" is a comic study both of manners
and of selfishness. When a poor young couple marries,
the various members of the community try to outdo one
another in bringing gifts which are impressive but not
functional. The presents are simply a Species of vanity--
an extension of self. When one gift is Opened, the bride
asks innocently:

"What be the bowls for? Oatmeal?"

The visitors all laughed.

"Oatmeal!" cried Abby. "Why, they are finger

bowls.“l

As the givers gain humility, they retract their useless

30. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Th§_Givers (New York,
l90h), p. 268.

31. Ibid., p. 110

256.
gifts and are able to make the gifts what they should be--
gestures of love.

"The Reign of the Doll" concerns Fidelia and Diantha,
two eccentric and stiff-necked old-maid sisters living
across the street from each other but long separated by an
argument over their father's will. Shortly before Christ-
mas the worst electrical and wind storm in years descends
upon the village. Driven by fear, the more timid sister
enters the old family house for the first time in years.
United by this "special providence," the sisters pass the
stormy hours making clothes for a charity doll. As they
work through the night, they are slowly united by the gift
and the act of love. The dialog, which is excellent, and
the characterization of the old maids make this a controlled
Story of sentiment rather than a piece of sentimental wo-
men's fiction.

Only two of the stories are not Christmas stories.
One of them, "Eglantina," concerns the love of a blind boy
for a girl with a disfigured cheek. Mrs. Freeman spends
several discursive paragraphs on "inner beauty." The in-
creasing number of her stories like this indicate that the
pressures of the market were beginning to tell heavily on
her. The brilliant realist, bright with promise, was grad-
ually becoming a sentimental old woman--but not an old
woman devoid of the spirit of adventure. The other non-
Christmas story, "The Butterfly," shows her continued will-

ingness to treat almost any subject. It is the story of a

257.

man who hides from his daughter the fact that her mother
is promiscuous. It is not a distinguished story; but, as
Foster says, "The 'broken home' was a new subject in these
days, and it is interesting to see that Mrs. Freeman could
treat it well."32

If The Givers is merely an undistinguished collection,
The ng§_Lavinia and Others (1907) is an inferior one.

Along with The Wind in the Rose Bush it displays Mrs. Free-

 

man at her worst. It contains the farthest reaches of two
unfortunate trends in her writing: historical narrative
and the SOphomoric style of the scribbling woman. "The
Gold," an historical narrative, contains the following ex-
change:

"Wherefore cannot you tell me where the
gold is, Abraham Duke?"
"I can tell you not, Catherine."33

"The Fair Lavinia," also historical, contains dialog equal-
ly bad and also coy overwriting. The following example
will serve:

The Spring was wonderful that year: a year
long ago; it was late, there had been many
northeast storms and frosts, but it was at
last fairly triumphant. The trees were forth
all together in a silently hustling crowd,
and it seemed as if many of them instead of
taking their turns for flowering and leafing
as usual were pushing to the front, regardless
of all the laws of the vernal season. One
looking from his window saw leaves of maples
deepening from rose to green. . . . The dark
limbs of oaks having chopped their last year's

32. Foster, Mary E, Wilkins Freeman, p. 166.

33. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Thg_Fair Lavinia and
Others (New York, 1907), p. 229.

258.

shag of russet, which had endured so long at

their knotty knees, to be pierced by violets

and Spring beauties, showed tufts of gold. . . .

The birches were clad as lightly as nymphs,

revealing their graceful limbs, white with

Eggepaggigfi.3£ spring, through dim clouds of
Canby and others have noted the close interrelation of
character and setting in the best Freeman Stories and the
characteristic restraint in the treatment of setting.

This restraint is what Helen McMahon has in mind when she
finds Mrs. Freeman receiving deserved praise for "Simplicity
and the value of common forms, the appeal of being unmis-
takably true to life."35 The excerpt quoted above indi-
cates how far astray She had actually gone in following

the false lights of the market place.

Most of the other stories are without distinction,
although they do occasionally diSplay moments of insight--
like the scene in "Amarinda's Roses" where Amarinda, near-
ing thirty and still unmarried, thinks about putting on
a Spinster's cap and her maiden aunt weeps at the prOSpect.
Two better stories are "The Willow—ware" and "The Secret,"
both of which deal with the related themes of love and re-
bellion. In "The WilloweWare" Adeline, a young girl, re-
bels at the role her rural New England village had assigned

to her. Rejecting Spinsterhood, she defies her old maid

aunts and disrupts their orderly ways by buying ready-made

3A. Ibid., pp. 3-4.

35. Helen McMahon, Criticism Qf_Fiction: A_Study 9;
Trends in the Atlantic Monthly (New'York, 1952) p. 19.

259.

clothes and refusing to sew. All of this constitutes a
kind of shaking of the fist at her personal fate, but not
at the role of women in general, for she quickly graSps
the Opportunity to marry and play out that primary role
which society provides for women. It should be noted that
Adeline's attitude toward marriage is, like that of almost
all the other Freeman heroines, acquisitive rather than
sexual.

Catherine's rebellion in "The Secret" is deeper and
more personal than Adeline's. When she unavoidably keeps
her fiance waiting, he demands to know where she had been.
In making such a demand he is clearly Operating within the
approved patterns of his society. She, however, refuses
to tell him; and he leaves, breaking the engagement. In
trying to rectify the situation, her mother states the
conventional attitude and Catherine replies.

"As long as he's a man," she [the mother)
said, "all a woman can do is Sit still and do
nothing."
. "gg am not going to sit still and do noth-
ing.
This is the extent of her rebellion, but she does keep
faith with her private Self and maintain her integrity.
When her fiancé relents and in relenting honors that pri-
vate self, she marries happily. Her concern had been for

the deeper personal needs of women not different social

r0133 0

36. Freeman, The Fair Lavinia, p. 195.

*

 

260.

In the decade after 1895 Mrs. Freeman wrote a number
of very good short stories, but the number in relation to
the quantity of pieces produced was small. The increas-
ing interest in sentimental conventions and in historical
romance, together with the preoccupation with story groups
clustered around some artificial unifying device, led her
away from her own best talent. The Fair Lavinia and Others--
eSpecially the title story--represents the end of this long
decline. Her last three collections are better.37 The first
of the collections which Signal a return to her former qual-
ity is The Winning Lady and Others (1909). Although the
title story is a New Jersey story, the collection reflects
a return to early New England themes and subjects. His—
torical romances are things of the past; the focus here is
on regional manners and situations, dialect, humor, and,
occasionally, tragedy. It even looks like her first two
collections; over three hundred pages long, it contains
eleven stories, the best of which diSplay the old brevity
and simplicity of style.

Most of the stories are undistinguished, ranging from
the inconsequence of "Billy and Suzie" to the slight but
pleasant humor of "A New Year's Resolution." But the very
first paragraph of the first story indicates that the tide

37. "Mrs. Freeman's latest Short stories, of which
Edgewater PeOple (1918) is a representative collection,
rose almost to the level of her earliest work." Arthur

Hobson Quinn, American Fiction: An_Historical and Cri-
tical Survey (New York, 1936), p. #39.

261.

has turned. After the introductory paragraph of "The Fair
Lavinia" previously quoted, it is a relief to encounter
the following:

Mrs. Adeline Wyatt stood before her long

mirror.‘ She held a silver-framed hand-

glass, and she surveyed her head crowned

with a pretty toque at every possible angle.

Adeline was always conscious of exercising

stern heroism when she Stood before her

mirror. She Spared herself nothing. She

looked unflinchingly at every crease in her

chin, every crew‘s-foot about her eyes, every

hollow in her cheeks . . . She faced the

worst, and as far as possible, without the

use of arts which she deSpised, she rem-

edied defects. She practised before her

mirror exactly the carriage of head and

arrangemgnt of hair which were most be-

coming.3
Here is the closely observed, fully rendered scene and the
use of the significant detail. Here is the ability to
portray what Arthur Mizener has called "the meaning of the
moment." But the character as well as the technique dis-
plays the return to form. Although the story is set in
Metuchen, Adeline wyatt is one of Mrs. Freeman's redoubt-
able New England women with her realistic courage, her
willingness to do battle against time, and her scorn of
deception. The story concerns Adeline's moment of weak-
ness, in which she cheats at cards in order to win a punch
bowl, and her moment of retribution, when she confesses.
Like Jane Field and like Sylvia Whitman in The Shoulders
9§_Atlas, she finds that she cannot live with the taste of
sin. The plot and insight here are not original; but the

38. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Winning_Lady and
Others (New York, 1909), pp. B-A.

262.
story is fresh. It is Mrs. Freeman's powers of observa-
tion and her ability to make different details significant
that enables her to retell substantially the same story
without being guilty of the monotonous clichés that Bret
Harte, George washington Cable and other regionalists pro-
duced in their later years.

"Eliza Sam" is a clear return to the scenes and devices
of her early masterpieces. The narrator Speaks sadly of
the New England Mrs. Freeman knew SO well.

My neighbors are mostly women. There used

to be men enough years ago, when I was a boy

and a young ‘an, but they have all died or

moved away.33
The story is comic; and the narrator, completely free of

the patronizing tone that marked the author's occasional

narrators from The People pf Our Neighborhood on, recounts

 

two different stories--the discouraging of an unwanted
suitor and the reclaiming of a drunkard--which are rooted
deeply in regional folk humor. As in "The Winning Lady,"
it is the language as much as anything that indicates re—
newed strength. Here it is the narrator's dialect.

Her real name ain't Eliza San; it is Eliza
Hunt. She's called Eliza Sam to distinguish
her from the other Eliza Hunts. There are
three in this village, and they have to have
their fathers' and husbands' names tacked on
to theirs to till 'em apart. Eliza Sam.wasn't
never married and her father's name was Sam.
He died about five years ago. He kept the
saw mill. Beside Eliza Sam there is Eliza
John and Eliza Caleb. Eliza John is married
to a man whose name is John, and Eliza Caleb
ain't married, never was, and is never like

39. Ibid., p. 286.

263.

to be, but they have tacked Caleb 8nto her
name to tell her from the Others.4

The verb "distinguish" might be considered a flaw, but
the regional sentence patterns and the hinted variant pro-
nunciations give this a genuine ring. Above all the non

seguiturs about Eliza Sam's father make the passage authen-

 

tic and comic.

The two best stories in Th§_Winning Lady grow out of
two of Mrs. Freeman's most fundamental talents, her powers
of observation and her tragic vision. The first, "Old
Woman Magoun," is a tragic story set in a decaying little
New England village called Barry's Ford. The main char-
acter is a salty, illiterate old woman who preserves her
integrity and her values against the indolence and evil
which pervade the life of the village and who devotes her
energies to raising her probably illegitimate granddaughter.
When the dissolute father claims the child, intending to
let her become a gambler's mistress to pay for gambling
debts, Old Woman Magoun takes the daughter for a walk and
allows her to eat deadly nightshade. The story, which is
very frank, is told fortunately in a style which is a
reversion to the author's earliest, starkest prose. With
its Strong sense of tragedy, one is forced to wonder what
she could have accomplished if her editors and confidants
had encouraged this Aeschylian Streak instead of urging on

her the pious clichés of the market place.

A0. Ibid., p. 286.

 

26A.

The other first rate story is "The Selfishness of
Amelia Lamkin," which in length, tone, and theme is remin-
iscent of Rose Terry Cooke—-eSpecially of "Freedom Wheeler's
Controversy with God." Amelia suffers from a martyr-complex
and contributes to her family‘s weakening moral fiber by
doing too much for them. The doctor says to her daughter,
"Of course I realize how almost impossible it is to prevent
self-sacrificing women like your mother from Offering them-

selves up."l+1

Using one of her favorite devices for under-
scoring theme, Mrs. Freeman contrasts Amelia's species of
selfishness with her sister Jane's. Where Amelia is faded,
Jane is fresh. Where Amelia is worried, Jane is serene.
Where Amelia is put-upon, Jane is independent. Jane, who
had her chances,'chose the freedom of Spinsterhood rather
than the sacrifice of marriage. Her values are material.
"Addie {Amelia's daughter] might do bet-
ter when it comes to money."
"Money isn't everything."
"It is a good deal," reSponded Jane.42
When Amelia collapses from overwork, the various mem-
bers of her family are plagued by feelings of guilt. The
careless son hOpeS that mitten-mending hadn't been a con-
tributing factor; the lazy daughter tries to justify her
"delicacy." And Amelia's husband asks with guilty concern,

"Jane, do you think putting in my sleeve-buttons and studs

hurt her."£"3 AS Amelia begins to recover, the irony of the
#1. Ibid., p. lh8.
AZ- nag... po 1&3-

L3. Ibid., p. 149.

265.
story and the title becomes clear. Amelia's selfishness
is really love, and her family's concern is really a sel-
fish desire to assuage their feelings of guilt.

When Mary Freeman died, she left behind between forty
and fifty uncollected short stories. Of these, twenty
were published between 1900 and 1910.hh The stories range
in nature from realistic studies in manners like "Humble
Pie" through symbolic, WOrdsworthian stories like "Prism"
to the outright fantasy of "The Cautious King and the All-
Round Wise Woman." They all have in common, however, the
fact that they fall remarkably far short of her best work.
The best of them, "About Hannah Stone," concerns a strong-
minded New England Spinster--an eccentric—-who makes the
parson Spend two dollars for a Christmas tree for the
church but then gives each parishioner a present. She
defends her conduct with the simple New England philosophy,
"Givin' is givin', and sellin' is sellin'."l+5

That these stories could find a publisher bad as they
are indicates the degree of Mrs. Freeman's popularity, and
the range of this pOpularity is indicated by the variety
of magazines willing to publish her material: Everybody's,
Lippincott's, The Century, Collier's, Ladies Home Journal.
She also published in British magazines as varied as gp§_

AA. Foster errs in his fine Freeman bibliography by
listing "The Revolt of SOphia Lane" as an uncollected
story. It appeared later as the title story of Thg Givers.

#5. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "About Hannah Stone,"
Eve bod '3, IV (January, 1901), p. 27.

266.
English Illustrated and Cornhill. When one contrasts
these inferior stories (the best ones almost always went
to Harper's) with the Stories that came earlier and those
that came later and even with the best of this decade, one
can see the pernicious effect that the market place had on
Mary's writing. It gave her the formula of romantic love
and sentimental self-sacrifice. It published everything
she wrote according to this formula. In doing so, it
intruded itself between her and the New England "double-
ness" which was always the chief source of the regionalist's
strength. Thus, it kept her from reaching and sustaining
the high level of art of which she was capable. The market
gave her popularity and financial rewards; but it made her,

like Scott Fitzgerald, the victim of success.

CHAPTER VIII
THE FINAL PHASE

In 1912 Mary Wilkins Freeman was Sixty years old.
She had been a professional writer for thirty years and
in that time had produced eleven Short story collections
and eleven novels. She had become financially secure not
only through the successful sale of her books but through
her marriage. Her health was not the best, but she did
not Slow down. Perhaps because she could see hints of
failure in her ten year old marriage to Dr. Freeman, She
continued to throw herself into her work. Writing, which
had ceased to become a necessity, now became a habit--even
a compulsion. Consequently, the next Six years saw the
publication of four more volumes: Thg_Butterfly House (1912),
The Copy-cat and Other Stories (1914), Ag Alabaster Box
(1917), and Edgewater PeOple (1918). This last, like Th3
Copy-cat, is a Short story collection.

The Butterfly Hpuse, like The Debtor, is a New Jersey

 

 

story and a story of suburbia. However, it is a better
book for two obvious reasons. First, Mrs. Freeman by this
time had been in Metuchen longer and had developed a more
definite attitude toward and reSponse to this "material."
Second she wrote mostly about women and the world of bridge
parties, social calls, and literary societies rather than
about the world of finance and stock market Speculation,

267 o

268.

of which She knew so little. The central plot concerns
Annie Eustace, a young girl who is secretly a gifted
novelist. Annie suffers in silence while Margaret Edes,
whom Annie thought her dearest friend, claims credit for
Annie's best seller. After a courtship of sufficient
length and difficulty Annie marries the young minister
Karl Von Rosen, who guesses and rejoices in her Secret.

Stated thus baldly, the plot can be seen as another
patchwork of the melodrama and sentiment that Mrs. Freeman
used to piece together her novels. There were other,
worse things added; Mrs. Freeman had learned well enough
the prescription for writing marketable stories. The story
begins with the discovery of an abandoned Syrian child on
the doorstep of the bachelor minister's manse. While using
this improbable piece of business to underscore the pro-
vincial American's fear of the foreigner, the author un-
consciously reveals her own, Speaking of "the soft guile
of a race as supple and silent as to their real intentions

"1 Only after she has exploited the mysterious

as cats.
presence Of the baby for some time does she seem to dis-

cover that as a story line it would lead nowhere. Conse-
quently, she has the baby kidnapped by its father and then
turns her attention to the romance between Annie and Karl.
And in the last two—thirds of the book the emphasis shifts
back and forth between Annie and Karl on the one hand and

1. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Butterfly House (New
York, 1912), p. 90.

269.
Margaret Edes and her family on the other. The kidnapping
is only mentioned once. Clearly it is a badly unfocused
book. There are other weaknesses too, which indicate that
the novel was written in haste. Mrs. Freeman is careless
in placing her characters geographically. In one scene
Annie lives a quarter of a mile away from.Margaret; in
another scene she lives right across the street.

Like The Debtor and "Doc" Gordon, The Butterfly House
Opens with a scene of comic realism. In this case the
scene is the monthly meeting of the Fairbridge women's
club, called The Zenith Club. The little vanities and
social ploys of the suburban women are displayed with
pitiless comic insight as the meeting builds to its climax:
an authoress's talk on the subject, "Where does a woman
Shine with more luster, at home or abroad?"2 Here also,
before the melodrama begins, Mrs. Freeman has a chance to
introduce the characters, some of whom are fine grotesque
studies and others of whom gather about them some of her
most repeated themes.

Three caricatures might be mentioned as examples of
the note of biting satire that echoes through the suburban
books. ,Mr. George B. Slade, one of the two contestants
for the title of social leader of Fairbridge, is aggressive
in pursuit of the values of the "new woman" and suspicious

of simple, virtuous girls who "can't sing like Leila Mac-

20 Ibid., pp. 24-250

270.
Donald or Mrs. Arthur Wells or play the piano like Mrs.
Jack Evarts or recite like Sally Anderson."3 Bessy Dicky--
an absurd name--is the Spinster secretary of the Zenith
Club, which has given focus and meaning to her meager life.
She is tall, angular and rendered ludicrous by a slight
cast in one eye. Her knees tremble with excitement when
she reads the monthly minutes in the presence of Reverend
.Mr. Von Rosen, around whom centers whatever antiseptic
fantasies she has. Mrs. Freeman indulges in a little auto-
biographical fun by creating the character of Martha Wal-

lingford, the visiting author of Hearts Astray who never

 

recites in public. Her visit to iargaret Edes' house
gives the author a chance to diSplay a talent for dialog.
While Mrs. Freeman's dialect Speech is often direct and
effective, her higher class characters often Speak appal-
lingly. The Butterfly House Shows that when the yeast

of satire is added, the mixture is a success. The nervous
dialog at the dinner given for Miss Wallingford is excel-
lent.

Annie Eustace, the heroine, talks only infrequently
and secretly about her novels. When she does, however,
she reveals the author's somewhat ambivalent relationship
to her profession. In one outburst Annie says joyfully of
her novel, "You know it is selling wonderfully."h Earlier

Annie had discussed the relation of history--eSpecially

3. 1.72.1.4.” Po 27-
4. Ibid., p. 290.

271.

contemporary, local, social history-—to fiction.

I keep a journal. . . . and the journal was

very stupid. So little unusual happens here

in Fairbridge, and I have always been rather

loathe to write very much about my innermost

feelings or very much about my friends because

of course one can never tell what will happen.

It never seemed to me quite delicate--to keep

a very full journal, and so there was in

reality very little to write.
Although it is always dangerous to infer too much about
an author from what she puts into the mouth of a character,
this statement is very tempting. This is the second of
Mrs. Freeman's New Jersey novels. Since the first created
an uproar among the good people of Metuchen, a number of
whom considered themselves Slandered, it seems clear that
here She was trying to reassure local readers. One fears,
nevertheless, that she was serious. Her novels are the
result of not writing about "innermost feelings" and of not
having innermost thoughtS--that is, a world view--to fall
back on. The persistence with which she wrote historical
fiction and melodramatic love Stories--admittedly to sell
in the market place--indicates an unawareness of those
reportorial skills which enabled her to use the usual to
depict life where "so little unusual happens." The state-
ment quoted above is not satire, and the Speaker has the
author's complete Sympathy. Mrs. Freeman was not a cynic
bent on deception. One reasonable conclusion is that Annie

Speaks for the author and reveals her deficient powers of

self-criticism.

50 Mo, P. 1760

272.

In Spite of the sentimental and melodramatic cliches
at the center of the book, Thngutterfly figu§§_is really
a book about values and reSponses to life. Three different
characters respond to life in three different ways; that
is, they lgyg_in three different ways. The characters are
Annie Eustace, Alice Mendon, and Margaret Estes. These
three also portray Mrs. Freeman's awareness of the limiting
effect of environment on the reSponse a character is able
to make to life. She says of Margaret, "Mrs. Edes had a
Napoleonic ambition which was tragic and pathetic because
it could command only a narrowscope."6 Further on she
says quite explicitly, "One living within narrow horizons
must have limited aims."7 Nevertheless, it is not the di-
mensions of one's envirOnment but the Object of love and
the direction of sympathies that distinguishes the good
from the bad person—~although environment might well
separate the happy from the unhappy.

Annie is a typical Freeman heroine, conventional in
her needs and attitudes; and like most of the author's
young girls, docile and dependent. She needs to love and
be loved; her greatest desire is to play the traditional
woman's role. To this end She tells Karl that she is more
than willing to give up her writing after marriage, but

finding her talent a rather charming addition to the cata-

5- 1114-: P- 55-
70 Ibid., p. 600

273.

log of wifely virtues, he encourages her to continue.
Clearly, however, She is willing to subordinate her will
to the needs of others. This is one reSponse--one kind of
love. The problem is that Annie is not a successful char-
acterization. She and the clichés of her secret author-
ship and her love affair exist only on the level of pOpular
women's fiction.

Alice Mendon is an interesting character and an unusual
one for Mrs. Freeman to create. The only other Freeman
heroine with whom She can be compared is Maria Edgham in

By_the Light 9f the Soul. Like Maria, Alice is seemingly

 

immune from the ravaging consequences of isolation and
Spinsterhood. "Alice Mendon has never cared a scrap about
getting married anyway . . . Some women are built that

"8 She finds her fulfillment in a love that

way. She is.
is completely self-denying-—that "realizes the need of
another, rather than one's own."9 AS one considers these
two heroines, Maria and Alice, one wonders if Mrs. Free-
man's growing disillusion with her own marriage might not
have forced her toward the conclusion that these free
Spirits really did have the best of it.

Whatever their differences, Annie and Alice were able

to achieve reSponses toward life and diSpositionS of will

that permitted happiness or at least contentment. This

8. Ibid., p. 2820

9. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, By_the Light 9; the Soul
(New York, 1907), p. [+970

 

27A.
is not the case with Margaret Edes, the woman who claims
to be the author of Annie's book. Hers is a diseased
will. She is diSposed not to love but to rule; the object
of her every concern is herself. Alice says of her, "Mar-
garet is a self-lover; her whole heart turns in love

toward her own self."10

Mrs. Freeman's insight into this
selfish woman, who by her involvement in literary clubs
and social activities is clearly a Species of the new
‘woman or feminist that the author disliked so much, is
subtle and fine. Margaret's self love makes her vain,

and vanity iS the foundation of her sturdy self-discipline.
Margaret is capable of sitting still for hours in the in-
tense heat to keep her clothes fresh and pressed in order
to make a favorable impression.

Margaret's moral position diSplays Mrs. Freeman's most
modern and ironic insight into the nature of evil. Mar-
garet has committed a serious social wrong and a mortal
sin. When the consequences of her deed penetrate her
vanity, she determines to confess her guilt. Because con-
fession will ruin her unsuSpecting and virtuous husband's
career and all but destroy the lives of her children as
well as her own, she discovers that her punishment for sin
is that she cannot confess it. She is doomed to live her
lie. Margaret is one of Mrs. Freeman's finest characters

and her moral crisis is well-conceived and ironically pre-

sented, though weaker than it should be because of the

10. Freeman, The Butterfly House, p. 208.

 

27S.
vacuity of the main plot.

In 1917 Mary Wilkins Freeman was sixty-five years old,
but she showed no indication that she intended to put down
her pen. Not only was she hard at work on the stories that
were to comprise her last collection, She was also com-

pleting Ag_Alabaster Box in collaboration with Florence

 

iorse Kingsley, a Wellesley-educated Ohioan then living

in Staten Island. Mrs. Kingsley had written thirty
novels prior to the collaboration. Most of them were
Biblical romances like Titu, A Comrade Q§_the Cross (1894)

and Tor, A_Street Boy 9§_Jerusalem (1905). The rest, like

 

The Star 9f_L9y§ (1909), were commonplace romances of the
kind that flooded the woman's market. Her reputation was
always sub-literary. Although Ag_Alabaster Box was a
corporate effort and Mrs. Kingsley later adapted it for

the screen, it can be treated as Mrs. Freeman's work be-
cause the good things in it are the things Mary did well
(grotesques, regional dialog, etc.) and because the central
situation came out of Mary's girlhood in Brattleboro.

Ag_Alabaster Box is set in Brookville, a town deteri-

 

orated after its bank was ruined by the embezzlement of its
president, M . Bolton. The relation between this situation
and Colonel Silas Wait's embezzlement in Brattleboro in
1880 is obvious. Years after the crime Bolton's daughter
Lydia returns to Brookville to try to repair the damage

her father had done. Although the story tends to get mired

in Lydia's romance with Jim, it portrays primarily the

276.
town's reaction to her return. The result iS the best
dramatic characterization and the most penetrating in-
vestigation of the evil ways of diseased wills since Egg:
bggkg, In its self-devouring evil, its xenOphobia, and
its violence, Brookville might be in Yoknapatatha County
as easily as in New England. Even the central love affair
is successful in that Jim's response to Lydia is the only
valid alternative to the town's hostility. In love there
is salvation.

Nothing indicates Mrs. Freeman's rejuvenation so much
as the dialog. There are fine, long comic passages in
which garrulous old ladies gossip about furniture and other
scenes in which sullen men Speculate on the ulterior mo-
tives behind the new library. The author's ear was never

better. Not since Jane Field had she so successfully

 

suited sound to sense in the comic mode as in Ag_Alabaster
Box. Explaining why her horse kicked its traces Mrs.
Daggett says:

I guess that's so, Ann . . . Dolly got kind

of fractious over his headstall when I was

harnessin'. He don't seem to like his sun

hat, and I dunno's I blame him. I guess if

our ears stuck up through the tOp of our

bunnits like his we wouldn't like it neither.11
The following exchange reveals not only the precision of
Mrs. Freeman's ear but also her instinctive reSponse to
the folk wisdom that lay at the root of regional comedy.

"My if it ain't hot," she observed.

11. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kings-
ley, An_Alabaster Box (New York, 1917), p. 194.

2770

"You're so fleshy, Abby, I'd think you'd feel
it something terrible."

"Oh, I don't know," said Mrs. Daggett
placidly, "Of course I'm fleshy, Ann; I ain't
denying that; but so be you. You don't want
to think about the heat so constant, Ann.
Our thermometer fell down and got broke day
before yesterday, and Henry says, 'I'll bring
you up another from the store this noon.'
But he forgot all about it. I didn't say a
word, and that afternoon I set out on the
porch under the vines and felt real cool--
not knowing it was so hot--and along comes
Mrs. Fulsom, a-pantin' and fannin' herself.
'Good land, Abby,' says she; 'by the looks
a body'd think you didn't know the thermo-
meter had risen to ninety-two since eleven
o'clock this morning.‘ 'I didn't,' I said
placid: 'our thernometer's broke.' 'Well,
you'd better get another right off,’ says
she, wiping her face and groaning. 'It's an
awful thing, weather like this, not to have
a thermometer right where you can see it.‘
Henry brought a real nice one home from the
store that very night; and I hung it out of
sight behind the sitting-room door; I told
Henry I thought 'twould be safer there."

"That sounds exactly like you, Abby,"
commented Mrs. Whittle censoriously. "I
should think Henry Daggett would be on to
you by now."

"Well, he ain't," said Mrs. Daggett.12

This dialog is good. So are the various narrative

devices that Mrs. Freeman had used before, such as the

scenes of general discussion in the general store and at

the women's club meeting. She always liked to get char-

acters talking about relevant situations, thereby revealing

both incident and character, but this is genre painting and

can only contribute so much to the success of a work of art.

What makes this one of Mrs. Freeman's better novels is that

the central situation, conventional romance, weak ending

12. Ibid., p. 128.

278.
and all, is structurally valid. In the telling of this
central story she is able to develop a powerful theme of
the confrontation of good and evil-~the confrontation of
the girl who comes to right an old wrong and the town
which has become rigid in patterns of evil.

Like "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," this is a
story of a village ruined by the evil that rests in the
hearts of men. Brookville's primary failure is its failure
to recognize the source and universality of that evil.
When the Old banker Andrew Bolton returns from prison,
broken in health and mind, he indicates clearly the uni—
versal nature of the evil that is destroying the town.

You Spoke just now of the village as being

ruined years ago by the villainy of one man.

That's a lie! The village ruined the man. . . .

Every Tom, Dick, and Harry, for miles about;

every old maid with a book to sell; every

cause--as they call the thousand and one

pious schemes to line their own pockets—-

every damned one of 'em came to Andrew Bol-

ton for money, and he gave it to them. He

was no hoarding skinflint; not he. Better

for him if he had been. When luck went

against him, as it did at last, these pre-

cious villagers turned on him like a pack of

wolves.1

Having denied the evil in his own heart, each vil-
lager is free to Seek hell according to his own lights--
and to resist salvation in his own way. In presenting
the reactions of the villagers to Lydia's attempts at

philanthrOpy, Mrs. Freeman presents vivid, complex char-

acters with the greatest skill since Pembroke. In some of

13. Ibid., pp. 240-24le

279.
the characters their reSponse is fairly simple. Fanny,
the younger sister of Lydia's lover, repays Lydia's acts
of kindness with hostility partly because She sees her as
a rival for the affections of the young minister but also
because she is jealous of the more urbane girl's manners and
dress. Mrs. Solomon Black, a kindly enough matriarch,
feeds her vanity on the fact that Lydia is her boarder.
0f such slender stuff she weaves a social victory. Henry
Daggett, the reasonably honest prOprietor of the general
store, rejoices in Lydia's philanthrOpic habits and un-
limited earning power and begins cautiously to expand his
store.

These are simple reSponses. Other characters are
more corroded and more complex. Deacon Whittle, a con-
ventionally pious hypocrite, is almost paralyzed by his
conflicting instincts. Willing to engage in a variety of
schemes to defraud Lydia, he is nevertheless reluctant to
sell her the old Bolton place which he had been attempting
to sell for years. Unable to believe in the girl's sin-
cerity, he suSpects a trap. Paralyzed by the conflicting
emotions of greed and fear, he stands motionless and vivid
as one of Mrs. Freeman's finest characterizations.

Another complex portrait of evil is Lois Daggett, the
poisonous Old maid. Lois resents Lydia partly because she
possesses a larger than average dose of typical rural
xenOphobia. This, however, exists side by side with curio-

sity, which drives her to a tea at Lydia's at the earliest

 

280.

moment. Resentful of Lydia's prosperity and contemptuous
of her generosity, she is nevertheless eager to capitalize
on them. She succeeds; Lydia says that she will buy five
copies of Famous PeOple, a gift book which Lois sells.

"There's nothing neater for a Christmas or

birthday present," shrilled Lois Daggett

joyously. "And so informing."

She swallowed her tea in short, swift

gulps. Her faded eyes shone. Inwardly she

‘was striving to compute the agent's profit

on five leather-bound COpieS of Famous PeOple.

She almo t said aloud, "I can have a new

dress."
In Spite of Lydia's persistent kindness, Lois does not
abandon these conflicting but equally base motives. The
determinist in Mrs. Freeman was quick to point out, how-
ever, the limits of Lois's culpability.

She had had a poisoned life, in a narrow rut

of existence, and the toxic emotions had be-

come as her native atmOSphere of mind. Now

she seemed to be about to breathe in a better

air of humanity, and she choked under it.1

The author presents several of these characters by
way of contrast. She contrasts Mrs. Daggett and Mrs.
Whittle, Lydia and the rural Fanny, the direct, blunt Jim
and the polite, pious wesley Elliot. wesley, an interest-
ing character, reveals the complexity and subtlety of Mrs.
Freeman's insight. He is the local minister and a reason-
ably good one, but he is also a boy in love with love and

looking for a wife-~boyish and boring, pious and pompous,

14. Ibid., p. 134.
15. Ibid., p. 250.

281.
self-centered and self-sacrificing. In his complexity he
becomes a successful character and escapes completely the
stereotype that trapped so many ministers in the fiction
of the period.

The town's reaction to Lydia and her philanthropy
culminates in a violent mob attack on the recently restored
Bolton mansion. The account of the attack on the girl
and her house is as dramatic and violent a scene as Mrs.
Freeman ever painted. This attack i§.a culmination,
and it has that quality so necessary in realistic fiction--
inevitability. The story is, like figmbroke, clearly a
tragedy. But here again Mrs. Freeman retreats from the
consequences of her own tragic vision. The story concludes
with the moral regeneration of the town and the happy
union of Wesley and Fanny and Jim and Lydia. When one man
admits that he took part in the attack on Lydia, the re-
sponse is, "Aw, never mind if you did. We all know you
wa'n't yourself that night, Lucius."16 It is astounding
that Mrs. Freeman didn't realize that the first three
hundred pages illustrated beyond any question that he was
indeed himself that night and also make clear why he was
like that. This failure of nerve at the end, together with
the author's unfortunate attempts to shroud the old banker
and his daughter in Gothic mystery, keep this novel from

taking its place next to Pembrokg as one of her most suc-

16. Ibid., p. 304.

282.
cessful. But its fine dialog, its many insights, its ex-
cellent characterizations and its viable central situation
Show that the skills of her youth had not left her and
that She was still capable of artistic growth and experi-
ment.

Along with these novels Mrs. Freeman produced two
volumes of short stories in the decade of the war, the
first of which was Th§_COpy-Cat and Other Stories (1914).
The first Six stories in the volume are about the children
of an unnamed New England village. After a decade or more
of experimentation with various unifying devices (the
ghost stories, the thematic unity, the repetitious symbol),
Mrs. Freeman returned to her origins and her original
source of strength, the New England regional tradition.
There is a concept here and in Edgewater PeOple (1918)
that is not found in the great early collections. While
the earlier collections were about New England and about

the Specific New England of Randolph, Massachusetts, and

 

Brattleboro, Vermont, they did not deal with a specified

 

New England. While the careful reader could piece together
the author's judgment on rural New England, he could do so
only by extracting from the many unnamed villages she used
as setting, those common regional characteristics with
‘which her many characters had to contend. It is this un-
Specified and undifferentiated quality that gave rise to
the inaccurate critical judgment that there is no "Mary

'Wilkins country."

283.
In these later works there is a change. She writes
about a Specific and Specified place--a village in The

Copy-Cat, a complex of villages in Edgewater People. As

 

the various characters reappear in the different tales

and as little bits of local history crOp up in the telling
of the various stories, Mrs. Freeman achieves a density of
effect missing from her earlier collections. The place
becomes a character; the whole becomes greater than the
sum of its parts. In this series of interrelated stories
she shows more intricately than in any miscellaneous col—
lection, or in any of her novels, the interaction of present
and past in one place. This is not a new discovery. Cable
and Harris before her wrote collections of regional Short
stories like this as did Mrs. Stowe and Miss Jewett in

the New England tradition itself. And, of course, Sher-
wood Anderson (Winesbugg, Ohio appeared in 1919), William
Faulkner, and others were to do it later. But here,
finally, she achieves what is perhaps the most successful
form for conveying the interaction of classes and groups,
and families and times, in a given place. This is to say
that She worked out for herself the most successful of re-
gional forms.

Nevertheless, The COpy-Cat and Other Stories is a
disappointing collection. One reason is, of course, that
the Six village tales are all about children, and that
Mrs. Freeman is sentimental and not very accurate when

writing about children. Another reason for the book's

284.
failure g§_g collection is that the last six stories are
not about the village at all. Thus the author is guilty
of violating a self-imposed principle of unity.

Three of the village stories are sentimental and
minor. "The COpy—Cat" and "Little Lucy Rose," a story of
puppy love which starts brightly with a description of a
minister's wife who likes to go sledding with her son and
other school boys, are inconsequential. "Daniel and Little
Dan'l" is perhaps the most poorly conceived story. In
order to achieve the sentimental union of Old and young
Mrs. Freeman insensitively kills Off a variety of minor
characters. Although this story is something Of a mis-
fortune, the central character is intelligently conceived.
He is a man turned sour because he is forced from his
cobbling trade by a shoe factory. He is also "a moral
coward before physical conditions. He was one who suffers,
not so much from agony of the flesh as from agony of the
mind induced thereby."l7

The other three village stories touch, in one way or
another, themes that are both vital and inherently regional.
"The Cock Of the Walk" concerns a little boy who discovers
his independence in a street fight. Significantly he is
forced to knock down his aunt in order to win the fight.
The story also touches on the relation of the present to

the past in another way.

17. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Th§_§92y-C§t_§ng_gt_-§_
twries (New York, 1914), p. 86.

 

285.

Johnny came of the best and oldest family in
the village, but it was in some reSpectS an
undesirable family for a boy. In it survived,
as fossils survive in ancient nooks and cran-
nies of the earth, old traits of gace, un-
changed by time and environment.1

"Johnny-in-the-Woods" is one of Mrs. Freeman's rare suc-
cessful Stories of children. It tells of the difficulties

encountered by a boy enflamed by a reading of Robin Hood.

 

Here as elsewhere Mrs. Freeman is patronizing toward chil-
dren (she knew none closely), but this story is saved by
humor. "Big Sister Solly" is a comic Story of the con-
frontation of a little girl's imagination and a Calvinist
minister's conscience. The girl, in her need for love,
pretends she has a big sister. The minister, his conscious-
ness of truth obscuring her need for love, tries to stOp
her "lying." The comic climax comes when the fashionable
women of the town pay a call on the imaginary sister. The
sentimental ending need not decrease one's appreciation of
the comic situation.

Of the six stories in the volume which do not concern
the village three can be ignored and three deserve brief
comment. "The Balking of Christopher" tells of a symboli-
cally named, Thoreau-like man who leaves his family to live
alone on a mountain and wrestle with theology and teleology
in an attempt to know "why." ChristOpher Dodd is one of
Mrs. Freeman's most vivid grotesques and, like the others,

twisted into the shape he's in by the pressures of en-

18. Ibid., p. 35.

 

286.
vironment. "Mr. Dodd is a strange man. He ought to have
been educated and led a different life."19

In "The Umbrella Man" Mrs. Freeman writes with sym-
pathy of Stebbens, a recently released convict who makes
a meager living as an itinerant umbrella salesman and re-
pairman and who marries his colorless, battered ex-fiancé,
seduced and abandoned by a bigamist. This is clearly a
retelling of "A Humble Romance," but in the realistic
character portrayal of these victims of fate Mrs. Freeman
diSplays a greatly expanded naturalistic sympathy. The
greater sordidness of the lives of these later characters
and the violence below the surface and behind the plot
might have been an artistic eXpression of a deepening sense
of evil that the industrial revolution and the war brought
to her as well as to so many others.

"Noblesse," the strongest story in the collection, is
not a regional story at all. It is the story of Margaret,
a fat woman of emotional delicacy who is reSponSible for
the care of her younger step-sister. After the step-sister's
marriage to a dissolute man, Margaret continues her lonely
life with the couple. Relieving her frustrations by com-
pulsive eating, she grows immense. Her weight becomes the
torment which drives her to seek further release in food.
As she gains more weight, the couple become more abusive.

Jack roared with bitter mirth when he saw

poor Margaret forced to enter her tiny room

19. Ibid., p. 251.

 

 

 

287.

sideways; Camille laughed also although She
chided Jack gently.20

It is not their abuse, however, that becomes unbearable;
it is their indifferent acceptance of her obesity as a
fact. When they face financial crisis, they ask Margaret
to seek employment in a side-show; and while she suffers,
they Speak of honor.

"Jack has gone broke," stated Camille. He

owes Bill Stark a pile of money, and he can't

pay a cent of it; and Jack's sense of honor

about a poker debt is about the biggest thing
in his character."2

This story, which reminds one of an episode in The Country

 

g; the Pointed Firs, is an atypical Freeman story. It has
a nightmarish quality that anticipates Nathanael West, and
it depicts a world much more indifferent and unfeeling than
the one She usually portrays. This indifference coupled
with her own clear compassion for the victim makes this
unusual little_story the most naturalistic piece Mrs. Free-
man ever wrote.

Egggyg§§§_PeOple (1918) is Mrs. Freeman's last col-
lection. It has been well Spoken of. Foster states, "If
some of the stories are thin and sentimental, several

reach her best level."22 Arthur Hobson Quinn has also

praised it. However, they both praise it for the wrong

20. Ibid., p. 169.
21. Ibid., p. 171.

22. Edward Foster, Mayy E. Wilkins Freemgn (New
York, 1956), p0 1850

 

288.
reasons. None of the stories comes up to the quality of
"A Tardy Thanksgiving," "A Taste of Honey," or the more
recent "Old Woman Magoun." None of the characters in this
collection is as memorable as the central figures of the
earlier stories. Perhaps they weren't intended to be,
since the relation of character to setting is reversed. In
the earlier collections the author's primary concern was
with character and with the individual's reSponse to the

central situation. In Edgewater Eeople her interest and

 

the reader's is not SO much in the ghggggggy as in the
lace, an aSpect of which is represented by the characters
of the various stories. A different kind of story-~one
which makes its point in the context of a series of related
stories--is required because the interest is in relation—
ships which transcend the individual story. Mrs. Freeman
says in her preface, "The stories in this volume relate
to families living in a patriarchal fashion, although not
under one roof, under one village tree."23 And the story
of the families is, of course, the story of the village—-
of both its present and its past. She says:

Villages, as well as peOple, exist subject

to laws of change, increase, final dissolu-

tion. They have charactegl+ complex, of

course, still individual.

It is this that is fine in the final volume. She had

23. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Edgewater PeOple (New
York, 1918), p. 2.

24. Ibid., p. l.

289.

worked out a method which allowed her to tell the story
She wanted to tell-~the story of the life of a place--
'without running afoul of the unsolved structural problems
that weakened the novels of the New England tradition.
But the device was late in coming, for Mary Wilkins Free-
man was sixty-eight and the vein was thin.

Speaking of Edgewater PeOple, A. H. Quinn says:

She dealt more frequently with the repre-

sentatives of families who had once been

wealthier and more important but who re-

tain great pride in their traditions. In

gghfiisgoggiétge£5material is more like that
Eatthiessen complained that Miss Jewett's work smelled of
rose leaves.26 Here Mrs. Freeman is a little musty too.
The stark grotesques set with firm Strokes against a stark
landscape are gone. In "Sarah Edgewater" we have the sen-
timental story of a Spinster, jilted many years before,
who, at the cost of some pain, maintains the family tradi-
tions and the family virtues, not the least of which is
philanthropy. "The Voice of the Clock," the title of which
suggests the reciprocity of present and past in the village,
concerns the survivors of two old families, the Licesters
and the Sylvesters. One of the families is rich and arro-
gant; the other is poor and sensitive. The Story has great
potential; but Mrs. Freeman's mechanical reSponses to the
requirements of the market place take over, and it deter-

25. Arthur Hobson Quinn, American Fiction: Ag_flistor-
icg; and Critical Survey (New York, 1936), p. 439.

26. See p. 59.

290.
iorates into a sentimental love story that she didn't
want to tell at all.

"Value Received" is the most interesting of the
Jewett-like stories." It concerns two Spinster Sisters,
Dora and Ann Matthews, who "found themselves hOpelessly
stranded in a backwater of the intensely genteel and
decorous past."27 These two old ladies, living with their
many treasures in a house which can no longer maintain
them and which they can no longer maintain, care for and
brood about those treasures which the contemporary world
scorns.

SO you remember what that lady from Boston

said about wax flowers? . . . . She said

wax flowers had been the most decadent

[ornaments] of a decadent age of household

decoration. She said that she classed wax

flowers and worsted mottoes and gilded Spades

and fggeral wreaths together in an appalling

list.

The story has controlled sentiment and a strong sense of
the passing of time; and the ladies and their treasures
and their house, which is maintained only by outside sup-
port, constitute, like the old house in Miss Jewett's
Deephaven, a moving symbol of New England and the rela-
tionship of present to past in New England.

"The Old Man of the Field" concerns a semi-recluse

who is forced into the poor house by the good peOple of

Edgewater when they discover that he is 111. A little boy

27. Freeman, Edgewgger Peo 1e, p. 76.
28. Ibid., p. 90.

291.
‘who sympathizes with him raises a valid moral question.
"Will they let him out after he has
recovered?"

"I don't believe they will. The town
authorities think he ought to be taken care

of." "I ay the town authorities have no
right."25
While the old man is ill, the friendly children of the town
come to his shack and try to clean it for him. They dimly
perceive that what they discard as trash has great value
for him, but they realize that it must be discarded if the
shack is to be saved at all. Then while boiling hot water
to scrub the floor, they accidentally burn the shack down.
The story is not only symbolic (the complex relation of
present to past and of New England to the outside world
is evident), it is also ironic. The old man cannot live
on his own terms, and those who try to help him find that
they cannot help because they cannot accept his terms. In
trying to help, they actually destroy. In trying to aid
him to live on their terms, they take from him his very
motive for life. The old man, like the old region in
which he lives and of which he is a symbol, dies because
the world has robbed him of the conditions under which it
is possible for him to live.

"The Outside of the House" is a comic story, the ef-
fect of which is dissipated by unnecessary melodramatic

complications. Dealing with the humbler peOple of Edge-

water, Mrs. Freeman is able to indulge in passages of

29. Ibid., p. 37.

292.
superior regional dialog.

"Just see that red-geranium bed, Martha."

"Them ain't geraniums; them is begonias,"
said Martha haughtily. -

"It always seems to me as if all the
flowers was geraniums," said Joe. He laughed.
Martha did not smile. "They ain't," she
said. -

In terms of the plot this passage is almost a non-sequitur,

 

but its quiet humor, its revelation of character and char-
acter relationships, and its regional flavor make it and
other passages like it relevant to the author's main pur-
pose: the portrait Of a township. This Story is also
interesting because of the long introductory passage con-
cerning the history of the various hamlets of the township,
a passage which reveals as clearly as the preface Mrs.

Freeman's purpose in writing Edgewater PeOple.

 

In a collection like Edgewater Peoplg, one would ex—

 

pect to see a diSplay of interest in the effect of environ-
ment and heredity on character. The stories reveal less
of this than expected. However, two of them concern men
who are imprisoned by the past. In each case the hero is
dominated by his mother. In "Sour Sweetings" a son allows
his marriage to be ruined by his mother's malignant pride—-
a pride without any very firm foundation.
"What have the Whittemores ever done?"

temorzg."§illy don't know, except be Whit-

30. EEEQ., pp. 144-145.

31. EEEQ., p. 187.

293.
Only when he can break his mother's hold over him, only
when socially he breaks the hold of the past and psycholo-
gically he breaks the hold of pride can he save his mar-
riage. "Sour Sweetings" is an effective, short retelling
of PembrOke. I

"The Soldier Man" deals with the same theme. Its
hero, Henry Ludd, tries to break free of his mother's
domination but finds that he is unable to do so. Mrs. Free-
man also makes it clear that Henry is the victim of heredi-
tary forces. He is the product of a marriage between a
man from an exhausted, played-out family and a woman from
a crudely dynamic family of lower social standing. From
his mother he inherits nervous vitality but from his father
an exhausted will that has no power of resistance. This
conflict of old and new anticipates a theme with which so
many Southern writers were to deal later.

The remaining stories are inferior. "A Retreat to the
Goal" is a sentimental tale of a returned prodigal. "The
Ring with the Green Stone," the worst story in the col-
lection, is a structurally complicated tale of "a love past

"32 Two other stories, "The Liar," and

all logic and reason.
"Both Cheeks," are not only bad; they are sadly significant.
They reveal that the lady who, for all her faults, had
always been able to look at the diversity of life and tell

what She saw was no longer able to react to changing con-

32. Ibid., p. 283.

294.

ditions. She had written about rural, urban, and suburban
life, about New England, New Jersey, and New York. She
had dealt with agrarian and industrial themes and with
Calvinism and the Gilded Age. But the war came too late
in her life and career to become the stuff of her art.
Both of these stories are war stories. "The Liar" is a
sentimental tale of a mother who lies to make her son seem
a war hero and who finds fulfillment when he finally goes
off to fight. "Both Cheeks" is a jingoistic tale of the
conversion of a pacifist. Whatever her personal feelings,
as an artist Mrs. Freeman was too old to react to the war.

Her productivity during the decade after 1910 was not
confined to the two novels and the stories in the collec-
tions. Mrs. Freeman also wrote sixteen stories for various
magazines including Epiliers, Century, The Eaturday Evening
Egg; and Ehe Womanjg Home Companion. These stories were
never collected. For the most part, they deserve to exist
only in the limbo of old magazine volumes. Many of them
are holiday stories. Either "Prop," a story about the war,
or "Honorable Tommy," a Christmas story, is possibly the
‘worSt thing she ever wrote. Occasionally the insights are
there, however, and the stories seem to have possibilities.
"The Blue Butterfly" concerns Marcia Keyes, a forlorn
dressmaker who "belonged to the large class whom the tri-
umph of others subdues."33 "Cries-Cross" tells of two old

33. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "The Blue Butterfly,"
Woman's Home Cogpanion, XL (January, 1913), 4.

295.
maids who exchange houses for a week because they feel the

change will do them good. One of them, in the house where

her lover died thirty-five years before, winces as her
imagination conjures up "the peace which she had seen on
the faces of the aging and married women who had been

girls with her."3h "Mother Wings" deals with a girl whose
life is very nearly ruined by her mother's misguided zeal.

All Ann is fit for is to marry and settle
down. But mother wanted her to be in the
front rank of the advggce women movement,

and she simply can't.
This is one of Mrs. Freeman's not infrequent Slaps at the

feminist movement. But these and others, in Spite of

their possibilities and their moments, come to little.

One story, interesting in conception and very inferior in

execution is "Friend of.My Heart." It is subtitled "A

love Story of old New England--When men went west to make
money and came back to win love."36
The uncollected stories are not all devoid of merit.
"A Guest in Sodom" (1912) is a superior comic piece with
tragic overtones and ironic Symbolism. It is the story
of a virtuous family man named Benjamin who has lived a

life of probity and limited achievement when, in his middle

 

34. .Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "Cries-Cross," Harpeg's
Bazaar, CXXIX (August, 1914), 365.

35. .Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "MOther Wings," Harper's
Bazaar, CXLIV'(December, 1921), 90.

 

36. Mary E. Wfilkins Freeman, "Friend of My Heart,"
.Qggg HOusekeeping, LVII (December, 1913), p. 733.

296.
years, he gives in to the blandishments of the Gilded Age.
He sells a nine acre lot which had been in the family for

many years. With the money he buys an automobile made by

the Variable Tea Kettle Company. When it arrives, he
finds he can't crank it without injury to his back. He
also discovers that it will run neither often nor long.
"Once is a while after Sammy Emerson had done an extra

lot of tinkerin', the car would run real nice a day and a
half or two days, but she never ran over two."37 When the

"transgression" bends, he takes action and is promised a

new car. However he gets his own car back, and after many

trials "he just stood up in the car, and he damned for the
"38 "A Guest in Sodom" is really a

Told

first time in his life.
tall tale in the best tradition of frontier humor.
by a first-person narrator in a laconic tone which con-

trasts sharply with the content of the story, it is one of

.Mrs. Freeman's most Twain-like tales. It might also be

noted that fellow New Englanders Edwin Arlington Robinson

and Robert Frost achieved many effects by this same device
of juxtaposing tone and content.
Two other stories of merit are "The Boomerang" and
"Cloak Also." The first is, like "A Guest in Sodom," a
tall tale. It concerns the trials of a self-righteous

couple in their attempts to give away a phonograph. The

.37. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "A Guest in Sodom,"
gentur , LXXXIII (January, 1912), p. 348. .

38. Ibid., p. 349.

297.

second is a bitter story of a guilty town. In this tale
Joel buys a dry-goods store in rural New England. Selling
his merchandise on credit, he is soon in need of cash not
only to replenish his supplies but simply to live. When
he tries to force payment, the town turns against him and
accuses him of being a bad business man among other things.
Joel's death in the end sentimentalizes and weakens the
story a little, but his deathbed accusation is simple and
effective. "I never thought I was any better than other
people. Now I know I am."39

When "Mother Wings" appeared in Harper's in 1921 Mary
Wilkins Freeman was Sixty-nine years old. Her writing
days were over for all practical purposes. She published
two more stories in the twenties, but neither one had any
merit. In her own mind, of course, She never quit. As
late as 1928 she was negotiating with publishers."0 And
there are at least four stories in manuscript dating from
the twenties: "The Brother," "One," "The Witch's Daughter,"
and one that exists in two fOrms under the titles, "One
Old Lady" and "The Rocket." In the last story one version
ends with the death of thecentral character and one ends
with her recovery from serious illness. Neither version
is very good; but the central figure, a salty, shrewd,

39. Mary E. Wilkins F eeman "Cloak Also," Harper's
Bazaar, cxm (March, 1917 , p. 5 ,

40. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Mr. Briggs,
February 1, 1928 (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York).

298.

profane Old lady, is delightful. Foster claims that at
the very end she was planning a sequel to Pembroke."1 She
was never to write it, but it had been a long career.
One Sign of its duration was a letter she wrote to Harper's
in 1927 asking to be "advised of the approach to public
domain of my work Since I am willing to renew cOpyright
myself.“+2

The previous year she had written a revealing letter
to an aSpiring young writer named Miss O'Brien. In it she
confessed to a bewilderment with the times that contributed
as much as did ill health and advancing years to the falling
off of her work.

Everything is different Since the war and

since even pre-war days for I think the change

antedated the war. AS nearly as I can under—

stand the situation there is in arts and let-

:senvwsiftstshame f" math“

2

In the same letter she admitted that she no longer had her
former influence in the market place, a fact that can be
detected in the lessening frequency of her stories in
Earper's through the decade of the war.

Throughout the years after her husband's death in 1923

She continued to live in Metuchen. In the autumn of 1929

41. Foster, Mary E. Wilkins Freemgg, p. 193.

 

299.

she interrupted her literary labors with plans for a trip
to Brattleboro and Randolph. At the end of the following
winter she suffered a severe heart attack. She died on
March 15, 1930. The newSpaperS devoted columns to her
Obituary. They got her age wrong, a custom dating from
1902 when she allowed the press to think her a younger
bride than she was. Had She lived till fall, she would

have been seventy—eight.

CHAPTER IX
REPRISE: AESTHETIC AND REPUTATION

As the previous chapters have shown, Mrs. Freeman never
developed a subtle and integrated theory of composition;
neither did she deve10p a mature world-view, or adhere to
an intellectual system which could provide a common founda-
tion for all of her work. This is not to say that she
develOped no attitudes toward or judgments about her craft.
These attitudes were, however, rules of thumb more than
anything else; and they seemed to develop as a result of
the combined pressure of her experience as an artist and
her desire to please various outsiders who, taking an
interest in her work, were willing to advise her. Among
those who advised her and helped her to articulate her own
position were the various editors with whom she corres-
ponded during the first two decades of her career.

Running all through Mrs. Freeman's comments on liter-
ature is a tension between her instinctive realism and her
urgent economic need to succeed in the market place. When
the two conflicted, she tended to abandon principle in
favor of market value. Her editors tried to guide her in
these matters, and She accepted their guidance in aesthe-
tics as she did in money matters during the early years.

As the years passed, She grew increasingly independent of
her editors, not because she developed an aesthetic inde-
pendent of their judgments and values but because she became

300.

301.
more confident of her ability to meet market demands and
more sure of her own worth in the magazine world.

Her first mentor was Mary Booth, an editor of Hagper's
Bazaar. In many letters to Miss Booth, Mrs. Freeman signs
herself "Pussy Willow." Whether this intimacy indicates
artistic dependence is Open to question, but the eagerness
‘with which She listened to Miss Booth's criticism is not.
Early in 1885, she assured Miss Booth, "I think I do like
criticism and am grateful for it, when I can truly feel
that it is a just one."1 Her negative reSponse to criticism

2would suggest that this attitude was reserved for

elsewhere
those few in whom she had confidence and on whom she came
to depend. It is unfortunate that Miss Booth and the con-
fidants who followed her were all professional journalists--
albeit of the highest kind--and custodians of the genteel.
Miss Booth tried to make her work more marketable. Mrs.
Freeman responded:

I will certainly try to polish my style, as

you advise . . . I wish, if it is not too

much trouble, that you would mention to me

any like mistakes of which I may be guilty.3
In several letters written in 1885 and 1886, the years
immediately preceeding the appearance of A_Humble Romance,
Hrs. Freeman wrote apologetically to Miss Booth lamenting

1. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Mary L. Booth,
February 17, 1885 (Columbia University Library, New York).

2. See p. 124.

3. Freeman, letter to Mary L. Booth, February 17, 1885.

302.

the fact that some of her stories were "too tragic" and ex-
pressing the fear that they would not be wanted on that
account. Market value was, of course, important to a young,
single woman with a living to make. Yet she was aware of
the conflict between market values and her own talent. She
said in defense of her realism of the significant detail,
"I suppose the trouble is, the uncomfortable feeling I have,
that I am not telling things exactly as they are and making
everything clear, if I don't mention everything."4

She relied on other editorial consultants as well as
on Miss Booth. The most important of them was H. M. Alden,
the editor of Harper's. Because of her friendship with
Alden's second wife and his daughter and in later years be-
cause of the nearness of the Alden house to her own in
Metuchen, Mrs. Freeman saw him frequently; consequently she
did not often write to him. Although the written evidence
of his influence is not ample, there can be little doubt of
it. He was the final judge of her stories and the one who
saw them into print. She expressed her gratitude to him
in various letters and comments and in a bad, sentimental
poem Of praise She wrote in honor of his seventieth birth-

day. That his influence was on the side of gentility can

be seen in his critical comments which emphasize her "im-

le0 Ibido

 

303.

"5 and her "affection for the material.

pressionism, "6 His
views were shared by the genteel critic, Charles Minor
Thompson.

Another editor with whom she was friendly and in whose
judgment she had confidence was Richard Watson Gilder.
She sought out his critical Opinions about her infrequent
and ineffective poetry. He was able to draw from her
comments on a variety of subjects. In an undated letter
written around the turn of the century, she said, "I
should be very pleased to give you my Opinion on the sub—
ject of literary agents."7 This is certainly a gesture of
friendly confidence from a woman who was always loath to
express her Opinion on any subject other than women writers.
When Gilder tried to lure her away from Harper's, She re-
mained loyal, although she did send him a short story in
1900, followed by a letter asking for more money. The two
pressures that to a great extent shaped Mrs. Freeman's
aesthetic are revealed in a letter she wrote to Gilder in
1899. She asked:

Do you think you could use in "The Century"

a play: a realistic New England, a modern

New England play, a tragedy? . . . The play
is as realistic as Ibsen's. I wish it were

5. Edward Foster, Mary E, Wilkins Freeman (New York,
1956), p. 900

6. H. M. Alden, "Editor's Study," Harper's, LXXV
September, 1887), 640.- .

7. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Richard Watson
Gilder (New York Public Library).

304.

as good.8
Here is the confrontation of the realism of her talent
and, represented by Gilder, the sentimentality and genti-
lity of the market for which she felt compelled to write.

From 1885 to 1900, Mrs. Freeman's one vital contact
‘with the world of the realism that had kicked itself free
of the genteel and was evolving new values was Hamlin
Garland. Although fate could have provided her with a
more useful confidant, Garland did give her a chance to
express her own instinctive literary values. The things
she told him appear strikingly like the statements he was
to make himself a few years later.

For ten years from 1887 to 1896 Mrs. Freeman main-
tained a correSpondence with Garland. This exchange of
letters reveals an interesting parallel in the thinking of
the two writers-~in their critical and aesthetic opinions
and in their own work. The correSpondence is eSpecially
valuable because it came at a time when they were both
doing their best work. The principles on which they
agreed were put forth by Garland in Crumbling Edolg (1894).
In that book Garland uses the terms "veritism" and "local
color" to define and defend his realism. "Local color in
fictiOn," he claims, "is demonstrably the life of fiction."9

8. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Richard Natson
Gilder, August 4, 1899 (New York Public Library).

9. Hamlin Garland, Crumblin Idols, ed. Jane Johnson
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1950), p. 49.

305.
Local color he defines as "such quality of texture and
background that it could not have been written in any other

“10 The local color-

place or by anyone else than a native.
ist, the veritist, of course, writes about the present.
"To the veritist, therefore, the present is the vital

ll

theme." Judging by these criteria, he considers Mrs.

Freeman a success.12
Her letters to Garland are full of enthusiasm and of
the confidence one would expect of a writer rapidly coming
to the peak of her powers. In an undated letter (probably
written in the early '90'S) sent from South Braintree in-
stead Of Randolph, Mrs. Freeman lightheartedly praises
Garland, promising to defend him from attack and asking
that he do the same. The letters also Show that she was
being subjected to flattering impositions by Garland, who
could be a relentless friend. In a letter dated January
27, 1891, she acknowledges the receipt of a play and a
story which Garland sent to her for criticism. In the
Same letter she thanks him for trying to arrange a meeting
between herself and Howells. Garland's unsolicited efforts
indicate that the shy wbman who loved privacy was fighting

a losing battle against the literary and journalistic world

that Garland represented. That she was the subject of six

10. Ibid., pp. 53‘540
11. Ibid., p. 65.

 

12. Ibid., p. 290

 

 

306.

interview articles in 1891-92 indicates the completeness of

her defeat.
When the correspondence began, Garland had published

nothing. From Mrs. Freeman's reSponses one can almost feel
that Garland was working out his manifesto in their cor-
reSpondence and that her replies helped put his own views
in focus. Serving willingly enough as his sounding board

in a letter dated November 23, most probably in 1887, She
said:

You ask me whether I am trying to depict char-
acters and incidents of the present time or of
any particular region or whether I wish to deal
with the past New England life. Well, I sup-
pose I do not know, I have a fancy that I can
myself discover my own aims better from my own
work than in any other way. I have never
thought of it before, but I suppose I should
as soon write about one time and one class of
peOple as another, provided they appeal to my
artistic sense and I knew enough about them. 3

Garland was not content with this incipient new criticism,
and two weeks later he got the reSponse that his veri-

tist's heart was seeking.

Yes I do consider that I am writing about the
New England of the present day, and the dia-
lect is that which is daily in my ears. I have
however a fancy that my characters belong to a
present that is rapidly becoming past, and that

a few generations will cause them to disappear.14

13. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Hamlin Garland,
November 23, 1887? (university of Southern California
Library, Los Angeles).

14. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Hamlin Garland,
December 8, 1887 (University of Southern California Library,
Los Angeles).

 

 

307.
This immediacy of time and place is an essential ingre—

dient of veritism as is the awareness of the pressures of

change.

She had already, in the previous letter, defined veri-
tism for him before he invented the word.

Next you ask if the idea of being true is
always present with me. I can answer quite
positively to that, and I think it is possi-
bly the only question concerning which I
could be quite positive. Yes. I do think
more of making my characters true and having
them say and do just the things they would
say and do; than of anything else, and that
is the only aim in literature of which I
have been really conscious myself.

Garland himself was never more precise in his definition.

Garland was convinced that realism--veritism--was a
higher, nobler form of literature than man had previously
employed. Disturbed by the genteel critics who treated
it as an unhappy fad, he was consoled by Mrs. Freeman.

I may be realistic in Spite of myself because
I am in a realistic age. A few centuries or

a half a century ago I might have been roman-
tic for the same reason. But I do certainly
not believe that realism is due to a deliberate
following of the fashion in any genuine author.
One does not look into new novels as one looks
into milliners [sic] windows. . . . I think you
are right in assuming that realism is not a
fashion. I do not think I would be realistic
because it is fashionable. I do not {gink I
knew it was fashionable when I began.

Here is Mrs. Freeman thoughtfully helping Garland fashion

15. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Hamlin Gar-
land, November 23, 1887?

16. .Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Hamlin Gar-
land, March 1, 1889 (University of Southern CalifOrnia
Library, Los Angeles).

 

 

308.
his doctrine of veritism. The next ten years were to
reveal their inability to follow that doctrine. This
inability in Mrs. Freeman was compounded of several failures:
the failure to solve the problem of form and the failure
of the critical intelligence to perceive the "veritable"
when and where it existed. She did work out, in Pembroke,
a viable regional form; but, failing to recognize the nature
of her own achievement, she abandoned it only to return
gropingly toward it in such later works as IE; Butterfly
Egp§g_and Edgewater PeOple. Garland was not so fortunate;
he never came close to producing a successful realistic

novel. Rose 23 Dutcher's Cooly, which starts with the

 

strength of Sister Carpie, fails at the end. Their mutual
failure to perceive veritism when it confronted them is
seen in Garland's praise of the unfortunate MgEgEgp and
in Mrs. Freeman's statement about her novel Jerome, "I
hope people will like Jerome better than I do. I never
got so heartily bored with a character in my life."17 By
1900 they both had travelled so far from these early
declarations of realism that she had completed Egg Heart's
Highway and Garland was at work on The Captain 9; pp;
Gray-Horse Troop.

In 1899 Mrs. Freeman wrote about the world of the lady
writer in a volume called What Women Can Earn. In it she

17. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Hamlin Gar-

land, October 4 1896 (Universit of South 0 ' '
Library, Los Angeles). y ern allfornla

309.
Speaks as a realist and passes on to all the world the
advice that Miss Jewett was to give Willa Gather a few
years later.

The simplest road to success is the best.
There is really little to do except to pro—
vide oneself with good pens, good ink and
paper, a liberal supply of patience, Sharpen
one's eyes and g§§§_p9_see everything Ep Egg
whole creation likely to be of the slightest
assistance. . . .

A young writer should follow the safe
course of writing only about those subjects
She knows thoroughly and concerning which
she trusts her own convictions. Above all,
She must write in her own way. (italics mine

 

 

)18

Here is the realist who wants to see everything. A year
later in a Harper's Bazaar interview she explained her
career in terms almost of divine aflatus.

I like my work, yes; and I have, too, in per-
forming it, a sense of duty because it is my
work and I can do it. Fame and money are
acceptable to me, but if I had plenty of each
I would still write. Not that I put a moral
purpose in my books, except the underlying
one of fidelity to my art, but because, as I
have already said, this is my talent, I58
thing that I can do, and I must do it.

There is certainly no reason to doubt either the
realism or the dedication to craft revealed by these two
statements, but there was always the pressure of the
market place. Two statements made early in the 1900's
provide a clear insight into the pressures that caused the

18. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "Good Wits, Pen, and
Paper," in Grace H. Dod e, et al., What Women Egp_Eggp_

(New York, 1898), pp. 2 '29.

19. M. H. Welch "Mary e. Wilkins " Harper's Bazaar
XXXIII (January 27, 1900), 69. ’ " "'”

310.
decline in her work, eSpecially in her short stories.
writing to Elizabeth Jordan of Hagper's Bazaar she asked,
"Can you pay me $300 as usual? It is just as easy for me

O This is the attitude

to write a $300 as a $200 story."2
that permitted her to write those horrible historical
stories and the melodrama of Thg_fligg_;n_the Rose gush.
And in spite of her denial, she was willing to add senti-
ment and morality to her stories like sugar to a cake
recipe.

I do see that sentiments and uplifting ones

are in demand, and I cannot be quite sure of

meeting your needs in that direction. . . .

but I willzbe more than glad to do anything

I am able.
Note that she admits that she cannot be sure of success.
As a realist she always felt the tension of the genteel
market place.

In 1913 Mrs. Freeman wrote an article called "The
Girl Who wants to write: Things to Do and Avoid."0 In
it she is careful to distinguish between motive and achieve-
ment, aware, perhaps, of her own strong economic motives.
She says, "In reality a man may write something which will
live for the sake of something rather ignoble, and a woman
may write something for money with which to buy a French

20. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Elizabeth
Jordan, May 19, 1903 (New York Public Library).

21. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Elizabeth
Jordan, July 12, 1904 (New York Public Library).

311.

hat."22 Here is the market place's legitimate answer to
the aesthetes; it is permissable to write with an eye
toward money and the things it buys, but one should not
sell his birthright. There is more than a hint of chau-
vanism in her comment, "Look upon the scene with American
eyes and write from American viewpoints.n23

In discussing the artists and critics associated with
The Atlantic during Mrs. Freeman's lifetime, Helen.McMahon
said, "For some realists 'the sacredness of the real’
meant, as for Howells, an increased social reSponSibility."2£+
Mrs. Freeman shared this view. In one significant passage
she shows herself to be a realist and to be aware of her
social reSponSibility within a genteel context. She says
of the woman writer: "She must write, above all things,
the truth as far as she can see the truth, as clearly as
she can see it, and even the truth must be held back unless
it is of a nature to benefit and not to poison."25 A little
further on she says, "Write about the things which interest
you."26 However, she adds this caution elsewhere: “I
think, first of all, that the writer ought to leave herself

22. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "The Girl Who Wants to
Write: Things to Do and Avoid," Harper's Bazaar, XLVII
(June 1913), 272. .

23. lbig,

2h. Helen McMahon Criticism of Fiction: A Stud of
Trends in_the Atlantic Monthly"lhew77brkj"i§32) B. l. “'

25. Freeman, Harper's Bazaar.
26. Ibid.

312.

out of the whole prOposition."27 One is tempted to see in
this last statement a deliberate false trail. Remembering
the storm raised by The Debtor, and wishing to disguise the
autobiographical elements in By the Light g§_the Soul and
The Butterfly House, she might have been willing to say
something that was not true, strictly Speaking. Her sound-
est bit of advice was stylistic, and the New England ladies
who preceded her would have agreed with her when she wrote,
"Above all things, in the matter of style strive for
clarity. . . . The mystic style is never the best style."28

This Hagper's Bazaar article is her most succinct
statement about writing. Her later comments are scattered
and indirect. One very late letter throws light on her
ambivalent position:

I forgot to tell you that if Mr. Hartman [Lee

Foster Hartman, a Harper's editor] wishes my

story changed I am able to change it radically

and am willing to do so. If he does not like

it, I will send it to a woman's magazine, then

if returned destroy. I am trying to eliminate

worthless work if I can identify it. I 0 not

‘wish a lot of trash to appear after me.
Here are all those things that held her back: her need
to succeed in the market, her willingness to abide by edi-

torial judgment, her inability to make critical judgments

about her own work. These attitudes, coupled with her

27.
28.

H

bid.
bi

 

H
D.

O

 

29. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Mr. Briggs,
February 1, 1928 (Pierpont Mbrgan Library, New’York).

313.

artistic pride and concern for future judgments reveal the
stance with which Mary Wilkins Freeman confronted the world
of Letters. Coming, as they do, from a childless and
lonely woman of seventy-six trying to tidy up her reputa-
tion two years before her death, they also exhibit a kind
of controlled pathos which was so important an element in
her best fiction. So does her comment elsewhere in the
same letter.

Aside from the financial aspect is more: the

life of my work. I feel that is all I came into

the world for, and have failed dismally if it is

not a success.3

Mrs. Freeman's writing career stretched over forty-
five years from 1882 until 1928. In that long period of
time the press and public were kind--if not always accurate
or beneficial in their judgments. When her first volume
came out, her editor gave it the following praise:

They [the stories in A Humble Romance] are

somewhat in the direction of Miss Jewett's

more delicate work, but the fun is Opener

and less demure, the literature is less re-

fined, the poetry is a little cruder; but

there is the same affectionate feeling for

the material, a great apparent intimacy

with the facts, and 3 like skill in render-

ing Yankee parlance. 1

This is a favorable notice if one considers the talent
with which she is compared, but it is an inaccurate and

damaging comment if one considers Mrs. Freeman's own

skills. The remarkable gifts of observation on which her

30. Ibid.
31. Alden, Harpegfs, p. 6h0.

 

314.
symbolism of significant detail is based is dismissed
merely as "apparent intimacy with the facts." The tough-
ness of her realism is treated as a series of flaws in a
genteel facade. She is "less demure," "less refined,"
"a little cruder;" MissJewett’s work is "more delicate."
When one considers this kind of critical perversity to-
gether with Alden's statement that Mrs. Freeman is a
subjective writer, one can only Speculate at the kind of
damage the kindly Mr. Alden may have done. He was not
alone, of course; others, like Charles Minor Thompson,
praised her idealism and her gentility.

It was not only the critics who praised her work--
often for the wrong reasons. Readers, too, showed their
enthusiasm. Around 1890, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote
to convey her enthusiasm and that of her brother Henry
for Mrs. Freeman's work. In 1888 Lowell sent a letter
praising her short stories. In 1907 she received the fol-
lowing tribute of which she was eSpecially proud.

I should think it would be a very pleasant

feeling, that of knowing that as a writer

one has been able to help so many, many

peOple. We felt that we would like to

thank yongor just having existed and

written!

It was written on White House stationery and signed by
Theodore Roosevelt. It makes one wonder at her comment
the following year: "It is the poor rank and file who

32. Theodore Roosevelt, letter to Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman, June 6, 1907 (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York).

315.
cast votes for me,"33 a reflection on her pOpularity in
general and about her widely publicized novel-writing
contest with the Englishman Max Pemberton.3h These were
the parts of her audience that she tried so hard to please:
the genteel editors and the melodrama-loving public.
Between them her native gift for realism had to get on as
best it could.

Criticism was working itself free of gentility during
the first decade of this century. An indication that this
attempt was successful on some levels at least is the fol-
lowing passage from H. S. Canby's study of the short story.

She [Mary Wilkins Freeman] is a conscientious

realist, who constructs her little stories as

carefully as Maupassant himself. . . . With

her the local color story in Egglish reaches

its highest point of finesse.

A. B. Maurice's comments in The Mentor in August, 1919,

 

reveal the survival of the genteel aesthetic and of the
genteel image of Mrs. Freeman and her work. So does Grant
Overton's The Women Who Make Our Novels published in the
same year. Maurice's article treats women novelists in
general. That it begins with a full page picture of Mrs.
Freeman indicates her stature at the end of the war decade.
33. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, note without salutation
or address, February 23, 1908 (Newberry Library, Chicago).
34. Through 1908 novels by Mrs. Freeman and Mr. Pem-
berton were serialized in the New York Herald. The reading
public was asked to vote either for the American Realist or

the English Romancer. Mrs. Freeman won the $5,000 prize.

35. Henry Seidel Canby, A_Study g§_the Short Stogy
(New York, 1913), p. 58.

316.

Another indication that her reputation was paramount
among women novelists is a letter from the American Academy
of Arts and Letters in 1917 informing her that, with her
permission, they were going to place her name in nomina-
tion for membership. No woman had ever been nominated or
admitted before. She was warned that she might be discri-
Aminated against on the basis of sex. Never a feminist
or in any way militant about women's rights, Mrs. Freeman
replied, "Please be very sure that I shall not be in the
least disturbed if women are not admitted. I can very
readily see that many would object."36 She was not ad-
mitted, and she hid whatever disappointment she may have
felt behind her realization that the nomination itself was
a singular honor.

Seven years later the Academy atoned for its lack of
gallantry when it decided to give her a medal for her con-
tribution to American letters. At the ceremony the huge,
bronze outer doors of the Academy Opening onto 156th Street
were dedicated to her and through her to the women writers
of America. It was a fine gesture, and the old lady appre-
ciated it. She also enjoyed the added pleasure of "renewing
an old friendship to my great delight."37 The friendship
she referred to was that with Hamlin Garland, who presided

36. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to Mr. Thorndyke,
October 25, 1917 (American Academy of Arts and Letters
Library, New York).

37. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, letter to the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, April, 1926 (American Academy

of Arts and Letters Library, New York).

 

 

317.

at the ceremony. In his Speech of praise he said:

Book after book flowed from her pen, each

containing unfaltering portraits of lorn

'widowhood, crabbed old age, wistful youth,

cheerful drudgery, patient poverty, defiant

Spinsterhood, and many other related and

individual types of character, each with

prOper background of hill, town, or village

street, all making an unparallelled record

of New England life.38
Even in this finest moment, her behavior was character-
istic. After an exchange of several letters with Garland,
Mrs. Freeman, who never read in public, finally agreed to
speak; but all she was willing to say was "thank you."

In Roadside Meetings, which came out in 1930, Garland
said substantially the same things about her. He said,

As a student of minute forms of conduct, She

had no superior. The amazing part of her

genius lay in her ability to see the near-by

life of hgg neighborhood in artistic per-

Spective.
But the genteel image persisted. In 1927 Henry W. Lanier
edited a volume called The Best Stories gngagy E, Wilkins.
It contained some very fine things-—it would have to--,
but many of the sterner stories are missing. He does not
include "Sister Liddy," "A Village Lear," "A Tardy Thanks-
giving," or "A Taste of Honey." In their place he offers
"The Wind in the Rose Bush," "The Butterfly" and a number
of other sentimental pieces.

38. Hamlin Garland, Speech made at the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, quoted in The New York Times,
April 2‘}, 1926, See. 1’ p. 70

39. Hamlin Garland, Roadside Meetm mgs (New York,
1930), P0 340

 

 

318.

On March 18, 1930, The New York Tim§§_ran a fairly
lengthy obituary on Mrs. Freeman. In it She is praised
for her realistic mastery of detail. "The surprising
part of it was the variety of experience and incident
imparted to every story of these outwardly uninteresting
personalities." However, to preserve the genteel image
the comment is added, "The touch of kindly humor was in-
variable."40 '

Since her death, her reputation has steadily diminished.
Since World War II "The Revolt of Mother" has been drOpped
from many high school anthologies. Her only biographer
says in summation,

Her truth is of a narrower and more precious

kind--a superb understanding of the undefeated

neurotics, occasionally men, more often

women. . . . They are all--these striving

neurotics--seeking a wholeness of Spirit and

a fullness of life almosfilimpossible of at-

tainment in the village.

A few lines previous to this, he says, "It is pleasant to
return to her stories because they distill the flavor of
life in a New England village."h2 This last comment is
consistent with the genteel image but inconsistent with
his own comments about neurotics. "Pleasant" is not the

word for a "sordid Aeschylus;" nor Should the "impossibi-
lity of attainment" be allowed to stand. Through love a

40. Obituary, New York Iiggg, March 18, 1930, Sec. 1,
P. 7.

#1. Foster, M331 E, Wilkins Freeman, pp. 190-191.

#2. IQ;Q,, p. 190.

319.
number of her characters do attain a fullness of life.

Mrs. Freeman was not always a successful artist, but
in her best moments she was a serious one. Perhaps Brooks'
assessment is the fairest. "In some of her early tales,
perhaps twenty or thirty, she was an eminent artist, as
eminent as Miss Jewett, and even more so, because of the
depth of feeling that informed her art."43 And that
deepest feeling was tragic as her finest art was realistic.
That this is not always clearly seen is the result not only
of the critical conventions of the day but also of her own
frequent failure to perform in her best manner and truest
vein while pursuing, as she did, both pOpular acclaim and
financial success. Garland's memory of their first meeting
in the ’80's may serve as a literary epitaph. "Her suc-
cinct, lowrvoiced comment was often lost in the joyous
clamor of less important voices.“+4 It was--partially--

her own fault.

#3. Van W ck Brooks, New England: Indian Summeg
(New York, 1950 , p. A65.

#4. Garland, Roadside Meetin s, p. 34.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. The works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.

Books:

Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins. A Humble Romance and Other
Stories. New'York, 1887.

. A New England Nun and Other Stories. New
York, 1891.

. Jane Field. New York, 1893.

 

. Pembroke. New York, 189A.

 

. Madelon. New York, 1896.

 

. 'ggggmg, A_§99§ Man. New York, 1897.

 

. The PeOple gf_0ur Neighborhood. Philadelphia,

 

1898.
. Silence and Other Stories. New York, 1898.

 

. The Jamesons. New York, 1899.

 

———_*w~.—n_

New York, 1900.

 

. The Heart's Highway, A_Romance 9: Virginia
;p_the Seventeenth Centugy. New York, 1900.

 

. Undegstudies. New York, 1901.

 

. The Portion 9; Labor. New York, 1901.

 

. Six Trees. New York, 1903.

 

. The Wind in the Rose Bush and Other Stories

*““*—_—

__ f th Supernatural. New York, 1903.

-'-—

 

. The Givers. New York, l90h.

 

. The ertog, New York, 1905.

 

. ii the Light. 2.1.: the. seal. New York. 1906.

 

320.

 

 

321.
. "Doc" Gordon. New York, 1906.

 

 

 

. The Fair Lavinia and Others. New York, 1907,
. The Shoulders g£_At1as. NeW'York, 1908.

Howells, wm. Dean, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, et al. The
Whole Famil , §_Nove1 g1 Twelve Authors. New York,

1903.

Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins. The Winning Lady and Others.
New York, 1909.

. Tbs.Yals§.££idsi A.BQE§E£2§ New York. 1912.

 

. The Butterfly House. New York, 1912.

 

The CoEy-Cat and Other Stories. New York,

 

1914..

Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins and Florence Morse Kingsley. Ag,
Alabaster Box. New York, 1917.

Freeman,8Mary E. Wilkins. Edgewgter PeOple. New York,
191 .

 

. The Best Stories 9§_Ma§y E. Wilkins. Henry
W. Lanier, editor. New York, 1927.

Uncollected Short Stories:

Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins. "The Shadow Family," The Boston
Budget, January 1, 1882.

. "The Story of Little Mary Whitlow," Lippin-
cott's, XXI (May, 1883), 500.

. "The Wandering Samaritan," Cosmo olitan, 11
(September, 1886), 28.

. "Susan Jane's valentine," Hagper's Bazaar,
XXXIII (February 17, 1900), 132.

 

 

 

. "Pumpkin," Hagper's Bazaar, XXXIII (November
2h, 1900): 1863‘ '

. "The Christmas Ghost," Eve bod '8, III
—w' (December, 1900), 512.

 

 

 

322.

, "About Hannah Stone," Eve bod '3, IV (Jan-
"’ nary, 1901). 25- '

 

. "A Tragedy from the Trivial," Cornhill,
third series, X, (January, 1901), 63.

 

. "An Easter Card," Everybody's, IV (April,
1901). 372-

. "Two for Peace," Lippincott's, LXVIII (July,
190i). 51-

. "Prism," The Centuyy, LXIII (July, 1901), #69.

 

 

 

 

"The Happy Day," McClure's. XXI (May. 1903).
“*' *89. ‘

. "She Who Adorns Her Sister Adorns Herself,"
Harper's Bgzaar, XXXVIII (May, l90#), #56.

 

. "Hyacinthus," Harper's Monthly, CIX (AUSUSP:
I904): 937'

 

. "Humble Pie," Independent, LVII (September 1,
190A), 477.

. "The Slip of the Leash," Harper's Monthly,
CIX (January, 1905), 669.

. "For the Love of Oneself," Harner's Monthly,
CX (January, 1905), 303- .

. "Other PeOple's Cake," Collier's, XLII (Nov-
ember 21, 1908), 1#.

 

 

 

. "The Cautious King and the All-round Wise
——_ WOman," Harper's Weekly, LIII (June 26, 1909), 22.

 

:1 _fl_. "Julia--Her Thanksgiving," Hg;pgyl§_Bazaar,
XLIII (November, 1909), 1079.

 

fly, <_. "The Christmas Lady," nglgg' 39mg Journal,
XXVII (December, 1909), 17. ""”

 

. "Josiah's Fires Christmas," Collier's, XLIV
"(December 11, 1909), 9.

 

. "The Fightin McCleans," The Delineator,
LXXV (February, 1910 , 113. "‘““"*‘

 

__, "The Slayer of Serpents," Collier's, XLIV
f" (March 19, 1910), 16. ““*---

 

 

323.
, “The Steeple," Hampton-Columbian, XXVII

"“’T"0c"’tober, 1911) , #12.

. "The Horn of Plenty," Collier's, XLVIII
—r9 “(November 18, 1911), 22.

 

. "A Guest in Sodom," Cent , LXXXIII (Jan-
uary, 1912), 3h3-

g“. "Doll Lady," Harper's Monthly, CXXIV (Jan-
uary, 1912), 279.

. "The Blue Butterfly," W0man{§_Home Com anion,

"—“"("XL January, 1913), 3.

__y. "Something on Her Mind," Harper's Bazaar,
XLVI (December, 1912), 607.

 

 

 

. "Friend of My Heart," Good Housekeepigg, LVII
(December, 1913), 733.

. "Criss-Cross," Harper's Monthly, CXXIX (August,
1914). 360. -

. "The Saving of Hiram Sessions," Pictorial
Review, XVI (May, 1915), 20. """"“""""

. "Sweet-flowering Perennial," Harper‘s Month-
;y, CXXXI (July, 1915), 287.

. "Emanci ation," Harper's Monthly, CXXXII
(December, 1915 , 27.

. "Honorable Tommy," Woman's Home Companion,
XLIII (December, 1916), 15.

 

 

 

 

 

 

. "Boomerang," Pictorial Review, XVIII (March,
1917): 22° '
. "Cloak Also," Harper's Monthly, CXXXIV (March,

__ 1917), 545.

. "Thanksgiving Crossroads," Woman'§_Home Com-
anion, XLIV (November, 1917). 13.

 

 

 

,‘_. "Prop," Saturdgnyvening Post, CXC (January
5, 1918), 12.

 

"Jade Bracelet," Forum, LIX (April, 1918),

 

#29?—

32h.

_y, "The Return " Woman's Home Com an‘
(August,.1921), 21.’ P Lesa, XLVIII

 

. "Mbther-Wings " Harper's Monthl CXL
(December, 1921), 90,’ 1y, IV

 

‘IApril, 1923), 630. ’, Y. CXLVI

 

. "The Jester " The Golden Book VII
1928), 821. ’ ’ (June’

 

Stories in Manuscript:

"The Witch's Daughter." New York Public Library, New York.
"One Old Lady." New York Public Library, New York.
"The Rocket." New York Public Library, New York.

Miscellaneous Prose:

Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins. "Good Wits, Pen and Paper,"
What omen Can Earn. G. H. Dodge et al. New York
13990 , ’

. "Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights," The
Wgygg;§_gy§at Women Novelists. Philadelphia, 1901.

 

. "New England Mother of America " Country
Life ig_America, XXII (July, 1912), 27.’

 

 

. "The Girl Who wants to Write: Things to Do
and Avoid," Harper's Bazagy, XLVII (June, 1913), 272.

 

325.

Letters:

Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins. Letter to Mary Booth, February
17, 1885. Columbia University Library, NeW'York.

. . Letter to Mary Booth, April 12, 1885. Colum-
bla University Library, New York.

 

. Letter to Mary Booth, November 5, 1887.
Columbia University Library, New York.

 

. . Letter to Hamlin Garland, November 23, 1887?
University of Southern California Library, Los Angeles.

 

. Letter to Hamlin Garland, December 8, 1887.
University of Southern California Library, Los Angeles.

 

. Letter to Hamlin Garland, March 1, 1889.
University of Southern California Library, Los Angeles.

 

. Letter to Harper and Brothers, March 27, 1893.
Columbia University Library, New York.

 

. Letter to Harper and Brothers, May 31, 1893.
Columbia University Library, New York.

 

. Letter to Harper and Brothers, June 9, 1893.
Columbia University Library, New York.

 

. Letter to Mr. Wilcox, August 20, 189#. Colum-
bia University Library, New York.

 

. Letter to Hamlin Garland, October #, 1896.
University of Southern California Library, Los Angeles.

 

. Letter to H. L. Nelson, August 31, 1897.
Columbia University Library, New York.

 

. Letter to Richard watson Gilder, August #,
1899. Columbia University Library, New York.

 

. Letter to Richard Wetson Gilder, 1899? Colum-
bia University Library, New York.

 

. Letter to H. M. Alden, October 6, 1900. Colum-
bia University Library, New York.

 

. Letter to Elizabeth Jordan, May 19, 1903. New
York Public Library, New York.

 

 

 

 

326.

. Letter to Elizabeth Jordan, June 12, 190#.

 

New York Public Library, New York.
. Letter to Carolyn Wells, 190#? University of

 

Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia.

. Letter to Miss French, January 27, 1906.

 

Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

. Note without salutation or address, February

 

23, 1908. Newberry Library, Chicago.
. Letter to Mr. Thorndyke, October 25, 1917.

 

American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York.

. Letter to Miss O'Brien, February 27, 1926.

 

University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville,
Virginia.

. Letter to American Academy of Arts and Letters,

 

April, 1926. American Academy of Arts and Letters,
NeW'York.

. Letter to Harper and Brothers, November 19,

 

1927. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
. Letter to Mr. Briggs, February 1, 1928.

 

Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

327.

II. Secondary Sources.

Adams, Henry. The Education g£_Henry Adams. Philadelphia,
1931.

Alden, Henry Mills. "The Editor's Study," Hayper's Maga-
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. Ma azine Writing and the New Literature. New
York, 190 .

 

 

American Literayy Manuscripts: A_Checklist 9f Holdings ig_
Academic, Historical, and Public Libggries ;g_the
United States. Austin, Texas, 1960.

 

Becker, George. "Realism: An Essay in Definition," Modern
Language Quarterly, x (June, 19#9), 18#.

Blair, walter. Native American Humor. San Francisco, 1960.
Brooks, Van wyck. The Confident Years. New York, 1952.
. The Flowering 9; New England. New York, 1952.

 

. NeW'England: Indian Summer. New York, 1950.

 

Brown, Herberth. The Sentimentgl Novel ;g_America, 12 9-
1860. New York, 1959.

Canby, Henry Seidel. A_Study 9£_the Short Story. New York,
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Carter, Everett. Howells and the Age 9§_Realism. Phila-

Cary, Richard. Sarah Orne Jewett. New York, 1962.

Chamberlin, J. Edgar. "Miss Mary E. Wilkins at Randolph,
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Cooke, Rose Terry. Huckleberries Gathered from New England
Hills. Boston, 1891.

. Somebody's Neighbors. Boston, 188#.

 

Deegan, Dorothy Yost. The Stereotype g§_the Single WOman
lg Ameyggan Novels. New York, 1951.

Dodge,8Ggace H., et al. What women Can Earn. New York,
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Duffey, Bernard. The Chicago Renaissance ig American
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Feidelson, Charles. Sygbolism and American Literature.
Chicago, 1953.

Fiske, Horace Spencer. Provincial Types i3 American
Fiction. New York, 1903.

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1292 to 1900. Philadelphia, 19367

 

"111111,

Foster, Charles H. The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Bpecher
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.—

 

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