Mary Wilkins Freeman: a Study Of The Short Fiction. - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1998 by Robert M. Luscher

MARY WILKINS FREEMAN: A STUDY OF THE SHORT FICTION by Mary R. Reichardt. Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1997. xv 219 pages. $25.95.

A MARY WILKINS FREEMAN READER, edited by Mary R. Reichardt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. xxi 428 pages. $65 cloth; $25 paper.

Building on previous scholarship on Mary Wilkins Freeman, Mary R. Reichardt has assembled two more welcome additions to the growing bookshelf of criticism on and primary materials by the most prolific American female short story writer of her era. Although Freeman is traditionally cast as a realist or local color writer, both of these recent works demonstrate that her career was more multifaceted, with her style characterized more aptly by Jewett's concept of "imaginative realism." In these companion volumes, Reichardt divides Freeman's career as a writer of short fiction into three phases, with a clear awareness of continuities in style and subject matter that crosscut them. Freeman's early and best-known stories depict New England village life, while her mid-career work moves toward fulfilling her desire to write tales incorporating the supernatural, symbolic, and historical. In her final phase, Freeman experiments further with collections of interrelated stories and stories featuring child protagonists, but continues to pursue her earlier concerns, sometimes with a darker outlook.

With her first stories for adults published as she entered her thirties, Freeman began her career as a writer relatively late, although she wrote children's fiction and poetry throughout her life. Boosted by the acceptance of a half dozen stories in 1883, Freeman started a career during which she produced a canon of nearly 250 adult stories, 147 of which were gathered into 14 collections (an ample selection of the other hundred can be found in Reichardt's 1992 Uncollected Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman). Though attuned to the economics of the profession and willing to write stories on commission, upon reaching relative financial security in mid-career she was able to experiment more with other genres and with other modes of short fiction that compelled her interest. Throughout her career, however, Freeman's thematic interests remained consistent: the moral and emotional toll of poverty, especially as affected by the era's and region's prevailing religious beliefs; family relationships and courtship, especially their potentially narrowing influence; and the manifestation of the obdurate New England will.

While Reichardt has previously treated Freeman's short fiction in A Web of Relationship (1992), her Twayne volume provides a broader survey of Freeman's career in the genre, favoring chronological organization rather than topical focus by character type. In the spirit of providing a fresh assessment of Freeman's work, the frontispiece replaces what has become the standard photograph of the younger Freeman in a lacy white dress with one from The People of Our Neighborhood (1898) in which Freeman clearly appears more comfortable, mature, and self-assured. While critics have tended to search in Freeman's work for those strains that fit preconceived ideas of her aims, Reichardt demonstrates that her fiction incorporates a complex blend of realism and romance. William Dean Howells, for instance, encouraged by her early depictions of village life, became disconcerted with her later admixture of sensibilities. More recent critics, focusing on feminist critiques, marginalized Freeman's employment of the sentimental conventions of her day.

In surveying Freeman's oeuvre, Reichardt provides a balanced assessment of her popularity and prolific output, noting that 50 stories deserve to be rated as finely crafted. The opening section discusses Freeman's influences and aesthetics and examines two lesser-known village stories--"The Object of Love" and "Justina" (neither of which appears in the Mary Wilkins Freeman Reader)--thus signaling Reichardt's intention to discuss stories outside of the traditionally celebrated half-dozen that have established Freeman's contemporary reputation. Freeman's strength, Reichardt observes, resides in probing the inner lives of her characters--particularly their frustrations and moral battles--in stories whose ironic plot twists undercut the domestic ideology of her times, whose open endings perhaps prefigure modernism, and whose spare dramatic style creates detail that emphasizes psychological insight. Although Freeman wrote a number of stories that will make those who celebrate her realism and feminism uncomfortable, Reichardt does not merely dismiss these stories as products of Freeman's need to support herself but rather analyzes them as the work of one who wrote with an awareness of her contemporary audience and who achieves a "provocative open-endedness in her body of fiction [by] refusing to prescribe or generalize about what course all women should adopt" (13).

In discussing Freeman's early career (1882-1891), which encompasses her best known collections--A New England Nun and A Humble Romance-Reichardt focuses on the subtleties of the female characters' decisions. She finds complexity not only in the better known village stories, such as "A Poetess," but also in such works as "A Conflict Ended" and "A Moral Exigency," both of which employ the technique of doubling that Freeman favored throughout her career. In A Mary Wilkins Freeman Reader, Reichardt observes that Freeman's description of her character Martha Patch, in "An Honest Soul," who "seized eagerly upon the few objects of interest which did come within her vision, and made much of them," provides an apt characterization of these early stories, whose narrow compass perhaps inspired her desire to grow artistically and experiment during mid-career.