In an 1895 oration on Margaret Fuller, Ednah Dow Cheney praised the leader of Conversations for the “force of her intellect,” a force achieved “not by borrowing the peculiar weapons of man, but by using her own with courage and skill.” Such a leader of women, Cheney told her national feminist audience, had “planted … the seeds of thought, principle, and purpose” in her own life as a teenager at the Conversations, “and I owe it to her to speak in her name, to try to make her life again fruitful in others.”1
Cheney gave a particularly direct and eloquent account of Fuller’s influence, even as she tried to extend it. But others, among them feminist writer Mary Wilkins Freeman, followed Fuller more implicitly in the 1890s, even joining Cheney in the instruction of younger women. In Freeman’s 1899 essay “Good Wits, Pen and Paper,” she sounded notes of transcendental self-reliance in offering the following advice to would-be female writers: “break free from dullness and complacency,” “sharpen your eyes and ears to see and hear everything,” “write in [your] own way,” “look upon the scene with American eyes,” “learn to be your own mentor.”2 Though Freeman was born two years after Fuller’s death, and though she penned mostly fiction and lived much of her life in small villages rather than Boston, she and her work resonate with Cheney’s contemporary account of Fuller. In Freeman’s written work and role as mentor to others, Fuller’s transcendental feminist “seeds” also bloomed and grew.
This study is situated between the tracing of influence and the discovery of a broader cultural intertextuality between the two writers: it repositions Freeman as a New England–focused, feminist transcendental realist more than a generation removed from, yet writing in proximity and response to, Margaret Fuller and the networks of Boston women that sustained Fuller’s memory and work.3 Transcendental realism, a vein of the broader realist movement, provides a new angle of vision for the consideration of literary work after the Civil War as a response to a continuing transcendental call or ethos. Without genre-based, geographic, or chronological restrictions, yet cognizant of the ways in which later authors’ perspectives are multiply influenced, the concept of transcendental realism offers opportunities for fresh interpretations of both familiar and lesser-known writing, and it acknowledges the legacy of transcendentalism via common thematic connections and literary aims shared by the core figures and later writers and activists. Among the continuities especially relevant to Fuller and the women writing after her are insistence upon truth and accuracy of vision, promotion of self-culture, celebration of the real and commonplace, discovery and interpretation of intuited divinity, and—through these common concerns—use of literary work to reform society.4 In her stories, Freeman models what Charles Capper argues is the “central defining characteristic” of literary transcendentalism: “its collective commitment to change people’s lives by changing their minds.”5
Historically intense debates and shifts in scholarly evaluation of Freeman’s works underlie my claim of her kinship with Fuller’s feminist transcendentalism. Freeman’s initial champions, realists Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, as well as twentieth-century critics F. O. Matthiessen, Fred Lewis Pattee, and Van Wyck Brooks, applauded her verisimilitude and attention to detail, focusing on her description of familiar rural settings and New England character types. So admired was Freeman for these accomplishments that, in 1925, she was awarded the inaugural William Dean Howells Medal by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; today an inscription on the Academy’s bronze door is still “Dedicated to the Memory of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and the Women Writers of America.”6 Two years later her longtime publisher, Harper & Brothers, crowned her career by producing The Best Stories of Mary E. Wilkins. However, though Freeman maintained a high level of popularity and critical approval for another decade after these accolades, much of her corpus then drifted out of publication and was reclassified as “local color,” minor realism, or regionalism, most likely because she dealt predominantly with women’s lives in rural settings. Fortunately, late twentieth-century scholars Marjorie Pryse, Josephine Donovan, and Susan Allen Toth rejected these judgments, revived interest in Freeman’s work, and reaffirmed her place among the major realists of her era. Additionally, these newer Freeman scholars repositioned her alongside Sarah Orne Jewett and Charlotte Perkins Gilman as an early feminist and psychological realist.7 With their valuable essays and new anthologies of Freeman’s works, as well as a pair of revealing literary biographies and a collection of previously unpublished letters, Freeman’s rich life and struggles as a writer emerged alongside new feminist views of her fiction.8
The discovery of transcendental impulses in the work of a fictional realist arose from these various phases of reassessment, with Freeman’s biographers Edward Foster and Perry Westbrook first to establish ties between her writing and that of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In turn, the transcendental ideologies of intuition and self-reliance have been discovered as important resources in Freeman’s inward-turning feminist character studies.9 In the words of her 1906 novel title, many of her characters live By the Light of the Soul. Building on these breakthroughs of literary, social, and biographical criticism, I turn to Freeman in relation not only to Emerson but also to the precursor who united feminist and transcendental thematics, Margaret Fuller.10
Although the link was not explored critically for a half-century after her death, Mary Ella Wilkins Freeman encountered and embraced literary transcendentalism in formative years.11 Born in 1852, Freeman spent her childhood and early adolescence in Randolph, Massachusetts, a farming town just fifteen miles south of the transcendentalists’ Boston hub, and then during her young womanhood lived in Brattleboro, Vermont. Raised by strict Congregationalist parents, by the age of nineteen she was avidly reading and discussing Emerson and Thoreau in active resistance to the village ethos, along with her equally inquisitive friend Evelyn “Evie” Sawyer (Severance). She had just returned to Brattleboro from a disappointing year at Mount Holyoke College, which pleased her no more than it had Emily Dickinson a quarter-century before. As she recalled afterward, she “did not behave at all well” at the religiously orthodox school, due to “monotony of diet and too strenuous goadings of conscience.” Thereafter her real education came through reading, as she and Evie ranged widely not only in the transcendentalists but also (across gender and genre) in Poe, Goethe, Dickens, Thackeray, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many poets.12 Of all these writers, however, it was Emerson that Freeman explicitly acknowledged in her 1913 essay “The Girl Who Wants to Write,” describing herself as from early years “committed to the teaching of ‘Nature,’ ‘The American Scholar,’ and ‘Self-Reliance.’”13
Freeman certainly enacted a girl’s version of “Self-Reliance” in becoming a writer. She first tried out the literary marketplace in her early twenties because of her family’s economic need. Then her instincts guided her to move from poetry and children’s fiction to short stories for adults. In 1883 came the miracle of acceptance and a check for $25 from editor Mary Louise Booth at New York’s prestigious Harper’s Bazar. A series of other stories followed in the same magazine for women, followed by inclusion in the even more illustrious Harper’s New Monthly, and in 1877 Harper’s published her first book-length collection of stories. In the meantime, however, she relocated her life and base for writing from the family’s pragmatically chosen location in Vermont back to their ancestral home in Massachusetts. An early romance had failed, and both parents and all her siblings had died. After a period of bitter doubt and loneliness, Freeman took her father’s modest inheritance and moved in 1884 into the Randolph home of her closest childhood friend, Mary John Wales.14 Randolph and her friendship with Wales would ground her life for years afterward.15
Along with Freeman’s rising stature as a writer, these cherished ties would also provide the base from which a village writer could take on Boston’s literary establishment. As she wrote to Booth in 1888, the year after her book appeared, she was relying on the connections of an avid supporter from the city to “meet some Boston people.” “She knows all the people I want to meet, Miss Jewett, and Mrs. Fields etc. and they are to take me out to Concord to take tea with the Emersons. Won’t it be lovely?” Ralph Waldo Emerson had died six years before, so it was to the shrine of his house and the conversation of his wife and daughter that Freeman was making her pilgrimage. But she later paid homage to both the father of American transcendentalism and his family through her characters Mr. and Mrs. Emerson in “The Lost Ghost,” a story about a Boston family relocating to the country.16
Nothing comparable to the acknowledgment of Emerson specifies Freeman’s reading of Fuller, though the young woman’s wide survey of books is likely to have included her. More to the point, Freeman pursued her writing career in settings where old transcendentalism, new realism, and Fuller’s feminist works were actively embraced at once. Even the New York world of Harper’s knew and defended Fuller. Mary De Jong, in the essay preceding my own in this collection, shows editor Mary Louise Booth receiving vehement defenses of Fuller from Caroline Healey Dall amid the 1884–85 scandal of Julian Hawthorne’s attack. At exactly the same season, Freeman traveled to New York for the first time and met Booth, after months of exchanging letters.17 Even more personally, in the Boston region that she had newly chosen for her writing life, recent biographies of Fuller, as well as the newspaper blitz arising from Hawthorne’s attack, would have made her story and ideas vivid to an up-and-coming woman writer. The best clue, however, is Freeman’s listing to Booth of the people she “wanted to meet” beyond the Emersons: Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields. Freeman succeeded in becoming a visitor to the powerful literary salon centered at Fields’s home on Charles Street. In turn, Fields introduced her to older writers like Jewett, and she directly advocated for Freeman’s literary productions with her husband, influential Atlantic Monthly editor and book publisher James T. Fields.18
Annie Fields, as Rita Gollin shows, was “in many senses a facilitator—between authors as a hostess, and, as a writer, between generations who could become acquainted with one another.” Fields herself compared the conversations in her salon with Fuller’s, celebrating the transcendentalists while also drawing in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. “And so the ball rolls on,” she exulted.19 If her aims were not openly political, they certainly were woman centered and feminist. This long-running, multigenerational group—fueled by friendship, rooted in love of literature and transcendentalism, and united around issues of gender and reform—included many who were friends, students, or avid readers of Fuller, such as Cheney, Louisa May Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Peabody, Julia Ward Howe, Eliza Farnham Pratt, and Jewett.20 In such a company of New England writers in the late 1880s, Fuller would have been a name to conjure with. One especially influential mediator of Fuller in the Fields circle may have been Harriet Beecher Stowe, whom Freeman had first read almost two decades before, shortly after the publication of Oldtown Folks (1869). As Monika Mueller points out, in that novel Stowe had diverted the thematics of female self-reliance to the New England village in presenting such “Fullerian virgins” as Miss Minerva Randall, who could both navigate a ship and read Greek and Latin.21 In later years, at Annie Fields’s salon, the two authors could talk directly about their respective New England heroines.
A larger cultural world of Boston women also strengthened the bonds among authors fostered by Annie Fields. The politically oriented American Woman Suffrage Association was located in Boston, and the New England Women’s Club (NEWC) also brought together writers and reformers with society ladies and seekers. This group was so devoted to Margaret Fuller that they celebrated her birthday. Again personal friendships supported cultural connections. Through Booth, Freeman enjoyed acquaintance with Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first female Congregational minister in the United States, who became a leader of Boston’s feminist organizations, extending her reach from the NEWC to suffrage advocacy and publication. Freeman’s Brattleboro friend Evie Sawyer Severance, still close by letters, was related by marriage to Caroline Seymour Severance, a New England Women’s Club’s founder. Fields, Alcott, and other writers also belonged.22
The culture of women’s clubs was integral to both literature and reform. Freeman repeatedly acknowledged its importance, both to herself and to others. She was apparently not an official member of the New England Women’s Club despite connections to the group. However, once she married in 1902 and moved to New Jersey, Freeman and her sisters-in-law participated actively in Metuchen’s “Quiet Hour Club”; once more they read Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” while also discussing the pros and cons of coeducation and considering the moral value of opening museums, libraries, and art galleries on Sundays. Their lively conversations on literature and philosophy attempted, as Margaret Klawunn claims, to “bring together the women in Metuchen for mental culture, social intercourse, and a sympathetic understanding of whatever women [were] doing along the lines of progress.” As an active member of this all-female association, which followed the patterns of Boston’s NEWC and New York City’s Sorosis, Freeman herself promoted “female culture,” debated philosophy, encouraged public speaking, and created literature alongside other notable women, including the group’s founder, Hester M. Poole. More than a simple book circle, the club called upon each woman to lead a discussion, to research and speak publicly about literature, to write, and to prepare women for activity outside the home.23
Freeman, then, experienced an immersion in Fuller-influenced cultural groups, reinforcing the personal reading of Fuller’s work that may have come even earlier in her life. The result is that in both her fiction and her criticism, self-reliance is seen and tested explicitly through the lens of gender. Her work promotes women’s autonomy in opposition to prescriptive environments, pondering as well such concerns of the overlapping feminist and transcendental communities as individual inspiration, personal protest, and democratic principles. Until recently these intersections would have seemed surprising, given the fifty-year gap between the transcendentalists’ pre–Civil War peak of influence and Freeman’s life and work. The plausibility of reading her texts in such a light, however, grows alongside other studies in this collection on the later nineteenth-century literary work and reform of Elizabeth Peabody, Caroline Dall, Julia Ward Howe, Louisa May Alcott, and Pauline Hopkins, all significantly linked to antebellum transcendental, abolitionist, and feminist legacies. As Cheney recalled, “seeds of thought” had come to life across decades in the ongoing careers of both elders and new protégées. Fuller’s ideas were available for Freeman’s new and original imagining of “a woman’s place.”
Most significantly, Freeman shared with Fuller a scrutiny of the feminist implication of self-reliance for the dual conditions of a woman’s life, marriage and singlehood. Woman in the Nineteenth Century had laid down the challenge that “union” was possibly only for “those who are units,” that a woman’s first obligation was “as a nature to grow, … as a soul to live free and unimpeded.” Her Miranda, a fictional type of herself, embodied such possibilities in independence from men. Although Fuller’s essay also idealizes four ascending types of marriage, from household partnership to union of spirit, her argument often dwells on the thwarted circumstances of wives. The wife of the “irritable trader” has no opportunity to speak for herself, and an old woman who has lived with her husband for forty years in a hut on a mountain cannot say why she has accepted “so barren a spot.” “[I do] not know,” the old woman replies. “It was the man’s notion.” Fuller comments to her reader, “I would not have it so.”24
Neither would Freeman “have it so.” Herself a single woman for most of her years, she created female characters isolated in rural New England, trying to navigate a village-based, postwar world short on men, money, and tolerable marriage possibilities. The result is visible both in her most widely anthologized stories and in her lesser known, newly available work. Among the best-known fiction, for example, “A New England Nun” represents the case of a happily single woman declining long-promised marriage, while “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” presents a woman finding voice and power against her husband’s “notion.” The present study focuses on two of Freeman’s fictional pieces among the many that might be viewed through this lens: the relatively familiar story “A Conflict Ended” (1886) and the newly recovered “Juliza” (1892), which Mary R. Reichardt notes was never included by Freeman in one of her original collections.25 The first ends in a pair of marriages, the latter in a remarkable charting of unmarried vocation. In these negotiations of spinsterhood and marriage, Freeman explores what Leah Blatt Glasser has characterized as a battleground of “conflicts between defiance and submission, self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice.”26 Such characterization of women’s battles is positioned as well amid the concern for creativity, identity, mentoring, and voice that would inform Freeman’s advice to would-be writers in “Good Wits, Pen, and Paper” (1899).
The impulse to allegorize that led Freeman to name a fictional family “Emerson” finds even wider expression in “A Conflict Ended,” where the names of characters and settings seem to allude playfully to her feminist and transcendental precursors. One suitor is George Elliot (male nom de plume of the female British realist); his fiancée is Margy (diminutive of Margaret); and the customer for whom she is creating a hat “Mis’ Fuller.” The drama unfolds in the village of Acton: can it be a coincidence that a real Acton lies alongside Concord in eastern Massachusetts?27 But the town name has a wider possible implication as well, as the two heroines “act on” their convictions in negotiating marriage. Such a reading is supported by the older heroine’s name, Esther, alluding clearly to the Old Testament exemplum of female voice and confrontational bravery. And her would-be male partner is Marcus Woodman, who combines Roman rigidity and New England woodenness under the shared “mark” of a defective historical Christianity.28
At once pathetic and humorous, “A Conflict Ended” opens with conflict-causer Marcus, who has refused to enter the Acton Congregational Church for a decade, stubbornly sitting on its steps during services, sacrificing his engagement to Esther Barney, his social status, and his productive place in the community because he does not like the “new” minister. Despite initial praise for his nonviolent action, Esther is careful to distinguish between this potentially Thoreauvian behavior, born of principle, and his later presence on the steps, which she attributes to a gendered, foolish resistance to change. Marcus, she declares to Margy, has “got so much mulishness in him it makes him seem almost miraculous.” His peculiar behavior is no less than an addiction, which he has taken to “the way other men take to smoking and drinking” (SSS, 78, 88). Through Esther’s vernacular voice, Freeman is offering a critique of both male intransigency and Protestant divisiveness, two New England traditions she had personally and culturally witnessed.
In fact the story’s real miracles and creative acts of resistance are the work of women, as Marcus’s stubborn passivity liberates and inspires Esther. She has long since dismissed earlier thoughts of marriage to him and claimed her own place in the community as owner of a millinery shop, thereby serving and socializing within an active, multigenerational circle of single and married women, including Marcus’s mother. But she continues to care for him, and one Sunday, amid his step-sitting vigil, Esther tries to get Marcus to accept her parasol as protection from both the sun and the condescension of the parishioners’ glares. Narrative language depersonalizes her act of will as the exercise of an “intense, nervous nature” against his even greater force. She is initially unsuccessful because the two middle-aged lovers “were on such different planes that [her will] slid by his with its own movement; there could be no contact even of antagonism between them.” The word “movement” is central here, resonating with the larger women’s movement toward new ideas and opportunities. Movement opposes fixity, and Esther is its agent. For a second time she holds out the parasol, now pointing it at him “like a weapon” (SSS, 75).
Caught off balance and forced to pay attention, Marcus awkwardly accepts the parasol and looks to her for approval. In a delightful reversal of Victorian-era gender roles, Esther becomes his rational, powerful, forward-looking protector and Marcus a literal homme covert protected in the shade of her feminine accessory.29 Later offering to join Marcus’s protest on the steps, Esther might seem to concede, but actually she continues the challenge that allows him to move forward literally, figuratively, and philosophically: he confesses to long weariness with his vigil, marries Esther in a spirit of open communication, and enters the church at last (SSS, 88–89). Esther’s action prompts Marcus to realize what she has always known but only recently been able to communicate; she has managed to change not only herself but also her partner. In Fuller’s terms, Esther and Marcus each have become genuine and equal “units,” forming a “union” of value to both of them.
Alongside the negotiations of this couple, Esther’s new millinery shop assistant, Margy Wilson, also responds to an offer of marriage from George Elliot. Margy rejects self-sacrifice and takes her fledgling feminism a step farther than her mentor-employer. George has assumed that his unpleasant mother (also a defector from the Congregational minister’s fold) will live in the same house with them, but Margy tells Esther that she is “going to have it an understood thing that [she is] going with George, and [she] ain’t going with his mother.” George will have to choose between the two women in his life. “I don’t care,” Margy assures Esther, “I’ll show him I can get along without him” (SSS, 77, 78). From start to finish, however, Margy cannot get along without Esther; she needs her guidance and friendship. Each makes the other better. As Reichardt comments, for Freeman “women’s relationships … are at once more fundamental, substantial, and tenacious than women’s relationships with men.”30
The story’s wider transcendentalist and feminist implications emerge as the two women talk. Telling Esther that she is out of sorts and looking for an outlet, Margy “go[es] right to work on Mis’ Fuller’s bonnet.” Rather than staying with the grain—of the velvet and of the town—Margy realizes that she is agitated and unable to follow established patterns. She repeatedly “cuts everything bias,” but Esther tells her to “never mind” because patterns “ain’t much anyway” (SSS, 78). In the end, what Margy creates is both liberating for her and most likely satisfying for Mis’ Fuller, who will be the first in Acton to try something new. Although at one point Margy says that she has “about made up [her] mind it’s a woman’s place to give in mostly” to George and his mother (SSS, 79), she uses the conditional words “about” and “mostly” in a way that tells of her less accommodating side: the conversations with Esther have sparked inner dissatisfaction, and she is still seeking out an egalitarian union. In what Susan Allen Toth calls her “positive drive toward fulfillment,” Margy becomes a better version of herself and her mentor.31 She prompts Esther to think about her relationship with Marcus again in a new light, thus initiating a two-way process of thought. Ultimately, Margy’s mother-in-law-to-be ends up living with another son, and marriage plans with George proceed.
This happy ending is given a new, unconventional meaning—for Margy and for the story as a whole—because it is so much the product of women’s wills. “A Conflict Ended” represents a much wider body of Freeman’s work precisely in the extent of its conflict, of women vocally rebelling against the status quo and claiming agency. Biographer Edward Foster quotes an unpublished manuscript—unusual within Freeman’s corpus for its first-person voice—that appears especially to express the author’s own kindred thoughts. This fragmentary text is also noteworthy in phrasing resistance as response to metaphysical circumstance, in a manner worthy of Fuller or Dickinson. “I am a rebel and what is worse a rebel against the Overgovernment of all creation,” declares the narrative voice of “Jane Lennox.” “I even dare to think that, infinitesimal as I am, … I, through my rebellion, have power. All negation has power.”32
“Juliza,” written in 1892 but unpublished in Freeman’s lifetime, expresses that rebellion in a much more fully realized fictional world. It also extends the exploration of love, work, self-culture, and socially prescribed gender limitations begun in “A Conflict Ended.” In this story the nonconformist title character ultimately chooses to devote herself to public speaking rather than to a man and marriage, although the path to this decision is not at all straightforward. Through her gifts of oratory and intellect, Juliza Peck recalls both Fuller and the women abolitionists’ claiming of public voice; she might even be traced back through Fuller to such romantic prototypes as Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, whose verbal artistry fills the public spaces of Rome.33 Unlike her giggling, fashion-focused, man-chasing peers, Juliza Peck, a “heavily built” young woman “with a certain importance about her,” has been home-schooled by her “majestic” mother in relative isolation from the oppressive, patriarchal mores of Stony Brook (another name with connotations of rigidity).34 In her education and resulting self-dependence, she is the most like Fuller’s Miranda of all Freeman’s heroines, though the formation of these traits comes from a mother rather than a father. Juliza’s relation to the town is primarily through her public renditions of poetry, performed with an elocutionary skill that itself has been taught by her mother. As a result of inwardness and independence, however, she is ignorant of the power hierarchy and “breaks the rules” of the separate spheres.35 Soon conventional expectations are reversed in humorous but critically significant ways.
In a courtship scene reminiscent of, yet even more confrontational than, those in “A Conflict Ended,” Juliza frets over her childhood friend Frank Williams, whom she mistakenly supposes to be her intended husband. She is concerned at his inability to take care of himself rather than her own prospects for married life. “What makes you act so?” she asks Frank, as they walk home together from one of her brilliant, well-attended oratorical performances. He has become hungry, irritable, and befuddled by “tryin’ to do the cookin’” while his mother lies ill. As his despair builds, Juliza, the epitome of common sense, decides that “there ain’t but one thing to do”—marry Frank to rescue him from his own ineptitude (US, 24–25). Assuming that he will also be persuaded by this logic, she voices her willingness. An awkward moment ensues, and Frank must, in keeping with his name, be “frank.” Hesitatingly, he suggests to Juliza that “there’s something to be considered besides common sense, sometimes,” thus alerting her to the possibility that he might love someone else. Confused about his answer and a bit nervous about what this breach of propriety might do to her public reputation, Juliza still does not regret being turned down. On the contrary, in a response closely akin to that of Freeman’s more famous “New England Nun,” she sighs with relief that Frank has dismissed her proposal, and she goes home to have her mother explain exactly why Frank “don’t want to marry” a strong woman like her (US, 26). Even though the mother has produced this independent and intellectual daughter, she is shocked at Juliza’s breach of traditional courtship protocols:
“Juliza Peck, you didn’t ask Frank Williams to marry you?”
“No, I didn’t ask him; I told him I would.”
“Do you know what you’ve done?”
“What?”
“What? You’ve made yourself a laughin’ stock all over Stony Brook.”
“I don’t see why I have, I’m sure.”
“Don’t you know girls don’t tell young men they’ll marry ’em unless they’re asked.”
“I don’t see why they don’t.”
“You needn’t tell me you didn’t know better than that.” Juliza turned about, and fronted her mother calmly.
“No I didn’t, an’ I don’t,” said she. “I don’t see why it’s any worse for a girl to speak than ’tis for a man.” (US, 27)
Juliza is exploring what Martha J. Cutter, in her analysis of “The Revolt of ‘Mother,’” calls the “frontiers of language.”36 Sure of herself and her words, Juliza rejects conventional ideas about courtship, takes the initiative, and proposes marriage. Assuming that Frank, like Marcus in “A Conflict Ended,” needs her protection and guidance, she becomes centered and purpose driven. Through speech much like that of Sarah Penn, the rebellious “Mother” in Freeman’s best-known work, Juliza becomes a profound “speaking subject,” one described by the narrator in masculine, even phallic, terms as a “massive pillar” of “certain dignity” (US, 29). Unsatisfied with the cultural norms, she seeks to “redefine a linguistic frontier” and cut through the mentality of separate spheres.37 Yet, unlike “Mother,” Juliza begins her act of rebellion with this sort of speech, rather than arriving at it late in life and marriage. Moreover, it is significant that, out of respect for her mother’s abilities and “energetic fire,” Juliza makes her marriage proposal knowing that she is less needed at home than with Frank, whom the narrator depicts in traditionally feminine (and debilitating) language as “shrinking,” “hesitating,” “feeble,” “blushing,” and “constrained” (US, 28–30). Fuller’s sense of the sexes as a “great radical dualism … perpetually passing into one another” is here explored in directly subversive terms.38
Granted a reprieve from a potentially unfulfilling partnership, Juliza looks inward and experiences a sense of liberty and clarity; her soul expands, her mind soars, and she becomes not just an actor but active. Like Miranda and the “Fullerian virgins” in Stowe’s fiction, she arrives at acute personal insight once the distraction of courtship is removed.39 Like Esther and Margy in “A Conflict Ended,” she stops asking questions and starts giving orders. Indeed Freeman’s protagonist, in Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s famous feminist description, is “stealing the language” of men,40 appropriating and altering it to celebrate herself, to communicate better with men, and to transcend prescribed gender roles. She understands—and helps her mother, Frank, and the reader to understand—that she does not need or want a man to support her economically or emotionally, although she is more than capable of doing so for him, if she should so choose.
But the story does not end with this feminist victory alone. Juliza is of a new generation and creates her own rules. Frank is of the old order and needs both a wife to tend to him and a lesson about the potential for different types of mutually satisfying male-female relationships. Hence, despite her mother’s initial objections, Juliza does what needs to be done: she claims control not only of her own fate but also of Frank’s. In a feminist version of Cyrano de Bergerac, Juliza enthusiastically takes on Frank—and his courtship of the woman he actually loves, Lily Emmons—as a project. Frank is comically clueless about how to communicate with the opposite sex and relies upon Juliza’s writing and speaking skills to win Lily’s consent. Juliza’s mother, old-fashioned around the edges despite her dominant position in marriage and her training of Juliza, is not so easily convinced that this act—and Juliza’s resolution to remain unmarried—are good things. She sees Juliza as defying not just one but three established social conventions: first, that adult women should be married and dependent upon men; second, that women should never tell males what to do or presume to speak for them; and third, that performing for self-gratification “ain’t a woman’s place” (US, 33). Undoubtedly, Freeman makes these issues prominent because she knew of—and worried about—many women like Juliza’s mother who denied their own daughters, sisters, or neighbors the opportunity to live for themselves. Her own mother had experienced a loss of identity and security through culturally decreed marriage, a fate that Freeman regretted and hoped to avoid.41
The conclusion of “Juliza,” therefore, is triumphant, transcendent, and significantly radical, including negotiation of marital status and more. Juliza’s coaching of Frank Williams succeeds, and the “new” Frank is able to communicate clearly and effectively not only with Juliza but also with Lily. As a result, the couple marries in the very church that serves as Juliza’s venue for public recitations, and they ask her to honor them not with a wedding present but with a wedding presentation (US, 35). Her mesmerizing speech at her would-be fiancé’s marriage to another is a personal and public success, showing that there are alternatives for the young women in her generation that were unavailable to their mothers. Indeed, the dazzling Juliza is such a commanding presence at the altar that, when the last word falls from her mouth, “everybody listen[s],” and the bride and groom are “forgotten” (US, 36). The quirky, headstrong, working “spinster” has found a voice that all must hear and respect. With her creativity, integrity, unconventionality, and strength of determination, Juliza has done the nearly unthinkable in small-town Stony Brook—and in American literature and society of the day—she has upstaged a marriage. She leaves the church committed to her self, her art, and her audience. The townsfolk are moved deeply by Juliza, and her mother also becomes proud of her daughter’s achievements.
Like a successful minister or spiritual leader, she has, from the pulpit, delivered an important message, unveiled the spark of divinity within, and inspired all to change and grow. As Beth Wynne Fisken comments of another heroine, she “shine[s] with an inner light reflecting a higher spiritual plane.”42 Tellingly, Juliza’s transformative victory and that of Freeman’s protagonist Esther are won in—or on the steps of—traditionally patriarchal churches. Such institutions saw significant intellectual activity and reform between 1870 and 1900. As Phyllis Cole notes, during this time “transcendentalism enjoyed prolonged vitality in the religious, literary, and benevolent work of Boston’s feminist community,” and many of the debates begun by Fuller continued within the domain of churches.43
Through her hybrid characters and the balancing points they attain—between old and new, masculine and feminine, individual and community, private and public—Freeman offers literary and life options for her readers and severely critiques the gendered limitations that hemmed in American women of the nineteenth century. Single, Juliza thrives. Because of the foresight of the two widow-aunts for whom she was named, Julia and Eliza, Juliza does not need economic help from a man to be secure in life. She has a well-equipped home and money to live on; she may freely pursue her artistic calling, develop her voice, and nurture her soul because women from an earlier generation, themselves married at some point yet seeing beyond their own limits, have provided a way for her. Like Sarah Penn on a much grander scale and outside of marriage and motherhood, Juliza is “goin’ to think [her] own thoughts an’ go [her] own ways, an’ nobody but the Lord is goin’ to dictate to [her] unless [she has] a mind to have him.”44
Indeed Juliza resembles Freeman herself, who in 1889 remarked to a friend that, “as far as the signs of the time go, I do not see any reason to apprehend that I ever shall be married.” In a sad irony, Freeman did agree in 1902, at the age of fifty, to try marriage with her longtime suitor, Dr. Charles Freeman, but with disastrous consequences. Any promise of marital “union” vanished within a few years, as her former friend, advocate, and intellectual equal became a controlling force in her career and an aggressive alcoholic. As a result, both Freeman’s writing and her emotional health suffered, and—afraid, outraged, humiliated—she eventually had Charles committed to the New Jersey Hospital for the Insane, seeking legal separation in 1922.45 Although this happened long after the writing of “Juliza,” Freeman already seems sensitive in it to the possible pitfalls of marriage, or at least to those of the wrong marriage. It is particularly poignant, then, that through Juliza, Freeman urges women to be emotionally supportive of their unmarried peers, should they choose—or be forced—to live independently. Without this sort of understanding, Freeman argues, women run the risk of being their own enemies. In an effort to prevent such outcomes—as did Fuller in her Conversations, Fields in her salon, and Freeman and Poole in their “Quiet Hour Club”—Freeman paid the generosity of her writing forward, educating women and men, single or married, about the potential benefits associated with improving themselves as individuals in relation to the larger world.
Both Freeman and Fuller, whose texts and voices cross from the private to the public realm, have much in common with Juliza and with Freeman’s protagonists in “A Conflict Ended.” These heroines see independence and education as spiritual goals, ends for which women should fight—even against other women, if they are in the way. Each views pursuit of these aims as God given, embracing the belief that woman needs “as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her.”46 Like Freeman and Fuller, they do not disallow the possibility of actualizing these goals in marriage, but they repeatedly question the institution and celebrate female autonomy. They obey their inner voices, rejecting compulsory marriage and tradition for tradition’s sake and abhorring silence and forced subservience. Reaching across the literary and literal generations, these characters challenge cultural norms and create new ways of being.
Both, furthermore, wrote in their respective times as literary voices in close proximity to the political and cultural networks of nineteenth-century feminism. As Cheney noted in her 1895 address on Fuller—contemporary with the high point of Freeman’s career—a collective understanding among women was building. Freeman contributed to it by creating characters who, in Toth’s words, fought for “a measure of individual freedom” amid tension “between need for independence and social insistence on conformity, between private fulfillment and social duties.” Glasser further suggests that Freeman explored these needs from within, articulating “the psychology of women’s conflicts as she knew them,” “giving voice” to them and “open[ing] a door to what the ‘spinster’ of her time generally kept ‘in a closet hidden, like a skeleton.’”47 Freeman’s protagonists may have come from small towns, but they pioneered modern ways for readers of nationally circulated magazines.
Still committed to these values in her sixties and even more invested in the process of mentoring future generations of women authors, Freeman expanded on the themes of her earlier “Good Wits” essay in “The Girl Who Wants to Write: Things to Do and Avoid” (1913). As well as recalling her early love of Emerson’s essays, she instructed the aspiring woman author to record “above all things, the truth as far as she can see it, as clearly as she can see it,” and to seek out “American viewpoints.” Such precision and genuineness, she noted, may help to shape a “distinctly national literature.” Here Freeman sounded a chord not only with Emerson but also with Fuller in her “Short Essay on Critics,” published in the Dial’s opening issue more than seven decades before. Freeman warned her female audience to be wary of the power of literary critics, like Fuller applauding their proper function, but counseling that it would be a “great mistake to listen too much to individual criticisms of literary efforts and be swayed by them.” On the contrary, she cautioned that reviewers often had preset agendas for judging the unsuspecting author’s creations, and these were antithetical to originality. If the hopeful woman writer could hold fast to her own vision and write originally, “as if she were running a race in the sight of the world,” she stood the best chance of success. Freeman adhered to the transcendentalist’s belief in “inward law” over “outward rule.” If the girl-author truly wanted to achieve greatness and satisfaction, Freeman advised, she must listen to her own voice and discover courage, or she would “defeat her own ends.” It is always better, Freeman reasoned, “to go your own gait, although you may toddle and limp, than to go the gait of another.” That pace would lead to the ultimate prize, “liberty.”48
Within Freeman’s feminist works, one finds both the ideal truth of transcendentalism and the descriptive truth of realism. Her conscious aim, she declared in 1887, was “making [her female] characters true and having them say and do just the things they would say and do” in real life. Howells applauded this goal and praised Freeman’s interpretation of everyday scenes, her “unity of spirit,” and her “community of characters,” but he declared at the same time that every “sketch is like the sentences of Emerson … an infinitely repellent particle.” Indeed her transcendental impulse extends from style to content. In Freeman’s fictional women and girls, Howells finds, “at last are real interests, passions, ambitions,” and “figures … drawn with exquisitely satisfying veracity.”49 Freeman’s truths were inner expressions of self-trust and outward accounts, whether humorous or indignant, of repression and injustice. These truths united in promotion of the advancement of women and other individuals who had been denied active choice. Like Fuller, Freeman “would have every barrier thrown down … every path laid open.”50 She advanced personal and social change, yearned for philosophical insight, applauded individuality, and offered alternatives. Freeman is both a transcendental realist and, in the spirit of Fuller’s definition, an “Exaltada.” She succeeds at representing women who, like their real fin-de-siècle counterparts, act and react. They move from inner self-discovery to public voices and action. Each at her chosen speed, they move toward personal and communal victories, each running her own “race in the sight of the world.”
1. Ednah Dow Cheney, “Lecture Given at the Congress of the American Advancement of Women,” in Reminiscences of Ednah Dow Cheney (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1902), 193–94.
2. Mary Wilkins Freeman, “Good Wits, Pen and Paper,” in What Women Can Earn: Occupations of Women and Their Compensation, ed. Grace H. Dodge et al. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1899), 23–29.
3. See the introduction to Monika Mueller, George Eliot U.S.: Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Perspectives (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2005) on this productive approach to comparative literary study. Mueller argues that Eliot not only writes in direct response to the texts and philosophies of Hawthorne, Stowe, and Fuller but also encompasses “unconscious, socially prompted types of text formation, archetypes, popular culture,” even “ideas in the air” (20). Freeman, with Howells, Stowe, and Eliot herself as likely mediators of Fuller, does the same.
4. Transcendental realism is an idea I developed in “Transcendental Realism: The Thoreauvian Presence in Howells’s A Modern Instance,” Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 2 (1999): 149–57; the concept was explored more fully in my dissertation, “Transcendental Realism: Natural Environment and Social Reform from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Mary Wilkins Freeman,” PhD diss., Univ. of South Carolina, 2001.
5. Charles Capper, “Margaret Fuller as Cultural Reformer: The Conversations in Boston,” American Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1987): 509.
6. Edward Foster, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (New York: Hendricks House, 1956), 189. On the William Dean Howells Medal, see Brent Kendrick, The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985), 370–71 and illustration after 268.
7. See Susan Allen Toth, “Defiant Light: A Positive View of Mary Wilkins Freeman,” New England Quarterly 46 (1973): 82–93; Marjorie Pryse, ed., Selected Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983) ; and Josephine Donovan, New England Local Color Literature: A Women’s Tradition (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983). Freeman admired the work of Gilman, and she both admired and socialized with Jewett, who wrote on multiple occasions to Freeman praising the younger writer’s short stories.
8. Biographies include Foster, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman; and Perry Westbrook, Mary Wilkins Freeman (Boston: Twayne, 1988). For letters, see Kendrick, Infant Sphinx. Selected recent feminist studies include Mary R. Reichardt, A Web of Relationship: Women in the Short Fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman (Jackson: Univ. of Mississippi Press, 1992); Reichardt, Mary Wilkins Freeman: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1997); Martha J. Cutter, “Beyond Stereotypes: Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Radical Critique of Nineteenth-Century Cults of Femininity,” Women’s Studies 21, vol. 9 (1992): 383–95; and Leah Blatt Glasser, In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Boston: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1996).
9. Foster, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, 33–34, 52; Westbrook, Mary Wilkins Freeman, 8, 13, 60–62, 126–28. Westbrook further asserts Emerson’s influence on the representation of nature in Freeman’s Six Trees and Understudies (112–17). On the theme of “self-reliance” in Freeman’s fiction, see also Rosamond Smith, “The Celebration of Self-Reliance in the Fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman,” PhD diss., Univ. of Alberta, 1975; and Beth Wynne Fisken, “‘Unusual’ People in a ‘Usual Place’: ‘The Balking of Christopher’ by Mary Wilkins Freeman,” Colby Library Quarterly (1985): 99–103. For more on Freeman’s transcendentally inspired nature writing, see Robert M. Luscher, “Seeing the Forest for the Trees: The ‘Intimate Connection’ of Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Six Trees,” American Transcendental Quarterly 3 (1989): 363–81; and Terrell F. Dixon, “Nature, Gender, and Community: Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Ecofiction,” in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed. Karla Ambruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2001).
10. The only sustained study I have found that explores links between Fuller and Freeman is Mary Bortnyk Rigsby’s dissertation, “Margaret Fuller’s Feminist Aesthetic: A Critique of Emersonian Idealism in the Works of Fuller, Alcott, Stowe, and Freeman,” PhD diss., Temple Univ., 1991, one section of which focuses on Freeman’s Pembroke (1894).
11. As a young woman, she changed her second name to “Eleanor,” her mother’s name. Although Freeman produced many of her works prior to marriage, I use her married name rather than “Wilkins” throughout because she preferred it.
12. Foster, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, 7–8, 24–33; Freeman to Helen L. Todd, 6 March 1907, quoted 31.
13. Mary Wilkins Freeman, “The Girl Who Wants to Write: Things to Do and Avoid,” Harper’s Bazar 47 (June 1913): 272.
14. Foster, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, 39–40, 50–56, 59–63; cf. Westbrook, “A Young Writer in New England,” chap. 1 of Mary Wilkins Freeman.
15. Freeman’s complex relationship with Wales, with whom she lived for almost two decades prior to her marriage to Dr. Charles Freeman and also during its troubled periods, parallels the “Boston marriage” of her colleagues Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields, as well as Fuller’s romantic friendships with Anna Barker and Caroline Sturgis. See especially Kendrick, introduction to Infant Sphinx, on the relationship with Wales and the absence of extant letters between them; and Glasser, “The Tenderness of One Woman for Another,” chap. 6 of In a Closet Hidden.
16. Mary Wilkins Freeman to Mary Louise Booth, 15 May 1888, in Kendrick, ed., Infant Sphinx, 88. On Booth’s career, see Paula Bernat Bennett, “Mary Louise Booth and Harper’s Bazar,” in Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1840–1910, ed. Sharon M. Harris with Ellen Gruber Garvey (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 2004), 225–40. Freeman’s “The Lost Ghost” appeared in the collection “The Wind in the Rose-Bush,” and Other Stories of the Supernatural (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903).
17. Foster, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, 62.
18. For discussions of this group, see Josephine Donovan, New England Local Color Literature, 38–49; Deborah Evans, “Annie Adams Fields,” in American Women Prose Writers, 1870–1920, ed. Sharon M. Harris, Heidi L. M. Jacobs, and Jennifer Putzi, vol. 221 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Group, 2000), 120–27; and Rita K. Gollin, Annie Adams Fields, Woman of Letters (Boston: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2002).
19. Gollin, Annie Adams Fields, 123; Fields quoted on 155.
20. Evans, “Annie Adams Fields,” 122–24. Fields was also a hostess and biographer of male writers, including Emerson, but her detailed diary shows that her salons were exclusively for women (quoted in Julia Sprague, History of the New England Women’s Club, from 1868 to 1893 [Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1894], 123–24).
21. Mueller, George Eliot U.S., 83.
22. See Phyllis Cole, “Woman’s Rights and Feminism,” in OxH, 222–40, on Fuller’s web of influence into the early twentieth century through Howe, Cheney, Higginson, Alcott, Paulina Wright Davis, and others in a “generation of dissenters” (230, 237).
23. Kendrick, Infant Sphinx, 268; Margaret Klawunn, “The ‘New Women’ of Suburbia: A Study of the Quiet Hour Club of Metuchen, New Jersey,” Journal of Rutgers University Library 46 (1984): 91–100. A well-known advocate of suffrage, Poole was not only a writer but also the founder of the International Council of Women in 1888 and a member of Sorosis (91–92). Freeman actively joined the Quiet Hour Club in 1902 but may have had earlier involvement during visits to her longtime friend Charles Freeman’s town.
24. EMF, 321, 261–64, 282–89, 346; emphasis in original.
25. Reichardt, Mary Wilkins Freeman, 30.
26. Glasser, In a Closet, xvi. See also chap. 6, “Sometimes I Think I Am a Monster,” for Freeman’s experience of unmarried life and depiction of it in her fiction.
27. In this reading of the 1886 story, Freeman clearly knew of Fuller by text or at least reputation even before her 1888 pursuit of the “Boston people” who upheld Fuller’s legacy.
28. Mary Wilkins Freeman, “A Conflict Ended,” in Selected Short Stories, ed. Pryse. Page references will hereafter be cited parenthetically as SSS.
29. On the laws of “coverture,” see for instance http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/wes/collections/women_law/, accessed 15 November 2013.
30. Mary R. Reichardt, “‘Friend of My Heart’: Women as Friends and Rivals in the Short Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman,” American Literary Realism 22, no. 2 (1990): 54.
31. Toth, “Defiant Light,” 90.
32. Untitled ms., n.d., quoted in Foster, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, 142–43. Among Freeman’s stories of rebellion, see for instance “The Church Mouse,” “Old Woman Magoun,” “Mistaken Charity,” “A Poetess,” “The Secret,” “A Modern Dragon,” “On the Walpole Road,” “An Honest Soul,” The Portion of Labor, Pembroke, and By the Light of the Soul. For a related study, see Carol Holly, “Reading Resistance in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s ‘A Poetess,’” American Literary Realism 39, no. 2 (2007): 95–108.
33. See EMF, 297, for Fuller’s praise of de Staël’s influence on “little rugged girls” in “the obscurest schoolhouse in New England”: “They may never through life hear her name, but she is not the less their benefactress.”
34. Mary Wilkins Freeman, “Juliza,” in The Uncollected Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman, ed. Mary Reichardt (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1992), 21; hereafter cited parenthetically as US.
35. See Lucia Cherciu, “‘A Veritable Guest to Her Own Self’: Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Humorous Short Stories,” Journal of the Short Story in English 35 (2000): 25.
36. Martha J. Cutter, “Frontiers of Language: Engendering Discourse in ‘The Revolt of “Mother,”’” American Literature 63 (June 1991): 279–91.
37. Cutter, “Frontiers of Language,” 280.
38. EMF, 310.
39. Mueller, George Eliot U.S., 83.
40. See Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).
41. Young Eleanor Wilkins agreed to marry her husband Warren a year after her father’s death, but instead of financial security, Warren brought his subsequent family a shared embarrassment over their “increasingly shabby homes and parsimonious existence” (Glasser, In a Closet Hidden, 6; Reichardt, Web of Relationship, 8).
42. Fisken, “‘Unusual’ People,” 150.
43. Cole, “Woman’s Rights and Feminism,” 235.
44. Freeman, “The Revolt of ‘Mother,’” in SSS, 134.
45. Freeman, quoted in Glasser, In a Closet Hidden, 56; for an account of her marriage and separation, see 174–77, 200–204.
46. EMF, 261.
47. Toth, “Defiant Light,” 128, 133; Leah Blatt Glasser, “‘She Is the One You Call Sister’: Discovering Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,” in Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about Their Work on Women, ed. Carol Ascher, Louise DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick (New York: Routledge Press, 1994), 187–88.
48. Freeman, “Girl Who Wants to Write,” 272; see also Fuller, “A Short Essay on Critics,” in Transcendentalism: A Reader, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 294–300.
49. Freeman, quoted in Reichardt, Mary Wilkins Freeman, 143; William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 75 (September 1887): 639, 640, and 83 (June 1891): 155.
50. EMF, 260.