A History of American Literature

238 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900

to celebrate a victory,” she observes, “or to worship the god of harvests in the grove

above.” “It was strangely moving to see this and make a part of it,” she goes on:

The sky, the sea, have watched poor humanity at its rites for so long; we were no more

a New England family celebrating its own existence and simple progress; we carried the

tokens and inheritance of all such households from which this had descended, and

were only the latest of our line.

Another woman writer who devoted herself, at least in the best of her work, to

her New England homeplace was Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930). Born in

Massachusetts, she spent most of her life there until her marriage in 1902. She began

by writing stories for children, and during the course of a long career she wrote

fourteen novels, three plays, and three volumes of poetry, but her finest achievements

were the stories she produced for her first two published collections, A Humble

Romance and Other Stories (1887) and A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891).

Set in the decaying rural communities of small New England villages and farms,

these stories capture the spirit of the people through their dialect. That spirit is often

dour: Freeman describes what she calls, in one of her stories, “A Church Mouse”

(1891), “a hard-working and thrifty” but also “narrow-minded” group of people

whose “Puritan consciences” often blight their lives. Freeman focuses, in particular,

as Jewett does on the lives of women in these small communities. Exploring their

interior lives and their relationships, she shows them struggling to assert themselves,

and acquire some small portion of what they want, in a community dominated by

male power – or, to be more accurate, grumbling male indifference. “Men is

different,” comments one woman in “Old Woman Magoon” (1909). “You ain’t found

out yet we’re women-folks. You ain’t seen enough of men-folks yet to,” a woman tells

her daughter in “The Revolt of ‘Mother’ ” (1891). “One of these days you’ll find out,

an’ then you’ll know we only know what men-folks think we do, so far as any of it

goes,” she adds with caustic irony; “an’ how we’d ought to reckon men-folks in with

Providence, an’ not complain of what they do any more than we do of the weather.”

So, in “The Church Mouse,” a homeless, abandoned woman uses her sharp tongue

and decisive wit to seize a place for herself in the local meeting-house. The menfolk

are first perplexed, then annoyed, but they fail to evict her; and when, eventually, the

local women take her side, her new home is secure. In “The Revolt of ‘Mother,’ ” as

the title suggests, a woman takes similarly decisive action after forty years of accepting

that her husband rules the roost. “I ain’t complained,” she points out, but she does

so when he begins to build a barn on the site supposedly reserved for their new

house. Like the heroine of “The Church Mouse,” she then takes what she will clearly

not be given. While her husband is away, she marches her family into the barn and

sets up home there, with all the “genius and audacity of bravery” of General Wolfe,

the narrator comments, storming the Heights of Abraham. The husband reluctantly

accepts a fait accompli when he returns. “Why mother,” he declares, “I hadn’t no idea

you was so set on’t as all this comes to.” Whether this is genuine bewilderment or

bluster Freeman leaves piquantly unclear. Either way, or perhaps both, it is, we

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