Mary Wilkins Freeman's Artist Fiction
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University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Doctoral Dissertations Student Scholarship Spring 1989 The hair wreath: Mary Wilkins Freeman's artist fiction Norma Johnsen University of New Hampshire, Durham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation Recommended Citation Johnsen, Norma, "The hair wreath: Mary Wilkins Freeman's artist fiction" (1989). Doctoral Dissertations. 1575. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/1575 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS The most advanced technology has been used to photo graph and reproduce this manuscript from the microfilm master. 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Ann Aibor, MI 48106 THE HAIR WREATH: MARY WILKINS FREEMAN’S ARTIST FICTION BY NORMA JOHNSEN BA, University of Arizona, 1965 MA, University of Arizona, 1967 DISSERTATION Submitted to the University of New Hampshire in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English May, 1989 This dissertation has been examined and approved. LIdunL/ ____________ _____________ Dissertation director, Melody Gr'auTich Associate Professor of English Jean' kennard, Professor of English David Watters, Associate Professor of English f\, isj ________ Barbara White, Associate Professor of Women's Studies Witzling/ Associate professor of Arts and Women's Studies iliw HW Date ABSTRACT THE HAIR WREATH: MARY WILKINS FREEMAN’S ARTIST FICTION by Norma Johnsen University of New Hampshire, May, 1989 Mary Wilkins Freeman uses an artist protagonist to explore conflicts and issues she herself faced as a woman writing in male-defined culture. Her artists make art in the context of a highly developed, expressive, sometimes subversive, and always deeply personal women’s art tradition. Their singing, their poems and stories, and their decorative "household arts" speak a complex poetic language . The Mary Wilkins artist defines self through her art. In "A New England Nun" the artist preserves her artistic identity by retreating to her solitary pleasures of household arranging, sewing, and distilling. Other household artists or architects assert their identity by creating and articulating space. The artists in "A Church Mouse" and "The Revolt of ’Mother,’" for example, make man- defined space into woman-defined space, an activity women writers like Wilkins perform when they move into the traditionally male space of literature. The Wilkins artist attempts to balance her independent iv identity with her need for connection and love. Like many other artist protagonists in nineteenth-century fiction, the knitter in "An Independent Thinker" ultimately sacrifices her art for love. But the artist in "An Old Arithmetician" affirms the joy of balancing creative work and supportive human love, a dimension excluded from "A New England Nun." In other stories the artist balances art and love by relating to others through her work. In "On The Walpole Road" the artist unfolds her story naturally to an appreciative audience, in much the same way as Wilkins wrote her famous early stories. But in "Sister Liddy" the artist performs to impress a hostile audience, an approach similar to Wilkin’s own in her later work. In "A Village Singer" and "A Poetess" Wilkins shows how audience pressure and internal conflict destroy the artist, pointing to the ways that she herself was silenced. In later years, Wilkins wrote fewer artist stories. The forces that threaten the artist in early stories overwhelm her later work. Testifying to the power of these forces, many later novels are "crazy quilts" where we sense Wilkins herself is diverted by love, criticism, or anger. The power of her early artist stories in light of the confusion of her later novels and stories helps us understand what it was like to combine the roles of artist and woman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centures. This artist theme is an enduring value in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s work. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT................................................... iv CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTION: THE ARTIST’S STORY.................1 II. THE HAIR WREATH: OUR SISTERS’ ART.............. 20 III. NEW ENGLAND ESSENCES.............................50 IV. HOUSEHOLD ART.................................... BO V. KNITTING AND COUNTING...........................114 VI. PIECES.......................................... 145 VII. THE LOST VOICE.................................. 174 VIII. CRAZY QUILTS.................................... 212 IX. VALUE RECEIVED..................................258 BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................................. 266 iii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE ARTIST’S STORY Many of the eccentric old women and spinsters in the famous early stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) are artists. When they tell stories, sing, quilt, make wreaths, and write poetry, these women and their work represent Mary Wilkins and her work, and their conflicts and concerns reflect the conflicts and concerns of women artists and writers of the late nineteenth century. Their stories and songs and garlands are part of a women’s art tradition in which art may be perishable, like flowers and housekeeping, and deeply personal, like friendship quilts and memorial wreaths. Often overlooked or dismissed by other characters, in Mary Wilkins* early stories this women's art is a form of the struggle to speak about self and about connections between self and others, essential concerns of women artists working in male-defined culture. In examining the woman artist and her "domestic art" in Wilkins’ fiction, I propose a new and illuminating view of this writer’s largely neglected work. The artist theme offers a way of interpreting the space and work images by which Wilkins often builds character and meaning in her early stories. This theme also presents a focus for 2 understanding Wilkins’ life in relation to her fiction and in particular for acknowledging her struggle with many of the art, career, identity, and marriage issues that women are still struggling with today. And, finally, this artist theme provides a way of viewing her work as a whole, a critical project which, according to Mary Reichardt’s recent review of criticism, is long overdue.1 Initial critical attention to this writer who has been called "an anomoly in the American literary tradition"2 was intense and largely favorable. The stories of Mary Wilkins (she added "Freeman" when she married in 1902 at age 49), first published in Harper’s Bazar and Harper's Magazine in the 1880's, were immediately popular with both critics and reading public. Seen as representative of the "local color" genre along with work of Sarah Orne Jewett and Rose Terry Cooke, her stories were promoted and praised by important critics as the beginnings of a genuine American realism. William Dean Howells of Harper's said he saw in Wilkins’ stories the genius of American literature: revelation in microcosm of a world "as broad as life."3 Atlantic Monthly editor Horace Scudder admired Mary Wilkins as a realist who had "genuine originality" and a "strong artistic sense."4 This praise from the literary tastemakers highlights the qualities that set the fiction of local color writers apart from the melodramatic "trials and triumphs" plots and heroines of popular women’s novels by earlier sentimental novelists like Susan Warner and Augusta Evans. Wilkins, Jewett, and Cooke wrote realistic stories about village life and rural people, usually women, usually spinsters, often old, homely, and acidic. Frequently,