Reading Freeman Again, Anew

Summary

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) is best known, read and taught today as the author of short regionalist fiction, and true enough, her literary production is largely set in rural New England, a region she depicts in its period of economic decline or marginalization after the US Civil War. A New England nun, however, she was not. Reading Freeman with and against the grain implies unlearning what we think we know about her and her oeuvre. Freeman’s work frustrates our attempts to situate her in clearly delineated categories because her prolific production spanned over nearly fifty years, from the early 1880s and well into the modernist era; because she experimented with a diverse array of forms and genres, writing poems and novels and sketches, children’s tales, sentimental stories, and protest novels; because her biography tells us that she straddled social classes; because, and most importantly perhaps, her work ultimately resists many of the very frames that have brought her back to visibility (transcendentalism, sentimentalism, realism, naturalism). Her literary production is robust and varied enough to bear the weight of a profound critical rethinking which questions the paradigms that have obscured her work—and that of other (women) writers—from view.

An increasingly vibrant literary scholarship has already opened new critical expectations and has unsettled the conditions of normative legibility that guided the relatively cloistered readings of her work in the decades following her last publications. Some fifty years after her death, and thanks to the recovery work that brought her back from the margins of American letters in the 1980s, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman gained recognition in the US and abroad at the intersection of diverse and sometimes overlapping literary critical rubrics, including New England “local color,” rebellious regionalism and female naturalism. More recently, however, Freeman studies have taken a different set of turns including Gothic, ecocritical, queer, and transnational approaches. New research on Freeman, invigorated by the foundation of the Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Society at the 2017 meeting of the ALA in Boston, has disclosed unexpected aspects of her work. This essay collection, co-edited by the three founders of the society and featuring a concluding piece by one of the most important scholars to lead the first wave of Freeman’s recovery, Sandra Zagarell, aims at pushing further in this direction.