It is a giant geographical and emotional leap from
Chopin's steamy passionate Louisiana to the cold and restrained New England
world of Mary Wilkins Freeman's most famous story "A New England
Nun." Mary Wilkins Freeman marks an advance over Jewett in terms of moving
the story farther away from local color regionalism and closer to the tight
thematic structure of Chekhov, James, and Anderson. Very early, her impressionism was noted: A reviewer in the London Spectator
said about her stories. "The
stories are among the most remarkable feats of what we may call literary
impressionism in our language, so powerful do they stamp on the reader's mind
the image of the classes and individuals they portray without spending on the
picture a single redundant word, a single superfluous word." Howells,
however, said in a review of New England Nun and Other Stories in 1891,
that he had a fear that she would like to write romantic stories. Says she should write one and get it out of
her system and then return "to the right exercise of a gift which is one
of the most precious in fiction," that is an art in the "service of
reality."
Indeed, what Freeman did was combine the detail of
realism with the thematic patterning pioneered by Chekhov, Joyce, Turgenev, and
Anderson. Consequently, as Edward Foster points out, the problem in trying to
understand her stories is that we must combine seemingly incompatible generic
terms. "Miss Wilkins wrote local
color stories of an inner feeling at once romantic, naturalistic, and symbolic
and of a surface texture realistic and impressionistic." "A New England Nun," her most
famous story, a story that Perry Westbrook calls a perfect story, worthy of
standing with the best of Chekhov or Mansfield, these conventions are combined
in a quintessential way. Moreover, the
story embodies what Frank O'Connor has called the characteristic lonely voice
of the short story, a characteristic that Arthur Machen noted in her stories as
early as 1902, in a helpful comment that could characterize Sherwood Anderson's
stories as well. "I think the whole
impression which one receives from these tales is one of loneliness, of
isolation." Machen's point is that great literature is not generated by
the drawing room, but by the expression of the "withdrawal of the soul; it
is the endeavor of every age to return to the first age, to an age, if you
like, of savages, when a man crept away to the rocks or to the forests that he
might utter, all alone, the secrets of his own soul.... It is from this mood of
lonely reverie and ecstasy that literature proceeds, and I think that the sense
of all this is diffused through Miss Wilkins New England stories."
"A New England Nun" is in the tradition of
Chekhov and Mansfield, although it was written before either. The central character is a Jamesian figure
shut away from the flow of everyday life.
Her stories combine the realistic and the impressionistic. Note also the combination of romanticism and
realism. Focus in "Nun" is Louisa's sense of what she considers
almost "artistic" control over the order and neatness of her solitary
home. She rejects the masculine disorder
of her impending marriage. Compare this
story with Mansfield's "Miss Brill"--being on the outside of
life. Story filled with imagery of her
nun-like existence. Edward Foster points
out the characteristic short story conventions by noting many questions whose
answers would have yielded real understanding are never raised in the story,
e.g. what was the relationship between Louisa's mother and father? what kind of love was she capable of when she
and Joe were first engaged? "It is
easy to dismiss these questions," says Foster, "by noting that Miss
Wilkins was contriving a short story and not a novel....It seems that 'A New
England Nun' is a triumph not only of art but of reticence." Indeed the same kind of reticence that later
characterizes Anderson, Hemingway, and Carver.
The story opens with the atmosphere of the natural
world being echoed within Louisa.
"There seemed to be a gentle stir arising over everything for the
mere sake of subsidence--a very premonition of rest and hush and
night." This is good description of
the structure of the story itself. It is
described in the next sentence:
"This soft diurnal commotion was over Louisa Ellis also." She is described in terms of the
"feminine appurtenances" around her, which from "long use and
constant association, a very part of her personality." (This is the metonymic connection of realism;
she is the sum of the objects around her).
She is described in terms of adverbs, the way she does
things--peacefully, carefully, precisely. She sets out her tea with "as
much grace as if she had been a veritable guest to her own self." And indeed, she is; she does things, but she
is passive as well. She lives on sugared currants, sweet cakes and little white
biscuits; eats salad in "delicate, pecking way" (identified with the
bird in the cage in her house, the little yellow canary. She wears three
aprons, one for eating, one for sewing, one for company--not for sexual
protection, but for ordering and compartmentalizing, wearing appropriate
uniform for each activity.
Joe Daggett fills the room (see this in Lawrence's
"Horse-Dealer's Daughter").
They have nothing to say to each other. When he leaves, she brushes up
his tracks and thus leaves no trace, so that she is left alone. Joe is afraid he will put a clumsy foot
through a "fairy web" and he knows she is always watching lest he
should. During the fourteen year
absence, she had entered a path "so straight and unswerving that it could
only meet a check at the grave, and so narrow that there was no room for any
one at her side." Narrator says
this was a subtle happening that they were both too simple to understand--what
is so subtle about it? Is this the key
to the story?
The winds of romance have another name for Joe, and
for her the wind had never more than murmured. (She is not romantic; she is
realistic, attention to detail. Is this
the ultimate end of realism--the life of Louisa; ironic if so, for the life of
Louisa is a life ordered as the romantic artist saw life should be in the art
work. Work this out--wrong to think that
order means sterility, just as wrong to think that idealism means lifeless. She
worries about leaving her home, her "neat, maidenly possessions" are
like the faces of old friends (again the metonymy image) She makes aromatic essences in her little
still and loves to sew a linen seam, not for "use" but for the
"simple mild pleasure which she took in it."
"Louisa had almost the enthusiasm of an artist
over the mere order and cleanliness of her solitary home." She worries about the disorder of coarse
masculine belongings strewn about in endless litter (note she is not concerned
about Joe so much as she as about his things--metonymy) Caesar was a hermit of
a dog, chained up for fourteen years for a sin in puppyhood. "His reputation overshadowed him, so
that he lost his own proper outlines and looked darkly vague and enormous." She pictures him on the rampage through the
village, seeing innocent children bleeding in his path. "she had great
faith in his ferocity."
She overhears Lily and Joe, Lily has a masterful way
that would have "beseemed a
princess." When Louisa and Joe part the next day she is like a queen
"who, after fearing lest her domain be wrested away from her, sees it
firmly insured in her possession." Now Caesar will never "go on a
rampage through the unguarded village.
Now the little canary might turn itself into a peaceful yellow ball
night after night, and have no need to wake and flutter with wild terror
against its bars." (note the image of her and Caesar, not as an image of
Joe, but an image of controlled libido) When Lily goes by Louisa feels no qualms,
for if she had sold her birthright for a bowl of pottage, she did not know it
for the taste of the pottage was so delicious.
"She gazed ahead through a long reach of future days strung
together like pearls in a rosary, every one like the others, and all smooth and
flawless and innocent, and her heart went up in thankfulness....Louisa sat,
prayerfully numbering her days, like an uncloisterd nun." The similarity between this ending, both in
terms of imagery and in terms of theme, to Anderson's "Hands" is
striking.
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