Abstract
Against a dominant diminished view of rural New England in the late nineteenth century, Mrozowski argues that Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman deployed a Gothic regionalist aesthetic that balanced paltry economic prospects and winnowed worldviews with haunting, excessive descriptions of the landscape that bordered on the mystical and the sacred. Jewett’s Country-By Ways (1881) and Freeman’s Six-Trees (1903) exemplify a Gothic vision compensating for the lost agencies and eroded powers of New England inhabitants. Through lush portraits of stoic trees, ruined farms and unmarked graves, these writers celebrated a local world far richer than some austere Calvinism, more grounded than the new age mysticism of spiritualism and theosophy, and more recalcitrant than the grasping impulses of Gilded age capitalism.
Nobody has mourned more than I over the forsaken farmhouses which I see everywhere as I drive about the country out of which I grew, and where every bush and tree seem like my cousins.
—Sarah Orne Jewett, 1884 letter to John Greenleaf Whittier
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
This composite critical portrait of their New England is drawn from Josephine Donovan’s New England Local Color Literature: A Women’s Tradition: “Something is dying in the fictional world of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman” (119); Joanne Karpinski describes how New England became “in effect, a no man’s land” and a “waste land” abandoned by successive generations of men and containing a diminished life for remaining women (“The Gothic” 140); Perry Westbrook’s Acres of Flint and his short study of Mary Wilkins Freeman frame Jewett and Freeman as recorders of “rural New England’s decline” (Freeman xii); Richard Brodhead defines regionalism as “the work of memorializing a cultural order passing from life” in a way that manufactures symbolic compensation (Letters 120).
- 2.
Critical discussions on the explicitly and traditionaly Gothic works of Jewett and Freeman are abundant. One would do well to start with Elizabeth Ammons’ “Jewett’s Witches” in Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett and Dara Downey’s “Dangerous Houses in the Uncanny Tales of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary E. Wilkins.”
- 3.
Fetterley and Pryse note that “narrative interruptions” and the “use of framing” typify Jewett’s sketch design, as she visually zooms into a descriptive scene setting interspersed with frequent, poignant digressions (179).
- 4.
Marjorie Pryse offers an analysis of Gunn’s tale as an example of how Jewett blurs the classificatory and differential powers typically afforded to gender and class identities in “Sex, Class, and ‘Category Crisis:’ Reading Jewett’s Transitivity.”
- 5.
William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 83 (June 1891): 155–56, reprinted in Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman. Edited by Shirley Marchalonis (Boston: GK Hall, 1991).
- 6.
Warren’s version of regionalism has been rightfully deconstructed by critics, but the legacy of a crumbled Puritan spirituality still rings true in Freeman’s fiction: Jennifer Fleissner describes a blank moral space now filled with “obsessive domestic rituals,” as individual compulsions replace “once-meaningful religious dedication” (Fleissner 111).
Works Cited
Ammons, Elizabeth. “Jewett’s Witches.” Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett. Ed. Gwen L.Nagel. GK Hall, 1984, pp. 165–184.
Brodhead, Richard. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. U of Chicago P, 1993.
Brooks, Van Wyck. New England: Indian Summer. Garden City Publishing, 1944.
Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. U of Chicago P, 2003.
Cary, Richard. Sarah Orne Jewett. College and University Press, 1962.
Crow, Charles L. American Gothic: U of Wales P, 2009.
Dixon, Terrell F. “Nature, Gender, and Community: Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Ecofiction.” Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace. U of Virginia, 2001, pp. 162–176.
Donovan, Josephine. New England Local Color Literature: A Women’s Tradition. Continuum, 1988.
Downey, Dara. “Dangerous Houses in the Uncanny Tales of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary E. Wilkins.” Haunting Realities, edited by Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden. U of Alabama P, 2017, pp. 119–131.
Elbert, Monika and Wendy Ryden. “EcoGothic Disjunctions: Natural and Supernatural Liminality in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Haunted Landscapes.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 24., no. 3, Summer 2017, pp. 496–513.
Fetterley, Judith, and Marjorie Pryse. Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture. U of Illinois P, 2003.
Fleissner, Jennifer. Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism. U of Chicago P, 2004.
Foote, Stephanie. Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. U of Wisconsin P, 2001.
Freeman, Mary Wilkins. Six Trees. Books for Libraries Press, 1969.
Howells, William. “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 83 (June 1891): 155–56. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman, edited by Shirley Marchalonis. GK Hall, 1991
Jewett, Sarah Orne. Country By-Ways. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1881.
Karpinski, Joanne. “The Gothic Underpinnings of Realism in the Local Colorists’ No Man’s Land.” Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, edited by David Morgan, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski. Associated UP, 1993.
Kendrick, Brent L. The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. The Scarecrow Press, 1985.
Peattie, Donald. A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America. Houghton Mifflin, 1948.
Pryse, Marjorie. “Sex, Class, and ‘Category Crisis:’ Reading Jewett’s Transitivity.” American Literature, vol. 70, no. 3, Sept. 1998, pp. 517–549.
Reichardt, Mary R. Mary Wilkins Freeman: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, 1997.
Warren, Austin. The New England Conscience. U of Michigan P, 1966.
Welty, Eudora. “Place in Fiction.” On Writing. Random House, 2002.
Westbrook, Perry. Acres of Flint: Writers of Rural New England, 1870–1900. The Scarecrow Press, 1951.
———. Mary Wilkins Freeman. Twayne Publishers, 1988.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mrozowski, D. (2021). Hallowed Ground: The Gothic New England of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman. In: Elbert, M., Bode, R. (eds) American Women's Regionalist Fiction. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55552-8_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55552-8_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-55551-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-55552-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)