[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19th century humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. No really, I’m serious!]
On the writer and story that are funny, wise, and anything but narrow.
For a long time, late 19th century local color writing—and
specifically women’s local color writing—and even more specifically New England
women’s local color writing—was dismissed by many scholars as narrow and parochial, historically and socially representative but not
particularly significant in broader, lasting, literary terms. Over the last few
decades, many scholars have pushed back on those ideas, seeking to redefine the writing as “regionalist” rather than local color and to recover and re-read many of the individual authors and works within
that tradition. Yet outside of academia, I don’t know that such efforts have
led to nearly enough public consciousness of these writers—and if I were to
make the case for why they should, I might well start with the very talented
New England regionalist Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930).
Freeman’s prolific career and prodigious talents were certainly recognized
in her own era, as she was awarded the 1925 William Dean Howells Medal for distinction in fiction and in the following year became part of the
first group of women elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. While she began her career writing children’s stories, and published works
in multiple genres, it was her local color short
stories for adults, collected in volumes including A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887), A New England Nun
and Other Stories (1891), Silence and Other
Stories (1898), and The Givers (1904), that most established her reputation and these
culminating accomplishments. And yet in the half-century after her death those
same stories came to many scholars to represent Freeman’s limited scope,
interests, and talents, and thus to categorize her as precisely an example of a
once hugely successful local color writer whose works now retain only historical
or social interest.
I could push back on those ideas and make the case for Freeman in any
number of ways (as have many of the scholars I mentioned in my first
paragraph), but I don’t know that there’s a better way to do so than to ask you
to read my favorite Freeman story, “The Revolt of Mother” (1890). “Revolt” has all the hallmarks of New England local color, from its
setting on a New England farm to its characters’ dialect voices; like most
local fiction more broadly, the story’s tone is mostly light and witty, with
surprising character and plot twists leading to an unexpected conclusion. None
of those are bad things nor disqualify the work from literary significance, of
course—in fact, they make it engaging for readers, a goal of just about any
author in any genre. But Freeman’s story is at the same time deeply wise in its
portrayals of every member of its focal family, individually, as a community,
and in their histories and evolving present and future identities. It reveals a
great deal about its particular historical and social setting, about gender and
marriage, about parenting and generational change, and about human nature at
its most flawed and its most hopeful. In short, it does just about everything
great literature and art can do, and does it all well.
Next humorist
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other humorists you’d highlight?
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