Despite naming her story A New England Nun (which "treats the pervasive theme of psychic oppression and rebellion of women"), the nun in the title is a reference to a woman who waits for something like love or God, in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's opinion, with varied results. Her main character Louisa Ellis who is "prayerfully numbering her days, like an uncloistered nun" after waiting for 14 years for her betrothed to return to her, only to overhear him declare his love for someone else, and then turns him away on their wedding day, so he can be with the woman he really loves. She has waited for nothing, when she could have been out living life and finding someone to love her back.
Freeman herself went to seminary but "left after a year in which she resisted the school's pressure on all students to offer public testimony as to their Christian commitment." She reminds me of Emily Dickinson, rebelling against organized religion and writing about it: "The constraints of religious belief, and the effects of these constraints on character formation and behavior, is one of her chief subjects."
Although she does write about religion, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is "best known for her depiction of New England Village Life." She paints the sounds and night atmosphere of the New England countryside in A New England Nun : "The twilight had deepened; the chorus of the frogs floated in at the open window wonderfully loud and shrill, and once in a while a long sharp drone from a tree-toad pierced it." In her story The Revolt of the Mother, Freeman describes a old couple living in the countryside: "She looked as immovable to him as one of the rocks in his pasture land, bound to the earth with generations of blackberry vines." Her description is amazing and her usage of metaphors and symbols are entwined with good storytelling.
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