dedilliterati

I'm fucking DONE!

That's right, beeeeotch! I graduated! AND I'll probably STILL go BACK for MORE!

That said, my report was fucking brilliant! Well, maybe not, but -given the constraints- it was! No lies, this was an awesome report. I started typing around 7am and finishe by 4:30 pm, and I hope that my professor isn't an SG member or anything. Then I wold go from to to , . Yeah, but she probably is that cool, or that academic.

Anyhow, for your viewing pleasure, and in the hopes that anyone having to write a report about grotesques in 19th century American Literature, with a primary focus on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, here you go:

Grotesque Representations: implied criticism of female station in the 19th century

Follow one another without interruption... When you have thus formed the chain of ideas in heads of your citizens, you will then be able to pride yourselves on guiding them and being their masters. A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas; it is at the stable point of reason that he secures the end of the chain; this link is all the stronger in that we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our own work; despair and time eat away the bonds of iron and steel, but they are powerless against the habitual union of ideas, they can only tighten still more; and on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the unshakeable base of the soundest of Empires(102-3).


Mary Wilkins Freemans short stories An Honest Soul, A Mistaken Charity, and Old Woman Magoun, possess grotesque depictions of her protagonists. The jarring quality of these characters is intended to draw an emotional reaction about each protagonists respective condition. The protagonist of An Honest Soul, Martha Patch, is so disconcerted by mistakes she has made quilting and the belief that her work will be judged by harshly her neighbors, that she virtually wastes away while attempting to ensure that her mistakes are never discovered. Harriet and Charlotte Shattuck of A Mistaken Charity, respectively deaf and blind, move into a home offered by Mrs. Simonds only to find that they prefer their previous dilapidated home more than the supposedly comfortable house Simonds had worked to get for the Shattuck sisters. Old Woman Magoun, from the story of the same name, murders her granddaughter Lily and, afterward, carries around the doll which Lily carried until she died. What each of these stories holds in common is a commentary about what constitutes normal and abnormal for women in 19th century New Englands society. The perspective of the three short stories is also that of the limited third-person omniscient narrator. As society defines what is normal, these abnormal characters represent the fears and limitations of what New Englands 19th century offers for the women living within its social system and mores.
Mary Wilkins Freeman was a popular author from the 19th century, who lived and wrote in to the early twentieth century. Freemans work from 1881 until 1887 was extremely well received, and two of the short stories this essay focuses on(An Honest Soul and A Mistaken Charity) come from this period. Old Woman Magoun was published later in her career. As a female in the 19th century, Freeman had to have been conscious of the pervasive social restrictions which the 19th century upheld against women. Freeman had the benefit of writing late in the 19th century and early in the twentieth, which allowed women authors to write out their desires for independence more explicitly. With Freeman, this is most certainly the case, although what Freeman was writing for and against explicitly, may have been difficult to fully convey to her audience at the time.
In order to bring together this interpretation of Mary Wilkins Freemans short-stories, it is beneficial to relate it to three separate areas of background information. The first area of interest is the concept of the grotesque. Fiction of the Modern Grotesque and The Grotesque by Bernard McElroy and Phillip Thomson, provide an overall background and analysis of the grotesque and its importance. The next area of interest is the concept of social control and how normalcy is supported by pervasive punishment and examination, which is rooted in Michel Foucaults Discipline and Punish. The final area of background information is Susan Harriss 19th-Century American Womens Novels, which addresses a subversive method of writing and reading that to an uncertain degree effectively eluded patriarchal control. From analyzing these texts, it will be easier to synthesize them into a fruitful interpretation of An Honest Soul, A Mistaken Charity, and Old Woman Magoun. According to Bernard McElroy in Fiction of the Modern Grotesque: to give form to the unspeakable has always been a function of the grotesque(184). Grotesque, for McElroy, ... implies a differentiation from the norm(6), the source of which is mans capacity for finding a unique and powerful fascination in the monstrous(1). Phillip Thomson argues in The Grotesque, that the grotesque is essentially the copresence of the laughable and something which is incompatible with the laughable(3). Both authors acknowledge a debt to John Ruskins The Stones of Venice, where Ruskin argues that ... the mind, under certain phases of excitement, plays with terror(McElroy 2) and that the terror of the grotesque is associated ... with horror, anger, or awe at the human condition(Thomson 15). Thomson argues, because of the characteristic impact of the grotesque, the sudden shock which it causes, the grotesque is often used as an offensive weapon(58). Building off of Thomsons concept of the impact which the use of the grotesque possesses, we might add McElroys idea of the grotesques special fear, which leads to a combination of fascination and revulsion(3). According to McElroy, Freuds term unheimlich, (unhomely, literally) or uncanny is one way to address this specific form of fascination with the grotesque, which stems from ...repressed infantile anxieties, and partial reversion to the old animistic conception of the universe(4). The greatest effect of grotesque art is to direct our attention to the undignified, perilous, and even gross exaggeration, distortion, or unexpected combination(McElroy 11).
However, it is not enough to discuss the effects of the grotesque without addressing how the grotesque relates to artistry and its implications of the world it inhabits. McElroy argues to imagine a monstrosity is to imagine a world capable of producing that monstrosity(11). An artist of the grotesque then, ...does not merely combine disparate forms or distort surfaces. He creates a context in which such distortion is possible...(McElroy 5). The terror of the grotesque can be associated with humanity and its relation to aggression. McElroy relates the grotesque to the desire to commit aggression and the fear of aggression, and he specifies ... and I do not mean merely natural aggression, but aggression by impossible, all-powerful means(4). Thus, the grotesques most common theme is dominance and submission(McElroy 17).
Thomson offers an especially enlightening characterization of the grotesque as anti-rational(42), which is contrasted against and is even preferred over reasonableness and enlightened self-interest by which men of the world purport to act(McElroy). When the grotesque is considered in light of the supposedly reasonable world in which it exists, one finds that the grotesque, aberrant by all normal standards, is a humiliated man totally engrossed in a losing battle with his external environment, yet forced to concede that the world is right in judging him diseased and contemptible(McElroy 28). The perverse, and readers unheimlich fascination with it, is the weapon with which the individual fights for his autonomy against the stupid conformity of average man(McElroy 28). In this way, the grotesque may be interpreted as a submissive victim of its world, reveling in its perversity while fascinating its audience, because it fights the total system capable of creating the grotesque, in the first place; the misery of the human condition.
Michel Foucaults Discipline and Punish is both a wonderful tool for understanding how social control affects modern society and an excellent basis for interpreting the female condition of New England women in the 19th century. Foucault addresses what he calls the political technology of the body, which cannot be localized in a particular type of institution or state apparatus(26). The ideology of 19th century New England certainly was not a favorable place for individually minded women, especially considering that women were not even granted the right to vote in America until 1920 with the ratification of the fourteenth amendment. The implication being that, although control and repression of women was obviously one effect of living within Americas patriarchal society, women were certainly incorporated into a political technology of the body. Women authors in the 19th century striving for a strong female voice and empowerment, were victims of a patriarchy that had inserted the power to punish more deeply into the social body(Foucault 82). Female authors like Mary Wilkins Freeman, especially, had to be cautious about maintaining an image of normalcy that was unthreatening to men while empowering to women, in order to escape potential punishment at the hands of the public/society that they wrote for.
Indeed, Foucault argues, that the right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defence of society(90), while the instruments of punishment altered from physical aggression to ...forms of coercion, schemata of constraint, applied and repeated(128), that introduces the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved(182). Disciplines became the formulas of domination(Foucault 137), and literary criticism of womens texts is certainly one method among many, which patriarchy utilizes to constrain women within what may be considered socially acceptable or normal models for women to uphold. The success of this manipulation of power flows from simple instruments; hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement, and their combination in a procedure that is specific to it, the examination(Foucault 170). The constant examination within society culminates into such a presence, that Foucault rhetorically asks, is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons(228). The diffusion of examinatory systems into society, which Foucault calls the carceral system, functions to establish ... a norm(298). This scrutiny surrounds value-judgements of acceptability and normalcy within literature as well. Female authors in 19th century New England had to understand that their literature was constantly being monitored even as it was being accepted into the mainstream.
In 19th-Century American Womens Novels, Susan Harris notes in the writings of 19th century American novelists, ... the writings show an intense, almost paranoid awareness of the needs, and censures, of the public, an entity conceived of as easily influenced by the written word(19). She also notes that readers of 19th century American womens literature ... express fascination with the deviant characters, ambiguous situations, and most of all, with heroic women both historical and fictional(19). Thus, in order to covertly avoid public censure, a viciously effective form of punishment for authors, Harris theorizes that 19th century women novelists developed a technique of writing subversive middles, ...which, slowly and hesitantly at first, began to posit womens a priori capabilities for self-determination(21) to elude patriarchal control. These subversive middles of 19th century American womens novels ... explore profoundly radical possibilities for women, radical not in terms of male boundaries, but in terms of female ones(Harris 76).
This implies that 19th century American female novelists understood both the expectations of women within their society and how to utilize them to their own personal ends. Thus, in the end of Susan Warners Queechy, the narrator of the text chooses to stress patriarchal societys expectations of Fledas, the protagonist, weakness, even if it contrasted with the textual proof of her strength, to satisfy the cultural mandate that heroines be gentle, submissive, and physically frail(Harris 95). This purposeful deviation from the textual proof was accessible to 19th century readers who were capable of configuring, or realizing, the texts differently than the cover story indicated(Harris 19). Oblivious reviewers, on the other hand, such as one whose ... review focuses so much on the Preface that it is open to speculation whether the reviewer had read the rest of the novel(Harris 132) find it hard to decipher the deflection of the beginning and end of these novels to understand their radical possibilities for women readers. American women novelists of the 19th century, then are covertly pushing the boundaries of societal norms, by reifying female potentials within the literature of the period, which is certainly the case within Freemans short story An Honest Soul.
An Honest Soul follows Martha Patch through a series of mistakes in quilting, which requires tedious attention to detail in rectifying. As Martha is relying upon her completion of her neighbors quilts in order to get money for replenishing her pantry, which runs out before she can collect the money from her neighbors. There is a subplot in the text which is related to her desire for a front window for her house, which only has a blank wall. Marthas father died before he could add an addition to the house, and the narrator of the text notes that the lack of a front window was a continual source of grief to her(Freeman 80). This subplot of the fathers inability to finish his tasks because of his death, closely parallels Marthas own stubbornness and near-death experience, because she is incapable of admitting to others that she has made mistakes, while piecing together her neighbors quilts. Luckily, when Martha is incapable of getting up off of the kitchen floor, a neighbor comes to her rescue, feeding and nursing Martha back to health. In the end, Martha receives her money and praise for a job well done, trades work for the window that she has always wanted, and is given more work immediately. This time the desired objects are braided rugs Martha will work on are braided rugs, to which she thankfully says Im kinder sick of bed-quilts somehow(Freeman 91).
The grotesque nature of An Honest Soul, lies in Marthas fear of having her work thought less of by her neighbors. For instance, when Martha believes that she has mistakenly switched Mis Bliss and Mis Bennets pieces of calico after working on them for a fortnight, her immediate response is not to verify whether she may be mistaken, but to correct the problem without consulting either neighbor about it. It may be possible that neither neighbor would care about the simple oversight, which wasnt an oversight at all, considering that the quilts were originally completed correctly. The basic grotesqueness of this piece is how willing Martha is to sacrifice herself for her pride and reputation.
Four scenes of Marthas need to be accepted as a self-sufficient and hard worker display her determination to carry out more than she is physically capable of, because she is unwilling to accept imperfection or personal insufficiency. The first, is when Martha believes she has committed her first mistake and acknowledges that her neighbor ...wont say nothin, an shell pay me, but shell feel it inside, an it wont be doin the square thing by her(Freeman 82), but decides that she will correct the mistake on her own. The second scene is, after working for an additional unspecified number of days, while recognizing that shes ... gettin pretty short of vittles(Freeman 83), she finds that she second-guessed herself and has created more for herself than she needed to. Even though Mrs. Bennet offers Martha cake and a bite of something to eat because Martha looks ...real faint(Freeman 84), Martha refuses. In the third scene, Martha vows Ill hev them quilts right ef it kills me(Freeman 85) and, upon completion, finds herself sunk to the kitchen floor and incapable of seeking help, whiles she moans I reckon Im bout done to(Freeman 87)! Lying on the floor, Martha notices in the sunlight that there is dust on a black chair and exclaims what if anybody come in! I wonder if I cant reach it(Freeman 88)! In the final scene, Mrs. Peters comes and helps Martha, offering her food from her own pantry because Marthas was only bare shelves. Martha reluctantly gives into her hunger and eats the food Mrs. Peters offers and says an Ill pay you jest as soon as I kin git up(Freeman 89).
To conclude the analysis of An Honest Soul, Martha has already internalized the social control which the footnoted quote by Servan serves to explicate. Thinking that everyone should follow one another without interruption, Martha refuses to interrupt those, as the narrator puts it, ...kindly well-to-do people, who would have gone without themselves rather than let her suffer(Freeman 86). The laughable and pity which is incompatible with laughter, shines through in the scene where believing that she may well die, Martha can only think of the dust on a black chair. Similar to E. D. E. N. Southworths The Desrted Wife, for all of their pretenses of moral conservatism, both texts are actually attempting to illuminate womens need to ... think and act for themselves independently of spousal or social approval, and therefore to recognize their value in and for themselves(Harris 134). In A Mistaken Charity, the Shattuck sisters discover their personal senses of value in the face of supposedly normal life.
In A Mistaken Charity, the Shattuck sisters live for free in a secluded area within a ramshackle, leaky hut, and rely upon the beneficence of their neighbors and nature to survive. The sisters, Harriet and Charlotte, are respectively deaf and blind, although when Charlotte is happy, she is capable of seeing chinks, or glimpses of luminescence. However, though the food is scarce and the hut is ... like livin with a piece of paper, or maybe a sieve, twixt you an the rain(Freeman 239), Charlotte and Harriet are content to stay there. One day Mrs. Simonds, a do-gooder and close friend of a ... rich and childless elderly widow...(Freeman 242), brings the Shattuck sisters doughnuts and later decides to give them a ...comfortable home for the rest of their lives(Freeman 242). Both sisters are frightened of being taken away to the poorhouse and enjoy living in their home. When Mrs. Simonds returns offering them a better home, shes surprised to find that they dont want to go. Mrs. Simonds enlists the help of a minister, who they still refuse to listen to, but the winning argument ...was advanced most eloquently to Harriet, that Charlotte would be so much more comfortable(Freeman 243).
Upon arriving into the Home, the sisters stay two months. During this time-period they had to be more particular about their dress(Freeman 244); can not go without caps, just as they always had done(Freeman 245); and find saying O Lord had been much disfavored in the Home((Freeman 245). Finally, the sisters agree to escape, ...hobbling along, holding each others hands, as jubilant as two children, and chuckling to themselves over their escape, and the probable astonishment there would be in the Home over it(Freeman 246). On the long walk home a man in a wagon offers to take them close to their home, who asks about the Shattucks situation. Harriet lies to the man about who they are, except that they are sisters and that Charlotte is blind, and eventually come home. In the end, the chinks, which indicate Charlottes happiness, are so plentiful that ...they air all runnin together(Freeman 249)!
A Mistaken Charity could be perceived as grotesque for a number of different reasons. First, the combination of a pair of elderly sisters, one blind, the other deaf, is funny and oddly disturbing. In and of itself, this pair could serve as an example for common ailments accompanying old age, however there is more. The choice of their worn and secluded house over the apparently normal living space speaks to different levels of contentment, which most readers could perceive of as a sad way of life, yet the sisters are more content to return to their previous lifestyle than before they left for the Home. Or perhaps just the irony of living in a home that was supposed to comfort them ...for the rest of their lives(Freeman 242), but which affords them none of the comforts they desire is grotesque enough within the story, but there is also a deeper underlying commentary that relates to the full story, and that is the issue of value-recognition from outside and within.
Before the Shattuck sisters begrudgingly agreed to move into the Home, it is fairly safe to say that though the sisters were self-conscious, they hardly felt the need to deny their personal choices and ways of life to Others, until Mrs. Simonds meddled in their affairs in the supposed name of committing a good deed. However, implicit in Mrs. Simondss offer for a comfortable life in the Home is her personal evaluation that their lifestyle was not comfortable. Mrs. Simonds, then, is an outsider, who came in to examine the Shattuck sisters and found that they were not living a lifestyle she would deem normal. Embodying the Foucaults carceral system of control, a minister is also brought in to convince the sisters that their way of life is abnormal and that they should try living a comfortable and normal lifestyle. This has the effect of isolating the sisters as a pair, but the argument that succeeded in gaining the sisters compliance was to Harriet, arguing that Charlotte would be so much more comfortable(Freeman 243). This tactical maneuver, divide and concur, leads both sisters to agree that perhaps they are abnormal to a degree, and that in order to help each other, they should agree to try out the Home.
After realizing that the Home is less ideal than their original home and escape, the ride with the man in the wagon indicates a dual-truth. The first truth is that to be normal for the sisters is undesirable if normality is based on someone elses definition. The second truth, which relates to the mans purpose in the story, having been designated abnormal by Others, they must lie to them or are ... forced to concede that the world is right in judging [them] diseased and contemptible(McElroy 28). The Sisters, then (like Ruth Hall, who chooses her potentially uncertain career over the opportunity to marry a wealthy southerner) explicitly reject ...the reassumption of protection(Harris 124) and opt instead for the worldly struggle. In this story, the implicit criticism of 19th century mores is that a females concept of normalcy should be dictated by outside sources, so long as they are satisfied. As a close reading of Old Woman Magoun will lend support, the dominance of patriarchy is perhaps the 19th century womans greatest oppressor.
Old Woman Magoun begins by explaining how Old Woman Magoun initiated the building of a bridge across Barrys Ford. Old Woman Magoun is capable of intimidating most men in the town of Barry, except Nelson Barry, the father of Old Woman Magouns granddaughter Lily. Lily, at fourteen years of age is an innocent and beautiful girl, who still carries a doll and has learned everything she knew from Old Woman Magoun. Although Old Woman Magoun has never allowed Lily to go to the store before, Sally Jinks convinces Old Woman Magoun that Lily should go to the store. On Lilys way through the woods alone, Lily meets Jim Willis and he holds her hand and later wins her through a card-game with her father, who has previously taken no interest in her life.
Lily returns from the store with salt for her grandmother, her doll, and a package of candy from her father, which infuriates Old Woman Magoun and sends her into a panic. This appears to be long expected and, after serving a meal as a reward for the completion of the bridge, Nelson Barry visits Old Woman Magoun, giving her a week to give Lily to his care, although Old Woman Magoun has discovered that she will end up with Jim Willis because of the card-game. Following this scene, Old Woman Magoun and Lily arise early and walk three miles to Greenham, passing a bush of deadly nightshade. Old Woman Magoun visits Lawyer Mason and his wife in the hopes that they will adopt Lily, thus sparing Lily her fate at the hands of her father and Jim Willis, but the offer is declined. While Lily waits, Mrs. Mason gives Lily cake, a sour apple, and milk, which Lily happily accepts. This time Old Woman Magoun and Lily stop at the nightshade bush, and while the grandmother is off in the distance, Lily unwittingly eats the nightshade, which Old Woman Magoun most likely planned. After Lily and Old Woman Magoun arrive home, Lily explains that shes sick from drinking milk and eating and eating a sour apple. Lily slowly and painfully dies, while Old Woman Magoun spoke from the depths of her soul, where she envisions an utopian afterlife for Lily. Barry Nelson comes with Jim Willis only to find that Lily is breathing her last breaths. Old Woman Magoun continues to live as she had before, but people said she was a trifle touched, since every time she went over the log bridge with her eggs or her garden vegetables to sell in Greenham, she carried with her, as one might have carried an infant, Lilys old rag doll.
There are three distinct aspects of grotesqueness at work within the text of Old Woman Magoun. The first grotesque feature is the blatant gender differentiation within Old Woman Magoun. For instance, there remains an eerily sinister tone based on word-choice when Old Woman Magoun is looking at Nelson Barry during the interview about Lilys custodianship: She stood there and looked at him as she might have looked at a rebellious animal which she was trying to tame. The man laughed. The definitive article of the mancoupled with the generalizing of a specific person, him in the previous sentence, seems to generalize Barry Nelson into only an example of a male. Note that the the man laughed, could easily have been substituted for a less explicit reference to Barrys gender, simply by stating instead that he laughed. In a way, Freeman uses this tone, and similar references to gender, in order to in order to dehumanize men within the text.
The second grotesque aspect of Old Woman Magoun is the dialogue between Old Woman Magoun and Lily, as Lily is dying, and that Lilys dead mother was very sick once from eating them. In the dialogue between Old Woman Magoun and Lily, Old Woman Magoun fantasizes that Lily will go to a place where ... all the dolls are alive, and that dolls like yours can run, and talk, and love you back again. This is also a place, Old Woman Magoun asserts, where Lily will ... find [her] mother, and she will take [Lily] home where [Lily is] going to live. This scene, where Old Woman Magoun knows without a doubt that Lily is going to die and connects it with her mother could be touching, if it werent for the uncanniness of Lilys dead mothers sickness, with the circumstances of Lilys. Also, the image of the doll, if it was inherited by Lily from her late mother, adds yet another possible morbid twist to the tale.
The final grotesque feature of Freemans Old Woman Magoun, is the dementia after Lilys death which affects Old Woman Magoun. After Old Woman Magoun most likely killed Lily by allowing her to eat the nightshade, Old Woman Magoun carries around Lilys doll whenever she crosses the log bridge to Greenham. The humorous and terrifying aspect of an old woman carrying her dead granddaughters doll is striking. The contrast between age and action, or the potential ambivalence about whether Old Woman Magoun believes that the doll is animate or not, remain unresolved. The possibility that Old Woman Magoun had been demented before any of the story the narrator tells us is also unknown. Could it be that Old Woman Magoun was jealous of her daughters and granddaughters youth, and that she killed both of them to reclaim what was once her doll? Is it possible that Old Woman Magoun killed her daughter and granddaughter in order to preserve their youth, and that the doll is her demented representation of either or both of them as still young? The text wont allow for any definitive answers, but it does offer implications about what and who 19th century women should fear.
The setup of Old Woman Magoun emphasizes the masculine gender in a negative light. Frequently, Old Woman Magoun comments to her female companions men is different, or something similarly deprecatory. Lawyer Mason wont allow his wife to adopt Lily, although the text implies that she may be interested, as she states she is a beautiful little girl. Finally, in Old Woman Magouns version of heaven, there are no men. The only man referenced in relation to Old Woman Magouns image of the afterlife is Lilys grandpa, and that is solely in reference to the gold color of Old Woman Magouns wedding band, but Old Woman Magoun wont acknowledge him, but only the quality of the color. Lily asks about the color gold Like the ring grandpa gave you?..., to which she replies: Yes, gold like that.
The effect of the grotesque ... can best be summed up as alienation(Thomson 59). Is it any wonder then, that regarding the writing of these short stories that the narrator chosen is the limited third person omniscient? Mary Wilkins Freeman consciously utilizes the grotesque in order to deflect a reading public from empathizing with figures that some readers may not fully be capable of relating to. Understanding that women in the 19th and early twentieth century are striving to recognize their worth through literature, Freeman creates these short-stories to place female grotesque characters in a monstrous world, which indicates the obstacles women readers must overcome in order to actualize themselves as integral individuals.
Bibliography:
McElroy, Bernard. Fiction of the Modern Grotesque. St Martins, NY: 1989.
Thomson, Phillip. The Grotesque. Methuen, London: 1972.
Harris, Susan K. 19th-Century American womens Novels: Interpretive Strategies. Cambridge, NY: 1992.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Vintage, NY: 1995.
Freeman, Mary E. W. A Humble Romance and Other Stories. NY: 1915.
http://home.attbi.com/~mewf_short_stories/OldWomanMagoun.htm





, Ian