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Reading Mary Wilkins Freeman Anew: Race and Queer Ecologies
The European Study Group of Nineteenth-Century American Literature will hold its annual meeting “Freeman in Paris” at Université Paris Cité, from September 30 to October 1, 2022.
The study group convenes each year in a different European country to discuss (formally and informally) little known nineteenth-century texts with a view to expanding our perspective on 19th US literature. The study group finds its strength in its mix of European scholars from different backgrounds and at various stages in their careers. The format allows for various approaches, from academic papers, group discussions, and interventions from Master students across different universities (this year: Université Paris Cité, Université Bretagne Sud, and Université Bordeaux Montaigne).
This year the group will step into Mary Wilkins Freeman’s world of New England against the backdrop of Paris, a city she visited. The focus will be on race and queer ecologies and we will be reading two of Freeman’s lesser studied works: her play, Giles Corey, a Yeoman, and Understudies, a 1901 collection of stories.
The European Study Group of Nineteenth-Century American Literature will hold its annual meeting “Freeman in Paris” at Université Paris Cité, from September 30 to October 1, 2022.
The study group convenes each year in a different European country to discuss (formally and informally) little known nineteenth-century texts with a view to expanding our perspective on 19th US literature. The study group finds its strength in its mix of European scholars from different backgrounds and at various stages in their careers. The format allows for various approaches, from academic papers, group discussions, and interventions from Master students across different universities (this year: Université Paris Cité, Université Bretagne Sud, and Université Bordeaux Montaigne).
This year the group will step into Mary Wilkins Freeman’s world of New England against the backdrop of Paris, a city she visited. The focus will be on race and queer ecologies and we will be reading two of Freeman’s lesser studied works: her play, Giles Corey, a Yeoman, and Understudies, a 1901 collection of stories.
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Works under study Giles Corey, Yeoman, A Play (1893) The group has the honor to invite J. Samaine Lockwood as a keynote speaker with a paper entitled “Colonial Past, White Feminist Future: Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Giles Corey, Yeoman.” Giles Corey, Yeoman, A Play—published in 1893—depicts the Salem witch trials, and the fate of those who were accused of witchcraft by their own neighbors in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. The play is a powerful indictment of the ways in which collective hysteria and misplaced power can triumph over reason. Giles Corey gives its characters a personality and thus an autonomy that official documents, almost lost to history, fail to offer. |
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Understudies (1901)
The group will also be discussing Freeman’s Understudies (1901), a little studied (under-studied) collection of stories. Published in 1901, about the time Freeman married and moved to Metuchen, NJ, it has long been considered as a “late Freeman” production and, therefore, less valuable, less compelling, than her more famous “regionalist” tales, such as “A New England Nun” or “A Humble Romance”, the eponymous titles of her two most well known collections published in 1891 and 1887. The collection comprises twelve tales, half of them focused on an animal, half of them on a plant. Recently, Understudies has drawn the attention of some critics interested in ecocriticism, ecofeminism, queer ecology (Susan Grifffin, Stacy Alaimo, Susan Stone, Elizabeth Young). Reading Understudies, the reader recognizes the Freeman they know - a lover of “nature,” influenced by Transcendentalism, a wonderful story-teller with a taste for the Gothic and the weird, a provocative gender bender. But Understudies also point to a less familiar Freeman, a scrutinizer of the relationships between the human and the non-human, challenging the divide between men, women and trees, reconsidering the Victorian association of women and flowers, or men and animals. The collection is funny, dark, unsettling, and definitely worth reading as a group. |
