Untimely Freeman

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s oeuvre has been historicized, and rightly so, but Freeman’s texts also resonate with our present. This chapter stakes out a third position between the injunction to only historicize and the pitfalls of presentism. It reads Freeman as untimely, that is, it opens up her texts to “unforeclosed possibilities” that have since her time come to pass, or not. The chapter focuses on two of her turn-of-the century collections of animal and plant stories, Understudies (1901) and Six Trees (1903) and reads them as Freeman’s testing ground for what today we would characterize as a radical critique of the ontological divide between nature and culture (Descola) and an audacious move towards alternative forms of kinships and queer assemblages (Haraway’s “oddkins”) across species. Not only does her fiction – as fiction – partly strip humans of their hegemony as social—and narrative—agents; it also sidesteps our ingrained anthropological dualisms without always eroding the boundaries between species. Freeman’s late stories do not bring us backto a pre-modern episteme nor projects us into a desirable utopia; they “speak back” to us from a present that is not ours yet uncannily continuous with it. Their contemporaneousness is a shared productive dischrony.