Reading Freeman Again, Anew

This introduction explores the history of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s reception from the end of the nineteenth century to today’s post-recovery critical approaches. Acknowledging various critical turns, from the emphasis on a women’s ethics of care to a focus on female rebellion, the introduction proposes that women’s power in her work involves the same contradictions and abuse of boundaries that any kind of power entails. The introduction then moves to more recent and unexpected ways of reading Freeman, emphasizing the fetish, the Gothic, even the criminal. Freeman is political: labor-capital relations in her work should receive more attention. But Freeman’s social awareness, important as it is, should not be decoupled from racial anxiety. Reading Freeman at the intersection of questions of gender, class and ethnic identity is important. Her critical regionalism speaks back to us when reassessed from the perspectives of queer historicism and queer ecology, and if she sometimes wrote to formula, a renewed attention to her aesthetic choices, well after the turn of the century, is needed. Her oeuvre might productively be read against the periodization that has relegated late (married) Freeman to oblivion, beyond regionalism and in conversation with world literature.