마녀의 해방—<뉴잉글랜드의 수녀>에 나타난 뉴잉글랜드 지역주의
Witch Unbound: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s New England Regionalism in “A New England Nun”
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“A New England Nun” is considered Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s most representative work. Though she wrote numerous short stories, this one particularly serves as a marker of how scholarly views of Freeman’s literary disposition have been formulated. Freeman first earned her reputation as one of the bestselling female local-color writers who dominated the American literary market in the latter half of the 19th century. But she was soon forgotten during the burgeoning American literary scholarship in the early twentieth century that eventually constructed a white-male-centered canon of national literature. Freeman was rescued out of obscurity and included in the tradition of women’s literature by feminist critics in the 1980s and ’90s. Since then, Freeman has been a household name of proto-feminist scholarship by virtue of her portrayal of unmarried or widowed women’s quiet yet radical pursuit of independence and freedom despite the patriarchal surroundings of hyper-conservative New England rural areas. Feminist critics contend that they have rediscovered her significance by means of so-called ‘literary regionalism,’ which proposes that 19th-century American women writers created an alternative ‘region’ of women’s own apart from androcentric society. That criticism is supposed to be a backlash against earlier dismissal of Freeman’s work as too localized, too domestic, and thus too feminine. However, it commits one and the same misunderstanding as local-color criticism of Freeman’s authorial intention, which in fact attempts to combine the local and the feminine and suggest her own regionalism. This essay aims to prove that intention by reading “A New England Nun” anew as a story of the ‘New England witch,’ which was an extremely popular literary icon throughout the 19th century that functioned to contain the undesirable—that is, un-Protestant and un-patriarchal—aspects of America and label them as the nation’s long-gone past. Such reading will help us comprehend Freeman’s keen perception of the much more complex and dynamic realities of New England at the time that were full of energies to lead the modernization of the relationship between individuality and community as well as locality and nationality.
Abstract
“A New England Nun” is considered Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s most representative work. Though she wrote numerous short stories, this one particularly serves as a marker of how scholarly views of Freeman’s literary disposition have been formulated. Freeman first earned her reputation as one of the bestselling female local-color writers who dominated the American literary market in the latter half of the 19th century. But she was soon forgotten during the burgeoning American literary scholarship in the early twentieth century that eventually constructed a white-male-centered canon of national literature. Freeman was rescued out of obscurity and included in the tradition of women’s literature by feminist critics in the 1980s and ’90s. Since then, Freeman has been a household name of proto-feminist scholarship by virtue of her portrayal of unmarried or widowed women’s quiet yet radical pursuit of independence and freedom despite the patriarchal surroundings of hyper-conservative New England rural areas. Feminist critics contend that they have rediscovered her significance by means of so-called ‘literary regionalism,’ which proposes that 19th-century American women writers created an alternative ‘region’ of women’s own apart from androcentric society. That criticism is supposed to be a backlash against earlier dismissal of Freeman’s work as too localized, too domestic, and thus too feminine. However, it commits one and the same misunderstanding as local-color criticism of Freeman’s authorial intention, which in fact attempts to combine the local and the feminine and suggest her own regionalism. This essay aims to prove that intention by reading “A New England Nun” anew as a story of the ‘New England witch,’ which was an extremely popular literary icon throughout the 19th century that functioned to contain the undesirable—that is, un-Protestant and un-patriarchal—aspects of America and label them as the nation’s long-gone past. Such reading will help us comprehend Freeman’s keen perception of the much more complex and dynamic realities of New England at the time that were full of energies to lead the modernization of the relationship between individuality and community as well as locality and nationality.
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