SOURCE: “Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and the Tree of Knowledge,” in New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition, Frederick Ungar, 1983, pp. 119–51.

In the following excerpt, Donovan surveys the various mother-daughter relationships and strong female characters in Freeman's short stories.

Something is dying in the fictional world of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. A way of life—the woman-centered, matriarchal world of the Victorians—is in its last throes. The preindustrial values of that world, female-identified and ecologically holistic, are going down to defeat before the imperialism of masculine technology and patriarchal institutions. In Sarah Orne Jewett's vision the world of the mothers holds its own against the historical forces that impend its demise. With Mary E. Wilkins Freeman the mothers are taking a last stand, going down to apparently inevitable defeat. The hopelessness of their prospect drives many of them to a kind of obsessive protectiveness of their...