The Loophole of Retreat

In Harriet Jacob’s narrative, we see the author’s justification and definition of what seems to establish thinking as a kind of masochistic self-imposed imprisonment. In many feminist works we see the issue of imprisonment, not necessarily of the female body, but of the mind. Virginia Woolf further illiterates the significance of the room or space in which women need to further their thought processes for writing and creating. For Linda, her imprisonment is both representative of the physical and psychological confinement of women from a slightly wider perspective—one that gives us the point of view from a loophole of retreat. The loophole of retreat is a metaphor for slavery. The establishment of slavery—with its degradation and oppressiveness of the human psyche—is paralleled with the oppression of women, with its limitations and restrictions of the female soul and mind. Since Linda is a black woman, both her color and her gender are avenues for self-imprisonment. Dr. Flint represents the masochistic tyranny from which women like Linda are forced to go into hiding. Linda has escaped from the slavery of the white man, but she must self-imprison herself in order to maintain freedom. The transcending confinement of women, from one cage to another, demonstrates that women’s struggle for liberation seems an endless fight. Yet, women draw power from these dark and confined places, and use these “retreats” to harbor creative forces against the oppression of men.

DESIRE in Morte Darthur, Dr. Faustus and Twelfth Night

Desire is a powerful motivator for many characters in literary works. Desire is full of passion, want, need and self-satisfaction. All humans have some form of desire, whether it be for money, knowledge, fame or another individual. But, as seen in the following characters, though some may be able to keep their personal desires under control, many cannot.

In Malory’s Morte Darthur, the character of Lancelot allows his desire for another man’s wife to cloud his judgment and ultimately lead to the ruin of King Arthur’s kingdom and the finale of the Knights of the Round Table. When Lancelot goes to Queen Guinevere’s private quarters while King Arthur is away, he is risking his friendship with the Arthur and the respect of the other knights when he makes that decision. Desire can drive a man (or woman) to do things that they would not normally do. However, in Lancelot’s case, his strong desire for Guinevere ends up with both lovers dead and many other people hurt from their selfish actions.

In Doctor Faustus by Marlowe, Dr. Faustus is shown to be a man who has a strong desire for knowledge. However, this desire is not one that will lead him closer to theology or God, but away from religion and towards the supernatural and magical. Dr. Faustus’ desire is very obsessive, as he shows that he is willing to give his soul to the devil in order to obtain his ultimate desire. His desire is also selfish and prideful, as seen when he boasts to his friends and seeks their appraisal in hopes of gaining great prestige. But Dr. Faustus’ desire is also tainted with wrong reasons and he too pays for his greed in the end.

Also, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night there is much desire for love between many of the characters. For instance, Orsino’s desire for Olivia seems very passionate and heartfelt. His declarations of love for her are compared to no other and his desire almost turns into a kind of melancholy longing. However, desire is shown to be erratic and distorted, because it turns out that Orsino’s desire really belongs to his true love Viola. So again, desire proves to be short lived if it is aimed at the wrong target, but very satisfying in the end if the right person comes along.
In the scenarios mentioned above, desire turns out to be somewhat disastrous, even fatal. This proves that desire has many faces and is not guaranteed to end “happily ever after” for many. More often than not, these characters’ desires are out of control, proving that desire that is left unrestrained can bring about a world of problems.

Mad Voices...Continued Part II

Dickinson’s poem “435”, which beings “Much Madness is divinest Sense”, speaks for the hidden and oppressed literary genius of women. Dickinson was considered deeply emotional and hypersensitive to the outside world. It troubled her so that she assigns herself to an incurable illness and lives the rest of her life in isolation. Phoebe Pettingell further elaborates on Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist theory of madwomen in the attic and the female authors who write about them, asserting that “the American poet Emily Dickinson, a devout admirer of these female English novelists, was so impressed by the figure of the madwoman in the attic that she decided to take the role upon herself. Dressed ever in white, she kept to her room, writing "half-cracked" notes or poems to people she refused to see. This persona was deliberately cultivated, Gilbert and Gubar insist, because so long as she knew that others thought her crazy, she did not need to worry about the unorthodoxy of her verse; madness was a pose that gave her artistic freedom”. Dickinson’s poem declares that what seems “Much Madness” is actually the most “divinest Sense”. Those with a “discerning Eye” are those that understand the plight of the woman who feels imprisoned by her own society and can see the reality of the oppression of the creative soul and mind that yearns for freedom. Gilbert and Gubar define this “double bind” as the woman poet’s dilemma “on the one hand, the necessity of self-assertion for a woman, on the other hand, the necessity of self-assertion for a poet”. Dickinson includes the “double bind” of women in this poem. In the face of the majority, which is unidentifiably male, the woman must either “assent” and be sane or “demure” and be mad. Either case is defined by a “Chain”—locked in the grip of society’s expectations or in the chains of an insane asylum.

Dickinson understood the power of the pen. For many women, writing kept them alive and kept them from going completely mad inside their inescapable homes. The threat of total madness is thwarted by the refuge found in authorship and writing to free the mind and spirit. In her poetry, Dickinson explores the anxiety of authorship that many women felt in attempting to write and the affliction of disease, quarantine and elusiveness that plagues their writing. In the poem “A Word dropped careless on a Page,” Dickinson alludes to “what literary women have hidden or disguised,” that is the “story of the woman writer’s quest for her own story” (Gilbert and Gubar). The poem speaks of the effortless delivery of a single word, which does not apply to women writers, because they struggle to even pick up the pen. The reference is to the words of powerful male writers, the “Wrinkled Maker”, whose stimulating language tells lies of the female sex. The effortless power of male authorship has a great impact on the literary world, creating a masculine mold that all writing must fit. Dickinson claims this patriarchal bias in literary culture is responsible for the breeding of infectious sentences in women’s writing. The poem states, “Infection in the sentence breeds / We may inhale Despair / At distances of Centuries / From the Malaria—” (“A Word”). Gilbert and Gubar claim that “to heal herself, […] the woman writer must exorcise the sentences which bred her infection in the first place; she must overtly or covertly free herself of the despair she inhaled from some “Wrinkled Maker”. Dickinson predicts the devastating effects of the spread of disease in women’s writing, ultimately ending in despair. However, in order for women to finally rid themselves of the disease of secrecy and concealment, the infectious fear of authorship and authority, she must incorporate the realities of her experiences into her texts and live through her stories.

In Dickinson’s poem “613”, the foreshadowing of women’s liberation in writing is expressed with declaration and pride. The poem, written in 1862 by Dickinson, states:

They shut me up in Prose—
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet—Because they like me "still"—
Still! Could themself have peeped—
And seen my Brain—go round—
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason—in the Pound—
Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Abolish his Captivity—
And laugh—No more have I— (1-12)

The female voice in the poem declares that no longer will the female writer be forced to remain silent in the limited confines of “womanly” subjects that keep her childlike, innocent, and immobile. The poem gives voice to the “captive” predicament of the female artist, who has always struggled to release her voice and show the genius trapped in the brain labeled with madness. The tone of the poem is rebellious, fighting against the constraints of “stillness” so inbred through the societal expectations of the quiet, well-mannered, submissive female of the nineteenth century. This rebelliousness will not be underestimated or quieted, just as it is impossible to capture the spirit of a bird, so too the woman’s will to be free from “the Pound” may trap her corporeal body, but the recesses of her mind are untouchable and unchainable. Emily Dickinson’s poetry provides the madwoman in the attic with a powerful voice that speaks for the oppression of all female artists and writers. From the confines of her own home, Dickinson’s infected sentences stem from a place of feminine power and creativity that was often dictated by male influence, turning palsied verses into blatant manifestos. Her poetry resonates within the plight female authors to use their so called weakness as powerful expressions of identity and the self.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 2000. Print.

Mad Voices and Infected Sentences in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

Emily Dickinson is known for being the “gentle spinster”, the recluse, the poetic genius and the mad woman in the attic. Throughout her poetry, Dickinson manages a number of complex themes that speak for the silent voices of women of the nineteenth century and previous. Franz Wright claims, “..It's a commonplace that women had endured artistic isolation as an age-old norm, possessing neither models nor the incentive of a public forum or stage that would make possible taking themselves seriously”. However, what makes Dickinson stand out from her female contemporaries is the fact that she actually became the woman in the attic. However, for Dickinson, the confines of the home and its isolation become a breeding ground for feminine power and creativity. Dickinson’s poetry subtly implies those issues for all women yearning for the freedom and power to express themselves in a way that was only available for men. Themes of isolation, concealment, repression and desire for artistic and individual independence in Dickinson’s poetry become a feminist anthem for the starving artist in women over the centuries.

Dickinson’s phobia and hypersensitivity to the harshness and reality of the outside world reflects a more universal notion of women’s struggle to overcome their own phobias of their inner potential to be writers in comparison to the Dickens and the Hawthornes. According to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Those women who were among the first of their sex to attempt the pen were evidently infected or sickened by just the feelings of self-doubt, inadequacy, and inferiority that their education in “femininity” almost seems to have been designed to induce”. Dickinson denounces the conception of male intimidation and the patriarchal “requirements” women have been forced to meet. In her poems, the mad woman “enacts the part of a defiant childwoman who resents her tyrannical husband/father and longs to be delivered from his fierce Requirements” (Gilbert and Gubar). Women are forced to leave behind and abandon the things that represent her past life, her childhood, once she enters marriage. Dickinson’s poem “732”, presents an image of a young woman, so young perhaps she still holds in her possession the prized dolls of her girlhood, who must now “drop” these insignificant “Playthings” to embark on more important responsibilities of being a wife, which makes her a real woman. Gilbert and Gubar note that in this poem specifically, Dickinson “understood the social requirements, masquerading as cosmic laws, which obliged every woman in some sense to enact the role of Nobody. Her accurate perceptions are expressed in various poems and letters devoted to what she ironically described as ‘the honorable Work’ of women”. Though Dickinson never indulged in the physical toils of life, instead enjoying a sequestered, private life, she manages to give a voice to the plight of all women, privileged or impoverished. Dickinson speaks for the female artist, poet and genius whose work was considered by male counterparts hypersensitive, overly Romantic and passionate. In her own poetry, Dickinson portrays a persona that is not herself, but a supposed self that adheres to an artifice or predominate male construct, what feminist critics essentially claim is a diseased feminine authorship.

The playthings are named in the following stanza as things like “Amplitude” and “Awe”, which harbor imaginative and creative power, yet “lay unmentioned” at the bottom of the sea. According to Dickinson, such abandoned playthings that the woman now misses in her new role as wife are not completely lost, but are “absolute necessities” that “silently produces pearl and weed, though such objects (like poems in a bureau drawer) are secrets known only to the strong, assertively masculine part of the woman that must be called Himself in a patriarchal culture” (Gilbert and Gubar). In totality, the poem comments on the double life women must lead in order to endure societal standards as well as keep alive the passionate, artistic soul within. Women must take on women’s work, yet many, like Dickinson, struggle to throw away their playthings for the more “womanly” toys, like irons, pots and children, the “real” dolls.

In Dickinson’s poem “579”, through the use of stark metaphor the natural sensation of hunger combined with a quench for possession finally reaches an awareness and appreciation for a long, painful absence. Dickinson’s tone is vexed and yearnful, and the object of desire seems ambiguous, hidden beneath the meaning of her diction. The speaker of the poem can be identified as a female who hungers for something that will satisfy her desire for knowledge. The sense of lacking or poverty in this poem carries a foreboding presence. The hunger that Dickinson refers to stands for more than a lack of food, but a lack of the substances that artistic women need for livelihood. This hunger that the speaker mentions has existed for her a long time, perhaps even over centuries of women: “I had been hungry all the years.” She describes the experience of having “looked”, “seen” or “touched” the bread and wine, both religiously symbolic of the flesh and blood of Christ, but never having eaten it. The second line states, “My Noon had Come—to dine— / I trembling drew the Table near— / And touched the Curious Wine” (2-4). Dickinson seems to use the word “Noon” as symbolic for a timeless moment; the hour that stood apart from everything and everyone else. The use of a possessive noun, my noon, places the speaker in a momentary time-freeze where she, “trembling”, draws near to a table with food. Having been barred from the pleasure of eating, the pleasure of writing and being a part of the literary world, the woman trembles with weakness and anxiety once she approaches what was once only available to men. It is now the woman’s time to eat, to take possession, but since there has been an absence for so long, there is apprehension. Noon is a time when the mid-day meal is eaten, and it is at this time that the speaker must face her hunger.

In stanza three, the speaker’s consciousness has somewhat shifted to a current revelation of something previously not known. She says, “I did not know the ample Bread— / ‘Twas so unlike the Crumb” (9-10). The speaker is curious about self-fulfillment and self-satisfaction as they approach the source. The ample, or abundantly satisfying, bread is contrasted to the mere crumb. The speaker now knows, after having previously been unaware, of the vast amount of knowledge that there was to possess. Dickinson relishes in the realization that the areas of interest, the subjects for study and knowledge to be gained for her sex are much more ample than the crumbs women were used to—the subjects of cooking, sewing, and other domestic duties. As Gilbert and Gubar state, “What the lives and lines and choices of all these women tell us, in short, is that the literary woman has always faced equally degrading options when she had to define her public presence in the world. If she did not suppress her work entirely or publish it pseudonymously or anonymously, she could modestly confess her female ‘limitations’ and concentrate on the ‘lesser’ subjects reserved for ladies as becoming to their inferior powers”. Women had been isolated from a reality of possession, of knowing the satisfaction and fulfillment of being free to write and express themselves without constraint. Now, the speaker’s “trembling” indicates a physical state of astonishment and apprehension to this new found knowledge.

*Continued...see Part II

Tragedy in Morte Darthur

The Tragedy of War

One specific passage from Morte Darthur indicates Malory’s attitude about war: “And never since was there never seen a more dolefuller battle in no Christian land, for there was but rushing and riding, foining and striking; and many a grim word was there spoken of either to other, and many a deadly stroke”. This brief remark by the narrator indicates a deep sense of contemplation and remorse about warfare and the affect it has own its participants. Obviously, themes of war, death and revenge are present in Malory’s work and reflect his own time, in which England was divided in the War of the Roses. There are a few incidents of accidental killing that seem to be Malory’s way of expressing the horror of innocent bloodshed and moral devastation of war.

Sir Gawain’s Divided Loyalty

I think that more than any other character in Morte Darthur, Sir Gawain appears to be the one who struggles the most with his loyalty to the crown and his love for his brothers in the knighthood. Sir Gawain is put in the most difficult position possible for a man: he must choose between two of his friends whom he loves. His loyalty is different towards the two—he has obligations to serve King Arthur, but his devotion to Lancelot is by way of their bond through knighthood and honoring the chivalric code. At first, Sir Gawain refuses to admit that Lancelot is sleeping with the queen, but once his brothers are killed he pledges revenge. However, we see that Sir Gawain has all along been struggling to keep Lancelot in his favor when the footnotes mention that at Gawain’s death he repents for insisting that Arthur fight Lancelot and writes a letter to Lancelot asking him to help the king fight against Modred’s attack.

Similarities of the Chivalric Code

The chivalric code honors justice, loyalty, courage, faith, courtesy, humility, piety and nobility. These virtues are clear in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but they are also preserved in Morte Darthur. Just to highlight a few: a sense of courtesy is seen when Sir Gawain refuses to take part in the burning of Queen Guinevere. Though the custom during that time was to burn adulteresses on the stake, Sir Gawain’s courtesy towards women will not allow him to ethically engage in putting Guinevere to death. We also see courage when Lancelot comes to the queen’s rescue as her knight in shining armor and saves her life. Finally, we see Arthur and Gawain’s attempt at justice for the innocent deaths of Sir Gaheris and Gareth by Lancelot.

Imagination at Work in Shakespeare's 12th Night

When Feste disguises himself as Sir Topas in order to fool an imprisoned Malvolio, the humor of the play takes a darker turn. One may wonder why Feste bothers with a disguise if Malvolio cannot see him. Often, Shakespeare emphasizes how characters depend on what they perceive through their eyes, which influences what they think or believe. Disguises come in handy for most characters to change character and fool others. However, Malvolio is void of sight, yet Feste is still able to make him believe that he is Sir Topas the priest. Characters are aware of how words and the eye can mislead and stir up imagination of the mind. Imagination becomes the mind’s eye. In Twelfth Night, imagination is often affected by the illusiveness and unpredictability of language, the sense of sight and the act of disguise.

Viola tells the Captain, “I believe thou hast a mind that suits with this thy fair and outward character (1.2.46-47). She is trusting that the Captain is as true on the inside as he appears on the outside, but she cannot be certain of this. When Malvolio reads the fake love letter, Fabian remarks, “Look how imagination / blows him” (2.5.37-38). Ironically, Malvolio says to himself, “I do not fool myself, to let imagination / jade me” (2.5.143-44). Characters speak of imagination as being unreliable and deceptive.

Sight is important in feeding the imagination, and characters find the benefit of using disguise to change their outward appearance. As if a forewarning, Feste makes mention that “nothing that is so, is so”, illustrating the illusive nature of the play and the tricks that can be played on the mind (4.1.7). Even Sebastian beseeches the mind’s eye to work its power: “Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep” (4.1.58). In Sebastian’s situation, he has never seen Olivia before, yet she continues to make romantic advances toward him, because she thinks he is Cesario. Sebastian thinks to himself that this must all be a part of his fancy or imagination, and if it is, he secretly wishes that it will last forever. Sebastian’s statement proves that imagination can have a strong influence over what a character is lead to believe, even though in this case events end happily.

In Act 5, when Feste disguises himself as Sir Topas, the lack of sight puts a darker spin on imagination at work. Malvolio is locked in complete darkness and cannot see Feste’s disguise at all. Feste asks Malvolio, “Alas, sir, how fell you besides your five wits?,” to which Malvolio responds, “Fool, there was never man so notoriously abused” (4.2.79-80). The footnotes mention that the five wits include imagination. So the emphasis is no longer on sight, but on the variability of language and behavior to influence the imagination. Feste must put on a perfect act, as both a priest and a fool, to a totally blind spectator. This act shows that imagination can still be deceived without sight or the benefit of disguise. Malvolio only imagines that there is a fool and a priest outside his room. He relies on his hearing instead, so the lack of sight here proves that even a good disguise is nothing without the ability to use language to fool the mind and stir imaginations.

Natural Imagery as Female Sexual Symbolism in Jewett’s “Heron” and Freeman’s “Nun”

Sylvia is the main protagonist in the short story “A White Heron” by Sarah Orne Jewett. Sylvia is only nine years old and lives on her Grandmother’s farm in the country. Sylvia is a complex character psychologically and emotionally for her age. The story reveals the complexity of a young girl maturing into a woman. Under the influence of Jewett’s regionalist writing, Sylvia’s character is more three-dimensional and sentimental, revealing layers of her personality through nature imagery and sexual symbolism in her surroundings and relationships. Likewise, in Mary E. Freeman’s “A New England Nun,” the domestic imagery symbolizes a more significant meaning of sexual escape from the burdens of marriage that threaten Louisa Ellis’ artistic haven in which her selfhood is housed. For many women of Louisa’s time period, autonomy came only with the denial of sexual pleasure, just like a nun’s life. Jewett’s short story can be compared Freeman’s in terms of women’s bond with their natural surroundings and how its imagery marks the emergence of their sexual freedom in a male dominated society.

There is a wide array of nature imagery in “Heron” that symbolize the coming of age of Sylvia and how she decides to be a woman of nature rather than a woman of society. Trees are abundant throughout the story, especially the pine tree. Sylvia climbs one large pine tree to see the white heron's nesting place in total isolation and from the point of view that is secret and safe. Paula Blanchard says that the “lofty old pine of ‘A White Heron’ [is] widely interpreted as a phallic symbol” (234) itself where nature’s presence is “a symbol for human psychological states and a character in its own right” (242). Sylvia cherishes the isolation and seclusion of the woods and the secret location of the white heron’s nest, which the hunter seeks so desperately. The mythical significance of the tree seems to be its role as a bridge for Sylvia, connecting her to the woodlands and to the sky where birds reign. She does express a wish to fly like the birds: “…and Sylvia felt as if she too could go flying away among the clouds” (Jewett 816). The landscape is described beyond the confines of those woods as an endless expanse of nature’s beauty, where “westward, the woodlands and farms reached miles and miles into the distance; here and there were church steeples, and white villages, truly it was a vast and awesome world!” (Jewett 816). According to Blanchard, in the story “nature is a powerful and seductive protagonist. It has claimed Sylvia long before the hunter appears and literally given her life” (242). By climbing the great pine tree Sylvia comes very close to the act of flying as a human without wings. Along with the story’s theme of "growing up", the climbing of a tree symbolizes that the climber is transitioning from one stage of life into another. Sylvia’s transformation in nature from a girl into a woman marks her sexual awareness and maturity.

Bird imagery is probably the most obvious and symbolic in the “Heron.” As Sylvia brings the stray cow home again, she communes with the birds and their world by “listen[ing] to the thrushes with a heart that beat fast with pleasure” (Jewett 812). Sylvia is suddenly jolted back into the other world, where men prowl, when she hears the whistle, “not a bird’s-whistle, which would have a sort of friendliness, but a boy’s whistle” (812). Sylvia thinks that the “enemy” has discovered her and only after much apprehension and caution does she begin to like the tall young man who is a bird hunter. Later in the story, Sylvia seems to morph into a bird herself when she climbs the pine tree observing the heron’s nest before she makes her final decision whether to unveil the secret she and nature share with the hunter. Richard Cary remarks on Jewett’s character’s strong bond with nature, claiming that they are often “endowed with such ingenuous sensitivity to the moods and meanings of nature that they appear absolutely at one with landscape and weather, their natural habitat” (54). Sylvia climbs the tree without shoes or protection, “with her bare feet and fingers, that pinched and held like bird’s claws to the monstrous ladder reaching up, up, almost to the sky itself” (Jewett 816). Sylvia climbs the tree with such ease, as she has climbed it so many times before, like a bird is so naturally familiar with his own surroundings. The further she climbs, the more difficult it becomes and the more she morphs as “her thin little fingers clumsy and stiff” begin to resemble “angry talons” (816). She takes on the feathery lightness of birds when the smaller limbs of the tree are described as possibly not being able to “advantage this light, weak creature on her way!” (816). By the time Sylvia reaches the top, she is a bird, able to see even the distant “white sails of ships out to sea” (816) and “the wild, light, slender bird that floats and wavers, and goes back like an arrow presently to his home in the green world beneath” (Jewett 817). As a heron, Sylvia gains freedom to be herself, to make her own choices and to live her own life. Furthermore, she earns for herself three rewards: “she has achieved knowledge of nature, knowledge of self, and a merger of self with nature. To divulge the secret of the heron would be to divulge the secret of self; to destroy one would be to destroy the other” (Carey 102). As a young girl, a wild, untamed virgin, Sylvia is very much aware of her own secret power that she will never tell.

In “Heron,” the hunter symbolizes the patriarchal society and the allure of masculine sexuality that Sylvia is fighting against. If Sylvia gives the secret of the heron’s location to the hunter, she will be giving herself to him in an act of sexual submission and final offering of individual feminine power. The hunter’s violence towards birds, by only killing them for the sport, demonstrates the threat to Sylvia, as a symbolic bird herself, and the potential sealing of her own death by surrendering to him her secret. Elizabeth Silverthorne states that “From a feminist critical perspective, Sylvia’s rejection of the temptation to please the young man who attracts her may be seen as a rejection of material and fleshly pleasures because of the need to be true to her own nature, which is inextricably tied to the nature around her” (126). Her metamorphosis into a “white” bird symbolizes her purity and virginity that is endangered by act of hunting itself and the proof of its bloody prizes carried in the hunter’s “lumpy game-bag”. Sylvia’s apprehension is sensed early on by his uncommon whistle and later when she accompanies him in the woods as he carries his gun, a rather phallic image, while she wonders “why he killed the very birds he seemed to like so much” and knows that she “would have liked him vastly better without his gun” (Jewett 815). The hunter never shows any direct violence or insincerity towards Sylvia. Sylvia's conflict arises when she must decide whether to tell the hunter about the heron's nest. However, she realized that “in sacrificing the heron, she would have sacrificed her own integrity” (Silverthorne 127). She decides to keep the secret to herself, somehow retaining her childhood innocence in the process. Sylvia gains female control over her life’s destiny, choosing a life connected to nature rather than the typical women’s work she is expected to perform living on a farm.

Freeman’s sense of regionalism, with its focus on the natural surroundings of women, is evident in the short story “A New England Nun” where the protagonist, Louisa Ellis, is an engaged spinster who enjoys ripping seams and sewing them back together. Louisa's triumph comes when she is able to let go the man named Joe Daggat that she has been engaged to for fourteen years and finally allow herself to be truly happy in a solitary, yet peaceful life. Leah Glasser remarks on how the story “offers a brilliant analysis of the autonomy the single woman can achieve through her work, whatever form it takes, the self-fulfillment it brings, and its fragility in the face of marriage” (36). The character of Louisa Ellis is realistically drawn by her quaint and common lifestyle. However, Freeman also offers this female protagonist from a deeper psychological perspective of the world around her and its relation to her sexual liberty. Louisa’s surroundings are all images of her work that “are deliberately delicate and on the brink of vanishing,” symbolizing a deeper exploration of “Louisa’s buried sexuality and the necessity of that burial” (Glasser 36). Louisa is not as shallow or superficial as she may appear. Her diligent efforts to maintain the tidiness and orderliness of her home, in essence her “space”, is symbolic of the woman’s fight for control over her own body in a society that enforces standards keeping the female body corseted and silent.

Louisa’s sanctuary is her home and is described in much detail throughout the story. Her kitchen contains a little square table precisely in the center, covered with starched tablecloth, where she used real china everyday—to the envy of the neighbors. Her living room is seen by Joe Dagget as “her delicately sweet room” in which he feels “perplexity and uneasiness” as if he was “surrounded by a hedge of lace” (Freeman 850). The constant domestic imagery of needles, thimbles, scissors, baskets, ribbons, tea, china, a garden, a green gingham apron, and books, creates a domestic haven in which Louisa is dominant and unthreatened. However, like Sylvia’s woods are invaded by the hunter, Louisa’s home is invaded by Joe Dagget. His rearrangement of her books and albums and tracks of dirt on her rug leave Louisa feeling violated: “Louisa, on her part, felt as much as the kind-hearted, long-suffering owner of the china shop might have done after the exit of a bear” (Freeman 850). Glasser notes that Louisa’s “hobby is to distill the essences from rose petals, and she stores the oils in vials for no apparent use. This small detail indicates Louisa’s stored-up yet though ultimately unrealized and useless sexuality” (36). Louisa’s self-imposed nunnery is a deliberate attempt to preserve her artistry, her home and her sexuality. The pet canary that she keeps, which “fluttered wildly beating his little yellow wings against the wires” when Joe visited is symbolic of Louisa’s bird-like nature. Glasser observes the image of the caged bird as a metaphor for the controlled wild nature of Louisa: “Although she may inwardly “flutter wildly,” Louisa is careful to keep the wires of her cage firmly shut whenever Joe visits" (36).

Louisa Ellis is expected to marry and make a home with her husband as a submissive wife. The value of marriage and home-making is heavily ingrained in women’s prospects in life. However, Louisa is not so willing to give up her freedom. For Louisa, the prospect of “marriage would require the loss of her own home. Her ‘maidenly possessions’ would be ‘robbed of their old environments’ when moved to Joe’s home where ‘they would appear in such new guises that would almost cease to be themselves,’ just as Louisa senses she will be herself in her role as Joe’s wife” (Glasser 36). Instead, Louisa chooses to defy society’s standards for her life, making the decision to be a nun and be happy. Louisa’s rejection of marriage results in a continuation of domestic duties that giver her self-pride and satisfaction. Louisa becomes an artist in her own studio, creating her own masterpieces, with no male influences to stifle her individuality. Glasser states that Freeman’s “story captures contradictory voices, the victory and the loss in the choice to remain a ‘nun,’ faithful to oneself and to one’s work” (36). Louisa’s domestic work may be deemed menial or worthless, but Freeman intends to show something else. Louisa’s craftiness gives her a kind of power over her home, body and soul that would be void if she were to become the wife of Joe, working to create a home based only on his wants and needs. Louisa would rather remain “cloistered” in her own world amongst “her little feminine weapons” (Freeman 855), surrounded by those objects that personify her sexual freedom from a male world.

Works Cited
Blanchard, Paula. Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work. New York: Addison-Wesley,
1994. Print.
Carey, Richard. Sarah Orne Jewett. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1962. Print.
Freeman, Mary E.W. “A New England Nun.” Lauter, et al 848-856.
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