SOURCE: “The Subversion of Genre in the Short Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman,” in New England Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3, September, 1992, pp. 447–68.

In the following essay, Gardner discusses how the relationships among characters in Freeman's short fiction run counter to prevailing treatments in sentimental literature of the era.

When we first enter it, the fictional world of Mary Wilkins Freeman seems both familiar and strange. Weddings close the stories of lovers; heroines pine away of broken hearts; parents stand in the way of love, but love prevails. Many characters live “happily ever after,” while occasionally a character dies for a cause, leaving the world “better,” if poorer, than before. Yet each of these plot lines, familiar from traditional comedy or tragedy, receives a curious twist at Freeman's hands.¹

Whereas the lovers in traditional comedy are young, Freeman's are likely to be over forty; if younger, it is not their...