SOURCE: “‘I Never Say Anything at Once So Pathetic and Funny’: Humor in the Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman,” in American Transcendental Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3, September, 1999, pp. 215–31.

In the essay below, Canfield interprets what he sees as the humorous aspects of “A Conflict Resolved,” “The Poetess,” and “A New England Nun.”

In the tradition of American comic literature, Mary Wilkins Freeman's comic stories of the 1880s and 1890s do not shy away from the paradoxical connections between death and creativity, and they are obsessively concerned with individual freedom and the consequences to freedom of social and biological constraints.¹ Freeman's work repeatedly confronts choices between individual freedoms and social connections, between justice and compatibility. But unlike much American comedy that, in its satiric argument, demonstrates a preference for freedom, Freeman's tales use comedy less to resolve these tensions in favor of freedom than to face frankly the costs, both...