Write Action Radio Hour: Mary Wilkins Freeman’s The Revolt of Mother, on WVEW 107.7 FM

Mary Wilkins Freeman is one of Brattleboro’s “lost treasures” and on the third and fourth Sundays of each month,

Write Action will be featuring some of her best stories, as well as biographical and historical information.

This Sunday, February 22,  at from 5 -6 PM, the Write Action Radio Hour will offer a reading of “The Revolt of Mother”, one of her most anthologized and critically acclaimed stories. Freeman’s story, The Revolt of Mother, is one told with both humor, anger, compassion and detail. It’s a small masterpiece. 

The following is from the excellent biography of her which you can find at this link. It touches on her life in Brattleboro.

http://archive.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap6/freeman.html#bio

“While
Freeman was still in elementary school, her family was forced to move due to economic hardships in Randolph. In Brattleboro, Vermont, Warren Wilkins opened a dry goods shop next to a book store owned by Joseph Steen. The move to Brattleboro, Vermont, proved to have a profound influence on Freeman’s future career as an author. Many
afternoons following high school, she would spend hours gleaning over books in Steen’s book store. Her love for literature would later encourage her to try her hand at writing.

It was also in Brattleboro that Freeman had her first taste of psychic horror which would find its place in her gothic stories. Only forty yards from the small home the Wilkins lived in was the Marsh Building of the Vermont Insane Asylum. Many patients from the Asylum were allowed to roam freely through the neighborhood in the daytime, and several would end up at the doorstep of the Wilkins. Although Freeman would later claim that she was not particularly fond of people, she became skilled at analyzing a person’s character, motives, and emotion. She studied people, both through literature and through watching those people who made up the world around her, including the insane elements.”

“Following graduation from high school in 1870, Freeman attended Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary. The zealous religious indoctrination at Mt. Holyoke was too intense for Freeman. The purpose of the school was to “sharpen the religious sensitivities of its students. . . to bring to conversion every girl who had not previously had that experience . . . .” (9) Freeman felt stifled in this rigid learning environment. She lasted there one year. Of her time at the seminary, Freeman later wrote:

I was very young. . . and went home at the end of the year a nervous wreck, so I fancy I may be somewhat confused about the whole. What I am sure of is that I ate so much beef in different forms and so many baked apples that I have never wanted much since. I have often wondered why they looked out so beautifully for our young morals, and did not vary our menu more. As I remember, I did not behave at all well at Mt. Holyoke, and I am inclined to attribute it to monotony of diet and too strenuous goadings of conscience (31).

After a brief and unsuccessful stint as a teacher at Miss Sawyer’s School for Girls, and after an equally unproductive try at a career as an artist, Freeman turned to writing. Her first works were religious poems that were never published. However, she did share them with her father and a Vermont clergyman. Encouraged by the positive response from both of her chosen readers, she then wrote a children’s verse for a Fall River magazine. Although it was an unpaid publication, the praise and encouragement from the editor spurred Freeman on.

In 1873, Freeman fell madly in love with Hanson Tyler, a navy ensign home on leave from service in Havana, Cuba. Unfortunately, Tyler did not return Freeman’s intense feelings of love. Till her death, Freeman kept a photograph of Tyler and held on to his memory throughout her life. The single women in Freeman’s stories often
reflect the unrequited love Freeman felt for Tyler, and addresses the issue of the male hesitancy to commit to a monogamous relationship.”

We hope you can join us for this reading, and for the broadcasts of the Write Action Radio Hour on WVEW, Brattleboro’s very own community radio station, at 107.7 lp FM. WVEW also streams on the web at www.wvew.org.