“In the Humble Fashion of a Scripture Woman”: The Bible as Besieging Tool in Freeman's “The Revolt of ‘Mother’”:

Much bas been written about Sarah Penn, the rural, New England heroine of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's story, "The Revolt of 'Mother'" (1891). Sarah-who has been waiting forty years for the new house her husband, Adoniram, promised her--one day observes a group of men digging a foundation for a new barn on the very spot where the long-promised house was to have been constructed. When she confronts her husband, demanding to know why he is building a barn for which he obviously has no real need instead of a new house to replace their inadequate dwelling, Adoniram refuses to speak, and the building project continues. When the barn is almost finished, Adoniram leaves on business, and Sarah takes advantage of the opportunity, moving her two children and all of the family's belongings into the newly constructed barn. The story concludes with Adoniram's return and capitulation: he tearfully agrees to transform the new barn into the new home he promised to build so long ago. In the end, Freeman writes, "Adoniram was like a fortress whose walls had no active resistance, and went down the instant the right besieging tools were used" (468). In particular, much has been written about those besieging tools, about why and how this meek, dutiful farm wife won the battle for the barn. Although several critics have shed important light on the strategies both Sarah Penn and Freeman herself employ in their struggle against patriarchy, most have ignored the religious underpinnings of the revolt and the biblical tools used to besiege and, at last, to topple the walls of the patriarchal fortress. As Elrod has noted, "readers have failed for the most part to see the connection between the defiance of [Freeman's] strong female characters and their identification with New England religion. Rather, Puritanism is frequently understood as an entirely malicious force always and simply at odds with positive change" (229). Elrod writes that "Freeman's work reveals her sense of both the liberatory possibilities and the severe restrictions of her New England religious tradition" (226) and that "Freeman's heroic women's boldest moments occur, fairly consistently, in the context of the religious meaning of defiance within her own tradition; it is this tradition they chafe against, this tradition they derive meaning from" (228). Freeman's generous use of the Bible and her sense of the liberatory possibilities of her religious tradition, including "the possibility of more expansive views of gender roles" (Elrod 228), place her squarely in the tradition of the domestic writers of her day. Ann-Janine Morey points out that "the domestic writers often were critical of the workings of religious institutions and round the Bible to be their ally against official interpretations. These women encountered the scriptures as uniquely applicable to their situation of domestic and cultural confinement" (Morey 744), and their work "represents a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman's point of view" (Tompkins 124). Of course, the culture these writers were trying to reorganize was steeped in biblical language. In order to address that culture, the domestic writers "registered the impact of the Bible, and they assumed an audience that was familiar with scripture and the doctrines derived from scripture by the church" (Morey 744). Freeman's stories rarely contain biblical quotations (Morey 753), but "The Revolt of 'Mother'" relies upon numerous allusions that her biblically literate audience would have noticed immediately. For example, Michael Tritt argues that "Freeman's choice of the names Sarah and Adoniram ... indicates a subtle subversion of the presumed gender stereotypes prevalent in the New England of the day" (209). Tritt points out that both Sarah of Genesis and Sarah Penn are women of considerable force who exert powerful influence over their husbands and over succeeding generations (209). They are also women of great patience. …