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expand1995 (1)
1Author:  Thompson, Charles MinerAdd
 Title:  Miss Wilkins: An Idealist in Masquerade  
 Published:  1995 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text 
 Description: ON any walk or drive in rural New England, in the springtime, one is sure to find on some abandoned farm an unkempt old apple orchard. The gnarled and twisted trees uphold on their rotting trunks more dead than living branches, and bear, if at all, only a few scattered and ghostly blossoms. And in that group of pitiable trees, dying there in the warm sunshine, there will be nothing to suggest life and joyousness except the golden woodpeckers with their flickering flight, and the bluebirds with their musical, low warble. If, indeed, the orchard stands upon a sloping hillside, one can glance away and see in the valley prosperous villages, smiling, fertile farms, and other orchards, well kept, healthy, and looking from their wealth of blossoms like white clouds stranded. But if one be of a pessimistic complexion, he can shut his eyes to that pleasanter prospect, gaze only at the old orchard, and think of it as typical of New England. So, in fact, in its limited degree, it is; but almost to the ultimate degree of exactness is it typical of the New England village which Miss Wilkins delights to draw. In place of the worn-out trees there are gnarled and twisted men and women. There are, of course, the young people, with their brief, happy time of courtship, to take the place in it of the birds; but her village, like the orchard, is a desolate and saddening spectacle. In that community of Pembroke which she has celebrated, what twisted characters! Barney Thayer refuses to marry Charlotte Barnard because, as the result of a quarrel with her father, Cephas, he hastily vows never to enter the house again. Not the anger of his mother, not the suffering of his sweetheart, not even jealousy of handsome Thomas Paine,—who, seeing her forsaken, makes bold to woo,—has power to move him from his stubborn stand. The selfish pride of Cephas is so great that he lets his daughter's happiness be destroyed rather than admit himself wrong, or take the smallest step to reconcile him with her lover. Barney Thayer inherits his self-will from his mother, a woman of indomitable will, who rules her family with an iron hand. When she hears that Barney has refused to marry Charlotte, she forbids him ever to step within her door again; when her youngest son, Ephraim, who has a weak heart and whom the doctor has forbidden her to whip, disobeys her, she whips him, and he dies; when her daughter Rebecca falls in love with William Berry, she forbids the marriage for a trivial cause, and when Rebecca, denied the legitimate path of love, steps aside into the other way, she disowns and casts her out. She loses all her children rather than yield to them the least shadow of her authority. Charlotte Barnard's cousin, Sylvia Crane, leaving her own house on the Sunday night of Charlotte's quarrel with Barney to comfort her, misses the weekly call of Richard Alger, her lover. His nature, compounded of habit and pride and stubbornness, does not let him come again, once his pride has been offended, once his habit has been broken. Silas Berry—William Berry's father—is determined to sell his cherries for an exorbitant price. When the young people refuse to buy, he tells William and Rose, his children, to invite them to a picnic and cherry-picking. When the guests are departing, he waylays them to demand payment for his cherries. He outrages common decency with his mean trickery, but he has his way. Nearly every character in the book is a monstrous example of stubbornness,—of that will which enforces its ends, however trivial, even to self-destruction. The people are not normal; they are hardly sane. Such is Miss Wilkins's village, and it is a true picture; but it wholly represents New England life no more than the dying apple orchard wholly represents New England scenery.
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