Abstract
Thirty years prior, in her first stories, she articulated the identical message. A fiction so disillusioned and cynical was not in accord with popular sentiment.2 Rigid adherence of the public to moral and social conventions camouflaged bitterness and anger. In contrast, Freeman's stories were an expos6: an expos6 of contempt for men's impotence, incompetence, and aggression and for women's passivity, dependence, and rage. Freeman's characters are the New England peasantry. They are the leftovers of society-the spinsters, widows and widowers, bachelors, and elderly-living civilized but neglected lives. Women dominate the action in her stories. But her men, as antiheros, cannot be extricated from the action. Each human silhouette implicates the other. They, as archetypes, bear a
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