Fairy tale motifs in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's Pembroke

Abstract

This thesis examines Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's second novel PEMBROKE (1894) and argues that the novel is rife with archetypal fairy tale features. An American writer whose career spanned the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, Mary Wilkins Freeman is commonly identified by literary scholars as a local color realist and proto-feminist writer. However, as this thesis will demonstrate, PEMBROKE is more accurately understood as an amalgamation of literary traditions. One important and until now unexplored aspect of the novel is its correspondence to fairy tale male and female characterization, plot movement, two-dimensionality, and marriage-resolution.