No Pity: Mary Wilkins Freeman, Disability, and the “Tears of Things”

Abstract:Frustrated by the framing of disability as tragedy, disabled protestors in the 1990s adopted the slogan “no pity” to argue that feeling prohibits the civil rights movement’s commitment to material change. Extending the connection historian Paul Longmore establishes between late-twentieth-century versions of charity and nineteenth-century fiction, this essay turns to regional writer Mary Wilkins Freeman whose work is subject to the same pity that activists decry one hundred years later. Early and late critics attribute her stories’ presumed pathos to her depictions of impaired women. While feelings like sentiment were understood as catalysts for social reform in the nineteenth-century United States, Wilkins Freeman’s attention to the material world—her emphasis on objects rather than people—redirects such feelings, making visible the everyday needs of poor, disabled characters. Emphasizing the facts of hardship rather than the feelings of it, these turn-of-the-century stories reveal a longer genealogy of affect’s relationship to disability.