The Revolt of Mother

This research examines Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's short story "The Revolt of 'Mother'" as an exemplar of Marxist principles. The research will provide an outline of the text and then discuss how "the magic of ideology" functions as a means of developing the narrative pattern and the characters.

The action of "The Revolt of 'Mother'" is straightforward if perhaps a bit eccentric. Sarah, a farm wife whose husband Adoniram builds a new barn instead of a long-promised new house, moves the entire household into the barn when he is away on business. Upon his return he quickly accepts the situation and promises an upgrade.

How Marxist principles enrich understanding of this seemingly unambiguous plot is suggested by the very title of the story, which promises a theme of revolt as the narrative conflict. But the entire narrative can be read as a proxy for the Marxist argument for revolution as a wholesale transformation of experience. The action of moving the household, however, is not really the content of the revolt. The meaningful transformation occurs in the mind of Sarah before any physical action is undertaken. That is where ideology becomes relevant to the text.

As Rivkin and Ryan explain, an important feature of Marx's critique of ideology is that ordinary experience "is driven from within by what Marx called 'class struggle'" (231). Although class struggle is the familiar phrase, the operative word is within. What maintains conditions of material oppression, in Marx's form

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a barn (Freeman). Sarah absorbs the betrayal--the barn is to be sited where their house was supposed to have been built 40 years ago--and does not articulate her objections. The description of her seeming meekness in the face of Adoniram's intent is "the result of her own will, never of the will of another" (Freeman). That foreshadows the revolt, although it does not take the violent form that Marx seems to anticipate. She does, however, ask for information. The fact that Sarah's adolescent son but neither she nor her daughter has known about the barn for three months establishes the inequality of gender relations in the household, and the way in which she absorbs the information that four cows are to be added to the livestock tells the reader that it is Sarah who bears the responsibility for milking. Sarah articulates the unequal power relationships when she tells her daughter that when she is married she will "know that we know only what men-folks think we do, so far as any use of it goes, an' how we'd ought to reckon men-folks in with Providence an' not complain of what they do" (Freeman). Indeed, Sarah does not complain: "Nobody's ever heard me complain" (Freeman). But she sees the facts of her situation--a cramped house al

Category: Literature - T