Freeman

I really like A New England Nun, though I thought that it could have had more feeling in it. All of the characters in the story sound as if they are cut off from their own feelings.  Louisa was such an OCD character but her only feelings were about her things and her way of doing things and not about the man that she was getting ready to marry after 15 years of engagement. Also Joe and Lily didn’t seem to show any feelings when they were talking to each other.  Though this is a short story it wouldn’t have taken that much more space to make these characters less shallow.  

Louisa dwelled more on what she was going to change in her daily routine than the fact that after 15 years she was finally going to be able to marry her fiancé. It upset her more that he moved the books around on the table and left dirt on her floor than it did that he went to Australia for 14 years. While she was thinking about things she was troubled that she wouldn’t be able to rip out stitches just to re-sew them for the pleasure of it, and she was worried that she would be able to use her still to distill her plants from her garden. This doesn’t sound like a woman getting ready to marry the man she loves. 

                Joe and Lily’s characters felt empty as well. When they were sitting on the wall talking they didn’t seem to show much feeling, even though I thought that they were supposed to be in love and saying good bye since Lily was leaving so she didn’t have to watch him marry another woman. Even in that time they might not have touched but there should have been more feeling in their words.

                Even though the characters seem to be very shallow, feeling less people things seemed to work out for the best for everyone. Joe and Louisa would never been happy married to someone they didn’t love and Lily would have been a very unhappy old maid.