Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) is best known for her short stories in A New England Nun, and her attention to the local color of New England culture and language puts her in the same category as other northeastern writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett and, yes, Stephen King. I add King’s name here because he must be a fan of Freeman’s works, treading as they do the ground that King has found so amenable to his own dark stories: the insular New England towns filled with eccentric, borderline grotesque characters who are nevertheless palpably real and human. Like some King’s vernacular stories (his novel Dolores Claiborne comes to mind), “Luella Miller,” first published in 1903, is told largely in the voice of one old woman in the town, who has seen everything with a sharp and unsentimental eye.
Lydia Anderson is another of Freeman’s nuns, and old woman who never married but has the history of the town–including (or esepcially) its scandals–right at her fingertips. The story opens with a third person narrator speaking about the terror the townspeople feel for the abondoned house that once belonged to Luella Miller. No on, not even cold and shivering vagrants, will enter the house if they know what’s good for them. The house stands unmolested and solitary, and the children of the town are so afraid of it that they will not dare to break its windows or scrawl grafitti on its walls. Once the house’s haunted bona fides are established, the narrator relinquishes the story to Lydia.
Lydia knew Luella Miller when she first arrived in town with the name Luella Hill. She was a pretty, graceful, and dreamy girl who managed to land a job teaching school despite her inability to do any kind of work at all. Instead, she has the oldest and brightest pupils take over the real teaching duties. This continues for a time until Luella snags Erastus Miller shortly before she runs into the danger of losing her job; the couple moves in across the street from Lydia, who keeps her ye on them.
Soon a sort of scandal begins to color the perception of Luella. She is apparently completely incapable of doing any work at all, including the basic domestic duties expected of all married women. Although the town gossips about this development, it fails to generate any real feeling of ill-will. Erastus takes on all of the house work in addition to his own work, and it is not long before he begins to fade away. Soon he dies.
One after another, people from the town and neighboring communities come to help Luella take care fo herself, and one after another, the helpers fade and fall sick. Each victim seems to be worked to death. Despite the excessive mortality of her domestic help, Luella manages to hold a strong attraction for nearly everyone: people seem to be literally dying to help her out.
Finally the town catches on after Luella manages to kill off the handsome, dashing young doctor who was preparing to marry her. No one will help her, and Luella begins to fall into the same sort of sickness that claimed the others. Once, when she say how difficult it was for Luella to carry some items home from the store in her weakened state, Lydia gives her some help. Although it was only a small effort, it made Lydia desperately ill for weeks.
After Luella finally succumbs to her illness, the house stands, a monument to her life-sucking power. Once a traveler who knew no better broke into the abandoned house to escape the weather, but he did not survive the night. Later, after Lydia herself dies as an old woman, someone burns the house to the ground.
One interesting point about Luella’s predatory behavior is that she seems to be completely unaware of it. Instead, she is portrayed as an innocent, childlike figure with her lovely blond hair and guileless blue eyes. Nearly every description of her could instead be the description of a small child, incapable of fending for herself. As such, she is a freakish woman who does not fit any models for femininity of the times: she is not the angel of the house nor is she the independent new woman. She inhabits a space outside any recognized role. Yet her insistence on maintaining some facade of domesticity places her in a dangerous spot. She wants to take advantage of the life afforded by feminine domesticity but she is incapable of producing that. Instead of nurturing life she instead seems to suck life out of anyone who attempts to help her. Those who help her are only enabling her vampiric half-life.
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