Review of “Luella Miller” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Halloween Countdown

Plot:

The only person alive who remembers Luella Miller is Lydia Anderson, now eighty years old. She never thought Luella was pretty, though her husband Erastus worshipped the ground she walked on. Luella came to teach school but didn’t do much of the teaching. The work was left to one of the older girls, Lottie Henderson, who was happy to teach while Luella sat and embroidered a pocket handkerchief.

Lottie began to fade, but she kept coming to school right to the end. No one ever knew what she died of.

Luella quit teaching when she and Erastus married. Erastus did all the cooking and cleaning; he was happy to do it for his Luella. No one saw the consumption coming on nor realized how quickly it would take such a young man.

Thoughts:

Lydia compares Luella to a willow; she’s pliant and weak but unbreakable. People happily rush to care for her, as if she can’t care for herself, even at their own expense. Luella flourishes as her caretaker of the moment fades away.

How much of this does she realize? It’s hard to say. When Lydia tells her to shift for herself, she insists she can’t. Some commentators online refer to her as a “Marxist vampire.” She seems to suck the vitality out of people.

I confess I’m the first to pick up a torch or a pitchfork for the proletariat, but what strikes me about Luella is that she is a child, a dependent toddler in an adult’s body. She has never faced or overcome challenges, nor has anyone taught her practical skills. She misses the people who die, of course. But more importantly, who will take care of her now? Could she even brew herself a cup of coffee? Left to her own devices, she would starve.

Lydia tells her that Maria, the caretaker of the moment, should “stay home and do her washin’ instead of comin’ over here and doin’ YOUR work, when you are just as well able, and enough sight more so, than she is to do it?”.

Luella regards Lydia like “a baby who has a rattle shook at it. She sort of laughed as innocent as you please. ‘Oh, I can’t do the work myself, Miss Anderson,’ says she. ‘I never did. Maria HAS to do it.’”

Why Luella has been kept a child, the reader is never told. She is not wealthy—she was a schoolteacher who married a man who chopped wood for a living.

An air of the supernatural hangs on in that even after Luella dies, her menace remains.

This is a sad little horror tale.


This story can be read here:

This story can be listened to and read here: (41:07)


Bio: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) began writing children’s literature as a teenager. Most of her two hundred stories for adults are realistic, such as “A New England Nun.” She also wrote ghost and supernatural stories.

Title: “Luella Miller”
Author: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930)
First published: Everybody’s Magazine, December 1902
Length: short story