Untitled - Rhode Island Historical Society

Portrait of Lillie Chace rX/yman and her son,
Arthur Crauford Wyman, circa 1BB5.
Courtesy of the John Hay Library, Brown
Uniuersity,
I19 "I(/AS SHE CLOTHED WITH THE RENTS PAID FOR THESE WRETCHED ROOMS?"
Interestingln the middle-class rvoman reformer who visits Josie at the reform
school is depicted as sympatheric but ineffectual.
Lillie's next published srorl', "sainr or sinner," appeared in Atlantic Monthly a
fewmonths after "The child of rhe state."'" "Saint or sinner" has a factory
operative as its heroine, and it is set entirelv in a dreary mill village. In this
story, as in her previous one, Liilie rvas asking her middle-class readers to consider
women and men of a sort that had probably been unknown to them.
In the fall of 1878 Lillie's writing career was temporariiy interrupted by her
marriage to businessman John Crawford Wvman.52 Lillie, who at twenty-four
"cherished an appropriately girlish ideal" of the "ral1, slender, poetic" man she
would marry, first encountered John wvman on the deck of the steamer cuba,
en route to Europe, in 1872. She later described him as " a gray haired man,,
who was "of medium height, stout, ruddy complexioned and furnished with a
double chin."53 Although virtually no details of their courtship are known, it is
clear that what captivated Lillie most about John \7yman was his link to her
abolitionist past: he had been converted to Garrisonian abolitionism by his first
wife, Emma'sfillard of Massachusetts, who had died in 1861.5a Despite their
age difference-John wyman was twenty-five years Lillie's senior, and closer in
age to her mother-and his distinct variance from her "girlish ideal,', the two
were wed in october 1878 in a simple ceremony at the chace Homestead in
valley Falls. The gathering received the blessing of abolitionisr patriarch
\X/illiam Lloyd Garrison, who attended with one of his sons.r,
Although Lillie chace may have embraced her deep abolitionist roots with her
marriage to Nfyman, the evenr iiterally uprooted her from her Valley Falls home
and the reform ambiance that pervaded her mother's household. Although she
returned to the Homestead to give birth to a son, Arthur Crawford'Wyman,
eleven months after her wedding, Lillie lived apart from her mother from 1878
until 1881, as John \fyman's business interests took him to New York City,
Boston, and \Tashington, D.c. During this period Lillie seems ro have published
nothing. Her removal from her mother's unflagging energy and bustling reform
household undoubtedly had something to do with this hiatus.In the fall of 1881,
about the time that Elizabeth Buffum Chace was preparing "Facrory \7omen and
Girls of New England," Lillie and her husband returned to Valley Falls and pur-
chased her brother Arnold's spacious house on Broad Street, across from the
Homestead.'6 There, nourished by the renewed proximity of her mother, as well
as by the relative isolation of the village, Lillie resumed her writing.
It was in two stories published consecutively in the Atlantic Montbly during the
winter following her return that Lillie'Wyman tapped directly into themes
presented in "Factory'Women and Girls." The correlation between these stoliss-"f
[ss1sr's Dower" and, especially, "And Joe"-and her mother's paper is
remarkable. How closely the two women collaborated in their work is not
known, nor is it known if either wrote at the other's urging.
"Hester's Dower, " which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly of December 1 8 81,
harks back to the preindustrial golden age of New Engiand agrarian life that
Chace described in the opening paragraphs of "Facrory'Women and Girls."r'
's7ritten by a child of the industrial era, however, the story mocks chace's rosy
recollections. Its protagonist, Hester Arnold, a seamstress, has spurned her
weak-willed lover in a fit of anger and has become the classic New England
"spinster," a term evoking the days that Chace celebrated, when village women