[ITNA; 2024]

Mary Belle Freeley published the novella Fair to Look Upon in 1892, during a period of great social change and economic growth in the United States. After about four decades of persistent activism that began with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the women’s suffrage movement was in full swing. Still about thirty years away from securing the right to vote, suffragists had made key strides in eroding the long held legal system of “coverture,” which granted husbands full control over the rights and property of wives. During this era, the country witnessed the dawn of the independent, educated, career-minded “New Woman.” White women of affluence could relish newly-won freedoms and exercise more control over their personal, social, and professional lives, but most women remained in purgatory as second-class citizens under the law, beholden to traditional customs and societal expectations.

Suffragists continued to protest many of these customs, such as the longstanding practice that required women to vow to “love, honor, and obey” their husbands on their wedding day. A Christian tradition dating back to the early sixteenth century, the vow of obedience was primarily derived from passages in the Book of Peter that command submission from a wife, so that her husband might find an example in her “purity and reverence.” The most famous recorded protest of the practice came from abolitionist and activist Lucy Stone, who omitted “obey” in her vows to fellow activist Henry Browne Blackwell in 1855. The pamphlet they wrote together on their well-publicized marriage ceremony ultimately set the standard for what egalitarian marriage could look like. Curiously, other examples of fervent opposition to this vow of obedience appear lost to time. That is, aside from Freeley’s novella, which has been given new polish in a 2024 edition by ITNA press.

Fair to Look Upon begins with an unnamed narrator, soon to be married to a charming young man. They are sitting on a “luxurious divan” discussing the “culinary and domestic arrangements of [their] future home.” Our narrator is asked a series of questions by her future husband that appear to mirror the Christian marriage vow: Will you love me always? And will you honor me always? And will you obey me? She hesitates at the last question. “I don’t believe a woman ever lived who ever obeyed anyone—God, angels or men,” she says. Naturally, antics ensue. Her fiance calls her a traitor to her sex, postponing their wedding so that she might study her Bible and learn what it means to be a dutiful, obedient wife. The narrator exclaims, “‘Study your Bible!’ That is what everybody says when they want to prove any theory, creed, ism, or anything.” Defiant, she locks herself in a room to study—and emerges with a whirlwind retelling of Old Testament stories that skewer the concept of wifely obedience.

She begins with the story of Adam and Eve, opening with an irreverence that colors the rest of the novella. “[Now] I know that Adam is rather an ancient subject,” she says to her readers. “But you need not elevate your eyebrows in scorn, for you will be ancient yourself sometime.” In her retelling, the narrator subverts the framing of Eve’s actions, describing her temptation by the Serpent in the Garden of Eden as not lack of willpower, but rather a spark of curiosity. Eve eats the apple inspired by her “ambition for something better.” For Freeley’s narrator, Eve’s transgression is a “sweet blaze of glory” that causes her to question the world, with “thought blossom[ing] like a rose.” When Eve encourages Adam to do the same, it results in “invention and ingenuity,” as Adam and Eve both realize they are naked and gather fig leaves to use as clothes. Without Eve’s disobedience, there would have been no progress, advancement, or human intelligence, and for that, in Freeley’s view, Eve deserves “a profound salaam of admiration and respect” as “the first courageous, undaunted pioneer woman of the world.”

In each subsequent chapter of the 109-page novella, the narrator examines a different set of characters from the Bible, so that the whole work becomes a document of feminist revisionism. Freeley’s argument is crystal-clear: If you read closely, you would be hard pressed to find any truly obedient woman in the Old Testament. In this retelling, disobedience is a common trait of Biblical women, from Eve’s humanity-defining original sin; to the “dissensions and envy” of sister wives Rachel and Leah; to Moses’s wife Zipporah, who grows so tired with her husband prophesying in Egypt that she’s sent back home to Midian. She interprets the stories with a good sense of humor. In one notable example, Freeley takes liberties in her retelling the story of Moses’s discovery in the river by the Pharaoh’s daughter, framing the Baby Moses as a something of a conniving participant in his adoption into Egyptian royalty: 

the baby, who never before had seen the purple and fine linen of majesty or the sparkling jewels of wealth, knowing this was the opportunity of his life, put up his hands in welcome and said in the universal language of babyhood, “Ah, goo! ah, goo!”

The humorous, sardonic interjections allow for levity in an effort that could otherwise be very dry and academic, and provide a bit of buffer for what are ultimately controversial views for the era. Through these retellings, Freeley offers a nuanced take on a woman’s role in nineteenth-century American society, reflecting the feminist ideals that were just starting to take root. She points out how interpretations of scripture throughout history allowed for a flattening of important women figures in the Bible, which in turn, permitted a flattening of a woman’s role in society. Referring to Isaac’s wife Rebekah, considered the mother of Israel, the narrator takes note of how interpreters have long overlooked her shrewdness for the reason that she was “very fair to look upon.”

In relating the history of these examples who have been held up since time immemorial for us to follow, the writers of “Holy Writ” never expatiate upon their virtue, industry, domesticity, constancy or love, but we are simply and briefly told they were “fair to look upon,” and the natural logical inference is that we shall “go and do likewise.”

Freeley’s Biblical women are not simply obedient and beautiful; they are unruly, lawless, loving, tender, angry, jealous, mischievous, manipulative. They are schemers, managers, strategists. This reinterpretation of the Old Testament compensates for a lack of modern role models for women of the era and probably spoke to Freeley’s contemporaries, who no longer needed to restrict their ambitions to the domestic sphere. They could receive an education and work outside the home, equipped with more tools than ever to build careers, earn wages, and contribute to the progression of industrial capitalism. In Freeley’s interpretation, not only do women possess the qualities to thrive in these new vocations, they have had this potential since time immemorial, since the era of the Bible’s founding mothers.

Throughout the novella, Freeley takes aim at men who have perpetuated the ideal of female submission throughout history. In retelling Abraham and Sarah’s story in Genesis, the narrator points out how Peter, who set the standard for wifely submission in the New Testament, “holds Sarah up as a bright and shining example” of obedience. She immediately counters:

It is a telling fact . . . that he had to go back nearly two thousand years to find an obedient woman. There were evidently none in his day, but as he wished to make his teaching effective and submit some proof to clinch his argument, he went back to Sarah . . . which shows he had never gotten at the real facts in the lovely Sarah’s career, or else was misrepresenting Sarah to carry his point in favor of his own.

The narrator then goes on to recount Sarah’s “lawless, crafty, and coquettish” behavior when her servant Hagar becomes Abraham’s second wife.

It is through the narrator’s “careful perusal” of the Bible that Freeley invites readers to consider new interpretations of women’s role in society and of how we use the Bible to support attitudes toward women. Noting that prevailing interpretations of scripture are established by “those who did not read their bible intelligently,” she invites her readers to consider their own reactions to and interpretations of the text—and how that might impact their own experiences. In the story of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah, the narrator unpacks Jacob’s vow to labor for seven years for Laban in order to win his daughter Rachel’s hand in marriage—and how that might alter prevailing perceptions of the meaning of true love:

What a world of devotion that one sentence reveals. As we read that we forget all about the prosaic age in which we live; forget the modern I’ll-give-you-a-brown-stone-front-and-diamonds-in-exchange-for-your-youth-and-beauty-love, and believe in the kind that makes a man a god and a woman an angel, and we imagine that an affection so intense and deep that it could make seven weary years of labor “seem but a few days” must be as constant as the flowing tide, as steadfast as the stars—and then after a while we are desperately, despairingly sorry that we have read any further than that verse because we are so sadly disillusioned.

Jacob’s story of devotion is one that continues to be dissected and interpreted within the Judeo-Christian tradition as a model for love. The lesson often deduced is that abiding love is of an intense, sacrificial nature, worthy of years of hard labor. But Freeley chides that these interpreters aren’t fully reading—conveniently overlooking the rest of the story. A few pages later, she points out how Jacob is forced to marry the elder sister Leah first and labor another seven years to finally “win” Rachel. He then sets up a chaotic household of two wives who are “madly jealous of each other,” who engage in unruly competition. They each give Jacob their maids as concubines (“he accepted them both. It was like him.”) and make Jacob’s life a “howling wilderness.” These arguments establish Fair to Look Upon as a novel about how we read. Of the many radical ideas that Freeley presents, her most subversive is to imply that the Bible is simply a collection of stories rather than creed—a text to interpret rather than believe in.

In that spirit, Freely ends the novella ambiguously. When the narrator of Fair to Look Upon finishes her study of the Book of Ruth, she has not seen or reached out to her fiancé in weeks. A “profound silence [falls] like a pall” between them. All of a sudden, he shows up at her doorstep, abruptly asking when they will get married. When she replies that she has not finished her Bible study and that she cannot be submissive, he exclaims, “I just want you to love me and—and boss me.” He calls himself foolish and explains that he tried to fall in love with some other girl, but found them all “flat, stale and unprofitable” in comparison to our narrator. “There was no light in their eyes, no roses on their cheeks, no pleasure in their presence, no rapture in their touch,” he says, begging that they get married the next day, “as long as cooking stoves and marriage licenses are so cheap.” We never learn the narrator’s answer, and she closes the matter with a brush off: “And I said—never mind what I said.”

An accompanying chapter illustration by W.L. Dodge of a couple in an embrace suggests that the two reconcile. If true, then perhaps our narrator has strategically wooed back her fiancé through silence and shrewdness, exercising the same crafty, manipulative qualities as the Biblical characters she describes. But by the text alone, we can’t necessarily say that a complete reconciliation or a wedding takes place. Maybe she ultimately rejects him. Readers can decide for themselves.

Mary Belle Freeley’s identity is something of a mystery, which might explain why Fair To Look Upon never assumed a spot in the canon of first-wave feminist literature. No biographical information of Freeley appears to exist, so it’s likely she used a pseudonym. We’re left only to speculate. Perhaps she lived as an obedient wife who hid her feminist ideas; maybe she wrote more humor and satire under a different name; or maybe she was a “New Woman”—an active, unruly suffragist. I’ve wondered if she lived to see women finally win the right to vote in 1920, or if she witnessed the ways in which feminist activism evolved throughout the twentieth century. We can say for certain that she never lived to see the use of the word “obey” erased from marriage ceremonies. The practice was never banished outright; rather, it slowly eroded over time as women secured more legal rights. Some churches would not do away with it until well into the twentieth century.

Think of other landmark works of the era: The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), The Awakening (1899). These are serious, psychological, relatively humorless works that throw into relief what Freeley’s novella accomplishes. Maybe Freeley needed the freedom of a low profile to unleash her candid, sardonic sense of humor and revolutionary ideas. Maybe she didn’t take it all too seriously. In any case, she leaves modern readers with a narrative voice and story that feels applicable to the current struggles that first went public with the work of the suffrage movement. At its core, the continued fight for women’s rights and bodily autonomy still relies on many of the things that Freeley so playfully delivers in Fair to Look Upon: an ability to see women as multidimensional, an ability to interpret writing in order to defend an argument, and the courage to speak out and offer those views to the world.

Margarita Diaz is a writer based in Washington, D.C.


 
 
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