Jewett vocabulary

1. dilatory—Intended to delay; Tending to postpone or delay: dilatory in his work habits.

"[ . . . ] her cow, a plodding, dilatory, provoking creature in her behavior" (1).

2. Regionalism—late nineteenth-century literary style which emphasized local regions and their inhabitants; Includes the representation of regional dialects and cultural mores, de-centering of European-American privileged masculine authority and centering of marginal characters such as women, elders, girls, rural people, and even animals and land.

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Freeman vocabulary

3. diurnal—Relating to or occurring in a 24-hour period; daily.

"This soft diurnal commotion was over Louisa Ellis also" (1).

4. currants—A small seedless raisin of the Mediterranean region, used chiefly in baking.

"Then she went into the garden with a little blue crockery bowl, to pick some currants for her tea" (1).

5. stint—A length of time spent in a particular way: a two-year stint in the military.

"As for himself, his stint was done [ . . . ]" (5).

6. redolent—Having or emitting fragrance; aromatic.

"She gloated gently over her orderly bureau-drawers, with their exquisitely folded contents redolent with lavender and sweet clover and very purity" (5).

7. choleric—Easily angered; bad-tempered.

"The neighbor, who was choleric and smarting with the pain of his wound, had demanded either Caesar's death or complete ostracism" (6).

8. St. George's dragon—In Christian hagiography Saint George—The Saint who killed the Dragon (ca. 275-281–303) was a soldier of the Roman Empire, from Anatolia, now modern day Turkey, who was venerated as a Christian martyr. The episode of St George and the Dragon was Eastern in origin, brought back with the Crusaders and retold with the courtly appurtenances belonging to the genre of Romance (Loomis; Whatley). The earliest known depiction of the mytheme is from early eleventh-century Cappadocia (Whately), (in the iconography of the Eastern Orthodox Church, George had been depicted as a soldier since at least the seventh century); the earliest known surviving narrative text is an eleventh-century Georgian text (Whatley).

In the fully-developed Western version, a dragon makes its nest at the spring that provides water for the city of "Silene" (perhaps modern Cyrene) in Libya or the city of Lydda, depending on the source. Consequently, the citizens have to dislodge the dragon from its nest for a time, in order to collect water. To do so, each day they offer the dragon a human sacrifice. The victim is chosen by drawing lots. One day, this happened to be the princess. The monarch begs for her life with no result. She is offered to the dragon, but there appears the saint on his travels. He faces the dragon, slays it and rescues the princess. The grateful citizens abandon their ancestral paganism and convert to Christianity.

"St. George's dragon could hardly have surpassed in evil repute Louisa Ellis's old yellow dog" (6).

9. sanguinary—Accompanied by bloodshed.

"She fed him on ascetic fare of corn-mush and cakes, and never fired his dangerous temper with heating and sanguinary diet of flesh and bones" (6).

10. troth-plight—Archaic. n. A betrothal.

"Even now she could hardly believe that she had heard aright, and that she would not do Joe a terrible injury should she break her troth-plight" (8).

11. list—To lean or cause to lean to the side: The damaged ship listed badly to starboard. Erosion first listed, then toppled the spruce tree.

"Louisa could sew linen seams, and distil roses, and dust and polish and fold away in lavender, as long as she listed" (9).

12. pottage—A thick soup or stew of vegetables and sometimes meat.

The idiom Freeman is using here is from the Bible and has come to have a general meaning: if a person sells her birthright for a mess of pottage, she accepts some trivial financial or other gain, but loses something much more important.

Scripture: Genesis 25: 29-34:  29 Once when Jacob was cooking some stew, Esau came in from the open country, famished. 30 He said to Jacob, "Quick, let me have some of that red stew! I'm famished!"31 Jacob replied, "First sell me your birthright." 32 "Look, I am about to die," Esau said. "What good is the birthright to me?" 33 But Jacob said, "Swear to me first." So he swore an oath to him, selling his birthright to Jacob. 34 Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and some lentil stew. He ate and drank, and then got up and left. So Esau despised his birthright.

"If Louisa Ellis had sold her birthright she did not know it, the taste of the pottage was so delicious, and had been her sole satisfaction for so long" (9)

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Gilman vocabulary

13. identification with the oppressor—a mechanism of control whereby the oppressed person begins to identify her interests with her oppressor's interests. The oppressed person is usually unaware that his idenfication with the oppressor hinders his chances of liberation. Often some event will raise the oppressed person's consciousness about the power imbalance of her situation and she will become aware of the injustice of her subordinate position. It is at that time that she will dis-identify with the oppressor, and will often identify actively with people of her own oppressed group or class.

14. projection—a psychological defense mechanism whereby the person projects his negative or troublesome feelings onto some exterior object or being and then attributes those disowned feelings to that object or being, not himself.

15. untenanted—unoccupied.

The narrator wonders "why [the summer house should] have stood so long untenanted."

16. fancy—the mental faculty through which whims, visions, and fantasies are summoned up; imagination, especially of a whimsical or fantastic nature. Literary definition: the mind's ability to produce new combinations of images or ideas, usually in a more limited, superficial, or whimsical manner than that achieved by the imagination proper. Before S. T. Coleridge's distinction between the faculties of fancy and imagination, the terms were often synonymous, ‘fancy’ being an abbreviation of ‘fantasy’. Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria (1817), argued that the fancy was merely ‘a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space’ and was thus able to combine and reassemble ready‐made images in new spatial and temporal arrangements, but not able to dissolve and unite them in new creations as the imagination could.

"He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency."

17. lurid—Glowing or shining with the glare of fire through a haze: lurid flames.

"a dull yet lurid orange in some places"

18. Romanesque—Of, relating to, or being a style of European architecture containing both Roman and Byzantine elements, prevalent especially in the 11th and 12th centuries and characterized by massive walls, round arches, and relatively simple ornamentation.

19. delirium tremens—an acute, sometimes fatal episode of delirium usually caused by withdrawal or abstinence from alcohol following habitual excessive drinking. It also may occur during an episode of heavy alcohol consumption.

a kind of "debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens

20. fatuity—Smug stupidity; utter foolishness.

"go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity"

21. frieze—A plain or decorated horizontal part of an entablature between the architrave and cornice. A decorative horizontal band, as along the upper part of a wall in a room.

"They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze"

22. infantilize—To reduce to an infantile state or condition: “It creates a crisis that infantilizes them—causes grown men to squabble like kids about trivial things” (New Yorker).

23. arabesque—A ballet position in which the dancer bends forward while standing on one straight leg with the arm extended forward and the other arm and leg extended backward.

"The outside pattern is a florid arabesque"

24. sulphor (cf. sulfur)—A pale yellow nonmetallic element occurring widely in nature in several free and combined allotropic forms.

"a sickly sulphur tint"

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Twain vocabulary

25. bildungsroman—A novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character.

26. picaresque novel—a genre of usually satiric prose fiction originating in Spain and depicting in realistic, often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social degree living by his or her wits in a corrupt society.

27. picaro—A rogue or adventurer; the main character in a picaresque work when that character is a man or boy.

"I got into my old rags and my suger-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied" (1).

"the door of the cavern was big enough to roll a hogshead in [ . . . ]" (43).

29. reticule—A drawstring handbag or purse.

"a retucule wit needles and pins and beeswax and buttons and thread [. . . ]" (46).

30. towhead—A sandbar or low-lying alluvial island in a river, especially one with a stand of trees.

"[ . . . ] we tied up to a towhead in a big bend on the Illinois side [ . . . ]" (57).

31. texas—A structure on a river steamboat containing the pilothouse and the officers' quarters.

"[ . . . ] do you reckon anybody's going to resk his life for a texas and a pilot-house [ . . . ]" (60).

fantods—A state of nervous irritability; Nervous movements caused by tension.

"These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn't somehow seem to take to them because if ever I was down a little they always give me the fantods" (91).

32. bitters—A liquor, generally spirituous in which a bitter herb, leaf, or root is steeped.

"mixed a glass of bitters" (95).

33. galoot—A person, especially a clumsy or uncouth one.

"Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chooping, because they're most always doing it on a raft [ . . . ]" (106).

gallus—Elastic straps that hold trousers up (usually used in the plural).

"ragged old blue jeans britches stuffed into his boot-tops, and home-knit galluses" (108).

rummy—n. Slang., pl. -mies. A drunkard.

"Well, I'd ben a-runnin' a little temperance revival thar 'bout a week, and was the pet of the women folks, big and little, for I was makin' it mighty warm for the rummies [ . . . ]" (108-9).

34. histrionic—Of or relating to actors or acting; Excessively dramatic or emotional; affected.

"But the histrionic muse is the darling" (115).

35. bee—gathering; A bee, as used in quilting bee or spelling bee, is an old word to describe a gathering of friends and neighbors to accomplish a task or to hold a competition. The tasks were often major jobs, such as clearing a field of timber or raising a barn, that would be difficult to carry out alone. It was often both a social and utilitarian event. Jobs like corn husking or sewing, could be done as a group to allow socialization during an otherwise tedious chore. Such bees often included refreshments and entertainment provided by the group.

"Why the Lynching Bee Failed" (130).

36. shines—Informal. Pranks or tricks.

"Well, it would make a cow laugh to see the shines that old idiot cut" (136).

37. dodge—To practice trickery or cunning; prevaricate.

"Oh, this is the boss dodge [ . . . ]" (150).

38. shoal—A shallow place in a body of water; A sandy elevation of the bottom of a body of water, constituting a hazard to navigation; a sandbank or sandbar.

"[ . . . ] I was over the shoal water now, so I went right along [ . . . ]" (168).

39. brickbat—A piece, especially of brick, used as a weapon or missile; An unfavorable remark; a criticism.

"[ . . . ] like when you heave a brickbat in a mud-puddle [ . . . ]" (212).

40. foxfire—A phosphorescent glow, especially that produced by certain fungi found on rotting wood.

"[ . . . ] what we must have was a lot of them rotten chunks that's called fox-fire, and just makes a soft kind of glow when you lay them in a dark place" (214).

41. seneschal—An official in a medieval noble household in charge of domestic arrangements and the administration of servants; a steward or major-domo.

"[ . . . ] and put some dirt and greease around the sawed place so the very keenest seneskal can't see no sign of its being sawed [ . . . ]" (215).

42. case knife—A knife kept in a sheath or case; A table knife.

"A couple of case-knoves" (218).

43. Jew's harp—A small musical instrument consisting of a lyre-shaped metal frame that is held between the teeth and a projecting steel tongue that is plucked to produce a soft twanging sound.

"A jew's-harp's plenty good enough for a rat" (236).