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In A New England Nun, Freeman contrasts Louisa’s life as an artist to New England’s societal standard of what a woman should want to do with her life. Freeman depicts Louisa’s artistic aspects as domestic animals around her house. When Joe approaches the canary, the canary goes ballistic–additionally, Joe plans to release the dog from his chain, who has been chained up for fourteen years on account of biting a neighbor’s hand. Additionally, throughout the story, Freeman describes Louisa’s actions as “feminine” and “delicate”, to remind the audience that though she does not fit into the standard of what women should want, she is still a woman and should be accepted as one.

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“While New England celebrated good housekeepers, it assumed, as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous sketches of heroic domesticity illustrate, that they were married. Louisa’s problem is that she prefers to be the sole consumer of her own labors. In Louisa, then, Freeman creates a site for contradictory values, where the Romantic idea of the artist is juxtaposed to a cultural idea of womanhood” (Harris 28)

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“It was now fourteen years since, in a flood of youthful spirits, he had inflicted that memorable bite, and with the exception of short excursions, always at the end of the chain, under the strict guardianship of his master or Louisa, the old dog had remained a close prisoner” (Freeman 9).

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“Louisa, all alone by herself that night, wept a little, she hardly knew why; but the next morning, on waking, she felt like a queen who, after fearing lest her domain be wrested away from her, sees it firmly insured in her possession” (Freeman 13).

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“As Glasser notes, Freeman positions her “artist” within the most confined of domestic spaces–a small house shared only by a canary, with a large passive dog consigned to a doghouse at the edge of the property–and suggests that Louisa’s artistic flowering can only be nurtured within that tiny sphere and for herself alone” (Harris 29).