Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

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American Literature Readings in the 21st Century

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction By Amy L. Strong Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism By Jennifer Haytock

10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-05

Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin

The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut By David Simmons

The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned By Marit J. MacArthur Narrating Class in American Fiction By William Dow The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative By Heather J. Hicks Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles By Kenneth Lincoln Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production By Catherine Seltzer Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech By Dianne L. Chambers



Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko By Lindsey Claire Smith

From Silence to Speech

Dianne L. Chambers



Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton

FEMINIST READINGS OF EDITH WHARTON

Copyright © Dianne L. Chambers, 2009. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61765–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chambers, Dianne L. Feminist readings of Edith Wharton : from silence to speech / Dianne L. Chambers. p. cm.—(American literature readings in the 21st century) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–61765–0 (alk. paper) 1. Wharton, Edith, 1862–1937—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Feminism and literature—United States—History—20th century. 3. Women in literature. 4. Sex role in literature. I. Title. PS3545.H16Z638 2009 813⬘.52—dc22

2009011850

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

1

Wharton and Feminist Criticism

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2

Wharton, Women, and Authorship at the Turn of the Century

25

Competing Discourses and the Word in The House of Mirth

49

3

4 The Unravelling of Story in The Reef

67

5 Seduction and Language in Summer

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Gender and Performance in The Glimpses of the Moon

125

Conclusion

151

Notes

157

Bibliography

197

Index

207



C on ten t s



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I wish to thank Linda Wagner-Martin who introduced me to Edith Wharton and has supported me in my work for all these years. I also want to thank Cindy Gilmore for her enthusiasm and support for this book for nearly as many years. I owe thanks to family, friends, and colleagues in the Department of English at Elmhurst College who have never stopped asking about Edith Wharton. Special thanks to Shirley Roemer. I owe much gratitude to the librarians at the A.C. Buehler Library who always found what I needed. And finally, thanks to Mom and Dad who taught me persistence along with their love.



Ack now l ed gmen t s




Edith Wharton has proven to be a fascinating and compelling subject who eludes any easy categorization as a woman and writer. The study of her life and her novels, short stories, and nonfiction reveal her to be a figure rich in contradictions. She was an American patriot who was appalled when Henry James gave up his American citizenship in World War I; nevertheless, she lived most of her adult life in England and France. Born into the elite class of New York society that was defined by old money and rigid social rituals in the nineteenth century, she relentlessly satirized the hide-bound traditions and foibles of these same upper classes. Fearing that being classified as a woman writer would define her work as less significant than writing produced by men, Wharton rejected any connections to the many women writers during her time. Refusing to believe that the writing of serious literature was limited to men, she complained in a letter to a friend that she would never be able to write like a man. Consistently worried about the critical acceptance of her work throughout her career, she worked hard to earn the attention of intellectuals and artists; yet, at the same time, she was also a shrewd businesswoman who carefully oversaw the details of marketing her work and celebrated both the making of money and her status as a best-selling writer. These contradictions testify to her complex personality and make the exploration of her writing within the context of her culture and personal history an absorbing journey. During her lifetime, Wharton was recognized as a serious and critically appreciated writer. In 1921, she won a Pulitzer for The Age of Innocence—an award made annually “for the American novel which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood” (qtd. in Lewis, Wharton 433). In 1924, she became the first woman to be given an honorary degree of Doctorate of Letters by Yale University in recognition of “her place in the front ranks of the world’s living novelists” and as a person who had “elevated the level of American literature” 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


Introduction


(qtd. in Lewis, Wharton 453). She was nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature in 1927 as “the foremost living creative literary artist of America” (qtd. in Lewis, Wharton 481). Wharton was also extraordinarily well received by the reading public. With the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905, her success as a best-selling writer was clear. Over 140,000 copies were in print by the end of the year and, for the first two months in 1906, her novel remained the highest-selling book in the country (Lewis, Wharton 151). In 1918, she was offered $18,000 by Pictorial Review for the serialization of her next novel (Lewis, Wharton 423). Within two years after the publication of The Age of Innocence, she had earned nearly $70,000 on the novel. In 1922, Wharton sold over 100,000 copies of her new novel, The Glimpses of the Moon, earning almost $60,000. By any barometer used to measure success, Wharton clearly had achieved it. However, despite critical and popular success in her lifetime, Wharton’s entry into the canon of writers who are regularly taught in American literature classes and whose work is the routine subject of scholarly attention is relatively recent. Often relegated to the status of Henry James’s protégé after her death in 1937, Wharton’s work largely disappeared from critical and public attention. Thirty years ago, most of her texts could be found only in used bookstores. Her work was rarely anthologized. The teaching of her novels was confined to Ethan Frome by high school teachers who, in large part, appreciated the work for its brevity. All of this has changed, of course. Initiated in part by the publication of R.W.B. Lewis’ biography in 1975, an edited collection of her letters by R.W.B and Nancy Lewis in 1988, and a second major biography by Shari Benstock in 1994, Wharton has become a significant figure in American literary history. A detailed, extensively researched, and lengthy biography by Hermione Lee was published in 2007. Critical analyses and biographies by such feminist scholars as Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Elizabeth Ammons, Candace Waid, and Linda WagnerMartin have renewed critical interest in this American writer. Nor is the current renewal of interest in Wharton confined to scholars and critics. Bookstores carry new editions of her popular novels and she is the subject of undergraduate seminars at colleges and universities. Wharton would very likely have been especially pleased by her increasing presence in American popular culture with the release of film adaptations of Ethan Frome (1993), The Age of Innocence (1993), and The House of Mirth (2000). This resurgence of interest in her work certainly supports an ongoing feminist agenda among American critics to rediscover and reposition women writers 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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within the tradition of American literature; however, continuing contemporary interest in Wharton also testifies to the depth of Wharton’s understanding of American culture and the acute insight of her narrative voice. The current return of popular and critical attention to Edith Wharton invites further study of this complex and contradictory woman. Wharton’s life and her career represent, in significant ways, the challenges of being a women writer at the beginning of the twentieth century. No longer easily dismissed as a second rate-Henry James, Wharton elicits continuing debates over her role as an American writer, as a woman writer, and as a feminist. Contemporary critics argue about whether she is best read as a realist, romanticist, or naturalist, as a writer of novels of manners or melodrama, as a sharp satirist or a producer of sentimental potboilers. The connecting threads of Edith Wharton’s gender, class, and cultural context make for an intriguing story that highlights turn-of-the-century concerns about changing gender roles and authorship. Wharton emerges as a writer who both embodies and delineates the cultural conflicts over male and female roles in America at the beginning of the twentieth century. Born in 1862, the daughter of Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones and George Frederic Jones, Wharton entered into the world as a child of considerable and long-standing wealth and secure family name, a descendent of an old and respected family with impeccable social credentials and a member of Old New York society. While she was expected to be well-mannered, speak faultless English, and be welldressed, she was neither encouraged nor expected to become an author. Noting in her autobiography that “in the eyes of our provincial society,” writing was considered to be an activity positioned somewhere in “between a black art and a form of manual labor,” Wharton came to embrace a distinctly European model of intellectual life and to author critically successful novels that revealed the vanities and morally corrupt values of her native American eastern, upper class culture (Backward 69). Her satiric voice is at its keenest when pointing out the outworn rituals, empty values, and limited worldview of the denizens of Old New York American society. And yet, Wharton remained loyal to many of the traditions and views of Old New York society. Wharton took pride in her prestigious ancestry. In her autobiography, she traces her ancestry through a legacy of socially prominent relatives. Upon the completion of her first great mansion in 1902, in Lenox, Massachusetts, she named this home the Mount, after the summer home of her great great grandfather 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


INTRODUCTION


Ebenezer Stevens who had served as an artillery officer in the Revolutionary War and who was referred to as “our great progenitor” by Wharton (Lewis, Wharton 8). Wharton’s lifestyle certainly was representative of her class and the traditions appropriate to a member of Old New York society—although, later in life, she came to depend heavily on earnings from her writing to subsidize that standard of living. Throughout her life, she built and maintained impressive homes with lavish gardens that demonstrated prevailing tastes of the moneyed classes in Europe and America. One of her first publications which she coauthored with the architect Ogden Codman in 1987 was a carefully researched and knowledgeable book called The Decoration of Houses. Writing regularly every morning, Wharton preserved the traditions of upper class New York in the afternoons and evenings. All her life, Wharton maintained the customs—that she had learned while growing up—of keeping house and garden and entertaining guests. She was impatient with the modernity that threatened the social traditions and domestic rituals of her childhood. She complains bitterly in her autobiography about the loss of “a part—the most important and honorable part—of that ancient curriculum of house-keeping which . . . was . . . swept aside by the ‘monstrous regiment’ of the emancipated” (Backward 60). She grumbles: Young women [were] taught by their elders to despise the kitchen and linen room, and to substitute the acquiring of University degrees for the more complex art of civilized living. The movement began when I was young, and now that I am old, and have watched it and noted its results, I mourn more than ever the extinction of the household arts. Cold storage, deplorable as it is, has done far less harm to the home than the Higher Education. (Backward 60)

Believing that decorum and good manners were integral to social interaction, she writes in her biography that, although her parents failed to provide her with a formal education, they had always insisted that she and her brothers speak proper English. Highly conscious of class distinctions, she was appalled by the lives of ordinary people. Writing to her good friend Sara Norton about her brief stay in a new hotel in New England she reports: I have been spending my first night in an American “summer hotel” and I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining callow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! And, mind you, it is a new and fashionable



4

INTRODUCTION

5

Wharton played the great lady of society throughout her life. And yet, her very career as a serious and popular author, as an intellectual and best-selling writer, and as a satirist of New York society placed her in direct opposition to the class from which she had emerged and in which she maintained membership. That Wharton recognized these tensions between her class and her choice of profession is clear. Early in her career, after the chaos of moving into the newly built Mount, in a letter to Sara Norton, she quotes Goethe’s Faust about two souls residing in one breast and complains that “the Compleat Housekeeper has had the upper hand for the last few weeks” and that only now has she reestablished a “sense of proportion” (Lewis, Letters 72). According to Madame Saint-Rene Taillandier who collaborated with Wharton late in Wharton’s life on a French translation of The Age of Innocence, Wharton continued to maintain a rigid line between her work as a writer and her role as a society woman. Taillandier reports that she and Wharton worked together each morning until Wharton decided it was time to retire to dress for the day and to prepare for her guests. Taillandier comments that “when the hours of work were over . . . the book-people vanished, the luncheon-bell rang, and there was only the hostess receiving her friends with all the arts of civilization” (qtd. in Lubbock 162). Perhaps the strongest evidence of Wharton’s class allegiance, however, exists within her novels. Her continuing brilliant analysis of the social order and culture of Old New York society suggests her ultimate inability to reject, entirely, the class that had shaped her world and early identity. At some level, certainly, recording and understanding the traditions of a unique class within American culture were as important as critiquing the flaws of that social order. In the end, Wharton works as both satirist and historian of Old New York society. The continuing tensions between Wharton’s classist values and conservative attitudes and her efforts to ridicule what she saw as the superficiality and anti-intellectualism of her native New York society are also played out in terms of gender. In her autobiography, Wharton explores in detail the difficult relationship with her mother who came to represent for her much that was wrong with American women defined by their wealth and social status within an elitist social system. Wharton describes her mother as a shallow woman whose focus on fashionable clothes and superficial values provided a telling model



hotel. What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast. (Lewis, Letters 93)


of the very kind of womanhood she critiques in many of her novels. Wharton rails against her mother’s efforts to ensure that the young Wharton read only what was considered proper. Noting with contempt that her mother refused to allow her to read the popular novels of the day—the very novels devoured by Wharton’s mother and friends—Wharton grew up to write the same kind of popular best sellers. Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s psychoanalytical biography of Wharton, A Feast of Words, explores Wharton’s childhood experience of a largely psychologically absent and cold mother. Wharton’s own words suggest the extent to which she both resisted and conformed to her culture’s expectations of a woman’s role. In her autobiography, Wharton complains that her family determined she must make her debut into society a year early because she was seen as too “bookish.” On the other hand, she also reports enjoying the balls, meeting eligible young men, and dancing with her older brothers’ friends. In 1885, she married Edward Wharton, a young man of established class from Boston, and appeared to happily settle down to life as a young society matron in Newport and New York. From the beginning, however, it seems that Wharton’s marriage and her role as wife were not without difficulties. In A Backward Glance, Wharton recounts what was to her an utterly humiliating experience when she confronted her mother about exactly what would happen in the bridal bedroom only to be told that one does not speak of such matters in polite company. It seems the marriage itself was not consummated for three weeks (Lewis, Wharton 53). Yet the apparently naïve, fearful, and terribly inexperienced young woman would take a lover in midlife—Morton Fullerton—a man several years her junior with an equally complicated sexual history. Although Wharton appeared willing enough as a young woman to conform to the social expectations of her gender and class, she ultimately found herself in a loveless marriage characterized by Teddy’s public philandering and mismanagement of their finances. While Wharton would write about divorce in a number of her novels, her silence about this event in her autobiography hints at the pain it caused Wharton to leave Teddy and take up life as an independent woman. If the role of wife eventually proved to be problematic for Wharton, motherhood was a role Wharton never took on. Wharton seemed keenly aware of the consequences of living a different kind of life. She clearly relished her life as a self-sufficient woman who had achieved great critical and financial success, created a community of close friends who satisfied her intellectual needs, and traveled widely in a way possible only for a woman unencumbered by husband and children. Even 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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so, Wharton expressed, late in her life, her fear that she may have missed something important in not having children. She confides to a close friend, the recently widowed Bessy Lodge, that Lodge was “blessed among women” to have had “children who are a part of him” (Lewis, Letters 217). It is surely intriguing that a number of Wharton’s later novels focus on motherhood and children in significant ways— The Glimpses of the Moon, The Old Maid, A Mother’s Recompense, and The Children. Clearly, Wharton was keenly aware of her failure to follow the expected trajectory of the lives of women in general and the women of her own class in particular as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. Not surprisingly, Wharton’s relationship to her native country was equally complex. As a child she lived for a time in Europe—a decision made by her father as a way to stretch the family funds during a period of economic downturn in America—but in 1872, she and her family returned to her native country and Old New York society. Wharton grew from child to young debutante to new society matron in Newport and New York. Nevertheless, as she became increasingly successful in her writing, Wharton began to travel more and live for longer and longer periods in Europe. From 1907 onward, she began to spend increasing amounts of time in England and France, staying in England through World War I, and eventually moving back and forth between her homes outside Paris and on the French Riviera. By the time she traveled to New Haven to accept her honorary doctorate from Yale in 1924, she had not been to America for ten years; she admitted that perhaps she needed to see her native country again if she was “going to go on writing about it” (qtd. in Lewis, Wharton 451). By and large, however, Wharton believed American culture was not conducive to artistic and intellectual endeavors. Writing to a friend in 1911, she asserts, America can’t be quite so summarily treated & so lightly dismissed as our great Henry [James] thinks; but at the present stage of its strange unfolding it isn’t exactly a propitious “ambiance” for the arts, & I can understand his feeling as he does. (Lewis, Letters 253)

In 1921, she writes to Sinclair Lewis that she hopes that “if two or three are gathered together, I believe we can save fiction in America” (Lewis, Letters 445). Her most complete analysis of the cultural failings of her native country is found in French Ways and Their Meaning published in 1919. In a series of essays eventually collected into the book, she



INTRODUCTION


expresses her distress over the absence of intelligent and cultured conversation in America. In her view, American women suffer this absence most keenly when compared to French women. She deplores the fact that American women were encouraged to remain childlike while French women were treated as adults and persons capable of intelligent conversation (although she further comments that French women also knew when to be silent and to remove themselves from the conversation). She notes with delight that many French women of their class organized salons and invited artists of all kinds to engage in an evening of conversation. And yet Wharton never abandoned her native country. The subjects of Wharton’s novels remain unwaveringly American. Whether these Americans travel abroad extensively or even take up living in France or England or Italy or marry French counts, they remain Americans. The settings for her best-known novels such as The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence remain the streets and elegant mansions of upper class New York. In Ethan Frome and Summer, she ventures out into the rural environs of Maine and Massachusetts but her subject is America. Despite living in Europe almost continuously since well before World War I until her death in 1937, she retained her national identity as a legal American citizen and as one of its leading authors. Clearly identifying herself as an American writer, Wharton nevertheless strenuously rejected all attempts to categorize her as American woman writer. Expressing contempt for the “colorists,” the late nineteenth-century, largely female, local color writers who captured the culture and customs of regional America, Wharton did, in fact, record, in careful detail, the appearances, activities, and social rituals and traditions of a unique class and place in American urban life. Resisting what she saw as the pejorative label assigned by her culture to American women writers of local color, Wharton worked hard to make clear that her subject had larger implications. In A Backward Glance, she describes at length her long-lasting affiliations with European male intellectuals, writers, and artists. Perhaps most telling, however, are the oppositions at work in Wharton’s understanding of herself as an author. Constructing the personal story of the growth of the artist as a young woman in her autobiography written late in life, Wharton consistently defines her writing as a secret, almost shameful, pleasure. She describes herself as a child leaving young guests in mid-visit to retire to her bedroom to “make-up”—a creative activity involving holding a book and creating a story at breakneck speed. She remembers with pride her mother’s 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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one-time birthday gift of a bound edition of a story written in early adolescence. Yet Wharton throughout her autobiography emphasizes the private nature of this process of writing. Reflecting on her girlhood, Wharton recalls, “There was in me a secret retreat where I wished no one to intrude . . . Words and cadences haunted it like songbirds in a magic wood” (Backward 70). Later on, Wharton depicts herself as a young society matron so naïve about this business of writing that she apprehensively sends off several poems for possible publication accompanied only by her gilt-edged visiting cards. And when Wharton experiences her first success as a professional writer, she immediately falls ill, undergoes a rest cure, and remains unable to write for six months. The publication of these private efforts, the making public of her secret passion, carries considerable consequences for the young writer. Wharton ultimately became a successful and major figure in American literature. She supported friends, family members, and various charities through her writing. By 1905, with the success of The House of Mirth, she reports “a growing sense of mastery [that] made the work more and more absorbing” (Backward 293). Clearly, Wharton the author had come a long way from the little girl making up stories and the young lady sending off her visiting cards to publishers. Over the course of her life, she managed her career with business savvy and purposefulness. In 1917, she abandoned her long-term association with Scribner’s Publishing when she decided that the conservative firm no longer adequately marketed her work or secured the most advantageous terms for her writing. By all accounts, Wharton became an eminently successful writer and shrewd advocate for her work. Ironically, this enterprise rests on novel after novel depicting the failures of female protagonists to find their voices and to tell their stories. In The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart inexorably spirals down the social ladder of upper New York society, silenced by rumor and her own unwillingness to tell the story that would save her. In The Reef (1912), Anna Leath chooses to remain with her unfaithful fiancé at the oppressive cost of maintaining her silence about his adultery. In Summer (1917), Charity Royall marries her own step-father to legitimize herself as wife and mother, rather than telling her former lover about their child. In The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), Suzy regains her husband and proves her virtue, not by convincing Nick she is worthy of his attention, but only through a silent pictorial as Nick observes her from the distance, framed in a doorway, child in her arms. The men in Wharton novels consistently observe, judge, 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


INTRODUCTION


and speak for women while the women in Wharton novels are consistently denied the opportunity to speak, to explain, to tell their story. This paradox between Wharton the author and the silenced protagonists of her novels point to the multiple challenges of authorship faced by a woman of Wharton’s culture, gender, and class at the end of the nineteenth century. This book looks closely at selected novels by Wharton to consider how they represent the challenges and constraints of female authority and authorship at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the same time, this study examines the complex narrative strategies Wharton employs to overcome these discursive limitations. Class allegiance, gender role, and national affiliation intersect in important ways and reveal rich contradictions in her life and work. Chapter One explores the ways in which this study of Edith Wharton both rests on and is complicated by the history of feminist critics and theorists working on women and narrative over the last thirty years. The important work of these early critics validated the study of women’s writing and challenged the canon of mostly male writers. Arguing for the significance and absolute necessity of foregrounding women’s literary efforts, these critics established a tradition of women writers and began important discussions about the gendered differences in a female literary history. At the same time, however, other feminist critics worried that a focus on women’s writing might disadvantage and marginalize these writers by failing to integrate their work into the mainstream of literary history. Furthermore, as critics and theorists were influenced by postmodernism and post-structuralist theory, they struggled with the destabilizing of identity and conceptions of gender that rejected claims of a fixed and transcendent woman’s voice. This chapter concludes that making gender central to the analysis is possible only by recognizing that the analysis must take place within a specific cultural and historical context that limits and defines understandings of the concepts of woman, gender, and the gendered production of texts. Chapter Two provides the particular historical and cultural context out of which Wharton struggled to become an author of serious literature and popular novels. The staid and conservative values of Old New York society limited her access to the kind of education most of her fellow male writers were accorded. Family and class expectations discouraged her from even considering the profession of writing. Although Wharton wrote at a time noted for its many women writers and readers, much of this writing was dismissed as feminine, sentimental, and not worthy of serious attention. The clash between 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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Victorian values and the emergence of the New Woman heightened cultural tensions over women’s roles in general. Publishing practices were moving from a paternalistic model that protected women from the fray of public life to a business model that required writers to move out of the privacy of their writing rooms into the public realm of marketing of their work. Given the challenges facing Wharton, perhaps the most surprising aspect of her life is that she ever became an author. The next four chapters consider the ways in which selected novels reveal the personal and cultural constraints on Wharton’s writing and the complicated narrative strategies by which she answered the challenges she faced as a female writer. The House of Mirth, The Reef, Summer, and The Glimpses of the Moon can be placed along a trajectory of increasingly complex ways of telling the story and a growing confidence within Wharton about taking on the role of writer. The novels form a continuing discussion about the possibility and potential for women to become the authors of their own lives. Although her protagonists largely fail to control their own stories, the very existence of Wharton’s novels proves that women can tell the story. Wharton’s multilayered narratives accord their author voice, authority, and power over the story. Chapter Three shows how Wharton’s The House of Mirth represents Lawrence Selden not only as Lily’s possible savior, but also as the inaccurate chronicler of her life. Wharton’s text silently juxtaposes events in Lily’s life with repeated failures on Selden’s part to act in her favor or to even understand the meaning of Lily’s experience. Disjunctions in the text reveal another story that revises the surface tale, a story that suggests Lily’s real mistake is putting her faith in Selden’s reputed ability to read her true self. In The House of Mirth, the word that Lily can never quite articulate is appropriated by Selden to construct a narrative that makes him a redemptive figure, a tale that fails to admit his complicity in her tragic fate. Chapter Four argues that Wharton explores even more explicitly the controlling power of masculine narrative in The Reef. From the beginning pages of the novel, George Darrow imposes his own stories on the women in his life. Wharton makes clear that the person who controls the way events are talked about also wields power over those events. Sophy Viner silences herself even before the novel ends. Anna Leath ultimately apparently abandons her questions and her voice to accept the passionate life she believes Darrow offers her. Yet Wharton, the author, critiques such choices. Initially working within the narrative frame of classic tragedy, Wharton’s novel resists the 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


INTRODUCTION


traditional resolution of the tragic structure. The final fragmentation of the story into ambiguity and uncertainty denies the reader the comforts of classic tragedy. No character experiences transformation through self-knowledge. Instead, Wharton underscores the failure of Anna to challenge the flawed narratives of Darrow and to seek the truth that might free her. Chapter Five looks closely at Summer, a novel written within the time frame of Edith Wharton’s affair with Morton Fullerton. Although not autobiographical, the novel’s careful exploration of erotic passion invites the reader to read the traces of the author’s awakening of her own sexuality in the feelings ascribed to Charity Royall as she falls in love with Lucius Harney. Unlike Charity, however, Wharton is an accomplished writer who, while fascinated by the lure of language, retains a firm hold over her story. Establishing a metaphorical link between sexual passion and the seductiveness of language and narrative, Wharton transforms a story apparently about the disastrous consequences for a woman who embraces her own sexuality into a tale about women and the alluring but dangerous and alienating effect of masculine narratives. Chapter Six explores a novel often dismissed by past reviewers and current critics as sentimental melodrama. A more careful reading of The Glimpses of the Moon, however, yields a carefully crafted narrative resting on Wharton’s sophisticated revision of narrative genres commonly associated with women writers. She shows how individual masculine narratives about the identity and moral worth of the female protagonist are themselves contained within larger cultural narratives regarding women. Employing parody and intentionally conflicting discourses, Wharton turns the sentimental novel on itself and uses the genre to question the very assumptions on which it rests and to take issue with the “feminine” way of looking at life advocated by such genres. The languages of economics and business clash with narrative patterns of romance writing so that the novel consistently undermines surface claims about life, love, and female destiny. The tale of Susy Lansing’s fall from grace and the subsequent restoration of her moral rectitude in Nick’s eyes appears to employ the elements of cheap melodrama and evidence the failing powers of an author past her prime. On the contrary, Wharton’s narrative offers one of her most sophisticated and broad-ranging analyses of discourse and women. This book closely examines Wharton’s continuing investigation of the complicated and difficult relationship of women to the telling of stories. The historic, cultural, and personal conditions of Wharton’s 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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life as the nineteenth turned into the twentieth century make her a compelling subject. The considerable forces that work against her becoming a writer offer a useful context for an analysis of the connections between cultural authority and the gender of authorship. Her own novels consistently draw attention to the difficulties of women telling their own stories. In the end, however, the critical and popular successes of her novels reveal Wharton’s triumph. While Wharton carefully details the problems of women telling stories, her skill as a writer reveals multiple solutions to those challenges. Wharton’s success as a woman of independence and noted author offers a powerful critique of the silencing of women found in her own novels. Wharton’s narratives reveal her acquisition of a voice that accords her financial and social independence. These novels also raise her to the status of a major American writer.



INTRODUCTION




1


A contemporary study of Edith Wharton and the rich contradictions that define her as a woman, an author, and an American is possible only because of the work of feminist critics and scholars over the last thirty years. Their work has provided the framework essential to exploring the complicated life of Edith Wharton as a writer, to recognizing the importance of the cultural context of gender, and to providing necessary theoretical models about authorship and gender. Although the leading American critic Annette Kolodny argued some thirty years ago in her landmark essay that engaging in feminist literary criticism and attending to women authors in college curriculum and scholarly articles was something like “Dancing through the Minefield,” she is no longer dancing alone. English departments in many colleges and secondary schools routinely ask students to consider gender in the reading and writing of texts in introductory literature courses. University students choose entire courses on “Women and Fiction” and “The Gender of Narrative.” Scholarly journals have been created to focus on gender, and annual conferences are convened to celebrate women authors and to offer analyses of gender in history, culture, and literature. Increasing numbers of thinkers and intellectuals recognize the presence of gender politics and vested interests in the reading and writing of literature. Efforts by earlier feminist scholars have also influenced publishers to make the work of women writers more available. Works by women writers long out-of-print have been rediscovered and published in new editions with forewords by established feminist scholars. Thirty years ago, texts by Edith Wharton could be found only in bookstores selling used books. Multiple editions of her books now crowd the shelves of mass-market bookstores. Feminist scholars who began their work in the 1970s and 1980s have radically altered the landscape of academic and popular discussion about women and writing. Thanks to



CH A P T ER


the work of these theorists, Wharton is no longer easily dismissed as a second-rate Henry James or a minor subject in the narrative of American literary history. It is ironic, then, that this important foundational work has also raised important political, practical, and intellectual questions about making gender the center of attention in the exploration of narratives and their authors. Increasingly sophisticated analyses of gender challenge accepted beliefs of earlier scholarship about the study of women writers. Although there continues to be important work that extends the efforts begun by women scholars in the 1970s and the 1980s, exactly how to go about such work is complicated by the very history that has made such work possible. While current feminist theorists continue to explore the relationship of women to discourse, language, and narrative, they also continue to strongly disagree on how to talk about women, language, and writing. For instance, post-structuralist feminism appears, on the surface, to reject the usefulness of discussions about gendered authorship, writing style, and narrative. Such theorists argue that genuine political, social, and material change in the lives of women will occur when gender differences are recognized as neither innate nor essential. Dissolving the binary opposition between the masculine and the feminine is the only way to insure that women are no longer defined as the other. An anthology of women’s writing or a course on women writers potentially marginalizes women writers because it implicitly retains the assumption that male writing is the norm. Other feminist theorists respond that historical and material conditions have always shaped female experiences of authorship in gendered terms. Women’s lives have historically differed in important ways from the lives of men. To abandon discussion about female authorship, for such critics, is to cooperate in the very historical silencing of women’s voices—a silencing against which feminist critics have battled from the early days.1 Perhaps a way out of the impasse is to pose the possibility that one can explore women’s relationship to language and narrative without returning to reductive notions about self and gender. One might, for instance, consider the ways in which the very structure of language remains male-centered and problematic for women who must use such language to construct their narratives. Feminist writers and critics from Virginia Woolf to Jane Tompkins have explored in some detail the not entirely unrelated problems women have experienced in finding time to write, a place to do their writing, and a publisher for their work. Feminist historians such as Joan Scott and Rosalind Rosenberg 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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have constructed persuasive histories that attest to the historically limited conditions of women’s lives. To connect the historical narratives and biographical studies of women writers to theories about the gendered nature of language and narrative is to position the analysis of gender difference firmly within the cultural context out of which such writing emerges. To consider the ways in which women authors have had to negotiate their very relationship to narrative structures, the use of metaphor and the generation of stories within the context of their own cultures can be a starting point for analysis. Avoiding simplistic understandings of a female self still allows critics to consider questions about gender and narrative as viable and credible. Cultural context becomes the still center around which one can investigate the gendered experience of writing while recognizing the always shifting identity and unstable category of the woman writer. The two poles of the debate over how to talk about the writing of women have been historically figured in geographic terms. AngloAmerican and French feminists early on established very different traditions of analysis shaped by differing perspectives on the gendered nature of language, narrative, the writing self, and the effects of gender on women’s material lives.2 For the past thirty years, much AngloAmerican feminist literary criticism has concerned itself with the material, political, economic, and social conditions that constrain women’s writing. Linked with the woman’s movement of the 1970s, much of this criticism was marked by an accompanying political agenda that advocated women’s interests inside and outside academia. Theoretical concerns addressed the need for defining a history of women’s writing and developing a mode of criticism based on beliefs about the gendered lives of women and their stories. For instance, Adrienne Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” calls for a new way of looking at literary tradition. She points to her own struggles between her female identity as wife and mother and her role as a poet working within a masculine tradition. She argues that women must find another perspective on a literary history that largely ignores female writing.3 Rich asserts that female creativity will generate social change. This early essay reflects the revolutionary fervor, optimism, and unproblematic understanding of “woman” particularly characteristic of the woman’s movement and feminist literary criticism in the 1970s in the United States. American critic Elaine Showalter, in “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” also emphasizes the importance of gender difference in writing. She articulates the need to determine what “constitute[s] women as a distinct literary group” and how to define “the difference 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


WHARTON AND FEMINIST CRITICISM


of women’s writing,” a project she terms “gynocritics” (248). The final paragraph of the essay echoes Rich’s earlier revolutionary rhetoric as Showalter metaphorically describes the current job of feminist critics as redefining the earlier mission from “a search for the promised land . . . in which all texts would be sexless” to the current need to embrace “the tumultuous and intriguing wilderness of difference itself” (266–67).4 These early calls by American critics for a woman’s literary tradition and new methods of analysis for the reading of women’s texts clearly addressed the silencing and marginalization of women writers. Yet, at the same time, these critics were vulnerable to questions raised by increasingly influential post-structuralist thinking.5 The question of how to talk about gender difference and undermine gender hierarchies—activities essential in the study of a woman writer— has to be raised within the context of post-structuralist reevaluations of conceptions about gender and the self. Many French theorists, writing at the same time as these early American feminist critics, did this by locating gender difference within the cultural ideologies embedded in language. Drawing on post-structuralism, Derrida, and Lacan, these theorists interrogated the very nature of language to see how structures of meaning and systems of signs reflected and produced notions of difference, established a male/female opposition, and shaped the writing of women. For feminist thinkers such as Helene Cixous, radical change demands a turning of language on itself in order to disrupt the gendered binary opposition put into place by language.6 Calling this kind of writing ecriture feminine, she locates this “feminine” writing within the female body. Luce Irigaray, another major French critic, also links woman’s writing to the body. Irigaray argues that female sexuality demonstrates that the body of a woman is not “one” and that her desire speaks a language different from man’s language. She asserts that recognizing the plural sexuality of women would give voice to her “contradictory words” and allow for the discovery of a female language that exists outside a “phallic economy.” Irigaray names this feminine language parle femme (29).7 Although Cixous and Irigaray situate their conceptions of woman’s writing in a post-structuralist frame, both have been accused of essentialism in their apparent linkage of female sexuality to a feminine mode of discourse. The two theorists seem to suggest that to be female is to have access to some way of writing that is different, anarchic, and multiple in meaning. What is most intriguing about their theories is the focus on a disruptive discourse that both label as 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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feminine and that can be used to undermine a phallocentric conception of language and disrupt the hierarchy of male over female writing. What remains problematic, however, is the role of woman’s body in relation to this liberating discursive realm. The equating of gendered bodies with gendered writing fixes identity and imposes an ahistorical and universalizing perspective differentiating experiences of authorship within a given gender. In the end, Cixous and Irigaray fail to provide a framework for analysis of women writers that escapes the essentialism and universalizing impulses also present in the work of Rich, Showalter, and Kolodny. Ultimately, although Cixous and Irigaray usefully raise questions about the notion of woman and how language both is shaped by and constructs a gendered identity, they fail to address the social, political, cultural, and economic conditioning of the female body that seeks to tell the story. If American feminist critics in the 1970s can be accused of a superficial understanding of difference in the literary experiences of women, these French critics, in their efforts to locate difference within the realm of language itself, appear to ignore the actual experiences of women writers in a material world.8 The use of post-structuralist strategies, then, both advances and complicates the analysis of women’s writing. Peggy Kamuf, in “Replacing Feminist Criticism,” shows how post-structuralism can, in fact, begin to dismantle institutional structures and modes of thought that exclude women. For Kamuf, expanding or revising the literary canon to include or privilege women’s writing leaves unchallenged the power structures and modes of knowledge production that oppress women.9 Kamuf argues that feminism must use the “lever of contradiction” to “disengage meaning from patterns of sexual opposition” (46). Kamuf’s post-structuralist stance that questions the existence of “man” and “woman” and that seeks to dissolve the binary opposition of gender within language certainly offers the potential for deconstructing assumptions that devalue women’s writing. More problematic, however, is her conclusion that readers need to move beyond the focus on gender in feminist criticism. Kamuf’s stance, in effect, once again erases women’s experiences and risks muting their voices. While she is accurate in pointing out that the concept of an entirely coherent and autonomous self is naive, it is also true that human beings continue to think of themselves and others as having some agency in the creation of a self and a narrative of identity that offers coherence and suggests a core self inhabiting a gendered body. In her reply to Kamuf, Nancy K. Miller in “The Text’s Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions” (1982) maintains that gender still 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




matters and argues that “ ‘we women’ must continue to work for the woman who has been writing, because not to do so will reauthorize our oblivion” (49). Contemporary theory’s “sovereign indifference” to the signature of the author, in Miller’s view, is a particularly serious threat to women “who have lost and still routinely lose their proper name in marriage” (53).10 Furthermore, Miller shows that it is also possible to view women’s writing as a disruption of the hegemonic assumptions of nineteenth-century humanism. She argues that women’s discourse can “challenge the confidence of humanistic discourse as universality” (52). Literature and criticism that explore traditional “female” experiences hitherto largely ignored by writers challenge the assumed universality of male experience.11 This study of Edith Wharton as a woman writer from a feminist perspective—even some thirty years after these early debates—continues to face these same challenges. The problem of preserving the category of women writers while avoiding naiveté and the threat of marginalization and rejecting reductive notions of self or gender resists easy solutions. A purely post-structuralist position, which fails to take into account history and material conditions, will erase women’s experience and the uniqueness of her gendered story. A purely essentialist position that fails to recognize the shifting nature of identity constructed within language forecloses discussion about the structures of meaning embedded in language and narrative that challenge female authorship. The most useful theoretical perspective would do two things at the same time: (1) It would recognize the constructedness of self through language and avoid any fixed or inherent sense of a gendered identity; (2) It would also take into account the historical conditions that shape the self and make gender matter. Julia Kristeva’s notion of the speaking subject addresses both issues. Kristeva rejects the term “feminist” and, in fact, has claimed that “woman” does not exist except in negative terms. Nevertheless, her deployment of linguistic and psychoanalytic theory to investigate the construction of self, the subversive properties of language, and the origins of the self’s relationship to the symbolic order offers a framework for the analysis of the female writer. Focusing on the “speaking subject,” Kristeva believes that it is important to “establish the heterogeneous logic of signifying practices and [to] locate them, finally and by way of their subject, in the historically determined relations of production” (32).12 Kristeva’s concept of the speaking subject shaped by history can be used to focus attention on female writing in terms of a gendered subject position. Gender and history can no longer be 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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separated. Although an author can potentially inhabit any number of subject positions, material conditions and historical forces determine the way an individual writer of either gender is positioned in a particular way at a specific time. Claims about the importance of studying women writers no longer rest on some universal concept of woman but, instead, recognize the role of gender in the production of the text at a particular time and place. Since identity as a speaking/writing subject is not fixed but only temporarily held in place by cultural and historical forces that govern the production of the text, the critic can investigate the specific constraints (which include gender) on the construction of the narrative. Criticism can examine how the text reveals gendered cultural and material characteristics of signifying practices that shape the speaking subject without making claims for a woman’s voice that transcends time and place. Kristeva’s theory makes it possible to examine how male and female subject positions establish differing relationships to discourse. Such a stance allows for some slippage between the gendered subject positions of male and female authors and avoids the fixed notions of gender identity and conceptions of essentialized gendered writing with which post-structuralists rightly take issue. Denise Riley in “Am I That Name” more directly addresses how the study of women’s history and writing is both possible and necessary in a post-structuralist age. Riley argues that the category of “women” is as “troublesome” as the post-structuralist “woman.” Indeed, she believes that “ ’women’ is [a] historically, discursively constructed” term that operates against a backdrop of shifting cultural constructs about nature, class, identity, and reason (1). For Riley, the concept of “women” is always in flux because the historical conditions that define the term are never at rest. However, Riley claims that recognizing the “semantic shakiness” of the concept of woman need not erase the category (5).13 Riley argues that a woman is never only a woman and that her relationship to a literary tradition, for example, will be mediated by nationality, region, race, ethnicity, class, education, and personal biography—all factors that invite the crossing of gender lines. She grants women control over the shifting definitions of the female self. She argues that historicizing gender disrupts the fixed male/female binary opposition.14 Her stress on the “temporality” of “collective identities” can be used to generate a post-structuralist analysis of women’s writing embedded in a specific culture at a fixed time in history (16). An illustration of how Riley’s historicizing of the post-structuralist self might be applied to a particular feminist literary event is described 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




by Teresa De Lauretis in an essay about a group of Italian women working to define their collective identity and to mentor one another for twenty years in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.15 She redefines essentialism in post-structuralist terms as a set of “attributes that . . . feminists define, envisage, or enact for themselves” rather than as a “God-given nature” (5). Arguing that women have always worked to define themselves within a given culture and time, De Lauretis argues that women must recover the history of their struggles embedded in the tradition of their writings.16 De Lauretis supports her own theoretical stance by reference to “one possible history, one story”—the narrative of the women of Milan who opened a bookstore, published a manifesto, and established women’s groups to encourage awareness and to provide an arena for female-to-female mentoring from 1966 to 1986 (14). She reports that the women ultimately validated the uniqueness of their female identity and their place in writing by creating a genealogy of writing women.17 De Lauretis’s essay reaches some of the same conclusions about the need for a woman’s literary tradition (or a woman’s reading of the male tradition) as advocated by Rich, Showalter, and Kolodny. Her insistence on the importance of the history of the woman’s movement, her definition of identity as a set of attributes located within a historically produced subject, and her reliance on a specific historical model (the women of Milan) demonstrate one answer to the “problem” of women’s relationship to the symbolic. She illustrates a way for critics to engage in literary discourse about women’s writing that is firmly located within history. Kristeva’s notion of a speaking subject and De Lauretis’s story about the women of Milan emphasize the intersection of time, history, and culture in the creation of the category of “woman” and offer a framework for this study of Edith Wharton as a twentieth-century American woman writer. Wharton’s class, gender, and nationality intersect with changes in the publishing industry and notions of male and female writing to reveal multiple challenges to Wharton’s position as a writer. Attending to the historical and cultural forces that shape Wharton as a “speaking subject” invites the reader to consider how her novels may reveal something of Wharton’s struggle to achieve narrative authority. A careful reading of her novels also reveals Wharton’s development of increasingly sophisticated narrative strategies not only to tell her own story but also to carry out an investigation into the ways by which women both control and are controlled by narrative. While this study rests on the premise that many women writers in the past and present struggle with internal and external forces to 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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claim identity and authority as an author, it makes no assertions about a universal female voice or the existence of a kind of transcendent female writing. It is neither possible nor desirable to divorce discussion about gender and narrative authority from its historical context and to draw conclusions about an essential female writing when no woman has ever lived in a time or place free from the conditions that shape her writing. Instead, this book contextualizes the analysis of work by Edith Wharton by examining the historical, economic, cultural, and aesthetic forces that governed notions of women and the production of texts at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Wharton’s own criticism, her autobiography, and her letters shed light on her understanding of writing and gender. Nevertheless, the best evidence for Wharton’s concern about gendered control over language and narrative appears in her novels and short stories. Attending to the conditions, ideologies, and experiences that define Wharton’s gendered subject position sheds new light on Edith Wharton’s novels. The multilayered narratives in The House of Mirth, The Reef, Summer, and The Glimpses of the Moon reveal Edith Wharton’s continuing interest in narrative discourse and female authorship in two important ways. First, these novels written between 1905 and 1922 offer evidence of Wharton’s struggles to engage in an activity perceived by herself and her culture as something that men did. Thematic concerns and narrative features within the novels highlight the telling of stories. Wharton uses male narrative filters to introduce and describe female protagonists and makes continual references to various contradictory discourses such as that of business and economics and art and aesthetics that get applied to women. Repeated narrative lines track how female characters become progressively imprisoned by male stories. All of these strategies suggest Wharton’s awareness of the ways women are rendered powerless by their exclusion from the discursive realm. In these novels, male and female characters are carefully defined in relation to their unequal control over language and narrative. The central question is usually whether or not a female protagonist will be able to narrate her own story. Within the context of Wharton’s history as woman writer, the struggle to achieve narrative control at the fictional level can be read as Wharton’s own struggle over how to tell her story. Second, these same novels demonstrate Wharton’s increasingly successful handling of narrative structure and theme to gain narrative authority and to exercise control over her story. If the outsider cannot narrate her story directly, she devises alternative narrative structures 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




that give her voice without appearing to challenge patriarchal power. There is, of course, a rich tradition of women’s stories about women who manage to tell their stories using irony, deceptiveness, and even silence.18 Indeed, women writers’ efforts to define themselves as authors and to tell the story they need to tell may require a kind of betrayal—an undermining or subverting of the conventional narrative so that more than one story can be told. Thus the themes and narrative structures in Wharton’s narratives may not only reveal the stress and tensions of taking on authorship but also may suggest “solutions” to the pressures aligned against women writers—writers shaped by and working within a culture that says men write great literature and women get written about. Wharton’s narratives that employ irony, even deceit, that rely on implied critique, that use silence as a mode of narration are effective precisely because they “tell the Truth but tell it slant” as Emily Dickinson advised. A narrative that refuses to contain the whole story, that reflects textural disjunctions and ruptures, that employs conflict and irony, that allows for a silent authorial critique from the gaps within the narrative can be a way of telling a story albeit obliquely. Such a text invites the reader to participate in the construction of an alternative story—even a story that interrogates the very possibility of storytelling—and can be a way for an outsider to gain a measure of narrative authority. Tracking the alternative story in a selection of Wharton’s novels written during what many argue is the most successful and productive period of her career reveals Edith Wharton’s own fears and fascination with her identity as an author and with the profession of writing. But these alternative stories also point to her increasingly sophisticated analysis of the nature and potential for women’s stories. Wharton’s carefully crafted ongoing discussion with her culture about gender and writing surely represents an important period in the history of women’s efforts to enter into the literary world.



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Wharton, Women, and Authorship at the Turn of the Century

Edith Wharton’s development as an author occurs at a time when ideological, economic, and historical forces governing ideas about sexual difference, gender roles, and the profession of writing were undergoing significant changes. Julia Kristeva’s concept of the “speaking subject” provides a useful starting point for exploring the ways in which these changing cultural forces shaped Wharton as a woman and author. Kristeva’s theory asserts that “a theory of meaning . . . must necessarily be a theory of the speaking subject” (27). And for Kristeva, the speaking subject is always embedded within a network of personal experiences and historical and cultural conditions.1 Thus, we not only view Wharton as an author making choices about what story to tell and how to tell that story but also acknowledge the psychological, economic, historical, and cultural factors that influenced these choices.2 Edith Wharton’s personal history and the larger social and cultural background of her era make her a particularly rich subject for an examination of gender and authorship. She was born in 1862 into a venerable old New York family and, by her own account, raised within a “provincial society” where “authorship was still regarded as something between a black art and a form of manual labor” (Backward 69). Wharton came late to the profession of writing—publishing her first collection of short stories at the age of thirty-seven. This author, who made American life the subject of nearly all of her work and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, repeatedly complained about her country’s inability to provide a culture that was receptive to art and aesthetics. At one point she lamented to Sara Norton: “What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty” (Lewis, Letters 93). Wharton believed that this artistic and intellectual sterility was compounded by condescending American attitudes 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


CH A P T ER


toward women. Beginning in 1907, she lived more and more in France where a woman was treated as a “grown up” and was given authority and recognition “as a business woman, as a mother, above all as an artist” (Wharton, French Ways 100, 110). As a writer beginning her career at the turn of the century and publishing steadily until her death in 1937, Wharton’s experience of authorship was marked by rapid changes within the literary profession that impacted beliefs about gender and writing. Male and female authors were rejecting the “feminine” sentimentalism of much of nineteenth-century American literature and choosing the more “masculine” modes of realism and naturalism. The adoption of increasingly formal business practices within the publishing industry and the professionalization of literary work, in general, especially affected women writers. An emphasis by publishing houses on best-sellers, a phenomenal increase in the amount of money paid to successful authors, the development of mass-market publishing strategies, and the growth of picture magazines was altering the process and profession of writing in America. Authorship was no longer primarily a genteel activity carried out in the privacy of one’s home and aided by a paternalistic publisher, but an aggressive business centered in busy offices and dependent on savvy publishers marketing the results to a carefully targeted public. For the large numbers of women writing in the nineteenth century, these changes provided new challenges to writing and publishing their stories. It was within these larger cultural changes, that Edith Wharton struggled to reconcile the double identity of author and woman. For in Wharton’s case, she and her culture had come to see these roles as being largely at odds with one another. Indeed, a reading of Wharton’s work from the beginning to the end of her career reveals the continuing challenges, occasional failures, but more often triumphs of creating and maintaining a sense of self large enough to contain all of these contradictions. Her “resolution” of this divided self, finally, seems to depend on her acceptance of paradox and conflict. Any study of this fascinating woman quickly reveals the contradictions inherent in her identity as woman and writer. Wharton’s autobiography, letters, and nonfiction as well as comments from her friends, editors, and fellow intellectuals and writers reveal both her determination to succeed as an author and her painful awareness of the social isolation she would experience with family and friends in her social class if she became an author. Wharton valued the conservative traditions by which she was raised and, later in life, explicitly lamented the passing of Old New York.3 But she also refused to 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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accept the limitations imposed by that rigid world on her gender. She aspired to the name of artist and the admiration of serious critics and yet she was also determined to acquire the sort of readership within the mass market that assured her a steady income. She worked diligently every morning at her writing but maintained throughout her life the image of the elegant hostess presiding over her drawing room and gardens in the afternoons and evenings. A noted conversationalist, she lived much of her life as an expatriate who admired French women for adeptly managing salons even though Wharton also praised them for knowing that when “interesting . . . men” were in attendance, women were “not expected to talk much” (Wharton, French Ways 24). She was a female author who achieved critical acceptance from the literary establishment, best-seller status from the popular reading public, and great financial success through her writing. But, ironically, many of Wharton’s narratives centered on women who failed to tell their stories. The contradictions within Wharton are certainly reflected in the major ideological conflicts about gender at the turn of the century. Wharton lived and wrote during a period in America when gender differences were the topic of vigorous debate.4 As Elizabeth Ammons suggests in Conflicting Stories, by the end of the nineteenth century, “the scientific insistence on difference” had been “popularized” (40). At least partially because of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, much of Wharton’s culture accepted differences between men and women as essential, rooted in biology and driven by evolution. A developing medical profession furthered the gender gap at least among middle and upper class women.5 For example, the identification of hysteria, which was viewed as a largely female disease diagnosed by male doctors, took place in the latter part of the century.6 The degree, nature, and method of educating women were also hotly contested. As Louise Newman points out in Men’s Ideas/ Women’s Realities, in the late nineteenth century, many members of the medical profession such as Dr. Edward H. Clarke, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a physician specializing in the treatment of female nervous diseases, worried about the dangers of educating women in the same way as men. Newman details the “confrontation . . . between those who argued that women had a right to an education equal or identical to that offered men and the physicians who warned that a ‘male’ education would render women infertile and sickly” (54).7 At the turn of the century, cultural debate over gender roles and sexual difference was taking place in the scientific, medical, social, academic, economic, and political realms. 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


WHARTON AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY


The woman question also deeply divided American popular culture at the end of the nineteenth century. Many men and women clung to beliefs in “True Womanhood”—maintaining separate spheres of action for men and women, celebrating female domesticity, and viewing women as the custodians of moral values through their roles as wives and mothers. At the same time, advocates for the “New Woman” campaigned for women’s education and the vote, demanded greater access to the workplace, and rejected social and religious arguments that accorded women subordinate status. Although the era of True Womanhood was passing by the time Wharton was born in 1862, many of the attributes of the ideology remained in place. If piety was not valued as much in Wharton’s world, female purity and ignorance about sexual matters were expected in young women of Wharton’s class. 8 On the other hand, as the century proceeded, major external forces were already working against the ideal of the True Woman.9 Barbara Welter notes, The movements for social reform, westward migration, missionary activity, utopian communities, industrialism, the Civil War—all called forth responses from woman which differed from those she was trained to believe were hers by nature and divine decree. (40–41)

Nevertheless, in the midst of such social turmoil, the cult of True Womanhood offered social norms, shaped cultural aspirations, and provided apparent consensus about accepted gender roles, behavior, and beliefs for many people. The stability afforded society by the assumed agreement about women’s roles encouraged acceptance of the status quo. Thus, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, although forces for change in women’s roles became stronger, they also evoked much cultural anxiety. As the country moved into the Progressive Era with its emphasis on social reform argued by and for women, a kind of gender war emerged. Indeed, the Progressive Era was marked by heightened concerns about masculinity. Ammons observes, The era that saw women gain the vote, earn unprecedented percentages of college degrees, enter the professions in unheard-of-numbers, lower the birthrate, raise the divorce rate, and stop the sale of liquor was also, it is important to remember, the era of San Juan Hill, the Rough Riders, World War One, and a political party named, not carelessly, the Bull Moose Party. (Conflicting Stories 16)



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In both the larger culture and academic circles, men worried about how to shore up American masculinity. The Boy Scouts of America was founded in 1910 to provide an organization for young men that countered the effects of too much female influence. The Modern Language Association fretted about increasing numbers of women in literature classrooms.10 Writing associated with reform efforts during the Progressive Era in journalism and popular novels also revealed anxiety about masculinity. One such example is David Graham Phillips, a muckraking newsman, contributor to mass-market magazines and novelist. Historian James R. McGovern, writing about Phillips, noted that Phillips’s novels promoted stereotypical masculine qualities and attitudes toward women and was characteristic of the period in its celebration of such perceptions.11 While the Progressive Era opened up opportunities for women to enter more fully into society, changing gender roles elicited hostile responses and reactionary social movements from all quarters. Conflicting ideologies between 1890 and the 1920s were reflected in cultural attitudes toward women writers and their texts.12 Although the number of women writers had greatly increased throughout the nineteenth century, questions about the desirability and appropriateness of female authors—especially in the realm of serious professional writing—remained.13 And even if women were accorded a place in the literary arena, expectations about choice of genre, writing style, and subject matter were often defined by cultural beliefs about women. Admittedly woman made inroads into the literary field in the nineteenth century, especially in fiction. By 1872, almost three-quarters of the novels published had been written by women (CoultrapMcQuin 2). And yet, even while women’s stories were taking over the publishing industry, the “cultural messages” about women authors remained “ambiguous” (Coultrap-McQuin xii). One of the most popular novels in the nineteenth century, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—which advocated social change by calling mothers to nurture and guide the nation to the higher moral ground regarding slavery— was, on some level, simply a natural and non-threatening extension of Victorian ideas about women as the moral guardians of the home and family. Especially in the realm of the domestic novel, the woman writer could teach appropriate values and behavior for women and men and encourage appreciation for literature in an increasingly literate population while not threatening prevailing understandings of women’s roles.





Nevertheless, Victorians worried about the effect of literary work on women. Coultrap-McQuin quotes, “Women writers were stereotyped as ‘bluestockings’ and as ‘strong-minded’ women whose intelligence made them ‘tough, aggressive, pedantic, vain, and ugly’ ” (16). Thus, even though women writers could potentially maintain their idealized roles—after all, writing could be done at home—the act of writing was perceived as potentially destructive to a woman’s role and desirability. Even if a woman did achieve success as a writer without losing her femininity, she was often dismissed as second-rate precisely because she wrote “like a woman.” In 1877, H.O. Houghton, publisher of The Atlantic Monthly (a periodical that regularly printed work by women), held an anniversary dinner to which he invited sixty valued contributors—none of them women (Coultrap-McQuin 2). By the end of the nineteenth century, women could and did point to a tradition of women writers, major gains for women in access to education including the opening of women’s colleges, and a sense that women’s horizons were considerably broader than at the beginning of the century. Yet, at the same time, it was also clear that women authors in the past and the present were still subject to distrust, hostility, and contempt. Both men and women writers and their readers continued to reflect the ambiguities about gender and writing embedded in their culture. Women critics at that time were keenly aware that many men and women saw the literary profession as unnatural and incompatible with a woman’s role. In an essay published in 1891, Helen Gray Cone discusses the lack of progress for women writers. Strenuously arguing that contemporary women authors have achieved equality in the literary field, Cone admits she is surprised that more women have not become authors.14 Coultrap-McQuinn quotes another nineteenthcentury speaker: “If women were wise they would understand that they have a mission quite as grand as that of literary authorship. It is the mission of keeping alive for men certain ideas, and ideals too, which would soon pass out of the world” (11). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writing in 1911, directly addresses the issue of gender and literary work in The Man-Made World (1911) where she laments that “after ages of culture, in which men have developed architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and the drama, we find women . . . making flowers of wax . . . doing mottoes of perforated cardboard, making crazy quilts and mats and ‘tidies’ ” (78). While Gilman sees some evidence of a movement in literature away from an exclusively masculine focus on love and war and adventure, 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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as “new laborers” (that is, women) enter the “field,” she admits both men and women have yet to recognize the value of women’s stories.15 While Gilman reflects on the cultural conditions working against women writers, the conflict between being female and an author appears overtly in the career of Willa Cather.16 For a period during her adolescence she changed her name to William Cather, Jr. after William Boak, her mother’s brother who died fighting for the Confederacy.17 As her biographer Sharon O’Brien notes, in her early life, Cather found little to admire about her female ancestors, despite real accomplishments within the domestic arena. O’Brien suggests, And yet it is understandable that Willa Cather did not take pride in her personal and artistic inheritance from her female forebears until she had first declared her attachment to the male line, literary as well as familial. Traditional women were not the first models and mentors for a young writer desiring acceptance by the elite world of art and letters; female diary-keepers, letter-writers, and storytellers had no status in the world of high culture dominated by Henry James. (30)

Not surprisingly, then, Cather was not entirely pleased to be included in Grant Overton’s The Women Who Make Our Novels (1918) because she feared it categorized her as one of the “authorines” (O’Brien 6). Indeed Cather strenuously disassociated herself from the company of female authors, claiming “As a rule, if I see the announcement of a new book by a woman, I—well, I take one by a man instead . . . I have noticed that the great masters of letters are men, and I prefer to take no chances when I read” (O’Brien 177). Although Cather would eventually change her view of women and women artists drastically—Sarah Orne Jewett becomes her mentor—and although she comes to reject the earlier internalized message that women could not write well, she never forgot that much of her culture failed to achieve a similar understanding. O’Brien notes that as late as 1931, Cather “admitted to one of her readers that it was a great disadvantage to be a lady author—anybody who thought it wasn’t was a fool and should read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own” (6).18 A similar defensiveness tinged with anxiety about authorship appeared in much of Wharton’s correspondence and in the autobiography she published toward the end of her life which both records and creates her career as a writer. The act of becoming a published writer was both satisfying and terrifying for Wharton.19 According to her autobiography, A Backward Glance, written when she was seventy, Wharton even as a child had wanted “to make up stories.” Creating 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




for her readers an image of the little girl not yet able to read or write, book in hand, “striding” around the room making up her own tales about “real” people, Wharton as an adult author constructs a story of the self as author by claiming that this early behavior destined her to become a writer. She observes, “There was something almost ritualistic in the performance. The call came regularly and imperiously; and though, when it caught me at inconvenient moments, I would struggle against it conscientiously . . . the struggle was always a losing one. I had to obey the furious Muse” (35). Wharton’s very language defines the act of writing as fated and sacred. Later, after Wharton learns to read, she experiences the “secret ecstasy of communion” when she enters a “secret retreat” of books “haunted” by “words and cadences . . . like song-birds in a magic world” (69, 70). Her elaborate metaphor again lends a mythic quality to a time when the authorto-be first encountered the secret realm of storytelling. Yet when Wharton actually takes on the role of writer as an adult, publishing three poems and a short story and being invited to produce a collection of tales for Scribner’s, she suffers years of illness— nausea, fatigue, and depression. In his biography of Wharton, R.W.B. Lewis explains Wharton’s serious breakdown at the age of thirty-two and the very beginning of her career as “evidence that she had absorbed into a guilt-ridden corner of her being her society’s and her mother’s distrust of a person of good family who took seriously to writing” (76). He argues that Wharton’s confusion over her “fundamental role in life: wife, social hostess, observer of foreign parts—or drawing on all of these, a writer of fiction” led to the breakdown (76).20 In her biography of Wharton, Hermione Lee surveys a number of versions of this oft-debated period in Wharton’s life and notes that Lewis’s explanation seems to have persisted—perhaps encouraged by Wharton’s own account in her autobiography. According to Lee, Wharton’s description of her early career reads as a kind of “escape narrative” in which after a period of initial illness, she became the destined author (80). Lee suggests “that this heroic retrospective narrative of depression giving way to achievement is too simple” and that Wharton was both actually physical ill (likely asthma) and leading a full life despite periods of feeling unwell: “She was leading complicated, active, energetic life all through the period in which she was also unwell, unhappy, and depressed” (80). Throughout her career, Wharton seemed to consider writing as something to be hidden away. She almost always refused to discuss the morning hours of work with her guests at her grand and elegant homes—The Mount or Pavillon Colombe or Hyeres. At the age of 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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seventy, after years of success as a best-selling and critically accepted author, she still referred to her writing as “the secret garden” (Backward 197). Even within the autobiography where the successful author, nearing the end of her career, attempts to construct a public self as a serious artist fulfilling a destiny, Wharton consistently refers to writing and books as a kind of hidden pleasure.21 Although Wharton believed there were obstacles to establishing herself as a serious author based on her gender, class, and even nationality, she also found the experience exhilarating. In A Backward Glance, she describes her tentative overtures to several magazines in 1899. Admitting she knew nothing about how “authors communicated with editors,” she writes, “I copied out in my fairest hand” three poems “and enclosed each in an envelope with my visiting card” and mailed them to three different magazines” (109). Their acceptance became a defining event for Wharton for the rest of her life: As long as I live I shall never forget my sensations when I opened the first of the three letters and learned that I was to appear in print. I can still see the narrow hall, the letter-box out of which I fished the letters, and the flight of stairs up and down which I ran, senselessly and incessantly, in the attempt to give my excitement some muscular outlet. (Backward 109)

In writing, Wharton finds an identity that she values highly. She marks the beginning of her literary career with the publishing of two short stories in 1891 but argues that she does not find an independent self until the 1899 publication of her short story collection The Greater Inclination.22 This publication of the first volume of her short stories radically transforms her sense of self. “I had written short stories that were thought worthy of preservation. Was it the same insignificant I that I had always known? . . . [M]y friends could not have been more astonished and incredulous than I was” (Backward 113). Yet, however unlikely it seemed to herself and her friends, the act of publishing gives Wharton a new identity that she fully embraces.23 Wharton’s understanding of herself as a woman also complicates her understanding of herself as a professional writer. Her upper class upbringing in the second half of the nineteenth century within the traditions of Old New York society inculcated in her many of the values of Victorian womanhood. Such female protagonists in her novels as Lily Bart, Anna Leath, and even Susy Lansing reflect Wharton’s understanding of what her culture expected of women—to be





well-dressed, to marry, to manage a home, and to be witty and clever without being too intellectual. Wharton was keenly aware of the consequences of being a daughter rather than a son in her family. Unlike her brothers, Wharton was never sent to school and, although she was given tutors and allowed the use of her father’s extensive library, she decries her lack of formal intellectual training. “Being deprived of the irreplaceable grounding of Greek and Latin, I never learned to concentrate except on subjects naturally interesting to me, and developed a restless curiosity which prevented my fixing my thoughts for long even on these” (Backward 47–48). Although the lack of intellectual stimulation within Wharton’s home and society was common to both men and women, girls were actively discouraged from serious mental effort. At least in Wharton’s experience, girls were excluded from opportunities and spaces designated for serious intellectual activity. Wharton notes that the “gentleman’s library,” which “was an essential part of the old New York household,” was her father’s (Backward 52). While her mother is identified as “little of a reader” by Wharton, Wharton imagines that her father had at one time an appreciation for poetry “which might have been developed had he had anyone with whom to share it” (Backward 51, 39). She adds, “But my mother’s matter-of-factness must have shriveled up any buds of fancy . . . I have wondered since . . . what manner of man he was really meant to be. That he was a lonely one, haunted by something always unexpressed and unattained, I am sure” (Backward 39). Clearly Wharton wishes she could have been that intellectual companion for her father. Instead, she was taught to appreciate the value of a good table, eternally tidy drawing rooms, and fashionable dress. At the age of seventeen, she made her debut into society, her parents having “decided that I spent too much time in reading, and that I was to come out a year before the accepted age” (Backward 77). Wharton’s negative attitude toward her culture’s view of a woman’s role certainly derives in part from her unhappy relationship with her own mother. As Cynthia Griffin Wolff discusses at length in A Feast of Words, Lucretia Stevens Jones was a formidable presence in Wharton’s life as both a mother and a representative of contemporary womanhood. Wolff suggests that the tension between mother and daughter was heightened by Lucretia’s ambivalent treatment of Edith’s fledgling literary interests. The mother apparently made attempts to copy down the little girl’s stories and much later had a set of her poems privately published, but her chilling response to the eleven-year-old’s first attempt at a novel and her own preoccupation with society and 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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fashion contributed to Wharton’s sense that literature could serve only as a secret refuge for a woman of her class.24 Wharton notes that she could “not hope to render the tone” used by her mother in speaking of “Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who was so ‘common’ yet so successful. On the whole, my mother doubtless thought, it would be simpler if people one might be exposed to meeting would refrain from meddling with literature” (Backward 68). It seems clear that Wharton’s education, family, and culture not only failed to nurture her as the developing writer she longed to become but also actively discouraged her from ever acting on her childish wish to “make up.” When she returned at the age of twenty to New York with her mother after the death of her father, Wharton says she “had almost forgotten [her] literary dreams” (Backward 88). She notes, “I could not believe that a girl like myself could ever write anything worth reading, and my friends would certainly have agreed with me” (Backward 88). But Wharton did not give up those dreams and eventually became the very kind of successful writer so scorned yet so eagerly read by her mother. Authorship entailed for Wharton, then, a rejection, at least in part, of the role of woman as defined by her mother and her culture. But in Wharton’s case the rejection of this cultural role was not entire. Perhaps because of nostalgia for the solidity and traditional values of her society (despite her clear-eyed critique of its failings in many of her novels), Wharton routinely expressed her impatience with feminist ideas, radical social change, and the emergence of the New Woman. As she grew older, her conservatism emerged most clearly.25 In her autobiography, she lashes out against the loss of the standards of her youth specifically in terms of women and their contribution to “civilized living”: I have lingered over these details [an elaborate description of her parents’ dinners] because they formed a part—a most important and honorable part—of that ancient curriculum of house-keeping which, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries, was so soon swept aside by the “monstrous regiment” of the emancipated: young women taught by their elders to despise the kitchen and the linen room, and to substitute the acquiring of University degrees for the more complex art of civilized living. The movement began when I was young, and now that I am old, and have watched it and noted its results, I mourn more than ever the extinction of the household arts. Cold Storage, deplorable as it is, has done far less harm to the home than the Higher Education. (59–60)





Wharton’s own life-style seemed in many ways an effort to preserve the standards of her childhood that depended largely on a woman’s filling a traditional role in the home. Letters and contemporary accounts attest to the elegance of her various homes and gardens, and her attention to the decoration of rooms and to her guests’ needs. But, simultaneously, Wharton was writing. While Percy Lubbock’s Portrait of Edith Wharton presents a rather biased and unattractive view of the author, his commentary and quoted responses from people who knew her provide some insight into the way Wharton juggled the traditional responsibilities of an upper class lady and her own determination to write. Lubbock reports that Wharton wrote every morning while at home and traveling. He refers to a Boston publisher Daniel Berkeley Updike, who apparently knew Wharton and Teddy well, for a description of Wharton’s regimen at Lenox in the early part of her career: Her writing was done early in the day, though very little allusion was made to it, and none at all to the infinite pains that she put into her work or her inexhaustible patience in searching for the material necessary to perfect it. By eleven o’clock she was ready for friends and engagements, for walking or garden-work. (22)

From Lubbock’s perspective, Wharton derived much of her sense of self as a woman from her membership in the upper class of Old New York. He cautions the reader, “You must realize that a person in her position has her position to think of—not indeed for a moment that of a woman of celebrated talent, which could easily take care of itself, but that of a lady who, as the poet says, was such a lady” (56). While Lubbock perhaps too easily establishes a dichotomy between Wharton’s dual lives, she herself was aware of the tension. In a 1902 letter to Sara Norton, she refers to the massive undertaking of relocating to the home she had just built in Lenox and apologizes for not writing, noting that the “weapon has rusted in its scabbard since we began to move” (Lewis, Letters 72). She explains the delay by quoting a passage from Faust by Goethe—“Two Souls, alas, do dwell within my breast”—and asserting that “the Compleat Housekeeper has had the upper hand for the last weeks” (Lewis, Letters 72). Throughout her life, Wharton works to maintain both identities although she establishes a boundary between these two selves. Lubbock quotes Madame Saint-Rene Taillandier, who met Wharton late in her career and collaborated with her daughter and Wharton on a translation of The Age of Innocence. Taillandier talks about the



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excitement of working so closely with the author but notes: “It was a mark of our hostess, whether natural or self-imposed, that when the hours of work were over, there was an end: the book-people vanished, the luncheon-bell rang, and there was only the hostess receiving her friends with all the arts of civilization” (162). Apart from close friends and intellectual companions such as Walter Berry and Henry James, there were apparently few people with whom Wharton discussed her work. Again Madame Taillandier notes, “I should have liked . . . to question my dear hostess about her morning’s work behind the fluttering curtain. I shall never know if it was modesty, or a deliberate discretion, or simply a real need for silence and detachment; but with me at least . . . she never lent herself to such questions” (Lubbock 168). Within her upper class society, Wharton maintained the role of elegant hostess and remained determinedly silent about the secret pleasures of her writing. Although Wharton preserves her role as a sort of great lady of society—building, decorating, and presiding over the grand homes and beautiful gardens popular with her class, thus retaining the conventional roles of housekeeper and hostess—she was less successful in fulfilling cultural expectations regarding marriage and motherhood. Never having children and eventually divorcing Teddy after years of unhappiness, Wharton expresses a measure of regret in her 1910 letter to the recently widowed Bessy Lodge: “You had life in the round, & for most of us it is such a poor lop-sided thing. And you have your children, who are a part of him; & I can imagine what that must be . . . I say you have been blessed among women” (Lewis, Letters 217). For Wharton, the work of writing and the identity of author became increasingly central in giving meaning and shape to her life. Wharton escaped the pain of Teddy’s illness and their disintegrating marriage only in her writing: “It has been impossible to work except spasmodically these last months, & more & more & more I find that Salvation is there, & there only” (Lewis, Letters 218). Indeed, Wharton made the painful decision to divorce Teddy only after it was clear that Teddy could no longer manage even the appearance of contented and responsible spouse. By this time, Edward Wharton was openly keeping a mistress and, despite Edith Wharton’s appeals to her husband and the family lawyers, irresponsibly managing their finances. To the contemporary reader, the dissolution of the marriage seems inevitable as Wharton grew more and more successful as a writer and asserted ever more strongly her need to associate with fellow authors and intellectuals in whom Edward Wharton had no interest. For Wharton, the 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers



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If I didn’t feel the irresistible “call” to write I should give up the last struggle for an individual existence, & turn into a nurse & dame de compagnie for Teddy, because, after all my experiments & efforts, I have found no solution to the problem between doing this & breaking altogether. The present makeshift existence is utterly destructive to any sustained imaginative work. (Lewis, Letters 261)

Although Wharton ultimately challenged many of the roles defined as acceptable for women and clearly enjoyed the friendship of men, she was never without the friendship of women. Percy Lubbock, the one-time friend and early biographer of Wharton’s life, is largely responsible for the view that Wharton as a woman disliked other women and vastly preferred the company of men.26 Early in his biography he notes that Wharton liked to refer to herself as a “self-made man” (11). He quotes a Mrs. Gordon Bell who explains, “Being a very normal person she preferred men to women, and often terrified the latter with a cold stare; but she was frequently unconscious of it, except when they were gushing—that she couldn’t stand” (28). Mrs. Bell adds that “many women” have confessed to feeling that Wharton “looks at me as if I were a worm” (28). Daniel Updike says that in Lenox, “neighboring ladies were sometimes made uncomfortable by the suspicion—by no means unfounded—that Mrs. Wharton was ironically amusing at their expense” (17). Yet, as Susan Goodman argues in Edith Wharton’s Women, this picture is not entirely accurate. Goodman describes the intimate friendship Wharton shared with Sara Norton that lasted for twentytwo years as “egalitarian” and suggests that the lengthy correspondence between the two is a “rebuttal” to the view of Wharton as a woman who disliked other women (33, 31). She points out that a survey of Wharton’s letters to her sister-in-law Minnie Jones and her childhood friend Daisy Chandler belie the image of Wharton as a woman at continual war with members of her gender. In fact, Wharton especially admired strong women, artists and writers, who demonstrated the capacity to function successfully in a “man’s” world. In A Backward Glance, she describes meeting in 1894 the English woman Vernon Lee whose study of eighteenth-century Italian history she greatly admired. Invited to Lee’s villa on the basis



need to write was paramount and although she never rejected the role of lady, in the end, she had to sacrifice her status as wife. In 1911, she complaines to Morton Fullerton:


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Thanks to him, my acquaintance with his sister had grown into a friendship which has never flagged, though we are so seldom together. Hitherto all my intellectual friendships had been with men, and Vernon Lee was the first highly cultivated and brilliant woman I had ever known. I stood a little in awe of her, as I always did in the presence of intellectual superiority, and liked best to sit silent and listen to a conversation which I still think almost the best of its day. (Backward 132)

Later, in 1904, when Wharton wrote to Sara Norton about helping Lee arrange a series of lectures in America, she emphasized the importance of a serious audience. “She does not want to ‘lecture to fashionable women in bonnets,’ with a list of millionaire patronesses, for which I respect her” (Lewis, Letters 81). While Wharton was impatient with women who accepted the traditional role accorded women by her culture, she eagerly embraced those women who could match her own intelligence and drive. Although Wharton has been cast by early critics as a protégé of Henry James, an upper class woman who never took herself seriously as a writer, a closer look at this paradoxical figure reveals a person who claimed authorship on her own terms. For Wharton, it was important to revise the traditional woman’s role rather than to reject it. Quite simply, she wanted to be both—a “lady” and an author— and to a large degree she succeeded. Unlike Cather, she did not reject her position as lady although she identified largely with male authors and intellectuals. Unlike Gilman, she never became a radical voice for women’s rights although she was a hardheaded businesswoman who eventually and painfully divorced Teddy so that she could lead a life of financial and social independence. The questions that emerge, then, are how did the adult Wharton overcome her ambivalence about writing and her distrust of her ability “to make up”? How did she negotiate the cultural tensions inherent in becoming a serious female writer at the turn of the century? One part of Wharton’s solution was to accept the contradictions that defined her, to develop a sense of self as a woman and writer that existed on her terms, and to acknowledge her differences.27 Although she was a successful woman writer, she always believed that men wrote with a greater range and scope that she would always lack. She claimed



of the publication of a sonnet that had been noticed by Lee’s brother, Wharton expresses her gratitude:


to be neither a Victorian sentimentalist nor a modernist; her career spanned five decades of change in American and European literature but she held to her own sense of subject and style, unable to appreciate either Henry James’s later novels or James Joyce’s modernist narratives.28 She took her writing extremely seriously and was much gratified by complimentary reviews and awards such as the Pulitzer and the honorary degree from Yale, but she also maintained an elegant upper class lifestyle and accepted many of the conventions regarding “ladies” inherited from her Old New York traditions. Unlike James, she never relinquished her American citizenship; but as soon as she could choose, she lived her life in what she perceived as the less constraining world of Europe. It is also significant that Wharton was willing to risk the social exclusion that authorship entailed for someone of her class and gender.29 In her autobiography, she consistently describes the sense of isolation created by her desire to be a writer. As a young woman she realized her “secret dreams” could never be understood by members of her own class; indeed she herself recognized the irony in wishing to become an author when she “had never even seen one in the flesh” (Backward 76, 87). As she began her career, she worked without the encouragement of society friends or fellow writers, artists, or intellectuals. She notes that the publication of her early stories initially gave her no access “to other workers in the same field” (Backward 112). Later in life she developed friendships and professional ties that made her part of a community of writers and thinkers, but at some level her sense of “difference” kept her from complete allegiance to any one group of professional authors. It is true that some of Wharton’s closest friends and advisors were men. Her literary confidant was Walter Berry. Her inner group—“a family that you choose for yourself” as Lubbock put it—consisted of men: Henry James, John Hugh-Smith, Gaillard Lapsley, Percy Lubbock, and, for a time, Morton Fullerton. In A Backward Glance, she tracks the development of herself as a writer largely in terms of the men she meets—Egerton Winthrop, Paul Bourget, Bernard Berenson, and Howard Sturgis. Placing herself in the literary tradition of Hawthorne, she rejected any connection to earlier female authors such as the phenomenally popular nineteenth-century writer Harriet Beecher Stowe.30 Wharton also consistently distanced herself from other contemporary women professionals.31 In 1903, she refused to be interviewed for Women Authors of Our Day in Their Homes. In 1928, she rejected the offer to appear in a proposed film called Woman Marches On, 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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which was “to portray the accomplishments of American women in various fields since 1900” according to R.W.B Lewis in the published collection of Wharton’s letters (515). Wharton told her agent, Rutger Jewett at Appleton, who had proposed the idea: “Apart from the fatigue that it would involve I must confess that I should not be greatly flattered at being associated with some of the ladies named in the list who are to figure in this same series” (Lewis, Letters 515). Lewis adds that the proposed list included the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Dr. Florence Sabin of Johns Hopkins Medical School, and the actress Mary Pickford. In addition to distancing herself from contemporary women professionals, Wharton divorced herself from the tradition of the nineteenth-century domestic and sentimental novel that had become thoroughly feminized. In this respect, she resembled many later nineteenth-century American writers, male and female, who, wishing to be taken as serious authors, felt compelled to reject popular writing conventions of the earlier period. The literary merit of one-time popular writers such as Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and E.D.E.N. Southworth declined in the latter part of the nineteenth century as these writers came to be seen as creators of sentimental melodramas whose vision was constrained by the limits of feminine concerns and whose rhetorical appeal rested on female emotion. The denigration of these Victorian writers represented a number of cultural interests including the desire to signify differences between popular and elite taste and a determination to reject what was seen as an enervated genteel culture. Most germane to the present discussion, however, were radically changing notions of serious authorship that had become connected to assumptions about gender and writing. In Sentimental Modernism, Suzanne Clark notes the destructiveness of the perceived connection between women and sentimentalism: Women, of course, have a privileged (or fatal) relationship with the sentimental. From the point of view of literary modernism, sentimentality was both a past to be outgrown and a present tendency to be despised. The gendered character of this condemnation seemed natural: women writers were entangled in sensibility, were romantic and sentimental by nature, and so even the best might not altogether escape this romantic indulgence in emotion and sublimity. Or so it might seem to a criticism anxious to make distinctions. (2)

Recognizing that comparisons with the sentimental writers of the nineteenth century would gender and devalue her own work, Wharton





adopted a style she believed was diametrically opposed to the sentimentalism of her literary mothers.32 It seems that Wharton’s assessment of her culture’s loss of interest in a “feminine” style of writing was both insightful and shrewd. As Christopher Wilson points out in The Labor of Words, the best kind of writing at the turn of the century was seen as “vigorous,” forceful, energetic, and realistic.33 Wilson quotes an editor at The Atlantic who wanted the “roast beef” in literature (58). Frank Munsey, a magazine and newspaper publisher, explained: “We want stories . . . not washed out studies of effete human nature, not weak tales of sickly sentimentality, not ‘pretty’ writing . . . we do want fiction in which there is a story, a force” (qtd. in Wilson 58). Wharton clearly shared Munsey’s attitude. In her view the legacy of sentiment was precisely what American writers needed to oppose. In 1921, she wrote to Sinclair Lewis that he was one of the few writers who kept her from “despair” over the state of American literature (Lewis, Letters 445). She added, “Some sort of standard is emerging from the welter of cant & sentimentality, & if two or three of us are gathered together, I believe we can still save fiction in America” (445). One of the ways by which Wharton set herself apart from the female sentimentalists was to define herself as a realist who refused to back away from representing life as she saw it.34 In 1899, she thanked Barrett Wendell, professor of English at Harvard, for his appreciative comments on her short story collection The Greater Inclination. She was pleased to learn that he had found “glimpses of that big outer world through my writing” and asserted, “I don’t mind being called ‘cynical & depressing’ by the sentimentalists, as long as those who see the ‘inherences’ recognize my ability to see them too” (Lewis, Letters 39). Wharton believed her novels and short stories avoided the limitations of romantic sentimentalism (and the limitations of female authorship). In 1902, she told Sara Norton that she was especially happy about a review of The Valley of Decision that suggested “that Italy is my hero—or heroine, if you prefer.” Wharton went on, “I would rather have had that said than any number of undiscerning compliments, because American & English reviewers of fiction are so disinclined to recognize that novels may be written from a dozen different standpoints, & that the ‘heart-interest’ need not always predominate” (Lewis, Letters 59). Wharton’s rejection of the sentimental and her insistence on representing the reality of her world were, she believed, also a way of distinguishing herself from contemporaries such as Sarah Orne Jewett. In A Backward Glance she defends her depiction of New England 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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rural mountain people in Summer by asserting that her picture of these people was grounded in reality. Wharton argued that she had a friend who as a rector had made a journey to a rural mountain community very much like the community she had created in her novel. Alleging that she had painted an accurate picture unlike the sentimental regionalists, she explains, Needless to say, when “Summer” appeared, this chapter was received with indignant denial by many reviewers and readers; and not the least vociferous were the New Englanders who had for years sought the reflection of local life in the rose-and-lavender pages of their favorite authoresses—and had forgotten to look into Hawthorne’s. (294)

Wharton conveniently ignores Hawthorne’s own theories of the romance in her effort to disassociate herself from the “authoresses.” But what is important is Wharton’s apparent concern about being linked with the domestic novel or the sentimental tradition. Although Henry James could examine the intricacies of social relationships without risk of being categorized as a novelist working within an inferior tradition, Wharton knew that her exploration of the same subject matter needed a defense. Wharton’s concern over developing a literary style perceived as more “masculine” can be linked to changes within the publishing industry as well.35 Although Wharton in her autobiography talks about her writing as a kind of destiny or calling, she was also a shrewd businesswoman who, by the end of her career, depended on her writing to support two homes, much traveling, relatives, and a large group of charities. Christopher Wilson in The Labor of Words suggests that an emphasis on timeliness and efficiency, an aggressive search for “truth,” and a predilection for a professional, direct, realistic, nonliterary writing style represent a rejection of earlier associations of authorship with femininity (even for men), gentility, and amateur status.36 As Wilson argues, literary work became professionalized between 1880 and 1920. The change in status of the author from amateur to professional and of the publisher from genteel publisher to businessman contributed to the dilemma faced by all writers, especially women authors. Although giants in the earlier publishing industry such as Charles Scribner and Alfred A. Knopf intended to and did make money, they were also concerned about maintaining an ideology that defined literary work as something more than a commercial enterprise.37 But as the century drew to a close, the “business” of writing and publishing 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers



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The new ideal of Businessman Publisher . . . may have been less congenial to women writers . . . In contrast to their more leisured predecessors, editors and publishers like S. S. McClure, Edward Bok, Frank Munsey, and “Colonel” Harvey . . . were workaholics who emphasized activity, energy, and time-orientation. They organized their offices for efficiency and profits. They de-emphasized personal relations with writers . . . They encouraged hard work rather than style, as the route to literary success, and frequently associated their views of writing with masculinity . . . [T]he increased emphasis on vigor and marketing made authorship seem more than ever to be a male activity. (48)

In the fields of newspaper work, mass magazine writing, and book publishing, writing took on a decidedly masculine tone. Wilson notes, A consistent theme in all three fields was the new editor’s desire to alter the ideological orientation of American writing, and implicitly its social foundation as well. In their own rhetoric, literary endeavor would be professionalized, rehabilitated from elitist and academic pretensions, and made more masculine and practical. (89)

Clearly women’s relationship to the business of writing becomes even more complex in such an environment. So long as women could work at home and forward their efforts to a paternal publisher, they offered no real threat to the image of the innocent woman blithely ignorant of the grittiness of business affairs. As one nineteenthcentury observer noted, “A man going from office to office to sell a poem or a leader must be a very sorry sight. A woman compelled to peddle by voice and eye such a ware must be a sadder sight still” (qtd. in Coultrap-McQuin 15). Wharton’s concern about the popular success of her novels and the business of publishing them attests to her willingness to engage wholeheartedly in what her culture perceived as a masculinized activity. Although she remained with the conservative publishing house of Scribner’s for much of her career, she was very much involved in the publication of her work. R.W.B. Lewis notes that “from the moment she signed the contract for The Decoration of Houses, she began showering Brownell with suggestions about its “manufacture . . . .[W]hen the whole matter was settled, Brownell wrote with weary courtesy



became the dominant value and generated an environment less inviting to women writers. Susan Coultrap-McQuin notes,

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that the publishers ‘had a comfortable feeling of how ship-shape and business-like your end of the task has been’ ” (Lewis, Wharton 78). Wharton’s letters to her publishers regularly question whether or not her work is being properly advertised. In 1899, after the release of The Greater Inclination, she wrote to Brownell that although “prominent publishers” such as “Messrs. McMillan, Dodd & Mead, McClure, Harper, etc., advertise almost continuously in the daily papers,” she has found only one ad for her collection in a Sunday paper (Lewis, Letters 38). Lewis suggests that there was a “real basis for her charges . . . . Scribner’s may perhaps be taxed for recognizing too slowly the literary phenomenon they had introduced” (Lewis, Wharton 88).38 As her career progressed, Wharton eventually chose to serialize her work with the higher-paying mass-market picture magazines. Summer ran in McClure’s in 1917, The Age of Innocence and The Glimpses of the Moon in Pictorial Review in 1920 and 1922.39 In this light, her choice to leave Scribner’s publishing house to move to Appleton and Company with the publication of The Reef in 1912 seems a savvy business decision by an independent woman very much in control of her financial concerns and undaunted by the masculinized business of publishing. Ultimately, Wharton saw herself as an anomaly, a woman who could write serious literature successfully. For her, all writing was gendered in some way or the other and the “best” kind of writing emerged out of a masculine perspective.40 She believed her writing was the site of an internal struggle between the masculine and the feminine. She tells Robert Grant in 1907, That fact is that I am beginning to see exactly where my weakest point is.—I conceive my subjects like a man—that is, rather more architectonically & dramatically than most women—& then execute them like a woman; or rather, I sacrifice, to my desire for construction and breadth, the small incidental effects that women have always excelled in, the episodical characterization, i mean. The worst of it is that this fault is congenital, & not the result of an ambition to do big things. (Lewis, Letters 124)

Although Wharton seems to grant both genders their speciality, her language points to certain assumptions about an implicit hierarchy in the gender of writing. The masculine scope is broad and more dramatic; the feminine sense is small and concerns itself with details. That Wharton ultimately privileges the masculine approach is clear as she goes on:





As soon as I look at a subject from the novel-angle I see it in its relation to a larger whole, in all its remotest connotations; & I can’t help trying to take them in, at the cost of the smaller realism that I arrive at, I think, better in my short stories. This is the reason why I have always obscurely felt that I didn’t know how to write a novel. I feel it more clearly after each attempt, because it is in such sharp contrast to the sense of authority with which I take hold of a short story.—I think it ought to be a warning to stop; but, alas, I see things more & more from the novel-angle, so that I’m enclosed in a vicious circle from which I suspect silence to be the only escape. (Lewis, Letters 124)

Wharton did not, however, remain silent, nor was she content to write only short stories. But the anxiety she expresses here is a clue to understanding her internal division regarding authorship. By the time this letter was written in 1907, she had published her third novel but continued to worry about her ability to write the longer narratives. Although she finds she can indeed take command of the short story, the structure of a larger and longer work demands a confidence and an assurance she suggests she does not have at this point. For to be a truly serious artist in Wharton’s mind at this point, one needed to enter a masculine realm. Wharton’s anxiety over her narrative authority can be traced by looking closely at four novels written between 1905 and 1922. This analysis of Wharton’s struggle to claim narrative authority approaches the question from two related perspectives. First, in what ways do these texts reveal her personal dilemma about authorship and gender as it is played out within the ideological contradictions governing the production of writing by men and women? Second, how do Wharton’s texts reveal narrative strategies that address the divided position of the female author and enable her to take on the authority of writing, to assume the roles of artist and literary professional, to develop a popular readership and an enviable literary reputation? The House of Mirth (1905), The Reef (1912), Summer (1918), and The Glimpses of the Moon (1922) can be read as a set of narratives in which Wharton struggles to face her fears regarding her storytelling abilities and to address the cultural constraints faced by female authors at the turn of the century. These novels call attention to the problems of writing, narrative discourse, and the use of metaphor by women when the culture continues to define these activities as masculine. In these novels, Wharton’s position as a female author can be linked to the struggle between male and female characters over control of language and story within the narrative.41



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Although Wharton refuses to grant any of her female protagonists both personal happiness and control over narrative, she develops narrative strategies within this sequence of novels that give her a voice and make her one of the most successful novelists of the early twentieth century.42 Wharton asks her readers to attend carefully to her male narrators, who appear heroic but, ultimately, define and inaccurately portray female protagonists. Using competing discourses such as the language of business and the protestations of romance to describe the same event, Wharton invites her audience to reconsider the cultural misperception that women exist outside the economy of making money. While tracing the seductiveness of narrative and story, Wharton unfailingly reveals the way in which stories often contain, even destroy, women. Wharton’s consistently ironic voice sets up a kind of double text that both tells a story and comments on that story simultaneously.43 Thus Wharton can obliquely critique her culture’s assumptions about women and narrative even as she successfully entertains her readers. This “betrayal” of the text, this silent subverting of the apparent story, is a breaking of the “rules.” But to the writer whose relationship to discourse and narrative is from the beginning problematic, perhaps the breaking of narrative and genre conventions is the basis by which the story can be told. Wharton’s efforts to take up authorship rest on her transgression of cultural expectations about a person of her gender and class. In 1925, Edith Wharton wrote Daisy Chandler thanking her for an insightful reading of The Mother’s Recompense. In a lengthy paragraph, Wharton lists a series of reviews that she thinks clearly miss the point of her novel. She writes, “You will wonder that the priestess of the Life of Reason shd take such things to heart; & I wonder too. I never have minded before; but as my work reaches its close, I feel so sure that it is either nothing, or far more than they know . . . . And I wonder, a little desolately, which?” (Lewis, Letters 483). But in 1933, Wharton concludes in her autobiography, If one has sought the publicity of print, and sold one’s wares in the open market, one has sold to the purchasers the right to think what they choose about one’s books; and the novelist’s best safeguard is to put out of his mind the quality of praise or blame bestowed on him by reviewers and readers, and to write only for that dispassionate and ironic critic who dwells within the breast. (Backward 212)





Wharton’s practical advice suggests that she had a vision to which she remained true but that she also realized that some of her readers might never fully comprehend that vision. The contemporary and continuing critical interest in her novels suggests that many readers are finding and appreciating the richness and complexity in her writing—a recognition for which Wharton longed.



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3

Competing Discourses and the Word in The House of Mirth

The House of Mirth represents Edith Wharton’s first critical and popular success as a novelist. Published in October 1905, after having been serialized in Scribner’s Magazine, the novel sold so well that the publishers printed 140,000 copies in the first three months. Wharton was delighted with the reception, telling Charles Scribner in November that “it is a very beautiful thought to me that 80,000 people should want to read ‘The House of Mirth,’ & if the number should ascend to 100,000 I fear my pleasure would exceed the bounds of decency” (Lewis, Letters 95). At the end of the year, she was gleefully responding to letters from her readers and fellow writers and happily informing her publisher she was already contacting an agent to handle the bids she was receiving for a dramatization of the novel. The narrative identified Wharton in the eyes of her contemporaries and early literary critics as a writer of realistic narratives critiquing the excess wealth and moral bankruptcy of upper class New York society. A reviewer for the Bookman, argued that in depicting “the most intense tragedy of recent years” Wharton enacted upon a “sordid stage” the story of a young woman who “never saw clearly any better path” (Hale 364–65). For current readers of Wharton, however, The House of Mirth signals Wharton’s interest in the relationship between narrative and gender from the very beginnings of her career.1 Taking into account the ongoing debates about women’s roles in American society, the increasing professionalization of the publishing industry at the turn of the century, and Wharton’s own anxieties over becoming an author invites an alternative reading. The House of Mirth moves beyond the conventional narrative of a good woman ruined by her own weaknesses and the moral corruption of the society that shaped her. At the beginning of the novel, Wharton seems to position Lawrence Selden 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


CH A P T ER


as the character who best reads Lily Bart. The independent and confident Lily Bart of the first part of the novel paradoxically seems to embrace these readings by Selden; by the by the end of novel, Lily clings to Selden’s narratives as evidence of a better and truer self. Selfidentified as a man who resides both inside and outside the social scene that defines Lily, Selden believes that the story of Lily he constructs throughout the novel is more truthful than the façade Lily presents to the world. Yet Wharton’s narrative consistently underscores Selden’s misreadings of Lily’s feelings and behavior and ultimately reveals Selden as a terribly inaccurate chronicler of her life. Narratives by other characters—the unending gossip and rumor that travel freely throughout Lily’s society—further reveal Lily’s subjection to the false stories of others. Giving over to Selden the power to define her deepest self and damaged by her increasing inability to control the destructive stories that circulate around her, Lily emerges as a kind of failed author. Certainly, the false stories of Bertha Dorset and Lily’s former friends lead to Lily’s utter loss of economic and social power. But Lily’s loss of self to the identity narrative constructed by Selden carries even more devastating consequences. The deeper tragedy in The House of Mirth is not the dramatic failure by Lily to adopt a higher moral standard but her inability to author herself. While Wharton’s novel is clearly not autobiographical in any traditional sense, the story she chooses to tell and the narrative structures by which she tells her story call attention to gender and a struggle for control over language and narrative. It is as if Wharton is using this novel as a way to work through problems of authorship. On one level, the obvious tale seems to be a kind of morality play in which Lily Bart is unable to free herself from the corruption of Old New York society in order to enter “the republic of the spirit” described by her potential savior, Lawrence Selden. But Wharton’s novel also considers the position of a woman who consistently misreads the potential of narratives damaging to her reputation, who determinedly remains silent about a packet of letters that might counter the ruinous stories, and a woman who allows Selden to construct the story of her most true self. A closer examination of Lily’s conflicted relationship to language and story points both to Wharton’s own anxieties about authorship and the broader challenges faced by women writers at the beginning of the twentieth century. The House of Mirth plays out in fictional terms the gender, class, and cultural constraints on Wharton’s emergence as a major American writer. That Wharton succeeds in telling her story is a result of the complex narrative strategies Wharton constructs to challenge those constraints. The 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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novel, then, both reveals the problems of authorship for a twentiethcentury upper class woman writer and offers a kind of solution that enables Wharton to tell her story. Early contemporary reviewers of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth focused on the social and moral implications of the novel. Her “illuminating picture of the quest for pleasure as carried on by rich and ‘smart’ New Yorkers” of the day furnished the backdrop for “a disaster infinitely more tragic than the conventional unhappy ending of a lovely woman who stoops to folly” (“House” 657). Wharton was seen as “the greatest thing a writer of fiction can be—a moralist” who told the tragic story of a “self-loving and money-loving heroine” trapped by the destructive influences of her wealthy, pleasure-seeking society (Meynell 130).2 Critical fascination with the morality of Wharton’s tale was attested to by one reviewer’s fear that Wharton’s portrayal of Lily’s fate was too severe. He noted, “When we consider the damnation threats which surround us from the cradle to the grave, that is the flaw in Mrs. Wharton’s splendid sermon. People give rise quicker to a hope. To offer a warning is like giving a stone when they ask for bread” (“Review” 1151). Many later critics have continued to read The House of Mirth as a novel of manners and sentiment in which Wharton depicts a woman who cannot be saved and a society whose valuing of the material and aimless pursuit of luxury, pleasure, and social power shapes and destroys even the potential for goodness. Critics have argued that Lily represents Wharton’s critique of her own heroine either because Lily demonstrates an inability to choose better moral values or because Lily emerges as a kind of female anachronism at the end of the nineteenth century—a character who reflects conceptions of womanhood that Wharton herself finds unacceptable. Other critics continue to center blame on the immorality of a society that so completely defines Lily’s sense of herself and her world.3 Such readings of Wharton’s novel make Lily the victim of either her society or her own weaknesses. Lawrence Selden emerges as the hero of the novel and his republic of the spirit, detailed in a conversation with Lily early in the novel, operates as the presiding ideal throughout the narrative. In this case, the novel is read as explicitly privileging male insight and knowledge and implicitly crediting the masculine imagination that constructs a space free from social pressures. While other more detailed and sophisticated analyses recognize Wharton’s ironic treatment of Selden and his participation in his society’s definition of Lily as a “bad” woman, most, in the end, accept what appears to be Wharton’s straightforward critique of her heroine.4 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


THE WORD IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH


Numerous readers have accepted Selden’s critical voice as synonymous with Wharton’s authorial perspective on her flawed heroine.5 Such readings fail to address the narrative structure of the novel that seems to both privilege and undermine Selden’s position as a credible narrator and spokesperson for Wharton. While Lawrence Selden’s perspective seems to represent Wharton’s authorial voice, Wharton, at the same time, devotes much attention to Lily’s view— creating a plot line that consistently demonstrates radically differing perspectives on Lily’s effort to survive in her world. Wharton juxtaposes Selden’s notion of a republic of the spirit where one cultivates an aesthetic view of the world and does not think about money, with careful details about Lily Bart’s dire economic situation as an unmarried woman financially dependent on ungenerous relatives with no access to the world in which one makes money. And most importantly, if the ending appears to provide a tidy resolution to Lily Bart’s internal and external conflicts and valorizes Selden’s attempts to save Lily from herself, Wharton systematically makes Selden an integral part of each of Lily’s crises. Such disjunctions within the narrative argue for an alternative reading of the novel that moves beyond a sentimental accounting of Lily’s tragic failure to escape the moral corruption of her class. Indeed, by shifting the focus to exploring Wharton’s use of Selden as the narrator of Lily Bart’s story, the reader will find a series of conflicting discourses and ruptures within the narrative structure. Such disconnections call into question an unproblematic reading of Lily as a woman in need of salvation from her society and of Selden as her potential redeemer and instead turn attention to the role Selden plays in his construction of Lily as a woman in need of his help. Selden’s failure in the novel is not simply that he fails to provide Lily with a genuine alternative to the shallow society that defines her social identity and moral character, but that he also coops Lily’s story of self. Edith Wharton’s story is more than a sentimental account of a woman gone wrong, a critique of a materialistic society, or even a feminist lament over the damaging effects of a capitalist patriarchal society. Instead, The House of Mirth is ultimately a narrative about the effects of gender on the reading and authoring of stories and the consequences for those who lack discursive power. Such a reading dislocates Selden’s privileged masculine perspective and makes his subjective viewing of Lily the object of Wharton’s scrutiny.6 In this novel, Wharton examines Selden not as Lily’s savior but as the constantly inaccurate chronicler of her life. The narrative consistently demonstrates how Selden’s readings of Lily Bart emerge as 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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wrong, insufficiently aware of Lily’s oppressive economic reality, or calculatingly self-serving. In presenting Selden as an author whose inaccurate readings of Lily are as destructive as the societal forces that imprison her, Wharton’s text raises questions about authoring in general and female authoring in particular. Consistently defining the use of metaphor and literary language as both masculine and oppressive, the text reveals an essential distrust of narrative. Yet as an artist Wharton herself must use the devices of aesthetic language, metaphor, and narrative structure to tell her story. Disruptions within the narrative then point to the double-bind faced by a female writer engaging in an activity identified by her culture and herself as something that men do. Wharton sees herself as representing the “real” in her fictional treatment of Lily Bart’s experiences. She even believes she provides some moral perspective on this life.7 But at the same time as Wharton works toward her apparent narrative purpose, she also explores her own dilemma as a female writer at the turn of the century. Her portrayal of Lily Bart as a woman unable to define herself in her own language and within her own story reveals Wharton’s threatened position as author. Cultural and familial notions about the role of women conspired to silence Wharton just as Lily Bart’s society, largely through Selden’s words, consistently silenced her. Unlike her creation, Wharton does tell the story, but only by entering into a realm that the narrative explicitly represents as masculine and damaging to women. Wharton takes on the role of author by using a kind of narrative deception that constructs a layered story. She simultaneously invokes the conventional elements of sentimental melodrama—a bad woman who fails to embrace the higher morality of the male hero—and undermines the same cultural narrative. Challenges to the straightforward authoring of the narrative are repeatedly foregrounded in the novel. Contradictions rupture the text. Selden as privileged storyteller is consistently revealed as wrong. Entirely disparate and opposing discourses are applied to Lily in the novel at the same time. Despite Wharton’s appropriation of the genre conventions of the Victorian sentimental novel and melodrama in her representation of the tragic death of the heroine and the valorization of Selden as hero, the deathbed scene seems not so much an idealization of womanhood and tragic love as another horrifying instance of the silencing of the female protagonist. Such disjunctions create a space for an alternative narrative that enables the text to examine the problem of literary language and the construction of stories.8 The discrepancies between Selden’s position 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




as privileged storyteller and his consistent failure to get the story right, the final imposition of his story on a dead woman, and the conflicting ways of talking about Lily create disturbances or gaps within the narrative structure. The disjunctions within the story operate as a silent and ironic commentary on the way Lily is subjected to the talk of others.9 The text works at the “realistic” level as an overt criticism of social conditions and gender relations that corrupt and destroy individuals and at a self-conscious meta-level as an exploration of the challenges to constructing a female narrative that escapes oppression and silencing. Wharton’s voice appears within the interstices of the ruptured surface story to critique the masculine impetus to subordinate all within his narrative. The most significant aspects of Wharton’s discussion about storytelling and gender emerge from what is not said. In this sense the author reinforces her female protagonist’s experience. After all, in The House of Mirth, what is not talked about has far more important implications than what is openly acknowledged in Lily’s community. Ruptures within the narrative ask the reader to participate in the construction of the story.10 The discrepancy between Selden’s perspective as primary reader of Lily Bart and his repeated misunderstandings of events becomes an invitation for the reader to consider how conventional narrative structures can distort female experience. The gap between the two modes of discourse applied to Lily in the novel—the literary language of metaphor and art, and the language of business in which art is commodified—suggests the problem of women who have no language of their own. The disjunction between Selden’s apparently tidy and conventionally romanticized resolution of events in the closing chapter and the reader’s understanding that his narrative imposes his own story on Lily point to the way men’s totalizing stories of women are arbitrary and oppressive. An examination of the manner in which these gaps operate in the text and on the reader reveals Wharton’s attempt to manipulate literary language and traditional narrative structure.11 For if language is not to be trusted, an author’s only chance to tell the story rests on her ability to structure a narrative around meaningful silences so that another story can emerge. Such a reading of The House of Mirth reveals the real complexity of this novel and suggests that Wharton’s view of her society and the men and women who inhabit it is much more critical than one expects to find in a sentimental novel or a novel of manners.12 Wharton not only satirizes the aimless pursuits of the upper classes but also considers the implications of basing a society on unspoken “dingy” economic realities and unequal relationships 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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between men’s and women’s access to language and narratives of self. Wharton’s subversive narrative strategy in which the disjunctions or silences speak allows her to raise questions about her society that her readers would never have accepted if those questions had been presented more directly.13 A continuing disruptive force in the novel depends on Wharton’s use of Lawrence Selden as a narrative filter.14 By beginning and ending the novel from Selden’s point of view, Wharton appears to privilege this masculine perspective. In Lawrence Selden, she creates a character who sees himself as both a representative of the best this society can produce and a detached observer and critic who possesses “a happy air of viewing the show objectively” (55).15 Yet Wharton explicitly undermines the lawyer’s assertion of objectivity by noting that Selden possesses an artistic sensibility and order of mind that “could yield to vision-making influences as completely as a child to the spell of a fairy-tale” (133). Throughout the novel, Selden applies this transforming fancy to Lily herself. The reader’s first meeting of Lily is filtered through Selden’s consciousness as he muses on what might separate this “highly specialized” woman “whose simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions” from “the herd of her sex” (3, 5). He and the reader view Lily from a superior vantage point. Searching for an apt metaphor, Selden cannot decide if she is simply a vase of “vulgar clay” or fine material that “circumstance has fashioned into a futile shape” (5). Such ambivalence is characteristic of Selden’s perspective on Lily and signals one of the central problems of the novel—whether or not Selden can read Lily accurately and provide the reader with a reliable view of her character.16 Selden’s view of Lily continually shifts between two opposing readings. She is either a creature of artifice who must always be evaluated through the “argument from design” (5) or she is a victim who must be rescued from a soulless society. His view of Lily as victim is generally imaged in highly romantic notions of womanhood.17 He notes that her figure possesses “a kind of wild-wood grace to her outline,” so that, as she stands in his room, she appears like “a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing-room” (13). At one point, he imagines himself as Perseus on a quest to “take her beyond— beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition, and corrosion of the soul” (154). Although even Selden “smiled at [his] whirl of metaphor,” he never questions his capacity to image Lily in his own terms (159). Such readings deny Lily agency in the construction of an independent self and shape the reader’s understanding of this female 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




character in terms of dominant patriarchal narratives. Selden’s metaphor-making and repeated insistence that he knows the “real Lily Bart” enact a sort of verbal violence. His heroic efforts to detach her beauty “from all that cheapened and vulgarized it” make her an object of his story (135). Selden’s language and narrative imprison Lily Bart every bit as much as the civilization that made the “links of her bracelet” read by Selden as “manacles chaining her to her fate” (7). In other words, Selden’s reading of Lily Bart’s character becomes a sort of writing, a writing that the narrative itself asks the reader to recognize as objectifying and oppressive. Furthermore, Wharton’s narrative consistently challenges the reader to question whether or not Selden’s reading/writing is accurate or reliable. The text appears to privilege Selden’s view of things, yet much of the narrative undercuts his ability to interpret events accurately. While the novel’s structure and narrative pattern of events continually invite the reader to read Selden’s reading of Lily Bart, Selden’s interpretation of Miss Bart depends largely on his perception of Lily’s sexual behavior. One crucial episode representative of the pattern of misreading is Selden’s sighting of Lily leaving the Trenor household alone at midnight. Whether she is worthy of him or not rests on his understanding of the extent to which she has succumbed not only to the vanities and vulgarities of her social class but also on the extent to which she has “paid” her way through sex. Although Selden has told Lily that he is “amphibious” (70) and can breathe inside and outside society, his judgment of Lily that night reflects a blind acceptance of his society’s conventions. The timing of the episode is especially ironic because Selden has just been imagining that he and Lily could break free from this society, but his immediate and wholly inaccurate assumption that Lily is having an affair with Gus Trenor reveals Selden’s reliance on conventional social narratives. The disjunction between Lily’s “reality” and Selden’s story sets up a powerful critique of Selden’s narrative appropriation of Lily Bart. But the text never overtly criticizes Selden’s story making. Instead Wharton’s critique resides in the narrative juxtaposition of Lily’s actual story—her fear about responding to Gus Trenor’s invitation, her sense of being deceived and trapped by this man who wields financial and physical control over her, her reluctant decision to enter his home that night, and her horror at almost being raped—and Selden’s highly conventional story regarding the implications of an unmarried woman leaving a married man’s house late at night when his wife has left town. Selden makes no attempt to talk with Lily, to 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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allow that “deeper eloquence” (216) he has seen within her speak. It appears that Lily’s possible explanation simply does not matter because in effect she has already “spoken” through her appearance at the Trenor household. Most clearly, Selden has deprived Lily of her own speech, her own narrative. The text reveals the consequences of Selden’s silencing of Lily to be equally serious in Selden’s refusal to address Lily’s desperate economic position. His refusal to hear Lily’s real concern about the material conditions that shape her actions and his insistence on the primacy of the language of the republic of the spirit strip Lily of a language by which she can articulate to herself or others the genuine economic constraints on a single upper class lady with no income of her own. Selden tells Lily that it would be very difficult for the rich to enter his republic of the spirit and yet he is well aware of the power and function of money. Selden “enjoyed spectacular effects, and was not insensible to the part money plays in their production” (131). He even recognizes that Lily “cost a great deal to make” (5). Yet he refuses to face the economic realities of her financial situation and rejects out of hand Lily’s assertion that “the only way not to think about money is to have a good deal of it” (69). Selden may be detached from “the sumptuary side of life” (152) but as a man and a lawyer he has access to economic power that Lily can never possess; his denial to her of a language by which she can describe her position only traps her further. Lily’s positioning outside of a language and story that adequately relates her desired view of self to the material conditions in which she lives signals another series of disjunctions in the narrative operating on the discursive level. In The House of Mirth, Wharton makes use of two separate and opposing discourses—the language of art, aesthetics, and literature, and the language of profit and trade. Lily, believing she possesses an artistic sensibility, claims her appearance at the opera in a new dress gives her “a poetic enjoyment” (116). As she prepares for her tableau vivant under the painter’s guidance, Lily insists that “her dramatic instinct was roused” (131). But significantly, the object of Lily’s aesthetic attention is not the world but herself.18 And it is within Lily’s perception of herself that the two opposing discourses collide. If Lily is an art object, she is also an object for trade since art and women in this society are bought and sold to serve as measures of men’s economic and social status.19 Indeed, the language of business and commodification is routinely associated with Lily throughout the novel. As Elizabeth Ammons has noted in Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, marriage is the 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




business for which women such as Lily Bart have been explicitly trained. “The economics of being a woman in Lily’s world amount to working as a wife, and working hard, to translate financial power into social power by displaying a particular man’s wealth for him” (33). Furthermore, Ammons notes that such “skills, if she does not choose to use them as some rich man’s wife, are not transferable” (32).20 Lily’s entire life has been spent in preparation to be a decorative object, something “fashioned to adorn and delight” (301). After the death of her husband and the loss of the family money, Lily’s mother views her daughter’s beauty as “the last asset in their fortunes . . . and she trie[s] to instil into the latter a sense of the responsibility that such a charge involved” (34). On one level Lily clearly understands and accepts these economic terms. She explains to Selden, “Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop—and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership” (12). She sees her worries about keeping herself up and finding a husband while juggling the needs of friends and relatives as a form of employment that links her with those who serve the rich, noting that “she and her maid were in the same position, except that the latter received her wages more regularly” (28). Wharton’s narrative reinforces the relentless nature of these unpleasant economic realities by taking up Lily’s story at a point in her career at which she is in danger of losing much of her market value. Her friends are tired of thinking of Lily as a single woman. She finds herself worrying about wrinkles after a night of losing at cards as she makes anxious calculations regarding her finances. “Younger and plainer girls had been married off by dozens, and she was nineand-twenty, and still Miss Bart” (38). Yet, although Lily devotes herself to the obtaining of a husband by bartering her beauty and social skills, she continually resists defining herself and her actions in terms of the language of business. “She liked to think of her beauty as a power for good, as giving her the opportunity to attain a position where she should make her influence felt in the vague diffusion of refinement and good taste” (35). In fact, the intrusion of this discourse into her awareness is usually reason enough to stop Lily from proceeding any further in the current scheme to make money or to attract a wealthy mate. The individual who openly accepts these realities, who blatantly expresses the economic view that undergirds New York society, and who most evidently represents the discourse and world of business is Simon Rosedale; it is Rosedale’s overtures that Lily rejects repeatedly 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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throughout the novel. Rosedale’s perspective deflates the value of the aesthetic language by which Lily and her set define their society and their lifestyle. 21 This businessman unabashedly admits he wants to buy his way into society; to his mind, being in society is as valid a hobby as horse-racing or purchasing art. 22 In the latter half of the novel, subsequent to Bertha Dorset’s destructive gossip and Lily’s rapid decline in social status, Rosedale insists on “plain-speaking” (255) to Lily and argues that while the truth or falsity of the stories about her might matter “in novels; I’m certain it don’t in real life” (256). Lily is sensible of his “stock-taking eyes” appraising her like “some superfine human merchandise” (256). Rosedale offers Lily a simple business deal: use the letters to silence Bertha and I’ll marry you and back you with my money. Lily, although reluctant to consider his proposition, finds it “refreshing to step into the open daylight of an avowed expediency” and feels in it a “subtle affinity to her inmost cravings” (256, 259). Yet she finally refuses Rosedale’s “business-like give-and-take . . . mutual accommodation” precisely because it makes explicit what she and her society pretend not to see (259). In terms of the surface story, Lily’s rejection of Rosedale’s proposal is clearly to be applauded. The traditional reader can take satisfaction in the triumph of Lily’s moral self over expediency. But once again disturbing questions arise. Given Bertha Dorset’s evident rejection of any similar moral code and her implacable enmity, the reader must wonder why Lily pays such a high price to maintain the fiction.23 Lily’s rejection of Rosedale for a second time will incur certain disastrous economic consequences for Lily—consequences that the reader knows full well given Wharton’s careful defining of the plight of a single woman who has neither money nor society’s backing. And while Lily does not love Rosedale, neither had she loved Percy Gryce. Ironically, Rosedale genuinely loves Lily. He consistently and frankly avows his love for her. Given his penchant for plain speech, Rosedale’s claim certainly tempts the reader to accept his story.24 The apparent triumph of social and moral propriety over questionable business dealings seems less than straightforward here. In fact, Rosedale’s genuine feeling for Lily, his speechless rage over the poverty to which the fine Miss Bart has been reduced, his plea that she allow him at least to set her up in the hat-making business present themselves as the actions of a truly moral being. While Wharton’s anti-Semitism makes it difficult to read Rosedale entirely sympathetically, his frank talk and undisguised motives are refreshing not only 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




to Lily but to the reader as well. If Wharton’s narrative does not completely invert the assumed hierarchy of moral language over plain business talk, the text at least calls into question the conventional relationship between these two discursive realms. But Lily remains caught within the social and moral conventions of a society that has long since rejected her. Trapped within the language of Lawrence Selden whom she believes appeals to another and better self, she cannot create her own identity free from either society or Selden. Rosedale’s angry accusation that she refuses to use the letters because they are addressed to Selden turns out to be a shrewd understanding of Lily’s motives. Later in the novel, when Lily once again considers using the letters to purchase her freedom, she is prevented by her own imagined reading of Selden’s reading of her behavior. She saw “her action as he would see it . . . and the fact that, to attain her end, she must trade on his name, and profit by a secret of his past, chilled her blood with shame” (304).25 Having defined her actions in the language of profit and trade, Lily must refuse to carry out her scheme. Wharton’s text thus reveals the ideological contradictions at work in discourse applied to women. The problem is that Lily cannot fully inhabit the realm of either discourse. Her social training has made it impossible to apply the language of business to her own dealings, yet her economic position that denies her direct access to earning a living puts her in the business of marketing herself. The disjunction between Lily’s aspirations for an aesthetic definition of self and the ever present discourse of business and trade that more accurately defines Lily’s actual value to and relationship with her world leaves her without a discourse that fully describes who she is within the context of the material conditions of her life. Selden’s consistent refusal to address Lily’s economic position and his insistence on his own fiction about Lily and the world they inhabit mark him as insensitive and perhaps even culpable.26 He dismisses Lily’s lament about the undesirability of a “shabby woman” and the necessity of having clothes as “the frame” for other attractions (12). His insistence on being able to discern the “real Lily Bart” who could be “divested of the trivialities of her little world” is a cold rejection of the very problems she faces (135). Lily cannot be detached from her context. Her rhetorical efforts to free herself from economic realities by adopting Selden’s aesthetic talk of a better self ultimately cause her death. The narrative structuring of events in the final chapters of the novel further foregrounds the problem of female relationship to 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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discourse and graphically demonstrates the destructive consequences of women becoming totally subsumed within a masculine narrative. The discrepancy between the apparently neat resolution of the narrative as presented from Selden’s perspective and a whole series of questions and gaps operating within the text to resist closure undercuts the surface narrative playing out the tragic love story of Lily and Selden. The novel’s apparent sentimental ending that positions Selden as the hero who waxes poetic on the death of his beloved Lily does satisfy the conventional expectations of Wharton’s readers. After all, Lily must die. What else can be done with a woman at the end of the nineteenth century who has no economic future, who is no longer marriageable, and who has taken to drugs? As Rachel Blau DuPlessis suggests in Writing beyond the Ending, literary conventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries required an author to create a female protagonist who faithfully enacted the prevailing cultural codes for a woman; she must either marry or meet an end suitable for the failure to marry—death. Edith Wharton’s readers in 1905 would have found the ending of The House of Mirth tragic but entirely appropriate. The cautionary tale of a woman who transgresses social and moral laws is completed by Lily Bart’s death. The faults of the larger corrupt society that produced her are highlighted by the seemingly inexorable downward spiral into which its vulnerable victim is thrown. Furthermore, giving Selden, literally, the last word apparently restores the masculine perspective to its proper position. Selden is allowed to create the final narrative of Lily’s last moments; he constructs himself as the man who knew the true Lily who existed outside the pleasure-seeking and superficial society structure that had trapped her. Nevertheless, a contemporary reader might find disjunctions within the narrative that undermine the very sentimental and melodramatic conventions the novel evokes to satisfy reader expectations. There is, first, the question of Selden’s responsibility to Lily. His appearances throughout the novel usually occur at moments of crisis for Lily and his interventions routinely elicit either a miscalculation on Lily’s part or an outright refusal to carry out the current plan to win a suitable mate or make a living. Selden, appearing at Lily’s side whenever she faces such a dilemma, time and again, defines her actions as morally questionable and socially irresponsible. And in each case, Lily ultimately assigns a higher morality to Selden and blames herself for her failure to maintain true virtue. Such is the pattern established by Wharton that controls the surface plot line. At the 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




same time, however, Wharton’s layered narrative encourages the reader to take careful note of the persistently negative consequences for Lily and the consistent absences of Selden’s assistance when Lily is most vulnerable. Early in the novel, her acceptance of Selden’s invitation to go for a walk at Bellomont ultimately ruins her careful plan to marry Percy Gryce. While Lily does not love Gryce, Selden is unable or unwilling to offer himself as an alternative. Later, in the novel, when Lily is serving as social secretary to the newly rich social-climbing Mrs. Hatch, Selden’s sudden appearance at the residence convinces her to leave her position and to embrace the better self that Selden always calls forth. But Selden is conspicuously not available when Lily abandons the job that had allowed her to survive outside the society that has irrevocably cast her adrift. It may be true, as Carry Fisher says, “At heart, she despises the things she’s trying for” (189). Perhaps Selden does function throughout the story as a kind of moral barometer for Lily. However it is also true that he consistently removes himself from any responsibility for the consequences for Lily resulting from his principled stance. Selden is absent through much of the novel—after Bellomont, after the Gus Trenor affair, after Lily’s humiliating return from Europe, and during her struggle to support herself in the hat-making trade. But his absence is most notable in the closing pages of the penultimate chapter when Lily wanders the streets after leaving his room for the last time. The narrative pattern of Selden’s presence and absence throughout the novel signals Lily’s consistent misreading of Selden. Lily blames herself for his neglect on her return from Europe, believing that she had once “stood with Lawrence Selden and disowned her fate” (317). Yet the reader cannot ignore the great irony in Lily’s understanding of their relationship since the text has already shown that Selden’s construction of meaning regarding her relationship to Gus Trenor was false and made possible only because he refused to allow her to tell her story. Selden’s characteristic silences allow Lily to attribute all that is good within herself to him. As the narrative represents Lily’s diminishing hopes and increasingly dire economic straits, Lily asserts that only Selden’s calling forth of her “true” inner self has kept her “from really becoming what many people have thought me” (307).27 She accuses herself of having destroyed this transforming passion and potential redemption, never realizing that Selden was initially attracted only by her perceived moral weaknesses; in the opening pages of the novel, he admits to the reader that he was a man who had given up sentiment long before he met Lily at the train station. At their meeting at Bellomont early in the novel, Selden is pleased to discover her 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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yearning for a life apart from society, seeing it as an “emotional weakness” and “the most interesting thing about her” (68). He notes to himself, “To be the unforeseen element in a career so accurately planned was stimulating even to a man who had renounced sentimental experiments” (69). Lily admires his “cultivation,” “light irony,” and “sense of superiority,” never suspecting she is the object of his cynicism (65).28 Lily dies not because she is guilty of some transgression against society or morality but because she misreads Lawrence Selden.29 She attributes passion and feeling to a man who values detachment above all other things. In her attempts to define herself and her life in Selden’s terms, she adopts a discourse and narrative that will surely destroy her.30 Selden’s language renders Lily mute.31 She can neither speak to save herself by using Selden’s letters to silence the woman who is destroying her nor can she redefine herself in terms that free her from Selden’s judgment. Locked in Selden’s language, she has no language of her own. In the closing pages of the novel, she concludes, “Nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation” (320). The scene of Lily’s death has drawn much critical discussion. Elizabeth Ammons suggests that Lily’s death represents her acceptance of the “docility society has all along expected of her” (Argument 42). Focusing on Lily’s self-hatred, Judith Fetterley argues that Lily’s “unwillingness to survive” at any cost marks Lily’s moral achievement but also makes the author complicit with the destructive forces that the author herself criticizes in the novel (209–10). Cynthia Griffin Wolff sees Lily’s death as Wharton’s recognition that “Lily is not a viable adult” (Feast 136). Elaine Showalter notes that Lily is without language, that she suffers from “ladylike self-silencing” and is unable “to tell her own story” to Selden (“Death of a Lady” 136). For Showalter, Lily’s death represents Wharton’s rejection of an earlier self that “lacked confidence as a working writer, that longed for the escapism of the lady’s world and feared the sexual consequences of creating rather than becoming art” (146). Gloria Erlich says that Lily “dies on the threshold of female sexuality, unable to cross over” (69).32 Yet Lily’s death need not signal Wharton’s judgment against her protagonist for some kind of moral lapse, failure to represent the writer’s enlarged sense of womanhood, or her fear of sexuality. Instead Lily’s frantic attempts to explain to Selden, her desperate search for the word, and her death serve a strategic narrative function in the novel by tracing the consequences of a woman’s failure to control 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




language and story. Lily’s death heightens the effect of the narrative’s contrast between her position outside language and Selden’s facile understanding of the “word” in the final chapter. Lily’s last scenes in the novel dramatically picture what happens to a woman without a language of her own. In her final visit to Selden, Lily struggles to explain what his faith had meant to her but the “words would not come more clearly” (307). She is reduced to a silence that even Selden “dared not break” (310). At the end of the chapter, having taken the sleeping drug, Lily once again struggles to say the word “she had found that should make life clear between them,” the word that “lingered vague and luminous on the far edge of thought” (323). But Lily is unable to speak because she has never found a language by which she could narrate her own story.33 Within the context of Lily’s inability to speak, Selden’s redemption of Lily through language in the closing paragraphs of the novel becomes an ironic counterpoint to the surface layer of the narrative that positions Selden as the moral center of the novel. Arriving that morning, convinced that he now knows the word (which inexplicably is a word “not for the twilight but the morning”), Selden arrives too late to save Lily in a physical sense (324). But the masculine ability to use language to project self onto the world is a skill at which Selden is adept. In the final chapter, Selden is still attempting to read Lily. As he goes through her letters, he constructs a story about her final hours. Not surprisingly, his primary concern is what she felt for him. Also not surprisingly, he nearly gets the story wrong. At the point of leaving the room after discovering the letter to Trenor, he stops only when he finds a letter from himself apparently saved by Lily. This evidence of his seeming importance to her gives Selden the courage to formulate “an explanation of the mystery” (329). Her death conveniently allows him to “read into that farewell all that his heart craved to find there” (329).34 While Lily alive had continually eluded his attempts to fix a romantic and aesthetic definition on her, the dead Lily becomes the perfect subject of his reflections.35 (One is reminded of Poe’s assertion that the most poetic theme in the world is the death of a beautiful woman.) Comfortingly, Selden can even detect forgiveness in those “mute lips” (329). Selden, who “knows how names can alter the color of beliefs” (70), finally linguistically captures the meaning of Lily Bart and her relationship to him: “In the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear” (329). And yet, Wharton’s text has consistently raised questions about Selden’s ability to read, to name. That Wharton never reveals the word is perhaps a clue to 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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another reading of The House of Mirth. The message is not to be found in the language of Lawrence Selden, in the masculine impetus to make metaphor, to align and structure events within culturally accepted masculine narratives. Instead the reader has to look at the silences, at what is not said, at the spaces within the story. The ruptures within Wharton’s text, thus, reveal the dilemma of a female writer working within a culture that codes authorship as male and the subject of narrative as female. Yet these ruptures also suggest a solution to the “problem” of women writers such as Wharton who must face down both social disapproval and inner uncertainty in order to write. A layered narrative that establishes multiple and contradictory readings represents Wharton’s efforts to begin working out her own narrative position and identity as a serious author. The narrative comments on itself: a story that appears to privilege male authorship also questions the accuracy and consequences of that authorship. Wharton’s contradictory and fragmented text allows for a silent authorial critique from within the gaps and invites the reader to participate in the construction of an alternative story that criticizes masculine narratives about women. By writing The House of Mirth at the start of her career as a professional novelist, Wharton took on what was to prove to be a central concern for the rest of her career—how to negotiate the relationship between her own gender and narrative authority.







4

The Unravelling of Story in The Reef

The Reef reflects Wharton’s continued interest in the ways in which power over language and narrative is gendered. Published seven years after The House of Mirth, The Reef also demonstrates how masculine narratives silence women’s voices and how women fail to define their own stories of identity. However, while The House of Mirth examined the challenges to female discursive power within the world of upper class, wealthy women of leisure, The Reef extends the analysis into two different directions. First, Sophy Viner, a lower class woman, who makes a living as a governess and lady’s companion and who lacks the socioeconomic power of Old New York society matrons, introduces the effect of class differences on female control over story. Second, Anna Leath, an upper class woman living as an expatriate in France, introduces the struggle for female voice within the context of an international and cosmopolitan culture. Seven years after the publication of The Reef, Wharton would publish a series of essays titled French Ways and Their Meaning identifying French culture as particularly appreciative of adult women with curious minds and strong opinions. Nevertheless, Anna is less empowered than Sophy in the text. As is the case of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, Sophy and Anna ultimately emerge as silenced subjects unable to control the stories told about them and unable or unwilling to construct their own narratives. The working-class Sophy, marginalized by both class and gender, lacks the training and experience to tell her story in opposition to George Darrow’s narratives about her. But Anna, privileged by class and a previous marriage to a wealthy Europeanized American, also finds herself excluded from narrative power by Darrow’s refusal to listen to her concerns. In the end, Anna suppresses the inner voices that warn her against Darrow and his narratives and chooses silence. As in The House of Mirth, Wharton’s attention to the struggle of female characters to find their voices and the failure of the male story 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


CH A P T ER


to adequately represent the truth of these women’s lives can be read as a coded tale; the text seems to invite the reader to consider how the female characters might represent a persistent dilemma for their author who continues to search for a way to establish her own narrative authority. As in The House of Mirth, The Reef ’s thematic interest in gender and its relation to discourse is supported by Wharton’s use of narrative strategies that challenge masculine storytelling in the novel. If the structural juxtaposition of alternating perspectives reveals the inaccuracy of Lawrence Selden’s stories, these contradictions in The Reef reveal the deliberate deception of George Darrow’s narratives. If Selden’s readings of Lily demonstrate his unwitting reliance on social conventions about gender, Darrow’s readings of Sophy and Anna reveal his self-serving efforts to orchestrate stories that endorse his unacceptable masculine behavior. The Reef, like The House of Mirth, operates as a multilayered narrative that allows Wharton to critique the gender ideologies of her time. Themes and narrative structures that call attention to the effects of deceptive and inaccurate storytelling by men and the silencing of the female voice encourage the reader to consider The Reef in the context of Wharton’s continuing concern about the challenges to female authorship. Despite thematic and narrative parallels between the two novels, important distinctions can be made that point to Wharton’s development as a writer and her more sophisticated handling of the consequences of unequal narrative power based on gender. In The Reef, Wharton’s critique of the masculine willingness to impose his own story on women has sharpened and been made more explicit. Anna Leath, unlike Lily Bart, is very conscious of the ways language can be misused. She also understands that she lacks the ability to say what she means. As in The House of Mirth, these struggles are represented in gendered terms, but Anna’s awareness of her position outside language heightens the novel’s tension between language and silence.1 The Reef explores more directly the controlling power of narrative and metaphor. At one point in the novel, George Darrow tells Sophy Viner that “a good deal depends on the words one uses to define rather indefinite things” (171). In The Reef, Wharton demonstrates how the individual who linguistically controls how events are talked about also wields power over those events. George Darrow’s control over stories about Sophy and his management of conversations with Anna enable him to manipulate the perceptions and behavior of both Sophy and Anna. In this novel, Wharton introduces passion and its complicated connection to discursive power, a theme she will take up in greater detail 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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in Summer four years later.2 But even in this earlier novel, Wharton sets passion, feeling, emotion, and instinct at odds with language and speech. Working against her own internal resistance to language determined by her longing to give herself up to emotion, the character of Anna struggles to define herself and articulate her desire against Darrow’s overt linguistic manipulation of events. As Wharton’s story directly confronts a woman’s struggle to achieve discursive authority, strategies employed within The Reef establish narrative disjunctions even more marked than the ruptures found in The House of Mirth.3 Wharton’s narrative structure reproduces thematic struggles between feeling and language, and between a masculine and feminine voice, in its very form. Gaps in time, abrupt shifts in point of view, and the open-endedness of the conclusion yield a highly fragmented narrative. Paradoxically, George Darrow’s counsel to Anna who despairs of “reconstruct[ing] her ruined world” at the end of the novel emerges as a metaphor for Wharton’s narrative design (312). Darrow advises Anna late in the narrative: “What I meant was that when you’ve lived a little longer you’ll see what complex blunderers we all are: how we’re stuck blind sometimes, and mad sometimes—and then, when our sight and our senses come back, how we have to set to work, and build up, little by little, bit by bit, the precious things we’d smashed to atoms without knowing it. Life’s just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits” (313). Ironically, Darrow voices Wharton’s own implied invitation to the reader to piece together the broken bits of her narrative to generate a story. Anna’s story emerges out of her fragmented speech, the hesitations in her discourse, and her silences. In a similar way, the narrative structuring of fragments in The Reef enables the female author to create a doubling of meaning so that the novel both validates and critiques the female’s sacrificing of the self to experience the fullness of passionate feeling. Darrow’s stories subsume Sophy’s and Anna’s experiences within his understanding of the world. But at the same time disjunctions within the text work against the totalizing effect of Darrow’s (and Wharton’s explicit) narrative by extending authorship to the reader. Anna’s and Sophy’s silences within the story become the author’s means to critique the very silencing of her protagonists. As earlier critics of Wharton have suggested, the author’s interest in Anna’s efforts to define herself and articulate her desire can be usefully read against the backdrop of Wharton’s own life.4 By the time Wharton was writing The Reef in 1911, her affair with Morton Fullerton had been over for a year. Although R.W.B. Lewis suggests the two parted amicably, Wharton’s letters in the closing stages of the 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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I re-read your letters the other day, & I will not believe that the man who wrote them did not feel them, & did not know enough of the woman to whom they were written to trust to her love & courage, rather than leave her to this aching uncertainty . . . . You told me once I should write better for this experience of loving. I felt it to be so, & I came home so fired by the desire that my work should please you! But this incomprehensible silence, the sense of your utter indifference to everything that concerns me, has stunned me” (Lewis, Letters 160–62).

Although she wants to believe that her work will benefit from the experience of sexual passion and the strong emotions elicited by Fullerton, the ending of the relationship seems to make writing very difficult for a seemingly vulnerable Wharton. She tells Fullerton in May 1909 that “the tiresome woman is buried, once for all, . . . & only the novelist survives,” but in another letter written certainly that same month and possibly that same evening, she is again pleading that they resume their “former state” as “good comrades” even if not as lovers because his present unwillingness to talk with her is too painful (Lewis, Letters 179, 180). That Wharton has to come to some sort of crisis about Fullerton’s refusal to respond to her letters is suggested by her decision to stop work on The Custom of the Country and to begin writing The Reef in 1911. The context of Wharton’s encounter with her own sexuality and the turmoil of emotion and passion within her personal life may explain, in some way, Wharton’s alteration in her writing projects. Her work shifts from a novel centered on the empowered voice and emotional shallowness of Undine Spragg to a very different novel showing how passion and feeling might cause the loss of female voice. As in The House of Mirth, Wharton’s The Reef both reflects and becomes a way to explore the struggle of female storytelling; significantly, however, Anna Leath and Sophy Viner attempt to narrate story and self within the context of highly charged emotional and sexual relationships. Furthermore, the act of writing The Reef seems unusually difficult and not entirely within the author’s control. Curiously, in 1912 Wharton asked Fullerton for advice about the construction of the novel. Given the fragmented style of the narrative, it seems significant



relationship indicate that Wharton experienced much painful turmoil over Fullerton’s refusal to respond to her letters. For instance, she writes to him in August 1908,

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that Wharton, while entirely satisfied with the content of her novel, was very anxious about the structuring of her story. She tells Fullerton, “I don’t think I’ve ever been so worried & uncertain about the ‘fracture’ of a book—I’ve no doubts about the stuff!” (Lewis, Letters 271). Wharton’s attitude toward the finished novel is, not surprisingly, deeply ambivalent. Her relief at being finished with the project is evident in a letter to Gaillard Lapsley in which she apologizes for not seeing him by noting that “for the last two months my book has really held me tight. Now it’s out of—no, I’m out of it’s clutches” (Lewis, Letters 276). Three months later she writes to Bernard Berenson, “I’m sending you my book, though I don’t want to because I’m sick about it—poor miserable lifeless lump that it is!” (Lewis, Letters 284). But as Lewis points out, six years later, Wharton tells her editor, “I put most of myself into that opus” (Lewis, Wharton 326). Wharton’s difficulty with the composition of the novel and her ambivalence about the finished product suggest that the issue of women and discursive power connected to the emotional turbulence of passion and sexuality were compelling concerns for Wharton in 1911 and 1912. But the very existence of the novel attests to Wharton’s determination not to be silenced and her purposeful efforts to work through those concerns within her own writing. As in The House of Mirth, Wharton introduces the female protagonists in The Reef through the filter of a masculine voice. Both Sophy Viner and Anna Leath are initially described and reflected upon by George Darrow.5 The opening pages of the novel implicitly link narrative to a masculine voice and demonstrate the way women become the objects of male stories. The tale begins with Darrow’s frustrated re-readings of a telegram he has received from Anna Leath asking that he delay his planned visit to her home outside Paris. In his anger, he metaphorically projects Anna’s message onto the world. Her words are transformed into concrete objects—bullets, dice cast by malicious gods, angry waves: All the way from Charing Cross to Dover the train had hammered the words of the telegram into George Darrow’s ears, ringing every change of irony on its commonplace syllables: rattling them out like a discharge of musketry, letting them, one by one, drip slowly and coldly into his brain, or shaking, tossing, transposing them like dice in some game of the gods of malice; and now, as he emerged from his compartment at the pier, and stood facing the wind-swept platform and the angry sea beyond, they leapt out at him as if from the crest of the waves, stung and blinded him with a fresh fury of derision. (3)





Darrow’s metaphorical appropriation of Anna’s language and the dramatic rendering of her words signal Darrow’s facile use of language and his propensity to construct stories about others for his own benefit. Indeed, Darrow’s imagined transformation of Anna’s words into concrete physical objects—bullets, dice, and angry waves—reflects both a characteristic behavior and a narrative pattern. Darrow’s poetic use of language within the narrative reduces people and objects around him to mere components of his story. Metaphor, personification, and dramatic imagery enable him to appropriate a kind of narrative and linguistic authority that mirrors his attempts to retain power in his relationships throughout the novel. Projecting his inner world onto people and objects around him, Darrow reads the jostling of the crowd at the pier as further evidence of his rejection. For example, after receiving Anna’s telegram, he complains to himself, “ ‘She doesn’t want you, doesn’t want you, doesn’t want you,’ their umbrellas and elbows seemed to say” (11). Later in the novel, Wharton explores the imaginative projection of the emotional self onto the “real” world even more directly, but Darrow’s early thoughts in the story suggest the power of imaginative language to shape one’s perception of the external world in significant ways. Bored and depressed by the Parisian rain, Darrow muses, There were no variations of rhythm, no lyrical ups and downs: the grey lines streaking the panes were as dense and uniform as a page of unparagraphed narrative . . . . [H]e sat staring with dull acquiescence into the boundless blur of rain, which affected him like a vast projection of his own state of mind. (74).

The character’s description of the rain as a kind of tedious and badly written story calls attention to the process of writing. Darrow explicitly links the effect of this bad writing to his own frame of mind. Later, he will recall this metaphorical musing as the reason for beginning his affair with Sophy Viner. The text establishes Darrow as an author skilled in creating stories that serve his own self-interests and damage those around him. Anna, Darrow’s fiancé, and Sophy Viner, his mistress, become key elements in Darrow’s stories. Subjects for analysis and experimentation, Anna and Sophy are also the foci of the various dramatic narratives Darrow constructs for himself in the course of the novel. The writing of these narratives depends on Darrow’s willingness to read and interpret others. For example, his first meeting with Anna Leath



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becomes an opportunity for Darrow to re-read her in his own terms. Although the middle-aged Anna has married, borne a daughter, and been widowed, Darrow recalls his encounter with her as a young woman and assures himself that the present-day mature woman is as easily interpreted as the young girl he knew so long ago. Reminding himself that “every syllable told with her” (4) and certain that the years had made her an even “finer and surer . . . instrument of expression” (4), he interprets her slight pressure on his arm as an indication of “exceptional warmth in the greeting” (3). Darrow’s facile interpretations of Anna’s telegram and her behavior point to Wharton’s interest in the links among reading, writing, authority, and control. The boundary between reading and writing is consistently blurred in The Reef. Most of the characters attempt to “read” each other in the novel but Darrow is clearly the primary interpreter who manipulates his readings to support his own drama. Darrow’s seizing of authorship underscores a pattern also seen in The House of Mirth—the use of men’s narratives to exert control over those caught within the male story. An even more overt indication of Darrow’s tendency to construct a story for his own amusement, solace, and satisfaction can be seen in his first meeting with Sophy. Attracted by her frankness and bemusedly sympathetic toward what he immediately defines as her “microscopic woes”(12)—the wind has ruined her umbrella and, as we learn, later Sophy has just lost her job—Darrow regains a sense of well-being under her gaze. Vaguely recalling that Sophy had been present at some event in his past, Darrow’s interest in her is presented in both poetic and scientific terms. He recalls her as the “blurred tapestry” of a former gathering place and is momentarily surprised to discover that the tapestry had been alive (17). Her face is first a “shallow flowercup” and then a “darkening gleaming mirror that might give back strange depths of feeling” (20). Her naive pleasure at his invitation to the theater arouses his curiosity about her “hunger” for enjoyments he finds dull; he notes that it would be a “fine chance to experiment with such hunger” (33). Wharton’s references to scientific discourse depict Sophy as an object of empirical study for Darrow. On taking Sophy to the theater, he is delighted to discover that “she was an extraordinary conductor of sensation” (51). He notes that “he had not often had the opportunity of studying the effects of a perfectly fresh impression on so responsive a temperament and he felt a fleeting desire to make its cords vibrate for his own amusement” (52). Later in the chapter, he admits that Sophy has become “of absorbing interest to him as an 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




escape from himself and an object about which his thwarted activities could cluster” (56). For Darrow, however, Sophy also serves as a reflection of the self.6 His “study” of the young woman is driven not only by idle curiosity but also by the effect she has on him. Under Sophy’s attention, his positive sense of himself is restored. The text reveals the complex relationship between narrative and identity as Darrow reduces Sophy’s character to a mirror of himself. Although Darrow asserts that he is intrigued by the young woman, her claim on his attention rests largely on the way she gives Darrow back to himself. Thus the real object of Darrow’s study, and story, is himself. The conflation of the language of scientific analysis and literary discourse is dependent on the female as a kind of mirror. Sophy’s fascination with Darrow enables him to look on her as the center of a story that he constructs to shore up his own identity. The gaze is clearly masculine and authorial. Darrow shapes the self he wants to see in Sophy. She does not mediate his view of self but simply gives back his own projected identity in a sort of doubling movement.7 The opening pages of the text thus establish the parameters for Wharton’s engagement with both narrative and gender. The masculine voice that creates narrative and transforms people and nature through metaphor writes himself onto the world. He constructs an identity via the mirroring of self in people and objects around him, employing the medium of his own language. The “male instinct of ownership” (18) is played out in Darrow’s efforts to appropriate the world through discourse. Even his career as a diplomat marks him as a person especially adept at talk, skilled in the use of language. Darrow is further intrigued by Sophy because her history makes her a story with which he is unfamiliar. For Darrow, Sophy Viner escapes his categories of “feminine type” (26). Sophy is neither clearly a lady nor “not a lady.” He muses, “She was distinguished from the daughters of wealth by her avowed acquaintance with the real business of living, yet it seemed to Darrow that her experience had made her free without hardness and self-assured without assertiveness” (27). Darrow searches for a story of her that accounts for this strange mixture of “precocious wisdom” and “disarming ignorance” (61). His inability to “explain” Sophy by any conventional narrative challenges Darrow to construct a dramatic rendering of her. Fascinated by Sophy’s untutored responses to the play when they attend a performance of Cerdine, Darrow is amused by her apparent inability to distance herself from the staged fiction. He is charmed by the “primitive simplicity of her attitude toward the tale itself, as toward something 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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that was ‘really happening’ and at which one assisted as at a streetaccident or quarrel overheard in the next room” (49). Although the sophisticated Darrow condescendingly notes Sophy’s blurring of fact and fiction, he fails to recognize a similar pattern in his own behavior. Sophy’s responsiveness to the story being acted on stage is actually an inverted mirroring of Darrow’s relationship to the world. If Sophy makes “real” the enacted fictions, Darrow fictionalizes what is “really happening.” However, the narrative suggests that Darrow’s story-making has far more damaging consequences. Unlike Sophy’s naive appreciation of the play, Darrow’s dramatizing of their relationship is clearly self-serving. Humiliated by Anna’s telegram asking him to delay his planned visit, Darrow impatiently awaits a letter of explanation; when it does not arrive immediately, he turns his attentions to Sophy. Deciding not to post the letter asking her friends for help, he determines to give the young woman a “little amusement, a little personal life” (56). Denied any narrative authority, the vulnerable Sophy is unable to tell her own story to her friends. Instead, she becomes a character in Darrow’s subtle drama that demonstrates his considerable skill at setting tone and creating a believable plot. Defining his actions as those of a friend and sure of his own ability to control the relationship, Darrow is initially “satisfied that he had struck the right note, and [was] convinced of his power of sustaining it” (76). But bored by the weather and increasingly angry at Anna, Darrow finally abandons his earlier intention of simple friendship; before long, he and Sophy become lovers. Simultaneously, Darrow constructs a story to excuse himself from responsibility. He blames the slide from fellowship into the riskier complexities of a sexual entanglement not on himself but on the setting that disturbed his aesthetic balance. “The rain had made all the difference. It had thrown the whole picture out of perspective, blotted out the mystery of the remoter planes and the enchantment of the middle distance, and thrust into prominence every commonplace fact of the foreground” (76–77). The melodramatic tone and the metaphorical references to drama and art sound like an overwritten passage in a bad novel. Darrow excuses himself by blaming Anna’s “frugal silence,” Sophy’s needs, and nature’s interference (47). He employs aesthetic discourse to mask his undesirable behavior. Intent on living out this story, he also quickly denies Anna her story. When the long-awaited letter from Anna finally does arrive, Darrow—having “fingered its thickness and weight and calculated the number of sheets it must contain”—throws it unread into the fire and chooses Sophy’s more present charms (78). 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




Yet Sophy’s presence in terms of her talk comes to bore Darrow. Although he first imagines his value to Sophy “as a sympathetic ear, . . . someone before whom she could unfold and shake out to the light her poor little shut-away emotions,” he soon tires of her reminiscences about her past unhappiness with Mrs. Murrett and her desire for a career in the theater (39). In his view the “girl had been dying for some one to talk to” and her talk makes him want to make her happy (39). But even in the beginning it is the sound of her voice that compels him, not what she says. Her inability to participate in his privileged aesthetic response to high culture reduces her talk to “chatter,” to the mere “rattling of a tongue” (39). Darrow’s decision to end the relationship will not be motivated by morality, guilt, or the boredom of an old conquest, but, finally, because Sophy lacks his perceived skill in discourse. Until then, Darrow deliberately mutes Sophy’s voice by assigning her to the realm of nature and defining her as a creature incapable of useful speech. Darrow muses, “A shade of lassitude had crept over their intercourse. Perhaps it was because when her light chatter about people failed, he found she had no other fund to draw on” (261). Defining her as “one of those elemental creatures whose emotion is all in their pulses, and who become inexpressive or sentimental when they try to turn sensation into speech,” his silencing “caress” “restore[s] her to her natural place in the scheme of things” (262). Denied the opportunity to speak for herself, Sophy becomes a silent audience for Darrow’s aesthetic talk while she is categorized as the embodiment of speechless nature. At the theater, Sophy charms Darrow by “the deference with which she received his comments,” a deference that rouses him to speech (49). Her questions “called from him more ideas about the theatre than he had ever supposed himself to possess” (49). At the same time, Sophy remains the subject of Darrow’s continuing metaphor-making: “Darrow felt as if he had clasped a tree and a nymph had bloomed from it” (262). Having relegated Sophy to the world of nature, Darrow no longer listens to her words but “let[s] her voice run on as a musical undercurrent to his own thoughts” (262). The structure of the novel underscores Sophy’s silencing and, later, Anna’s as well. Darrow functions as the narrative filter throughout Book One of the novel. Sophy’s responses are carefully interpreted by Darrow for the reader: Sophy never speaks for herself. Instead, the opening part of Wharton’s novel is given over entirely to a masculine voice appropriating the young female protagonist as a part of his story. Book One also establishes Darrow’s willingness to narrate Anna in a 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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similar way. She, too, never speaks for herself in the exposition of the narrative. Darrow’s musings about Sophy at the beginning of novel bring to mind his youthful love of Anna Leath, although subsequent experiences “had swept away all but the outline of their story” (27). If his interest in Sophy rests on whether or not she is a lady, the riddle of Anna Leath for Darrow is figured in terms of what becoming a lady has cost her. For Darrow and Anna, the cultural transformation of a lady depends on a kind of denaturing, a repression of passion.8 If Sophy becomes a speechless creature of nature and the object of Darrow’s passion, Anna represents a woman whose strong natural passions have been worn away by the process of becoming a lady at home in Darrow’s world, one capable of the public discourse of civilized living. The text hints at the loss of an essential connection between passion and the private language of emotion. “What were all her reticence and evasions but the result of the deadening process of forming a ‘lady’?” (29) He compares “their youthful story” to the frozen and mute “ghostly lovers of the Grecian Urn, forever pursuing without clasping each other” (30). Darrow believes he could have given Anna both passion and a vital language. He assures himself, “If she had been given to him then he would have put warmth in her veins and light in her eyes: would have made her a woman through and through” (30). Instead he sees “her fated to wane into old age . . . echoing the words she had always heard” (30).9 The imagery here points to the dilemma faced by the women in the novel. Whether inside or outside nature, the two protagonists are denied access to language. If she exists within nature (and outside culture, as does Sophy), she lacks the kind of aesthetic language necessary to engage the dominant culture as personified in Darrow; her naturalized condition enables others to contain her within their own verbal constructions. But if she exists inside culture, as does Anna, the process of making her a lady removes her from nature and denies her access to the language of strong feeling. If Sophy lacks an aesthetic discourse, Anna has been cut off from the language of passion. Darrow reads Anna as he reads Sophy. He erases the existence of Anna’s first husband by finding meaning in Anna’s very silence about Fraser Leath. Mrs. Leath’s words gave no hint of her husband’s having failed to justify her choice; but her very reticence betrayed her. She spoke of him with a kind of impersonal seriousness, as if he had been a character in a novel or a figure in history; and what she said sounded as though it had been learned by heart and slightly dulled by repetition. (6)





Darrow believes Anna’s silence contributes to his “impression that his meeting with her had annihilated the intervening years” since “she had suddenly grown communicative and kind: had opened the doors of her past, and tacitly left him to draw his own conclusions” (6). As in the case of Sophy, Darrow denies Anna her own accounting of her life and instead makes her part of his self-absorbed story. Book One, then, establishes Darrow as a voice that employs metaphor to make persons and objects around him extensions of the self, to read and interpret others as characters within his own narrative. The text signals from the outset that this impetus to story others is a way to contain and control. But most importantly, Book One marks this authoring as masculine and patriarchal. Wharton’s structuring of The Reef has led some critics to observe that the novel is the “most classical of her novels in composition.”10 And indeed the narrative’s division into five books tracks the familiar dramatic line of a classic tragedy: opening with an extended exposition that details Darrow’s involvement with Sophy and Anna, culminating in a dramatic climax in Book Three when all three characters—Sophy, Anna, and Darrow—must negotiate the outcome of their connected fates, and the apparently tidy ending in Book Five with Sophy’s decision to give up Darrow to Anna. But while this foregrounded structure seems to tie the narrative neatly together, a closer examination of the sudden shifts in perspective in each book and the disjointed relationships between one book and the next reveals a highly fragmented narrative.11 Abrupt shifts in space, time, and point of view dislocate the reader. Book One ends in a dingy Paris hotel room late in the afternoon on a rainy day as Darrow throws Anna’s letter into the fire before turning to kiss Sophy. Book Two opens several months later at Givre, the Leath family estate, as Anna gazes at the play of October light over the “old high-roofed house . . . [and] the grassy court filled with the shadow . . . of limes” with a letter from Darrow in her hand (83). The sudden shift into Anna’s mind and the silent gap in time signal a pattern within the narrative of alternating viewpoints and spaces.12 As the novel proceeds, Anna and Darrow’s struggle over their future together is encoded in their increasingly disparate perspectives as the narrative rapidly shifts back and forth between the two points of view. In addition, the structure signals both Anna’s desire and her failure to control her world through language. Although Book Five is told through Anna’s single consciousness, its disjointed style contrasts to Darrow’s carefully orchestrated narrative in Book One. Anna’s growing alienation from language is contained within the content 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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and the structuring of her story. Indeed, by the end of the book, the narrative threatens to unravel completely; the text’s edging toward incoherence reflects Anna’s own desperate vacillations and uncertainty in the closing pages of the novel. From the very beginning of the second section of the novel, Wharton details both Anna’s subjection to the language of others and her desire for her own language. Book Two opens with Anna’s description of the beauty of Givre—lyrical, vividly portrayed in image and metaphor. But suddenly we are told that her ability to see her world in this way is attributed by Anna to the evocation of Darrow’s presence by a letter she has just received. Wharton notes, “In Mrs. Leath’s hand was the letter which had opened her eyes to these things, and a smile rose to her lips at the mere feeling of the paper between her fingers. The thrill it sent through her gave a keener edge to every sense” (86). Indeed Darrow’s letter has removed the “thin impenetrable veil” though which she has been condemned to look at life (86). Anna believes she has lived far too long without passion, cut off from life, and hopes that Darrow will rescue her from her isolation. But Wharton’s text from the beginning suggests that Anna can acquire experience and an awareness of her passions and instincts only at the cost of language. Passionate feeling and the expression of feeling in language is possible only if one is willing to silence oneself in more public ways. Recalling their aborted, youthful affair, Anna notes she had long ago refused Darrow precisely because “he wanted to kiss her, and she wanted to talk to him about books and pictures, and have him insinuate the eternal theme of their love into every subject they discussed” (89). Although apart from him she always regretted these failures, on his return, “she [always] sped her little shafts of irony, or flew her little kites of erudition . . . and the things she really wanted to say choked in her throat and burned the palms of her hand” (89). As a young woman, Anna’s skill in the language of learning and knowledge, the very discursive power that had made her a lady, rendered her unable to articulate her own desire for Darrow. As a young woman, Anna had been fearful of the passion that “swept over her like a wind that shakes the roof of the forest” (88). A chance reunion some twelve years later, however, has given Anna and Darrow the opportunity for a “gradual reflowering of their intimacy” (7). Now an older and more experienced woman, Anna has lived through the reality of a marriage without passion. Freed by widowhood from the empty marriage, she has returned to her youthful wondering “why everybody about her seemed to ignore all the passions and sensations which formed the stuff of great poetry and 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




memorable action” (86). She is determined this time to choose deep feeling and that “bliss which the fearful human heart scarce dares acknowledge” (85). Although “not used to strong and full emotions,” Anna embraces the passionate feelings aroused by Darrow. Having lived too long with a “layer of gauze between herself and reality,” Anna believes that Darrow will give her a more direct relationship to life. Wharton’s presentation of Anna calls into play a complex intersection of issues: women, desire, language, and narrative. Anna’s struggles to articulate desire and a story of self are represented by Wharton as very different from Darrow’s manipulation of the word. Unlike Darrow, who uses language, metaphor, and narrative to mediate his world and relentlessly enact dramas of self, language separates Anna from direct experience of the world. When she met her first husband, she believed that his “every word, every allusion, every note of his agreeably-modulated voice” would usher her into “a society at once freer and finer” than what she had known (92). She had turned to Fraser Leath, a man with a “storied past,” a man who seemed to share her values and “thought her opinion worth hearing” (91). Although “his kiss dropped on her like a smooth pebble” (93), Anna chose a man who promised “the largest scope for self-expression” (92). But her life with Fraser Leath had proven to be “like a walk through a carefully classified museum,” a life lacking passion, a life predicated on “preserv[ing] the social tradition” (95, 94). Although as a young woman “the mere phrase ‘a French chateau’ had called up to her youthful fancy a throng of romantic associations,” she had come to see her home as “the very symbol of narrowness and monotony” (84). Although she felt herself made for “strong joys and passions,” she could find intense feeling only in the “secret excursions of her spirit” and not in the reality of the life she led with her husband (95). The text images the unreality of this time in terms of old, almost forgotten, stories. Anna talks to Darrow of her husband “as if he had been a character in a novel” (6). Her own past “appeared to its heroine like some grey shadowy tale that she might have read in an old book one night as she was falling asleep” (96). Anna’s choice of a partner who valued her “self-expression” had placed her within a marriage without deep feeling and separated her from “real” life. The mature Anna rejects the dull story of her old life and purposefully seeks the passion from which she had fled as a young woman. The text hints at the outset, however, that the older Anna’s efforts to create a passionate life will continue to threaten her control over language and story. Recalling their reunion in Book One, Darrow 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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remembers listening appreciatively as Anna “talked . . . shyly yet frankly” of the missed years and “had spoken also, with an intense eagerness of affection, of her little girl Effie, . . . and in a strain hardly less tender, of Owen Leath, the charming clever young step-son whom her husband’s death had left to her care . . .” (5). The paragraph abruptly ends in mid-sentence with an ellipsis as if Darrow’s recollection of Anna’s talk suddenly becomes too tiresome to carry on. Wharton’s text visually and verbally represents the drifting away of Darrow’s mind in the very middle of Anna’s eager outpourings of self and foreshadows for the reader Darrow’s later impatience with Anna’s efforts at “self-expression.” As the novel proceeds, the text vividly dramatizes the ultimate failure of language to forge a genuine union of mind. Anna and Darrow will come to see themselves “as beings of a different language who had forgotten the few words they had learned of each other’s speech” (292). In the end, the narrative demonstrates the systematic alienation of a woman from language. As Anna comes to recognize the deep feelings Sophy holds for Darrow, Anna becomes increasingly suspicious of her fiancé. She pleads with Darrow, “Do speak at last—you must speak! . . . . [Y]ou must see your silence is doing her more harm than your answering questions could” (269). Although Darrow advises Anna simply to “let things run their course,” Anna insists: “We’re all bound together in this coil” (271). The events in the novel take on the elements of a classical tragedy as Anna insists on discovering the truth about Sophy and Darrow—a truth the reader already fears could destroy Anna. Like a kind of Oedipus, Anna is doomed to uncover the hidden causes that explain the web of evasions she sees at work. Turning to Sophy, Anna argues, “Isn’t best that we should speak quite frankly?” (280). Sophy confesses to Anna that she is rejecting Owen’s offer of marriage because she still loves the man who “was good to me” (283). Forced to face the affair, Anna is deprived of the resources of speech and sees herself “suffering as a hurt animal must” unable to name her pain or to control it with language or reason (285). The tapestry of lies Darrow creates will lead Anna, in the end, to an acceptance of the “uselessness of speaking” (353). She will discover that social discourse is neither transparent nor communicative of “true” feeling. Instead, Anna will come to believe that talk is a kind of façade that masks the dark internal forces that shape human relationships. Her discovery of the “hidden powers, of a chaos of attractions and repulsions far beneath the ordered surfaces of intercourse” will convince her that language can no longer be the thing on which she can rely (353). 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




The structure of the narrative reinforces this thematic exploration of the female alienation from language. The text represents Anna’s painful efforts to determine the full story about Darrow and Sophy by moving steadily back and forth between the two perspectives of Anna and Darrow. The disjunction between perspectives silently establishes an ironic commentary on Darrow’s self-absorption and Anna’s futile efforts to determine a course of action based on “truth.” What actually happened in Paris several months earlier becomes for Anna the subject that must be addressed. Darrow’s present visit to Givre has occurred only after Anna has sent two letters explaining her initial request to put off the visit. While Darrow has “forgiven” Anna’s earlier reticence, the text makes clear that all that remains unsaid creates significant tension between the two lovers. Darrow’s arrival at Givre evokes a sense of dislocation in Anna. As she shows him the mansion, “[s]he seemed to listen to herself speaking from a far-off airy height and yet to be wholly gathered into the circle of consciousness which drew its glowing ring about herself and Darrow” (107). This splitting of self is reflected in her language: “To the aerial listener her words sounded flat and colourless, but to the self within the ring each one beat with a separate heart” (107). From the outset, Anna is both desirous of talk and afraid of it. Finally alone with Darrow, “Anna was intensely aware that as soon as they began to talk more intimately they would feel that they knew each other less well” (109). And, in fact, her first efforts to talk about the failure of the intended visit leave her with an “inarticulate perplexity” (111). The time frame for the first meeting in the story between Darrow and Anna calls the reader’s attention to the very different subject positions the two characters hold in terms of language, knowledge, and power. This initial conversation between Darrow and Anna takes place only after the reader has seen Darrow’s consistent use of language to objectify and manipulate those around him. Because the reader already knows what has happened in Paris, Anna’s lack of knowledge as she struggles to resume the relationship with Darrow is underscored. The reader now discovers that Darrow has, in fact, never told Anna that he had not read her first letter and has come to Givre only in response to a second letter. The dialogue taking place between Anna and Darrow is disjointed, staccato, visually marked by dashes reflecting the hesitations in their speech. Long descriptive paragraphs interrupt the halting one-sentence questions and responses exchanged by the two.



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Darrow’s answers are terse, evasive. He makes clear he does not want to discuss the past—arguing that his presence speaks for him. Darrow’s skillful manipulation of their talk to avoid what Anna most wants to speak of vividly represents the basic struggle over language the two lovers face throughout the story. For Wharton, at least on one level, the battle between the sexes is played out in the realm of discourse. In the end, Darrow controls the talk and, as in the earlier scene with Sophy, terminates their conversation with a kiss. As was the case with Sophy, Darrow comes to reject Anna’s talk. In a second conversation on the following day, Anna remains worried about her stepson’s mysterious and problematic engagement, and with “inward tremor” offers a “carefully developed argument” asking Darrow not to speak of their own plans right away. But Anna suddenly sees that “Darrow’s face gave back no reflection of her words” (121). At first pained “that his thoughts could wander at such a moment,” in an abrupt shift “with a flush of joy she perceived the reason” (121). The realization that her “nearness,” the “details of her face and dress,” held him rather than her words ironically frees her to speak “with ease, authority, conviction” (122). Anna’s sudden facility with language emerges only because she realizes that Darrow no longer listens to her talk. Anna tells herself, “He doesn’t care what I say—it’s enough that I say it—even if it’s stupid he’ll like me better for it” (122). Anna enters into speech only by rejecting its utility. She unwittingly cooperates in her loss of the word. She is relieved to discover that her body speaks more surely than her language.13 Denied speech by the intensity of her emotion, Anna wonders that “her body should seem as unrelated to the self that writhed within her as if had been a statue or picture” (285). The novel represents the problematic connection between authority and language in Anna’s ambivalent response to her relationship to Darrow. Anna eventually gives voice to her fearful suspicions about Sophy and Darrow. She believes her “confession” of doubts actually “may help to establish her dominion” (125). She recalls “the sense of power she had been aware of when talking to Darrow” (125). And yet she also desires to submerge herself in him: “She wanted him to feel her power and yet to love her for her ignorance and humility. She felt like a slave and a goddess, and a girl in her teens” (124). Anna’s belief in her power over Darrow, although it may result from the expression of her fears, also incorporates the realization that nothing she says actually matters. Wharton seems to suggest that a woman’s position as a speaking subject is, at best, tenuous and temporary. In Anna’s





case, the physical act of speech is more important than the words with which she expresses herself. The narrative reinforces Anna’s predicament with an abrupt shift in point of view in the chapter that immediately follows. Wharton’s movement into Darrow’s mind sets up a parallel to the previous scene and offers a silent critique of Darrow’s role. The reader is shown that Anna’s fears regarding the shifting balance of power are valid. Darrow believes that “fate had . . . early marked him for the high privilege of possessing her” (129). Using metaphor and aesthetic discourse to emphasize his singular ability to know Anna, he thinks, “She was like a picture so hung that it can be seen only at a certain angle; an angle known to no one but its possessor. The thought flattered his sense of possessorship” (130). Darrow “owns” Anna through his word because he refuses to allow her to speak for herself. He recalls her appearance as she attempted to talk about the meeting with Owen and remembers that he was thinking “less of her words than of her look” (130). Having relegated Anna to the position of an object that speaks only through the body, Darrow further mutes even this discourse. “His imagination was struck by the quality of reticence in her beauty. She suggested a fine portrait kept down to a few tones, or a Greek vase on which the play of light is the only pattern” (127). Darrow admires Anna, ultimately, for the nuanced and subtle ways in which her body speaks. Wharton’s narrative about the troubled relationship between Anna and Darrow becomes part of a larger discussion about gendered language and power. The pattern of silence and manipulation through language established in these initial interactions between Darrow and Anna is repeated and heightened in the course of the novel as the tension between the two lovers increases. The narrative structure details the gendered miscommunication as the novel shifts back and forth between viewpoints, leaps forward in time, and restlessly moves to and from Paris hotel rooms and the chateau in middle France. Driven to discover the “truth,” to speak of the matter of Sophy, Anna finds resistance within both herself and Darrow. Wharton has structured the narrative so that the reader already knows what has happened in Paris. But this knowledge, of course, is precisely what Darrow is determined to conceal from Anna. Her efforts to make Darrow reveal Sophy’s “antecedents . . . and her past history” (157) in order to evaluate Sophy’s suitability as a governess for her young daughter are ironic because the reader knows that Sophy’s story has most to do with Anna herself. Admitting Darrow to her retreat at



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Givre, Anna tells him that she had “never before cared to talk with anyone” there (157). Darrow responds by redefining communication in terms of silence rather than speech, as he suggests, “Let’s be quiet, then: it’s the best way of talking” (157). As Anna gets closer and closer to the truth, Darrow desperately thwarts her efforts to speak. Wharton’s narrative represents this struggle for power and language in a series of conversations in which Anna pleads with Darrow to tell her what he knows about Sophy Viner. Darrow’s evasions and half-truths, his linguistic manipulation of both Sophy and Anna, his self-interested sensitivity to the unspoken communication of those around him, and his maneuvering to escape from the impossible situation make him a skillful opponent for Anna. Although “he loathed the slighting indifference of the phrase,” he dismisses Anna’s initial questions about Sophy by categorizing her as a “secretary or something of the sort, in the background of a house where I used to dine” (143). Later, he tells Anna that he was “not conscious of ever having heard any one say two words about her” (160). He claims he can attest only to a “general vague impression that she seems very plucky and extremely nice” (160). Wharton heightens Darrow’s dilemma by revealing that Sophy has apparently agreed to marry Owen. Perceiving major threats to his planned marriage to Anna, Darrow begins rewriting the story of Sophy. Although he still feels himself “bound to silence” (187), his “sympathy” for Sophy has turned to “an obscure indignation against her” (187). The “sidelong grace that had charmed his eyes in Paris” he now reads as a “painted picture” (169). He tells Anna that although he hasn’t a word to say against Sophy, “that doesn’t necessarily imply that I think her a good match for Owen” (195). His first maneuvers consist of refusing to take sides in the argument among Anna’s mother in-law, Anna, and Owen over the planned marriage to Sophy. But his attempts to speak privately to Sophy to test her resolve and engineer his own plans create suspicion in both Owen and Anna; he is forced to disguise his design by arguing that he has only been trying to discover if it is best for Owen to marry Sophy. At first Anna accepts his explanation “with a growing sense of reassurance” although she needs “to separate the abstract sense of his words from the persuasion in which his eyes and voice enveloped them” (252). But eventually, ironically, Anna’s confession of her own doubts unmasks the hidden story. With a series of ellipses and fragmented phrases, Wharton’s text visually represents Anna’s hesitations and




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You’ve forgotten about the cloak? The pink cloak that Owen saw you with at the play in Paris? Yes . . . . yes . . . I was mad enough for that! . . . It does me good to laugh about now! But you ought to know that I am going to be a jealous woman . . . a ridiculously jealous woman . . . you ought to be warned of it in time . . . (268)

Again Darrow says nothing, but this time his face gives him away. Reluctant reader of Darrow that she is, Anna is forced to see “reflecting itself in all his lineaments . . . the overwhelming fact of Sophy Viner’s passion” (269). Darrow takes “the onslaught in silence” and is unable to call up “the usual phrases of banter and denial”—although even here he believes they might “have served their purpose if he could have uttered them without being seen” (269). Nevertheless, Anna pleads with Darrow to speak, asserting that “your silence is doing her more harm than your answering my questions could” (269). But Darrow never does put his response into words; although Anna finally learns the whole truth of the affair, she gathers her knowledge from what Darrow refuses to say. The conversation terminates in a silence that speaks as Wharton tells the reader, “Silence fell between them, a silence in which the room seemed to become suddenly resonant with voices” (272). Wharton ends the chapter with Darrow’s assertion that Sophy has given him up. The author assigns Darrow the final word that gives his speech implicit authority; however, the success of Darrow’s story as a persuasive piece of work is compromised because Anna so clearly desires to accept his narrative of the events. When Darrow leaves, Anna is left alone with her thoughts but it is Darrow’s words that consume her: “ ‘I must believe him . . . I must believe him . . . ,’ she tells herself, “repeating the words like a talisman” (275). And, indeed, Anna does come to believe Darrow. Although she wants to tell him to leave Givre immediately and cries that “nothing [he] can say will help,” he manages to convince her that he must stay for appearance’s sake, to shield Owen from the truth (285). Anna’s agreement implicates her in the conspiracy of silence; ultimately, she will find herself imprisoned within that silence, cut off from language and story. Sophy Viner also is drawn into this web of silence.14 Having reappeared in the novel as Effie’s governess and Owen’s fiancé, the presence of this character richly complicates Wharton’s treatment of men and women, language and power. Sophy, who is much talked about, who both speaks and refuses to speak, and who is both agent and



verbal stumbles in her effort to articulate her fears:

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object within the novel, unwittingly drives much of the narrative action. On the one hand, as Wharton presents her, Sophy is continually subjected to others’ narratives; her lack of economic and social power places her outside language. Darrow sees her as natural, naive, even without tact, and ignorant of “the social complications” (36) that he must continually negotiate. As the abandoned Sophy had struggled in Paris to compose a letter seeking help from friends, Darrow had noted how her “flushed cheek and frowning brow” demonstrated that “[s] he was really powerless to put her thoughts in writing, and [how] the inability seemed characteristic of her quick impressionable mind, and of the incessant come-and-go of her sensations” (44). Within Darrow and Anna’s world, she is without social, economic, or linguistic power. At Givre, she is the constant subject of talk by others. On the other hand, Sophy’s lack of social standing enables her to elude a fixed identity in the minds of the other characters. Although Darrow initially finds their “fellowship . . . as much outside such [social] definitions as a sunrise stroll with a dryad in a dew-drenched forest,” he continually attempts to locate Sophy within a story of those social conventions (35–36). But he discovers that she cannot be contained within any single story. “She might be any one of a dozen definable types, or she might—more disconcertingly to her companion and more perilously to herself—be a shifting and uncrystallized mixture of them all” (61). Sophy’s class status seems equally unstable. Although she meets Darrow having left an unhappy job as a lady’s companion and although she is hired as a governess for the Leath household, her engagement to Owen suggests that her experiences as a working woman do not preclude her from entry into the higher class of the Leath family. Furthermore, although Sophy seems without agency, dependent on Darrow and then Anna and finally Owen to escape the hard life from which she has fled, she does speak and act in the novel in ways that give her an independence admired by the others. From the beginning, Anna envies Sophy’s passion, experience, and autonomy. Later she comes to admire even more Sophy’s apparent ability to choose her own destiny in rejecting both Owen and Darrow. Despite attempts by Darrow and Anna to categorize Sophy as either naive innocent or shrewd woman of experience, she eludes a final fixing of either term.15 Indeed, Wharton’s text prevents Darrow, Anna, and the reader from arriving at any simple reading of her history or her actions. The very conclusion of the narrative leaves unanswered what happens to young Sophy as the character simply disappears from the text. 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




Sophy is represented in various and contradictory ways to narrative and language. Sophy’s conflicted relationship to speech and to creating her own story suggests Wharton’s own ambivalence about the power and potential of narrative for women. At some level, Sophy may represent the possibility of escaping masculine narratives and authorial control. Her success in articulating her desire and keeping her word give her agency and construct her as a foil to Anna. However, unlike Anna and Darrow, Sophy is never given a narrative voice of her own in The Reef. In Book One, she is presented entirely from Darrow’s perspective. In Books Two, Three, and Four, she is the subject of much discussion. Her interactions with Anna and Darrow furnish some clues about her perspective, but the reader never gains direct access to this character’s interior world. In Book Five, Sophy Viner is almost entirely absent; she engages in one brief conversation with Anna but the narrative in the closing pages describes almost exclusively Anna’s thoughts about her as well as Anna’s unsuccessful efforts to find her. Initially in Book Two, Sophy is largely talked to or talked about. When she first meets Darrow again, months after the Paris affair, Sophy has begun work as Anna’s daughter’s governess; Darrow is eager to speak to her privately and demands to know why she had never contacted him. Sophy asserts she had nothing to say; she “had no history” (149). But for Darrow, Sophy’s history and her present plans are crucial. Confronted by a “gulf of silence” that takes over the family and guests (165), Darrow is determined “to talk things over” with Sophy (173). Sophy rightly fears that Darrow will want to get rid of this unpleasant tie to his past; he briefly experiences a superficial concern for the “poor thing” that elicits in him a fleeting “picture of himself as she must see him” (152). Uncomfortable about his own role in the affair, Darrow is caught between his sense of being “bound to silence” (187) regarding Sophy and his desire to tell the truth and get rid of her. But unlike Anna, Sophy insists on plain speaking. She immediately demonstrates her understanding of his dilemma. She allays his fears about her remaining at Givre by indicating that she’s “had another offer” (173). But interestingly, this subject of Darrow’s stories whom Darrow seeks to silence maintains her own silence about her engagement to Anna’s stepson. Sophy’s withholding of this information gives her a certain temporary control over Darrow and clearly presents her as a much more powerful figure than Anna even if she is the abandoned woman. Sophy remains the subject of much talk in the middle portion of the narrative. Anna discusses her at length with both Darrow and 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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Owen. Madame de Chantelle has an audience with Darrow to determine her own actions regarding Sophy and the proposed marriage. An old friend of the family, Adelaide Painter, is brought to the country house for the specific purpose of discussing what to do about Sophy. Darrow’s thoughts revolve continually around the young woman. Sophy is both aware of and resistant to her position as subject under discussion. She rejects Darrow’s assertion that he has told Anna “nothing” by pointing out that she knew she was being talked about in the sitting room. Much later in the novel, she apparently convinces Anna that the breakdown in the relationship between herself and Owen is at least partly due to “her annoyance at feeling herself so talked over and scrutinized” (265). Ultimately the character of Sophy attempts to speak out for herself, to “explain” herself to Darrow, Anna, and Owen, but her efforts to take control of her own story are at best only partially successful. She ends her engagement to Owen but cannot reveal that the reason for calling off the marriage is that she sees now she has been wrong to “sweep everything away,” to erase the memory of Darrow (260). She tells Darrow, “ ‘I’ve had you and I mean to keep you . . . . To keep you hidden away here,’ she ended, and put her hand upon her breast” (260). At first Sophy’s refusal to explain herself further gives her a measure of control over the others. Sophy’s self-imposed silence forces Anna to read more carefully the situation. Anna, who is “habitually so aware of her own lack of penetration, her small skill in reading hidden motives and detecting signals, now felt herself mysteriously inspired” (246). She points out to Sophy and Darrow, “It’s much better for you both that this absurd question should be cleared up now” (247). Sophy’s silence, in effect, speaks for her as the closing paragraphs of the chapter dramatically represent the apparently complete breakdown of communication among Sophy, Darrow, Anna, and Owen. Like a scene in a play, characters abruptly enter and exit the narrative. Owen walks out with a “smothered exclamation”; Sophy refuses any “additional word of explanation” and also leaves “before Anna could find a cry to detain her” (247). But for the first time Anna can decode the message hidden beneath the surface talk. When Darrow enters the room, she reads the secret of the affair in his refusal to look at Sophy. So on one level, Sophy does not need to say more. But the text moves on to show that Sophy’s continuing silence is finally not voluntary and exacts a personal price. In the closing scenes of Book Five, Sophy returns to Anna wanting to tell Owen “exactly what happened,” 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




pleading “I don’t want him to think worse of me than he need” (305). But by this time, Anna has become so trapped within the conspiracy of silence herself that she refuses to allow the young woman to tell her story. By the end of the novel, Sophy is positioned as considerably less powerful in the realm of language. Sophy sees that Anna does not understand her and cries, “It’s my fault for not knowing how to say what I want you to hear. Your words are different; you know how to choose them. Mine offend you” (305). It seems an ironic parallel that the text itself abruptly ends Sophy’s story as well. Although Anna later comes to regret her decision to suppress the story and indeed believes that speaking to Sophy is the only way to save herself, neither Anna nor the reader encounters this character again. Finally tracing Sophy Viner to the hotel room of her sister, Anna is told that Sophy has already left to join her former employer. Given the text’s vivid portrayal of Sophy’s unhappiness in the employ of the “beastly” Mrs. Murrett in the opening pages of the novel, Sophy’s decision to return to her old job is difficult to understand. But the narrative remains silent on this account. Sophy’s efforts to say what she means, to define her relationships, and to act on her understanding had given her a temporary independence that Anna envies and will later try to emulate. Perhaps Sophy points to Wharton’s own desire for a female voice freed from masculine constraint. Yet even this representation is undermined by the conflict between Sophy’s actions, her enforced silence and her final disappearance from the text, and Darrow’s continued metaphorical readings of her. If Wharton is struggling to define woman as a speaking subject (and thus to create her own place from which she can speak as an author), she seems to remain deeply ambivalent about the potential for success. As a character, Sophy represents the possibility of a woman claiming her own story—Sophy makes it clear that she chose Darrow—but the text suggests that the payment is excessive. Although Sophy confesses to Anna, “You were all so good to me—I wanted so to stay with you,” the narrative brings this character full circle and the young woman returns to the unhappy life she had fled in the opening of the story. While Sophy’s tragedy is that she is finally denied access to the telling of her own story, Anna’s dilemma is that she must ultimately reject even the potential efficacy of language and narrative. As the novel moves to a close, Anna becomes increasingly aware of the failure of language to discover or convey truth. She turns language against itself to still her growing doubts. Anna first dismisses Owen’s accusations about Darrow as “complete delusion . . . [speaking] the 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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words deliberately and incisively, as if hoping that the sound of their utterance would stifle the whisper in her bosom” (241). As Owen continues, she “longed to silence him, but no words came to her,” and she has to admit that “Darrow’s reticences and evasions had been more than a figment of her doubts” (242). From this point on, Anna is never able to quiet her own inner voice or to ignore the gaps in Darrow’s speech. Her efforts to construct an acceptable story, to silence her own questions fail utterly. Her failed attempts to lay to rest her demons by talking things out with Darrow split the speaking self further. When Darrow tells her that if she would only listen, she would understand, Anna recognizes that she does understand. “So, in herself, she discerned for the first time instincts and desires, which mute and unmarked, had gone to and fro in the dim passages of her mind, and now hailed each other with a cry of mutiny” (314). She discovers she cannot trust even what she intends to say. At Owen’s sudden appearance in the midst of the conversation with Darrow, Anna suddenly renews the engagement to Darrow that she had just ended at the beginning of their talk: “The words seemed to have uttered themselves without her will, yet she felt a great sense of freedom as she spoke them” (316). Ultimately this divided self is silenced completely as Anna concludes: When she and Darrow were apart she exhausted herself in appeal and interrogation, she formulated with fervent lucidity every point in her imaginary argument. But as soon as she was alone with him something deeper than reason and subtler than shyness laid its benumbing touch upon her, and the desire to speak became merely a dim disquietude. (328)

Images of imprisonment that have been present throughout the narrative intensify in the closing pages and make concrete both Anna’s being positioned outside speech and her entrapment within Darrow’s language. Altered by this transforming passion (for it is Anna who is changed, not the frog prince), Anna longs to be freed not with a kiss but the word: “She hoped he would break the spell by some releasing word. But she presently understood that he recognized the futility of words, and was resolutely bent on holding her to her own purpose of behaving as if nothing had happened” (328).16 And, indeed, it eventually becomes clear that Anna’s real choice is between passionate love and language. Darrow uses his presence and his sexuality to silence Anna in much the same way he had stopped Sophy’s chatter. Early in the novel, he





puts a stop to Anna’s probings with a kiss so that she “sat as if folded in wings” (116). The metaphor might indicate a gentle entrapment but it is imprisonment nevertheless. Furthermore it is an imprisonment based on the apparent opposition between language and passion within the female protagonist. As Anna finds herself slipping under Darrow’s spell of sexuality, she feels herself both protected and enslaved: “All her fears seemed to to fall from her as he held her. It was a different feeling from any she had known before: confused and turbid, as if secret shames and rancors stirred in it, yet richer, deeper, more enslaving” (317). The intensity of feeling strips Anna of the capacity for independent action. She is “restless” out of Darrow’s presence and has “a sense of incompleteness, of passionate dependence, that was somehow at variance with her own conception of her character” (318). Anna’s realization of those intense feelings that she hopes will remove the veil from her life can be experienced only if she abandons an independent self, rejects the resources of language, and embraces her own silencing. At what she intends to be their final conversation at Givre, Anna, although determined to part, finds herself unable to say goodbye. Darrow pleads with her not to give him her answer that night. The scene ends with Anna clasped in Darrow’s arms where “all that he and she had ever felt or seen, their close encounters of word and look, and the closer contact of their silences, trembled through her at the touch” (342). Anna rejects language and gives herself over to “the flood of light” (343). By giving herself to him, Anna becomes part of Darrow’s story. It is clear that Anna has little reason to trust either Darrow or his facility with language. Anna knows that she can never accurately read Darrow’s thoughts: “She reflected with a chill of fear that she would never know if he were speaking the truth or not” (322). She knows she cannot trust his “professional expertness” (321). In this light, Darrow’s facile reading of her moods and fears is particularly intrusive, a kind of violation both physical and linguistic. “There were moments when it seemed to double her loneliness to be so certain of his reading her heart while she was so desperately ignorant of his” (334). In the end, Darrow both silences Anna completely and refuses to speak himself: “Darrow had shown her how he dreaded vain words, how resolved he was to avoid all fruitless discussion. He must have been intensely aware of what had been going on in her mind since his return, yet when she had attempted to reveal it to him he had turned from the revelation” (336). She follows suit, “behaving, till the final 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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moment came, as though there were nothing more to say” (337). And indeed Anna is once again unable to speak lulled by the solicitude and security of the silence between them. Wharton makes very clear that the conventional romantic conclusion that would satisfy her contemporary readers is possible only because Anna is willing to ignore her inner voices and to forgo further talk. Giving way to these mute instincts traps her completely within Darrow’s discourse. The loss of identity, agency, and language is immediate. Anna believes “she was his now, his for life” (344). She finds that “her fear of doing or saying what he disliked was tinged by a new instinct of subserviency against which her pride revolted” (346–47). Unable to free herself, she knows there will always be the “insurmountable wall of silence . . . , a wall of glass through which they could watch each other’s faintest motions but which no sound could ever traverse” (354). Anna’s imprisonment seems complete when she makes one final attempt to get Darrow to tell all: “I want to know now, to know everything. Perhaps that will make me forget” (358). But Darrow refuses: “Aren’t you going to tell me?” she asks; Darrow responds simply, “No” (358). Anna is forced to accept his refusal to breach the wall of silence. Darrow’s repeated and largely successful attempts to manipulate Sophy and Anna through language signal Wharton’s continued concern with the oppressive potential of narrative. As in The House of Mirth, Wharton represents the problem in gendered terms by demonstrating the self-absorption of the male protagonist and the damaging effect of his story on the female protagonists. The authoring of the story accords the storyteller authority over events. This thematic focus in The Reef is reflected in the narrative structure of the novel as well— perhaps most clearly in the ending. Wharton’s narrative provides no clear resolution of the plot conflicts. Unlike Lawrence Selden, Darrow is not given the final word. The narrative chaos of the ending is especially significant given the novel’s earlier references to classical tragic narrative—a genre that promises a kind of organic and unified form and a theme based on insight into the human condition and one’s place in the world. In fact, Wharton’s structuring of the final chapter in The Reef actively works against the reader’s desire for a satisfying conclusion. The conclusion to the novel provides no closure for either character or reader. Neither female protagonist conveniently dies. The reader knows only that Sophy has given up Darrow and gone off to another life about which the narrative remains entirely silent. But the novel does not end in marriage either. Increasingly impressed by Sophy’s 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




integrity and independent actions, Anna suddenly begins to reconsider her earlier decision to marry Darrow. Her uncertainty, just as the narrative draws to a close, effectively disrupts the marriage plot and Wharton’s narrative structure. The potential of Anna’s ultimate rejection of Darrow though so slim as to remain at best a shadowy possibility nevertheless exists because the text both raises and refuses to answer the question. The text makes clear that the reader will never know, for sure, what Anna will decide. The textual silences regarding Sophy’s future and Anna’s marriage can be read as Wharton’s reluctance to play out the unhappy destinies the narrative has established for the two women. That the conclusion of the novel resists closure can be read as Wharton’s strategic effort if not to free these characters at least to leave the discussion open. The open-endedness of the conclusion and the authorial silence about significant elements of the story signal the author’s desire that things could be otherwise. Yet there is nothing dishonest about The Reef. If the text does not say explicitly what will happen, the novel does structure the concluding pages so that the reader is invited to read the ending that Wharton cannot or will construct. Sophy does, in fact, keep her word and leave, but we learn in the final paragraphs that she has returned to Mrs. Murrett and the position from which she had fled in the opening of the novel. Anna’s situation is even more chilling, so chilling that even Wharton seems unwilling to write it and instead presents it through the novel’s very open-endedness. Anna’s increasing indecisiveness itself seems a kind of imprisonment. Her desperation is reflected in the fragmented and surreal quality of the novel’s final chapter.17 The discussion between Anna and Darrow in the penultimate chapter seems to suggest that Anna will marry Darrow despite her belief that “she will never know if he were speaking the truth or not” (332).18 Anna is suddenly freed from “a sort of tranced rigidity” to make the claim “he’s mine!” (359). Anna’s belief in the “the moral sweetness” of giving herself to Darrow seems to resolve her doubts and points toward a conventional ending that would satisfy most readers’ expectations (359). However, the next morning, Anna awakens “to a humiliated memory of the previous evening” and—again— resolves to end the engagement (360). The pattern of her vacillation has been well established at this point; even the most sympathetic reader doubts Anna’s ability to act decisively now.19 Deciding that only Sophy Viner who had “kept faith with herself” (361) could “save her” (360), Anna determines to seek Sophy out and tell her that she also will reject Darrow. The pledge, the word, will be the talisman by 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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which she too can act. Unlike Lily Bart, Anna knows the word by which she can free herself but she must communicate it to the one other person she believes also understands the cost of her decision. Learning that Sophy has been staying with her sister, Anna sets out to find the sister, speak to Sophy, and save herself in the final chapter. But it is in this chapter that Wharton’s text introduces the disorder that ends the novel. Anna’s visit to the sister takes on a bizarre, surreal quality. Totally at a loss in these surroundings, Anna once again loses the chance to speak and free herself. Wharton’s setting gives the whole scene a nightmarish quality, a fitting representation of Anna’s own psychic state. Ushered into a “dim untidy scented room, with a pink curtain pinned across its single window”, Anna meets “a lady with a great deal of fair hair and uncovered neck smiling at her from a pink bed on which an immense powder-puff trailed” (364). The conversation of the two is disrupted by the hysterical barking of the pet dog that can be silenced only by a caramel. The dog “hurled itself at Anna with a volley of sounds like the popping of Lilliputian champagne corks” (364). The pinkness of the room, the references to candy and champagne, the presence of Jimmy and the masseur suggest tawdry pleasures and the surfeiting of illicit passions, a dingy femininity that contrasts with Anna’s own ladylike training. In the chaotic interchange, Anna learns that she has just missed Sophy who left the night before. Silenced by Sophy’s absence and the hysterical barking of the dog, Anna leaves with the message undelivered. While the indeterminacy of the conclusion (Wharton does not say what Anna will do) seems to invite the reader to at least consider the possibility that Anna will free herself from Darrow and his story, Wharton’s structuring of this final scene within the context of the rest of narrative also suggests that Anna’s escape is only wishful thinking. Wharton’s authorial silence then becomes another way of telling the story. Her apparent lack of structural closure forces the reader to fashion for herself the very ending that Wharton seems unwilling to articulate. Having given into mute instincts and unable to locate Sophy, Anna is denied the chance to say the word that will free her. The reader is invited to consider to what extent this final scene of a shabby life and corrupt femininity reveals the tawdry underpinnings of Anna’s own passion. Wharton’s exploration of the potential for female control over language and narrative in The Reef is disturbing. In the end, Anna seems unable to act, utterly alienated from language and incapable of controlling her own story. In the closing pages, Anna is unable to settle the rush of her thoughts. We see her restlessly taking trains, rushing 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




via cabs from one Paris apartment to another, frantically motoring across country toward Givre; Anna is clearly in flight, but from what? Is it Darrow’s construction of events that require that they never again speak about Anna’s fears? Or is it also Anna’s horror that a part of her is willing to give up language and independence to lose herself in a protective and enslaving passion where “loving him became . . . the one real fact in the world” (359). Wharton’s construction of the opposition between speech and real feeling within Anna forecloses any resolution for character, author, or reader. The Reef points to a radical distrust of the efficacy of language and story in women’s lives. The narrative incoherence of the closing pages reflects both Wharton’s awareness of the dilemma and her struggle to construct a narrative that gives women a voice, even if at this point it is a story emerging out of the silence.



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Seduction and Language in Summer

Summer, published in 1917, continues Wharton’s exploration of gender and power in narrative and language. Conflicts between male and female narrative authority, women silenced and fragmented by their lack of discursive power, and stories of identity remain compelling topics for Wharton. Wharton’s female protagonists in The House of Mirth, The Reef, and Summer—who are unable to generate their own stories of self—experience tragic consequences. Wharton employs strategies such as layered narratives, disruptions in the plot line, and the juxtaposition of radically differing and clearly gendered points of view both to reveal and critique stories of femininity and female behavior. Like The House of Mirth, Summer seems to follow a traditional plot line leading to the appropriate fate—either marriage or death—for a young woman who ignores moral and social mores. Reminiscent of the plight of Lily Bart, Charity Royall’s fortune appears to complete the sentimental tragic romance narrative that contemporary readers of Wharton expected to find in most of her novels. Clearly Lucius Harney is as willing to write his own story about Charity Royall as Lawrence Selden was eager to narrate the tale of Lily Bart. Summer’s thematic concerns and fascination with metaphorical language, however, link it more closely to The Reef. Anna Leath’s failed efforts to speak her mind and to define her own relationship to Darrow seem to foreshadow Charity Royall’s experiences with Lucius Harney. In both novels, Wharton highlights the connection between passionate love and the failure of language for women. In The Reef, Wharton established an essential conflict between female control in the realm of language and the full experience of her sexuality. Anna Leath linked the discovery of passion and the achievement of “real” life, to a dropping of the veil that separates oneself from the world; but that revelation of a more fully lived life—perhaps more “real” and



CH A P T ER


more natural—also ultimately robs her of language. In Summer, Charity Royall, who embraces the physical world and finds nature the sustaining core of her life, ultimately loses agency, identity, and voice when she is seduced by the language and story of another. Often read as a novel of Wharton’s own sexual awakening, Summer is clearly the author’s most explicit treatment of sexuality up to this point in her career.1 But more importantly, in this novel, Wharton moves beyond an exploration of the awakening of sexuality to an extended analysis of sexual passion as a metaphor for language. Summer, in the end, not only traces the consequences of giving way to one’s sexuality and passion but also explores the seduction of language and story. Having already established herself as a successful writer admired by critics and enjoyed by the public, Wharton perhaps is finally ready to explore in more detail the inner source from which those stories emerge. While the novel is not conventionally autobiographical, a careful analysis of Wharton’s narrative about a woman caught up in the emotional turmoil of sexual passion yields a reading both enriching and relevant to a more complete understanding of Wharton’s discovery of her own sexuality and her development as an author. What is most fascinating about Wharton’s Summer is the transmutation of a story about the awakening of sexuality into an exploration of the seductive power of language. Wharton’s continuing investigation of women and their stories in Summer explicitly examines the links between gender and class. Although Lily Bart’s struggles in The House of Mirth clearly relate to her internal conflict about retaining her upper class status and her rejection of a society she distrusts and dislikes, the gendered differences over control of language and story are not linked to class distinctions. Although Selden relentlessly traps Lily within his own gendered narratives, both he and Lily are members of Old New York society. While Lily’s refusal to sell herself or to profit from Selden’s letters ultimately exclude her from the upper class world, her credentials as a member of that class are never in question. Lily’s “mistake” is her refusal in the end to play by the rules of the rich and wealthy. In The Reef, Wharton admittedly raises the matter of class in the character of Sophy. Part of Sophy’s lack of power and inability to control the talk about her is linked to her working-class status. But Anna Leath’s troubled efforts to find a language that expresses her real self and elicit the truth from Darrow are not based on unequal class status. The battle over discursive power is a gendered one. In Summer, however, the struggle over language connects class and gender in significant ways. Charity Royall inhabits a social class far beneath the 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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Old New York society of Lily Bart and the wealthy cosmopolitanism of Anna Leath. Indeed, even within the narrow confines of North Dormer, Charity finds herself excluded from the community of high society, such as it is in the little country town. Born on the Mountain just outside of North Dormer into an isolated outlaw community, Charity’s heritage is one of abysmal poverty and unsavory reputation. Rescued by her guardian when her father is sentenced to jail, Charity is raised in North Dormer constantly reminded of her “tainted origin” (61).2 Wharton’s introduction of class heightens the dichotomies between male and female narrative power in Summer. If Wharton seems willing to explore more directly the wellsprings of passion, the nature of discursive power, and the complications of class and gender in Summer, she also appears able to offer a more straightforward critique of masculine stories and female voicelessness. Summer relies less on narrative ruptures, fragmentation, and ironic juxtapositions to reveal an alternative story and abandons completely the narrative strategy of filtering female experience through the male voice. Instead, Wharton reveals the experience of her female protagonist much more directly by telling the story entirely from Charity Royall’s perspective. The reader encounters the female protagonist not by way of the mediating commentary of a Lawrence Selden or a George Darrow but by direct entrance into Charity’s mind.3 The single consciousness point of view leaves fewer narrative spaces for the reader to complete as in The House of Mirth. Nor does Wharton’s text, here, ask the reader to take up the role of author in ending the novel as in The Reef. Wharton concludes Summer with a decision by her protagonist and the consequences of that decision. If Wharton’s narrative once again fails to grant the female protagonist the rhetorical power to define herself and tell her story, the structure of Wharton’s text at least suggests more confidence in her control over the narrative and a greater sense of authority. Even if Wharton’s protagonists continue to struggle within the discursive realm, their author seems increasingly certain of her own control over language and story. The opening of the narrative signals the author’s interest in the female story. Wharton, herself, straightforwardly introduces the female protagonist as the anonymous “girl” leaving “lawyer Royall’s house” (7). Instead of Selden’s viewing of Lily or Darrow’s musing about Anna, Summer begins with Charity’s thoughts about Harney. Charity’s female gaze shapes the reader’s first view of the male protagonist Lucius Harney as he laughingly chases his hat down the street. Structurally, the text makes Charity’s perspective on Harney central. Almost immediately the narrative shifts into Charity’s mind 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


SEDUCTION AND LANGUAGE IN SUMMER


as she takes note of the “stranger” and imagines the larger world from which he must have come. Her first words—“How I hate everything!”—identify her as a character terribly dissatisfied with her life in the small town of North Dormer. The presence of the stranger awakens in Charity the old longings and imagined stories about life in “modern communities” (11).4 Charity emerges in these opening pages as a female figure with agency. She can articulate her desire—to get out of North Dormer— and she seems to possess the imaginative capacity to construct an alternative story for herself that would allow her to escape the “languid household drudgery” of a boring marriage to one of the few young men in town (9). Wharton tells us that Charity “had always kept to herself, contemptuously aloof from village love-making, without exactly knowing whether her fierce pride was due to the sense of her tainted origin, or whether she was reserving herself for a more brilliant fate” (3). But Charity Royall is also caught within a story over which she has less control. For her entire life, Charity’s history of having been brought down from the Mountain has set her apart from the other residents of North Dormer and enabled the townspeople to construct a story about her: Charity was not very clear about the Mountain; but she knew it was a bad place, and a shame to have come from, and that, whatever befell her in North Dormer, she ought, as Miss Hatchard had once reminded her, to remember that she had been brought down from there, and hold her tongue and be thankful. (12)

So while the structure of the novel seems to accord Charity a certain amount of power over her own story (at least she speaks for herself), the narrative also undermines this power. The early introduction of the history of Charity’s “tainted origin,” in fact, indicates an essential theme explored by Wharton in the novel. Charity both accepts and resists this narrative of self generated by the townspeople. Although she holds most of North Dormer in contempt, she is, in fact, influenced by the story as she tries “as usual to be thankful” as “she looked up at the Mountain” in these opening pages (12). Although Charity has only scorn for her fellow townspeople and is determined to escape their judgment, she does hold her tongue and feels shame about her history. From the very beginning of the novel, Charity’s imagined story of self and her destiny takes place within the context of the already existing “talk” about her in the town.



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Charity’s failure to generate a narrative of self and her entrapment within the narratives of others is at least partly an effect of class. Charity’s mother—defined as no better than an animal—gives her up when her husband goes to jail. Although Charity scorns life in the “weather-beaten sunburnt village of the hills, abandoned of men,” she also “knew that, compared to the place she had come from, North Dormer represented all the blessings of the most refined civilization” (10, 11). Within North Dormer, Charity’s social position is ambiguous. Although she fears no one and while “she had always ruled” North Dormer in some way, she can never really escape her position as the “humblest of the humble even in North Dormer, where to come from the Mountain is the worst disgrace” (22). But while Charity can distance herself from the villagers she despises, her attraction to Lucius Harney, nephew to Miss Hatchard— the social matriarch and protector of culture in North Dormer and its richest inhabitant—makes her vulnerable to the class distinctions she has previously ignored. Wharton’s text images the chasm between Harney and Charity in terms of language: “Education and opportunity had divided them by a width that no effort of hers could bridge, and even when his youth and his admiration brought him nearest, some chance word, some unconscious allusion, seemed to thrust her back across the gulf” (76). Charity’s sexual transgression later in the novel will also be a crossing of class boundaries. Much like Sophy Viner, Charity is doubly excluded from discursive power because of her gender and her class. Wharton delineates the lower class status of Charity in great detail. In the novel, the people living on the mountain represent an essential lawlessness that is contained neither by social institutions nor (even at a verbal level) within the linguistic category of “human.” The mountain people exist “quite outside the jurisdiction of the valleys. No school, no church—and no sheriff ever goes up to see what they are about” (66). The text’s metaphorical descriptions of Charity’s people repeatedly call up associations with the animal world. Not “half-human” (73), “sodden and bestial” (83), the people live “like vermin in their lair” (86). Charity’s mother was a woman “from Nettleton that followed one of those Mountain fellows up to his place and lived there like a heathen” (208). To live on the mountain is to regress to a more primitive existence.5 Wharton’s most overt discussion of sexual passion takes place from the perspective of a young woman clearly excluded from Wharton’s own class and appears to link the potential for sexual transgression to a lower class status. 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




Indeed, Charity is highly sexualized.6 Wharton’s social positioning of her protagonist makes possible a much more open discussion of sexuality and male-female relationships than she has achieved in her previous novels. She is explicit about the danger Charity risks in the liaison with Lucius Harney. The small town of North Dormer is full of stories about what happens to young women who transgress sexual mores. From the beginning Charity recognizes the dangers of “going with a city fellow” (63) and knows that “almost every village could show a victim of the perilous venture” (63). Wharton is equally explicit in her description of Charity’s sexuality. She describes Charity’s waiting for Lucius Harney in the abandoned house on the side of the mountain that the two have furnished with the rudiments of domestic life—a mattress, a Mexican blanket, a table and two chairs. Lying on the mattress, she thinks she has seen the shadow of Harney pass by “the gloryflooded room” at sunset (203). Wharton tells us, “She half raised herself, and then dropped back on her folded arms. The combs had slipped from her hair, and it trailed in a rough dark rope across her breast. She lay quite still, a sleepy smile on her lips, her indolent lids half shut” (204). Wharton’s description of the woman in a state of disarray and lassitude, waiting in the twilight for her lover, depicts sexuality much more openly than anything the author offers the reader in the characters of Lily Bart, Sophy Viner, or Anna Leath.7 Wharton records Charity’s sexual encounters in language much more graphic than she had used to depict the experiences of Lily, Anna, or Sophy. Charity’s sexual response to Harney is strong: “He turned her head back, feeling for the curve of her throat below the ear, and kissing her there, and on the hair and eyes and lips. She clung to him desperately, and as he drew her to his knees on the couch she felt as if they were being sucked down together into some bottomless abyss” (211). Wharton makes clear in Summer that a woman giving way to her sexual feelings takes great risks. The possible consequences of illicit sexual behavior are acknowledged early when Charity recalls the fate of Julia Hawes who had an abortion and became one of the painted ladies of a nearby town; this reflection occurs long before she and Harney become lovers. The story of Julia’s tragic downfall and ostracism by North Dormer (even her own sister can visit her only in secret) is clearly supposed to function as a warning to Charity, as a potential script. The sexualizing of Charity, the explicit depiction of the sexual encounter, and the tracking of the consequences of sexual behavior outside the social mores of the community occur within a narrative that clearly assigns lower class status to the protagonist. Thus, part of



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Charity’s vulnerability is a consequence of her lower class origins; she is inherently prone to transgressive behavior. Charity is also particularly susceptible to a partner who represents a level of wealth and class that transcends the social structure of North Dormer. The reader is told early in the story that Charity had managed the men of North Dormer with ease. But in terms of Wharton’s analysis of language and passion, Charity is rendered most defenseless by her exclusion from the education, access to language, and experiences that upper class status brings. Wharton’s tracking of the exploitation of her protagonist links these multiple vulnerabilities. Her novel examines the relationships between the natural world, social conventions constructed by a “civilized” culture, access to the training in language and narrative accorded the upper class, and gender. Wharton’s text consistently associates Charity with external nature, setting into play a series of pairings between physical nature and the nature of women in opposition to language, cultured society, and the masculine story. Early in the novel Wharton defines Charity’s realm as that of nature and the physical world in direct contrast to the world of letters and language. Having obtained a job as librarian of The Honorius Hatchard Memorial Library only through the political maneuvering of her guardian, Charity looks on the position as simply a means to earn enough money to leave North Dormer. She sees this “temple of knowledge” as a “prison-house” (14), an “old vault” with a “familiar chill” (44), and a mausoleum that causes Charity to wonder if the “deceased author” the building commemorated “felt any deader in his grave than she did in his library” (13).8 To Charity, this world of language and literature is an alien one in which books are unruly objects that constantly have to be reorganized on the shelf. Lucius Harney’s request for a “history of the place” recalls one specific title against which she “had a special grudge . . . because it was a limp weakly book that was always either falling off the shelf or slipping back and disappearing if one squeezed it in between sustaining volumes” (18). Although she later tells Harney that “this is my library” (46), her sense of proprietorship derives largely from her power to determine when the library is open to the public and her understanding that “no one ever comes here for books” (47) but “to meet the fellows they’re going with—if I’d let ‘em” (48). Charity reads people, not books. She angrily tells Lucius Harney she understands the motives of her patrons “even if I don’t know about books all I ought to” (48).




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She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to all that was light and air, perfume and color, every drop of blood in her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under her palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the fingering of the wind in her hair and through her cotton blouse, and the creak of the larches as they swayed to it. (21)

Charity often escapes from the library to climb to a favored pasture on the mountain hillside. Wharton emphasizes the opposition between Charity and language when she notes, “Generally at such times she did not think of anything, but lay immersed in an inarticulate well-being” (21).10 Lyrical descriptions of the June summer days emphasize Charity’s instinctive responsiveness to this natural world. Lying “on a ridge above a sunlit hollow,” Charity senses “the warm currents of the grass running through her” and notes the “frail white flowers and bluegreen leaves” of a blackberry branch “against the sky” and “beyond, a tuft of sweet-fern uncurled” and, hovering over all, the vibrations of a “small yellow butterfly . . . like a fleck of sunshine” (53). Images of fecundity and growth reflect the fertility and sheer physicality of this natural world. Charity feels “the push of myriads of sweet-fern,” “the crowding shoots of meadowsweet and yellow flags,” the “bubbling of sap and slipping of sheaths and bursting of calyxes” (54). For Charity all of this was “merged in a moist earth-smell that was like the breath of some huge sun-warmed animal” on which Charity herself lay, “passive and sun-warmed” (54).11 Wharton’s sexually implicit metaphors in such passages help to establish a series of oppositions between Charity (who thrives in this physical world) and Harney (who wishes to read books about the history of this place). The world of language and literature is cold, lifeless, and unnatural and runs counter to the sustaining and fertile physical world in which Charity lives most fully. Paradoxically, however, Charity is drawn to Lucius Harney precisely because of his learning and his way with words that mark him as an ambassador from another world that exceeds the diminishments and meanness of life of North Dormer. His “talk” both thoroughly confuses her and attracts her, although his desirability rests largely on his evident “superiority” (22). The text distinguishes Harney’s dominance over the inhabitants of North Dormer specifically in terms of his facility with language. Charity is mystified by his question about 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


Instead, Charity responds to the physical world, to nature.9 Wharton describes Charity early in the narrative:

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a card catalogue and his comment that the library didn’t “seem strong on architecture” (17). She realizes that “the more she wished to appear to understand him the more unintelligible his remarks became” and she compares him to “the gentleman . . . who had ‘explained’ the pictures at Nettleton”—heretofore Charity’s symbol of the larger world of the experience and learning for which she longs and from which she was excluded (17). Harney devalues the social and economic power of Miss Hatchard—Charity’s employer and the richest person in town—simply by talking about the town leader “as if she were a querulous baby” (51). But the text also makes clear that Harney’s superiority in the realm of the word depends largely on Charity’s willingness to grant him complete authority over language because it “made her feel for the first time what might be the sweetness of dependence” (23). In Harney, Charity believes she has met a person who makes it worthwhile to endure a “sense of inadequacy” (61). She no longer envies the village girls “their long hours of inarticulate philandering with one of the few youths who still lingered in the village” and instead willingly submits herself to Harney’s “monologue[s] on art and life” (61). Wharton’s novel at first seems to valorize the female story by privileging Charity’s point of view and by introducing the reader immediately to Charity’s desire to free herself from their limiting stories about her, but finally the narrative undermines the potential for this female story by turning to the conventional romance plot. Wharton’s novel about sexuality is, thus, also a narrative about the seductive quality of language and story. The text metaphorically links sexual attraction to the pleasure of being defined by another; ultimately Charity is seduced by language itself. Charity most values Harney not as a lover but as a teller of tales, a purveyor of words. Harney’s “endearing words” offer Charity an identity opposed to North Dormer’s harsh judgment of the young woman (90). Subject to the town’s external limiting narrative of who she is, Charity is in search of a story of self adequate to her aspirations. But as in The House of Mirth and The Reef, the female protagonist, here, finally fails to construct her own account of the self. Wharton’s novel relentlessly demonstrates how narrative and language both seduce and trap the person who is unsuccessful in speaking for herself. In the end, Charity fails to create a story that allows her to escape from North Dormer and “its mean curiosities, its furtive malice, its sham unconsciousness of evil” (157). From the beginning of the novel, she is caught within tales told by others and, at best, able to choose only the narrative by another that most attracts her. The stories 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




about her multiply and shift within the larger narrative until her attraction to the story offered by Lucius Harney sets into motion the conclusion of the novel. It is Harney’s words that finally trap Charity in a story from which she cannot escape, a story that forces her to abandon her earlier fiction about leaving North Dormer. Stories in this novel both define identity and shape behavior. Charity’s “tainted” background marks her as someone in especial need of the stories told by North Dormer to police the behavior of its young men and women. Indeed, she is well aware of the risk she takes in “going with a city fellow” as “every village could show a victim of the perilous venture” (63). But the most constraining stories for Charity are not the village gossip about her background or even the dire warnings generally addressed to her youth and sex but the stories generated by the two male protagonists in the novel. In the course of the novel, it becomes clear that Charity’s personal fiction of escape cannot withstand the alternative stories of her fate posed by her guardian, Mr. Royall, and her lover, Lucius Harney. In an effort to evade the story of her identity constructed by lawyer Royall, Charity entrusts herself to the romanticizing narratives created by Harney. Instead of constructing her own story, she becomes trapped between the two versions of self created by the two men. From the beginning, Harney’s speech has a great deal of influence over Charity. It is Harney’s talk that nearly gets her fired as librarian. And it is his talk that most deeply wounds. Charity discovers early in the novel that Harney has talked to Miss Hatchard about the library and the poor state of the books. Even in the opening pages of the novel, Charity is more often the object of speech than the recipient. Harney’s comments cause Miss Hatchard to complain to Royall about his ward. Charity is told that Miss Hatchard “claims you’ve neglected things, and that she’s going to get a trained librarian” (42). Upon hearing that Harney has said she was not taking proper care of the books, Charity is incensed: “What did she care for the other charges against her? Malice or truth, she despised them as she despised her detractors. But that the stranger to whom she had felt herself so mysteriously drawn should have betrayed her!” (43). Although we later discover that Harney had no understanding of the potential consequences of his talk and argues that she was “given a wrong version,” Charity is clearly about to lose her job. Ironically, when she accuses Harney of the injustice of his speech, he immediately silences her by asserting that “you don’t mean what you said” (50). He insists that he had wanted only “to make things pleasanter for you here; and better for the books” (51).12 Harney’s talk calms Charity and he gives his 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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“word” that he will settle the matter with Miss Hatchard. Although Charity retains her job, her encounter with Harney clearly positions her outside any real discursive power. Even when she is given the chance to speak her mind, she is told that she cannot mean what she says. The initial attraction of Harney’s talk is that it offers an alternative version of Charity’s Mountain heritage that directly counters the North Dormer view of things. Although the village had “implied its disparagement by an intonation rather than by explicit criticism,” Charity had lived under the shadow of stories about the Mountain people her entire life (65). Harney’s characterization of the outlaw community as “a little independent kingdom” of people who “have nothing to do with the people in the valleys” shifts her perspective entirely (65). She welcomes his redefinition of her background because it seems to give her a view of self that is both more attractive and accurate: “The words thrilled her. They seemed the clue to her own revolts and defiances, and she longed to have him tell her more” (65). As with the town, Harney recognizes Charity’s “difference,” but he redefines her past as something that makes her unique and strong. The danger of Harney’s romantic view is that it mediates Charity’s sense of self. While Charity has always held herself apart from North Dormer and felt only contempt for its people, she cannot fashion a story about herself until she hears it from another. Wharton’s text physically stages Charity’s positioning outside discourse in a conversation between Harney and lawyer Royall early in the story. Wharton’s setting for the conversation is important because it establishes—in the material realm of space and composition— Charity’s lack of power in the discursive arena. Wharton opens the chapter, “That evening after supper Charity sat alone in the kitchen and listened to Mr. Royall and young Harney talking on the porch” (68). The next paragraph amplifies the details of the staging—the image of Charity seated inside the house by the open window, the men on the porch as darkness falls, the evening sounds of nature broken by the men’s talk. Charity notes that “Mr. Royall’s [voice] was full of a sonorous satisfaction” (68). As if marking out a scene in a play, Wharton positions her characters to illustrate visually the interaction between genders that she is investigating thematically.13 Wharton foregrounds the men together on the porch and locates Charity in the background—clearly physically absent from the conversation. Charity is positioned as one who listens but does not speak. Charity takes note of her guardian’s apparent conversational ease and attributes it to the masculine presence. Harney’s arrival had “for the first time in years” 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




given Royall “a man’s companionship” (70). Wharton seems to suggest that the male bonding occurs only because Charity is absent: “She was surprised to find how well he seemed to talk now that he had a listener who understood him; and she was equally struck by Harney’s friendly deference” (70). At first the conversation is “beyond her range” but eventually they begin to talk about the Mountain (70). Wharton once again underscores Charity’s physical absence as she suddenly shifts back to Charity who “who drew back a little, lest they should see she was in hearing” (70). Charity, who has only a vague understanding of how she had come to be adopted by lawyer Royall and his wife, finally acquires more detailed knowledge through Royall’s narrative about her people and her rescue from the Mountain. Charity obtains a version of a possible story of self only by eavesdropping on the talk between the two men. Charity, the subject of the conversation, is not a participant in the conversation. Royall’s story about the Mountain people and his rescue of the little girl offers Charity her first concrete definition of self. Royall describes the mountaineers as “scum” a “gang of thieves and outlaws” who “herd together like heathen” (71). She learns that her father was convicted of manslaughter and that her mother “ain’t half-human” and “had been glad enough to let her go” (73). Thus Charity is defined for Harney by Royall’s narrative. She learns the “truth” about herself by listening in on the conversation between two men about her. Wharton quickly moves at this point to examine Charity’s reaction to her “naming.” The narrative evokes feelings of suffocating “humiliation” and absolute despair within Charity (73): She knew at last: knew that she was the child of a drunken convict and of a mother who wasn’t “half-human,” and was glad to let her go; and she had heard this history of her origin related to the one being in whose eyes she longed to appear superior to the people about her! (73)

Although Charity has long resisted the town’s vague stories about her tainted origins, she immediately accepts Lawyer Royall’s narrative. Wharton represents Charity’s disheartened response and emotional chaos in a powerful metaphor in the closing scene of the chapter as Charity retires to bed, “her whole soul a tossing misery on which her hopes and dreams spun like drowning straws” (77). Although she awakens the next morning calmer and with “only a vague heart-soreness” (77), Harney’s silence on the trip out to the 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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mountainside quickly reestablishes Charity’s earlier despair and fear. Having agreed before the story of the previous evening to take Harney to see an old farmhouse “typical” of the region, Charity now regrets going to the “brown house” inhabited by her people while “the story of her birth was fresh in his mind” (80). She has been catalogued and contained by Royall’s story. When they arrive at the house, she recalls the “old derided tales of the Mountain people” (83) and she can think of nothing else besides Harney’s presumed judgment as they enter the kitchen inhabited by an old woman, an “unkempt creature,” and an “unshaved man in a tattered shirt . . . asleep” by the stove (83). Perhaps in an effort to save her pride, Charity asserts her potential kinship to the sad people living in squalor to Harney, not wanting “him to think that she regretted having told him” about her Mountain origin (87). Finally, she confronts him about his reaction to the knowledge that these people living such limited and reduced lives in dirt and despair may be her “folks” (88). Her outburst elicits the solace of language from Harney. “He turned to her with eyes full of reproach. ‘Oh, Charity’—It was the first time he had ever called her by name” (88). Although Harney almost immediately puts their interaction on a physical plane (he puts her arm around her and she sobs on his shoulder), what is most comforting is, literally, the word—her name. On the trip home she is “consoled” by Harney’s “endearing words” (90). Although “his words had been more fraternal than lover-like,” Charity is transformed by them. Wharton notes that “when the drive was over and she got out of the buggy tired, cold, and aching with emotion, she stepped as if the ground were a sunlight wave and she the spray on its crest” (96). Harney’s story of Charity—“a waif from the Mountain” deserving of “consolatory murmurs”—replaces her perceived experience earlier that day in which she had encountered her self in “the sight of the weak-minded old woman, of the cowed children, and the ragged man sleeping off his liquor” (96, 85). Thus Harney’s words give Charity a verbal identity that adequately counters the shame and self-doubts raised by North Dormer and Royall. But while Charity’s new identity is transformative and apparently sufficient, the text will undermine this reading of Harney’s story in two important ways. First, Harney’s view of the Mountain people is completely inaccurate. Later in the novel, Charity will flee to the Mountain community in an effort to escape from “the harsh code of the village” (238). Her participation in the life of the actual people that Harney romanticizes will reveal to the reader Harney’s failure to provide Charity with a useful version of self. Although he defends these admittedly “rough 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




customers” as people with “a great deal of character nevertheless,” it will be difficult to reconcile his words with the picture Wharton offers later in the novel (65). Besides being inaccurate, however, Harney’s story is destructive in that it makes Charity less likely to formulate her own understanding of self. Instead of generating her own story in opposition to lawyer Royall and North Dormer, Charity relies on Harney’s words to free her. Indeed, this chapter, which occurs early in the narrative, establishes the central metaphor at work in the novel—namely, the conjunction of physical passion and the seduction of language. For in the end, Charity is overcome not by Harney’s physical attraction or even her own sexual responsiveness but by language and story. Unable to speak for herself, Charity tries to escape her guardian’s story of her identity by substituting Harney’s rewriting of the narrative. Charity’s seduction by Harney is not so much a physical abandonment to desire as an attraction to his language and a willingness to allow him to define her.14 Wharton’s conflation of sexual passion and the transforming (and transcending) properties of language offer an important clue to the subtext of her narrative—the allure of the story and the seductive quality of discursive power. The text establishes, at the outset, that Charity’s ambivalent response to narrative and language makes her particularly vulnerable to Lucius Harney’s storytelling. An earlier trip to Nettleton sponsored by a local Episcopal clergyman had awakened her to the understanding “that North Dormer was a small place” and brought on a period of intense reading until “she found it easier to take North Dormer as the norm of the universe than to go on reading” (10). Nevertheless, her dream of escaping North Dormer can be read as a kind of script for a potential self. Her first meeting with Lucius Harney makes her conscious of her “ignorance of life and literature” (39). And although she finds the library a prison-house, Charity herself reveals a willingness to transform herself and others in imagined narratives such as one finds in the books she scorns. The evening after meeting Harney, she stands before her mirror imagining herself as the heroine of a fairytale in which here she appears as “a bride in lownecked satin, walking down an aisle with Lucius Harney. He would kiss her as they left the church” (40). Significantly, Charity’s fantasy is defined by the conventional marriage narrative and a kind of fairytale rescue of the female heroine. Although Charity has resisted the village stories about the Mountain and her past, the appearance of Harney changes her perspective even on these narratives. “She had become absorbingly 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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interesting to herself, and everything that had to do with her past was illuminated by this sudden curiosity” (59). Harney’s interest in Charity both validates her as a subject worthy of a narrative of self and predisposes her to entrust the telling of that story to Harney. Harney’s readings of Charity’s history, his response to Royall’s story of Charity’s rescue, his “endearing words” of consolation satisfy a deep desire for an identity that escapes the constraining stories of the townspeople and her guardian. Nevertheless, Wharton demonstrates how this female protagonist who hopes to be freed by the word is, at the same time, contained within an alternative narrative not of her own design. Charity’s linguistic relationship with Harney sets in motion the subsequent plot line and Charity’s destiny. Her passion for his word ultimately entangles her further in the very stories from which she had longed to escape—the village warnings that she was no better than her mother, imprisonment in an unhappy marriage, and a life in North Dormer. Wharton introduces the pattern of Charity’s entrapment within Harney’s language at the beginning of the relationship. The day after their visit to the “brown” house, Charity anxiously awaits his appearance at the library and wonders “what his first words would be” (91). Harney’s visits to determine how best to ventilate the library make Charity keenly aware of the contrast between her public and her private relationship to the young man. The library, the site for the public exchange of stories, functions as the backdrop for the privately coded sexual and social exchange of “words” between the two. While their previous conversation has been limited to superficialities due to “the risk of being interrupted by some passer-by suddenly smitten with a thirst for letters” Charity finds a “fascination . . . in the contrast between these public civilities and their secret intimacy” (90). But when Harney appears the day after the trip up the Mountain, they have no time to talk because he is accompanied by the minister. Mr. Miles’ appearance brings with it an awareness of the outside world and “a look of constraint in Harney’s eyes” (95). Charity immediately begins to wonder “if he repented the tender things he had said the night before” (95). Having already given Harney the power to construct both her identity and the nature of their relationship, his word takes primacy even over her own understanding of events. Harney’s construction of Charity’s identity becomes the means by which she can resist, at least temporarily, her guardian’s and North Dormer’s narratives but this giving over to Harney the right to her “story” ultimately reinserts Charity into those same narratives. 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




Wharton’s protagonist in Summer, like Lily, Sophy, and Anna, fails to generate her own narrative of self and is finally trapped by stories constructed by men. In this novel, however, Wharton creates conflicting stories about Charity by assigning narratives to separate characters: Lucius Harney and lawyer Royall. Charity, in some ways, has less power than Lily, Sophy, or Anna because the pretense of choice is not between the self and another but between the contradictory stories of her self created by the two central male characters. The initial conversation about Charity between the two men signals a triangular pattern central to the novel. In a series of alternating scenes between Charity and her guardian and Charity and Harney, the text shows how their contradictory narratives of Charity’s identity and their readings of each other’s stories regarding Charity strip her of all discursive power and, despite her efforts to escape, trap her within the masculine narrative. Throughout much of the novel, Royall’s narratives of Charity reflect the harshness and rigidity of the village. Perceived by Charity as an adversary, he represents the failures and limitations of North Dormer.15 Their relationship is based on a struggle for domination played out in a discursive space in which the withholding of information and silence communicate as effectively as speech. At least in the beginning, Charity holds the upper hand. Royall’s attempted rape some time in the past—he comes drunk to her room one night pleading he is a lonely man—is averted when Charity informs him, “This ain’t your wife’s room any longer” (29). Reading “deep disgust in her face,” Royall leaves Charity untouched. Later when he proposes marriage for the first time, Charity’s open derision again silences him. His offer to “do whatever you say” only invites her scorn: “As he stood there before her, unwieldy, shabby, disordered, the purple veins distorting the hands he pressed against the desk, his long orator’s jaw trembling with the effort of his avowal, he seemed like a hideous parody of the fatherly old man she had always known” (34). Royall stops the flow of her derision with the raising of his hand and complies with her wishes to bring another woman into the house and to get her the job at the library. Although Royall “had never spoken a word of excuse or extenuation,” Charity knows that the effect of their past argument had been to silence Royall. “Its consequences were latent in every word that he or she exchanged, in every glance they instinctively exchanged. Nothing now would ever shake her rule in the red house” (38). And yet Charity comes to suspect that Royall retains discursive power over her in other important ways. First, she overhears him 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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telling the history of her unhappy heritage to the man she most wants to impress. Later, she believes that Royall is responsible for Harney’s sudden disappearance from their table where he has been taking his meals. His terse announcement regarding Harney—“He ain’t coming”—fills Charity with “agitation” but evokes a comparable silence from her (97, 98). The contest of wills takes place in silence: “With a word he could have relieved her uncertainty: but never would she gratify him by saying it” (99). Driven to discover the reason on her own for Harney’s sudden absence, she learns that he has not left the village. Ironically, Charity’s decision not to speak, not to confront either Royall or Harney— instead she holds a silent night-long vigil outside Harney’s window— subjects her to the talk of others. Wharton describes in careful detail Charity’s lingering outside Harney’s lighted window as she attempts to read visual clues—Harney’s apparent inability to work, the suitcase half-full of clothes, his “look of weariness and self-disgust,” and his moody staring at the ceiling (103). Charity determines not to knock at the open window although she could picture “the welcome his eyes and ears would give her” (105). What stops her from calling to Harney is not “the fear of any sanction” but narrative, the stories about what happens “between young men and girls” (105). Charity suddenly recalls the stories about women who chance illicit sex: “It was what Miss Hatchard was still ignorant of, but every girl of Charity’s class knew before she left school. It was what happened to Ally Hawes’s sister Julia, and had ended in her going to Nettleton, and in people’s never mentioning her name” (105). Charity debates within herself the lesson of such stories but distances herself from the supposedly horrid consequences, deciding, “It did not, of course, always end so sensationally . . . . Charity had always suspected that the shunned Julia’s fate might have its compensations” (105–106). But that night Charity elects not to risk that fate and consoles herself that she at least preserves an admirable impression: “She did not know why he was going; but since he was going she felt she must do nothing to deface the image of her that he carried away” (106). Nevertheless, despite Charity’s efforts to elude the village’s reading of her actions, Wharton reinforces Charity’s inability to control the story since she is seen, after all, outside Harney’s window. The village interprets Charity’s behavior as a sign that she has, in fact, given herself to the city fellow. The next day, Royall confronts Charity after dinner. “ ‘I want you should come here first; I’ve got something to say to you’ ” (110). Pleading that they might “talk together like 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




friends,” he tells her she had been seen outside Miss Hatchard’s house close to midnight (111). In response to her question—“’Who says I was with him last night?’ ”—he assures her, “ ‘The whole place is saying it by now’ ” (111). The terms of their argument center then on the village narrative about Charity and Harney. Wharton makes clear that the story is of primary importance and not the “reality” of the event in the interchange between Royall and Charity. At first Charity is so scornful of the rumor and Royall’s concern that she refuses to defend herself against the false accusations. Royall is quick to categorize her as a “lost girl” (a phrase that clearly calls into play a whole series of stories about young women who transgress moral boundaries) and to reject her speech—“Oh my God, why did you tell me?” (112) He admits that he has spoken to Harney in an effort to avert “this thing coming” but pleads “I didn’t name you to him” (113). Wharton’s narrative itself takes on a bitter irony in this scene because it so clearly demonstrates how the central character is contained within stories not of her own making despite her effort to avoid this very talk. After Charity contemptuously reveals to Royall the truth of her vigil, Royall asserts that although “I believe what you say, . . . they won’t” (115). He adds, “You’ve been with the fellow all day long every day since he came here . . . and I’m a lawyer and I know how hard slander dies” (115). The primacy of narrative in the construction of “truth” in this scene underscores Charity’s increasing powerlessness. Charity finds herself unable to discount Royall’s story. Her guardian excuses his interference on the basis of his superior understanding: “There is one thing as old as the hills and as plain as daylight: if he’d wanted you the right way he’d have said so” (116). Royall’s warning to Charity thus rests on Harney’s refusal to say what Royall believes should have been said. Royall’s reading of Harney’s silence contrasts with the second wedding proposal Royall now makes to Charity. Admitting that he “had a shameful thought once,” he argues that, otherwise, he has always “acted straight” (116). In opposition to Harney’s refusal to speak up, Royall offers himself and the promise of starting over in “some big town, where there’s men, and business, and things doing” (116). When Charity refuses to speak, Royall finally offers to make Harney marry her if she will only “say” (118). Royall’s invitation to speak for Charity is, of course, doomed from the outset. His proposal to force Harney to marry her, to “put things to him so he won’t be long deciding,” runs counter to Charity’s romantic narrative (118). Nevertheless, Royall’s rendering of the events immediately influences Charity’s reading of her relationship to 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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Harney. She notes to herself that “something transient and exquisite had flowered in her, and she had stood by and seen it trampled to earth” (118). Charity’s imaginative response is thus shaped by Royall’s discourse. His language structures her understanding of herself even though she has, in fact, done nothing wrong: “She was still trembling with the humiliation of his last words, which rang so loud in her ears that it seemed as though they must echo through the village, proclaiming her a creature to lend herself to such vile suggestions. Her shame weighed on her like a physical oppression” (119). Charity’s shame is as much an effect of Royall’s own offer to talk to Harney as it is a consequence of the town’s talk, and when Harney suddenly appears at the door, she quickly sends him away. Charity, although “seized by an impulse to get away” from the reading of her relationship to Harney by lawyer Royall, is unable to refute his understanding of the town’s gossip (119). She accepts what appears to be inevitable—Harney’s absence and the town’s talk. While the text has made clear that Charity is becoming increasingly entangled in a web of masculine narratives, Wharton’s melodramatic conclusion to the chapter underscores the point. Harney sends a note pleading that she meet him one more time in secret, presumably to “talk.” The other’s word, whether Royall’s assertion of the town gossip or Harney’s message, clearly shapes Charity’s actions in what will prove to be very destructive ways. For it is at this point that the narrative establishes more overtly the metaphorical relationship between physical desire and the seduction of language as it details the developing relationship between Harney and Charity. Significantly, the opening of the next chapter does not begin with the arranged meeting but, instead, skips forward two weeks so that the reader has direct access to the climactic conversation and the apparent resolution of the status of their relationship. Written as a kind of “flashback,” the text replays the meeting and the reunion in Charity’s mind and privileges the effect of Harney’s speech on Charity. The gap in the narrative exposition of what must have been a dramatic moment—after all, Charity’s fortunes had seemed at their nadir—precludes the reader’s judging for herself the intentions of Lucius Harney. Instead she must simply take Charity’s “word.” Much indeed has happened. By this point in the novel, Charity and Harney have created a “past . . . rich enough to have given them a private language” (128). Charity recalls how Harney’s “first words might easily have estranged her” but “that he had found the right word, which was one of simple friendship,” and a “tone” that “put her guardian in the wrong” (128). Although she is occasionally disturbed 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




by the curious intermittent periods of “brooding silences, which were as different as possible from the pauses when they ceased to speak because words were needless,” she believes that she and Harney are “comrades” (143). While the two now meet privately and have arranged a holiday trip to Nettleton to escape the judgmental eyes of North Dormer, Charity and Harney yet remain “just” friends. Charity can ignore the town’s sordid talk and Royall’s dire warnings because the actuality of their unconsummated relationship opposes the inaccurate talk. While she knows that “in most of the village friendships between youths and maidens lack of conversation was made up for by tentative fondling,” she takes comfort in that Harney “had never . . . sought to betray her into any sudden caress” (129). The two weeks have provided a respite from Royall’s story. Nevertheless, all of this abruptly changes during a trip to Nettleton when Royall exchanges private warnings for public naming. Suddenly encountering a drunken Royall who, unbeknownst to Charity, also has come to Nettleton, Charity is once again defined by the masculine word. Standing on the riverbank like an ancient prophet, Royall “drew himself up” and “stretched out his arm: ‘You whore—you damn—bare-headed whore, you!’ ” (151). Royall’s public labeling of Charity now destroys even the “dream of comradeship.” Responding to Royall’s public judgment, she decides to return to the Mountain and her “folks” (159). Knowing that the “story, exaggerated and distorted, was probably already on its way to North Dormer” and turning over and over in her mind “the disgraceful spectacle of the drunken old man apostrophizing her in the presence of a band of loafers and street-walkers,” Charity attempts to flee what she believes is the inevitable talk (157, 158). Terming the relationship between herself and Harney as a friendship no longer sufficiently refutes Royall’s reading of things. “It was as if her guardian’s words had stripped her bare in the face of the grinning crowd and proclaimed to the world the secret admonitions of her conscience” (160). Hurriedly packing clothing and “the little packet of letters she had received from Harney,” Charity sets out the next afternoon (158). But again the narrative dramatically calls attention to Charity’s entrapment within masculine language and narrative. Her escape from Royall’s story is interrupted by Harney’s alternative narrative. Harney reclaims the fleeing Charity literally and metaphorically through his own words. Finding the collection of letters unknowingly dropped at the roadside, he tracks her to the abandoned cabin where she intends to spend the night. Surprised by his sudden appearance, “no words came to her” (163). Rendered speechless, she agrees 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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to sit down and talk quietly. The conversation ends in a kiss and the apparent consummation of their passion. Later the reader discovers that Harney himself has convinced Charity to return precisely because of the village rumors. He argues that “what people would say” will be countered by her physical presence. Charity hopes that, although she can never articulate a credible verbal narrative, her body will speak for her. Although Harney and Charity have now consummated their relationship, the text makes clear that the exchange of physical passion has been and continues to be mediated and structured by language. Charity’s desire is at its root a desire for the word. Ordinary life seems vague and insubstantial compared to the “reality” of “the wondrous unfolding of her new self” (180). But it is language, the word, that transforms: “More wonderful, at first, than Harney’s endearments were the words that were a part of them. She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as bright and open as the summer air” (180). Language takes on a materiality, a concrete physical existence. Charity recalls to herself Harney’s “presence” and “the way his short-sighted eyes, at her approach, widened and deepened,” but these physical signs of his attention are subordinate to the word. What remains most important for Charity is “the flush of youth and tenderness in which his words enclosed her” (197). It is Harney’s language that embraces the young woman. At first it seems as if the relationship will give Charity a voice too, although even here Charity is constrained from speaking openly about the secret affair. Agreeing to participate in the celebration of Old Home Week, she finds she can safely express what she feels in song: “It was a joy to Charity to sing; it seemed as though, for the first time, her secret rapture might burst from her and flash its defiance at the world” (191). Nevertheless, even this veiled communication fails to escape the narrative’s linkage of woman and nature: “All the glow in her blood, the breath of the summer earth, the rustle of the forest, the fresh call of birds at sunrise, and the brooding midday languors, seemed to pass into her untrained voice, lifted and led by the sustaining chorus” (191). Thus Charity’s “speech” is coded in song rather than expressed in direct narrative and associated with nature (which the text has already established places Charity outside language). And, in fact, Charity, silencing herself, finally takes pleasure in the very fact that she cannot speak. She finds it “absurd” when others talk as if they knew Lucius Harney because she is sure that she “was the only being on earth who really knew him” (176). Her hidden 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




knowledge, in fact, is what has “made her life something apart and inviolable, as if nothing had any power to hurt or disturb her as long as her secret was safe” (176). Charity cannot speak of her love or assert her claim to Harney in any socially overt way. The cost of this “rapture” is her silence. Ultimately, Charity’s trust in Harney’s narrative is redefined by Royall’s words as the narrative shifts once again to Royall’s reading of events. In a second dramatic scene, paralleling the earlier porch exchange, Charity is again positioned as the object of talk between the two men. Suddenly appearing at the lovers’ cabin at the side of the Mountain (the middle ground between the anarchy of the Mountain peak and the repression of the village space), Royall surprises Charity who is in a state of disarray, the picture of a woman lazily awaiting her lover’s arrival—“indolent lids half shut” and “hair hanging loose across her breast” (204). When Harney appears and Royall confronts him about marriage to his ward, Charity stands “silent, too humbled for speech” (207). Although Harney retorts that Charity can speak for herself, she doesn’t. Instead, Royall speaks for both of them, claiming that Charity doesn’t dare question when or if Harney will marry her and that Harney knows he didn’t need to bother to ask her. Categorizing Charity in his rage as a fallen woman, Royall does not grieve for her but for his own lack of knowledge. “And you know why you ain’t asked her to marry you, and why you don’t mean to. It’s because you hadn’t need to; nor any other man either. I’m the only one that was fool enough not to know that” (207). Royall repeats Charity’s history and again makes explicit his and the town’s narrative of her: “They all know what she is, and what she came from . . . .I went to save her from the kind of life her mother was leading—but I’d better left her in the kennel she came from” (208). Royall’s taunt at first silences even Harney but later elicits the intended marriage proposal. The text represents the reluctance in Harney’s speech with dashes and ellipses as he tells Charity, “ ‘I shall have to go off for a while—a month or two, perhaps—to arrange some things; and then I’ll come back . . . and we’ll get married’ ” (210). The accusation and proposal comprise actually an exchange between two men, a sort of masculine contest between two rivals, a struggle in which Charity is both subject to and the subject of their discourse but never a speaker. Royall’s verbal manipulation of Harney is successful (as he claimed it would be)—it seems the two are to be married. But Charity immediately senses the cost to her of Harney’s speech: “His voice seemed like a stranger’s: nothing was left in it of the vibrations she knew” (210). Unable to respond to him, “the words died in her 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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throat” (210). Royall’s verbal appropriation of her desire strips her of pride and leaves her with nothing else to say to her lover. Harney’s marriage proposal puts into words the desire she never fully allowed herself to articulate: “Since the fanciful vision of the future that had flitted through her imagination at their first meeting she had hardly ever thought of his marrying her. She had not had to put the thought from her mind; it had not been there” (212). Ultimately Charity is left without any voice in the relationship or in Wharton’s text as the narrative painfully traces Charity’s decreasing ability to express her desire, to construct her own story and to defend herself against the narratives of Royall and North Dormer. At the leave-taking she feels only shame and for the first time finds Harney’s speech hurtful: “His reiterated promises to return seemed almost wounding” (212). Although Harney asks her to write, “the address frightened her” (213). Language no longer transforms self and world but instead becomes insufficient even to the task of communication. She worries that her own letter (if she could write it) “would never reach its destination” (213). She reads Harney’s first letter “with a strange sense of its coming from immeasurable distances and having lost most its meaning on the way” (214). Literally unable to give voice to her feelings, she can respond only with “a coloured post-card of Creston Falls” (214). Charity’s distrust of language is so great that she is driven to substitute the visual for the verbal, a mute remembering of the place from which Harney had once sent the alluring notes and letters that had seduced Charity. She composes long letters in the cold nights “but the letters were never put on paper, for she did not know how to express what she wanted to tell him” (220). When Charity does bring herself to write—a terse disconnected three-sentence note—she actually disempowers herself. It is impossible to ignore the textual irony here. Charity’s one effort to take on power as a speaking and writing subject ultimately strips her of any meaningful choice in terms of her fate. Unable to imagine marriage to Harney and painfully aware that “he had never spoken . . . till Mr. Royall had forced the word from his lips,” Charity determines to release Harney from his word (214). Believing that his prior pledge to another woman must mean more than any promise to her, she advises him to marry Annabel Balch and tells him she would “rather you acted right” (221). At first she feels a sense of relief; only later will she come to wonder why she receives no response from the lover for whom she has sacrificed so much. Indeed Wharton delays Harney’s answer until she has further advanced the plot line to reveal Charity’s discovery that she is pregnant 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




with Harney’s child. Wharton underscores the dramatic significance of this new knowledge by describing the arrival of Harney’s letter immediately after Charity’s return from the doctor. Initially the letter’s meaning is difficult to decipher—“she found it almost as difficult to understand as the gentleman’s explanation of the Bible pictures at Nettleton” (229). Finally, Charity becomes “aware the gist of its meaning lay in the last few words. ‘If ever there is a hope of realizing what we dreamed of . . . ’ ” (229). The “if” breaks the code for Charity and she reads “in every word and every reticence . . . the avowal of Annabel Balch’s prior claim” (230). Wharton shows how this knowledge of her pregnancy immediately alters Charity’s reading of herself and Harney. Her body having spoken, Charity “no longer had any difficulty in picturing herself as Harney’s wife now that she was the mother of his child”; she can easily dismiss the other woman’s “claim” as “sentimental fantasy” (228). The pregnant Charity decides the material reality of their relationship, embodied in the child, overrides the word, the earlier promise to another woman. She begins to consider the potential for a story centered on redemptive love rather than female sacrifice. During this “dark night of the soul” she reconstructs “each separate stage of her poor romance” in one last effort to formulate her own story (231). Memory and narrative for the first time become “a part of her, they were building the child in her womb” (231). Wharton’s conflation of text and child—both consequences of the passions of language and sexuality—appears to momentarily hint at the possibility of Charity’s giving birth to her own narrative. Indeed, Charity is moved to affirm this newly discovered sense of self in language. “She had a superstitious feeling that the letter must be written on the instant, that setting down her secret in words would bring her reassurance and safety” (232). It seems that Charity has found a viable connection to language. But having offered this hopeful resolution to the reader, the narrative immediately snatches it away. Charity has no paper and must descend the steps to Royall’s office. The brief encounter with Royall reintroduces the split between self and language and fixes her within the narratives she has tried to elude. She reads in Royall’s “pitiless gaze” the “grim perception of her state” and when she returns to her room she discovers “all the words that had been waiting had vanished” (233). Her potential narrative of self is aborted and she can only stare at the “blank page” (234). Moreover, she is inexorably drawn back into the narratives of identity she had resisted throughout the novel: “Her five minutes face to face with Mr. Royall had stripped 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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her of her last illusion, and brought her back to North Dormer’s point of view” (234). She can recall only old stories of loveless marriages or Julia Hawes’ ineffectual tale of resistance. Caught within these old stories, she is unable to envision an alternative that can give shape to her own experience; she cannot imagine her own story: “In the established order of things as she knew them she saw no place for her individual adventure . . . .” (235). Charity is thus left without any genuine resources of language.16 Her one letter to Harney has freed him to keep his word to the other woman. Unable to find the words to take the message back, unable to articulate a claim based on their child, Charity cannot script the narrative that will save her. The capacity to speak for herself could only emerge if she were able to use her body to tell the story. She tells herself that “if she could have gone to Harney it would have been different; she would only have had to show herself to let his memories speak for her” (234). But having no money for such a trip, Charity has only the written word—the very tool the narrative has already established she can never control. If anything, the body speech to which she is subject threatens to betray her. Gazing at herself in the mirror, she notes the “white” face, “pinched cheeks and dark-ringed eyes”—“signs” that “she could not hope . . . would escape the watchful village” (235, 236). Powerless to construct an alternative narrative, Charity resorts to another old story—escape to the Mountain and a return as a mother to the mother she no longer remembers.17 But Charity quickly discovers that Harney’s romanticized view of the mountain folk is as insubstantial as his promises. She finds that the houses are “hardly more than sheds, built of logs and rough boards, with tin stove-pipes sticking out of their roofs” (245). Imagining that the mother she never knew would provide the solace and direction she cannot find in civilized North Dormer, Charity arrives to discover that the woman has just died. The scene is terrifying. Entering the room where her dead mother lies, Charity sees “a group of a dozen people sitting or sprawling about a table made of boards laid across two barrels” (247). Striking a match, the minister reveals “pale aguish heads that started out of the shadow like heads of nocturnal animals” (248). Charity sees “no sign . . . of anything human” in the body of her mother who lies on a mattress on the floor “like a dead dog in a ditch” (250). Wharton’s representation of Charity’s people characterizes this community as sordid and indicative of the danger of nature allowed to run its course. The text makes clear that Harney’s romantic view of a life on the Mountain free from the narrowed vision of North Dormer is illusory and will be finally damaging to Charity when she embraces 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




it.18 Ironically, only language enables Charity to face the reality of the moment. The words of the burial ritual read by the minister calm Charity: “One by one the mighty words fell on Charity’s bowed head, soothing the horror, subduing the tumult, mastering her as they mastered the drink-dazed creatures at her back” (253). The language of ritual temporarily mediates the primitive for both Charity and the lawless community. Nevertheless, horrified by the picture of the squalor and degeneracy of the Mountain people, Charity finds the story of her people inadequate and, in the morning, sets out to return. At this point, Royall appears on the scene and Wharton’s portrayal of Charity’s entrapment within the language of others is complete. No longer able to resist Royall’s words—he asserts that he knows what she really wants: “to be took home and took care of” (271)—she finds comfort in “his silent presence” (273) and agrees to marry him.19 So to avoid North Dormer’s talk, she embraces Royall’s version of her and passively acquiesces to the marriage. Some critics argue that Royall’s appearance is meant to be a kind of rescue.20 After all, Royall had been at least temporarily transformed in Charity’s eyes during his address at Old Home Week. His speech about returning to North Dormer after having failed elsewhere had elicited the belief that there “was a man talking” (195). But in the end, this brief acknowledgment of Royall’s temporary ascendancy seems an inadequate counter to his initial representation as a failure and a drunkard. Wharton’s narrative strategies in the closing pages of the novel further call into question a positive reading of the marriage. The conflation of wedding and funeral imagery, the implication of incest, and the narrative’s circular structure suggest that the marriage is evidence of Charity’s ultimate failure to script an alternative narrative for herself and her child. The closing scenes of the text underscore the motif of imprisonment and death. In a clear allusion to earlier references to the library as prison house and vault, Charity and Royall await the wedding witnesses in “a room full of books” (276). The wedding ceremony takes place in a “low vaulted room” (277). As the clergyman begins to read the marriage service, Charity recalls “Mr. Miles, standing the night before in the desolate house of the Mountain, and reading out of the same book words that had the same dreadful sound of finality” (278). Wharton’s metaphoric association of the funeral with the wedding ritual suggests that Charity’s marriage to Royall is a kind of death.21 By this point, Charity is so completely divorced from language that the ceremony ends with her no longer being able even to hear “what was being said” (278). The sight of Lake Nettleton in the painting in the honeymoon hotel room awakens “the old impulse of flight . . . but 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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it was only the lift of a broken wing” (280) and recalls Wharton’s earlier use of images of entrapment when Charity had imagined herself as a sort of “night-bird suddenly caught and caged” (186). While marriage to Royall will avert North Dormer’s open criticism, it clearly fixes Charity within the very story from which she has been attempting escape since the opening pages of the novel. The suggestion of incest adds a further troubling element to the narrative’s resolution. While Charity’s marriage to her guardian is technically neither illegal nor immoral, the conclusion of the novel carries a decidedly ambivalent tone. Is Charity, woman or child; Royall, husband or father? On the Mountain, Charity “followed Royall passively as a tired child” (274). The narrative parallels Charity’s first rescue as a little girl to the current occasion when Royall recalls aloud, “It was a day like this when I came up here for the first time” (266). After the wedding, Royall pronounces Charity “a good girl” (290). It is difficult to read the childlike behavior as anything but regressive and the marriage as incestuous in spirit.22 Perhaps the most important clue to the text’s critique of Charity’s fate lies in the circular movement of the plot. Unlike the fragmented structuring of The Reef, the narrative line of Summer rejects any open-endedness in the conclusion of the novel. Beginning and ending at precisely the same spot, the narrative accomplishes a closure so complete that it suffocates. In the opening, Charity stands on the “doorstep” of her guardian’s house—discontented with her life but determined to escape the little town (7). The final sentence of the novel reads, “Late that evening, in the cold autumn moonlight, they drove up to the door of the red house” (291). The elegiac setting— summer has ended and the season of death has begun—indicates a loss, an absence. The contrast between the young woman emerging from the red brick house on a June afternoon watching a young man chase his hat in the wind and the lethargic woman burdened with husband and child is marked. The novel’s oppressively circular structure implies Charity’s stagnant future. Beginning and ending outside the red brick house, the novel’s parallel opening and conclusion underline the contrast between the initial hopes centered on an imagined story of escape and the despair of the passive young woman who has indeed come home to stay. While the narrative plays out the marriage plot, the force of the imagery in these closing pages suggests that the marriage is finally a tragic foreclosure of Charity’s earlier story of independence and agency. Wharton’s narrative thus demonstrates how women are trapped within narratives not of their own making. Although the text ends 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




with a marriage, the disturbing imagery undermines the apparent redemption of Charity and hints at Wharton’s concern over her protagonist’s utter lack of power. Summer emerges as an important novel within Wharton’s continuing narrative about gender and discursive power. For, finally, Charity’s unhappy fate can be traced back to the word that both seduces and imprisons. Unable to wield power over her own story and relegated to the realm of inarticulate nature and a body whose language only betrays, Charity is positioned outside language. The closing episode in which Charity reclaims Harney’s gift of the brooch is a key scene both for the character’s story and for Wharton’s own critique of female exclusion from language and story.23 The pin, a “small round stone, blue as a mountain lake, with little sparks of light all round it,” serves as icon and symbol to Charity (134). Given the pin by Harney on the first Nettleton trip, Charity had been forced to leave it with the doctor who had confirmed her pregnancy as a pledge of payment. The morning after her wedding, Charity returns to Dr. Merkle to reclaim “her only treasure” (288). Asked to pay an outrageous sum to redeem the pin, Charity nearly leaves without it. But instead wanting “it for her baby” and believing “it, in some mysterious way, to be a link between Harney’s child and its unknown father,” she uses all of Royall’s marriage money to buy it back (288). The “talisman” gives her the courage to take up pen one more time to inform Harney of her marriage (288). This time Charity is able, in spite of herself, to articulate the “truth”—the permanence of his memory within her. She adds, “I’ll always remember you” (289). Although “the last words were not in the least what she had meant to write,” Charity asks herself, “Why should she not tell him the truth?” (289). The truth is not the announcement of the baby but the naming of her desire. So on one level the brooch becomes a kind of charm that gives Charity access, however briefly, to language. But, visual and concrete, the brooch is a kind of coded material speech as well. Although Royall will never know, Charity has exchanged his money for the symbol of her love for another man and a sign for her child of its real father. The doubleness of the pin that is both object and sign for one who knows how to read it underscores the duality of Wharton’s own narrative. While the surface text can be read as a sort of romance in which the young woman is rescued in the end, other stories critiquing the romance plot are encoded within the narrative. Like her protagonist, Wharton too has found a way to tell her story.



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Gender and Performance in The Glimpses of the Moon

When Edith Wharton published The Glimpses of the Moon in 1922, critical acclaim and a large popular readership had already established her as a major literary figure and provided her with financial security. As early as 1917, she had entered the mass magazine market, having made an agreement with D. Appleton and Company for the serialization of Summer in McClure’s and its subsequent publication as a book. Her editor at Appleton at the time wrote to her, “You are the only author in the field who is writing literature and at the same time being paid the high figure which is usually the reward of tosh” (qtd. in Lewis, Wharton 446–67). Her reputation as a best-selling writer would earn her nearly $70,000 in 1922 (Lewis, Letters 446). Yet Wharton had also achieved recognition from the literary world with the reception of the Pulitzer Prize for the Age of Innocence in 1921. The melodramatic plot and sentimental theme made The Glimpses of the Moon an immediate popular and financial success. Having been first serialized in The Pictorial Review and then published as book, it sold over 100,000 copies in the first six months.1 Contemporary reviews of the novel, however, were mixed. Some reviewers argued that the work was better than either The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth in its analysis of the corruption of the wealthy class in America; other reviewers found the plot disconnected, the characters unbelievable, and the writing slick.2 Nevius Blake called it “the feeblest of her novels” (19). More recent criticism has also tended to dismiss the narrative as an inferior work. In his autobiography of Wharton, R.W.B. Lewis took note of “its characteristically entertaining moments” but found it ultimately “not very readable today”(Wharton 445). Cynthia Griffin Wolff found the “natures” of the two protagonists to be “sketched quickly, almost carelessly, with a facile, glossy, verbal shorthand” and the plot to be marred by a “pat, sentimental denouement” 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


CH A P T ER


(Feast 347).3 Nevertheless, a careful reading of this novel within the context of Wharton’s ongoing exploration of gender and narrative suggests that this novel is much more carefully crafted and more deserving of critical attention than previous readers have accorded it. Within the story of Wharton’s continuing fascination with women trying to tell their own stories, The Glimpses of the Moon marks a turning point. Earlier novels such as The House of Mirth, The Reef, and Summer demonstrate multiple ways in which her female characters fail to control their stories; these novels can also be read as efforts by Wharton to explore her own struggles with telling the story and her own uncertainties about writing. Her analyses of the problematic relationship between gender and discursive power reside beneath the surface story and amid the gaps within the narrative; these hidden stories reflect both Wharton’s concern about her role as author and her determined efforts to face down these personal and professional challenges. The Glimpses of the Moon suggests that Wharton has at last laid claim to her own narrative authority. Sophisticated narrative strategies and broader thematic concerns with cultural beliefs about women and the stories that constrain them reveal the insight and craftsmanship of a skilled and confident writer. Wharton employs parody and satire to extend her analysis of society beyond the surface criticism of the foibles of the very rich to a critique of the gender ideologies at work within that society. Although Susy Lansing never fully controls the stories about her, Wharton makes her a better reader of society and narrative than Lily, Anna, Sophy, or Charity. The Glimpses of the Moon turns the reader’s attention away from the muting of women’s language and narrative, to a concern about the ways in which women always remain subject to broader cultural stories that define the character of women and their appropriate gender roles. Wharton’s novel moves beyond representing the effects of unequal gender power over story and language to an analysis of the cultural beliefs that generate this gender inequality. In The Glimpses of the Moon, Wharton explores how damaging individual masculine narratives regarding the identity and perceived morality of a female protagonist are themselves contained within larger destructive ideologies governing male and female gender roles.4 Wharton moves beyond the struggles of individual characters to seize control over language and story in order to critique broader cultural narratives about romantic love, female virtue, and motherhood. On the surface, the story of Susy Lansing seems to support common cultural assumptions about women, their nature, and their destiny as 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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wives and mothers, but a closer reading of the text shows Wharton’s actually calling into question this gender ideology.5 Gender itself is revealed as a kind of performance scripted by society. Wharton employs a complex set of narrative strategies including the adoption and revision of specific genres often associated with women writers and readers and the adaptation of characteristics from drama to the novel in creating this rich text. Wharton foregrounds the discussion of female stories by drawing on two genres often associated with female subjects and female writing: the sentimental novel and the epistolary narrative.6 The sentimental genre makes use of a female protagonist whose virtue is threatened by economic circumstances or corrupting social forces. The woman lacks agency over her fate and, instead, depends on redemption by a male hero with superior moral strength. Any threat to the social order by female agency and feminine power is safely contained by the marriage or death of the female protagonist in the conclusion. Transgressions against womanly virtue are punished and patriarchal power is validated. Wharton’s employment of the narrative elements of the sentimental genre would have been satisfyingly familiar to her readers, a familiarity that perhaps explains the book’s popularity despite negative critical reviews from the literary establishment. Her use of these genre conventions would have assured her male and female readers that current cultural narratives about women’s roles were both natural and rewarding. But a closer look at the story suggests that Wharton’s text reworks these narrative traditions and appropriates them for very different purposes. Employing parody and conflicting discourses, Wharton turns form on itself and uses these genre conventions to question the assumptions on which they rest. The narrative takes issue with the “feminine” way of looking at life advocated by the sentimental genre and undermines implicit claims about love and female destiny. Attending to the ways in which Wharton revises the genre to suggest that gender is a socially constructed performance scripted by culture reveals Wharton’s undermining of both the genre and its assumptions about gender. The epistolary narrative overlaps the sentimental in some ways. The central protagonist is female; her virtue is under attack albeit by a male villain. Her rescue depends on the reformation of the male villain or the intervention of another powerful male. In either case, the protagonist is unable to save herself. Marriage is usually the outcome. But more important for Wharton’s continuing interest in gender and narrative is that the epistolary novel draws attention to the 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


GENDER IN THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON


writing of the story. The letter writer, usually female, straightforwardly recounts her adventures to her readers. Language and story are transparent and dependable forms of communication. In The Glimpses of the Moon, public and private writing in the form of letters, notes, telegrams, and newspaper articles carry the plot forward. But, in Wharton’s text, writing is never a reliable form of communication. Characters intend to write then fail to finish the letter. Telegrams are missed. Received letters require careful interpretation to arrive at even an ambiguous meaning. Wharton uses the multiple methods of written communication to advance the story line but, at the same time, she consistently demonstrates that language and narrative are never transparent and that meaning is always subject to the reader’s perspective. Again, Wharton employs elements of the epistolary genre to undercut the implicit confidence in the story and the written word on which the genre depends. In demonstrating the instability of language and the ambiguity inherent in reading, Wharton, the author, invites her reader to question the form, function, and possibilities of narrative. Finally, Wharton draws on a third set of literary conventions taken from the stage to highlight the problematic construction of gender roles for men and women. She demonstrates that society’s implicit narratives about gender create artificial performances of gender roles. What society suggests is natural and destined is revealed as artifice and constructed. The ups and downs of Susy and Nick’s relationship reveal the centrality of staging and performance in the construction and maintenance of acceptable gender behavior. Interactions between the two protagonists reveal the social narratives that govern their understanding of each other as moral and worthy mates. Furthermore, the public nature of Nick and Susy’s marriage, separation, and reunion reveals the ways in which the larger society is equally dependent on maintaining appearances. Wharton’s exploration of the performance of gender as scripted by society employs a sophisticated narrative strategy that reveals the confidence and skill of an accomplished writer. The novel not only uses dramatic metaphors to image a society consistently on show but also makes use of dramatic conventions in the telling of the story. The Glimpses of the Moon highlights performance, staging, and notions of seeing and being seen both within the fictional world—where men and women continually fashion and refashion social selves—and in the narrative construction of that world. Wharton’s unmasking of the cultural narratives that determine gender performance requires a parallel unmasking of the writer at work in constructing her own novel. 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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The text consistently points “behind the scenes” to show Wharton orchestrating the staging of events within the story. By emphasizing the “staginess” of specific moments in the narrative, Wharton obliquely questions the presumed naturalness of such cultural roles as romantic heroine, fallen woman, and mother. The conflation of these narrative conventions—the sentimental, the epistolary, and the dramatic—indicates an experienced author’s control over her craft. The revision of these conventions to critique cultural stories about women and the stability of language and narrative reveals the sophisticated level of Wharton’s continuing commentary on gender and narrative. Indeed Wharton’s authoritative control over her story is signaled at the outset. As in The Reef, Wharton alternates the perspective on events between her male and female protagonists, but in The Glimpses of the Moon, she also employs an omniscient narrator who presides much more directly over the narrative events. The opening line of the novel reveals a narrative voice that seems to construct a stage on which Susy and Nick Lansing will play their roles. This narrator announces the opening of the romantic scene between the newly married couple and immediately calls into play the novel’s title: “It rose for them—their honey-moon—over the waters of a lake so famed as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather proud of not having been afraid to choose it as the setting of their own” (1). Although the reader is eventually given access to Susy and Nick’s thoughts, the opening narrative voice distances the reader from the sentimental effect of the honeymoon scene and introduces a note of irony to the action. The reader suspects, from the outset, that she will know these characters far better than they will ever know themselves. The beginning pages of the novel, in fact, suggest that Wharton intends to disrupt fully the willing suspension of disbelief in the reader of The Glimpses of the Moon. Wharton’s text appears to promise that she will routinely unmask her own methods of telling the story. The reader will move beyond passively reacting to the dramatic action and emotional turmoil of Susy and Nick, into the drama of the telling of the story. Wharton’s invitation to an ironic reading of the opening scene becomes the key to reading the entire narrative. But, at the same time, Wharton signals to her reader that appreciating the irony is not enough. Instead the ideal reader should attend to the ways by which the author creates that irony and structures her narrative. Ultimately this 1922 novel invites the reader to recognize that both romantic novels and cultural narratives of gender are constructed 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




things dependent on countless decisions made by the author and ideological assumptions maintained by society. The first chapter of The Glimpses of the Moon demonstrates Wharton’s strategic use of conventions from drama and the sentimental novel to set up and then undermine the expected romance reading.7 Wharton’s description of Nick and Susy’s first moonlit evening at the villa at Como is literally a staging of the romantic. The text’s careful attention to the details of setting call to mind a playwright’s directions as Wharton’s protagonists, lit by the natural spotlight of the moon, lean “over the inevitable marble balustrade” and point out to each other the sights, sounds, and smells of their romantic refuge (1). The text’s highly descriptive language emphasizes the idealized romantic setting. The interaction between the two lovers recalls the discourse of romance. Wharton is clearly calling on conventions associated with the novel of sentiment to establish the tone and elements of the opening scene. The newly married couple stand “silent in the enveloping loveliness of the night . . . aware only of the warm current running from palm to palm, as the moonlight below them drew its line of magic from shore to shore” (2). The spring breeze “brushe[s] their faces with the scents of the garden” (4). Susy and Nick delight in the sight of the fire-flies set against the darkness and the “splash of moonlight on the water. Apples of silver in a net-work of gold” (3). The two are united—“one flesh from shoulder to finger-tips” (3). Wharton’s lush language and vivid description set the stage for a standard love scene. Yet almost immediately, she undercuts her own staging by calling attention to the artifice of both language and setting. She makes explicit the underlying irony in her construction of this “scene of romantic raptures” (1). Nick Lansing notes that he “could bear . . . even a nightingale at this moment” (3) and, as if in direct response to the director’s call for one final element in the staging of a scene, the author provides the desired stage prop. “A faint gurgle shook the magnolias behind them, and a long liquid whisper answered it from the thicket of laurel above their heads” (3). The immediate appearance of not one but two nightingales signals the movement of the text from an uncomplicated presentation of the romantic setting and event into a parodic re-presentation of romance and sentimental writing. Wharton’s spotlighting of the artificial and cliched nature of this stock romantic scene invites her reader to take an ironic view of these opening events and, ultimately, of the entire novel. Nick and Susy are framed by the balustrade of their balcony and softly lit with the glow 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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of the rising moon. By unveiling the author’s role in the construction of this drama, Wharton introduces a notion of performance that implicitly takes issue with the “naturalness” of the idyllic honeymoon of these two lovers. Throughout The Glimpses of the Moon, Wharton continues to examine the construction of the story and the gender of writing. She highlights her interest in the writing of stories by using narrative strategies to call attention to the construction of the story as she tells the story. In The Glimpses of the Moon, she concerns herself less with narrative disjunctions, fragmentary structure, or the use of metaphor to layer her narrative but, instead, rather straightforwardly employs her text as a kind of commentary on genre and the gendered profession of writing itself. By appropriating elements from the epistolary tradition and the sentimental novel, Wharton seems to locate her novel squarely within a romance tradition. But from its opening pages, the narrative consistently undercuts the very conventions it employs. For example, in this opening scene, when the characters finally begin to talk, the dialogue is not about love but about finance. We discover that this “scene of romantic raptures” was chosen largely for economic reasons. Although Nick and Susy love each other, they both believe that love is not enough for two people who have no financial resources. They agree to give way to their natural feelings only after Susy has determined that a brief period as a married couple certainly will not hurt their chances for eventually more advantageous matches and has calculated they can live off their wedding presents for at least a year.8 Throughout the opening scene, Wharton juxtaposes the discourse of the romance novel with the language of business. Unable to identify the flowers giving off the rich fragrance earlier alluded to, Nick resorts to monetary terms in describing “that guinea-a-bottle stuff” (3). Several pages into the first chapter, Wharton expands her initial description of the setting in language straight out of romance writing. The lake displays a “silken smoothness,” the sky is “powdered with vanishing stars,” and the “trickle of the fountain behind the house” is the only sound to disturb the lovers’ silent musings (4). But abruptly the text breaks the flow of lyrical description of nature as Susy speaks “in a voice languid with visions. ‘I have been thinking,’ she said, ‘that we ought to be able to make it last at least a year longer.’ ” (4) The reader is told that Nick “not only understood her, but had been inwardly following the same train of thought” (4). So, instead of exchanging expressions of passion and undying love these two figures of romance talk business. Susy and Nick fully realize that, 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




in their world, personal happiness must be bought and paid for. Thus, although Wharton calls into play the genre of sentimental romance writing in her narrative about young love, she also creates an ironic perspective on that kind of writing through the introduction of an opposing discourse. The discourse of passion and the narrative conventions of the novel of sentiment clash with the economic realities and the discourse of business; the revision of narrative form creates a subtext that questions the “fairytale” assumptions on which the genre of romance writing rests. By drawing on the conventions of the epistolary novel, Wharton extends her continuing analysis of gender and narrative to an exploration of the nature of language itself and the efficacy of the word. In Susy and Nick’s itinerant social set, the reading of mail and writing of letters are part of the daily routine. The exchange of notes and letters, in fact, sometimes functions as the only means of maintaining at least the appearance of family ties and friendship when partners and companions rarely share the same physical space. For instance, Ellie Vanderlyn and her husband are so infrequently together that the novel makes explicit note of Nelson Vanderlyn’s “happiness in being, for once, and for nearly twenty-four hours, under the same roof with his wife and child” (89). Even mothering is half-heartedly conducted long distance as Ellie “had . . . given no sign of life since her departure, save in the shape of a post-card . . . in which Mrs. Vanderlyn instructed her child to be awfully good, and not to forget to feed the mongoose” (55). Both plot and character development in The Glimpses of the Moon depend on the exchange of letters and notes characteristic of the epistolary genre. In the epistolary narrative, the written word is a privileged form of communication. Written language is the transparent medium by which both reader and character participate in the narrative. In many ways, Wharton’s novel appears to reflect these values. Her narrative seems to underscore the reliability of language; characters not only make use of private modes of communication such as letters and postcards but also depend on more public uses of the written word in the form of newspaper articles. Ultimately, however, Wharton’s text fails to support the reliability of the written word in either the private or public realm. Although characters continuously communicate via the written word, the narrative soon reveals to the reader that language is neither transparent nor trustworthy. At the same time that Wharton evokes the structure of the epistolary novel, she subverts the values on which it rests. Her text almost immediately undermines the potential of language either 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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to honestly communicate or to represent the “truth” of things. When Susy and Nick arrive at the Vanderlyns’ palace at what is to be the second stop in a sequence of wedding gifts of villas, palaces, and apartments across Europe and America, Susy discovers a packet of letters carefully dated and numbered from Ellie to be sent to her husband at regular intervals. Susy quickly realizes that she is to pay for their use of the palace by helping Ellie to hide her secret rendezvous with her lover and to assist Ellie in keeping her affair from her husband. Thus, the text demonstrates very early in the story that the letter can as easily deceive as communicate “truth.” Furthermore, Ellie’s letter begs Susy not to “say a word of this to any one, even to Nick” (36). Although Susy intends “to make a clean breast of the whole thing” to her husband, she ultimately participates in the silence and the deceptive use of language (37). In Wharton’s revision of the epistolary tradition, the contents of letters are less important than the fact of their existence. The letters represent a dilemma for Susy who must decide between her desire to assure Nick of a quiet place in which to write and her own sense that his moral standards would require they leave immediately. Susy’s decision to comply with Ellie’s request sets in motion the central movement of the plot—Nick eventually discovers the scheme. In horror at Susy’s deception, he immediately leaves her; the remainder of the narrative centers on two questions: Can Susy be morally redeemed?9 Can Nick reunite with Susy? Ellie’s letters are a deliberate miscommunication, a false message designed to hide her absence from her home. Susy’s role as message-bearer in turn leads to deception and the failure of communication as she recognizes that she cannot speak to Nick. In addition, in Wharton’s reworking of the epistolary narrative, letters are often promised but never sent. Thus characters turn to more public recordings of the self—telegrams and newspaper articles—when private letters fail. When Nick leaves, he sends Susy a brief letter explaining he must “work this thing out” by himself and promising “a proper letter in a day or two” (120). The letter is never written but its promise remains a determining factor in Susy’s decisions throughout the novel. Nick’s initial effort to account for his actions is interrupted by his chance notice of a newspaper account of the death of a close friend’s uncle and cousin, making him “possessor of the one of the largest private fortunes in England” (133). “Thank[ing] whatever gods there were for pushing that mortuary paragraph under his eye,” Nick sends a second letter reminding Susy of their earlier contract to free each other if either got a chance for an advantageous 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




match. He tells Susy to let their friend Strefford—now Lord Altringham—“have the chance” and again promises to “write again in a day or two, when I’ve collected my wits” (135). The public record takes precedence over the private correspondence in determining Nick’s course of action. Wharton complicates the exchange of written information by calling attention to the difficulty of reading. For Wharton’s characters, language is no longer a transparent medium. Even when a message of some kind gets delivered, characters struggle to determine its “real” meaning. Susy’s three days of anxious waiting for Nick’s word end with the arrival of three letters from three different authors. Wharton’s structuring of the plot around the reception of the letters establishes both a narrative mode and a thematic concern that allude to the epistolary tradition. The first piece of communication, “a word from Strefford, scribbled in the train,” apologizes to Susy for his abrupt departure and also promises a future letter (136). The second, Nick’s letter posted from Genoa releasing Susy according to the terms of their contract, only contributes to her uncertainty about Nick’s state of mind and the future of their relationship. Susy anxiously tries to decode the letter: “She devoured the letter in a flash, and then sat and brooded over the outspread page as it lay on her knee. It might mean so many things—she could read into it so many harrowing alternatives of indifference and despair, or irony and tenderness!”(137) The letter carries the potential for too many meanings. Susy, unable to determine any fixed meaning, attempts to narrow the possibilities by imagining the context of the writing: “Was he suffering tortures when he wrote it, or seeking only to inflict them on her? Or did the words represent his actual feelings, no more and no less, and did he really intend her to understand that he considered it his duty to abide by the letter of their preposterous compact?” (137). Finally, she attempts to assign meaning to the absence of language: “He had left her in wrath and indignation, yet, as a closer scrutiny revealed, there was not word or reproach in his brief lines. Perhaps that was why, in the last issue, they seemed so cold to her” (137). The written word utterly fails to communicate a reliable message to Susy. Susy finally turns to her third piece of mail, a postcard from Coral Hicks, in an envelope addressed in “large stilted letters” (137). The two-sentence message promising to take “the best care of” Nick on their cruise functions as secondary text that seems to allow Susy to settle on the meaning of Nick’s letter. But the reader cannot be entirely sure since Wharton’s own text comes to a full stop here (138). Ending Part I with the message from Coral, Wharton’s narrative 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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exploits the white space between Part I and Part II to move Susy geographically from Italy to Southern France and emotionally from optimism about reuniting with Nick to resignation about exploring a relationship with Strefford. Susy’s inability to read Nick’s letter characterizes the reception of many letters throughout the novel. Because the message is either not delivered or inadequate, characters seek information from other sources, piece together a kind of story, and turn from private to public sources of information. The first letter from Strefford and the final card from Coral frame the letter from Nick to Susy so that the conclusion of Part I hints at the consequences of the failed communication taken up in Part II of the novel. If the postcard implies a potential link between Nick and Coral, Strefford’s letter reminds the reader that Susy also can pursue another partner. Significantly, the introduction of multiple love triangles is accomplished solely through the exchange of letters. The reader, a kind of privileged recipient of the word, has been given access to texts not available to any one character and thus can provide her own gloss on the scene. By the end of the first third of the novel (the text is divided into three parts), Wharton has established her characters within a situation completely defined by language. The two protagonists have separated and for the time being can communicate only through the written word. Strefford, a potential partner for Susy, and Coral, a potential partner for Nick, threaten the central relationship between Nick and Susy and complicate the exchange of letters. A network of letters (both actual and promised) structures much of the next section of the novel. Alternating between Nick’s and Susy’s points of view, Wharton represents the characters’ efforts to make sense of the word, to construct a coherent and accurate narrative from newspaper articles, scribbled notes, and messages from rivals. In detailing the difficulties of sending and receiving messages, the text offers a kind of model for the reading experience. Just as the characters struggle to create meaning, the text asks the reader to engage in that same effort. Wharton signals the need for interpretive reading by her deliberate use of and immediate undermining of the epistolary form. Having called into question the nature of narrative, Wharton will attempt to restore the potential for some sort of story but it will be a story constructed between author and reader. Taking up the old way of life, at least temporarily, Susy flees to Versailles and Violet Melrose’s house. Strefford’s telegram announcing his desire to see her makes Susy recall her despair and anger over Nick’s cold letter and causes her to feel the depth of her “friendship” 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




to Streffy (153). Stefford’s visit, motivated by his inability “to make head or tail” of an earlier letter from Susy, gives Susy the chance to tell her story and analyze Nick’s letter and subsequent behavior before an audience (157). Strefford’s cynical interpretation does not surprise Susy, but his offer of marriage does.10 But Susy cannot answer because she still awaits Nick’s promised letter. She tells Streffy, “Nick said he would write again—in a few days. I must wait—” (164). Letters depend on other letters and communication is halted in a kind of linguistic gridlock. For the next three weeks, Susy regularly promises herself to write Strefford “if there’s no letter from Nick this time next week” (167). Despite the leaving of her address at their Paris bank, Susy hears nothing and is forced to draw her own conclusions: “She smiled with a touch of bitterness at the difficulty he was doubtless finding in the composition of the promised letter” (167). Susy herself is unable to write—“her own scrapbasket . . . heaped with the fragments of the letters she had begun” (167). The letter from Nick never arrives and instead Susy eventually receives in her morning mail a “scribbled message from Mrs. Melrose” (174). When Susy enters Mrs. Melrose’s bedroom, she finds the lady “glancing over her letters” (175). Violet Melrose’s proposal that Susy take on the care of a mutual friend’s set of children finally forces Susy to act in the absence of language and letter. Telling Violet that she cannot care for the Fulmer children because she is going to England “to see a friend,” Susy that night “wrote to Strefford” (178). Meanwhile as Susy has surmised, Nick cannot write the promised final letter and gives himself up to “visions of fleeing landscapes” as seen from the deck of the Hicks’s cruise ship and the “anaesthetic” of books from the ship’s library (179). As in Susy’s case, the absence of letters is duly noted by others and results in a proposal to Nick by Coral to take on the role of social secretary. But again like Susy, Nick refuses to answer Coral just yet: “But I must wait, at any rate—wait for letters . . . I shall have to wire to have them sent. I had chucked everything, even letters, for a few weeks” (188–89). For Nick, however, there is no message from Susy in the bundle of letters finally forwarded from his bank. Instead he constructs his own reading from a dry London newspaper listing of expected guests at Ruan Castle, a listing that includes Susy and Strefford. He concludes that Susy has taken his advice, accepted the terms of their initial contract, and agreed to marry Strefford. Thus Wharton has constructed an epistolary novel that depends as much on the promise of letters as on their actual delivery and as much on public newspaper accounts as private letters. 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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For Nick and Susy the desire for the letter controls their actions even in the absence of this private means of communication. Motives and feelings have to be discerned from newspaper articles rather than personal letters. Wharton has drawn from the conventions of a specific novel tradition in order to revise that genre for her own purposes. While the promise of letters drives the plot forward in much the same way as the actual letters in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, the missed communications and miscommunications of these central characters call attention to the indeterminacy of meaning. Wharton further questions the validity of narrative and language through her repeated references to writing and fiction. Although many of Wharton’s novels satirize upper class society’s blithe distrust of traditions of high culture, especially literature, this novel raises significant questions about literature and the profession of writing. Her narrative consistently deflates any literary pretensions a character might hold. Just as romance in this novel is entangled in economics, writing is ultimately a business. She makes Nick’s chosen profession that of writing and tells us that Susy meets him at one of the “heterogeneous dinners that the Fred Gillows tried to think ‘literary’ ” (6). Susy is intrigued by “the young man . . . of whom it was vaguely rumored that he had ‘written’ ” (6). Later we learn that one of Susy’s motives for aiding Ellie is that she wants to ensure that Nick has a quiet place in which to write: “Already nascent in her breast was the fierce resolve of the author’s wife to defend her husband’s privacy and facilitate his encounters with the Muse” (37). Yet writing, just as love in this novel, must pay. Very early in the novel, Susy goes to see Nick, sure she would find him at home, “doing a dreary job on a popular encyclopedia” (8). Although she briefly wishes his talents were directed toward a novel, she “immediately reflected that, if it were the kind that she could bear to read, it probably wouldn’t bring him in much more than his encyclopedia” (8). Wharton comments, “Miss Branch had her standards in literature” (8). But the standards are essentially pecuniary. From the opening chapter of the novel, Wharton links economics and literature— debunking the romance of writing and asserting the business of writing. Susy recalls a conversation between herself and Nick before their marriage in which she dismisses Nick’s help by claiming he “talk[s] like the hero of a novel” (11). Feeling as if she has a sort of “contract” with her friend to avoid Nick early in the novel and long before their marriage, Susy explains the implicit agreement as the same kind of “right” that Nick would “recognize on the part of your publisher” (11). And, although, after the wedding, Susy temporarily seems to 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




accept that Nick will probably never “earn a living by what he wrote” (56), the happy resolution of events at the end of novel is enabled by the news that Nick is to be paid some money for the two travel pieces on Crete he wrote. Wharton’s conflation of the profession of writing with the business of publishing and her revision of the epistolary genre to raise questions about the role of the word and the stability of meaning point to her continuing interest in gender and narrative. But these textual features also suggest that the accomplished writer and successful author of many literary texts seems to be moving toward more foundational questions about the very nature of the word and the potential for language and narrative to adequately tell the story. Can we ever say what we mean? Does the absence of speech function as powerfully as its presence? What is the proper relationship between aesthetic representation and the material world of publishing as well as financial success as an author?11 If Wharton’s concerns point more clearly to the very instability of language, on the one hand, and the professional employment of that same language in publishing, on the other hand, she continues to connect both sets of questions to gender. If language and the literal and metaphorical letter are inadequate means of communication, then men and women must resort to other modes of expression. In the absence of speech or the written word, the semiotics of gesture, actions, and the body can also tell the story. For Wharton, in The Glimpses of the Moon, although the staging of the self is both advantageous and inescapable, it is also gendered. More specifically, the performance of the self is inextricably connected to matters of reading and writing. But as we have seen in earlier Wharton novels, reading and writing are activities more often practiced by men in regard to women. In The Glimpses of the Moon, however, Wharton attempts to track more closely the origins of the stories that men construct about women. Ultimately, her text suggests that both men’s and women’s understanding of women’s stories about the self reside in larger cultural ideologies. These cultural narratives shape the stories that men create about women and that women accept as natural and truthful readings of their core selves. It is at this point that the argument seems to circle back on itself; if language and narrative are inherently unstable and open to interpretation, then cultural narratives about gender roles are neither necessarily fixed nor natural. In order to explore these questions, Wharton resorts to conventions drawn from drama.12 In The Glimpses of the Moon, Wharton blurs the line between novel and play to underscore the staging of her own romantic novel about 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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love, female virtue, and motherhood. By emphasizing the dramatic qualities of three key scenes in the novel, Wharton highlights the artifice of these narrated events. Dramatizing the opening honeymoon scene on Lake Como, the narrative climax in which Susy assumes the role of motherhood, and the closing scene in which Susy as fallen woman confesses and is forgiven, Wharton directs the reader to question the “naturalness” of these traditional female roles. Selecting three events that play out central roles in many women’s lives, Wharton’s narrative suggests that gender roles are performances scripted within larger cultural stories about women. Connecting notions of performance to culturally scripted gender roles, Wharton examines the intended audience for such dramas and expresses concern about the effect of the observer on the reading and writing of the narrative dramas. Most importantly, Wharton’s highlighting of the staged quality of specific scenes that play out conventional literary and cultural narratives about women’s roles raises questions about the extent to which such narratives are inherent, natural, and “truthful.” Nick carefully attends to Susy’s performance of these roles in his continuing efforts to assess Susy’s moral standards. But Wharton’s emphasis on the dramatic and constructed nature of the roles invites the reader also to question the cultural narratives that generate those roles. Wharton’s use of dramatic conventions is particularly apt in this novel about a society predicated on show and appearances. Male and female characters are conscious throughout the story of how they are seen, by whom they are seen, and where they are seen. As marginal members of high society, Nick and Susy are keenly aware of the gaze that determines social standing and consistently work to manage the staging of their appearances. Thus Susy convinces Nick to marry her by pointing out that their assuming a new role in society as a married couple would make them a “novelty” and “twice the success we are now” (21, 22). In arranging their order of stay at the various residences offered by their friends as wedding presents, they agree they must go to New York for the winter because it “would keep them in view” (25). Just before leaving Lake Como, Nick articulates his fear about the precariousness of their social position in dramatic metaphors: “Signs of departure . . . gave him a chill sense of unreality, as if the past month had been an act on the stage, and its setting were being folded away and rolled into the wings to make room for another play in which he and Susy had no part” (27–28). Although both men and women are subject to social scrutiny, the novel centers ultimately on women and their performances as viewed 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




by men. Wharton makes clear that being the object of a negative gaze is a position inhabited by the powerless—usually women in all classes and men without money. When men such as Nick temporarily lack the economic means to escape the gaze and the judgment of society, their response is to resist the female position. For instance, Nick grows increasingly uncomfortable in the employ of the Hickses as he comes to understand that his role as social secretary devalues his social standing: But if the young man’s value had risen in the eyes of his employers it had deteriorated in his own. He was condemned to play a part he had not bargained for, and it seemed to him more degrading when paid in bank-notes than if his retribution had consisted merely in good dinners and luxurious lodgings. (283)13

Later, he vows to leave the job since “to be treated by Mr. and Mrs. Hicks as a paid oracle, a paraded and petted piece of property, was a good deal more distasteful than he could have imagined any relation with these kindly people could be. And since their aspirations had become frankly social he found his task, if easier, yet far less congenial than during his first months with them” (283). Toward the end of the novel, simply suspecting that he might be the object of Susy’s look as he wanders the streets creates the irrational belief that he is subject to the gaze of the entire city: As he walked through the familiar streets each approaching face, each distant figure seemed hers. The obsession was intolerable. It would not last, of course; but meanwhile he had the exposed sense of a fugitive in a nightmare, who feels himself the only creature visible in a ghostly and besetting multitude. The eye of the metropolis seemed fixed on him in an immense unblinking stare. (313)

Nick’s surreal vision of himself as the subject under scrutiny is ironic given that Susy has regularly been the object of his particularly judgmental eye. Nick Lansing is specifically identified as an observer who has seen too much: “Much that once amused him hugely now amused him less, or not at all: a good part of his world of wonder had shrunk to a village peep-show” (16). He had been drawn to Susy because she offered a fresh perspective on his jaded observations. Although he sensed between the two of them a “free-masonry of precious tolerance and irony” that made her an especially attractive companion, he was also well aware of “the pleasure of looking at her and listening to



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her” (17, 16). Admittedly, other men regularly take on the role of spectator. Fred Gillow, one of the many men attracted to Susy, makes no effort “to see her alone . . . . More than ever he seemed content to be the gratified spectator of a costly show got up for his private entertainment” (73). Even the naive Nelson Vanderlyn, blind to the affairs of his wife for much of the narrative, makes his first appearance in the novel as a spectator: “Still in his travelling clothes, [he] paused on the threshold of his own dining-room and surveyed the scene with pardonable satisfaction” (86). But women are the primary objects of society’s gaze. Wharton establishes the connection between women, their roles, and society most vividly in the scene in which Strefford takes Susy—who has just agreed to be his wife—to an exhibition of eighteenth century paintings. Both Susy and Strefford recognize that their appearance together announces his proposed plans for her: “She had never yet shown herself with him publicly, among their own group of people: now he had determined that she should do so” (225). From the moment of their entrance into the Petit Palais, Susy is made aware that poor old Streffy has been transformed into Lord Altringham and that he intends her to share in his “triumphal advance” among “the rulers of the world they moved in” (226). As Susy stands beneath the portrait of Strefford’s great-grandmother, surrounded by the socially elite, the living woman is as much an object on view as the painted image of the Countess of Altringham. Susy sees that Streff is “letting her feel, and letting all the people about them guess, that the day she chose she could wear the same name as his pictured ancestress” (227). Susy’s subjection to the public gaze signals her future adoption of the Altringham name and her role as Strefford’s wife. While Susy is viewed by many, Wharton’s text most carefully examines Nick’s viewing of Susy. The novel takes on a sort of doubling of the dramatic action whereby the reader observes Nick observing Susy’s performances. Wharton’s use of this twofold viewing spotlights the gendered ways in which men see and women are seen; it reveals the limits on female agency and power and the ways men construct the roles that women appear to assume. It is true that in the opening sections of the novel, Susy shows some control over the way in which she is seen. Indeed, the text explicitly portrays Susy as an actress who prepares carefully for her performances. For instance, early in the novel and shortly after their first real argument, Susy avoids further discussion with Nick by preparing herself like a professional: “Her face was pale and haggard; and having, by a swift and skillful application of cosmetics, increased its appearance of fatigue, she crossed the 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers



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There had been more than one moment in her past when everything— somebody else’s everything—had depended on her keeping a cool head and clear glance. It would have been a wonder if now, when she felt her own everything at stake, she had not been able to put up as good a defence. (103)

But ultimately, despite her skill as a manager of scenes, Susy is unable to shape the perceptions of others and the roles she is observed to play—especially by Nick. In the end, the narrative makes clear that Susy’s moral redemption is possible only when Nick teaches her to “look at things a lot differently” and she comes to see her own behavior in terms of his more “perpendicular” view (54). Ironically, this moral transformation takes place in Nick’s absence and outside his direct observation. Susy’s adoption of a higher moral view is essentially an internal acceptance of his standards in her definition of self, the willingness to see life as he does. In ending her engagement to Streffy and repudiating the old life, Susy feels a “breath of freedom” (270). But what is finally disturbing is that this freedom is also a loss of self: “Like a weary load the accumulated hypocrisies of the last months had dropped from her: she was herself again, Nick’s Susy, and no one else’s” (270). Susy’s apparent rejection of the shallow, constrained social roles she has played in the past and her return to a truer self is a giving over of that self to another. Like Lily Bart, Susy has internalized the male gaze so completely that she can be herself only when she sees herself through the idealized partner’s eyes. On one level, then, The Glimpses of the Moon offers a straightforward and conventionally sentimental account of a woman whose virtue is restored by the man she loves. Like Lily Bart, Susy comes to understand that her “better” self is called forth by a man. The reunion in the closing pages of the novel is possible because Nick sees that Susy has come to accept his view of the world and his “higher” moral standard. Yet, as in The House of Mirth, Wharton’s text simultaneously questions this sentimental reading of events. The author’s use of dramatic conventions to underscore the performative elements in social roles



room and softly opened her husband’s door” to say goodnight (39). As a woman with little money, Susy has had to rely many times on her talent and experience as an actress. In the crucial interview with Nick about Ellie’s letters, she depends on her “old training to hold his eyes while she put the questions” to deflect his judgment:

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and the action of the observer in constructing those roles raises questions about the “naturalness” of these cultural stories governing gender behavior. To see the novel as Wharton’s critique of the artifice that grounds the behavior of the rich and aimless is hardly new. But Wharton’s criticism extends well beyond this surface satire of her culture—a perspective accepted and even valued by her contemporary audience—to a questioning of certain feminine cultural roles that would have threatened the social order in significant ways. Thus although the text’s various representations of Susy as romantic heroine, mother, and redeemed “fallen” woman seem to support a conservative ideology of true womanhood, the narrative’s calling attention to the staging of these roles indicates Wharton’s ironic stance toward that same ideology.14 The text points toward an ironic reading in a number of ways. Most obviously, similar to Lawrence Selden’s view of Lily Bart, Nick’s understanding of Susy’s moral condition is clearly erroneous at times. Wharton’s narrative structure highlights his misreadings. After their argument over the letters, Susy relies on her consummate skills as an actress to keep up a good front at the dinner party in the face of Nick’s conspicuous absence. The story alludes to her “practiced flippancy” (115) and desperate attempts at gaiety but finally describes Susy’s inability to carry things off as she tells Strefford to find her a gondola and send her home alone. Then in the next chapter, Wharton describes Nick’s experience of the same event in a way that emphasizes his erroneous judgment of Susy’s performance. Wandering the streets himself that evening, Nick spots Susy and her dinner partners as described in the previous chapter. Explicitly focusing on Nick’s viewing of Susy’s actions, Wharton positions Nick in darkness on the boat landing gazing on Susy lit by the light of a streetlamp. Seeing Susy “bareheaded and laughing, a light scarf slipping between her fingers” (129) as she leaves the gondola, Nick decides “that was the last picture he was to have of her” and “that he was not going back” (130). Replaying the “scene” over and over again in his mind, Nick completely misreads Susy’s acting as the “real thing.” Like a naive theatergoer, he is unable to distinguish between appearance and reality and decides that Susy’s apparently callous behavior makes her no longer worthy of his attention. His interpretation of the event is largely colored by his assumption that Susy is playing yet another role: “Under the lamp-flare on the landing he had a good look at her face, and had seen that the mask of paint and powder was carefully enough adjusted to hide any ravages the scene





between them might have left” (129). Like a spectator in a darkened theater, Nick gazes at Susy spotlighted by the streetlamp and constructs his own misreading of the event and her state of mind. So too, Wharton’s text spotlights Nick’s inaccurate reading of Susy’s performance. Wharton’s staging of the opening scene in her novel can be read as a signal to the reader to look more closely at subsequent staged moments in the narrative. The text’s elaborate descriptions of setting and lighting in the narration of the novel’s events and consistent framing of action within an elaborately detailed mise-en-scene underscore the “staginess” of these moments. By foregrounding the spectator viewing the action, Wharton draws attention to the reader/ audience interpretive function always at work in drama and narrative. Her appropriation of dramatic conventions to dramatize sentimental and climactic moments invites the reader to look very closely at the conventional events of a sentimental tale. Wharton’s narrative, in actuality, undermines the very cultural stories—about the romantic heroine, motherhood, and the redemption of the fallen woman—that her novel appears to validate. In addition to opening the novel with a drama of romantic love, the text calls attention to the staging of two other narrative events occurring toward the end of the novel. Both scenes comprise key points in dramatic structure—the climax and the resolution—and both seem especially relevant to Wharton’s exploration of female roles in that they play out highly charged cultural narratives about female behavior—the valorization of motherhood and the redemption of a fallen woman. Wharton heightens the dramatic tension by framing the narrative action to highlight the male protagonist’s position as privileged spectator. The first scene depicts Susy as the ultimate mother—a kind of Madonna. Having instituted divorce proceedings, Nick, back in Paris, decides he wants to see Susy one last time. Obtaining her address from the divorce lawyer, he takes a taxi to a surprisingly out-of-the way address far from the social center of the city. Discovering only a dilapidated and weather-beaten house with “the worn look of a tired work-woman’s face” instead of the expected “stately private hotel . . . . with lights pouring across glossy turf to sculptured gateposts,” he decides he has been given the wrong address and is preparing to leave when a delivery boy approaches the house and Nick draws back into the shadows to watch (318). Wharton has already carefully established the mise-en-scene—the worn housefront, the “family wash fluttering between meagre bushes” (318). 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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Almost immediately the door opened; and there stood Susy, the light full upon her, and upon a red-cheeked child against her shoulder. The space behind them was dark, or so dimly lit that it formed a black background to her vivid picture. She looked at the errand-boy without surprise, took his parcel, and after he had turned away, lingered a moment in the door, glancing down the empty street. (319)

It is significant that Wharton’s representation of the scene is highly dramatic and visual; the doorway serves as a sort of proscenium arch framing the brief and silent performance. Wharton even calls attention to details of lighting—interior darkness forming a “black background” against which Susy and the child are dramatically lit by the arc-light playing over the housefront (319). Nick as the privileged spectator is entranced and altered by the sight. Defined as “her watcher,” Nick gazes upon “a new Susy, curiously transformed, transfigured almost, by the new attitude in which he beheld her” (319). By underscoring both the staging of the scene and Nick’s response to that staging, Wharton points out the interrelation between the performance and the observation of the performance. For it is finally Nick’s reading of Susy’s silent and unwitting performance that determines the ending of the novel. Wharton makes clear that the sight of Susy with the child in her arms is the catalyst for Nick to draw on the most common cultural traditions surrounding ideal motherhood to transform Susy into a Madonna-like figure. Having placed Susy securely within the story of perfect motherhood, Nick decides that Susy can indeed measure up to his perpendicular standards: “For an instant she stood out from the darkness behind her, and through the veil of the winter night, a thing apart, an unconditioned vision, the eternal image of the woman and child; and in that instant everything within him was changed and renewed” (319). Wharton’s freezing of the action for Nick turns Susy into a kind of religious medieval painting of mother and child.15 For the reader, the narrative line also suggests that Wharton is privileging the role of mother. Indeed, Susy has been altered, made less selfish, by her care of the Fulmer children. But the text also indicates that Susy’s moral transformation may be, in part, simply a rereading of her character. Her ability to manage, which had been judged by Nick as a liability and evidence of her scheming nature early in the narrative, is now read as a useful asset in caring for her brood with never quite enough money or time. And, in fact, a closer look at 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


The reader observes Nick’s watching the scene unfold as the boy approaches the house and rings the bell:


the scene (within the context of Wharton’s narrative strategies throughout the novel) reveals an alternative reading that suggests that Wharton’s real interest lies in questioning cultural narratives about motherhood—motherhood is natural and desirable for all women, motherhood is an ideal state, motherhood will save a woman from her own moral weaknesses. Furthermore, Wharton’s foregrounding of Nick’s own role in reading Susy’s unwitting performance at least suggests that cultural narratives about the universal efficacy of motherhood may be comfortable social fictions. Nick’s viewing of Susy represents for her not only a loss of agency but also a loss of individual identity. She is no longer Susy but a “vision” and an “eternal image.” But it is his gaze that sets her “apart” and it is his own rebirth that most interests him. Lurking in the shadows, Nick delightedly traces “the familiar curves,” noting the “thinness” of the arm, the “droop of the shoulder,” and her “brooding way” (320). The appropriating gaze culminates in a claim of ownership: “ ‘But she’s mine!’ Nick cried, in a fierce triumph of recovery” (320). Susy, subject to the male eye and masculine narrative, becomes an object of possession. Wharton hints further at the fictionality of social notions of natural motherhood by demonstrating that, although Susy is apparently transformed through motherhood, evidence of maternal feelings and ideal family life is not omnipresent in the novel. The most notable negative example is Ellie Vanderlyn who happily abandons her daughter for most of the summer without securing a governess or leaving an address where she can be reached. The ideal mother, Grace Fulmer, leaves Susy in charge of her five children to accompany her husband on his trip to Italy. Even Nick is not particularly pleased that their second honeymoon takes place with a convenient ready-made family. (The newly responsible Susy cannot abandon her children even for Nick and so the Fulmer children accompany them.) It seems that the idea of motherhood is more satisfying than the reality. Perhaps the most convincing argument for an ironic reading of the maternal story is that an ironic stance explains a great deal about the novel’s supposed weaknesses. Although many critics have identified the height of Wharton’s career as beginning with The House of Mirth in 1905 and ending with The Age of Innocence in 1920, Wharton continued to publish fiction and nonfiction until her death in 1937. Indeed, a number of her later novels are now receiving critical praise.16 That The Glimpses of the Moon has not been among them may be more an effect of the reader’s misreading of Wharton’s structure and tone and less a consequence of flaws within the text. If Wharton is, in fact, 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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problematizing maternity as a role the female must assume to be worthy of a man, the melodramatic staging of Susy as Madonna, Nick’s abrupt turnabout, the cliched rescue of Susy by Nick the next morning, the sudden plot shifts, and apparent gaps in the narrative that might account for this sudden reversal are less puzzling.17 If the scene of idealized motherhood and the subsequent cliched and skeletal plot line reuniting the two lovers are strategic efforts to call attention to weaknesses in the sentimental genre and the cultural narrative, the novel becomes much more interesting. Wharton at the very least is raising the possibility that motherhood may be less a natural role for all women and more a central element in a social narrative that guides gender interaction and shapes notions of female morality as much as it preserves the species.18 Wharton, then, parodies the sentimental genre in order to question the cultural story. The final staged scene in the novel lends additional weight to such a reading. Once again, Wharton’s visual treatment of the scene— details of lighting and the composition of figures—reveals highly dramatic qualities to the narrative. Paralleling the opening balcony scene of the narrative, Wharton draws heavily on the traditions of romance and melodrama. It is evening and Susy and Nick are alone (the children safely stashed in another hotel). They sit in the dark before the fire with the “ray from a street-lamp” shining “through the unshuttered windows” and spotlighting the two (360). The action comprises Susy’s complete transformation as a moral being with a final confession—unlike Nick she had never returned her gift from Ellie Vanderlyn for sending the letters. In making her confession to Nick, Susy is clearly caught within another “eternal” image—the redemption of the fallen woman. Susy kneels in front of Nick who sits in a chair before the fire: “She straightened herself, still kneeling before him, and lifted her head so that the firelight behind her turned her hair into a ruddy halo” (361). Nick’s announcement that he has received some money for two “travel-impressions” means that she can now return the gift (which she had pawned to pay for this second honeymoon). Susy’s admission that she had “never returned it” (362) and her determination to retrieve the bracelet and return it to Ellie break down the last of Nick’s reserve; he believes that they will never be separated again: “Her confession had broken up the frozen pride about his heart, and humbled him to the earth” (363). Nick’s forgiveness of Susy apparently resolves the central conflict of the novel in that the two lovers are as united by their moral integrity as by their love. But as has been the case throughout the narrative, the “staged” quality and cliched melodrama suggest another level to Wharton’s 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers




narrative. The woman kneeling in the darkness, backlit by the fire so that her hair is an angelic halo of light, like the abrupt appearance of the two nightingales in the opening scene, suggests that irony and parody should mediate any reading of this enactment of the redemption of the heroine. Within this context, Nick’s role in the closing scene is somewhat troubling. The male gaze is uninterrupted as Nick watches Susy fall asleep—her head resting on his lap—and muses over the differences between men and women, for Susy’s confession “had also roused [in Nick] forgotten things, memories, and scruples swept aside in the first rush of their reunion” (363). Although he admits that Susy’s treatment of Strefford during their separation had been “noble” while “he had been a coward in regard to Coral,” he also silently criticizes her for having so quickly forgotten all about Strefford (363). In the context of Susy’s silence, Nick—as the author, he is now “awfully hopeful about . . . [the] book” (360)—fashions a narrative about Susy and himself and “the old contrast between the two ways of loving, the man’s way and the woman’s” (364). In Nick’s mind, the difference resides in the masculine ability to recall, to make the event part of his own life-story: “His mind dwelt on Coral with tenderness, with compunction, with remorse; and he was almost sure that Susy had already put Strefford utterly out of her mind” (363–4). Nick imagines himself to be the center of Susy’s life, and that Susy “from the moment of finding him again” would look on Strefford “as if he had never been” (364).19 Given Nick’s previous misreadings of Susy’s behavior, the reader can easily find his self-satisfaction in his behavior toward Coral and his uncontested belief in his own position at the center of Susy’s awareness as yet additional examples of convenient fictions. Even the text hints at the irony in that Nick is only “almost” certain. The final paragraph reinforces the ironic tone in its parallel to the opening scene. Having constructed his fiction, Nick wakens Susy and the two lean, not on the marble balustrade, but the window sill while the moon momentarily “laboring upward, swam into a space of sky, [and] cast her troubled glory on them, and was again hidden” (364). Thus Wharton’s conclusion to The Glimpses of the Moon undermines an unquestioned acceptance of this sentimental narrative about female redemption through motherhood. As in The House of Mirth, Wharton gives the male protagonist the final word—not to affirm his superior moral standard but to foreground and critique the arrogance of his judgment. By underscoring the dramatic illusion of specific scenes and the role of Susy as performer and Nick as writer and 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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observer, the narrative creates an ironic perspective on events both sentimental and dramatic. Wharton’s appropriation and revision of the sentimental genre allow her to critique the traditional roles romance writing assigns women. The use of dramatic conventions to highlight the artifice of such roles in the narrative invites the reader to consider the constructedness of gender roles in the elite class of American society that fascinated Wharton throughout her career. The revision of the epistolary genre to undermine any belief in the transparency of language and any certainty about the ability of narratives to communicate the truth suggests that Wharton, at this point in her career, is willing to consider foundational questions about narrative. Although this writer liked to picture herself as a kind of nineteenth-century anachronism in the modernist age, her narrative questioning of the text and its meaning could easily be found in a postmodernist novel. Nevertheless, Wharton never completely abandons faith in the efficacy of story; her long career and impressive body of work refute such a conclusion. In the end, Wharton exploits this play of meaning inherent in language and story to create narratives that operate at multiple levels and that simultaneously invite the reader to discover diverse and even opposing meanings within the text.







Edith Wharton was a prolific writer in a number of genres. She completed works of nonfiction including essays and books on the decoration of homes, French culture, and the art of writing fiction. She published travel writing and an autobiography. Although best known for her short stories and novels, she was also a poet. Having received the Pulitzer in 1921 and the honorary degree of Doctorate of Letters by Yale University in 1924 and having been nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature in 1927, Wharton clearly succeeded in becoming a major American writer recognized for her artistic talent, intellectual power, and cultural critique. With the publication of her first novel, The House of Mirth, in 1905, she established herself as a best-selling writer who appealed to the reading public as well as the intellectual elite. She maintained her status as a popular writer throughout her lifetime. Clearly, Wharton was exceedingly successful as a writer. The little girl who delighted in “making up” had become the adult author who earned critical and popular acclaim. And yet, despite these external markers of approval, Wharton often reveals, in her letters, her concern about the nature and scope of her writing style and her fears that her readers will never fully appreciate her work. Despite the overwhelming success of The House of Mirth, for instance, she complains in a 1907 letter to Robert Grant that “she has always obscurely felt that I don’t know how to write a novel.” She explains that although her imagination is more masculine so that her subjects are envisioned “more architectonically & dramatically than most women,” she can only “execute them like a woman” (Lewis, Letters 124). A year later, she writes to Morton Fullerton that her “talent” is of “the low & photographic order” (Lewis, Letters 153). In 1925, she confides to her close friend, Margaret Terry Chanler, “As my work reaches its close, I feel so sure it is either nothing, or far more than they know . . . And I wonder, a little desolately, which?” (Lewis, Letters 483). Wharton was clearly thinking about her literary legacy when she began conceiving her autobiography in 1923. She explains to her editor



Conclusion


that she has been thinking for some time about writing her autobiography in order “to avoid having it inaccurately done by someone else after my death, should it turn out that my books survive me long enough to make it worth while to write my biography” (Lewis, Letters 465). In A Backward Glance, published three years before her death, Wharton largely ignores traditionally significant life events such as her marriage and divorce and, instead, focuses almost exclusively on her literary development. Wharton carefully constructs an idealized writing self that she can trace back to childhood. Her narrative reveals her deep desire as she argues that it was her destiny as a writer that enabled her to overcome family disapproval, an insufficient education, and intellectual isolation. Wharton describes her earliest encounter with books as a “secret ecstasy of communion.” She finds within herself “a secret retreat where I wished no one to intrude.” She goes on to note that “words and cadences haunted it like song-birds in a magic wood and I wanted to be able to steal away and listen when they called” (Backward 70). Wharton’s longing to become a writer, nurtured in isolation and secrecy, is accompanied by an underlying anxiety about her ability to achieve her heart’s desire. The four novels explored in the book reflect these internal struggles and fears about authorship within the personal and larger cultural contexts that shaped Wharton’s life and writing. The House of Mirth, Summer, The Reef, and The Glimpses of the Moon encode the multiple constraints on Wharton’s writing and her successful triumph over those constraints. The novels represent an extended discussion about the very possibility of telling the story. For Wharton, gender was inextricably linked to narrative authority. Her personal experiences and her culture implicitly and explicitly taught young women that serious writers were men. Although working at the end of a period of unusual literary output by women, Wharton accurately believed that female writing at the end of the nineteenth century was seen as less serious, less artistic, and less intellectual. She herself dismissed women writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett as a mere sentimentalist. Wharton recognized that the label of local colorist, often assigned to these women writers, diminished their work. Although Wharton saw herself as a realist who presented her characters and their lives with accuracy, she believed that the recording of the small daily details of ordinary life prevented these writers from constructing the more important bigger picture—a more universal narrative. Sentimental plots limited the story to the adventure and intrigue of romance—finding a mate, getting married, and raising a family. 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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Changes in the publishing industry reinforced the negative stereotypes of women writers as well. The increasing commercialization and professionalization of writing and publishing in the latter part of the nineteenth century suddenly began to undermine previous cultural assumptions about the fatherly editor who could mediate between the domestic realm of women and the harshness of the marketplace. Literary critics and book reviewers began to demand a more virile writing style. And despite the creation of colleges for women and the increased opportunity to enter professions such as medicine and teaching, the large majority of women continued to embrace the roles of wife and mother as their primary work. Despite the diminishing emphasis on an idealized Victorian womanhood and the increasing awareness of women’s ability to attend college, to agitate for social reform, to explore the freedom of the New Woman, most women’s lives were little changed. Female roles in Wharton’s social class were especially limited. Wharton attended her debutante ball, married a man from her own class, lived the life of a young society matron, and continued to balance her writing with her role as wife for many years and as society hostess for her entire life. Assuming that a girl’s formal education need only support her future role as wife and mother, Wharton’s family denied her access to formal higher education. Wharton was certain that being limited to the education her tutors gave and random readings from her father’s library had forever prevented her from developing the focused attention and wider scope of thought that she believed would have made her a better author. Much of her well-documented contempt for her own mother rested on the nineteenth-century cultural training given to American women. Developing a proper sense of fashion, keeping a tidy parlor, and mastering the intricacies of behaving as an upper class lady was work enough for women in Old New York society. Given these personal and cultural obstacles to Wharton’s writing, it seems less surprising that these four novels written between 1905 and 1922 appear to consistently underscore the failure of women to author the story. Lily Bart, Sophy Viner, Anna Leath, Charity Royall, and Susy Lansing reflect differing awarenesses of their silencing but, ultimately, all fail to take control of the story. Conversely, Lawrence Selden, George Darrow, Lucius Harney, and Nick Lansing seize narrative power and subject others to their stories. But what matters, finally, is that Edith Wharton is the author of these novels. Her narrative control over these characters, her construction of the fictional space in which they live their lives, and her creation of story lines that 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


CONCLUSION


poignantly and angrily reveal the lack of female power over the story are the strategies of a writer who has found the authority to write. Furthermore, a closer look at these novels indicates that Wharton’s apparent compliance with the cultural views that strip women of control over the story is not necessarily an accurate read. These novels comprise a multilayered discussion about gender and narrative power. Wharton’s protagonists struggle against their absence of power over the story and, in that struggle, reveal Wharton’s clear and continuing critique of the masculine impetus to take over the narrative. The narrative structures of these novels reveal increasingly complex strategies that allow their author to tell multiple and even contradictory stories. The apparently straightforward account of a woman who failed to seize her redemption at the hands of Lawrence Selden in The House of Mirth is also the story of Selden’s utter inability to understand Lily and a critique of his willingness to reduce her to a role in his own selfserving drama of unrequited love. Over and over again, the supposed chronicler of Lily Bart, the man who knows the true Lily, is revealed to have gotten the story wrong. Lily’s primary mistake is not her inability to extricate herself from a vain and self-centered society, but her belief in Lawrence Selden’s ability to love her and to tell her who she really is. In The Reef, the surface story centered on Anna Leath’s choice of love and passion at the cost of suppressing concerns about her fiancé’s fidelity is countered by an alternative narrative. The openended conclusion and the fragmentation of the narrative reveal the psychological costs of Anna’s efforts to silence her doubts. Charity Royall’s seduction in Summer is both a matter of desire and the power of language. Wharton’s narrative about the betrayal of love and the social regulation of sexuality is also an account of the alluring yet dangerous effect of words. Wharton’s text explores not only the actual consequences for being subject to a lover’s endearments but also, by metaphorical extension, the tragic consequences for those who are unable to hold their own in the realm of language. In The Glimpses of the Moon, iconic images of the romantic heroine, the woman gone wrong, and the Madonna mother seem to mark key points on the familiar trajectory of a fall and redemption narrative that can be traced as far back as Eve in the garden. Susy Lansing is restored to her place beside Nick only when she has mastered the moral lessons he must teach her. At the same time, these images are revealed as powerful cultural illusions created and maintained by men. In the end, Wharton clearly reveals the artificiality and insufficiency of such stories in explaining the complex behavior of women. 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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Wharton’s counternarratives depend on a kind of narrative betrayal, an undermining of her own story. Her critique emerges from gaps within the narrative. The subjection of women to flawed and destructive male narratives ironically creates spaces within the novel for the emergence of Wharton’s own story. The careful employment of metaphor, the juxtaposition of conflicting modes of discourse, and the subtle revision of genre conventions enable Wharton both to tell the story and to question the story. Certainly, these novels can be read as advocating prevailing notions about women’s morality and the tragic consequences for those women who stray from the moral standard or refuse to be rescued by the male hero. These narratives can be seen as supporting cultural norms policing women’s roles. Such readings made Wharton popular with her readers. But Wharton’s skill as a writer is such that alternative readings critiquing those narratives also exist. Ultimately, the contradictions that appear in Wharton’s novels and those that shape her life can never be fully resolved. Wharton remains both the shrewd businesswoman and a grand dame of high society. She remains the writer who rarely abandons her focus on the subject of America but lives abroad for most her adult life and often expresses contempt for her native culture. She is an author who carefully cultivates intellectual alliances with acclaimed writers and artists but is positively gleeful about making enough money to put a new roof on her home. These contradictions point to the rich complexity of Wharton’s life and her writing. While the rewards of reading Edith Wharton offer sufficient argument in support of careful study of this major American writer, her life and work also offer insights into the condition of a woman writer. If these insights must be measured in terms of the specific cultural milieu from which Wharton emerges, they too perhaps at least point to some of the conditions and challenges that women writers face in general. In the seventy years since Wharton has died, radical social changes have occurred in women’s lives. Certainly women have greater access to higher education and financial independence and more choices regarding career and family. Inarguably, finding a “room of one’s own” (to use Virginia Woolf’s language) is easier for women in the twenty-first century. And yet, Wharton’s struggles to become a writer at the turn of the twentieth century and her continuing analysis of gender and narrative power should still demand attention. In a recent lecture, Anna Quindlen, columnist and author, argued that legal and institutional changes governing women’s lives do not necessarily ensure that cultural ideas that shape individual 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


CONCLUSION


attitudes and behavior about gender also change. She noted that at her speaking engagements around the country she is often asked how she had been able “to have it all”—editor for a major newspaper, novelist, columnist for a weekly newsmagazine, wife, and mother of three. She added that this question is always posed by a young woman. Edith Wharton had much to say about the desire, challenges, and consequences of having it all. In a letter written to Mary Berenson just a year before her death, she alludes to “this wonderful adventure of living, which seems to me to pile up its glories like an horizon-wide sunset as the light declines.” She goes on to describe herself as “an incorrigible life-lover & life-wonderer & adventurer” (Lewis, Letters 598). In the end Wharton was clearly happy with her life and her work. These novels not only record one woman’s obstacles to taking on the authority of telling the story but also serve as a clear measure of her triumph over those obstacles. In a letter to Bernard Berenson in 1937, Wharton sympathized with him about the challenges of completing a book. She shared a 1934 entry from an “old diary-journal” in which she had asked herself “What is writing a novel like?” Wharton had answered, The beginning: A ride through a spring wood. The middle: The Gobi desert. The end: Going down the Cresta run.

Wharton, who at this time was working on her last novel—The Buccaneers, an unfinished work that would be published posthumously—added that she was still “slowly struggling toward the Cresta run” but did not “yet despair of sliding down” (Lewis, Letters 602). Wharton’s letter to her friend attests to the rich experience she found in writing and her faith that she would discover the story that was waiting to be told. In the end, Wharton was certain that she had become the writer she had once found only in an imagined and secret place deep within herself.



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Chapter 


1. Freudian psychology, Marxism, and postmodernism have challenged easy understandings of the self and gender. Arguing that psychological, cultural, and economic forces constrain independent freedom of action to such a degree that a stable identity is perhaps no longer possible, such theorists understand the self as, at best, a temporary if useful story about one’s identity. If the self is unstable, claims about gender identity are even less fixed. Deconstructing traditional categories of male and female, post-structuralist gender critics assert that such binary thinking is too simplistic in assigning innate traits to men and women. Even more problematic, for feminist post-structuralists, is the potential for such binary categories to keep in place the very hierarchical thinking that has been used to exclude women and to devalue female roles and their stories. Separating out the study of women writers in women’s courses and searching for markers of gender in narrative style and content, so the argument goes, implicitly retain cultural beliefs that women’s narratives can never be seen as normative and universal. Other feminists respond that social and material conditions construct gender differences that clearly impact the experience of being a woman and her writing. Although it is certainly possible and sometimes useful to deconstruct the notion of a stable self and essential gender traits, most of the time, these theorists argue, we continue to treat each other as men and women. Our gendered bodies have obvious consequences for how we live and think about ourselves and how we tell our stories. 2. For a brief and highly readable summary of feminist criticism from Kate Millet to Kristeva see “Introduction: The Story So Far” by Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore in The Feminist Reader. Toril Moi’s Sexual/Texual Politics, although more polemic in tone, provides a more detailed discussion. Moi is much more sympathetic to French feminism than Anglo-American theories. For a good overview of feminist analyses of gender that undergird this literary criticism, see Chapter 5, “Feminism, Stories of Gender,” in Thinking Fragments by Jane Flax. Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” in Coming to Terms edited by Elizabeth Weed offers a historian’s perspective on the postmodernist debate.



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3. Rich talks about the woman writer’s need to heal the split between a sense of herself as a writer and a woman defined by her gender in cultural and material ways. Like T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Rich advocates an understanding of the literary past but, unlike Eliot, she believes this history can be turned to revolutionary purposes centered on altered ways of seeing gender and writing: “We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (2046). For Rich, “the work of Western male poets reveals a deep, fatalistic pessimism as to the possibilities of change” and only women’s creative energy will generate change (2056). Rich’s implicit assumption that aesthetic change must be related to social change reflects the early Anglo-American emphasis on pragmatic action, ethics, and the transformation of the conditions under which women live and write. 4. Although Showalter’s gynocriticism establishes a rationale and method for examining the gender of writing, her paradigm also risks defining gender differences as innate rather than as social constructions by cultures organized around believed differences between genders. Even more problematically, Showalter must sacrifice individual differences between women in order to establish the importance of a universal woman writer. In an effort to locate common ground for women writers founded on the historical and cultural experiences of living and writing as a woman, Showalter separates the woman writer from the very specifics of the historical and cultural conditions that she has argued shaped her as unique and worthy of specialized tools of analysis in the first place. The challenge of articulating difference based on the gendered experience of living and writing as a woman is complicated by the seeming paradox of recognizing the common material and cultural conditions of all women’s lives while, at the same time, ignoring the historical and cultural differences. 5. In her early essays, Kolodny, like Rich and Showalter, works to underscore essential differences based on gender in order to rescue women writers who have been devalued and silenced by masculine standards of literary value. Kolodny’s “A Map for Rereading” (1980) argues that feminist critics should look at how women’s writing comes from a nondominant literary tradition and, therefore, may require a different kind of reading. Her “Dancing Through the Minefield” (1980) calls for new critical methods of reading that take into account unequal power relationships and the differing literary histories that have shaped male and female writers. By the end of the decade, however, she has begun to confront those critics who see gender in more fluid ways and to point out the consequences of blurring the gender line. In “Dancing Between Left and Right” (1988), she directly responds to post-structuralist feminists who use the work of Lacan and Derrida



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to theorize and complicate the idea of “difference.” Kolodny expresses concern about male appropriation of feminist work and the construction of feminist studies within masculinist paradigms such as Lacan’s psychoanalytic structures or Derridean deconstruction. Cixous, a post-structuralist sympathetic to Jacques Derrida, defined two kinds of writing: the masculine that preserves binary oppositions and the feminine that disrupts the normative structures of male-centered language. Her essays “Sorties” and “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975)—reading more like poetry than prose in their use of puns, paradox, and metaphor—enact her theories and demonstrate a use of feminine language that can never be entirely controlled by author or reader. All page references to Irigaray’s essays refer to the collection of essays translated by Catherine Porter and published as This Sex Which Is Not One in 1985 by Cornell University Press. Reworking Lacan’s concept of desire and language, Irigaray finds “multiplicity” rather than “phallic oneness” (30) in the language of women. In “The ‘Mechanics’ of Fluids” (1974), Irigaray argues that “woman” exists outside the current language system that is based on properties of the solid, while the “woman-thing . . . speaks fluid” (111). Irigaray’s essays demonstrate her interest in a theoretical discourse that is allusive, witty, metaphorical, and female. More recent American feminists are struggling to bridge the gap between American criticism and French theoretical discourse. See Essentially Speaking by Diana Fuss, “Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism” by Nancy Fraser, and Linda Nicholson and Linda Alcoff’s “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism.” For a more specific literary analysis, see Alice Jardine’s Gynesis. In her effort to link an American interest in ethics and social practice and French concerns with discourses and structures of language that undergird social practice, Jardine argues for the “rethinking of both male and female subjects’ relationship to the real, imaginary, and symbolic” (44). Kamuf asks, “If feminist theory can be content to propose cosmetic modifications on the face of humanism and its institutions, will it have done anything more than reproduce the structure of women’s exclusion in the same code which has been extended to include her?” (45) Kamuf’s important attack on humanism highlights a system of thought that has defined masculine as universal and true, and feminine as the Other. Miller extends her argument in another essay, “Changing the Subject” in Subject to Change. She notes the postmodernist claim for the death of the author “does not necessarily hold for women” who have “been excluded from the polis” and whose “relation to integrity and textuality, desire and authority, displays structurally important differences from that universal position” (106).



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11. Consider, for instance, Anne Bradstreet’s “farewell” to her unborn child in “Before the Birth of One of her Children” written in 1678. Although the story of America in the seventeenth century is usually about taming the wilderness and its native peoples and struggling to create the “city on the hill,” Bradstreet’s poem expressing her fear about giving birth (in a new country and under primitive conditions) suggests a very different, but equally viable story of courage. 12. The Kristeva Reader edited by Toril Moi provides both an overview of Kristeva’s work up to the mid-1980s and ready access to a number of her essays. In “The System and the Speaking Subject,” found in this volume, and Revolution in Poetic Language, translated from La revolution du langage poetique published in 1974, Kristeva sets forth her concept of the split subject and the dialectical relation between the symbolic (associated with patriarchal law and linguistic system) and the semiotic chora (associated with the maternal, pre-oedipal, and pre-linguistic). For further discussion of Kristeva’s view on semiotics and literatures see Desire in Language. 13. Riley argues that “female persons can be very differently positioned” over time in relation to concepts of the self, soul and body, sexuality, and Nature (2). She believes that admitting the “instability” of women as a “historical foundation” is a way of escaping the current threats of “deconstruction and transcendence” to feminist analyses (5). “It’s not that our identity is to be dissipated into airy indeterminacy, extinction; instead it is to be referred to the substantial realms of discursive historical formation” (5). Riley asks, “But if being woman is more accurately conceived as a state which fluctuates for the individual, depending on what she and/or others consider to characterize it, then there are always different densities of sexed being in operation, and the historical aspects are in play here”(6). 14. Riley believes that recognizing that ideas of gender change over time interrupts the simple opposition of male and female. Riley believes that history shows how the “female speaker” whose “rejections of, adoptions of, or hesitations as to the rightness of the self description at that moment” can shift. For Riley, examining how “ ‘men’ and ‘women’ are enmeshed with histories of other concepts” of the self undermines the simple “binary opposition of sexual antagonism” without ignoring the historical presence of the gender opposition (7). Riley’s position is strategically useful for a feminist politics and aesthetics. 15. “The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S. and Britain” (1989). 16. Finding the polarity between post-structuralism and essentialism in contemporary feminist debates fruitless, De Lauretis advocates shifting the terms of the discussion away from theoretical differences within the feminist movement to “the historical specificity, the essential difference of feminist theory itself” (6). This rhetorical maneuver



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enables her to break down what she sees as a “pernicious opposition of low versus high theory” that is “reductive” and creates an unnecessary division between individuals supposedly working toward the same goal—defining a feminist perspective (12). More specifically, De Lauretis’s emphasis on multiple perspectives and dialogue between feminists—in a footnote she refers to her own article as a dialogue— recovers texts from earlier moments in the woman’s movement, texts that De Lauretis notes contemporary post-structuralist feminists wrongly dismiss. Like Denise Riley, De Lauretis highlights the historical perspective. For De Lauretis, it is important to recognize the “socialhistorical location” of the feminine subject, the consequences of this historical positioning of women, and the history of the woman’s movement that chronicles past efforts by women to grapple with this locating of the gendered self within the culture (11). Thus De Lauretis would seek to recoup such earlier feminist texts as Adrienne Rich’s 1971 “When We Dead Awaken” without rejecting the more recent contributions of French post-structuralists such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. De Lauretis finds the analysis of sexual difference “less an essentialist biological or metaphysical view of woman’s difference (from man) than a historical materialist analysis of ‘the state of emergency’ in which we live as feminists” (27). 17. De Lauretis records how “autocoscinza,” a sort of consciousnessraising practiced by small groups of Italian women in the 1970s, led directly to a recognition by the women of Milan of “their own different subjecthood” and consequent need “to gain self-representation in the established symbolic order” (21). De Lauretis sees this recovery of women’s writings as “a frame of reference for one’s analyses, understanding, and self-definition” and as a way to “mediate a woman’s relation to the symbolic” (15). 18. Female-authored poetry, prose, and drama have historically revealed a subject position excluded from the discursive realm. These women’s texts reveal struggles to claim their place in literary history. In seventeenth-century America, Anne Bradstreet’s poetry was first published by her brother-in-law in 1650 without her knowledge of its final editing. In “The Prologue,” “ her poetic persona seems to allay men’s fears about writing women by assuring her readers that “men can do best and women know it well.” Arguing that her meager and inept offerings will only make their “glistening gold but more to shine,” Bradstreet asserts her right to tell her story. The ironic tone of the poem, nevertheless, actually mocks male narratives and privileges female stories. In the nineteenth century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” recounts the case of a woman driven to write in isolation and secrecy. The protagonist achieves a kind of victory after finding the story of a trapped woman written in the wallpaper by stripping the wall and freeing the woman. Her madness frees her to construct her story. Claiming narrative authority by defining writing as a physical



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and psychological imperative, the protagonist tells a story about the necessity of storytelling. In 1957, Isak Dinesen’s community of female storytellers in “The Blank Page” uphold a long tradition of storytelling. But again Dinesen’s tale is more about the process of storytelling and the struggle to achieve narrative authority than the story itself. Ironically, the narrative is never completed. Like a hallway of infinitely receding mirrors, the multiple narrators appear to lead the reader to the heart of the story only to fall silent leaving the reader to the mute contemplation of the one canvas of “pure white linen” unstained by virginal blood . Already excluded from the patriarchal printed page, Dinesen’s storytellers try to enter the discursive realm through an oral narrative emerging out of the female body as they invite their audience to consider the meaning of the absence of bloodstains on a bridal bedsheet—but even so the narrators are ultimately forced to “draw their veils over their faces and [become] . . . dumb” (1422). Chapter  Wharton, Women, and Authorship at the Turn of the Century 1. For Kristeva, “the conception . . . of meaning as the act of a transcendental ego cut off from its body, its unconscious and also its history” is “outdated” (Kristeva Reader 28). She instead advocates the practice of “semanalysis” that “conceives of meaning . . . as a signifying process” (28) located within the speaking subject who is a “divided subject” (28). The “person” making meaning, then, is subjected “to bio-physiological processes ( . . . what Freud labeled ‘drives’)” and “to social constraints (family structures, modes of production, etc.)” (28). Kristeva’s speaking subject is always constructed by internal and external forces that are “social, political and historical” (33). 2. Kristeva’s theory restores the importance of history and cultural context to the study of the woman writer. Cultural debates about the nature and role of women, changing publishing practices, and increasingly negative views of the “woman writer” shape Wharton as an author. Analysis of textual meaning within her novels—what Kristeva might consider a study of semiotics—has to take account of these external conditions. 3. This study focuses on the ways in which Wharton critiqued the conservative gender ideology of her time. Nevertheless, Wharton remains true to her conservative roots in terms of class, race, and political ideologies. Jennie Kassanoff’s Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race argues that too much of Wharton criticism has ignored her conservative views on class and race—topics of considerable public debate in Wharton’s time. Kassanoff offers a useful corrective to this absence. Integrating social documents and close readings of selected novels, she explores Wharton’s anxieties about the democratic racial and class incursions into larger parts of American culture and the effects



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of these social and demographic changes on the community of social elites to whom she remained loyal. For a compelling historical account of women’s participation in the controversy over sex differences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Rosalind Rosenberg’s Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism. It should be noted at the outset that my comments in this chapter focus almost exclusively on middle and upper class white women. The experiences of women of color and working-class women were far different. I concentrate on one layer of a complex and varied structure of female experience not because it is universal but because it most closely describes Edith Wharton’s cultural context. Complaints and Disorders by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English details some of the major differences between the lives of women of the “leisure” class and working-class women in terms of their treatment by the medical profession at the turn of the century. The apparent proliferation of this disease gave doctors (mostly male) a ready group of patients (mostly female) to treat at a time when medicine was attempting to gain currency as a scientific enterprise and a recognized profession. For a discussion of the connection between the development and treatment of hysteria, cultural roles prescribed for women, and the professionalization of medicine, see “The Hysterical Woman” in Carole Smith-Rosenberg’s Disorderly Conduct and “The Sexual Politics of Sickness” by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in Peter Conrad’s The Sociology of Health and Illness. Newman argues that the real debate centered not on sexual difference, “but the social and political implications of that difference” (xiii). Her collection of essays from The Popular Science Monthly from 1870 to 1915 provides a fascinating account of the controversy. For another version of the debate, see Clarke’s Sex in Education (1874), in which he outlines his proposals for the separate education of women so as not to endanger their reproductive capacities, and for a reasoned response in Sex and Education, edited by Julia Ward Howe (1874). Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s A Feast of Words explores at some length the pattern of sexual repression handed down by Lucretia Jones to her daughter. In general, Wolff’s study is a valuable discussion of the conflict Wharton experienced between her desire for adulthood and the model of female behavior represented by her mother. The roles of homemaker, nurse, and moral guardian, identified by Welter as central to True Womanhood, continued to shape expectations of female behavior in Wharton’s time. Admittedly, as Welter acknowledges, even during the height of True Womanhood, the ideal often deviated sharply from the reality. Class status and economic conditions for individual women dictated whether or not one could



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participate fully in True Womanhood; nevertheless this cultural ideal modeled by higher-status women shaped the aspirations of women from all classes. 10. Chief Scout Thompson Seton expressed his concern over boys who were becoming “a lot of flat-chested cigarette smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality” (qtd. in Susan Faludi’s Backlash 63). At the Modern Language Association convention in 1909, a speaker worried about the effect of increasing numbers of women in literature classes and advocated the need to preserve within literary study the “ideal of masculine culture” (qtd. in Conflicting Stories 16). 11. James R. McGovern claims that this period was responsible for “the emergence of a ‘virility impulse’ . . . [that] may be described as an exaggerated concern with manliness and its conventional concomitants—power and activity” (335). He points out that the heroes in Phillips’ novels “are rigidly defined and highly conventionalized super-males” who display their virility in action and a “masterful handling of women” (346, 347). He shows how the popular Phillips’ work ethic and fiction consistently reveal anxiety about the need to preserve manly vigor. Phillips, who wrote in a standing position and scheduled writing time from eleven at night until four, five, or six in the morning seven days of the week, commented, “I could not trust myself to luxurious surroundings for fear they would soon eat all of the manhood out of me” (McGovern 340). At the same time it should be noted that Phillips was a strong supporter of women’s rights who “praised the independent woman who behaved like a man” (349). His final novel Susan Lenox traces the life of a young woman born illegitimate, who is driven to flee her arranged marriage at seventeen and is forced into prostitution to survive, but who is eventually taught the value of work and independence and helped toward a successful career in theater. Wharton said in a letter that the novel was one of “the only things out of America that have made me cease to despair of the republic—of letters” (Lewis Letters 445). McGovern links Phillips’ masculine activist stance to changing work patterns and increasing participation by women in the larger society. He notes that the “decline of self-employment opportunities . . . after 1900,” the increase of leisure time for men, and the entrance of more and more women into the job market between 1880 and 1920 exacerbated cultural tensions about gender roles (352–354). McGovern goes on to say, “This enlarged sphere of women’s activity, the more disturbing because it was disrupting traditional roles, may have contributed a situational base for the psychological element of Progressivism. One needs hardly speculate that the allusions in fiction and non-fiction of the period to women refusing to bear children describes a fact which contributed to the sex roles of the period. The instances in popular literature of near and actual role reversals with women consciously wishing to be like men or becoming like



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them in personality are also suggestive of basic tensions” (354). For an analysis of Susan Lenox in terms of Wharton’s ideas about naturalism and ways in which the Phillips novel can be seen as “vindicate[ing] Wharton’s vision in The House of Mirth” see “The Bitter Taste of Naturalism: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and David Graham Phillips’s Susan Lenox.” In Doing Literary Business, Susan Coultrap-McQuin notes, “Attitudes toward women writers often mirrored attitudes toward women” (15). She also observes, “Although men’s character also was presumed to be reflected in their texts, the connections expected in women’s works were strongly influenced by the cultural prescriptions for women” (15–16). For a useful discussion about Wharton’s efforts to separate herself from other women writers, her desire to be successful in the marketplace and the literary world, and the increasing antagonism of men toward women writers, see Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Politics of Female Authorship by Deborah Lindsay Williams. Williams’ introduction, “Strangled with a Petticoat,” offers an overview of challenges facing Wharton, Cather, and Gale at the beginning of the twentieth century. Chapter One, “Threats of Correspondence: The Letters of Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and Edith Wharton,” closely examines letters between Gale and Wharton. Williams shows that, for Wharton, “an artist must remain unaffiliated, at least publicly” (36). Nevertheless, Wharton’s letters to Gale argues that “Wharton’s interest in the other woman’s work and ideas seems far from perfunctory: the community of spirit is attractive” (36). In Chapter Three, “Sisterhood and Literary Authority in The House of Mirth, My Antonia, and Miss Lulu Bett,” Williams suggests that The House of Mirth helps Wharton to establish her literary voice and gives her confidence in the profession of writing although Wharton maintains her “apparent hostility to sisterhood and to feminism” (122). In her essay “Women in Literature,” Cone claims that the opening of women’s colleges and supposed increased accessibility of the profession should have increased women’s “advance in literature” (126). She attributes the comparative scarcity of women writers to “unavoidable self-consciousness” felt by those “released from the burden of a retarding tradition” and the “new social responsibilities” of the college-educated woman (126). But her argument raises questions. Why is it that men such as Frank Norris, Jack London, and Stephen Crane managed to combine literature and social reform? And how quickly could women leave behind the tradition of denial and suppression of voice that Cone traces in her own essay? Gilman notes, “It is difficult for men, heretofore the sole producers and consumers of literature, and for women, new to the field, and following masculine canons because all the canons were masculine,



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to stretch their minds to a recognition of the change which is even now upon us” (105). The familiar case of Kate Chopin is an example of cultural resistance to women’s stories that critique prevailing assumptions about gender. The negative public reaction to Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) has been well documented. Publishing almost nothing after the novel, Chopin virtually retired from writing. The amount and severity of critical response to Chopin’s narrative suggest that women had made little headway in literary parity by the close of the century. Having discovered a new identity as an artist and having experienced sexual freedom, Chopin’s protagonist chooses suicide rather than returning to her Victorian role as wife and mother. Sustained negative public reaction to the novel suggests that the reading audience of the time was not ready to accept narratives—by women—that threatened prevailing cultural attitudes toward gender roles in any way. While it might be argued that any novel published at this time about a woman who deliberately flouts social and sexual conditions would offend American readers, public response to immoral books differed on the basis of gender. One case in point is Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie published in 1900. Dreiser’s book was condemned by his own publisher and some readers, but it was taken seriously by reviewers and championed by another important writer of the time, Frank Norris. By 1905, Dreiser was a successful magazine publisher who bought the rights to Sister Carrie in 1907 and had it reissued. By 1915, having completed four additional novels, he was seen as a major American author. Chopin was largely ignored for the next thirty years. 16. Sharon O’Brien constructs her biography Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice within this paradigm—the conflict between being female and an author. O’Brien argues that Cather’s authentic voice emerges only after she has reconciled this division. Volume I of the biography carefully details how Cather’s writing “apprenticeship was distinguished by her struggle to resolve the culturally imposed contradictions between femininity and creativity” (5). 17. An interesting parallel can be drawn here. In her autobiography, Edith Wharton pays particular attention to her great-grandfather, Major-General Ebenezer Stevens, who took part in the Boston tea party, commanded artillery units in the Revolution, and became a highly successful East-India merchant after the war. Confessing “a secret partiality for him,” Wharton admires his energy and ambition (14). That she too wished to signal some linguistic connection to an admired male forbearer is suggested when she named her home in Massachusetts “The Mount,” the title given by her great-grandfather to his country home on Long Island. 18. Elizabeth Ammons’ sketches of the careers of women in the closing pages of Conflicting Stories are compelling evidence of the tension between being female and an author within Wharton’s culture. These



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writers faced material conditions and internal and external cultural forces actively hostile to writing such as the responsibilities of wifehood and motherhood; religious, class, or regional traditions opposed to female writing; the intensification of gendered alienation through racism or poverty; and charges of plagiarism and expectations that women “produce nothing but pretty . . . stuff” (198). It is within this cultural context that Wharton had to define herself as an author. In her introduction to The Portable Edith Wharton, Linda WagnerMartin examines ways in which some of her selections of Wharton’s work can be linked to elements of Wharton’s biography and her development as a writer. (xvii). She notes, “Her hegira through her existence is itself a kind of metaphor for the life of the writer—that such an artist does live in her imagination, does find comfort in her aesthetic and in her product” (xxi). Shari Benstock in No Gifts from Chance disagrees with Lewis. She argues that Wharton’s claim of illness in an 1895 letter to her publisher “was in some measure disingenuous.” According to Benstock, although Wharton “did not invent illness . . . she did dramatize her situation to editors who were far away” (80). In The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, Gloria C. Erlich explores in great detail connections between psychological family dynamics in the Wharton family, Wharton’s changing relationships to her own sexuality, and Wharton’s writing and view of herself as an author. Erlich makes a compelling argument in favor of a “psychic nexus that embraced Wharton’s creative as well as her erotic life” (42). She asserts that “books and even words become libidinized” (42). Erlich suggests that Wharton constructs “an authorial self’ firmly established within “the realm of the father” (45). While I am unwilling to place as much emphasis on the theme of incest in Wharton’s own life, I agree that Wharton seems to articulate writing in sexualized terms. Hermione Lee notes that Wharton’s unpublished memoir Life and I is even more explicit “about the physical account of her passion for story-telling” as a little girl (14). She finds Wharton’s descriptions of the making up to be “extremely erotic” (14). She recalls, in her autobiography, living the “old life, for my husband was as fond of society as ever, and I knew of no other existence, except in our annual escapes to Italy.” She adds, “I had as yet no real personality of my own, and was not to acquire one till my first volume of short stories was published” (Backward 112). In an early letter to her publisher, she apologizes for the extended correspondence, the insistent questions about title page, format, and publication date by noting her eagerness to finally see these “people” in print. Again although Wharton’s autobiography is not entirely trustworthy as a recollection of events, the careful construction of a writing self at the end of her career testifies to the centrality of this self-image throughout her life. Hermione Lee calls Wharton’s autobiography “a



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25.

26. 27.

28.

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beautifully produced and illustrated book . . . an impressively evasive exercise in good manners and self-screening” (715). In A Backward Glance, Wharton describes her mother as witnessing the fall of the French monarchy in Paris in 1848 but says she “suspect[s] that the study of the Paris fashions made a more vivid impression on her than the fall of the monarchies” (20). Wharton describes the “tradition of elegance” her mother preserved throughout her life and “the excitement caused by the annual arrival of the ‘trunk from Paris’ ” full of the most recent fashion in dresses (Backward 20). Lucretia had few intellectual interests although she insisted on overseeing her daughter’s reading. Wharton maintains that she was “an indolent woman” who made things easy on herself by requiring Wharton to show her any piece of fiction the daughter wanted to read and then refusing her permission (Backward 65). Wharton points out the irony in her mother’s action by making note of “the stacks of novels” that Lucretia and the other older women “devoured” (68). In Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Elizabeth Ammons explores at some length Wharton’s apparent conservatism in later life, attributing much of it to the effect of the war. Janet Malcolm in “The Woman Who Hated Women” makes the same assertion in an article published in 1986. Hermione Lee also takes note of the significant contradictions within Wharton’s image. She says, “Wharton’s self-creation through the 1890s and 1900s as a woman writer who could not be categorized under ‘feminine’ or ‘sentimental,’ and a highly cultured author who could also appeal to a big audience, was a remarkable one” (171). In a 1904 letter to William Crary Brownell, Wharton writes, “The continued cry that I am an echo of Mr. James (whose books of the last ten years I can’t read, much as I delight in the man) . . . makes me feel rather hopeless” (Lewis, Letters 91). In 1923, she writes Bernard Berenson that she found Joyce’s Ulysses “a turgid welter of pornography . . . & uninformed & unimportant drivel; & until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation & thought can make a work of art without the cook’s intervening. The same applies to Eliot” (Lewis, Letters 461). Nevertheless, critics have begun to explore Wharton’s complicated connection to modernism in recent years. Frederick Wegener in “Form, ‘Selection,’ and Ideology in Edith Wharton’s Antimodernist Aesthetic,” was “concerned about her own lack of enthusiasm about the work of her younger contemporaries” (119). But for Wegener “Wharton’s regressive social and political views”—especially in her later essays on writing—“are closely intertwined with her convictions about the writing of fiction and the making of art” (134). Carol J. Singley argues that Wharton’s use of irony in the service of realism constructs “an ironic detachment we associate with modernism” in



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“Edith Wharton’s Ironic Realism” (226). Singley notes that although critics have attempted to read Wharton within the modes of realism, naturalism, and sentimentalism, Wharton escapes any easy categorization. Katherine Joslin points out in “ ‘Embattled tendencies’: Wharton, Woolf and the nature of Modernism,” that feminist scholars over the last twenty years have read Wharton as a “transitional figure” (203). Joslin traces what she sees as a dialogue about art and representation that emerges from a comparison between the writings of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton. Joslin defines modernism as “a sharp dialogue, . . . a transatlantic dialogue, over literary possibilities” and places Wharton firmly within this debate (204). 29. In A Backward Glance, she says, “My literary success puzzled and embarrassed my old friends far more than it impressed them, and in my own family it created a kind of constraint which increased with the years. None of my relations ever spoke to me of my books . . . the subject was avoided as though it were a kind of family disgrace” (144). 30. According to Ammons in Conflicting Stories, Wharton’s identification with male authors, scholars, and intellectuals was not uncommon for many women at the turn of the century. She argues that among “turn-of-the-century women committed to art as their goal” the “aspiration to be taken seriously as an artist” meant “a strong and frequently outspoken—indeed often belligerent—identification with the acknowledged great writers of western tradition, who were almost always male” (123). In addition, Ammons notes that many of these same women writers also separated themselves from an American tradition of literature. She says, “As if to emphasize their independence . . . they distanced themselves from U.S. literary tradition, connecting themselves instead to an international artistic community” (123). Although Wharton greatly admired Emerson and saw herself working toward some of the same ends as Hawthorne, she clearly allied herself with European artists. Moving to France, reading extensively in contemporary European literature, forming friendships with Europeans and Americans who saw themselves as Europeans, Wharton found the international milieu more conducive to her writing. In general, she believed that “America . . . [wasn’t] exactly a propitious ‘ambiance’ for the arts,” and in particular, she found that European culture at least in some ways gave women a wider scope. In French Ways and Their Meaning, she argues, “Compared with the women of France the average American woman is still in kindergarten” (100–1). Wharton believed that the exclusion of American women from the economic and intellectual realms and their relegation to the home and the company of other women prevented her countrywomen from ever being genuinely “grown up.” 31. In “No Innocence in this Age” included in the collection Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors, Jamie Barlowe argues that “Wharton



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33.

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35.

36.

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was indebted to a number of professional women” who worked “in early mass-market industries, particularly commercial theatre and film, but also interior design, advertising, and magazine production” (44). She suggests that critical discussion should move beyond “Wharton’s intentions and attitudes about . . . collaborations with women” to ways in which “their work advanced her commercial success” (44, 45). Amy Kaplan’s The Social Construction of American Realism offers a useful analysis of Wharton’s rejection of the sentimental and domestic tradition, her embrace of realism, and her efforts to become a professional (65–87). In his study of four male writers of the period, Wilson observes, “each of these writers became a symbol of the highly ‘masculine ideal’ of authorship which infused the public rhetoric of the Progressive era. It was as if each writer personally experienced the dismantling of ‘feminized’ Victorianism and the making of Progressive-era culture in his own literary psyche. The new cult of masculine writing momentarily overshadowed differences of region, social stratification, or politics” (xiv). Wharton displayed this same insistence on facing things in her personal life as well. In 1909, she wrote to Morton Fullerton, “Don’t think me sentimental or ‘petite fille’ . . . .. It’s just this—the situation is changed, & I, who like to walk up to things, recognize it, & am ready to accept it—only it must be nettement!” (Lewis, Letters 179). In “Edith Wharton and the ‘authoresses,’ ” Donna Campbell explores Wharton’s rejection of local color in two of her early short stories. Arguing that Wharton was writing within a period of change in which cultural tastes as defined by critics associated local color with inferior and feminine writing and naturalism as masculine and superior, Campbell examines Wharton’s attempts to create a realistic style that escaped the constraints of either tradition. Mary Marchand in “Cross Talk: Edith Wharton and the New England Women Regionalists,” explores the connections between local writing and contemporary concerns about perceived threats that such writing posed to high culture. Marchand argues that Wharton’s rejection of regionalism in Edith Frome was also a rejection of the threat to high art posed by “a politicized women’s culture” (388). Marchand concludes that Wharton’s novel reveals Wharton “asserting her class culture against the rising factions of the middle class . . . while, on the other hand, offering an alternative feminism that that seeks to subvert, not simply revaluate, conventional female identity” (390). Thus, Wharton’s efforts to support her class ideology and to define herself as a serious author can be seen as parts of a single agenda. Coultrap-McQuin notes that such male artists as Hawthorne and Irving were seen as “feminine” in their artistic temperament (15). She also argues that, in the nineteenth century, authors were generally placed in a female position by the paternalism of the publishers (38).



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37. Scribner’s investment in this ideology may help explain his extreme and almost personal disappointment when Wharton decided to leave Scribner’s for Appleton. Lewis argues that the trouble began when Scribner refused the serialization of Summer for Scribner’s Magazine in 1916. On the other hand, the publisher knew that Wharton’s books were generally lucrative. Wharton had often expressed disappointment about the advertising of her books in her correspondence with Brownell, the editor at Scribner’s. And although she claimed early in her career that she did not have to “live by the pen,” she began to rely on her writing income to support her large homes and beautiful gardens, her automobiles and extensive travels, and her charities. Appleton was able to offer her considerably larger amounts for her novels. Although Coultrap-McQuin and Wilson note that Wharton remained with the conservative publishing house for twenty years, it is apparent that Wharton was a woman of her times in her decision to obtain the best deal for her work that she could get. 38. Lewis reads much of Wharton’s correspondence with her publishers unsympathetically. For example, he suggests that her series of complaints bordered “on paranoia” (88). In his discussion of Wharton’s move from Scribner’s to Appleton, he notes that her concern about advertising for Ethan Frome was “reminiscent of the earlier days”— behavior already dismissed by Lewis as evidence of her ill health (311). He suggests that Wharton’s decision to have Appleton publish The Reef was motivated by a desire for more money, quoting from her letter to Scribner’s in which she claims they had made a “very high offer for it” (Lewis, Wharton 312). It also seems possible to view Wharton’s concern over the marketing of her books and her effort to take the best offer as evidence of her business acumen. In her biography of Edith Wharton, Hermione Lee suggests that there were three major problems—“each with arguments to be made on both sides” (422). Lee reports that Wharton was unhappy with the marketing of her books and her publishers were worried that she was working on three books at the time. But Lee believes that the biggest problem had to do with the serialization and publication of her books. If Wharton chose to serialize a novel in another magazine besides the one owned by the publisher, the publisher still insisted on the book. Lee says, “It was as much on the tension between serialization and book publication, as on sales, that the Wharton-Scribner relationship foundered” (423). 39. Louis Auchincloss in Edith Wharton cites the serialization of The Glimpses of the Moon in Pictorial Review as “the clue to the author’s lapse of style and taste” (169). He finds further evidence of Wharton’s loss of aesthetic standards in the “mawkish jacket” of the book edition published by Appleton (169). The implicit and unexamined correlation between a rise in public popularity and good business strategies and the decline in artistic value is commonly applied to women’s writing. See Jane Tompkin’s Sensational Designs.



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40. In a letter to Bernard Berenson in 1917, she says, “And, oh, how it does agreeably titillate the author’s vanity to have his pet phrases quoted to him!” She footnotes the masculine pronoun as follows: “You see I’m getting a little confused about my sex! A form of megalomania” (Lewis, Letters 398–99). 41. Elsa Nettels in “Language and Convention in Wharton’s Hieroglyphic World” located in her work Language and Gender in American Fiction explores Wharton’s interest in language, class, social codes, and gender. Nettels argues that language is powerful “in protecting the social order,” class divisions, and even generations (99). Even more importantly, however, language most often gives men power. She notes, “Female characters rarely objectify men in similes or metaphors but male characters habitually perceive women in the centuries-old figures” (116). For Nettels, though, both men and women are defined by social roles and “concepts of gender too powerful for individual characters of either sex to escape” (118). 42. Barbara Hochman in “The Rewards of Representation: Edith Wharton, Lily Bart and the Writer/Reader Interchange” explores the contrasting relationships to narrative between author and protagonist in The Awakening and The House of Mirth. Defining both texts as naturalistic, Hochman claims that naturalism enables Chopin and Wharton to seek “authorial status beyond the confines of ‘women’s’ writing” (212). As I do, Hochman believes that Wharton’s very success as a writer distinguishes her narrative authority from her protagonist’s failure to control narrative. 43. Wharton’s letters and autobiography reveal her appreciation of an ironic perspective on self and world. In 1921, she wrote to Gaillard Lapsley about a review by Edmund Wilson on The Age of Innocence: “He speaks words that are as balm to me, for it has dawned upon him that perhaps satire is my weapon” (Lewis, Letters 444). In A Backward Glance she writes “that it is . . . the ironic sense of the pity and mystery of things which have always created the closest tie between myself and my friends” (158). Chapter 

Competing Discourses and the Word in T HE H OUSE OF M IRTH

1. Both Cynthia Griffin Wolff in A Feast of Words and Candace Waid in Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld discuss Wharton’s treatment of women, art, and writing in her earliest short stories and novella, The Touchstone but as Waid notes The House of Mirth “represents Wharton’s first sustained interrogation of the relation between women and writing” (17). 2. For a complex analysis of Wharton’s critique of her society, see Travis Foster’s “Ascendant Obtuseness and Aesthetic Perception in The House of Mirth.” He argues that Percy Gryce (a character rarely discussed by



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critics) reveals a “doubled yet uncritical consciousness” that allows him to fantasize being seen by others as his own version of the “ideal self” (1). His lack of insight—a deliberate obtuseness—is set alongside Lily’s “permanent double consciousness” that “prevents her from seeing any version of herself that is not mediated through another” (2). (Later in this chapter I make the same point about Lily.) Foster concludes that Wharton’s novel “doubles the object of its inquiry” to interrogate Old New York Society as Wharton represents it and as it “(mis)represents itself” in a kind of willful obtuseness (6). 3. The House of Mirth has received a great deal of critical attention. James Tuttleton argues that the novel “is fundamentally the story of a failure of connections, of Lily Bart’s failure to get into relation with an order of cultural values superior to the goal of worldly pleasure pursued by fashionable haute monde” (124–25). Gary Lindberg demonstrates how “agents of social power” work to “hasten the errant individual back into his communal place” (46). He argues that Lily is unable to escape the constraints of her community and class because these forces have so shaped her perceptions that “Lily, for all her dissatisfied dreaming, had never really conceived the possibility of revolving around a different center” (54). Cynthia Griffin Wolff sees the novel as an “attack . . . [on] all those vanities of a society whose moral failures are captured in its devastating impact the lives of women” (Feast 110). She argues that Wharton’s decision to have Lily die “implies a judgment upon the elements of femininity that Lily embodies: they are not viable, not worth preserving” (Feast 136). Wolff returns to The House of Mirth twenty years later in “Lily Bart and the Drama of Femininity.” In the second essay, Wolff traces connections between Edwardian drama, the narrative structure of the novel, and Lily’s “performance” of the ideal woman. Wolff claims that Wharton’s goal is to critique the “gendered propaganda” of theater and life. I am convinced by Wolff’s argument and, in this study, explore the roles of stagecraft and female performance in The Glimpses of the Moon. Finally, there are a number of excellent critical texts that provide a good starting point for a study of the novel. One particularly useful work is “The House of Mirth”: A Novel of Admonition by Linda Wagner-Martin. This Twayne Reader’s Companion locates the novel within its historical context, surveys its reception, and offers some of the earliest discussion on Selden as a problematic narrator, the multilayered narrative structure, and the connections between Lily’s artistic desires and Wharton’s efforts to establish a writing career. See also a critical edition of The House of Mirth edited by Shari Benstock. The five critical essays cover many of the most central arguments about the novel including Wharton’s deconstruction of Selden as the traditional sentimental hero; themes of capitalism, consumption, and gender; female subjectivity; and the challenges of authorship by Wharton. Finally, Carol J. Singley’s Edith Wharton’s



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4.

5.

6.

7.

‘The House of Mirth’: A Casebook collects eleven of the most important essays published on the novel as well as two short excerpts from Wharton on writing and The House of Mirth. Waid’s treatment of The House of Mirth in her 1991 study is one of the first works to focus on Wharton’s use of Lily Bart as a representation of “the predicament of the woman artist” (17). But Waid explores in some detail Lily’s position as a double to Bertha Dorset—a dangerous “scripter of scenes in which Lily Bart is cast as a character” (23). While my analysis reaches some of the same conclusions about Lily’s place outside writing, I am also interested in exploring consequences within the text of Wharton’s effort to author a narrative about a woman’s ultimate failure to tell her story. David Holbrook in Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man sees Selden as failing Lily, although he suggests, “Each lets the other down, at moments of crisis—out of emotional impotence” (36). In his careful study of a series of Wharton novels, Holbrook sees a pattern of male figures who fail. He links these failed males to Wharton’s attachment to her father. He argues that the relationship may or may not have been incestuous but that certainly the closeness (even if largely in Wharton’s fantasies) convinced her that no man (who was not a father figure) would satisfy; the female protagonists are doomed to seek out men who let them down. In general, Holbrook reads the male protagonists more sympathetically and the female protagonists less sympathetically than I do. Mary Louise Pratt in Toward a Speech Act Theory defines literary works as “display texts” in which the speaker is “understood to be displaying an experience” in which speaker and reader “contemplate, explore, interpret, and evaluate, seeking pleasure and interpretive consensus” (143, 140). Claiming that literary works can be treated as “discourse acts” whose purpose is to represent the world, Pratt suggests that literary “utterances” can be analyzed similarly to natural narratives (143). Furthermore, she notes that certain kinds of literature distinguish between a “fictional speaker” and “its real-world speaker, the author” (173). According to Pratt, readers of such texts must “atten[d] to at least two utterances at once—the author’s display text and the fictional speaker’s discourse” (174). I am arguing that The House of Mirth should be examined at two discursive levels: Lawrence Selden’s narrative construction of Lily (and Lily’s response to his story of her) and Wharton’s discourse on Selden as author. Wharton writes to Dr. Morgan Dix, rector of Trinity Church in New York, in 1905, “I could not do anything if I did not think seriously of my trade; & the more I have considered it, the more it has seemed to me valuable and interesting only in so far as it is ‘a criticism of life’ . . . . No novel worth anything can be anything but a novel ‘with a purpose,’ & if anyone who cared for the moral issue did not see in my work that I care for it, I should have no one to blame but



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myself—or at least my inadequate means of rendering my effects” (Lewis, Letters 99). 8. In Criticism and Ideology, Terry Eagleton outlines a relationship between realism, history, ideology, and aesthetic form that provides a theoretical foundation for my analysis of Wharton’s text. Arguing that realism in a text is already governed by ideological representations of the real, Eagleton locates history in the production of a text. He says, “The ‘textual real’ is related to the historical real, not as an imaginary transposition of it, but as the product of certain signifying practices whose source and referent is, in the last instance history itself” (75). The “incoherence of the text” is meaningful in that it reveals “ideological categories . . . by the significant disarray into which it is thrown in its efforts to operate its materials in the interests of a ‘solution’ ” (86). For Eagleton, “the process of the text is the process of problem-solving” (87) and “it is therefore important to read the text, as it were, backwards—to examine the nature of its ‘problems’ in the light of its ‘solutions,’ ” even those solutions termed “acceptably unresolvable” (88). The relationship between the ideological and the aesthetic can best be figured as a kind of endless circuit “of an ‘aesthetic’ solution to ideological conflict producing in its turn an aesthetic problem which demands ideological resolution, and so on” (88). I am arguing that the structural disjunction in Wharton’s text reveals a formal “solution” to the “problem” of female narrative authority at the same time it represents the ideological conflict figured in a woman’s assertion that she writes serious literature. 9. The question of authorial agency remains a difficult issue for the contemporary critic. To state definitively either that Wharton deliberately devised a narrative structure full of gaps or that Wharton’s conflicted narrative structure unwittingly reveals competing ideologies regarding women’s writing is neither possible nor desirable. The most accurate assertion is probably that Wharton is doing both. Writers do make decisions about point of view, choice of language, development of character, and narrative structure at the same time they remain caught within their own cultural ideologies and personal interior drama. That Wharton herself was aware of the tensions within her narrative is indicated by a letter to her editor, William Crary Brownell, in 1905 shortly before the book was published. She says, “I was pleased with bits myself; but as I go over the proofs the whole thing strikes me as so loosely built; with so many dangling threads, & cul-de-sacs, & long dusty stretches, that I had reached the point of wondering how I had ever dared to try my hand at a long thing—So your seeing a certain amount of architecture in it rejoices me above everything—my theory of what the novel ought to be is so exorbitant, that I am always reminded of Daudet’s ‘Je reve d’un aigle, j’accouche d’un colibri’ ” (Letters 94–95).



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10. Wolfgang Iser in examining the relationship between text and reader notes that the “act of reading is . . . the transformation of the author’s signals” (3). Because the literary text is a response to, rather than a representation of, the world, Iser says that this lack of identification creates “a certain amount of indeterminacy” which must be “counterbalanced . . . in terms of the individual experience of the reader” (8,9). For Iser, multiple viewpoints in a text create further gaps that must be “bridged” by the reader (11). Since the author “outlines . . . the possible alternatives for the reader . . . [the] structure . . . involves the reader . . . and yet, at the same time, it controls the reader’s evaluation” (20). I am arguing that Wharton’s novel invites such reader participation. 11. Wharton’s interest in the process of reading and the role of the reader has interested a number of critics. Barbara Hochman in “The Awakening and The House of Mirth: Plotting Experience and Experiencing the Plot” notes the motif of reading in Wharton’s novel and concludes that Wharton’s belief in the fruitful interchange between her own readers and her text enables her to tell the full story. For a fascinating analysis of reading practices, Wharton’s mass audience of middle-class readers, and The House of Mirth, see Amy Blair’s “Misreading The House of Mirth.” 12. Maureen Howard in “The Bachelor and the Baby: The House of Mirth” also argues that Wharton uses the genres of the novel of manners and melodrama to disrupt reader expectations. Howard claims that Wharton’s evocation of contemporary notions of Darwinism reveals Lily’s subjection to a heritage and tradition that dooms her. Wharton’s refusal to apply the comforting ending associated with the novel of manners and melodrama underscores Lily’s lack of will. For Howard, Wharton, on the other hand, “willed” herself into “the role of professional writer” (146). 13. Linda Wagner-Martin’s, ‘The House of Mirth’: A Novel of Admonition reaches some of the same conclusions I do in this chapter. I am especially indebted to her reading of Selden as a problematic “hero,” her understanding of Wharton’s creation of a subtext that critiques the “fictions” of a happy marriage (54), and the role of the reader in the construction of alternative meaning. 14. In “Point of View and Narrative Technique in the Fiction of Edith Wharton,” Michael J. O’Neal makes a similar argument about the use of Selden as a “reflecting mind” (277). Offering a linguistic analysis of Selden’s voice, he demonstrates the way Wharton “underlines the extent to which a woman in her social position exists in the semantic position taken by an observer” (274). Although O’Neil recognizes an “amused” spectator role played by Selden and Wharton’s ironic view of Selden, he determines that Selden’s perspective is equated with the “author-narrator’s ideological perspective” (276). I argue that Selden does not speak for Wharton in any sense. Lori



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16.

17.

18.

19.

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Merish in “Engendering Naturalism: Narrative Form and Commodity Spectacle in U.S. Naturalist Fiction” is more critical of Selden’s seeing of Lily. For Merish, Lily as both consumer and commodity draws Selden’s “controlling gaze” (250). She concludes that Wharton finally “foregrounds and ironizes his will-to-possession” (260). In “The Conspicuous Wasting of Lily Bart,” Ruth Bernard Yeazell discusses Selden’s spectator status and Lily’s display of self throughout the novel. Applying Thorstein Veblen’s sociological study of the leisure class to the novel, Yeazell shows how “conspicuous waste” lies at the heart of Old New York society. She concludes that Wharton both satirizes this society and chronicles “the faltering pulse of resistance . . . to the bitter end” of her heroine (37). Carolyn L. Karcher in “Male Vision and Female Revision in James’ The Wings of the Dove and Wharton’s The House of Mirth” also recognizes the problems of Selden’s authorship in the opening and closing scenes in the novel: “The gap between his perceptions and those Wharton allows us through a direct view of Lily makes for a devastating indictment of the male observer-author’s myopia and sanctimoniousness” (237). In “The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton’s House of Mirth,” Elaine Showalter traces certain of these “male myths and fantasies” (139–40). Wolff has noted Lily’s function as a visual art object. Examining portrait and mural art of the period that for Wolff picture the woman “as an essentially ‘artistic’ creation” which idealizes the feminine, she suggests that “women like Lily . . . might be lured by the seductive confusion between representation and reality and come to view themselves as objects—to be admired, to be sustained in their beauty” (115). She also points to Selden’s dual role as “connoisseur” and critic. Nancy Von Rosk in “Spectacular Homes and Pastoral Theaters” argues that Lily’s display of the self is a kind of performance of gender using pastoral nature as stage. Von Rosk believes that Lily’s final decline should be set against the public urban spaces of the nineteenth century. Judith Fetterley has explored the economic implications of the objectification of Lily’s beauty in terms of her society and her relationship to Selden, noting that “the beautiful object, presumably so valuable, is in fact peculiarly valueless” (202). According to Fetterley, the paradox for Lily is that she cannot exist as “ornamental without a solid economic base; yet all of Lily’s attempts to acquire such a base are blocked . . . precisely because of her nature as beautiful object” (202). Emily Orlando in “Picturing Lily” in Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors believes that Lily does find “power in art” even though the art is constructed via her body as in the tableau vivant of the Reynolds portrait (85). Orlando concedes that Lily’s ultimate refusal to sell herself or her values leads to a powerless “final presentation as a still life” (105).



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20. Recent critics have extended the scope of Ammons’ argument. WaiChee Dimock in “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth” examines how “the power of the marketplace” invades all social interchange (783). She suggests that men and women suffer from this “commodification of social intercourse” (784). Dale Bauer in Feminist Dialogics argues that Lily has to “market herself as a piece of art in an acquisitive culture” (93). Wendy M. DuBow in “The Businesswoman in Edith Wharton” argues that Lily Bart and Undine Spragg in Custom of the Country are both aware that the business of a lady is the acquisition of a husband. Unlike Undine, however, Lily finally rejects this role and fails to achieve her goal. DuBow points out that eight years later, Wharton will create a protagonist who is a consummate businesswoman. Although Undine is seen as unlikeable by most readers, she emerges as an “admirable protagonist” in terms of her business acumen and success in looking after herself (17). Lois Tyson says in “Beyond Morality” that Lily’s participation in commodity culture through the marketing of herself as an oject d’art reveals her desire to transcend the “existential inwardness.” See also “Divided Selves and the Market Society: Politics and Psychology in The House of Mirth” by Robert Shulman. For a very recent perspective on commodity culture and consumerism, see “Shopping for Survival: Conspicuous Consumerism in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Ellen Glasgow’s The Wheel of Life” by Anne-Marie Evans. Arguing that Glasgow’s novel can be read as a direct response to Wharton’s text, Evans traces the ways in which Lily’s necessary shopping further traps her in her social role. On the other hand, Glasgow’s protagonist, “despite [her] blatant embrace of cathartic consumer practice” comes to a significantly more positive ending (14). Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors, edited by Gary Totten, contains a number of essays focusing on The House of Mirth in terms of material culture and turn-of- the-century changing practices of commercialization, commodification, and consumption. 21. Increasingly, critics are turning to the figure of Rosedale. In “The ‘Perfect Jew’ and The House of Mirth,” Irene C. Goldman-Price places Rosedale within the growing overt anti-Semitism of New York society at the end of the nineteenth century. She sees Rosedale as more fully developed than a stereotype but a character used by Wharton who can raise taboo topics such as the economic structures that undergird Lily’s society. David Herman in “Economies of Essence in The House of Mirth,” shows how Rosedale’s identity as Other is a culturally and socially constructed “essence” that reveals the “alreadycommodified character” of Old New York society (7). He, too, takes note that Lily and Rosedale share an understanding of the economic elements that support society even if Lily and her community refuse to discuss it. Meredith’s Goldsmith’s essay “The Year of the Rose”



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23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

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asserts that Rosedale is a “far more complex and contradictory representation” of the Jewish male than previously recognized by critics. Goldsmith notes that just as Lily is both drawn to and repelled by Rosedale, Wharton is deeply ambivalent about the encroaching presence of the Jewish community. Jennifer Shepherd in “Fashioning an Aesthetics of Consumption” in Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors shows how Wharton and Lily make use of commodity aesthetics to distinguish high class status; Rosedale is suspect, then, in terms of his race and class. Nevertheless, according to Shepherd, “His patient attempts at sartorial camouflage and assimilation” may “pay off” over time (154). She concludes that Rosedale’s potential for success might be seen as “Wharton . . . scripting the possibility of success for herself in the increasingly commercialized and competitive sphere of turn-of-the-century American letters” (157). Dimock says that Lily is “the only one who pays routinely and scrupulously” in her society. She argues that Lily’s protection of Bertha out of love for Selden represents “an act of wanton expenditure” (789). Showalter sees Rosedale as offering the “hope of continuity, rootedness, and relatedness that Lily finally comes to see as the central meaning of life” (“Death of a Lady” 142). See “Disowning ‘Personality’: Privacy and Subjectivity in The House of Mirth” by William E. Moddelmog for an analysis of the consequences of Lily’s inability to see herself apart from Selden’s perspective. According to Moddelmog, Lily’s failure to control her own story and the stories about her make her “true” self unknowable to Selden, Lily herself, and the readers of Wharton’s novel. Roslyn Dixon in “Reflecting Vision in The House of Mirth” makes the same criticism. She points out that while Selden represents “an ethical perspective on Lily’s expedient decision” (213), he does not “follow his own philosophy” (214). Carol Sapora Baker in “Female doubling: The other Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth” closely examines the doubled self of Wharton—art object vs. real woman, the outer self constructed by Wharton vs. the inner self called forth by Selden. As I do, Sapora extends the specific discussion about Lily’s inability to define an independent self to the wider context of Wharton and women writers at the end of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Benjamin D. Carson in “ ‘That Doubled Vision’ ” sees the doubled vision of Lily and Wharton as Wharton’s reflection of “the power” and the “failure” of gender ideology within Wharton’s culture. Diverse and contradictory critical responses to Lawrence Selden are nearly as prevalent as analyses of Lily Bart. In “ ‘Natural Magic’: Irony as a Unifying Strategy in The House of Mirth,” Carolyn Miller similarly sees the danger Selden’s perspective holds for Lily and Wharton’s



NOTES

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30. 31.

32.

33.

NOTES

ironic treatment of his “pose of superiority” but believes he is essentially a “decent man” (85). Joseph Coulombe in “Man or Mannequin” argues for an even more positive reading of this character. Noting that early reviewers of the novel debated whether Selden was admirable or culpably unsympathetic to Lily, Coulombe points out that critics in the first part of the last century found him “intriguingly complicated” but a “positive alternative” for Lily (3). But he finds most recent criticism to be nearly entirely negative. Within this context, Coulombe, argues that Selden, although not perfect, represents a new kind of man who does offer Lily a way out. He concludes that Wharton in Selden “redefines what it means to be a man in a competitive moneydriven society” (8). I think Wharton’s critique of Selden is pervasive and unambiguous. Hermione Lee also notes that “Lily liked to think of herself as a reader, and one of the things that attracts her to Selden is that he makes her a better one” (194). Dale Bauer notes, “The point of view Lily shares with Selden does not allow her freedom to speak” (122). In “The House of Mirth and Edith Wharton’s ‘Beyond!’ ” Janet Gabler-Hover and Kathleen Plate use theoretical perspectives drawn from Nietzsche and Julia Kristeva to demonstrate Lily’s subjection to Selden’s authority in terms of language. Shari Benstock in her essay “ ‘The word which made all clear’: The Silent Close of The House of Mirth” (located in Famous Last Words edited by Alison Booth) argues that Lily’s death and Wharton’s decision to remain silent about the “word” enabled her to “represent the tensions between personal desires and public codes of behavior” (245). Making a larger argument about Wharton’s belief in “the ethical referentiality of art,” Benstock says that Wharton structures her ending to demonstrate that there is “no moment for the word that Selden and Lily might whisper to each other . . . separate from the social customs” of their world (249, 245). Benstock claims that Wharton maintains her insistent critique of her society to the end of her career despite the pressure of readers and the need to sell her work to support herself. Mirth was one of a number of novels that was serialized before publication as a book. Showalter points out that Lily, the object of “male discourse” throughout the novel, “dies with the word of self-definition on her lips” (“Death of a Lady” 136, 137). Bauer in Female Dialogics suggests “there is no word . . . that could center her life” (126). For a radically differing reading of the “word,” see Donald Pizer’s “The Naturalism of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.” Pizer believes that Lily is fully aware of her subjection to the forces of capitalism and the patriarchy. Nevertheless, Pizer argues that Selden’s belief in the “word” signals a faith that transcends the destructive forces of naturalism.



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34. Dale Bauer argues that Selden finds Lily’s suicide “unreadable, because he cannot—or will not—interpret this gesture as his own failure” (Female Dialogics 127). I agree that Selden does not find himself guilty but would argue that Selden, nevertheless, makes an interpretation. 35. Tricia M. Farwell in Love and Death in Edith Wharton’s Fiction argues that Selden can attain ideal “love as a spiritual union” only after Lily has died (24). Farwell traces Wharton’s shifting views about love through a set of novels that bridge Wharton’s career. She believes that at the point of writing The House of Mirth, Wharton had conceived of ideal love “as a spiritual union beyond the physical” (10). By the time Wharton was working on The Reef, Farwell sees Wharton moving toward embracing the notion of physical love although the conflict between the physical and the spiritual, between life and death in love, remains. Farwell sees this tentative acceptance of the physical extended in Summer as “Wharton presents a picture of an uneasy acceptance of the physical love she found as an inferior love in earlier works” (106). Although Farwell ends her analysis with The Buccaneers, her analysis of The Glimpses of the Moon is more central to my study. Farwell concludes that Wharton creates a final balance between the physical and the spiritual forms of love—a love of equals—between the two protagonists. Farwell is clearly not reading any irony in The Glimpses of the Moon and seems less interested in Wharton’s critique of relationships between men and women in general. Chapter 

The Unravelling of Story in T HE R EEF

1. I do not accept here an inherent binary opposition between masculine voice and female silence. Post-structuralist feminist theory usefully argues that the very terms “man” and “woman”—like male and female voice—are discursive constructions. But it is important that Wharton, writing at the turn of century within a culture where notions of gender difference were under intense discussion, represents the struggle for control over discourse in oppositional gendered terms. Wharton’s choice reflects ideological tensions over gender roles and her continuing interest in women’s efforts to take up authorship. 2. Cynthia Griffin Wolff finds The Reef to be one of Wharton’s less successful novels because of its treatment of sexual passion. She believes that although the story introduces “the immensely convoluted, many-sided problem of sexuality,” it fails to resolve these “components” into a “coherently focused image” (Feast 219). In Wolff’s view, Wharton achieves this coherent vision only in The Age of Innocence. This chapter attempts to show how the “incoherence” of the narrative enables Wharton to critique more fully sexual inequality of gender roles and narrative power. 10.1057/9780230101548 - Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton, Dianne L. Chambers


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3. Kathy Hadley’s In the Interstices of the Tale: Edith Wharton’s Narrative Strategies also signals the importance of Wharton’s structuring of her novels to create a layered text. In her discussion of The Reef, Hadley takes note of George Darrow’s attempts to reduce Anna and Sophy to stereotypes, Sophy’s love for Darrow despite his ill treatment of her, and the dilemma facing Anna at the end as she struggles with her doubts about Darrow and Sophy and her desires to act on the passion she feels for Darrow. Although The Reef is the only novel we both treat, I share Hadley’s interest in Wharton’s narrative structures, Wharton’s use of irony, and the presence of underlying narratives that undermine the surface tale. Hadley’s book is one of the first works of criticism to call for a re-reading of Wharton’s novels in terms of the gaps or “interstices” through which an alternative story emerges. 4. R.W.B. Lewis calls it “possibly the most autobiographical work of fiction she ever wrote” (Lewis, Wharton 326). In one of the few essays published on this novel, Jean Gooder also claims “The Reef is charged with personal memories” (44). In “Unlocking Edith Wharton: An Introduction to The Reef,” Gooder traces connections between Wharton’s relationship to Fullerton and her protagonist’s dilemma in the narrative. See also James Tuttleton’s “Mocking Fate: Romantic Idealism in Edith Wharton’s The Reef.” Gloria Erlich in Edith Wharton’s Sexual Education finds traces of Edith Wharton’s experiences with Fullerton throughout the novel. She argues that Wharton visits her earlier sexual ignorance in The Reef in Anna Leath while defining Sophy as the “erotic principle” (111). She argues that in spite of “humiliation and anguish” over Fullerton, Wharton “took away the valuable prize of the passion experience” (115). Hermione Lee offers a particularly detailed account of Wharton’s relationship with Fullerton in her biography; she agrees with Lewis that The Reef is autobiographical. Lee argues, “The Reef was an extraordinarily candid expression of private feelings about her desires and sexual knowledge, immaculately disguised by the novel’s formal control and careful dramatic design” (354). 5. James W. Gargano also comments on Wharton’s “technical skill” in mediating the reader’s perception of Anna through Darrow in “Edith Wharton’s The Reef: The Genteel Woman’s Quest for Knowledge” (42). 6. For a reading that claims “to offer a . . . nuanced description of . . . [Darrow’s] motivations” see Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Shame by Lev Raphael. Raphael suggests that Darrow is motivated by humiliation (by Anna) rather than being insensitive in his treatment of Sophy. 7. Later the text will contrast this essentially narcissistic paradigm to Anna’s alienation from self. Anna also gains an identity through the other but the source and effect of what is seen are very different.



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Anna finds herself reflected in Darrow but her awareness is filtered through her sense of Darrow’s understanding of who she is. Anna sees herself as a woman viewed and thus the movement is triangular. The potential for narratively constructing the self with any measure of independence is clearly limited in this situation. One of the major arguments Wolff makes throughout A Feast of Words is the repressive effect of family and culture on Wharton as she grew up and assumed the role of lady. In her discussion of The Reef, Wolff calls attention to Wharton’s cultural and class ideology that said it “was not ‘nice’ for girls to have feelings” of either a sexual or “assertive” nature (207). The irony is that throughout the narrative, Darrow refuses to hear Anna as she struggles to define herself, to express her desire, to engage him in talk. See Jean Gooder in “Unlocking Edith Wharton.” Tuttleton also discusses the “geometric” precision of the novel that he believes is Wharton’s attempt at “harnessing . . . volatile sexual feelings” (“Mocking Fate” 460). Tuttleton takes the allusion to Greek tragedy further, noting that Darrow and Sophy see Oedipe in Paris. It seems clear that Wharton’s text is designed to echo Greek drama in important ways. Fraser Leath, for example, is described as a Sphinx. But more importantly, Anna’s drive to search out the “truth” and the tragic consequences of her discovery that nearly destroy her hint at a subtle allusion to the Oedipus tale. In a letter to Wharton, Henry James calls the novel a “Drama” and repeatedly compares it to the work of Racine— that most classical and Greek of French playwrights (239). Gooder also recognizes the heightened tensions in the narrative arguing that the “close organization of the novel compels attention to the emotional discrepancies at its heart—discrepancies between what seems and what is, between speech and silence, truth and lies, courage and fear” (48). Blake Nevius complains in Edith Wharton that limiting the point of view to these characters makes it difficult to discern Wharton’s specific attitude toward Darrow and her general moral perspective on the narrative. I find his reading of Darrow too sympathetic given the novel’s careful portrayal of Darrow’s self-absorption from the very beginning. The counterpoint between Darrow’s easy appropriation of people and things around him and Anna’s intense struggle to make sense of the world emerges as a useful strategy for critiquing Darrow and garnering sympathy for Anna. Thus Anna conceives of herself as something to be seen. Her identity is not constructed through language but through her imagined perception of Darrow’s seeing her “as she was” (124). The characterization of Sophy Viner has evoked contradictory critical responses. Wolff recognizes the narrative effectiveness of not showing Sophy’s character “directly” but later complains that Wharton



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15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

never reveals “the essence” of this character (Feast 210, 218). Carol Wershoven in The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton sees Sophy as a courageous and generous “free spirit” whose silent presence in the text is a “catalyst for Anna and Darrow to examine their stereotypical ways of thought” about women (98). Moira Maynard in “Moral Integrity in The Reef: Justice to Anna Leath” offers a more tempered view—noting that although this character represents the impulse to face life unflinchingly, she maintains a curious blindness toward Darrow’s shortcomings. Wershoven sees Sophy’s escape from the “artificial and simplistic categories” employed by Darrow and Anna as evidence of her emerging “unscathed” from her experience (107). I read Wharton’s text as much less positive about Sophy’s fate in the hands of Mrs. Murrett. For an intriguing discussion of Wharton’s use of the fairytale motif in the novel, see Elizabeth Ammons’s “Fairy-Tale Love and The Reef.” Critics read the final scene as both evidence for Anna’s probable rejection of Darrow in an effort to preserve her ideal of romantic love and her enforced acceptance of the harsh reality that love rarely saves one. Compare Tuttleton’s contention in “Mocking Fate” that Anna “holds to a romantic ideal of love and emotional and sexual fulfillment . . . unsullied by desecrating compromises” (471) to Ammons’ conclusion in “Fairy-Tale Love” that the conclusion reveals as “fantasy” the female dream of “deliverance” for both Anna and Sophy (628). The existence of so much critical debate underscores the effectiveness of Wharton’s strategic authorial silence. As James Gargano suggests, the narrative ends “as vision, not as explicit moral” (48). Gooder also believes that Anna will never free herself: “She cannot accept Darrow and she cannot bring herself to reject him” (51). The painful representation of Anna’s indecisiveness has been noted by Wharton’s readers from the outset as Gooder points out. Henry James wrote, “I am not sure her oscillations are not beyond our notation” (qtd in Millicent Bell, Edith Wharton and Henry James). Critics continue to draw attention to Anna’s frenzied state of mind. Maynard, for example, argues that although such indecision “exasperates readers,” it reveals Anna’s desperate efforts to find a “communal” justice that recognizes her needs as well as her responsibilities toward Effie and Owen (290). Margaret McDowell in Edith Wharton argues that the “psychic interplay between Darrow and Anna and Anna’s anguished introspection . . . in Book 5 account . . . for the richness of the novel” (40). Chapter 

Seduction and Language in S UMMER

1. Cynthia Griffin Wolff calls it “the most erotic fiction that Wharton ever published” in A Feast of Words (267). In the introduction of the



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Harper and Row edition of Summer, Wolff describes the novel as a Bildungsroman in which “sexual passion” is seen as “an essential component of that process” of growth into adulthood (x). Kathy Grafton in “Degradation and Forbidden Love in Edith Wharton’s Summer” also reads the novel as the story of Charity’s sexual maturation. Using Freudian theory, Grafton examines the ways in which Lucius Harney’s and Charity Royall’s sexual relationship both represents and finally moves beyond masculine degradation of the object of desire and female fascination with the forbidden. Grafton says that Charity’s marriage to lawyer Royall is evidence of “own[ing] her power” and the development of “ease with her sexuality” (366). Wharton was aware that she had written a novel about sex that challenged the prudishness of her public, complaining in a letter to Rutger Jewett about the rejection of The Old Maid by two mass market magazines. First recalling The Scarlet Letter and Adam Bede as “classics” that deal with such material, she goes on to ask, “And how about my own Summer?” (Lewis, Letters 443). In Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics, Dale Bauer places Wharton’s novel within contemporary cultural debates about eugenics, family studies, and reproductive policies (28). Noting Charity Royall’s Mountain heritage, she suggests that Charity’s decision to have her baby points to Wharton’s resistance to simplistic assumptions about degeneracy and racial purity being made in the early part of the twentieth century. “Charity’s deliberation in exercising her own sexuality” sets her apart from the “bad mothering” as defined by North Dormer (37). Charity chooses the person with whom she has sex, the man she will marry, and where she will live as a mother and, thus, defines herself. Jean Frantz Blackall in “Charity at the Window: Narrative Technique in Edith Wharton’s Summer” considers the challenge Wharton faces in giving narrative voice to the uneducated and wordless Charity. Backall concludes that Charity’s highly visual appreciation of the physical world and Wharton’s references to windows and mirrors provide a kind of frame for the novel that allows Wharton to speak through her protagonist. In “The Desolation of Charity Royall,” Linda Morante explores the “wasteland imagery” of “the culturally destitute New England hill town” (247). She sees it as a “central key to character analysis” (247). Wharton’s treatment of the rural New Englanders on the Mountain is complicated. She considered both Ethan Frome and Summer to be realistic portrayals of “life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England” (Backward 293). In her discussion of Summer in Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, Candace Waid also takes note of Wharton’s insistence on the “harsh and biting



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realism” of the Berkshire novels (97). But the loaded imagery suggests less an accurate representation of poverty and barren lives and more a symbolic picturing of anarchy. The early references to an animal-like existence and the later vivid scenes of a thoroughly degraded life portray a nightmare world in which social bonds simply do not exist. In defining the Mountain people as primitive and animalistic, Wharton draws on an evolutionary model. In a letter to Sara Norton, Wharton declares that Darwin “was one of the formative influences of my youth” (Lewis, Letters 136). But the narrative also hints that civilized life in the town could become equally barbaric. Later in the novel, Charity will flee to the Mountain hoping to escape “the harsh code of the village” that makes scapegoats of those individuals who fail to conform (238). The feral quality of the doctor/abortionist in Nettleton with the false teeth and “murderous smile” suggests a primitive lawlessness at the heart of civilization. Furthermore, two years later, Wharton will describe her own society as a community of savages. The Age of Innocence is an anthropological study of New York society in which civilized conventions are imaged as primitive ritual. The Darwinian sociological analysis of her own community in the subsequent novel thus becomes a kind of extension of Summer. Clearly, for Wharton, the darkly primitive, which both fascinates and horrifies, functions most effectively as a metaphor for powerful emotions and drives that exist inside and outside the human community. Given Wharton’s nuanced treatment of lawlessness and social bonds, it is not surprising that she and Joseph Conrad admired each other’s work. Conrad especially liked Summer (Lewis, Wharton 398). Stuart Hutchinson in “Unpacking Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome and Summer,” dismisses Wharton’s treatment of Charity, lawyer Royall, and the mountain community as written in a “spirit of reductiveness” in Wharton (232). Although I agree that Wharton’s insistence on the realism of characters is not entirely valid, I remain convinced that the metaphoric power of the mountain people is deliberate and significant. In “Ethan Frome and Charity Royall: Edith Wharton’s Noble Savages,” Pascha Anrece Stevenson argues that Charity is Wharton’s representation of Rousseau’s noble savage. Although Stevenson sees Wharton “as a literary anthropologist” with an elitist perspective, she acknowledges the complicated and sympathetic portrayal of Charity in the light of her subjection to Lucius Harney and the “civilized” world he represents. She concludes that “civilization is no more redeemed” than the “primitive” New Englanders (427). 6. In “The Unmastered Streak: Feminist Themes in Wharton’s Summer,” John W. Crowley argues that Charity’s sexuality as “defined by men” makes her a kind of “trophy to be captured” (90) by Harney and a “form of property” to be “defend[ed] . . . from other men” by Royall (89). I find Crowley’s pessimistic reading of Charity’s entrapment by men more convincing than Wolff’s efforts to read the narrative



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as a positive example of Charity’s growth into adult experiences and roles. Abby Werlock in “Whitman, Wharton, and the Sexuality in Summer” also claims that Wharton treats sexual activity as something only men can control. Tracing connections between the language in Wharton’s novel and Walt Whitman’s poetry, Werlock sees Summer as “a brilliant prose response to the masculine confidence and sexuality found in Leaves of Grass” (261). In the end, Charity is “aligned with all the powerless women in the novel” (250). While Anna thinks a great deal about passion and real life, Wharton’s portrayal of Anna’s desire and sexual encounters with Darrow figure largely within the gaps of the narrative. Like romantic films of the 1930s and the 1940s, the text “fades out” on the first kiss, ensuring that the scene of romantic rapture is only imagined. Waid also calls attention to the metaphoric association between the library and death. She sees Charity’s flight as a rejection of the “underworld” (123). I agree with Waid that Charity’s “inability to express . . . feelings in spoken or written words . . . is perhaps the most poignant aspect of the novel” (124). In Edith Wharton, Margaret McDowell explores the negative consequences of Charity’s connection to nature that comes to represent “a fatality far stronger than she as a limited individual can cope with” (78). Some critics have also constructed arguments based on Charity’s inability to use language to define herself. Rhonda Skillern in “Becoming a ‘Good’ Girl: Law, Language, and Ritual in Edith Wharton’s Summer” argues that Charity’s “resistance to the symbolic order” throughout the novel reveals her desire to inscribe female experience outside the patriarchy (119). Ultimately, she fails because “she has found no way to adequately represent it” (132). Susan L. Hall in “The Death of Love: Sexuality, Secrets, and Settings in Wharton’s Summer” also points out that Wharton’s representation of the failed love affair rests, at least in part, on “the difficulty of communication in language” (16). Here Wharton’s use of the animal metaphor is positive. It should also be noted that Charity finds this place on the mountainside. The vitality and fecundity of Charity’s refuge contrasts with the scene of death and sterility that takes place later in the novel on the mountaintop. The text seems to establish a middle ground (literally on the side of the mountain) where the physical can be given space without running amok, but no one lives here. Charity is treated as a sort of book by Harney. He believes both she and the volumes need proper ventilation and sunlight. Indeed, Harney spends much of the novel “reading” Charity. The detailed description sets up a kind of physical depth of field in which multiple layers of narrative intersect. The triangular mediation of the female self through masculine narrative is enacted in Wharton’s



NOTES

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17.

18.

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staging of the scene. Through language, the text achieves an almost cinematic style that spotlights a particular scene and gives it a physical dimension in order to “talk” about discourse. By calling attention to what is happening not through direct authorial comment but by the details of staging, Wharton’s narrative reveals a potentially subversive strategy that enables the author to critique her own representation. As author, Wharton trains her sight on the masculine gaze and the mediation of the female (self) identity through the male gaze. However, the multiple looks are finally controlled by the author who is, in fact, female. Wharton will exploit this “cinematic” style even more directly in The Glimpses of the Moon. Lacan defines the origin of language in terms of desire, the endlessly regressive effort to articulate one’s desire, to substitute the word for the absence of what the heart most desires. In an inversion of Lacan’s psychic system, the object of this character’s desire is not material but linguistic. Critical readings of Royall are divided about whether Royall should be seen as a complete villain or as an individual whose failings are somewhat mitigated in the novel. The difficulty is not lessened by Wharton’s ambiguous comment in a letter to Bernard Berenson: “I’m so particularly glad you like old man Royall. Of course, he’s the book” (Lewis, Letters 398). For two discussions of Royall’s central but dual position in the novel, see “Summer: The Double Sense of Wharton’s Title” by Christine Rose and “The Divided Conflict of Edith Wharton’s Summer” by Carol Wershoven. While Waid also recognizes Charity’s “inability to compose writing: to turn flesh, feeling and experience into words or letters,” she suggests that Charity’s motherhood is not entirely tragic (124). Waid argues, “Unlike Wharton, Charity does not compose the mother by writing about her; she overcomes the threats of the murderous mother, the animal mother, and the predatory father by embodying the mother” (125). But as Waid herself goes on to say, although Wharton’s writing may be a way of psychologically containing her own mother’s power, she denies this avenue to Charity. Although Wharton provides her protagonist “with a place on earth as a mother; . . . she does not make a place for her as a poet” (125). Although Waid finds some salvation in Charity’s marriage, I argue that Charity’s powerlessness as a “poet” and her consequent assumption of motherhood and marriage to a man she does not love make her a thoroughly tragic figure. For an intriguing analysis of Summer as a reenactment of the DemeterPersephone myth that records “the demise of the nineteenth century woman’s community” (75) as a failed mother-daughter connection, see Josephine Donovan’s After the Fall. The conflict between Harney’s story and Charity’s actual experience points to an apparent contradiction in Wharton’s text as well. Early in



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the narrative, Wharton appears to accord Charity a kind of unvoiced poetic nobility in her responsiveness to her nature retreat on the mountainside. In many ways, the narrative works to make the reader unsympathetic to the narrowness and meagerness of life in North Dormer. But even if the text reveals Wharton’s own desire for a place that escapes the civilized and deadening constraints of community, it also represents Wharton’s inability to figure such a space. If social institutions and codes of behavior represent a sort of barbarism in their treatment of those individuals who do not conform, they also limit the anarchy and primitiveness of life. It is difficult not to read the contradictory impulses within the narrative as Wharton’s working through her own dilemma regarding lawlessness, the desire of the individual, impatience with the constrictions of society, and a valuing of responsibility to the community. Although Wharton’s affair with Fullerton by her own account liberated a self she had never known existed, her narrative rendering of the experience in Summer suggests that escape from social convention can be only temporary. For an analysis of the novel in the light of Wharton’s “real world problems,” see “Cold Ethan and ‘Hot Ethan’ ” by Cynthia Griffin Wolff (231). 19. Wharton reinforces Charity’s position as childlike—“she followed Mr. Royall passively as a tired child” (274). Later he feeds her like a child—pouring her coffee and putting the bread on her plate (269). In Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Ammons also points to the child imagery, arguing that marriage to Royall “dooms Charity Royall to perpetual daughterhood—a fate that Wharton surrounds with images of spiritual paralysis and death” (141). See also Crowley’s essay that finds “childish dependency” at the core of Charity’s relationships with both Harney and Royall (92). 20. Perhaps more than any other Wharton novel, Summer has elicited radically differing readings. Ammons and Wolff stake out the extremes in terms of reading Charity’s marriage to lawyer Royall. Wolff argues that the conclusion is “perhaps, the beginning of love” (219) and that the “novel . . . is a hymn to generativity and marriage” (Feast 293). Ammons believes the narrative provides “Wharton’s bluntest criticism of the patriarchal sexual economy” (133). She argues, “The final union between Charity and Royall is not merely depressing; it is sick” (Argument 133). See also “Life’s Empty Pack: Notes toward a Literary Daughteronomy” by Sandra Gilbert, “ ‘Seduced and Abandoned’: Convention and Reality in Edith Wharton’s Summer” by Nancy Walker, “Edith Wharton’s Summer and ‘Woman’s Fiction’ ” by Barbara White, and Verging on the Abyss by Mary Papke (131–34). Barbara Comins in “ ‘Pecking at the Host’: Transgressive Wharton” moves beyond the issue of incest to trace Wharton’s use of allegorical references to biblical stories and religion—allegory that undermines rather than points to a clear moral



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stance. She believes that Wharton’s transgressions reveal “Wharton’s problematic relationship to religion” (20). Erlich in Edith Wharton’s Sexual Education believes that the marriage represents Charity’s “final defeat in her struggle for autonomy” (126). She attributes agency to Charity even at the end when she chooses the “bizarre solution” of marriage over other options such as “moving out of North Dormer” (130, 129–130). Hermione Lee argues “that the ending can be read as . . . a sinister immolation of youth,” or a “realist adjustment on both sides, where Royall becomes grave and kindly . . . and Charity feels reassured and secure” (512). She concludes, “Wharton’s readers cannot agree upon the ending, because the book pulls against itself” (513) 21. Ammons points out that the connection in Charity’s mind “has its depressing logic” since “her spirit, in effect, dies” (138). 22. Again critical response is divided. Waid sees Royall as “the protective ‘father’ who insists on sheltering the ‘fatherless’ children” (114). In “Cold Ethan and ‘Hot Ethan,’ ” Wolff notes “a disquieting element of sublimated incestuous affection” but believes that the “ambiguities” point to a “final insight” in which “love must have a social component to be viable—must contain both dependency and desire” (243, 244). Ammons argues that “the incestuous nature of patriarchal marriage is the . . . subject of Summer” (Argument 133). William E. Hummel in “My ‘Dull-witted Enemy’: Symbolic Violence and Abject Maleness in Edith Wharton’s Summer” claims that Royall exerts symbolic violence over Charity while “present[ing] himself as a crumbling icon of American manhood” (224 ). Veronica Makowsky and Lynn Z. Bloom see Royall much more positively in “Edith Wharton’s Tentative Embrace of Charity.” Noting Wharton’s “defense against her discomfort at class and artistic exploitation” through her critique of Harney, they claim that Royall emerges as the one character truly capable of charity in the novel (224). Julie Olin-Ammentorp in Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War reads Royall, Charity’s final predicament, and the novel’s ending in a largely positive way. Placing the writing of the novel in the middle of World War I, Olin-Ammentorp suggests that writing Summer provided an escape for Wharton and a possible respite for the reader from the grim horrors of the war. She finds much evidence of the effects of the war on Wharton as she was writing her novel. She points out the refugee-like status of the Mountain folk and the astonishingly gruesome description of Charity’s mother’s death. Nevertheless, Olin-Ammentorp argues that “the menaces threatening Charity are relatively minor” and at least “manageable” compared to the horrors of war (63, 64). She concludes that Charity’s marriage reveals the presence of love, however “bittersweet [its] tone” (65). Although I read the novel and its ending in a radically differing way, Olin-Ammentorp’s argument is persuasive within the context of Wharton’s wartime writings.



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Chapter  Gender and Performance in T HE G L I MPSES OF THE M OON 1. Appleton paid Wharton $45,000 that year in serialization fees and royalties (Lewis, Wharton 444). The story also attracted the interest of the developing film industry; Paramount purchased the film rights for $15,000 (Benstock 370). The silent film, starring Bebe Daniels, John Powell, Charles Gerrard, and Nita Naldi and directed by Allan Dwan, was released in 1923. 2. For a summary of reviews of Wharton’s novels by her contemporaries, see Edith Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography by Kristin O. Lauer and Margaret P. Murray. 3. Critics have routinely categorized The Glimpses of the Moon as an inferior novel. Cynthia Griffin Wolff argues in A Feast of Words that “Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are almost caricatures of Selden and Lily Bart” and that Wharton had apparently “begun . . . to borrow from her own earlier work” (346). Although Gary Lindberg in Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners notes that it was written at the same time as The Age of Innocence, he believes it “bears surprisingly little stylistic resemblance” (142) and represents one of the “later novels of manners” that “are simply not good books” (11). Noting a similarly unsatisfying parallel to The House of Mirth, Geoffrey Walton too calls it “a careless and ill-written first study of the socially anarchic twenties” (147). Elizabeth Ammons, who provides the most extensive discussion, finds it “stale” and an indication of Wharton’s “treading water on the old issues of economics and social pressure” (Argument 158). While I recognize that The Glimpses of the Moon is a very different sort of novel from The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence, difference does not necessarily imply inferiority. I am suggesting that the text of the 1922 novel calls attention to itself in ways that demand another set of reading conventions to address parody of a genre rather than a “straightforward” satire of a society. Peter Rabbinowitz argues in Before Reading that an interpretation should yield the “best” book possible. Paying closer attention to the parodic elements and taking into account Wharton’s well-documented contempt for the sentimental will yield an entirely different reading of the narrative as I have suggested. 4. In The Age of Innocence, published just two years earlier, Edith Wharton investigated masculine narratives about women not so much in terms of their oppressive and constraining effects but more in terms of how such narratives fail to contain women. Here she represented men’s efforts to “story” women as impotent fantasies. Her



23. Waid reads the pin “as a talisman, as a text, as a sign that points to an author” (118). She suggests that the pin “is a symbol that tells its own story” (116) and ultimately becomes a “sign of protected motherhood” (117).

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successive reworkings of the “problem” of female narrative achieved partial resolution in The Age of Innocence; her narrative constructed a fiction that in some ways appeared to free its author by positing the failure of masculine story. Although Newland Archer wants to escape the “realities” of language that would define Ellen Olenska as “mistress” if she is not “wife” (289), Ellen insists that such thinking is only fantasy. Archer tells her, “I want—I want somehow to get away with you into world where words like that—categories like that— won’t exist” (290). But Ellen replies, “Oh, my dear—where is that country?” (290). Later in the novel, having married May, raised his children, and devoted his life to civic duties, Archer has transformed Ellen into story: “When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed” (347). At the end of the novel, Archer again chooses his story over “real life” (361). Deciding that his imagined view of the woman he has not seen in nearly thirty years “is more real to me than if I went up” to her apartment and fearing that the actual person would disrupt that gentle dream, “Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel” (361). The shift in The Glimpses of the Moon is one of emphasis. Lawrence Selden constructs stories about Lily Bart that constrain and destroy her. Part of Royall’s power over discourse stems from his role as a speaker for the town’s conventional morality about young women, marriage, and motherhood. Conversely, Nick Lansing continues to construct his own narratives about Susy— which Susy accepts as Lily Bart did—but The Glimpses of the Moon explores more fully how these narratives derive from broader cultural stories to which both genders are subject. 5. A radically alternative reading to my argument can be found in “Marriage in The Glimpses of the Moon” by Harriet Gold. Gold sees Nick as a “positive hero” and argues that the novel celebrates marriage and motherhood (13). I find Wharton’s novel to be much more ironic in its treatment of women and men. 6. Although the epistolary novel and the feminized sentimental novel represent disparate traditions, the history of the novel’s development suggests a link going back at least to the eighteenth century in British literature. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa Harlowe (1748), often cited as paradigms of the epistolary narrative, both track the sentimentalized amatory adventures of a female protagonist. In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt notes “that Richardson was using an essentially feminine, and from a literary point of view, amateur tradition of letter-writing” (193–94). Suzanne Clark in Sentimental Modernism: Woman Writers and the Revolution of the Word discusses at some length women’s “privileged (or fatal) relationship with the sentimental” (2). She argues that modernism worked to construct the sentimental tradition as the source of bad



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writing that lacked the objectivity, rationality, complexity, and freshness of what we now call high modernism. She also shows how sentimental literature has come to be linked with mass culture and the gendered writing of women. For women writers in the twentieth century, this literary tradition “exists as an unwanted discourse” (37). Clark’s helpful delineation of the powerful sentimental tradition provides a useful discussion of the conventions with which Wharton and her readers were familiar. Extending Clark’s ideas to the writing and reception of Wharton’s novel would suggest that Wharton’s mass culture readers would have found the genre entertaining and validating. Wharton’s critics would be likely to dismiss the novel because of its sentimentalism. Wharton herself consistently rejected the conventions of sentimentality in American culture and writing. In A Backward Glance, Wharton asserts, “It is always a necessity to me that the note of inevitableness should be sounded at the very opening of my tale and that my characters should go forward to their ineluctable doom like the ‘murdered man’ in ‘The Pot of Basil’ ” (204). Although Wharton is speaking here of the development of her characters, her assertion might apply equally well to her attitude toward these characters. Certainly as an author who carefully designed her narratives, Wharton valued a consistent tone. Laura K. Johnson in “Edith Wharton and the Fiction of Marital Unity” notes the economic conditions that underpin marriage in both The House of Mirth and The Glimpses of the Moon. Developing an argument around the legal issues of marital unity and the marital contract, Johnson asserts that Wharton “expose[s] the legal fictions of contract and unity as fictions” (967). Neither Lily nor Susy succeed in creating a marital union that escapes the financial and contractual aspects of marriage. Again the focus on female virtue connects the epistolary and the sentimental narrative. Both Clarissa and Pamela centered on the efforts of a female protagonist to sustain her virtue under relentless attack by a male adversary. Of course, Wharton’s narrative complicates and ironizes elements of the gendered battle over moral virtue, since it is Susy who, at least in Nick’s eyes, threatens the moral order and Nick who upholds the higher standard. Furthermore the struggle is over not only sexual behavior but the management of money. Wharton’s language underscores the finances of romance in this scene. Strefford describes his marriage proposal as an “offer . . . from an elderly peer of independent means” (162). Susy cannot help thinking of how much she would “enjoy paying . . . back” her crowd for their “condescending kindnesses . . . their Christmas cheques” (163). Many critics have dismissed most of the novels after The Age of Innocence as not up to her earlier standard of writing. R.W.B. Lewis, among others, argues that one reason for the artistic decline of her later novels was her increased writing for high-paying mass market



NOTES

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13. 14.

15.

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magazines that demanded not “the best fiction . . . of which she was capable, but only the best fiction acceptable to popular magazine editors and tolerable to magazine readers.” Lewis suggests that Wharton “never consciously ‘wrote down,’ but she drove herself to write too fast and too much, because of financial need” (Lewis, Wharton 447). But as Jane Tompkins notes in Sensational Designs, academic readers have been too ready to denigrate a work precisely because it was popular. I would argue that this predisposition to see the popular as less artistic has led readers to ignore the merit of a novel such as The Glimpses of the Moon. Very early in her career, Wharton recognized the usefulness of the dramatic in fiction. In 1906, she wrote Robert Grant about the collaborative adaptation of The House of Mirth she was doing with Clyde Fitch: “The play is great fun, & I am learning so much that is useful in my own trade that, even if it fails, I shall not regret the work” (Lewis, Letters 103). Even later, Wharton considered her work especially appropriate for adaptation to the stage, writing in 1921 to Minnie Jones that she was “particularly pleased” about a proposed dramatization of The Age of Innocence (Lewis, Letters 439). In the same letter, she muses, “How odd that no one should know there is a play in ‘The Reef’ all ready to be pulled out!” (440) Hermione Lee notes that “Wharton was experimenting as a dramatist as well as a novelist in the early 1900s” (181). She believes that Wharton’s “fascination with the theatre would stay with her, and profoundly affected the way she would write her fiction” (181). Note that Nick can escape the public gaze if he marries Coral, but Susy must embrace her role as object on view to marry Strefford. For an analysis of the continuing limitations on young women’s roles even in the modern age, see “ ‘Too Young for the Part’: Narrative Closure and Feminine Evolution in Wharton’s ‘20s Fiction” by Melanie V. Dawson. Dawson sees a pattern in Wharton’s later novels that signals Wharton’s concern over the failure of young men and women to break free of the traditional cultural roles assigned to women. She argues that these novels are not evidence of Wharton writing past her prime but Wharton exploring “a generation locked in a troubling developmental inertia” (113). She argues that “young women reproduce the race ideologically as well as biologically” (113). Thus the young female protagonists of Wharton’s later novels are forced to sacrifice themselves “by adopting retrograde social roles, which appear startling out of sync with their otherwise modern lives” (91). My argument focuses on the ways Susy Lansing is forced to accept these roles. The portrait of Susy as ideal mother recalls the earlier scene with Strefford at the exhibition of eighteenth-century paintings in Paris. Susy’s rejection of Strefford means she will never again stand beneath the portrait of Strefford’s great-grandmother in “its great carved



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golden frame” sitting “like a throne above the other pictures.” Susy is quite aware that Strefford had been demonstrating that Susy “could wear the same name as his pictured ancestress” (227). For Strefford and Nick, Susy is a work of art; the transformation from an eighteenth-century wealthy dowager to a medieval Madonna visually represents Susy’s moral achievement but neither representation is controlled by Susy. For an interesting essay linking the theme of home—what Nick and Susy truly need—to the novel’s imaging of the Virgin and Child in this scene and the motif of the moon throughout the narrative, see “The Glimpses of the Moon and Tiepolo’s Fresco, The Transportation of the Holy House” by Adeline Tinter. She notes that a ceiling fresco at the Vaderlyn Palazzo seen by Nick early in the novel is actually the Tiepolo fresco. Tintner argues the fresco imagery of the Virgin with her Child sitting on the top of her house being transported by angels against the moonlight ties together some of the most important themes in the novel. The explanation of the reference is extremely useful although I see Wharton’s allusion as essentially ironic. 16. Carol Wershoven in The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton, although no more enamored of The Glimpses of the Moon than most critics, at least admits that “it is dangerous to group all the postwar novels together and to attribute any inferiority in them to one general cause” (110). Candace Waid says that The Children (1924) is one of her best works. A Mother’s Recompense (1925) has also been given more attention in recent scholarship. Nevius Blake admits that the unfinished Buccaneers, published posthumously in 1938, “indicates” that Wharton could “regain control of her style” even in her last work (237). I believe taking a fresh look at The Glimpses of the Moon, as a text with its own style and purpose, may demonstrate that Wharton is fully in control of this text as well. 17. The story clearly “worked” for Wharton’s audience. Although Margaret McDowell calls it “disappointing and dull,” Wharton’s readers did not find it so (17). McDowell admits it became a bestseller in both America and England. 18. In her intriguing analysis “Mothers and Flappers,” Elizabeth Ammons examines Wharton’s postwar perspective on motherhood. Ammons finds a major shift—moving “from a liberal to a conservative position”—in Wharton’s attitude about mothers and female freedom after the war (Argument 160). Ammons says that this group of novels “for the first time” advocates “marriage, the home, and motherhood” as a solution to the dilemma of the “untrained leisure-class young woman” (Argument 162, 161). While it is certainly true that Wharton must have been shaken by the cataclysmic events and horrors of World War I, I am not sure this is reason enough to read all of the subsequent novels as testaments to Wharton’s reactionary response toward all women. Furthermore it is impossible to know



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exactly how Wharton felt about not being a mother as she grew older. As Wolff notes, her close relationship with Elsinia Tyler and her family during the war gave her a chance to get to know “the vagaries and delights of little children,” especially the two-year-old William Tyler (348). And yet Percy Lubbock quotes Daisy Chandler as writing that Wharton was “really frightened in the presence of children” and “knew nothing of the natural pleasure our children give us” (148). Although Ammons also notes the ambivalence, she imagines “it . . . very probable that there were times she wished she had a child” (168). Nevertheless, we simply cannot know and, in constructing a view of Wharton as aging and childless, we run the risk of imposing our own version of the ideology about the saving virtues of motherhood on our reading of the text. 19. In Verging on the Abyss, Mary E. Papke examines the novel as an “entrepreneur tale” that combines the business motif of The Custom of the Country with the “pathos” of The House of Mirth (143). She reads the novel as finally about “Susy and woman’s lot”—“necessary compromises and dulled sensibilities, a life made harder precisely because she is a poor woman, and thus dependent on the ‘tribe,’ . . . for her sustenance” (145). Papke too finds the final scene an implicit critique of gender differences that have been essentialized by Wharton’s culture. Focusing on Nick’s view of “the two ways of loving,” she finds that “the fundamental differences between true women and true men are maintained” (146).



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Springer, Marlene. Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1976. Stein, Allen F. After the Vows Were Spoken: Marriage in American Literary Realism. Columbus: Ohio State P, 1984. Stevenson, Pascha Antrece. “Ethan Frome and Charity Royall: Edith Wharton’s Noble Savages.” Women’s Studies 32 (2003): 411–29. Tinter, Adeline R. “The Glimpses of the Moon and Tiepolo’s Fresco, The Transportation of the Holy House.” Edith Wharton Review 14.1 (Spring1997): 22–27. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Totten, Gary. Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2007. Tuttleton, James W. “Mocking Fate: Romantic Idealism in Edith Wharton’s The Reef.” Studies in the Novel 19 (1987): 459–74. ———. The Novel of Manners. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1972. Tyson, Lois. “Beyond Morality: Lily Bart, Lawrence Selden and the Aesthetic Commodity in The House of Mirth.” Edith Wharton Review 9.2 (Fall 1992): 3–10. Vita-Finzi. Penelope. Edith Wharton and the Art of Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990. Von Rosk, Nancy. “Spectacular Homes and Pastoral Theaters: Gender, Urbanity and Domesticity in The House of Mirth.” Studies in the Novel 33.3 (2001): 322–50. Wagner-Martin. The House of Mirth: A Novel of Admonition. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990. ———. ed. The Portable Edith Wharton New York: Penguin, 2003. Waid, Candace. Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991. Walker, Nancy A. “ ‘Seduced and Abandoned’: Convention and Reality in Edith Wharton’s Summer.” Studies in American Fiction 11(1983): 107–14. Walton, Geoffrey. Edith Wharton: A Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1982. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957. Weed, Elizabeth, ed. Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge, 1989. Wegner, Frederick. “Form, ‘Selection,’ and Ideology in Edith Wharton’s Antimodernist Aesthetic.” A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton. Ed. Clare Colquitt, Susan Goodman, and Candace Waid. Newark: University of Delaware P, 1999. Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: Ohio UP, 1976. Werlock, Abby H. “Whitman, Wharton, and the Sexuality in Summer.” Speaking the Other Self. Ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1997.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wershoven, Carol. “The Divided Conflict of Edith Wharton’s Summer.” Colby Library Quarterly 21 (1985): 5–10. ———. The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1982. Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. 1920. New York: Scribner’s, 1970. ———. A Backward Glance. 1934. Scribner’s, 1985. ———. French Ways and Their Meanings. New York: Appleton, 1922. ———. The Glimpses of the Moon. New York: Appleton, 1922. ———. The House of Mirth. 1905. New York: Penguin, 1985. ———. The Reef. 1912. New York: Scribner’s, 1965. ———. Summer. 1917. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. ———. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Scribner’s, 1925. White, Barbara A. “Edith Wharton’s Summer and ‘Women’s Fiction.’ ” Essays in Literature 11 (1984): 223–35. Williams, Deborah Lindsay. Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the Politics of Female Authorship. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Wilson, Christopher. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. “Cold Ethan and ‘Hot Ethan.’ ” College Literature 14 (1987): 230–45. ———. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. ———. “Lily Bart and the Drama of Femininity.” American Literary History 6.1 (1994): 71–87. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, 1929. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. “The Conspicuous Wasting of Lily Bart.” New Essays on The House of Mirth. Ed. Deborah Esch. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001.



206

Age of Innocence, 1, 2, 5, 8, 36, 45, 125, 146, 166–7 (n.18) Ammons, Elizabeth, 2, 27, 28, 57, 63, 168 (n. 25), 169 (n. 30), 195–6 (n. 18) Backward Glance, 3, 6, 8, 9, 25, 31, 33, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42, 47 Benstock, Shari, 2, 167 (n. 20), 180 (n. 32) Berenson, Bernard, 40, 71, 172 (n. 40) Berry, Walter, 37,40 Blake, Nevius, 125 Bourget, Paul, 40 Cather, Willa, 31, 39 Chandler, Daisy, 38, 47 Children, The, 7 Chopin, Kate, 166 (n. 15) Cixous, Helene, 18–19, 159 (n. 6) Clark, Suzanne, 41, 192–3 (n. 6) class, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 26, 49, 51, 52, 67, 87, 98–9, 100–1, 102–3, 104, 105, 108–9, 117–18, 140, 170 (n.35) Cone, Helen Gray, 30, 165 (n. 14) Coultrap, McQuin, 29–30, 44, 165 (n. 12), 170 (n. 36) Custom of the Country, The, 70 Decoration of Houses, 4, 44 De Lauretis, Teresa, 22, 160 (n. 16) Dreiser, Theodore, 166 (n. 15) Du Plessis, Rachel Blau, 61

Erlich, Gloria, 63, 167 (n. 20) Ethan Frome, 2, 8 Feminist theory, 10, 15–24, 157 (n.1, 2) Anglo-American, 17–18, 19, 159 (n. 8) Essentialism, 19, 20, 22 French, 17,18–19 Post-structuralist, 10, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21 Fetterley, Judith, 63, 177 (n. 19) films based on Wharton novels, 2 French Ways and Their Meaning, 7–8, 26, 27, 67, 169 (n. 30) Fullerton, Morton, 6, 12, 38, 40, 69–71, 170 (n. 34) Gender differences anxiety over changing roles, 28–9 and higher education, 27 and history, 16–17, 20–2, 25 and language, 18–19, 55, 84, 97 scientific debate, 27, 163 (n. 7) and writing, 1, 21, 30, 31, 41, 43–4, 45–6, 53, 65, 67, 68, 69, 93 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 30–1, 39, 165–6 (n. 15) Glimpses of the Moon, The, 2, 7, 9, 11, 12, 23, 45, 46, 125–49, 152, 154 Goodman, Susan, 38 Grant, Robert, 45 Greater Inclination, The, 33, 42, 45



Inde x

INDEX

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 40, 43 House of Mirth, The, 2, 8, 9, 11, 23, 46, 49–65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 97, 98, 99, 105, 125, 126, 142, 146, 148, 151, 152, 154, 173–4 (n. 3) Hugh-Smith, John, 40 Irigaray, Luce, 18–19, 159 (n. 7) James, Henry, 1, 37, 40, 43 Wharton compared, 2, 3, 16, 39 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 31, 152 Jones, George, Frederic, 3, 34 Jones, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, 3, 6, 9, 34–5, 168 (n. 24) Jones, Minnie, 38 Kamuf, Peggy, 19, 159 (n. 9) Kolodny, Annette, 15, 19, 22, 158 (n. 5) Kristeva, Julia, 20–1, 22, 25, 160 (n. 12), 162 (n. 1,2) Lapsley, Gaillard, 40, 71, 172 (n. 43) Lee, Hermione, 2, 32, 167 (n. 21), 167–8 (n. 23), 168 (n. 27), 171 (n. 38), 180 (n. 29), 182 (n. 4) Lee, Vernon, 38–9 Lewis, R.W.B. 2, 32, 171 (n. 38) Lewis, Sinclair, 7, 42 Lodge, Bessy, 7, 37 Lubbock, Percy, 36, 38, 40 McGovern, James R., 29, 164 (n. 11) Men male gender anxiety, 28–9, 164 (n. 10) masculine writing style, 43–4, 45, 152, 170 (n. 33) narrative filters, 23, 52, 53, 55, 71

patriarchal power, 24, 27, 56, 78 spectator role, 9–10, 55, 73–4, 139–42, 143–6, 148 Miller, Nancy, 19–20, 159 (n. 10) Mother’s Recompense, A, 7, 47 New York Society, 1, 3, 4, 5, 10, 25, 26, 33, 49, 50, 51, 53–4, 56, 57, 58, 60, 153 Norton, Sara, 4, 5, 25, 36, 38, 39, 42 Old Maid, The, 7 Phillips, David Graham, 29, 164–5 (n. 11) Progressive Era, 28–9 publishing industry paternalism, 11, 170 (n. 36) professionalization, 11, 26, 43–4, 153 and Wharton, 9, 44, 45 reader, role of, 54, 61–2, 65, 69, 93–4, 174 (n. 6), 176 (n. 10) realism, 42–3, 49, 54, 152 Reef, The, 9, 11, 23, 45, 46, 67–96, 97, 98, 99, 105, 123, 126, 129, 152, 154 Rich, Adrienne, 17, 18, 19, 22, 158 (n. 3) Riley, Denise, 21, 160 (n. 13, 14) sentimentalism, 10, 12, 26, 40, 41–3, 51, 52, 53, 54, 61, 97, 127, 129–31, 132, 142–3, 149, 152, 192–3 (n. 6) sexuality, 12, 68–9, 71, 75, 77, 79–80, 89, 91–2, 95, 97–8, 101–2, 110 Showalter, Elaine, 17–18, 19, 22, 63, 158 (n. 4), 177 (n. 17) Stevens, Ebenezer, 3–4, 166 (n. 17) Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 29, 35, 40, 41



208

Sturgis, Howard, 40 Summer, 8, 9, 11, 12, 23, 43, 45, 46, 97–124, 125, 152, 154 Valley of Decision, The, 42 Victorianism True Womanhood, 28 values, 29 women’s roles, 10–11 Wagner-Martin, 2, 167 (n. 19), 176 (n. 13) Waid, Candace, 2, 172 (n.1), 174 (n.4), 187 (n. 8), 188 (n. 16) Welter, Barbara, 28, 163–4 (n. 9) Wharton, Edith America, view of, 1, 4–5, 7–8, 25–6, 42, 169 (n. 30) American women, view of, 5, 8 anxiety of authorship, 31–3, 35, 45–6, 47, 49, 50, 71, 126, 151, 152 as businesswoman, 1, 9, 39, 44–5, 49, 171 (n. 37, 38) conservatism, 35, 162–3 (n. 3), 168 (n. 25) development as a writer, 8–9, 10–11, 12, 24–5, 33, 37–8, 40, 53, 65, 96, 126, 138, 149, 153–4, 156 divorce, 6, 37–8, 39, 152 French women, view of, 7–8, 26, 27, 67 friendships with women, 38–9

209

with men, 38, 40 homes, 3–4, 32 marriage, 6, 152 modern writers, view of, 40, 168–9 (n. 28) motherhood, view of, 6–7, 147, 195–6 (n. 18) national identity, 1, 7, 8, 40 rejection of women writers, 8, 41–2, 43, 152, 165 (n. 13), 170 (n. 35) relationship with mother, 5–6, 8–9, 34–5, 168 (n. 24) sexuality, 6, 12, 98, 167 (n. 21), 183 (n. 8) writing schedule, 4, 5, 27, 36 writing, view of, 8–9, 32, 38, 45 Wharton, Edward, 6, 37–8, 39 Wilson, Christopher, 42, 43 Winthrop, Egerton, 40 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 2, 6, 63, 125, 163 (n. 8), 172 (n. 1), 177 (n. 18), 181 (n. 2), 183 (n. 8) Women constraints on writing, 1, 10–11, 16–17, 19, 23, 30–1, 44, 50–1, 53, 152–3, 166–7 (n. 18) constructed term, 22 dismissal of writing, 10, 30–1 New Womanhood. 11, 28, 35 True Womanhood, 28 Woolf, Virginia, 31



INDEX

Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

American Political Poetry into the 21st Century (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

American Political Poetry into the 21st Century (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

American Political Poetry into the 21st Century (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Edith Wharton

Wharton, Edith - The Touchstone

Wharton, Edith - The Reef

Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Wharton, Edith - The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton

Overtones of Opera in American Literature from Whitman to Wharton

The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682-1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682-1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682-1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Wharton, Edith - The Glimpses Of The Moon

Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome

The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth

Readings from Emile Durkheim

Readings from Latin Verse

Readings from Classical Rhetoric

Wharton, Edith - Afterward(1)

Wharton, Edith - HouseofMirth

Wharton, Edith - Summer

An Edith Wharton Chronology

Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-first Century)

Wharton, Edith - Kerfol(1)

Edith Wharton on Film

Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

American Political Poetry into the 21st Century (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

American Political Poetry into the 21st Century (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

American Political Poetry into the 21st Century (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Edith Wharton

Wharton, Edith - The Touchstone

Wharton, Edith - The Reef

Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Wharton, Edith - The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton

Overtones of Opera in American Literature from Whitman to Wharton

The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682-1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682-1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682-1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Wharton, Edith - The Glimpses Of The Moon

Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome

The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth

Readings from Emile Durkheim

Readings from Latin Verse

Readings from Classical Rhetoric

Wharton, Edith - Afterward(1)

Wharton, Edith - HouseofMirth

Wharton, Edith - Summer

An Edith Wharton Chronology

Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-first Century)

Wharton, Edith - Kerfol(1)

Edith Wharton on Film

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