Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

58 | Spring 2012 Special Issue: The Short Stories of Edith Wharton Guest Editor: Virginia Ricard

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1225 ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version Date of publication: 1 June 2012 ISBN: 0294-0442 ISSN: 0294-04442

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Linda Collinge-Germain, Michelle Ryan-Sautour and Emmanuel Vernadakis

Introduction Virginia Ricard

Articles

Make It Short: Edith Wharton’s Modernist Practices in Her Short Stories Sarah Whitehead

Breaches of Realist Conventions in Edith Wharton’s Short Fiction David Malcolm

Realism and Ritual in the Italian Short Stories of Edith Wharton Robin Peel

The Epistolary Motif and Literary Creation in Edith Wharton’s Short Stories: Narrative, Aesthetic and Moral Issues Audrey Giboux

Reading and Readers in Edith Wharton’s Short Stories Agnès Berbinau-Dezalay

“Writing a War Story”: The Female Author and the Challenge of Witnessing Joanna Scutts

Reading the Ruins: “Coming Home,” Wharton’s Atrocity Story of the First World War William Blazek

Imagining the American West in Wharton’s Short Fiction Gary Totten

Prince Charming or Animal Bridegroom?: Fairy Tale Elements in Edith Wharton’s “Bunner Sisters” Nancy Von Rosk

The Dogs of “Kerfol”: Animals, Authorship, and Wharton Jennifer Haytock

Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and “Pomegranate Seed” Gina Rossetti

A Face of One’s Own: Edith Wharton and the Portrait in her Short Fiction Michael Pantazzi

The Art of Irresolution in Edith Wharton’s “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” Brigitte Zaugg

“Sermons in Stone”: Théophile Gautier’s Emaux et Camées and Edith Wharton’s “The Eyes” Joseph Urbas

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Bibliography

Edith Wharton: A Bibliography Virginia Ricard

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Foreword

Linda Collinge-Germain, Michelle Ryan-Sautour and Emmanuel Vernadakis

1 We are very pleased to present this special issue of the Journal devoted to the short stories of Edith Wharton. Virginia Ricard, associate professor of American literature at the University of Bordeaux and guest editor of the issue, has compiled a volume of innovative research on Wharton’s short fiction which she completes with an informative introduction and a very useful bibliography. We thank her for her meticulous and thorough editorial work.

2 You will also note in the front pages of this issue that Michelle Ryan-Sautour has joined the Editorial Board of the Journal as Associate Editor and that Emmanuel Vernadakis is now Consulting Editor, a position that allows him both to remain a part of Journal activities and to devote the time necessary to his role as Director of the CRILA Research Center.

AUTHORS

LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN JSSE Editor

MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR JSSE Associate Editor

EMMANUEL VERNADAKIS JSSE Consulting Editor

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Introduction

Virginia Ricard

1 Edith Wharton (1862-1937) wrote nearly ninety short stories in her lifetime, an achievement that seems all the more remarkable when we remember that she was almost thirty when her first story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” was published in July 1891, and that she was thirty-seven when her first collection of stories, The Greater Inclination, came out in 1899. A late starter perhaps, but not a slow learner: when Wharton sent a copy of that first collection to her friend Paul Bourget (1852-1935), whom she had met in 1893 at the beginning of his eight-month tour of the United States, Bourget noted in his diary: [Ragatz] June 30 [1899] Reading Edith W.’s book (the greater inclination) proves to me what the art of the short story may be when the subject is very representative and the style concise […]. Admired, concerning this book, what patience can achieve. I remember Edith W. in 93, and the short story she was writing then, about a schoolteacher in a small town I think. What progress in these six years through hard work and strength of will. I am convinced that the life of the artist is to be found entirely in this power of composition. 1

2 “Patience,” “hard work,” “strength of will,” and the “power of composition” resulted in twenty-three stories written during the decade following the publication of Wharton’s first story. Bourget’s description of the “artist” hardly fits R. W. B. Lewis’s representation of Edith Wharton as “suffering from paralysing depression” during much of the same period.2 In her measured appraisal of Wharton’s supposed illness, Hermione Lee has pointed out that Wharton herself contributed in A Backward Glance to the “heroic retrospective narrative of depression giving way to achievement.” Wharton, she writes, “was leading a complicated, active, energetic life all through the period in which she was also unwell, unhappy and depressed” (79), a view corroborated by the letters to Anna Bahlmann, in which Wharton presents herself as active in spite of ill health, and engaging in various strenuous physical activities not usually associated with neurasthenic patients, such as ice-skating and twenty-mile bicycle rides. Looked at differently, in the years between 1890 and 1900 Wharton was undergoing a radical transformation: it would have been surprising had she not suffered from depression. In

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Wharton’s case at least, depression was probably not a disorder, or not only a disorder, but a form of protection, a means of adapting to the onslaught of the new. Another passage from A Backward Glance provides a clue to what was happening during those years: “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—and that was not until 1899” (868). Writing, in other words, the “power of composition” as Bourget put it, was the manner in which Wharton was able—by her own account—to “acquire” a personality. The short stories, which she would continue to write prolifically almost until the moment of her death in 1937, are evidence of the energy Wharton spent reinventing herself as an artist.

3 In “A Writer of Short Stories,” R. W. B. Lewis insists that although Wharton “began as a writer of short stories and, in a sense, […] finished as one,” she did not “significantly modify the genre itself.” She was, he said, a “preserver,” or “caretaker,” rather than an explorer. Lewis bases his argument mainly on what Wharton herself has to say in The Writing of Fiction (1925) about the art of the short story: “those who remain imprisoned in the false notion of their own originality will always fall short of what they might have accomplished” (28). Wharton sees form as order (21) and style as discipline (22); she favours the two unities, “the old traditional one of time, and that other, more modern and complex” one of vision, formulated by Henry James, but long since “observed by the masters of fiction” (34-35); and she sees herself as an heir—of the French and Russian authors of nouvelles, and of the German and English creators of spectral apparitions. Continuity, in other words, is the key word in “Telling a Short Story.” “Mrs. Wharton says much that is engrossing and valid, but virtually nothing that is new,” writes Lewis (10). This Wharton-of-the-old-guard has remained, since Lewis at least, a recurring figure in the criticism of the short fiction.

4 Yet, Lewis himself also says that “in practice, Edith Wharton was often subtler, and both her ambition and her imaginative achievement greater, than her common-sense critical remarks might lead one to expect” (10). He adds that she was “the first American writer to make almost exclusively her own” one area of experience: the marriage question (11). Finally, he acknowledges the element of surprise in her inclusion of the eerie in her discussion of the short story. He might have added that even Wharton’s “common-sense critical remarks” are mitigated in the same chapter of The Writing of Fiction by declarations of freedom such as: “General rules in art are useful chiefly as a lamp in a mine, or a hand-rail down a black stairway; they are necessary for the sake of the guidance they give, but it is a mistake, once they are formulated, to be too much in awe of them” (33). Rules, in other words, are meant to be broken, and Edith Wharton did not think of herself as ordained to eschew the new anymore than she saw herself as bound by tradition.

5 Lewis sometimes turns to Wharton’s biography to explain the stories—another constant in Wharton criticism: “There are of course urgent biographical reasons for Edith Wharton’s near obsession with the perplexities of marriage,” he writes (“A Writer” 12). “It is evident,” he adds, that in “Souls Belated,” Ralph Gannet “speaks for Wharton” when he tells Lydia Tillotson, who has left her husband for him, that “life is made up of compromises” (13). Perhaps. Lewis goes on to assert that “the translation from life into story is complete” in “Kerfol,” but “incomplete in ‘The Hermit and the Wild Woman,’” which he sees as “Mrs. Wharton’s effort to make a story out of a deeply troubled period of her life […]. It becomes uncomfortably clear that the relation between the Wild Woman and the Hermit is an elementary version, at several kinds of

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remove, of the relation between Edith Wharton and Walter Berry,” Wharton’s life-long friend (21).3 Many critics after Lewis have also seen certain short stories as “translations from life.” Some, Barbara White among them, even turn to the stories to fill in the gaps in the life: “It was the consecutive reading of Wharton’s short stories […] that first led me to the belief that she may have been an incest victim. This might be because, as Candace Waid suggests, ‘the short stories provide the most intimate record of Wharton’s fears and desires.’” White goes on to say that “it was not only the strange father-daughter stories that led me to the incest theory but also the obsessive themes of hidden male corruption” (48-49). This, needless to say, is merely speculation, and although Wharton’s biography is of interest to most readers, conjecture remains conjecture.

6 A third constant in the criticism of Wharton’s stories is what might be called the question of class and money. Wharton is almost always qualified at the outset as a “literary aristocrat” whose province, especially in the short stories, is limited to Old New York, Brahmin Boston, and the international scene, with stories like “Mrs. Manstey’s View” or “Bunner Sisters” figuring as exceptions that confirm a general rule. In his introduction to his 1991 Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, Lewis describes Wharton as a “restive member of the upper-middle-class New York society into which she was born” (vii). He goes on to describe the houses she bought and sold and the money she made from her stories and then adds: “There is no doubt that Edith Wharton after 1920 wrote and sold a number of flimsy fictional concoctions for large sums of money—to pay the expenses for her elegant manner of life, her travels, her lavishly hospitable homes in southern France and outside of Paris, and her many private charities” (ix). As Barbara White points out, this presentation of Wharton was first shaken by the feminist reading of Wharton’s work in the 1960s, and then by the revelation of her love affair with Morton Fullerton—seen as humanizing her—and finally by the continued study of Wharton’s correspondence, which reveals a woman who is anything but a snob (xii). Lewis, again in his essay on Wharton as a short story writer, says that “rooms and the furnishings of rooms are […] her chief source of metaphor in her short stories” and he remarks on her “sometimes excessive concern with the details of female dress, and her minute observation of interior décor” (23). Certainly, Wharton’s attention to manners and ornament, rather than merely “a source of metaphor,” has often been perceived as a sign of Wharton’s belonging to an obsolete world of hierarchies, households on a grand scale, and servants, a radically past world that is no longer the one we inhabit.

7 How are we to read Wharton’s short stories today then? Wharton said that “situation” was “the main concern of the short story” (The Writing of Fiction 37). But are the “situations” presented in her stories still “situations”? Or, to put it differently, has what was new when Wharton wrote, remained new? In The Writing of Fiction, Wharton said that an “impression of vividness, of presentness […] has to be sought” in the short story (37). But presentness, surely, is not always a sustainable quality. Yet, it is striking that in an age in which, in most of Europe and North America at least, over fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, Wharton’s “marriage question” stories should still be germane to our preoccupations. Lewis was surely correct in saying that, in the best of Wharton’s stories, the situation is gradually revealed in all its complexity and finality. What we know at the end […] is not so much how some problem got resolved, but the full nature, usually the unsurmountable nature, of the problem itself.

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[…] The immediate human situation has, in short, become a paradigm of the human condition. (11)

8 “The Other Two”, for example, is about the way the presence of his wife’s two former husbands can make a man in New York wince—he groans and winces repeatedly in the story—and about what it means for a woman to have more than one husband in any time or place. In the course of the story, Waythorn becomes aware of “the full nature” of what he has done in marrying Alice Varick, formerly Alice Haskett. His problem is never “resolved,” but, for the reader, it opens up a series of ethical, anthropological and metaphysical questions about the way we live. Wharton’s evocations of the many facets of the “woman question” are never merely anecdotal. The reader is constantly reminded of the cultural invariants involved: what is to be done with eros? How are we to order love? Are some rules superior to others and how do they affect our behaviour? In “The Other Two” once again, the language used to describe matrimony is the language of Wall Street—marriages are “ventures,” and previous husbands are “discounted”—and reveals the underlying structure of exchange that founds matrimony in all societies everywhere. This movement from the particular to the universal is perhaps the most striking trait of Edith Wharton’s stories.

9 Similarly, Wharton’s critiques of consumerism, including literary consumerism as in “Xingu,” are set in historical circumstances that provide the reader with the elements that allow him to place the story in time and space: “Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition” (1). But stories like “Xingu” also ask what it means to buy and what it means to read: “Mrs. Ballinger’s province […] was the Book of the Day.” She cannot remember even last week’s books: “facts came and went like transient lodgers.” She is in fact, not really a reader at all, but is proud to be “‘abreast with the Thought of the Day”’ (7). The problem is a universal one and Mrs. Ballinger stands for anyone anywhere who believes that ideas can be picked up, ready-made, off a shelf. The story’s relevance to our own age of unbridled cultural consumerism is difficult to miss.

10 In A Backward Glance, Wharton explains how, from an early age, she was able to observe only from afar: “I did not know how deeply I had felt the nobility and harmony of the great European cities till our steamer was docked at New York” (817). Distance, in other words, is her fundamental epistemological tenet. Wharton’s narratives of cultural conflict are almost always cosmopolitan, or at least transatlantic, in perspective. In “The Lamp of Psyche,” a return voyage across the Atlantic is necessary for a young wife to understand that, seen from Boston, her husband is a coward, but, since she lives with him in Paris, “tolerant affection” possesses “precisely the same advantages” as “passionate worship” (42). In “The Muse’s Tragedy,” travel—to Italy this time—allows another young idolater to discover the difference between life and literature. This telescopic view, not so very different from a contemporary multicultural perspective, would appear to make a modern of Wharton. Yet Wharton is never a relativist. Some form of disenchantment or disappointment is usually the result of her characters’ clash with the world they encounter outside their dreams. In her stories, reality is limited, and therefore disappointing, everywhere and always. The present, moreover, is hardly an improvement over the past. Nothing makes this clearer than Wharton’s

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supernatural stories: in “Kerfol” or “The Duchess at Prayer,” for example, the past is precisely not past, as the tellers of these tales come to understand.

11 One of the paradoxes of Wharton’s short stories is that they unblinkingly record the seamier sides, the petty compromises, and sometimes repellent details of marriage and family life and yet propose no future for individual desires outside those institutions. The stories chronicle the loss of illusion (“Autres temps” and “The Quicksand” for example, or again “The Lamp of Psyche”); they present a damaged world made livable only through guile or accommodation (“Charm Incorporated” for example, or “Joy in the House”); they make fun of attempts to renew the world and in particular to renew marriage (“Souls Belated” or “The Reckoning,” for example). Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (“your Fouriers failed,/Because not poets enough to understand/That life develops from within,” viii 434-436), the short stories as a whole reject earthly utopias. Yet, although Wharton repeatedly revealed her conviction that there was no “world elsewhere”—and Lewis was surely right to say that for her, “society, crushing as it might be, was all there was” (13)—she was not altogether insensitive to what might be called the romance of democracy. Her stories chronicle seemingly irrelevant lives with generosity and compassion: in “All Souls’,” for example, Sara Clayburn says laughingly: “Lonely? With my old servants? You forget how many winters I’ve spent here alone with them” (802). And as Avril Horner and Janet Beer have recently shown, many of Wharton’s characters, like the elder Bunner sister, or Miss Mary Pask for example, are spinsters and lonely or ill—or both ill and lonely, like Alice Hartley in “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell.” The stories are full of characters who exist on the edges of society and, as Beer and Horner point out, some live in literally remote and liminal spaces, as in “Kerfol,” “Miss Mary Pask,” “The Duchess at Prayer,” or even in “The House of the Dead Hand” although the story unfolds in the heart of Siena. The late stories often portray the loneliness of older women and “in the late ghost stories in particular, [Wharton] is intent on challenging stereotypical images of the ageing woman in order to reveal energies and desires that have been constrained by a lifetime of conforming to the expectations of others” write Horner and Beer (161).

12 More generally, the stories are inhabited by characters with strong feelings who are hedged in and hampered by the institutions and societies in which they live. Mostly women, they are passionately maternal, like Catherine Glenn in “Her Son,” or Grace Ansley in “Roman Fever,” or prey to illicit erotic desire. In fact, as Hildegard Hoeller has shown, the stories are often “driven by the secret force of female ‘illegitimate’— that is, extramarital—desire” (171). Some critics have seen this “excess” of feeling as an attribute of “sentimental fiction,” which Hoeller claims has a place in Wharton’s œuvre although it is at odds with the “economy” of realism. It is telling too that women are sometimes represented as a source of energy and renewed strength in Wharton’s stories: in “Coming Home,” for example, the world has literally fallen apart, and the saving remnant is made up of women—and more particularly one woman who is clearly portrayed as modern. When she plays the piano, she has a preference for Stravinsky.

13 So, although the stories can be read as a critique of modernity, and in a sense document a particular stage of our ongoing attempt to become modern (this, surely, is what Bourget meant in his journal by “very representative subjects”), and although many of the stories are hilarious and scathing satires of the unpoetic, materialistic, narcissistic, modern world, they are also lyrical evocations of individual dilemmas. The ghost stories are probably the best examples of Wharton’s awareness of the consequences for

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the individual of the unfinished modern project. In her preface to Ghosts, she writes that it is not electricity that is responsible for driving ghosts away. “I have made the depressing discovery that the faculty required for their enjoyment has become atrophied in modern man” (White 139). She goes on to say that continuity and silence —“two conditions abhorrent to the modern mind”—are necessary to the appreciation of ghost stories. She then defines the good reader in curiously Nabokovian terms: rejecting clichés—“boring stage properties” like “the battlemented castle”—and praising “words shadowy and transparent enough” to send “a cold shiver down one’s spine” (White 141-142). In Wharton’s ghost stories, the eerie seeps in between the folds and interstices of existence evoking the attraction of otherworlds. Like Nabokov too, Edith Wharton uses irony to mask a lyrical subtext: in “Souls Belated,” the reader may be amused by Lydia Tillotson’s naïve denial of the need to make lust respectable but is also moved by her predicament. Caustic observation of manners does not entirely dissimulate the plight of a “soul.”

14 Still, the stories are more than chronicles of a new “roaring and discontinuous universe,” as Wharton herself described modernity (“Preface to Ghosts” White 141). They are not merely reports. We learn about the transatlantic life, and about New York, Boston, and Paris in the throes of change. But Wharton’s stories are also forms that demand our attention as works of art. As artefacts, they strike us today as audacious undertakings—audacious in the sense that they are, as Richard Ford has it, “daring little instruments” that “almost always represent commensurate daring in their makers.” Edith Wharton demonstrated her audacity, not only by writing the stories— and the passage from A Backward Glance quoted above makes it clear that an inner transformation was necessary to get the stories written at all—but also by choosing the short story form. Her decision to use a form so dependent on brevity in order to force us to notice something crucial about the world she inhabited—and the title of her second collection of stories was Crucial Instances—was a bold one. Concision, omission and radical authorial decisions concerning beginnings and endings are, of course, also aesthetic features of the novel. But with short stories more is left out, more concision is needed, and authorial decisions about what to include or what to leave out are necessarily more radical. Wharton’s stories are “daring little instruments” in that, within their restricted compass, and in spite of their condensation and the absence of impedimenta—the absence of the furniture and stuffing that fill out novels—they attempt to say something important. To adopt a form that required “bold foreshortening” (The Writing of Fiction 42) was to take a risk since, as Wharton put it, with the short story, form is all—or almost all: “The effect produced by the short story depends almost entirely on its form” (37). Selection, then, “the choice of what is kept when the superfluous has been jettisoned,” is essential. But Wharton also thought that the case for the “economy of material” was sometimes overstated. She condemned excessive “thrift.” “Some critics, in their resentment of the dense and the prolix, have tended to overestimate the tenuous and tight,” she wrote (41). The short-story writer, in other words, must find his balance somewhere on the tightrope between the two extremes of “parsimony and waste” (43). The financial metaphor of writing as compared to “the administering of a fortune,” with the implied result of riches or ruin, shows that Wharton was aware that short-story writing was a perilous enterprise.

15 Why do Edith Wharton’s stories please us? Perhaps, as we have already suggested, because they are still relevant to our world. But, more probably, because of the way they use language. As readers, we are surprised by what Wharton tells us, but much

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more surprised by the way she tells it. In “Telling a Short Story”—unlike the chapter on the novel, telling is the focus of her title—Wharton says a great deal about selection but only briefly mentions the order in which the “essentials are set forth” (41). Yet it was perhaps here that Wharton departed from accepted ways in her short-story writing. Her particular combination of wickedness and compassion—“her tendency to combine satire and melancholy” (Horner and Beer 7)—confers ambivalence on the stories, thus opening them up to endless interpretation, and commanding our attention. Recently, critics have argued that not only is Wharton’s subject matter modern, but that her narrative style, especially in her short stories, has many of the features of modernist writing.4 Since short stories were almost always published in magazines and therefore subject to particular constraints, they were especially conducive to modern, impressionistic writing—very different from the writing associated with the older novel-in-miniature sort of story. The very form of the short story, because it implicitly challenged literary norms, came to be closely associated with modernism. Within Wharton’s stories, the use of ellipsis, of cuts and jumps, as well as the very modern demands she makes of her readers—“reading should be a creative act” (White 140)—are perceived as Wharton’s entry visa to the ill-defined territory of modernism.

16 Long before she became a writer of short stories, Edith Wharton was a reader. And it was perhaps her familiarity with literature in four languages that allowed her to become prolific as quickly as she did: everything suggests that many of her early stories were in a sense ready, waiting to be written down as soon as she had found a form. As Wharton saw it, she was entering into a preexisting conversation. In her discussion of Proust, she says she admired him because he was not merely an innovator, but “that substantial thing in the world of art, a renovator” (The Writing 109). Marcel Proust was a great writer, in other words, because he drew on “the great line of classic tradition” in order to renew form. But reading too is a way of entering an existing conversation or debate. In “The Vice of Reading,” Wharton says that “the value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity […]. Where this reciprocal adaptability is lacking, there can be no real intercourse between book and reader” (Uncollected Critical Writings 99). Both reading and writing, then, are “reciprocal” activities: both are “an interchange of thought” (99). The writer moves between the familiar world of history and tradition and the unknown world of the future reader. Both reading and writing thus become transformative experiences. Clearly, Wharton was aware of the vivifying effect of the “power of composition”: I must return to ‘The Greater Inclination,’ and to my discovery of that soul of mine which the publication of my first volume called to life. At last I had groped my way through to my vocation, and thereafter I never questioned that story-telling was my job […]. Meanwhile I felt like some homeless waif who, after trying for years to take out naturalization papers, and being rejected by every country, has finally acquired a nationality. (A Backward Glance 873, emphasis added.)

17 Over a period of almost five decades, Edith Wharton wrote short stories that were a source of both popularity and income. If, as she herself put it, “the surest way of measuring achievement in art is by survival” (The Writing of Fiction 36), the renewed interest demonstrated by the fourteen articles in this special issue is, we hope, a sign of Wharton’s achievement as a short-story writer. Two authors, Sarah Whitehead and David Malcolm, discuss Wharton’s engagement with modernism; one, Robin Peel, analyses Wharton’s religious leanings in the Italian stories. Audrey Giboux discusses the role of letters as a narrative device in three stories and Agnès Berbinau-Dezalay

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analyzes reading and the figure of the reader. In the two articles following, Joanna Scutts and William Blazek analyse some of Wharton’s war stories—more particularly, “Coming Home” and “Writing a War Story.” Gary Totten and Nancy Von Rosk both analyse motifs in “Bunner Sisters”: the West and cultural norms on one hand, and fairy tale motifs on the other. Jennifer Haytock looks from a new angle at the significance of dogs in “Kerfol,” Michael Pantazzi discusses the meaning of the portrait in Wharton’s short stories, and Gina Rossetti thinks about the new definition of marriage that emerges in “The Other Two” and “Pomegranate Seed.” Finally Brigitte Zaugg provides an attentive reading of “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” and Joseph Urbas offers a highly original close reading of “The Eyes.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beer, Janet and Avril Horner. Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Bourget, Paul. “Journal” (664/6). Bibliothèque de Fels. Institut catholique, Paris.

Ford, Richard. “High-Wire Performers.” The Guardian. Saturday 3 November 2007.

Goldman-Price, Irene. My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlman. New Haven: U of Yale P, 2012.

Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. London: Vintage Books, 2008.

Lewis, R.W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

---. “A Writer of Short Stories.” 1968. Edith Wharton: Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. 9-28.

---. “Introduction.” The Selected Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribner’s, 1991.

Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. Ed. Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: Library of America, 1990.

---. Collected Stories. 1891-1910. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001.

---. Collected Stories 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001.

---. “Preface to Ghosts.” White. 139-142.

---. “The Vice of Reading.” The Uncollected Critical Writings. Ed. Frederick Wegner. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. 99-105.

---. The Writing of Fiction. 1924. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

White, Barbara. Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

NOTES

1. Paul Bourget. My translation. The original French reads: « [Ragatz] 30 Juin [1899] La lecture du livre d’Edith W. (the greater inclination) me prouve ce que peut être l’art de la nouvelle, si les sujets sont très représentatifs, le faire très ramassé […] Admiré à propos de ce livre, ce que peut

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la patience. Je me souviens d’Edith W. en 93, et de la nouvelle qu’elle écrivait alors sur une institutrice dans une petite ville, je crois. Quel progrès en ces six ans, par le travail et la volonté. On doit se persuader que la vie de l’artiste est tout entière là dans cette force de composition ». («Journal» 664/6) The story Bourget remembers reading was very probably “Something Exquisite”, refused by Burlingame in 1894, and then published in 1900 as “Friends” in Youth's Companion 74 (23 August 1900): 671-80. 2. Lewis’s description in his 1975 biography of Wharton’s ill-health was subsequently taken up by her major biographers—Cynthia Griffin Wolff (1977) and Shari Benstock (1994), for example—as well as by the authors of Wharton chronologies such as Maureen Howard in the Library of America edition of the short stories. 3. R. W. B. Lewis founded this analysis of “The Hermit and the Wild Woman” on Wayne Andrews’ introduction to The Best Short Stories of Edith Wharton (New York: Scribner, 1958). Andrews quotes several passages from Wharton’s “diary” for 1907, which he believed to concern Walter Berry. When he started work on his biography of Wharton in 1967, Lewis discovered the existence of Morton Fullerton and his probable affair with Wharton. Only later, in 1980, did Edith Wharton’s love-letters to Fullerton come to light. They were bought by the University of Texas at Austin, and made it necessary to reinterpret Wharton’s “diary” for 1907. 4. The introduction of Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman (Beer and Horner) provides a recent overview of the critical discussion on the question of Wharton’s modernism.

AUTHORS

VIRGINIA RICARD Virginia Ricard is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Bordeaux. She has published a number of articles in English and French about Jewish American authors who have written about the voyage from Europe to America—including Mary Antin, Eva Hoffman, Ludwig Lewisohn, Henry Roth, and Saul Bellow. In 2008 she turned her attention to an author who made the opposite journey, publishing an article about Wharton’s Italian stories, “Legendary Spells: Edith Wharton's Italy”. She is currently preparing a book on Edith Wharton and France.

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Articles

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Make It Short: Edith Wharton’s Modernist Practices in Her Short Stories

Sarah Whitehead

1 Critical dissonance over Edith Wharton’s modernist practices has intensified over the last decade, and although few view her nowadays as the “literary aristocrat” Parrington had firmly ensconced in the nineteenth century (153), Wharton’s relationship with modernism and modernist writing continues to be an increasingly fertile area of scholarship. Whereas Peel concluded in 2005 that she was “apart from modernism,” later studies, including those by Wagner-Martin, Haytock, and Beer and Horner identify distinctly modernist features in Wharton’s narrative style. It is in recent critical appraisals of her short fiction in particular, a literary form closely associated with the “new” writing of the twentieth century, that scholars have found Wharton’s poetics “experimental” (Ware 17), “subversive” (Whitehead 54), and “modernist” (Campbell 5), noting her innovative manipulation of traditional forms. Indeed, there is much to suggest that the enforced brevity of the genre and the confining nature of magazine publication (the format in which almost every short story of this era appeared [Chan xix]) prompted Wharton to produce her most impressionistic and, to use her own 1925 term, “renovat[ive]” (109) narratives. Rather than stories in the nineteenth-century tradition of the novel in miniature, Wharton’s short fiction is more akin to those of the following century in her use of unreliable narration, gaps, epiphany and, above all, in her expectation of an active reader.

2 Wharton’s enduring relationship with the short story is mirrored by its popularity with many modernist writers; Hanson notes that it is in this era that it “came to have for the first time in its history, a status almost equivalent to that of a novel” (56). The ephemeral, fragmentary and fleeting nature of the predominantly magazine short story appealed to the new wave of twentieth-century writers who relished the paradoxical freedom this particular literary form of enclosure offered with the single criteria that it should “take fifteen minutes to read out loud” (Wells viii). Indeed, rather than restricting the writer, H.G. Wells argues that it presented a certain freedom not to be

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found in a novel, concluding that “this world is not for the weary and in the long-run it is the new and variant that matter” (vii). In his study of her short fiction, Levy notes that it was also this paradoxical freedom and enclosure that attracted Wharton to the form, arguing it was particularly well suited to her representations of similarly confined female experience (124). Wharton evidently felt both comfortable and secure within this genre and as early as 1907 she confidently wrote of her “sense of authority” in the form (Lewis 124). This confidence is reflected in the experimental poetics of her stories, and it is here, in what is arguably the most iconic modernist form, that she employs various techniques which now bear striking similarities to the “new” modernist fiction which she ridicules in her own fiction and critical writing. Indeed in “Writing a War Story” (1919) she satirizes Pound’s injunction to “make it new” by presenting her readers with a fictional editor not unlike Pound himself, who at the time was the editor of The Little Review, a magazine which under his leadership took on the motto “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste.” Wharton makes “diabolical fun [of the] posturings . . . of modernism” (Wegener 118) by having her editor advise a young writer to abandon “the superannuated habit of beginning each line with a capital letter” (247). Yet Wharton herself was not immune to using her own rules of punctuation in her narratives; the Atlantic Monthly felt compelled to publish her 1912 story “The Long Run” with an apology for the deviant punctuation,1 and in his 1948 article “The Psychology of Punctuation,” Thorndike singles out Wharton as an example of the modern “mania” for ellipsis points, ascribing her excessive usage to a “fondness for novelty” (223, 225).

3 Despite the various affinities between Wharton’s work and modernist writing, Wharton emphatically distanced herself from the new authors and their fashionable “Kodak” school of writing, likening Joyce’s prose to the unmixed ingredients of a pudding in a 1923 letter to Bernard Berenson (Lewis 461). However the judgements in her critical essays present various self-contradictions; Wegener notes, for example, how Wharton’s hostility towards stream of consciousness writing becomes less straightforward when she draws the “misleading connection” (32) between this and the naturalistic “slice of life” practised by writers such as Chekhov. Such lack of clarity is further confounded by her own predilection for internal monologue, frequently presented in terms of a “mental wrestling match” (Blackall 150-151). Thus, whilst I refer to Wharton’s critical writing in the following discussion of four of her stories, this article will follow Lawrence’s advice to foremost ‘trust the tale’ rather than the artist (31).

Wharton’s Narrators and Narrative Vision

4 In her discussion of narrative vision in the short story Wharton employs the Jamesian term “reflector” and recalls his principle that a writer should choose a mind with “the widest possible view” (WF 36) when deciding by whom the tale will be told. Indeed, James’s narrators often present a further viewpoint in addition to that of a focalizer’s experience or vision, endowing his impressionistic accounts with an element of nineteenth-century omniscient narrative traditions. Whilst not completely reliable themselves, James’s narrators often signal the potential unreliability of a focalizer’s perspective and nudge the reader towards considering the wider view of the events narrated. James’s urbane narrator in Daisy Miller (1878) neatly indicates the insensitive and immature Winterbourne’s many faux pas and fatal lack of concern in a text liberally

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seasoned with erudite French and Italian expressions which are notably absent from the focalizer’s own idiolect. However, despite Wharton’s praise for James’s technique, there is a distinct absence of stabilizing, implicitly authorial presence in her own short fiction. Her stories, by contrast, remain firmly positioned within a single, often narrow- minded narrating consciousness, and rather than offering some reassuringly reliable narrative yardstick against which to assess a focalizer’s point of view, are themselves a testament to the idiosyncrasies of perception. Indeed, as she states in “Telling a Short Story,” “exactly the same thing never happens to any two people” and “each witness of a given incident will report it differently” (WF 35).

5 Wharton states that once the narrator of a tale has been decided upon, the writer should stay firmly within this mind and register, and not include any event, language or judgement from outside this character’s vision. She writes: Never [...] let the character who serves as reflector record anything not naturally within his register. It should be the story-teller’s first care to choose th[e] reflecting mind deliberately [...] and when it is done, to live inside the mind chosen, trying to feel, see and react exactly as the latter would, no more, no less, and, above all, no otherwise. (WF 36)

6 As a consequence Wharton’s narratives are limited by their narrators and are often fragmentary and ambiguous, presenting further questions for the active reader in a manner not dissimilar to Chekhov’s “interrogative” style so admired by Mansfield, who once wrote to Woolf in 1919, “What the writer does is not so much to solve the question but to put the question” (qtd. in Hunter 72). Indeed, as early as 1899, this creative use of gaps and absence had already been noted by her critics, with “F.J.G.” writing in the Book Buyer: Each tale is mainly told between the lines. By a touch here and a touch there you are enabled to construct a prelude for yourself, and when you come to the last page you have no difficulty in carrying on the action to its remote possibilities, or to its inevitable subsequent proceedings. Mrs. Wharton makes you wonder again at the truth of the old axiom that, after all, there is nothing so eloquent as silence. (Tuttleton et al. 15)

7 Wharton’s interest in imperfect, incomplete vision is evident not only in her poetics but also the content of her stories. Titles such as “Mrs. Manstey’s View” (1891), “The Lamp of Psyche” (1895), “A Glimpse” (1932) and “The Eyes” (1910) demonstrate the importance she gives to the onlooker. Many of her narratives rest upon a misreading of a situation or even object, including a misread picture in “The House of the Dead Hand” (1904), a misread book in “The Descent of Man” (1904) and a misread diagnosis in her 1930 story of the same name. Such interest in perception and its relation to meaning align her writing with what has since been regarded as the “essentially modernist concern” of the nature of perception and the psychology of the perceiver (Stevenson 27). Furthermore her use of imperfect vision, the incomplete or absence signals a refusal to offer authorial judgement and her expectation that the reader will recognise inconsistencies and ironies and so, fill in the gaps of her often fragmentary narratives.

8 An active reader of this type is courted in Wharton’s 1899 story, “The Pelican.” The narrative concerns a widowed Mrs. Amyot who lectures on various “cultured” subjects, from Shakespeare to Greek art, to support her young son, Lancelot. The title itself bears an indirect, symbolic relation to the story, which the reader is left to deduce alone, rather like the titles of her other three stories “The Lamp of Psyche” (1895), “After Holbein” (1928) and “Pomegranate Seed” (1931), the last prompting letters from

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readers who were not able to make the implicitly signalled link.2 The pelican is traditionally represented as a selfless creature, frequently depicted piercing her breast with her beak so that her offspring can eat her own flesh and blood when food is scarce. In medieval times artists often placed the bird with its nest on top of the cross; Thomas Aquinas (who is mentioned later in the story) uses the pelican in his hymn Adoro te Devote, as does Shakespeare (also referred to in the story) in Hamlet and King Lear.3 In fact, the bird beats its bill against its chest to get macerated food out for its young, which, against its white feathers, creates the startling illusion it is harming itself. The implicit link between the pelican of the title and Mrs. Amyot suggests that the “actual suffering” (79) she claims she must go through by speaking in public for the sake of the baby, is a fallacy rather like medieval notions of the bird’s self-sacrifice. This is confirmed in the final scene of the story, by which time her son is a grown man with his own children who angrily demands to know why she continues this pretence. By this point the question the reader asks is not whether she really needs to give lectures, but why she actively chooses to do so.

9 Wharton’s narrator in this story is a wealthy man whose unreliability is signalled from the very outset of the narrative; his denunciation of her inept attempts to tackle demanding subjects and his account of his manoeuvres to avoid her clutches are belied by the fact he has spent the last few decades closely following her career and even helping her with her research. The attraction he feels for this woman is apparent from the opening sentence: “She was very pretty when I first knew her, with the sweet straight nose and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity; humanized by a dimple that flowered in her cheek” (76). Suitors are referred to, and the narrator muses that if she had married, classical figures such as Plato might have escaped her “treatment,” adding “but I handed over Plato as a hostage and escaped on the afternoon train” (81). Unable to acknowledge or admit his own interest in Mrs. Amyot, his unreliability is further reinforced by his need to go south on a rest cure (a technique Wharton also uses to signal an unreliable male narrator in “The Triumph of the Night” [1914] and “Miss Mary Pask” [1925]). Thus the “vast machinery of fraud” (86) that the narrator believes he has put in motion by helping Mrs. Amyot write a lecture on the reconciliation of science and religion and by using his contacts to promote her talks, is mirrored on a further diegetic level in his own self-deception as to the true nature of their connection.

10 Dillard notes the particular suitability of the “crank” narrator to modernist ends, commenting that this type of narrator is modernist in its distance and irony (210-211). Wharton’s irony here is twofold, manifest first in the ironic nature of the narrator’s witty discourse, in comments such as “There was nothing she did not remember— wrongly” (77) and then in the irony that, supposedly repelled by this woman’s lack of intellectual rigour, he has spent decades charting her lecturing career and has composed his story around her. Peel cites Wharton’s abandonment of the reassuring figure of the reliable narrator as one of the factors that make Ethan Frome (1911) her most modernist pre-1914 work and discusses how this contributes to the inherent uncertainty about the story itself (153). “The Pelican” demonstrates how she was using this technique twelve years earlier to create a story with multiple layers of meaning and irony on different diegetic levels, so typical of modernist fiction.

11 The story culminates in a puzzling lack of closure when the adult Lancelot angrily confronts his mother in front of the narrator. He accuses her of making him party to

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fraud—a concept which has by now become a central theme in this story—and lists the unnecessary gifts she buys her grandchildren, “lace christening dresses and life-size rocking-horses with real manes! The kind of thing children can’t do without” (94). His mother does not defend herself and her reasons for lecturing remain an unclosed narrative gap. After Lancelot’s dramatic departure from the room, the narrator’s actions defy his words of the last twenty pages and he tenderly holds out his hand to her. She takes it and tearfully ends the story with the words “I sent his wife a seal skin jacket at Christmas!” (94). Wharton’s seemingly incongruous, certainly inconclusive final sentence links Mrs. Amyot’s financial independence with female materialism and commodification, an association Huyssen finds typical of twentieth-century representations of women (47). By focusing on what were later to be seen as modernist anxieties around the rapidly evolving material culture at the turn of the century, Wharton cleverly intertwines traditional resistance to a female independence with contemporary concerns over female self-commodification. Indeed this final narrative gap allows for this narrative to be read as either a Victorian warning about the dangers of allowing women to acquire a taste for earning an income or as a modernist lament about the way women are duped by a commodity culture into squandering their growing financial independence on unnecessary and even unwanted products.

12 “The Pelican” can be read as either a “gently ironic account of a rattlebrained woman who lectures” (Lewis 81), or as a damning portrait of a society that would not let a woman do something “unless it could be done in the name of maternal sacrifice” (Wolff 97), depending on whether one accepts the narrator’s version or considers Mrs. Amyot’s perspective. Wharton’s creation of contradictory narratives, an ambiguity reinforced by the final sentence of the tale, poses more questions than it answers via her artful use of narrative gaps for ironic purposes. Indeed much of her “refusal to share information” beyond her narrator’s powers, which Dessner regards as “undue privateness, even selfishness in [her] narrative procedure” (60, 57), results from her use of irony, that is, the gap between what is said and what, perhaps, is meant. However, as Singley notes, such instances of irony often run the risk of being overlooked (232).

Wharton’s Narrative Gaps, Ellipses and Absences

13 Introducing a final narrative gap in the last sentence of a story is a technique Wharton uses in various short fictions, including her early story “A Journey” (1899). From the outset this nineteenth-century narrative has the impressionistic, fragmentary tone that was later to be associated with modernist writing. Wharton writes: As she lay on her berth, staring out at the shadows overhead, the rush of the wheels was in her brain, driving her deeper and deeper into circles of wakeful lucidity. (65)

14 The theme of darkness and what is hidden therein is continued throughout the narrative, and the reader is prompted to consider what secrets lie underneath this story of facade and pretence. “A Journey” is the story of a woman on a three day train trip who must conceal the fact her husband died during the second night so as not to be asked to leave the train with the corpse before she arrives at her destination. The woman’s name is never given, but the reader is told that she is a school teacher who

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married late in life only to have the promised prosperity and adventure offered by a spouse marred by fatal illness. The train journey is to New York, where the wife can be with her family while her husband dies. Focused on the woman’s experience alone, the narrative is infused with the wife’s bitterness at the cards she has been dealt. Wharton writes “life had a grudge against her” (66) as she remembers the doctors’ “accustomed treacheries” (67) and is repulsed by her husband’s emaciated state, watching him “as she might have watched a strange animal” (66).

15 On the night her husband dies his wife is lying in her own berth, when she believes she hears him call, but when she listens again she realises that it is the “greasy sound” of another man snoring (68). She lies down again, yet sleep evades her. At this point the narrative slips into free indirect discourse: She lay down and tried to sleep . . . Had she not heard him move? She started up trembling . . . the silence frightened her more than any other sound. He might not be able to make her hear–he might be calling her now . . . What made her think of such things? (68)

16 Wharton’s account of the woman’s thoughts, her use of dots and dashes to indicate the woman’s tentative, anxious state of mind and question marks to signal her confusion creates a narrative suggestive of unmediated thought. The ellipses add uncertainty and a dreamlike element to the passage as the woman begins to fall asleep. Blackall notes Wharton’s tendency to signal a narrative shift towards “inner, subjective and reflective material [via a] prolifera[tion] of ellipses” (149). And it is this use of ellipsis, deemed an “icon” of modernist writing (Henry 151), combined with a mix of third person realism and stream of consciousness writing, which creates an impressionistic, uncertain narrative thread quite distinct from the Victorian writing traditions of the nineteenth century.

17 After her husband’s death the woman must convince the other passengers and porter that he is sleeping in order not to be ejected from the train at the next station. She spends a fretful day near the berth, having pinned the curtains together so nobody will look in, too afraid even to visit the luncheon car in the fear her duplicity will be discovered. By the afternoon she is in a state of nervous exhaustion, and falls fitfully in and out of a dreamlike state, finally slipping into a nightmare reminiscent of Virgil’s description of Aeneas’ descent into the underworld, into a “darkness of death [...] a black whirlwind on which they were both spinning like leaves, in wild uncoiling spirals, with millions and millions of the dead” (75).

18 The woman is abruptly woken by the movement of her fellow passengers as the train approaches New York station. The mythical, fragmentary, ellipsis-ridden account of her dream is in direct contrast to the heightened realism with which the people around her are described. She notices the sickly ivy plant a woman with false braids is holding, the Christian Scientist she had met earlier reversing his cuffs and hears the clicking sound of the conductor’s gadget as tickets are checked. The juxtaposing of these two distinct forms highlight the two selves—the inner, perhaps unconscious self and the public persona driven by social convention and routine in an essentially performative existence. The reader is encouraged to excavate the latter in search of the former and look for the symbolic value of the details Wharton has chosen to relate: the false hair, the dirty cuffs, the sickly plant. The insistent, annoying clicking of the metal machine suggests the irritating nature of social coexistence—everything reflects the woman’s dissatisfaction with life, the pretence (including hers) of living, the thwarted dreams. A

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similar use of evocative physical description by the positioning of impressionistic thoughts next to a realist detail is found by Levenson in Conrad (The Genealogy of Modernism 2), and is later described as precursive to the development of realism into symbolism by Lodge, who adds that it can also be found in Joyce’s Dubliners (Modes of Modern Writing 42). Indeed Kaplan and Simpson also note the significant use of detailed commonplace for symbolic purpose in Joyce’s iconic modernist text, Ulysses.

19 Wharton’s use of “detailed commonplace” is a prevalent feature in her short stories, from the stained wallpaper and shabby books in “Mrs. Manstey’s View” (1891) to the radio left on in “All Souls’” (1937). Such details serve symbolic purposes; motifs such as a door knocker in the form of a dead hand and a pomegranate design in a carpet in “The House of the Dead Hand” (1904) are often employed to reinforce an allusion already present in the text. More significantly associated with what has since been regarded as modernist poetics, however, is Wharton’s use of absence in her description of everyday surroundings, such as the lack of an inscription on a tomb in “Mr. Jones” (1928), a space on a wall where a picture used to be in “Pomegranate Seed” (1931), or some inserted asterisks or ellipses in a letter in “The Muse’s Tragedy” (1899) to erroneously signal that something has been taken out. Indeed, rather than simply using commonplace detail for symbolic purposes, Wharton frequently uses “commonplace absence” to add layers of meaning to her texts. The missing inscription is not only a forgotten wife, but one who is deaf and dumb, imprisoned in a stately home which is to become a living tomb. The space on the wall is left by the removed portrait of a first wife who haunts her husband’s second marriage and the asterisks in “The Muse’s Tragedy” reveal the awful truth that there was nothing to hide in the first place.

20 Returning to the final section of “A Journey,” the details that the woman notices define her character: the performative, artificial, even deceptive quality of her surroundings mirrors her own performance, particularly in what she predicts will be her next act— that of feigned shock when she “finds” that her husband is dead, as she tries to wake him. There is no such performance; the story ends in ambiguous darkness, a feature Lodge finds typical of modernist writing (Modes of Modern Writing 46). The final sentence reads: “She flung up her arms, struggling to catch at something, and fell face downward, striking her head against the dead man’s berth” (75).

21 It is unclear whether the woman lives or not and the reader must search through the significant absences in the text to find closure. The husband speaks only six words; little is given of his experience, implying it holds little interest for her; no mention whatsoever is made of their courtship; and the insertion of “of course,” after the statement “she still loved him” (66), suggests she is as much a slave to convention as her fellow passengers on the train, as does her clichéd, narrow-minded vision of the situation, when she laments that she has been denied the chance to “spread her wings” (66) at last. What operates on one level as a realist adventure story of sorts—will she be able to keep up the pretence her husband is asleep until they arrive in New York?—is made irrelevant by the ambiguous, “interrogative” final paragraph. The earlier moments of impressionistic narration, free indirect discourse and symbolic use of detailed commonplace foreshadow Wharton’s decision not to provide a neat conclusive ending in the Victorian tradition.

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Wharton’s Epiphanies

22 Three years later Wharton presents a split narrative voice in “The Reckoning” (1902). Her reflector, Julia Westall, is first presented in the symbolic cigarette haze of the Van Siderens’ living room, attending a talk given by her second husband on being true to oneself and remaining married only if one actively wishes to. Her eyes rest on the daughter of the house and she wonders if the young Una Van Sideren should be listening to such matters, and decides someone really ought to speak to the girl’s mother. The internal dialogue continues and she asks herself why, at the ripe age of twenty-six, Una is still single, and then berates herself for such an old-fashioned, regressive question. Wharton writes: It was as though someone else had been speaking—a stranger who had borrowed her own voice: she felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental ventriloquism. (456)

23 “The Reckoning” is the story of Julia’s search for her identity, somewhere between the two selves in the narrative. For the reader it is apparent that Julia is deceiving herself when she believes she supports her second husband’s unconventional views about marriage and divorce, and his progressive creed that one need only be faithful to oneself. Her true, traditional self is displayed by the way she needed social approval to be able to take the step of divorcing her first husband, Arment. Wharton writes: “Everyone was ready to excuse and even defend her. The world she adorned agreed that John Arment was ‘impossible’” (460), but no concrete reason or explanation of his “impossible” nature is given. It is only when her second husband asks to be released from their marriage, to marry the young Una, that Julia has some understanding of how her first husband felt when she left him. She also finally recognises his kindness in giving her the freedom to remarry by agreeing to the divorce.

24 Wharton creates an epiphany when Julia goes to her first husband to ask his forgiveness. Wharton writes: “their eyes met in a sudden shock of comprehension; a veil seemed to be lifted between them” (474). Arment is about to say something important as Julia is leaving and takes an impulsive step forward, but stops himself when a footman arrives to open the door. It appears he is as much ruled by convention and his public self as his former wife. Julia is therefore left to walk out into the darkness of the street alone. Julia’s epiphany ends in the clear vision that she is alone in literal and figurative obscurity. “The Reckoning” begins in a cigarette haze of confusion and ends in the crisp, cold paradoxical clarity of darkness, as Julia acknowledges both the suffering she has caused and the tempting emotional security of conventional marriage.

25 Thirty years later, Wharton portrayed the search for identity and inner conflict differently in “Joy in the House” (1932). In this story Christine Ansley must decide between two unsatisfactory men: her lover and her husband. Allowed by her husband Devons to have a trial marriage with another man, on the understanding that if it is over within six months she will be accepted back into the family home, Christine Ansley decides to return two weeks before her time is up. Even as she packs her clothes for her week-long journey back to America, she is still not completely decided. Although also written in the third person, Wharton’s presentation of Christine’s conflicting thoughts is different from that of Julia Westall’s mental struggle in “The Reckoning.” Using a wide range of punctuation to “jolt” the narrative, Christine’s

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struggle is disjointed, piecemeal and reaches no real conclusion. Once back in the family home again, Christine is still unsure whether she has made the right decision. Wharton writes: She put her hands up and hid her face in them for a moment. . . . Why this perpetual pendulum swing? Jeff—Devons, Devons—Jeff, backward and forward in her brain? (634)

26 Rather than hearing a second voice or rather a second self, as Julia does in “The Reckoning,” Christine’s thoughts are the sum of two incomplete, conflicting points of view, neither perhaps her own. As she muses over the two men, her thoughts are self- contradictory, and her opinions, her husband’s: Poor Jeff! He would never be anything but a roamer . . . With whom would he roam next, she wondered? But that speculation did not detain her long. She wanted to turn her thoughts away from Jeff, not to follow him through his subsequent divagations. . . . She supposed all artists were like that; he said they were. Painters especially. . . . Not that she had ever thought of him as a great painter–not really. . . . (633)

27 The use of the third person urges the reader to consider not only Christine’s dilemma, but Christine herself. Her lack of self-knowledge and clarity of vision is demonstrated by her continued reliance on her husband’s opinions, in this case his claims about the unreliability of artists.

28 When Christine learns that Jeff has committed suicide she finds a new, much darker meaning to the banner, “Joy in the House,” which her husband had put up for her arrival. Her first reaction is a need to escape, which is then counteracted by remorse now that Jeff can no longer take her away: “But the hand which had opened the world to her was dead, was stiff in the coffin already” (651). She orders the banner to be taken down and walks wearily upstairs to see her son, for whom, she tells herself, she has decided to remain. There is no moment of understanding, no inner strength achieved by new knowledge and no clear definition of Christine’s character, merely evidence of her reliance on her husband and Jeff. Christine’s epiphany hovers outside the text, and rather like the reader of Mansfield’s “The Prelude,” the reader is left with a disturbing lack of anticipated closure.

29 When she does include them, Wharton’s epiphanies are often moments when characters previously fettered by the narrow vision with which they are initially introduced—mirrored by the restraining nature of the short story form itself—have moments of clarity, of insightful re-envisioning of their situation. Such an epiphany occurs in “The Lamp of Psyche” (1895), when Delia Corbett realises that the man she had married and worshipped for many years had been too cowardly to fight in the Civil War. This moment is “a milestone in her existence” (41); the past itself has not changed, only the wife’s vision of it, like the awful revelation referred to in the title. In her study of Wharton’s use of epiphany, Kim describes it as a “substantive feature of her work” (150) and notes that Wharton’s epiphanies are in relation to a public self, and that such moments of perception acknowledge a wider context—that of social and often material dimensions. In The Writing of Fiction Wharton states that an “explicit awareness of the eternal struggle of man’s contending impulses,” that of public duty and private desire, is needed for the short story to reflect human experience (14, 36). Such blurring between subjective vision and wider social experience, does not, according to Kim, set Wharton apart from modernism, who adds that such combinations of narration of interior and exterior experience are employed by Joyce in

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Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In these two examples she argues that Joyce’s epiphanies do not reveal a transcendent truth, but serve to focus the spiritual eye, to “highlight […] a subjective consciousness linked to aesthetic vision” (151). In a strikingly similar manner, Wharton’s epiphanies illuminate not simply a character’s understanding of their own experience, but throw light on the relationship between human nature and the material and cultural forces within which it functions.

Wharton and Literary Tradition

30 Peel writes that Wharton’s belief “that there should be order in art” and her admiration for traditional forms set her apart from modernism (278). Certainly, her work does not have the modernist “chaotic, random, fluid[ity]” (Peel 278) of Joyce’s Ulysses, but neither does Dubliners. The modernist experimentation that was taking place at the turn of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth was firmly rooted in a literary tradition in its “allusion to or imitation of literary models” (Lodge “Language of Modernist Fiction” 481). In his study of the modernist short story, Head cites Joyce’s mimicking of the tripartite structure of a learning or initiation plot in “A Little Cloud.” Here the central character, Chandler, an aspiring writer, after meeting up with a successful friend returns home to his nagging wife and crying child, in a “cruel parody of enlightenment and decisive action” (Head 187). Wharton’s short stories are often reworkings, frequently subversive in character, of traditional plots and structures in a strikingly similar manner. Thus, instead of meeting a woman who turns out to be a ghost, Wharton has a narrator meet a ghost who turns out to be a live woman in “Miss Mary Pask” (1925), and writes a story about a thoughtful, altruistic woman who gives up everything—her money, her suitor, her business—so that her sister can be happy, to be rewarded not by a neat felicitous conclusion, but poverty- stricken loneliness in “Bunner Sisters” (1916). Furthermore her reworkings of classical narrative, which I have identified in “Demeter Forgiven” (2010), further align her writing with the works of various modernist writers including Woolf, Pound and Eliot. Wharton certainly did not disapprove of innovation, it was the junking of past literary tradition, which Peel conceives as “the connection between art and wider society” (99), that she found unacceptable. In her chapter on Proust (a writer who is widely regarded as modernist in his use of subjective narration) in The Writing of Fiction, Wharton describes his style as “renovat[ive],” and celebrates the fact that he had taken “the next step forward in a developing art without disowning its past” (WF 109). Wharton’s writing follows the same philosophy of building on and developing or “renovating” established narrative traditions. In her short stories in particular, she delights in subverting literary (and social) norms; her predilection for withholding closure, creating unreliable narrators, and so frequently centering her narratives around absence offer a decidedly modernist challenge to past traditions without dismissing them.

31 Wharton’s belief in the importance of structure and order does not set her apart from modernism. Eliot coined the term “mythical method” to describe the technique contemporary writers were employing in their use of myth to create order out of the chaos of modern existence. His subsequent definition of the term is not with reference to the fondness displayed by various modernist writers for classical myth, but rather the importance of structure and order. The “mythical method” was, he states, “simply

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a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” and such structuring was a “step toward […] order and form” (177-178). Often regarded as worlds apart from Wharton and her writing, Eliot’s creative philosophy has much in common with that of this grande dame of American literature. Indeed her vision of the novels of the past as “counselors” (WF 19) appears to be echoed in his pronouncement that “the most original talent is […] bound within a tradition” (Bell 15). Recent rethinking of modernism itself, with debate prompted by such seemingly “unmodernist” practices as Joyce’s “highly conventional” (Boscagli and Duffy 133) publicity photos on the front page of Time magazine and Faulkner’s compliant response to editorial demands to redraft his fiction for mass market publication (Stevick 8-9), indicate that much of the new writing of this era did make compromises with public taste and was not as radical as authors professed. In his book The Paradoxy of Modernism, Scholes calls for a long overdue undoing of absolutes such as Pound’s defence of originality in order to properly understand modernism (218), and, indeed, Pound’s injunction to “make it new” belies the distinct past literary traditions upon which much modernist writing is based.

32 Peel argues that it is also Wharton’s vision of the purpose of art—that is, that it has “an important role to play in the good society”—which ultimately excludes her from the modernist canon (278). I would question whether Wharton’s technique of presenting the wider social significance of a personal epiphany is completely contrary to modernist ideologies. Halliwell (2001) and Kim (2006) certainly see social significance in modernist epiphany. In terms of the “good” society Peel refers to (278), Wharton’s attitude towards the moral value of a story is an ambiguous one. Some of her critical writing, such as her comment that a reader’s first response to a story will be “What judgment on life does it contain for me?” (1925 23) suggests a belief that literature has some moral purpose, yet other comments, such as her description of Woolf and Joyce’s fiction as “that unhappy hybrid, the novel with a purpose” (Wegener 175) suggest the opposite. I believe that her lack of clear authorial assertion, the ambiguity of her texts, and the often contradictory meanings they contain suggest that her narratives are not Wharton moralizing—questioning perhaps—but certainly not dictating. Therefore by giving her epiphanies an explicitly social frame, Wharton is commenting on society, but not necessarily postulating what is needed for a good society. Wharton’s “The Pelican” reflects changing attitudes towards female agency and economic self- sufficiency; and whilst some sympathy is shown for her female protagonist, Mrs. Amyot is certainly not an idealised vision of the benefits of female independence and learning.

33 In “The Vice of Reading” Wharton complains of the “mechanical” reader, who, brought up on a diet of “cinema obviousness” (Wegener 96), makes little attempt to read between the lines of her stories, or assign meaning to the various subtle, often ironic, signposts she plants in her texts. Here we encounter another self-contradictory statement in her critical writing when it is evident that her short stories were written for an active reader who would discern her multiplicity of meaning, her subtle ironies, her artful use of absence and rejection of an absolute, single truth. Much progress has been made in decisively moving Wharton out of the Victorian era (in which she wrote for only nine of her forty-six writing years) and acknowledging her place in the twentieth-century canon. Now under the modernist microscope, Wharton’s short stories indicate the need for a timely recognition of the distinct similarities between the poetics of her short fiction and those of the “new” writing she so vehemently

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dismissed. Indeed, it is in the short story that we find Wharton at her most experimental, her most “renovative,” and her most modernist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beer, Janet and Avril Horner. “Edith Wharton and Modernism: The Mother’s Recompense.” American Modernism: Cultural Transactions. Eds. Catherine Morley and Alex Goody. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 69-92.

Bell, Michael. Literature, Modernism and Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. New York: Methuen, 1980.

Blackall, Jean Frantz. “Edith Wharton’s Art of Ellipsis.” Journal of Narrative Technique 17.2 (1987): 145-165.

Boscagli, M. and E. Duffy. “Joyce’s Face.” Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading. Eds. Kevin J.H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.

Campbell, Donna. “Edith Wharton’s ‘Book of the Grotesque’: Sherwood Anderson, Modernism and the Late Stories.” Edith Wharton Review 36 .2 (2010): 1-5.

Chan, Winnie. The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1980s. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Dessner, Lawrence Jay. (1983) “Edith Wharton and the Problem of Form” Ball State University Forum. 24.3 (1983): 54-63.

Dillard, Annie. “Contemporary Prose Styles.” Twentieth Century Literature 27.3 (1981): 207-222.

Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1980.

Halliwell, Martin. Transatlantic Modernism: Moral Dilemmas in Modernist Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2001.

Hanson, Clare. Short Stories and Short Fictions 1880-1980. London: Macmillan, 1985.

Haytock, Jennifer. Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Head, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Henry, A.C. “Iconic Punctuation: Ellipsis Marks in a Historical Perspective.” The Motivated Sign: Iconicity in Language and Literature. Eds. Olga Fischer and Max Nanny. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001. 135-155.

Hunter, Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2007.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1988.

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James, Henry. Daisy Miller. London: Penguin Books, 1988.

Kaplan, Carola M. and Anne B. Simpson. Seeing Double: Revisioning Edwardian and Modernist Literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996.

Kim, Sharon. “Edith Wharton and Epiphany.” Journal of Modern Literature 29.3 (2006): 150-175.

Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923.

Levenson, Michael H. The Genealogy of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1984.

Levy, Andrew. The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1993.

Lewis, R.W.B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

Lewis, R.W.B. and Nancy Lewis. Eds. The Letters of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribner’s, 1988.

Lodge, David. “The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy”. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930. Eds. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. London: Penguin, 1976. 481-496.

---. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1977.

Mansfield, Katherine. The Complete Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Auckland: Golden Press, 1974.

Nettels, Elsa. “Gender and First-Person Narration in Edith Wharton’s Short Fiction.” Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Eds. Alfred Zilversmit and Annette Bendixen. New York: Garland, 1992. 245-60.

Parrington, Vernon. “Our Literary Aristocrat.” Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Irving Howe. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1962.

Peel, Robin. Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics, and Fiction before World War I. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson U P, 2005.

Scholes, Robert. “Afterword: Small Magazines, Large Ones, and Those In-Between” Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches. Eds. Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2008. 215-226.

Singley, Carol J. “Edith Wharton’s Ironic Realism.” Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization. Eds. Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2000. 226-47.

Stevenson, Randall. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. Lexington: U P of Kentucky, 1992. Stevick, Philip. Ed. The American Short Story, 1900-1945: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

Thorndike, E.L. “The Psychology of Punctuation.” The American Journal of Psychology 61.2 (1948): 222-228.

Tuttleton, James W., Kristin O. Lauer and Margaret P. Murray. Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. ‘Women Authors and the Roots of American Modernism’. A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914. Eds. Robert Paul Lamb and G.R. Thompson. Malden, M.A.: Blackwell Publishing. 1990. 140-148.

Ware, Michele S. “The Architecture of the Short Story: Edith Wharton’s Modernist Practice.” Edith Wharton Review 20.2 (2004): 17-24.

Wegener, Frederick. Ed. Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996.

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---. “Form, ‘Selection’, and Ideology in Edith Wharton’s Antimodernist Aesthetic.” A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton. Eds. Clare Goodman, Susan Colquitt and Candace Waid. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1999. 116-38.

Wells, H.G. “The Secrets of the Short Story.” Saturday Review 80. 23 Nov. 1893: 692-693.

Wharton, Edith. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Scribner’s, 1925.

---. “Permanent Values in Fiction.” The Uncollected Critical Writings. Ed. Wegener. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1996. 175-179.

---. “The Lamp of Psyche.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001. 23-41.

---. “A Journey.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 65-75.

---.“The Pelican.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 76-94.

---. “The Reckoning.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 454-475.

---. “Joy in the House.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001. 632-652.

Whitehead, Sarah. “Breaking the frame: how Edith Wharton’s short stories subvert their magazine context”. European Journal of American Culture. 27.1 (2008): 43-56.

---. “Demeter Forgiven: Wharton’s Use of the Persephone Myth in her Short Stories”. Edith Wharton Review. 26.1 (Spring 2010).

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford U P, 1977.

NOTES

1. “The Long Run” (1912), published in Atlantic Monthly, was placed alongside the following statement: “In this story certain divergences in spelling and punctuation from the established practice of the Atlantic are made at the request of the author—The Editors.” 2. Wharton writes in her preface to Ghosts that when “Pomegranate Seed” first appeared in a magazine “I was bombarded by a host of enquirers anxious, in the first place, to know the meaning of the story’s title” (Wegener 1996 : 271). I am surprised she did not recieve a similar reaction to her 1928 story “After Holbein,” also published in the Saturday Evening Post, in which the title and the title alone, refers to a series of woodcuts depicting both the inevitability and universality of death. (No reference is made to the woodcuts in the magazine publication of the story.) 3. “Pie Pelilicane, Jesu Domine,/ Me immundum munda tuo sanguine.” (verse 3) (“O loving Pelican, O Jesu Lord,/ Unclean am I but cleanse me in thy blood”) In Hamlet, Act IV, Scene V, lines 145-147, Laertes says to the king: “To his good friends thus wide I’ll open my arms, And like the life-rendering pelican, Repast them with my blood” In King Lear, Act III, Scene IV, Lear describes his daughter as “Those pelican daughters” (line 72).

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ABSTRACTS

Edith Wharton a formulé des critiques véhémentes à l’encontre des écrits aujourd’hui considérés comme modernistes. Pourtant, certaines de ses nouvelles portent l’empreinte des techniques narratives introduites au début du XXe siècle. Dans sa première nouvelle, “The Pelican” (1899), la présence d’un narrateur peu fiable, l’absence de clôture et le refus de formuler clairement la position de l’auteur annoncent la conception de Joyce d’un artiste invisible, présent à l’intérieur, derrière ou au-delà de son œuvre. L’épiphanie que l’on retrouve dans “The Reckoning” est une caractéristique aujourd’hui étroitement associée à l’écriture des modernistes, de même que l’emploi du monologue intérieur dans cette même nouvelle et dans “Joy in the House” (1932). Mais c’est surtout par le rôle qu’elle attribue au lecteur de ses nouvelles que Wharton s’apparente à ses contemporains modernistes : le lecteur doit être actif, capable d’identifier ses reprises des récits traditionnels, de comprendre l’ironie et de combler les vides laissés dans ces textes souvent fragmentaires.

AUTHORS

SARAH WHITEHEAD Sarah Whitehead teaches English Language and Literature at Kingston University and Tolworth Centre for Continuing Education. She is the author of a doctoral thesis on Edith Wharton’s Short Stories, with a focus on her modernist practices and magazine publications. She has published articles on the short story in Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, European Journal of American Culture and the Edith Wharton Review.

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Breaches of Realist Conventions in Edith Wharton’s Short Fiction

David Malcolm

1 Edith Wharton’s critical reception emphasizes her status as a social and psychological realist. The consensus is almost overwhelming. For Malcolm Bradbury, she is “one of America’s finest social satirists and observers of the evolving American order” (44). In his introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton (1968), R.W.B. Lewis notes Wharton’s thematic adventurousness and complexity, but sees her as a writer content to reproduce the conventions of nineteenth-century social-psychological realism (33-34). In a review of another of Lewis’s editions of Wharton’s short fiction, Samuel I. Bellman describes Wharton, unambiguously, as “a delineator of daily living in the world of wealthy and privileged Americans, from the 1890s to the 1930s” (133). Critics seem almost unanimous in their celebration of Wharton’s thematic daring, while disregarding the possibility of her having technical ambitions (Messent 184-203; Lowe 383-400; Allen 33-40; Gray 355-358; Campbell). Maria Lauriet is typical in describing Wharton as a writer of “feminist realism” (83).

2 Yet, as John Updike points out, “she lived into modern times.” “But,” he continues, “she was not a modernist; though well aware of changing fashions, her young friends could not convince her of the virtues of Ulysses” (157). Claudia Roth Pierpoint writes of Wharton’s vexed relationship with innovative and younger contemporaries. She felt out of date when she read The Great Gatsby, hated it when Virginia Woolf saw her as epigonic and passée, but encouraged her identification with a commonsensical traditionality in her comments on novels and short stories, in, for example, The Writing of Fiction (1925) (74). Barbara White writes of Wharton that she “lived at the wrong time”—neither a “pioneer” in the development of short fiction, nor a participant in the innovations of the period after the Great War (xi) (See also: Totten 116). Nonetheless, Candace Waid and Clare Colquitt point out Wharton’s connections with and interest in younger writers and even her influence on Faulkner’s work (547-549).

3 Indeed, a small number of commentators have discussed Wharton’s fiction, especially her short fiction, as more technically innovative than the critical consensus acknowledges it to be. Lewis’s description of her work as “resolutely traditional art”

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(35) that operates within “received forms” (34) has been questioned. Gianfranca Balestra and Sarah Whitehead separately write of Wharton’s fully conscious subverting of the norms of magazine publishing (Balestra 13-24; Whitehead 43-56). Janet Beer comments on Wharton’s self-reflexive engagement with the conventions of supernatural and Gothic fiction (269-287). Sharon Kim discusses Wharton’s interest in Joycean epiphany in her short stories (Kim 150-175). One of the boldest of such revisionist views of Wharton’s short fiction is that of Kathleen Wheeler in “Modernist” Women Writers and Narrative Art (1994). Wharton’s novels, travel writings, and short stories are, she argues, “not just social commentaries or moral analysis but works of art” (77). Wharton’s writing must be seen, Wheeler insists, in the context of the “scrutiny” and rejection of the conventions of nineteenth-century realism. It is placed in the company of the work of James, Woolf, Willa Cather, and Djuna Barnes (78), and it is marked by “anti-realist gestures” (79). In discussions of travel writing and short stories, Wheeler points to Wharton’s foregrounding of the text as artifact, and insists that such evident disruption of realist norms has a thematic and, indeed, feminist purpose (82-83, 88-98).

4 Many of Wharton’s short stories—and not just at the beginning of her writing life— certainly follow realist conventions.1 Their focus is on social mores and attitudes and the effects of those mores on the psychology and lives of their protagonists. Stories such as “The Lamp of Psyche” (1895), “Souls Belated” and “A Journey” (both 1899), “The Other Two” and “The Reckoning” (both 1904), “The Daunt Diana” (1909), “The Day of the Funeral” and “Her Son” (both 1933), and even (pace Wheeler) “Roman Fever” (1936), predominantly follow the conventions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century realism set out above. “The Lamp of Psyche,” for example, is set in an economically, but highly verisimilar, established social and geographical world–Paris, Boston, the Corbetts’ charming hôtel particulier, their “delightful dinners” (24), the social world “from the Back Bay to the South End” (30), Mrs. Hayne’s home and Mrs. Hayne’s dress (31-32)—the story material is recounted in a logical-chronological fashion, point of view is largely restricted to that of Delia, the protagonist, and her crisis is set within and, in a sense, dependent on, documented historical events and their implications. She must rethink her attitude to her husband because he did not serve in the Civil War (36). “The Lamp of Psyche” is a compelling story, and it is so powerful and complex because it is realized within a set of realist conventions. When Wharton takes the short story into challenging and controversial thematic areas—women’s psychological complexities and needs, the trials of socially irregular liaisons, intricate existential dilemmas, madness and delusion—she does this predominantly in pieces that do not undermine or question the rules of the realist text.

5 However, Wharton also continually breaches realist conventions. Two of the ways in which she does so are obvious, and have been commented on by many critics (although not quite in the context of a pushing against the boundaries of realism). Wharton’s interest in fable is a case in point. In, for example, “The Valley of Childish Things” (1895) the story material is simplified to produce clear contrasts, the geography is undocumented, many of the characters do not age, and there is no verisimilar social structure. “The Valley of Childish Things” is an acute and powerful feminist fable (the last paragraph, in which the male protagonist wishes that the “she” of the story had “taken better care of [her] complexion” (44) is particularly damning), but it comments on reality without following realist conventions. Wharton’s career-long interest in the supernatural story also illustrates a desire to deploy different conventions, to touch

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upon areas of experience that the realist story cannot. (See in this matter: Judith Hale Young 1.) Wharton’s supernatural stories are justly celebrated: “Afterward” (1909), “The Eyes” (1910), “Pomegranate Seed” (1936), and “All Souls’” (1937), for example. “Afterward” is a genuinely innovative ghost story, in which the premise of the story material is that, in the house the Boynes acquire, those who are haunted only realize some time after the supernatural encounter that it was an encounter with a ghost. The ambiguities of “The Eyes”—why is the young man Frenham so affected by Culwin’s story?; is his life a replay of Gilbert’s?—make this tale particularly sinister beyond its supernatural apparatus. All of Wharton’s supernatural stories plumb psychological depths—for example those of being a second wife to a husband still deeply linked to his first wife in “Pomegranate Seed,” and of complete isolation in “All Souls’”—and supernatural story conventions allow the author to express the sinister and obsessional in vivid shapes.

6 What has been much less noticed by Wharton scholars (with the exceptions noted above) is the degree to which her short fiction manifests a self-advertising literariness which sits ill with the consensus that Wharton’s work can be understood only in terms of social and psychological realism. Such literariness, the foregrounded artistic focus of parts of Wharton’s output, can be observed on two levels of her work, thematic and technical. On each level two elements point to the self-referentiality of several pieces of short fiction. First, her stories are often concerned with the literary and artistic life. Second, texts and fictions play a substantial and foregrounded role in many stories. These are both thematic aspects of literariness. Technical aspects, which are more radical, can be seen in an occasional self-referentiality of language and in a foregrounding of convention, both of which are inimical to the protocols of realism.

7 The literary and artistic life is at the center of a significant number of Wharton’s short stories: for example, “Expiation” (1904), “Full Circle” and “The Bolted Door” (both 1909), and “The Temperate Zone” (1924). “Expiation” and “The Temperate Zone” are particularly good examples of Wharton’s complex interest in authorship, literary reception, and scholarship, and in the writing of books in general. “Expiation” involves four writers, Paula Fetherel, Bella Clinch, their uncle the Bishop of Ossining, and Archer Hynes. The central parts of the story involve paradox. Mrs. Fetherel’s novel—Fast and Loose, despite its lurid title a rather bland production—becomes a best seller because it is denounced as immoral. Its being a succès de scandale allows its author to donate money to install a chantry window in her uncle’s cathedral, a service for which she receives no public thanks, the Bishop taking the credit for raising the money through his own maudlin and tendentious production Through a Glass Darkly. The successes and perturbations of these amateur or, at least, tyro writers are observed by Mrs. Clinch, a professional author of non-fiction, with titles such as Nests Ajar and How to Smell the Flowers to her credit, and “the distinguished novelist Archer Hynes” (491). The latter is observed collecting detail for his next novel (494), and he also works out the intrigue that lies behind the funding of the chantry window (498). “The Temperate Zone” is reminiscent of Henry James’s “The Aspern Papers” (1888). In it, Willis French, himself a failed visual artist and poet, pursues information about a once neglected but now fashionable painter Horace Fingall. He discovers that the legacies of both the artist and a writer whom he knew and admired greatly (Emily Morland) are in the hands of the superficial Paul couple with whom he has to compromise in order to write books about his great artist subjects. Donald Paul is a benign but philistine inheritor of the famous author Emily Morland’s fame and papers. Bessy Reck, later Mrs. Horace Fingall, now

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Mrs. Donald Paul, the wife of the dead artist, is a more sinister and calculating creature. She intends to make up for years of relative poverty by capitalizing on her dead husband’s name, even to the extent of bribing French, inter alia, with access to information he needs for his book, in order to obtain a fashionable portrait of herself to be painted by Jolyesse, an artist who is the antithesis of her late husband. The story captures the thrill of literary and art scholarship, especially of a biographical kind, and the imperatives of writing. French will do almost anything to find information for his books. His excitement on discovering a sketch of Emily Morland by Fingall, which shows they knew each other, is palpable. In a general way, the Künstlergeschichte plays a substantial role in Wharton’s work.

8 In keeping with the author’s interest in the literary life, texts and fictions play a prominent role in many of Wharton’s short stories. In “The Pelican” (1899), Mrs. Amyot makes a living by reading (however superficially) and lecturing, and comes from a text- generating family (a life her son Lancelot has fled). Lecturing, too, is the profession of Mr. Westall in “The Reckoning,” while letters are at the center of the story material in “The Letters” (1910), as they are in “The Line of Least Resistance” (1900), “Full Circle,” “Pomegranate Seed,” and “Confession” (1936). Letters—one false, one true—have determined the hidden event in the past of “Roman Fever.” Other kinds of texts are crucial in other stories: a doctor’s written verdict in “Diagnosis” (1933), a foreign newspaper article in “Afterward,” an altered painting in “The Moving Finger” (1901), and an inscription written on the back of a miniature of a dead Union officer in “The Lamp of Psyche.” In “Souls Belated,” (1898) Gannett is a writer (although he does not write anything in the hotel in Monte Rosa) and the adventuress Mrs. Cope is desperately waiting for the document that records her divorce. In “The Eyes,” Culwin tells a ghost story and Gilbert Noye’s aim in that story is to be a writer.

9 In Wharton’s stories, texts are often fictional, and certainly fictions and lies of a variety of sorts recur. Mrs. Amyot lies about her need to support her son (“The Pelican”), Mrs. Westall has subscribed to a doctrine of free love in which she no longer believes, and one suspects that Mr. Westall preaches the same doctrine as a principled cover for promiscuity (“The Reckoning”). In “After Holbein” (1930), Mrs. Jasper is surrounded by fictions of a dinner party and guests, and Anson Warley is drawn into the macabre charade to the degree that he becomes convinced of its reality. In “Her Son,” Mrs. Glenn has lied about her illegitimate child, and is herself practised upon by the unscrupulous and horrid Browns. Deception also takes place in “Diagnosis,” inasmuch as Eleanor Welwood suppresses the doctors’ revised verdict on Dorrance’s health. The unnamed protagonist of “A Journey” spins lies about her husband in order to hide the fact of his death. In “The Moving Finger,” Claydon repaints and repaints again Mrs. Grancy’s portrait, so that its relation to any original is attenuated. The text and the false text are, thus, at the center of many (but by no means all) of Wharton’s short stories. And several of her texts actually advertise their own fictionality, through foregrounding of language, and (more frequently) through foregrounding of convention. Parts of Wharton’s œuvre, thus, become both a reflection on the powers of texts and fictions, and embody and manifest the fictionality involved in producing stories.

10 Because of the length of her writing career, the language of Wharton’s stories might be expected to show substantial shifts. After all, the stylistic norms of the 1890s were not those of the 1920s and 1930s. However, one is struck by the relatively informal and

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modern lexis and syntax of most of Wharton’s short fiction from all periods of her output. For example, the following passage is from “A Journey.” “We’d better get him up now, hadn’t we?” asked the porter, touching her arm. He had her husband’s hat in his hand and was meditatively revolving it under his brush. She looked at the hat and tried to speak; but suddenly the car grew dark. She flung up her arms, struggling to catch at something, and fell face downward, striking her head against the dead man’s berth. (75)

11 Apart from “meditatively revolving it under his brush,” this passage (drawn virtually at random) would produce no raised eyebrows in a contemporary short story. Compared to this passage, “The Temperate Zone” shows no stylistic differences. French had wandered up to a bookshelf in what had apparently been Fingall’s dressing room. He had seen no other books about, and was curious to learn what these had to tell him. They were chiefly old Tauchnitz novels—mild mid-Victorian fiction rubbing elbows with a few odd volumes of Dumas, Maupassant and Zola. But under a loose pile the critic, with beating heart, had detected a shabby sketchbook. His hand shook as he opened it; but its pages were blank, and he reflected ironically that had they not been the dealers would never have left it there. (533)

12 The passage’s lexis tends at times toward the formal—“detected” or “reflected”—but this scarcely pushes it much beyond relative informality and modernity. At least two stories, however, do manifest a linguistic brio that is highly self-advertising. These are “The Moving Finger” and “The Line of Least Resistance.” The former does so only in one section of the text; the latter does so throughout.

13 The opening paragraph of “The Moving Finger” clearly illustrates part of this linguistic configuration: The news of Mrs. Grancy’s death came to me with the shock of an immense blunder —one of fate’s most irretrievable acts of vandalism. It was as though all sorts of renovating forces had been checked by the clogging of that one wheel. Not that Mrs. Grancy contributed any perceptible momentum to the social machine: her unique distinction was that of filling to perfection her special place in the world. So many people are like badly-composed statues, overlapping their niches at one point and leaving them vacant at another. Mrs. Grancy’s niche was her husband’s life; and if it be argued that the space was not large enough for its vacancy to leave a very big gap, I can only say that, at the last resort, such dimensions must be determined by finer instruments than any ready-made standard of utility. Ralph Grancy’s was in short a kind of disembodied usefulness: one of those constructive influences that, instead of crystallizing into definite forms, remain as it were a medium for the development of clear thinking and fine feeling. He faithfully irrigated his own dusty patch of life, and the fruitful moisture stole far beyond its boundaries. If, to carry on the metaphor, Grancy’s life was a sedulously-conducted enclosure, his wife was the flower he had planted in its midst—the embowering tree, rather, which gave him rest and shade at its foot and the wind of dreams in its upper branches. (307)

14 In this passage, the lexis is conspicuously formal and sophisticated—“irretrievable,” “perceptible momentum,” “vacancy,” “such dimensions,” “determined by finer instruments,” “disembodied usefulness,” “fruitful moisture stole far beyond his boundaries,” “a sedulously-cultivated enclosure,” and “embowering tree.” The syntax, too, can be complex. The reader encounters the following examples of multiple subordination and parenthetical insertion: “and if it be argued that the space was not large enough for its vacancy to leave a very big gap, I can only say that, at the last resort, such dimensions must be determined by finer instruments than any ready-made standard of utility” and “one of those constructive influences that, instead of

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crystallizing into definite forms, remain as it were a medium for the development of clear thinking and fine feeling.” One should also note the marked presence in the paragraph of simile and metaphor. Examples include extended metaphors (that of irrigation) and extended similes (the comparison of people to “badly composed statues”). The narrator even acknowledges the elaborateness of his figurative language (“to carry on the metaphor”). The density of figurative language is remarkable for a paragraph of eight sentences, each sentence carrying a simile or metaphor, or developing one that has already been introduced. The first two parts of “The Moving Finger” are replete with the same self-advertising lexis and figurative language, although this changes in the last half of the text. Once Grancy begins his intradiegetic narration, the language changes, and the homodiegetic frame narrator’s language in parts IV and V, although at times rich (“They had the baffled manner of empirics who have been superseded by the Great Healer” [319]), is much more informal and self- effacing than that of parts I and II.

15 Rather than discuss at this stage the function of such foregrounding of language in “The Moving Finger,” I would prefer to point to the similar highly wrought language of a contemporary story “The Line of Least Resistance.” Once again, it is revealing to look at a brief passage from the text. On this occasion it was the unpunctuality of the little girls. They came in with their governess some minutes after he was seated: two small Millicents, with all her arts in miniature. They arranged their frocks carefully before seating themselves and turned up their little Greek noses at the food. Already they showed signs of finding fault with as much ease and discrimination as Millicent: and Mr. Mindon knew that this was an accomplishment not to be undervalued. He himself, for example, though Millicent charged him with being a discontented man, had never acquired her proficiency in deprecation; indeed, he sometimes betrayed a mortifying indifference to trifles that afforded opportunity for the display of his wife’s fastidiousness. Mr. Mindon, though no biologist, was vaguely impressed by the way in which that accomplished woman had managed to transmit an acquired characteristic to her children: it struck him with wonder that traits of which he had marked the incipience in Millicent should have become intuitions in her offspring. To rebuke such costly replicas of their mother seemed dangerously like scolding Millicent—and Mr. Mindon’s hovering resentment prudently settled on the governess. (342)

16 Here, the foregrounding of language is achieved mainly through elevation of lexis (although some syntax is notably complicated): “unpunctuality,” “finding fault with as much ease and discrimination as Millicent,” “an accomplishment not to be undervalued,” “charged him with being a discontented man,” “acquired her proficiency in depreciation,” “mortifying indifference,” “afforded opportunity for,” “fastidiousness,” “accomplished woman,” “transmit an acquired characteristic,” “traits,” “incipient,” and “hovering resentment.” In contrast to “The Moving Finger,” “The Line of Least Resistance” remains linguistically homogeneous throughout. It is stylistically a most formal text.

17 What are the functions of such a linguistic configuration in these two stories? Both are stories about deceit and pretense. This is obvious in “The Line of Least Resistance.” Mr. Mindon is a comic and absurd character whose manly decisiveness in abandoning his frivolous, expensive, and (it turns out) adulterous wife is condemned from the start to be short-lived. It is a pretence, and his return to the family will be the beginning of another and added level of pretence. In a story of personal and social hypocrisy

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(emphasized by the coming of his three [like Job’s] comforters who aim to bring him back to his sham marriage), the story’s elevated language is appropriate in its mock- heroic dissonance with the paltry central figure and his feeble will. The function of the linguistically elaborate sections of “The Moving Finger” is more complex. They are in dissonance too, juxtaposed to the differing, less formal shaping of language in the second half of the text. Evident artistry is replaced by something more self-effacing. One must remember that this is a story about art. The painter Claydon declares proudly toward the end: “Pygmalion […] turned his statue into a real woman; I turned my real woman into a picture” (321). There is more than a suggestion (which Claydon denies [321]) that he uses his art to kill Grancy. (By repainting Mrs. Grancy as a woman expecting her husband to die, Claydon encourages the mentally frail Grancy to decline.) Where is the real Mrs. Grancy? In the first picture? In the two intermediate and repainted ones? In Claydon’s final repainting? What is the reader meant to make of these men who live with simulacra of a woman? Did Claydon hasten Grancy’s demise? In a story with so many questions, with such an emphasis on artifice and artificiality, with so many lies and (self-) deceptions, the self-advertising language of the story’s first half, drawing attention to text as text, is most appropriate. The rude shift in level of formality in the second half of the story only serves to highlight the first half’s ornateness.

18 But such modest gongorismo is multi-functional and has a metafictional effect beyond the semantics of any particular story. Both “The Line of Least Resistance” and “The Moving Finger” are—through their linguistic shaping—self-advertising fictions, performances, stressing the madeness, the artifice, of any story. Such a metafictional focus is further achieved through another strategy employed by Wharton—the foregrounding of convention in a significant number of stories. She emphasizes the fictionality of her texts by deploying the connected devices of coincidence and paradox.

19 Coincidence is a recurrent device in much prose fiction, and can be employed to complex effect. Lady Dedlock’s and Esther’s relationship and their connection with Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), or Parson Tringham’s chance encounter with Tess Durbyfield’s father and his whim to jest with him in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), are only two striking examples of the way in which fiction thrives on coincidence. Wharton’s short stories are full of coincidences. In “The Pelican,” the narrator’s meeting Mrs. Amyot’s son just before receiving a ticket to one of her lectures is a coincidence. So, too, is the surprising identity of Garnett’s restaurant-acquaintance in “The Last Asset” (1908). Lizzie West’s discovery of her unopened and therefore unread letters to Deering in the beaded bag also smacks of coincidence (“The Letters”). The presence of coincidence is not by any means necessarily something negative in a text. After all, coincidences do occur in extratextual human life, and the device itself can powerfully emphasize part of the vision of a story (for example, the role of chance in the world, the cruelty of circumstances, the necessary undoing of self-satisfaction and arrogance). In some of Wharton’s stories, coincidence assumes a very prominent role in the text. Examples here include Dorrance’s meeting with his former doctor after his wife’s funeral, when by chance, as it were, the doctor reveals that Dorrance had received the wrong diagnosis years before and that his wife had known it (“The Diagnosis”). “The Temperate Zone” is a tissue of coincidences–that the surviving spouses of Emily Morland and Hector Fingall should have married each other, that a sketch of Emily Morland should be found in a an abandoned sketchbook by French, and that French should have encountered Jolyesse on the Channel boat that he and the

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Pauls (unbeknownst to each other) were on. In “The Lamp of Psyche,” Corbett buys his wife (“something I picked up in a little shop in the Rue Bonaparte” [39]) the very thing, a Civil War miniature, that precipitates Delia’s disillusion. The central action of “After Holbein” hinges on Warley’s turning up, many years too late, at Mrs. Jasper’s house. “Queer coincidence—it was the Jasper house,” he muses (491). The climax of “Les Metteurs en Scène” (1908) depends entirely on coincidence—Blanche becomes wealthy and marriageable just as Le Fanois commits himself to marry Mrs. Smithers.

20 This last example demonstrates the closeness in Wharton’s work of coincidence to paradox. Le Fanois and Blanche seem destined for each other, but their scheming only serves to separate them not once but twice, both with Catherine Smithers and her mother. Paradox runs throughout Wharton’s short stories. In “Autres Temps” (1911) Mrs. Lidcote experiences paradox on two levels. First, her daughter’s divorce, which she is certain will bring her social ruin as it has her mother, has had no such effect. Second she learns twice that, paradoxically, the new mœurs do not apply to her. She is a social embarrassment both to her daughter and her admirer Franklin Ide. In “The Bolted Door,” Hubert Granice, a murderer, just cannot convince anyone of his guilt. As a further example of paradox, it is his attempts to prove his guilt that drive him mad and lead to his confinement. In “Charm Incorporated” (1936)—a paradoxical, or at least oxymoronic title—Targatt discovers that his wife’s numerous, exotic, and expensive relatives are finally very bankable. The story material of the celebrated “Roman Fever” itself hinges on coincidence and paradox combined. Mrs. Slade’s letter to Mrs. Ansley, which is maliciously intended to kill any relationship between Delphin and her rival, in fact, brings them together, if only briefly. The dull Grace Ansley has the brighter and more vibrant daughter, and here they are years later on a Roman terrace mulling over the past. Mrs. Slade’s sense of superiority and triumph is dashed in the story’s concluding sentence.

21 With a writer of Wharton’s skill, any element of a text is certainly multi-functional. Paradox is part of the vision of the world in many of her stories, and that is simply how things are. But coincidence and paradox have another function too. They constantly reveal the narrative mechanism of stories. (See, in this respect: Pierpoint 74.) In a famous essay on Laurence Sterne, written in 1921, the Formalist scholar Viktor Shklovsky argues that Tristram Shandy is “the most typical novel in world literature” because it exposes (“lays bare”) the devices and conventions of the novel (57, 30). Shklovsky’s fellow (and greater) Formalist Boris Eichenbaum writes of O. Henry’s short fiction in 1925 that the American author “often enough annotates the progress of the plot, taking each instance as an opportunity for introducing literary irony, for destroying the illusion of authenticity, for parodying a cliché, for parodying the conventionality of art, or showing how the story is put together” (255). One is tempted to argue that Wharton is doing something similar in her heavily foregrounded deployment of coincidence and paradox in some stories. The machinery of fiction is exposed. The technique is revealed. A story is a story, not an unmediated presentation of the real or actual, no matter how referential to and engaged in the social and existential dilemmas of reality that story may be.

22 Wharton does not do all this everywhere, nor is that all she does. But the presence of such elements as I have indicated above suggests that one needs to see her output of social and psychological realism in a nuanced light. It suggests Wharton was not nearly as hostile to or immune to the ludic bravura and metafictional interests of her

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modernist contemporaries as some commentators have indicated. Just as Wharton is interested in the life of writers and artists, and in the power of fictions, she demonstrates a marked, if intermittent, disposition toward emphasizing how artistic her short stories are.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Brooke. “The Accomplishment of Edith Wharton.” New Criterion 20.1 (Sept. 2001): 33-40.

Balestra, Gianfranca. “‘For the Use of the Magazine Morons’: Edith Wharton Rewrites the Tale of the Fantastic.” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996): 13-24.

Beer, Janet. “‘This isn’t exactly a ghost story: Edith Wharton and Parodic Gothic.” Journal of American Studies 37.2 (Aug. 2003): 269-287.

Bellman, Samuel I. Rev. of The Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, ed. R.W.B. Lewis. Studies in Short Fiction 29.1 (winter 1992): 133-135.

Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel. New edition. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Campbell, Donna. “Wharton, Edith.” The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer. Blackwell 2011. Blackwell Reference Online. 31 July 2011.

Eichenbaum, Boris. “O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story.” Trans. I.R. Titunik. Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications/U of Michigan, 1978. 227-270.

Furst, Lilian. All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995.

Gray, Richard. A History of American Literature. Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2004.

Kim, Sharon. “Edith Wharton and Epiphany.” Journal of Modern Literature 29.3 (Spring 2006): 150-175.

Lauriet, Maria. Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Lewis, R.W.B. “Introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton.” Women Writers of the Short Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Heather McClave. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1980. 32-49.

Lowe, John. “Edith Wharton.” Modern American Women Writers: Profiles of Their Lives and Works— From the 1870s to the Present. Ed. Elaine Showalter, Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz. New York: Macmillan, 1993. 383-400.

Messent, Peter. New Readings of the American Novel: Narrative Theory and Its Application. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990.

Morris, Pam. Realism. The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2003.

Pierpoint, Claudia Roth. “Cries and Whispers.” The New Yorker 2 April 2001: 66-75.

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Shklovsky, Victor. “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary.” Russian Formalist Criticism. Translated and with an Introduction by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln, Nebraska, and London: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 25-57.

Totten, Gary. “Critical Reception and Cultural Capital: Edith Wharton As a Short Story Writer.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition and Culture 8.1 (2007): 115-133.

Updike, John. “The Changeling.” The New Yorker 16 April 2007: 154-157.

Waid, Candace, and Clare Colquitt. “Toward a Modern Aesthetic: The Literary Legacy of Edith Wharton.” A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914. Ed. Robert Paul Lamb and G.R. Thompson. Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2005. 536-556.

Wharton, Edith. “The Temperate Zone.” The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton. Selected and Introduced by Anita Brookner. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1988. 531-540.

---. “After Holbein.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001. 474-496.

---. “Afterward.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001. 830-860.

---. “A Journey.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 65-75.

---. “All Souls’.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 798-820.

---. “Autres Temps.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 59-88.

---. “Charm Incorporated.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 653-677.

---. “Confession.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 710-748.

---. “Diagnosis.” The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton. Selected and Introduced by Anita Brookner. 541-561.

---. “Expiation.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 476-498.

---. “Full Circle.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 758-781.

---. “Her Son.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 524-586.

---. “Les Metteurs en Scène.” The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton. Selected and introduced by Anita Brookner. 393-408.

---. “Pomegranate Seed.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 678-709.

---. “Roman Fever.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 749-762.

---. “Souls Belated.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 95-122.

---. “The Bolted Door.” The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton. Selected and introduced by Anita Brookner. 474-512.

---. “The Daunt Diana.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 731-743.

---. “The Day of the Funeral.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 587-608.

---. “The Eyes.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 810-829.

---. “The Lamp of Psyche.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 23-41.

---. “The Last Asset.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 601-632.

---. “The Letters.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 861-897.

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---. “The Line of Least Resistance.” The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton. Selected and introduced by Anita Brookner. 341-354.

---. “The Moving Finger.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 307-322.

---. “The Other Two.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 433-453.

---.“The Pelican.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 76-94.

---. “The Reckoning.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 454-475.

---. “The Valley of Childish Things, and Other Emblems.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 42-49.

Wheeler, Kathleen. “Modernist” Woman Writers and Narrative Art. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994.

White, Barbara. Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1991.

Whitehead, Sarah. “Breaking the Frame: How Edith Wharton’s Stories Subvert Their Magazine Context.” European Journal of American Culture 27.1 (2008): 43-56.

Young, Judith Hale. “The Repudiation of Sisterhood in Edith Wharton’s “Pomegranate Seed.” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996): 1-11.

NOTES

1. I understand realism here as a set of literary conventions, established in the course of the nineteenth century in Europe and North America, and still widely employed in novels and short fiction today. These include a focus on and limitation to the social and material, an embedding of characters in a social environment, an obfuscation of the fictive nature of the text, and a transparency of language. One of the best discussions of this issue is in Lilian Furst’s All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction (23-24). See also: Morris 97-118.

ABSTRACTS

On considère en général Edith Wharton comme une représentante du réalisme social et psychologique. Son œuvre a été qualifiée de « résolument traditionnelle » par R. W. B. Lewis, et on la dit hostile à l’expérimentation moderniste. S’il est incontestable que Wharton a respecté en général les conventions réalistes, il n’en est pas moins vrai qu’elle les a souvent violées—dans ses histoires de fantômes, par exemple. Ses nouvelles, en particulier, ont souvent un caractère très littéraire. En témoignent la place qu’y occupent les milieux artistiques et littéraires, ainsi que le rôle joué par des textes dans l’univers imaginaire de l’auteur. Sur le plan de la technique d’écriture, les nouvelles de Wharton sont marquées par le caractère parfois autoréférentiel de la langue et par une fréquente mise en relief de conventions littéraires telles la coïncidence ou le paradoxe. Ces deux derniers caractères font de ses nouvelles des œuvres d’art manifestes plutôt que de simples témoignages sur les mœurs ou la psychologie des personnages.

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AUTHORS

DAVID MALCOLM David Malcolm is Professor of English Literature and Chair of the Department of Literary Studies in the English Institute at the University of Gdansk in Poland. He is co-author (with Cheryl Alexander Malcolm) of Jean Rhys: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne, 1996), and author of Understanding Ian McEwan (2002), Understanding Graham Swift (2003) and Understanding John McGahern (2007, all U of South Carolina P). He is co-editor of The British and Irish Short Story, 1945-2000, volume 319 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Thomson-Gale, 2006). The Blackwell Companion to the British and Irish Short Story, which he edited with Cheryl Alexander Malcolm, was published in autumn 2008. He has also co-edited collections of essays on Ronald Firbank, Sylvia Townsend Warner and T.H. White (Mellen 2004, 2006 and 2008). The Blackwell Handbook to the British and Irish Short Story is due for publication in February 2012.

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Realism and Ritual in the Italian Short Stories of Edith Wharton

Robin Peel

1 This essay explores the tension between scientific rationalism and aspects of religion in Wharton’s Italian short fiction. If Wharton’s novels of social realism explore the secular complexities of the social order imposed by Old New York conventions, an important strand in her Italian stories explores the implications for conduct of the invisible order that we label religion. Although in Edith Wharton’s short stories the presence of Italy provides a metonymy for an aesthetic response to history, art and architecture as “The Daunt Diana” (1909) shows, at play in these texts is another, more powerful discourse connoting a fascination with the signification of Christianity, whether in the form of its apparatus of church and priest, the enactment of ritual, or the myths and mysteries to which these symbols point. This fascination emerged in Wharton’s formative years of early childhood and early youth but was overshadowed by the unexpectedly productive return on her decision around 1902 to take the advice of friends such as Walter Berry and Henry James to focus in her longer fiction on contemporary America and Americans. The commercial success that immediately followed the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905 helped determine the focus of future fiction, especially her novels. Marriage and modernity became her subject. The nurturing and revival of an interest in Italy, a Catholic country, comes as a surprise only if we ignore the possibility that rule-bound Catholicism served as a necessary replacement for the rule-bound Old New York society that Wharton had left behind.

2 Wharton’s mature espousal of a rational and scientific epistemology was nurtured by her close friends Egerton Winthrop and Walter Berry and her reading of Darwin and Herbert Spencer. It is a development reflected indirectly in most of her longer fiction, with its sharp exposure of the contradictions and restraints imposed by class, gender and money on human types regarded as evolutionary species. Her “grand tour” engagement with medieval and post-medieval Italian church art ensured that her curiosity about a world unmeasured by science continued to be stimulated, however. During this pre-World War I period, an undercurrent of interest in the uncanny and the figure of the spiritual enquirer resurfaces in the fiction, an interest which provides a

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connection between the Italian short stories and ghost stories such as “Afterward” (1910). Recognition of the importance of this current, and its appearance in the poetry written at the time of the affair with Morton Fullerton, makes Wharton’s return to the mysteries and ritual of the Roman church in the final years of her life much easier to comprehend. Her Italian short stories provide more than a glimpse of the Wharton for whom Italy satisfied not just an aesthetic and cultural need, but a spiritual one.

3 Importantly, Wharton’s pre-World War I Italian stories explore the latent spiritual strand suppressed or neglected in her longer fiction after The Valley of Decision (1902)— sometimes in a historical, and sometimes in a contemporary setting. Her later, post- World War I, stories do not exhibit the same tension between secular politics and metaphysics, partly because by then Wharton was no longer suppressing her leanings towards Catholic ritual. Ostensibly this difference is reflected in a change in the stories over time. “Souls Belated” (1898) is a more anxious story than “Roman Fever” (1936), where the tone is poignant and the painful events long past. But an early Italian story “A Venetian Night’s Entertainment” (1903) is light and without any suggestion of enduring psychological pain, whilst Wharton’s very last story “All Souls’” (1937), though not Italian, evokes all the terrors of isolation and an apparent manifestation from the world beyond the grave. In this final story, where concerns nurtured in Italy are transmuted into New England gothic, the issue of what happens to souls after death haunts the narrative.

4 The encounter between modernity and religious belief, the subject of Wharton’s first published novel, The Valley of Decision, is explored most clearly in the Italian short story “The House of the Dead Hand” (Atlantic Monthly XCIV August 1904). The story is set in Siena, and is steeped in the iconography of Italian art suffused with the language of religion. Dr Lombard, an expatriate art collector who has reputedly acquired a missing Leonardo from a farmhouse in Bergamo, is a “mystic” and “devout” student of the Italian Renaissance (520). His daughter Sybilla, who is the actual owner of the painting, is a “votary of the arts” (525). There is a recurring tension between this language of the transcendental and the sublime and the language of science, technology and the rational. This tension is further complicated by the suggestion of incest, so that the transcendental and sublime are intoxicated by a transgressive, but concealed sexual element. Wharton has a Hawthorne-like interest in veiling in her Italian short fiction and in this story hints at the way ritualised, suggestive acts take place in secret places or involve something veiled, as in the paintings in the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii. Jennie Kassanoff (66-67) has discussed the way in which the female hand, which gives the story its title, is introduced in phallic terms [the “dead drooping” sallow marble hand “thrust forth” (522) from above the door] and hints at “some evil mystery” (522) which might take place inside the house. Kassanoff notes the description of Gus Trenor’s phallic hand in The House of Mirth, and the more explicit signal of the incestuous father’s name for his penis (his “third hand”) in the pornographic manuscript fragment with its Italian sounding character “Beatrice Palmato”1 whose surname also suggests a hand. The cool, detached rhetoric of Wyant, the rational, intellectual narrator, contrasts with these sinister allusions to taboo practices.

5 In “The House of the Dead Hand”, Wyant, who has come to report on the painting for a friend, is hoping to capture the painting in a photograph. Before he is allowed to see the picture, he learns that the art collector’s wife prefers Frith’s Railway Station, that popular, busy, late-Victorian celebration of trains and travellers. Technology provides

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an otherwise unlikely link between the serious Wyant and the foolish Mrs. Lombard. In contrast, the showing of the painting is conducted in an extravagantly reverential and theatrically religious way. Before it is unveiled, Miss Lombard “began to recite St Bernard’s invocation to the Virgin in the thirty-third canticle of the Paradise” (526). As the curtains draw back, Wyant (like the reader) has been primed to expect a “sacred object” (526). Yet the painting contains the same contrasting tensions as the story. There are religious strands, most notably the crucified Christ “on a lonely peak” (527), but the central figure is a Circe-like figure with golden hair “beneath a veil” (527), holding an inverted skull into which a young Dionysus pours wine, while “at the lady’s feet lay the symbols of art and luxury: a flute and a roll of music, a platter heaped with grapes and roses […] and a bowl overflowing with coins and jewels” (527). “Lux Mundi,” the motto, is surely an ironic reference to Holman Hunt’s 1855 picture of Christ with the lantern. We need to remind ourselves of Wharton’s remark about the importance of “Italian Backgrounds,” which gives the crucifixion scene an importance that its position in the picture does not seem to warrant. Yet in this section of the story all the religious references are shot through with irony. Dr Lombard tells his visitor that Sybilla “has chosen what Catholics call the higher life” and that “this room is a chapel, the sight of that picture a sacrament” (527-8). Sybilla is “blessed” (528). The daughter then delivers an analysis of the painting, noting the figure’s Mona Lisa-like left hand, the painting’s “mystic rose” and the symbols of eternity (528), but Wyant can see that she is reciting. Because Lux Mundi is not part of the script, she cannot explain it. Exaggerated reverence for art is a religion, in other words, and it is that mannered substitution that the narrative mocks, not the inner religious experience.

6 The visit ends in a confrontation between Lombard and Wyant, when the latter broaches the subject of the photograph. The thought of attempting to form some kind of base reproduction of a work of unfathomable beauty enrages Lombard. Wyant leaves, and goes straight to a church to view another painting, this time of St. Catherine, in the evening light. Once again painting and more earthly mysteries become entwined, as Wyant discovers he has unwittingly become the go-between and carrier of letters between Sybilla and Count Ottaviano Celsi, who suddenly confronts him in the church. From here on the story becomes a narrative of acute social, not religious, analysis. Much fun is had at the expense of Mrs. Lombard’s Englishness, her conventionality, and her aunts, all treated with a sharp irony reminiscent of Jane Austen or Dickens. The conclusion of the tale is much more disturbing. Sybilla is not released from her tyrannical father’s custody when he dies, but is condemned to a perpetual psychological paralysis, frozen into inactivity. The dead hand directs female behaviour from beyond the grave, its deadness a vacuous reverence for art that willingly sacrifices human relationships. Social realism and sombre perversion intermingle.

An Italian History

7 Wharton learnt Italian at an early age and as an adult wrote and read widely in the language. She also read deeply about Italian history and culture, studying, for example, Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and John Addington Symonds’s The Renaissance in Italy. Although she loved both Roman and Renaissance art, aesthetically and historically she was most drawn to seventeenth, eighteenth and

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nineteenth-century Italy. During this period the peninsula evolved from a Mediaeval group of contesting city states to the independent Italy of 1861, unified only a year before her birth. In the years leading up to the French Revolution, the Italian states saw ideas from the Enlightenment coming into collision with despotism, particularly in Tuscany. It was this reforming, revolutionary period that particularly interested Wharton. The Valley of Decision is a historical novel set in Italy precisely during the period before the French Revolution. As carefully researched as George Eliot’s Florence- based historical novel Romola (1863), its subject is the complex—sometimes complementary, sometimes antagonistic—relationship between reason and religion, both of which are equally necessary as far as the novel is concerned. This long, historical, bildungsroman anticipates and can be read as a revealing “Italian background”2 to the Italian short fiction. The novel unfolds in the context of opposing historical forces, representing the old and the new worlds. The protagonist Odo is nurtured by the conservative forces of church and state, by the Jesuits and the old aristocracy. In Turin, however, he encounters the new transalpine philosophy originating in the France of Rousseau, the Encyclopedia and Voltaire. In exploring how these cultural and political tensions commingle in the person of Odo, the book reflects the similar schism in Wharton’s psyche and anticipates her later suspicion of modernism. Like Wharton, who was attracted by science and technology and frustrated by the Old New York conventions, Odo is excited by the new ideas but is divided because as a child he was moved by church frescoes of Franciscans, and it was his dream to become a Franciscan himself. This epistemological conflict is played out more concisely in many of Wharton’s Italian short stories—at first playfully. “A Venetian Night’s Entertainment” (1903), a reminiscence of the eighteenth century, is a family tale related by Judge Anthony Bracknell to entertain his grandson. Venice may be exotic for the adventurous young Tony Saulsbee, but it is also a dangerous place for an American Protestant. Tony is prepared to see the Mediterranean in religious terms, for his Uncle Richard Saulsbee had brought back from his travels pictures of “heathen mosques and palaces” and “turbaned infidels.” When his ship finally docks, Tony immediately becomes the victim of an elaborate confidence trick set in train by a group disguised for Carnival, with a beautiful young woman as the bait. Young Tony is dealt a humiliating lesson. Magic is seductive, but it can deceive.

8 In her fondness for Italy, Wharton provides evidence of the paradox that characterised much of her life. She was an acute observer of the material world but immersed herself in art. She loathed the American preoccupation with products and hotels, but was an early motor car enthusiast. Italy entered her life for very material reasons, following her father’s decision to move the family to Europe to save money during the economic banking crises of the immediate post-Civil War years. However the Italy she recalls in her autobiography A Backward Glance is a place of enchantment: The chief difference was that the things about me were now not ugly but incredibly beautiful. That old Rome of the mid-nineteenth century was still the city of romantic ruins in which Clive Newcome’s “J.J.” had depicted the Trasteverina dancing before a locanda to the music of a pifferaro. I remember through the trailing clouds of infancy, the steps of the Piazza di Spagna thronged with Thackerayan artists’ models, and heaped with early violets, daffodils, and tulips; I remember long sunlit wanderings on the springy turf of great Roman villas; heavy coaches of Cardinals flashing in scarlet and gold through the twilight of narrow streets; the flowery bombardment of the Carnival procession watched with shrieks of infant ecstasy from a balcony of the Corso. (21)

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9 The nostalgic tone continues with further memories of watching the “toy procession of stately barouches and glossy saddle-horses which, on every fine afternoon of winter, carried the flower of Roman beauty and nobility round and round and round the restricting meandering of the hill top,” and recollections of “hunting on the slopes of the Palatine for the mysterious bits of blue and green and rosy stone which cropped up through the turf […] and turned out to be precious fragments of porphyry, lapis lazuli, verde antico and the all the mineral flora of the Place of the Caesars” (21). The delight in the magic of Italy is palpable.

10 Less attractive is the fact that Wharton’s love of Italy did not include a love of Italians, for whom she had the disdain so common among the group that identified itself as Anglo-Saxon in the late Victorian and Edwardian period. In a 1903 letter to her childhood friend Daisy Chanler, Wharton writes: “I think sometimes it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, & ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, & bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom.”3 Characters in the Italian stories are not averse to making general observations about the difference between Anglo-Saxons and Italians. Though these comments are often presented ironically, that is not the whole story. In “The House of the Dead Hand” Mrs. Lombard, the silhouette of whose cap “seemed a protest against Continental laxities” complains that “they don’t understand toast in Italy” (523). Her husband is moved to observe that “she cannot resign herself to the Italian method of dusting furniture” (524). “The Latin race is rhetorical,” observes Colonel Alingdon in “The Letter” (1904), concluding that “fluency and sonority are part of the Italian inheritance.” Italy is certainly “Other” to these visitors, and the narrative voice is usually amused rather than troubled by these judgements.4

Soul and Society

11 Published in 1898 and one of her first Italian short stories, “Souls Belated” seems an example of social realism, with sharply observed portraits of the English and the Americans abroad. The story starts with two lovers on yet another journey, this one from Bologna via Milan to Hotel Bellosguardo in the Italian lakes, in their flight from the Old New York society that condemns the married Lydia’s elopement with the writer Gannett. It anticipates Fussell’s theory of travel writing (203) which sees travel as the freedom to realise abroad what you would not do in your own country. “Their wanderings during the year had been like the flight of outlaws, through Sicily, Dalmatia, Transylvania and Southern Italy. Isolation, at first, had deepened the flavor of their happiness, as night intensifies the scent of certain flowers” (104). This story of forbidden fruit and exile is told in quasi religious terms (and Mrs. Cope, who is staying in the hotel with Lord Trevenna, has also “sinned”). As the title suggests, the story is not about sexual infidelity, but about the “soul” and its need for spiritual respectability. Lydia says to her lover “When they asked you to hand the plate in church I was watching you—you wanted to accept” (117). The phrase in italics draws attention to the lure and function of conformity and conventionality. Lydia’s epiphany has her conclude that “two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them—children, duties, visits, bores, relations—the things that

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protect married people from each other. We have been too close together—that has been our sin. We’ve seen the nakedness of each other’s souls.” (118) Like Adam and Eve they have become outcasts and victims, now conscious of the controlling intimacy of their own nakedness. Lydia tries to leave Gannett, and one morning he sees her making her way to the steamer office. As he watches, paralysed, from the hotel window, an image of penitential suffering comes to him: “He thought of her as wandering barefoot through a stony waste” (121). One of the passengers who have gathered near the landing is a “snuffy priest” (122). Lydia, also paralysed, fails to board the steamer. The lovers, like characters out of Dante, are condemned to live a life of wandering together, agonised and severed from one another by a sense of what they have lost. It comes as no surprise, then, that in 1899 and 1900 Wharton travelled in Northern Italy in search of more religious shrines of the kind she had found at San Vivaldo, the subject of an essay and chapter in Italian Backgrounds (1905).

12 The title of that work comes from the essay in which Wharton argues that it is in the backgrounds to Italian paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that we see the real Italy. One of the best insights into Wharton’s meditative, introspective side is provided by a story which seems to have been inspired by this sense of the importance of background, “The Hermit and the Wild Woman” (Scribner’s Magazine 1906), which gave its name to the collection of short stories published in 1908. At first the story appears to be a light, satirical narrative of an eccentric recluse’s encounter with the figure he has been taught most to fear, the sinful woman. The figures are allegorical, and the narrative has the feel of one of Aesop’s fables, or a tale by the Brothers Grimm. It is to all intents and purposes a narrative in which background has been foregrounded so that secluded or veiled figures in cave or convent are brought out and placed centre stage. The story is set in the distant past (the Hermit’s mother was killed by an arquebuse shot as she leaned from a tower) and even the Italian setting, signalled by the Wild Woman’s move from the northern Alps to papal Rome and beyond, seems to be treated allegorically. The Hermit and the Wild Woman are not named, and are clearly meant to be regarded as symbols rather than characters of the kind we expect from Wharton’s usual social realism. This is apparent in the presentation of an extreme recluse, the “Saint of the Rock” who has withdrawn to the driest and most barren part of the mountain, and sits motionless in contemplation in the full glare of the summer sun or exposed to the icy blasts of the winter wind. The Hermit makes a disastrous visit to pay homage to this sage, during which he is told curtly not to speak. Wharton’s mischievous and satirical streak, most evident in a novel such as The Custom of the Country, is glimpsed in her ironic rendition of the unexpected rebuff that occurs at the moment of intended reverence. Yet behind the almost Saki- like rhetorical detachment of its treatment of human endeavour, entrapment and distress, lies a profound meditation on the conflict between the spirit and the flesh, the mind and the body. As a boy the Hermit witnessed terrible slaughter and carnage. He was a quiet boy, we are told, and it is hardly surprising that “his happiest moments were when he served mass for the chaplain in the early morning, and felt his heart flutter up and up like a lark, up and up till it was lost in infinite space and brightness” (578). This is a description of the introspective religious impulse which dominates his youth: “Above all, he liked to have time to save his soul” (579). Wharton disguises the seriousness of this meditation on the spirit beneath a detached, sceptical, narrative voice: “His memory kept good store of prayers and litanies, besides long passages from the Mass and other offices, and he marked the hours of his day with different acts of

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devotion” (580). Wharton protects herself from the scepticism of the sophisticated reader by adopting this condescending tone but we should not allow it to mislead us. The narrator is troubled by her subject. Might it not be right to withdraw from the world, to give up its pleasures, and cultivate the soul?

13 The Wild Woman faces a very different kind of conflict. When her mother dies she is shut away in a convent, and her entrapment, and the denial of any bodily pleasure, is enforced by the religious order of nuns. When the Abbess learns of her longing to bathe, she orders her “to sleep every night for a month in [her] heavy gown, with a veil upon [her] face” (590). Literally and symbolically parched, desperate for water, she escapes from her cell, sheds veil and gown, and enjoys the sensual pleasure of immersing herself in the tank of water, whose reflection shimmers on the ceiling of her cell. She is eventually caught and punished, but then during an attack by Saracen pirates, escapes to the hills and begins to wander. Her encounters range from the ideological (the heresy of Protestant ideas about the individual’s direct contact with God) to the whimsical (wood creatures laying gifts before an idol in a cave she occupies for a time). The conflict between spirituality and sensuality is enacted in the final scene, which sees the triumph of the Wild Woman who dies naked in water, but dies a saint. The Hermit, who discovers her body and is in turn discovered by the villagers who have made a pilgrimage to see her, thinks only of his own reputation, which he fears is now ruined. There is no doubt that the woman, who healed others but did not deny the sensual pleasure of water, is the greater human being. Water is life, and to deny life is to distort the soul. This is clearly a very religious story, which has much to say about Puritanism and about the Catholic Church’s attitude to women. Gender is central, but it is less a story about sexuality than an ontological narrative in which metaphysical principles are embodied by man and woman. There is no Lawrentian rhetoric of completeness through sexual union here. Instead the woman is the wiser one and she is on her own. Life, and the body, both of which she represents, are not to be suppressed.

14 Although Wharton endorsed neither modernism5 nor the New Woman, her Italian short stories show her wrestling with the conundrum of an older religious tradition which brought with it the beauty and spirituality she felt was absent in America and critics such as Nathalia Wright are surely correct in observing that Wharton was one of a generation of writers who saw Italy as a sanctuary from American materialism that nevertheless confined women even more than did the conventions of Old New York. Annette Benert (98) contrasts George Sand’s affectionate memories of French Catholic convent life, a reprieve from her dysfunctional family, with Wharton’s depiction of Italian convents as places of entrapment for women in both “The Hermit and the Wild Woman” and The Valley of Decision. As an American Protestant she might well be expected to have had reservations about convents, but other aspects of Catholic life (the role of priests, for example) are treated in her fiction with more indulgent irony. It is likely that the creator of Lily Bart felt that not all women had Sand’s fierce independence, and was thus more critical of those institutions designed to control women, forcing them to be either wives or nuns. Emily Orlando suggests that Wharton’s fiction is a sustained critique of the (mis)representation of women, citing, for example, the elements suggesting sexual ecstasy in the Bernini statue commissioned by the jealous husband to entomb her lover in “The Duchess at Prayer.” Such a critique is by no means limited to the Italian fiction, but it is arguable that the influence of Italian Catholicism is traceable in the turn taken in the analysis of

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womanhood in Wharton’s post-World War I novels, where the focus moves to the figure of the mother, a figure that combines the paradoxes and contradictions that intrigued Wharton. Julie Olin-Ammentorp (295-312) argues that the Madonna figure fascinated Wharton for the reasons explored by Julia Kristeva in her essay “Stabat Mater.” Catholic dogma surrounding the Virgin Mary may have a politically conservative agenda, but Kristeva identifies a powerful and empowering mythology in the full implications of early Church teaching, which makes the Madonna not only mother, but wife and daughter of Christ, thus embodying a powerful female trinity in one figure (160-186). For Kristeva a politics that recognises some women’s continuing desire for motherhood is not provided by the figure of the Virgin, but historically she has provided a focus for such debates, and Benert reads “The Hermit and the Wild Woman” as confirmation of Wharton’s investment in the outer journey rather than the inner. In one sense this is true. The Wild Woman travels ceaselessly after escaping the convent (the parallel with Wharton is obvious), does good works, is admired and becomes a saint. But the story is a dialectic, requiring two poles, and anticipates the turn towards the spiritual and the return to the Italian world of Catholicism in the final decades of Wharton’s life. The story is clearly linked to the travel piece “What the Hermits Saw” in Italian Backgrounds, which had appeared the year before. In this travel sketch Wharton describes the huts, bridges and chapels occupied by anchorites who seek to make connections with the old gods displaced by Christianity. The inner search is the search of the artist and those concerned with the soul should never be ousted by society.

Italian Backgrounds

15 It is helpful to keep returning to Wharton’s observation about the importance of background in Italian painting when reading her other Italian stories, whose foreground is often concerned with travelling Americans. Like “Souls Belated,” “The Muse’s Tragedy” (1908) is concerned with writing and adultery (though in “Souls Belated” a further twist to the punishment is that since their elopement Gannett has been unable to write). Once again a hotel by the Italian lakes is the setting for the action, but we learn, through letter or the memory of the well-named Mrs. Memorall, about events elsewhere. Rome is the scene of a theatrical enactment of unrequited love, Venice of fleeting sexual fulfilment. The narrative confirms the impossibility of earthly desire. Mrs. Mary Anerton, the muse and supposed lover of the poet Rendle in Rome, goes to live in Venice after his death. What follows is a subverted story of courtly love. Rendle never loved his supposed muse, and she has spent her life adoring him but being overlooked by him. As a mature woman in her mid-forties, she meets Danyers, a young scholar devoted to the works of Rendle, and discovers that he has actually fallen in love with her. After their initial encounter at the lakeside Hotel d’Este, they spend a month together in Venice, ostensibly to work on a book on Rendle. She then leaves Danyers, so that she can cherish that month for ever. Italy in this story is the setting for unrequited desire, art, and self-denial. It is religious in its treatment of abnegation.

16 In The Valley of Decision religion and politics compete on equal terms but in another story of 1904, “The Letter,” it is the politics which is foregrounded. This story, like The Valley of Decision, advertises the amount of historical research and reading that Wharton undertook, as Colonel Alingdon relates the complex political context of his devotion to Donna Candida, who loved an ardent Italian nationalist and liberal from

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Modena during the struggle for Italian independence. By a Hardyesque twist of circumstances this same man had intercepted her brother Emilio’s eve-of-execution letter to his mother and sister, and rather than delivering it to the intended recipients betrays them by giving it to the authorities, thus denying them the traditional family solace of the martyr’s last words. The story turns on the sophistry of Donna Candida, who convinces herself and persuades Colonel Alingdon that his rival, the nationalist she loves, betrayed her family for honourable reasons. He loved Italy so much that he knew he must do nothing that would endanger his position as a liberal activist. This is politics, and clever, almost Jesuitical in fact, and the rival’s devotion to the cause is religious in its intensity. Human beings are victims of this devotion, however, and the mood of the story is sombre.

17 In some stories the Italian background suffocates the narrative. “The Confessional” may have a very religious sounding title, but the first two thirds of the story show how political battles between Lombardy and the ruling Austrians determine the family life of Count Roberto, a nationalist, and his young wife the Countess Faustina, whom he rescues from the lecherous looks of insufferable Austrians, but who supposedly takes an Austrian lover, Franz Welkenstern, the cousin of his half-brother’s wife. The political background is sketched in such detail that a political feud seems to be played out as a family feud. Then there is a sudden turn, as the Count persuades his wife’s confessor to let him take his place and listen to his wife’s confession. Having done so, he publicly exonerates her, even though we suspect that she has confessed to the affair. The Count goes off to fight for Lombardy and Italy. The priest, who is the narrator, is sent to the United States as punishment for betraying his spiritual duty. There, he later encounters the Count, ill and also an exile. He nurses him back to life and the story ends as it has begun, with a political emphasis. The Count spends the remaining eight years of his life lecturing and raising money to support patriots and the Italian cause. Priest and patriot may seem to represent two different threads of Italian life, but what they share, and what Wharton seemed to find attractive, is the certainty, the passion and the authority of those who have definite convictions and values. From the very beginning we are told, with seeming approval and affection, of the absolutism of the enlightened priest. “Among his parishioners Don Egidio ruled with the cheerful despotism of the good priest. On cardinal points he was inflexible, but in minor matters he had that elasticity of judgment which enables the Catholic discipline to fit itself to every inequality of the human conscience. There was no appeal from his verdict.” The imposition of order, regulation, ritual and tradition is presented as one way of coping with the darkness of human behaviour.

18 The darkness of the human condition and the cruelty of powerful men are the medieval and modern themes which run through many of these tales of Italy. In “The Duchess at Prayer” (Scribner’s 1900), we are again in the purely Italian world of The Valley of Decision, but here art and religion are subsumed in a Poe-like psychological story of burial alive. The story is set in a villa above Vicenza, near Venice, and opens with an architectural description made striking by a religious metaphor: “Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house, that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional?” (234) This might be the opening of “The Fall of the House of Usher” where the distorted reflections of the castle in the tarn anticipate the distortions of perception and behaviour inside. In “The Duchess at Prayer,” a title which signals both

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Italian history and religion, the narrator is taken into the Duchess’s apartments by an old man and is confronted with a painting on the chimney panel: “Duke Ercole II,” the old man explained, “by the Genoese Priest.” It was a narrow-browed face, sallow as a wax effigy, high-nosed and cautious- lidded, as though modelled by priestly hands. (236)

19 The sinister images continue as the visitor enters first the bedroom of the “Duchess Violante,” with its “yellow Christ agonized between the curtains” (236), and then a chapel in which “pictures of bituminous saints mouldered between the pilasters” (236). The succession of images concludes with the figure of the Duchess by “the Cavaliere Bernini” with a face that is “a frozen horror” (237). It is shocking. “Never have hate, revolt and agony so possessed a human countenance” (237). The tale belongs to a long tradition of narratives in which changing art is used to convey horror, from the portrait in Bram Stoker’s “The Judge’s House” (1891) to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Unlike the ageing portrait of Mrs. Grancy in “The Moving Finger” (1901), a story partly set in Rome and one in which a painting seems to change supernaturally but is actually repainted by the artist Claydon, there is more than a suggestion of the occult in “The Duchess at Prayer.” The face on the statue of the Duchess became contorted after it was placed in the chapel by the Duke to cover access to the crypt, which was the trysting place for the Duchess and her cousin, and where the Duchess’s lover has been entombed alive. Here, religious settings, religious images and religious figures (notably the chaplain, who develops a hatred for the Duchess, spies on her and betrays her infidelity to the Duke) are grotesque agents of control, thwarting transgressive desires. The Duchess’s name signals that transgression, the Italian word meaning “violate, break, outrage, defile, infringe.” Yet religion has also been used by the Duchess, who seeks to disguise sexual desire in the trappings of piety. It is not just her name that suggests that she is the victim in this story. The Duke abandons her for long periods, and shows no sign of affection for her.

20 Italy continues to appear in Wharton’s fiction during her final decade. “A Glimpse,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1932 is set in Venice and explores a situation in which a lovers’ relationship is complicated by rivalry in art, as seen through the eyes of a visiting American. “Roman Fever” was originally published in the magazine Liberty in 1934 and in the collection The World Over in 1936, only a year before Wharton’s death. Much anthologised, it is a poignant story of two mature widows with a shared Old New York background who have accompanied their daughters to Rome, and while the young women go out in the company of eligible young men, the mothers spend an afternoon looking out over the Forum. Both women are of “ripe but well cared-for middle age” (749), and when they find themselves in the same hotel in Rome the “similarity of their lot” again draws them together (752). One of them, Grace Ansley, is stolid and knits, but has a vibrant daughter in Babs. The other, Alida Slade, was admired for her beauty, and was married to a famous corporation lawyer, but to her disappointment (“I always wanted a brilliant daughter” [755]) her Jenny is pretty but “safe” (753). The antipathy which Mrs. Slade feels for Grace Ansley has much deeper roots, however, for it transpires that Alida had feared her as a rival when Alida was engaged to Delphin and discovered that her fiancé was loved by Grace. Alida plotted the other woman’s downfall by sending a letter as if from Delphin, luring Grace to a secret tryst in the Colosseum, where she hoped Grace would contract a mild form of “roman fever” which in fact she did. But there is a ferocious twist, when Grace reveals that Delphin was

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indeed there to meet her, because she had replied to “his” letter and Babs, conceived that night in the Colosseum, was Delphin’s daughter.

21 In the short stories of Edith Wharton, Italy carries many meanings, and is both an important setting and symbol. In a comment which shows how Fussell’s point about travel writing also applies to fiction, Virginia Ricard has noted that Italy is a place where travellers, particularly American travellers, can act outside the social conventions and restraints of their own society (73). For women, ironically and paradoxically, it is also shown to be a place of entrapment and confinement, a theme explored by Wharton in all of her fiction, but shown more bluntly in the narrative context of Italian social practices in earlier centuries. Her pre-World War I Italian short stories reveal more undisguised repression than any of her Old New York stories, where exclusion rather than imprisonment is the effective means of ensuring the social control and the conformity of women.

22 Love of art, of tradition, and public representations of both carnal and spiritual desire, none of which Wharton found in the United States, was satisfied by Italy and is clearly traceable in her Italian short fiction. Ultimately Wharton seems to have submitted to the dark and somewhat frightening mysticism of the cardinals and priests, figures which had fascinated her in The Valley of Decision. In his biography of Wharton, R.W.B. Lewis argued that her 1932 visit to Rome differed from all the others, because Wharton, who had previously been captivated by Christian art, architecture, spectacle and history, began to “interest herself strongly in the rituals and ceremonies, in the liturgical experience of the Christian religion, and in the meanings they exemplified” (509). Hermione Lee is more circumspect, arguing that Wharton’s attraction to Catholicism “was aesthetic as much as devotional” (714). Even though at the end of The Gods Arrive Vance immerses himself in St Augustine, Lee argues that we should give more attention to the aesthetic than the spiritual because her final short stories are pagan rather than orthodox in their religion, and concerned with the haunting of the present by the past. But as the last of these stories, “All Souls’,” shows, these narratives are concerned with the possibility of a visitation by a spirit, even if the All Souls Eve vigil takes place in Connecticut. Published posthumously in a collection called Ghosts, this and other stories of the supernatural world do indeed engage with the uncanny and with those spiritual presences found alike in Colosseum, church and New England gothic house.

23 The lure of Italy in Wharton’s final years suggests the triumph of sentiment over scientific materialism. It is anticipated by her fascination with the genre of the ghost story, where the hidden world seems to goad science into an explanation. In the rhetoric of both the Italian short fiction and the ghost stories there is the thrill that Wharton also found in the mysteries of Catholic ritual. It is perhaps unsurprising that as the death of those around her encouraged Wharton to reflect on her own mortality, Italian Catholic ritual triumphed over the ephemeral material world exemplified by America. Wharton’s final years may have been spent in the congenially intellectual environment of France where she had chosen to live and own property, but for this restless wanderer, on the move throughout her life, Italy provided a spiritual home.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benert, Annette. The Architectural Imagination of Edith Wharton: Gender, Class and Power in the Progressive Era. Madison-Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2007.

Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994.

Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress: From this World to That Which is to Come. Ed. James Blanton Wharey. Rev. ed. Roger Sharrock. London: Oxford UP, 1960.

Colquitt, Clare, Susan Goodman, and Candace Waid, (eds). A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1999.

Fussell, Paul. Abroad. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.

James, Henry. The Golden Bowl. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Joslin, Katherine, and Alan Price. Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe. New York: Peter Lang, 1993.

Kassanoff, Jennie A. Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.

Kristeva, Julia. “Stabat Mater.” The Kristeva Reader. Ed: Toril Moi. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. 160-186.

Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. London: Chatto and Windus, 2007.

Lewis, R. W. B.. Edith Wharton A Biography. London: Vintage, 1993.

Olin-Ammentorp, Julie. “Wharton through a Kristevan Lens.” Joslin and Price 295-312.

Orlando, Emily J.. Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2007.

Peel, Robin. Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics and Fiction before World War I. London: Associated UP, 2005.

Ricard, Virginia. “Legendary Spell: Edith Wharton’s Italy.” American Authors Reinventing Italy: The Writings of Exceptional Nineteenth Century Women. Ed. Sirpa Salenius. Padova: Il Prato 2009: 69-85.

Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. London: Dent/Everyman, 1993.

---. “A Glimpse.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America 2001. 609-631.

---. “All Souls’.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 798-720.

---. “A Venetian Night’s Entertainment.” Scribner’s Magazine Dec. 1903: 640-651.

---. Italian Backgrounds. New York: Scribner, 1905.

---. Italian Villas and their Gardens. New York: Century, 1904.

---. “Roman Fever.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 749-762.

---. “Souls Belated.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001. 95-122.

---. “The Confessional.” www.readbookonline.net/readOnline/3271. N.p., 21 Oct.2010.

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---. “The Daunt Diana.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 731-743.

---. “The Duchess at Prayer.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 234-253.

---. “The Hermit and the Wild Woman.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 578-600.

---. “The House of the Dead Hand.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 520-547.

---. “The Letter.” www.readbookonline.net/read/266/8184. N.p., 21 Oct. 2010.

---. The Letters of Edith Wharton. Eds. R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis. New York: Collier- Macmillan, 1989.

---. “The Muse’s Tragedy.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 50-64.

---. The Valley of Decision. UK: Kessinger Publishing, 2004.

Wright, Nathalia. American Novelists in Italy: The Discoverers, Allston to James. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1965.

NOTES

1. This was unpublished in her lifetime. See Lewis 544-548. 2. In the first essay in Italian Backgrounds (1905) Wharton stresses the importance of the hinterland in Italian paintings. 3. Edith Wharton to Margaret Terry Chanler (“Daisy’) 8 Mar. 1903. Letters. 1989: 77-78. 4. Although the dominant attitude, there were exceptions. See E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), for example. Some consider Wharton to be one of those exceptions. See, for example, Ricard (70). 5. For a discussion of Wharton’s relationship with modernism, see my Apart from Modernism.

ABSTRACTS

Plus Edith Wharton avance en âge, plus son écriture est caractérisée par le scepticisme scientifique et par l’observation minutieuse de la société. Cet article montre que Wharton ne s’est pourtant jamais départie de sa fascination à l’égard de l’invisible, même si la ferveur religieuse de son enfance s’affaiblit peu à peu, avant de disparaître complètement à l’âge adulte. Cette fascination se manifeste dans les nouvelles italiennes, qui explorent la tension entre rationalisme et religiosité. Le questionnement concernant le statut de l’âme, omniprésent dans ces nouvelles, permet de mieux comprendre le goût de Wharton pour les histoires de fantômes, ainsi que son évolution vers le catholicisme pendant les dernières années de sa vie. Si cette évolution s’explique en partie par son attirance pour le rituel, elle exprime aussi l’intérêt de Wharton pour l’existence de l’âme et la possibilité de la révélation.

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AUTHORS

ROBIN PEEL Robin Peel’s most recent monographs are three studies of the relationship between transatlantic culture and the writings of three American women writers who lived in Massachusetts. Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics (2002), Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics and Fiction before World War I (2005) and Emily Dickinson and the Hill of Science (2010). He lives in Exeter in the UK.

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The Epistolary Motif and Literary Creation in Edith Wharton’s Short Stories: Narrative, Aesthetic and Moral Issues

Audrey Giboux

1 Edith Wharton, who was a great letter writer herself, was certainly familiar with the tradition of the European epistolary novel (Benstock 37). More than thirty of her stories mention or quote letters as a narrative device designed to introduce a slight disruption within a single point of view. In her famous essay of 1925, The Writing of Fiction, Wharton emphasizes the need to reduce the narration to a single focalizer: “The effect of compactness and instantaneity sought in the short story is attained mainly by the observance of two ‘unities’—the old traditional one of time, and that other, more modern and complex, which requires that any rapidly enacted episode shall be seen through only one pair of eyes” (43). The use of the letter motif is a good example of this quest for narrative efficiency. Wharton resorts to this device in three stories—whose characters are all writers—and which connect the epistolary motif with a reflection on literature, a clear attempt on Wharton’s part to examine letter writing both as a narrative process and a literary topic. This article will attempt to analyze the way Wharton uses this realistic narrative tool to raise a series of questions about the moral and literary implications of epistolary writing.

Letter Writing as the Polyphonic Intrusion of a Female Voice in an Otherwise Male Perspective1

2 The letter motif is central in “The Muse’s Tragedy,” the opening story of the collection The Greater Inclination, published in 1899. The main character, Danyers, is a young critic who has written an essay on Vincent Rendle, a deceased poet. The canonized poet happens to have dedicated his verse to a married woman called Mary Anerton, who

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goes by the bucolic name of “Silvia” in his works. Danyers and Anerton first develop a friendship, based on their common admiration for the poet and on an intellectual collaboration in the writing of the definitive critical study of Rendle’s aesthetic—or at least until Danyers grows jealous of the past love between the poet and his muse. The first two sections of the story are told through Danyers’s perspective. After a narrative ellipsis, the third and last part consists in the whole letter2—without comment or response—written by Anerton to Danyers, her suitor. Anerton explains that she has decided to leave Danyers and tells him why he should not marry a “disappointed woman” (58-9). The missive plays an epiphanic and subversive role that sheds new light on the whole story: Anerton reveals she was never loved by Rendle “as a woman” (62) and that their relationship was a mere pretext for his poetic creation; with Danyers, she was only trying to find out if another man could sincerely love her for herself and not only as an Egeria.

3 The structure of the story is significant: the relationship between Anerton and Danyers is presented as a repetition of the one she had with Rendle, insofar as the critic can be seen as an avatar of the poet he admires, and because the critical collaboration between Danyers and Anerton reduplicates the intellectual interaction between the poet and his muse. M. Denise Witzig has provided a feminist interpretation of the sexual dimension of the denied love between the muse and both poet and critic, where the works stemming from their literary communion appear as their metaphorical progeny (264). The tragic element consists in the irony that every reader of Rendle’s poetry believes in the deep love he is supposed to have felt for “Silvia.” This story is thus a subtle variation on the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea: Rendle saw his muse as a purely literary object and Danyers’s initial fascination with the heroine seems to be founded on a certain literary sentimentalism. But Anerton, by contributing actively to Rendle’s poetic creation and to Danyers’s critical study, and more particularly by writing this letter, becomes a writer and a creator herself. As she explains the true nature of her relationship with Rendle and her desire to put Danyers’s feelings to the test, she becomes a feminine Pygmalion, re-creating the figure of the poet who made her an Egeria, and shaping the young critic, almost maternally, according to her own desires. Her letter is a reinterpretation of the story previously read, and leads the reader to question the status of “Silvia” as a representation of the “Woman,” the so-called eternal feminine myth which perpetuates a long series of stylized and idealized feminine archetypes in western poetry: the muse, it seems, attempts to seize and reappropriate the myth. Through this reflexive character, Wharton lays emphasis on the limits of a literary canon formed through a mainly masculine fantasy.

4 But the letter motif is not only a way to give the female character a voice otherwise denied in a narrative focalized on the masculine perspective. In her missive, Anerton mentions the correspondence Rendle dedicated to her, published in the volume of his Life and Letters: You have noticed the breaks in the letters here and there, just as they seem to be on the point of growing a little–warmer? The critics […] praised the editor for his commendable delicacy and good taste (so rare in these days!) in omitting from the correspondence all personal allusions, all those détails intimes which should be kept sacred from the public gaze. They referred […] to the asterisks in the letters to Mrs. A. Those letters I myself prepared for publication; […] I copied them out for the editor, and every now and then I put in a line of asterisks to make it appear that something had been left out. […] The asterisks were a sham—there was nothing to leave out. (60)

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5 The boundary between the private and the public, very tenuous in the case of published letters of famous authors, is subverted here by the ambiguous—poetic rather than private—relationship which united the writer and his muse. The asterisks ironically stand for an absent text and not as a substitute for a private love message. By clarifying the misunderstanding, Anerton paradoxically gains the status of an author: she has falsified the text, giving it another meaning, appropriating it in order to maintain the illusion that she had been loved, converting the text of Rendle’s letters into her own literary work.

6 Anerton also mentions two types of letters sent by Rendle that reveal the personality of their author: the ones he wrote when he was on a trip with another woman; and the one he addressed to her when she lost her husband, described as a “beautiful letter” in which “he was kind, considerate, decently commiserating” (61). Anerton’s portrait of the poet’s indifference to the feelings he praises in his works shows him to be a character who plays the part of an attentive friend: the aesthetic quality of his writing overrides the necessity of sincere communication. The treatment of the letter motif in this story thus introduces a moral issue, since the respect due to a literary text should protect it from manipulation, and transparency in epistolary expression is supposedly required. In this perspective, the decision of the female character to leave her mark on the poet’s correspondence and to reveal the truth in her own letter seems to indicate a desire to free herself from her status as literary object compelled to submit to the reader’s (possibly false) interpretation and to conquer the position of an active writer.

A Conflict between Private and Public

7 “Copy” is a dialogue published in 1901 in the collection called Crucial Instances. The discussion involves Mrs. Ambrose Dale, a famous novelist and a widow, and her old friend the no less famous poet, Paul Ventnor—so famous, in fact, that he is referred to as “public property” (277).3 Dale, who refuses to sign the autographs her admirers beg her for in their letters (274), defines the identity of writers by contrast with “real people,” telling Ventnor: “I died years ago. What you see before you is a figment of the reporter’s brain—a monster manufactured out of newspaper paragraphs, with ink in its veins. A keen sense of copyright is my nearest approach to an emotion. […] [T]he last shred of my identity is gone” (278). The character, like Anerton in “The Muse’s Tragedy,” metafictionally exhibits the difficulty of being trapped in the role of a mere literary fantasy in the eyes of the public. The whole dialogue is indeed a reflection upon the gap between privacy and publicity in the case of a literary correspondence. The reader learns from the conversation between the two artists that they were lovers long ago, before Dale dismissed Ventnor who then married another woman. The conversation takes a sentimental turn when they discover that they have both kept the letters they sent each other. Ventnor first presents these missives as a substitute for the work Dale never dedicated to him and as a precious souvenir of their past love, by confessing that he always has them with him and often rereads them. But Dale introduces a dichotomy between two different ways of considering their correspondence when she claims she kept his letters because Ventnor was already a famous author by then, whose writings were valuable. The debate is then oriented towards moral and social issues: are these letters from the past “compromising” or “immune” (280)?

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8 The literary nature of the correspondence between two authors becomes the main topic of the dialogue, in the course of which a case of conscious insertion of a literary text within a private letter is mentioned. Dale recalls that Ventnor quoted verses of Epipsychidion, a love poem Shelley devoted to Emilia Viviani, but Ventnor disapproves of using literature in private communication (“Mercy! Did I quote things? I don’t wonder you were cruel,” 281). The content of letters is also described as a source of inspiration for literary creation. Reading a letter she sent Ventnor, Dale says: “it’s the most curious thing—I had a letter of this kind to do the other day, in the novel I’m at work on now—[…] And […] I find the best phrase in it, the phrase I somehow regarded as the fruit of […] all my subsequent discoveries—is simply plagiarized, word for word, from this!” (280-1). Although she judges the rest of the letter “poorly done,” this statement shows that the fictional letter included in the novel is simply the unconscious reminiscence of an old private letter. Ventnor also recognizes in one of these letters the first hint of a famous sonnet he wrote later (281). The traditional cliché according to which art is a sublimated transubstantiation of life is here shown to depend on an unconscious process.4

9 The rest of the dialogue is characterized by an opposition between symbols of life and death. Ventnor describes the rediscovery of the old letters as the unrolling of a “mummy,” but hopes there is a “live grain of wheat” in it (281). The allusion to a verse of the gospel of John when Christ announces his death (“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit,” 12: 24) shows that their correspondence, an emblem of a dead love, may in fact contain the germ of their creations. Renouncement as metaphoric death may be necessary to a new life and to literary activity seen as a form of salvation. The grain metaphor also recalls Wharton’s well-known fascination with the myth of Persephone (Donovan 1989). Goddess of both the underworld and the harvest, she symbolizes fertility and the possibility of overcoming death. The syncretism between the biblical parable and the ancient myth is also corroborated by the title of Dale’s novel, Pomegranate Seed¸ which refers to the grains of pomegranate Persephone ate in hell after her abduction by Hades—and the reason why she was not allowed to return to the world of the living without her spouse’s permission. By way of these references, the dialogue questions the possibility of gaining a new literary life for past love. One reading of the “grain of wheat” might be as an expression of faith that the letters contain “other material” ready for a literary transubstantiation (282).5

10 The authors have a dilemma to solve: which of them should keep the other’s letters in the end? To whom do the letters belong, to the one who wrote them, to the addressee, or perhaps to the readers, inasmuch as artists whose works are already classics can enjoy no privacy (282)? These questions engage legal but also moral and sentimental issues. The casuistry is dramatized and Dale calls “bargain” what Ventnor ironically describes as a model of “arbitration treaty” ruled by “conventions” (283). Although he previously refused to give back Dale’s letters because they are “the only thing [he] ha[s] left” (282), he claims that “technically […] the letter belongs to its writer,” particularly in this case since “there’s nothing in which a man puts more of himself than in his love- letters.” Dale, as a “dialectician,” considers on the contrary that she has a right to both the letters she wrote and received. Her suffering and loneliness are the price she has paid for the right to keep Ventnor’s letters, because, as she puts it, love letters belong to the woman who inspired them: “you couldn’t have written them if I hadn’t been

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willing to read them. Surely there is more of myself in them than of you. […] [A] woman’s love letters […] belong to her more than to anybody else” (283). Dale asserts her prerogatives as muse. She also demands her own letters back, because only her identity has not changed since the time of their love affair, whereas Ventnor “voluntary ceased to be the man who wrote [her] those letters.” The debate comes to an end with Dale’s two aphorisms: if a woman’s love-letters “are like her child,” a man’s love-letters “are all he risks” (283). Two definitions of literary ownership emerge from the dialogue: an objective conception, which irreversibly attributes the ownership of a text, whatever it is, to the person who wrote it; and a subjective conception, which requires moral continuity of the identity of the letter writer and implies obtaining the permission of the addressee (who has a sort of emotional right to it) before publication. The key word in the second definition—based on a moral argument6—is what Dale calls “authenticity.”

11 The climax of the scene is reached when the disappointed Dale suddenly renounces her right to the letters Ventnor wrote her. This decision is followed by a series of coups de théâtre: the possibility that each might return the letters so that they can be used as a source for the other’s memoirs is rapidly abandoned; then both renounce the possibility of having the whole correspondence in their possession. The issue of the letters, as a pretext for their quarrel, is surprisingly transformed. First a textual testimony of a dead past, providing only literary suggestions, it becomes a series of vivid remembrances. “How fresh they seem, and how they take me back to the time when we lived instead of writing about life!” says Dale. This remark removes the love letters from the realm of literature, as if a private correspondence could free itself from the necessity of style and from aesthetic effects. The last turn in the dialogue is initiated when Ventnor suggests destroying the letters, whose literary value would exceed their sentimental value in the eyes of the public, with the following argument: “there’s nothing like the exhilaration of spending one’s capital!” The financial metaphor is soon replaced by a bucolic one however. Dale, explaining that the “deserted garden [they] sometimes used to walk in” has been “turned into a public park, where excursionists sit on cast-iron benches admiring the statue of an Abolitionist,” introduces a comparison between them, both able to earn money through the sale of their keepsakes, and the man who sold the garden and who “has made a fortune that he doesn’t know how to spend.” The two old friends finally decide to “sacrifice [their] fortune and keep the excursionists out.” Two statements then take the metaphor of the secret garden a step further: their memories are compared by Ventnor to “more than a garden” (“it’s a park”) and by Dale to a whole “world—as long as [they] keep it to [them]selves.” The intrusion of strangers is thus held responsible for the corruption of their memories: “even the pyramids look small when one sees a Cook’s tourist on top of them!” (285). The characters then decide to burn their letters, considered as “the key to [their] garden”: this auto-da-fé takes on a sacrificial function, freeing them of the temptation to capitalize on private life for the sake of art.

Letters as Power Issues and Role-Playing

12 Like those in “The Muse’s Tragedy” and “Copy,” the characters in “Full Circle,” published in 1910 in the collection Tales of Men and Ghosts, are both authors. The plot is centered round the opposition between a successful writer, Geoffrey Betton, whose first

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novel has aroused a great deal of interest, and an acquaintance of his, Duncan Vyse, the talented author of an unpublished novel entitled The Lifted Lamp. Thanks to a flashback, the reader learns that a few years earlier, Vyse asked his friend to help him get published, but in spite of three notes to remind him of the request, Betton has forgotten his promise to contact the editor who might have helped Vyse. The letters motif, then, is part of a power game: Betton sees the letters sent by Vyse as desperate pleas; and the letter that the powerful Betton does not send the editor serves as proof of his ascendancy over Vyse.

13 At the beginning of the story, where Betton is the principal focalizer, he is anticipating the “deluge” (764) of letters from admirers after the publication of his second novel, Abundance. Reading these letters has indeed become a ritual since the success of his first book: “He remembered […] the thrill with which [...] he had opened the first missive in a strange feminine hand.” But the feeling soon turned into disgust: For more than a year after the publication of Diadems and Faggots […] the inane indiscriminate letters of condemnation, of criticism, of interrogation, had poured in on him by every post. […] And the wonder of it was […] that when their thick broth of praise was strained through the author’s anxious vanity there remained to him so small a sediment of definite specific understanding! No—it was always the same thing, […] the same incorrigible tendency to estimate his effort according to each writer’s personal preferences, instead of regarding it as a work of art, a thing to be measured by fixed standards! (759)

14 The passage seems to deny that readers—conditioned as they are by narcissistic preoccupations—are able to judge works of art on the basis of aesthetic criteria. Letters, in other words, do not constitute a medium of real communication. The letters are referred to through the metaphor of breaking waves: his success began to submerge him: he gasped under the thickening shower of letters. His admirers were really unappeasable. […] [T]hey wanted his opinion on everything […]. Perhaps the chief benefit of this demand was his incidentally learning from it how few opinions he really had: the only one that remained with him was a rooted horror of all forms of correspondence. He had been unspeakably thankful when the letters began to fall off. (759-60)

15 Betton, who initially feels real pride in readers’ admiration, then begins to understand the “vanity of it all,” as if the ironically recurring metaphor of the “deluge” of letters were a kind of biblical punishment for his self-satisfaction. The satirical use of free indirect speech allows the reader to penetrate the character’s self-analysis and to measure how the “epistolary burden” is considered a public intrusion into the space of intellectual privacy: “Half a million of people would be reading him within a week, and every one of them would write to him, and their friends and relations would write too” (759-760). The letters are thus a symptom of the readers’ exorbitant power over the author’s vanity.

16 Fearing that the publication of Abundance will put an end to “the blessed shelter of oblivion” and “the cursed letters would begin again” (760), Betton decides to employ a secretary to answer them; Vyse, having renounced literature, proposes his services. A master and servant dialectic, which founds the psychological tension in the story, is set up when Betton creates a rivalry with Vyse by cruelly asking him if he has “any idea of the deluge of stuff that people write to a successful novelist”. By asking Vyse to sign “Betton,” the successful author turns his secretary into an alter ego. This is underlined by the parallel in their physical descriptions: “As Betton spoke, he saw a tinge of red on Vyse’s thin cheek, and his own reflected it in a richer glow of shame.” And it is stressed

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further by a remark made by Betton—one that introduces a fiction within the fiction —“You’ll have to answer them as if they were written to you.” The first section of the story then renews the topical antagonism between the bourgeois artist, who, catching his own reflection in a mirror, admits that “his high-coloured well-fed person presented the image of commercial rather than of intellectual achievement” (764), and the impoverished but talented bohemian artist, who has “grown shabbier” (762) since the failure of his literary ambitions. But Vyse gains power as Betton’s collaborator and substitute: obtruding in Betton’s correspondence; writing in his name, pastiching the “tone” in which Betton would have written the letters; and being creative again, although he has given up writing on his own account.

17 The second part covers the period when the “deluge” of letters indeed pours in, giving Vyse much to do and the blasé Betton the joys of “indolence” and of “wild and lawless freedom.” Feigning to fear it will “be worse than Diadems,” he advises Vyse against using a sentimental tone. Vyse’s cleverness arouses in Betton a feeling of exultation, “between fear and rapture”: “For five or six blissful days Betton did not even have his mail brought to him […]” (765-6). The ironic dimension of the narrative increases when Betton begins to feel “a shame-faced desire to see his letters.” Betton, eager to have access to his readers’ flatteries and even to their “stereotyped homage,” decides to read the letters before submitting them to his secretary: “It was really a pleasure to read them, now that he was relieved of the burden of replying: his new relation to his correspondents had the glow of a love-affair unchilled by the contingency of marriage” (766).

18 The harmony is broken when Betton notices that the number of letters has decreased and finds “unexpectedly disagreeable to have Vyse read any letters which did not express unqualified praise of his books.” Beginning “to fancy there was a latent rancour, a kind of baffled sneer, under Vyse’s manner,” he decides to “edit the letters before his secretary saw them” (767). The mirror relationship between the prosperous and the unsuccessful writer is reinforced by Betton’s obsession with what Vyse thinks of him. Playing the part of a detached man, feigning to distance himself from his readers’ opinions, the hypocritical Betton, “reduced to wondering whether [Vyse’s] imperturbable composure were the mask of complete indifference or of a watchful jealousy,” wants to unmask his rival. The moral analysis of the character’s psychology turns another corner with this narrative comment: “The latter view being more agreeable to his employer’s self-esteem, the next step was to conclude that Vyse had not forgotten the episode of The Lifted Lamp, and would naturally take a vindictive joy in any unfavourable judgments passed on his rival’s work.” Betton’s doubts are thus communicated to the reader who begins with him an investigation of the true feelings of the secretary about the “unfavourable criticisms [which] preponderat[e] in Betton’s correspondence.” This becomes a pretext for Betton to dismiss Vyse without giving him the real reason for this decision–the shame caused by the “unfavourable comments” met by the novel, and without having recourse to the “more embarrassing” argument that the “correspondence about the book had died out.” Betton then develops a literary fascination with his secretary, speculating on his motivations and saying to himself, “with the sudden professional instinct for ‘type’: ‘He might be an agent of something—a chap who carries deadly secrets’” (768). The reader soon learns Vyse’s only secret is his poverty, which forces him to defend his position before his employer when Betton declares that the job is not worthy of his talent.

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19 In the third part of the story, Betton considers the decrease in the number of letters a humiliation, as is revealed by the use of free indirect speech: “What a triumph for Vyse!” He disguises his despair at seeing Vyse witness his failure behind a mask of kindly sollicitude, fearing that dismissing Vyse might cause him to commit suicide: “This consideration came after the other, but Betton, in rearranging them, put it first, because he thought it looked better there, and also because he immediately perceived its value in justifying a plan of action that was beginning to take shape in his mind” (770). This enigmatic passage renews the inquiry into Betton’s intentions, as he pretends to himself to be acting in Vyse’s interest.

20 After an ellipsis, the reader learns that the number of letters has increased, whereas Betton acts as if this revival of interest for his book annoyed him. The letters mostly see the critics’ misrepresentation of Abundance as an injustice. But Vyse notices from the beginning that the letters from women are unusually short: this is the first clue that something is wrong. Vyse, after a careful analysis of the writing, style and content of the letters, reveals to Betton that all the letters were written in the same hand, and that a letter he wrote in his own name to a female admirer of the novel came back to him marked “Dead Letter Office,” whereas a letter he wrote to the same woman in Betton’s name did not come back. The narrative underlines the physical symptoms of Betton’s trouble when Vyse explains that he thinks all the letters are “a hoax” (771-2). His exaggerated laughter when Vyse unconvincingly suggests that perhaps the valet, Strett, is the author of the letters, and his “gentle irony” when he doubts Vyse’s “ingenious conjecture” (772) are the final clues leading the reader to conclude that the author of the fake letters could only be someone living in Betton’s flat—that is to say Betton himself. The letters written to himself in the name of imaginary readers are in fact addressed to Vyse and meant to preserve his image in the mind of the secretary he feels so superior to. By replying to these imaginary readers, Vyse then writes to none other than Betton himself, thus closing the first “circle” in the story.

21 The dramatic intensity of the duel between the authors culminates in the fourth part of the story. Betton, aware that Vyse knows he is the author of the letters, says to Vyse: “If you suspect [Strett] you’ll be thinking next that I write the letters myself”, after which the letters stop coming. The narcissistic reason why Betton is nevertheless forced to keep Vyse in his service is expressed in direct speech (“If I ship him now he’ll think it’s because I’m ashamed to have him see that I’m not getting any more letters”) and reveals the power the secretary has won over his employer. The master-servant relationship is thus inverted,7 when Vyse kindly predicts that Abundance, which Betton calls a “confessed and glaring failure” (773), will be shown to be a success by another wave of admiration: “this is just a temporary lull in the letters. They’ll begin again—as they did before. The people who read carefully read slowly—you haven’t heard yet what they think.” With this promise, Vyse asserts his power of manipulation over Betton’s state of mind, who immediately feels “a rush of puerile joy at the suggestion” (774).

22 The third rush of letters, unlike the ones Betton wrote, is characterized by the sociological variety of the “careful readers.” These “really remarkable letters” have great literary “quality”: One of the writers was a professor in a Western college; the other was a girl in Florida. In their language, their point of view, their reasons for appreciating Abundance, they differed almost diametrically; but this only made the unanimity of their approval the more striking. The rush of correspondence evoked by Betton’s

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earlier novel had produced nothing so personal, so exceptional as these communications. (774-5)

23 The psychological plot reaches its highest degree of complexity as Betton grows increasingly obsessed with Vyse’s opinion of his failures and success and develops the rivalry with him, focusing not only on literary issues, but on sentimental issues as well: He had gulped the praise of Diadems and Faggots as undiscriminatingly as it was offered; now he knew for the first time the subtler pleasures of the palate. He tried to feign indifference, even to himself; and to Vyse he made no sign. But gradually he felt a desire to know what his secretary thought of the letters, and, above all, what he was saying in reply to them. And he resented acutely the possibility of Vyse’s starting one of his clandestine correspondences with the girl in Florida. (775)

24 Betton announces his decision to answer the most laudatory letters himself and begins a correspondence with a woman he becomes infatuated with—just as Vyse was previously fascinated with one of the fictional female correspondents Betton invented and named Hester Macklin.

25 The novelist delights in these correspondences as he finds in them the “proof of his restored authority” and evidence that Vyse was right when he predicted Abundance would find its own public: The professor’s letters satisfied his craving for intellectual recognition, and the satisfaction he felt in them proved how completely he had lost faith in himself. He blushed to think that his opinion of his work had been swayed by the shallow judgments of a public whose taste he despised. […] All this the professor’s letters delicately and indirectly conveyed to Betton, with the result that the author of Abundance began to recognize in it the ripest flower of his genius. But if the professor understood his book, the girl in Florida understood him; and Betton was fully alive to the superior qualities of discernment which this process implied. For his lovely correspondent his novel was but the starting point, the pretext of her discourse: he himself was her real object. […] Betton’s agreeable person had permitted him some insight into the incorrigible subjectiveness of female judgments, and he was pleasantly aware, from the lady’s tone, that she guessed him to be neither old nor ridiculous. (776)

26 This passage, which underlines the vanity and male chauvinism of the character, also confirms that Vyse is the author of the letters. But the secretary not only flatters his employer’s taste for praise, he also courts him: the two authors are trapped in a kind of mediated love relationship. The initial device of Vyse’s writing in Betton’s name is made more complex by this sub-plot in which Vyse seems to know Betton’s temper and weaknesses so well that he is able to make Betton fall in love with a fictional woman he has created—but also, in a way, fall in love with his writing. The second “circle” which gives its title to the story is completed when Vyse writes letters to Betton in the name of readers who do not exist and Betton addresses his letters to none other than Vyse himself, believing he is writing to a woman.

27 In a comic repetition of the same inverted scene, Betton tells Vyse that a letter he wrote to the girl in Florida has come back marked “Dead Letter Office” and that he knows Vyse is the author of “her” letters just as he himself had been the author of the fictional Hester Macklin’s letters. This scene, in which letters are discovered to be the medium of two consecutive manipulations, makes the story a parody of a detective novel, as Betton exposes Vyse’s as well as his own duplicity. This subversion of a literary genre in the frame of a psychological plot is made more complex by the irony contained in the dialogue, in particular when Betton reveals to Vyse how clear-sighted

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Vyse has been in the diagnosis of his failings: “you saw I couldn’t live without flattery” (779). As Charlee M. Sterling suggests, “though Wharton almost reflexively employs simple irony where and when useful, it is her employment of double irony that marks her as an ironist par excellence” (21). Betton’s irony concerning Vyse’s trickery indeed coexists with the irony of which he is the conscious object.

28 At the end of the story, then, letter writing paradoxically demonstrates the power of fiction. Betton renounces his usurped superiority when he denounces Vyse’s duplicity, while simultaneously praising his stylistic talents and sense of psychology: those letters were wonderful […]! […] [W]hen you’d foolishly put me on my guard by pointing out to me that they were a clumsy forgery, and had then suddenly guessed that I was the forger, you drew the natural inference that I had to have popular approval, or at least had to make you think I had it. […] And so you applied your […] immeasurably superior […] abilities to carrying on the humbug, and deceiving me as I’d tried to deceive you. And you did it so successfully that I don’t see why the devil you haven’t made your fortune writing novels! […] The way you differentiated your people—characterised them—avoided my stupid mistake of making the women’s letters too short and logical, of letting my different correspondents use the same expressions: the amount of ingenuity and art you wasted on it! (779-80)

29 The conclusion is ironic in tone. When Betton makes amends and apologizes for not having helped his friend, Vyse denies that he has written the false letters either for sympathy or because of a desire for revenge. He simply needs money. Betton acknowledges Vyse’s superiority in the interpretation of people’s attitudes, whereas he failed to understand he was deceived by Vyse. Since the letters written by the latter are said to have the quality of literary writing, it seems that the story pays homage to the plasticity and eloquence of epistolary writing.

30 Wharton’s three short stories confronting characters who are authors with the joys and pains of epistolary writing demonstrate her interest in a literary topic particularly favourable to the mise en abyme of the dangers and difficulties of authorship. These meta-literary fictions allow her to investigate, ironically, the narrative possibilities offered by the letter motif. The moral ambiguities of the private correspondence of public figures—occupying a space between the private and the public, between sincere self-expression and the desire to manipulate, between simple communication and complex art—are all presented here. More generally, insofar as the letter motif enables Wharton to reflect in these stories on writing and the power of writing, it also provides a critical image of literature.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance. A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994.

Donovan, Josephine. After the Fall. The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989.

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Haytock, Jennifer. Edith Wharton and the Conversation of Literary Modernism. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.

Singley, Carol J. Edith Wharton. Matters of Mind and Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Sterling, Charlee M. Irony in the Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Lewiston, Queenstin, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005.

White, Barbara Ann. Edith Wharton. A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twaine Publishers, 1991.

Wharton, Edith. Collected Stories 1891-1910. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: The Library of America, 2001.

---. Collected Stories 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: The Library of America, 2001.

---. The Collected Short Stories. 2 Volumes. Ed. R. W. B. Lewis. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968.

---. The Writing of Fiction. New York, London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925.

Witzig, M. Denise. “‘The Muse’s Tragedy’ and the Muse’s Text: Language and Desire in Wharton.” In Edith Wharton. New Critical Essays. Ed. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1992: 261-270.

NOTES

1. See White (62-63) on the question of gender and narrative. 2. “April Showers” similarly quotes from a letter which is sent to the wrong addressee, is misinterpreted by her, and is then used as a symbol for misunderstanding and as a narrative device to unmask the character’s tendency to be fooled by her own presumptions (The Collected Short Stories vol. I 189-96). 3. Dale may seem to be an avatar of Wharton herself and the title of Dale’s novel, Pomegranate Seed, strikingly anticipates that of a story Wharton published in 1936 in the collection The World Over. 4. This is the plot of “Writing a War Story” in which Wharton uses a mise en abyme to deal with the question of the “subject” and satirize “inspiration” and the artificial opposition between form and content in literary works. 5. The character draws this biblical metaphor by approximately quoting the parable of the sower (282) told by Christ in three of the gospels (for instance Matthew, 13: 3-9). 6. See Singley (6). 7. Jennifer Haytock develops a radical interpretation of this relationship: “Betton and Vyse become so engrossed in the other’s reaction to their joint situation that they become a closed loop of correspondence. Each man lives off the other as a succubus, Betton feeding his ego and Vyse his body” (93).

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ABSTRACTS

Cet article analyse l’interaction entre le motif épistolaire et l’enjeu de la création littéraire dans les trois nouvelles de Wharton qui insèrent l’outil narratif et/ou l’objet littéraire réaliste qu’est la lettre dans des intrigues centrées sur des personnages d’écrivains (“The Muse’s Tragedy,” “Copy” et “Full Circle”). Il met au jour la réflexion métalittéraire critique menée par l’auteur sur les différents versants de l’écriture, épistolaire et fictive, ainsi que le traitement ironique et moraliste que la nouvelliste applique à l’ambiguïté fondamentale du texte épistolaire, vecteur d’une expression censément privée ici livrée publiquement, partagé entre la revendication d’une vérité et la recherche d’effets esthétiques, qui confine à un véritable jeu de rôles stylistique.

AUTHORS

AUDREY GIBOUX Audrey Giboux is the author of a PhD in Comparative Literature on Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the reception of French classical literature. Her work focuses mainly on the relationship between classical literature and modernity, and more especially on the notions of modern classicism and modern ethics.

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Reading and Readers in Edith Wharton’s Short Stories

Agnès Berbinau-Dezalay

1 In her edition of The Journal of a Disappointed Man, by W.N.P. Barbellion, Wharton underlined the following passage on the role of a porter in a library: [He] spends his days keeping strict vigil over his catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire—the desire every book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in somebody’s mind […] A Book is a Person and not a Thing. (qtd. in Ramsden x)

2 With the evocation of a catacomb, the public library is endowed here with a tomb-like dimension and presented as a shelter for books—so many souls left on the banks of the Styx, longing for a reader to come and resurrect them, thus challenging the boundaries of time and oblivion. The reader is a smuggler, but also an archaeologist who digs out forgotten treasures, and even a magician who can hear the voices of books and bring them back to life. Such were the calls that the young Edith Wharton heard in the volumes enclosed in her father’s library: when she took them out of the oak bookshelves and started reading them, she transformed these inanimate objects into living companions. For Wharton reading was not a passive activity: it transmutes people and things.

3 Associating transgression with reading may sound paradoxical when referring to the work of a novelist whose environment was the highly codified upper-class New York and New England society at the turn of the twentieth century. A novelist, moreover, who advocated notions of order and selection as guiding principles in her essay The Writing of Fiction. Yet, reading and the figure of the reader are the means chosen by Wharton to express and underline deviation from the established norm, and to emphasize the discrepancy she perceived between what might be and what really was, between an ideal world and disappointing reality. A further paradox lies in the fact that her awareness of that essential divergence is to be found more specifically in the genre most constrained by formal norms: the short story. The stories that Wharton wrote all her life were so many narrative spaces within whose limits the writer felt free to

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express both her resistance to norms and her aspirations to an imaginary elsewhere. It was here too that she developed a sentimental trend that she condemned so vigorously in her critical essays.

4 Yet reading doesn’t always take on positive connotations in Wharton’s work. Making literature one’s only reality may amount to being trapped like Don Quixote who, having read too many books of chivalry within the walls of his library, ended up perceiving the outside world through the distorting lens of literature. In the same way as Cervantes’s professed goal in writing the adventures of Don Quixote was to alert his readers to the risks of reading novels of chivalry, Edith Wharton’s aim when including readers of sentimental stories in her short stories was perhaps to better reassert the superiority of realism in literature. Yet both authors helped bring to the fore the very type of literature they intended to debunk. Analyzing the role of reading and readers in Wharton’s short stories is thus another way of addressing the subversive trends in Wharton’s work.

5 Transgression can be understood in various ways when connected to reading and readers: first, books and their environment provide the possibility of transgressing physical boundaries by projecting the reader into remote places and ancient times; within Wharton’s short stories as well as without, readers can be categorized as transgressors or conformists according to what they read and how they read, but also according to their gender; transgressing the limits imposed by reality through reading is shown to be potentially dangerous, since it often confronts the readers with their inability to overcome the barriers of reality and to exist in a world governed by other norms. The brief experience of escape through reading is therefore likely to lead to disenchantment and to the necessity for readers to adjust to their disappointing environments.

Reading: Transgressing Boundaries

6 In chapter XI of Edith Wharton’s long novel Hudson River Bracketed, Heloise Vance warns young Vance Weston when he discovers the rows of books in Miss Loburn’s library: “Don’t shake the books as if they were carpets, Vance; they’re not. At least they’re only magic carpets, some of them, to carry one to the other side of the moon” (113). Reading is clearly defined here as a way of transgressing spatial boundaries and being projected into another reality, ruled by other norms, “on the other side” of the known world. Books become passports to a new land; they are the screens on which the reader’s fancies may crystallise. When recalling her own childhood, Edith Wharton remembered her fascination for the printed pages of Washington Irving’s Alhambra before she could even read: There was richness and mystery in the thick black type, a hint of bursting overflowing material in the serried lines and scant margin. […] Well—the “Alhambra” once in hand, making up was ecstasy. At any moment the impulse might seize me; and then, if the book was in reach, I had only to walk the floor, turning the pages as I walked, to be swept off full sail on the sea of dreams. (Backward Glance 34)

7 Merely looking at undecipherable characters on a page immediately conveys marvellous visions, the materiality of the novel seeming even more likely to entail

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creativity (“making up”) than actual reading, because one’s fancy is not curbed by the story’s limits of time and space.

8 As a little girl, Edith Wharton had her most extraordinary travelling experiences reading books in her father’s library. Whenever I try to recall my childhood it is in my father’s library that it comes to life. I am squatting again on the thick Turkey rug, pulling open one after another the glass doors of the low bookcases, and dragging out book after book in a secret ecstasy of communion. (Backward Glance 69)

9 Here, the library is presented as both enclosed—a confined room where the little girl is alone and where books themselves are locked in bookcases—and dynamic, allowing passionate exchanges between the child and the books she ardently devours. The library paradoxically provides a fenced-in frame for a form of communion which transgresses physical boundaries. In Wharton’s short stories, where the library is usually the heart of the house, the same ambivalence is to be found: it stands both for utmost confinement—as in “Afterwards” or “The Other Two”—and radical openness onto the world, such as that experienced by the fifteen-year-old Troy Belknap in “The Marne,” on his way to Europe. Another of his cronies, the library steward, had unlocked the book-case doors for him, and buried for hours in the depths of a huge library armchair (there weren’t any to compare with it on land) he had ranged through the length and breadth of several literatures. (261)

10 Paradoxically, the young boy doesn’t experience the enchantment of travelling on deck, as he gazes at the immensity of the ocean. The lexical field of confinement, referring both to the boy and to the books he releases from their cages, enhances the geographical metaphor standing for the distances travelled by turning the pages of books. The library is both a u-topos and a u-chronos: it is a moving isolated island, which enables the reader to transcend physical boundaries. It provides a counterpoint to a reality that may seem dull or disappointing, especially in the eyes of a child who feels somewhat estranged from his environment.1

11 So reading makes it possible to transgress the frame of a closed room. It also provides an opportunity to go beyond the boundary of death and to transcend the barrier between the self and others. “Meanwhile, though living authors were so remote, the dead were my most living companions” (Backward Glance 69). Readers have the power to resurrect forgotten books and books are seen as media allowing them to befriend dead writers who people their solitude. But books are also treasures around which the living happy few may gather; in Wharton’s case, all her friendships—with Walter Berry, Henry James, and Bernard Berenson among others—were linked to books. Another paradoxical characteristic of the ambivalent Whartonian library is therefore that it stands for both solitude and friendship, for isolation and communion through the exchange of reading experiences or simply a shared taste for beautiful bindings.2

12 In the short stories, the mere presence of books in a room is sometimes enough to convey a sense of intimacy and friendship, while suggesting transgression: this is the case of Lizzie Hazeldean’s drawing-room in “New Year’s Day,” where the narrator marvels at the ability of that vaguely scandalous woman to create an atmosphere where men feel at ease, far from the fetters of social norms. By fusing two traditionally distinct spaces—the library and the drawing-room—thus transgressing the architectural codes prevailing in New York at the end of the nineteenth century, Lizzie

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Hazeldean asserts her status as a marginal woman and offers the appropriate setting for other kinds of transgressions—of a moral nature this time—which explains the attraction she exerts.3

13 In her article “The Architecture of the Short Story: Edith Wharton’s Modernist Practice,” Michele S. Ware underlines the links between the organization of a house and the structure of a short story. Indeed the paradoxical dimension of the Whartonian library as a place characterized both by confinement and connection finds a formal counterpart in the genre of the short story—the most suitable form to express the aspirations and transgressions connected with reading. Michele Ware observes that both the structure of a house and that of a narrative must obey the principles of symmetry and proportion: Wharton’s essay The Writing of Fiction echoes the architectural precepts presented in The Decoration of Houses.4 Just as in a house each room should have its own particular nature while being integrated into a harmonious whole, the majority of Wharton’s short stories are divided into sections which have their own specificity and yet participate in the overall coherence of the narrative.5 This gives the evolution of the plot its rhythm and helps to throw into relief significant contrasts or meaningful consequences.

14 “A Journey” thematically takes up the motif of the partition by staging a woman and her husband travelling in separate berths. The man dies during the journey, and the woman tries to hide his death until they reach their final destination, thus transgressing the law that would have obliged her to get off the train with the body before she arrived at her destination. The whole narrative is organized around the notion of fragmentation, the opposition between the outside and the inside, and the growing distance between the woman and the man who is partly hidden behind a curtain. “A Journey” illustrates the formal constraints that, according to Wharton, preside over the elaboration of a short story—proportion, coherence, symmetry, the first line finding an echo in the last one—and also suggests, through the behavior of the woman, that transgression can be found within the very limits imposed by these restraints.

15 So, in “A Journey” as in so many of Wharton’s stories, the author paradoxically chose that most codified form to express her doubts as to the validity of norms. The tight structure of the story enables Wharton to point to the opposition between the ideal and the real and to deviate from her own professed belief in realism. Indeed, the expression of the characters’ disillusionment, and their aspirations to a vaguely defined “elsewhere,” is mainly to be found in the short stories, and more specifically among readers, who are more likely to be aware of the gap between the dullness of their lives and the models they discover in books.

16 Yet, although reading seems to favor transgression, not all Wharton’s readers are tempted to emancipate themselves from conventions, and reading sometimes even lies on the side of the acceptance of norms.

Readers: Conformists or Transgressors?

17 In the short stories, reading appears as one of the defining features of a character—it is part of the social image he or she projects. But various factors—and above all gender— affect that image. There are male readers and female readers, and they are not perceived in the same way by their social environment. In Wharton’s narratives,

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reading is usually a subversive activity for women and a conformist one for men. Indeed, unsupervised reading was considered as a threat to a young girl’s morality in the upper-class society in which Wharton was raised and most of her short stories are set.6 New York society in the 1860s was characterized by the wariness of all forms of intellectualism. In that context, women who read were usually marginalized. This accounts for the fact that they are often chosen as the main protagonists of the short stories, which explore the fates of those who don’t conform to the norm, who embody some form of deviance from the established order. In Wharton’s stories, two main categories of female readers—that sometimes merge—may be identified: bookworms, deprived of all power of attraction, and other readers who provoke curiosity and convey a sense of mystery, precisely because they are readers. In “Atrophy,” Nora Frenway is considered by all her acquaintances to be a conventional woman who respects the norms of her social circle: “Not that she was a woman to be awed by the conventions. She knew she wasn’t. She had always taken their measure, smiled at them —and conformed” (437). The intransitive use of the last verb, separated from the rest of the sentence by a dash, underlines Nora’s submission to the laws that rule her world. Respecting conventions is presented as a categorical imperative. Although the short story was published in 1927, at a time when old New York had been invaded by those whom Wharton considered as parvenus, the old model persisted. Nora is an adulterous woman, and to hide that ultimate transgression (what she calls her “real life” 436), she carries to extremes her respect for norms in everyday life. Reading is part of her strategy of dissimulation, and it is seen in the story as a means of making her undesirable: “No one had ever suspected Nora Frenway. Didn’t she know what her friends said of her? ‘Nora? No more temperament than a lamp-post. Always buried in her books . . . Never attractive to men, in spite of her looks” (439). In the eyes of the world—and of men more specifically—a woman who reads loses her power of seduction. Reading places Nora on the margin of her social circle, but not the same margin as that in which adultery places her: in the end, although reading is associated with boredom and is used by Nora as evidence of her respect for convention, it is also characteristic of woman whose non-standard behavior is likely to provoke scandal.

18 Wharton repeatedly denounced the impossibility, for a woman, of being recognized as an intellectual in American society, and intellectual female readers are often associated in her tales with something deadly. In “The Angel at the Grave,” Paulina has specialized in the works of her grandfather, Orestes Anson, and is presented as the Sybil in charge of interpreting the oracles left by the idol. The vocabulary of religion in the Ancient world (“altar,” “worship,” “temple,” “idolatry,” “Persephone,” “the House possessed her”) pervades the story and contributes to the image of Paulina as young virgin shut up in her role as a medium between the sacred and the profane. Everyone acknowledges her intelligence and literary skills, but everyone also denies her creative power. Like the Sybil who preserves her chastity, she refuses to follow the man who offers to take her away from her deadly environment.

19 However, when reading is disconnected from intellectualism, as it is with Mrs. Hazeldean in “New Year’s Day,” female readers are presented in terms of the power of seduction with which reading endows them. They are mostly perceived through masculine points of view, which seems to show that while denouncing the difficulties met by women in her time, Wharton does not radically question the social order

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responsible for that situation. She never promotes the image of an intellectual woman who succeeds in life without owing her success to the way men see her.

20 The way male readers are seen is altogether different. Reading does not set them apart from the group and is even sometimes simply conventional. In an increasingly materialistic society, some men do not read at all. In “Charm Incorporated,” Targatt spends more time in Wall Street than in his library: “In fact, he had never had time to read, or to think consecutively on any subject but money-making” (656). His lack of interest in reading is associated with his incapacity to see what is taking place under his own roof: a man who does not read is blind to the world around him. Yet reading may also be a factor of isolation for men, the symptom of their refusal to accept others. Reading of non-subversive works, especially religious works, sometimes even threatens human fellowship. In “The Seed of Faith”—one of the rare tales set in Africa—young Willard Bent, who questions the usefulness of his mission in an indifferent, even hostile environment, wonders at the apparent serenity of the leader of the Mission. Willard attributes Blandhorn’s absence of doubt to the kind of books he reads: “he never read anything but the Scriptures, a volume of his own sermons […] and—occasionally—a back number of the missionary journal that arrived at Eloued at long intervals, in thick mouldy batches” (394). Far from offering an opening to otherness, this narcissistic reading of his own sermons reinforces Blandhorn’s isolation: “no doubts disturbed him” (394). Here reading is perceived as a factor of ignorance, erecting yet another barrier between Blandhorn and his immediate surroundings and signalling the failure of his “mission.”

21 Even in cases less extreme than “The Seed of Faith,” male reading is seldom linked to transgression. In fact it is often a way of conforming to a social model according to which it was an essential part of the education of a young gentleman. Men who show a real taste for literature are not despised, but they place themselves outside their social environment in order to observe it at a distance and with condescendence, conscious of the superiority that culture confers. Male readers stand intentionally on the outskirts of society, without running the risk of being excluded from it. However, although their detachment allows them to see the flaws of their environment, it also blinds them. And distance sometimes turns into insensitivity or cowardice. Thursdale in “The Dilettante,” for example, or Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, are learned men who prefer to live in a world of books rather than do what is expected of them as men.7

22 Besides the gender divide, Wharton provides other positive and negative images of readers in her stories, distinguishing between the good and the bad reader, between what, in her essay “The Vice of Reading,” she calls the “innate” and the “mechanical” reader. She defines the innate reader as someone who is able to tell a good book from a bad one, to select the works he reads instead of accumulating them,8 and to establish connections between the various books he has read. The innate reader delights in “intellectual vagrancy,” “the improvised chase after a fleeting allusion, suggested sometimes by the turn of a phrase or by the mere complexion of a word,” he uses the book “as the keynote of unpremeditated harmonies, as the gateway into some paysage choisi of the spirit” (Uncollected Critical Writings 102). When it comes to reading, Wharton praises vagrancy, detours, and wandering. The mechanical reader, who reads a book from the first to the last page, misses the adventure of reading, the opportunity to discover words, and through them, to meet the writer. Considering books as mere objects, the mechanical reader fossilizes them by placing them in separate corners of

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his mind, instead of establishing fruitful connections between them, and between himself and the author: What is reading, in the last analysis, but an interchange of thought between writer and reader? If the book enters the reader’s mind just as it left the writer’s—without any of the additions and modifications inevitably produced by contact with a new body of thought—it has been read to no purpose. (Uncollected Critical Writings 99)

23 For Wharton, good reading implies a reader who doesn’t passively receive the writer’s words as if he were listening to a monologue but actually enriches the work with his own past reading experiences.

24 In the short stories, evocations of mechanical readers are numerous and usually ironic. Members of reading clubs, like the one founded by Mrs. Ballinger in “Xingu” “regard literature as a cable-car that can be ‘boarded’ only by running” (Uncollected Critical Writings 100): Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition. (1)

25 The use of the present tense makes Mrs. Ballinger both universal and timeless. She stands for all the women whose intellectual pretensions Wharton constantly stigmatizes in her work. The “indomitable huntresses of erudition” are so many representatives of readers who perceive culture as yet another social convention. Reading in clubs is thus devoid of the subversive dimension reading takes on when performed by women individually. For Mrs. Ballinger the contents of a book matters little. What counts is to “keep up” and to be able to talk about “the Book of the Day” (7) —in this case Osric Dane’s “The Wings of Death,” whose subject remains very blurred in the women’s minds. In a way, all books become synonymous for Mrs. Ballinger, since they all represent the constant challenge of maintaining one’s social position by being “up to date” (7). Her mind is no longer a library, but a hotel instead, “where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board” (7). Literature passes through it without leaving a trace. What counts is “the moment,” and time is no longer perceived as continuous but as constantly repeating itself. Books become mere objects of consumption for readers on the run. The content of what is read is progressively reduced from books to reviews and finally to the slogans to be found on magazine pages. Books are products and the techniques used to sell them are as efficient as those used for any other commodity.

26 Still, for all her stigmatization of the financial interests connected with literature and for all her scorn for the average reader, Wharton had to cater for the tastes and requirements of her readers. Her stories were bought by magazines whose priority was to sell as many issues as possible. Wharton also had to contend with censorship.9 Jessica Levine has shown that “The Old Maid” (the story of a spinster who, in spite of appearances, once had a passionate love story and has an illegitimate daughter) was refused by several magazines because the narrative was deemed too “vigorous.” Wharton addressed subjects that sounded subversive and shocking to her contemporaries (adultery, illegitimate children, free union) while preserving her position in the American world of letters, but had to water-down the last two stories in Old New York. And Gianfranca Balestra underlines that while she praised ambiguity and ambivalence in “tales of the fantastic,” Wharton adapted to her readers by adding

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explanations at the end of some of her ghost stories in order to make them more intelligible.

27 As well as stigmatizing the ignorance and arrogance of the mechanical reader, Wharton denounces books that reveal the secrets of celebrities and fuel voyeurism and an unhealthy taste for scandal. “The Touchstone” starts with an invitation from Margaret Aubyn’s biographer to send him letters written by the famous author. Glennard, who has kept many of the love letters Aubyn addressed to him, thinks he might publish them and then marry his lover, Alexa Trent, with the money he earns. The story is a reflection on guilt, on literature as a commercial enterprise, and on the connections between public persona and private self. Magazines are omnipresent in the story—the Spectator, the Horoscope, the Radiator—and are associated with vulgarity since they exhibit a respectable woman’s private life. Magazine readers are ultimately held responsible for the publication of the letters. Their reading them is described as a vice, a form of unhealthy addiction. That, at least, is the way Mrs. Touchett evokes her own relation to the book: “I’m positively sick of the book and I can’t put it down. Can’t you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel? Flamel shook his head. “Not even with this breeze. Literature travels faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that we can’t any of us give up reading; it’s as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a virtue. “I believe it is a vice, almost, to read such a book as the Letters,” said Mrs. Touchett. “It’s the woman’s soul, absolutely torn up by the roots—her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn’t care; who couldn’t have cared. I don’t mean to read another line: it’s too much like listening at a keyhole.” (192)

28 Reading is a vice, an inescapable disease rather than a pleasure, as is the exposure of a soul that was meant to remain hidden. In fact, reading Margaret Aubyn’s letters is obscene: “it’s much like listening at a keyhole,” says Mrs. Touchett. The use of the verb “listening” underlines the fact that it is Mrs. Aubyn’s voice that can be heard through these letters, a voice absorbed by, and put to the service of, masculine exploitation. If publication has been made possible—and profitable—it is ultimately because of readers’ fondness for this sort of reading.

29 So there is a negative kind of transgression connected with reading in Wharton’s short stories. More generally, the stories point to the risks run by those who have spent too much time in the library.

The Dangers of Transgression

30 Just as Don Quixote’s reading of novels of chivalry distorted his vision of reality, readers in the short stories come to perceive their environments in new ways. Most often, reading is closely intertwined with their longing to escape from some form of confinement, to reach an “elsewhere” defined as the opposite of reality. Reading is both the cause of longing (by supplying the image of what is outside the walls of the “prison”) and a remedy to the feeling of boredom born of confinement, since it offers at least temporary escape. Yet reading too much may lead readers to shut themselves up in another kind of prison and to lose touch with reality. Mme Bovary’s fate—itself closely linked to that of Don Quixote—shows to what extent reading may be assimilated to a disease. Confined within the walls of a convent as a girl, Mme Bovary read too many sentimental novels and they distorted her vision of reality. She constantly

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expected real life to fulfil her dreams—and was always disappointed. Wharton’s readers are contaminated by the same disease of anticipation, felt through the recurring use of the modal “would,” which implies uncertainty while carrying the promise of a better future. In “The Recovery,” Claudia Day is presented as “flushed with anticipation” (272): The vision of herself walking under the “historic elms” toward the Memorial Library, standing rapt before the Stuart Washington, or drinking in, from some obscure corner of an academic drawing-room, the President’s reminiscences of the Concord group—this vividness of self-projection into the emotions awaiting her made her glad of any delay that prolonged so exquisite a moment. (273)

31 Claudia relishes not the prospect of a love affair but that of the adventure of knowledge that she is about to embark on. Her pleasure—the evocation is not devoid of sexual connotations—derives from the fact that Claudia imagines a moment that is bound to be marvellous but which she cannot picture precisely. Reading, in other words, contributes to the distortion of vision, including vision of the self: self-fictionalization is to be found in many of Wharton’s short stories.

32 In many cases, literature progressively invades the readers’ reality from the outside. It is sometimes so present in the minds of the characters that it becomes an obstacle in their real lives. In “The Long Run,” Merrick misses his chance to experience happiness for fear that his life might resemble a bad sentimental novel. When Paulina Trant suggests moving in with him, he perceives her offer as “an act of romantic folly” (128). Convention is a barrier which, like literature, prevents him from fully living in the present moment.

33 Literature, in other words, sometimes kills life. Instead of providing an opening onto the world, it represents another kind of confinement. As in the case of Mme Bovary, the pleasure of anticipation turns into a form of deadly obsession and all books become synonymous since they merely fuel a desire that can never be satisfied. In the end, anticipation turns out to be no more than the projection of a disappointment to come. In Wharton’s stories reading often conjures up visions of an elsewhere that can never be actually reached. Two poles are thus juxtaposed: the hope of flight and the subsequent awareness that the dream can never come true. Those who have been led to read reality through the filter of literature end up, at some point, adjusting to their environment. They are confronted with the knowledge that “would” will never be real. And their resignation is purely passive: the failure of romance does not imply a victory over reality. “The Long Run” is a good illustration of the tragic results of giving up romantic aspirations. Halston Merrick and Paulina Trant, at first defined by the way they stand out from the group, become dull, faded parts of the social tapestry. Merrick, recalling the hopes nourished at the time of their idyll, sounds all the more pathetic as we know they have not come true: “Well, with her one had the sense that one would never have to come back; that the magic ship would always carry one farther. And what an air one breathed on it! And, oh, the wind, and the islands, and the sunsets!” (123). He is evoking an “unmapped” (a favourite word of Wharton’s), imaginary world, a u-topos, where social rules no longer apply. But the magic ship gets lost before it reaches the harbour: “This thing between us isn’t an ordinary thing. If it had been we shouldn’t, all these months, have drifted. We should have wanted to skip to the last page—and then throw down the book” (130). The metaphor of the sea is mixed here with that of reading—if one’s dreams are to be lived out, the book must, at some point, be closed.

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Yet Halston has renounced the open sea and he and Paulina have been compelled to re- establish themselves on land, in the social tapestry they had left behind.

34 Almost all of Wharton’s readers finally adapt to reality, they resign themselves to accepting their lives, dull and conventional as they are. “Resigned adaptations,” an expression used in “The Triumph of Night,” sounds almost redundant in Wharton’s universe.10 Examples of “reasonable” adjustments proliferate, sometimes in the form of a marriage, which often stands for renunciation. In “The Letters,” after discovering that her husband has not read a single one of the letters she sent him while they were apart, Lizzie contemplates leaving him. But the loss of illusions leads to resignation: “she understood now that she had gradually adjusted to the new image of her husband as he really was, as he would always be. He was not the hero of her dreams, but he was the man she loved, and who loved her” (897). So, the acceptance of fate lies on the side of maturity, while enchantment and illusions—like reading itself—are associated with youth and sentimentalism. The final message is blurred: is the author a moralist who prefers conservative outcomes, or does she glance ironically at the superficial satisfaction of those who end up respecting norms instead of transgressing them?

35 If reading in Wharton’s short stories at first seems to be connected to a positive kind of transgression synonymous with adventure, discovery and openness, not all the stories actually offer an opportunity for escape—some reinforce the confinement of the readers’ social environment instead—and not all the readers in the stories are positive transgressors. Reading ultimately leads the reader back to reality once he has realized that, as Sinclair Lewis put it, fantasy is actually “fallacy.” The overall effect of the omnipresence of books and readers in Wharton’s short fiction is to underline what Wharton saw as the unbridgeable gap between the ideal and the real. But Wharton also uses books and reading as a means to reveal her own temptation to deviate from the norm, whether social or literary, a disjunction that accounts for the disillusioned tone that prevails in all her work. The stories are, paradoxically, the frames within which Wharton most freely expresses her own longing for emancipation, and through her disillusioned characters, she represents her own disappointed dreams. She suggests the desirability of transgression while showing its dangers and ultimate impossibility. But the stories also provide a form that allows her to demonstrate her virtuosity as a writer, imposing her own rules onto a reality whose laws cannot be transgressed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balestra, Gianfranca. “‘For the Use of the Magazine Morons’: Edith Wharton Rewrites the Tale of the Fantastic.” Studies in Short Fiction 33. 1 (1996): 13-25.

Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quixote. 1605-1615. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2003.

Del Fattore, Joan. “Edith Wharton.” Short Story Writers 3. Ed. Frank N. Magill. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1997. 950-958.

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Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Mœurs de province. 1857. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.

Levine, Jessica. “Discretion and Self-Censorship in Wharton’s Fiction: ‘The Old Maid’ and the Politics of Publishing.” Edith Wharton Review 13.1 (1996): 4-13.

Lewis, Sinclair. The Man from Main Street: A Sinclair Lewis Reader. Selected Essays and Other Writings. 1904-1950. Ed. Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane. New York: Random, 1953. 115.

Nettels, Elsa. “Children and Readers in Wharton’s Fiction.” Edith Warthon Review 12 (1995).

Orlando, Emily J. “Rereading Wharton’s ‘Poor Archer’: A Mr. ‘Might-Have-Been’.” American Literary Realism 1870-1910 30. 2 (1998). 56-76.

Ramsden, George. Edith Wharton’s Library, A Catalogue. Settrington: Stone, 1999.

Ware, Michele S. “The Architecture of the Short Story: Edith Wharton’s Modernist Practice.” Edith Wharton Review 20.2 (2004): 17-23.

Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. An Autobiography. 1934. New York: Touchstone, 1998.

---. “Afterward.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America 2001. 830-860.

---. “A Journey.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 65-75.

---. “All Souls’.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America 2001. 798-820.

---. “Atrophy.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 436-447.

---. “Charm Incorporated.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 653-677.

---. Hudson River Bracketed. 1929. London: Virago Press, 1985.

---. “New Year’s Day.” Old New York. Novellas and Other Writings. Ed. Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: Library of America, 1990. 489-550.

---. The Age of Innocence. 1920. London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1996.

---. “The Angel at the Grave.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 254-270.

---. The Custom of the Country. 1913. New York: Penguin Classics, 1987.

---. Ogden Codman. The Decoration of Houses. 1898. New York: Classical America and Henry Hope Reed, 1998.

---. “The Dilettante.” The New York Stories of Edith Wharton. Ed. Roxana Robinson. New York: NYRB 2007. 159-169.

---. The House of Mirth. 1905. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

---. “The Letters.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 861-897.

---. “The Long Run.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 112-140.

---. “The Marne.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 261-308.

---. “The Old Maid.” Old New York. Novellas and Other Writings. 371-444.

---. “The Other Two.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 433-453.

---. “The Recovery.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 271-289.

---. “The Seed of Faith.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 369-401.

---. “The Touchstone.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 162-233.

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---. “The Triumph of Night.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 141-165.

---. The Uncollected Critical Writings. Ed. Frederick Wegener. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996.

---. The Writing of Fiction. 1924. New York: Touchstone, 1997.

---. “Xingu.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 1-25.

Wood, Sarah F. Quixotic Fictions of the USA 1792-1815. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.

NOTES

1. In her article “Children and Readers in Edith Wharton’s Fiction,” Elsa Nettels shows that Edith Wharton reproduces through the characters of young readers—most of whom are boys—the magical and exclusive dimension linked to the activity of reading which she herself experienced as a child. There was in me a secret retreat where I wished no one to intrude, or at least no one whom I had yet encountered. 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 Glance 70) The exclusion linked to reading works both ways: by travelling imaginary distances, readers elaborate for themselves private fictional spaces nobody can trespass, peopled by imaginary companions belonging to other times and places, at odds with their dull or aggressive environment. 2. Edith Wharton was herself an adept of rare collections and devoted much time to the meticulous arrangement of her numerous libraries, at The Mount (Massachusetts) and in the two houses she owned in France. 3. “What is there in the atmosphere of such houses that makes them so enchanting to a fastidious and imaginative youth? Why is it that ‘those women’ (as the others call them) alone know how to put the awkward at ease, check the familiar, smile a little at the over-knowing, and yet encourage naturalness in all? The difference of atmosphere is felt on the very threshold. The flowers grow differently in their vases, the lamps and easy-chairs have found a cleverer way of coming together, the books on the table are the very ones that one is longing to get hold of. The most perilous coquetry may not be in a woman’s way of arranging her dress but in her way of arranging her drawing-room; and in this art Mrs. Hazeldean excelled” (305). 4. The Decoration of Houses was Edith Wharton’s first major success as a writer. It is an essay she wrote with Ogden Codman and in which she exposed the principles that should preside over the organization of a house: proportion (in the relation of each part with the whole) and symmetry. 5. “One of the most obvious formal characteristics of Wharton’s short stories is their compartmentalization, a kind of fragmentation without the implied discontinuity” (Ware 20). 6. The fear of the bad influence on women of the reading of fiction dates back to the origins of the United States at the end of the eighteenth century, when the fact that women might read European novels was considered a threat to the integrity and innocence of the young American nation that women were supposed to preserve: “In the newly-constituted USA, the alleged evils of reading fiction appeared especially pernicious, for the vitiated sentiments of European novels were perceived to pose an insidious threat to the purity of the nation and the future of republicanism. […] And if fiction was especially dangerous when transported to American soil, it was considered to be most dangerous of all in the closets of American women, for Jefferson’s American ‘Angels’ were regarded as the moral guardians of the new republic” (Wood 169-170).

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7. Emily J. Orlando underlines the passivity of a number of male readers in Wharton’s fictions, suggesting that reading tends to feminize men, thus leading to another kind of transgression, that of genders. 8. In The Writing of Fiction, Wharton places the principle of selection at the core of the elaboration of a short story, thus linking the good reader and the good writer. 9. Magazine publishers were indeed submitted to the pressure of groups like “The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice” founded in 1872 and led by John S. Sumner, whose influence was reinforced during the First World War. In the 1920s, the norms of “decency” in literature were still close to Victorian norms. Recent “picture” or “yellow” magazines like McClure’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post or The Cosmopolitan shared the cautiousness of older reviews like Century, Scribner’s or Harper’s which felt responsible for the cultural standards they offered their learned readers. 10. Joan Del Fattore says as much: “she recognized the fact that adjustment to life sometimes entails a compromise with one’s private self which constitutes a betrayal” (953).

ABSTRACTS

Dans les nouvelles d’Edith Wharton, la lecture semble indissociable d’une forme de transgression, ce qui est paradoxal de la part d’un écrivain revendiquant un certain conservatisme dans ses essais théoriques comme dans sa perception de l’ordre social. La lecture est d’abord un moyen de s’affranchir des carcans géographiques et temporels en projetant le lecteur de l’espace clos de la bibliothèque vers l’ailleurs. C’est au sein du cadre très codifié des nouvelles, images formelles de la bibliothèque, que Wharton exprime de façon privilégiée un écart par rapport à la norme, et prend acte, le plus souvent à travers ses personnages de lecteurs et de lectrices, du décalage qui sépare le réel d’un idéal souvent mal défini. Pourtant, la lecture peut parfois être mise au service d’un certain conformisme, puisqu’elle détermine le regard que l’environnement social porte sur un individu. La typologie générique que l’on peut établir à la lecture des nouvelles trouve un écho dans la distinction opérée par Wharton entre « lecteurs mécaniques » et « lecteurs nés » qui ont fait l’expérience d’une forme de décentrement par le biais des livres. Cependant, lecture et transgression ne sont pas sans danger : liée à un désir d’évasion, la littérature peut déformer la perception que le lecteur a du monde et le condamner à se heurter sans cesse au démenti du réel. Chez Wharton, la déformation temporaire de la vision se solde toujours par un ajustement qui équivaut à une résignation, la reconnaissance de la victoire d’un environnement décevant.

AUTHORS

AGNÈS BERBINAU-DEZALAY Agnès Berbinau-Dezalay, a former student of the École Normale Supérieure and a holder of the Agrégation in English, has a doctorate in American Literature. She taught at the University of Paris for four years and is currently teaching students in classe préparatoire littéraire (khâgne) at Lycée Auguste Blanqui in Saint-Ouen. Her research focuses mainly on the work of Edith Wharton: in her thesis she analysed quixotism in Edith Wharton’s and Sinclair Lewis’s short stories, and in

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2008 she published an article entitled “La Bibliothèque, (auto)portrait d’Edith Wharton” in Conserveries Mémorielles.

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“Writing a War Story”: The Female Author and the Challenge of Witnessing

Joanna Scutts

1 Edith Wharton’s “Writing a War Story” was first published in Woman’s Home Companion in September 1919. With incisive wit and pitiless irony it skewers its protagonist, “Miss Ivy Spang, of Cornwall-on-Hudson,” for her pretensions to literary talent and useful war service alike (247). A decidedly minor poet who is asked to contribute a short story to a well-meaning publication aimed at convalescent soldiers, Ivy struggles to balance the rival claims of literary fashion, subject matter and audience. In the desperation of her looming deadline, she plagiarizes the private diary of her French governess, who has worked in a war hospital, and turns a story “Mademoiselle” has heard and recorded from one of her patients into sentimental short fiction. At first Ivy seems to have scored a roaring success with the soldiers in her own ward, but she is soon mortified to discover that none of them has read her story—her “success” lies in its flattering accompanying photograph of the young authoress in nurse’s uniform. Ivy’s shame at being so objectified is undercut by her own earlier pride at her appearance in the photograph.

2 The story unsettles the common critical assumption that the First World War made Wharton temporarily abandon the irony that was her sharpest literary tool.1 Instead, despite its lightweight comic tone, the story reveals the complexity of Wharton’s attitude to the war and its impact on literary culture, as well as foregrounding larger issues of truth-telling, authority, gender and witnessing that have long challenged war writers, both combatant and civilian. Read in conjunction with Wharton’s non-fiction war writings, her short story “Coming Home,” and her novella The Marne, “Writing a War Story” demonstrates that Wharton was capable of thoughtful reflection and self- satire regarding her position as a female author and a witness to horrors she could not share.2

3 The target of Wharton’s irony in the story is not just naïve Ivy, but the literary culture that fosters her pretensions and encourages her to prioritize form over content.

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“Writing a War Story” satirizes several venues of publication and review: one proto- modernist, one an opportunist war venture, and one a middlebrow, wide-circulation literary magazine. The story deals as much with the challenge of publishing as composing a war narrative, and it presents us from the start with a heroine who is vainly but not impractically concerned with the public reception of her writing. Ivy enthusiastically responds to the flattery of “the editor of ‘Zig-zag’, the new ‘Weekly Journal of Defiance’”— proudly unpopular avant-garde “little magazine” with echoes of Blast.3 The absurdity of his claim that her poems would “‘gain incommensurably in meaning’ when she abandoned the superannuated habit of beginning each line with a capital letter” makes it clear that Ivy’s first failure lies in choosing the wrong mentors for her art (247). The announcement that with the outbreak of war Ivy “forgot all about writing poetry” seals her reputation as a dilettante.

4 Yet more mainstream literary magazines also provide little guidance. On the beach, struggling with her recalcitrant “Inspiration,” Ivy picks up a discarded copy of another magazine, “the midsummer ‘All-Story’ number of ‘Fact and Fiction’” (249). Unlike “Zig- zag,” this publishes established authors—ones that Ivy judges harshly from their opening lines: “She may not have known much about story-writing, but she did know that that kind of a beginning was played out.” The “played-out” beginning—“In the month of October, 1914—” is ascribed to “one of the most famous names of the last generation of novelists,” and Ivy’s rejection of it is clearly tongue in cheek, for in its bluntness it echoes Wharton’s own, slyly last-generation opening, “Miss Ivy Spang, of Cornwall-on-Hudson—” (250). The representation of this magazine, with its parade of clichéd stories by outdated authors, may reveal some self-consciousness on the author’s part about the venues in which her own stories would subsequently appear. As Sarah Whitehead has discussed, Wharton’s publishing relationship with Scribner’s Magazine ended in 1919, ushering in an era of increased compromise with editorial staff over her stories, in accordance with the move to more middlebrow venues like Woman’s Home Companion (one of the six best-selling publications in the first half of the twentieth century). The commercial “framing” of stories in these magazines—in the form of illustrations, advertisements and other texts—inevitably affected their reception and meaning.4 The magazine’s publication of 57-year-old Wharton’s own photograph next to “Writing a War Story” was a particularly ironic framing of a story that turns on the sex appeal of an author’s image. However, Wharton could also turn the frame to her advantage: a predominately female readership would likely be more sympathetic in their interpretation of the story’s ending, which details Ivy’s humiliation at the hands of an exclusively male audience. To the extent that Wharton saw readers as part of the meaning-making process, the targeting of female readers here seems a deliberate effort to introduce an extra, situational level of irony to the otherwise misogynistic ending.5

5 “Writing a War Story” is at heart a self-referential tale. Ivy’s youthful naïveté, her plagiarism and her humiliation are deployed in order to raise questions Wharton asked herself about authorial perspective and privilege during wartime: who should be writing war stories, and in what form? How do the inevitable limits on information and blockages of vision affect the judgments and interpretations of the writer? As Barbara A. White notes, there are “unmistakable clues” that help to “detect” Wharton in Ivy Spang: Ivy’s story is called “His Letter Home,” evoking Wharton’s own 1915 story for Scribner’s Magazine, “Coming Home,” while the protagonist of Ivy’s story and of Wharton’s January 1919 story “The Refugees” share the last name Durand (White 87).

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These connections do not simply poke retrospective fun at Wharton’s own wartime literary output, but more pointedly target the publications that are soliciting pretty, marketable writers for war stories. It is the editor of “The Man-at-Arms” who asks Ivy directly for a story with a “Coming-Home scene to close with.” His requirements are plainly absurd: in addition to the paradoxical “tragedy with a happy ending,” he also wants “all the articles written by people who’ve done the thing themselves, or seen it done.” The facts that Ivy’s war service is the elegant and bloodless work of “pouring tea once a week” in a Paris hospital, and the nearest she has been to the front is “as far as Rheims, once,” are nevertheless no barrier to her producing “a good stirring trench story” (248).

6 The magazine which is to publish Ivy’s story is, in her words, “the opening number of ‘The Man-at-Arms,’ to which Queens and Archbishops and Field Marshals were to contribute poetry and photographs and patriotic sentiment in autograph!” (248). In scope and prestige, it echoes a similar project Wharton herself undertook at the outset of the war, the anthology The Book of the Homeless. As Peter Buitenhuis describes it, this was a collection of poetry and art by an array of artistic luminaries, for which, with customary energy, “Mrs. Wharton solicited the manuscripts, edited them, translated the French and Italian pieces, got Theodore Roosevelt to write an introduction and General Joffre a dedicatory letter, then herself wrote a preface and had it ready for the press by the end of 1915” (494). Clearly her editorial judgment and energies were more carefully directed than the unnamed editor of “The Man-At-Arms,” and her collection was undertaken to raise money for refugees, not “bring joy to the wounded and disabled in British hospitals” (248). Nevertheless, the comic rendering of Ivy’s enthusiasm for the venture suggests again that Wharton was capable of turning an ironic retrospective gaze on her own wartime activities—especially since the resulting fictional anthology is a failure, “made up in equal parts of tired compositions by people who knew how to write, and artless prattle by people who didn’t” (255).

7 In her chapter “Telling a Short Story” in the postwar Writing of Fiction, Wharton lays out several rules for the form. The most important principles are “selection and design,” and the goal of the story is not character development (as it is in a novel) but the representation of a “situation,” classically unified by time and by the single perspective of the central “reflector.” Furthermore, the end must be in sight from the beginning—a rule that Ivy breaks, in her obsession with beginnings and her faith that everything else will follow automatically. Without a clear idea of the ending, a story will end up with what Wharton dismisses as the “machine-made ‘magazine-story’” kind of ending, and without organic unity (excerpted in White, 135). In Ivy’s final opportunity for understanding and praise, from the fortuitous presence in the hospital of a renowned novelist-turned soldier, she encounters a distinctly Whartonian critic. Although he has in fact read her story, his laughter tells her everything she needs to know, and his blunt assessment—“You’ve got hold of an awfully good subject […] but you’ve rather mauled it, haven’t you?”—makes it clear that the story’s failure is the mismatch of its content and form (259).

8 Ivy’s “subject” is derived from her governess’s diary, a genuine document of witnessing, the plain and factual tone is clearly a more powerful narrative mode than Ivy’s sentimental storytelling: “‘Military Hospital No. 13. November, 1914. Long talk with the Chasseur Alpin Emile Durand, wounded through the knee and the left lung at the Hautes Chaumes. I have decided to write down his story…’” The diary, which is

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“written in a close, tremulous hand,” and “pour[s] on and on without a paragraph—a good deal like life,” shows honesty and accuracy in the act of bearing witness; Ivy’s judgment, that “Decidedly, poor Mademoiselle did not even know the rudiments of literature!” (253) proves once again the limits of her shallow formalism. Yet Ivy is also led astray by external pressures—the requirements for a happy ending, a dash of sentiment, a thrill, and a neat resolution. In the context of war, such compromises carry significant ethical consequences.

9 Edith Wharton’s war was a French war. Her love of the country and her identification with its values were deeply rooted, and she experienced the outbreak of war as a profound shock. She was not alone in her sense of the war as a cataclysmic rupture with the past, which would constitute a radical challenge to literature. Henry James, too, expressed in no uncertain terms his belief that the war would destabilize the civilized world and would prove impossible for the artist to represent: “such realities play the devil even with his very best imaginations and intentions” (qtd. in Price 1997, 27). Many combatant writers later expressed a similar sense of representative impossibility, although based more on the incommunicable horrors of their personal experience.6 For Wharton and James, the threat to France was connected to everything that they valued about their adopted nation, everything represented in Wharton’s postwar collection of articles French Ways and their Meaning which, by “extolling French intellectual and social values,” were intended as a postwar guide for Americans to the real importance of the country (Price 1996, 169). The war’s threat to “civilization” was a threat to culture, and especially to literature.

10 In “Writing a War Story,” Ivy Spang’s first difficulty is that she finds herself “suffering from a plethora of impressions” and unable to shape them into fictional form (249). Wharton’s first war writing was similarly impressionistic, and she battled her editors at Scribner’s Magazine in order to publish her non-fiction articles in preference to short stories—although they continued to insist on a story, and paid her half as much for her non-fiction impressions of the war as for her 1915 story “Coming Home” (Price 1996, 44-56). “The Look of Paris” appeared in the May 1915 issue, followed by a further five articles in subsequent months, which detailed her visits to the front with the Red Cross and were collected as Fighting France later in 1915. Describing the first few days of the war, she uses metaphors drawn from natural disaster to convey her sense of shock, and to reinscribe observable disruptions such as mobilization—compared to a “huge break in the normal flow of traffic, like the rupture of a dyke” (6)—as signs of the unseen, historic cataclysm: “Like a monstrous landslide [the war] had fallen across the path of an orderly laborious nation, disrupting its routine, annihilating its industries, rending families apart, and burying under a heap of senseless ruin the patiently and painfully wrought machinery of civilisation . . . ” (5).

11 Wharton did not, however, occupy the status of a neutral observer. She was actively soliciting wealthy Americans for donations for the various charities and relief efforts she had played a part in establishing, and thus her “impressions” also had to convey a sense of the moral virtue of the mobilized nation. She used paradox (and played on her readers’ prejudices about the French) in order to heighten the dignity of the people —“the dramatic sense of the [French] race had already told them that the event was too great to be dramatised”—and the city: “The sudden flaming up of national life, the abeyance of every small and mean preoccupation, cleared the moral air as the streets had been cleared, and made the spectator feel as though he were reading a great poem

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on war rather than facing its realities” (8). Any hint of artistic decadence is cleansed from the city streets. This latter vision also makes a casual but important distinction between war poetry and war’s “realities,” suggesting that for Wharton, the two could not be made to coexist. This has the effect of shielding literature from the responsibility to bear witness, but it also raises the question of how “realities” were to be faced, and what value poets could have in wartime.7

12 A repeated trope of Fighting France is the interplay of attachment and rupture, in which the “ceaseless vigilant attachment of generations faithful to the soil” is evoked in order to represent its opposite, the war’s violent modernizing break with the past (3). Colm Tóibín, in his introduction, quotes the historian Graham Robb to convey the real immense historic change that mobilization—let alone the war—in fact represented for a predominantly rural nation: “Until 1st August 1914, no piece of news had ever reached the entire population on the same day” (viii). Although the essays show Wharton sometimes writing “at the top of her voice,” her subject is nothing less than instantaneous and universal change in the lives and movements of an entire population (Price xiii). In her wartime fiction, a similar structure of continuity and violent interruption is employed to convey the magnitude of loss. In the novella The Marne, the protagonist Troy Belknap’s visit back to his beloved tutor’s village conveys loss through the negation of what was there before: “The church, once so firm and four-square on the hill, was now a mere tracery against the clouds; the hospice roofless, the houses all gutted and bulging, with black smears of smoke on their inner walls” (284). Yet this negation at the same time offers a flash of imaginative restoration—the “firm and four- square” church appears for a moment to fill out its burned outline.

13 In “Coming Home,” Wharton reverses the strategy that she uses in Fighting France; rather than using the image of ruins to evoke the value of what has been destroyed, she attempts first to convey the value of “home” and to generate suspense from the possibility of its loss. A jaded American narrator tells the story of his comrade’s increasingly anxious homecoming to a village in the part of France that has been apparently devastated by the machinations of a particularly devilish German commander. The protagonist’s name, Jean de Réchamp, is identical with that of his village, thus embedding him in the landscape and making the personal and geographic losses and costs identical. Réchamp does not know what has happened to his village or his family, so for most of the story destruction is left to our imagination, piquing a lurid curiosity to uncover horrors that have been hinted at. This somewhat manipulative structure aims to provoke the fear of loss, the joy of reunion and the renewed pain of separation—exactly the effects Ivy Spang’s editor wanted for her homecoming story.

14 However, in order to ground its archetypal sentimentalism in reality, “Coming Home” draws directly on Wharton’s own observations of the Vosges region of France where the story is set. In the story, the narrator notes that, “[t]he sense of loneliness and remoteness that the absence of the civil population produces everywhere in eastern France is increased by the fact that all the names and distances on the mile-stones have been scratched out and the sign-posts as the cross-roads thrown down” (39). The detail precisely mirrors Wharton’s observation in Fighting France: “In this part of the country, which is one of many crossroads, we began to have unexpected difficulty in finding our way, for the names and distances on the milestones have all been effaced, the signposts thrown down and the enameled plaques on the houses at the entrance to the villages removed.” (38).

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15 Fiction and non-fiction diverge, however, in the representation of the enemy. In Fighting France the Germans are a shadowy collective presence, whereas in the story, their inchoate “evil” is encapsulated in a single figure, the devilish Oberst Von Scharlach, who is known to be in the area inhabited by the family and fiancée of the story’s hero. Scharlach’s artistic refinement enhances his cruelty—he “made a painting of the ruins”—yet his acts of violence are not described, depending instead on the reader’s imagination, fueled by newspapers and anecdotal evidence: “Put together the worst of the typical horrors and you’ll have a fair idea of it.” (41) The story’s atmosphere of dread relies on its readers’ familiarity with the “typical horrors” contained in reports of German atrocities committed as they invaded Belgium and France. The more lurid of these stories—of nuns and priests killed at prayers, babies impaled on bayonets, widespread rape and murder—became the stuff of propaganda posters and cartoons, and passed into something like folklore. Such excesses tended to undermine the credibility of more sober reports, and civilian belief in these stories is usually taken as evidence of the power of propaganda. However, recent research in German military archives has suggested that more than 6,000 Belgian civilians were killed during the first two months of the war, purportedly in response to guerilla attacks.8 The stories that reached French, British and American ears, however, contained no such military rationale (accurate or otherwise) and the victimization of Belgium was crucial to the representation of that country during the war and in mobilizing wealthy Americans to make charitable contributions. In The Marne Wharton makes no attempt to conceal the titillating appeal of these stories in New York society: “Here was Mr. So-and-So, just back from Belgium—such horrible stories—really unrepeatable! ‘Don’t you want to come and hear them, my dear? Dine with us tomorrow’” (274).

16 Stories of atrocity and victimization allow little room for resistance, only for noble suffering. It is intriguing, therefore, that Wharton chose, in “Coming Home,” to show the power of compromise—effectively, of collaboration—as an effective strategy in protecting against devastation. As Barbara White puts it, the story can be read as “an adventure with a female hero” in Yvonne Malo, Jean’s fiancée, who keeps the family safe through her own, implied, sexual sacrifice to Scharlach (85). The family she protects is depicted as provincial, moribund, and “helpless,” while Yvonne represents the New Woman—financially independent, sexually experienced, artistic, and at home in Paris. Her self-possession suggests the potential that the war could offer liberation as well as suffering for women. Although the story closes with the implication that Jean murders Scharlach, it is sufficiently ambiguous to undercut any sense that he is taking effective revenge for her violation. Yvonne has managed to rescue herself, and her survival is her own affair.

17 In Fighting France Wharton’s central challenge lies in getting near enough to “the war” to truly be in a position to observe and represent it. The titles of many contemporary published journals and later memoirs by women—including May Sinclair’s Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915), Mildred Aldrich’s On the Edge of the War Zone (1917), Ellen LaMotte’s The Backwash of War (1916), and Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929)— testify to a sense of exclusion from the war zone, or at least of confusion at being unable to form a coherent picture from what has been witnessed. Many combatant memoirs, meanwhile, express the frustrated sense of being “in” the war yet unable to see it, or more powerfully, the horror of being unable to do any more than watch—

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enduring the “helpless sight” that haunts the speaker’s dreams in Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” (15). The pieces collected in Fighting France are similarly united by their emphasis on looking and the struggle for the best vantage point. Wharton emphasizes the variety of perspectives available to her on to the battlefield, and maintains a delicate, often uncomfortable balance between witnessing and spectatorship. This discomfort is highlighted in her wartime fiction, in which the effort to get close to the war and report back becomes as competitive as the pre-war race for the newest Paris fashions: “After all, Mrs. Belknap wasn’t the only person who had seen a battlefield! Lots and lots more were pouring home all the time with fresh tales of tragedy: the Marne had become—in a way—an old story” (The Marne, 273).

18 The struggle to see becomes a struggle to represent, and Wharton finds herself calling upon older literary and artistic models to grasp for expression, from nineteenth- century—“‘It was gay and terrible’ is the phrase forever recurring in War and Peace, and the gaiety of war was everywhere in Cassel”—to much older forms: “the cavalry galloping by in single file suggested a black frieze of warriors encircling the dun- coloured flanks of an Etruscan vase” (68, 80). Such moments of cultural connectivity might seem like a retreat from the effort to grasp and record what is really happening, but for Wharton, literary and artistic allusions are part of what makes the world comprehensible. Her descriptions of the front are most vivid when she is not writing “at the top of her voice,” but when she employs the more subtle eye of the artistically minded social satirist—for instance, reading the scene at a restaurant in Châlons as if it were a ballroom: “within the last two years the question of colour has greatly preoccupied the French military authorities, who have been seeking an invisible blue; and the range of their experiments is proved by the extraordinary variety of shades of blue, ranging from a sort of greyish robin’s-egg to the darkest navy, in which the army is clothed” (24).

19 Fighting France reveals Wharton—whose journeys to the front were sanctioned by the highest authorities and combined with carrying necessary supplies to the war zone—as indefatigable in the struggle to be an eyewitness. Her excitement when there is finally something to see is palpable: told that the fighting is visible from a nearby garden, she exclaims, “It did not take us long to reach that garden!” Opera glasses have given way to field glasses, which give a similarly tantalizing, and highly aestheticized, glimpse of the action: “a little corner of the battle of Vauquois was suddenly brought close to us— the rush of French infantry up the slopes, the feathery drift of French gun-smoke lower down, and, high up, on the wooded crest along the sky, the red lightnings and white puffs of the German artillery […] we stood there dumbfounded at the accident of having stumbled on this visible episode of the great subterranean struggle” (29). The more common invisibility of the war is evident in the repeated possibility of similar “stumbles”—visiting a village close to the German frontier in Lorraine, Wharton has to be “abruptly pulled back” and warned “Take care—those are the trenches!” (56) The undetectable presence of the enemy transforms the landscape itself, so that its bucolic appearance becomes deceptive: “The longer one looked, the more oppressive and menacing the invisibility of the foe became. ‘There they are—and there—and there.’ We strained our eyes obediently, but saw only calm hillsides, dozing farms. It was as if the earth itself were the enemy, as if the hordes of evil were in the clods and grass-blades” (51).

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20 In the absence of “visible episodes,” Wharton relies on absence itself to evoke the war, focusing on the emptiness of the landscape as contrasted to its busy and useful pre-war condition. It is the encounter with absence, with emptiness, at the start of her piece “The Argonne” which first stimulates the exclamation “This is war!” (22). What war is, and where it is, is a pressing question throughout Wharton’s journey. Even at the end of her tour, Wharton still presents herself as struggling to comprehend the war’s reality: “It was one of those strange and contradictory scenes of war that bring home to the bewildered looker-on the utter impossibility of picturing how the thing really happens” (97). The most powerful image of what the war might really mean is etched on the faces of those who have seen what “really happens,” yet Wharton’s powers of observation and imagination fail her at this crucial moment. Watching a line of éclopés in Châlons—the walking wounded and shell-shocked—she observes that “it is a grim sight to watch them limping by, and to meet the dazed stare of eyes that have seen what one dare not picture” (23). This is the line between spectator and witness—the spectator can choose not to see.

21 In her novella The Marne, published in The Saturday Evening Post on 26 October 1918, the young protagonist, Troy Belknap, is engaged in a constant struggle to get close to the war, and to the fantasy of maturity, wisdom and meaning that it embodies.9 Wharton again draws on her descriptions of the countryside in Fighting France to evoke Troy’s romantic attachment to the country, although from the beginning this landscape is represented as fleeting and fragile, glimpsed from the window of his mother’s “noiseless motor”: The little boy’s happiness would have been complete if there had been more time to give to the beautiful things that flew past them; thatched villages with square- towered churches in hollows of the deep green country, or grey shining towns above rivers on which cathedrals seemed to be moored like ships; miles and miles of field and hedge and park falling away from high terraced houses, and little embroidered stone manors reflected in reed-grown moats under ancient trees. (262)

22 The paradoxical mobility of this landscape—flying past and falling away—as seen from the window of the “Pegasus motor” means that he cannot grasp its significance until he sees it from the inside, visiting the family of his young tutor, M. Gantier. The temporary reversal of perspective, as Troy peers out through “small window-panes looking on old box-gardens that he was always being whisked past in the motor,” briefly opens up the real meaning of France and its rootedness in the past (263). When the name of the little town appears in the daily wartime communiqués, its loss recalls it vividly to Troy’s memory: “He saw all these modest beaming people grouped about Mme Gantier’s coffee, and Papa Gantier’s best bottle of ‘Fine’; he smelt the lime-blossoms and box, he heard the bees in the lavender, he looked out on the rich fields and woods and the blue hills bathed in summer light. And he read: ‘Not a house is standing.’” (265) The “landslide” that Wharton predicted in 1914 sweeps away a vision that has barely taken shape for Troy, and this loss of something he never quite possessed sharpens his lasting sentimental attachment to France and his desire to fight and die for her.

23 The excesses of Troy’s attachment tend to overshadow the ironic bite of the story, which satirizes American attitudes to the war as wavering between curiosity, self- satisfaction and outright boredom. Nor does the narrator quite spare Troy, whose passion for the war is driven primarily by an adolescent desire to be taken seriously, to live up to his warlike name. Sent back to school, his descriptions of what he has seen

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—“his haunting impressions of the Marne”—merely earn him the deflating nickname “Marny Belknap” (273). Troy finally makes it back to France at the end of the war because he begs for the trip as a birthday present, arguing that his parents have always indulged him in the past. But he is still too young to fight and has to serve his time in a volunteer ambulance unit, until in the midst of the confused retreat from the Marne, he is hoisted up into a truckload of American soldiers heading into battle. However, he doesn’t even get to fire a gun before he is shot in the back during a reconnaissance raid, and “rescued” by the spirit of his dead tutor who embodies the spirit of the Marne. Ending with Troy in hospital, confused about what—if anything—he has done, the end of the story reads like defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

24 For most of the story Troy struggles, as does Wharton in Fighting France, to approach near enough to see action: “Here he was, once more involved in one of the great convulsions of destiny and still almost as helpless a spectator as when, four years before, he had strayed the burning desert of Paris, and cried out in his boy’s heart for a share in the drama” (292). Yet he does not understand that the “drama” is not a visible spectacle, but is dependent on the imagination of its audience to create a meaning that transcends its observable reality. Recovering in hospital, he has to be told after the fact, “Battle of the Marne? Sure you were in it—in it up to the hilt, you lucky kid!” (307). The story ends with Troy’s resolution to follow the spirit of his tutor, the spirit of the Marne, back to the battlefields of France. For “Marny” Belknap, that battlefield is mystic and eternal; the transmutation of champs de bataille into Champs-Elysées is a curious comfort to Troy, although most likely not for those reading about him in the final days of the war.

25 Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story,” is an influential analysis, part memoir and part polemic, of the methods and meanings of war writing. It is structured as a series of vignettes, told by the narrator but usually paraphrased from another storyteller, interspersed with a relentless digging away at the notion of truth-telling. In tone, vocabulary and historical setting, the story could not be further from Edith Wharton, but the story offers an illuminating counterpart to “Writing a War Story.” As Ivy eventually learns to do, O’Brien’s narrator privileges the content of the story over its form, yet at the same time recognizes that the story—its “subject” or its “truth”— cannot be conveyed from teller to listener without form. The responsibility of the storyteller is therefore to listen, like Ivy’s governess, and to communicate as far as possible without “mangling” the truth to fit the aesthetic values of the short story.

26 At the same time, as Wharton implies when she alludes to Tolstoy, the idea that a “true war story” can be lifted clear of literary influence may be an impossible requirement: war does sometimes fit the parameters of fiction and recall other stories. The narrator of “Coming Home,” describing the reunion of Jean with his old servant, protests to his audience, “I know you affect to scorn the cinema, and this was it, tremolo and all. Hang it! This war’s going to teach us not to be afraid of the obvious” (43). O’Brien too considers the question of true stories that nonetheless fit sentimental narratives, and reaffirms the importance of “grounding reality,” without which “it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue” (83).

27 Wharton’s efforts to get close enough to the war to see and understand its reality, and bear witness to its effects, are clearly compromised by her inability to see and represent the enemy as anything but a malevolent, inhuman force. Her perspective is based on “passionate Francophilia” and the privilege of a wealthy outsider, who is

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nevertheless allowed closer to the front than most journalists (Buitenhuis 496). What is “obvious” from such a position is not the whole truth. Yet her commitment to representing the war from her own direct observation is evident in her correspondence with her Scribner’s editors about “Coming Home,” in which she claims to have “revised and completed the story from direct personal impressions” (qtd. in Price 1989, 98). Despite the incomplete success of her war stories, her susceptibility to sentiment and her partisan thinking, Edith Wharton’s wartime writings attest to her belief that the war mobilized authors to the urgent challenge of bearing witness. Her tireless efforts to get close to the fighting, meanwhile, make it clear that she could accept no “impressions” other than her own.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Buitenhuis, Peter. “Edith Wharton and the First World War.” American Quarterly Vol 18, No. 3 (Autumn, 1966): 493-505.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: OUP 1975; revised 2000.

Horne, John N. and Alan Kramer. German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002.

O’Brien, Tim. “How to Tell a True War Story.” The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. 67-85.

Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce et Decorum Est.” The Collected Poems. New York: Chatto & Windus, 1963. 55.

Price, Alan. “Edith Wharton’s War Story.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 8, No. 1, “Toward a Gendered Modernity.” (Spring, 1989): 95-100.

---. The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Wharton, Edith. Collected Stories 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: The Library of America, 2001.

---. “A Backward Glance.” Novellas and Other Writings. New York: The Library of America, 1990. 767-1068.

---. Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort. 1915. London: Hesperus Press, 2010.

---. French Ways and Their Meaning. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1919.

---. Ed. The Book of the Homeless (Le Livre des sans-foyer). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916.

White, Barbara Ann. Edith Wharton. A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twaine Publishers, 1991.

Whitehead, Sarah. “Breaking the Frame: How Edith Wharton’s Stories Subvert Their Magazine Context.” European Journal of American Culture 27.1 (2008): 43-56.

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NOTES

1. Buitenhuis, for instance, calls The Marne “the most naïve and sentimental fiction she ever wrote,” and notes that most critics have deemed her 1923 war novel A Son at the Front “irrelevant” (497; 498). 2. The editors of the Library of America edition of Wharton’s later stories seem to invite this reassertion of irony; by placing “Writing a War Story” directly before The Marne, the reader cannot help but detect a similar “mangling” of an authentic story in this earlier piece. 3. Blast, Wyndham Lewis’s short-lived literary and art magazine, published two editions in 1914 and 1915, and was uncompromising in its editorial polemics, while “Zig-zag”’s commitment to vers-libre, and poetic form over content, seems to satirize the pre-war Imagist poets, several of whom were featured in Blast. 4. Whitehead argues that this breaking-up of a text with illustrations and advertisements, and excerpting parts of it for marketing purposes, means that “no other literary genre encourages a reader to approach a text in such a disrupted manner as that of the magazine.” Yet she does not wholly agree with critics who see Wharton’s writing for “middlebrow” magazines as a lowering of standards: instead, the play of ambiguity and closure becomes more delicate, generating “narratives that are simultaneously explicit and subtle” (49). 5. Whitehead cites Wharton’s preface to her collection Ghosts (1937), which laments the “withering” of her readers’ “creative faculty” (48). 6. Fussell gives the most influential account of this phenomenon, in The Great War and Modern Memory. 7. W. B. Yeats, approached by Wharton to contribute to her anthology The Book of the Homeless, took a different view in his short poem “Reasons for Keeping Silent,” later re-titled “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” and implicitly questions Wharton’s firm distinction between poetry and reality. The poem begins “I think it’s better that in times like these/A poet’s mouth be silent,” suggesting that if poetry cannot “set a statesman right” it has no use in wartime (The Book of the Homeless 45). This stance made him a rare dissenter in the flood of patriotic poetry that greeted the outbreak of war. 8. The most recent historical study of this period is by Horne and Kramer. Their subtitle A History of Denial makes clear their stance that the atrocities have too often been dismissed as propaganda. 9. In The Writing of Fiction Wharton defined the novella, or the “long short story” as a form suited to “any subject too spreading for conciseness yet too slight in texture to be stretched into a novel” (excerpted in White, 132). This rather vague and negative definition may account for some of the imbalances in The Marne.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article tente d’éclairer la complexité de la représentation littéraire de la guerre pour Wharton, à la lumière de « Writing a War Story » et des écrits sur la guerre rassemblés dans Fighting France. Comme beaucoup de combattants et d’infirmières auteurs de témoignages, Wharton pose la question de la légitimité et du point de vue dans tout discours fictionnel sur la guerre. Les textes de Wharton montrent aussi en quoi le caractère limité de la vision d’un auteur a une incidence sur ses jugements et ses interprétations. Ils posent le problème éthique d’une

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esthétisation de la guerre. « Writing a War Story » pose ces questions sous une forme satirique, à travers le cas d’Ivy Spang, femme de lettres mineure, à qui on demande d’écrire une brève nouvelle pour une publication distribuée aux soldats à l’hôpital. Au début, Ivy semble être très appréciée des soldats, jusqu’au moment où elle découvre que le bon accueil réservé à sa nouvelle doit beaucoup à la photographie flatteuse de l’auteur en uniforme d’infirmière qui accompagne le texte. La cible de la satire est le monde littéraire qui alimente les prétentions d’Ivy et fait passer la forme avant le contenu. La nouvelle éclaire la tension entre les obligations de l’auteur en tant que témoin et son rôle d’artiste créateur, tension présente également dans les témoignages de Wharton.

AUTHORS

JOANNA SCUTTS Joanna Scutts is a postdoctoral lecturer in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University where she teaches the freshman great books course “Literature Humanities.” She received her Ph.D. from Columbia in May 2010, with a dissertation entitled Memorial Modernisms: Remembering the Dead in British Literature and Culture. Her book project explores the connections between commemoration and literature in the aftermath of the First World War, and her wider research interests include modernism, war literature, visual culture and gender studies.

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Reading the Ruins: “Coming Home,” Wharton’s Atrocity Story of the First World War

William Blazek

1 Edith Wharton’s First World War short story “Coming Home” was presented to its original readers in 1915-16 as an atrocity narrative—a distinctly contemporary text within Xingu and Other Stories, a book collection whose general emphasis is on old upper-class New York, cosmopolitan marital affairs, and haunted pasts.1 Early reviews of “Coming Home” placed it mainly as a well-constructed work that vividly depicts what had become in war propaganda commonplace themes of physical destruction and sexual trespass. Reviewers then and critics since have focused on the use of suppression and omission in the text. Yet this story of wartime atrocities in north-eastern France also enfolds within its layered focalization a meta-narrative containing some familiar topics in Wharton’s fiction, including the emergence of female agency, patriarchal recidivism, the transformation of social hegemonies, and hereditary degeneration. If the story addresses received ideas of violation and retribution common in the genre of war-atrocity publications, it does so not only to play upon readers’ anticipations of the unfolding plot, but also to explore deeper assumptions about social norms and gender expectations. Beyond that achievement, it poses questions about the reliability of language, thereby undermining the atrocity story genre itself and questioning the reliability of sources and the ability of any writer to represent the unfathomable nature of war. In this vortex of literary and philosophical complications, “Coming Home” adds a further existential complexity as it ultimately destabilizes the concept of home as a space of secure origins and grounded meaning.

2 Wharton’s reasons for adding a war-atrocity story to Xingu were in part commercial, to bring the anxious vitality of current events to bear on a collection whose seven other stories harken back to pre-war settings and concerns. (Indeed, the other stories were written before the start of the war.) Nevertheless, the inclusion of “Coming Home” reflects the author’s well-documented initial belief in the authenticity of war-zone atrocity events and her eager reporting of rumours about atrocities in her letters and

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non-fiction writings, especially in the first year of the war. To one of her favorite American correspondents, Sara (“Sally”) Norton, she wrote during the first month of fighting: The “atrocities” one hears of are true. I know of many, alas, too well authenticated. Spread it abroad as much as you can. It should be known that it is to America’s interest to help stem this hideous flood of savagery by opinion if it may not be by action. No civilized race can remain neutral in feeling now. (Letters 335)

3 Her quotation marks around the word “atrocities” indicate both how the word was forced into people’s wartime vocabulary and how it had to be treated cautiously, a special lexical case. While atrocity stories have a basis in hard evidence,2 most readers do not have the ability to verify that evidence and the stories rely on readers’ willingness to imagine brutalities that cannot be directly substantiated. At the end of September 1914 she again wrote to Norton, declaring: As to the horrors & outrages, I’m afraid they are too often true—Lady Gladstone, head of the Belgian refugee committee in London, told a friend of mine she had seen a Belgian woman with her ears cut off. And of course the deliberate slaughter of “hostages” in defenceless towns is proved over & over again. (Letters 340)

4 The substitution of “horrors and outrages” for “atrocities” is significant in that it highlights the ease with which euphemism and emotional shorthand can be employed to convey the beliefs lying behind the facts of wartime atrocities. And perhaps it reveals Wharton’s intuition about how the overuse of “atrocity” would soon lead to complacency about the facts and feelings upon which her revulsion towards German military aggression was based. Seeing German militarism as an outrage against Western civilization’s core values, Wharton could at first accept third-hand accounts and uncontextualized stories as hard evidence of culturally ingrained Teutonic barbarism, yet she soon saw how difficult it was to separate the truth from hearsay and rumour. As Trudi Tate suggests, “Many writers were aware that the stories they had read and heard during the war might be unreliable, misleading, or simply untrue” (43). Moreover, these ambiguities were compounded when writers such as Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Wharton herself wrote propaganda for the Allied war effort. “How can one bear witness when one’s knowledge is so imperfect?” Tate asks. “How do people imagine themselves as subjects, or indeed as citizens, in a culture which is mobilised around rumours, lies, and official secrecy?” (43).

5 Wharton’s despair at the United States’ obdurate neutrality over the next two and a half years further provoked her to influence American public opinion in favour of joining the Allied cause. Her wartime journalism from 1915, collected in book form as Fighting France (1919), includes passages of propaganda based on general assumptions about German atrocities. In a portrait of Belgian refugees flooding into Paris, she reflects on how they have “nothing left to them in the world but the memory of burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged into slavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old men trampled by drunken heels and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying” (34). The sentence carefully builds the level of outrage from building damage and civilian casualties to more insidiously conscious acts of barbarism and cruelty. Elsewhere in the text, Wharton recreates scenes such as the once lovely setting of the little town of Clermont-en-Argonne, now ruined by the Germans, and she sardonically comments: “No doubt its beauty enriched the joy of wrecking it” (61). She records without documentation how “the martyr town” of

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Gerbéviller was first shelled, then each house set ablaze, and lastly any escaping inhabitant “neatly spitted on lurking bayonets” (99). (In a 14 May 1915 letter to Henry James, she gives a different version, retelling the acting-mayor’s account of hiding with his wife and other women in a cellar, the house above in flames, “& the Germans shooting and torturing people all through the town [Letters 355].) From a motor-trip to Belgium, she describes the ruins of Poperinghe and the paralysis of the empty town, concluding that “wherever the shadow of Germany falls, all things should wither at the root” (157). In other sections Fighting France moves away from the specifics of German military ferocity to more rounded reflections on the meanings of war and the difficulties of comprehending it.3 Her efforts to understand what she saw as a new barbarism infecting the progressive optimism of the early twentieth century are both complex and meditative. However, the partisan descriptions and insinuations concerning German brutality are clearly meant as propaganda, which the story “Coming Home” contains but also complicates and, as shall be argued, ultimately dissolves.

6 As a correspondent and journalist, Wharton refuses to acknowledge in her accounts of war atrocities that brutal acts in combat could produce angry retaliation and reprisals on both sides of the Western Front. Propaganda writing does not tend to present the enemy’s point of view, after all, and neither a subtle turn of phrase nor a nuanced narrative voice is required to produce the designed effect of inciting soldiers and civilians to hatred. The key document that initiated much of the British and American reaction to atrocity stories during the First World War was the Bryce Report, published as Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages (1915) and The Evidence and Documents Laid Before the Committee on Alleged German Outrages (1915). Led by Lord Bryce, the popular British Ambassador to Washington from 1907-1913, the Committee based its findings on the statements of over 1200 witnesses, mainly Belgian and French civilians and soldiers, with collaborating evidence from diaries supposedly taken from captured German troops. The conclusions were clearly intended to stir up hatred against the Germans and to influence the United States to join Great Britain in the war (Quinn 34-37), and the publication gained momentum following the torpedoing of the Lusitania in April 1915.4 The report contains stories of organized massacres, the killing of prisoners and the wounded, and deliberate destruction of property. The looting and burning of villages filled the testimony, along with accounts of murdered children, babies spitted on bayonets, and women raped and tortured. Peter Buitenhuis states: “The Bryce Report continued to exert a powerful influence on American opinion throughout the war. And yet the report, as is now generally acknowledged, was largely a tissue of invention, unsubstantiated observations by unnamed witnesses, and second- hand eyewitness reports, depending more on imagination than any other factor” (27). Invention being the writer’s métier, Wharton would have been conscious of the need to temper emotional reactions to atrocity stories that reinforced preconceived opinions about imperial Germany. Nevertheless, the Bryce Report was widely accepted as valid among her circle of friends, and their reactions added to Wharton’s store of matériel in writing “Coming Home.” Daisy Chanler, an old family friend from New York, records in her autobiography: “We all read Lord Bryce’s Report on the German atrocities in Belgium. Coming from him, the distinguished historian, the kindly and hospitable English gentleman whom we had known as Ambassador in Washington, this Report carried conviction and filled us with zealous indignation” (qtd. in Price, End of Innocence 193, n. 109). Sara Norton in Boston also had correspondence from her younger brother,

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serving with an ambulance unit on the Western Front, to support the official register of atrocity tales. Her anger found an unusual creative outlet in the publication of New Nursery Rhymes on Old Lines, a collection of anti-German verses based on the Mother Goose rhymes. Published anonymously (“by an American”) in 1916, the thin volume contains diatribes against the “Huns,” Kaiser Wilhelm, German-American “plotters,” and President Wilson. The rhyme “Ding Dong Bell” is transliterated into an atrocity scare: Ding, dong, bell— The body’s in the well! Who put it there? Germans—have a care, Whisper low, for they may hear, Watch thy child, for they are near; Who?—’s-sh—I dare not tell. Ding, dong, bell. (II)

7 Wharton’s critical opinion of the book is unrecorded, but her knowledge of this and other examples of and responses to atrocity propaganda is placed in “Coming Home” upon a conditional and reflective surface of the text. For characters absent from the events surrounding an atrocity, whose perceptions are coloured by the emotional and social investment of what they choose to believe, searching for facts to support their assumptions proves fruitless. Moreover, those characters most directly involved in the events may want to remain silent—“I dare not tell”—about the deeper implications and fuller truths of their experience.

8 Wharton experienced the dynamics of atrocity stories directly in her war-relief work when, in November 1914, a wealthy American woman made an unusual offer of funds to the Foyer Franco-Belge, a relief society for refugees that was closely associated with the American Hostels for Refugees that Wharton established. The large donation came with the gruesome stipulation that the Foyer produce a child mutilated by the Germans. Alan Price recounts how André Gide, working in the society’s administration, was assigned the mission. But inquiries with journalists provided only false leads; Jean Cocteau could not fulfil his promise of an interview with a Red Cross nurse who supposedly knew about children who had had their right hands cut off; and when Gide was told about a similar atrocity in a Belgian village, a long wait for photographic evidence came to nothing. “Gide was finally forced to admit ‘Not one of these statements could be proved,’” and Price concludes: “Like the contemporary legends told by ‘a friend of a friend,’ the stories of atrocities and mutilation could not be confirmed” (End of Innocence 31). To Gide’s credit, the grim effort to produce the evidence that would have procured the financial reward for the charity went as far as it could, but no further, until arriving at its logical conclusion. Would another writer have been tempted to manufacture convincing proof for the sake of the good work that the donation could have ensured? The anecdote reads like a plotline worthy of Wharton’s treatment. Working closely with Gide in the related war charities, Wharton would at least have considered the account of his pursuit as a cautionary reminder of the moral issues involved when humanitarian service, money, and war collide.

9 The odd condition imposed on the charitable offer also points to a psychological complexity in atrocity stories. Their grounding in partial truths, rumor, and myth suggests the role of the subconscious and the atavistic impulses at work in tales of mutilation, sexual violence, and pillage. In his study of popular fiction written under

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the influence of Allied propaganda, Patrick J. Quinn discusses one of the first American books to center its narrative on atrocities, specifically drawn from the Bryce Report. Frances Wilson Huard’s memoir My Home in the Field of Honor (1916) relates what are framed as authentic scenes in which German soldiers loot and burn a village, kill children and torture young women. “The details of the German barbarity are almost lovingly recounted,” Quinn notes, “and the readers of these memoirs are made to feel that Huard was writing in an emotionally pent-up state and took pleasure in stirring up anti-German feelings” (40). This insight is reiterated in Trudi Tate’s summary of how “both the propaganda of the Great War and some of the criticism which followed seem to articulate a horror at pleasure of its own of which the writing itself is unaware.” She concludes: “This may be a further reason why atrocity stories were so fascinating, and so disturbing, and why they received so much attention” (61). Citing several examples from post-war investigations into Allied propaganda as well as propaganda texts themselves, Tate observes how the documents operate within a Freudian model of sexual repression and release, balanced between horror and fascination (48-50). Sado- sexual accounts of bodily mutilations, physical debasement, and domestic or somatic violations can be read as sensational routes to satisfy the public, whose restricted personal experience of warfare is enlarged by the insinuation and titillation of atrocity propaganda. Thus disgust and anxiety are paired with pleasure and temporary security in the psychic imagination.

10 In writing a war story based on the political, personal, and psychological foundations of atrocity discourse, Wharton relies on omission and related screening devices that refuse to make direct or explicit reference to the atrocities themselves. This reliance on suggestion and implication was noticed by the early reviewers of “Coming Home.” “It is a grim story, vivid, of a kind which we know to have been only too commonplace, and with a tragedy the more appalling because it is only suggested, never fully told,” observes the New York Times Book Review (Tuttleton 228)—with its “which we know to have been only too commonplace” serving to emphasize the way Wharton also uses the almost universally accepted truth of German atrocities in her manipulation of reader expectations. Similarly, the British perspective from the Times Literary Supplement proposes “There is no facility of sentiment here, and this grave and ominous little glimpse of provincial life, just revealed, immediately hidden, is unforgettable” (Tuttleton 229). The English Spectator follows this path in praising the author’s facility with narrative reticence, declaring that “‘Coming Home’ is a painfully vivid story—all the more vivid for its suppressions and omissions,” noting also how the plot turns on “a dreadful surmise” about a German atrocity and how “the act of vengeance in which the narrative closes wipes out the score but does not clear up the mystery” (Tuttleton 234). Francis Hackett in the New Republic, focusing more generally on Wharton’s narrative style, asserts that the author “is dramatic hypodermically” (Tuttleton 235). Gerald Gould in the New Statesman follows a highly critical line with “Coming Home” but takes Wharton to task mainly for what he sees as the story’s melodrama and use of “stage- property” and detailed description to cover the flaws in an inauthentic story. Tellingly, Gould zeroes in on a passage in which Wharton makes a passing reference to a youth being burned alive, an element that she probably included to both establish and deflect attention from the central—hypothetical—atrocity of sexual blackmail. Gould inserts a parenthetical query: “(Does Mrs. Wharton mean this case to be taken as authentic? If so, she would have done better to give her references: if not, she would have done better to omit the incident)” (Tuttleton 230). The question exposes atrocity stories’ dual

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quality that turns partial truths into authenticated facts by appealing to an audience prepared and willing to believe. Because her readers were familiar with atrocity stories in the media and fiction and were prepared to accept voyeurism and scatology, the difficulty Wharton faced with “Coming Home” was in the development of a narrative that skilfully resists actually revealing an atrocity. While some contemporary critics appreciate the text merely for its historical interest,5 the structure of the narrative reveals something more compelling. By including subtexts that raise issues about women, class degeneration, patriarchy, and the nature of truth, Wharton found a way to produce an atrocity story and simultaneously challenge it as an established form and subject.

11 Concealing that aim from her readers becomes the unacknowledged aim of Wharton’s use of layered focalization in the narrative. She frames the story with complex but precise perspectives and voices, guiding (or perhaps misdirecting) readers from the beginning through primary and secondary narrators who both see and tell of events as they unfold, so that the technique becomes part of the story and reinforces the epistemological questions it asks. Julie Olin-Ammentorp, in her comprehensive study of Wharton’s war writings, gives the most thorough critical analysis available of “Coming Home.” She describes the story as having “a Chinese-box sort of structure” (49), with its unnamed initiating narrator commenting externally about the American volunteer ambulance-driver H. Macy Greer, who in turn tells his story about the young French aristocrat Jean de Réchamp. The narrative technique might also be understood as archaeological layers of perspective, voice, and meaning, with an open structure beneath the third narrative layer, a fourth dimension containing stories of various civilians, relatives, soldiers, nuns, and others. Information is conveyed through speech, memory, letters, and the general hubbub of news, gossip, and guesswork. This refracted method serves to both conceal and distribute meaning, adding veils to already uncertain understanding.

12 The opening sentence of “Coming Home” signals how the imagination works on reality, and the first few paragraphs emphasize the hazards of trying to pin down what stories reveal: “The young men of our American Relief Corps are beginning to come back from the front with stories.” The focus here is on the nature and function of stories and the way they contribute to the creation of what most people know about war and its most explicit effects. News from the battlezone for those far away from the front arrives fragmented and scattered, the narrator explains. All such information is unreliable on account both of its usually traumatic and uncertain origins and of its reinterpretation by eager, biased, and imaginative listeners. Wharton frames this core ambiguity carefully within the layered technique of the narrative. The secondary narrator, Greer, is neither sentimental nor falsely cinematic in his way of telling stories, but he “has the gift of making the thing told seem as true as if one had seen it” (26), the “as if” projecting both confidence and suspicion. The external narrator’s criticism of Greer’s “slovenly drawl” (26), characteristic of his generation of American youths, indicates that the style of the story will not be dramatic or sensational, but will depend instead on content and on what would become a key modernist technique of reader involvement in narrative construction, particularly through the use of omission. The atrocity genre is part of the framework because it too demands an imaginative contribution of readers. Thus, when Greer is complimented because “his eyes see so much that they make one see even what his foggy voice obscures” (26), the reader is invited into the obscurity as well as the light that surrounds this storyteller-guide.

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More accurately, the reader is reading a story about a story that tells a story about stories, as if listening in on the conversation that the unnamed (male) external narrator is having with Greer, who has been coaxed “to my rooms for dinner and a long cigar” (26). Having established the reader as eavesdropper and voyeur, Wharton can proceed to unravel the tale, with a complicit reader curious about a mysterious story, selected by an external narrator from Greer’s otherwise inaccessible cache of frontline accounts.

13 The central plot involves Greer and the injured cavalry lieutenant Jean de Réchamp and their efforts to discover what has happened to Réchamp’s family and to his fiancée, Yvonne Malo, after the Frenchman’s village has been overrun by a German offensive. What thickens this plot is the steadily built presence-by-absence of the German officer Oberst Graf Benno von Scharlach, who (it is eventually confirmed after much hinting and foreshadowing) was in charge of the occupation of the village and occupied both the Réchamp château and at least the time and perhaps the bed of Mlle Malo over the course of two and a half days and three full nights. His surname is German for “scarlet” as well as “scarlet fever.” Scharlach has a terrifying reputation as a ruthless commander, and pervasive stories about his brutality suggest infection and the threat German militarism poses for France and the United States. (His name is also too close to “Shylock” not to make the reader wonder what grisly payment he might demand.) When Greer and Réchamp eventually reach the village, isolated in the Vosges, their fears are heightened by the scenes of devastation that they have observed on their journey through the region and by war-shocked people relating their traumatic experiences, including the story noted above about the Germans burning a boy to death.

14 Much of this narrative is delivered through supposition and misdirection, and it becomes infused with imagery of ruin, connoting forces of change or new dilemmas to be faced. Réchamp’s grandmother recounts how, when the enemy soldiers arrived bad- tempered on a hot day, they were given cooling cider and wine to drink by the servants on Yvonne Malo’s instruction. “‘Or so at least I was told,’” says the old lady (46). Applying standard tactics to confuse the enemy advance, the French had rubbed out the numbers on mile-stones and taken down sign-posts, so the region has become an open landscape that must be re-read and re-interpreted even by the locals. In the same way, wartime conditions create barriers to understanding, impose new standards of behaviour, and upset moral certainties. The church steeple of a nearby village no longer serves as a landmark, for the church, houses, and factory have all been flattened: the vanished church and gutted workplace represent the loss of moral compass, social routine, and class certainties that had previously ruled provincial life. An old woman known to Réchamp tells him what happened. “It was one of the most damnable stories I’ve heard yet,” the listener Greer remarks: “Put together the worst of the typical horrors and you’ll have a fair idea of it. Murder, outrage, torture: Scharlach’s programme seemed to be fairly comprehensive” (41). Allowing for Greer’s hardening from war-zone experience and his sardonic tone, the words nevertheless contain some slippery phrasing (“I’ve heard yet,” “seemed”) and formulaic blocks (“typical horrors,” “murder, outrage, torture”) that require completion by the reader. Further complication is added by the old grandmother when she remembers Scharlach’s orderly showing her his silver-mounted flute and his paintbox and says, “before he left he sat down on my door-step and made a painting of the ruins” (41)— perhaps as a sadistic memento or as sign of war’s destruction of the past, but certainly

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a vignette that jumbles expectations and invites analysis. Wharton relies on the effect of atrocity tales to create anxiety with the aid of the reader’s imagination. As Greer and Réchamp travel closer to the Frenchman’s home they must abandon their motor ambulance and move down the scale of human transport. On a horse-drawn cart driven by a half-crazed old woman, they are told “They’re all like that where Scharlach’s been,” so that primitive fears are loaded in the space of the two-wheeled trap, a “crazy chariot” (41). Scharlach’s name scrawled across a door-panel evokes terror through implication, as the journey is conducted following the “devil’s traces” (32) towards what is assumed will be the main exposition of his bestiality. The words are traced into the two observers’ brains like horror itself, with enough evidence of actual destruction to encourage assumptions about evil motives, even though “scorched earth” military expediency and battlefield necessity—rather than malevolence or revenge—might be equally valid explanations for the ruins observed.

15 The psychological impact of the atrocity story within Wharton’s text is built through this compression of imagined fears and on external details that suggest but do not confirm. The natural human desire to seek truth and the resulting failure to uncover it amid uncertainties is also emphasized in the background information provided about Yvonne Malo. Her gossip-filled history has parallels with the rumours that support the legends about Scharlach. Her father was a French painter and her mother was Polish, making her past doubly dubious. Left an orphan at the age of ten, she was placed in the care of a guardian, the Marquis de Corvenaire, who “really, as far as one knows, brought his ward up rather decently” (33) with the help of his maiden sister (who later went “dotty” [34]). Some scandal is attached to this arrangement. When the Marquis dies and leaves some money to Yvonne, gossip almost prevents Réchamp from obtaining parental permission to marry her. Wharton presents the scenario with dashes to indicate pauses and invidious inflections, and with ellipses to indicate silences and innuendo, “‘Things in the air … that blow about…’” (37). Réchamp’s grandmother “unpacked her bag—a heap of vague insinuations, baseless conjectures, village tattle” that nevertheless forms “a slander built of adamant” (37). Ironically— considering he is the victim of presumptions later in the narrative—Réchamp disproves the rumours about his fiancée by discrediting a servant and housekeeper involved in the stories and ridiculing “the whole flimsy fable” (37), even though Greer’s account provides no clear proof of the Marquis’ or Yvonne’s innocence. Thus Wharton implies a link between the power of gossip here and the impact of atrocity stories, although the reader may only subliminally make that connection.

16 Yvonne Malo also pulls the text into underground currents. She seems a risky choice for an heir to an old estate and title. After receiving her inheritance as a teenager, she went to Paris to study and play music, take up painting, and lead the life of an independent New Woman of outspoken views and bohemian airs. Yet, Greer’s recounting of what Réchamp tells him about her takes on a fable-like quality: she is described as an ugly duckling in her youth who changes into the dark beauty Réchamp falls in love with because she is not “the traditional type” (35). Greer speculates: “think how she must have shaken up such a man’s inherited view of things! […] she turned his world topsy-turvey” (35). Wharton gives a sympathetic portrait of this young woman who “behaves with the independence of a married woman” (35) and holds advanced views on divorce, in particular when confronted with women with provincial, traditional outlooks. Yvonne could certainly embarrass the Réchamp family through

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her outspokenness, and in contradictory ways she is both silenced in the story’s central atrocity motif and liberated from her in-laws’ inherited prejudices.

17 The unanswered question at the heart of “Coming Home” is whether or not, in order to protect the Réchamp family and their estate, Yvonne slept with Scharlach. Greer summarizes the conclusion of his and Réchamp’s enquiries: “There were little discrepancies of detail, and gaps in the narrative here and there; but all the household, from the astute ancestress to the last bewildered pantry-boy, were at one in saying that Mlle Malo’s coolness and courage had saved the château and the village” (53). The “gaps” are the places in which atrocity narratives thrive, though, and Yvonne’s reticence to discuss the circumstances or disclose her role in subduing Scharlach and his men arouses Réchamp and the reader’s suspicions. “What was it the girl’s silence was crying out to me?” Greer asks himself, his silent listener-narrator, and thereby the reader. These suspicions are a form of titillation, since the subject of the enquiries is the stuff of pornography and so voyeurism.

18 Resorting to punctuation to obfuscate imagined sexual acts, Wharton inserts a hurried dialogue between Greer and Yvonne: “I don’t want him [Réchamp] to hear—yet—about all the horrors.” “The horrors? I thought there had been none here.” “All around us—” Her voice became a whisper. “Our friends … our neighbours … every one ... ” (51)

19 She could be protecting her fiancé from a darker truth, or perhaps only from a renewal of rumors about her and concealed sexual license. “‘I know the stories that are about,’ she tells Réchamp, ‘[…] since we had been so happy as to be spared, it seemed useless to dwell on what has happened elsewhere.’” His reply—“‘Damn what happened elsewhere! I don’t yet know what happened here’”—fuses external atrocities and inner fears, as “elsewhere” becomes “here,” and what is known about Scharlach in other places becomes what he is expected to have been in Yvonne’s company. Her chastity and his patriarchal lineage are the real possessions that Réchamp fears lost, as he says “‘I’m blind with joy . . . or should be, if only . . . ’” (52). The outspoken woman refuses to speak, turning aside assumption and rumor about Scharlach, despite Réchamp’s insistence that “‘the man’s name is a curse and an abomination. Wherever he went he spread ruin’” (52). In Réchamp’s eyes Yvonne’s name is cursed by association and she responds: “‘So they say. Mayn’t there be a mistake? Legends grow up so quickly in these dreadful times. Here’—she looked about her again on the peaceful scene—‘here he behaved as you see. For heaven’s sake be content with that!’” (52). In these conversations, Wharton combines the themes of sexuality and heredity with the workings of the atrocity narrative, using gaps and uncertainty to explore hidden socio- psychological anxieties. Her story’s layered narrative also opens up questions about how moral positions might shift in extreme conditions, and about the way truth is determined when opposing perceptions of already ambiguous facts collide.

20 The possibility of a relationship between Oberst von Scharlach and Yvonne Malo represents a threat to the continuation of the Réchamp hereditary line for two chief reasons. First, references to the decimation of “good local stock” confirm that the Réchamp genetic pool has become stagnant—“I never saw a completer ruin,” Greer reports (39). Moreover, Jean de Réchamp’s parents are described as “a grey-haired lady knitting with stiff fingers, an old gentleman with a high nose and a weak chin” (43), of whom their son explains “‘there never were such helpless beings’” (31). Decay has set

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in, for the grandmother is still a “wonderful specimen” (45). Wharton’s reading of Darwin and Spencer and her literary applications of genetic and racial theories have been well established by critics such as Elizabeth Ammons and Cecelia Tichi. In “Coming Home” the title suggests conflicting tensions at work in this context, in that the concept of home becomes as unstable as the mixed inheritance that Yvonne brings into the Réchamp family. The aristocratic line is in need of renewal and she can provide cross-breeding and rejuvenation. Barely holding on through hereditary ruin, the family relies on well-bred composure and manners. Greer observes how they “had the command of the grand gesture—had la ligne” (44), but they lack control of their destiny. “‘We’re very province,’” Réchamp admits, with generational inbreeding compounded by inactive intellects and self-imposed confinement to their château (27). There, nothing new has happened for decades, until the war breaks out; and Réchamp imagines his father then repeating “‘One must act—one must act!’ and sitting in his chair and doing nothing” (32).

21 The only traces left by Scharlach are his name and the reports of his misdeeds. Yet he incarnates the dark sexual threat of war and thus constitutes a potential rival to Réchamp in Yvonne’s reproductive line. Indeed, Scharlach and Yvonne are allied in several ways in the text. Both are described as “dark” on more than one occasion each (29, 40, 43, 55), usually a mark of racial otherness or foreign influence in Wharton’s work, and probably a link to nocturnal intrigues here. She is called “proud” (38) and he is “basely proud” (55). They share musical talent, and in their first encounter she plays the piano—Stravinsky and Moussorgsky, suggesting lively inventiveness and modern sensibility—while he sings in a fine baritone (47). The grandmother’s account of this partly follows one given to her by Réchamp’s sister Simone, so the reader gets the story fourth-hand. This device makes the facts seem more elusive and obscures the subtext of sexual and racial transgression, but it also leaves its mark: the grandmother believes that the German captain’s name is “Charlot,” and while she notes the oddity of the French name she opines that “it probably accounts for his breeding” (48).

22 Having established Scharlach’s suitability as a “man of the world” (48) in the grandmother’s limited view, and implied his mating compatibility with Yvonne’s foreign background and aesthetic temperament, Wharton packs sexual metaphor into her subtext concerning heredity. In the three nights that the Germans occupy the village, Scharlach and his comrades dine with Yvonne in the château and play (or rather have been “making”) music with her afterwards “for half the night, it seemed” (54), with Wharton including the uncertainty of the added comment clause, “it seemed,”6 and the silent invitation to wonder what they did for the other half of the night. Moreover, Greer observes, “By daylight, decidedly, Mlle Malo was less handsome than in the evening […] Yes, she was less effective by day” (49), thereby opening up further conjecture about her sexual proclivity. She was not educated in a convent, and the grandmother admits “‘there is something to be said for the new way of bringing up girls’” because “‘The convent doesn’t develop character’” (46)—the character necessary to make one’s own moral choices, to adapt to urgent circumstances, and not to be ruined by guilt. Earlier in the narrative, Greer meets “some jolly Sisters of Charity” who have saved their hospice by facing down the Germans, thus adumbrating Yvonne’s bold action. “‘It’s a pity those Sisters of Charity can’t marry … ’” Greer asserts (31). Yvonne’s fiancé is unfavorably compared to Scharlach, suggesting the sexual potency of the German, whom Yvonne has “placated and disarmed” (53). While Réchamp has a lame leg from a battle wound and is therefore hors de combat and relegated to driving an

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ambulance, Scharlach’s facial scar indicates his warrior status. Greer and Réchamp’s dangerous and unsettling journey into the disfigured Vosges landscape takes the form of an entry into Freudian carnal mysteries, and thereafter in the narrative Freudian symbolism accumulates. As a sign that Yvonne has protected the family line from external penetration, the steepled village church remains erect and the well-rooted old elm tree in the churchyard will shade future generations of Réchamps (42-43). Yet, family salvation has come at some cost, it seems, as Jean de Réchamp’s question metonymically suggests: “‘Do you see that breach in the wall, down there behind the trees? It’s the only scratch the place has got’” (48). In the final section of the text, Scharlach lies wounded but takes his pain Spartan-like, with barely a moan (55). By contrast, in addition to the connotations of the Frenchman’s leg wound, Réchamp’s impotence is further implied by the suggestion that it is he who has disabled the ambulance by creating a leak in the gasoline tank.

23 These sexual allusions and symbols underpin the meta-narrative about how war upsets established hierarchies of action and thought, and redirects social and psychic energies. Tropes of silence, opaque vision, and ambiguous speech contribute to a sense of confusion and possibility—also a feature of atrocity narratives, which, almost by definition, create new realities out of threadbare facts. These literary devices help Wharton to build multiple layers of meaning upon the atrocity-genre foundation of her text. In addition to exploring the potential of the new woman (possessing independence of thought and autonomous selfhood), repositioning women’s sexuality within war, and challenging easy assumptions about national stereotypes, the text also questions the status quo of patriarchal inheritance, the worth of static traditions, and even the viability of fixed epistemological beliefs, as the reader comes to question not only the nature of truth but also the unreliable sources of knowledge.

24 The final section of “Coming Home might be interpreted as a retreat from such radical and ambitious aims. Réchamp’s perhaps calculated subterfuge to take revenge by killing his rival could be seen as the re-establishment of aristocratic privilege and patriarchal control. Olin-Ammentorp interprets the (unproven) act as a symbolic reclaiming of Yvonne’s chastity (53). In a neat twist, Wharton has Scharlach suffering “atrociously” (55) from an abdominal wound and therefore apparently paying in kind for his supposed atrocities and cruel appetites, while, after his enemy’s death, Réchamp is restored “to a state of wholesome stolidity” (57).

25 However, the final dramatic scene relies on enigmas that cannot be solved, listed by Greer at the end. He has possession of the German’s papers, so how could Réchamp have known it was Scharlach they were carrying in the ambulance? There is no evidence to prove that Oberst Scharlach did not die suddenly from his wounds while the Frenchman stayed behind alone with him during Greer’s absence. Nor is there any proof that Réchamp knew that the tank was leaking before they set out from the frontlines. These elements are like the mysteries of a ghost story (the Xingu collection contains two)7—or like the untraceable facts of an atrocity story. Furthermore, the plot coincidences that “Coming Home” utilizes also suggest the artificiality of cinema scenarios or fantasy tales: Scharlach just happens to be the wounded soldier placed in the ambulance (55); Réchamp manages to be assigned to Greer’s ambulance (30); they are delayed in the undamaged village because some newly wounded French soldiers could not yet be carried back with them (48); and on the way back to Paris they are diverted to the area of heavy fighting where Scharlach is found. These coincidences are

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in keeping with the exaggerations that propel all atrocity stories. In the final section of the text, the impression of Scharlach is likewise unreal. His body and his name become an unexplainable narrative, staring at the reader as Greer shines a pocket-lamp on Scharlach’s face and, making no mention of the German’s scar, finds that “his look was inscrutable.” And a few minutes later, “I turned the light on him, but he lay perfectly still, lips and lids shut, making no sign” (55). With these words, the text acknowledges the depths and limitations of language, unable to speak to or see into a vengeful heart or past the border of death.

26 Wharton’s surprisingly rich subtexts, then, playing with and beneath the atrocity narrative, are engaged with the shake-up in Western society and thought that were the result of the First World War. The subterranean narratives not only involve the new woman’s reinvigoration of old class and gender structures, but also ask questions about how new and old ways might be reconciled, and what problems remain. Within the ambiguities of atrocity tales and complexities of social reconfigurations, Wharton also asks moral questions about what is right and wrong when rapid change is imposed and choices must be made. She leaves her characters wondering how to return to the safety of home as a secure set of ideas. Her text also places the ruins of social and literary preconceptions before the reader and says—much as Henry James twirls perspective in What Maisie Knew or Melville poses his question about the enigmatic white whale —“Read them if you dare.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ammons, Elizabeth. “Edith Wharton and the Issue of Race.” The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Ed. Millicent Bell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 68-86.

An American [Sara Norton]. New Nursery Rhymes on Old Lines. Boston: Merrymount Press, 1916.

Blazek, William. “Trench Vision: Obscurity in Edith Wharton’s War Writings.” L’obscur. Ed. Françoise Sammarcelli. Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2009. 66-84.

Buitenhuis, Peter. The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914-18 and After. London: B. T. Batsford, 1989.

The Committee on Alleged German Outrages. The Evidence and Documents Laid Before the Committee on Alleged German Outrages. London: Ballantyne, Hanson; His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1915.

---. Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages Appointed by His Britannic Majesty’s Government and Presided Over by the Right Hon. Viscount Bryce. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1915.

Ferguson, Niall. The Pity of War. London: Penguin, 1998.

Harris, Ruth. “The ‘Child of the Barbarian’: Rape, Race and Nationalism in France during the First World War.” Past and Present 141 (Nov. 1993): 170-206.

Leech, Geoffrey and Jan Svartnik, A Communicative Grammar of English. London: Longman, 1975.

Olin-Ammentorp, Julie. Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2004.

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Price, Alan. “Edith Wharton’s War Story.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 8.1 (Spring 1989): 95-100.

---. The End of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War. London: Robert Hale, 1996.

Quinn, Patrick J. The Conning of America: The Great War and American Popular Literature. Costerus New Series 136. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001.

Tate, Trudi. Modernism, History and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998.

Tichi, Cecelia. “Emerson, Darwin, and The Custom of the Country. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Ed. Carol J. Singley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. 89-114.

Tuttleton, James W., Kristin O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray, eds. Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews. The American Critical Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Wharton, Edith. Collected Stories 1911-1937. New York: The Library of America, 2001.

---. Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort. The War on All Fronts, vol. III. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919.

---. The Letters of Edith Wharton. Ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis. New York: Macmillan, 1988.

NOTES

1. “Coming Home” was first published in the December 1915 issue of Scribner’s Magazine and reprinted in Xingu and Other Stories the following year. 2. Niall Ferguson summarizes the current historiographical position: “Although the Entente press wildly exaggerated what went on in Belgium, there is no question that the German army did commit ‘atrocities’ there in 1914”—involving the execution of civilians, including women and priests, the use of civilians as human shields during battle, the razing of numerous villages, and at least one case of a young woman being bayoneted to death. There were also several cases of Germans committing rape in occupied France (246). A more specific study by Ruth Harris, focused on the conflicting imagery associated with French women and the children born from rape after the German invasion of France, examines some attributes of atrocity evidence and stories that closely relate to Wharton’s text. Harris notes that French and Belgian women interviewed about their experience of brutality by German soldiers characteristically remained silent or obtuse about the details of that experience (178-179). German soldiers were depicted in testimony, media reports, and propaganda as two types of barbarians—either callous and calculating Prussian officers or bovine and rapacious Bavarian rank-and-file troops (182). Moreover, Harris argues, France’s anxieties about how to deal with raped women and the so- called enfants du barbare expressed the shame of French males who could not protect their wives and daughters. An underlying crisis of masculinity, therefore, results from the threat of German territorial and bodily penetration, with its symbolic and genealogical challenge to French patrimony—especially if considered through contemporary updating of the theory of telegony, which asserted “that the German seed would remain within the vaginal mucus and would produce antibodies to retard or even prevent fertilization by French sperm” (196), and would thus produce a permanent reminder of French weakness and an indelible stain on French national ideals based on patrilineal authority, stable family bonds, and maternal care and devotion. 3. For a critical-theoretical analysis of this material, see William Blazek “Trench Vision.” 4. Quinn highlights the irony in Germany’s relative failure to match the success that Allied propaganda had in broadcasting convincing atrocity stories, considering how most historians

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conclude that atrocity tales began in Germany following the armed resistance of Belgian civilians and trained snipers. Mindful of similar tactics employed by their adversaries during the Franco- Prussian War, German soldiers in 1914 overreacted to this threat during what was intended to be a lightning advance through neutral Belgium (27). 5. See Price’s “Edith Wharton’s War Story” for an interpretation of “Coming Home” that accepts this kind of historical limitation. 6. Leech and Svartvik explain that comment clauses “are so called because they do not so much add to the information in a sentence as comment on its truth, the manner of saying it or the attitude of the speaker” (216-217). 7. “Kerfol” and “The Triumph of Night.”

ABSTRACTS

« Coming Home » est une des rares nouvelles écrites par Edith Wharton sur la Première Guerre mondiale. Cette nouvelle explore les moyens mis en œuvre pour représenter la guerre et construire un récit de guerre en s’appuyant sur un type de texte bien connu, le récit d’atrocités. Dans une œuvre écrite plus tard, « Writing a War Story », Wharton fait la satire des publications populaires en temps de guerre à travers le portrait d’une femme de lettres sans envergure à qui le responsable d’une revue demande « une bonne histoire de tranchée bien émouvante, se terminant par un retour à la maison… et une scène de Noël, si vous y arrivez ». La nouvelle « Coming Home » est bien éloignée de cette caricature. Wharton y recourt à l’ellipse et au non-dit pour faire sentir les ambiguïtés de la violence et les horreurs de la guerre. En empruntant des éléments au récit d’atrocités et en introduisant dans son texte une multiplicité de perspectives et de voix, Wharton crée un texte lisible à plusieurs niveaux qui exige une interprétation active du lecteur. Cet article revient d’abord sur le récit d’atrocités comme genre et sur l’intérêt que lui accorda Wharton, puis il propose une analyse détaillée du texte. Une des conclusions majeures est la suivante : en insérant entre les lignes du récit d’atrocités des questionnements sur les femmes, la décadence, le patriarcat et la nature de la vérité, Wharton réussit à utiliser et à remettre en question le genre de la nouvelle d’atrocités.

AUTHORS

WILLIAM BLAZEK William Blazek is Senior Lecturer in English at Liverpool Hope University, where he teaches courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European literature. He has published on the writing of E.E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Louise Erdrich, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Herman Melville. His recent work includes essays on Edith Wharton’s First World War non-fiction and a chapter in the volume Edith Wharton in Context. A founding co-editor of The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, he has also co-edited the essay collections American Mythologies: New Essays on American Literature (2005) and Twenty-First-Century Readings of Tender Is the Night (2007).

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Imagining the American West in Wharton’s Short Fiction

Gary Totten

1 Edith Wharton’s work is not generally associated with the themes or images of the American West, and if we were to locate a geographical emphasis in her work, we would most likely identify it as the eastern U.S. We also might consider Wharton in relation to the “Northern,” a genre that Leslie Fiedler defines as “tight, gray, low- keyed, under-played, avoiding melodrama at all costs,” set in a domestic and sometimes hostile environment in a “mythicized New England, ‘stern and rock-bound,’ the weather deep winter: a milieu appropriate to the austerities and deprivations of Puritanism.” Fiedler deems Ethan Frome (1911) the quintessential U. S. Northern novel (16).

2 However, the West plays a significant role in Wharton’s work when she uses the trope of travel to or from the West to narrate her female characters’ engagement with or manipulation of cultural norms. The issue of marriage and divorce is relevant in this regard. Debra Ann MacComb notes that “[a]lmost from the nation’s inception, liberalized divorce laws and the consequent increase in divorces were associated with westward growth” (772), and she situates The Custom of the Country (1913) in this context. Indeed, Undine Spragg’s journey from the Midwest backwater of Apex to New York evokes comparisons between the wild West and sophisticated East, and her journey West to obtain Dakota residency and then a Reno divorce from Ralph Marvell emphasizes the relationship between unregulated western US spaces and women’s increased cultural freedom. In The House of Mirth (1905), Wharton explores the relationship between women’s social power and western space through the character of Lily Bart who, in order to rehabilitate her diminishing social power, travels with the Gormers to Alaska to take her “out of [her] friends’ way” and, as Carry Fisher says, keep “out of their sight till they realize how much they miss you” (379). In both novels, women move to less regulated western spaces to counteract old New York cultural expectations.

3 Here I examine the somewhat different role that the American West plays in Wharton’s characterization of female characters in some of her short fiction. In her “Bunner

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Sisters,” the American West announces ominous consequences for the story’s female protagonists, and the West is represented as a space of dwindling opportunity, countering some of its conventionally positive connotations in the nineteenth-century American imagination as “a land of infinite possibility” and “a stage” for the country’s “important dreams” (Murdoch 24). While my analysis focuses on “Bunner Sisters,” I examine the text in relation to other Wharton stories that assign negative cultural associations to the West, such as the crass materialism of the nouveau riche, the isolation from polite or fashionable society, or the taint of scandal and illegality. Although she does not analyze “Bunner Sisters,” Janet Beer notes how, while Wharton was making the transition from short stories to novels, the novella form allowed her to resolve technical questions and “to order and consolidate subject, language and structure (92),1 and critics such as Andrew Levy and Scott Emmert observe the correlation between the compact short story form and examinations of enclosed spaces (Levy 65) or determinism (Emmert) in Wharton’s stories.2 Extending these connections between form and content, we might view Wharton’s short fiction as a form in which she attempts to aesthetically control social forces that resist regulation, or, as Frederic Jameson asserts about the ideological work of aesthetic form, to construct “formal ‘solutions’” for “unresolvable” cultural issues (79). Such control might constitute part of “the sense of authority” that Wharton associated with her writing of short fiction (Letters 124). However, within the formal strictures of what Wharton termed the “smaller realism” of short fiction (Letters 124), the negative cultural meanings she attaches to the American West, including themes of entrapment, loss of opportunity, and alienation, emphasize the ambivalence with which she viewed the gender norms and expectations of American culture.

4 Although “Bunner Sisters” was written in 1892, Wharton begins by describing aspects of popular culture that establish the story’s historical setting as the 1870s, “when New York’s traffic moved at the pace of the drooping horse-car, when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of Music and basked in the sunsets of the Hudson River School on the walls of the National Academy of Design” (166). More subtly, this introduction establishes the story’s cultured eastern setting as opposed to the stereotypically uncultured western regions of the country to which Evelina will travel later in the story when she follows her husband to St. Louis, Missouri. Although the Bunner sisters’ flat and shop are simple and modest and the street upon which they live is covered in a chaotic “mosaic of coloured hand-bills, lids of tomato-cans, old shoes, cigar-stumps and banana skins” (167), Wharton situates them in an atmosphere containing a degree of civility and order that contrasts with the disarray of both sisters’ lives after Evelina returns from the West. The imagery of the squalid street contributes to the story’s naturalistic tone, which Donna Campbell and Linda Kornasky have noted, but the story takes an even more naturalistic turn once Evelina travels to St. Louis to begin her married life and then returns alone and broken.

5 Mark Twain’s wild west imagery in Roughing It (1872) provides a striking literary contrast to Wharton’s setting in “Bunner Sisters” and represents a text and set of metaphorical conventions with which Wharton and her readers would have been familiar. Twain characterizes himself as a “young and ignorant” Missourian (19) eager for Far West adventures, and, as in dime Westerns such as Thomas Harbaugh’s Plucky Phil, of the Mountain Trail (1881), Twain’s narrative is replete with romantic episodes traversing “hostile Indian country” (76), encountering notorious outlaws (87), and enduring extreme weather (273-74). More relevant to the St. Louis references in

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Wharton’s story, during the late nineteenth century Twain also explores the wild and lawless nature of pre-Civil War Missouri in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and represents the Mississippi Valley as western frontier in Life on the Mississippi (1883). In the first half of this narrative, which appeared as a series of articles in the 1875 Atlantic Monthly, Twain recounts his days as a river pilot before the Civil War, while in the second half he describes his return to the area twenty-one years later. In his 1875 articles, Twain depicts his fellow pilots and river folk as frontier types, but in the second half of Life on the Mississippi an obvious change has taken place in Missouri and the Mississippi Valley as it has developed into a burgeoning business and industrial area. Joseph L. Coulombe observes that in the book’s conclusion, the train (symbol of industrial culture) heading to Chicago, “carrie[s] [Twain]—literally and figuratively— away from the American West, away from the past of renegade pilots and robust individualism, and toward the future of finance capitalism and personal compromise” (90). While Twain, who admits at the beginning of the second half of Life on the Mississippi that he has become distanced from his western persona as “a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England” (246), might demonstrate a more forgiving attitude toward western mores and manners than Wharton, both writers mine the same cache of western stereotypes.

6 Coulombe’s reading suggests that Twain turns away from the frontier past and embraces the industrial future, but vestiges of frontier stereotypes cling to Twain’s discussions of St. Louis and Missouri in the second half of Life on the Mississippi. As Twain narrates his return to St. Louis from the East in the early 1880s, he observes that, as one travels in any direction away from New York City, “you can get up in the morning and guess how far you have come, by noting what degree of grace and picturesqueness is by that time lacking in the costumes of the new passengers” (248). This decline in the quality of dress and breeding marks the first step in a steady cultural deterioration as he passes westward through regions in which men sport full goatees (a most “obsolete and uncomely fashion”) (248), loafers “carry both hands in their breeches pockets,” and most citizens chew tobacco, before arriving in St. Louis (249).

7 A dime novel such as Frank Reade, The Inventor, Chasing the James Boys With His Steam Team (1890) demonstrates how progressive and frontier-like images of the Mississippi Valley coexisted in period fiction. The author of the Frank Reade series, D. W. Stevens (John R. Musick), a native Missourian, combines in his tales the three popular late nineteenth- century subgenres of the Western, science fiction, and detective fiction (Brown 38-39). Pursuing Frank and Jesse James through Missouri, Reade is the quintessential man of ingenuity using his inventions to root out the notorious James brothers who, through their mythologized status as wild West outlaws, seem to defy American progress and technology. The Frank Reade novels were expressly intended for a young male audience, and much dime-novel fiction was, as Bill Brown points out, “an enterprise of men writing for men about men” (32). However, this does not mean that Wharton and female readers would not have been familiar with the genre and its representation of the West. Brown notes the immense popularity of the genre (6), and even negative discussions of the dime novel would have contributed to public awareness of the form. For example, Anthony Comstock’s criticism of dime thriller editors for acting as “Satan’s efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young” (242) or W. H. Bishop’s 1879 article in the Atlantic Monthly (a forum with which Wharton and her audience would have been familiar) criticizing dime-novel violence suggest the wide-

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ranging public discourse surrounding the dime novel. By the late nineteenth century, the public’s awareness of dime-novel conventions were so well known that, as Brown observes, a novel such as Frank Reade could consist of almost pure dialogue because “the staging [had] already been done by the novel’s predecessors,” creating a mythology of the West that “already exist[ed] as shared knowledge” (33).

8 Both literary and popular writers thus contributed to the frontier image of the American West, and of Missouri in particular, that circulated during the late nineteenth century, but during the period, commentators also emphasized St. Louis’s prominence as a Midwestern capital of progress. In 1884, Civil War general John W. Noble, speaking at the Reunion of the Tri-State Old Settlers Association of Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa, referred to St. Louis as the “great metropolis of the Mississippi valley” (Report of the Organizing and First Reunion 12), and in his welcome address at the same gathering, Edward Johnstone referred to Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa as “[a]n empire in themselves —nay, each of them fitted to be an empire! . . . [and] strong enough by their moral influence alone to insure for all time, the perpetuity of the Union” (9). Although these remarks were made at an event lionizing the three states in question, other perhaps more disinterested commentators such as Linus Brockett also noted St. Louis’s preeminent position as a U.S. urban center. Brockett characterized St. Louis in 1882 as the point of departure for the West (252), a distinction that the city still carries, and observed that by 1880, it had become the largest city in “Our Western Empire” (948).

9 Like Twain, however, Wharton relies on some of the same stereotypes about the supposed lack of culture west of New York City in stories written not long after “Bunner Sisters” featuring western characters or communities that are unrefined or lacking in taste. For example, in “The Pelican” (1898), when Mrs. Amyot’s lectures cease to draw audiences in the “critical and […] exacting” East (84), the narrator promises to recommend her to western universities. Describing the more sophisticated audiences who tire of Mrs. Amyot, the narrator notes that her diminishing reputation is a result of scholarly trends as much as scholarly acuity, since audiences “now demanded either that the influence or the influenced should be quite unknown, or that there should be no perceptible connection between the two” (84). Although she exhausts the interest of her eastern audiences, Mrs. Amyot is a great success in the West once the narrator recommends her, and the ways in which western college professors collude with the narrator to provide her with audiences cause the narrator to wince at “the vast machinery of fraud that I had set in motion” (86). The fact that Wharton sets this questionable endeavor in the West suggests at best an undiscerning and naïve good nature on the part of Mrs. Amyot’s western audience and at worst a lack of good sense and taste, and neither naïveté nor bad taste, we are led to believe, are qualities of the eastern audience.

10 In Wharton’s 1899 story “A Journey,” the West also functions as cultural wasteland. The protagonist and her husband move to Colorado for his health, but she despises living there without anyone to admire her good taste, “to wonder at the good match she had made, or to envy her the new dresses and the visiting cards” (66). Even when the couple returns East because the man is dying, the woman finds this unpleasant circumstance preferable to western life, and until the train actually leaves the station, she worries “that they would never get away” (67). The woman is distraught when her husband dies on the train heading East and covers up the fact for fear that she will be put off the train with his dead body at some backwater station. Yet Wharton represents her

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emotional distress over her husband’s death as only slightly more intense than her loathing of Colorado or the fear that she would not escape, emphasizing her negative attitude toward her western exile.

11 Mary Boyne in “Afterward” (1910) has similarly negative feelings about her almost fourteen-year exile from New York in “the soul-deadening ugliness of a Middle Western town” (832), “where the amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost of efforts as arduous as her husband’s professional [engineering] labours” (840). The “prodigious windfall of the Blue Star Mine” allows them the means and leisure to escape and enjoy life (832), but the negative effects of midwestern capitalistic enterprise plague them even once they are living in a rented English country house, first by way of an article from the Waukesha Sentinel describing a suit brought against Boyne by his colleague Robert Elwell in connection with the Blue Star windfall (840-41), and then in the form of Elwell’s ghost who comes for Boyne (844). After Boyne’s disappearance, Mary pieces together the story of his business deal with Elwell, which was not quite “straight,” according to Boyne’s business associate, Parvis (854). Parvis’s description of how Boyne cashed in on Elwell’s tip casts a “lurid glare” over the Blue Star episode (855) and the “sensational” nature of a Sentinel article about Elwell’s widow seeking financial aid (857) does little to lessen the story’s scandal. Similarly, Wharton subtly characterizes both the lurid and the sensational as western forces in her depiction of the Bunner sisters’ milieu, and the taint of negative influence from western or midwestern capitalistic enterprise also appears in that story.

12 Wharton sometimes represents such western deficiencies through her depiction of nouveau riche western characters. Referring in A Backward Glance (1934) to the “successive upheavals,” which by World War I had destroyed society’s “frame-work” and obliterated the manners and customs of old New York, Wharton marks the first of such upheavals as the infiltration in the 1880s of “big money-makers from the West” (6). Wharton elaborates on this assertion in her autobiography when she includes an incident related to her by Clyde Fitch (who dramatized The House of Mirth), in which his secretary shows his ornate Connecticut country house, complete with Italian furnishings, to a “newly-rich Western couple”: [T]he husband had never heard of the sette cento (or perhaps of Italy) and was puzzled and put off by the furniture. [. . .] In one bedroom there was a delicately carved and gilded four-poster, hung with old brocade, its tester decorated with amorous allegories. This was the show room of the house, but the husband said he’d never seen a bed like that, and what the devil could anybody do with it? The scandalized secretary replied that Mr. Fitch had brought it back from Venice, and considered it his best piece; and the wife, to disguise her husband’s ignorance, hastily remarked: “Why, I think it’s a perfectly lovely bed! Can’t you just see one of those old monks in it?” (163-64)

13 The husband’s lack of appreciation for the piece coincides with the similar lack of taste in many of Wharton’s newly-rich western characters that would appear in her twentieth-century fiction. For example, in “Charm Incorporated” (1934), Nadeja Targatt’s brother, Boris Kouradjine, marries Mamie Guggins of Rapid Rise, Oklahoma in a match that pairs her family’s industrial dynasty with the Kouradjines’ status as Eastern European dignitaries (666). Wharton emphasizes the western nouveaux riches’ lack of cultural capital, however, when Mamie Guggins’s considerable fortunes fail to rehabilitate the Kouradjines’ tenuous social status, especially in the eyes of Najeda’s husband, James Taggart, for whom the match emphasizes his sense of superiority over Nadeja’s needy and uncultured siblings. Wharton launches a similar critique against

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such cultural paucity in The Custom of the Country, when Raymond de Chelles takes Undine Spragg, daughter of newly rich Midwesterners, to task for her lack of cultural depth as an American, coming as she does from “towns as flimsy as paper, where the streets haven’t had time to be named, and the buildings are demolished before they’re dry, and the people are as proud of changing as [the French] are of holding to what we have” (545). In this case, Wharton directs critique toward Americans in general, but because it is through her newly rich western protagonist, the stereotypes she employs have particular relevance for our understanding of her vision of the West.

14 Wharton constructs an image of western culture that is, in fact, less nuanced than that reflected in western popular and print culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In an 1895 travel sketch, “Galveston, Texas, in 1895,” Stephen Crane argues that travelers insisting on “radical differences between Eastern and Western life have created a generally wrong opinion” (706). Tara Penry notes that nineteenth- century western periodicals “dismantle binary myths of a literate East and preliterate West by demonstrating the westward spread of US print culture” (49); in fact, Barbara Cloud observes that late nineteenth-century U.S. Census data show some areas of the West to be more literate than the general population of the U.S. (13). Penry argues that like their eastern counterparts, western periodicals emphasized the development of a distinctly American intellectual tradition and through sentimental discourse promoted middle-class values such as domesticity and piety (53-54). Further, western periodicals often were more sophisticated than eastern publications in their approach to dialect materials according to Penry. By 1875, when the Atlantic Monthly was serializing Twain’s Mississippi pieces, national eastern magazines used local color sketches and dialect stories “as metonyms for the regions they describe.” But because “western periodicals assume[d] literacy for their western audience, dialect narratives in this context [… represented] some combination of history, humor, and description of a social class below the implied reader. Western periodicals show[ed] their region as a space occupied by multiple social classes speaking a variety of dialects over time” (60). The West that Wharton imagines in stories such as “The Pelican,” “A Journey,” or “Afterward” relies on the metonymic, and thus stereotypical, strategies of the national eastern magazines rather than the more complex cultural perspective of western publications.

15 In her physical description of Ann Eliza in “Bunner Sisters,” Wharton reveals her reliance on such metonymic strategies. Although the sisters’ shop is described as “a shrunken image of their earlier ambitions” (167), we learn that sometimes “among their greyer hours there came one not bright enough to be called sunny, but rather of the silvery twilight hue which sometimes ends a day of storm” (167). As the story begins, Ann Eliza is enjoying one of these twilight days. She has put on her best “double-dyed and triple-turned black silk” (168) in honor of her sister, Evelina’s, birthday, and in her holiday mood, “a faint tinge of pink still lingered on her check- bones, like the reflection of sunset which sometimes colours the west long after the day is over” (168). Although Ann Eliza does not enjoy many sunny hours in her eastern and cloistered New York existence, on her best days, the darker “twilight” East contrasts with the glowing “sunny” West lingering in her cheeks, recalling the sunsets of the Hudson River School artists evoked at the beginning of the story. Some of these works, such as Albert Bierstadt’s Sunset in the Yosemite Valley (1868), presented what Angela Miller has termed “operatic views” of the American West and, in a Civil War context

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rife with social and political division, “promis[ed] a renewal of national hopes with landscapes of heroic and unfamiliar dimensions” (205).

16 As prospects for marriage and livelihood disappear for Ann Eliza, it becomes clear that any sunset colors lingering in her face are a reflection of opportunities long past rather than a promise of renewal. Ann Eliza’s predicament is similar to that which Wharton imagined a year earlier for the protagonist in her first short story “Mrs. Manstey’s View” (1891). Both stories take place in urban settings emphasizing the naturalistic detritus of city streets. Similar to the squalor of the Bunner sisters’ street, on Mrs. Manstey’s street, “the ash-barrels lingered late on the sidewalk and the gaps in the pavement would have staggered a Quintus Curtius” (1), and while some neighboring yards are green and welcoming, her view also takes in “stony wastes, with grass in the cracks of the pavement and no shade in spring save that afforded by the intermittent leafage of the clothes-lines” (2). Into this depressing vista, Wharton inserts the image of the western sunset to characterize Mrs. Manstey’s stage of life and her prospects. The narrator tells us that Mrs. Manstey prefers “the narrowing perspective of far-off yards” when “at twilight, […] the distant brown-stone spire seemed melting in the fluid yellow of the west.” At these moments, she “lose[s] herself in vague memories of a trip to Europe, made years ago, and now reduced in her mind’s eye to a pale phantasmagoria of indistinct steeples and dreamy skies” (3). We learn that the “fluid yellow” of the western sunset points toward Mrs. Manstey’s tenuous relationship with her indifferent daughter, now married and living in California, never visiting, and seldom writing (1). In another rare appearance of California in her short fiction near the end of her career, Wharton designates the state as the place to which Kate Spain retreats after the Lizzie Borden-esque scandal of her father’s death in “Confession” (1936), paralleling its use in “Mrs. Manstey’s View” as a western space to which cruel daughters retreat after abandoning (or worse yet, murdering) their parents. The western sunset further reminds Mrs. Manstey of a bygone trip to Europe, now indistinct as a memory of “dreamy skies” less filled with promise than with nostalgia for what is lost. Wharton employs sunset imagery in both stories to emphasize the women’s fading lives and shrinking opportunities.

17 However, both Mrs. Manstey and Ann Eliza seem quite content with their circumstances, despite the limited scope of their material and emotional lives. Not until their familiar New York lives are permanently disrupted do they experience debilitating changes, which are represented in relation to western space and culture. The change wrought by Herman Ramy’s presence in the Bunner sisters’ lives is felt well before he and Evelina are married and move to St. Louis. Ann Eliza instigates the acquaintance with Ramy when she buys Evelina’s birthday clock from him, and, after visiting the sisters to repair the clock, he begins to frequent their flat. One evening, he calls unannounced as Ann Eliza and Evelina are listening to their neighbor, Miss Mellins, relate tales of crime and scandal fueled by her reading of magazines such as the Police Gazette or Fireside Weekly (184). Although such periodicals would have represented questionable sources of information, the Bunner sisters tolerate the tales and Ann Eliza exhibits “a ripple of sympathy” for Miss Mellins’s fantastic story of the circumstances surrounding her birth (185). According to Penry, the Police Gazette was among the national eastern periodicals in the nineteenth century that “discovered the profitability of a timeless West” and promoted the mythology of its violence in its pages

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(61). In this context, Miss Mellins represents a further source of the western forces that threaten the sisters’ peaceful existence.

18 Upon Mr. Ramy’s arrival, the romance that Ann Eliza attaches to his presence is undermined by Miss Mellins’s more lurid version of his intentions toward Evelina. Throughout the narrative, Ann Eliza constructs romantic narratives to accompany her shopping excursions, including her visits to Ramy’s shop, and as she relishes her memory of these exciting and often terrifying episodes long after the incidents are over, it becomes clear that she depends upon these narratives to exert control over the city’s disorder and also over her life and circumstances. When Miss Mellins meets Ramy, however, she remarks that there will soon be a wedding (187), an unwelcome observation that disrupts Ann Eliza’s romantic life narrative and causes her first pangs of jealousy toward Evelina (resulting in her criticism of Evelina’s appearance [187]), a sign of the drastic changes that Ramy will introduce into their lives. Ramy’s presence and stories have already altered the sisters’ life narratives irreversibly, as they come to rely on his opinion and on the romance and drama of his struggles and life story to add excitement to their own (188), but Miss Mellins’s view of the passion brewing between Ramy and Evelina, in the context of the sensationalism promoted by the Police Gazette, brings Ann Eliza her first real emotional pain. As a purveyor of western stereotype, the crime magazine also serves as harbinger for the further pain that western forces will inflict upon Ann Eliza.3 Although she refuses Ramy’s surprise marriage proposal later in the story, and thus chooses the stability and order of her unmarried existence rather than the turmoil suggested by Miss Mellins’s sensational interpretation of marriage and romance, these negative forces eventually overwhelm her, nonetheless.

19 Further, as “Bunner Sisters” moves toward its conclusion, the West asserts itself as a negative capitalistic force much like the force characterized by Wharton in “Afterward” and in agreement with her belief that old New York society had been infiltrated by nouveau riche western capitalists (Backward Glance 6). In “Bunner Sisters,” Wharton maintains this link between the forces of capitalism and the erosion of genteel culture. Initially in “Bunner Sisters,” St. Louis seems to figure as a city of opportunity, in accordance with the popular commentary by Brockett and others to which I referred earlier. Even though the city triggers the disruption of Ann Eliza and Evelina’s quiet and orderly life, it also represents the place where Ramy and Evelina can begin their new life together and Ramy is offered a new start in the clock business. Neither character fares well in this western space, however: Evelina is abandoned, loses a baby, and is forced into the streets to beg for her living, and Ramy loses his position. The negative endings of these marriage and business plots undermine St. Louis as a symbol of progress.

20 For Ann Eliza, on the other hand, Evelina’s marriage means the loss of the shop, for she cannot provide customers with the stylish items that Evelina produced. Although Ann Eliza’s existence as a shopkeeper seems claustrophobic and limited, it grows even more limited after her sister’s departure for the West, particularly as capitalistic forces exert increasingly negative pressure on the shop’s dwindling business. Like the western forces that Wharton sees as threatening old New York, some of this negative force in “Bunner Sisters” comes from the industrial West. As a shorthand for the culture- threatening forces of capitalism, Ramy’s supposedly reinvigorated career in the clock industry4 in St. Louis destroys Ann Eliza’s contented life with Evelina. Somewhat similarly in “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” capitalist enterprise in the form of the expansion of

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the neighboring boardinghouse (which will block Mrs. Manstey’s precious view) threatens to obliterate Mrs. Manstey’s peaceful existence, a way of life that is so much a part of her that when she considers moving from the flat that she has occupied for seventeen years, the narrator notes that she might as well be “flayed alive” and “she was not likely to survive either operation” (5). Although the boardinghouse expansion is not explicitly western, it combines with other factors in the story, including the estranged daughter in California and the western sunsets that represent Mrs. Manstey’s dwindling opportunities, to prefigure the obliteration of Mrs. Manstey’s life, quite literally with her death at the end.

21 The images at the end of “Bunner Sisters” similarly underscore the threats of western industrialism. In order to cover the shame of Evelina’s situation, Ann Eliza concocts a story that Ramy has gone West on business (236), an image which recalls and anticipates Wharton’s use of the West as representative of desertion in “Mrs. Manstey’s View” and “Confession.” With Evelina’s eventual death and the failure of the shop, Ann Eliza goes into the streets of New York to find employment. However, much like earlier ventures out of the shop (to shop or to go on outings with Ramy, Evelina, and Miss Mellins), this outing also proves more terrifying, confusing, and exhausting than liberating. Ann Eliza enters a shop advertising the availability of a position as saleswoman and finds it to be as cheerful and thriving as she and Evelina had once envisioned their shop, but she learns that the position is intended for “a bright girl: stylish, and pleasant manners. […] Not over thirty […] and nice looking” (246). As she returns to the street to find another help wanted sign, the language of the story implies that she may not find employment in the new cultural landscape of the city that privileges youth and beauty over experience: the city, “under the fair spring sky, seemed to throb with the stir of innumerable beginnings” (246). The positive connotations of the spring imagery and the suggestion of new beginnings could imply renewal, or at least survival, for Ann Eliza, but the fact that she faces “innumerable beginnings” also suggests the arduous work of her economic survival and emphasizes the tenuous status of the unmarried older woman in late nineteenth-century urban consumer culture. In the context of the ways in which Wharton employs western imagery in her short fiction, the ending’s emphasis on multiple and uncontrollable forces gestures toward the foreclosing of opportunity and hope, much like the negative influence suggested by the personal, cultural, and economic disorder issuing from western space and enterprise in Wharton’s other work. Her inability to resolve the effects of such social forces for her women characters in the more aesthetically controlled form of her short fiction demonstrates the power of these forces in women’s lives.

22 The 1890 U.S. Census declared the end of unsettled land, and Frederick Jackson Turner analyzed the significance of the closing frontier on American culture just one year after Wharton wrote “Bunner Sisters.” Critics such as Mary Lawlor and David Murdoch have noted the nostalgia that Turner’s frontier thesis generated in American literature— immediately after 1893 in the works of the American naturalists, according to Lawlor, and in the early twentieth century, according to Murdoch. “Bunner Sisters” is perched on the cusp of this changing attitude toward the American West and frontier, and although, unlike Frank Norris, Jack London, Stephen Crane, or Willa Cather,5 Wharton would not explicitly demonstrate this nostalgia in western novels, she engages with the meanings and implications of western space in significant ways. Like the eastern periodicals, Wharton seems to “fr[eeze] the West into a timeless myth” (Penry 61), but

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her use and characterization of that myth also differ dramatically from what we find in eastern print culture. Indeed, she represents the West in her short fiction much less nostalgically than her contemporaries and in a way that we might even consider counter-cultural in its vision of the threat that the West’s unregulated cultural spaces pose to women’s lives and relationships.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2005.

Bishop, W. H. “Story-Paper Literature.” Atlantic 44 (September 1879): 383-93.

Brockett, Linus Pierpont. Our Western Empire; Or The New West Beyond the Mississippi: The Latest and Most Comprehensive Work on the States and Territories West of the Mississippi. Philadelphia: Bradley, Garretson and Company, 1882.

Brown, Bill. “Reading the West: Cultural and Historical Background.” Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns. Ed. Bill Brown. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997. 1-40.

Campbell, Donna M. Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1997.

Cloud, Barbara. The Business of Newspapers on the Western Frontier. Reno: U of Nevada P, 1992.

Comstock, Anthony. Traps for the Young. 1882. Ed. Robert Bremner. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967.

Coulombe, Joseph L. Mark Twain and the American West. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2003.

Crane, Stephen. “Galveston, Texas, in 1895.” Prose and Poetry. Ed. J. C. Levenson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 706-11.

Emmert, Scott. “Drawing-Room Naturalism in Edith Wharton’s Early Short Stories.” Journal of the Short Story in English 39 (Autumn 2002). 28 June 2011.

Fiedler, Leslie A. The Return of the Vanishing American. New York: Stein and Day Publishers, 1968.

Fleissner, Jennifer L. “The Biological Clock: Edith Wharton, Naturalism, and the Temporality of Womanhood.” American Literature 78.3 (2006): 519-48.

Frank Reade, The Inventor, Chasing the James Boys With His Steam Team. 1890. Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns. Ed. Bill Brown. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997. 363-506.

Harbaugh, Thomas Chalmers. Plucky Phil, of the Mountain Trail; Or, Rosa, the Red Jezebel, A Tale of Siouxdom. 1881. Popular American Literature of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Paul C. Gurjahr. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. 963-1021.

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Hochman, Barbara. “The Good, the Bad, and the Literary: Edith Wharton’s Bunner Sisters and the Social Contexts of Reading.” Studies in American Naturalism 1.1/2 (2006): 128-43.

Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

Kornasky, Linda. “On ‘Listen[ing] to Spectres too’: Wharton’s Bunner Sisters and Ideologies of Sexual Selection.” American Literary Realism 30.1 (1997): 47-58.

Lawlor, Mary. Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000.

Levy, Andrew. The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

MacComb, Debra Ann. “New Wives for Old: Divorce and the Leisure-Class Marriage Market in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.” American Literature 68.4 (1996): 765-97.

Miller, Angela. The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.

Murdoch, David H. The American West: The Invention of a Myth. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2001.

Penry, Tara. “The Literate West of Nineteenth-Century Periodicals.” A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West. Ed. Nicolas S. Witschi. Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 2011. 48-62.

Report of the Organizing and First Reunion of the Tri-State Old Settlers’ Association, of Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa, Held Thursday, Oct. 2d, A.D. 1884, at Rand Park, Keokuk, Iowa. Keokuk, IA: Tri-State Printing Co., 1884.

Totten, Gary. “Critical Reception and Cultural Capital: Edith Wharton as a Short Story Writer.” Pedagogy 8.1 (2008): 115-33.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1884. The Oxford Mark Twain. Vol. 10. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

---. Life on the Mississippi. 1883. The Oxford Mark Twain. Vol. 9. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

---. Roughing It. 1872. The Oxford Mark Twain. Vol. 3. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

Wharton, Edith. “Afterward.” 1910. Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, 1891-1910. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001. 830-60.

---. A Backward Glance. 1934. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.

---. “Bunner Sisters.” 1916. Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001. 166-246.

---. “Charm Incorporated.” 1934. Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, 1911-1937. Howard 653-77.

---. “Confession.” 1936. Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, 1911-1937. Howard 710-48.

---. The Custom of the Country. New York: Scribner’s, 1913.

---. Ethan Frome. New York: Scribner’s, 1911.

---. The House of Mirth. New York: Scribner’s, 1905.

---. “A Journey.” 1899. Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, 1891-1910. Howard 65-75.

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---. The Letters of Edith Wharton. Ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis. New York: Scribner’s, 1988.

---. “Mrs. Manstey’s View.” 1891. Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, 1891-1910. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001. 1-11.

---. “The Pelican.” 1898. Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, 1891-1910. Howard 76-94.

---. “The Vice of Reading.” North American Review 177 (1903): 513-21.

White, Barbara A. Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1991.

NOTES

1. As I have argued elsewhere, critical opinion about Wharton’s strengths in short fiction has been mixed and inconsistent in reviews, critical studies, and even in Wharton’s personal correspondence on the subject (“Critical Reception” 118-19). 2. Sarah Whitehead finds an interesting correlation between Wharton’s narrative strategies and the restrictive material frames imposed upon Wharton’s short stories by the magazines in which they are published. She suggests that “Wharton’s narrative strategies effectively subvert the material, editorial and readership contexts in which they were published” (43). Barbara A. White argues somewhat differently that Wharton might have achieved more in the short story form “had her conception of form been less rigid” (4). 3. The sisters’ well-worn copy of Longfellow contrasts with the stories of the Police Gazette. Barbara Hochman argues that while Longfellow’s poetry would represent “the high point of culture and gentility” for the Bunner sisters (129), in light of Wharton’s 1903 essay “The Vice of Reading,” we can be sure that Wharton would have condoned Miss Mellins’s reading of “recognized trash” (“Vice of Reading” 514) over the Bunner sisters’ “naïve and inordinate adulation of high-cultural forms” such as Longfellow’s poetry (Hochman 131). 4. See Jennifer Fleissner for a discussion of how “the strict clock time of industrial capitalism” (524) represents the biological forces influencing the characters, especially time’s effect on the sisters’ reproductive power. 5. See Mary Lawlor for a discussion of these writers in the context of nostalgia for the West.

ABSTRACTS

Dans ses romans, Wharton raconte parfois un voyage vers l’Ouest américain, ou de l’Ouest vers l’Est, pour évoquer la confrontation entre ses personnages féminins et les normes culturelles. Lily Bart part avec les Gormer en Alaska pour se dérober aux regards extérieurs. Undine Spragg part vers l’Ouest pour mettre fin à son mariage avec Ralph Marvell en divorçant à Reno, ce qui souligne le lien entre la liberté des territoires de l’Ouest américain et la liberté croissante des femmes. L’Ouest américain joue un rôle assez différent dans les nouvelles. Mon analyse, centrée sur « Bunner Sisters », s’appuie aussi sur d’autres nouvelles donnant de l’Ouest une image négative : c’est le domaine du matérialisme grossier des nouveaux riches, un monde ignorant totalement les usages de la société polie, un domaine en proie aux scandales et à l’illégalité. Dans « Bunner Sisters », l’Ouest est un monde où les possibilités semblent se restreindre, vision fort éloignée de l’image nostalgique de l’Ouest des contemporains de Wharton. On peut même dire

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que la nouvelliste prend le contrepied de cette vision en montrant que la liberté de l’espace culturel de l’Ouest constitue une menace pour la vie des femmes.

AUTHORS

GARY TOTTEN Gary Totten is Associate Professor of English at North Dakota State University and President of the Edith Wharton Society (2011-2013). He is the editor of Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture (U of Alabama P, 2007) and has published articles on Wharton and her contemporaries.

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Prince Charming or Animal Bridegroom?: Fairy Tale Elements in Edith Wharton’s “Bunner Sisters”

Nancy Von Rosk

1 In his essay of 1941, “Justice to Edith Wharton,” Edmund Wilson declared that Wharton’s early novella, “Bunner Sisters” was “undeservedly neglected” (204). More recently, Donna Campbell has remarked that the novella “deserves to be better known,” and Hermione Lee writes that this “realist masterpiece of thwarted lives never gained the status it would have had if it had come out as a separate novella like Ethan Frome” (180, 161). Lee adds that in “Bunner Sisters,” “Wharton’s strong strand of compassionate realism—more Dreiser than James—has tended to be undervalued” (184). Indeed, “Bunner Sisters” has had a long history of being overlooked. Rejected twice by Scribner’s because of its length and its “being unsuitable to serial publication,” it would be twenty-three years before Wharton saw “Bunner Sisters” in print (Lewis, Letters 31).1 As both Wharton’s reputation and Wharton scholarship have grown enormously in recent years, this important early work—Wharton’s first attempt at longer fiction—has been receiving more scholarly attention, and much of the discussion has focused on the novella’s grim realism, its unrelenting naturalism.2 While Wharton certainly provides an unflinching look at the lives of single working women in nineteenth-century New York, what has not been explored in enough detail is how the realism of “Bunner Sisters” is fused with elements of romance, how the story’s incorporation of fairy-tale structures and motifs contributes to its emotional intensity and compelling imaginative power.

2 Elizabeth Ammons has persuasively shown how Wharton’s realism often combines with fairy tale elements, deepening the social criticism of her work, and allowing her to explore the psychosexual dimensions of her subject. Demonstrating how “Ethan Frome calls up the fairy tale ‘Snow White’” while The Reef’s meaning “derives from allusions […] to ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty,’” Ammons’s readings of these texts are incisive and illuminating, but she dismisses “Bunner Sisters” and does not attend to this text’s striking use of fairy tale elements (79). She sees it as “confused,” a story “crudely

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misandrous,” and Herman Ramy as simply “a monster.”3 Yet “Bunner Sisters” is also a work where “fairy tale visions dominate,” and even in this early work, “love as we have been taught to expect it […] in our fairy tales with their eternally happy endings is Wharton’s subject” (Ammons 57). “Bunner Sisters,” I would suggest, is not a “confused” piece, but a rich text, not only for its early social criticism of the conditions of single working women’s lives, but also for the exciting glimpse it offers into Wharton’s technique, her combining of realism and elements of romance, an approach that will eventually culminate in her masterpiece Ethan Frome.

Sibling Devotion and “Snow White and Rose Red”

3 In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim, observes that fairy tales about siblings often “stand for seemingly incompatible aspects of the human personality,” and “are among the oldest and most widely disseminated” (90). While the tales may vary in some respects, they all have a common plot whereby the siblings “usually separate after an original period of having been united and then have different fates” (Bettelheim 90). “When the adventurous brother perishes […] because he has permitted himself to live in accordance with his desires or to disregard dangers and obstacles,” Bettelheim writes, “his brother sets out to rescue him, succeeds and forever after the two live happily reunited” (91). “Bunner Sisters” follows much of this general structure as one sibling leaves home, is “exposed to terrible perils,” and the other feels compelled to rescue her (Bettelheim 91). Wharton’s tale also recalls a particular sibling fairy tale in which this plot is altered somewhat, a tale Bettelheim includes in the “animal bridegroom” category, the Grimm Brothers’ “Snow White and Rose Red.” In this tale, two sisters are devoted to each other and remain together as they encounter troubles and challenges. As the narrator remarks: “The two children were so fond of one another that they always held each other by the hand when they went out together, and when Snow White said, ‘We will not leave each other,’ Rose Red answered, ‘Never so long as we live,’ and their mother would add, ‘What one has, she must share with the other’” (Grimm 502). When the two sisters are visited by a prince who has been turned into a bear by an evil dwarf, they both help the bear. Later in the story after the prince is freed from the dwarf’s spell, Snow White marries the prince and Rose Red marries the prince’s brother so that even after marriage, the sisters need not separate. Indeed, what is continually stressed in “Snow White and Rose Red” is the devotion, harmony and unity of the siblings.

4 Wharton sets up a similar scenario in “Bunner Sisters”: two devoted sisters have always lived together peacefully, and are “content” with the “humble prosperity” of their shop (167). With its echo of “Once upon a time,” Wharton’s opening line of the story even recalls the language of fairy tales: “In the days when New York’s traffic moved at the pace of the drooping horse car,” she begins, “an inconspicuous shop […] was intimately and favorably known to the feminine population of the quarter bordering on Stuyvesant Square” (166). As in “Snow White and Rose Red," the bonds between women and the strength of female community are highlighted in “Bunner Sisters”: the world of the Bunner sisters is a “homosocial world” in which men make but a “shadowy appearance” (Smith-Rosenberg 9, 2). Campbell observes that this sheltered female world seems to come “straight out of local color fiction”: “Surrounded by the small supportive community of women who live in their neighborhood […] the Bunner sisters

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contrive to make of their life together a thing perfect of its kind” (174, 176). Though they do not live in the idyllic pastoral world envisioned in “Snow White and Rose Red” and though their mother is absent, Wharton’s sisters are similar to Grimm’s in their commitment “to make of their life together a thing perfect of its kind.”

5 The degree to which their lives are marked by a common destiny is also emphasized in Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s observation that “The women are linked indistinguishably” in their shop’s sign; “they share their simple meals and sleep together in the same big bed in which they were born: two pinched lives that might extend together unchanged into eternity” (67). Wolff believes that “the women have very little to distinguish between them” because Wharton was not able to create varied women characters early in her writing career (67). Wharton, however, does emphasize differences between the sisters, differences that echo the fairy tale structure described by Bettelheim, and it is these differences as well as their common destiny and their harmonious life together that align the Bunner sisters with Grimm’s fairy tale sisters (67).

6 In Grimm’s tale, we learn that Snow White is “more quiet and gentle than Rose Red,” and that she “sat at home with her mother and helped with the housework” (Grimm 501). Like Snow White, Ann Eliza is the more quiet, the more domestic sister. She is the one who will work without complaint and repress her own needs and desires while Evelina is always “the first to yield to her feelings” (192). It is Ann Eliza who puts the kettle on the stove, and awaits the return of her younger sister who runs all the errands in their neighborhood (167). Though Ann Eliza is older than Evelina, she seems incapable of negotiating with the outside world. When Evelina is sick and Ann Eliza must go to the market for them, Evelina feels certain that the market vendors will “cheat” her older sister (174). Indeed it seems Ann Eliza’s journeys outside the domestic realm are not only “intense,” filling her with “subdued excitement,” they are often harrowing (172). In the market, she confronts the “gory-aproned butcher” who “picked up his weapon with a grin” (175). Riding in the horse carts she is “wedged” between strangers as she feels the “persistence of an evil dream” (192). And in her visit to Tiffany’s, she enters a nightmarish vision where “[w]hichever way she looked, clocks stretched away from her in glittering interminable vistas,” and their “cackle […] came to her like the yell of waves in a storm” (224, 226). Since Ann Eliza prefers the “monastic quiet of the shop,” part of the drama of the story is that she is compelled to leave this protected domestic sphere, and, in following the structure Bettelheim observes in so many sibling fairy tales, this will culminate in her attempt to find the whereabouts of Evelina who she fears is in terrible trouble (442).

7 Evelina meanwhile resembles Rose Red who “liked better to run about in the meadows and fields looking for flowers and catching butterflies” (Grimm 501). During their outing to rural Hoboken, Evelina is described as “more restless” (198). In Mrs. Hochmuller’s garden, Ann Eliza “thought of quiet afternoons in church, and of hymns her mother had sung to her when she was a baby” (198). Evelina, however, “wandered from the well to the summer house and back […] tossed crumbs to the chickens and disturbed the cat with arch caresses, and at last […] expressed a desire to go down into the wood,” soon disappearing with Herman Ramy through the hole in the fence (198). Not only is Evelina the one who eagerly explores the world outside the home, she is also concerned with ornamentation; like Rose Red who “every morning […] laid a wreath of flowers by her mother’s bed before she awoke” (Grimm 502), she has a knack for decoration, and beautifying things. Evelina, we learn, “pins a crimson bow under her

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collar,” and “still permitted herself the frivolity of waving her pale hair” (187, 169). Clearly, like the fairy tale sisters, Ann Eliza and Evelina while living similar lives are opposite in temperament; however, the harmony and ease found in Snow White and Rose Red’s placid world will prove impossible to maintain in Wharton’s novella.

Sibling Rivalry and “Cinderella”

8 Once Herman Ramy enters the sisters’ lives, the bonds between Ann Eliza and Evelina become strained and Wharton’s story begins to take on the elements of “Cinderella,” a fairy tale that reinforces passive femininity where women are rivals and men have ultimate power. Ann Eliza is now torn between her desire for marriage and her loyalty to Evelina; when she becomes jealous of the attention Ramy gives Evelina, she is startled by her “secret disloyalty” (187). As the focus of the sisters’ lives shifts from maintaining their shop to entertaining a male suitor, the Bunner sisters’ easy compatibility is complicated by bitterness and rivalry.

9 Indeed, one could argue that Ann Eliza is a kind of Cinderella figure. She is humble and self-effacing, gaining the readers’ sympathies while the self-absorbed Evelina is “never actively alive to the emotional atmosphere about her” (205-206). Like Cinderella, Ann Eliza seems condemned to serve her selfish sister who always gets the first cup of tea and the largest slice of pie (170). She saves her money to buy the clock for Evelina’s birthday, and by the story’s end, she wears herself out trying to nurse Evelina back to health. Evelina, on the other hand, is a chronic complainer: “Ain’t it hateful having to do everything in one room,” she asks Ann Eliza who responds, “I always think if we ask for more what we have may be taken from us” (180, 181). Despite Evelina’s whining, Ann Eliza serves her sister without complaint, and when Evelina is getting ready for an outing with Ramy, Ann Eliza “brought out her mosaic brooch,” and “a cashmere scarf of their mother’s was taken from its linen” (188). Ann Eliza, who expects nothing for herself, is like Cinderella adorning an undeserving stepsister for the ball. Like Cinderella’s stepsisters, Evelina is also depicted as less sincere and more pretentious; when Ramy visits the sisters she speaks with “a high drawl she cultivated before strangers,” and she lays his overcoat “on a chair with the gesture she imagined the lady with the puffed sleeves might make use of” (182). While we are continually shown Ann Eliza’s emotional turmoil and pain, we only see Evelina’s vanity and self-absorption such as when she smiles at her reflection in the cracked glass and declares: “My bonnet is becoming, isn’t it?” (189). As Campbell aptly remarks, “Ann Eliza, like Ethan Frome is tied to an inferior partner” (79).

10 In “Cinderella” of course, the vain and self-absorbed sister would never win the prince. The humble hard-working and self-sacrificing sister does, and, in the same way, Wharton’s Cinderella figure is desired by “the prince” too. In fact, Ramy eventually seeks out Ann Eliza and proposes. Although he has no slipper, he somehow recognizes the worthier mate: “I guess you’re healthier than your sister, even if you’re less sizeable,” he decides (200). As Ramy’s comment demonstrates, Wharton follows the fairy tale motif only so far. Indeed, his proposal refutes the possibility of a happy outcome as he continues with, “I always liked de quiet style—no fuss and airs and not afraid of work” (202). Speaking “as though dispassionately cataloguing her charms,” Ramy’s proposal reveals his true concerns: which sister will he get the most work out of? Which sister will be easiest to dominate and order around? (202). While this

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proposal dramatically denies a “Cinderella” outcome to her story, Ann Eliza insists on viewing herself as a kind of Cinderella and Ramy as a kind of Prince Charming. Indeed part of the tragedy is the sisters’ continual misreading of Ramy.1 Sadly, Ann Eliza turns his practical no-nonsense, self-serving proposal into the “crucial moment of her life,” the moment when the prince finally sees her true value (203). As the narrator observes, “She felt as though a visible glory lay on her,” and “at last” she and Evelina were “equals” (204). Like Cinderella, Ann Eliza only seems to recognize her own worth when she is desired by a male suitor.

11 Unlike Cinderella, however, Ann Eliza rejects the offer of marriage and continues to serve her less worthy sister. Wharton’s tale shows us the toll such self-abnegation takes on a woman’s psyche. This Cinderella—while seemingly selfless—is struggling to repress her hostility and resentment. When Evelina visits Ramy, the narrator points out that Ann Eliza feels a “twinge of envy for the fate which gave Evelina every opportunity that came their way” (179). She also recalls with bitterness that Evelina “had the Sunday school teacher too” (179). Finally, Wharton questions the good that results from such self-denial, for while Cinderella’s self-sacrifice eventually ends and she is rewarded, Ann Eliza will only come to learn “the inutility of self-sacrifice” (236).

Prince Charming or Animal Bridegroom?

12 Although the plot of “Bunner Sisters” revolves around the Cinderella motif of male rescue, the story also draws upon the imagery and motifs of the “animal bridegroom” fairy tale whereby the prince is placed under a spell, transformed into a beast and needs to be rescued, for while the sisters look to Ramy as their rescuing prince, at first they feel that he actually needs their help. In addition then to recalling the sibling relations in “Snow White and Rose Red,” Wharton’s novella also echoes this fairy tale’s use of the animal bridegroom motif. As Bettelheim remarks of animal bridegroom tales, “it is the heroine’s affection and devotion that transform the beast. Only if she comes to love him truly will he be disenchanted” (284). Bettelheim also notes that “these stories convey that it is mainly the female who needs to change her attitude about sex from rejecting to embracing it, because as long as sex appears to her as ugly and animal-like, it remains animalistic in the male, he is not disenchanted” (286). He goes on to explain how the animal bridegroom functions in an unusual way in “Snow White and Rose Red”: While the animal groom is nearly always a disgusting or ferocious beast, in a few stories, it is a tame animal, despite its savage nature. This is true in the Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White and Rose Red.” But these bestial qualities are not absent from the story—they are represented by an uncouth dwarf who has bewitched the prince into a bear […] the girls have to rescue the dwarf three times before the bear can kill it and become disenchanted. So while the animal groom is friendly and tame, the females still have to exorcise its nasty nature in the form of the dwarf for an animal-like relation to become a human one. (285-86)

13 Evoking Grimm’s dwarf who has an “ash gray face,” and “glared at the girls with fiery red eyes” (Grimm 506, 504), Herman Ramy is “a shortish man with a pale bearded face,” and “prominent eyes” (181-82). He is certainly a man under a spell—the spell of opium —and his “nasty nature” rather than being “exorcised” only expands as the sisters, powerless to “disenchant” him, entrust their lives to his keeping. By the story’s end, Ramy’s beast-like qualities intensify; his treatment of Evelina is so inhumane that we

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are left with no hope that the “animal-like relation” between a man and a woman might become a “human one.”

14 There are also key moments when Wharton’s novella and Grimm’s fairy tale seem to mirror each other in their use of incident and imagery. In Grimm’s tale, Snow White and Rose Red are terrified of a bear that arrives at their door on a cold winter’s night, but the bear is kind and assures them: “Do not be afraid, I will do you no harm. I am half-frozen and only want to warm myself a little beside you” (Grimm 503). Like the fairy-tale sisters, the Bunner sisters are also disturbed by an unexpected male arrival. The knock of Ramy on a “very cold night” makes Ann Eliza anxious and nervous as the baby’s petticoat she is holding “shook in her fingers” (181). Like the bear, Ramy “knew what hard times was,” and he evokes sympathy and compassion from both sisters who listen “to the story of his early struggles in Germany and of the long illness which had been the cause of his recent misfortunes” (188). Both Grimm’s bear and Wharton’s Ramy are drawn to the sisters’ homes and domestic comforts. The bear soon “came every evening at the same time, lay down by the hearth and let the children tease him as much as they pleased” (Grimm 503). It is not long before he “stretched out by the fire and rumbled contentedly” (Grimm 503). Not only does the bear become comfortable, the sisters are no longer afraid of the bear: “They tugged his hair with their hands, put their feet upon his back and rolled him about or they took a hazel switch and beat him, and when he growled, they laughed […]. When they were too rough he called out, ‘Leave me alive children. Snow White, Rose Red, will you beat your suitor till he’s dead?’” (503). Grimm’s sisters are confident and capable—these are not girls that need to be rescued. Indeed, they even seem to exert power over their male guest.

15 Mirroring the events in Grimm’s tale, Ramy also visits the sisters with “increasing frequency,” and as “he grew more intimate […] he began to permit himself long stretches of meditative silence that were not without charm to his hostesses” (188). Yet the sisters’ comfort and familiarity with this male figure is distinctly different from that displayed by Snow White and Rose Red: “There was something at once fortifying and pacific in the sense of that tranquil male presence in an atmosphere which had so long quivered with little feminine doubts and distresses, and the sisters fell into the habit of saying to each other in moments of uncertainty: ‘We’ll ask Mr. Ramy when he comes,’ and of accepting his verdict whatever it might be with a fatalistic readiness that relieved them of all responsibility” (188). Unlike Snow White and Rose Red who maintain control over their hearth and home, the Bunner sisters play a traditional feminine role and their confidence in themselves and their initial desire to rescue this man turns to insecurity, passivity and fear. Before too long, they even entrust Ramy with their financial security; the narrator informs us that “after long hours of midnight counsel they had decided to advise with Mr. Ramy where to invest their money” (193). Rather than rescuing the “animal bridegroom,” rather than believing in their own strength, the sisters, like the sisters in Cinderella, desire to be rescued and have their status enhanced through marriage. Despite the differences in the sisters’ sensibilities, both Grimm’s tale and Wharton’s story highlight the inevitability of the marriage plot. Grimm’s sisters eventually marry and live happily ever after with the prince and the prince’s brother, and Wharton, while refuting the possibility of disenchanting the “animal bridegroom,” nevertheless has Evelina Bunner make a disastrous marriage with Ramy.

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16 Indeed, while Snow White and Rose Red soon recognize the pure heart of the bear, the prince beneath the animal exterior, Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner fail to see the dark designs of Ramy, the beast within the lonely bachelor. In addition to mirroring the bear’s actions in “Snow White and Rose Red,” Ramy recalls the “animal bridegroom” of fairy tales in other ways. As Marina Warner emphasizes, “the animal bridegroom may appear in various guises, but is always repulsive” (279). With his “yellowish teeth,” “sunken cheeks,” “wide skull thinly covered with grayish hair,” and “knotty joint square finger tips rimmed with grime,” Ramy is—without a doubt— a repulsive figure (182). There is also an odd animal image that appears in reference to Ramy in the text. When Ann Eliza leaves his shop, her “eyes were fixed on a dusty bronze clock in the window […] and she remembered that it represented a Newfoundland dog with his paw on an open book” (194). Later at Tiffany’s when she learns the truth of why Ramy was “sitting in abject dejection behind his counter,” she “saw again […] the green bronze clock in the window representing a Newfoundland dog with his paw on a book” (226). This image of a dog pawing a book is telling: it functions as a subtle symbol of Ramy and emphasizes the inability of the sisters to understand him. Although Ramy quotes Longfellow and seems to have a reverence for culture, he is motivated by baser animal instincts as his treatment of Evelina after their marriage shows. He is in reality a cruel, selfish, immoral man who only appears to be cultured, genteel and decent. 1 For the Bunner sisters, there is no prince hiding beneath the surface. As Maria Tatar writes: “In many tales of animal grooms, neither an act of love nor a deed of violence suffices to reverse the spell cast on a prince by a wicked witch or evil fairy” (175). Wharton’s story, while echoing at times “Snow White and Rose Red,” taps into the darker versions of the animal bridegroom tale.

17 So Ramy is no prince charming, and his selfishness and inability to love align him instead with another fairy tale character: the dwarf. In his analysis of the roles of dwarfs, Bettelheim comments that “[d]warfs are eminently male, but males who are stunted in their development. These little men with their stunted bodies and their mining occupation—they skillfully penetrate into dark holes—all suggest phallic connotations. They are certainly not men in any sexual sense—their way of life, their interest in material goods to the exclusion of love, suggest a pre-oedipal existence” (210). Like the dwarf of many a fairy tale, Ramy is “stunted” in his development. He is not looking for a loving relationship, but only for someone who will support his drug habit. Though he fathers a child, he has no feelings of love towards it and no desire to raise it. When he discovers Evelina is pregnant, he gets “mad,” and after the baby is born and Evelina is ill in the hospital, Ramy abandons them, running away with Mrs. Hochmuller’s daughter, and taking all of Mrs. Hochmuller’s money (234). Ramy—the man both sisters looked to with longing, relief and wonder—turns out to be “a drug fiend,” and no amount of feminine devotion can break the spell cast by opium (228). Evelina will eventually die from her traumatic experience, leaving Ann Eliza alone and destitute.

Awakening and Integration

18 N. J. Girardot believes that fairy tales “reflect the struggle for maturity and enlightenment,” and that fairy tale heroes and heroines “seek an awakening rather than a mate” (qtd. in Stone 395). As Warner puts it, “the idea of awakening […] goes to the

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heart of fairy tale’s function” (417). As mentioned earlier, the two figures in sibling tales “symbolize opposite aspects of our nature, compelling us to act in contrary ways”: “the striving for independence and self assertion, and the opposite tendency to remain safely home, tied to the parents” (Bettelheim 91). “Both desires reside in each of us,” Bettelheim writes, and “we cannot survive deprived of either” (91). These tales teach, therefore, that “entirely cutting oneself off from one’s past leads to disaster, but that to exist only beholden to the past is stunting […] while it is safe, it provides no life of one’s own. Only the thorough integration of these contrary tendencies permits a successful existence” (Bettelheim 91, emphasis added). Echoing the plots of sibling fairy tales recounted by Bettelheim, Ann Eliza must somehow integrate those “contrary tendencies” of remaining “safely home” and “striving for independence”; she must reconcile her past life with her sister with a new life of her own, and on this level, one could argue that Wharton’s tale of integration succeeds even if the fairy tale of romantic love fails. Rather than moving towards darkness and despair then, “Bunner Sisters” might also be read as a story that moves towards “integration,” for there are subtle shifts that take place within Ann Eliza as the story progresses, and the ending is more ambiguous than most critics have been willing to acknowledge.1

19 “Bunner Sisters” is also a story of an arduous journey that results in awakening and integration. Ann Eliza who did not like to venture outside the “monastic quiet of the shop” eventually displays courage, endurance and growth, for by the end of the story she has made several difficult journeys alone to discover her sister’s whereabouts. Her journey to Hoboken is especially trying as “everything about her seemed unfamiliar and forbidding”; when she reaches Mrs. Hochmuller’s house with her heart “beating violently,” she finds that the flower borders are “blackened,” the window panes are “cracked and dirty,” and the irate washer woman slams the door in her face (219, 220). After she leaves this “desolate scene, the icy wind piercing her thin dress like gauze,” she becomes feverishly ill, and is so helpless that her neighbors must care for her (221).

20 In the midst of recovering from this difficult journey, she continues her search, intent on discovering what has happened to Evelina. She next ventures to Tiffany’s, Ramy’s former employer, feeling “weak and unsteady” (224). It is an agonizing trip for the shy and feeble Ann Eliza as she “felt herself the centre of innumerable eyes” when she “moved forward between long lines of show cases” (224). Although she feels flustered and uncomfortable, she manages—in a scene of surreal anxiety—to pass through “a great hall full of the buzzing and booming of thousands of clocks,” to meet Mr. Loomis who reveals the bitter truth about Ramy’s drug addiction (224). This journey, while physically and emotionally devastating, leads her closer to the truth, and her courage and commitment to her sister elicits admiration from her neighbors; however, as time passes she “was conscious that Mrs. Hawkins and Miss Mellins were watching her with affectionate anxiety but the knowledge brought no comfort. She no longer cared what they felt or thought about her. Her grief lay far beyond touch of human healing and after a while she became aware that they knew they could not help her” (228). This passage emphasizes Ann Eliza’s growing awareness, her realization that the burden of knowledge brings no comfort. Along with this increasing awareness though we see her increased strength and endurance. While at first she is “too small a person to harbor so great a guest” as solitude, and although she lies ill for a while, “little by little she grows used to being alone,” and just before Evelina’s return she “was insensibly beginning to take up the healing routine of life” (229).

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21 As Jennifer Fleissner observes, we do see in Ann Eliza “a capacity for renewal,” and by the novella’s end “the shop’s routine is not deadening but in comparison to a ‘fatal’ marriage ‘peaceful’” (543, 539). Moreover, amidst all the emotional turmoil of Evelina’s return, Ann Eliza displays a stoic endurance and practicality as she realizes there is “little time to brood” and is “surprised at the strength and steadiness of her voice” (236). Here we truly see a different character from the timid women who was overwhelmed with visiting the market and walking the city streets. Also, instead of adhering to a rigid set of conventions, she now questions “inherited principles”; for the first time she realizes that a lie may be the more humane action when she decides to keep the truth from Miss Mellins to protect Evelina, and wrestling with her earlier belief that “decent people do not borrow,” she becomes more flexible and begins to think for herself: “But nowadays she no longer believed in the personal supervision of Providence and had she been compelled to steal the money instead of borrowing it, she would have felt that her conscience was the only tribunal before which she had to answer” (236, 237, emphasis added). Ann Eliza is now moving towards greater knowledge and self-awareness even if that knowledge is painful and terrifying. She keeps insisting to the doctor: “I want to know” (238). This seems to result in a bigger heart as well, for she is less judgmental, more understanding. When Evelina admits she is “disheartened,” Ann Eliza “accepts it in silence” rather than meeting Evelina’s confession with “a word of pious admonition as she would in the past” (237). We sense Ann Eliza’s growth, her humanity, her willingness to stare life in the face, rather than run from its horrors; we see her recognition that the old pieties may not work, and that there is not always an easy answer. As Fleissner puts it, Ann Eliza becomes a “doubting modern subject” (531).

22 While Wolff has astutely observed that “Bunner Sisters” is intimately tied to Wharton’s own emotional struggles, she sees this as the novella’s flaw; I would suggest that this is what makes the novella so compelling. It is a story that, while dark and grim, shows solitary strength and purpose, and taps into deep fairy-tale structures that perhaps evoke Wharton’s own feelings during one of the darkest decades of her life: her realization of her solitude, the loneliness and disappointment of her marriage, and finally her movement towards awakening and integration. Like Ann Eliza, Wharton was no longer young, but she was becoming stronger and wiser; she was moving out of a time of illness and physical weakness to make her own way in the world.

23 Ann Eliza’s setting out at the novella’s end might suggest a move towards a kind of integration as the ending provides a sense of distance from the past, but also a sense of valuing that past. The little shop she visits appeals to her because it “was about the size of the one on which Ann Eliza had just closed the door, and it looked as fresh and gay and thriving as she and Evelina had once dreamed of making” (245). When the shop girl tells Ann Eliza, “We want a bright girl, someone stylish […] not over thirty anyhow and nice looking,” we realize that what Ann Eliza valued in her former shop—its welcoming atmosphere, its fostering of a female community—is not necessarily valued in this new world that privileges style and image (246). Still, we may also sense that within Ann Eliza’s stunned and confused response to the shop girl is her refusal of the values embodied by this new shop. Ann Eliza may not be able to find a shop that integrates the values of the past with her hopes for a brighter future but her determination and her hard-won knowledge are very real.

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24 Indeed, Wharton’s story of Ann Eliza’s “awakening” highlights the dark undercurrent in many versions of the animal bridegroom and Cinderella fairy tales, for grooms are not always disenchanted and Cinderella figures are “subjected to all manner of abuse and humiliations” (Tatar 182). As Tatar emphasizes: “the hard facts of fairy-tale life offer exaggerated visions of the grimmer realities and fantasies that touch and shape the lives of every child and adult” (192). While Wharton gives us perhaps an “exaggerated vision of the grimmer realities,” at the end of “Bunner Sisters,” there is also, as Hermione Lee said of Wharton herself in the 1890s, a stronger and more admirable woman here “making the best of what happened to her” (77). Wharton’s final lines remind us that ultimately “Bunner Sisters” is a story about survival: “The great city under the fair spring sky seemed to throb with the stir of innumerable beginnings. She walked on, looking for another shop window with a sign in it” (246). Both Ann Eliza Bunner and Edith Wharton do go on. And while Ann Eliza’s awakening may be met with limited opportunities in this new modern city, Edith Wharton would transcend the emotional deprivation of her life. “Bunner Sisters” even in its dark uncertain ending nevertheless points to Edith Wharton at the start of a remarkable career.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.

Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1977.

Campbell, Donna. “Edith Wharton and the “Authoresses”: The Critique of Local Color in Wharton’s Early Fiction.” Studies in American Fiction 22 (1994): 169-83.

Fleissner, Jennifer L. “The Biological Clock: Edith Wharton, Naturalism, and the Temporality of Womanhood.” American Literature. Volume 78, Number 3. September 2006. 519-548.

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Grimm’s Tales for Young and Old: The Complete Stories. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Anchor Press, 1977.

Hochman, Barbara. “The Good, the Bad, and the Literary: Edith Wharton’s ‘Bunner Sisters’and the Social Contexts of Reading.” Studies in American Naturalism. Volume 1:1 Summer and Winter 2006, 128-143.

Kornasky, Linda. “On ‘Listening to Spectres too’: Wharton’s ‘Bunner Sisters’ and Ideologies of Sexual Selection,” American Literary Realism 30:1. Fall: 1997. 47-58.

Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. New York: Vintage Books, 2007.

Lewis, R.W.B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1975.

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Lewis, R.W.B. and Nancy Lewis. The Letters of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1988.

Martin, Jay. Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865-1914. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1967.

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs, Vol. 1:1 (Autumn 1975), 1-29.

Stone. Kay F. “The Misuses of Enchantment: Controversies on the Significance of Fairy Tales.” Ed. Hallet, Martin and Barbara Karasek. Folk and Fairy Tales, third edition. Ontario: Broadview Press, 1985. 391-415.

Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

Wharton, Edith. “Bunner Sisters.”Edith Wharton Collected Stories, 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. Library of America, 2001. 166-246.

Wilson, Edmund, The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

NOTES

1. R.W.B. Lewis writes that Wharton’s editor at Scribner’s, Edward Burlingame, was “warily complimentary”: “I like and admire much of it quite unreservedly,” Burlingame wrote to Wharton, “but the motif and the admirable detail and color of the story fail to carry its great length.” Burlingame decided he could not accept it since “it was too long to print in a single issue and it would be fatal to divide it.” See Edith Wharton: A Biography, p. 66. 2. Donna Campbell believes that “Bunner Sisters” is Wharton’s most “overt exploration of naturalism and local color fiction” (80). Jay Martin decides that along with Summer and Ethan Frome, it is one of her chief works of naturalism. Shari Benstock, meanwhile, praises the realism of the novella, observing how Wharton “recreates the reality of these women’s lives with subtle accuracy” (70). Linda Kornasky sees the novella as an “investigation into how the disintegration of female lives can be represented in naturalist fiction”(47). Most recently, Jennifer Fleissner has observed that “Bunner Sisters” might interrogate naturalistic conventions and be, “a countervision to the dehumanizing effects of the mechanical timepiece” (540). She argues that rather than hopelessness, the story may offer an alternative possibility for women since “the most rigorously clock-timed work might actually offer a certain freedom not available when the only compulsion was nature’s own” (543). 3. While the text is highly critical of traditional gender roles, “misandrous” seems too extreme a charge for “Bunner Sisters.” There are likeable men in the novella such as Mr Loomis, Mr. Hawkins and the man who finds Evelina begging on the streets and puts her on a train bound for New York. 1. Barbara Hochman argues that “the seductive appeal of ‘culture’ for the Bunner sisters […] is especially important. The fatal attraction of Mr. Ramy […] is much enhanced by their perception of him as an ‘educated man’”(128). “Bunner Sisters,” she insists, stresses the danger of “assuming that a literate person is necessarily a virtuous one” (130).

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1. See again Barbara Hochman’s analysis of the sisters’ misreading of Ramy in “The Good, the Bad and the Literary: Edith Wharton’s ‘Bunner Sisters’ and the Social Contexts of Reading.” 1. Fleissner’s interpretation is more positive and takes into consideration the ambiguity of the ending. She writes: “Perhaps ‘Bunner Sisters’ might better be considered alongside Sister Carrie, for their endings leave us similarly in medias res. Carrie’s movement back and forth in her rocking chair, in a motion again akin to the clock’s empty endless ticking, has seemed to many no different from a Lily-like ‘plot of decline.’ Yet why should this be? Carrie has not attained perfect happiness, certainly, but the point of her story seems closer to ‘Bunner Sisters’ in its recognition that the stories thought to promise such a conclusion—the plot of marriage, the rescue by a protective man—turn out to be less palatable than remaining on one’s own” (542). Fleissner adds that, “Despite a standard critical tendency to see naturalism’s heroines as poverty-stricken, the class position of working women like Carrie, Trina McTeague and Ann Eliza […] is at the least ambiguous, too new yet to be slotted simply under existing alternatives” (542).

ABSTRACTS

Alors que la plupart des analyses critiques de « Bunner Sisters » insistent sur le réalisme sombre de cette nouvelle, je m’intéresse ici à la reprise des motifs et des structures du conte de fées. En m’appuyant sur les travaux de Bruno Bettelheim, je montre que les relations entre les sœurs et le personnage du prince charmant reprennent des motifs de « Cendrillon » et de « Blanche neige ». Cette approche met en évidence le mélange de réalisme et de merveilleux. En racontant l’échec du mariage, et en montrant l’existence d’une autre possibilité, peut-être plus intéressante, Wharton finit par refuser le conte de fées sentimental et par faire le récit d’une « intégration ». Finalement, l’itinéraire sentimental d’Ann Eliza Bunner est très proche de celui de Wharton : c’est ce qui fait l’importance de cette nouvelle, qui permet de mieux comprendre les sentiments de la femme et le style de l’écrivain.

AUTHORS

NANCY VON ROSK Nancy Von Rosk is an Associate Professor at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, New York. Her publications on Edith Wharton and other late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American writers including Willa Cather, Mark Twain, Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska have appeared in essay collections and journals such as Studies in the Novel, Journal of Transnational American Studies and Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies.

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The Dogs of “Kerfol”: Animals, Authorship, and Wharton

Jennifer Haytock

1 Edith Wharton loved dogs, and although she seldom included them in her fiction, her personal writings reveal that she thought about them often and deeply. In a diary begun in May 1924, she reveals: “I am secretly afraid of animals—of all animals except dogs, & even of some dogs. I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which belies it, & is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off & left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? Their eyes seem to ask us” (“Quaderno” 211). In Life and I, her unfinished first attempt at an autobiography, Wharton writes: I always had a deep, instinctive understanding of animals, a yearning to hold them in my arms, a fierce desire to protect them against pain & cruelty. This feeling seemed to have its source in a curious sense of being somehow, myself, an intermediate creature between human beings & animals, & nearer, on the whole, to the furry tribes than to homo sapiens. I felt that I knew things about them—their sensations, desires & sensibilities—that other bipeds could not guess; & this seemed to lay on me the obligation to defend them against their human oppressors.

2 She then explains that her sense of obligation moved through the phases of “morbid preoccupation” to a “haunting consciousness of the sufferings of animals” that only passed when she worked “to better the condition of animals wherever I happened to be living, & above all to make the work of their protection take a practical rather than a sentimental form” (193). Given these two statements about her feelings toward dogs, Wharton’s story “Kerfol,” her only work in which dogs appear in primary roles, invites a reading of her portrayal of the relationship between humans and animals. In the story, dogs appear in a multi-faceted, multi-signifying system as symbols, ghosts, and actual dogs. “Kerfol” not only encompasses a turning point in the historical debate about the relationship between humans and animals but also attempts to reconcile Wharton’s feelings of kinship with and fear of dogs in their ghostly representation as the victims of class and gender privilege and as the executors of vengeance on behalf of the silent. In this story, she also tackles the problem of being taken seriously as a writer while addressing a subject not considered serious: the love of dogs.

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Wharton, Dogs, and Serious Discourse

3 That Wharton loved dogs is well known among scholars of her life and work. In A Backward Glance, Wharton claims that “The owning of my first dog made me into a conscious sentient person […]. How I loved that first ‘Foxy’ of mine, how I cherished and yearned over and understood him!” (4). Biographers note that Wharton always had dogs in her life and that she grieved for them when they died (Lewis Biography 160; Lee 151-52). The Mount, her home in Lenox, Massachusetts, has a cemetery for several of her dogs. She also took a public stance in the movement to protect animals. In the winter of 1905-06, she was active in the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and she gave a speech quoted in the New York Times about the need for an open investigation of the society’s leader in order to regain public confidence in the organization (“May Ask”). Hermione Lee notes that Wharton also participated in the S.P.C.A.’s debates about the ethics of euthanasia for pets and that she was active in a campaign to make bowls of water publicly available for dogs in New York (152). As the passage quoted earlier indicates, she was careful to make her public work on behalf of animals “practical” and not “sentimental.” She kept her feelings for dogs private until late in life, when she wrote about them in A Backward Glance. As Amy Kaplan has shown, Wharton struggled to assert her “profession of authorship” by distinguishing herself from other women writers, particularly those “whose work was described by some as pure idleness and by others as conspicuous consumption” (68); further, her critical sense of the “serious” usually required that Wharton exclude the animals she loved from her literary work. Writing about dogs would quickly have undermined her standing as a “serious” writer.1 Still, as Hildegard Hoeller has demonstrated, even while Wharton bowed to “male literary taste preferring irony, economy, and realism,” she recognized that “for a woman writer, adherence to such a male taste at the cost of a sentimental voice means nothing less than a form of self-annihilation” (53). Hoeller illuminates Wharton’s use of sentimentalism to portray issues such as motherhood and women’s sexual desire (36), to which I would add a love of pets. Although care for animals does not have to be gendered—Wharton’s husband Teddy was devoted to them too—the love of pets has been regarded as a sign of the feminine and effeminate.2 Mindful of this prejudice, Wharton was careful to avoid sentimental representations of dogs in her public writings (though not in her private letters, in which she occasionally sent messages in her dogs’ names3). In “Kerfol,” she skirted this problem by producing a “serious” story about dogs by appropriating the ghost story form.

4 “Kerfol” first appeared in Scribner’s and then in Xingu and Other Stories in 1916, although it was written before the war (Letters 385). In the frame of the tale, the unnamed first- person narrator seeks out a property in Brittany that his host has suggested he might like to purchase. When he arrives at Kerfol, the guardian who is supposed to show him the house fails to appear. As the narrator explores the property by himself, a pack of dogs quietly follows him. When he later explains what happened, his host’s wife remembers that “that day” is special and tells him that no dogs live at Kerfol. The framed tale follows—a story distilled by the narrator from the history of a trial, that took place in 1602, in which Anne de Cornault stands accused of murdering her husband, Yves de Cornault. Although witnesses suggest that the marriage was happy at first, they also believe that Anne suffered too much from loneliness and her lack of

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children. Her husband brings her a dog for company but later kills it when he suspects that she is committing adultery with a neighbor, Hervé de Lanrivain. He subsequently kills four other dogs to whom Anne has shown kindness until, according to Anne, one night their ghosts appear and maul him to death on the stairs outside her bedroom. Although the judges do not find her guilty, they hand her over to her husband’s family, and she eventually goes insane. The story ends in the present with the narrator’s meditations on the subsequent life of Anne’s supposed lover.

5 Wharton’s ghost stories, including “Kerfol,” are often interpreted as critiques of paternalist and patriarchal marriage that produces and regulates gender and sexuality, and they tend to focus on women silenced by patriarchal power.4 “Kerfol” has not received much attention on its own, and in the few extended treatments it has been given, critics have tended to read the dogs as signs of something else. Helen Killoran suggests that the dogs distract the reader from an underlying issue in the story, the violent conflict between the Jesuits and the Jansenists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jenni Dyman argues that the dogs “symbolize Anne’s plight” (78) and that they “represent Anne’s suppressed self” (85). Margaret B. McDowell sees them as “mute, uncomprehending victims of an evil that destroys those who challenge its supremacy,” much like Anne de Cornault herself. McDowell recognizes, though, that “as perturbed, avenging forces, the dogs acquire a reality so strong as to convince us at times of their actuality as dogs and as spirits” (141). I argue that overlooking the dogs is a result of principles inherent in scholarly and other serious discourse. As theologian Stephen H. Webb shows, we do not take pets and the love of pets seriously because “pets are about excessive emotions, and excess cannot be easily analyzed or articulated” (79). We expect animals to “mean,” not to be. But, given Wharton’s love of dogs and her need to protect them, reading the dogs as dogs—and the ghosts of the dogs as ghosts of dogs—becomes essential. That Wharton should write a ghost story in which the dogs are not protected by their mistress suggests vulnerability and impotence in women’s lives as wives but also articulates Wharton’s own desire to protect animals and express what she intuited as “their sensations, desires and sensibilities.” This need to protect animals and articulate their feelings has yet to be explored.

Dogs among the Cornaults: Conflicting Views in the Seventeenth Century

6 Understanding the dogs in “Kerfol” requires recognizing the changing relationship between animals and humans during the early modern period in Western history. The framed tale takes place just before significant changes occurred in the ways humans in Western Europe perceived animals in relation to themselves. As Keith Thomas explains in his study Man and the Natural World, animals in the early Christian era were considered to be in the service of humans, as ordained by God, and were seen as signs of man’s dominion on earth. In the seventeenth century, Christian thinkers began to change their views, considering that “nature existed for God’s glory,” not man’s service, and “that [God] cared as much for the welfare of plants and animals as for man” (Thomas 166). Thomas quotes Henry More, author of An Antidote Against Atheism (1655), as claiming that animals were made “to enjoy themselves” (166). Further, theologians and philosophers began to imagine the inner lives of animals:

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What this new mode of thinking implied was that it was the feelings of the suffering object which mattered, not its intelligence or moral capacity. […] Or, as Jeremy Bentham observed in 1789 in a famous passage, the question to be asked about animals was neither ‘Can they reason?’ nor ‘Can they talk?,’ but ‘Can they suffer?’ This was a new and altogether more secular mode of approach. It was now possible to attack cruelty to animals without invoking God’s intentions at all. The ill- treatment of beasts was reprehensible on the purely utilitarian grounds that it diminished their happiness. Animals had feelings and those feelings ought to be respected. (Thomas 176)

7 While Thomas focuses on specifically English attitudes toward animals and acknowledges that French thinking sometimes differed,1 he notes that Montaigne and other French philosophers largely concurred that God valued animals and humans equally (166). Wharton set the tragedy of the Cornaults before the seventeenth-century shift in religious thought, but she framed her tale with a twentieth-century perspective on animals. More important, she knew the story would be read by a twentieth-century audience. The dogs thus resonate differently for the story’s characters and its readers.

8 In the framed tale, most of the human characters’ attitudes toward the dogs stem from the belief that humans hold dominion in the natural world. Yves de Cornault in particular treats the animals as if they were in his service and makes it clear that they are subject to his mercy. He pays a large sum for the first dog, a “little golden-brown dog,” of a breed, probably Pekinese, that was “beginning to be in demand at the French court” (99).2 He regards the dog as a sign of his status and as his property. He also views the dog as a symbol within a tradition that places a premium on female chastity. When he comes across his wife sleeping with her dog at her feet, like the effigy on his great- grandmother’s tomb, he promises Anne that she too will have her dog at her feet in death if she earns the privilege: “The dog is the emblem of fidelity,” he tells her (103). It does not occur to him that the dog has rights or subjectivity. When Anne later reveals in court that her husband strangled the dog, the narrator imagines that “A smile must have passed around the courtroom: in days when any nobleman had a right to hang his peasants—and most of them exercised it—pinching a pet animal’s windpipe was nothing to make a fuss about” (102). Indeed, Yves de Cornault hangs a peasant and beats a horse the day after the little dog is found dead (105). Wharton’s critique of his class privilege appears in this evocation of cruelty not only to dogs and horses but also to certain classes of humans, namely peasants and women.3 Wharton’s readers may have made this connection since, as Diane L. Beers shows in her history of anti-animal cruelty organizations in the United States, the end of the nineteenth century saw public opinion shifting in favor of the humane treatment of animals. Further, Beers explains, “Activists believed that by teaching adults and especially children the core values of their cause, they would cultivate a more compassionate society for everyone” (86). In other words, by the beginning of the twentieth century, treating animals well was considered a sign of a fully moral adult person. By making Yves de Cornault a killer of pet dogs, Wharton brands him as inhumane, to her contemporaries.

9 Anne de Cornault does not regard the dog the way her husband and judges do; her perspective reflects the philosophical and theological changes of her time. She first compares the dog to “a bird or a butterfly,” but on closer inspection she changes her language: he “looked at her with eyes ‘like a Christian’s,’” the quotation marks signifying that the words are Anne’s in the court transcript (99). So Anne no longer classes the dog among animals (“a bird or a butterfly”) but moves it closer to humans, with a standing in God’s eyes and possibly even possessing a soul.4 Unlike her husband,

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she does not view the dog as a symbol: She vows to be “faithful […] if only for the sake of having my little dog at my feet” (103).5 Later, Anne draws a connection between herself and her dog when she testifies in court that she asked her neighbor Hervé de Lanrivain to take her away. The judge asks her why: “Because I was afraid for my life.” “Of whom were you afraid?” “Of my husband.” “Why were you afraid of your husband? “Because he had strangled my little dog.” (102)

10 Anne thus equates herself with a dog. Part of her tragedy, as critics have noted, is that not only her husband but her society and its legal system too associate her with her dog in a less-than-human category: both are objects to be purchased and consumed.6 In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol Adams points out that the degrading association between women and animals runs both ways: “We oppress animals by associating them with women’s lesser status” (72). Wharton makes her argument against the tyrannical treatment of wives by appealing to the twentieth-century sense of how animals should be treated: if readers recognize that Yves de Cornault’s behavior toward animals makes him a not-fully-moral being, they may see his treatment of Anne as part of the same vein of immorality. More subtly, Wharton suggests that Western culture devalues dogs as much as women, and to her, both oppressions are equally troubling.

11 Part of the problem of understanding both Anne and the dogs is that a love of animals is often seen as a compensation for the lack of children, or even as simply childish in itself. Anne’s dogs are seen not as dogs but as child substitutes; local gossip indicates that she treated the dog “as if it had been a child” (99), although there is no evidence that Anne herself sees the dog as a child. As a woman in a patriarchal society, Anne is treated as a child, by her husband, her judges, and her later narrator. And as a woman who loves dogs, she is marked as doubly childish. In the narrator’s reconstruction of the trial, the judges view Anne’s testimony as “pueril[e]” (106) and listen with impatience: “Dogs again—!” (109). The narrator offers no quotations from the transcripts to prove the judges’ dismissal of Anne’s story; the bias is his. Wharton must have been familiar with this kind of attitude and may have sensed some of her friends’ impatience with her dogs and her care of them.7 Her personal writings indicate that she saw dogs and other animals as subjects in themselves with “sensations, desires and sensibilities.” While many of Wharton’s ghost stories address the issues of erotic and sometimes transgressive love, the secret passion of “Kerfol” is not Anne’s alleged love affair with Hervé de Lanrivain but rather her love for her dogs. Her husband, her judges, and her narrator would be able to understand extramarital passion (just as the narrator imagines the judges’ boredom with the story of the dogs, he “fanc[ies]” that the judges anticipate Anne’s telling of the affair with “a certain relish” [108]), but they cannot see, let alone validate, her love for her pets. Reading Anne’s grief for her dogs literally, rather than as code for a frustrated love affair, allows the reader to take Wharton’s own attachment to animals seriously.

12 As ghosts, the dogs’ motivation is far from transparent. The ghosts have been read as vengeful spirits doing the will of Anne de Cornault. In Sexchanges, the second volume of their No Man’s Land trilogy, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that “of course, as Wharton surely meant to imply, the animals were themselves agents of their mistress’s unspeakable and deadly desire” (160). Kathy Fedorko similarly explains that the dogs “clearly speak for the passive Anne” (67). The assumptions of these critics is troubling:

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according to them, the dogs, or rather the ghosts of the dogs, act only on behalf of someone else and, further, we can know their motives. Certainly they may be protecting their mistress from the onslaught of her husband’s wrath, but the deeply disconcerting problem with animals and ghosts is that they cannot talk and make their desires and purposes known through language. In “Kerfol,” Wharton represents the dogs as having subjectivity and agency apart from that ascribed them by other characters. In life, the dogs are gentle creatures, variously loving and clever and meek and plaintive (all terms used, admittedly, to describe human behavior and emotions). As ghosts, they are violent and ruthless in their slaying of Yves de Cornault. In Anne’s description of the attack, which the narrator transcribes, she tells of them “snarling and panting” and of hearing “a sound like the noise of a pack when the wolf is thrown to them—gulping and lapping” (109). This moment speaks of the fears provoked by dogs, that is, of their potential for violence. The story drives home the duality of dogs: they descend from wolves and yet they are trusted pets. Wharton’s description of the dogs in “Kerfol” reminds us of their potential for violence, and her language of the wolf hunt shows that dogs can be as or more violent than the prey they are trained to kill. As much as humans might like to think they know their pets, Anne’s horror at her dogs’ behavior, or at least that of their ghosts, suggests that the motives of animals can only be guessed at.

Kerfol’s Dogs in the Twentieth Century: The Narrator and Serious Literature

13 Unlike Yves or Anne de Cornault, the dogs appear in the frame story; they are ghosts by this time, but the narrator does not know that. The ghost dogs thus also allow for a reading of human attitudes toward animals in the early twentieth century. Early in the story, the narrator establishes that he is sensitive to historical atmosphere: “I wanted only to sit there and be penetrated by the weight of [Kerfol’s] silence” (90). Eventually he wants more, “not to see more […] but to feel more: feel all the place had to communicate” (91). But, as with any first-person narrator, his presentation of himself is suspect: although he may want to feel more, he may not be capable of feeling what the “place had to communicate.” As Elsa Nettels has shown, Wharton’s male narrators are often obtuse in some way, frequently biased by the privileges of gender, class, education, and race. Although he sees the ghosts, which suggests that he has some capacity for “feeling,” this narrator is no exception, particularly in his patronizing rendering of Anne de Cornault (“She was not a clever woman, I imagine” [108]). Still, there is a gap between the narrator’s experience of “feeling” Kerfol and his narration of Anne’s story, during which he encounters the ghost dogs. While he has limited ability to sympathize with Anne, he can and does respond to the emotions that he perceives in the dogs. When approached by the Chinese “Sleeve-dog,” he sees “anger in his large brown eyes” (91), and he notes that the greyhound’s “expression was more timid than that of the others” (92). In other words, he recognizes their suffering as suffering: I had a feeling that they must be horribly cowed to be so silent and inert. Yet they did not look hungry or ill-treated. Their coats were smooth and they were not thin, except the shivering greyhound. It was more as if they had lived a long time with people who never spoke to them or looked at them: as though the silence of the place had gradually benumbed their busy inquisitive natures. And this strange passivity, this almost human lassitude, seemed to me sadder than the misery of

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starved and beaten animals. I should have liked to rouse them for a minute, to coax them into a game or a scamper; but the longer I looked into their fixed and weary eyes the more preposterous the idea became. (93-94)

14 The narrator empathizes with the dogs’ emotional state, but he is not anthropomorphizing. He interprets the cause of their suffering in terms of what would matter in the emotional life of a dog: a lack of human attention. There’s no way to know if he is right in his interpretation of these dogs, of course. But the narrator’s sympathy for the dogs proves his humanity and, even if he himself has not achieved the moral transition from sympathy with animals to that with humans, his response to the dogs prepares the reader to sympathize with Anne.

15 Looking at “Kerfol” through a history of human-animal relationships thus opens up questions about where the story’s horror lies. Why and for whom is it frightening? Where does its “thermometrical quality” (“Preface” 273), as Wharton called it, come from? Critics focus on the crimes perpetrated against Anne de Cornault by her husband and a legal system that denies her a voice. But it is not Anne’s terrorized ghost that haunts Kerfol; it’s the ghosts of the dogs. Although Wharton wrote about the ghost story genre in her “Preface” to Ghosts, she never fully articulated what she thought a ghost was. Her stories reveal some of their attributes, however. Monika Elbert argues that in “All Souls’,” “the ghosts are, psychologically seen, the passions which have been repressed in the individual psyche.” In “Kerfol,” the horror is not Anne’s suffering but rather the loneliness and victimhood of the dogs: “The impression they produced was that of having in common one memory so deep and dark that nothing that had happened since was worth either a growl or a wag” (94). The dogs experience the helplessness and terror of violent death, an emotional trauma that has left them caught between worlds, forever longing for and unable to experience human contact. They cannot speak their fear or pain at the time of their deaths or their loneliness afterward as ghosts. To Wharton, their experience of violence and muteness lies at the heart of the ghost story’s meaning.

16 Dogs and ghosts share what Wharton calls the characteristics of “usness” and “not- usness.” In Wharton’s words, both dogs and ghosts are mute or silent, conditions to which she responds with fear. They are also both “left behind”—dogs by the processes of evolution, and ghosts by the need of the living to move on. Wharton articulates the distance between “us” and “not-us” as that of language and, in “Kerfol,” the similarities between ghosts and dogs make the ghost story the medium through which she could address animals seriously. That is, if recognizing cruelty to dogs allows readers to see cruelty to women, understanding the silence of ghosts may help readers to hear the silence of dogs. While the dogs cannot be communicated with through language, the narrator shows that they may be approached through feeling. Just as ghosts may be seen by those who are sensitive to them, dogs may be understood by those who are open to them and who can bridge the gap between “us” and “not-us” by being aware that animals have their own “sensations, desires & sensibilities.” Dogs may communicate through, not in spite of, their silence.

17 Wharton’s “curious sense of being, somehow, myself, an intermediate creature between human beings and animals, and nearer, on the whole, to the furry tribes than to homo sapiens” is one manifestation of her struggles with silence, of her fear that her own voice may be silenced. At the same time, this “curious sense” also seems to have offered her not only an identity from which to speak and write but also one that avoids the

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complicated and damaging systems of identification enforced in the human world. She could mediate for dogs and protect them, and she could also be of them, a position reflecting not negatively of humanity but rather positively of animal-hood. One senses that Wharton regarded belonging “to the furry tribes” as a privilege, despite their loneliness and terrible muteness. As she wrote in A Backward Glance, she transformed herself from her in-between state into a human one through her care for dogs. Webb suggests that the excess associated with the love of dogs offers something spiritually rewarding: “dogs are like a gift, a grace undeserved, that releases us into an economy of abundance, where the economic laws of scarcity and therefore competition no longer apply and where instead we feel ourselves the beneficiaries of a wealth that is actualized only as we give it away, and in giving we see something that we could not see before. In this way, dogs are part of the antieconomy of giving, generosity, and grace” (103-04). Loving dogs is emotional excess, and Wharton found a way to make this excess productive in a literary economy that did not value it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990.

Beers, Diane L. For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006.

Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.

Dyman, Jenni. Lurking Feminism: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Elbert, Monika. “The Transcendental Economy of Wharton’s Gothic Mansions.” American Transcendental Quarterly 9.1 (1995): 51-67.

Fedorko, Kathy A. Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century: Volume 2: Sexchanges. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Hoeller, Hildegard. Edith Wharton’s Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction. Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 2000.

Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Kaye, Richard A. “‘Unearthly Visitants’: Wharton Ghost Tales, Gothic Form and the Literature of Homosexual Panic.” Edith Wharton Review 11.1 (1994): 10-18.

Killoran, Helen. “Pascal, Bronte, and ‘Kerfol:’ The Horrors of A Foolish Quartet.” Edith Wharton Review 10.1 (1993): 12-17.

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Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. New York: Knopf, 2007.

Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

--- and Nancy Lewis. The Letters of Edith Wharton. New York: Collier, 1988.

Lubbock, Percy. Portrait of Edith Wharton. Orig. 1947. New York: Kraus, 1969.

“May Ask Legislature to Investigate S. P. C. A.” New York Times, 19 February 1906.

McDowell, Margaret B. “Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories.” Criticism 12.2 (1970): 133-152.

Nettels, Elsa. “Gender and First-Person Narration in Edith Wharton’s Short Fiction.” Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Ed. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992. 245-260.

Patten, Ann L. “The Spectres of Capitalism and Democracy in Edith Wharton’s Early Ghost Stories.” Edith Wharton Review 25.1 (2009): 1-8.

Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Tyler, William R. “Personal Memories of Edith Wharton.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 85 (1973): 91-104.

Waid, Candace. Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Webb, Stephen H. On God and Dogs: A Christian Theology of Compassion for Animals. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. Orig. 1934. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964.

---. “Kerfol.” Edith Wharton: Collected Stories. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001. 89-111.

---. Life and I. The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton. Vol 2. Ed. Laura Rattray. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009. 183-204.

---. “Preface to Ghosts.” Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings. Ed. Frederick Wegener. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 270-74.

---. “Quaderno dello Studente.” The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton. Vol 2. Ed. Laura Rattray. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009. 205-215.

White, Barbara. Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

Woolf, Virginia. Flush: A Biography. Introduction by Trekkie Ritchie. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

NOTES

1. Wharton was not alone in this concern. In his 1983 introduction to Flush, Virginia Woolf’s biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, Trekkie Ritchie quotes Woolf’s diary, in which she wrote of her fears that critics would call her book “‘charming,’ delicate, ladylike. And it will be popular… Now. I must not let myself believe that I’m simply a ladylike prattler” (xiii). 2. In her recent Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes, Laura Brown describes the “immoderate love” of the nineteenth-century trope of the “lady and the lapdog” (85), which had, she argues, far-

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reaching implications in that excessive love for an animal created the possibility of sympathy for oppressed peoples, including slaves (81). 3. William Tyler recounts some of her letters in which Linky, Wharton’s last Pekinese, “speaks.” In one letter, Wharton and Linky congratulate Tyler and his wife “on the immense privilege of having under your roof a member of the Imperial race;” a later letter is signed in Linky’s name (102-03). 4. See Kathy Fedorko and Jenni Dyman, among others, for readings of gender in Wharton’s ghost stories. See Candace Waid particularly on Wharton’s use of the ghost story to convey anxieties about women’s silence, 176-178. See also Richard A. Kaye for a reading of the ghost stories that addresses homosexuality. 1. For example, human names for dogs signified affection in England, but never took hold in France (Thomas 114-15). 2. The appearance of a Pekinese in the story is an anachronism, as the breed was not introduced in the West until the nineteenth century (Thomas 107). 3. Ann L. Patten offers a reading of Wharton’s early ghost stories that “relies on a definition of the uncanny as relating to cusp experiences, such as when the old value system encounters the new” (1). The same clash of values takes place in “Kerfol,” with seventeenth-century aristocratic privilege coming under scrutiny by the twentieth-century narrator. 4. As biographer R. W. B. Lewis shows, Wharton was frustrated by the Catholic Church’s refusal to grant that animals have immortal souls (Biography 160). She was not alone in her belief. Thomas argues that despite the teachings of the Church, animals had long been popularly believed to have souls or at least to have something of the “divine spark” (138). The seventeenth century saw much debate on the issue, and while many heretics declared that neither man nor beast had a soul, some religious figures argued the opposite: “In the 1770s the Calvinist divine Augustus Toplady declared that beasts had souls in the true sense, adding that he had never heard an argument against the immortality of animals which could not be equally urged against the immortality of man” (Thomas 140). 5. In 1920, Wharton published several “Lyrical Epigrams” in the Yale Review, one of which was about her dog: My little old dog: A heart-beat At my feet See Lee, 643. Although a dog at a woman’s feet is a symbol in “Kerfol,” to Wharton, having a dog at one’s feet is a moment of emotional and kinetic connection between two living creatures. 6. See Dyman 77, and White 17. 7. Percy Lubbock reveals that Gaillard Lapsley referred to Wharton’s dogs as “those damned Pekinese” (139). Lee reports that Wharton’s friendship with the young Byzantine scholar Steven Runciman may have fallen apart when he refused to pamper her dogs (707).

ABSTRACTS

Edith Wharton aimait les chiens, et elle a exprimé la force de ce sentiment dans deux passages-clés de ses écrits autobiographiques. « Kerfol » est la seule de ses œuvres publiées qui accorde une place très importante aux chiens : cette nouvelle nous invite à nous interroger sur la représentation du rapport entre l’homme et l’animal. Wharton utilise la structure du récit enchâssé pour évoquer l’histoire des relations

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entre l’homme et l’animal en Europe occidentale, qu’elle intègre à sa critique de l’oppression des femmes dans le mariage. La présence de fantômes de chiens dans cette nouvelle s’explique par la crainte de ne pas être prise au sérieux en tant qu’écrivain et neutralise les stéréotypes associés à l’amour des animaux par l’intégration du texte à la tradition fantastique. Le refus de la critique de s’intéresser aux chiens de « Kerfol » témoigne d’une incapacité à reconnaître les animaux comme sujets à part entière : la critique s’obstine à ne considérer les animaux que comme les signes d’autre chose qu’eux-mêmes. Ce n’est qu’en reconnaissant les chiens en tant que tels que le lecteur peut comprendre la profondeur de la cruauté morale dans cette nouvelle.

AUTHORS

JENNIFER HAYTOCK Jennifer Haytock is Professor of English at SUNY The College at Brockport. Her monographs include Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (2008) and At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature (2003). She has also published essays on Wharton, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara, and Ellen Glasgow.

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Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and “Pomegranate Seed”

Gina Rossetti

1 Examining Wharton’s short fiction, one attends to the complex and nuanced representations of marriage. In many ways, these representations focus on how the conventions of marriage hold female characters to standards of behavior that are not applied to male characters. In her short story “The Other Two,” (1904) the twice- divorced Alice Haskett Varick Waythorn comes to be the object of judgment, if not of scorn, because “society has not yet adapted itself to the consequences of divorce, and that till that adaptation takes place every woman who uses the freedom the law accords her must be her own social justification” (434). Alice’s third husband determines whether or not she will be accepted in society. And while her adaptability and unflappability are precisely what he finds attractive, these qualities also serve as the criteria for his judgment of her. Waythorn’s chuckle at the story’s conclusion, when all Alice’s spouses—both current and former—gather to be served, seems to suggest a new social order in which a woman’s ability to shed her past is directly related to her new husband’s ability to “discount it.”

2 Such “discounting,” while certainly laden with markers of both male privilege and condescension, appears not to be the issue at stake for the new marriage depicted in “Pomegranate Seed.” In this 1931 short story, Mrs. Kenneth Ashby’s spectral power seems to control the outcome of her husband’s second marriage. The source of that power lies in the regular letters, sent to and read by her husband only. Her will is done beyond the grave, and the letters appear to trigger the husband’s departure. While Charlotte has consented to live in her husband’s home replete with his late wife’s furnishings, Kenneth cannot “discount” his first wife’s original claim. With the myth of Persephone as a framing device, the story seems to act out two simultaneous impulses: first, Elsie’s hold suggests that Kenneth cannot shed his past and enter a new

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relationship—and the reader’s attention is repeatedly drawn to the shrine-like appearance of his home. Secondly, the invocation of Persephone suggests that the institution of marriage will be loosened, and that Kenneth will be wedded to both women. So, when both stories—“The Other Two” and “Pomegranate Seed”—are read together, the very definition of marriage is called into question.

The Ties that Bind

3 As Mary Papke argues in Verging on the Abyss, “The Other Two” fits within the context of Wharton’s “early stories [that] point to the concept of marriage as business, men as dealers in the property of women, as well as the conventional belief that a man’s status is reflected by the appearance and manner of his wife and material possessions” (116). Such an approach deftly contextualizes the short story in the early Wharton canon echoing Thorstein Veblen’s examination of women as commodities in Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen said that the “practice of seizing women from the enemy as trophies gave rise to a form of ownership-marriage, resulting in a household with a male head” (19). The wife became a trophy of male competition, and her very existence showed that she was an object of exchange, whose worth was determined by the market. In “The Other Two,” Alice is a twice-divorced mother of a twelve-year-old daughter whose value derives from Waythorn’s ability—“in the Wall Street phrase” (434)—to discount these liabilities. Or so he initially believes. Alice’s value also comes into play through Waythorn’s ability to construct her as part of his own narrative: in the story’s opening paragraphs he symbolically connects a thoroughly modern New York divorcee with the Madonna and child. As he waits for Alice, who is checking on her sick daughter, he muses that, for him, Alice’s “affection for the child had perhaps been her decisive charm” (433). This prompts him to picture her “bending over the child’s bed” and to think “how soothing her presence must be in illness: her very step would prognosticate recovery” (433). Whether Alice actually performs these duties is not known because we have access only to Waythorn’s fantasy, which initially places Alice in a maternal context. Juxtaposed to this scene, however, is one that foregrounds the characteristic Waythorn both prizes and loathes in Alice: her elasticity, or more precisely, her ability to move away from a distressing circumstance, or perhaps even from one marriage to the other without complications or visible marks of injury. Waythorn reasons that “when she had done all she could for Lily, [Alice] would not be ashamed to come down and enjoy a good dinner” (435). We never gain access to Alice’s ideas about motherhood because Waythorn controls the narrative gaze.

4 Waythorn admires his wife although “he knew what was said about her; for, popular as she was, there had always been a faint undercurrent of detraction” (434). Alice “had a way of surmounting obstacles without seeming to be aware of them, and Waythorn looked back with wonder at the trivialities over which he had worn his nerves thin” (435). This approach contains the seeds of its own contradiction. It also underscores the extent to which Alice’s “value” depends on external appraisal. In other words, stories about her previous marriages are fodder for gossip and diminish her value in view of any future marriage, thus undermining the very source of her material existence. Waythorn’s assessment of Alice’s elasticity, then, not only oversimplifies the ties that still bind her to her previous husbands, it also suggests that her value is important only if it enlarges his property holdings. Still, when Alice emerges from Lily’s room, “though

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she had put on her most engaging teagown she had neglected to assume the smile that went with it” (435). Her expression runs counter to the narrative he constructs, which prompts him to do a number of things that will diminish the value of his new possession.

5 Rather than consider that a divorce provides women with severed ties in name only, Waythorn regards the tethers that still bind Alice to Haskett and Varick as an albatross around his neck, or more precisely, as his personal ghost story. The reader learns that Waythorn “always refused to recognize unpleasant contingencies till he found himself confronted with them, and then he saw them followed by a spectral train of consequences. His next days were thus haunted” (447). While not strictly a ghost story, it is curious that in “The Other Two,” Waythorn’s response to Alice’s previous marriages is evoked in terms of the ghostly. Alice’s previous unions haunt Waythorn rather than Alice, and allow him to imagine himself as the duped party. Wharton critiques Waythorn’s assumptions and conclusions, and his later conversations with Alice become instruments for these “ghosts,” and in particular Haskett, to exert new power over her.

6 The haunted marital past is the focus of Waythorn’s concern in “The Other Two,” and the same—even more intense—feelings are depicted in “Pomegranate Seed.” This story uses the ghost story and Elsie’s seemingly powerful hold over Kenneth as an attempt to expose as unnatural the limitations imposed by conventional marriage. Wharton accomplishes this by representing the male character as the one who is trapped by his past. Using Wharton and Codman’s The Decoration of Houses (1897), I will argue that the décor of the Ashby home—and Charlotte’s adjustment to it—serves as a metaphor for the perpetuation of the past in the present and the manner in which the rules and conventions of the past remain unquestioned. In many ways, Charlotte’s “challenges” have less to do with the letters and more to do with the home itself—preserved in the manner that Elsie Ashby desired—thus preventing Charlotte from imagining a new beginning. This symbolic tie to the past plays itself out in Charlotte’s desire to solve the mystery of the author of the letters and her husband’s disappearance, and suggests the extent to which she believes problems can be identified and transcended by the application of time-tested rules. By depicting a male victim, Wharton gains greater freedom to delineate the confining nature of the conventions of marriage.

7 Wharton’s first mention of the impact of the ghostly over the living is to be found in The Decoration of Houses. In a discussion of room decoration, the authors say that “it must never be forgotten that everyone is unconsciously tyrannized over by the wants of others—the wants of dead and gone predecessors, who have an inconvenient way of thrusting their different habits and tastes across the current of later existences” (18). In “Pomegranate Seed” this problem reveals itself on two levels: first, with the preservation of the home’s out-of-date decorative style, which stands in marked contrast to the city’s modern architecture, and second, with Charlotte’s perception that the letters themselves are missives from the late Elsie Ashby that bind Kenneth to the past and prevent him from embracing the present with her. The story appears to follow the advice about front entrances offered in The Decoration of Houses: “while the main purpose of a door is to admit, its secondary purpose is to exclude.” Codman and Wharton go on to say that “the hall or vestibule from the street should clearly proclaim itself an effectual barrier. It should be strong enough to give a sense of security” (103).

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At first, the Ashby home conforms to these recommendations because it stands between Charlotte and the city: She turned her back on it standing for a moment in the old-fashioned, marble- flagged vestibule. […] the sash curtains drawn across the panes of the inner door softened the light within to a warm blur through which no details showed. […] this veiled sanctuary she called home always stirred her profoundly. (678)

8 The decoration of the entrance harks back to an earlier decade, and its emphasis on exclusion sets the stage for Charlotte’s outsider status in the Ashby home: “since the death of Kenneth’s first wife, neither the furniture nor hangings had been changed” (678). Charlotte’s friends tell her that Elsie’s ghost will continue to preside over the home and Kenneth’s heart: “he’ll never let you move an armchair or change the place of a lamp. […] and whatever you venture to do, he’ll mentally compare with what Elsie would have done in your place” (682).

9 Several salient points emerge from the juxtaposition of The Decoration of Houses and the story’s opening pages: Victorian decorative conventions are presented as a respite from the modern era’s jarring sensibilities. Both texts confirm the realities that reveal themselves to Charlotte, but a closer examination raises questions about the character’s assumptions, exposing them, and her, to critique by the reader. For while the vestibule may offer shelter to the home’s inhabitants, Wharton and Codman also argue that “the vestibule should form a natural and easy transition from the plain architecture of the street to the privacy of the interior” (104). In the short story, there is no such easy transition, suggesting the extent to which Charlotte is not simply ensnared in decorative preferences of the past, but also in the restrictive social mores of the Victorian era. While Charlotte imagines that it is the “soulless roar of New York, its devouring blaze of lights, the oppression of congested traffic, congested homes, lives and minds” (678) that threaten her existence—if not her sanity—the real danger lies in her belief that her home functions as a haven protecting her from the chaos outside: “in the very heart of the hurricane she had found her tiny islet—or thought she had” (678). And for her friends who initially counsel against marriage to a widower, “none of these forebodings had come true” (682).

10 And yet “Pomegranate Seed” is a ghost story with the second Mrs. Ashby presumably haunted by a past that terrorizes her in the present and threatens her future. While Charlotte may not believe her friends’ cautionary comments, she crafts her own ghost story, one that seemingly threatens her marital happiness. Crucial to Charlotte’s tale of a deceased wife who haunts her former husband’s new marriage is that she must possess some degree of narrative reliability. However, the evidence of Kenneth’s unfaithfulness consists only of stolen glances, hasty assumptions, and problematic interpretations of non-verbal behavior, all of which are parodied1 and reveal more about Charlotte’s inability to imagine a more modern conception of marriage than it does about Elsie’s demands on Kenneth. Charlotte sees Kenneth’s disappearance at the end of the story as irrefutable evidence that her suppositions are correct. The husband’s loss of agency and the Persephone myth paradoxically allow the story to suggest the possibility of an alternate form of marriage in which multiple partners coexist.

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Unraveling Old Entanglements

11 For readers of “The Other Two,” it is important to see that Waythorn comes to envision the ties that bind Alice to her previous husbands not only in terms of ownership and diminished value—and thus threats to his status—but also as a source of sexual anxiety. At the beginning of section two, for instance, Waythorn sees Haskett’s impending arrival at the house as a violation of his domain: “as his door closed behind him he reflected that before he opened it again it would have admitted another man who had as much right to enter it as himself, and the thought filled him with physical repugnance” (437). In his discussion of this scene, Kiran-Raw suggests that “Waythorn and Haskett’s rivalry over Alice turns into an intensely personal relationship with a homosexual undercurrent” (40). Consequently, he interprets Waythorn’s disgust as an example of same-sex erotic panic. I would contend instead that Waythorn’s disgust derives from the realization that male power and privilege imply access to his home. In this particular case, Haskett’s legal right to see Lily grants him entry into Waythorn’s life as well as into Alice’s. Haskett’s presence illustrates that other men have claims to Alice that might be exercised at any time, thus vitiating Waythorn’s authority and even his manhood. However, in a later scene, where Alice confuses her second husband’s habits with those of her third husband and adds cognac to Waythorn’s coffee, Waythorn’s authority is criticized and distanced. What is striking about the scene is not so much that Waythorn has previously observed that Varick prefers cognac with his coffee and understands whom Alice has in mind, but that the error occurs as Waythorn gloats about his appropriation of Alice: As the thought of Haskett receded, Waythorn felt himself yielding again to the joy of possessorship. They were his, those white hands with their flitting motions, his the light haze of hair, the lips and eyes . . . . She set down the coffee pot, and reaching for the decanter of cognac, measured off a liqueur glass and poured it into his cup. (440)

12 Alice’s error reminds Waythorn that she has served other men and his needs are not unique.

13 While Waythorn initially sees Haskett as an invading force, his approach to Varick differs, particularly as Varick and Waythorn “had the same social habits, spoke the same language, understood the same allusions” (444). Custody rights introduce Haskett into the Waythorn home, but chance—connected to speculation on Wall Street— accounts for Varick’s entry. Using what would now be termed insider trading information, Varick earns $100,000 from a stock “tip” and needs assistance investing the money. Because Varick cannot work with his usual broker, who is convalescing, he must seek out Waythorn’s expertise. Waythorn agrees to assist Varick because while “he did not care a farthing for the success of Varick’s venture, the honor of the office was to be considered, and he could hardly refuse to oblige his partner” (441). His meetings with Varick become opportunities for Waythorn to revise his narrative of Alice and to conclude that she has used her marriages as attempts at social-climbing. He arrives at this conclusion after hearing a chance comment made by Varick that confirms rumors Waythorn had already heard but presumably discounted, “that a lack of funds had been one of the determining causes of the Varick separation” (441). Waythorn then traces Alice’s trajectory: “he could fancy how pretty Alice must have looked, in a dress adroitly constructed from the hints of a New York fashion-paper, and how she must have looked down on the other women, chafing at her life, and secretly

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feeling that she belonged in a bigger place” (444). Alice’s desire to please becomes the instrument of her upward mobility. Interestingly, her twelve-year-old daughter is also described as “too anxious to please” and she “does not always tell the truth” (446). Her behavior appears to be inherited from her mother, thus once again legitimizing early rumors about Alice.

14 While Alice’s accommodation to each succeeding husband elicits Waythorn’s condemnation, he serves as the instrument that provides the means to make that accommodation possible. Even though Waythorn laments his hauntings by these “ghosts,” the actual spectral horror comes to be visited upon Alice—who if she is to insure her present marital happiness—must adjust to Waythorn’s demands. It is at this point in the text that the use of business language with respect to Waythorn’s marriage intensifies. In order to better rationalize Haskett’s regular presence in his home, Waythorn “had to accept him as a lien on the property” (448). The language here foregrounds Alice as a damaged commodity, encumbered by obligation and in debt to a previous owner. Waythorn appears to “buy” Alice at a loss, which turns into an attempt to re-establish his prowess by absorbing a financially risky purchase. Waythorn “compared himself to a member of a syndicate. He held so many shares in his wife’s personality and his predecessors were his partners in business” (449). So, not only is Alice used property, but Haskett and Varick are entitled to the dividends she might still yield.

15 While Alice’s former husbands trigger Waythorn’s anxiety, their presence elicits curiosity on the New York social scene. As the narrator notes, “some experimental spirits could not resist the diversion of throwing Varick and his former wife together, and there were those who thought he found a zest in the propinquity” (449). Propinquity, of course, suggests kinship as well as proximity and legitimizes Waythorn’s constant interactions with Haskett and Varick, easing Waythorn’s resistance as he too, “had drifted into a dulling propinquity with Haskett and Varick and he took refuge in the cheap revenge of satirising the situation” (450). The kinship and proximity with the former husbands allow Waythorn to re-imagine Alice’s worth on the basis of her sexual experience: “he knew exactly to what training she owed her skill. He even tried to trace the source of his obligations […] Varick’s liberal construction of the marriage bond had taught her to value the conjugal virtues; so he was directly indebted to his predecessors for the devotion which made his life easy if not inspiring” (450). The debt Waythorn values is one that presumably brings him pleasure as Alice has learned these “wifely arts.” As Papke argues, “Waythorn is continually and disconcertingly thrust into the company of the other two husbands. At first, he mentally belittles his wife for too openly appearing as used goods […]. At the conclusion, however, Waythorn has managed to rationalize a means of profit-making from his partner’s work” (116-117). This re-assessment symbolically allows Waythorn to revisit earlier manifestations of his anxiety: his “sudden exclamation” (440) when Alice adds cognac to his coffee and his jealousy about the pearl necklace Varick had given her and which “at Waythorn’s insistence had been returned before her marriage” (443). Clearly, his acceptance of Alice’s former husbands is due to the passage of time, which “dulled the irony of the situation” (450).

16 If Waythorn has adjusted, what is the meaning of his laughter at the end of the story, after each of Alice’s husbands has presented himself before her in the library? While the text provides no final explanation for Waythorn’s reaction, the laugh might be used

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as a commentary on his original aversion, recognizing that “he had fancied that a woman can shed her past like a man. But now he saw that Alice was bound to hers both by the circumstances which forced her into continued relation with it, and by the traces it had left on her nature” (449). And while he condemns Alice for these complicated and intertwined ties, they reassert themselves as that which had initially drawn him to her in the first place, thus re-establishing her worth insofar as they make her a rare commodity. She becomes a rare object, in other words, whose scarcity is the source of an increase in her value. However, the terms according to which value is determined are established by men, and it is men who do the dealing.

17 If humor reassures Waythorn that his fears are unfounded, no such enlightenment occurs for Charlotte in “Pomegranate Seed.” Nowhere is Charlotte’s insistence on the accuracy and truth of her assumptions more powerful than in the second section, where the arrival of the eighth grey letter prompts her to realize that “she knew she would have no peace till she found out what was written on that sheet” (684). Rather than open the letter, she leaves it for her husband to open while she hides in his library so she can “see what happened between him and the letter when they thought themselves unobserved” (685). By anthropomorphizing the letter, Charlotte falls back on a ready-made script of the betrayed wife, thus justifying her detective and prosecutorial techniques. With her husband’s arrival, the text continues its critique of Charlotte’s actions and her seeming inability to accurately determine what her husband does, and includes statements such as “he must have re-read [the letter] a dozen times—or so it seemed to the woman breathlessly watching him,” or with Kenneth’s back to Charlotte “he raised the letter still closer to his eyes, as though he had not fully deciphered it. Then he lowered his head, and she saw his lips touch the sheet,” and finally once face-to-face with each other, “Charlotte noticed how quickly he had regained his self-control; his profession had trained him to rapid mastery of face and voice” (686). These descriptions cast doubt on Charlotte’s actions and the conclusions she draws from them, ironically undermining the story she crafts and her ability to write, narrate, and interpret it.

18 Charlotte’s inability to interpret evidence and context intensifies during her ensuing conversation with Kenneth, which occurs in the late Mrs. Ashby’s drawing room. While Charlotte demands prompt answers to her questions, Kenneth insists that she embrace ambiguity, meeting her queries with responses like “not now—not yet” (695), which only fuel Charlotte’s “passionate need to feel herself the sovereign even of his past” (683) and compels her to insist on their leaving all persons, places, and things familiar. Rather than draw Kenneth closer to her, Charlotte’s ultimatum drives him away. That the drawing-room is the setting reinforces two points: Charlotte’s proprietary grip on Kenneth is from another era and produces suffocation and the room symbolically suggests that Kenneth is still husband to both wives.

19 Charlotte’s delusions about her own power persist in the fourth section; everything in this section underscores the extent to which Charlotte either imagines acts occurring that “prove” Kenneth’s love and faithful devotion to her only, or she receives second- hand information about Kenneth and their future. Charlotte unwittingly lays the ground-work for Kenneth’s Persephone-like departure—focusing not on his return to her at some future point in time, but emphasizing, instead, the extent to which Kenneth is permanently lost to her. Central to Charlotte’s difficulties at the end of the short story is the extent to which the letters and the reversal of the Persephone myth

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call attention to her fundamental inability to live with ambiguity. In other words, what the letters and the myth share is the recognition that language and relationships are not fixed entities but are constructions where meaning is constantly negotiated. Charlotte’s binary thought process is what also links her to her mother-in-law whose “astringent bluntness of speech responded to the forthright and simple in Charlotte’s own nature” (692). This bond solidifies early in the relationship when the elder Mrs. Ashby notices the removal of Elsie’s portrait, which leads her to praise Charlotte and reminds her not to put it back. “Two’s company,” she says (692). At the same time, both women oversimplify Elsie in their assumption that the removal of her portrait somehow negates her presence. Their joint fear of Elsie’s unseen power serves as a metaphor for their discomfort with the liminal in general: “how safe and familiar it all looked; and out there, somewhere in the uncertainty and mystery of the night, lurked the answer to the two women’s conjectures, like an indistinguishable figure prowling on the threshold” (702). It is ironic, then, that Charlotte arrives at the conclusion that the handwriting in the letter is Elsie’s at the very moment when the elder “Mrs. Ashby looked up, her eyes […] lifted to the blank wall behind her son’s writing table” (707) where Elsie’s portrait once hung. Charlotte uses the blank wall—or Elsie’s absence—to confirm her presence. This is also the case when she tries to read the ninth grey letter: Charlotte attempts to read what is not there and in doing so imposes her fears on the page, which then serves as evidence that Elsie has summoned Kenneth to her side, leaving Charlotte alone with her mother-in-law to contemplate her defeat.

20 The conclusion of the story begs the question: why is Kenneth’s departure framed in the Persephone myth? And if his departure broadens the definition of marriage, why is this act left undeveloped? Readers familiar with the myth, in which the maiden’s hunger for forbidden fruit permanently binds her to the underworld for several months of the year, will see how the myth changes in Wharton’s story: Wharton not only casts the figure as male, but also represents the departure as a matter of choice. Because Charlotte interprets events in terms of either/or, a binary thought process that the text as a whole rejects, to represent Kenneth’s departure more fully would be counter-productive. Instead, readers are literally left with his blank page in which they must negotiate the terms of this new and more open marital union. This conforms with Wharton’s vision of her ghost stories: “when I first began to write ghost stories, I was conscious of a common medium between myself and my readers […] of their meeting me half way among the primeval shadows, and filling in the gaps in my narrative with sensations and divinations akin to my own” (Ghosts viii). In their analysis of her preface, Carol Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney emphasize that Wharton “literally represents the act of reading as peering in an almost blank page, filling in gaps, absences, [and] ellipses[,] defin[ing] reading as the production of meaning rather than the discovery of truth” (189). In many ways, Charlotte’s inability to read the ninth letter “establishes it as a floating signifier, which creates shifting relationships among the characters who attempt to appropriate it and discover its meaning” (Singley and Sweeney 182). Charlotte’s ambiguity-induced anxiety leads her to re-establish her rightful place as Kenneth’s wife by following her mother-in-law’s advice to call the police. What is most telling in this final moment is the call is not placed, and any enforcement of the “law” that Charlotte seeks never occurs.

21 From the juxtaposition of “The Other Two” and “Pomegranate Seed” emerges the gradual embrace of ambiguity. As her characters negotiate and re-interpret the conventions of marriage, Wharton helps readers to examine and question them. In

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Wharton’s later story, however, this modern approach to marriage eludes Charlotte, and the reader is compelled to recognize her confinement within convention itself. Equally haunted by his spouse’s past, Waythorn emerges far more successfully than Charlotte simply because he understands that it is impossible to shed one’s past. The story’s final scene depicts Alice in communion with three husbands—none of whom claim sole possessorship—who content themselves with “shares” of Alice Haskett Varick Waythorn. In these texts and others, Wharton anticipates the modern consequences of multiple marriages, revealing that these unions—much like language itself—are predicated upon negotiation between and among the participants.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beer, Janet and Avril Horner. “ ‘This Isn’t Exactly a Ghost Story’: Edith Wharton and Parodic Gothic.” Journal of American Studies. 37:2 (August 2003): 269-285.

Kiran-Raw, Melteux. “Edith Wharton’s ‘The Other Two.’” The Explicator 68:1 (2010): 39-42.

Papke, Mary. Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton. Westport and London: Greenwood P, 1990.

Singley, Carol and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. “Forbidden Reading and Ghostly Writing: Anxious Power in Wharton’s ‘Pomegranate Seed.’” Women’s Studies 20 (1991): 177-203.

Veblen, Thorstein. Theory of the Leisure Class. 1899. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.

Waid, Candace. Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld. Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1991.

Wharton, Edith and Ogden Codman, Jr. The Decoration of Houses. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897.

Wharton, Edith. Ghosts. New York: Appleton-Century, 1937.

---. “Pomegranate Seed.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001.

---. “The Other Two.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001.

NOTES

1. For a discussion of Wharton’s appropriation of the Gothic for the purpose of parody, see Janet Beer and Avril Horner’s “ ‘This Isn’t Exactly a Ghost Story’: Edith Wharton and Parodic Gothic.” While the article does not address “Pomegranate Seed,” its invocation of Linda Hutcheon’s approach to parody is a salient point insofar as “parody can either be used at the expense of the original text’s ideology or it can hold ideology up as an ethical standard. From this point of view, parody acts as a consciousness-raising device, preventing the acceptance of the narrow, doctrinaire, dogmatic views of any particular ideological group” (280).

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ABSTRACTS

Dans les nouvelles d’Edith Wharton, la conduite des personnages féminins est soumise à des critères qui ne s’appliquent pas aux personnages masculins. Dans « The Other Two » (1904), Alice Waythorn, qui a divorcé deux fois, est l’objet d’un certain mépris. C’est le troisième mari d’Alice qui a le pouvoir de décider si elle sera ou non acceptée par la société. Si la capacité d’adaptation de sa femme est précisément ce qu’il apprécie en elle, il n’en est pas moins vrai que c’est à lui que revient le pouvoir de porter un jugement sur elle. Le sourire de Waythorn à la fin de la nouvelle laisse deviner un nouvel ordre social dans lequel la possibilité pour une femme d’oublier son passé est directement liée à la capacité qu’a ou non son mari de l’ignorer. Dans « Pomegranate Seed » (1931), Mrs. Ashby exerce son pouvoir par-delà la mort en adressant à son mari des lettres qui déterminent l’issue du deuxième mariage de Mr. Ashby. La nouvelle laisse entendre que Kenneth Ashby a du mal à se libérer de son passé pour nouer une relation nouvelle et l’invocation de Perséphone semble indiquer qu’il sera, d’une certaine manière, marié à deux femmes en même temps. C’est la définition même du mariage qui est remise en question dans ces deux récits.

AUTHORS

GINA ROSSETTI Gina M. Rossetti is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Saint Xavier University. Her expertise is in American literature after the Civil War and before World War I with a special emphasis on American literary naturalism. Professor Rossetti has published a book entitled Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature (U of Missouri, 2006), and numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews. She is an Advisory Board member for the Jack London Society and is the Area Chair for Jack London Studies at the Popular Culture Association Conference.

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A Face of One’s Own: Edith Wharton and the Portrait in her Short Fiction

Michael Pantazzi

1 The face of the young Edith Wharton is known to readers chiefly through two charming portraits by Edward Harrison May‚ showing her at age eight (National Portrait Gallery‚ Washington. D.C.) and eighteen. She was fond of both and after her marriage they hung in the hall of Pencraig Cottage along with a third portrait of her as an infant‚ now at The Mount. In 1930‚ after Wharton received the Gold Medal of the Academy and Institute of Letters‚ she gave the second May portrait to that institution.

2 Wharton’s attitude to a now lost painting‚ commissioned in 1886 by Teddy Wharton from Julian Story‚ is enlightening in regard to her thoughts about the act of portraiture. She mentioned it in the context of her discovery of Venetian furniture: “I was sitting to him one day restless‚ and desperately bored‚ for I saw the picture was going to be a failure when my eye lit on an arm-chair” (A Backward Glance‚ 101). Later‚ characters in two of her short stories also express their familiarity with the fatigue of posing. Bessy Fingall‚ in “The Temperate Zone” (1925)‚ remembers how her husband had “used to paint a thing over twenty times—or thirty‚ if necessary. It drove his sitters nearly mad. That’s why he had to wait so long for success‚ I suppose” (236); and Christine Ansley‚ in “Joy in the House” (1932)‚ reflects on her former lover: “Not that she had ever thought him a great painter—not really. . . . His portrait of her‚ for instance! Why‚ she must have sat for it sixty times—no‚ sixty-two; she’d counted. . . . Hours and hours of stiff neck and petrified joints” (633). Julian Story’s portrait of Wharton—the “failure”—was nevertheless used for publicity purposes‚ until the then famous author wrote to her editor at Scribner’s in 1903‚ “I hate to be photographed because the results are so trying to my vanity; but I would do anything to obliterate the Creole Lady who has been masquerading in the papers under my name” (“To William Crary Brownell.” 14 February 1902. Letters 57-58).1 And that same year‚ in another short story‚ “Expiation” (1903)‚ Wharton ascribed her feelings to Paula Fetherel who says‚ “They’ve no right to use my picture as a poster!” (492). So Story’s portrait was used— with his written endorsement printed with the image—as long as it was useful: in 1899‚ Story was better known than Wharton‚ but by 1903‚ the situation was reversed.

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Wharton and the History of Art

3 The presence of works of art in Wharton’s stories is clearly the result of her experience. Her travels were of primary importance‚ as were the books she read. Her considerable erudition instils her prose as a matter of course. The names of old masters are casually introduced as points of reference for her readers. Annette Birkton in “That Good May Come” (1894) has a face that has grown as “serene as that of some young seraph of Van Eyck’s” (29); elsewhere‚ analogy is intended to be misleading: the manipulative bride of “In Trust” (1906) is said to have “a little ethereal profile‚ like one of Piero della Francesca’s angels” (620). In any case‚ Wharton’s way of seeing in everyday life clearly depended both on her intimate knowledge of particular works of art and her familiarity with contemporary criticism. In A Backward Glance‚ she refers to pictures to evoke friends: Robert S. Minturn2 is described as a “grave young man whose pensive dusky head was so like that of a Titian portrait” (156)‚ while Edward Robinson3 “might almost have sat for the portrait of a Teutonic Gelehrter” (158).

4 One of the earlier stories‚ “The Duchess at Prayer” (1900) was probably sparked by John Addington Symonds’s Renaissance in Italy of 1887‚ which also inspired her unpublished poem “The Duchess of Palliano” [sic]‚ two related unpublished poems‚ “Lucrezia Buonvisi Remembers” and “Lucrezia Buonvisi’s Lover (Dying at Viareggio)‚” as well as “Kerfol‚” and the unfinished “Beatrice Palmato.”4 The historical Violante‚ Duchess of Paliano‚ was the wife of Giovanni Carafa who suspected her of adultery with his nephew‚ Marcello Capece. Carafa incarcerated Violante. Capece‚ who at first denied adultery‚ then confessed under torture and was killed by Carafa. The Duchess asserted her innocence but, shortly after the death of Carafa’s uncle, Pope Paul IV, she was strangled on her husband’s orders by her own brother and uncle during the night of 28-29 August 1559. Subsequently‚ Pope Pius IV tried and executed Carafa‚ as well as his brother and Violante’s two relatives. Wharton set her story in the Veneto‚ almost certainly in the Villa Rotonda‚ near Vicenza‚ to which she ascribed the pseudo- historical lore associated with the Villa Foscari‚ known as “La Malcontenta” and abandoned in Wharton’s time.5 As an undocumented legend has it‚ the original “Malcontenta” was Elisabetta Foscari‚ who‚ following a marital indiscretion‚ was shut up there for the last three years of her life. It is easy to imagine the Whartons visiting the villa and being told the story by the village custodian.

5 In the “The Duchess at Prayer‚” a visitor to an empty villa is shown the apartments of Violante‚ Duke Ercole II’s first wife. The old guide improbably claims that his grandmother‚ when a child‚ was present at events that took place over two centuries earlier. The characters are introduced through their portraits: first Ercole by Bernardo Strozzi‚6 followed by that of Violante. The visitor has the impression she smiles at him but nothing is made of this.7 In the chapel‚ Violante’s funerary monument‚ by Bernini‚ with a face distorted by an expression of horror‚ is revealed.8 This elicits Violante’s story: a transgression leading to her exile‚ then suspected adultery with the Duke’s cousin‚ Ascanio; finally‚ the Duke’s unexpected return with Bernini’s premature effigy‚ derived from a portrait by Elisabetta Sirani.9 The Bernini is placed above the crypt‚ containing the relic St. Blandina‚ where Ascanio is supposedly hidden. During the dinner that follows, Violante is murdered with poisoned wine and the next night the custodian’s grandmother witnesses the unfathomable vivification of Violante’s marble

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face. The Duke remarries a year later‚ his second wife giving him an heir and five daughters.

6 The story is odd inasmuch as the custodian’s narrative‚ intended to show that Violante is guilty‚ is contradicted by various signifiers. Violante owns a marble Daphne‚ premonitory of her metamorphosis‚ but also signaling her chastity. There is‚ as well‚ the unusual introduction of Elisabetta Sirani who notoriously died poisoned by a resentful servant not unlike Violante’s chaplain. Even more curious is the use of St. Blandina of Lyons‚ a patron saint of the falsely accused. Wharton almost certainly first thought of the more famous protector‚ St. Margaret of Cortona‚ the subject of her poem of 1901‚ whose cult‚ however‚ was approved only after the period of her story. The final revelation about the Duke’s second wife suggests that Violante’s elimination was a forgone conclusion.

7 Something of the genesis and development of Wharton’s method can be seen in “The Confessional” (1901)‚ which shares with “The Duchess at Prayer” an Italian background‚ a dynastic dilemma‚ a family chapel and the metaphoric transformation of a woman into a living statue. The story concerns the consequences of Faustina Intelvi’s confession to her husband‚ count Roberto Siviano. She has been accused of adultery by his brother‚ Andrea‚ who stands to inherit if Roberto produces no legitimate offspring. The narrative is straightforward though enhanced with references to art extraneous to the story. The young Roberto has features resembling those of Robert S. Minturn‚ “a melancholy musing face such as you may see in some of Titian’s portraits of young men” (322). The Siviano own a disputed Leonardo and a tomb by Bambaja10—veiled references to the Arconati-Visconti collections11—while in the parish church there is a St. Sebastian‚ also used to describe Ascanio in “The Duchess at Prayer‚” and mentioned in Italian Backgrounds (1905).

8 Another—questionable—Leonardo is central to “The House of the Dead Hand” (1904). Dr. Lombard‚ who found the painting in Bergamo‚ has forced his daughter‚ Sybilla‚ to purchase it‚ and keeps both daughter and picture as virtual prisoners. Wyant‚ the narrator‚ is on an errand: a Leonardo specialist‚ professor Clyde‚ wants to obtain a photograph of the painting. Few have seen it and Dr. Lombard refuses to have it photographed or sketched. According to Wyant’s account‚ the work‚ which is inscribed “Lux Mundi‚” is an extravagant portrait or allegory of a woman with a crucified Christ‚ a Dionysus‚ and various incomprehensible symbols. The description is reminiscent of Cassandra Sacrobosco who makes an appearance in Dimitri Merejkowsky’s best-selling Romance of Leonardo da Vinci (1902)‚ which Wharton almost certainly read. In Merejkowsky’s fictional biography of Leonardo‚ the learned Cassandra is a sorceress and the creator of a new religion—for “the children of Light”—in which Christ and Dionysus merge (292‚ 295).

9 Scholars have studied the fictitious painting for possible meanings in regard to Sybilla. 12 As in “The Duchess at Prayer‚” the seeds of doubt pierce through the textual surface. Wyant notices that the female figure echoes Dosso Dossi’s Circe (now called Melissa‚ and in the Borghese Gallery in Rome). The Dionysus who pours wine from a high-poised flagon actually replicates the youth in Pagan Sacrifice (now in the National Gallery‚ London) by Garofalo‚ a Dosso associate. Wharton was visually astute: when she re- contextualizes an image there is always a point. The cumulative intimations in the story suggest that the painting is not by Leonardo and this implication heightens the irony of Sybilla’s plight. Certainly‚ when she placed works of art in her stories‚

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Wharton usually referred to artists well known to the public who read periodicals such as Scribner’s and Harper’s in which she published.

10 Wharton’s Leonardo plot was probably also connected to a contemporary controversy.13 Donna Laura Minghetti‚ the widow of an Italian statesman‚ owned a portrait said to be by Leonardo and inherited from Giovanni Morelli’s collection in Bergamo. The picture was unpublished and no photographs were permitted. Nevertheless‚ it had been seen by visitors‚ among them Wharton’s friend Paul Bourget. When it was sold in 1898‚ the work was examined in Paris and London‚ and mostly negative opinions were expressed: the painting was not by Leonardo. The incident served as the donnée for Bourget’s story “La Dame qui a perdu son peintre”‚ published in 1910, yet it seems that Wharton was the first author to draw from it.

11 A second story inspired by Symonds is “Kerfol‚” loosely indebted to a murder case in Lucca. Lucrezia Malpigli was compelled to marry Lelio Buonvisi from Lucca, but a suitor from Ferrara‚ Massimiliano Arnolfini‚ followed her‚ and he and Lucrezia were suspected of adultery. On 1 June 1593‚ as she and her husband were leaving mass‚ Buonvisi was murdered‚ and the bravi who attacked him admitted under torture that they had been hired by Arnolfini. Before legal action was taken‚ Lucrezia found immunity in a convent and the court case proceeded without her and without Arnolfini‚ who had fled. The case was later reopened after accusations of impropriety‚ and Lucrezia was stripped of her veil and immured for seven years. Wharton retained elements of Lucrezia’s story in “Kerfol‚” displacing the setting to a castle in Brittany and fleshing out the characters differently. A sadistic husband‚ Yves de Cornault‚ suspects his wife of adultery with a meek young neighbour‚ Hervé de Lanrivain‚ whom she met at a religious function. The wife‚ Anne de Barrigan‚ has intimations of her end when Yves finds her with the Chinese dog he had given her lying on the bed at her feet. He tells her she looks like his grandmother’s funerary effigy. Her position‚ in other words‚ is one that resembles that of figures used for tombs in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It also links her to Ilaria Giunigi’s tomb in Lucca‚ the subject of an earlier poem by Wharton—Ilaria has a dog at her feet looking—like Anne’s dog—oddly Chinese. Yves strangles the dog‚ but before he can harm Anne‚ ghostly dogs kill him. Anne‚ not quite acquitted for murder‚ spends the remainder of her life shut in a cell in the castle while Hervé finds refuge in Holy Orders.

Portraits as Signals

12 The historical part of “Kerfol” opens with a description of a red crayon portrait of Anne. No true personality emerges from it‚ while a brief account of the portrait of Hervé is as colourless as his presence in the story. These two images raise the question of how Wharton uses portraits to project a personality. The matter is tellingly expressed in an episode of “Coming Home” (1915) in which Wharton directly addresses the issue of the self in an image. The scene concerns a group of photographs shown to the narrator—“A charming-looking family‚ distinguished and amiable; but‚ all‚ except the grandmother‚ rather usual. The kind of people that come in sets.” When shown a photograph of Yvonne Malo‚ who becomes the central character of the story‚ the narrator observes: “That girl had a face of her own! [...] a type so different from the others that I found myself staring” (28-29). The postulate about the possibility of having a face of one’s own‚ a discernible character—as opposed to belonging to a

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generic visual and psychological type—had been raised earlier by Wharton. In “The Portrait” (1899)‚ Mrs. Mellish says to the painter George Lillo‚ “Ah‚ in some cases I can imagine it’s impossible to seize the type [...] Some people are like daguerreotypes; in certain lights one can’t see them at all” (28). Certain faces‚ those of Mrs. Gisburn in “The Verdict” (1908) or Paulina Reardon in “The Long Run” (1912)‚ don’t quite register in the mind of the viewer. And in “Bewitched” (1925)‚ the narrator concludes that “It was doubtful‚ indeed‚ if anything unwonted could be made to show in Prudence Routledge’s face‚ so limited was its scope‚ so fixed were its features” (348-349). Some faces‚ then‚ are unmemorable‚ which is not the fault of the viewer—almost always a man in Wharton’s stories.

13 Portraits figure quite largely in several other stories. Usually they establish a visual connection‚ or contain information necessary to the plot. But they are always introduced at pivotal moments. In “The Lamp of Psyche” (1893)‚ the miniature portrait of a war hero serves as catalyst for a long unasked question: what was her husband doing during the Civil War‚ Delia Corbett finally asks. In “The Pretext” (1908)‚ a photograph is the first signal to unweave the protagonist’s unreciprocated love for a venal young man. And the fading photograph of a great pianist‚ along with some letters‚ inspires Ronald Grew‚ in “His Father’s Son” (1909)‚ with the idea that the pianist is perhaps his father‚ a more appealing prospect than that provided by his real father‚ the hopelessly romantic owner of Grews Secure Suspender Buckle. In the “The Touchstone” (1900)‚ two photographs symbolically frame the narrative of a man who has lost his moral compass. They portray the late Margaret Aubyn‚ a famous author who loved him‚ and Alexa Trent‚ the woman he will marry with the profits from the publication of Mrs. Aubyn’s love letters. The portraits of Lord Thudeney and of his unfortunate wife whom he kept prisoner‚ lead the protagonist in “Mr. Jones” (1928) to a process of inquiry and discovery. Then there are old portraits, in Mrs. Brympton’s house in “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” (1902), and many more triple-stacked ancestors in “The Angel at the Grave” (1901)‚ including the fading picture of the divinity of the house‚ Dr. Anson‚ above the fire-place.

14 Wharton sometimes used portraits to establish a genetic map within certain social circumstances. In “Madame de Treymes” (1905)‚ on entering a salon in Paris‚ Jack Durham recognizes Christiane de Treymes’s profile in the portrait of a powdered ancestress‚ just as in the The Valley of Decision (1902) Odo sees himself and his cousin in the portrait of the first Duke of Pianura’s by Piero della Francesca (vol. I 249). The hereditary motif reappears in the late story “Duration” (1936)‚ set in Boston‚ where the narrator notices with pleasure how “the Copley portraits looked down familiarly from the walls” on their modern‚ live replicas (786). Lineage‚ in other words‚ not only perpetuates itself‚ but does so visibly‚ making physical—and perhaps psychological— traits recognizable in the past.

15 A portrait is also the focus of “The Moving Finger” (1901) but the story says less about painting than about the effect of a form of obsession. There are three protagonists‚ Ralph Grancy‚ his friend the painter Claydon‚ and Grancy’s second wife. Both men are assertive. Mrs. Grancy‚ a silent figure‚ is said to come to life only in her husband’s presence. Claydon is asked to paint her. The portrait is never described and the reader is never told what Mrs. Grancy looks like, but learns simply that she is “extraordinary.” Like Wharton’s other usually passive sitters‚ Mrs. Grancy breaks her silence only to remark that she is represented facing east. The portrait is recognized as Claydon’s

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masterpiece though acquaintances “smiled and said it was flattered” (309). Three years later‚ Mrs. Grancy dies. After an absence of several years‚ Ralph Grancy has the feeling that the portrait no longer recognizes him because he has grown older‚ and he asks Claydon to age the figure too. Several transformations follow until the confusions between Mrs. Grancy and her simulacrum accumulate. The portrait is assumed to have an existence of its own. When Ralph is ill‚ the eyes of the portrait are said by all to predict his death. When Ralph dies‚ Claydon says: “You think I killed Grancy […] I swear it was her face that told me he was dying‚ and that she wanted him to know it! She had a message for him and she made me deliver it” (321-322). The portrait then reverts to Claydon‚ who restores it to its original form. He admits he was in love with Mrs. Grancy and adds “you don’t know how much of a woman belongs to you after you’ve painted her!” (321). Contrary to Pygmalion‚ Claydon says he turned a real woman into a picture while Ralph turned the picture into what he thought was a real woman.

Wharton and the Modern Art World

16 Another group of stories is no longer informed by older art‚ but addresses modern issues. Wharton’s stories about modern painters form a fairly homogeneous group. The artist is usually the focal point. Several stories are cynically accurate about the condition of the portrait painter‚ and leave little doubt about the possibility of an artist retaining his integrity within the higher reaches of the society that pays him. Wharton was fully aware that flattery was an important ingredient in the relationship between artist and client: Ned Stanwell‚ in “The Pot-Boiler” (1904) aptly sums up the recipe: “The pearls and the eyes very large—the hands and feet very small” (668). In both “The Verdict” and “The Pot-Boiler‚” Wharton holds dealers and women responsible for encouraging what she despised most—second-rate work. In the first‚ the narrator remarks that the artist‚ “all his life‚ had been surrounded by interesting women: they had fostered his art‚ it had been reared in the hot-house of their adulation. And it was therefore instructive to note what effect the ‘deadening atmosphere of mediocrity’ […] was having on him” (656). In “The Pot-Boiler‚” a dealer tells Stanwell: “You’ve attracted Mrs. Millington’s notice‚ and vonce you’re hung in dat new ball-room—dat’s vere she vants you‚ in a big gold panel—vonce you’re dere‚ vy‚ you’ll be like the Pianola—no home gompleat without you” (667-668).

17 In “The Portrait‚” an early story about the modern art world‚ a successful American artist living in Paris has an exhibition in New York‚ his first in a dozen years. George Lillo’s sitters fear him. As Mrs. Mellish‚ who would not sit to him‚ explains‚ “he is no more to blame than a mirror. Your other painters do the surface—he does the depths; they paint the ripples on the pond‚ he drags the bottom” (174). Lillo is the only painter in the stories examined who paints male portraits. When young and eager to make a splash‚ he set his eyes on Alonzo Vard‚ a spectacular-looking unscrupulous businessman who agrees to sit to him. Vard has a daughter who idolizes him. During the sittings‚ Lillo discovers that Vard is a small-minded man who offers him no inspiration‚ but he continues with the painting in order not to disappoint Vard’s daughter. When Vard has to flee justice‚ the portrait—a failure—is finished in his absence. Inexplicably‚ Lillo places the Vard portrait at the centre of the exhibition he opens twelve years later‚ where it is revealed to all as a failure. Just as inexplicably‚ Vard commits suicide on the opening day.

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18 Lillo has a rival‚ Cumberton‚ the author of innocuous pastels. This polarity‚ touched on in “The Portrait‚” is enlarged upon in “The Pot-Boiler‚” in which an aspiring artist‚ Ned Stanwell‚ is pitted against the fashionable but despised painter Mungold. Mungold and Stanwell also compete for Kate Arran. When offered a commission to paint a society hostess‚ Stanwell gives in to temptation. His painting is a social success and more commissions follow but he gets hold of himself and refuses further offers. His transient moral failure‚ however‚ is held against him by Kate who marries Mungold. In the “The Verdict‚” Wharton exploited the possibility of an intelligent Mungold as it were—one who has a moment of self-awareness. Owing to his eminence‚ Jack Gisburn is asked to paint the portrait of a dead painter‚ the mediocre Stroud. As he begins the task he notices a wonderful sketch by Stroud which suddenly reveals to him his own limitations. He recommends another artist to do the portrait—Grindle‚ whose career is thus launched. Gisburn‚ who is at the height of his fame‚ ceases to paint‚ marries a rich widow‚ and retires to the Riviera. So “The Verdict” is the story of the descent of one artistic “cheap genius” and the ascent of another around a corpse‚ and in the presence of their wives (one “not interesting‚” the other “an awful simpleton”).

19 Horace Fingall‚ the painter in “The Temperate Zone‚” has been dead for some years when the story opens and is brought to light through the lens of the narrator‚ a would- be biographer‚ a gossipy aristocratic sitter‚ and a poet. Emily Morland‚ now also dead‚ inspired Fingall’s work as he inspired hers. His mercantile‚ alluring widow‚ originally Bessy Reck‚ has married Donald Paul‚ Morland’s last love and heir. Bessy was the subject of Fingall’s most famous picture‚ purchased by the Luxembourg Museum. But celebrity comes only with death. The plot includes interesting sidelights on what happens to an artist’s estate. There is a colourful cameo of a spiteful society painter‚ André Jolyesse‚ who is able to say‚ “My full-lengths are fifty thousand francs now—to Americans” (220).

20 Painters’ lives‚ in Wharton’s stories‚ with a few exceptions‚ turn around the question of fame. Some like Fingall‚ or Lillo‚ or Jeff Lithgow in “Joy in the House,” or Vincent Deering in “The Letters” (1910), settle in Paris. Bessy Reck‚ the only woman painter in the stories‚ leaves a miserable existence behind to marry Fingall. Society painters‚ whose ephemeral fortunes depend on fashion‚ are rendered with tragicomic effect. The narrator of “The Verdict” remarks that “Victor Grindle was‚ in fact‚ becoming the man of the moment—as Jack [Gisburn] himself‚ one might put it‚ had been the man of the hour” (657). And Axel Svengaart‚ in “Charm Incorporated” (1934)‚ insists on painting his clients against the background of their sources of income‚ “one lady getting out of her car in front of her husband’s motor works‚ and Mrs. Guggins against the spouting oil well of Rapid Rise” (669). Svengaart is in New York to “do” only “a chosen half- dozen sitters” and charges fifteen thousand dollars for a three-quarter length (671). The choice or refusal of a painter is mostly dictated by fashion. Nowhere is this more evident than in Jack Gisburn’s remark in “The Verdict” about Mrs. Stroud’s request for her husband’s portrait: “Stroud’s career of failure being crowned by the glory of my painting him!” (661).

21 In the background are reminders of the living conditions of artists. Stanwell’s studio is “bare and gaunt‚ with blotched walls and a stained uneven floor” (“The Pot-Boiler” 663); Mungold’s is like a “manicure parlour” (664). Horace Fingalls’s rooms reflect a “scornful bareness” with “rough paint-stained floors” in “The Temperate Zone” (235). Lady Brankhurst‚ a partial observer, remembered them while occupied as “very

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picturesque‚ but one did smell the drains. I used always to take my salts with me; and the stairs were pitch-black” (212). In contrast‚ Claydon’s studio in “The Moving Finger” is a “long tapestried room with a curtained archway at one end. The curtains were looped back‚ showing a smaller apartment‚ with books and flowers and a few fine bits of bronze and porcelain” (320).

22 A question arises as to how well Wharton knew the art scene and borrowed from actual painters. Her group of artist friends was small. She knew Walter Gay and Jacques-Emile Blanche best‚ neither of them likely candidates as the originals of characters in her stories. The few known portrait drawings by Wharton herself show she emulated the work of Paul Helleu‚ whom she certainly knew and who was one of Proust’s models for the painter Elstir in A la Recherche du temps perdu. Julian Story is insufficiently known to allow for conclusive remarks but the stormy part of his life took place after 1909. Andres Zorn‚ the Swedish painter‚ who painted portraits of Isabella Stewart Gardner and three Presidents of the United States‚ perhaps inspired Wharton’s imaginary Norwegian‚ Axel Svengaart. As for Sargent‚ Wharton met him only in 1899 but of course knew him by reputation and Barry Maine has suggested that she had him in mind when creating George Lillo in 1899 (7-14).

23 Sargent in fact makes an appearance in “The Pot-Boiler,” where the dealer Shepson explains that his sitters allow him to take liberties “because it’s like being punched in the ribs by a King”; any other painter, however, is expected to make them look “as sweet as an obituary” (667). Wharton herself was to experience this delicate balance between artist and client in connection with two portraits of Henry James she commissioned. The first, by Jacques-Emile Blanche, was finished in 1908 and thought by the conservative Henry Adams “a rather brutal, Sargenty portrait” (Adams 146). It was purchased instead by an American collector who donated it to The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.. In 1912, Wharton turned down a second portrait of James commissioned from Sargent himself. Deemed a “failure,” it was given by the artist to the Royal Collections in honour of James.

24 Among secondary figures one might retain two friends. Robert Norton‚ a largely self- taught painter‚ less idle than he seemed‚ and the author of Painting in East and West‚ published in 1913‚ was very close to Wharton who owned some of his works. Georges Rodier (who barely registers in Wharton studies)‚ was an artist in early life14 and published L’Orient : Journal d’un peintre in 1889. In the early 1900s he frequented the salon of Madeleine Lemaire. Proust‚ who met him there‚ partly based the character of Legrandin in A la Recherche on him. In 1916‚ Rodier became Wharton’s right hand man in her war work. At the time‚ Jacques-Emile Blanche wrote to Cocteau: “Mariage possible‚ très annoncé‚ d’Edith Wharton et de Rodier. Je n’y crois pas” (Blanche 67). He was a source of information on varied subjects‚ from Chinese art to fashion‚ but it seems unlikely that he provided her with material for her later “artist” short stories. Another‚ secondary‚ figure proved contentious when Wharton published “The Verdict.” Wharton’s friends Egerton Winthrop and Lucy Hewitt thought they recognized Ralph Curtis as the model for Jack Gisburn and immediately alerted him. Unfortunately for all concerned‚ Curtis was a friend of Teddy Wharton’s and of almost everyone Wharton knew. It was the sort of incident she had written about lightly in “That Good May Come,” but this time it was real. The degree to which the Curtises resented the story is evident in the correspondence. An attempt many years later by Ralph Curtis to mend fences remained unresolved.15

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25 Portraits of the past cannot be compared to their originals‚ which leaves a degree of interpretive free play to the imagination. A.S. Byatt has discussed the question in depth in Portraits in Fiction. Imaginary painted portraits in fiction‚ however‚ are mental constructs, which can be carried in any direction an author wishes. As such‚ they have to be enjoyed on their own terms. Let the author lead the brush and so adopt Baudelaire’s useful dictum that “there are two ways of understanding portraiture— either as history or as fiction” (88).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams‚ Henry. The Letters of Henry Adams. Ed J.C. Levenson‚ Ernest Samuels‚ Charles Vandersee‚ and Viola Hopkins Winner. vol. VI‚ 1892-1918. Cambridge‚ Mass.: Belknap‚ 1988.

Baudelaire‚ Charles. “Salon of 1846‚” Art in Paris‚ 1845-1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions. Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire. Trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne‚ Oxford: Phaidon‚ 1965.

Benstock‚ Shari‚ No Gifts from Chance. A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribner‚ 1994.

Blanche‚ Jacques-Émile‚ and Jean Cocteau. Correspondance. Ed. Maryse Renault-Garneau. Paris: La Table Ronde‚ 1993.

Byatt‚ Antonia S. Portraits in Fiction. London: Chatto & Windus‚ 2001.

Carpenter‚ Lynette. “Deadly Letters‚ Sexual Politics and the Dilemma of the Woman Writer: Edith Wharton’s ‘The House of the Dead Hand’‚” American Literary Realism 24: 2 (1992): 55-69.

Lingner‚ Richard. “‘A most singular and entertaining couple’; Daniel and Ariana Curtis in Boston and Venice‚” in Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle. Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum‚ 2004. 53-86.

Maine‚ Barry‚ “Reading ‘The Portrait’: Edith Wharton and John Singer Sargent‚” Edith Wharton Review‚ XVIII: 1 (2002): 7-14.

Merejkowsky‚ Dimitry. The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci: The Forerunner. New York: Putnam‚ 1902.

Orlando‚ Emily J. Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P‚ 2007.

Pantazzi‚ Sybille‚ “The Donna Laura Minghetti Leonardo. An International Mystification.” English Miscellany‚ 16 (1965): 321-348.

Symonds‚ John Addington‚ Renaissance in Italy: The Catholic Reaction. pt. I. New York: Holt‚ 1887.

Wharton‚ Edith. A Backward Glance‚ New York: Appleton-Century‚ 1934.

---. “Afterward.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America‚ 2001. 830-860.

---. “Bewitched.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America‚ 2001. 347-368.

---. “Charm Incorporated.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 653-677.

---. “Coming Home.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 26-58.

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---. “Duration‚” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 782-797.

---. “Expiation.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 476-498.

---. “His Father’s Son.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 714-714.

---. “In Trust.” The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Ed. R.W.B. Lewis. Vol I. New York: Scribner‚ 1987. 616-631.

---. Italian Villas and their Gardens‚ New York: Century‚ 1904.

---. “Joy in the House.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 632-652.

---. “Kerfol.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 89-111.

---. “Madame de Treymes.” The Descent of Man / Madame de Treymes. New York: Scribner‚ 1914. 315-395.

---. “Mr. Jones.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 497-523.

---. My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann. Ed. Irene Goldman-Price. New Haven: Yale UP 2012.

---. “That Good May Come.” The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Vol I. New York: Scribner‚ 1987. 21-41.

--- “The Angel at the Grave.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 254-271.

---. “The Confessional.” The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Vol I. New York: Scribner‚ 1987. 314-343.

---. “The Duchess at Prayer.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 234-253.

---. “The House of the Dead Hand.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 520-547.

---. “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 499-519.

---. “The Lamp of Psyche.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 23-41.

---. “The Letters.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 861-897.

---. The Letters of Edith Wharton. Ed. R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis‚ New York‚ Scribner‚ 1988.

---. “The Long Run.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. 112-140.

---. “The Moving Finger.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 307-322.

---. “The Portrait.” The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Vol I. New York: Scribner‚ 1987.173-186.

---. “The Pot-Boiler.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 662-688.

---. “The Pretext.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 633-661.

---. “The Temperate Zone.” Here and Beyond. Toronto: McLeod, 1926.

---. “The Touchstone.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. 162-233.

---. The Valley of Decision. New York: Scribner‚ 1902‚ 2 vols.

---. “The Verdict.” The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Vol I. New York: Scribner‚ 1987. 655-662.

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NOTES

1. See also Benstock 63 and 483 n25. 2. Robert Shaw Minturn (1863-1918)‚ erudite Harvard graduate‚ businessman‚ philanthropist and collector‚ an early mentor of Edith Wharton. 3. Edward Robinson (1858-1931)‚ historian of classical art‚ director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1902-1905)‚ then assistant director (1905-1910) and director (1910-1931) of the Metropolitan Museum of Art‚ New York. 4. In Symonds‚ see “Lucrezia Buonvisi” 330-345‚ “The Cenci” 345-353‚ and “The Duchess of Palliano [sic]” 372-380. 5. Both villas are described in Wharton’s Italian Villas and their Gardens 245-49. The Villa Rotonda overlooks Vicenza like the villa of the story. Villa Foscari is on the Brenta‚ near Venice. 6. Bernardo Strozzi‚ known as “Il prete Genovese” [The Genoese Priest] (c.1581-1644)‚ important painter from Genoa who took holy orders and established himself in Venice in 1631. 7. In “The Moving Finger”‚ written a few months later‚ Wharton used the same device with Mrs. Grancy’s portrait. 8. Emily J. Orlando has shown that Wharton’s source for Violante’s monument was Bernini’s Anima Dannata; see Orlando 49. 9. Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665)‚ celebrated Bolognese painter of religious paintings and biblical heroines. Recently‚ her early death‚ deemed to have been murder‚ has been attributed to medical causes. 10. Agostino Busti‚ called Bambaja (1483-1548)‚ Milanese sculptor known mainly for his famous tomb of Gaston de Foix in the Castello Sforzesco‚ Milan. 11. The Arconati-Visconti were prominent in the political history of Lombardy. The best known objects of the family collection were Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus‚ given in 1636 by Galeazzo Arconati Visconti to the Ambrosiana Library in Milan‚ and the carved fragments of Bambaja’s mausoleum of Gaston de Foix‚ purchased by the city of Milan in 1990. 12. See‚ for example Carpenter 62 and 64‚ and Orlando 141-142. 13. For the controversy and its literary posterity‚ see Pantazzi 321-348. 14. A letter from Rodier of 1915 is in the Bahlman Papers‚ Beineke Library‚ Yale‚ YCAL MSS 361‚ Series I‚ Correspondence‚ 1-17‚ and Wharton mentions him in her letters‚ for which see My Dear Governess 242‚ 251‚ 258‚ 263 and 271. 15. See Adams 152 and 169. “To Elizabeth Cameron,” 9 June 1908 and 7 August 1908; and Lingner 74-75.

ABSTRACTS

L’intérêt d’Edith Wharton pour l’art en général est bien connu. Son attitude envers le portrait a été moins étudiée. Riches en exemples, les nouvelles de l’écrivain mettent en jeu une grande variété de représentations figuratives, du portrait symbolique ou mystérieusement animé au portrait mondain ou photographique. L’idée du portrait en tant que dénominateur social est souvent présente et le regard porté par Wharton sur le portrait moderne est fréquemment critique et ironique. De façon assez curieuse, elle pose aussi la question des visages mal individualisés, ce qui met en cause la possibilité de la représentation et l’idée même du “je” du portrait.

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AUTHORS

MICHAEL PANTAZZI Michael Pantazzi was Curator of European and American art at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1979-2006, a Fellow of the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 1988, and Guest Curator, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2007-2009. He curated or co-curated several international exhibitions among which Degas (Paris-New-York-Ottawa, 1988; Canberra, 2008); Egyptomania (Paris-Ottawa-Vienna, 1994-95); Corot (Paris-New-York, Ottawa, 1996-97; Tokyo-Kobe, 2008; Verona, 2009-10) and Daumier (Paris-Ottawa-Washington, 1999-2000, London, 2013). Latterly he contributed to the exhibitions Drawn to Art (Ottawa, Caen, 2010-11) and Daumier: The Heroism of Modern Life (London, 2013). He has published a number of catalogues and articles and taught at York University in Toronto, and Carleton University in Ottawa.

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The Art of Irresolution in Edith Wharton’s “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell”

Brigitte Zaugg

1 In the review she wrote on the occasion of the publication of the French translation of Edith Wharton’s ghost stories, in 2001, Florianne Vidal places the tales in “a typically anglosaxon fantastic tradition,” adding that they are, however, far from “Mathurin’s or Lewis’s macabre horror, or Edgar Poe’s very dark humor.” Wharton, who in The Writing of Fiction (1924) expresses her admiration for the mastery with which Scott, Hawthorne and Poe handled the supernatural in their short fiction,1 acknowledges in the preface to her collection Ghosts, published posthumously in 1937, the influences that “stimulated [her] to make the experiment” of writing ghost stories: The earliest, I believe, was Stevenson, with “Thrawn Janet” and “Markheim”; two remarkable ghost stories, though far from the high level of such wizards as Sheridan Le Fanu and Fitz James O’Brien. I doubt if these have ever been surpassed, though Marion Crawford’s isolated effort, “The Upper Berth,” comes very near to the crawling horror of O’Brien’s “What Is [sic] It?” (Preface to Ghosts, xi)2

2 In the preface, Wharton also cites Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” which, “For imaginative handling of the supernatural no one [...] has touched” (xi), and in the dedication puts her “spectral strap-hangers” “under the special protection of the only modern ghost-evoker whom [she] place[s] in the first rank” (xi), Walter de la Mare.

3 Ten of the eleven stories collected in Ghosts3 had already been published in magazines, the only exception being “All Souls’,”4 which Wharton sent to her agent only a few months before her death in 1937. The collection includes the author’s first attempt at a ghost story, “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” published in Scribner’s in November 1902 and later included in The Descent of Man (1904). This early tale demonstrates that Wharton had extracted from her readings of supernatural tales the devices that must be activated if a shiver is to be sent down the reader’s spine, and how proficient she was at using them in her own writing. Indeed, Wharton structures her story on gaps, absences, deferral of meaning, implication and innuendo, and “marshalls for her own purposes other techniques developed by masters of supernatural fiction,” in particular “the

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confused or unaware single consciousness as narrator or register [...], and James’s process of adumbration” (Dyman 7).

4 The story is organized in four sections of unequal length and is told in the first person. Alice Hartley, the narrator, recounts her experience at Brympton Place, an isolated country estate on the Hudson, where she has been hired as a lady’s maid. On the day of her arrival, as the housemaid, Agnes, leads her to her room in the servants’ wing, she is intrigued by “a thin woman with a white face, and a dark gown and apron” (501) that she passes in the corridor; the woman does not speak and Agnes does not seem to see her. Hartley soon notices a number of odd things about the house and its inhabitants, one of them—in direct relation to the title of the story—being that her mistress never rings for her but asks Agnes to fetch her instead. Hartley has no complaints about her mistress, to whom she takes an immediate liking, or about the other servants. She is also fond of Mr. Ranford, who discusses books with Mrs. Brympton and keeps her company whenever Mr. Brympton is away, which is often. Mr. Brympton, however, instantaneously becomes an object of dislike when Hartley finally meets him, a week after her arrival. Her first impression of him confirms the misgivings she had tentatively expressed during her conversation with Mrs. Railton, “a friend of the lady that first brought [Hartley] out to the States” (499) and Mrs. Brympton’s aunt, who sends Hartley to Brympton Place, assuring her, “my niece will take you on my recommendation” (500). Part two, about half-way through the story, culminates with Hartley’s bell going off in the middle of the night, summoning her to her mistress’s bedside. Mr. Brympton opens the door of his wife’s bedchamber, and his reaction makes it clear that another maid has got there before her. The identity of this unknown woman is elucidated in the third part of the story: it is Emma Saxon, Mrs. Brympton’s former maid, who has been dead for six months. In the last section, also the longest, Emma Saxon’s ghost leads Hartley to Mr. Ranford’s, as if she wanted her to deliver a message, but Hartley fails to comprehend what it is she must tell him. That same evening, Mr. Brympton abruptly returns from a trip he had supposedly taken to the West Indies; it seems that he suspects his wife of having an affair with Mr. Ranford. He is prevented from entering his wife’s dressing room, where he thinks Mr. Ranford is hiding, by Emma Saxon’s ghost. Mrs. Brympton dies in Hartley’s arms and the story ends with her funeral, Mr. Brympton’s departure, and the servants’ return to the house.

5 Hartley never questions the reality of the ghost once she has seen it; but the reader, having been deftly steered to the threshold between the natural and the supernatural, is left to decide for himself whether or not the ghost is a figment of Hartley’s imagination. Wharton manages to keep him suspended in a state of undecidability until the end of the story and even afterwards. Indeed, as Margaret McDowell puts it, “the effect lingers as the reader ponders the tale long after it has been told” (299). Moreover, what remains with the reader is not so much the reality or irreality of the ghost as all the questions raised in the course of the story about the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Brympton. Did Mr. Brympton physically or sexually abuse his wife? Were Mr. Ranford and Mrs. Brympton having an affair? Were they planning to escape together, that night, when Mr. Brympton unexpectedly returned? Did Mr. Brympton have anything to do with Emma Saxon’s death? What did she actually die of? 5 Comparing Wharton’s ghost stories and Walter de la Mare’s, McDowell explains, [the] presence [of the ghost] is less important than the cause of that appearance and the shocked response of a character to the supernatural phenomenon. For both

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of these authors, the interest of the story centers on the living and the human individual, on the relationships among the characters, and the exploration of the situation in which they find themselves. The impact of the story comes from these elements, rather than from the apparition itself. (298-99)

6 The reader thus stands, irresolute, faced with interpretations, conclusions and hypotheses he can never verify. In other words, the enigma makes it difficult to establish the truth. Wharton’s skill at maneuvering the reader towards this position relies on her use of a first-person narrator who provides evidence both in favor of one interpretation and against it, and who is unable to offer a clear-cut, decisive account of her experience as a lady’s maid at Brympton Place. In what follows, I propose to take a close look at the cogs and wheels that turn the narrative into a puzzle for the reader, in order to expose the inner workings of a system that Wharton had mastered.

Establishing the Narrator’s (Un)Reliability

7 In The Writing of Fiction, Wharton explains that “The effect of compactness and instantaneity sought in the short story is attained mainly by the observance of two ‘unities’—the old traditional one of time, and that other, more modern and complex, which requires that any rapidly enacted episode shall be seen through only one pair of eyes”; a bit further down, she adds that in order to achieve “the ultimate effect of probability [...] the character who serves as reflector [must never] record anything not naturally within his register (34, 36). She applies these rules in “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” and plays with the paradox entailed by the use of a first-person narrator: because Hartley tells her own story, recounting events she has witnessed and experienced, her account stands out as truthful and not to be doubted. However, precisely for the same reason, it is questionable—especially since this episode of her life apparently took place in a not too distant past. In other words, the subjectivity of the tale is due not only to the use of a first-person narrator but also to the fact that little time seems to have elapsed between narrated and narrating time. In spite of the past tense used throughout the story, the specific time marker with which the story opens (“It was the autumn after I had the typhoid”) and the proleptic remark in the middle of the first paragraph (“or I thought so at the time”), the impression conveyed is one of instantaneity, as if one were following the unfolding of events at the same time as Hartley. The story ends in winter, apparently sometime in February; so the reader understands in retrospect that the opening sentence does not refer to the span covered by the story but to Hartley’s encounter with Mrs. Railton and to her subsequently being hired as a lady’s maid at Brympton Place.

8 From the first lines of the story, Wharton invites the reader to see through, almost to doubt, Hartley’s tale and Hartley herself. At the same time, however, aware that the reader’s confidence must be secured from the start if he is to “be lured on to the most incredible adventures” (WF 30), she introduces her narrator-character as a straightforward, honest, and articulate woman. Single, self-supporting, Alice Hartley seems to have no relatives and very few acquaintances in the United States; nothing is said about her past. Her age is indeterminate, as is her nationality; it is made clear, however, that she is not an American citizen, a fact that accentuates her position as an outsider in the household.6 Moreover, she is nearly penniless after a three-month stay in hospital and two months of unemployment, hardships that appear undeserved and appeal to the reader’s compassion. Hartley’s illness, like the use of the first person,

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plays a double role: it attracts the reader’s sympathy but it also puts him on his guard. Having Hartley down with the typhoid is not a random choice, for typhoid, from the Greek word meaning “stupor,” causes the patient to lie prostrate for about three weeks with a high fever that often leads to delirium (hence its nickname of ‘nervous fever’). Hartley’s case must have been severe indeed, as she stayed in the hospital for three months, and then “looked so weak and tottery [when she came out] that the two or three ladies [she] applied to were afraid to engage [her]” (499). Her weakened state is corroborated by Mrs. Railton’s comment that she does not look “particularly brisk [...] just now” (499). Even after a few weeks at Brympton, where she enjoys “the good country air,” she says that she feels “still languid from the fever” (506), and complains that she does not sleep well. What may look like a detail is actually very important, as it implies that Hartley is still suffering from the after-effects of the typhoid and therefore may be likely to have a distorted perception of her environment—may even see things that do not exist, such as ghosts.

9 The narrator carefully tries to establish herself as a trustworthy person, one who keeps her own counsel and does not allow herself to be led astray by other people’s opinions: “I had asked no questions of the groom, for I never was one to get my notion of new masters from their other servants: I prefer to wait and see for myself” (500)—a point she comes back to a bit later: “not being one to ask questions I waited to see what would turn up” (501). When trying to discover the identity of the mysterious woman she saw in the corridor, she comes up with plausible explanations: at first she thinks that the woman is the housekeeper (501), then Mrs. Brympton’s trained nurse (501), and upon being told that there is neither a housekeeper nor a nurse in the house, “decide[s] that she must have been a friend of the cook’s, or of one of the other women- servants” (503). The verb “decide” indicates that Hartley is determined to shut out the “queer,” “odd” or “strange” things she has noticed by providing her own rational explanation for them. The repetition of these three adjectives in the space of half a page, to which “peculiar” is added a few lines further down, signals to the reader that a number of things are amiss in the household.

10 The same oscillation between one statement and its opposite is also noticeable in the description of the mansion. Hartley’s acknowledgment that “the house did look a bit gloomy” (500), in echo to Mrs. Railton’s warning (499), is brushed aside in her comment, “I could tell by the look of everything that I had got into the right kind of house, and that things were done handsomely” (500); but the isolation and the darkness of the place have an ominous ring. Her first impression runs as follows: “It was a dull October day, with rain hanging close overhead, and by the time we turned into Brympton Place woods the daylight was almost gone. The drive wound through the woods for a mile or two, and came out on a gravel court shut in with thickets of tall black-looking shrubs. There were no lights in the windows, and the house did look a bit gloomy” (500). Kathy Fedorko has underlined the parallel between Hartley’s first impression of Brympton Place and the opening paragraph in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”: “Her approach to Brympton Place is a toned-down version of the arrival of Poe’s narrator” (85). Later in her narrative, Hartley comes back to the sense of oppression she experiences in the house: “As soon as I was out of doors my spirits rose [...]; but the moment I caught sight of the house again my heart dropped down like a stone in a well. It was not a gloomy house exactly, yet I never entered it but a feeling of gloom came over me” (506). And a bit further down: “There was something about the house—I was sure of it now...” (507). Similarly, her depiction of the interior

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decoration is double-edged. The “dark panelling and a number of old portraits” (500) meet her approval and admiration, but they also denote darkness and age, well-known landmarks of any Gothic tale, like the verticality of the building, hinted at in the mention of two flights of stairs (500).

11 At other times, Hartley abstains from comment, as in the scenes where her rather innocuous questions unexpectedly elicit ill-humored reactions from the housemaid and the cook. When Hartley asks Agnes if the room opposite hers is the cook’s, Agnes answers “crosslike,” “‘Laws, no [...]. That’s nobody’s room. It’s empty, I mean’” (501). Later, as Hartley presses her point with the cook, Mrs. Blinder first grows confused and tries to evade the question, then turns pale before telling her “trembling-like” that it was Emma Saxon’s room, and upon Hartley’s query as to Emma Saxon’s physical appearance, gives her “a kind of angry stare” and “walked off into the kitchen and shut the door after her” (503). Hartley’s surprise is conveyed by the suffix “-like” in “crosslike” and the expression “a kind of” in “a kind of angry stare”: she perceives the two women’s reactions as expressions of unjustified anger and tones down her appraisal with comparative elements. The cause of the two women’s reactions is never given, and the reader is left conjecturing: perhaps they mean to deter Hartley from investigating the matter further—but why would they do that? Perhaps their reaction is linked to the circumstances of Emma Saxon’s death, never accounted for by anyone in the story—in which case their anger may be a defense mechanism and an expression of their fear (as “trembling-like” suggests). Perhaps they believe that Emma’s ghost still dwells in her old room, which is kept locked on Mrs. Brympton’s orders, and they want to prevent Hartley from finding out—but neither Agnes nor the aptly-named Mrs. Blinder seems able to see the apparition. Such episodes point out not so much Hartley’s fallibility as a narrator as her helplessness when confronted with inexplicable facts. They create an atmosphere fraught with mystery and secrets, heighten tension, and remind the reader of how much he depends on the narrator for information. They bring out the similarity between his position and Hartley’s, and invite him not only to question her reliability as a narrator but also to exercise his own faculties for deduction and play an active role in the reading process if he is to make sense of the story at all. The story demonstrates Wharton’s “finely tuned awareness of the reader,” her “recognition of the importance of the reader and the process of reading in the assignment of meaning” (Whitehead 54).

Hartley’s Shortsightedness

12 Hartley’s inability to grasp the full meaning of what she observes and overhears adds to the “effect of probability” sought by Wharton. Hartley is, after all, “only” a maid, even if she is said to be “quiet” and “well-mannered,” “educated above her station” and capable of “read[ing] aloud well” (500). Even though Mrs. Railton pays her several compliments in the course of their conversation and thinks highly enough of her to recommend her to her niece, Hartley’s social status is firmly established from the very beginning.7 As Karen Jacobsen and Sherrie Inness have pointed out, one of the reasons for this is that servants are used by Wharton as “a fictional device through which to observe and criticize the doings of the wealthy” (Jacobsen 8) and “a vehicle for critiquing upper-class values and for suggesting the instability of the class system in which she grew up” (Inness 1). Indeed, some of Hartley’s comments on her employers

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draw attention to the shortcomings of the upper classes. Her main target is Mr. Brympton, “the kind of man a young simpleton might have thought handsome, and would have been like to pay dear for thinking it” (504). The latter part of the sentence, added to her account of the way he looks at her during their first encounter, shows that she puts him in the category of those upper-class gentlemen who take advantage of their position to force themselves on the maids: “He swung about when I came in, and looked me over in a trice. I knew what the look meant, from having experienced it once or twice in my former places. Then he turned his back on me, and went on talking to his wife; and I knew what that meant, too. I was not the kind of morsel he was after” (504). This brings to mind the beginning of the story and Hartley’s conversation with Mrs. Railton. After a word about the house and her niece, Mrs. Railton begins a sentence about Mr. Brympton but abruptly interrupts herself, as if afraid of saying something she should not: “‘her husband—well, he’s generally away’” (499). Mrs. Railton’s hesitation and hurried dismissal of the subject is not lost on Hartley, who comes back to it with, “‘And the gentleman, ma’am?’” (500). Again, Mrs. Railton’s manner, as the terms “quick-like” and “suddenly” indicate, show that she does not want to dwell on the topic: “‘The gentleman’s almost always away, I tell you,’ said Mrs. Railton, quick-like—’and when he’s there,’ says she suddenly, ‘you’ve only to keep out of his way’” (500).

13 The ominous ring of this piece of advice, given as a kind of afterthought, finds an echo in Mr. Brympton’s portrait, which suggests strength, surliness, and a latent streak of violence: “a big fair bull-necked man, with a red face and little bad-tempered blue eyes” (504). The other adjectives Hartley uses to qualify him are “coarse, loud and pleasure- loving” (505-506), and she remarks several times (504, 507-508) on the strain put on the household by his permanent irritability and constant “cursing” and “grumbling” (505). She also comments on his drinking habits: Mr. Brympton [...] (as I soon found out) dr[ank] a deal more than was good for him. After Mrs. Brympton left the table he would sit half the night over the old Brympton port and madeira, and once, as I was leaving my mistress’s room rather later than usual, I met him coming up the stairs in such a state that I turned sick to think of what some ladies have to endure and hold their tongues about. (505)

14 The colour red—an easy-to-read symbol—is always associated with Mr. Brympton,8 suggesting an uncontrollable temper, anger, even blind fury, and therefore danger. Hartley notices that a “red spot” comes out on his forehead whenever he is displeased or angry (511, 518, 519) and, interestingly, she associates “red” and “savage” to describe his face when he opens the door on the night when the bell rings for the first time (509). As she finds Mrs. Brympton “lying very weak and still, [...] without speaking, her breath coming quick, and her eyes closed” (510), the reader cannot but come to the conclusion that, besides being a philanderer and a drunk, it may well be that Mr. Brympton also molests his wife—a conclusion that seems justified by Hartley’s comment that Mrs. Brympton “had never been the same since that night [...] her spirits didn’t revive, nor her strength either” (514).

15 The antagonism between Hartley and Mr. Brympton is paralleled by the mutual affection that develops between her and Mrs. Brympton. And that is another reason why her status as a lady’s maid matters: her function places her in a privileged position. Not only is she able to observe situations and overhear conversations that the other servants would not be party to, but a closeness develops between her and her mistress, recalling Mrs. Brympton’s relationship with Emma Saxon. Hartley notices that

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Mrs. Brympton “ha[s] grown attached to [her]”, and Agnes, the housemaid, tells her that “since Emma Saxon’s death, [she is] the only maid her mistress had taken to” (514). However, Hartley’s dedication to Mrs. Brympton means that her appraisal of her mistress’s relationship with Mr. Ranford is biased. If Hartley’s statement, “we were all glad to think that Mrs. Brympton had a pleasant companionable gentleman like that to keep her company when the master was away” (505), may be interpreted as a sign of her naivety, it certainly constitutes the first clue for the reader to understand that Mrs. Brympton and Mr. Ranford may have more in common than a taste for books. This is confirmed by a quarrel between husband and wife that Hartley overhears and reports in direct speech without commenting on it (508), and by the double errand Mrs. Brympton asks Hartley to run for her the next morning (510).

16 The episode shows how faulty and slow Hartley’s reasoning faculties are and the extent to which she may have misled the reader until then. Mrs. Brympton’s request that she go to the village “at once” to have a prescription made up is expressed “quickly,” and her instruction that she “be back again before Mr. Brympton is up” is added after a minute’s hesitation and a blush (510); and just before Hartley leaves the room, Mrs. Brympton calls her back “as if an idea had just struck her” (510) to ask her to drop a note at Mr. Ranford’s. The reader assembles the three elements (prescription, behavior, note) and understands immediately that the prescription is but a cover for the real errand Hartley is asked to run. The maid, however, although she has interpreted Mrs. Brympton’s hesitation and blush as signs of her uneasiness at having something found out, misinterprets their cause, linking them to the prescription and not to Mr. Ranford: “It struck me as peculiar that my mistress should wish the prescription made up without Mr. Brympton’s knowledge; and putting this together with the scene of the night before, and with much else that I had noticed and suspected, I began to wonder if the poor lady was weary of her life, and had come to the mad resolve of ending it” (510). It takes the chemist’s assurance that “It’s only lime water. You might feed it to a baby by the bottleful” (511) to make her revise her interpretation and add the third element to the other two: “If there was nothing to conceal about my visit to the chemist’s, was it my other errand that Mrs. Brympton wished me to keep private?” (511). The use of a direct question renders Hartley’s sense of shock, which is confirmed by her hurried dismissal of the idea: “I felt ashamed of my suspicions, and concluded that I was still disturbed by the strange events of the night” (511). The verb “conclude” here fullfils the same function as the verb “decide” discussed above, showing Hartley’s determination to brush aside any thought that might disrupt the rational and conventional order of things, and again pinpointing her unreliability.

17 For all Hartley’s attempts at “tell[ing] her story honestly” (Dyman 14), her narrative leaves several questions in mid-air, sometimes because she cannot provide an explanation, sometimes because she refuses to investigate the matter further. These blanks and gaps are in keeping with the character, but they are also, obviously, a narrative strategy used by Wharton to allow the supernatural to enter the story. It filters through the cracks and gradually pervades the narrative while it remains elusive, “its essence suspended in a void” (Balestra 3). The reader, “left in a disturbing cognitive stalemate” (Balestra 3), has no choice but to follow Wharton’s hint that “Every phrase should be a sign-post” (WF 30). In other words, the reader is invited to read between the lines in order to determine the real nature of the triangular relationship between husband, wife, and “friend,” and to solve the enigma of the closed

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door—that is to say, to cross the threshold separating text and subtext to discover what secret is hidden in what Deleuze calls the fold(s) of the text.

Crossing the Threshold

18 Thresholds and doors are of course closely connected. Closed or locked doors are a staple of Gothic fiction, as they generate suspense and anxiety, and Wharton does not fail to use this device in her story. Every time Hartley mentions the door opposite hers (and that is often), she uses the adjective “locked” to qualify either “room” or “door”; the phrase sometimes appears twice on the same page (509, 512, 513, 514). Clearly, the locked door exercises a kind of fearful fascination on Hartley, yet she never expresses any wish to open it or to enter the room; neither does she try to imagine or picture what (or who) is inside. She admits that “the thought of that locked room across the passage began to weigh on [her]” and that “Once or twice, in the long rainy nights, [she] fancied [she] heard noises there” (506); but she dismisses this as “nonsense” (506). After her bell has rung for the first time, however, she becomes convinced that “someone was cowering there, behind the locked door” (513).9 The reason why so much emphasis is laid on the locked door is that Hartley’s perception of it opening and closing in the middle of the night must stand out in the narrative as an inexplicable fact. No rational explanation can be provided, therefore the source of the noises must be supernatural.

19 The threshold is not just a useful metaphor describing the area where the reader (and Hartley) is positioned in a delicate state of imbalance. It is also mentioned repeatedly in the story in direct connection with Emma Saxon and the ghostly.10 Indeed, whenever the ghost appears, she is described as standing on a threshold, in a doorway, or in the corridor, all of which are places which allow passage from one room, one space, to another. On the day she arrives at Brympton Place, Hartley perceives “Half-way down the passage [...] a woman standing. She drew back into a doorway as we passed” (501). On the day of the dénouement, Hartley looks up from her sewing to see the ghost standing on her doorstep: “[...] there, in the door, stood Emma Saxon” (515). That night, after her bell has sounded and she has stepped into the hallway, she sees the ghost ahead of her: “[...] there at the head of the stairs was Emma Saxon” (518). And when Mr. Brympton opens the door to his wife’s dressing room, he is faced with the ghost: “On the threshold stood Emma Saxon” (519). Once Hartley has identified the ghost as Emma Saxon, she resorts to the same syntactical pattern, putting the location first, then the verb, then the full name—an effective way of heightening the dramatic effect of the ghost’s appearance.

20 The threshold is an appropriate place for Emma Saxon’s ghost—any ghost—to appear, for a ghost is itself a threshold. It is a liminal image, placed at the junction of two states (death and life) and two times (past and present), which makes manifest what is invisible, materializes what is immaterial. It is a spirit made, if not flesh, at least visible (though only some can perceive it); it is both present and absent. This double and paradoxical status is rendered in the story through two apparently contradictory elements: Hartley can hear the ghost’s footsteps in the corridor, but when she follows her outside, in the snow, she “noticed that she left no foot-prints behind her” (515). It is only when Hartley finds herself outside and sees the ghost ahead of her that she realizes she has stepped over a threshold and into another dimension. As Martha Banta

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puts it, “the ghostliness of thresholds comes from the fact that we do not know we have crossed them until after the crucial moment recedes into the past” (6).

21 A threshold is like an arcade, delineated by a frame and yet still open; as such, it is a liminal space. As Walter Benjamin noted in his reflections on architecture, “The threshold is a zone. And in fact a zone of passage (Übergang). Transformation, passage, flux—all are contained in the word threshold” (qtd. in Sieburth 19). To put it differently, it is “an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside, a zone without any hard and fast boundary on either the inward side [...] or the outward side [...]” (Genette 2). Genette’s definition of the paratext as “a zone not only of transition but also of transaction” (2) seems particularly suited to this notion of threshold.11 Indeed, by stepping over it, the reader signs an implicit pact with the narrator and agrees to see what she sees, to suspend his disbelief while at the same time keeping his “rational eye” open. The reader, in other words, sees simultaneously the dream and the real and, like the narrator, undergoes a rite de passage. The episode in which Emma Saxon’s ghost mutely invites Hartley to follow her and leads her to Mr. Ranford’s house constitutes one such rite of passage. Hartley, determined to “know what she wanted” (515), submits to the request she reads on the ghost’s face: “She looked at me long and long, and her face was just one dumb prayer to me” (515). Their long walk through the woods and the open fields may be regarded as a kind of ritual of initiation, which Hartley finds rather trying—she is tempted to give up and go back to the house several times (515, 516). As ghost and maid reach Mr. Ranford’s place, Hartley understands that “it was [her] turn to act,” that the ghost “hadn’t led [her] there for nothing” (516). But the ghost vanishes before Hartley has had time to ask her what it is she must do: “A sense of helplessness came over me. She was gone, and I had not been able to guess what she wanted. Her last look had pierced me to the marrow; and yet it had not told me!” (517).

22 The ghost does not “pass the word” and Hartley is, quite literally, wordless. She seems to have been struck dumb, left on the threshold of language, of articulateness, as if a door had closed in her face. Unable to answer Mr. Ranford’s questions, she faints. As in the episode where Hartley’s real errand was to give Mr. Ranford Mrs. Brympton’s note, the reader is able to piece the clues together immediately, whereas Hartley is not. Yet again, the maid’s failure to decipher the riddle and her confused awareness that something is pending help to build up suspense and accelerate the pace of the story— but both maid and reader are still in the dark as to what turn the plot will take, and Hartley is irresolute as to what she should do. It will therefore take one more intervention by Emma Saxon, another of her dramatic appearances on a threshold, to close the story.

23 However, although the final lines of the story convey the sense of an ending, with the different characters going their separate ways—Mrs. Brympton dies, Mr. Ranford “disappear[s]” the minute the service is over, Mr. Brympton “jump[s] into the carriage nearest the gate and dr[ives] off” as soon as the coffin is underground, and the “servants [go] back alone to the house” (519)—closure remains superficial. That is because, as Sarah Whitehead puts it, “Wharton’s multilayered texts [...] are simultaneously explicit and subtle” and “retain their absences and implicitly ambiguous nature” (49). The reader never gets any straightforward answers to the questions raised by Hartley’s statements and comments; instead he is left to conjecture and to work out the subtext for himself, to sort out what is objective from what is

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subjective in her narrative. Because Hartley’s account, in spite of her confusion—or possibly because of it—rings true and has an earnest quality about it, the reader cannot help being persuaded that the wife is the victim and the husband the brute, and that this ghost story is actually a tale of female victimization or, as Kathy Fedorko puts it, a portrait of “women’s constraint [and of] the nascent companionship among them, hampered by a reticence that prevents them from truly helping one another” (90). And yet even that interpretation seems to stop short of the real scope of Wharton’s tale. Jenni Dyman’s detailed analysis of the story,12 in her own words, “moves beyond the facile stereotypes of the villain husband, delicate Victorian lady, and kind friend, or the brute husband and the fallen, adulterous pair” (22). She suggests that Mrs. Brympton is not the only one who suffers in what Hartley calls an “unhappy match” (505), and that “The greatest suffering actually shown in the story is Brympton’s” (23). She also argues, convincingly, that “Wharton’s story is her own ‘Lady’s Maid’s Bell,’ sounding the alarm for women, and finally also men, in a society not sensitive to their needs or their true selves” (20). By resorting to an unreliable narrator and a fragmented tale, Wharton fashions gaps and spaces for the reader to investigate and to invest with his own meaning and interpretation(s). Her artistry lies in her capacity to create a text that transcends epochs and ways of reading: what on the surface is a rather conservatively written narrative, respectful of both Gothic and social conventions, turns out to be quite subversive. Wharton’s consummate art of irresolution, then, is but a top-coat covering her resoluteness in exposing the failings of the society in which she lived.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balestra, Gianfranca. “‘For the use of the magazine morons’: Edith Wharton rewrites the tale of the fantastic.” (24/04/12).

Banta, Martha. “The Ghostly Gothic of Wharton’s Everyday World.” American Literary Realism 1870-1910 27.1 (Fall 1994): 1-10.

Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Studies in Short Fiction. 1997. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Dyman, Jenni. Lurking Feminism: he Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. American University Studies, Series XXIV, vol. 62. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Fedorko, Kathy A. “Edith Wharton’s Haunted Fiction. ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell’ and The House of Mirth.” Haunting the House of Fiction. Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Eds. Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991. 80-107.

Fracasso, Evelyn E. Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Consciousness. A Study of Theme and Technique in the Tales. Contributions to Women’s Studies, Number 140. Wesport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Originally published in French as Seuils by Éditions du Seuil (1987). Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1997.

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Inness, Sherrie A. “Loyal saints or devious rascals”: domestic servants in Edith Wharton’s stories ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell’ and ‘All Souls’.” Studies in Short Fiction 36.4 (Fall 1999). 9 pages.

Jacobsen, Karen J. “Economic Hauntings: Wealth and Class in Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories.” College Literature 35.1 (Winter 2008): 100-127. 11 pages.

McDowell, Margaret B. “Edith Wharton’s Ghost Tales Reconsidered.” Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Eds. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1992. 291-314.

Nettels, Elsa. “Gender and First-Person Narration in Edith Wharton’s Short Fiction.” Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Eds. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992. 245-260.

Sieburth, Richard. “Benjamin the Scrivener.” Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics. Ed. Gary Smith. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. 13-37.

Vidal, Florianne. « Edith Wharton : Le Temps de l’Innocence » (27/04/01), (25/06/11).

Wharton, Edith. “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell.” 1902. Collected Stories 1891-1910. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: The Library of America, 2001. 499-519.

---. The Writing of Fiction. 1924. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Whitehead, Sarah. “Breaking the Frame: How Edith Wharton’s Short Stories Subvert Their Magazine Context.” European Journal of American Culture 27.1 (2008): 43-56. doi: 10.1386/ejac. 27.1.43/1.

NOTES

1. “almost all the best tales of Scott, Hawthorne, and Poe belong to that peculiar category of the eerie which lies outside of the classic tradition.” (28) 2. The title of Fitz James O’Brien’s story is “What Was It?” 3. The collection, minus “A Bottle of Perrier,” was reprinted in 1973 by Charles Scribner’s Sons under the title The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. 4. The story that eventually appeared in print was slightly different from the first draft Wharton sent to her literary agent; he asked her to modify the ending in order to make the story more suited to “the average magazine reader’s desire for something at least approaching a conclusive ending” (Eric S. Pinker, qtd. in Balestra, 5). See Gianfranca Balestra’s online article for more on this subject. 5. The reader is never told about the circumstances or the cause of Emma Saxon’s death, but three elements seem to hint at some kind of foul play: Mr. Brympton’s violent temper, the way he looks at Hartley when he first meets her, and the fact that he can see Emma Saxon’s ghost. 6. Having an outsider as narrator is a frequent device in Gothic fiction. Many critics surmise that Hartley was born in Great Britain, probably with reason. One may conjecture that Wharton chose to make Hartley a Brit in order to pay subtle homage to the ghost story writers she admired and whose names she mentions in her preface; or perhaps, keeping in mind Wharton’s comment on the origins of the readers who demanded a rational explanation, “Need I say there was never a Welsh or a Scottish signature among them?” (ix), Hartley’s nationality is an indirect way of accounting for her capacity to see ghosts.

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7. In “Gender and First-Person Narration in Edith Wharton’s Short Fiction,” Elsa Nettels underlines the fact that “Of the twenty-two first-person narratives in the two-volume Collected Stories, nineteen have male narrators” and “All three of the female narrators are subordinate in social position and wealth to the women whose stories they tell” (245, 246). 8. His high colour stands in sharp contrast to his wife’s pallor: Hartley remarks on how “white, and chill to the touch” Mrs. Brympton is after her husband leaves her to dress for dinner (504). 9. Jenni Dyman offers a very prosaic and rational explanation: “The reader might even conjecture, from the footsteps that Hartley hears in the hall, that Ranford sometimes hides out in Emma Saxon’s old room, making noises at night, and after hours, sneaking into Mrs. Brympton’s rooms” (19). 10. For Gianfranca Balestra, “this obsession with the threshold is paralleled in Wharton’s autobiographical fragment “Life and I,” in which it is directly related to the reading of ghost stories. She recalled how, when she was a child, this type of text provoked a long lasting terror in her, which became most formidable whenever she was on a doorstep.” (6-7) 11. Even though I am not dealing with paratext here, I have taken the liberty of using Genette’s formulation in a different context. 12. See in particular pages 15 to 19 for another analysis of Hartley’s unreliability.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article étudie la maîtrise dont Edith Wharton fait preuve dans la première histoire de fantômes qu’elle ait écrite, « The Lady’s Maid’s Bell », en particulier les ressorts narratifs auxquels elle a recours pour maintenir le lecteur dans l’indécision jusqu’à la fin de l’histoire et même au-delà. Ellipses, informations données a posteriori, insinuations, allusions, affirmations à double sens font partie intégrante de la structure de la nouvelle, mais c’est surtout l’utilisation de la première personne qui s’avère particulièrement efficace. En effet, la narratrice a une compréhension imparfaite des événements et se révèle incapable d’offrir un compte rendu clair au lecteur, qui se retrouve ainsi sur un seuil : à lui de décider s’il va le franchir ou non, à lui de réfléchir et de déchiffrer le texte sous-jacent de l’histoire.

AUTHORS

BRIGITTE ZAUGG Brigitte Zaugg is Associate Professor (Maître de Conférences) at the Université de Lorraine (Metz, France) where she teaches American literature and translation. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on Ellen Glasgow and has published several articles on the Virginian writer, as well as on Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Margaret Mitchell, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Edith Wharton. She co-edited Les Péchés innombrables de Richard Ford, et quelques autres (2008), L’Amérique d’Est en Ouest: The Grapes of Wrath de John Steinbeck et A Multitude of Sins de Richard Ford (2009) and L’Espace du Sud au féminin (2011) with Gérald Préher, as well as Dislocation culturelle et construction identitaire (forthcoming, 2012) with Kathie Birat and Charles Scheel. She is a member of the IDEA research group.

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“Sermons in Stone”: Théophile Gautier’s Emaux et Camées and Edith Wharton’s “The Eyes”

Joseph Urbas

“Gautier’s Axiom”

1 Edith Wharton’s ghost story “The Eyes” (1910) contains a rather curious reference to Théophile Gautier (1811-1872). Andrew Culwin, the dilettante who narrates his personal experience of visitation by a pair of sinister eyes, slips in the reference when describing the fruitless efforts of his former protégé Gilbert Noyes, a faithful follower of the French writer’s esthetic doctrine: “he kept on repeating Gautier’s axiom, and battering and filing at his limp prose till he’d spread it out over Lord knows how many hundred pages.”1 The axiom is identified by Maureen Howard, in the Library of America edition of Wharton’s short stories, as a famous line from the preface to Gautier’s novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1836): “Nothing is truly beautiful unless it is useless” (928n). Is this the most likely source? Perhaps not. If Gautier’s doctrine of l’art pour l’art is what Wharton had in mind, then the irony seems overly subtle, especially when applied to a secondary figure in the tale. For the gloss to make sense, Noyes would have to embody the axiom unawares, as a cruel split between self and art: the young man is as “beautiful” (820) as his prose is “useless” to publishers, who are relentless in their refusals of everything he submits.

2 Although the standard gloss cannot be ruled out,2 the resulting interpretation seems overwrought and inconsistent with the specific imagery of Culwin’s description, which points to another source in Gautier’s œuvre. A more likely inspiration—already suggested glancingly by Frederick Wegner3—is Gautier’s Emaux et Camées, which makes a far better fit with the brevity and the moral and esthetic self-awareness of “The Eyes.”

3 In his famous volume of poetry, Gautier champions the art of the small masterpiece and compares the perfection of form attainable in the short lyric to the exquisite

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craftsmanship of the jeweller or sculptor. The closing poem, “L’Art,” which provides a self-referential summary of the esthetic principles behind the collection as a whole, may help us to understand the deeper aims of Wharton’s reference to Gautier. As it happens, Gautier wrote more than one axiom. Here is another, which Emaux et Camées seeks to exemplify and which may be paraphrased as, “the harder the material, the more beautiful the form.” Thus Gautier, in the boldly axiomatic opening stanza of “L’Art”: Oui, l’œuvre sort plus belle D’une forme au travail Rebelle, Vers, marbre, onyx, émail. (Gautier 148.1) Yes, fair-wrought verse shuns pliant Form; beauty craves the touch Defiant: Marble, onyx, and such. (Shapiro 263)

4 The closing stanza, which puts the finishing touch on the volume and its metaphor of the poet as sculptor or jeweller, may well be what Wharton is ironically echoing in the description of Noyes’s “battering and filing”: Sculpte, lime, cisèle ; Que ton rêve flottant Se scelle Dans le bloc résistant ! (Gautier 150.14) Sculpt, chisel, file, and let Your flotsam dream, wind-blown, Be set, In the resisting stone! (Shapiro 267)

5 Noyes’s failure as an artist may be understood in precisely the terms laid down by Gautier in this final exhortation. Noyes’s material—his “limp prose”—is inherently unsuitable for crafting; and the predictable result is a sprawling mass (“spread . . . out over Lord knows how many hundred pages”), rather than the tight construction and hard finish of the small masterpiece—for example, the perfectly executed sculpture of a woman’s hand that Gautier holds up as a model in “Etude de Mains”: Pur fragment d’un chef d’œuvre humain. (Gautier 32.1)

Sculpte, Lime, Cisèle

6 There are a number of indications that Wharton may have had Emaux et Camées specifically in mind when she composed “The Eyes.” To begin with, I would cite a compelling piece of external evidence. Wharton quoted Gautier’s exhortation sculpte, lime, cisèle in an article that appeared in Scribner’s magazine in February 1910, just a few months prior to the publication of “The Eyes” in the same journal (Uncollected Critical Writings 191). In tribute to one of her close friends, the poet George Cabot Lodge, Wharton took issue with a simplistic application of Gautier’s doctrine. Cabot Lodge’s long verse drama “Herakles”—whose composition Wharton describes in curiously Gautierian language (“the image he had so patiently sought to shape emerged at length from the marble”)—seemed to her an exception to the rule: The theory that the artist should sacrifice much to produce little—the “sculpte, lime, cisèle” of Gautier—seems sometimes to be confused with the notion that abundant production is proof of mediocrity. Mediocrity, alas, is often fertile; but so, almost always, is genius. Taken by itself, abundance, in the sense of capacity for

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sustained expression, is a hopeful sign; and it is well that a young poet should measure himself with a long task. Cabot Lodge, in “Herakles,” certainly proved the value of the effort. (Uncollected Critical Writings 191)

7 In an admirably rich and suggestive note on the quotation, Frederick Wegener observes that Henry James had quoted “L’art” in full in an essay devoted to Gautier in French Poets and Novelists (1878).4 James described “L’art” as “the singularly perfect little poem which closes the collection of chiselled and polished verses called ‘Emaux et Camées’” (359). If James had nothing but the highest praise for this collection of “goldsmith’s work,” in which “every poem is a masterpiece” (362), he considered “L’Art” as “Gautier at his best” and—interestingly, for any discussion of “axioms”—“the only very distinct statement of intellectual belief that we remember in his pages” (359).

8 It is difficult to imagine that Wharton could have been unaware of James’s essay, which underscores what he saw as the moral dimension of Gautier’s poetry, over and against the doctrine of l’art pour l’art: [T]he artificer of “Emaux et Camées” was presumably of opinion that it is idle at all times to point a moral. But if there are sermons in stones, there are profitable reflections to be made even on Théophile Gautier; notably this one—that a man’s supreme use in the world is to master his intellectual instrument and play it in perfection. (356)

9 James was convinced that “L’art,” in particular, had a moral dimension: “These admirable verses seem to us to be almost tinged with intellectual passion. It is a case of an esthetic, an almost technical, conviction, glowing with a kind of moral fervour” (361). Wegener suggests that where Gautier was concerned Wharton “did not perhaps share James’s conflation of the moral with the esthetic, or his unqualified enthusiasm.” Wegener sees Andrew Culwin as the Gautierian esthete turned “malevolent” (Wharton, Uncollected Critical Writings 196n9).

10 James was right about Gautier, however. Although Emaux displays a studied indifference to the political upheavals of the day in its “Préface,” it does have a properly moral dimension, one that derives ultimately from the cult of craft labor. I shall argue that Wharton did indeed find a “use” for Gautier’s art in her subtle crafting of “The Eyes.” Emaux provided a rich background for her own “profitable reflections” on the relation between art and the moral life. “The Eyes,” we might say, is Wharton’s “sermon in stone.” But before continuing this line of inquiry, we need to consider briefly the internal evidence for Emaux as a source for the story.

Emaux and “Spots of Enamel”

11 Both Emaux et Camées and “The Eyes” build on the metaphor of hardness through imagery of hard materials—stone, ceramic, glass, and of course enamel. Ezra Pound found this quality in Emaux so compelling that he later turned it into a critical principle, in his essay “The Hard and Soft in French Poetry” (1918): “Anyone who dislikes these textural terms may lay the blame on Théophile Gautier, who certainly suggests them in Emaux et Camées; it is his hardness that I first had in mind. He exhorts us to cut in hard substance, the shell and the Parian” (Pound 285). The “textural” quality of hardness was thus, in Pound’s view, the distinguishing feature of Gautier’s esthetics.

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12 The most striking echo of Emaux in “The Eyes” may be found in the following passage, where the unnamed narrator describes Andrew Culwin’s head: Pressed into the hollow of the chair-back, it stood out an instant like an intaglio of yellowish red-veined stone, with spots of enamel for the eyes. (825)

13 This is by no means an isolated image in the story. Culwin initially describes the phantom eyes that haunt him as “sea-pebbles” or “small glassy disks with an agate-like rim” (816); later he compares them, in their quality of slowly acquired baseness and obduracy, to coral (824). Culwin describes Noyes on their first meeting in Rome in terms of stone-imagery, as “slender and smooth and hyacinthine,”5 as if he had “stepped from a ruined altar” (820). Phil Frenham, who replaces Noyes as Culwin’s new protégé and who provokes the older man into telling the story of the eyes, is described by the unnamed narrator in flattering, Gautierian terms—“like the pure paste under a fine glaze” (812).

14 Then too there is the shared esthetic of the minor scale and the detail, rather than the large canvas and the complete figure. In both works, form and content are one. The title of Gautier’s collection of “exquisite little pieces,” to borrow another phrase from James (362), is of course programmatic in this regard. As for “The Eyes,” it has been widely praised as one of the finest specimens of Wharton’s short fiction,6 and I would argue that it is her adoption of an approach similar to Gautier’s that made the story into a masterpiece in the minor key. Its imagery, qualities, and themes are perfectly commensurate with an esthetic commitment to the minor scale.

The “Tightening” Effect

15 “The Eyes” may be described as a small, hard literary object that describes a comfortable world haunted, morally as well as psychologically, by objects with similar qualities. The emphasis throughout is on the detail or the partial object, on the fragment rather than the whole—on the eyes and head, in particular. And this emphasis may be reformulated as an ethical problem. What happens when the whole human being and form are deliberately sacrificed for the pleasure procured by the part? A quick answer might be: the fetishized thing then returns with a vengeance, to haunt everyone—characters, narrator, and reader alike. Another esthetic and moral question raised by “The Eyes” is, to put it crudely: how do small, obdurate things get that way? Through the painstaking of the craftsmen or poet? Or through the crippling idleness of the man of leisure, whose pursuit of pleasure and flight from pain seem to shrivel and harden his very being, leaving him with nothing but “dryness” (811) and a “gnomelike” figure (813)? With “gouty hands” (828) and eyes like “spots of enamel,” Culwin—a dabbler forever promising a “great book” or “definitive work” (814, 820)— stands as something akin to a dark, leisure-class parody of Gautier’s diligent craftsman.

16 Then too we might say that Wharton has built the shrinking and hardening effect into the very shape of the story. The actions that make up its moral structure—Culwin’s narration and the two events he describes as preceding the appearance of the eyes: his false promise of marriage to Alice Nowell (814-815), and the reassuring lie he tells Gilbert Noyes (822-823)—all take place within the comfortable confines of libraries.7 What makes Culwin’s ghost story possible in the first place is the still more intimate atmosphere produced by a “tightening” of the group of friends, which Wharton quickly reduces, at the outset of her story, from eight to three. As the unnamed narrator puts

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it: “we knew that [Culwin] expected the nucleus of his group to tighten around him after midnight” (812). And the story of the phantom eyes is itself truncated, since Culwin simply breaks it off in one inconclusive sentence: “And so, after all, I never found out what they wanted . . .” (824). It should be noted that the abrupt end to the story of the ghostly eyes, which closes part two, is followed by the image of Culwin’s own eyes as “spots of enamel”—as if the fragmentary form of the tale and the apparition it describes found an answering reflection in the teller’s own features. And were it not for the interventions of the unnamed narrator, who is disturbed by this “sudden drop” and “disquieted by a sense of incompleteness” (825, 827) and who seeks, through his questions in parts 3 and 4, a proper literary end to what Frenham’s challenge had begun, Culwin’s ghost tale would remain a fragment.

17 It should be observed, however, that the narrator’s role is at once literary and social, in a pattern of mirroring that lends “The Eyes” much of its peculiar force. The embarrassment and unease that the narrator feels are not only esthetic responses; he struggles not only to help complete a disappointing fragment but also to ward off a comparable constriction and hardening of the social reflexes that the story itself has produced in its listeners, and particularly in Culwin’s young protégé, Frenham: Something in his silent gaze embarrassed me, and as if to divert attention from it I pressed on with another question. (825) “And the eyes?” I asked, after another pause which Frenham’s silence made oppressive. (828)

18 The relaxed intimacy of the tight-knit group has turned into a close atmosphere of stony silence and fixity. Frenham, who has “not moved” since the beginning of the tale, “continue[s] to maintain his silent immobility” (825). Unexpectedly, the ghost story’s original mover now sits “motionless” (827), “without moving” (828). “The Eyes” closes on this image of immobility and silence: “Frenham, his face still hidden, did not stir” (829). Furthermore, in the final chapters, movement itself seems only to underscore the general tendency to petrification. When Culwin stirs from his chair, it is only to walk “stiffly” and to lay “gouty hands” on Frenham’s shoulders (828). When Frenham finally does move, his change in position calls the narrator’s attention to an object that bodies forth this narrowing and hardening—a small mirror: Frenham shifted his attitude, and as he did so his elbow struck against a small mirror in a bronze frame standing on the table behind him. He turned and changed its angle slightly; then he resumed his former attitude, his dark head thrown back on his lifted palm, his eyes intent on Culwin’s face. (825) Culwin paused again, and Frenham still sat motionless, the dusky contour of his young head reflected in the mirror at his back. (827)

19 Frenham’s physical being is consistently reduced to parts or features: a head, a face, shoulders, a palm, but especially, of course, a pair of eyes. The story’s emphasis on the sculptural or painterly detail, perfectly suited to the dilettante’s eye, is thus further reinforced at the end, as if Culwin’s fetishizing gaze ended up shrinking the entire scene. Alice had been reduced, in his eye, to “thick and pretty” hair (815); Noyes, to a “radiant head,” with “blissful eyes” and “beautiful” eyelashes (821, 823). While telling his story, Culwin is suddenly struck by Frenham’s physical resemblance to Noyes—but, it should be noted, only as a head assuming a remarkable pose, “thrown back in the lamplight” (822). The intimate social setting of Culwin’s tale—the “nucleus” of friends together in his library—is finally compressed within a still narrower frame, captured as a series of partial reflections in the hard surface of a small mirror:

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[T]he light of the lamp on the table fell full on [Culwin’s] congested face, and I caught its reflection in the mirror behind Frenham’s head. Culwin saw the reflection also. He paused, his face level with the mirror, as if scarcely recognising the countenance in it as his own. But as he looked his expression gradually changed, and for an appreciable space of time he and the image in the glass confronted each other with a glare of slowly gathering hate. (828-829)

20 Metaphorically, Culwin’s mind—first compared by the unnamed narrator to “a forum, or some open meeting-place for the exchange of ideas,” then, less grandly, to “a kind of academic grove from which all the leaves have fallen” (811)—has further collapsed into a series of reflections tightly enclosed within a small bronze frame. This effect—in which fragments of living, moving forms become petrified, or frozen in glass—is prefigured in a rather conspicuous detail of the setting of Culwin’s false promise to Alice Nowell, the Tiffany desk lamp in his aunt’s library: “it had a ground glass shade with vine leaves, and glass drops around the edge” (815).

“Eyes” and “Hands”

On y voit les œuvres mauvaises . . . (Gautier 34.16) One sees its scabrous deeds large writ . . . (Shapiro 25)

21 Wharton seems to be doing with eyes what Gautier had already done with hands—that is, exploring the esthetic and moral implications of the anatomical detail. Could it be that the ethical quality of certain actions leaves discernible, readable traces on the hand or in the eye? Culwin, though a moral skeptic, admits that his “wider experience” points him to such “damnable implications” when the phantom eyes reappear: “I saw now what I hadn’t seen before: that they were eyes which had grown hideous gradually, which had built up their baseness coral-wise, bit by bit, out of a series of small turpitudes slowly acccumulated through the industrious years.” (824)

22 We can only admire the audacity of the word “industrious,” when we extend the term, as the story’s metaphor of mirroring invites us to do, to an idler like Culwin. Culwin now deciphers the signs of evil in the phantom eyes, much as Gautier’s executioner “reads” them in the hand of the condemned assassin: Tous les vices avec leurs griffes Ont, dans les plis de cette peau, Tracé d’affreux hiéroglyphes, Lus couramment par le bourreau. (Gautier 34.15)* Vice clawed vile hieroglyphic designs Of heinous wrongs–most foul, most fell– In all its wrinkles, all its lines, Signs that the executioner knew well! (Shapiro 23)

23 In “Etude de Mains,” a two-part poem already quoted above, Gautier considers how the single body part might reflect the conduct of the whole person. The poem is built on an exceptionally rich and subtle play of contrasts between two hands seen in a sculptor’s studio. It is a deliberate, self-conscious study in contrasts.8 The first part of the diptych, “Imperia,” describes the hand of a sixteenth-century Italian courtesan, in hard plaster; the second, the mummified, severed hand of Pierre-François Lacenaire, a notorious thief, murderer, and would-be poet executed in 1836. The one is a glorious creation, a masterpiece of the sculptor’s art (pur fragment d’un chef-d’œuvre humain), an object of pure contemplation and intense poetic and erotic fantasizing; the other, a real,

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amputated hand, a repulsive, hairy, still blood-stained thing (du supplice encor mal lavée, Gautier 34.12) which the speaker dares to touch and which provokes, by stark contrast with the first half of the study, a stern esthetic and moral judgment. The sculpted hand has been placed on velvet, as a piece of jewelry might be, throwing into sharp relief its form, color, and texture; the severed hand, which is close by, lies on a cushion. This last detail is essential to the moral theme; for after the speaker’s lyrical echoings off the hard finish of the sculpted hand, the second part explores the rather unexpected correlation between softness and violence. Lacenaire’s hand combines qualities that seem incompatible. It is en même temps molle et féroce—at once “soft and savage” (Shapiro 25). Even more: in the second poem, esthetic and moral judgments merge. The limp, idle, pampered hand of the thief and murderer—unhardened by honest craft labor on hard material—cannot produce true art: Criminelle aristocratie, Par la varlope ou le marteau Sa pulpe n’est pas endurcie, Car son outil fut un couteau. Saints calus du travail honnête, On y cherche en vain votre sceau. (Gautier 35.19-20) Crime’s aristocracy! No plane, No hammer’s labor’s ever made Its flesh tough time and time again! Its only tool, the dagger-blade […] Work’s honest calluses! For you We look in vain, no sign we see. (Shapiro 25)

24 Small wonder, then, that Lacenaire should be described in the closing stanza as a “true murderer and false poet” (vrai meurtrier et faux poète, Gautier 35.20).

25 Andrew Culwin is no killer, of course, even though Wharton does slip in a possible point of comparison—and one well suited to a ghost story. I refer to the metaphor of moral vampirism. Here is Culwin’s final description of the phantom eyes: “They reminded me of vampires with a taste for young flesh, they seemed so to gloat over the taste of a good conscience. Every night for a month they came to claim their morsel of mine: since I’d made Gilbert happy they simply wouldn’t loosen their fangs.” (824)

26 The irony of the unintentional self-portrait is hardly lost on us, since we have been prepared for it from the outset. Wharton chooses, very fittingly, Fred Murchard—the man who had put everyone in the proper “mood” for ghost stories—to inform us early on that Culwin has a “taste for young flesh”: Young Phil Frenham was the last, and the most interesting, of these recruits, and a good example of Murchard’s somewhat morbid assertion that our old friend “liked ‘em juicy.” It was indeed a fact that Culwin, for all his dryness, specially tasted the lyrical qualities in youth. (811)

27 More to the point for our purposes, though, is Wharton’s possible adaptation of the Gautierian contrast of physical and moral qualities, in particular of the hard feature thrown into sharp relief by—perhaps even created by—the soft background. We have already seen the most striking example of this, in the description of Culwin’s head: Pressed into the hollow of the chair-back, it stood out an instant like an intaglio of yellowish red-veined stone, with spots of enamel for the eyes. (825)

28 But this too is a detail that has been carefully prepared:

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Culwin had dropped back into his arm-chair, his shock head embedded in the hollow of worn leather, his little eyes glimmering over a fresh cigar. (812)

29 Throughout “The Eyes” Wharton places great emphasis on Culwin’s life of ease. For him, even the act of telling the story is an effort, one that he is reluctant to make and that requires his friends’ urgings to both start (Frenham) and to finish (the unnamed narrator). When pressed for his own “ghostly experience” (810), his first reflex is to seek refuge in the comfort of his surroundings: “Culwin cowered gnomelike among his cushions, dissembling himself in a protective cloud of smoke” (813). Like it or not, however, he must bestir himself to tell a story that is itself all about the acute discomfort caused by a pair of ghostly eyes. As he insists at the beginning of his tale, by way of preview: “I left them to pursue their interesting double life, though at times they made mine exceedingly uncomfortable… “Yes—uncomfortable; and you know how I hate to be uncomfortable!” (813)

Wharton’s “Sermons in Stone”

30 But Wharton’s whole point is of course that the single-minded pursuit of comfort and ease can have grave moral repercussions. Culwin has “nursed,” “protected,” even “carefully guarded” his leisure, “instead of squandering it in vain activities” (811). With the aging dilettante of “The Eyes,” the political detachment that Gautier had proudly displayed in Emaux becomes ethical. Among “vain activities,” Culwin clearly includes moral action. He prefers the tranquillity of the spectator ab extra, the “humorous detached observer of the immense muddled variety show of life” (810). He habitually declines “all collaboration with Providence” (815-816). “I’ve always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn’t be on an errand of destruction” (822). Idleness is harmlessness, in other words. Before his engagement to Alice Nowell, “the first good action [he] had ever consciously committed,” he was “merely a harmless young man,” rather than “an instrument of destruction” (815). And with Noyes, Culwin’s goal is to turn the young man into a beautiful version of himself—“an inoffensive idler” (821), “a charming parasitic thing” (826).

31 Moral action, if it must be indulged in, should be like the rest of the dilettante’s existence—all beauty, charms, and softness. Nothing stern or unpleasant. Why does Culwin refrain from telling Noyes the truth? Because it “would have been about as pleasant as slitting the throat of some gentle animal” (821). Doing good must feel good. Here is Culwin’s description of his feelings following his “first good action”—committed right before the first appearance of the eyes: “A glow of self-righteousness tempered my fears, and I said to myself as I undressed that when I’d got used to being good it probably wouldn’t make me as nervous as it did at the start. And by the time I was in bed, and had blown out my candle, I felt that I really was getting used to it, and that, as far as I’d got, it was not unlike sinking down into one of my aunt’s very softest wool mattresses.” (816)

32 Moral conduct should never bring pain to oneself or others—on the contrary. Above all: do no harm. Avoid pain, come what may. The very idea that doing good to others might require hurting them is mere sophistry or “humbug.” Thus Culwin, on his “duty” to tell Noyes the truth about his lack of literary talent:

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“It was well enough to tell myself that it was my duty to knock the poor boy’s hopes into splinters—but I’d like to know what act of gratuitous cruelty hasn’t been justified on that plea?” […] “He was too beautifully brave for me to keep up any humbug about my duty. And it came over me suddenly how I should hurt others in hurting him: myself, first, since sending him home meant losing him; but more particularly poor Alice Nowell, to whom I had so longed to prove my good faith and my desire to serve her. It really seemed like failing her twice to fail Gilbert—” (822-823; emphasis added)

33 Myself, first. Culwin redefines morality in hedonistic terms, as comfort and self- indulgence: the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain. Giving pain to others means, first and foremost, giving it to oneself. To avoid this with Noyes, Culwin opts for the easiest, most pleasurable way: “Hang it all, making people happy has its charms—” (823). And in the end Culwin is convinced, even with hindsight, that he did the right thing: “But I must plead in extenuation that the boy was a fool, and that I’d done my best for him—I really had” (827).

34 The cruel paradox is that Culwin’s softness ends up being far worse than the resistance of Frenham’s “obdurate” family (820). The “enchanting,” “beautiful” friendship ends nightmarishly, in hard words, “violence” (826), and a cruel outburst of laughter on Culwin’s part—laughter which he finds, in retrospect, more objectionable on social and esthetic than on properly moral grounds: “I don’t defend my laugh—it was in wretched taste” (827). No wonder that the eyes that haunt Culwin are those of a man who has “done a lot of harm in his life” (817). The exclusive pursuit of happiness, comfort, and idleness leads to a form of shrinking and hardening—perhaps even to an ultimate reduction to nothingness. In his moral skepticism, Culwin wants neither “to promote the moral order of the world” (816) nor to be “an instrument of destruction” (815). But in what appears to be a completion of the process of shrinking, he ultimately reduces Noyes, from a pair of “charming” or “beautiful” eyes, to “nothing.” When Culwin is asked by the unnamed narrator what finally became of his young protégé, he replies: “Oh, nothing became of him—because he became nothing” (827). Wharton even slips in an image suggesting that Culwin might suffer a similar fate. Just after the description of his eyes as “spots of enamel,” we see Culwin “so sunk into his chair that he seemed like a heap of his own empty clothes” (825). It is as if he were fast becoming, like the phantom eyes he tries to combat, a mere apparition, devoid of corporeal substance, as in his first “battle” with the ghost: “I was seized by an impulse of rage that jerked me to my feet and pitched me straight at the unseen figure. But of course there wasn’t any figure there, and my fists struck at emptiness.” (817)

35 This prospect of annihilation should not be entirely unexpected. For Culwin, morality has never been a matter of real being or ontological expansion, as it was for Emerson: “In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous action I add to the world.”9 It is, rather, a solipsistic, specular, ultimately esthetic relation—a matter of justifying one’s self beautifully, but “in one’s own eyes.” Myself, first. Those two words also define the way Culwin envisions his good turn to Alice Nowell, which Noyes’s appearance suddenly makes possible: “I had always wanted to do her some service, to justify myself in my own eyes rather than hers; and here was a beautiful occasion” (820). Human and moral realities become mere images in a speculum—or more appropriately, for the esthete’s world, fleeting images in his little bronze-framed mirror. In Culwin’s narrow vision of strict cause and effect (815), there is no real place for morality, any more than

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for metaphysics. Of the eight members of his social circle, only two—Murchard and Frenham—have “the habit of sending [their] souls into the invisible” (810). Culwin inhabits the cultural world of Positivism triumphant, as Wharton is keen to point out at the outset. And here is perhaps her most brilliant stroke in the choice of genre. Wharton shows how Culwin’s positivism and pleasure-seeking relegate duty to the realm of the supernatural, making “The Eyes,” almost indifferently, a ghost tale or a moral fable; either way, it is a tale of the unreal, a story that is incomprehensible to the narrow empiricist worldview which always finds the “connecting thread” missing (827). There is no observable tie between Culwin’s actions—necessarily “inoffensive,” “harmless,” and conducive to the happiness of others—and the subsequent fate of his friend and protégé Noyes. As Culwin concludes: “Put two and two together if you can. For my part I haven’t found the link” (828; see also, with Alice Nowell, 815). If we cannot observe the causal connection between two physical events, as the skeptic David Hume famously argued, how then for things far less palpable, like moral relations?

36 But Wharton’s simple story line has made it impossible for us readers to be quite so skeptical about the idea of necessary connections in our moral lives. After all, trouble begins not once but twice in Culwin’s otherwise care-free existence as a direct consequence of his moving from detached spectatorship to moral commitment—first with Alice Nowell, then, three years later, with Gilbert Noyes. No doubt about it, then: it is Culwin’s shirking his duty to others that causes the eyes to appear. We may of course be accused of committing the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. But readers of “The Eyes”—perhaps readers of any narrative, as Roland Barthes once suggested—have no choice but to embrace it. The success of the story depends on it. Here too, Wharton’s moral vision appears to be close to Emerson’s, in that it remains unaffected by the skepticism of a Hume or a Montaigne: “Seen or unseen, we believe the tie exists” (Emerson, “Montaigne, or The Skeptic”, 701).

37 Although the phantom eyes emerge in romance settings—now in “a damp Gothic villa,” now in Italy (814, 820)—as befits a supremely “Hawthornesque” short story (Wolff 156), they represent, above all, an ethical gaze. In their shared obduracy, Culwin’s own eyes, glimmering in the gathering darkness like Gautierian “spots of enamel,” are Edith Wharton’s “sermons in stone.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits.” Communications 8 (1966): 1-27.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983.

Gautier, Théophile. Emaux et Camées. Ed. Claudine Gothot-Mersch. Paris: Gallimard, 1981.

James, Henry. Literary Criticism, Vol. 2: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Lewis, R.W.B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

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Pound, Ezra. “The Hard and Soft in French Poetry.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. 285-289.

Shapiro Norman R., trans. Selected Lyrics. By Théophile Gautier. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011.

Singley, Carole J. Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. Cambridge: U of Cambridge P, 1998.

Wharton, Edith. “The Eyes.” Collected Stories, 1891-1910. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001. 810-829.

---. The Uncollected Critical Writings. Ed. Federick Wegener. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996.

---. Kerfol et autres histoires de fantômes. Trans. Jean-Pierre Naugrette. Paris: Le Livre de poche, 2011.

White, Barbara A. Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1991.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

NOTES

1. Wharton, “The Eyes,” Collected Stories, 1891-1910, 826. All references are to this edition and will be given hereafter between parentheses in the text. References to Théophile Gautier's Emaux et Camées are, in the original, to the page and stanza and to the page in Norman Shapiro's translation. 2. Howard's gloss has since been adopted by French translator Jean-Pierre Naugrette, 106n1. 3. Wharton, Uncollected Critical Writings 191, 196-197n9. 4. Uncollected Critical Writings 196-197n9. Wegener quotes the reference to Gautier in “The Eyes,” but misdates the publication of the short story as 1909, which would put it before rather than after the tribute to Cabot Lodge, with its quotation of sculpte, lime, cisèle. 5. Of course “Hyacinthine” might also be said to reinforce the floral metaphor, which emphasizes what the narrator and Culwin see as the latter's nurturing relation to his protégés (811-812, 821). But the immediate context suggests the jewel (or, by association, the sculptured altar stone) rather than the flower. Then too we might say that in the competition between the soft organic and hard inorganic metaphors—which Wharton sets up in the unnamed narrator's inconsistent descriptions of Frenham: now a “flower,” now, two sentences later, ceramic or stone (“the pure paste under a fine glaze”)—the latter win out. This process whereby life is frozen in hard “beautiful” materials is further developed in two objects which I shall consider below, one belonging to Culwin, the other to his aunt: a bronze-framed mirror and a Tiffany desk lamp. 6. R.W.B. Lewis has called the short story “one of the finest Edith Wharton ever wrote” (288), Cynthia Griffin Wolff “one of Wharton's most brilliant” (159). See also White 64. 7. Though the description of Culwin's apartment in Rome is rather vague, the room where he delivers his “verdict” on Gilbert Noyes's literary talent has a library-like atmosphere (“The manuscript lay between us, on my table”), heightened by the explicit visual parallel Culwin draws, while narrating the incident, between the two settings and the two protégés: “Gilbert sat opposite me, with his head thrown back in the lamplight, just as Phil's is now . . .” (822). 8. Unfortunately Shapiro's rearrangement of the opening stanza ruins Gautier's bold “attack” and its deliberate emphasis on purpose: Pour contraste is removed from its strategic position at the beginning of “Imperia”'s first line, and translated by the neutral formulation “in contrast.” 9. "Compensation," Emerson 300. With this appeal to Emerson, my reading joins Carole Singley's emphasis on Wharton's attraction to philosophical idealism (31; on Emerson see also 19, 23, 147-148,150).

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ABSTRACTS

Et si l’inspiration de “The Eyes” était plutôt venue d’une « Etude de Mains », celle proposée par Théophile Gautier dans Emaux et Camées ? L’hypothèse, pour étrange qu’elle paraisse à première vue, ne manque pas de vraisemblance. Wharton connaissait cette œuvre, qu’elle avait citée textuellement dans un article publié par Scribner’s quelques mois avant la parution de son nouveau conte fantastique. La référence explicite à Gautier dans « The Eyes » ne doit donc pas nous surprendre. Tout se passe comme si Wharton avait voulu adapter l’esthétique d’Emaux et Camées à la nouvelle en lui donnant, de surcroît, une dimension éthique déjà en filigrane dans l’œuvre de Gautier.

AUTHORS

JOSEPH URBAS Joseph Urbas is Professor of nineteenth-century American literature at the Université Michel de Montaigne–Bordeaux, a member of the research group SPH (Sciences, Philosophie, Humanités, http://www.sph.u-bordeaux.fr), and Associate Editor of the works of Herman Melville for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Editions Gallimard). His most recent publications focus on Transcendentalist philosophy. He is currently preparing a book of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s metaphysics.

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Bibliography

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Edith Wharton: A Bibliography

Virginia Ricard

1 A rapid perusal of the following critical bibliography reveals the paucity of work examining Edith Wharton’s art of the short story as a whole. Most of the articles listed below focus on one or two stories. Barbara White’s Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction, published in 1991, is still the only book-length study devoted to the subject. Certain more general studies of Wharton’s work—books with a chapter on Wharton and the short story, or books that focus on problems and themes apposite to the articles in this special issue—have also been included.

2 Collections or selections of Wharton’s stories have not been included. Wherever possible, the articles in this issue refer to the Library of America edition of the Collected Stories, volumes 1 and 2, edited by Maureen Howard (2001). When discussing stories that were not included in the Library of America collection, authors refer either to R.W.B. Lewis’s Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton (1968), to his Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton (1991), or to Anita Brookner’s two volumes, The Stories of Edith Wharton (1988-1989). Over the past twenty years, a number of selections have grouped Wharton’s stories thematically. Three major themes emerge: New England (e.g. Barbara A. White’s selection, Wharton’s New England: Seven Stories and Ethan Frome, Hanover: UP of New England 1995); New York (e.g. Roxana Robinson’s The New York Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: NYRB Classics, 2007); and, above all, ghosts (e.g. The Ghost-Feeler: Stories of Terror and the Supernatural, and The Demanding Dead: More Stories of Terror and the Supernatural, London: Peter Owen, 1996 and 2007; To Be Read by Candlelight: Two Tales of Suspense, West Huntspill: Parsimony, 2000; The Triumph of Night and Other Tales, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2008; or, in France, Kerfol et autres histoires de fantômes, Paris: Le Livre de poche, 2011). Other selections reflect different concerns (e.g. Marilyn French’s Roman Fever and Other Stories, London: Virago, 1985; Mary Gordon’s Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction by Edith Wharton, New York: Bantam, 1987; Candace Waid’s ‘The Muse’s Tragedy,’ and Other Stories, London: Penguin, 1992; Linda Wagner-Martin’s Portable Edith Wharton, New York: Penguin Books, 2003; Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s Roman Fever and Other Stories by Edith Wharton, New York: Collier Books, 1993; or the Dover Edith Wharton, Short Stories, New York: Dover, 1994). A study of the principles of selection and rejection in these collections and anthologies (from, say, William Dean Howells’ choice

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of “The Mission of Jane” for Great Modern American Stories, New York: Boni & Liveright, 1921, through Wayne Andrews’ The Best Short Stories of Edith Wharton, New York: Scribner, 1958, to the present day) might serve as a history of the fluctuating reputation of Wharton’s short fiction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, Wayne. “Introduction.” The Best Short Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribner, 1958. vii-xxvii.

Balestra, Gianfranca. “‘For the Use of the Magazine Morons’: Edith Wharton Rewrites the Tale of the Fantastic.” Studies in Short Fiction 33. 1 (1996): 13-24.

Banta, Martha. “The Ghostly Gothic of Wharton’s Everyday World.” American Literary Realism 27:1 (1994): 1-10.

Bardolph, Megan J. “‘That Strange Something Undreamt:’ Genre and Meta-Fiction in Edith Wharton’s ‘the Lady’s Maid’s Bell.’” Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 9.1 (2008): 137-146.

Bauer, Dale M. “Edith Wharton’s ‘Roman Fever’: A Rune of History.” College English 50.6 (1988): 681-693.

Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

--- and Avril Horner. Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

---. “‘This Isn’t Exactly a Ghost Story’: Edith Wharton and Parodic Gothic.” Journal of American Studies 37.2 (2003): 269-285.

Bell, Millicent. “A James ‘Gift’ to Edith Wharton.” Modern Language Notes 72.3 (1957): 82-85.

Bennett, Bridget. “‘Precious Allusions’: Female Muses and Authorising Writing.” Essays and Studies 51 (1998): 140-160.

Berkove, Lawrence. “‘Roman Fever’: A Mortal Malady.” CEA Critic 56.2 (1994): 56-60.

Billy, Ted. “‘Domesticated with Horror’: Matrimonial Mansions in Edith Wharton’s Psychological Ghost Stories.” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 25:3-4 (2002): 433-437.

Blackall, Jean Frantz. “Edith Wharton’s Art of the Ellipsis.” Journal of Narrative Technique 17.2 (1987): 145-162.

Blackford, Holly. “Haunted Housekeeping: Fatal Attractions of Servant and Mistress in Twentieth-Century Female Gothic Literature.” Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 16:2 (2005): 233-261.

Blazek, William. “Trench Vision: Obscurity in Edith Wharton’s War Writings.” L’Obscur. Ed. Françoise Sammarcelli. Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2009. 66-84.

Blum, Virginia L. “Edith Wharton’s Erotic Other-World.” Literature and Psychology 33:1 (1987): 12-29.

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Bowlby, Rachel. “‘I Had Barbara’: Women’s Ties and Wharton’s ‘Roman Fever.’” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17.3 (2006): 37-51.

Branson, Stephanie. “Ripe Fruit: Fantastic Elements in the Short Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, Edith Wharton, and Eudora Welty.” American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Julie Brown. New York: Garland, 2000. 61-71.

Brivic, Sheldon. “The Lacanian Phallus and the Lesbian One in Wharton's ‘Xingu.’” Journal of Modern Literature. 35.2 (2012 Winter): 25-36.

Brookner, Anita. Introduction. The Stories of Edith Wharton. Vol. 1. Ed. Anita Brookner. New York : Carroll & Graf, 1988.

---. Introduction. The Stories of Edith Wharton. Vol. 2. Ed. Anita Brookner. New York : Carroll & Graf, 1989.

Brumm, Ursula. “Ghosts Who Write Letters: Some Notes on Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories.” Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 26:1 (1993): 29-37.

Bulman, Jessica. “Edith Wharton, Privacy and Publicity.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 16:1 (2004), 41-82.

Burbridge, Martha Vanbiesem de. “Un Cuento de María Teresa Maiorana frente a uno de Edith Wharton.” Primeras Jornadas Internacionales de Literatura Argentin/Comparística. Ed. Teresita Frugoni de Fritzsche. Buenos Aires: Prensa U de Buenos Aires, 1996. 345-354.

Burleson, Donald R. “Sabbats: Hawthorne/Wharton.” Studies in Weird Fiction 12 (1993): 12-16.

Campbell, Donna. “Edith Wharton’s ‘Book of the Grotesque’: Sherwood Anderson, Modernism and the Late Stories.” Edith Wharton Review 26.2 (2010): 1-5.

---. “‘The (American) Muse’s Tragedy’: Jack London, Edith Wharton, and the Little Lady of the Big House.” Jack London: One Hundred Years a Writer. Ed. Sara S. Hodson and Jeanne Campbell Reesman. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2002. 189-216.

---. “The Short Stories of Edith Wharton.” Companion to the American Short Story. Eds. Alfred Bendixen and James Nagal. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 118-132.

Campbell, Lori M. Portals of Power: Magical Agency and Transformation in Literary Fantasy. Jefferson, NC; McFarland, 2010.

Carney, Mary, et al. “Wharton’s Short Fiction of War: The Politics of ‘Coming Home.’” In Postmodern Approaches to the Short Story. Ed. Farhat Iftekharrudin. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 109-120.

Carpenter, Lynette. “Deadly Letters, Sexual Politics, and the Dilemma of the Woman Writer: Edith Wharton’s ‘The House of the Dead Hand.’” American Literary Realism 24.2 (1992): 55-69.

Caws, Mary Ann. “Framing in Two Opposite Modes: Ford and Wharton.” Comparatist 10 (1986): 114-120.

Comins, Barbara. “‘Outrageous Trap’: Envy and Jealousy in Wharton’s ‘Roman Fever’ and Fitzgerald’s ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair.’” Edith Wharton Review 17.1 (2001): 9-12.

Conn, Peter. “Edith Wharton.” The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. 173-196.

Crow, Charles L. “The Girl in the Library: Edith Wharton’s ‘The Eyes’ and American Gothic Traditions.” Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination. Ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 2004. 157-168.

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Dean, Sharon L. “Edith Wharton’s Early Artist Stories and Constance Fenimore Woolson.” Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century. Ed. Victoria Brehn. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001. 225-239.

Del Fattore, Joan. “Edith Wharton.” Short Story Writers 3. Ed. Frank N. Magill. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1997. 950-958.

Donovan, Josephine. After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989.

Downey, June E. “Three Stories.” Creative Imagination: Studies in the Psychology of Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929. 202-208.

Dwight, Eleanor. “Edith Wharton and ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’” Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities. Ed. Franklin Fisher. Baltimore: Edgar Allen Poe Society, 1986. 49-57.

Dyman, Jenni. Lurking Feminism: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Eaton, Mark A. “Publicity and Authorship in ‘The Touchstone’: Or A Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Woman.” Edith Wharton Review 14:1 (1997): 4-11, 21.

Edel, Leon. “The Nature of Literary Psychology.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 29:2 (1981): 447-467.

Elbert, Monika M. “Bourgeois Sexuality and the Gothic Plot in Wharton and Hawthorne.” Hawthorne and Women. Ed. John L. Idol and Melinda M. Ponder. Amherst: U of Massacusetts P, 1999. 258-270.

---. “The Transcendental Economy of Wharton’s Gothic Mansions.” American Transcendental Quarterly 9.1 (1995): 51-67.

---. “T. S. Eliot and Wharton’s Modernist Gothic.” Edith Wharton Review 11.1 (1994): 19-25.

---. “Wharton’s Hybridization of Hawthorne’s ‘Brand’ of Gothic: Gender Crossings in ‘Ethan Brand’ and ‘Bewitched.’” American Transcendental Quarterly 17.4 (2003): 221-241.

Emmert, Scott. “Drawing-Room Naturalism in Edith Wharton’s Early Short Stories.” Journal of the Short Story in English 39 (2002): 57-71.

Erlich, Gloria C. “‘Forbidden Things’: Gothic Confrontation with the Feminine in ‘The Young Gentleman’ and ‘Bewitched.’” Edith Wharton Review 11.1 (1994): 3-9.

---. “The Female Conscience in Wharton’s Shorter Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Ed. Millicent Bell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 98-116.

Fedorko, Kathy A. Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1995.

---. “Edith Wharton’s Haunted Fiction: ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell’ and The House of Mirth”. Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Ed. Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991. 80-107.

---. “‘Forbidden Things’: Gothic Confrontation with the Feminine in ‘The Young Gentlemen’ and ‘Bewitched.’” Edith Wharton Review 11:1 (1994): 3-9.

Fields, Anne M. “‘Years Hence of these Scenes’: Wharton’s ‘The Spark’ and World War I.” Edith Wharton Review 19:2 (2003): 1, 5-10.

Fishbein, L. “Prostitution, Morality, and Paradox : Moral Relativism in Edith Wharton’s ‘Old New York.’” Studies in Short Fiction. 24.4 (1987). 399-406.

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Fisher, Benjamin F. “Transitions from Victorian to Modern: The Supernatural Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman and Edith Wharton.” American Supernatural Fiction: From Edith Wharton to the Weird Tales Writers. Ed. Douglas Robillard. New York: Garland, 1996. 3-42.

Fracasso, Evelyn E. Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Consciousness: A Study of Theme and Technique in the Tales. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

---. “Images of Imprisonment in Two Tales of Edith Wharton.” College Language Association Journal 36.3 (1993): 318-26.

---. “The Evolution of Theme and Technique in Selected Tales of Edith Wharton.” Journal of the Short Story in English 16 (1991): 41-50.

Friedl, Bettina. “Edith Wharton: ‘Pomegranate Seed’—the verge of Being.” Die englische und amerikanische Kurzgescichte. Ed. Klaus Lubbers. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990. 120-133.

Funston, Judith E. “‘Xingu’: Edith Wharton’s Velvet Gauntlet.” Studies in American Fiction 12.2 (1984): 227-234.

Gallagher, Jean. “The Great War and the Female Gaze: Edith Wharton and the Iconography of War Propaganda.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 7.1 (1996): 27-49.

Gentile, Kathy Justice. “Supernatural Transmissions: Turn-of-the-Century Ghosts in American Women’s Fiction: Jewett, Freeman, Wharton, and Gilman.” Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions. Ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamar Heller. New York, NY: Modern Language Association of America, 2003. 208-214.

Geoffroy-Menoux, Sophie. Introduction à l’étude des textes fantastiques anglo-américains. Paris: Editions du Temps, 2000.

Gerlach, John. Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1985.

Getz, John. “Edith Wharton and the Ghost of Poe: ‘Miss Mary Pask’ and ‘Mr. Jones.’” Edith Wharton Review 21:1 (2005): 18-23.

Giorcelli, Cristina. “Plays of White and Black in Edith Wharton’s ‘A Bottle of Perrier.’” Letterature d’America 16.65 (1996): 117-36.

Going, William T. “Wharton’s ‘After Holbein.’” Explicator 10 (1951): 8.

Goldsmith, Meredith. “A ‘Ghostly Cortege’ of ‘Imaginary Guests’: Ghosts of Old New York in ‘After Holbein.’” Ghosts, Stories, Histories: Ghost Stories and Alternative Histories. Ed. Sladja Blazan. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. 32-40.

Gómez Reus, Teresa. “Revisiting ‘the Angel at the Grave’: Parallelisms between Edith Wharton and George Eliot.” Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 2 (1993): 9-17.

Haining, Peter. Introduction. Edith Wharton: The Ghost-Feeler: Stories of Terror and the Supernatural. Ed. Peter Haining. London: Peter Owen, 1996.

---. Introduction. The Demanding Dead : More Stories of Terror and the Supernatural. Ed. Peter Haining. London: Peter Owen, 2007. 7-19.

Haytock, Jennifer. Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Heller, Janet Ruth. “Ghosts and Marital Estrangement: An Analysis of ‘Afterward.’” Edith Wharton Review 10.1 (1993): 18-19.

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Hendry, Michael. “Two Greek Syllables in Wharton’s ‘The Pelican.’” Notes and Queries 52:2 (2010), 224-225.

Hochman, Barbara. “The Good, the Bad, and the Literary: Edith Wharton’s ‘Bunner Sisters’ and the Social Context of Reading.” Studies in American Naturalism 1:1/2 (2006): 128-143.

Hoeller, Hildegard. Edith Wharton’s Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2000.

---. “The Gains and Losses of ‘Sentimental Economies’ in Edith Wharton’s ‘The Dilettante.’” American Literary Realism 28.3 (1996): 19-29.

Horton, Rod William. Social and Individual Values in the New York Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: New York UP, 1948.

Inness, Sherrie A. “An Economy of Beauty: The Beauty System in ‘The Looking Glass’ and ‘Permanent Wave.’” Edith Wharton Review 10.1 (1993): 7-11.

---. “‘Loyal Saints or Devious Rascals’: Domestic Servants in Edith Wharton’s Stories ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell’ and ‘All Souls.’” Studies in Short Fiction 36.4 (1999): 337-49.

Inverso, Mary Beth. “Performing Women: Semiotic Promiscuity in ‘The Other Two.’” Edith Wharton Review 10.1 (1993): 3-6.

Jacobsen, Karen J. “Economic Hauntings: Wealth and Class in Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories.” College Literature 35.1 (2008): 100-127.

Jirousek, Lori. “Haunting Hysteria: Wharton, Freeman, and the Ghosts of Masculinity.” American Literary Realism 32.1 (1999): 51-68.

Johnson, Alexandra. “A Forward Glance.” Nation 253.1 (1991): 59-61.

Kaplan, Amy. “Edith Wharton’s Profession of Authorship.” English Literary History 53 (1986): 433-457.

Kassanoff, Jennie A. Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.

Kaye, Richard A. “‘Unearthly Visitants’: Wharton Ghost Tales, Gothic Form and the Literature of Homosexual Panic.” Edith Wharton Review 11.1 (1994): 10-18.

Killoran, Helen. “Pascal, Bronte, and ‘Kerfol’: The Horrors of A Foolish Quartet.” Edith Wharton Review 10.1 (1993): 12-17.

---. “Sexuality and Abnormal Psychology in Edith Wharton’s ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell.’”CEA Critic 58.3 (1996): 41-49.

---. “‘Xingu’: Edith Wharton Instructs Literary Critics.” Studies in American Humor 3.3 (1996): 1-13.

Kimbel, Ellen. “The American Short Story: 1900-1920.” The American Short Story, 1900-1945. Ed. Philip Stevick. Boston: Twayne, 1984. 33-69.

Kinman, Alice Herritage. “Edith Wharton and the Future of Fiction.” Edith Wharton Review 18.2 (2002): 3-12.

Kiran-Raw, Meltem. “Edith Wharton’s ‘The Other Two.’” The Explicator 68:1 (2010): 39-42.

Koprince, Susan. “Edith Wharton, Henry James, and ‘Roman Fever.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 25 (1995): 21-31.

Kornasky, Linda. “On ‘Listen[ing] to Spectres too’: Wharton’s ‘Bunner Sisters’ and Ideologies of Sexual Selection.” American Literary Realism 30.1 (1997): 47-58.

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Kornetta, Reiner. “Das Korsett Im Kopf: Ehe und Ökonomie in den Kurzgeschichten Edith Whartons.” Düsseldorfer Beiträge aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik: 4. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996.

---. “Edith Wharton’s ‘The Angel at the Grave’ and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables.” Edith Wharton Review 14.2 (1997): 21-25.

Kozikowski, Stanley J. “Unreliable Narration in Henry James’s ‘The Two Faces’ and Edith Wharton’s ‘The Dilettante.’” Arizona Quarterly 35 (1979): 357-372.

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Lawson, Richard H. “Edith Wharton.” American Short-Story Writers, 1880-1910. Ed. Ellen Kimbel. Detroit: Gale, 1989. 308-323.

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---. “Introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton.” Women Writers of the Short Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Heather McClave. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980. 32-49.

MacNaughton, William. “Edith Wharton’s ‘The Blond Beast’ and Friedrich Nietzsche.” Edith Wharton Review 15.2 (1999): 13-19.

Maine, Barry. “Reading ‘The Portrait’: Edith Wharton and John Singer Sargent.” Edith Wharton Review 18:1 (2002): 7-14.

Mamoli Zorzi, Rozella. “Edith Wharton, Painting, and Modernity.” Literature and the Visual Arts in Twentieth-Century America. Ed. Bottalico, Michele. Bari: Palomar, 2002. 23-33.

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Markovits, Benjamin. “Manhattan Partings.” Times Literary Supplement 21-28 Dec. 2007: 28.

McDowell, Margaret B. “Edith Wharton’s ‘After Holbein’: ‘a Paradigm of the Human Condition.’” Journal of Narrative Technique 1 (1971): 49-58.

---. “Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories.” Criticism 12.2 (1970): 133-152.

---. “Edith Wharton’s Ghost Tales Reconsidered.” Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Ed. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland, 1992. 291-314.

---. “Edith Wharton’s ‘The Old Maid’: Novella/Play/Film.” College Literature 14.3 (1987): 246-262.

---. “The Short Stories.” Edith Wharton. Boston: Twayne, 1976. 84-91.

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Mortimer, Armine Kotin. “Romantic Fever: The Second Story as Illegitimate Daughter in Wharton’s ‘Roman Fever.’” Narrative 6.2 (1998): 188-198.

Murray, Margaret P. “The Gothic Arsenal of Edith Wharton.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 10.3-4 (1989): 315-21.

Nettels, Elsa. “Gender and First-Person Narration in Edith Wharton’s Short Fiction.” Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Ed. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland, 1992. 245-260.

---. “Thwarted Escapes: Ethan Frome and Jean Stafford’s ‘A Country Love Story.’” Edith Wharton Review 11.2 (1994): 6-8, 15.

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Olin-Ammentorp, Julie. “Female Models and Male Mentors in Wharton’s Early Fiction.” American Literary Mentors. Ed. Irene C. Goldman-Price and Melissa McFarland Pennell. Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, 1999. 84-95.

---. “Not Precisely War Stories: Edith Wharton’s Short Fiction from the Great War”. Studies in American Fiction 23.2 (1995): 153-172.

Orlando, Emily. Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2009.

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---. The Development of the American Short Story. New York: Harper and Bros, 1923.

Patten, Ann L. “The Spectres of Capitalism and Democracy in Edith Wharton’s Early Ghost Stories.” Edith Wharton Review 25.1 (2009): 1-8.

Peel, Robin. Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics, and Fiction before World War I. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2005.

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Petry, Alice Hall. “A Twist of Crimson Silk: Edith Wharton’s ‘Roman Fever.’” Studies in Short Fiction 24.2 (1987): 163-166.

Phelan, James. “Narrative as Rhetoric and Edith Wharton’s ‘Roman Fever’: Progression, Configuration and the Ethics of Surprise.” A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism. Ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. 340-354.

Pierpont, Claudia Roth. “Cries and Whispers: How Much of Edith Wharton’s Life Is in Her Short Stories?” New Yorker 77.6 (2001): 66-71.

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Price, Alan. “Edith Wharton’s War Story.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 8.1 (1989): 95-100.

Quinn, Arthur Hobson. “Edith Wharton” American Fiction: An Historical Survey. New York: Appleton-Century, 1936. 550-581.

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---. “Mrs. Wharton as a Writer of Short Stories.” Book News Monthly 26 (1907): 179-181.

Ricard, Virginia. “Legendary Spell: Edith Wharton’s Italy.” American Authors Reinventing Italy: The Writings of Exceptional Nineteenth Century Women. Ed. Sirpa Salenius. Padova: Il Prato 2009: 69-85.

Rich, Charlotte. “Fictions of Colonial Anxiety: Edith Wharton’s ‘The Seed of the Faith’ and ‘A Bottle of Perrier. ’” Journal of the Short Story in English 43. (2004): 59-74. http://jsse.revues.org/ index408.html.

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Rudkin, Casey J. “Wharton’s ‘New Year’s Day (The Seventies)’” Explicator 63:1 (2004): 32-34.

Salecl, Renata. “I Can’t Love You Unless I Give You Up.” Gaze and Voice as Love Objects. Ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996. 179-207.

Salina, Jamil S. “Wharton’s ‘Roman Fever’” Explicator 65:2 (2007): 99.

Saltz, Laura. “From Image to Text: Modernist Transformations in Edith Wharton’s ‘The Muse’s Tragedy.’” Edith Wharton Review 19.2 (2003): 15-21.

Sasaki, Miyoko. “The Dance of Death: A Study of Edith Wharton’s Short Stories.” Studies in English Literature 51.1-2 (1974): 67-90.

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Schacchi, Anna. “Per una critica dello sguardo: due raconti di Edith Wharton.” Gioco di specchi: saggi sull’uso letterario dell’imagine dello specchio. Ed. Agostino Lombardi. Roma: Bulzoni, 1999. 403-422.

Schriber, Marysue. “Darwin, Wharton, and ‘The Descent of Man’: Blueprints of American Society.” Studies in Short Fiction 17 (1980): 31–38.

Selman, Linda. “The Influence of the Bunner Brothers on Edith Wharton’s ‘Bunner Sisters.’” Edith Wharton Review 23:1 (2007), 13-18.

Sensibar, Judith L. “‘Behind the Lines’ in Edith Wharton’s a Son at the Front: Re-Writing a Masculinist Tradition.” Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe. Ed. Katherine Joslin and Alan Price. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. 241-256.

Shaloo, Sharon. “Making Room for the Artist in Edith Wharton’s Old New York.” The Modern American Novella. Ed. A. Robert Lee. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. 66-84.

Shaffer-Koros, Carol. “Nietzsche, German Culture, and Edith Wharton.” Edith Wharton Review 20.2 (2004): 7-10.

---. “Wharton in New York.” Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (2011): 23-24.

Silva, Reinaldo Francisco. “Eroticizing the Other in Edith Wharton’s ‘Beatrice Palmato.’” Mentalities/Mentalites 19.1 (2005): 38-45.

Singley, Carol J. “Edith Wharton, Religion, and Moral ‘Quicksand.’” Literature and Belief 15 (1995): 75-93.

---. “Gothic Borrowings and Innovations in Edith Wharton’s ‘A Bottle of Perrier.’” Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Ed. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland, 1992. 271-290.

Singley, Carol and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. “Forbidden Reading and Ghostly Writing: Anxious Power in Wharton’s ‘Pomegranate Seed.’” Women’s Studies 20.2 (1991): 177-203.

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Smith, Allan Gardner. “Edith Wharton and the Ghost Story.” Edith Wharton. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 89-97.

Stack, Allyson. “Culture, Cognition and Jean Laplanche’s Enigmatic Signifier.” Theory, Culture & Society 22.3 (2005): 63-80.

Stengel, Ellen Powers. “Dilemmas of Discourse: Edith Wharton’s ‘All Souls’ and the Tale of the Supernatural.” Publications of The Arkansas Philological Association 15.2 (1989): 85-104.

---. “Edith Wharton Rings ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell.’” Edith Wharton Review 7.1 (1990): 3-9.

Sterling, Charlee M. Irony in the Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Lewiston, Queenstin, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005.

Sweeney, Gerard. “Wharton’s ‘Bewitched.’” Explicator 56.4 (1998): 198-201.

---. “Wharton’s ‘The Other Two.’” Explicator 59:2 (2001): 88-91.

Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. “Edith Wharton’s Case of Roman Fever.” Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe. Ed. Katherine Joslin and Alan Price. New York: P. Lang, 1993. 313–331.

---. “Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall: Gazing in Edith Wharton’s ‘Looking Glass.’” Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers. Ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1997. 54-75.

Thomas, Jennice G. “Spook or Spinster? Edith Wharton’s ‘Miss Mary Pask.’” Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Ed. Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Colmar. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991. 108-116.

Thompson, Terry W. “‘A Journey’: Edith Wharton’s Homage to F. Marion Crawford’s ‘The Upper Berth.’” South Carolina Review 40.1 (2007): 19-26.

---. “‘All Souls’: Edith Wharton’s Homage to ‘The Jolly Corner.’” Edith Wharton Review 19.1 (2003): 15-20.

---. “Old Testament Sourcing in Edith Wharton’s ‘All Souls.’” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 19.4 (2006): 47-52.

---. “Wharton’s ‘Bewitched.’” Explicator 61.3 (2003): 155-58.

---. “‘With Every Practical Appliance’: Edith Wharton’s ‘All Souls’.’” English Language Notes 42.2 (2004): 68-74.

Tintner, Adeline. “Fiction is the Best Revenge: Portraits of Henry James by Four Women Writers” Turn-of-the-Century Women 2 (1985): 42-49.

---. “Louis Auchincloss’s Four ‘Edith’ Tales: Some Rearrangements and Reinventions of Her Life.” Edith Wharton Review 13.2 (1996): 9-14.

---. “Louis Auchincloss Reinvents Edith Wharton’s ‘After Holbein.’” Studies in Short Fiction 33.2 (1996): 275-277.

---. “Mothers vs. Daughters in the Fiction of Edith Wharton and Henry James.” AB Bookman’s Weekly (1983): 4324, 4326-4329.

---. “‘The Hermit and the Wild Woman’: Edith Wharton’s ‘Fictioning’ of Henry James.” Journal of Modern Literature 4 (1974): 32-42.

---. “The Narrative Structure of Old New York: Text and Pictures in Edith Wharton’s Quartet of Linked Short Stories.” Journal of Narrative Technique 17.1 (1987): 76-82.

---. “Wharton and James: Some Literary Give and Take.” Edith Wharton Review 3.1 (1986): 3-5, 8.

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Totten, Gary. “Critical Reception and Cultural Capital: Edith Wharton as a Short Story Writer.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition and Culture 8.1 (2008): 115-133.

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---. “Making Fun of the Critics: Edith Wharton’s Anticipation of the Postmodern Academic Romance.” New Directions in American Humor. Ed. David E. E. Sloane. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1998. 151-159.

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---. “Neglected Areas: Wharton’s Short Stories and Incest, Part I & II” Edith Wharton Review 8: 8 (1991): 2-12; 3-10, 32.

Whitehead, Sarah. “Breaking the Frame: How Edith Wharton’s Short Stories Subvert Their Magazine Context.” European Journal of American Culture 27.1 (2008): 43-56.

---. “Demeter Forgiven: Wharton’s Use of the Persephone Myth in Her Short Stories.” Edith Wharton Review (26:1) 2010: 1-9.

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---. “Telling the Story That Can’t Be Told: Hartley’s Role as Dis-Eased Narrator in ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell.’” Edith Wharton Review 14.1 (1997): 12-17, 21.

---. “Terrors of the Modern World: Edith Wharton’s ‘All Souls’ as a Revisionist Gothic Tale.” Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 9.1 (2008): 65-80.

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AUTHORS

VIRGINIA RICARD Virginia Ricard is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Bordeaux. She has published a number of articles in English and French about Jewish American authors who have written about the voyage from Europe to America—including Mary Antin, Eva Hoffman, Ludwig Lewisohn, Henry Roth, and Saul Bellow. In 2008 she turned her attention to an author who made the opposite journey, publishing an article about Wharton’s Italian stories, “Legendary Spells: Edith Wharton's Italy”. She is currently preparing a book on Edith Wharton and France.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 58 | Spring 2012