DLB 12 Edith Wharton

References: Charles Foster, The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher John R. Adams, "The Literary Achievement of Stowe and New England Puritanism (Durham: Harriet Beecher Stowe," Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University Press, 1954); University of Southern California, 1939; Edward Charles Wagenknecht, Harriet Beecher Elizabeth Ammons, ed., Critical Essays on Harriet Stowe: The Known and the Unknown (New York: , Beecher Stowe (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980); Oxford University Press, 1965). Alice A. Cooper, "Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Criti- cal Study," Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard Uni- Papers: versity, 1964; Harriet Beecher Stowe's papers are in the Alice C. Crozier, The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe Beecher-Stowe Collection at Schlesinger Library, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); Radcliffe College, Harvard University.

Edith Wharton (24 January 1862-11 August 1937)

James W. Tuttleton New York University

See also the Wharton entries in DLB 4, American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939, and DLB 9, American Novelists, 1910-1945.

SELECTED BOOKS: Verses, anonymous (Newport, R. I.: C. E. Hammett, Jr., 1878); The Decoration of Houses, by Wharton and Ogden Cod man, Jr. (New York: Scribners, 1897; London: Batsford, 1898); The Greater Inclination (New York: Scribners, 1899; London: Lane/Bodley Head, 1899); The Touchstone (New York: Scribners, 1900); repub- lished as A Gift from the Grave (London: Mur- ray, 1900); Crucial Instances (New York: Scribners, 1901; Lon- don: Murray, 1901); The Valley if Decision (2 volumes, New York: Scrib- ners, 1902; 1 volume, London: Murray, 1902); Sanctuary (New York: Scribners, 1903; London: Macmillan,11903); Italian Villas and Their Gardens (New York: Century, 1904; London: Lane/Bodley Head, 1904); The Descent of Man and Other Stones (New York: Scribners, 1904; enlarged edition, London & New York: Macmillan, 1904); Italian Backgrounds (New York: Scribners, 1905; London: Macmillan, 1905); The House of Mirth (New York: Scribners, 1905; London & New York: Macmillan, 1905); Madame, de Treymes (New York: Scribners, 1907; Wharton, age twe:nty-three,at the time of her marriage

433 Edith Wharton DLB 12

London: Macmillan, 1907); Hudson River Bracketed (New York & London: Ap- The Fruit of the Tree (New York: Scribners, 1907; pleton, 1929); . London: Macmillan, 1907); Certain People (New York & London: Appleton, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories (New 1930); York: Scribners, 1908; London: Macmillan, The Gods Arrive (New York & London: Appleton, 1908); 1932); A Motor-Flight Through France (New York: Scribners, Human Nature (New York & London: Appleton, 1908; London: Macmillan, 1908); . 1933); 11 Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse (New York: Scrib- A Backward Glance (New York & Lmdon: Apple- ;1 ners, 1909; London: Macmillan, 1909); ton-Century, 1934); J Tales of Men and Ghosts (New York: Scribners, 1910; The World Over (New York & London: Appleton- i London: Macmillan, 1910); Century, 1936); Ethan Frome (New York: Scribners, 1911; London: Ghosts (New York & London: Appleton-Century, Macmillan, 1911); 1937); The Reef (New York: Appleton, 1912; London: The Buccaneers (New York & London: Appleton- Macmillan, 1912); Century, 1938). The Custom of the Country (New York: Scribners, 1913; London: Macmillan, 1913); While at the close of her career Edith Wharton Fighting France,Jrom Dunkerque to Belfort(New York: was sometimes regarded as passe, a literary aristo- Scribners, 1915; London: Macmillan, 1915); crat whose fiction about people of high social stand- (j Xingu and Other Stories (New York: Scribners, 1916; ing had little to tell about the masses, particularly iJ London: Macmillan, 1916); during the Jazz Age and the Depression, a counter- ~ Summer (New York: Appleton, 1917; London: vailing view has begun to emerge in response to ;~ Macmillan, 1917); Edmund Wilson's call, after her death, for "justice" The Marne (New York: Appleton, 1918; London: to Edith Wharton. In this counterview, Wharton is Macmillan, 1918); seen as a serious and deeply committed artist with a French Ways and Their Meaning (New York & Lon- high respect for the professional demands of her don: Appleton, 1919; London: Macmillan, craft, a woman praiseworthy for the generally high 1919); quality and range of her oeuvre, a novelist who The Age 0/ Innocence (New York & London: Apple- wrote some of the most important fiction in the first ton, 1920); quarter of the twentieth century, perhaps in Ameri- In Morocco (New York: Scribners, 1920; London: can literary history. If this point of view has merit; Macmillan, 1920); her claim to attention arises from the clarity of her The Glimpses of the Moon (New York & London: Ap- socialvision, the particular angle of that vision (high pleton, 1922; London: Macmillan, 1923); society seen from the inside), and her subtle mastery A Son at the Front (New York: Scribners, 1923; Lon- of the techniques of fiction, which would be in- don: Macmillan, 1923); teresting to any reader concerned with the pro- Old New York: False Dawn (The 'Forties), The Old Maid cesses of writing; Recently the novelist Gore Vidal (The 'Fifties), The Spark (The 'Sixties), and New remarked in "Of Writers and Class: In Praise of Year's Day (The 'Seventies) (New York & Lon- Edith Wharton" that "At best, there are only three don: Appleton, 1924); or four American novelists who can be thought of as The Mother's Recompense (New York & London: Ap- 'major' and Edith Wharton is one." He regards pleton, 1925); Wharton and James as "the two great American The Writing of Fiction (New York & London: Scrib- masters of the novel." And he remarks. that "now ners, 1925); that the prejudice against the female writer ison the Here and Beyond (New York & London: Appleton, wane, they look to be exactly what they are: giants, 1926); equals, the tutelary and benign gods of our Ameri- Twelve Poems (London: Medici Society, 1926); can literature." If that statement is not justice to Twilight Sleep (New York & London: Appleton, Edith Wharton, it will be a long time in coming. 1927); Born into the conservative, fashionable, and The Children (New York & London: Appleton, wealthy society of old New York in 1862, Edith 1928); republished as The Marriage Playground Jones, the daughter of George Frederic and Lucre- (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1930); tia Rhinelander Jones, was privately tutored,

~ C) ~ DLB 12 Edith Wharton traveled extensively in Europe as a girl, and was Edith wharton: A Biography (1975), based on her married off on 29 April 1885 to Edward Wharton, a private papers, it has become vividly clear the extent man considerably older than she and with few in- to which these intensely felt issues arose from her tellectual or artistic interests. During the early years personal situation. of her marriage, she seems to have done little more Her first publication was a book of poems, than play the role of society matron and hostess in Verses (1878), privately published in Newport while New York and Newport. Several years after her she was yet a girl-Together with Artemis to Actaeon marriage, in 1894, she suffered a nervous break- and Other Verse (1909), and Twelve Poems (1926), down, which resulted in convalesence in a sanato- Wharton's verse suggests a very conventional poetic rium. There novel writing was prescribed therapy, sense, sometimes passionately eruptive, but never in and she thus commenced her professional writing connection with the great poetic revolution of the career. twentieth-century avant-garde. Verses was followed As a chronicler of the manners of New York by The Decoration if Houses (1897), a work on interior society from the 1840s into the 1930s, an interna- decor written with Ogden Codman, Jr. (apparent- tional novelist, and master of the short story, ly to bury the taste of her mother's generation). Wharton's principal focus, as indicated in her book And her first book publications of fiction were The The Writing if Fiction (1925), was the conflict be- Greater Inclination (1899), The Touchstone (1900), and tween the desire of the individual and the authority Crucial Instances (1901). of social convention. Blake Nevius has found the At the publication of The Greater Inclination, latent subject of her work to be two interlocking Henry James remarked that he was able to detect, in themes: "the spectacle of a large and generous na- these eight short stories, the echoes of George Eliot ture ... trapped by circumstances ironically of its sounding through the book. But many early re- own devising into consanguinity with a meaner na- viewers; among them John D. Barry in the Boston

ture"; and the related problem of trying LO define Literary World, remarked that, unfortunately, she nature and limits of individual responsibility, had been most influenced by J~mes himself-a determine what allowance of freedom or rebel- claim that Wharton came more and more to resent, can be made for her trapped protagonist with- although she and James were to develop a close at the same time threatening the structure of friendship. Harry Thurston Peck was perhaps Since the publication of R. W. B. Lewis's more discriminating in his observation that The

The Mount, the house Wharton built in 1901 on her 128-acre farm in Lenox, Massachusetts

435 ! Edith Wharton DLB 12 "'~..

Greater Inclination had caught the "English" manner The Touchstone, Aline Gorren remarked in the Critic of James's late style but had improved upon it. He that Wharton wasto be praised for "the geni~s with I concluded that "We have seen nothing this year that which she willbring to the surface the underground I has impressed us so much as Mrs. Wharton's book." movements of women's minds." The stories in The Greater Inclination vary from a Crucial Instances was marked by a declining straight drawing-room scene written in dialogue, to dependence on verbal irony and fin de siecle witti- 1:i a story-e-heavily freighted with psychological cism and by a growth of her mastery of the short- !~ analysis-of a symbolicjourney to death of a man story form. One of the predominant themes of this and his wife. A number of the tales explore the volume of tales is the futility of s.elf-sacrifice(as power of social convention and the difficulty of in "The Angel at the Grave"); another was the.aes- transcending it; and a rather tough pragmatic at- thetic poverty of the American scene, particularly titude permeates Wharton's treatment of the the New England small town, in contrastto Europe theme. As one character remarks of conventions, (as in "The Recovery"). These themes resonate "one may believe in them or not; but as long as they throughout all Wharton's fiction, and the stories do rule the world it is only by taking advantage of suggest, in their formal organization, what Whar- their protection that one can find a modus vivendi." ton conceived short stories to be: "crucial instances" In The Touchstone, Wharton tried her hand at disengaged from "the welter of experience" that the nouvelle, a form she wasto bring to perfection in "illuminate our moral lives." Ethan Frome (1911). The Touchstone involves a man Wharton's annual excursions to Europe dur- who secretly sells intimate love letters once written ing her early married life account for the immedi- to him by a now-deceased novelist, Margaret acy of the setting of her first novel, The Valley of Aubyn. After their publication, he confesses to his Decision (1902), a long chronicle-novel set in set- wife the sale of the letters, identifying himself as the tecento Italy on the eve of the Napoleonic invasion. " heartless recipient who allowed her anguished love Out of a passion for Italy were also to come Italian to be published to the world; this confession Villas and Their Gardens (1904), a serious examina- achieves an alleviation of his guilt and the rehabili- tion of Italian villa and garden architecture, illus- tation of his marriage. No longer, in the Jamesian trated by Maxfield Parrish's drawings, and Italian phrase, a "publishing scoundrel," Glennard be- Backgrounds (1905), a series of nine travel sketches comes the deeply sensitiveand moral man Margaret recording the impersonal impressions of the Aubyn had seen in potentia and loved. Whartons, the Paul Bourgets, and others of their While some of her early critics were to con- entourage. The title sketch of Italian Backgrounds demn the "flatness" of her characters in the short recreates the color and variety of the settecento story and nouvelle, Wharton always felt that it was "world of appearances-of fine clothes, gay colours the business of the novel gradually to develop and graceful attitudes." The Valley of Decision was character and that the' business of the short story inspired by the same impulse to recreate that world wasto reveal a significant situation. If therefore her in fiction, to vivify the colorful attitudes of the personae in the stories seem less than fully period. Like George Eliot'sRomola (1863), however, "rounded," her practice was premeditated. As she the novel principally dramatizes the politics of a was to observe in The Writing of Fiction, "No subject transitional age in which two political ideologies in itself, however fruitful, appears to be able to keep came into conflict with each other. An apt sense of a novel alive; only the characters in it can. Of the the novel is suggested in Wharton's letter to William short story the same cannot be said. Some of the Crary Brownell, her Scribners editor. It was, she greatest short stories owe their vitalityentirely to the said, "an attempt to picture Italy at the time of the dramatic rendering of a situation. Undoubtedly the breaking-up of the small principalities at the end of characters engaged must be a little more than pup- the 18th century, when all the old forms and tradi- pets; but apparently, also, they may be a little less tions of court life were still preserved, but the im- than individual human beings." None of her early mense intellectual and moral movement of the new critics would have objected to her description of the regime was at work beneath the surface of short story as "a shaft driven straight into the heart things. . . . I have tried to reflect the traditional of human experience," but her view of character- influences and customs of the day, together with ization in short fiction doubtless accounts for the new ideas, in the mind of a cadet of one of the recurrent conviction that, for all her brilliance, reigning houses, who is suddenly called to succeed Wharton's tales lackthe human warmth of great art. to the dukedom of Pianura, and tries to apply the Still,in praise of Wharton's psychologicalrealism in theories of the French encyclopedists to his small

436 DLD 12 Edith Wharton

principality. Incidentally I have given sketches of Venetian life, and gliIllpses of Sir WilliaIllHarnil-

ton's circle at Naples, and the clerical milieu at THE Rome, where the suppression of the Society of Jesus, and the mysterious death of Ganganelli, had produced a violent reaction toward Formalismand HOUSE OF MIRTH superstition. The close of the story pictures the falling to pieces of the whole business at the ap- proach of Napoleon." Conservative in its social imagination, charged with conteIllpt for radical Enlightenment political theorizing, The Valley oj De-

cision thus took an indirect stand against the per- BY

fectibilitarian schemes for American social reform EDITH WHARTON at the turn of the century, in the "progressive era." The general critical response was not favorable. Most reviewers felt it to be learned and labored and . lacking in dramatic action, with characters put to the use of symbolizingvarious political positions. As an anonymous reviewer for the Outlook put it, "The story is not dramatic; it does not deal with the mas- ter passions in a masterly way; it is a carefully wrought study of a period and a teIllperaIllent; an example of fine technique, a charmingly told story I.onbon of deep and unusual interest." MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED Sanctuary (1903) deals once again with the NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY theme of self-sacrifice. In this case, a woman mar- .1905 ries a man guilty of fraud in order to prevent his .;f/lrithllreJwwa unborn children from being "tainted" by their father's moral imperfection. In the end, Kate Orme Title page for Wharton's 1905 best-seller. Within thefirst three saves their son Dick from replicating his father's months of publication 140,000 copies were in print. financial dishonesty by having provided the sanctuary of love necessary to help him triumph over temptation where his father had not. In trying she could see in it. Was the New York beau to render plausible Kate's motivation for marrying, monde too shallowto yield deep significance?Some Wharton writes of "mysterious primal influences," critics, notably Van Wyck Brooks and V. L. Par- the "sacrificialinstinct of her sex," and that "passion rington, have thought so. But Wharton saw her of spiritual motherhood that made her long to fling task-in recreating this flat and futile commercial herself between the unborn child and its fate." But aristocracy in The House rif Mirth (1905)-as that of none of these phrases quite succeeds in making extracting from New York society the human sig- credible Kate's utterly fantastic motive in marrying nificance which would have universal meaning: as Dick's father. As an anonymous reviewer in the Wharton wrote in A Backward Glance (1934), "In Independent put it, Sanctuary is "the kind of book a what aspect could a society of irresponsible woman writes when she conceivesher characters all pleasure-seekers be said to have, on the 'old woe of walkingupon moral margins too narrow to be quite the world', any deeper bearing than the people comfortable. And it does not demonstrate the composing such a societycould guess? The answer growth of principles and manly stamina so much as was that a frivolous society can acquire dramatic it does a beautiful, tender sentimentality peculiar to significanceonly through what its frivolity destroys. women, whether they are writers, mothers or mis- Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing sionaries." people and ideals. The answer, in short, was Illy The Valley of Decision taught Wharton two prin- heroine, Lily Bart." ciples about novel writing, she later observed. The The story of LilyBart is the story of a beautiful first wasthat she ought to use the material she knew but fastidious girl of inadequate means who tries to best; the second was that the value of any fictional maintain her social position in the wealthy but dis- subject would depend on how much significance solute New Yo;k beau monde while, at twenty-nine,

437 Edith Wharton DLB 12 trying to find a suitably rich husband. As she loses example, did call Wharton a writer of naturalistic her tenuous position with the idle rich, Lily falls in tragedy, but Robert Morss Lovett found in her a the socialorder and eventually drops out of it, only "spirit of comedy." MarilynJones Lyde has tried to to die of an overdose of chloral in a cheap board- prove that Wharton's viewoflife was that of ethical inghouse. tragedy. E. K. Brown, however, argued that The product of the social forces that have Wharton saw life as more ironic than tragic. shaped her, Lilyis too poor to run with a fast crowd What Louis O. Coxe says of The Age of Inno- but too much enamored of its luxuries to give up cence (1920) has seemed true of her other works: wealth and glamour and make an independent life that one of the graces and delights of Wharton's with Lawrence Selden, the relatively poor young fiction lies exactly "in the multifariousness of its man who loves her. Lily'ssocial values, so reminis- thematic material, in its refusal to tie itself down to cent of those of Dreiser's Sister Carrie, and Lily's 'meaning,' the while that it glitters with a density, a tragic fall, so suggestive of Hurstwood's gradual hardness of surface that only a truly novelistic eye deterioration and suicide in aNew York flophouse, could have seen and an informing mind recreate." suggest that Wharton's world viewmight have been This celebration of Wharton's philosophical am- that of scientific naturalism. On this issue critics biguity returns to Percy Lubbock's claim that have frequently disagreed. Blake Nevius, for Wharton was not committed to anyone philosophi- cal view, to Frances Russell's complaint that Whar- ton was "full of standards, viewpoints." Wharton was not a thoroughgoing deter- minist. A close investigation of Ethan Frome, The House ofMirth and The Age ofInnocence-those works that most frequently provoke the question of her world view-shows that free will is ordinarily pres- ent. LilyBart, for example, realizes that Selden has preserved a detached viewof the societyshe aspires to, that he has "points of contact outside the great gilt cage in which they were all huddled for the mob to gape at": "How alluring the world outside the cage appeared to Lily,as she heard its door clang on her. In reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: it stood alwaysopen; but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having once flown in, could never regain their freedom. It was Selden's distinc- tion that he had never forgotten the way out." Lily defines her goal in life as "success,"getting as much as one can out of life. For Selden, however, it is personal freedom-what he callsthe republicofthe spirit: freedom "from money, from ease and anxi- ety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit-that's what I call success." But the problem of free will, the ability to choose between alternatives, is more complex than this analysis has suggested-principally because of the influence of Wharton's reading in the sciences. Her knowledge of the forces of heredity and envi- ronment, gained from writers like Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and John Locke, complicates her portraits. While according Lily Bart a measure of freedom and responsibility for her behavior, Wharton could alsowrite of her in such a way as to suggest that Lily is the poignant victim of hereditary and environmental forces Wharton in 1905, theyear The House of Mirth was published which she cannot understand and over which she DLB 12 Edith Wharton

moral decisions, in her awareness that in a very special sense character is destiny, Wharton must be called a "tender-minded determinist" who realized, like Lawrence Selden, that Lily"wassoevidently the ETHAN FROME victim of the civilizationwhich had produced her, BY that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles EDITH WHARTON chaining her to her fate." She learns too late the alternative order of values based on freedom that Selden describes. She cannot balance, as he appar- ently can, the epicurean's delight in pleasure with the stoic'sindifference to it. The novel thus weighs both Lily and contemporary New York society in the balance and finds them wanting. To complete the biblical phrase to which the title alludes: "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth" (Ecclesi- astes 7:3). The point of the novel is suggested by Wharton's remark in her review of Howard Stur- gis's novelBelchamber (1905): "A handful of vulgar people, bent only on spending and enjoying, may seem a negligiblefactor in the socialdevelopment of the race; but they become an engine of destruction LONDON through the illusions they kill and the generous MACMILLAN •• CO ardor they turn to despair." Surely Lily Bart was in KC.IIXI her mind when Wharton wrote those lines. Written rapidly under the pressure of a Scribner's Magazine deadline, The House of Mirth re- flectsweaknessesof styleand plotting and a strain of sentimentality that often mar Wharton's best fic- tion. But the book was a best-seller in 1905 and Title page for Wharton's 1911novel, herfirst to reflect intensely 1906.Whilemost reviewers deplored the vanityand personal emotions vulgarity of high society,WilliamPayne Morton was typical in praising the novel as "a work which has has little control: "Inherited tendencies had com- enlisted the matured powers of a writer whose per- bined with early training to make her the highly formance is always distinguished, and whose cou- specializedproduct she was:an organism ashelpless pling of psychological insight with the gift of ex- out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn pression is probably not surpassed by any other from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn and woman novelist of our time." The experience of delight; to what other end does nature round the writing the novel turned a drifting amateur into a rose-leaf and paint the humming-bird's breast? And professional writer, as Wharton herself confessed. wasit her fault that the purely decorative mission is It also revealed to her the possibilities inherent in less easilyand harmoniously fulfilled among social the novel of manners set in New York. She cele- beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to brated her success by moving permanently to be hampered by-material necessitiesor complicated France in 1907, hoping to find in the exclusive by moral scruples?" But although the figurative Faubourg Saint-Germain quarter of Paris a literate language tends to suggest that Lily is a naturalistic and civilizedhigh society lacking in New York. victim, the irony in the rhetorical questions should Madame deTreymes (1907)dramatizes, after the not be lost on the reader. manner of James's international tales (particularly In his Boston lectures on pragmatism in 1906, Madame de Mauves, 1874), the conflict between the William James distinguished between a tender- moral milieus of America and France. Set in Paris, minded and a tough-minded response to the ques- which is celebrated for its physicalbeauty (Wharton tion of free willand determinism. This distinction is always thought brownstone New York to be hid- relevant to Wharton's fiction. In her insistence that eous), this nouvelle contrasts the individual goodness heredity and environment do strongly influence of the American with the moral and social com- Edith Wharton DLB 12 plicities of a complex French social order. Henry to puzzle out their meaning, unwillingness to dis- James, who had just confessed in his preface to the turb rashly results so powerfully willed, so labori- New York edition of The American that he had not ously arrived at-the desire, in short, to keep intact understood the French aristocracy in 1875, as many links as possible between yesterday and cautioned her about her subject matter: "All the tomorrow, to lose, in the ardour of the newexperi- same, with the rue de Varenne, &c, don't go in too ment, the least that may be of the long rich heritage much for the French or the 'Franco-American' of human experience." The operative terms for her subject-the real field of your extension is point of view seem to be "enfranchisement of [England]-it has far more fusability with our native thought" combined with an "atavism of feeling." As and primary material. ... " But Wharton continued an expression of medieval Catholicism, the cathe- to feel more in command of the French scene than dral represented both a bondage of superstition to James had ever been. Even so, some reviewers won-- be cast off in the modern age and yet a manifesta- dered about Madame de Treymes's sinister view of tion to be reverenced of the ancient attempt to French familial solidarity, while Vernon Atwood struggle upward toward a clearer vision of the claimed it to be "an absolutely flawless and satisfying human condition. When the Germans shelled the piece of workmanship." . cathedral at Reims in World War I, James wrote to Wharton's third novel, The Fruit of the Tree her: "Rheims is the most unspeakable & immeasur- (1907), sought to capitalize on the then-current able horror & infamy-& what is appalling & vogue of muckraking and reform literature. This heart-breaking is that it's 'foreuer & ever!' ... There book abandoned the drawing-room milieu for the it was-and now all the tears of rage of all the bereft plight of the textile workers in a mill town in Mas- millions & all the crowding curses of all the won- sachusetts. Her aim, in telling the story of John dering ages will never bring a stone of it back!" Amherst, an assistant manager of a mill, was to Meanwhile, between 1904 and 1909, Wharton· expose and criticize the abuses of the industrial had been steadily producing short stories, amid fre- system, particularly the irresponsibility of managers quent motor trips through France and Italy. The who fail to look after the physical and spiritual wel- Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories (1908) is fare of their employees. That Wharton should have a collection of seven tales ranging from a saint's risked such a subject, about which she knew little, legend (the title story) through Jamesian tales of art seems incredible. And, indeed, she got many of the and life ("The Verdict" and "The Pot Boiler") to a details of factory life wrong. Then she shifted away tale of politics ("The Best Man"). Of these seven from the reform topic midway through in order to stories, perhaps "The Last Asset," about a divorced explore the moral implications of euthanasia couple'S momentary conspiracy to get their daugh- (Amherst's paralyzed wife is dispatched by an ter married off, is the best, despite the interest of the idealistic nurse who then marries him). The result is title story which, in its study of the abnegations of a a structurally imperfect novel that concludes with morbidly spiritual hermit, may be a portrait of the view that life is "not a matter of abstract princi- Henry James as the high priest of art. ples, but a succession of pitiful compromises with Wharton's next volume-Tales of Men and fate, of concessions to old tradition, old beliefs, old Ghosts (1910)-was a diversion from the two big charities and frailties." This observation, perhaps a novels then partially completed in manuscript-The latent theme of much of her fiction, suggests that Reef (1912) and The Custom of the Country (1913). the fruit of the tree is therefore a knowledge of the Only two of the ten tales are about "ghosts"-"The inextricable entanglements of good and evil. Eyes" and "Afterward." But several other stories A new invention, the motorcar, Wharton deal with fantasies, delusions, and hysteria in such a quickly discovered, had "restored the romance of way as to suggest the impact of her breakdown in travel." Her next book, A Motor-Flight Through the 1880s and of her husband's neurasthenia, which France (1908), deals with a three-week tour taken by was growing worse. At their best, Wharton's ghost the Whartorrs and Henry James in the Whartons' stories always have a doubleness of significance, a new automobile. Perhaps the key to the work lies in miltiplicity of possible psychological interpretations what Wharton had to say about the effect of that make the spectral tales plausible to the intellect. antiquities-like the Gothic cathedral at Reims-on In 1907 Wharton's knowledge of the French the American traveler who has, in effect, no roots in scene did not include a perfect command of a con- the past: "Yes-reverence is the most precious versational idiom, even though she had spoken the emotion that such a building inspires: reverence for language since childhood. At her request, Charles the accumulated experiences of the past, readiness Du Bos found a tutor for her, but he turned out to

440 DLB 12 Edith Wharton be too amiable to correct her conversational errors. richly symbolic in its network of recurrent images, Instead, he asked her to prepare, for each of his this work is frequently advanced as one of Whar- visits,a written exercise, which he then corrected. In ton's most "naturalistic" studies of human defeat Wharton's exercise book is the germ ofEthan Frome: and despair. Lionel Trilling, for example, once ob- three chapters in French which introduce the three served that whenever a character suffers in a piece major characters and pose the complex relationship of fiction, he does so at the behest of the author, who among them. The tragic ending of the story is must justify his cruelty "by the seriousness of his nowhere in sight here: Wharton gave up her French moral intention"; and he concluded that Wharton lessons after a few weeks and the copybook, with its "could not lay claim to any such justification." For unfinished tale, was temporarily forgotten. Trilling, the mind can do nothing with the "per- In the interim between the French version of petuity of suffering" which memorializes "a mo- the tale and the publication ofEthan Frome (1911)in ment of passion." It is true that the setting of English, there occurred perhaps the most passion- Stark field is grim, snowbound, and stony. But ate experience of Wharton's life-a brief but in- neither heredity nor environment serves to explain tense affair with Morton Fullerton, a ne'er-do-well the fate of the characters, nor are determinist con- American journalist then livingin Paris. Her private siderations invoked to account for them. If Ethan diary suggests the intensity of her feelings: "Wir remains with these querulous and droning women, waren zusammen. Die siissesten Stunden meines Lebens." it is lessbecause he is morally inert than because he ("We were together. The sweetest hours oimy life.") And is exceptionally responsible for them, if not con- again: "Sometimes I am calm," she wrote, "exalted strained by his guilt. Looked at in the light of almost, so enclosed and satisfied in the thought of Wharton's anguish over the Fullerton affair, Ethan you, that I could say to you truly, as I did yesterday, Frome is a stark projection, among other things, of 'I never wonder what you are doing when you are Wharton's inability-much less her characters'-to not with me.' At such moments I feel that all the escape the moral weight of self-punishment for il- mvsticismin me-and the transcendentalism that in licit love. Contemporary reviewers seemed to grasp women turns to religion-were poured into this point, in praising it as an analogue to Greek my feeling for you.... I am a little humbled, a little tragedy. As an anonymous reviewer for the Nation ashamed, to find how poor a thing I am, how the observed, "The wonder is that the spectacle of so personality I had moulded into such strong firm much pain can be made to yield so much beauty." lines has crumbled to a pinch of ashes in this flame! Her next novel-The Reif-marked a signifi- For the first time in my life I can't read! ... I hold cant departure from her characteristic mode as a the book in my hand, and see your name all over novelist. It abandons the chronicle novel, like The the page." House of Mirth, for a tightly constructed psychologi- At the same time, Wharton was filled with cal drama focused on a central situation-again a guilt, for she believed in the marriage commitment love triangle-with a novelistic structure reminis- and she knew that no relationship could be satis- cent of the manner of James's later works. Like factory that wasnot a total sharing of all the experi- Ethan Frome, The Reef deals with the power of sexual ences oflife. Besides that, Fullerton wasan unstable desire, the tortured frustrations of unrequited love, scapegrace whose amorous escapades, with both and the cerebrations of suspicion and jealousy that sexes,scandalized their circle of friends. The affair afflict Anna Leath, a "sheltered American girl" who wasbrief and intense; but this happiest moment of has grown up, much like Wharton, in a repressive her life could not last. The 1909 poem "Terminus," New York environment. Once again, the theme of published in Lewis's biography, suggests the in- the "monstrousness of useless sacrifice" is invoked, evitability of the end of the affair. by George Darrow, but Anna Leath cannot think of Ethan Frome, the nouvelle completed just after herself as Darrow's wife without remembering that that intense liaison with Fullerton, deals less with Sophy Viner has had an affair with him, without character development than with the creation of an imagining what they must have done together. So ironic situation-the entrapment of the three crip- trapped is she by her genteel aversion to physical pled victimsoflove and hate shut up together under sexuality that she cannot accept this virile man be- one roof in a snowbound New England farmhouse: cause it would compromise her ideal of perfect love Ethan, his wife, Zeena, and his beloved Mattie and thus would be a desecration of its sanctity. The Silver, now crippled, like Frome, in the wake of Reef glitters with felicities of psychological insight their suicidal toboggan ride into an elm tree. Stun- and precision. Henry James called it a "beautiful ning in the spare economy of its realistic detail, yet book," marked by "supreme validity and distinc-

441 Edith Wharton DLB 12

tion" and quite "the finest thing you have done." Country recreates in a free-swinging satire the career For most reviewers, however, it was a failure. of Undine Spragg, a type that Edmund Wilsononce In the long run, however, the Jamesian novel called the "international cocktail bitch," stripping developing all sides of a central situation was not to off the skin of a decadent and lifeless New York be Wharton's metier. In her next novel, The Custom social aristocracy, ridiculing the pretensions and of the Country, she returned to the long, rambling provincialism of the American Midwest, and lam- chronicle of manners, narrating the rise of a vulgar basting the American businessman as a crude and aggressive girl to social prominence in the East materialist devoted only to mammon. and in Europe. Undine Spragg, the heroine, is a The year that The Custom if the Country was dazzlingly beautiful girl from the Midwestern town finished was in many ways a crucial one for What- of Apex City whose social ambition is so poisonous ton. It marked, for one thing, the end of her mar- that it drives her to exploit everyone who crossesher riage to Edward Wharton, whose mental derange- path-her newly rich parents, whom she drags to ment and embezzlement of funds in Wharton's New York and nearly bankrupts in her search for a trust made life with him unendurable. Her sense of rich husband; Ralph Marvell, the fashionable New liberation was reflected in what James called Yorker whom she marries and drives to suicide; the Wharton's "dazzling braveries of far excursionism" Comte Raymond de Chelles, a French aristocrat of throughout the length and breadth of the Conti- ancient family who seems more sociallydesirable as nent. Immediately after her April 1912 divorce she a husband than even Ralph; and finally Elmer Mof- set out for Italy and then for Germany with her fatt, an American billionaire railroad king with friends Walter Berry and Bernard Berenson, the whom she eventually winds up. The Custom of the art critic. In Germany she met Rainer Maria Rilke

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Pages from the notebook Wharton kept while she was living in Paris at the beginning of World War I

442 DLB 12 Edith Wharton and other German artists, visited the great of "subjects" got up from week to week. "Kerfol" museums, saw Faust, and discovered the magic of and "The Triumph of Night" are both ghost stories Richard Strauss's operas. "They were," she later whichhover between the occult and the psychologi- wrote, "vernal hours," echoing Sigmund, "es war der callyaberrant. "The Choice" and "The Long Run" Lenzl" She began a new novel, an ambitious return to the theme of the moral ambiguities of love Kunstlerroman (a novel of education in which the outside marriage in New York society.Surely Mor- hero becomes an artist) to be called "Literature." ton Fullerton must stillhave been in her mind when But when World War I broke out in 1914, she she protested to Charles Du Bos "the poverty, the abandoned her compulsive travels, returned to miserable poverty, of any love that lies ouside of Paris, and threw herself into journalism and war marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a charities, organizing, among other things, a work- sharing of all!" "Autre Temps ... " and "Bunner room for unemployed seamstresses in her arron- Sisters"are the most brilliant tales in the collection; dissement and finding food and lodging for ref- "Bunner Sisters"iscomparable toEthan Frome in the ugees pouring out of Belgium. intensity of its vision of poverty and despair. Writ- Out of this work developed her next two ten at the fin de siecle,"Bunner Sisters"is a work of books-Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Beljort such powerful urban realism that Stephen Crane or (1915) and The Book of the Homeless (Le Livre des Dreiser could not have done better. Sans-Foyer) (1915). The first recounts the experi- In June of 1916, while the war raged on, she ence of about six expeditions to the front line, took a brief vacation at Fontainebleau, where she where Wharton reported on trench warfare, the wrote Summer (1917).This New England tragedy, a needs of the field hospitals, and the quiet heroism of companion piece to the wintry Ethan Frome, was a the men and women who stood the rigors of front- work as remote as possible from the combat scenes line combat. Free of what she called "lyrical patrio- around her. Summer records the story of a poor tism or post-card sentimentality," the book is young New England girl, Charity Royall, who is nevertheless optimistic propaganda directed at the seduced by a handsome cityarchitect who has come American 'public during the first fourteen months to her town to study itsold houses. Predictably,their of the war. Her compilation, The Book of the Homeless, summer romance results in her pregnancy, aban- intended to assist the Children of Flanders Rescue donment, but rescue by Mr. Royall,the foster father Committee, contained poetry and music she solic- who takes her in again and marries her. While its ited from such eminent artists as Rupert Brooke, portrait of the inbred and degenerate mountain Eleanora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Paul Claudel, people of the Berkshires angered local residents Jean Cocteau, Thomas Hardy, WilliamDean How- and led the Boston Evening Transcript reviewer to call ells, George Santayana, William Butler Yeats, Igor the book unconvincing, Wharton continued to insist Stravinsky, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John throughout her life that she knew, from the inside, Singer Sargent, and others. Like Wharton, Teddy the impoverished rural lives of the Fromes and the Roosevelt-who wrote the introduction to the Royalls.And she made a continuing claim for the anthology-was concerned about America's con- realism of her New England tales, contrasting them tinuing neutrality. "The part that America has to the idealizations of the New England local col- played in this great tragedy is not an exalted part," orists. The Bookman reviewer concurred in praising he wrote, "and there is all the more reason why the authenticity of Wharton's setting and charac- Americans should hold up the hands of those of terization, which showed "all the virtue of her style their number who, like Mrs. Wharton, are en- and none of its weakness." deavoring to some extent to remedy the national With the entry of the United States into the shortcomings." Meanwhile, in New York, Philadel- war in 1917, Wharton's hopes for the survival of phia, Boston, and Washington, "Edith Wharton" France soared. Her new enthusiasm wasreflected in committees sprang up to collect funds for the per- The Marne (1918), a badly written, embarrassingly petuation of her work. sentimental nouvelle about an underage American Despite her inability to finish the manuscript boy whose love for France is so impassioned that he of "Literature," Wharton did find time, amid her joins the U.S. Army Ambulance Serviceas a driver, war work, to put together Xingu and Other Stories for only to be killed at the Marne. Unfortunately, the publication in 1916. Most of the tales deal with book exudes an "Over There" enthusiasm suggest- typical Whartonian themes; some had been written ing that it is indeed sweet and dignified to die for wellbefore the war commenced. "Xingu" is a broad one's adopted country. satire on ladies' clubs which pretend to the mastery A Son at the Front, not published until 1923but

443 Edith Wharton DLB 12

written atthis time, is also a reflection of Wharton's opened a gulf between those days and these." In The war experience, specifically"that strange war-world Age of Innocence, a novel set in the old New York of of the rear, with its unnatural sharpness of outline her youth, Wharton sought to suggest some of those and over-heightening of colour." In this novel, the areas in which traditional society in old New York artist-father John Campton reacts to the war per- maintained the "old tradition of European culture" sonally and selfishly, as an inconvenience to his no longer characteristic of the postwar world. "To career, though he hopes that it may be the means by 'follow up' the traces of vanished old New York, which his drafted son will gain a finer sense of Wharton felt, "one had to come to Europe"; there values. When it becomes clear that the Allieswillnot one found that the New York of the 1870swasvery win a quick victory, the defense of France becomes much like that of the English cathedral town or the an obsession to him: "If France went, western civili- French "villede province" of the same era. In effect, zation went with her; and then all they had believed she remarked on another occasion,"c'est seulement in and been guided by would perish." The son is en ayant vu d'autres pays, etudie leurs moeurs, lu killed and the grieving father is much chastened by leurs livres, frequente leurs habitants, que l'on peut the experience. But the point isclear: the defense of situer son pro pre pays dans l'histoire de la civilisa- France is the salvation of Western civilization. tion" ("it is only by having seen other countries, Wharton's continual call for American intervention studied their customs, read their books, associated in the war was like that of Henry James, who re- with the people, that one can place one's own coun- nounced his American citizenship in 1915 as a ges- try in the history of civilization"). ture of protest at America's seeming indifference to Looking back, Wharton regarded old New 1. this assault on civilization. York as having preserved an order of civilizedval- -.~ The waysin which France stood for civilization ues too precious to be forgotten in the age of jazz ,~ ,':9 is suggested in Wharton's French Ways and Their babies, flappers, and bathtub gin. Writing The Age of Meaning (1919),a work published toward the end of Innocence was therefore an act of piety for her, an the war and intended for Americans, especiallysol- attempt to atone for her youthful satire on the diers, in France. In this work, Wharton sought to graceful, ordered civilityof her parents' world. On explain her adopted country to those unfamiliar one level the novel is a faithful record of the man- with its essential spirit, which she felt wastypified by ners and mores of that New York City haut monde those "French" qualities of reverence, taste, con- between 1870 and 1900: the opera evenings at the tinuity, and intellectual honesty. By"reverence" she old Academy of Music, playgoing at Lester Wal- meant the deeply rooted respect in France for old lack'stheater, the formal dinners, the round of visits customs, traditions, .rituals, and taboos-"les bien- and leaving visitingcards, the betrothal visits,Grace seances," the "always-have-beens," what she once Church weddings, the summers in Newport and called "the successivesuperpositions of experience winters in Washington Square, and the effect on her _that time brings." And by "continuity," she meant New Yorkers of "Arabian Night marvels" like the "the niost homogeneous and uninterrupted cul- invention of electricity and the telephone. ture" in the world. "France," she remarked, "has a The Age of Innocence interests today's readers, lessonto teach and a warning to give[Americans]. It though, less for these archaeological exhumations was our English' forbears who taught us to flout than for the spiritual portrait of the age. What tradition and break away from their own great in- Wharton meant by innocence was partly sexual heritance; France may teach us that, side by side propriety and financial rectitude, but partly an with the qualities of enterprise and innovation that aversion to the darker experiences of life, a fear of English blood has put in us, we should cultivate the innovation, and a submissiveness to the power' of sense of continuity, that 'sense of the past' which social convention that characterized her parents' enriches the present and binds us up with the class. Wharton tests the value of this innocence in world's great stabilisingtraditions of art and poetry the character of Newland Archer, a young dil- and knowledge." ettante who grows bored with the stuffy, ordered In A Backward Glance Wharton was to observe world, falls in love with a Europeanized American, that "the really vital change" between 1870 and the Countess Ellen Olenska, contemplates running 1934 was that "in my youth, the Americans of the away to Europe with her but is maneuvered back original States, who in moments of crisisstillshaped into conformity within the dictates of his society the national point of view, were the heirs of an old when his rebellion threatens to destroy his mar- tradition of European culture which the country riage. Yet far from being the story of "a pathetic has now totally rejected. This rejection. .. has instance of vain frustration, of wasted forces," The DLB 12 Edith Wharton

Age if Innocence demonstrates that beneath the sur- readers generally agreed with the Times Literary face dullness were things so fine and sensitive and Supplement reviewer, who described the novel as "a delicate that Ellen Olenska's spontaneity and social thorough mastery of the whole situation," and with iconoclasm seem almost crass by comparison. In William Lyon Phelps, who called her a writer who fact, the epilogue of the novel, set in 1900, affirms "brings glory on the name of America, and this is the balanced virtues of both the older ways of her best book." Indeed, it won for her the Pulitzer Archer's generation and the newer openness of the Prize in 1920. turn-of-the-century period, in the widower The publication of The Age of Innocence- Archer's declining to renew his interest in Ellen (out which Yvor Winters once called "the finest single of respect to the memory of his marriage) and in the flower of the Jamesian art; one which James fer- marriage of Archer's son, Dallas, to a girl of mar- tilized but would have been unable to bring to ginal social position. maturity"--closed out the major phase of Whar- While The Age if Innocence did not match the ton's career as a writer. Her best books were behind 100,000 plus salesrecord of The House oj Mirth, it did her, her war work was over, and many of her achieve best-seller status. Some reviewers com- friends-Henry James, Howard Sturgis, Teddy plained that Wharton's art was wasted on a negligi- Roosevelt, as well as young soldier-friends such as ble high society and trivial people. V. L. Parrington Ronald Simmons and her cousin Newbold claimed that there was "more hope for our litera- Rhinelander-were gone. It no longer seemed pos- ture in the honest crudities of the younger sible to stay at 53, rue de Varenne. Even Paris naturalists," and Katherine Mansfield begged for "a seemed too much. So Wharton gave up her little wildness, a dark place or two in the soul." But Faubourg apartment and bought a large estate out- side Paris at Saint Brice-sous-Foret, Henceforth, in the summer, Pavillon Colombe was to be her home; and in the winter shejourneyed to her other estate, Sainte-Claire Le Chateau, at Hyeres, on the Riviera. 'The AGE of Writing in the postwar world seemed highly prob- lematical to her . Yet stories kept clamoring to be iNNOCENCE told, and young writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald

BY and Sinclair Lewiswrote admiringly to her. Perhaps EDITII WHARTON something could yet be done to record the moral AUTHOR.OF "THE HOUSE OF IIIIlTJI/' "THE llEEF." "1U1tMB&." BTC. history of the postwar world, she decided. Looking about her at this world, Wharton was disgusted at the spectacle of the wealthy, de- nationalized, deracinated cosmopolites rushing about Europe from London to Paris, to St. Moritz and the Riviera. The Glimpses of the Moon (1922) deals with the four cornerstones of their existence- money, luxury, fashion, and pleasure. Her young 8 couple, Susy Branch and Nick Lansing, resemble LilyBart and Lawrence Selden of The House of Mirth in that they are in love and want to marry, but, also like Lily and Lawrence, they do not have enough money to maintain themselves in the rich crowd. Despite their desire to remain part of this group, D. APPLETON AND COMPANY they decide to marry, while each scouts for a NEW YORK :: MCMXX·:: WNDON wealthier spouse: "Why shouldn't they marry; be- long to each other openly and honourably, if for ever so short a time, and with the definite under- standing that whenever either of them got the chance to do better he or she should be immediately released? The law of their country facilitated such Title page for Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about exchanges, and society was beginning to view them high soCietyin the late nineteenth century. It earned her some as indulgently as the law." In the end, their experi- $70,000 between 1920 and 1922. ment a failure, Nick and Susy return to each other,

445 Edith Wharton DLB 12

poor but happy. Written for the Pictorial Review, a grande dame of American letters, had received an slick periodical aimed at American housewives,The honorary doctorate from Yale,and wasconsistently Glimpses of the Moon marked a steep decline in Mrs. identified as one of "the twelve greatest women in Wharton's powers. While some reviewers gave the America." Few reviewers gave her really bad re- obligatory nod to Wharton's stylisticpowers, Ruth views,although there were veiled complaints at her Hale memorably defined the critical view that "aristocratic status," her treatment of the beau would seal the book's fate: "Edith Wharton has no monde rather than the toiling masses, her old- business to be writing such trash." fashioned sensibility,the increasing slicknessof her Nor was A Son at the Front, largely composed stories. Perhaps the Independent reviewer caught the during the war, any improvement. At sixty,livingin general mood in his remarks about The Mother's her villa outside Paris, gardening and reading, Recompense: "Competent, skillful work, adequately Wharton wanted most to escape from the present. chiseled and polished like a painting by a compe- In 1923she returned to the United States to receive tent, but rather tired, artist." an honorary doctorate from Yale University, but in Wharton had alwaysfelt that few English and many ways the trip was a failure. Most of her old American novelistshad been really interested in the friends were long dead or unrecognizable, and New deeper processes of art. Perhaps with the exception York itself was measurably different from the pre- of Henry James in mind, she had The Writing of war cityshe had left almost two decades before. Her Fiction published in 1925. A compilation of essays parents' world, old New York, was gone without a that had appeared in Scribner's Magazine, the work trace. deals prescriptively with the craft of fiction, as she In an effort to recreate that vanished world of had meditated and practiced it. Emphasizing in her parents, Wharton produced in 1924 four Jamesian terms such issues as selection, psychology, nouvelles dealing with four decades of that vanished society'Ssocial history: Old New York, the collective title, iscomposed ofFalse Dawn (The 'Forties), The Old Maid (The 'Fifties), The Spark (The 'Sixties), and New Year's Day (The 'Seventies). As glimpses of the social THE MOTHER'S history of the time and place, Old New York is not compelling; but as a group of sharply realized moral RECOMPENSE dramas, the four parts do succeed as "crucial in- stances" of the complex struggle of four individuals BY in relation to the oppressive social order of a con- EDITH WHARTON ventional society in the process of change. AtmlllO. OF ~ NEW YOllK," "THE AGE OF IKNOCENcx," The Mother's Recompense (1925) expands the "THE GU)(PSES OP THE MOON." ere, theme of "Autre Temps ... " in order to suggest certain transformations of moral and social values DI$(IlIZlu,. u •.JI1UIIII lAi.,. SaILLn'. over two decades in contemporary New York. Kate Clephane, having abandoned her husband and child for a lover in Europe, returns to New York City eighteen years later to attend her daughter's wedding, only to discover that Anne's fiance is a young man with whom Kate has had an affair in Europe. Unable openly to oppose the marriage without revealing her own dissipation (except to a New York gentleman who is still willing to marry her), Kate acquiescesin the marriage to protect her daughter and returns to Europe alone. Hers is a drama of renunciation, her only recompense being D. APPLETON AND COMPANY that "whenever she began to drift toward new un- NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXV certainties and fresh concessions," she could re- mind herself that "once at least she had stood fast, shutting awayin a little space of peace and light the best thing that had ever happened to her." Title page for thefirst of Wharton's novels in the middle and late By 1925 Edith Wharton had become the 1920s about the relations between parents and children

A .. fro DLB 12 Edith Wharton and the moral sense, Wharton devoted chapters to we necessarily trail after us through life." "Telling a Short Story," "Constructing a Novel," Between 1925 and her death in 1937, Whar- and "Character and Situation." A concluding essay ton produced five more volumes of short stories, dealt with Marcel Proust. As a vade mecum for the the final flowering of her art with the short tale: aspiring writer, the volume has its uses, although Here and Beyond (1926), Certain People (1930), the prescriptiveness suggests how conventional Human Nature (1933), The World Over (1936), and were her attitudes in the age of surrealism, dadaism, Ghosts (1937). During this period she also wrote a and stream-of-consciousness fiction. For she is a volume of poems, her memoir, and five novels, one realist preeminently in the tradition of the early published posthumously. James, Howells, Honore de Balzac, and Emile Zola. Here and Beyond is composed of a half-dozen Perhaps some episodes from her novels Hud- tales which deal about equally with this world and sonRiverBracketed (1929) and The GodsArrive (1932) the next. Those which explore the supernatural- will lay bare the theory implicit in her realistic art. In "Miss Mary Pask," "The Young Gentleman," and the former novel George Frenside, a literary critic "Bewitched"--create, as always, an overpowering and adviser, tells the aspiring novelist Vance Wes- mood of occult strangeness, even while Wharton's ton that he ought to get out and mix more often in steady rationalism usually provides us with a means society: "Manners are your true material, after all." of understanding the inexplicable. Certain People This advice embodies Wharton's belief, as she put in also offers six tales, of which the best is doubtless The Gods Arrive, that "the surface of life was rich "After Holbein," a parable, in its way, of the fatal enough to feed the creator's imagination." This cor- consequences of the life of social self-indulgence in responds with the view she expressed in The Writing New York City during the Gilded Age. Human Na- if Fiction-for the novelist "the proper study of ture, dedicated to Bernard Berenson, whom she mankind is man's conscious and purposive be- visited almost every year at his Villa I Tatti in Flor- haviour rather than its dim unfathomable sources." ence, contains only five tales, all but one of them ("A The point of interest in human behavior, for her, Glimpse") concerned with illness, disease, and was "the conflicts ... produced between the social death. Over seventy when the book was published, order and individual appetites." The dramatization Wharton had been steadily deteriorating in health, of such conflicts frequently produces the novel of and almost all of her contemporaries had died. Yet manners, of which she was an expert practitioner. her theme was the inevitable fact that human nature Her aim was like that of Vance Weston-not "to had not changed as fast as Jazz Age social usages. Of denounce or to show up, as .most of the 'society' the generally trivial group of tales in The World Over, novelists did, but to take apart the works of the one, "Roman Fever," is as good as anything she ever machine, and find out what all those people behind wrote. Again, the focus is on age, the function of the splendid house fronts signified in the general memory, and death. The tale makes expert use of scheme of things." Such an intention, well executed, suspense; the controlled revelation of events which delivers the novel of manners from the charge of happened in the distant past has no equal in Whar- superficiality in its treatment of society. In fact, ton's oeuvre. It is at the same time a complex study Wharton's realism makes great demands on the in- of the sameness of, and the vital differences be- sight of the writer, for the surface must be probed tween, the generations, and a revelation of latent and dissected by one on whom nothing is lost. Like hatred which rises to a sudden and unexpected James, she remarked that "As to experience, intel- climax. In this tale, two widows in Rome, trying to lectual and moral, the creative imagination can keep up with their two fast-living, husband-hunting make a little go a long way, provided it remains long daughters, sit at a restaurant table overlooking the enough in the mind and is sufficiently brooded on." Palatine, the Forum, and the Colosseum. Consti- But her conception of experience was not impres- tuted only of their conversation about the girls and sionistic and inward, as was James's. For Wharton, their own girlhoods, and worked out against that the novelist's subject was the individual in full en- vast Roman memento mori, the tale suggests that gagement with the social world, its manners and the real Roman fever is not the malaria that afflicted mores, its rites and traditions, its liberties and con- their grandmothers' generation, but that power of straints. And she did not hesitate to criticize Howells passionate love sufficient, once experienced, to for not probing deeply enough or the later James nourish Mrs. Ansley through years of quiet obedi- for severing his characters from "that thick ence to the social forms of her New York City world. nourishing human air in which we all live and Leon Edel once observed that many of Wharton's move," for stripping them of "all the human fringes stories suffered from "too close an adherence to the

447 Edith Wharton DLB 12 formula popular at the end of the nineteenth cen- tury, that of the sudden twist, the coup de theatre." Yet "Roman Fever" could not have succeeded as effectively with any other ending than the ironic bombshell that Mrs..Ansleyquietly drops at the end, that Alida Slade's husband had also fathered Grace Ansley's daughter. In Ghosts, Wharton collected eleven tales al- ready published in magazines and book form, dedi- cating the book to Walter de la Mare. This collection contains a preface on the nature of supernatural fiction which, together with her comments in The Writing of Fiction, constitutes the rationale of her spectral tales. In the preface to Ghosts she remarks that while the rational mind may not believe in ghosts, "it is in the warm darkness of the pre-natal fluid far belowour consciousreason that the faculty dwellswith which we apprehend the ghosts we may not be endowed with the gift of seeing." Only two requirements were necessary, she felt, for the supernatural tale: silence and continuity. But with jazz, the wireless, "the conflicting attractions of the gangster, the introvert and the habitual drunkard," the ghost and the ghostly story, she predicted, may succumb "to the impossibility of finding standing- room in a roaring and discontinuous universe." "It is useless, at least for the story-teller," Wharton at age sixty-three Wharton had observed in 1927, "to deplore what the new order of things has wiped out, vain to shud- villains of Wharton's fiction became the middle der at what it is creating; there it is, whether for generation of valueless hedonists-not irreverent better or worse, and the American novelist can best youth, to whom societymust now look for salvation. use his opportunity by plunging both hands into the The final novels dramatize the fate in the modern motley welter." None of the five novelspublished in world of young people who have rejected adults' the last decade of her life-Twilight Sleep (1927),The inanities and who have discovered a value embed- Children (1928), Hudson River Bracketed, The Gods ded in the cultural past unknown to their elders. Arrive, and The Buccaneers (1938, posthumously Judith Wheater, a fifteen year old who tries desper- submitted to Appleton-Century by her literary ately to keep her brothers and sisters together, de- executor, Gaillard Lapsley)-matches the greatness spite the marryings and divorces and abandon- of The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, or The Age of ments of parents and stepparents, is typical of all of Innocence; but high claims have been made for the protagonists of the last five novels. They some- Hudson River Bracketed and The Buccaneers. how develop the "memorial manner," which The first of these five-Twilight Sleep-bids acknowledges and reverences the usable past, and a fair to be one of Wharton's weakest novels. A satire vivid moral sense (derived therefrom), by which on modern manners and morals, this novel ridicules their elders' conduct is weighed in the balance and the hurried, frenetic quality of modern social life, found wanting. While many reviewers.found the the ceaselesspursuit of pleasure and the fear of pain novel barely credible, Gorham Munson was (focusing on the new anesthetic used in childbirth perhaps typical in remarking that, although The that is indicated by the title), the secular substitu- Children "is not by the inspired Edith Wharton who tions for religious value in society,and the shallow- wrote that finest of New England tragedies, Ethan ness of love in the age of Freud, jazz, and "quickie" Frome, it is a characteristically competent Wharton divorces. product, and the sun of Henry James, once re- If Twilight Sleep reveals how the irresponsible fracted, still brings out the polish of pages that re- adults victimize the young, The Children makes the gret the decline in manners and record the new point even more explicitly. As she grew older, the vulgarities."

448 DLD 12 ~ditb Wbarton

The year Hudson River Bracketed appeared, and upon the inanities of life among the British thirty-one critics were asked to rank sove rrty-t.wo aristocracy, Wharton ","assharply revising her vie ws contemporary American writers on the basis of about the Midwestern nouveaux riches to show how literary merit. That Wharton still held her own was they might, after all, have a tonic effect on society indicated by sixteen of them placing her in group 1 and reinvigorate the meaning of the past and the and ten in group 2, generally judging her work as value of tradition. "superior." Hudson River Bracketed confirmed her Vance Weston's successive experiments with general reputation by expertly tracing the appren- several kinds of novels in Hudson River Bracketed and ticeship of a young American novelist of manners, The Gods Arrive have the effect of highlighting what, Vance Weston, while offering some lively comment to Wharton, were the limitations of novelistic on American life, the international literary scene, genres. Even the naturalistic novel, for Wharton, stream-of-consciousness fiction, dadaism and sur- had failed. The great French writers, she remarked, realism, and the artist's imagination. In brief, the "invented the once-famous tranche de vie, the exact novel deals with the necessity of Weston's discover- photographic reproduction of a situation or an ing in Willows-an old house designed in the Hud- episode, with all its sounds, smells, aspects realisti- son River Bracketed style-a symbol of continuity, cally rendered, but with its deeper relevance and its history, and tradition,-just what is needed to suggestions of a larger whole either unconsciously nourish the artist's imagination, according to missed or purposely left out." If they succeeded, she Wharton. held, they did so only in spite of their theories. As In The Gods Arrive, written as a sequel, Whar- early as 1914, she had left the hope that "some new ton has Weston go to Europe in further pursuit of theory of form, as adequate to its purpose as those American cultural roots and, at the same time, he preceding it, willbe evolved from the present welter descends deeper into himself to discover the source of experiment." But by the 1930s she did not find of his creative energies. The novel weaves together modernist theories of fiction to have produced a two interrelated themes: the age-old perplexing great narrative art. And in The Gods Arrive, she ex- problem of love between men and women, both pressed her dismay at the literati in Paris who de- within and without the married estate; and the dis- nounce tradition and argue that "fiction; as the art covery of Europe and its old established traditions of narrative and the portrayal of social groups, had by a young writer inflamed with the recently dis- reached its climax, and could produce no more ... covered concept of continuity. Both books were re- -that unless the arts were renewed they 'were ceived as competent and workmanlike, if old- doomed, and that in fiction the only hope of re- fashioned in their literary attitudes, Isabel Paterson newal was in the exploration of the subliminal." For remarking how Wharton "satirizes the modernists her, the realistic novel of manners, centering on the in her own leisurely way, conceding not the fraction characters' conscious and purposive motives in the of an inch in either theory or 'practice to their liter- conflict between the social order and the indi- ary claims." vidual's appetites, the novel of manners offering the One of the most interesting aspects of Hudson social surface but probing for its deeper signifi- River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive, as well as of The cance, would more than challenge the capacities of Buccaneers, her last, uncompleted novel, is that they any artist. express an increasingly complex attitude toward the In the process of dramatizing the vulgarity of American Middle West, which she had consistently the modern world and in defending the novel of satirized in her earlier work. The Buccaneers, set in manners against the emerging modernists, whom New York in the 1870s, deals with the efforts of the she largely misunderstood, Wharton lost, rather St. George family, indefatigable plutocrats from the conspicuously, the sharp irony of her youthful style; Midwest, to launch their daughters into New York and in its place readers increasingly encountered society. In Vance Weston and the St. George girls, both the bitter distortions of satire and a mellow who eventually discover the importance of the cul- nostalgia for a vanished world that few could re- tural roots and the traditions of an established soci- member across the wreckage of the Great Depres- ety, Wharton celebrates the energy, passion, and sion and the war years. She was never at home in the power of the new Americans, especially as they try postwar world. But although her novels became to assimilate cultural tradition. It is clear that, in increasingly deprived of that rich and direct social Wharton's affection for the invading American experience that is the substance of the American beauties, who marry into the English aristocracy, in novel of manners, she nevertheless tried to deal her satire upon the snobbishness of old New York, responsibly and realistically with her times up until

449 Edith Wharton DLB 12

her death in 1937. From this high seriousness and domadaire,45 (21 June 1936): 266-286. from her deep interest in the craft of fiction came a . handful of superior novels-The House of Mirth, Bibliographies: Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Vito J. Brenni, Edith Wharton: A Bibliography (Mor- Innocence-and a score of excellent short stories- gantown: West Virginia University Library, ~i among them "Autre Temps ... ," "Roman Fever," 1966); ';l.~ and "The Other Two." They will always be read James W. Tuttleton, "Edith Wharton: An Essay in ..~ with close attention and remembered with pleasure. Bibliography," Resources for American Literary i i Study, 3 (Fall 1973): 163-202. Biography: Other: R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New Hermann Sudermann, The Joy of Living, translated York, Evanston, San Francisco & London: by Wharton (New York: Scribners, 1902); Harper & Row, 1975). The Book of the Homeless, compiled by Wharton (Paris, 1915; New York: Scribners, 1916); References: Eternal Passion in English Poetry, edited by Wharton, Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton (Minneapolis: Robert Norton, and Gaillard Lapsley, with a University of Minnesota Press, 1961); preface by Wharton (New York: Appleton- Auchindoss, Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time Century, 1939). (New York: Viking, 1971); Millicent Bell, Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Periodical Publications: Story of Their Friendship (New York: Braziller, "The Vice of Reading," North American Review, 177 1965); (October 1903): 513-521; Irving Howe, ed., Edith Wharton: A Collection of Crit- "The Criticism of Fiction," Times Literary Supplement, ical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J: Prentice- 14 May 1914, p. 230; Hall, 1962); "The Great American Novel," Yale Review, new Margaret McDowell, Edith Wharto'a (Boston: series 16 Guly 1927): 646-656; Twayne, 1976); "When New York Was Innocent," Literary Digest, 99 Blake Nevius, Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction (15 December 1928): 27; (Berkeley: University of California Press, "Visibility in Fiction," Yale Review, new series 18 1953); (March 1929): 480-488; James W. Tuttleton, The Novel of Manners in America "Confessions of a Novelist," Atlantic Monthly, 151 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina (April 1933): 385; Press, 1972), pp. 122-140; "Permanent Values in Fiction," Saturday Review of Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph Literature, 10 (7 April 1934): 603-604; of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford Univer- "Souvenirs du Bourget d'Outremer," Review Heb- sity Press, 1977).

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