The Painless Peace of Twilight Sleep Cheryl Miller

2 2 The Painless Peace of Twilight Sleep Cheryl Miller hen Aldous Huxley’s Upon its publication, Wharton had Brave New World was been attacked as being out of touch Wfirst published seventy- with American life (she had spent five years ago, the critical reception only eleven days in her native coun- was markedly unenthusiastic—but try since 1913), and accused of sell- it did find one appreciative reader. ing out. In the Boston Transcript, Edith Wharton, then in her seventies Dorothy Gillman wrote, “The result and living abroad in France, was not of deserting her own class is disas- a fan of the new generation of writers trous for Mrs. Wharton. She now (she detested Joyce as “pornographic,” adventures in a world which she and thought Virginia Woolf’s novels does not really know...she seems works of pure “exhibitionism”). But deliberately to set out to write a com- in Brave New World, she found a work monplace story that will delight and that spoke to many of her own res- entertain readers of serialized fic- ervations about the modern age. She tion.” Frederick Hoffman concurred, praised it as a “tragic indictment of claiming Wharton seemed “insulted our ghastly age of Fordian culture” by history,” while Carl Van Vechten, and “un chef-d’oeuvre digne de Swift” writing in The Nation, called the (“a masterpiece worthy of Swift”). “I new work, “scrupulous, clever, and suffer from a complete inability to uninspired.” read novels about a future state of Eighty years later, the novel society,” she wrote one friend, “but in remains little-read. Despite a few this case, although it pretends to be champions such as Dale M. Bauer a prophecy of the future it is really a (author of the superb study Edith cruelly true picture of the present.” Wharton’s Brave New Politics), the Huxley was flattered by Wharton’s critical consensus is that Wharton’s accolades, and wrote in response that three “Jazz Age novels” are not equal she “had ‘put the case’ already” in to her earlier works. Hermione Lee, one of her own books, the 1927 novel Wharton’s most recent biographer, Twilight Sleep. Wharton felt much finds Twilight Sleep’s satire “thin and “set up” by Huxley’s “recognition”; harsh,” while feminist critic Cynthia like Brave New World, Twilight Sleep Griffin Wolff calls it “chaotically had not been well received by critics. plotted” and “sloppy.” FALL 2007 ~ 99 Copyright 2007. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. CHERYL MILLER The novel’s plot is indeed dis- included heavily-marked copies of jointed, its disorder meant, as Wolff T. H. Huxley (Aldous’s grandfa- recognizes, to reflect the restless- ther), Ernst Von Haeckel, George ness and constant turmoil of life Romanes, and Edvard Westermarck. in America after the Great War. Scientific themes appear often in her It focuses on Pauline Manford, the work. She drew on her knowledge wealthy, emancipated matriarch of a of anthropology and sociology (par- socially prominent New York house- ticularly Thorstein Veblen’s theory hold. Pauline, a sort of Jazz Age of conspicuous consumption) for her Mrs. Jellyby (as Lee calls her), is a great novels of the teens: The House of relentless do-gooder, taking up dona- Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and tions for Bolivian earthquake victims The Age of Innocence. One of her most and serving on endless committees famous short stories is even titled for her many causes. Meanwhile, her after Darwin’s The Descent of Man. second husband, Dexter, begins an affair with Lita, the beautiful wife of y the 1920s though, Wharton his stepson Jim. Only Nona (Pauline Bbegan to question the moral and Dexter’s daughter) and Arthur aims of modern science, particularly Wyant (Pauline’s much-abused first its ambition to relieve men of pain husband), suspect the truth. The and suffering. She was distrustful melodramatic climax comes when of a “world that believed in pana- Arthur discovers Dexter in Lita’s ceas.” As she warned one would-be bedroom, and attempts to kill Dexter. revolutionary, “The evils you rightly Instead, he shoots Nona, who had satirize will be replaced by others rushed in hoping to break off the more harmful to any sort of civilized affair. Pauline, ever worried about living.” This warning would serve as appearances, covers up the near-fatal the theme of her Jazz Age novels: The incident, and the entire family soon Glimpses of the Moon (1922), Twilight decamps overseas to avoid publicity. Sleep, and The Children (1928). In What appears on first glance to be each, she would depict a set of free- a mere domestic melodrama is really thinking moderns who believe they a searching examination of the new have “settled in advance all social, society profoundly shaped by modern religious and moral problems,” yet science and commerce. Wharton had still come “to grief over the same old long been an avid reader of what she human difficulties.” called the “the wonder-world of nine- Wharton pursued this theme most teenth century science,” and she con- forcefully in Twilight Sleep. The sidered Darwin and Herbert Spencer novel’s title refers to the mixture to be among the “greatest” of her of scopolamine and morphine phy- “formative influences.” Her library sicians administered to women to 100 ~ THE NEW ATLANTIS Copyright 2007. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. THE PAINLESS PEACE OF TWILIGHT SLEEP allow them to “forget” the pains of is to be effected is modern science, childbirth. The term appears at the motivated by man’s “blind dread of end of the first chapter as Pauline physical pain.” recalls how she arranged for Lita to But the morbidity at the root of the be admitted into the choicest hospital scientific worldview is bedimmed by for the birth of her and Jim’s son. the obscuring hope of progress. Fear The procedure’s purpose was eugen- cannot be dealt with directly (say, by ic, a subtext at which Wharton hints courage), so it is evaded, kept at bay with Lita’s request that “nothing by an ever-increasing array of rem- should ‘hurt’ her” during her labor. edies and by the determined effort By relieving this pain, the advocates to think only “happy thoughts.” Like of “twilight sleep” hoped to enable Mrs. Welland in The Age of Innocence, “delicate” women like Lita and those Pauline insists on keeping her mind of her set (i.e., the upper crust) to “bright and happy.” She regards life have more children, thus provid- as “a Sunday school picnic, with ing, as the medical historian Judith lemonade and sponge cake as its Walzer Leavitt explains, “a ‘better supreme rewards.” Discussion of race for future generations.’” anything “unpleasant” is assiduously It’s a goal that Pauline, an enthu- avoided—and if it cannot be avoided, siastic disciple of modern science, then forgotten just as the drugged shares. “Of course there ought to women in “twilight sleep” forget the be no Pain,” she thinks. For Pauline, pain of labor. “avoidance of pain” is the “ultimate The forgetfulness of twilight sleep end,” and the eugenic production (and of the scientific enterprise) of offspring, using only “superbly applies not only to pain, but also sound progenitors,” is but one tactic to the past. America is the land of in modern science’s arsenal. Babies progress, its citizens so focused on are “something to be turned out the bright future they imagine they in series like Fords,” the end-prod- have no time for the past. To them, uct of “months and years of patient Europe is only the site of “obsolete Taylorized effort against the natural superstitions unworthy of enlight- human fate: anxiety, sorrow, old age.” ened Americans,” lacking in such Thus, “twilight sleep,” for Wharton, modern conveniences as plumbing, is more than just a medical procedure. dentistry, and easy divorce. Thus, the It symbolizes man’s rebellion against only culture Pauline and the others “the natural human fate,” the fool- participate in is wholly situated in ish hope that he can forget human the present: cinema, gossip rags, nature and all its attendant evils: and jazz clubs. The family’s home is pain, anger, jealousy, lust, and grief. full of books but no one ever reads The means by which this rebellion them. Dexter does attempt a course FALL 2007~ 101 Copyright 2007. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. CHERYL MILLER of literary reading, starting with that all problems can be solved in a Tallentyre’s Voltaire, which he finds a matter of minutes. With Pauline’s “revelation” since he had never heard various self-improvement exercises, of Voltaire, but his education ends Wharton lampoons the burgeoning with his second book, the first vol- self-help industry, as exemplified by ume of Macaulay, which he thinks too Émile Coué’s 1922 bestseller, Self- long. Pauline, a professed Christian, Mastery Through Conscious Auto- is flummoxed when Nona reminds Suggestion, with its recommendation her of Christ’s suffering on the cross: that the reader recite aloud every “The idea of stirring up troublesome morning the mantra: “Every day, in mysteries of Christian dogma at the every way, I am getting better and breakfast-table!” she fumes. better.” Pauline’s many gurus are Wharton’s critics may have accused also all based on real-life persons; her of being detached from modern for instance, the Mahatma, with his American life, but she remained a hip-slimming exercises, is drawn keen, if disapproving, observer of from the popular yogi, Paramahansa modes and fashions. She stashed Yogananda, who gave lectures at away stacks of news clippings and Carnegie Hall with such pseudosci- advertisements heralding the newest entific titles as “Everlasting Youth: detergent or latest scientific “break- Psycho-Physiological Rejuvenation through.” Twilight Sleep is stuffed of Cells by Recharging the Body with these researches, with Pauline Battery.” sampling every 1920s fad: psycho- Wharton captures too the hygien- analysis, New Age spiritualism, self- ic craze that swept America in the help books, consumer science, drugs, 1920s, with hundreds of new clean- plastic surgery, and, of course, eugen- ing products suddenly lining the ics.

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