Preface and Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Tribes
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Notes Preface and Acknowledgements 1. Donnée Book (c. 1900), 39 (Yale). 2. E.W. to Robert Grant (25.vii.1900) (Yale). 3. E.W. to Sally Norton (24.ii.1902) (Yale). Chapter 1 Tribes 1. Reminiscence of Edith Wharton (unpublished MS) (Yale), 2. 2. I have borrowed these expressions from Sylvia Adamson, ‘The What of Lan- guage?’ in The State of the Language ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 503–14. 3. For some useful reflections on this phenomenon, see Kenneth Burke’s essay ‘The Negative as a Marvel of Language’ in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 419–25. See also Adamson, 509–10. 4. E.W. to A.H. Thorndike (18.xii.17) (Yale). 5. The widowed Mrs John Smith would only eventually style herself ‘Mrs Mary Smith’ after a suitable period of linguistic ‘mourning’, the alteration recognis- ing her status of married singleness; a divorcée would immediately become ‘Mrs Mary Smith’. The protean capability offered to someone like Mrs Ralph Marvell, who looks ‘so unmarried’ to French eyes, is encoded in her divorced title, ‘Mrs Undine Marvell’, a name she retains in widowhood. See Nancy Bentley’s discussion of the American divorcée in The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 185–9. Wharton’s own retention of ‘Mrs Wharton’ through marriage, divorce, and widowhood is an interesting parallel with Undine. Mrs Wharton would be horrified by ‘Wharton’, the mode to which I am reluctantly compelled by modern academic fashion. 6. E.W. to Edward Sheldon (6.v.24) (Yale). 7. Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last Hundred Years (New York: Random House, 1951), 153–4. For a fascinating précis of Amer- ican card-leaving protocol, see Kenneth L. Ames, Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 35–43. 8. Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society Etiquette and the Season (London: Croom Helm, 1973), 42–3. 9. The Mingott–Welland-Dallas/Beaufort family tree might be rendered as follows: 188 Abraham Mingott = Ellen Manson John Manson=Delia MissMingott =Mr Thorley MansonMingott =Catherine Spicer LovellMingott =Mary Chivers Mr Manson=? Miss Thorley=Mr Dallas Lovell Augusta= MrMingott =? Medora = 1) Henry Manson Dallas Rushworth Henry Welland 2) Italian marquis 3) Thorley Chivers 1) Regina Dallas=Julius Beaufort May=Newland Archer Jack="Mrs Jack" Ellen=Count Olenski 2) Fanny Ring= Fanny Beaufort = Dallas Mary=Mr Chivers Bill See various remarks in The Age of Innocence, and ‘Notes & Subjects I’ (Yale) for Wharton’s own attempts at this genealogy. The rela- tionship of Medora Manson is not entirely clear. She is either a daughter of Mrs Manson Mingott, and therefore the aunt of May and Ellen; or she is Mrs Manson Mingott’s first cousin by marriage, the widow of Manson Mingott’s uncle John Manson’s son. I have preferred the former solution because it explains Ellen’s habit of calling Medora ‘Aunt’. 189 190 Notes 10. The Ladies’ Home Journal rejected The Old Maid as too ‘vigorous’ for their readership (Benstock, 363). The Woman’s Home Companion worried that the elopement in The Buccaneers would be ‘difficult’ for their conservative readers (Benstock, 442); Summer aroused ‘puritanical’ recoil in parts of the American literary press (Lewis, 398). 11. The old Academy of Music, with 18 boxes, was superseded by the new Metropolitan Opera House, with 118. The Met was built with the backing of Mrs W.K. Vanderbilt and other new-rich social titans. Within two years of its opening in 1883, its competition closed the Academy (see Morris, 191). 12. Dio Lewis, Our Girls (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1871), 211. 13. Although I disagree with his conclusion, James W. Gargano interestingly reads Newland’s search for freedom as ‘a Faustian impulse to ignore the humane values that underlie responsible social intercourse’ (‘Tableaux of Renunci- ation: Wharton’s Use of The Shaugraun in The Age of Innocence’ Studies in American Fiction 15 (Spring, 1987), 2). Commitment to May, I suggest in Chapter 3, is rather a validation of irresponsible – unhealthful – fetishising of female innocence. 14. Stages and theatrical situations are a favourite Whartonian trope: they occur with special significance in The House of Mirth, The Reef, The Custom of the Country, Summer, The Marne and The Age of Innocence. 15. Catharine H. Waterman, Flora’s Lexicon: an Interpretation of the Language of Sentiment (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee & Co., 1861), 125. 16. S.C. Edgarton, The Flower Vase; containing the Language of Flowers and their Poetic Sentiments (Lowell, Mass.: Merrill and Heywood, 1847), 91. Wharton may only require a white flower for May at this point, but she is too astute a recollector of her native culture not to remember the popularity of flower- languages. The violets which May carries at other times represent, variously, ‘faithfulness’ and ‘modesty’; the violet is a flower which ‘retains the bashful timidity of the nymph’ (Waterman, 216). Yellow roses, Newland’s gift to Olenska, represent infidelity in love and friendship. ‘This scentless flower, which profits neither by attention nor liberty, seems only to prosper when under restraint.’ (Waterman, 179). On the semantics of phyllanthography, see Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993). 17. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, however, reads this as May’s (and therefore Old New York’s) deep and generous intuition (A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (second, revised, edition) (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publish- ing Company, 1995), 313–17. 18. ‘Visibility in Fiction’ (1929) in Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writ- ings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 164–5. 19. ‘A totem’, Freud says, quoting Frazer, ‘is a class of material objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate and altogether special rela- tion.’ (Totem and Taboo in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud vol. 13 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 103) I use this word somewhat gen- erously: Freud specifies totems as animals or objects rather than persons, but the bloodless, almost mummified quality of the van der Luydens seems to place them within this domain; in every other particular (the awed respect of the Archers, the endogamous connexion between the van der Notes 191 Luydens and the Archers and presumably with most other members of the tribe) they satisfy the conditions of totemhood. 20. Bernard Berenson was troubled by Wharton’s onomastics in The Custom of the Country, which he considered extreme; but she was able to cite ‘two “actu- alities” who occur to me instantly’: Lurline Spreckels and Florida Yurlee. ‘As for similar instances, the ‘Herald’ register will give you a dozen any morn- ing’. (Lewis, 349). Wharton’s notebooks contain many lists of names, some gathered, some invented. ‘Blondelle Malone’ caught her eye in the 1910–14 period; in 1918–23, names for a ‘Boston novel’ have generic predictability, as do those in a list for The Age of Innocence; and ‘Themistocles Apotheosis’ and ‘Carmelita Ring’ are proposed for a story called ‘The Cadums’ Governess’. 21. This anecdote is described but unattributed by Lewis, 12. 22. Mrs William Astor eventually prevailed (Morris, 155). 23. E.W. to Eunice Maynard (3.iii.09) (Yale). 24. Gargano points out that no such stage direction exists in the text of the play (Gargano, 10); however, the production at Wallack’s Wharton remembered is commemorated in a photograph of the episode (see Plate 2). 25. Henry James, The Europeans ed. Tony Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 79. 26. To appreciate Wharton’s structural mastery in this opera scene, with its restrained and delicate implications, it should be compared to the opening Faust scene in Frank Norris’s The Pit (1902). Norris uses the melodrama of ‘grand opera’ to open up Laura Dearborn’s responsive character; but it could be any theatrical event, any public occasion. There is no integration of situ- ation, repertoire, and point of view, and the narratorial control of the scene is merely procedural; the cool detachment of Wharton as a controlling lens is nowhere to be found. 27. This was also Mrs Astor’s practice on the third Monday of every January, before her ball (Morris, 146). Thorstein Veblen would classify such behavi- our as the ‘performance of leisure’. 28. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835,1840), 2 vols, trans. Henry Reeve, intro. Daniel C. Gilman (New York: Century Co., 1898), II, 264. 29. Mrs Trollope’s unequivocal design is to discourage ‘the wild scheme of pla- cing all the power of the State in the hands of the populace’. (‘Preface to the First Edition’, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) ed. Richard Mullen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), xxxiii. 30. The tradition appears as early as Crèvecœur, whose Letters of an American Farmer (1782) investigates such problems as ‘what is America like?’ and ‘what is an American?’ 31. See also Julian Street (an American) in Abroad at Home (1915), for additional observational essays. 32. See Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc, 1959), 412. An extended discussion Wharton’s use of Darwinian theory appears in Chapter 2. 33. Sandra H. Gilbert and Susan Gubar think she must have done (‘Angel of Devastation: Edith Wharton on the Arts of the Enslaved’ in No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 130). ‘Sociologists without a drop of American blood in them’, Wharton writes, ‘have been the first to recognise what the traditions 192 Notes of three centuries have contributed to the moral wealth of our country’ (BG5).