A Biography of Edith Wharton
Richard H. Lawson
Although Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is better known as a novelist than a short-story writer, she was in fact writing and publishing stories well before her debut as a novelist in 1902. Her first published story was "Mrs. Manstey's View," in Scribner's Magazine of July 1891. From the perspective of her boardinghouse window the elderly Mrs. Manstey witnesses the preparations for building onto the neighboring boardinghouse an addition that will block her beloved view. Her uncharacteristic--because it is active--attempt at nocturnal arson fails, and the harsh night air brings her pneumonia, which proves fatal. This first story, somewhat contrived in that Mrs. Manstey is primarily acted upon, contains in that very respect a prefiguration of what will emerge as the chief theme of Wharton's stories: life is an entrapment, an imprisonment.
Wharton's imprisonment was the hereditary society, even the family into which she was born, which prized manners and conformity, that is, suppression, above all, and which disdained artistic effort (or for that matter even commercial effort). From the upper-class New York household of her parents, George Frederic and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, who had their daughter educated at home by governesses, she entered, on 25 April 1885, into a disastrous marriage to Edward Robbins (Teddy) Wharton--a union that reinforced her social imprisonment. The two were divorced in 1913. In Edith Wharton 's fiction the problem of marriage and divorce is a variant of the imprisonment theme. Her concern with the cultural scene finds expression in a large number of artist stories--which, however, prove to be aligned with the more fundamental theme of imprisonment, marriage, and divorce. Even in the case of her dozen or so ghost stories, the flesh-and-blood characters tend to have problematic orientations toward marriage, or divorce, or the role of being a surviving spouse. The problem of marital relationship continues after death in Wharton's second published story, the allegory "The Fullness of Life," in Scribner's Magazine of December 1893. A deceased wife, deciding to forego the yearned-for kindred spirit she meets in the after-world, prefers to await her husband.
With "That Good May Come" (Scribner's Magazine, May 1894) Wharton returns to the real world; not, however, to her own real world but to the confined world of the lower-middle class. The impoverished author Birkton sells his literary integrity in order to buy his younger sister a confirmation dress. In an O. Henry-like pointe he discovers that the gossip he has guiltily committed to print is, in fact, true. The relativistic nature of Birkton's morality gives ample scope to Wharton's irony.
"The Lamp of Psyche" (Scribner's Magazine , October 1895), back in Wharton's native society, points to the effect on Delia's previously unqualified love for her husband, Corbett, when she discovers that he did not serve in the Civil War because of cowardice. In a marriage, like Delia's, like Wharton's own, a woman may be well advised to adapt to disillusionment. The reasoning may lie in its clear implication of her persistent subtheme that a woman without the protection of marriage is quite helpless in society. Some critics account "The Lamp of Psyche" among Wharton's best stories.
"The Valley of Childish Things, and Other Emblems" ( Century Magazine, July 1896) is a curious gathering of ten parables, the shortest a mere eight lines in length, bound together chiefly by a whimsical and ironic contemplation of human relationships. These parables reflect, among other things, an adult beset by disturbing memories of a somewhat loveless childhood as well as a sense of feminine ambition being brutally suppressed.
Wharton's first published collection of short stories (plus a one-act play), The Greater Inclination, was brought out by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1899. The lead story, "The Muse's Tragedy" (Scribner's Magazine, January 1899), evoked critical comparison of Wharton to Henry James. An early example of a Wharton artist story, it is of interest for its treatment of Mary Anerton's conflicting roles of muse and lover. The artistic background is of less moment than the marital and nonmarital relationships that it conditions. The tragedy, for Wharton, lies in Mary Anerton's passive need to have an affair in the forlorn hope that someone may respond to her as a real person. Wharton does not appear to consider reversing the convention by which the woman inspires art that the man creates.
"A Journey" may also be interpreted as Wharton's fictional expression of the desire to escape the imprisonment of her marriage and her society. A nameless woman and her invalid husband undertake a train trip from Colorado to New York City. En route he dies. Terrified of being debarked with his corpse at some unknown outpost along the way, she manages to the end to maintain the fiction of his being alive, though very ill. At the final moment she collapses, striking her head against the dead man's berth--fatally, the reader is left to infer.
In "The Pelican" (Scribner's Magazine, January 1898) a young widow, Mrs. Amyot, is obliged to turn to lecturing in order to provide for her infant son, Lancelot. (It was once believed that pelicans fed their young with their own blood.) Much later, however, years after he has become successful on his own, Mrs. Amyot is still lecturing under the pretense that she is doing it "for the baby," insensitive to the pride of her son. On the other hand she has to do something; and society has given her nothing else to do.
Although like "The Pelican," "Souls Belated" is esteemed critically, it seems to suffer from an uncharacteristically heavy-handed irony. Lydia is in the process of obtaining a divorce, but as a rebel against social conformity she is unwilling to marry Gannett, the man she loves. She thus defies the conventions of the Anglo-American guests at a resort hotel in the Italian lake country. After social intercourse illustrates painfully to her the untenability of her rebellion, Lydia accepts convention. Wharton uses her favorite metaphor, that of the prison, to emphasize the plight of Lydia--who, incidentally, also serves as an ineffective muse to Gannett's futile efforts to follow up on a promising debut as a novelist. Wharton occasionally tends to allow characters in the context of irony to become caricatures; that surely happens with at least the secondary characters in "Souls Belated."
"A Coward" presents Mr. Carstyle, who failed to fulfill a trust in his youth and is now--doubtless by way of compensation--repaying the money his dead brother embezzled, insisting on a life-style far less grand than that his wife noisily proclaims as her social birthright. In the anecdotal and melodramatic "A Cup of Cold Water" Wharton combines social levels, the lower-middle class and her own patrician class (as she did in her 1907 novel, The Fruit of the Tree). This tale may be of primary interest for its early view of the larger social alignments that emerged in some of Wharton's novels beginning less than a decade later: the difficult mutualism of the lower stratum and the patricians against the despoilers, the factory owners.
"The Portrait" is that of Vard, a crooked and rapacious politician, painted by an accomplished artist, Lillo. So as not to undeceive Vard's worshipful daughter about her father, Lillo contrives to paint a portrait that will not reveal Vard's awful inner essence. The artist story is the platform on which is worked out the delicate psychological dynamism between the Vards, father and daughter. In the process Wharton gives vent to her scorn of the American political realities of her day and of figures, like Vard, who greedily exploit those realities.
The Greater Inclination is a remarkable effort for a first collection. As a whole the stories are characterized by complex and ambiguous personal relationships, generally well-tempered irony, and an elegant diction that only rarely succumbs to preciosity. They also give indication of her lifelong thematic concerns. The critics and Wharton's publishers were pleased. In at least three printings The Greater Inclination sold thirty-five hundred copies in the United States and Great Britain.
Wharton published three magazine stories in 1900. Two of them, in the Youth's Companion, are distinctly juvenile in theme (although not in style). "The Line of Least Resistance," in the October issue of Lippincott's Magazine, is quite another matter. Mindon, whose wife has been unfaithful, allows his friends to persuade him not to divorce her because of the children. Again Wharton wrestles with the problem of divorce vis-à-vis society. The hero and the milieu of "The Line of Least Resistance" recur in her later novels, most specifically in The Custom of the Country (1913). Mindon is an aggressive businessman, quite without culture, whose commercial success has propelled him into a social world to whose concerns and niceties he remains a stranger.
Six stories and a "dialog"--a one-act play--are included in Crucial Instances (1901). In one way or another all of the stories connect thematically with the past, including the Italian past, a congenial topic with Wharton at this period and one doubtless brought to a focus by her research for her two-volume 1902 novel, The Valley of Decision . The lead story, "The Duchess at Prayer" (Scribner's Magazine, August 1900), is a story of the Italian past, of implicit sex, of forthright violence, and of the supernatural (the facial expression on a marble statue changes).
"The Angel at the Grave" (Scribner's Magazine, February 1901) provokes the question of how wise emotionally it might be for a young woman to immerse herself--and be immersed--in the role of curator of her grandfather's philosophical artifacts and reputation. By the time Paulina Anson is in her forties, her grandfather's scholarly reputation is on the verge of being revived by an attractive young male scholar, and her memories of her former sweetheart and the marriage she had given up are slightly restirred. The past, it seems, is not always linkable to the present except in such dilute measure.
One of Wharton's art stories, "The Recovery" ( Harper's Monthly, February 1901), takes place at Hillbridge, often the setting for Wharton's examination of the cultural scene. The artistic recovery is that of Keniston, effected during a European sojourn. There is little indication that Keniston's artistic enlightenment is paralleled on the personal level. "The Rembrandt" (Cosmopolitan , August 1900) is not a Rembrandt at all, even though its owner, the aristocratic, aged, and impoverished Mrs. Fontage, thinks it is. Having acquired it on her long-past European honeymoon, she is now compelled to sell it, while still attempting to preserve her pride and her manner. Art is the medium, but the message is social: members of Wharton's elite society rally around one of their own who has been brought to a pitiful pass by the imperative of social dynamics.
"The Moving Finger" (Harper's Monthly , March 1901)--the allusion is to stanza 51 of the Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám --is the guiding digit of one whom Wharton calls "the great Healer." Its agent is Claydon, a portrait painter, who yields to his friend Grancy's insistence that he age the portrait of Grancy's now dead wife. For Grancy avers that she is finding it increasingly difficult to relate to him now over a gap of five years during which Grancy himself has aged. Finally Claydon is charged to make the portrait of Mrs. Grancy reflect her knowledge that Grancy himself is soon fated to die. As usual in Wharton's fiction the artist situation is the background, perhaps even the catalyst for a personal, in this case (as in most) marital, interaction.
"The Moving Finger" is also an inchoate ghost story, accurately predicting Wharton's later work in this genre: with a minimum of ghostly trappings the dead do survive, and they are apt to be relentless. The "psychological complexities"--a phrase Wharton frequently used--are understated. It is just hinted that Claydon was in love with the living Mrs. Grancy, perhaps as much as her husband was. Claydon correspondingly shows signs of a guilty conscience. When Grancy calls on him to redo the portrait finally to depict Mrs. Grancy as aware of Grancy's impending death, he "miss[es] the mark" and paints her as anticipating Grancy's death (because he wishes his friend dead, the reader may infer).
The last story in Crucial Instances , "The Confessional," is an extended reflection of Wharton's profound fondness for Italy, a framed story depending heavily on melodrama. As a whole Crucial Instances embodies features of Wharton's later fiction, novels as well as short stories: psychological complexity, the theme of the deads' survival as ghosts, a pronounced distaste for pseudo-intellectualism, and the penetration into her hereditary society of those nouveaux riches whom she later called "the Invaders." Critics, probably with justice, ranked the stories in this collection as inferior to the more tightly drawn tales in The Greater Inclination.
Quite the contrary is true of her next collection, The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904), which in all but one story treats American material, to which Wharton applies a discerningly ironic eye. "The Descent of Man" (Scribner's Magazine, March 1904) provides an ironic aperçu of American mass culture. A skeptical and deterministic entomologist, Professor Linyard of Hillbridge, writes "The Vital Thing," a satirical work on popular culture. Its adherents, failing to grasp the satire, make Linyard a culture hero. His fame, however, proves a difficult tiger from which to dismount. When Linyard, who has continued to pursue his scientific work, wants to write a "real book," in which to present his recent scientific discoveries, he learns that to obtain sufficient funds he must mortgage himself further to the top crowd by writing a sequel to "The Vital Thing."
Jane's mission in "The Mission of Jane" ( Harper's Monthly, December 1902) is to reconcile her adoptive parents. The thematic irony--others are abundant--lies in the fact that the reconciliation is effected only when, years later, they finally succeed in marrying Jane off. Only in being unburdened of her are Mr. and Mrs. Lethbury enabled to cast at least a tentative bridge over the abyss of their vast incompatibility. However unsuitable their marriage, implicit is that divorce would be even more unsuitable--another fictional reflection of Wharton's personal plight.
"The Other Two" (Collier's, 13 February 1904) is one of Wharton's most engaging stories. The title refers to the two previous husbands of the woman who is now Alice Waythorn: the unprepossessing Haskett and the affable Varick. Events reveal to her present husband, in a most disconcerting way, that Alice has had the faculty of adapting to each husband in turn, including him, by sacrificing a certain portion of her own self. As Waythorn phrases it, she is "`as easy as an old shoe'--a shoe that too many feet had worn." This urbane tale of manners fittingly ends in the Waythorn library, whither each of the spouses, past and present, has repaired on one mission or another, only to find the others there. Alice Waythorn rises to the occasion in magisterially proffering tea to each. With a laugh Waythorn accepts the third cup.
It is divorce, of course, that has brought about this tense assemblage, adroitly put at ease by the adaptable Alice, so competent in dealing with the inevitable residue of divorces. Still, although Alice Waythorn prevails, it is at the cost of husbandly disillusionment and of her becoming something not quite human. Here Wharton is indeed a feminist.
"The Quicksand" (Harper's Monthly, June 1902) is about commercial success; what the quicksand swallows up is principle--not primarily that of Quentin the male entrepreneur but that of his wife, who over the course of time succumbs to the ease that money provides. The only refuge of her still lively conscience is frantic philanthropy. It is against falling into such a pattern that the widowed Mrs. Quentin warns Hope Fenno, the prospective bride of her son Alan. A secondary but also well-developed thematic strand is the exceedingly finely tuned relationship between Mrs. Quentin and her son, Alan (which replicates that to be found in Wharton's 1903 novella, Sanctuary). The reader may be inclined to regard Mrs. Quentin's by no means emotionally disciplined advice to Hope Fenno as something less than pure altruism and to consider the possibility that she may wish, however subconsciously, to keep her son for herself--in short, the Oedipal situation, of which Wharton was thoroughly aware.
"The Dilettante" (Harper's Monthly, December 1903), the shortest tale in The Descent of Man and perhaps the most urbane, gradually reveals Thursdale's fiancée's distress that his long-prior relationship with Mrs. Vervain did not include lovemaking. More than urbanity, Ruth Gaynor's distress apparently reflects healthy self-interest (quite likely also Wharton's comment on her own largely sexless marriage).
"The Reckoning" (Harper's Monthly, August 1902) is the one meted Mrs. Clement Westall by her second husband when he announces that in accord with their enlightened marital agreement of a decade ago he now wishes his freedom. Unfortunately Julia has settled into the marriage and gradually acquired a conventional point of view. Deeply shocked at his sudden proclamation she is unable to grasp why Clement tired of their marriage. She forces a distraught visit on her first husband, whom she had left because she had become tired of him, while he could not understand. Now she tells him that at least she understands how he must have felt. In a somewhat schematic way--the resolution is at once melodramatic and intellectual--"The Reckoning" reflects Wharton's continued fictional involvement with the problems of marriage and divorce and the emotional cost of each.