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It has been only a few weeks since I last read Edith Wharton; I enjoyed Ethan Frome so much I just couldn’t hold out any longer to read The House of Mirth (1905), Wharton’s first major success. I picked up this copy when, almost exactly one year ago this week, my wife and I took a trip to the Berkshires and visited Wharton’s beautiful home, The Mount. I was so struck by the beauty of the surroundings and amazed at the genius of the mind who created them (Wharton was a student of architecture and landscaping) that I thought I’d read the book immediately. As often happens, though, one book led to another . . . But enough of that: I now have read three of Wharton’s books, and I place each of them in my top tier.
The House of Mirth begins Grand Central Station when Mr. Selden spies Miss Lily Bart. Wharton’s skill in the opening is incredible: from Mr. Selden’s few observations we get a sense of who Lily Bart is and how their relationship is. Miss Bart is famous in New York’s high society. Her beauty out-classes them all. Any wealth she hoped to inherit, however, has been lost in prior generations until her mother and father had to live with the fact that they had nothing to pass on. As seemed to be the case in the hardened class system, Lily is able to live off of her family’s reputation for wealth, and, of course, off of her beauty.
Her parents, though, have now been dead for years. Lily lives with her aunt who gives her a generous but irregular allowance. Lily spends the money living among the rich. It is a kind of investment for the one goal she’s always had in front of her, a goal which Mr. Selden brings up during their brief visit together at the beginning of the book: marriage.
She coloured and laughed. “Ah, I see you are a friend after all, and that is one of the disagreeable things I was asking for.”
“It wasn’t meant to be disagreeable,” he returned amicably. “Isn’t marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?”
She sighed. “I suppose so. What else is there?”
“Exactly. And so why not take the plunge and have it over?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “You ask as if I ought to marry the first man who came along.”
“I didn’t meant to imply that you are as hart put to it as that. But there must be some one with the requisite qualifications.”
She shook her head wearily. “I threw away one or two good chances when I first came out — I suppose every girl does; and you know I am horribly poor — and very expensive. I must have a great deal of money.”
Selden was not proposing Lily marry himself — he certainly doesn’t have the money she needs, and he knows it. He merely posed the question generally: why isn’t Miss Lily Bart, the handsomest eligible (or ineligible) woman unmarried? Even stranger, she needs to be married if she’s to maintain her precarious position in society. It isn’t getting any easier since Lily is not nearing completion of her third decade of life. Worry, of course, is counterproductive: it just hastens the wrinkles she can’t afford to have.
She remembered how her mother, after they had lost their money, used to say to her with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: “But you’ll get it back — you’ll get it all back, with your face . . . .” The remembrance roused a whole train of association, and she lay in the darkness reconstructing the past out of which her present had grown.
Selden’s question is a very good one. Lily should have her pick of men. Obviously most of them are fools pandering to society, but they are the fools she needs. Early on we understand that Selden is not such a fool; she values his high opinion, knowing that it comes with more heart and understanding than the others’.
She had always been glad to sit next to him at dinner, had found him more agreeable than most men, and had vaguely wished that he possessed the other qualities needful to fix her attention; but till now she had been too busy with her own affairs to regard him as more than one of the pleasant accessories of life.
Selden is often on the fringes of the novel while Wharton eviscerates New York society by showing how ridiculous it is for people to pander to a society they despise only to keep that social structure functioning. Lily is no different here, though she seems more conscious of how ridiculous it is — these games. She can’t quite bring herself to marriage, though, just to solidify her place:
“That’s Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.”
Mrs. Fisher paused and looked reflectively at the deep shimmer of sea between the cactus-flowers. “Sometimes,” she added, “I think it’s just flightiness — and sometimes I think it’s because, at heart, she despises the things she’s trying for. And it’s the difficulty of deciding that makes her such an interesting study.” She glanced tentatively at Selden’s motionless profile, and resumed with a slight sigh: “Well, all I can say is, I wish she’d give me some of he discarded opportunities.”
This novel shows that it is not as simple as it might seem — and that is where it transcends being just a fabulous story. This social structure has locked itself into place by essentially killing any who oppose it: “it was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.” Lily cannot simply go out and get a job: she has not been raised to do labor, for one thing, so she lacks basic skills necessary to do what women laborers were doing at the time; for another, a laboring woman then could hardly survive on her wages even if she weren’t nearly killed by the labor itself. If Lily is repudiated by this society, then, she loses the source of living — not just of living the high life, no — of living at all. If she doesn’t marry, she will be forced down the rungs until she dies in the street. What a brutal society. They hated this book, by the way. A great discussion of this social structure as presented in The House of Mirth can be found in one of KevinfromCanada’s first blog posts.
The House of Mirth is strong in every way a good book should be strong. On its basic level, the words Wharton chooses are just perfect, and she arranges them in beautiful sentences that are in and of themselves lessons on rhetoric and wit. Using such sentences, Wharton creates a powerful plot that explores the consciousness of a woman in the early twentieth century who has nowhere to go. I think the writing gets better in Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence, but all the skill of observation and presentation to the reader is already well developed in this great book.
I looked for The Custom of the County at a bookshop tonight. They didn’t have it. If they did, I have no doubt I would have put of writing this review in order to begin another great reading experience with Edith Wharton.
Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Since I read it, I’m sorry to say but helpless to change, it has become one of those books I use when unintentionally guaging how well I’ll get along with someone: Did you like The Age of Innocence? If the answer is “no” or, worse, “eh, it was okay,” I cease to foresee any future literary discussions between me and that person. In fact, our relations may end right there. I’m the same way with The Great Gatsby. And look out those of you who hate Henry James: I’m becoming just as unattractively judgemental against those who dislike the Master too. (Don’t worry you haters of Moby-Dick; some books we can disagree on, yet I completely understand where you’re coming from). The hard truth for me, though, is that as much as I loved The Age of Innocence and presumptuously use it as a foundation to my literary pride, I still fail to live up to my passion. I’ve neglected my relationship with Wharton. It took a slim novel, Ethan From (1911), to remind me of the treasure that Wharton’s work is.
If it is possible, I might have loved Ethan Frome even more than The Age of Innocence. Thankfully there is no need to make any decision of that kind. They are quite different and can be loved equally if basing that love on Wharton’s top-quality prose and perfect observations.
Ethan Frome begins with a framing device. The narrator has recently moved to Starkfield, Massachusetts, and has noticed a broken figure of a man sometimes going about his business in the streets. This is Ethan Frome, fifty-two years old. Bit by bit the narrator learns of his history — some disfiguring event happened to Ethan Frome one February twenty-four years earlier. How much credence to give the bits of knowledge surrounding this event is anyone’s guess:
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
One of my favorite bits of knowledge comes from Harmon Gow. Wharton makes it clear very early that, yes, this is a human drama, but the setting — this poor village in Massachusetts that suffers brutal winters – is very important to her text.
Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps. But one phrase stuck in my memory and served as the nucleus about which I grouped my subsequent inferences: “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters.”
Winter plays a large, sinister role in this novel, but the underlying truth is that Starkfield itself is the center of this frozen world where men and women get stuck in life, stumbling into relationships for warmth, failing to ever realize spring.
After the brief framing introduction, the narrative slips back those twenty-four years to a time when Ethan Frome was desperately in love with the young Mattie. He doesn’t know how she feels about him.
Watching Mattie whirl down the floor from hand to hand he wondered how he could ever have thought that his dull talk interested her. To him, who was never gay but in her presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference. The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset.
The central problem is that Ethan has already wed Zeena, and Mattie is Zeena’s cousin, come to stay with them to assist Zeena in the housework. So we witness as Ethan suffers silently, unable to embrace his passion but also unwilling to cut it off. He is truly conflicted, and his internal struggle affects his observations of everything. Here is paragraph where Ethan attempts to discern whether Mattie has any esteem for him:
These alterations of mood were the despair and joy of Ethan Frome. The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches. The fact that he had no right to show his feelings, and thus provoke the expression of hers, made him attach a fantastic importance to every change in her look and tone. Now he thought she understood him, and feared; now he was sure she did not, and despaired.
Zeena, for her part, is always sickly — at least, that is her claim. More likely she is a depressed hypochondriac, seeking any way to gain her husband’s attentions, which he no longer wishes to give.
Then she too fell silent. Perhaps it was the inevitable effect of life on the farm, or perhaps, as she sometimes said, it was because Ethan “never listened.” The charge was not wholly unfounded. When she spoke it was only to complain, and to complain of things not in his power to remedy; and to check a tendency to impatient retort he had first formed the habit of not answering her, and finally of thinking of other things while she talked. Of late, however, since he had had reasons of observing her more closely, her silence had begun to trouble him.
We can relate Harmon Gow’s comment — “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters” — to Ethan and Zeena’s marriage. Ethan first met Zeena because she came to assist him in caring for his dying mother. His mother ended up dying in winter, and Ethan simply couldn’t stand the thought of being alone. He admits that had his mother died in the spring, he would not have wed Zeena. But that wedding is now a curse, keeping him from the young Mattie. Now Ethan is forced to enjoy Mattie’s company only on the sly. Toward the middle of the book, the prospect arises that he might have an entire evening alone with Mattie; Zeena has told him that she must travel to visit a doctor:
She continued to gaze at him through the twilight with a mien of wan authority, as of one consciously singled out for a great fate. “I’ve got complications,” she said.
Ethan knew the word for one of exceptional import. Almost everybody in the neighborhood had “troubles,” frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had “complications.” To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death-warrant. People struggled for years with “troubles,” but they almost always succumbed to “complications.”
Ethan’s heart was jerking to and fro between two extremities of feeling, but for the moment compassion prevailed. His wife looked so hard and lonely, sitting there in the darkness with such thoughts.
I see I’m drifting into plot summary. Wharton’s plotting is fascinating, though, and the story advances quickly. The reader is almost helpless to fight against it, drifting along on the wonderful prose as it takes us into the complicated consciences of the characters. Incidentally, there is more joy in any one of Wharton’s sentences than in most books in their entirety.
I would like to point out again, though, that despite the human drama that pushes the plot forward, this story is not simply about these poor people. This is Wharton’s edict on these small New England villages. Just as Ethan is locked in his marriage, he cannot escape this region, he cannot become something different somewhere else. It is almost impossible to realize his dreams.
Which brings me to my final point. Ethan Frome skirts a Romantic ending and punches the reader in the gut. In her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, Elizabeth Ammons talks about the book’s initial critical reception and quotes some of the critics. The New York Timeswrote, “Mrs. Wharton has, in fact, chosen to build of small, crude things and a rude and violent event a structure whose purpose is the infinite refinement of torture. All that is human and pitiful and tender in the tale — and there is much — is designed and contrived to sharpen the keen edge of that torture.” I thought I could see the ending clearly. I thought the clues throughout the book were leading me to that Romantic ending suitable of a poet. I was wrong and so much more disturbed by the perfect ending than any Romantic ending could have offered. There’s a cynicism that reveals an ugly undercurrent and that brings on an eternal winter.
It’s sad that we regard many classic novels as stuffy things of the past. There are several I’m still afraid of reading (Portrait of a Lady comes to mind) for fear of getting lost in a month-long haze of reading. I’m sure some of the fault lies in the way these novels are presented in schools. It wasn’t until late in my education that I came to realize that classic novels were classic for a reason: usually they are very very good and people like to read them because they are more than just an intellectual exercise and more than just a formulaic plot.
I now challenge anyone to read Edith Whaton’s The Age of Innocence (1920; Pulitzer (the first to be awarded to a woman)) and call it stuffy. Sure, the cover might look very formal and the society it describes is certainly stuffy, but Wharton’s prose is full of comedy and insight on par with or perhaps better than Jane Austen’s best. If that scares some of you away because you find Austen’s stories too happy, don’t worry about that here.
Let me begin by presenting a sample of Wharton’s writing that made me laugh out loud. Here Wharton is describing the morbidly obese matriarch, Mrs. Manson Mingott:
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the center of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.
That is not stuffy prose. And I’m not going to work hard to temper my desire to quote liberally from the book. With that introduction to Wharton’s skill, I now feel secure in describing the setup of the story, hoping that it won’t sound stuffy now.
It’s New York in the 1870s. Young Newland Archer of the upper-class has passed through the initial stages of manhood lock-step with what society expected. He is now grown and has a job at a prestigious law firm that handles the affairs of the upper-class. He’s had his conventionally wild post-adolescence, carrying on an affair with a married woman, etc., but as expected he has now found the value of settling down in matrimony.
There was no better match in New York than May Welland, look at the question from whatever point you chose. Of course such a marriage was only what Newland was entitled to; but young men are so foolish and incalculable—and some women so ensnaring and unscrupulous—that it was nothing short of a miracle to see one’s only son safe past the Siren Isle and in the haven of a blameless domesticity.
Strangely, even that feeling of relief when one’s son passes the Siren Isle is conventional. Despite the fact that Newland’s life is hardly unconventional, he has always seen himself as above New York’s social mores and considers himself quite cosmopolitan. He didn’t have an affair with a married woman in his youth because that’s when his society condones that sort of behavior; he did it because he wanted to. He is not now settling down to marriage because it is expected; he’s truly fallen in love with May Welland, and together they will rise above society.
May is purely conventional, however. But Newland looks forward to liberating her, though recently he’s had fears about how easily that might be accomplished:
It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young woman’s eyes, and bid her look forth on the world. But how many generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family tomb? He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of theKentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?
As marriage approaches, Newland is less secure about his future with May:
He reviewed his friends’ marriage—the supposedly happy ones—and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation to May Welland. He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.
To complicate matters further, Newland’s heart is drifting away from May. In the first chapter we meet the Countess Olenska, May’s older but not old cousin who married a count and has lived abroad for years. Returning to New York in a scandal, the Countess has just left her husband in Europe (“And now it’s too late; her life is finished”) and is even seeking a divorce. In another scandal, the Wellands have allowed the Countess to accompany them to the opera. Newland is proud of his almost-fiancée for avoiding false prudery and receiving her cousin, but to bring her to the opera is shocking even to him. But that doesn’t stop him from meeting the Countess.
Recognizing an innate attraction to the Countess, Newland convinces his family and May’s family to announce the engagement sooner than planned. He then attempts to get them to flout convention and advance the date of the marriage, though this frustrates him because it is expected that the future groom will desire such things. May asks Newland if he’s afraid he’ll fall out of love with her if they don’t move the date. And then in a form of magnanimity appropriate to one of her well-bred station, but shockingly genuine (May is a fantastically elusive character, allowing Wharton to criticize the society while recognizing its strength), May asks whether it is because Newland is in love with someone else but is unable to marry that other person.
Newland denies everything, which is all the easier when Newland sees that May thinks the woman he loves is his old fling and not the Countess, neither of whom he could marry since they were not divorced. Surprisingly, Mrs. Manson Mingott says the marriage date should be sooner, not later. Thus begins a torturous marriage where Newland has an affair in extreme slow motion, seeing the Countess only occasionally and her basically unwilling. But though he rarely sees her, his mind is absent while he is with May. The marriage deteriorates quickly as Newland blames May for not being as interesting as the Countess. There was “no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free . . . .” The ideas of his “untrammeled bachelorhood” no longer interest him.
This is a great story about a society afraid to approach the brink of change except by paying it lip service only to create the illusion of an enlightened mind. Fascinatingly, and I didn’t expect this, Wharton also shows the intricacies of that society’s power. Not even Newland understands how it works, even when it is working to make him fall in line. And underneath these giant themes are the lives of three individuals—the heart of the story. We feel for Newland, though we may not like him. We are attracted to and respect the Countess who both flouts and respects the social construct of New York. And while we sympathize with May, at first because she looks pathetic, we increasingly come to respect her as we see that she is far from naïve and powerless even though—and perhaps all the more so because—she has to do her maneuvering beneath the surface and within the social constructs she considers inviolate.
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