Edith Wharton

 

Edith Wharton

 

(c) Copyright (2021) by Kathleen Spaltro.

                                    All Rights Reserved.     

Many events have shown how difficult transatlantic communication can become and how deep a divide can exist between American and European values, attitudes, heritages, and experiences.  Henry James explored this territory in many novels and stories—such as The American, The Europeans, “Daisy Miller,” and The Portrait of a Lady.  His friend Edith Wharton likewise returned often to this topic, as the several volumes devoted to Wharton in the Library of America testify.  Like James, Wharton seemed especially fascinated by Americans who have become Europeanized.

Two such Europeanized Americans appear in Wharton’s  novel The Age of Innocence (1920) and her novella Madame de Treymes (1906).  Both women have married European men whose flagrant adultery has broken the marriages.   Disillusioned by their European lives and now attracted to American lovers, both women seek safety and security in American values and relationships, which they idealize.  Each considers the choice of divorce, which both European society and American society discourage.

Fanny’s and Ellen’s predicaments cause their American lovers to experience to the depths the powerful differences and similarities between European and American points of view.  Ellen’s lover Newland Archer, in advocating for her not to return to her Polish husband, also realizes the entrenched resistance of American society to the dissolution of Ellen’s wretched marriage and its deep disapproval of his own adulterous feelings for her. 

In portraying Archer’s passion for Ellen and Durham’s for Fanny,  as well as the eventual fate of both these women, Wharton outlined both differing and similar societal attitudes towards sexual irregularities, marriage as a passionate relationship between lovers, marriage as the bedrock of family life, and women as sexual beings, wives, and mothers.  

The Age of Innocence in particular dwells on the tension between the desire for a passionate life (and its attendant disgrace) and the pull towards the assumption of one’s duty to parents, spouses, and children (and its attendant denial of one’s deepest self).  It presents in a remarkably complex way both the dullness of duty and its moral superiority, both the fascination and depth of passion and its selfishness.  

Sarah Orne Jewett

 

Sarah Orne Jewett

 

(c) Copyright (2021) by Kathleen Spaltro.

All Rights Reserved.

 

A summer visitor to a seaside country town in New England, although she essentially remains an outsider, slowly becomes absorbed into the web of smalltown coastal life.  Her narration loosely strings together sketches of people and places, their unity provided by her own presence and the common locale.  This serves as the framework of the most memorable novels and stories reprinted in the Library of America Sarah Orne Jewett volume:  Deephaven, The Country of the Pointed Firs, and “Dunnet Landing Stories.”

The two novels and the stories all possess the charm of a sepia photograph come suddenly to life.  If the family legend retold by your elders entertains you and an episodic, plotless structure doesn’t bother you, Jewett will give you as much pleasure as she has given me.  As Helen, the narrator of Deephaven, comments, “It is wonderful, the romance and tragedy and adventure which one may find in a quiet old-fashioned country town, though to heartily enjoy the every-day life one must care to study life and character, and must find pleasure in thought and observation of simple things, and have an instinctive, delicious interest in what to other eyes is unflavored dulness.”

Read the best first—The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896); then enjoy its slighter but similar predecessor Deephaven (1877); lastly, savor your reunion with Country of the Pointed Firs characters in “Dunnet Landing Stories” (late 1890s).   Helen and Kate, the young ladies who visit Deephaven, prefigure the unnamed narrator of the Dunnet Landing novel and stories.  While Helen and Kate befriend Mrs. Kew, who lives with her husband in the Deephaven lighthouse, the older writer who visits Dunnet Landing befriends her landlady, Mrs. Todd,  the town herbalist who works closely with its country doctor. 

At least as interesting as the portrayals of the local characters are the depictions of Mrs. Todd’s herbs and the medicinal use she makes of them in doctoring the townsfolk.  She tells stories, too, of dead but not forgotten friends, like “poor Joanna,” jilted a month before her wedding day and impelled by melancholy to seclude herself on thirty-acre Shell-heap Island until she died.  Mrs. Todd also tells her lodger about “The Queen’s Twin,” a local woman born in the  same hour as Queen Victoria and about “The Foreigner,” a Frenchwoman married to a local captain and marooned by his death in the misery of local hostility and incomprehension—a pathetic and deeply moving tale.