Edith Wharton

New Critical Essays

Alfred Bendixen, Annette Zilversmit, Alfred Bendixen, Annette Zilversmit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317195214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1992, this volume of essays celebrates the revival of Edith Wharton's critical reputation. It offers a variety of approaches to the work of Wharton and examines largely neglected texts. It differs from many other collections of Wharton criticism in its insistence that the entire body of Wharton's work deserves attention.

This book will be of interest in those studying nineteenth century and American literature.

“All Souls’”: Wharton’s Last Haunted House and Future Directions for Criticism

Annette Zilversmit

Long Island University
Brooklyn, New York

“All Souls’” was Wharton’s last completed work, her last fictive portrait of the suffering, defeated women she created. On first encounter Sara Clayburn seems unlike Wharton’s other dispossessed, mutilated, despairing, or exiled heroines. She has attained and accepted the emblems of status and success in her society: wealth, position, marriage, a large country house with the long Colonial pedigree of her husband’s family and a maternal legacy of her mother-in-law’s servants, a house without even the encumbrance of husband or children. Unlike the other conflicted, indecisive, or dependent heroines, Mrs. Clayburn is described by her narrating cousin as “calm matter-of-fact,” “quick and imperious,” “a muscular resolute woman.”¹ She even prefers to live by herself in the country, knows how to load a gun, and, when necessary, swill down brandy. She seems the autonomous woman at last in Wharton. Yet when she twists her ankle and finds her servants inexplicably gone, the electricity and telephone mysteriously disconnected (although a snowstorm is piling up outside her windows), her hobbled journey through the suddenly “cold, orderly—and empty house” (262) reverberates with almost existential desolation. Any illusions of self-sufficiency and real contentment have crashed. When we acknowledge that it has been All Souls’ Eve and her servants perhaps beckoned by a mysterious woman to a witches’ coven in the nearby woods, this last fiction of Wharton becomes more than a tale of supernatural terror and revenge. It becomes a psychological study of a woman’s deep-felt loneliness and long-denied desires.

What is further intriguing about this last narrative is that Wharton submitted this story to her publisher to be the one new entry in a collection of her previously printed ghost stories, but she died before this volume, Ghosts, appeared, thus before the publication of the story. Leon Edel reads the tale as prefiguring Wharton’s demise, almost a death wish, with Wharton’s weakened heart displaced to Clayburn’s wounded foot, the figuration of death to the sense of estrangement.² More telling is that if a death wish inheres within the text, it is because of the author’s dim awareness that the tale contains subversive disclosure. Like “The Beatrice Palmato Fragment,” which Wharton never published but did not destroy, this posthumously printed tale contains illicit revelation.

The other extratextual significance lies in the setting and place of the main action, a large house in New England. For this almost last incarnation of her heroines, Wharton chose not Europe where she had been living for the last twenty-five years of her life, nor her native New York where she dwelt imaginatively in most of her fiction, but the area in which she resided only ten years of her life (1901–1911), the countryside of New England. And although displaced to the hills of Connecticut, the magisterial house on a height overlooking water, here the Connecticut River, is the barely disguised Mount built on a hilltop looking down on Laurel Lake. Unlike the other houses Wharton owned—the Pavilion Colombe outside Paris, which had been built for two eighteenth-century courtesans, or her Riviera estate, Ste. Claire at Hyeres, a former convent—the Mount was the one and only home Wharton designed herself and that no former woman had lived in. No longer needing Italian villas and English mansions for models as she did for her actual home, Wharton gives her fictional mansion the equally noble lineage of “good Colonial stock” dating back to 1780 (252–53). What further echoes Wharton’s years in Lenox is that the heroine takes her walks through Shaker’s Wood. Echoing usually with Hawthornian Puritans, these Massachusetts Hills, as Wharton must have known, were also Shaker territory where the celibate religious community first established itself. (Lee, the town that adjoins Lenox, is named for its woman leader, Ann Lee.) Furthermore, the house Sara Clayburn presides over is called Whitegates. Unlike most houses of the region whose gates are usually black, the Mount had white gates guarding the roadway and larger white ones closing the courtyard of the house itself. White, which Wharton consciously thought classical and serene but which reverberates also with Melvillian abyss, so dominates and identifies the similarly painted Mount that the people who bought it from Wharton named it White Lodge, a fact Wharton also knew although, except in this imagined replica, she never revisited the site. “All Souls’” may contain her reason—her many reasons—that after she sold this New England estate, except for two brief forays, she never actually returned to America.

If Wharlon was returning imaginatively to the New England countryside for her final landscape of human isolation and deferred passion, she was also revisiting and revisioning her quintessential New England work, Ethan Frome. If Frome lives, as the bracketing narrator says, “in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access” and if only a “vision,” an interior narrative, can dramatize the core of this repressed hero,³ then Wharton’s last heroine becomes his female soul-mate, the repressed and controlled woman. In writing her earlier narrative, as Wharton revealed in her memoirs, she strived to recover in this New England countryside the shades of Hawthorne and named her hero for the quintessential Hawthornian alienated man, the marble-hearted Ethan Brand. Hawthorne had made his Ethan a lime-burner by profession, and now in her final fable of human solitude, Wharton calls her heroine the echoing Clayburn (giving her also a resolute Hebraic first name, Sara). Such doubling suggests that, as with her earlier male counterparts, beneath seemingly contained presence lay smoldering passions.

But even more threads tie these two works, seemingly so disparate in gender, class, and location in Wharton’s career. As Elizabeth Ammons posits, the earlier New England tale may also be about witches, about the fear that women may turn out to be witches as Wharton describes Mattie in the final tragic tableau “with dark eyes [that] had the bright witch-like stare that disease of the spine sometimes gives” (188). Ethan Frome may be, as Ammons argues, the nightmare of its bracketing narrator, the anxious, wealthy man who fears that women may become self-involved, stop serving, and become demanding. Such unconscious dreads, Ammons presses, reflect “maternal rejection” first, and, more subliminally, all “female betrayal,” the rebellion of subordinate givers.⁴

But Ethan Frome told from...