Biography

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, into the wealthy “aristocracy” of the old New York society which would become the focus of much of her fiction. Her mother and father, George F. and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, both traced their family lines back three hundred years; their ancestors were mentioned in Washington Irving’s history of the Hudson River.

Wharton spent most of her childhood in Europe, where her family fled to avoid post-Civil War inflation. Returning to the United States in 1872, the Whartons followed the pattern common among their social set, wintering in New York City and summering in Newport, Rhode Island. As was the practice for a girl of her social status, she was educated primarily by governesses and tutors, made her debut to society at eighteen, and then traveled abroad.

In 1882, Wharton’s father died, and she lived in New York City with her mother. During this period, she met Walter Berry, a wealthy lawyer, and began one of the most important relationships of her life—it was to last more than thirty years. Berry acted as Wharton’s unofficial editor and literary adviser, beginning with her first book, The Decoration of Houses (1897), a volume on interior decoration inspired by her reaction against the ornate fashions then popular in the United States. Their relationship continued throughout Wharton’s career until Berry’s death in 1927. Although controversy exists as to both the quality and extent of Berry’s effect on her work, it remains clear that his influence was strong.

In 1885, Wharton married Edward R. “Teddy” Wharton, a member of socially well-connected families from Boston and Philadelphia. Although Teddy loved to travel as much as his wife did, the two had little else in common; he shared none of her love of the arts or the life of the mind. They spent the early years of their marriage traveling abroad, but in the early 1890’s Wharton suffered from a depressive illness which lasted until 1902, at which time Teddy began to show signs of the mental disorder that would plague him for the rest of his life.

Because of Teddy’s unstable condition and the financial difficulties which ensued, the couple curtailed their travels and settled into a pattern of wintering in Paris or New York and summering at The Mount, a home in Lenox, Massachusetts, designed by Wharton. There she found the solitude necessary to pursue her writing. Teddy’s mental condition was diagnosed as incurable in 1910, and in 1913 Wharton divorced him.

Wharton began to pursue a writing career seriously, partly as a cure for the depressive illness she suffered. She first gained recognition for short stories such as “The Greater Inclination” (1899), “Crucial Instances” (1902), and “The Descent of Man” (1904). Also during this period she followed her popular first book with Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904). She experimented with novellas early in her career, producing The Touchstone (1900) and Sanctuary (1903). Her greatest success with that form would come later with the publication of Ethan Frome (1911). Her first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), a historical romance set in eighteenth century Italy, received mixed reviews, but her second novel, The House of Mirth (1905), was a critical and commercial success. It marked the beginning of her career as a prominent literary figure.

The publication of The House of Mirth began a very productive period in Wharton’s career, during which she wrote the novellas Madame de Treymes (1907) and Ethan Frome and the novels The Reef (1912) and The Custom of the Country (1913). During this period, she developed a long-standing friendship with American author Henry James, with whom she has often been compared. James’s influence on Wharton is especially evident in The Reef but is present throughout her work.

Wharton was extremely active during World War I, living in Paris and performing extensive volunteer work for the Red Cross, serving as the head of the American Committee of the Acueil Franco-Americain, which by 1918 was caring for five thousand refugees settled in Paris. Wharton also founded the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee to send 650 orphans and children displaced by the war to families who lived away from the battle zones. She cared for six children in her own apartment, finding permanent homes for them after the war. Wharton was decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1917 for these activities. Her war experiences produced Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort (1915), which describes her inspection tour of hospitals in the battle zone, and a novel, A Son at the Front (1923).

Following the war she continued to reside permanently in France, making only one trip to the United States, in 1923, to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale University. In 1920, she moved from Paris to the eighteenth century Pavillon Calombe outside Paris; she also restored an ancient monastery on the French Riviera, in which she spent her ensuing summers. During this period she produced The Age of Innocence (1920), generally considered her best work, for which she received a Pulitzer Prize in 1921. She also became the first woman gold medalist of the American Society of Arts and Letters in 1924.

Her work after The Age of Innocence did not achieve the critical or popular success of her earlier books, although she remained prolific. Two novels, The Glimpses of the Moon (1922) and The Mother’s Recompense (1925), were not up to her usual standards and did not enhance her reputation, but with Old New York (1924), a collection of novellas, she regained her form.

She published five more novels before her death in 1937, including Hudson River Bracketed (1929), her autobiography A Backward Glance (1934), and the promising but unfinished The Buccaneers (1938). Wharton died of a stroke at the age of seventy-five and was buried next to the ashes of Walter Berry in the Cimetière des Gonards at Versailles, France.

Analysis

Too often known only as “that society lady author,” a writer of irrelevant and obsolete books, Wharton cannot be dismissed so easily. Although primarily dealing with a narrow social range and short historical span—the upper echelons of New York society from the 1870’s to the 1920’s—she mines verities about the whole of human nature from these small, seemingly unrepresentative samples of humanity. Far from being anachronistic or irrelevant, Wharton’s novels go deeper than their surface manners and mores to reveal universal truths about individuals in relation to their society, and she explores themes relevant to any era.

Regarded as one of America’s finest realists, along with her friend and literary inspiration Henry James, Wharton emphasized verisimilitude, character development, and the psychological dimensions of experience, all of which placed her in this tradition, although with some significant variations.

Some of her fiction, such as Ethan Frome, owes a greater debt to romantics such as Nathaniel Hawthorne than to the realists, and most of her work deals with the upper rather than the middle classes more common to realist fiction; critic Blake Nevius remarks: “She was destined from the beginning to be a realist. As a child in Paris, she used to . . . make up stories about the only people who were real to her imagination—the grownups with whom she was surrounded. . . . Mother Goose and Hans Christian Andersen bored her.”

The United States premiere novelist of manners, Wharton employs intricately detailed descriptions of outward form, including manners, customs, fashion, and decor, to reveal the inner passions and ideals of her characters. Using manners to register internal events as well as external circumstances allows her to indicate deeper emotions indirectly. The constricting effect of an elaborate and confining set of behavioral guidelines on the human psyche and the human spirit’s survival within these narrow boundaries provides one of the overriding themes of her fiction.

This emphasis on the power of environment over the individual sets her apart from the writer to whom she is most often compared, Henry James.

Frequently mentioned in the same breath, the two indeed have many similarities. They traveled in the same social circles, wrote about similar kinds of people, held the same values, and dealt with many of the same themes, particularly innocence versus experience. James, however, placed more emphasis upon the individual within the society than on the society itself. Perhaps the strongest bond between these two writers lies in their mutual devotion to the art of fiction, their continual study of the novel’s form, and their interest in the technique and processes of art.

As a realist, Wharton describes the houses, fashion, and social rituals of “old New York” in minute detail, studying this small stratum of society as an anthropologist might study a South Sea island. The Age of Innocence, for example, abounds in anthropological terminology, as the protagonist, Newland Archer, reveals when reflecting that “there was a time when . . . everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance.” He describes his own wedding as “a rite that seemed to belong to the dawn of history.” Archer’s use of this anthropological jargon reveals Wharton’s almost scientific fascination with the social milieu.

Similarly, in The House of Mirth, structured as a series of scenes that reflect the social status of its heroine, Lily Bart, Wharton meticulously records even the finest lines between classes, noting that “the difference [between them] lay in a hundred shades of aspect and manner, from the pattern of the men’s waistcoats to the inflexion of the women’s voices.” Although no such subtlety of detail exists in the very different world of Ethan Frome, a nevertheless fixed and immovable social structure offers the novel’s protagonist no avenue of escape from his equally barren business and marriage.

In all these novels, the elaborate rituals that sustain a culture protect tradition and stabilize the society, but they also constrict the freedom of the individual within that society.

Often victims of society’s narrow definition of acceptable behavior, Wharton’s multifaceted, psychologically complex characters are also victimized by their own weaknesses. Lily Bart, one of Wharton’s most fully realized characters, suffers under the limitations placed on women in her circumstances, but she falls equally victim to her own selfishness and snobbery.

Similarly, Newland Archer, imprisoned within the narrow behavioral confines of old New York, is also imprisoned by prejudices and lassitude. The eponymous character of Ethan Frome, as a result of his own and society’s limitations, also fails to escape a suffocating town, business, and marriage in order to seek intellectual and emotional fulfillment.

Although not involved in the feminist movement of her day, Wharton’s preoccupation with the limiting effects of societal restrictions on the human soul necessarily invokes feminist issues, for women especially suffered under this society’s narrow boundaries. Lily Bart, for example, finds her options severely limited because of her gender; even taking tea alone with a man in his apartment results in social condemnation.

Newland Archer often muses on the peculiar demands and expectations placed on women. When he declares, “Women ought to be free—as free as we are,” Wharton notes that he is “making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.” May Well and Archer is yet another victim—in this case, of her husband’s narrow definition of her character—and Ellen Olenska is the victim of society’s preconceptions of a woman’s behavior. The principal theme of Wharton’s fiction involves the individual in society: how personal relationships are distorted by societal conventions, the clash between changing characters and fixed society, and the conflict between nature and culture.

Wharton therefore stands a bridge between an older, more established nineteenth century world and the world of the twentieth century, which placed increasing emphasis on individual experience.

The House of Mirth, Wharton’s second full-length novel, not only guaranteed her literary reputation but also established the setting and themes she would explore throughout her career. Set in the early twentieth century New York society with which she was so intimately familiar, the novel offers an angrier and more bitter condemnation of this social milieu than Wharton’s later work, which mellowed with the passage of time. Both a meticulously thorough examination of a complex social structure and a brilliant character study, it offers a compelling exploration of the effects of social conformity upon the individual.

As the novel opens, its heroine, twenty-nine-year-old Lily Bart, has achieved the height of her powers: Beautiful, intelligent, charming, and sought after, she has nevertheless reached a turning point, knowing too well that society has no place for an unmarried woman past her prime. Her parents having left her no legacy but an appreciation for the finer things in life, Lily occupies a precarious social position under the protection of her dreary, socially prominent Aunt Peniston, and she must rely on the favors of the wealthy ladies and gentlemen who find her company amusing.

Lily’s craving for the secure foothold that only marriage can provide cannot entirely overcome her distaste for the hypocrisy and insensitivity of her class. Hardly lacking for opportunities to marry well, Lily nevertheless manages to sabotage her best chances, as she does in bungling her courtship with Percy Gryce, an eminently eligible but overwhelmingly boring pillar of the community.

Lily’s unique place in New York society—simultaneously insider and outsider—makes her one of Wharton’s most fascinating creations and offers the reader a privileged perspective on this world. A product of her society, “at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine . . . [who] must have cost a great deal to make,” Lily is also “so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”

Lily’s need to be surrounded by the beautiful things that only immense sums of money can buy and her distaste for the common and ugly enslave her to those she might otherwise find at best ridiculous and at worst repellent; they cause her to reject the only person for whom she feels genuine emotion, Lawrence Selden, a cultivated lawyer of modest means. As Lily can neither totally accept her society’s values nor be hypocritical enough to survive without doing so, she finally must perish.

Lily’s fall from social grace is incremental rather than precipitous, occurring gradually as she makes small compromises in order to survive. The novel opens with one of many small lapses in judgment, as she accepts Lawrence Selden’s impromptu invitation to take tea alone at his apartment. An illadvised financial arrangement with Gus Trenor, the husband of her friend and social arbiter, Judy Trenor, leaves Lily further compromised, as does her well-intentioned effort to keep socially powerful Bertha Dorset’s husband occupied while Bertha conducts an affair. Ostracized by the aristocracy and the nouveau riche, she then fails to succeed as a milliner’s apprentice and finally finds herself alone and nearly penniless.

Paradoxically, as Lily descends through these various layers of society, her strength of character grows, as evidenced by her determination to use the entirety of her meager inheritance to repay her debt to Gus Trenor and by her unwillingness to accept a handout from rich industrialist Simon Rosedale. Yet her fragile new sense of self cannot survive unsupported. She has “the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spindrift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them,” before succumbing to an overdose of sleeping pills.

Far from creating a clear-cut good versus evil or spirit versus materialism dialectic, Wharton establishes a more subtle and interesting conflict. Many of the novel’s characters embody such antithetical attributes, as, for example, the social worker Gerty Farish, who reveals more “good” attributes than Lily, including honesty, generosity, and devotion to good works. Nevertheless, she is not a particularly attractive or sympathetic figure, lacking Lily’s charm, perceptions, and sensitivity to beauty.

Simon Rosedale, on the other hand, a ruthless businessman and ambitious social climber, is one of the rare characters who shows genuine sympathy for Lily when she descends to the bottom of the social heap. Lawrence Selden, although largely sympathetic, exhibits a weakness of character that proves fatal for Lily; he is unwilling to relinquish his safe niche in the social order for her sake until too late. Like Lily, he senses that life holds more than exists in his narrow social milieu, but also like Lily he is loathe to give up his social acceptance to explore the possibilities. Lily, while too self-centered and elitist to be a conventional heroine, still possesses many qualities that attract the reader.

More naturalistic than her other novels, The House of Mirth contains too many coincidental plot twists to make Lily’s fall entirely believable. Wharton’s portrayal of the lower classes, as illustrated by her portrait of Nettie Struthers, the poor shop girl, possesses none of the subtlety or believability of her presentation of the upper classes; it often descends to melodrama. Despite these minor flaws, however, The House of Mirth portrays a small stratum of society and one character within that society to perfection, brilliantly illustrating the power of social conformity over individuality.

Ethan Frome, neither a commercial nor a critical success when first published, actually offended many of Wharton’s contemporaries by its harsh portrayal of New England life and its characters’ failure to triumph over adversity. Nevertheless, its popularity gradually increased until, by 1920, it had become the best-known and most widely read of Wharton’s works. Wharton herself believed that too much attention was paid to Ethan Frome at the expense of her other novels. Indeed, to judge her career solely by this single novella would prove misleading, because it is very unlike her other major works in setting, tone, and characterization. Like much of her other work, however, it deals with the relationship between an individual and that individual’s society.

Structured as a frame tale, the story unfolds from the point of view of Lockwood, a young engineer on assignment in the isolated New England village of Starkfield. His curiosity about one of the town’s characters, the physically deformed but striking Ethan Frome, drives him to construct a “vision” of Ethan’s history, assembled from information gathered in conversation with various townspeople and from his own observations of the fifty-two-year-old farmer.

The significance of this structure cannot be overestimated; Wharton even adds an uncharacteristic introduction to explain her decision to employ this literary device, which achieves perspective by creating an educated, observant narrator to intercede between the simple characters and the more sophisticated reader. Wharton also adds poignancy by setting the novella twenty-four years after the main action occurs.

Lockwood relates the simple but compelling story of twenty-eight-year-old Ethan Frome, a farmer and mill owner left nearly destitute after the death of his parents, both of who msuffered mental disorders. After enduring lonely years of silence with his mother, who was too busy listening for imagined “voices” to converse with him, Frome marries Zenobia Pierce, seven years his senior, who had nursed Mrs. Frome in her dying days. The sound of Zeena’s voice in his house is music to Ethan’s starved ears, and by marrying her he hopes to escape further loneliness.

Soon after their marriage, however, Zeena becomes obsessed with her various aches and pains, and she concerns herself solely with doctors, illnesses, and cures, falling as silent as his mother.

At her doctor’s advice, Zeena takes in her homeless young cousin, Mattie Silver, to help with the housework. Although a hapless housekeeper, Mattie brings a vitality to the Frome house that has been absent for years, and she and Ethan fall in love. Trapped by circumstances, as well as by Ethan’s strong sense of responsibility toward Zeena, the two foresee no future together.

On the evening that Zeena sends Mattie away for good, Ethan and Mattie decide to aim their sled straight for a giant elm tree so that they might find mutual solace in death. Both, however, survive the plunge, which paralyzes Mattie and disfigures Ethan. Zeena takes responsibility for caring for Mattie and Ethan, and the three live on in the Frome house, as Mattie becomes as querulous and unpleasant as Zeena and Ethan attempts to scratch out a living from his failing farm and mill.

In Ethan, “the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man,” Wharton fashions a character of heroic proportions. He is a country man who would have preferred the intellectual stimulation of the city, a sociable man doomed to silent suffering, a man whose misshapen body mirrors his thwarted intellectual and emotional life. Like Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, he is “more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty” but finds little of it in his own life. Like Lily, he feels trapped by society’s demands on him: “The inexorable facts closed in on him like prison-wardens handcuffing a convict. There was no way out—none. He was a prisoner for life.”

As always in Wharton’s work, setting figures prominently, but in Ethan Frome the stark landscape of New England, rather than the elegant brownstones of New York City, provides the background.

Wharton draws a close parallel between the action and the emotions of the characters and the bleak landscape; the two are inextricably intertwined.

Ethan “seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.” Even Frome’s house, lacking the “L” wing common to New England farm structures, reflects the emotionally stunted life existing inside, and the withering orchard of starving apple trees and crazily slanting gravestones in the family plot also mirror Frome’s blighted life.

Wharton uses irony, as well as landscape and imagery, to great effect in this work, often juxtaposing scenes for ironic effect. When Zeena greets Ethan at the kitchen door in the evening, “The light . . . drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins.” Later, however, when Mattie stands “just as Zeena had stood, a lifted lamp in her hand, against the black background of the kitchen. . . . [I]t drew out with the same distinctness her slim young throat and the brown wrist no bigger than a child’s.” Ethan Frome’s ultimate irony lies in the suicide pact which ends not in the mutual release of death but in endless years of pain and suffering and in the transformation of the vibrant young Mattie into a mirror image of the whining Zenobia.

The Age of Innocence, often considered Wharton’s masterpiece, takes a nostalgic look at the New York society of her childhood, which had undergone enormous changes by 1920. In a mood tempered from that expressed in the 1905 House of Mirth, Wharton criticizes many aspects of this society, especially its hypocrisy and tendency to stifle creativity and genuine emotion. In this retrospective she also finds value in its stability and traditions. At the height of her powers in this novel, Wharton brilliantly uses plot, character, dialogue, point of view, and irony to express her themes, including the needs of the individual versus the claims of the society and the tenuous balance between the values of innocence and experience and between tradition and change.

The novel’s plot revolves around the choice the protagonist, Newland Archer, must make between two women—his fiancé, May Welland, a flower of New York society, and her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, recently separated from her abusive husband and settled in New York. The Welland family enlists Newland to talk the countess out of seeking a divorce in order to avoid scandal and pain to her family. Newland soon falls in love with Ellen and, reversing his position, asks her to divorce her husband to marry him. Ironically, Ellen refuses, persuaded too well by Newland’s arguments against divorce, and Newland marries May. Ellen eventually returns to Europe, May announces her pregnancy, and Newland’s fate is sealed. Twenty-five years later, after May’s death, Newland passes up an opportunity to see Ellen in Paris, realizing that his dreams have becomemore important to him than reality.

The society Wharton describes in The Age of Innocence values conformity over originality, superficial pleasantness over reality, and respectability over individual freedom. Newland understands that “they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs,” but he does not disapprove. Smugly selfsatisfied, he feels intellectually and culturally superior to his social set but nevertheless embraces most of its moral doctrines and values, never fully realizing the extent of his own conformity.

In fact, Newland’s attraction to May is indicative of his acceptance of the establishment’s values. Initially, “[n]othing about his betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the ‘unpleasant’ in which they had both been brought up.”

May’s innocence, which Newland initially finds appealing, becomes oppressive, however, and Newland feels trapped by this creature he helped to create.

Ironically, although May does represent the weaknesses of the old guard—innocence, hypocrisy, and stifling propriety—she also embodies its strength: stability and respect for tradition. Yet for twenty-five years, Newland fails to look beyond his own preconceptions of his wife to appreciate these qualities.

Ellen Olenska, on the other hand, embodies experience, intellect, freedom, and individuality. Separated from her husband, a stranger in her own country, and largely ignorant of the strict codes of the society she was born into, she symbolizes disintegration of tradition and lack of stability. At the same time, she offers honesty and genuine emotion to a culture sorely lacking these qualities.

Wharton invests the novel’s minor characters with symbolic weight as well. The van der Luydens, the social establishment’s judges of morals and taste, appear in terms of death and dying. Mrs. van der Luyden “struck Newland Archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death.”

At the other end of the social spectrum, the immensely wealthy Julius Beaufort represents the threat of the new materialism. Tolerated only because he married into aristocracy, his open philandering and questionable business dealings typify the crass vulgarities of those breaking down society’s barriers. Mrs. Manson Mingott, combining both the old and new, stands for the stability of class combined with the vigor and independence of the nouveau riche, and Newland’s two companions, the gossiping Sillerton Jackson and womanizing Lawrence Lefferts, symbolize the establishment’s most hypocritical aspects.

Wharton also employs irony and symbolism to great effect in The Age of Innocence, particularly to describe the romance of Ellen and Newland. Although their passion for each other is evident and genuine, Wharton never allows the romance to descend into the tragic or melodramatic. Each of the couple’s interludes is somehow ironically undercut: Newland tenderly kisses what he believes to be Ellen’s pink parasol, only to discover it is not hers at all; the couple boards a ferry for a romantic tête-a-tête, only to be surrounded by a gaggle of schoolteachers on holiday; and, finally achieving solitude, they cannot forget that they are alone together in May’s wedding carriage.

Rich in characterization, symbolism, and irony, the novel deals with several powerful themes, including the balance between innocence and experience, tradition and change, and individual and society. It also addresses the repression of women, the role of marriage and family, and the conflict between sexual passion and moral obligation. In The Age of Innocence, Wharton perceives the repression of the self in the old ways, and fragmentation of the self in the new. Wharton’s alter ego, Newland Archer, feels comfortable with neither the old nor the new order; he inhabits a lonely middle ground, searching for a workable compromise between individual freedom and the claims of society.

Summary

No other writer of her time knew the upper classes of the United States more intimately or detailed their lives more movingly or convincingly than did Wharton. Her attitude toward “old New York” was one of both anger and nostalgia—anger at its stifling hypocrisies and moral passivity and nostalgia for the stability and sense of tradition which were being assaulted by the rise of the new industrial classes at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tension between these two conflicting emotions provides the subject matter for most of Wharton’s work. Torn between scorn and admiration for the old ways and fear of the chaos she saw accompanying the new, her fiction stands at the threshold of the twentieth century, a harbinger of the changes to come in American life.

Bibliography

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