Representative American Story Tellers: XVI— Edith Wharton | ||
I. HER MATERIALS AND METHODS
Now the first thing that must strike a discriminating critic, whether he makes her acquaintance through the medium of "The Muse's Tragedy" or "The Letters" is that he has to do with an author of
Yet if Mrs. Wharton shows a predilection for artistic and academic society, she nevertheless has a far-reaching—I was tempted to say, an exaggerated—instinct of social values. In all the various settings of her stories, whether in the self-satisfied provincialism of a New England college town, or the full flood-tide of New York life to-day, or of Lombardy a century ago, she never for an instant allows you to lose sight of the fact that there exists a local social code more potent than any laws of Medes and Persians; a fine, stratified caste system, too attenuated for any but the native born to grasp in all its details, yet inflexible in matters of cause and effect. Her subtle sense of the far-reaching significance of some quite trivial, perhaps unconscious infringement of these unwritten rules of conduct, gives us the real key to a number of her strongest situations. Her understanding of human nature, her relentless pursuit of a motive down to its ultimate analysis, her deliberate stripping off of the very last veils of pretense and showing us the sordidness and cowardice of human souls in all their nudity, are unsurpassed by any other woman novelist now living. She has a trick not merely of describing even her secondary characters so clearly that you feel you can see them both inside and out, but she often flings out some single line of description which ever afterwards sticks to that particular character like a burr and is probably the first thing we think of each time that character reappears. For instance, in "Souls Belated," "Mrs. Tillotson, senior, dreaded ideas as much as a draught in her back"; in "A Coward," "Mrs. Carstyle was one of the women who make refinement vulgar"; in "The Mission of Jane," Mrs. Lethbury is described as a woman most of whose opinions "were heirlooms—she was proud of their age and saw no reason for discarding them while they were still serviceable"; and still again in "The Portrait," Vard, the political boss, is described to us as a man "who had gulped his knowledge standing, as he had snatched his food from lunch-counters; the wonder of it lay in his extraordinary power of assimilation." And such examples could be multiplied indefinitely.
But this is merely a superficial aspect of Mrs. Wharton's treatment of character and of life. And to some extent the surface sparkle of her style is at times a blemish; we find ourselves straying away from the central interest of the story in order to relish for a moment the sheer verbal cleverness of some casual epigram, such as "Genius is of small use to a
EDITH WHARTON
[Description: Greyscale photo of a well-dressed Wharton, in lace, beadwork, and fur, standing, reading a letter.]As for the first of these tragic keynotes, that of misunderstanding, it is only necessary to glance through a few of the separate stories chosen almost at random to see how the word recurs over and over, with or without variations, like a leitmotiv. Thus, in "In Trust," Halidon sums up the crucial point with the words, "I can't make her see that I'm differently situated"; in "The Last Asset," Garnett lays his finger on the difficulty, "Ah, you don't know your daughter!" In "The Portrait," Mrs. Mellish says: "I wish you'd explain," and Lillo answers: "Would there be any failures if one could explain them?" In "Souls Belated," Lydia asks piteously: "You do understand, don't you?" and the heroine of "The Muse's Tragedy" says pathetically, "I shall never be quite so lonely again now that some one knows." "That's the dreadful part of it," says Mrs. Westall, in "The Reckoning," "the not understanding." And even in "The Daunt Diana," where the idol of old Humphrey Meave's heart was not a woman but a statue, the same leitmotiv recurs in the concluding paragraph, "Now at last we understand each other."
The other tragic motive, that of the inexorable demands of social traditions, the unwritten law of noblesse oblige, we find forming the very warp and woof of all Mrs. Wharton's bigger and more serious efforts. In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart is tossed as helplessly as a cork in the whirls and eddies of the social stream—tossed and buffeted and finally dragged under with her eyes wide open to her own helplessness. In The Valley of Decision, Odo Valsecca and Fulvia Vivaldi sacrifice their happiness to the obligations of rank, a prince's duty to his people; and they do this not in the spirit of generous sacrifice, but rather because they recognise the impossibility of doing anything else. And so again in Madame de Treymes, even an American finds that all the vaunted freedom and independence of our republic avails nothing when confronted by the impalpable yet unyielding wall of French family tradition and prejudice.
So much for the general character of Mrs. Wharton's situations and problems. Before turning to take a more specific glance at some of the separate stories, it is well to get the following points clearly in mind regarding her technique of construction. Mrs. Wharton is one of those exceptional writers who do not greatly concern themselves with conventional rules of length and breadth. Economy of means is a principle which never binds her against her will. Her short stories frequently lengthen out into the structure and dimensions of a novelette; her novelettes might so easily have been expanded into full-length novels. She writes apparently to suit herself, in whatever way the narrative comes most naturally to her. A Maupassant with a different ideal of story structure, a more relentless self-discipline, would have used a vigorous pruning knife on almost any of her stories and gained, it might be, sharper effects, but at the sacrifice of much delightful cleverness and some rare and subtle half-tones. We must accept Mrs. Wharton as she is, recognising frankly that she is one of those writers who must do the thing their own way if they are to do it at all—but do not let us fall into the widespread error of assuming that because her stories are so remarkably good she necessarily has a flawless technique.
Representative American Story Tellers: XVI— Edith Wharton | ||