such depths of sad initiation': edith wharton and new … criticism.pdf... · "such...

"Such Depths of Sad Initiation": Edith Wharton and New EnglandAuthor(s): Alan Henry RoseSource: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Sep., 1977), pp. 423-439Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/364277Accessed: 12/05/2010 08:14

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"SUCH DEPTHS OF SAD INITIATION": EDITH WHARTON AND NEW ENGLAND

ALAN HENRY ROSE

I

THE apparent pointlessness of the destruction the protagonist suffers in Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome often has

disturbed readers. Lionel Trilling, for example, sees the work as "a factitious book, perhaps even a cruel book."'l Irving Howe describes it as "a severe depiction of gratuitous human suffering in a New England village."2 Marilyn Lyde finds "no element of justice in the catastrophe."3 The harshness of this novel sometimes has been accounted for as Wharton's response to the sentimentality she saw as typical of New England fiction, or as an especial case of the need to inflict "punishment," as Jo McManis suggests, upon her characters for the author's own transgressions.4

Yet it has not been understood that the dark extremes in Ethan Frome are shared to a great extent by Wharton's other New England fiction, notably Summer and several short stories, and that they stem from a quality in Wharton's vision of New England not present in her typically urban novels of manners. A place, in the words of her friend and frequent visitor to her rural Massachusetts home, Henry James, that could display an "ugliness... [which] was the so complete abolition of forms,"5 the New England of Wharton's fiction is characterized by an almost total absence of experiential com- plexity. In this cultural emptiness, Wharton's imagination was

1 "The Morality of Inertia," in Great Moral Dilemmas, editor R. M. Mac- Iver (New York, 1956), 37.

2 "Introduction: The Achievement of Edith Wharton," in Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays, Irving Howe, editor (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1962), 5.

3 Edith Wharton: Convention and Morality in the Work of a Novelist (Norman, Oklahoma, 1959), 130on.

4 "Edith Wharton's Hymns to Respectability," Southern Review, vII, 989 (1971).

5 The American Scene, Leon Edel, editor (Bloomington, Indiana, 1968), 25.

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4 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

free to range in a manner not duplicated in her cluttered urban world. The effects of such a release upon Wharton's writ- ings were far-reaching. It is not just, as Blake Nevius puts it, that in her New England works Wharton's imagination stepped beyond its "generally... mundane level," and was "roused to symbol-making activity."6 Rather in these barren settings Wharton seems to have felt the full extent of the negation, the sense of void which since St. John deCrevecoeur has been seen as fundamental to experience in America. In contexts sometimes more resembling our precultural frontier than the Northeast, the dark fate of her New England characters stems from their contact with Wharton's unexpected vision of the most destructive of forces underlying American society.

The forms of Wharton's reaction to void in New England is a function of the interaction of her perception of that quality with her most frequent narrative theme: the prerequisites for attaining maturity. Normally in Wharton's fiction characters are confronted by a thick cultural environment, forced into a selection of experience through which they may learn what Nevius calls "the nature and limits of individual responsibil- ity," arriving eventually at the mature knowledge of the moral "compromise [that] is the only path to such freedom as is possible" in the author's world.7 The absence of experiential possibilities in Wharton's New England seems to short-circuit this crucial process. Without the potential for selection, the characters are unable to arrive at a sound sense of self: they are blocked in the final stage of the initiatory "pattern of disloca- tion, emotional chaos, and moral unity" which Lyde finds basic to Wharton's fiction.8 The weakness, a "moral inertia, the not making of moral decisions,"9 Trilling sees as characteristic of Ethan Frome is a symptom of this phenomenon. Yet its effects are still more extensive. For the impossibility of resolution plunges the New England characters into a spiral

O Edith Wharton (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953), 129.

7 Edith Wharton, 10, 18. 8 Lyde, loo.

9 Trilling, 43.

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of emotional and psychological disintegration ending in a condition which serves as a gauge of the destructiveness of the void in Wharton's imagination. In the depths of their thwarted initiations, without will, the characters finally surrender to the dark alternative to healthy initiation, the incestuous relationship in which, as R. W. B. Lewis has made clear, Wharton "evinced a steadily developing interest."'l0

II Even the briefest of Wharton's references to New England

share the sense of fundamental barrenness. Some of the scat- tered images simply hint at the quality; in Madame de Treymes at the mention of "the Kittawittany House on Lake Pohunk," "a vision of earnest women in Shetland shawls, with spectacles and thin knobs of hair, eating blueberry-pie at un- wholesome hours in a shingled dining-room on a bare New England hilltop, rose pallidly between Durham and the verdant brightness of the Champs Elysees."l1 Undine Spraggs in The Custom of the Country "felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled [a summer at Skog Harbour, Maine].... The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was 'exclusive,' parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation."12 In The Age of Innocence "a remote island off the coast of Maine [is] called, appropriately enough, Mount Desert."'3 Some display a greater intensity, as in "Bewitched," where the New England "solitude" is "a worm in the brain,"'4 and "The Triumph of Night," in which a blast of wind "came off New Hampshire snowfields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence."'5 The New England character, too, may be defined by empti-

10 Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York, 1975), 525. n1 "Madame de Treymes," in Madame de Treymes and Others: Four Novel-

ettes (New York, 1970), 168-169. (Originally published, 1907.) 12 The Custom of the Country (New York, 1913), 56-57. 13 The Age of Innocence (New York, 1920), 207. '4 The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, R. W. B. Lewis, editor

(New York, 1968), II, 416. '5 Collected Short Stories, n, 325.

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ness. Adelaide Painter, a matron appearing in The Reef, pre- sents a "blank insensibility,... a simpler mental state . .. [originating in] the big blank area of ... [her] mind, so vacu- ous, ... so echoless for all its vacuity."16

An idea of the way in which New England constitutes a block to maturity in Wharton's fiction can be got from the case of Paulina Anson in "The Angel at the Grave." Brought to New England as a young girl to care for the house of Orestes Anson, a local celebrity, Paulina's emotional development is influenced by the "cold clean empty meetinghouse" ambience.1" Self-fulfillment for Paulina lies with a suitor from New York who behaves toward the New England shrine as though "sporting on a tomb" (I, 249). "His love,... an em- bodiment of the perpetual renewal which to some tender spirits seems a crueler process than decay" (I, 249), provides a

healthy, mature alternative to the prevailing life denial. But Paulina already has been touched by the place, transformed into an analog of its "cold spotless thinly-furnished interior [which] might have suggested the shuttered mind of a maiden- lady" (I, 247). She rejects him, and in spite of a questionably upbeat ending, the final comment points out the waste of Paulina's life: "'I gave up everything.... I sacrificed myself .. . and it... left me here alone"' (i, 257).

And in "The Young Gentlemen" there is an echo of the symbolic intensity with which Wharton expresses the theme in her longer fiction. This story is set in the small New En- gland town of Harpledon, a place which as far as contemporary reality is concerned, is virtually defined by negatives: "How intolerantly proud we all were of inhabiting it! How we re- sisted modern improvements, ridiculed fashionable 'summer resorts,' fought trolley lines, overhead wires and telephones."18 Concealed within one of the oldest houses of this "relic of antiquity" (II, 385), are the descendants of one of the first families, two figures which objectify the results of such ex-

16 The Reef (New York, 1912), 212.

17 Collected Short Stories, i, 247. 18 Collected Short Stories, II, 385.

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periential exclusion. They are the very image of stunted maturity; "little creatures," "children... [which] were not children," "two tiny withered men, with frowning foreheads under their baby curls, and heavy-shouldered middle-aged bodies" (II, 397). In the distortions of their "dreadful little faces" and "small falsetto scream" (II, 397) are suggested the levels of darkness implicit in Wharton's vision of New England.

III Ethan Frome offers the first full expression of the effects of

New England in Wharton's fiction. All the components of the theme are present: the void characteristic of the setting, the helplessness of the protagonist as he reaches for a self-fulfillment that environment has made him too weak to attain, the widening gap between a fleeting vision of mature realization and the stunting reality, and the shadow of incest which serves as a gauge of the incapacity of moral growth. Yet conceived through remoteness, in France as an exercise in the French language, in this tale Wharton displayed a detachment from her vernacular rural content by virtue of the use of a "sophis- ticated"'9 first-person urban narrator. Because of the narrator's propensity to romanticize his protagonist, "thinking how gal- lantly his lean brown head, with its shock of light hair, must have sat on his strong shoulders before they were bent out of shape" (6), to aggrandize him into "the bronze image of a hero" (15), the full realization of the character's inherent crippledness is diffused. Seen through the narrator's tendency toward artifice, distantly "like a stage-apparition behind thickening veils of gauze" (19), the destructive content of Ethan's story is blunted.

The effects of the narrator's intelligence are seen first in his description of the void of the New England setting. "Life there-or rather its negation" (8), is depicted through a so-

19 The reference to the narrator is from Wharton's short preface describing the writing of Ethan Frome included in the Scribner's Modem Student's Li- brary edition. The quotations from the text are from: Ethan Frome (New York, 1911).

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phisticated, abstract language. In Ethan's youth, the narrator tells us, "twenty years earlier the means of resistance [to the isolation] must have been far fewer, and the enemy in com- mand of almost all the lines of access between the beleaguered villages" (9). He discusses the pathology of isolation, the psy- chosomatic illnesses found in the "lonely farm-houses in the neighbourhood" (78) which make up "a community rich in pathological instances" (77). Expressing the very sense of the void, the narrator employs images drawn from the technologi- cal training Ethan to some degree shares with him: "The effect produced on Frome was rather of a complete absence of at- mosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than ether inter- vened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic dome overhead. 'It's like being in an exhausted receiver,' he thought" (29). The result is a sort of intuitive Indian giving. For at the same time as the quality of the profound emptiness is evoked, it is disarmed by an envelopment in the familiar sense of control derived from the civilized imagery of ab- straction.

In the same way, the most extreme component in the narrative of Ethan Frome's "depths of sad initiation" (1 1) is blocked from full expression. Surely the marriage to Zeena is in part motivated by an incestuous impulse. In her decrepitude, Zeena constitutes a surrogate for Ethan's sick mother: grim with her "flat breast,... puckered throat, ... hollows ... of her high-boned face" (58), "seven years her husband's senior, ... already an old woman" (70), "within a year of their marriage she developed the 'sickliness' which had since made her notable even in" Starkfield (77). The marriage takes place immediately after the death of Ethan's mother. It is the product of the deepest irrationality: "After the funeral, when he saw her preparing to go away, he was seized with an unreasoning dread ... and before he knew what he was doing he had asked her to stay there with him" (76). The act is Ethan's response to the erosion of his self brought about by New England isolation; "the loneliness of the house" (74), "the mortal-silence of his long imprisonment" (75). Yet the only overt indication

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that such a violation of the most ancient of taboos exists in the narrative lies in the curious brand which accompanies Ethan's maiming. For recalling the symbol of his fratricide borne by Cain in the Old Testament, Wharton's protagonist too carries the mark of a primal crime; "the red gash across Ethan Frome's forehead" (4).

Yet within the limits imposed by the narrator's "Jamesian fine intelligence,"20 the narrative offers a powerful expression of the grim forms of initiation in New England. How much of a subjective quality the narrative displays can be gauged by the transformation in consciousness which occurs during the narrator's journey into Ethan's personal world. Enveloped by a severe snowstorm, the narrator experiences a "soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning" (25). In the "formless night" the disorientation seems almost universal; "even ... [Ethan's] sense of direction, and the bay's homing instinct, finally ceased to serve" (25). It is this journey, and the subsequent visit to Ethan's home, that triggers the narrator's conjectures, effecting the transition back into Ethan's youth. Introduced by such a relaxation of the conventional forms of perception, the story of Ethan's initiatory experience is told with the intense and highly selective imagery characteristic of an imaginative "vision" (27).

Accordingly, within the tale of Ethan's youth, the narrator focuses upon the one moment which most directly expresses the mechanics of Ethan's failure. Ethan's crucial test occurs during the evening in which he is alone with Mattie, the young girl he loves, while his wife is consulting with a doctor in a nearby town. Ethan's failure is not primarily of will; the narrative is punctuated with the protagonist's sublimated images of his wife's elimination, as when she fails to appear as usual at the door and the "wild thought tore through him. What if tramps had been there-what if .. ." (57). Nor is it entirely an incapacity to act; in the final accident Ethan deliberately swerves the sled back on course, "kept it straight, and drove

20Millicent Bell, Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship (New York, 1965), 294.

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down on the black projecting mass" (184) in the attempt to bring about the dual suicide. It is a more fundamental failure which the account of his evening with Mattie points up; in it Ethan displays an inadequacy in his very conception of life: he is unable realistically to conceive of a mature, fully intimate relationship.

The sense of this basic weakness in Ethan's vision comes early in the episode. In his anticipation of it, the time with Mattie displays the quality of an image one step removed from reality: "He pictured what it would be like that evening"; he is taken with "the sweetness of the picture" (73). When the moment actually comes about, rather than the illusory quality being dispelled, it intensifies; the scene seems to recede before him: "He had a confused sense of being in another world" (95). Moreover, confirming the failure of vision, each of these

expressions denies the very concept of growth, the foundation of healthy initiation into maturity. Ethan's image of life with Mattie displays an unmistakable resemblance to infantile pas- sivity; it is a place "where all was warmth and harmony and time could bring no change" (95). Without striving, in this state he can indulge in the "illusion of long-established in- timacy . . . and he set his imagination adrift on the fiction that they had always spent their evenings thus and would always go on doing so" (97). Fundamentally incapable of responding effectively to the challenge of a mature relationship, Ethan is indeed "suffocated with the sense of well-being" (88). No wonder in his one moment of realistic vision at the end of the episode, Ethan is overwhelmed by the sense of his own weakness: "'I've been in a dream, and this is the only evening we'll ever have together.' The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anaesthetic. His body and brain ached with indescribable weariness" (103).

Failing in the most profound manner in his initiatory challenge, the narrative traces the consequent disintegration of Ethan's personality. The threat of Mattie's removal stirs all his "healthy instincts of self-defence" (142)-he has a vision of eloping to the West with her-but his response is increasingly


fragmented. He experiences "confused motions of rebellion" (142), "confused impulses struggled in him" (151), "the pulses in his temples throbbed and a fog was in his eyes" (162), "his face tingled and he felt dizzy" (164), he suffers "some erratic impulse" (174). His perceptions make a conclusive turn to the conventional; he comes to see his impulse toward self-fulfillment from the life-denying point of view of the New England village, defining them as insane: "With the sudden perception of the point to which his madness had carried him, the madness fell and he saw his life before him as it was. He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute" (155). With the crippling sled crash the tale of Ethan's thwarted initiation ends, and the narrative reverses its initial journey. It withdraws from the flashback's heightened subjectivity through a transition marked by a familiar quality of disorientation in which "the last clearness from the upper sky is merged with the rising night in a blur that disguises landmarks and falsifies distances" (176). With a striking compression of imagery, the narrative has accounted for Ethan's dominant characteristic, the symbol of his failure to transcend the ties of immaturity constituted by the unbroken "jerk of a chain" (4) of his crippled gait.

IV Without the mediating consciousness of Ethan Frome's nar-

rator, Summer is free to express the full depth and implications of Wharton's vision. There is no hedging in this narrative which, done in Paris during World War I, Wharton described as "written at a high pitch of creative joy,. .. and while the rest of my being was steeped in the tragic realities of the war; yet I do not remember ever visualizing with more intensity the inner scene, or the creatures peopling it."21 Its description of the void in the rural Massachusetts setting, North Dormer, shares the definitiveness of deCrevecoeur's original catalog of negatives in American culture: "There it lay, a weather-beaten sunburnt village of the hills, abandoned

21 A Backward Glance (New York, 1964), 356. (Originally published, 1933.)

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of men, left apart by railway, trolley, telegraph, and all the forces that link life to life in modern communities. It had no shops, no theatres, no lectures, no 'business block'; only a church that was opened every other Sunday if the state of the roads permitted, and a library for which no new books had been bought for twenty years."22 In "desolate" country, its ambience characterized by the vacuum-like "transparent sky" (7), it is emphatically "at all times an empty place" (9).

The full extent of Wharton's vision in this novel is mea- sured by a feature of the setting exceptionally dark for this writer. Looming over the village is the Mountain, a "scarred cliff that lifted its sullen wall above the lesser slopes of Eagle Range, making a perpetual background of gloom to the lonely valley.... It rose so abruptly from the lower hills that it seemed almost to cast its shadow over North Dormer" (11- 12). Likened by Nevius to "the heart of Conrad's primeval darkness, whose savage inhabitants are the shapes of half-for- gotten fears and instincts,"23 the place serves as an objectifica- tion of the most unconscious components of the village's life. It harbors a small society made up of figures dominated by their instincts: its "first colonists are supposed to have been men who worked on the railway that was built forty or fifty years ago between Springfield and Nettleton. Some of them took to drink, or got into trouble with the police, and went off-disappeared into the woods.... Children were born. Now they say there are over a hundred people up there" (66). The "little independent kingdom" (65) is rife with all the taboos relegated to whispers in the village. Family relationships are virtually bestial in their deterioration: "On the other side of the fireless stove Liff Hyatt's mother slept on a blanket, with two children-her grandchildren, she said-rolled up against her like sleeping puppies" (258). Incest is the norm. In its frontier-like "independence," its "revolts and defiances" (65), and in its total absence of the most fundamental of social forms-it has "no school, no church-and no sheriff ever goes

22 Summer (New York, 1917), 1l. 23 Nevius, 171.

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up to see what they're about" (66)-the Mountain constitutes the link between the village and Wharton's intuitions of the origins of culture in America.

Touched in the most fundamental manner by the void underlying American society, the possibilities for mature self- realization in North Dormer are nil. The place abounds with figures who exemplify the failure of initiation, such as Miss Hatchard, a maiden lady of "long immaturity" (31). It incor- porates a ritual of regressive attitudes, the celebration of "Old Home Week" (170), intended "to set the example of reverting to the old ideals" (173). The set piece of the ritual is a speech translating this quality into terms of development, or rather of the crippling stasis which characterizes the place: "'Believe me, all of you,"' it concludes, "'the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there'" (195). The protagonist herself, Charity Royall, puts the impossibility of development in the setting into vernacular form: "'Things don't change at North Dormer: people just get used to them'" (121i). In such a setting, the protagonist is indeed forced into an ever "deeper sense of isolation" (31).

Thwarted by this barren context, it is significant that Charity is "determined to assert her independence" (126) by leaving North Dormer with Lucius Harney, a New Yorker, for a visit to the more urban nearby town of Nettleton. In contrast to the emptiness of the village, this city environment offers what seems infinite quantities of experiential data: "The noise and colour of this holiday vision seemed to transform Nettleton into a metropolis" (132). "Numerous were the glass doors swinging open on saloons, on restaurants, on drug- stores gushing from every soda-water tap, on fruit and con- fectionery shops stacked with strawberry-cake, cocoanut drops, trays of glistening molasses candy,... dangling branches of bananas" (133). "From the main thoroughfares came the clanging of trolleys, the incessant popping of torpedoes, the jingle of street-organs, the bawling of megaphone men and the loud murmur of increasing crowds" (138). The place is thick with the stuff of illusion, too: "hints of hidden riches" (133)

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are everywhere. There is "a dressing-room all looking-glass and lustrous surfaces where a party of showy-looking girls were dabbing on powder" (135-136), shop windows in which "waves of silk and ribbon broke over shores of imitation moss from which ravishing hats rose like tropical orchids,... or tiers of

fancy-goods in leatherette and paste and celluloid dangled their insidious graces,.. [and] wax ladies in daring dresses chatted elegantly" (133-134). It is the perception of this op- position between appearance and reality, made possible by the experiential thickness of the city, that is fundamental to the moral choice essential for a full and completed initiation.

Yet like Ethan, Charity already has been ruined by the void of North Dormer, her strivings for self-realization turned into "childish savagery" (221) by the thwartings of the place: "She had never known how to adapt herself; she could only break and tear and destroy" (220-221); her first words are "'how I hate everything!'" (9). In the same way as Ethan, growing up in a void she suffers an inadequacy of vision; she cannot conceive of the complex action inherent to mature life: "she could not imagine what a civilized person would have done in her place. She felt herself too unequally pitted against unknown forces" (221). So when finally placed in a context making possible the steps to initiation, Charity is incapable of the clarity of vision necessary to mature choice: "She was too bewildered by rich possibilities to find an answer" (138). Indeed, confronted by illusion in its starkest form, Charity's perceptions undergo a telling breakdown. For taken to a movie theater, Charity becomes unable to make the most elementary distinc- tion between appearance and reality: "Everything was merged in her brain in swimming circles of heat and blinding alterna- tions of light and darkness. All the world has to show seemed to pass before her in a chaos of palms and minarets, charging cavalry regiments, roaring lions, comic policemen and scowl- ing murderers; and the crowd around her ... became part of the spectacle, and danced on the screen with the rest" (139).

The importance of this incident is denoted by a sudden shift in the narrative tone. Previously indulgent toward the

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young protagonist, with her failure of vision an ironic-at times even a sardonic-undertone creeps into the novel. The date of her journey to Nettleton "to assert her independence" (126), July Fourth, Independence Day, takes on a grimmer meaning. The "mockery" by a fallen woman of North Dormer casually met in her degenerate life in Nettleton, "'Say! if this ain't like Old Home Week'" (145), is a direct parody of the rural platitudes celebrated in the village's ritual. Even the in- dulgence toward Charity's inarticulate, instinctual quality turns harsh. Instead of the previously sympathetic images of the girl with "her face pressed to the earth and the warm currents of the grass running through her" (53), now there is almost contempt for her lack of reason: "She did not think these things out clearly; she simply followed the blind pro- pulsion of her wretchedness" (160); "not a thought was in her mind; it was just a dark whirlpool of crowding images" (156).

Indeed, the episode at Nettleton triggers a final matrix of narrative developments. It initiates the painful process of Charity's losing struggle for maturity. Immediately after it the girl experiences the first of her increasingly regressive impulses: "Suddenly it became clear that flight, and instant flight, was the only thing conceivable.... She had a childish belief in the miraculous power of strange scenes and new faces to transform her life and wipe out bitter memories" (157-158). She indulges herself with the hollow illusion of a mature do- mestic establishment with Harney; the place which they set up for long afternoon liaisons is an abandoned "house ... as dry and pure as the interior of a long-empty shell" (166). The relationship itself is equally hollow; it displays a condition of depersonalization which does not disturb Charity: "He was utterly careless of what she was thinking or feeling" (164); "once more, as she spoke, she became aware that he was no longer listening" (169). With her once prominent sense of self disintegrating, Charity flees to the Mountain, the place of her origin, in a desperate attempt to establish some substantial bonds of relationship. Instead, in this context of primordial void she experiences a vision of transcendent isolation: "Char-

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ity saw a deep funnel of sky, so black, so remote, so palpitating with frosty stars that her very soul seemed to be sucked into it" (258). Coming for an affirmation of her self and finding "herself a mere speck in the lonely circle of the sky" (264), Charity's capacity for resolution dissolves. She abandons all attempts at self-determination when faced with the awareness that "she would have to live, to choose, to act, to make herself a place among these people-or to go back to the life she had left" (260-261). Seeking value in a journey back to our precultural past, the protagonist instead is finally destroyed by its "awful emptiness" (265).

As the narrative relates the protagonist's long journey to defeat in the frontier-like setting, it displays a telling level of meaning absent in Ethan's brittle tale. With her struggle for maturity, the attractions of regression, the easeful blandish- ments of North Dormer's life-denying stasis, confront Charity in images displaying the insinuating seductiveness of children's fairy tales. Enacting an early, aborted impulse to flee to the Mountain, Charity encounters a figure who offers to re- lieve her of the necessity to deal with the moral implications of her situation: out of a "Gospel Tent," "a young man in a black alpaca coat, his lank hair parted over a round white face, stepped from under the flap and advanced toward her with a smile. 'Sister, your Saviour knows everything. Won't you come in and lay your guilt before Him?' he asked in- sinuatingly, putting his hand on her arm" (161). On the evening before her participation in Old Home Week, Charity finds her costume set out for her in a storybook image depict- ing the lure of purity offered by the village's "sham uncon- sciousness of evil" (157): "When she opened her door a wonder arrested her.... A bar of moon-light, crossing the room, rested on her bed and showed a dress of China silk laid out on it in virgin whiteness.... Above the dress, folded on the pillow, was the white veil ... and beside the veil a pair of slim white satin shoes . .. produced from an old trunk in which. . . [were] stored mysterious treasures" (187). "In the moonlight they seemed carved of ivory . .. and they fitted her perfectly"

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(188). Finally, the alternative to village innocence, the lady abortionist in Nettleton with whom Charity considers dealing, is seen with a surreal grotesqueness that heightens the attractions of life in North Dormer: "Dr. Merkle was a plump woman with small bright eyes, an immense mass of black hair coming down low on her forehead, and unnaturally white and even teeth. She wore a rich black dress, with gold chains and charms hanging from her bosom" (224). It is the visit to "this woman with the false hair, the false teeth, the false murderous smile" (225), SO closely resembling the evil figure in fairy tales, that decides Charity upon keeping the child she is pregnant with by Harney, thereby making her first endorse- ment of the village's values.

But most important is the emergence to an irresistible power of the figure who to all intents in the narrative is Char- ity's father, Lawyer Royall. Having condemned Charity's real father to prison previous to the narrative, Royall in effect re- places him, as responding to the criminal's request the lawyer brings the infant down from the Mountain and takes her into his childless home. The specter of incest occurs early in the narrative, establishing the relationship's fundamental under- current. After his wife dies Royall attempts to break into Charity's bedroom. The girl blocks him, responding to his plea "'Charity, let me in.... I'm a lonesome man"' with the contemptuous: "'Well, I guess you made a mistake, then. This ain't your wife's room any longer'" (29). At this early point, with Charity for the moment victorious, "insolently conscious of her youth and strength" (34), Royall appears "unwieldly, shabby, disordered, . . . like a hideous parody of the fatherly old man she had always known" (34). Yet with the display of Charity's weakness on Independence Day, Royall's image begins its transformation. Still grotesquely distorted, "his face, a livid brown, with red blotches of anger and lips sunken in like an old man's" (151), Royall, nevertheless "tow- ering above" (15o) the group at the celebration in Nettleton, shows a "tremulous majesty" (151) during the chance meeting. Delivering the keynote speech in Old Home Week, Royall

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grows in stature still more: his "face wore the look of majesty that used to awe and fascinate her childhood" (191), "his in- flections were richer and graver than she had ever known them" (193). As he becomes a point of stasis in "the general blur,"-"his look seemed to pierce to the very centre of her confused sensations" (198)-Charity suddenly faints, falling "face downward at Mr. Royall's feet" (199). A figure of new strength, Royall "face to face" with Charity "stripped her of her last illusion, and brought her back to North Dormer's point of view" (234).

It is this Royall who appears out of the Mountain's emptiness to claim Charity, an irresistibly powerful surrogate father binding her by marriage to a lifetime of subservient immaturity. At the sound of "the grave persuasive accent that had moved his hearers at the Home Week festival" (270), Charity begins her final capitulation of self: "Her whole body began to tremble with the dread of her own weakness" (270), "her voice failed her" (270), "she had only a confused sensation of slipping down a smooth irresistible current; and she abandoned herself to the feeling" (273). Her capacity for autono- mous perception collapsing "like the universal shimmer that dissolves the world to failing eyes" (275), Charity at last "followed Mr. Royall as passively as a tired child" (274). Only one act of individual vision remains to the protagonist in the narrative: through "the sudden acuteness of vision with which sick people sometimes wake out of a heavy sleep" (279), Char- ity glimpses a picture hanging above her wedding bed. It is an engraving which "represented a young man in a boat on a lake overhung with trees. He was leaning over to gather water- lilies for the girl in a light dress who lay among the cushions in the stern. The scene was full of a drowsy midsummer radi- ance" (279-280). Surely the final development of the protagonist's characterization is encapsulated in this image of art within the narrative. Receded to the level of a sentimentalized cliche, Charity's potential for self-fulfillment conclusively has been lost. No wonder now, in this final sequence from Whar-

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EDITH WHARTON AND NEW ENGLAND 439

ton's most subjective novel, the protagonist, having touched the void, the ultimately destructive vision underlying Ameri- can society, seems atrophied, symbolically turned to stone, standing "among these cross-currents of life as motionless and inert as if she had been one of the tables screwed to the marble floor" (282).

such depths of sad initiation': edith wharton and new … criticism.pdf... · "such...

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