Edith Wharton: Summer (1917)

Edition: Modern Library, 2001
Review number: 1072

The companion piece to Ethan Frome, Summer has the same remote New England setting (in a town named, appropriately, North Dormer which is just like the earlier novel's Starkfield), but in the opposite time of year. It is a summer which doesn't end, even though the story is spread over several months.

Charity Royall is brought up as the ward of the only lawyer in North Dormer; she comes from the Mountain, a community of vagabonds outside the town viewed as moral degenerates. Grown up, she fends off the advances of her guardian and falls in love with Lucius Harney, a visitor to the town related to its principal citizens. The novel is basically a battle between their desire and the reactions of those around them, complicated by Charity's feelings of unworthiness because of her background.

Charity's sexuality is much more explicitly described than that of Ethan Frome, though the novel is entirely possible because of her innocence - today she would just sleep with Harney, and that would be the end of it. Things are not uncomplicated; among the aspect of sex which are mentioned is a back street abortionist. Charity's life is far freer than Frome's, as she is able to make trips away from North Dormer, but she is trapped in the same kind of way by her background and situation. The earlier novel works better, though, perhaps because the sense of suffocation is stronger.

Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome (1911)

Edition: Modern Library, 2001
Review number: 1069

There is often a tendency to romanticise American rural life in the days before modern communication, because people admire what they call the "pioneer spirit". When reading accounts from the time, such as the bleaker parts of Laura Ingalls Wilder's memoirs or Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, or this novel, it is clear that it was not in the least an idyllic existence; it was lonely hard work for (in many cases) little return.

The story of Ethan Frome comes in two parts. The framing chapters, a foreword and an epilogue, are told by a stranger who comes to the aptly named New England town of Starkfield in midwinter. There he becomes interested in the figure of Frome, a poor farmer injured in a sleigh accident twenty years previously. The main part of the novel tells the tale of the few days leading up to the accident. Frome's wife Zenobia has over the years since they married (when her vivaciousness provoked a desperate longing in Ethan, lonely after the death of his parents) become a cantankerous invalid, turning the farm's meagre profits into faddish patent medicines. A younger, even poorer, relation of Zenobia's, Mattie Silver, helps Ethan care for her and look after the housework.

The natural consequence of this is that Ethan finds himself increasingly drawn to Mattie, and when Zenobia announces that she has decided to throw her out and hire a girl who will be better at housework, he considers running away with her. But he can't even afford to do this and is driven into a corner from which there appears to be no way to make his life happier.

The other theme of Ethan Frome, then, is doomed desire, first that prompted by desperation (Ethan for Zenobia) then that of one sufferer for another (Ethan and Mattie for each other). The cold winters in which both parts are set, the quietness of the earth covered by drifting snow, form a smothering backdrop for the story which is as appropriate as the heat for Ethan Frome's companion novel of similar themes, Summer. The weather is as symbolic here as it is in the writing of Thomas Hardy.

There is much that is imperfect about Ethan Frome. One of its most obvious flaws is a frequently repeated criticism: the narrator, an outsider to Starkfield, suddenly knows a great deal about the precise actions and feelings of the intensely private Ethan of twenty years earlier. This is clearly a nonsensical conceit on Wharton's part, but the way in which the story is constructed is to a large extent dictated by the way in which she has set up her ending. Flaws apart, Ethan Frome has a strong impact; its atmosphere seems to me as memorable as, say, that generated in Turn of the Screw.

Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth (1905)

Edition: Everyman, 1991
Review number: 852

There are many novels about breaking into high society; fewer about falling out of it. Wharton's tragic story is about how Lily Bart gradually loses her place in the New York smart set, sliding lower and lower until her death in a common boarding house. The basic problem is money; Lily's family are not really rich enough any more to maintain their position, and it is her beauty and social graces which have let her continue to be accepted even until the beginning of the novel.

The obvious solution to Lily's problems is marriage to a rich man, and she seems to have plenty of opportunities, even if at twenty nine she is considered a bit old to do so. The problem is that she can never quite bring herself up to scratch, so that she schemes and works to entrap a man only to pull out at the wrong moment, put off by a vision of a lifetime of boring conversation or whatever the bad points about him happen to be. She also has a tendency to get into completely innocent situations which are then disastrously misunderstood, for example alienating two of her closest friends who think she is having affairs with their husbands. (In one case, this is particularly unjust; Bertha Dorset invites her on a trip to Europe on the understanding that she will distract Bertha's husband from her own affair, only for Bertha to turn neurotically suspicious and jealous.)

The interest of the novel is in its inversion of the typical romantic society plotline, and it is the characterisation of Lily which makes it successful and tragic. It is not full of mirth by any stretch of the imagination. (The title sounds like it is a quotation, but the nearest I could find, which reflects the spirit of the novel, is from an anonymous poem, On the Life of Man: "What is our life? a play of passion, / Our mirth the music of derision, / Our mothers' wombs the tiring houses be, / Where we are dressed for this short comedy".)

Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence (1920)

Edition: Penguin, 1974
Review number: 252

Edith Wharton's novel of New York Society in the 1870s, the time and background of her own youth, was the product of her experiences during the First World War. It is not a nostalgic backward look at an order that was fast disappearing, even in America; Wharton viewed the artificial innocence (born of a refusal to see unpleasant things) as something better shed. It is perhaps too much to say that she rejoiced in the downfall of the nineteenth century in the battlefields of France, but she certainly felt that it was past time for humanity to move on.

The story basically describes Newland Archer's gradual disillusionment with the society around him, in which every action is circumscribed by the rules of propriety, and where infringement of these rules can be severely punished. Engaged to the extremely conventional May Welland, he becomes fascinated by the beautiful Countess Olenska. She has recently returned from Europe, where she had scandalously left her aristocratic husband when she felt unable to live with his ill-treatment of her any longer.

Because Countess Olenska has spent much of her life in Europe, and has indeed carried out an action almost too scandalous to be imagined (running off with her husband's secretary), she does not just accept New York customs and morality without question, the way the others do. Because of her, Archer begins to see the ideas he grew up with in a different way. This may seem like a necessary part of growing up, particularly after several generations of intense questioning of parental ways of life which precede our own, but Wharton is depicting a society so privileged and sheltered - and cut off, in the days before fast Atlantic crossings, the telephone, when much railway traffic stopped the far side of the Hudson so that a further journey by ferry and carriage was necessary to get to New York itself - that many of its members never went through this process.

The innocence portrayed in this novel has its attractive qualities, but Wharton is more interested to show the reader its stifling and airless nature; it is an innocence only achieved at the cost of the ruthless exclusion of anything that might disturb it.