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Pomegranate Seed | Introduction

Edith Wharton composed the ghost story, ‘‘Pomegranate Seed,’’ near the end of 1930, and saw it published by the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1931. The tale was subsequently included in Wharton’s collection of short fiction, The World Over (1936), and then in her collection, Ghosts, published in 1937, the last year of the author’s life. Readers of that collection admired Wharton’s skill in writing tales of the supernatural, but several reviewers believed the ghost story to be a less important genre than the novels of social observation by which Wharton had made her reputation over the previous decades. While Wharton’s novels remain at the center of her achievements, her ghost stories have gained critical acknowledgment over the years. ‘‘Pomegranate Seed’’ is admired for the relentless pacing of its suspenseful plot, for the particularity with which its principal characters are rendered, and for the chilling evocation of the supernatural achieved by the story’s ending. ‘‘Pomegranate Seed’’ surely possesses the ‘‘thermometrical quality’’ cited by Wharton as the hallmark of good ghost stories; she believed a well-crafted ghost story should send a cold shiver down the reader’s spine. The story’s title is derived from the Greco-Roman myth of Persephone, which Wharton is likely to have read in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Abducted by Pluto, the Lord of the Dead, Persephone is not permitted to leave the underworld permanently because she has eaten six pomegranate seeds in the gardens of death. Contemporary critical debate on Wharton’s story has focused, in large degree, upon establishing correspondences between Wharton’s characters and their predecessors in the Persephone myth. Striking in its mythological resonances, ‘‘Pomegranate Seed’’ is also a powerful meditation on the supernatural, on the conflict between flesh and spirit, and on the constant risk of alienation in human life.

Pomegranate Seed Summary

Part I
‘‘Pomegranate Seed’’ opens as Charlotte Ashby enters the vestibule to her New York home and pauses before entering the house. She has paused to remember the course of her brief marriage to Kenneth Ashby, and to consider the mysterious events that have clouded their recent months together. Kenneth Ashby, a lawyer, is a widower whose marriage to Charlotte has apparently healed the grief he felt at the death of his first wife, Elsie Ashby. Charlotte has moved into the house Kenneth had shared with Elsie, and come to feel at home there. Kenneth has even moved the portrait of Elsie that had hung in his library up to the nursery of his two children, in order that Charlotte might feel herself to be the mistress of the house. When they returned from their honeymoon, however, Kenneth found waiting for him a mysterious letter in a gray envelope. Charlotte never learned the contents of the letter, addressed to Kenneth in a woman’s handwriting, but from its effects on her husband— withdrawal, sadness, and perhaps a touch of fear— suspects it is from a former lover. Several similar letters have arrived for him since the honeymoon, each one deepening Kenneth’s withdrawal and Charlotte’s suspicion. Charlotte enters the house at last and finds that yet another letter is waiting for her husband.

Part II
Troubled by the most recent letter’s arrival, Charlotte decides to... » Complete Pomegranate Seed Summary