Wharton’s, but the social pressures on her must have been similar: to make a suitable marriage, with social position certainly, and, if possible, money as well. In the novel, Lily is given a choice that Wharton apparently did not have: an offer of marriage from an emancipated young lawyer of her own class (though Berry, a lawyer, was thought at one time to have been Wharton’s suitor). Wharton chose a passionless marriage with Teddy; Lily was not allowed that solution. Selden deserts her at the crucial moment, and she dies of an overdose of sleeping medicine.

In her autobiography A Backward Glance, Wharton stated that her subject in The House of Mirth was to be the tragic power of New York society in “debasing people and ideas,” and Lily Bart was created to give that power dramatic scope. Lily’s entrapment by society and her eventual destruction are not the final story. Lily overcomes the limitations of her upbringing and aspirations and acts on principle. She has in her possession a packet of letters that she could use to regain her social position, but the letters would involve the reputation of Selden. She also has an inheritance of ten thousand dollars that she could use to establish herself in a profitable business, but she burns the letters and uses the money to repay a debt of honor. Lily dies, but in choosing death rather than dishonor, she escapes entrapment.

The Age of Innocence

In The Age of Innocence, published fifteen years after The House of Mirth, the underlying conflict is the same, though the tone of the novel and the nature of the entrapment are somewhat different. Here, the trapped individual is a man, Newland Archer, a young lawyer who is engaged to marry May Welland, a pretty and shallow young woman of respectable old New York society of the 1870’s and 1890’s. This is the world of Wharton’s young womanhood, a society that is narrow and rigid and socially proper.

Into this limited and self-contained world, she brings Ellen Olenska, a cousin of May, who belongs to this world by birth but left it years before and has since married a Polish count. Ellen has now separated from her husband, who has been notoriously unfaithful, and has returned to the bosom of her family for support and comfort. Archer is engaged by the family to help her in her quest for a divorce settlement. The inevitable happens: Archer and Ellen fall in love. Archer is attracted by Ellen’s European sophistication, her freedom of thought and manners, and her refusal to take seriously the small taboos of New York society. Archer considers breaking with May and marrying Ellen. The family, sensing his defection, contrive with other members of the society to separate the lovers and reunite Archer with May, his conventional fiancé. Social pressure forces Ellen to return to Europe, and Archer is again thinking of pursuing Ellen; then May announces that she is expecting a baby. Archer is finally and permanently trapped.

As though to drive home the extent to which Archer has been defeated, Wharton takes him to Paris years later. His son is grown, his wife is dead, and Ellen Olenska is now a widow living alone. Archer makes an appointment to see Ellen but gets only as far as a park bench near her apartment. At the last minute, he decides to send his son to see her, while he remains seated on the bench, telling himself that it would be more real for him to remain there than to go himself to see Ellen. The trap has done its work.

While one can see resemblances between Ellen and Wharton—the expatriation, the charm, the liberated views, perhaps even the slight French accent with which Ellen speaks—Archer is also Wharton, or that side of her that could never entirely escape the past. The Age of Innocence was thought by some reviewers to be a glorification of the past, which it clearly is not. Wharton does evoke with some nostalgia the old New York of her youth, but she also sets forth with delicate but cutting irony that society’s limitations and its destructive narrowness. Archer has led an exemplary life, one is led to believe, but the happiness he might have had was gently but firmly denied him. Whereas a more popular novelist might have allowed Archer to be reunited with Ellen at the end of the novel, Wharton insists that that would be unreal; for her, personal happiness in the real world is the exception rather than the rule.

Ethan Frome

Two of Wharton’s best novels—also two of her shortest—both deal with protagonists trapped by passionless marriages. The earlier of these, Ethan Frome, is about a Massachusetts farmer married to an older, neurasthenic wife, whose pretty young cousin has come to work for her. The inevitable again happens: Ethan falls in love with Mattie and dreams about running away with her. Ethan’s jealous wife, however, arranges for Mattie to be sent away, and Ethan is obliged to escort her to the train station. It is winter, and the lovers stop for a brief time together. They embrace, realize the inevitability of separation, and decide to kill themselves by coasting down a steep hill into a great elm tree. During the ride down the steep hill, Ethan accidentally swerves the sled; a crash occurs, in which the lovers are seriously injured but survive. Mattie becomes a disabled whiner, while Zeena, the neurotic wife, takes over the running of the household. Ethan, who is severely disfigured, feels himself like a handcuffed convict, a prisoner for life.

As Lewis has pointed out, the situation in Ethan Frome is very much like the situation in Wharton’s own life at the time. If one shifts the genders, Frome is Wharton trapped in a loveless marriage with the neurasthenic Teddy and passionately in love with a younger man who shared her interests and feelings, Morton Fullerton. The violent ending, of course, may be seen as Wharton’s passionate statement about her own desperate situation. The success of Ethan Frome, however, does not depend on making such biographical connections; the book is a brilliantly realized work of realistic fiction that owes its power not to some abstractly conceived pessimistic philosophy of life, but to Wharton’s successful transposition of her own emotional life into the language of fiction.

Summer

Summer was published six years after Ethan Frome and was called by Wharton and her friends the “hot Ethan.” As in Ethan Frome, there is a triangle: Lawyer Royall, elderly guardian of Charity, a pretty young mountain girl, and a visiting architecture student, Lucius Harney. During the idyllic summer months, an intense and passionate affair takes place between Charity and Harney. Harney returns to Boston, and Charity is left to face her guardian, who is also in love with her, and the prospect of an illegal abortion. The novel concludes with a reconciliation between Charity and her guardian and a secure if passionless marriage with him.

While it would be a mistake to overemphasize biographical parallels, they are unmistakable. The affair of Charity and Harney suggests Wharton’s earlier affair with Fullerton, while the intrusive presence of the fatherly Lawyer Royall suggests Teddy’s irksome claims on Wharton’s loyalties. An interesting alteration of chronology is in making the marriage with the older man follow the affair rather than precede it, as it had in Wharton’s own life. Summer was written four years after the Whartons were divorced, and by then, she may have had time to view her marriage to Teddy more dispassionately, as the practical solution it must originally have been. Like Lily’s death, the surrender to marriage is a defeat as well as a moral triumph. Summer is one of Wharton’s finest novels, written, according to her own testimony, in a state of “creative joy” and reflecting in its characters, scenes, and symbolic structures the deep well of the unconscious that seems to nourish the most powerful works of American fiction.

The Reef

The Reef, published the year before the Whartons’ divorce and commonly acknowledged to be Wharton’s most Jamesian novel, again deals with conflicts between the individual and society and the problems of marriage. In this novel, however, the society is remote; the inheritor of the society’s standards, Anna Leath, an American widow of a French nobleman, is reunited with an old friend, lawyer George Darrow, also an American, living in Europe. Anna and Darrow become engaged and are about to be married when Anna discovers that Darrow has had an affair with Sophy Viner, her daughter’s governess, a girl of a lower class, and that Sophy, who is also her stepson’s fiancé, is still in love with Darrow. For Darrow the situation is a matter of diplomatic maneuvering, of steering his way between the two women and the stepson; for Anna it presents a moral dilemma involving, on one hand, an inherited code of conduct that tells her that Darrow must be abandoned and, on the other hand, a personal code that tells her not to give him up.

The moral complexities of the novel are a good deal more intricate than summary can indicate—indeed, they are so ambiguous that one is hard-pressed to decide where the author stands. It is possible, however, to see in this novel situations parallel to Wharton’s earlier involvement with Fullerton, and a possible moral dilemma over her own infidelity. In a sense, Wharton is Sophy Viner, but Sophy (and Wharton’s affair with Fullerton) seen in the light of a later moral judgment; Wharton is also Anna, attempting to accept the break with conventional morality that led to Darrow’s affair with Sophy. The trap in which Anna finds herself is doubly baited, and no matter which way she turns, she must fall, either morally or emotionally. The fact that Anna chooses Darrow after all suggests the same kind of compromise other Wharton protagonists have made, Justine of The Fruit of the Tree and Charity Royall of Summer especially, both of whom were betrayed by the weakness of the men they loved but settled for what was finally available.

The Custom of the Country

The Custom of the Country is a different sort of work, influenced by the French realist Honoré de Balzac rather than by James. The novel attempts to deal, as did Balzac, with the destruction of an aristocracy by the invasion of uncivilized materialists.

The protagonist of the novel, Undine Spragg, is a handsome young woman from Apex, a city in the American Midwest. Undine’s father made a great deal of money in Apex and now has come East to try his hand in New York City. The Spraggs move into an expensive hotel, and the parents would be content to exist on the fringes of New York society. Undine, however, who is as ambitious as she is vulgar, manages to meet and then marry Ralph Marvel, an ineffectual member of old New York society. When life with Marvel grows boring, Undine becomes the mistress of a richer and more aggressive New York aristocrat, Peter Van Degen; when Van Degen drops her, she manages to snare the Marquis de Chelles, the son of an old aristocratic French family. Undine marries de Chelles, but she has learned nothing, being without taste, manners, or ideas; her sole interest is in amusing and gratifying herself. As soon as she gets what she thinks she wants, she becomes dissatisfied with it and wants something she decides is better. She grows tired of having to fit herself into the demands of the feudal aristocracy into which she has married; when she attempts to sell family heirlooms, whose value she does not understand, her husband divorces her. Her third husband is a perfect match, a hard-driving vulgar materialist from Apex, Elmer Moffat, whose chief interest is in buying European art. Moffat also aspires to an ambassadorial post but is barred because he is married to Undine, a divorced woman.

The Custom of the Country is regarded by some critics as among Wharton’s best fiction, but, as Blake Nevius has observed, during the course of the novel, Undine ceases to be a credible character and becomes an “inhuman abstraction.” Clearly, she came to represent everything that Wharton detested in the America of 1912 and, at a deeper and vaguer level, perhaps also expressed Wharton’s fear and resentment at the displacement of her own class by more energetic and less cultivated outsiders. The fact that such fears were real enough and the implicit social criticisms valid does nothing to alter the fact that, measured against books such as The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, Summer, and The Reef, the novel The Custom of the Country is crude and unconvincing. James had been right years earlier in advising Wharton to write about that part of the world she knew best, for in attempting to deal with the Midwest in The Custom of the Country, and later, in Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive, with bohemian circles about which she knew very little, she condemned herself to superficiality and caricature. It is difficult to take seriously Undine of The Custom of the Country or Advance Weston, the protagonist of Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive, who is said to be from Pruneville, Nebraska, and later Hallelujah, Missouri, and Euphoria, Illinois. Caricature is an expression of outrage, not understanding.

The Buccaneers

Fortunately, the last of Wharton’s novels, The Buccaneers, published the year after her death, was a return to the territory of her earlier fiction, old New York of the 1870’s. The novel was unfinished at her death and lacks the coherence of her best early work, but she could still write with the sharpness and scenic fullness that had characterized The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.

Wharton was a novelist of manners, then, not a chronicler of large social movements. Her real subject was the entrapment of superior individuals who keenly feel the pull of moral responsibility. Her talents for social observation, for noting subtleties of dress and decoration, for nuance of voice and phrase, and for language—precise and yet expressive—were essential instruments in the creation of her novels. Wharton has been unduly charged with pessimism; her characteristic tone is ironic, the product of a sensibility able to see and feel the claims on both sides of a human dilemma. If her voice faltered in her later years and she conceded too much to the popular taste for which she increasingly wrote, she nevertheless produced some of the finest American fiction published in the first two decades of the century, and her name deserves to stand with those of James and Fitzgerald, who outrank her only at their best.