SOURCE: Meynell, Alice. “The House of Mirth.” Bookman 29, no. 171 (December 1905): 130-31.

[In the following review, Meynell finds Wharton's moral stance lacking in The House of Mirth.]

Mrs. Wharton is essentially a moralist, albeit with the whole modern resolve not to declare herself. A Gift from the Grave remains her highest, most complete, and most commanding work, because, in a memorable passage she set her sail to a natural wind. Moral passion swept through the world of that book—direct grief, emotion close to the fact of life, love, indignation, remorse, dishonour, and honour; all the storms of breasts complex, civilised, but incorrupt. In The House of Mirth we have to read of the fortunes of a woman full of desires and of self-love, but void of virtue, of passion, and of intellect; and round about her are only lovers of their own ease and supremacy; claimants to the right of a social contemptuousness towards other less fortunate egotists as the salt of life; and graspers of riches as its sweetness. To observe this horde without obvious irritation is a work demanding self-control, and Mrs. Wharton watches them from the sequestered bower of her fine art, taking wide views, keeping her own counsel. It seems strange to say of a novelist who has filled five hundred pages with chosen words that she keeps her own counsel, but it is none the less obviously true of the writer of these five hundred remarkable pages. The keeping of her own counsel is one of the feats of her work. Is it indeed worth doing so well? Or rather, is not the other feat—that of the unlocking of a noble mind—worth doing? In much of her writing we were admitted to recognise her noble mind; we are reluctant to forego an intimacy that we valued. And when Mrs. Wharton goes about to keep her own counsel she does it, as she does everything, extraordinarily well.

Thackeray intended to keep his own counsel as a sentimentalist; but he did not do it well. He assigned the sentiment to certain characters—to women, to Laura Pendennis foremost—and pretended to be a moderately cynical man looking on with a smile; he took for himself, as it were, the part of Arthur Pendennis, whereas he was Laura at heart; and thus easily persuaded the duller readers in their multitude, during two generations, that he was of a cynical turn. But the author of The House of Mirth does not reveal herself, even dramatically. She is the greatest thing that a writer of fiction can be—a moralist; but there is no person in this story to bear the charge of the character.

And in this extremity of reserve lurks the one fault of art in the book—that is the indefiniteness of the “better part” which Selden has to offer to the self-loving and money-loving heroine. In the character of this young New York woman, about whom the whole history is written, we recognise two likenesses. She is partly Gwendolen Harleth and partly Hedda Gabler, yet with something modern in the place of Gwendolen's thirst after righteousness, and something intelligible in the place of Hedda's vice and Hedda's despair. Both resemblances therefore are slight. Now, in her slight likeness to Gwendolen Harleth she should have a kind of external conscience in the form of a man—a man at least esteemed, at least admirable. But the man in whom the rôle is just suggested, in The House of Mirth, is very little estimable. He has borne a part in the “cold obstruction” of the intrigues of man and woman in the world he lives in—a squalid past, we are compelled to see, because of the manner of woman who had been his random mistress. And the better part he shows the heroine, half-heartedly, as a way out of her pursuit of luxury, is vague. If it were definite we are sure it would be inadequate, and Mrs. Wharton ably leaves it in a little cloud. We choose, however, to pause where she passes, and to ask a closer question. All the answer we get is a tender of liberty, and obviously liberty is what the unfortunate egoist, the woman of the New York “world,” needs urgently, and all but desperately; but in what liberty does the apostle of this vague apostolate himself abide? We see him in the beloved luxury in which all the persons of the book roll themselves with revolting joy. We cannot imagine Lawrence Selden following liberty into a hard, or a useful, or a wild, or a sacramental life. He sets open, or rather ajar, to the woman who inclines to love him, a door into a better world too dubious for faith, a better world open to nothing but a very justifiable suspicion; and where there is no definite place to go to, or object in setting out, she does not go. She is less to blame than Mrs. Wharton.

We find her at the beginning poor, very lovely, member of the inner—the most contemptuous—social world of New York, in full pursuit of a millionaire. By the spite of her equals she misses her quarry; and the story that follows is the story of her failure to capture any other, until she dies drifting consciously into the peril of an overdose of morphia. She does some deeply dishonourable things on her way; plays a part in a yachting ménage to which the Elizabethans would give a plain name; is refused in marriage by an exceedingly vulgar Jew to whom she offers herself, having misunderstood his addresses, and yet sees him later as a friend; is betrayed and slandered before her world by one woman, helped with molle good nature by another, ruined by the general malice. Two good creatures—women—appear in the story: a little cousin given to good works, but the sequestered moralist makes her dowdy; a poor workwoman, but the sequestered moralist supplies her with a “fall” in her past.

It is the mode this year; next year, in a decade of years, it will not be the mode, so to hide a heart of emotion and of dignity. Meanwhile, it deprives us of the finest grace of Mrs. Wharton's genius—her imagery. When she wrote of moral passions and ideals, she used a splendid imagery. In The House of Mirth it is only towards the close, where tragedy darkens, and the writer permits herself to show she feels, that one or two admirable images prove to us how rich is the genius so long secluded.

Larry Rubin (January 1957)

SOURCE: Rubin, Larry. “Aspects of Naturalism in Four Novels by Edith Wharton.” Twentieth Century Literature 2, no. 4 (January 1957): 182-92.

[In the following essay, Rubin traces certain broad aspects of naturalism in four of Wharton's novels—The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, The Fruit of the Tree, and The Custom of the Country.]

The powerful strain of naturalism with which the art of Edith Wharton is suffused—a strain too often overlooked by critics—can be profitably studied by examining four representative novels: The House of Mirth (1905), The Age of Innocence (1920), The Fruit of the Tree (1907), and The Custom of the Country (1913). In these books we can trace certain broad aspects of naturalism as they are manifested in specific situations. The very theme of The House of Mirth, for example, has been defined as “the victimizing effect of a particular environment on one of its more helplessly characteristic products.” This product is Lily Bart, a social parasite and perpetual bridesmaid, who finally proves a trifle too scrupulous to claim her place in the world of luxury an pleasure—a world for which she has long been groomed and a position to which she has always aspired. She is, to quote Blake Nevius, “as completely and typically the product of her heredity, environment and the historical moment which found American materialism in the ascendant as the protagonist of any recognized naturalistic novel.” Having been made what she is by forces beyond her control, she eventually falls victim to those same forces. Dogged by poverty and hounded by scandal, she 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.”¹

On the other hand, the critics who perceive marked restrictions in Mrs. Wharton's use of determinism refuse to view Lily herself as being entirely blameless. Miss Monroe, for instance, declares:

Lily Bart's environment has so fashioned her that she is almost bound to be a parasite. Yet every step in her downfall is occasioned by a mistake in her own judgment or the failure of her will to meet the challenge of poverty and hardship.

The moral implications of this verdict are stressed by Lovett: “Heredity and environment play a large part in her undoing. … Nevertheless, at the root of her case is a moral attitude which is fundamentally wrong, and Lily is real enough to suggest that she could have changed it. …” That Lily should have managed somehow to rise above the inexorable pressures beating her down to the ground is implied by P. H. Boynton, whose indictment of the heroine is that, instead of retaining a stoical control of self, she “succumbs to the circumstances that created her.”²

Examining the text itself, however, one finds that Mrs. Wharton has placed such heavy emphasis upon the molding influence of environment that it seems as if Lily would have had to possess almost superhuman strength in order to withstand it. A strong hint of this influence appears in the very first chapter, when Selden, one of the few sensitive souls in the book, admires the heroine's beauty:

He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her form the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape?³

Tempted to advance her social position by setting aside a few scruples, she feels keenly the effect of her upbringing: “Her danger lay, as she knew, in her old incurable dread of discomfort and poverty; in the fear of that mounting tide of dinginess against which her mother had so passionately warned her.”

(page 478)

Again, in answer to a friend's demand to tell her “exactly what happened from the beginning,” Lily gives her an answer which, though expressed in a bantering tone, throws light on her problem:

“From the beginning?” Miss Bart gently mimicked her. “Dear Gerty, how little imagination you good people have! Why, the beginning was in my cradle, I suppose—in the way I was brought up, and the things I was taught to care for. …”

(page 363)

But the central statement of her heroine's dilemma Mrs. Wharton chooses to issue herself:

Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn and delight: to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and paint the humming-bird's breast? And was it her fault that the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to be hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral scruples?

(486-487)

Then, as if to make certain that no one has missed the point, the author, shortly afterward, states the same idea in different words:

But, after all, it was the life [the life of pleasure] she had been made for; every dawning tendency in her had been carefully directed toward it, all her interests and activities had been taught to center around it. She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty.

(512-513)

Lily, then, as Pritchett notes, has been “fatally conditioned from the first.”⁴ “There had been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength,” the author tells us (422). In view of these facts, how can we, in all fairness, ascribe moral culpability to such a person?

Actually, Lily Bart possesses a set of ethical principles somewhat loftier than those displayed by most of her fellow-hedonists in this elegant society; and it is part of the irony of the book that the practice of these higher standards is what ultimately brings about her ruin. Scruples have no place in the world depicted in The House of Mirth; thus, in good naturalistic fashion, the environment becomes the force which crushes the protagonist.

Lily, in a word, is trapped. The idea of a lovely young woman, obviously meant for better things, completely hemmed in and cornered by the values and conventions of a frivolous society—this idea is conveyed by the author by means of a multitude of allusions, images, and direct statements, all suggesting a feeling of imprisonment. Selden, for example, thinks of Lily as “so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate” (10). And the heroine herself feels as though she lives in a great gilt cage in which they were all huddled for the mob to gape at. How alluring the world outside the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard its door clang on her! In reality, as she knew, the door never changed: it stood always open; but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having once flown in, could never regain their freedom (86–67).

The sense of suffocation, which grows increasingly acute, is artistically suggested by a series of images in which the home of Lily's aunt, Mrs. Peniston (with whom the heroine lives), is seen as a tomb or prison:

The house, in its state of unnatural immaculateness and order, was as dreary as a tomb, and as Lily, turning from her brief repast between shrouded sideboards, wandered into the newly uncovered glare of the drawing-room she felt as though she were buried alive in the stifling limits of Mrs. Peniston's existence.

(160)

Although her own room is spacious, “contrasted with the light tints and luxurious appointments of the guest-rooms where so many weeks of Lily's existence were spent, it seemed as dreary as a prison” (176). Again, after describing the furnishings of Mrs. Peniston's sitting-room, the novelist remarks: “Lily felt for these objects the same distaste which the prisoner may entertain for the fittings of the courtroom” (274). And, after Mrs. Peniston's death, when Lily learns that her aunt has virtually disinherited her, she sits “in the purple drawing-room, which more than ever, in its stuffy dimness, resembled a well-kept family vault, in which the last corpse had just been decently deposited” (360).

The concept of the trapped sensibility also finds expression in Lily's hopeless feeling of the empty life in store for her:

Lily seemed to watch her own figure retreating down vistas of neutral-tinted dullness … When she ceased to amuse Judy Trenor and her friends she would have to fall back on amusing Mrs. Peniston; whichever way she looked she saw only a future of servitude to the whims of others, never the possibility of asserting her own eager individuality.

(162)

Even the physical environment helps to illustrate and reinforce this sense of futility: “The future stretched before her dull and bare as the deserted length of Fifth Avenue, and opportunities showed as meagerly as the few cabs trailing in quest of fares that did not come” (372). This feeling pervades the book, and it is most painfully present on the last night of the heroine's life, just before she takes the overdose of sleeping medicine: “ … the terrible silence and emptiness seemed to symbolize her future—she felt as though the house, the street, the world were all empty, and she alone left sentient in a lifeless universe” (519).

But I have not yet completely depicted the pathos of Lily's situation. In most books written from the naturalistic point of view, the trapped protagonist can expect no sympathy from the external world about him: nature and society seem simply not to care. And so it is with Lily Bart. This idea is succinctly stated early in the book, when the impecunious Lily, bemoaning her losses at cards, notes the large sums that several wealthy women in her party have won:

A world in which such things could be seemed a miserable place to Lily Bart; but then she had never been able to understand the laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations.

(42)

The indifference of society is typified by the impersonal quality which Mrs. Wharton takes pains to impart to it. “Society,” she writes, “is a revolving body which is apt to be judged according to its place in each man's heaven …” (79). Carrying out the figure, she later refers to Lily as “a star fallen from that sky” (461).

Even when “society” is reduced to living human beings, Lily finds that she is up against a blank wall. She comes face to face with this fact in a restaurant, for example:

Her eyes sought the faces about her, craving a responsive glance, some sign of an intuition of her trouble. But the sallow, preoccupied women, with their bags and note-books and rolls of music, were all engrossed in their own affairs. …

(488-489)

The images with which the author implements her expression of this view of life are manifold. In one place the heroine is said to have “the doomed sense of the castaway who has signalled in vain to fleeing sails” (368). In another, Lily asserts sadly, “I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else” (498). On the last night of her life she is possessed by “the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them” (515). Thus, the same force which first shaped Lily and then trapped her now turns a cold and indifferent shoulder to her despairing cries.

The amoral quality implied by such an impersonal society is represented at one point by Mrs. Peniston: “That lady's dread of a scene gave her an inexorableness which the greatest strength of character could not have produced, since it was independent of all considerations of right or wrong (274). Again, the businesslike matrimonial proposition made to Lily by Sim Rosedale, the Jewish parvenu, suggests the materialistic values of a society which seems to operate on a level totally removed from the hampering, tedious necessity of weighing moral alternatives:

It certainly simplified life to view it as a perpetual adjustment, a play of party politics, in which every concession had its recognized equivalent: Lily's tired mind was fascinated by this escape from fluctuating ethical estimates into a region of concrete weights and measures.

(417)

As for concrete details, in The House of Mirth, the reader finds them to be legion. The social life of New York is recorded in this book with “an anthropologist's thoroughness”;⁵ and street addresses, décor, and costume are noted with laboratory precision. A single sentence from the book will suffice to indicate the particular care taken by Mrs. Wharton to be accurate and specific in these matters: “Mrs. Peniston seated herself in her black satin arm-chair tufted with yellow buttons, beside a bead-work table bearing a bronze box with a miniature of Beatrice Cenci on the lid” (273-274). Often the minutiae of physical action are also faithfully recorded. Count the number of trivial details of bodily movement which appear in a few lines of one paragraph:

The pink-faced clock drummed out another hour, and Gerty rose with a start. She had an appointment early the next morning with a district visitor on the East Side. She put out her lamp, covered the fire, and went into her bedroom to undress. … laying aside her clothes with her habitual precision, setting everything in order for the next day. … Her servant did not come till eight o'clock, and she prepared her own tea-tray and placed it beside the bed. Then she locked the door of the flat, extinguished her light and lay down.

(262)

This is numbering the streaks of the tulip in earnest.

Here, then, is the evidence. The molding and determining forces of environment and heredity, the protagonist trapped and crushed by society, an indifferent, apparently amoral universe, and a host of specific details—such are the strains of naturalism which one finds deeply pervading The House of Mirth.

Turning to The Age of Innocence, frequently singled out as the author's greatest work, we find Edith Wharton, fifteen years later, making use of many of the same techniques. True, the setting—New York in the 1870s—is a generation earlier than that used in The House of Mirth, and the milieu described is situated at the very peak of the social pyramid instead of occupying merely the two or three levels just beneath that sanctum sanctorum; yet Mrs. Wharton's method has not been greatly altered.

The story is simple enough: it tells how Newland Archer's love for Ellen Olenska, an American-born woman seeking refuge in New York from an unhappy foreign marriage, is frustrated by social conventions and mores. Propriety is represented by May Welland—Ellen's cousin and the girl Newland marries, and by the families and friends of these principals. Like Lily Bart, Newland Archer is trapped by his environment. Joseph Warren Beach speaks of “the narrow prison of his predicament.”⁶ Osbert Burdett goes further and makes it clear that the environment performs its imprisoning and crushing functions through the agency of the family and through the values and ideals represented by that venerable social institution:

Newland is aware of some dim control, of the invisible net which is his family. … in the ensuing twenty years [after his marriage to May] he learns that his family and his wife had detected his attraction to the stranger, that all along their toils were closing about him, and that he had been a puppet in their quiet determined hands.⁷

Once again the environment, drawing upon inherited beliefs, molds before it ensnares; the irony lies in the fact that Archer himself—like Lily—realizes this but is powerless to combat these forces. Pleading with May for a short engagement, he is aware that he is essentially a conformist:

His heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the things that young men in the same situation were expected to say, and that she was making the answers that instinct and tradition taught her to make—even to the point of calling him original.

“Original! We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. We're like patterns stencilled on a wall. Can't you and I strike out for ourselves, May?”⁸

May herself, the chief instrument in the frustrating of Newland's hopes and schemes with regard to Ellen, is referred to by the author as a “terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in” (40). Supported by social convention, as Arthur Hobson Quinn points out, May “fights with the weapons forged from her innocence, never letting Newland know that she suspects him, but with perfect good breeding shutting from him all avenues of escape.”⁹ Indeed, this very innocence, Newland perceives, is artificial, “cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and long-dead ancestresses” (43).

Newland's sense of being trapped takes the form of a fear that his life will be one of endless routine. He wishes to avoid being overspread by “the green mould of the perfunctory” (125), but, the author tells us, “He had seen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream, though perhaps less ardently, and who had gradually sunk into the placid and luxurious routine of their elders” (125). The day he marries May, “the same black abyss yawned before him and he felt himself sinking into it, deeper and deeper” (187). Later, in an image strongly reminiscent of Lily Bart's visions of the futility of further existence, the full significance of his situation strikes him: “His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen” (228). It should be noted here that Ellen, too, is a victim of the determining circumstances which have woven Newland's destiny: when his mother-in-law remarks, “‘Poor Ellen—she was always a wayward child. I wonder what her fate will be?’” he is tempted to answer, “‘What we've all contrived to make it’” (144).

As in The House of Mirth, the cold, fixed, implacable quality of the universe in general and of society in particular is emphasized. Attempting to dissuade Ellen from seeking a divorce from her European husband, Newland exclaims: “‘Well, then: is it worth while to risk what may be infinitely disagreeable and painful? Think of the newspapers—their vileness! It's all stupid and narrow and unjust—but one can't make over society’” (110). The impersonal nature of the environment is brought out by the very way in which Mrs. Wharton personifies its inanimate but powerful components. “New York was inexorable in its condemnation of business irregularities,” she will assert, for example (271). The classic warning of Newland's mother—“if we don't all stand together, there'll be no such thing as Society left”—also illustrates this point (48).

In the matter of concrete detail, The Age of Innocence is, if anything, even more meticulous than The House of Mirth. Nevius again calls attention to Balzac's influence here:

Balzac's endless curiosity about the minutiae of business and legal transactions, property rights, and the arts of decoration is almost matched by Edith Wharton's passion for the detail of costume and décor; and her notation of the manners of her class is as scrupulous as Balzac's notation of bourgeois manners in César Birotteau or Eugénie Grandet. … It is difficult to conceive of The Age of Innocence ever having been written without the fruitful example of the great French novelist.¹⁰

Mrs. Wharton's description of the van der Luyden drawing-room is typical. It is, she says, a:

high-ceilinged white-walled Madison Avenue drawing-room, with the pale brocaded armchairs so obviously uncovered for the occasion, and the gauze still veiling the ormolu mantel ornaments and the beautiful old carved frame of Gainsborough's “Lady Angelica du Lac.”

Mrs. van der Luyden's portrait by Huntington (in black velvet and Venetian point) faced that of her lovely ancestress.

(49)

This apparently scientific, methodical approach is manifested particularly in Mrs. Wharton's extensive use of technical terms and images from sociology and anthropology. As Lovett notes, references to tribal concepts and taboos fairly abound in this book.¹¹ We learn, for example, that “what was or was not ‘the thing’ played a part as important in Newland Archer's New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago” (2). Newland and May go through the “ritual of ignoring the ‘unpleasant’” (23). A “family council” has to pass on their engagement (26). The van der Luydens, the crème de la crème of New York society, are “mouth-pieces of some remote ancestral authority” (52). And “some deep tribal instinct” warns the family that Newland is no longer firmly behind the conventions (254). Thus, in addition to the determinism so clearly evident in The House of Mirth, we find in The Age of Innocence a somewhat more studiedly scientific orientation, as Mrs. Wharton comes even closer, perhaps, to approximating the methods of the naturalists.

The egocentric, socially ambitious heroine of The Custom of the Country, Undine Spragg, is another product of the environment. Charles Bowen, a minor character whom the author occasionally makes her mouthpiece, delivers a long harangue on the reason for the American woman's inordinate desire for material possessions and then has this to say about Undine: “‘ … she's a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph.’”¹² After several divorces, the heroine marries a French nobleman who later fails to provide the social outlets she had expected. Moreover, she finds herself unable to supply this lack through her own actions because of the rigid code of the French aristocracy which hems her in; she feels “the impossibility of breaking through the mysterious web of traditions, conventions, prohibitions that enclosed her in their impenetrable net-work” (516). Following her usual pattern, Mrs. Wharton shows how Undine, first molded and then imprisoned by her environment, can expect, in times of stress, no sympathy from the heedless universe:

The immense murmur [of Paris] still sounded on, deafening and implacable as some elemental force; and the discord in her fate no more disturbed it than the motor wheels rolling by under the windows were disturbed by the particles of dust that they ground to finer powder as they passed.

(345-346)

The language of the social scientist is also present in this work. Musing on Undine's marriage to Ralph Marvell, a representative of the fast-disappearing old-guard gentility of New York, Bown realizes that Ralph's cultural values have little chance of surviving the materialistic onslaught personified by his wife:

Bowen, at the thought, felt the pang of the sociologist over the individual havoc wrought by every social readjustment: it had so long been clear to him that poor Ralph was a survival, and destined, as such, to go down in any conflict with the rising forces.

(280)

In the cruelly self-centered character of Undine Spragg, the author, in a sense, comes close to dealing with those sordid materials so often associated with naturalism. Here it is not the sordidness of the slums, but, what is basically far more repugnant, that of the spirit. The heroine and her social environment, Burdett writes, “have been coldly but vividly drawn. Undine is mercilessly real. …”¹³

Of the works under consideration, The Fruit of the Tree probably makes the most obvious concessions to free will and individual responsibility, at the expense of the naturalistic determinism which is so salient a factor in the other three books. The whole question of euthanasia is a moral one; and Justine Brent pays a dreadful price for violating the moral law involved when, through an act of her own volition, she puts an end to the physical sufferings of her friend, Bessy Amherst.

Nevertheless, the environment plays an important role in fashioning the chief characters, and, hence, helps to determine the course of the action. For example, there is the case of John Amherst, Bessy's husband, who marries Justine after Bessy dies. Though an enlightened man, he reverts to traditional social attitudes when his second wife reveals to him her part in Bessy's death—“like many men of emancipated thought, he had remained subject to the old conventions of feeling.”¹⁴ Justine, who had depended upon her husband's support, is thus torn for a time by extreme mental anguish.

A discussion of Bessy, a wealthy but somewhat shallow woman, prompts this remark from one of her friends:

Isn't she one of the most harrowing victims of the plan of bringing up our girls in the double bondage of expediency and unreality, corrupting their bodies with luxury and their brains with sentiment, and leaving them to reconcile the two as best they can, or lose their souls in the attempt?

(281)

As Bessy's husband, Amberst attempts to introduce certain social reforms into the operation of the textile mills she owns, but her weakness and vanity hamper him at every step. She is reluctant to give up any of the profits, and he finds himself constantly “battling against the dull unimaginative subservience to personal luxury—the slavery to houses and servants and clothes” (328).

But it is not Amherst alone who is trapped by the selfish, petty spirit of his first wife; for Justine perceives that Bessy herself is a victim of her own narrowness:

After all, there could be no imprisonment as cruel as that of being bounded by a hard small nature. Not to be penetrable at all points to the shifting lights, the wandering music of the world—she could imagine no physical disability so cramping as that. How the little parched soul, in solitary confinement for life, must pine and dwindle in its blind cranny of self-love!

(227)

Bessy's own character seems to be at fault here, but one must not forget that, like Lily Bart, May Welland, and Undine Spragg, Bessy is a product of the system.

Again, the gods are distressingly aloof; when Amberst and Justine endeavor one evening to discuss their problems outside Bessy's well-lighted pleasure-dome at Lynbrook, they feel the chill touch of the impersonal environment:

It was impossible to speak with the same freedom, confronted by that substantial symbol of the accepted order, which seemed to glare down on them in massive disdain of their puny efforts to deflect the course of events. …

(256)

There is a touch of repulsive detail, too, in the description of Amherst's view of the factory and its environs:

With sudden disgust he saw the sordidness of it all—the poor monotonous houses, the trampled grass-banks, the lean dogs prowling in refuse-heaps, the reflection of a crooked gas-lamp in a stagnant loop of the river. …

(22)

On the whole, however, there is too much concern with moral issues involving individual responsibility in The Fruit of the Tree to warrant its being placed very deep in naturalistic territory. Nevertheless, there seems to be little question that it contains marked naturalistic elements, and these serve to throw light on the fuller development of this approach in the other works I have considered.

In discussing elements of naturalism in the novels of Edith Wharton, pertinent comparison may be made between her works and those of Theodore Dreiser, an author whose name is almost synonymous with American naturalism as it was developed early in this century. In Dreiser's works determinism is combined with a great deal of emphasis upon detail, quite often of the sordid variety. For his naturalism is frequently concerned with poverty and squalor; he uses this approach to create a world almost completely removed from Mrs. Wharton's genteel beau monde. The degradation of Hurstwood in Sister Carrie (1900), for example, may have points of contact with the downward slide of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth; but whereas Dreiser finally shows Hurstwood practically rolling in the gutter, we never feel that the sufferings of the elegant Miss Bart can ever be much more than mental: the world of Edith Wharton is always stylish, and when the heroine is reduced to working in a sweatshop (as Lily is for a time), her employer turns out to be an exclusive milliner.

Furthermore, Dreiser's concept of man as the mere plaything of natural forces is formulated and codified, leaving little room for the subjective studies of moral uncertainty which sometimes fill whole pages of Mrs. Wharton's books. In a long quasi-philosophical, quasi-scientific passage in Sister Carrie, for instance, we find these pronouncements:

Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind. Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason. … We see man far removed from the lairs of the jungles, his innate instincts dulled by too near an approach to free-will, his free-will not sufficiently developed to replace his instincts and afford him perfect guidance.¹⁵

To a great extent, then, the human animal is at the mercy, not only of external pressures, but also of his biological drives and his entire physical make-up. Thus, explaining Hurstwood's worsening temper, Dreiser makes this curious statement:

Now, it has been shown experimentally that a constantly subdued frame of mind produces certain poisons in the blood, called katastates, just as virtuous feelings of pleasure and delight produce helpful chemicals called anastates. The poisons generated by remose inveigh against the system, and eventually produce marked physical deterioration. To these Hurstwood was subject.

(362)

Economic necessity plays an important part in determining the course of the heroine's life in Sister Carrie, and this factor looms large again in Jennie Gerhardt (1911). As with Carrie, it is financial need which ultimately underlies Jennie's decision to accept the role of kept woman. Yet in this latter book social determinism of a type we have found employed by Mrs. Wharton is also powerfully operative; for the socially prominent Lester Kane finds that public opinion will not tolerate his liaison with Jennie:

The race spirit, or social avatar, the “Zeitgeist” as the Germans term it, manifested itself as something having a system in charge. … He could not fly in the face of it. He could not deliberately ignore its mandates. The people of his time believed that some particular form of social arrangement was necessary, and unless he complied with that he could, as he saw, readily become a social outcast.¹⁶

However, whereas individual members of Mrs. Wharton's society, such as Mrs. Archer in The Age of Innocence, are often conscious instruments of social forces, Dreiser's characters are victims of blind powers which never seem to be voluntarily and deliberately aided by particular human beings.

On the whole, in the face of Dreiser's purer naturalism, his apparently scientific approach to human behavior, it may seem difficult to attach much importance to the naturalistic elements in the refined novels of manners by Edith Wharton. But we must take care not to be blinded by the grit and grime of Dreiser's sordid details. The difference between his naturalistic methods and those of Edith Wharton is, in the last analysis, largely a matter of degree, not of kind. The principle is basically the same. When Nevius declares that the quality which imparts lasting life to The House of Mirth is, as in Dreiser's novels, “the spectacle of a lonely struggle with the hostile forces of environment,”¹⁷ he is, I think, pointing up this unescapable conclusion. The fact that Mrs. Wharton's characters are trapped in gilded drawing-rooms, whereas Dreiser's are often imprisoned in the slums, is of minor significance in an over-all appraisal. The pathetic figures in her books are molded, cornered and crushed by impersonal forces beyond their control; and, in so far as this is true, Edith Wharton may be said to be at least a part-time student in the school of naturalism.

Notes

1. References, respectively, to Blake Nevius, Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction (Los Angeles, 1953), p. 57; Ibid., p. 57 and F. T. Cooper, Some American Story Tellers (New York, 1911), p. 174.

2. References, respectively, to N. Elizabeth Monroe, The Novel and Society: A Critical Study of the Modern Novel (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1941), p. 117; Robert Morse Lovett, Edith Wharton (New York, 1925), pp. 18-19; and P. H. Boynton, “American Authors of Today,” English Journal, XII, 30 (January, 1923).

3. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York, 1905), p. 7. All references are to this edition.

4. V. S. Pritchett, “Books in General,” New Statesman and Nation, XLV, 489 (April, 1953).

5. Loc. cit.

6. Joseph Warren Beach, The Twentieth Century Novel (New York, 1932), p. 302.

7. Osbert Burdett, “Contemporary American Authors: Edith Wharton,” London Mercury, XIIII, 59 (November, 1925).

8. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York, 1920), p. 81. All references are to this edition.

9. Arthur Hobson Quinn, American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey (New York, 1936), p. 567.

10. Nevius, Study (above, note 1), p. 185.

11. Lovett (above, not 2), p. 47.

12. Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (New York, 1913), p. 208. All references are to this edition.

13. Burdett (above, note 7), p. 57.

14. Edith Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree (New York, 1907), p. 525. All references are to this edition.

15. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York, 1917), p. 83. All references are to this edition.

16. Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt (New York, 1911), p. 374.

17. Nevius, Study (above, note 1), p. 59.