An Analysis of Three Women from Three Works by Edith Wharton - Essay Example

an analysis of three women from three works by edith wharton Oscar Wilde once said that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. While this may be the spark of some debates, it is nonetheless true that an author's works are a reflection of his life. For what experiences can an author draw upon to paint his own picture of life other than his own Edith Wharton's works are seen by scholars as "partially autobiographical sketches of the kinds of people she grew up with" ("Domestic Goddess"). Born Edith Newbold Jones, to a wealthy and high-profiled family in New York on January 24, 1862, Wharton was both an observer and a critic of the privileged circles of her time. Her works display her inborn wit and are characterized for their humor, incisiveness and uneventfulness (Wikipedia). As a child, Wharton lived overseas until the age of six when her family settled in New York. She was not formally schooled, but she educated herself by receiving instruction from her governess and by reading through her father's collection of books (Dwight and Winner). In 1885, aged 23, she married Edward Robbins Wharton, but the marriage was tumultuous and unhappy. The marriage ended in divorce in 1913, on grounds of her husband's public infidelity and degrading health. Wharton's first work published, The Decoration of Houses, is not a work of fiction, but a work on architecture and landscaping. In the course of her life, Wharton has traveled extensively through Continental Europe, eventually settling in France. From France, she observed the battles of World War I from the frontlines and wrote Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort, a series of articles about the fighting. She was involved actively in the Red Cross and with the refugees, and was given the French Legion of Honor award for her efforts. In a writing career spanning forty years, Wharton would produce more than forty volumes of work. Her first work published, The Decoration of Houses, is not a work of fiction, but a book on architecture and landscaping. She is best known for the novel The Age of Innocence, a work that made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. According to Elizabeth Ammons, in her experience, "students divide sharply on Wharton. Some love her work, responding particularly to the elegance and precision of her prose and the sharpness of her wit; others don't like her at all, finding it hard to "get into" her fiction because she seems so cold, the prose seems so detailed and self-conscious, and the subject matter is so elite" ("Edith Wharton"). Said Dwight and Winner, Edith Wharton "was a born storyteller, whose novels are justly celebrated for their vivid settings, satiric wit, ironic style, and moral seriousness," whose works contain characters are "[o]ften portrayed as tragic victims of cruel social conventions, they are trapped in bad relationships or confining circumstances." The three works chosen for this paper, The Other Two, The Muse's Tragedy and The Pomegranate Seed, are works of Wharton that provide examples to this statement. One such character trapped by conventions is Mrs. Alice Waythorn from The Other Two. The story is told from the point of view by Alice's third husband Mr. Waythorn, whose glowing fascination for his charming bride then turned to doubt about her personality and the fact that she was married twice before him. It is a doubt that grew each time he encountered her former husbands, to wane into numbness with familiarity with them, and to be resolved in the most humorous and unexpected of turns. The Muse's Tragedy, aptly named, is the story of a woman named Mary Anerton, who was seen by the society she moves in as the muse of the renowned poet Vincent Rendle, and immortalized in his "Sonnets to Silvia." While the public whispered of the great love affair between poet and muse, which lent fame - and after the poet's death, authority on his works - to Mrs. Anerton, the truth is that the love affair existed only in Mrs. Anerton's mind, the fruit of her unspoken longing for the poet, a love that was implied to but never returned by Rendle. Later on, after the poet's death, the muse meets Lewis Danyers, a fan of the poet and a young writer himself. A sojourn in Venice supposedly to discuss a book on Rendle turned into a short-lived love affair, which ends when Mrs. Anerton rejects Danyers' proposal to marry him, thinking that what Danyers feels for her is only a fascination for the muse, and not the woman. In The Pomegranate Seed, Charlotte Ashby, the second wife of a New York lawyer named Kenneth Ashby, struggles with the shadows of her husband's first wife, whose influence continues to mark their marriage even after her death. She despairs over a series of letters written to her husband by a person whose identity Kenneth would not disclose to her, even after an ugly and bitter confrontation. The story ends with a Gothic ring. How do Alice Waythorn, Mary Anerton and Charlotte Ashby fit in the general mold Edith Wharton has created for her characters Ammons listed the major themes of Wharton's writings. She said that: Major themes in Wharton's work include the effects of class on both behavior and consciousness (divorce, for example, often horrifies the established upper class as much for its offense against taste as for its violation of moral standards); the American belief in progress as actual and good (many "advances" Wharton welcomed; others she was contemptuous of); the contrast between European and American customs, morality, and sensibility; the confinement of marriage, especially for women; women's desire for and right to freedom in general, and particularly sexual and economic freedom, and the reality that, usually, the desire and right are thwarted; the preference of powerful, white, usually upper-class men for childish dependent women; the complexity and pain of relationships between women within patriarchal culture, including (and especially) rivalry and animosity among women. Alice Waythorn is the representation of a woman living through the consequences of not just one but two divorces. Mr. Waythorn, much aware of the previous ties to Alice's name, married Alice because "he had been drawn to her by the unperturbed gayety which kept her fresh and elastic at an age when most women's activities are growing either slack or febrile" and "[h]er composure was restful to him; it acted as ballast to his somewhat unstable sensibilities." In short, he adored her. However, he began to have doubts about his wife's personality when Alice's first husband, Mr. Haskett, started visiting their household to see Lily, Alice's daughter from her first marriage. The idea of Mr. Haskett stepping into the threshold of his household "filled him with a physical repugnance." Edith Wharton wrote that "amid the multiplied contacts of modern existence there were a thousand chances to one that he would run against one or the other, yet he found himself as much disturbed by his brief encounter with Haskett as though the law had not obligingly removed all difficulties in the way of their meeting." Waythorn was under the impression that Alice left Haskett because he was a brutish man who hurt his wife, but he was surprised to find Haskett, upon meeting him, "a small effaced-looking man." Mr. Waythorn was equally disturbed by the fact that business brought him in close proximity to Gus Varick, Alice's second husband. Although they were acquaintances, and that he is very much aware of Alice's connection to Varick before he married her, he began to feel ill-at-ease whenever they encounter each other publicly. Waythorn is somewhat insecure of Varick and he thinks of him as a man that is "easy without being undignified, and Waythorn was conscious of cutting a much less impressive figure." These encounters with Alice's former husbands made Mr. Waythorn look differently at his wife. It upset him that Alice lied about seeing Mr. Haskett over Lily, telling him instead that only the governess saw him, that Alice had no problems speaking with Varick in social gatherings. He began to realize that the situations Alice had been in had made her pliant, and it "sickened him." He began to think that she "was 'as easy as an old shoe' - a shoe that too many feet had worn." However, he began to "ask himself if it were not better to own a third of a wife who knew how to make a man happy than a whole one who had lacked opportunity to acquire the art." It was a question that was answered by Alice herself at the last scene of the story, when she entered the library and saw that all her husbands were in there. She handled the situation with grace and aplomb. Mary Anerton is a woman who strived to love and be loved by her poet, Vincent Rendle. In the eyes of the world, he loved her, because she is "the Silvia of Vincent Rendle's immortal sonnet-cycle, the Mrs. A. of the 'Life and Letters.' Her name was enshrined in some of the noblest English verse of the nineteenth century - and of all past or future centuries, as Danyers, from the stand-point of a maturer judgment, still believed." But the truth is that there is no great love affair that existed between the poet and his muse. Mrs. Anerton reveals that she is merely Rendle's intellectual equal, that "the intellectual sympathy between us was almost complete; my mind must have been to him (I fancy) like some perfectly tuned instrument on which he was never tired of playing." To Rendle, Mary Anerton was just someone who always understood. This piece of truth is something Mrs. Anerton bore with despair. She relished the thought that people thought that Rendle was in love with her because it makes her think that Rendle might probably be indeed in love with her. "You can't imagine the excuses a woman will invent for a man's not telling her that he loves her - pitiable arguments that she would see through at a glance if any other woman used them!" Mrs. Anerton wrote to Lewis Danyers. The tragedy of the muse is that, despite what society thinks, the "love affair" somewhat destroyed Mrs. Anerton's belief in herself. She wrote to Danyers: I had to find out what some other man thought of me. From the hour of our first meeting to the day of his death I never looked at any other man, and never noticed whether any other man looked at me. When he died, five years ago, I knew the extent of my powers no more than a baby. Was it too late to find out Should I never know why Danyers' avowal of love for Mrs. Anerton made her discover that she does have a sort of power over a man. But the next question that came to her was that was it because she was Mary Anerton or because she was Silvia She rejected Danyers' marriage proposal because at first she thought Danyers cared for Silvia, not for herself. But later on, she reasoned that Danyers is too young to realize it for himself. The last of them, Charlotte Ashby, portrays a woman who is forced to live in the shadow of another woman, enough to bring out a form of animosity that later kind of alienated her husband. Kenneth Ashby is described as a man totally enamored of his first wife, and Charlotte's friends told her that: Kenneth's never looked at another woman since he first saw Elsie Corder. During all the years of their marriage he was more like an unhappy lover than a comfortably contented husband. He'll never let you move an armchair or change the place of a lamp; and whatever you venture to do, he'll mentally compare with what Elsie would have done in your place. Charlotte accepted her place in Kenneth's house, as well as that of Elsie, but she wanted to own Kenneth's present and future, and even become sovereign of his past. That is why she despaired when the letters, enclosed in gray envelopes and written in a feminine hand with masculine strokes, started coming, the first one arriving on the very day Charlotte and her husband returned from their honeymoon. It despaired her because she thought it was from another woman, that it was from Kenneth's mistress; the reason that made her think thus is that Kenneth's demeanor changes every time he receives one of the letters, and that Charlotte herself caught Kenneth kissing one of them. Charlotte confronted Kenneth with this once, but Kenneth refused to reveal the identity of the letters' sender. The confrontation resulted in a bitter argument; to Charlotte, it was an argument that "seemed to change him into a stranger, a mysterious incomprehensible being whom no argument or entreaty of hers could reach. The curious thing was that she was aware in him of no hostility or even impatience, but only of a remoteness, an inaccessibility, far more difficult to overcome. She felt herself excluded, ignored, blotted out of his life." Charlotte grew afraid. She thought that "her husband was being dragged away from her into some mysterious bondage, and that she must use up her last atom of strength in the struggle for his freedom, and for hers." She thought she did it when she persuaded Kenneth to go away with her, away from those letters, but the feeling of victory was short-lived. The identity of the letters' sender was implied in an eerie way, and that Kenneth had gone away. These three women are pictures that Edith Wharton painted of the women of her time: strong and resilient in the face of adversity and the confining dictates of society. It was a time when women are trying to come out of the mold society has formed for them, and it was a struggle that Wharton herself, with her divorce, her love affairs, her position in society, knew too well. As Dwight and Winner put it, Edith Wharton's "life stands as an example of the obstacles that a woman of her time and place had to overcome to find self-realization." works cited Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton. 7 April 2006. Domestic Goddess:Edith Wharton. 2003. 7 April 2006. Dwight, Eleanor, and Viola Hopkins Winner. Edith Wharton's World: A Portrait of People and Places. 7 April 2006. Wharton, Edith. "The Muse's Tragedy." Scribner's Magazine. 1899: 77-84. Wharton, Edith. "The Other Two." The Descent of Man and Other Stories. 7 April 2006. Wharton, Edith. "The Pomegranate Seed." The Saturday Evening Post. 25 April 1931. Wikipedia. Edith Wharton. 21 December 2002. 7 April 2006. Read More