The Threads of Edith Wharton's Short Stories by Mónica Rodríguez

 On Edith Wharton's Short Stories

by Mónica Rodríguez

 Théobald Chartran (French, 1849 –1907), James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959), 1901. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical  Society, Gift of James Hazen Hyde, 1949.1

Source: https://www.nyhistory.org/exhibitions/beautye28099s-legacy-gilded-age-portraits-america

Edith Wharton published Tales of Men and Ghosts in 1910, following the popular trend of ghost stories started by 19^th-century American writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Washington Irving. Henry James, whom Edith greatly admired, also wrote ghost fiction, namely, The Turn of the Screw and the novella The Jolly Corner.

Wharton writes mostly about the society she was born into, that of "The Gilded Age" so masterly –and derisively- depicted by Mark Twain in his eponymous novel. This bourgeoning world was led by the New York "aristocracy", i.e., that of the powerful patron families, ruthless and driven by appearance and status. Wharton's stories include adept character studies of the individuals living in this society: the dismissive wealthy members of highest echelons, the upstarts longing to be accepted into the circles of "old money", the "has-beens", the dilettantes in endless pursuit of public acclaim…

The four stories selected for this study have a male protagonist whereas women play a noticeable peripheral role and are often described through the somewhat distorted lens of the men in the story. Wharton does not refrain from transcribing here what she has surely heard –or even said- about certain types of "dull" women, so characteristic in the despotic and harsh New York society she knew extremely well: "At eighteen she had been pretty, and as full of enthusiasm as he. Now she was sour, trivial, insignificant—she had missed her chance of life".

As mentioned earlier, all four stories belong to the literary tradition of "ghost stories" or "ghost fiction". It is worth noting that, although there aren't any ghosts or supernatural phenomena in them, all the protagonists are "haunted" by an obsession, by an unattainable desire that might well be their undoing.

Thus, in The Bolted Door, we are presented with an aspiring playwright who craves fame and recognition but attains neither. Faced with his inability to kill himself, he resorts to confessing a crime he had committed several years earlier in hopes of being sentenced to death and embarks on a desperate quest to be believed… but only to fail again.  In this tale, we find echoes of the "psychological terror" of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories as it is highly reminiscent of some of his tales, for instance, The Tell-Tale Heart or The Black Cat: "Granice was overcome by the futility of any farther attempt to inculpate himself. He was chained to life –a 'prisoner of consciousness'… in the glaring night-hours, when his brain seemed ablaze, he was visited by a sense of his fixed identity of his irreducible, inexpungable selfness, keener, more insidious, more unescapable, than any sensation he had ever known… the feeling that something material was clinging to him, was on his hands and face, and in his throat… it was the sense of his own loathed personality that stuck to his like some thick viscous substance."

Remarkably, the themes of double identity and feelings of psychological alienation, so present is this story ("he sometimes had the mysterious sense of a living metempsycosis, a furtive passage from one identity to another") are to be found as well in Henry James' celebrated ghost story The Jolly Corner, with multiple references to the main character's "alter-ego", "adversary", "his other self" or "presence". Another common trait in both stories is the fact that houses or rooms act as a sort of echo chamber of the protagonist's state of mind: "[Granice] looked slowly about the library, and every object in it stared back at his with a stale unescapable familiarity. How sick he was of looking at that room! It was as dull as the face of a wife one has wearied of." "The long thoroughfare stretched before him, dim and deserted, like an ancient avenue of tombs. But from Denver's house a friendly beam fell on the pavement."

In His Father's Son, the main character's obsession is shown in the sublimation of his yearning for elegance, refinement and social acceptance in his son, whose "ability to do well almost equalled his gift of looking well" although he was, in his father's words, "not a genius". In this way, the coarse protagonist "vibrated exquisitely in response to every imaginative appeal… moved in an enchanted inward world people with all the figures of romance… and to see his vision of himself suddenly projected on the outer world in the shape of a brilliant popular conquering son, seemed to give to that image a belated objective reality." Once more, the alter-ego leitmotif is aptly employed to dwell on the protagonist's elusive aspirations: "He recalled the vision now; and with it came, as usual, its ghostly double: the vision of his young self bending above such a white shoulder and such shining hair."

The abundant imagery of the dichotomy between external appearance and the inner self ("the souls of short-thick men… souls thus encased do not reveal themselves to the casual scrutiny as delicate emotional instruments") echoes back another masterpiece in the Victorian supernatural genre, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.

The tale Daunt Diana introduces us to an art collector, a scholar compelled to lower himself in order to survive by "expounding 'the antiquities' to cultured travellers… how it must have seared his soul!" Even when he has entered the circle of the wealthy, he regards the visitors to his newly-acquired collection with supreme disdain: "the worst of all are the ones who know… and yet wouldn't know a Phidias if it stood where they hadn't expected it."

In line with the other stories, he is also a "haunted" man, hankering for the possession of perfect beauty: "he had made himself into this delicate register of perceptions and sensations… only to find that the beauty which alone could satisfy him was unattainable—that he was never to know the last deep identifications which only possession can give." He is not only obsessed with the ideal of finding perfect beauty in art but, crucially, with possessing it, with the prerogative of exclusive enjoyment. In this sense, the kernel of this story powerfully brings to mind another one of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, The Oval Portrait, in which a painter transfers his wife's youthful beauty to her portrait ("This is indeed Life itself"), causing her untimely death in the process. As a side note, this tale has also been connected to Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

In the last short story, The Debt, we meet a maladroit student ("an awkward lout") whom a renowned professor has taken under his wing after perceiving "his gift of accurate observation" although it is also humorously remarked that "he had never known a lad... who gave such promise of uniting an aptitude for general ideas with the plodding patience of the accumulator of facts."

This character shares some striking features with the art collector in the previous story. Thus, the biology student is depicted as "a thinking machine, a highly specialized instrument of precision, the result of a long series of 'adaptations' […] he seemed to have shed his blundering, encumbering personality and come to life as a disembodied intelligence"; interestingly enough, the art collector had undergone a similar process of autodidacticism and adaptation: "during those early years, when he had time to brood over trifles and note imperceptible differences, he gradually sharpened his instinct, […] he had made himself into this delicate register of perceptions and sensations--as far above the ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific registering instrument is beyond the rough human senses."

Naturally, this character is also "haunted" by a fixation, in his case, the relentless pursuit of the scientific truth, even if that means going against the ideas upheld by his beloved mentor. In his conversation with the late professor's son, he graciously acknowledges his tremendous debt towards his protector, but he states that he must "carry on the light", noting that "Men like him [the professor] are the masters, not the servants, of their theories. They respect an idea only as long as it's of use to them, when its usefulness ends they chuck it out".

To conclude, there is a defining feature that pervades all of Edith Wharton's work, her brilliant use of ironic reversal, a tradition firmly associated with Guy the Maupassant's short stories, which Edith Wharton had eagerly read following Henry James' advice.

Irony is then used to establish a divide between what characters wish and what they finally get. This device is masterly exemplified in Daunt Diana's protagonist's predicament: "It was, in short, the old tragedy of the discrepancy between a man's wants and his power to gratify them."

The Bolted Door, a superb comic reversal of the "detective story" genre, shows a man as "ineffectual" as the sister so ungraciously referred to inasmuch as he has failed in each and every one of his life's endeavours.

His father's son also resorts to irony and reversal in presenting a comic transposition of The picture of Dorian Gray. It is fascinating to note that the protagonist's son "embodies" all his father's aspirations of beauty and refinement in a sort of enhanced version of the original self. Irony is also felt in the final twist as this son ultimately disowns his parentage by foolishly assuming that the man on the portrait is his "real" father.

In Daunt Diana and The Debt, the protagonists' driving force lies in their unflinching pursuit of the ideals of perfect beauty and knowledge, respectively. In the case of the art collector, he eventually succeeds in acquiring the coveted Daunt collection… only to realize that possession is not worthwhile without the excitement of the chase. The biology student, in turn, has attained academic recognition after succeeding his mentor and published his masterwork "The Arrival of the Fittest" (note the ironic undertones in the choice of words) but he philosophically reflects that all his endeavours are pointless as he is just meant to "carry on the light", as his master had done before him, and that both of them had always been expected to "drop and hand them on."

Be careful what you wish for,

you might get it later in life.

James Joyce