FATHER AND SON RAMBLING IN SOCIETY
by Belén Tizón
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"His Father’s Son" depicts Wharton’s detachment from social expectations about economic status and social constraints.
On one hand, we see a father who has no other aspiration than to increase the success of his company (“outwardly devoting his life to the manufacture and dissemination of Grew’s Secure Suspender Buckle” p. 2). On the other hand, Mr Grew exerts control over his child to prevent him from reproducing roles. His inner struggles make him dream of a son triumphing in society in all contexts.
Wharton is an author who constantly denounces the expected social status of people and how devastating it could be for a person. In this short story, Mr Grew despises his mediocrity, and social complex and remains hopeful in his heir (“Ronald in fact constituted his father’s one escape from the impenetrable element of mediocrity” p.2)
Her obstinate refusal to social constraints is also represented in the cities mentioned in the short story. While Wingfield seems to be a dull, not prosperous place (cf. description at the beginning of the novel), Brooklyn is a city close to New York, giving him the chance to have a livelier social life in theatres and also the kind of “society” the people living there constitute, a different standard (“had found their manners simpler, their voices more agreeable, their views more consonant with his own…”).
In the relationship between father and son, we can see the conflict between tradition and change, the father urges his son’s change and celebrates any performance contrary to stagnation (“Mr G. always affirmed to himself that the boy was not a genius [..] he had managed to be several things at once-writing poetry in the college magazine, playing delightfully..”). Criticism of tradition and passivity is also transmitted through the figure of the mother, nonetheless, we can appreciate some kind of female irony judging the role of women in the American society of the time.
