EDITH WHARTON’S PASSION FOR architecture was foundational, evidenced by her very first book, The Decoration of Houses, a non-fiction. Wharton disdained the merely decorative in rooms and buildings, she disdained it in her fiction. Her writing is severe, deliberate in its attacks and restraints, and lives in every detail and in the structure. Wharton’s novels and stories move from small moments to big ones (she manages to merge the two), from openness of opportunity and hope to inhibition and tragic limitation, from life’s transitory pleasures and possibilities to its dull and sharp pains and immobilizations. Traps and entrapment, psychological and societal, life’s dead ends become the anxious terminals for Wharton’s literary search for freedom and pleasure. In her book, pleasure is freedom’s affect.
The architect Wharton is always conscious of the larger structure, with her meaning central in each scene. She meticulously furnishes a room, so that all the pieces and lines in it function as emotional or psychological props, conditions or obstacles. Like cages or containers, her interiors keep characters in a place, often an internalized place. They enter rooms, meet, sit, talk, then Wharton lets them find the walls, the limits. She observes them in houses or on the street in chance meetings, and they fix each other—the gaze is her métier—to a moment in time, a truth (about the other or themselves), to a seat in the social theater. Everything that happens happens with effect, building her edifice.
Wharton selected her words with a scalpel, as if with or without them her patient would live, die; she was precise in her renderings, otherwise the construction might fall, and other such metaphors. Her writing isn’t ever labored, though. Yet nothing’s simple, or simply an object, and never just an ornament. The ornament is redolent and may even be causal.
Think of “The Bunner Sisters,” the poor women whose fate hung on the repair of a timepiece. A twisted tale, but then Wharton is perverse, and sophisticated and surprising in her perverseness. Her version of the exchange of women among men might be “The Other Two.” Mr. Waythorn meets, not by choice, his bride’s two former husbands, men he didn’t really know about but who are now in his life (have been in his wife), and whose existence confounds his sense of right, order, possession. At the story’s end, Waythorn arrives home and finds the other two there. His wife, charming, composed, serves them tea. “She dropped into her low chair by the tea table, and the two visitors, as if drawn by her smile, advanced to receive the cups she held out. She glanced about for Waythorn, and he took the third cup with a laugh.” End of story. She’s in a lowly position, a vessel, the third cup, but he’s the third cup too. If who he is is what he possesses, the joke’s on him. He grasps that.
Wharton’s stately, measured rhythms let the reader linger over a sentence, then move along, languidly. One may be stopped dead by some piece of psychological astuteness, a blunt idea, by brutal clarity, or staggered by an almost excessive, because perfect, image. Slowly, Wharton draws beautiful portraits, deceptive pictures. (I sometimes wonder if Wharton ever felt rushed by anything, then I remember Morton Fullerton and her love letters to him, that rush late in her life.) Beautiful language serves—like tea, an elegant service—ironic and difficult ends. It lures one into a network of sinister complications and, transformed, beauty leads to dreariness and viciousness. The reader will be torn by the loss of that plenitude, by failure, by hopelessness.
But Wharton is economical about elegance, stringent about lustiness, display, every embellishment. Never extravagant. Maybe it’s because she understood position and space, knew she didn’t really have much room, no room for profligacy. She couldn’t run from reality, even if she wanted to (and I think she did), so she had no room to waste, certainly no words to waste. The inessential might obscure the clarity she sought. She wouldn’t let herself go, let her writing go. She understood the danger, she understood any form of complicity. Her often privileged protagonists fatally conspire with society against themselves, become common prey to its dictates, helpless to disown or resist what they despise in themselves and it. Wharton was profoundly aware that, seen by others, she was free to do what she pleased, a privileged woman dangling the world on a rich string. And wrote, perhaps explained, in The House of Mirth, “She was 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.”
Architecture articulates space, the movement within walls and without them, delineates the relationships of the built to the unbuilt and surroundings. Wharton’s prose makes its own space. Her ideas were modern—she wanted to clear the house of nineteenth-century vestiges, stuffed chairs and stuffed shirts, to question conventions of all sorts, numbing traditions, but she was not a card-carrying modernist. Wharton was skeptical about the new, not positive that progress was progress, not sanguine about the future or the joys of speed and flight, as the Futurists were. She took off and looked back over her shoulder at the past. (Maybe she was presciently postmodern.) She doesn’t fit comfortably into the modernist canon.
It’s one of those uncanny pieces of fate—less colloquially, historical overdetermination—that her reputation, her literary place, is inflected not just by her idiosyncratic relationship to modernism but also by three biographical facts: she was female, upper class and Henry James’s younger friend. Not mentioning James in relation to her is not mentioning the naked emperor in the room which she did not design. Her critical reputation stands mostly in his large shadow. (Her primary biographer R.W. B. Lewis’s first sentence in his introduction to The House of Mirth begins “Henry James … ”) Few U.S. writers who are women make it, as the song goes, to standing in the shadows of love, critical love. The ironist Wharton might have appreciated, in her perverse way, the secondary or minor position. (Perhaps in the way Deleuze and Guattari appreciate minor literature.) Ironically, undidactically, Wharton teaches that separate isn’t equal; difference shouldn’t be but usually is hierarchical, and change in any establishment or tradition is, like her sentences, slow.