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Edith Wharton at The Mount, the country house she designed
and had built in 1902 |
This was a very disappointing read. I read two or three
books by Wharton when I was much younger, but perhaps I am more discerning
today. What was wrong with this book? I can think of several reasons.
Lack of characterisation
I couldn’t believe that the main characters, May Welland,
Newland Archer, and Ellen Olenska, could carry the weight of thought that Wharton
tried to invest in them. In fact, of these three, only Newland Archer’s thinking
is revealed. The novel could have been written in the first person by him.
Perhaps this lack of characterisation is a problem with a
genre where if you decide to write about boring characters trapped in their
environment, the book risks being boring itself.
The book attempts to present a Jamesian moment of decision:
will Newland Archer desert his wife for an adulterous affair with Countess
Olenska? But we feel he is too slight for us to bother much either way.
I was fascinated by the minutiae of New York life for the
super-rich around 1890. At that time, it appears that if it didn’t happen in
New York society, it wasn’t worth thinking about – at least, for the lucky
participants. A social whirl of balls, opera, summer houses in Newport (where
Wharton also had a house) but a life of complete philistinism, a cultural
desert. Plus the way the men were able, if they wished, to run a double life
with the tacit acceptance of their behaviour, clearly known about by the women,
but not mentioned.
I was not impressed by Wharton’s feeble attempt to depict a
bohemian artist, the tutor M. Riviere. Clearly she has a fondness for things
cultural and presents this as a foil to the empty lives of the rich – but Riviere’s character is as shallow as the main
three roles.
The love scenes descend into romantic fiction, and resemble
romantic fiction in that these characters are no better drawn or believable
than the heroes of Mills & Boon.
How is Countess Olenska so notable, so individual? Newland
is struck that she calls one of the wealthy relatives’ houses “gloomy” (“the
words gave him an electric shock, for few were the rebellious spirits who would
have dared to call the stately home of the van der Luydens gloomy”). In contrast,
he states, of her rented house “It’s delicious – what you’ve done here”. But we
never hear quite what she has done; she remains shallow, as are the other characters,
since we have no evidence otherwise.
Nor was I impressed by the plot. It is very unlikely that as
a lawyer, Newland Archer would be given a case involving his own family. But his
legal work seems so undemanding of his time that perhaps it doesn’t really
matter. There is no problem in him having time off for his emotional life,
Perhaps the lovingly detailed description of East Coast life
is to be expected. Wharton was born into
a rich New York family; she privately published a collection of poems, and “came
out” as a debutante. For much of her life she lived financially secure, from a
legacy and her husband’s income. I would have imagined her experience in the
First World War would have hardened her, yet this novel was only published in
1920.
Nostalgia?
Perhaps the book is, as some have claimed, an exercise in
nostalgia, for a world that would never return. However, if this was New York
in the 1890s, I want nothing of it. This is an existence totally dependent on
slavery; Olenska’s visit to Boston is noted because she did not have a servant
with her. She states it wasn’t worth it for only two day: “For two days it was
not worth while to bring her”. Newland sees this as “unconventional”. Olenska
is unusual in having a named servant, but one maid in the novel has no name except
the description “mulatto”: we first hear of a “a mulatto maid-servant in a
bright turban”. There is no description of the ethnic background of any of the
other slaves, except for Olenska’s Nastasia, so why the repeated mention of “mulatto”?
It must have some significance that escapes me (and escapes the World’s
Classics edition editor).
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