Mirrors, Sickrooms, and Dead Letters: Wharton’s Thwarted Gothic Love Plots

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ Wharton might have also wondered about the Internet and its role in the Gothic return of her missing book, as her last Gothic story, “All Souls’” shows her contempt for modern communication—the phone and the radio—as being one of the reasons the ghostly imagination has disappeared. See also Wharton’s preface to the Scribner ghost stories about the wireless and the cinema obliterating the existence of ghosts, who necessitate silence.

² See the extended discussion by Jean Blackall Frantz on Emily Brontë and Wharton. Jane Beer and Avril Horner read “Miss Mary Pask” as a parody of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Kathy A. Fedorko looks at both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in passing, but the latter mainly in the context (and only briefly) in relationship to Wharton’s Summer. Jenni Dyman alludes to Emily Brontë in passing in relationship to two of Wharton’s ghost stories. Emily Orlando notices some similarities between Jane Eyre and Wharton’s “Mr. Jones” in a note (223).

Although John Seelye does not discuss Jane Eyre in the context of Wharton, he does show how nineteenth and early-twentieth century adolescent novels by such authors as Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Eleanor H. Porter appropriated “coming of age” themes from Jane Eyre.

³ Bronfen is not as sympathetic as recent critics to Bertha; she sees her not as a maligned displaced Creole, but as a powerful vampirelike and sadistic female figure (221), probably in relationship to Brontë’s actual description of Bertha as a vampire; cf. Jean Rhys’s more sensitive recreation of Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea. As others have noted, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the “Jane” figure in her famous ghost story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” where the wife is ultimately seen as the Bertha figure, who is aware of her husband and some “Jane” locking her up.

⁴ Susan Goodman has described the missing love plots in her novels as reflecting Wharton’s own life: “Without ever rejecting the inevitability and the rightness of marriage, her heroines resembled their author. Their wish for a perfect soulmate, coupled with their inability to envision other structures for their lives, necessitate painful compromises” (8).

⁵ After Jane is overcome by horror at finding out at the altar about Rochester’s first wife, she gets a supernatural message from the dead mother to flee the premises. There seems to be a connection beyond the grave to the mother as guide, one that in her own life, Wharton was missing.

⁶ Hermione Lee and Cynthia Griffin Wolf suggest that it was in the period of Wharton’s difficult relationship with Mort Fullerton that this story was written; obviously, the idea from an unreciprocated show or passion would fit here, as he was also being devious with another woman in his life, his wife. Jenni Dyman refers back to Lewis’s biography and quotes him: “Deering . . . is almost to a detail an ironic though tempered portrait of Morton Fullerton” (63).

⁷ Many critics have noted Wharton’s desire to not be associated with other contemporary women writers or her American predecessors Jewett and Freeman. See the extended discussion by Deborah Lindsay Williams in her book Not in Sisterhood. See also my discussion of Wharton’s similarity to the Gothic New England women writers she derides (“Bourgeois Sexuality and the Gothic Plot”).

⁸ Singley and Sweeney discuss the anxious power of authorship for women: “In this ghost story, Edith Wharton purloins both the ‘letter’ and the power it represents; but she also reflects her own ambivalence—and that of the female reader—toward the possession of such power” (24). Candace Waid also sees the woman writer “as like Persephone, speaking as a ghost from the other side” (203). I, however, feel that the wife in “Pomegranate Seed” has a terrific power—as she can rewrite the script of her husband’s life/death. She calls him back like a siren.

⁹ It is not surprising that the library is a focal point for the woman wanting knowledge in Wharton’s ghost stories (especially, in the context of “Pomegranate Seed” and “Afterward”). In Wharton’s own life, the library was a special place where she could commune in secret with the great classics of the past in her father’s library; her unimaginative mother, however, did not want her to read novels, so those came later.

Though I came up with the idea of “dead letters” in my title by thinking both of Bartleby and of the dead letters in many of Wharton’s ghost stories, I later found a reference to “dead letters” in an earlier review of Wharton’s Ghosts, by William Rose Benet (1937), who preferred the ghost stories about men to “the lady’s tales of mere ‘fetches’ and witches and letters from the dead” (quoted in Dyman 60). Dyman suggests that Benet praised “The Eyes” and “A Bottle of Perrier” because they were “both masculine tales of domination” (60).

¹⁰ Using French feminist criticism, one could say her letters defy male interpretation—and so they cannot be deciphered. Still, these are strong letters that undo the husband.

¹¹ Kathy Fedorko has focused on the sexual dynamics of the story, with the ringing bell representing woman’s sexuality (28).

¹² Most critics feel that Hartley is the disempowered servant, but I agree with Cynthia Murillo’s assessment that she does have a certain amount of power, especially in setting things straight with Mr. Brympton—who exits quickly after her chiding him.

¹³ For an excellent discussion about the discussion of rooms in Wharton’s “Mr. Jones” and woman’s struggle for autonomy, see Jacqueline Wilson-Jordan’s essay about the story.

¹⁴ Much criticism of ghost stories dealt with social class issues or the imprisoned woman motif. See essays by Holly Blackford, Monika Elbert (“Transcendental Economy”), Karen J. Jacobsen, and Ann Mattis on the role of the servant class (psychological and social implications of Wharton’s capitalist milieu). For the most extensive psychological reading of Wharton’s emotional dependence on the servant class (to replace the lifelong feeling of the missing mother), see Gloria Erlich’s book-length study. In her essay about Gothic duality in women, Erlich suggests that the absent mother comes back to haunt husbands and daughter figures as a vampirelike mother in such stories as “Bewitched” and in Ethan Frome.

Although many of Wharton’s ghost stories are male-centered (as in Tales of Men and Ghosts), not much critical attention has been given to the male dilemma in Wharton’s Gothic, with the exception of Jenni Dyman’s comprehensive survey of Wharton’s ghost stories, which includes a sympathetic picture of males and females in a changing social arena. Lori Jirousek also shows changing social roles of males in her reading of Wharton’s and Freeman’s ghost stories, but her sympathies are with the female characters. Jennifer Haytock does discuss some of the male narrators or characters in the ghost stories in her chapter “Accumulation of Men in the Short Stories,” but her conclusion is predictable: “Either the woman writer can co-opt the male voice and its power, or she is merely a puppet in a power structure too overwhelming for her” (99).

¹⁵ For a discussion of triangulated homoerotic relationships, see my earlier readings in “A Bottle of Perrier” (“Wharton’s Modernist Gothic”) and in “Bewitched” (“Wharton’s Hybridization”). See also Richard Kaye’s discussion of homosexual themes in “Afterward” and “Pomegranate Seed.”

¹⁶ Naomi Schor discusses the romantic plot of George Sand’s Indiana here, with its “lure of narcissism, the impossibility of escaping the prison of self-reflection characteristic of the romantic ego and replacing it with a mimesis that strives to accommodate the other’s otherness, but which more than not is simply a more perfect model of the primary mirror of narcissism” (xviii).

¹⁷ Charles L. Crow recently has read “The Eyes” as Wharton’s “complex response to the dilemma of a woman’s writing within gender-coded literary conventions” (167). I disagree that the Gothic woman librarian, Alice Nowell, is the victor here; she is easily written off the pages and male narcissism again wins the day in this Gothic tale.

¹⁸ In most of the stories by Wharton I discuss here, there is an odd resemblance to Poe’s telltale sign of the Gothic: The death of a beautiful woman—only they are not always beautiful, as they are wives, not lovers. Every Wharton story but one I discuss here includes the death of at least one wife, if not two. And there seems to be a male clubhouse (as in “Fall of the House of Usher”) for men to get together to talk aesthetics, brought about by the death of a beautiful woman.

¹⁹ See Virginia Blum’s study, which focuses more on the male’s Gothic desire for the dead woman who is less demanding; these dangerously deluded males become vampirelike in their desire for the beautiful ideal. But I contend here that the female characters come to the realization that the idealized Gothic lover is in fact a delusion, and their life becomes difficult in their entrapment to a grotesque image of their previously idealized mate.

²⁰ I disagree with Kathy Fedorko here that Sara becomes one of the more evolved characters in Wharton’s work (as her last female protagonist) by combining male and female traits. I think Sara has definitely forfeited much of her womanhood. I believe the servant class represents that aspect of feeling and knowing that Wharton tries to promote in her ghost stories: in her preface to her collection of ghost stories, Wharton called for the sensitive reader who could feel the presence of a ghost and not ask for ocular proof. The winning combination of intuition with common sense typifies the servants (in the latter stories), who act as mediums or join covens.

Allan Gardner Smith contends that in Wharton’s ghost stories, “the horror of what is, of the suppressed ‘natural,’ is greater than the horror of what is not, of the conventionally ‘supernatural’” (97). In this context, he sees Sara’s fears of a witch’s coven and servants as emanating from her fear of sexuality and from her anxiety about ruling the household once the patriarch husband has died.

²¹ For other critics who discuss Wharton as a modernist author, see Jennifer Haytock, who believes that although Wharton did not see herself as a Modernist, her works partake of Modernist themes, and she concerns herself “with the ideas of modernism: The break from Victorianism, the impact of World War I on the individual and society, the isolated self, the possibilities and limitations of language, and the nature of the artist and the artist’s role in society” (1). See also my earlier study on Wharton and T.S. Eliot—on Wharton’s Gothic modernism: The inertia and malaise that characterize Wharton’s ghostly characters also characterize the lost individual or wasteland settings that Eliot evokes. Judith Sensibar does not describe the plight of Wharton’s Gothic males, but she does discuss the inadequacy of Wharton’s Modernist bachelor type in The Children (1928).

²² Especially in these later ghost stories, Wharton celebrates the insight and survival instinct of the servant. Thus, she differs from Brontë, who makes the servants in Jane Eyre overwhelmingly superstitious. Also, compare the governess in James’s The Turn of the Screw, where the governess’s mind is poisoned by romantic plots of Gothic novels. See also George Sand’s Indiana, where Indiana, caught in a love plot, finds herself obsessed with reading novels that captured the typical lady’s maid’s imaginations.