Edith Wharton's House Divided

Abstract

EDITH WHARTON'S HOUSE DIVIDED Bruce Michelson* It happens that in the unfolding of Edith Wharton's career, she wrote The House ofMirth in the midst of several ventures into stagecraft. In 1902 Edith Wharton published a thoughtful, competent translation of a play called Es Lebe das Leben by the then-fashionable Ibsenite Herman Sudermann, a play now faulted for mixing pat naturalism with trite histrionics. While she spoke of this translation (which sold well for a number of years) as a mere exercise, the text itself reveals that she took pains to cater to an American audience, and she showed great interest in the mounting of the play for its brief, poorly received Broadway run.1 In 1906, while The House of Mirth still held its own as a national best-seller, Edith Wharton joined forces with Clyde Fitch, the master of well-crafted stage hits, to transform her novel into a highly emotional drama, a venture which fared no better than The Joy of Living, as she called her translation of Sudermann's play.2 Her special interest in the stage goes back somewhat further: R. W. B. Lewis notes that she was busy with two or three plays of her own, and with writing drama criticism, as early as 1900 and 1901.3 These were sideline excursions in Edith Wharton's career, and they do not suggest that she was, like Henry James, a devotee of Ibsen or in any real sense a playwright manqué. But this much they do suggest: that The House of Mirth was built by a mind with a wide apprenticeship in literature and culture, a mind with special interests in the problems and possibilities of theatre, and that there are especially good reasons for reading the book as the best works of Henry James and Joseph Conrad and her other famous contemporaries are commonly read, as responding not just to a particular social circumstance but also to large-scale aesthetic and moral questions of the time. Edith Wharton's fiction has yet to receive thorough treatment of this sort, and discussions of her best work are only beginning to recognize those moments when her novels approach problems of such complexity and scope. Considering how often James, Conrad, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser are hailed for their awareness oí intellectual and cultural ferment, one wonders whether this side of Edith Wharton would have been recognized sooner had she not been a woman as well as a novelist. Only in the last dozen years has she emerged from the pigeonhole of the society author who responded *Bruce Michelson, Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, is currently a Fulbright Lecturer in Belgium teaching at the University of Ghent and the University of Liège. He has published widely in the scholarly journals, including Novel, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, and the Southern Review. 200Bruce Michelson to little more than James, her mother, her marriage, her self-education in interior design, her small dogs, and, of course, her place in a class system which kept her unhappy, entrapped, and on top. Edith Wharton's education, especially in Continental literature, in popular drama, and in critical theory, was deep and wide-ranging; her letters and her non-fiction prose demonstrate how aware she was of the changing, self-questioning artistic and idealogical world she grew up in. In the last decade some connections between that world and Wharton's fiction have begun to appear: the problem at the moment is to locate the large, fundamental concerns behind these various echoes. Cynthia Griffin Wolff makes a persuasive case for The House of Mirth as a treatment of a major crisis in the decorative arts;4 taking a cue from the Sudermann translation, Richard Lawson speculates on the moral significance of the resemblances between the novel and major themes in Es Lebe das Lebend And looking at The House ofMirth as a piece of social criticism, readers have long spoken of the book in naturalistic terms, observing Lily's dependence on the social and economic greenhouse that sustains her and ultimately casts her out and the theme of human vulnerability...