Edith Wharton's Use of France

Abstract

Henry James, on his first acquaintance with her work, believed that Edith Wharton would do best to concentrate her fiction on a subject where, by the 19oos, she was probably more at home than he was; the American social scene. 'She must be tethered in native pastures, even if it reduces her to a back-yard in New York.'t Critics have tended to follow this lead, building her reputation on those novels where she attacks the American attitude to women (The House of Mirth (190o5), The Custom of the Country (1913)) and exposes the Puritan inheritance of the American past, either grimly in the country (Ethan Frome (1 91 ) ) or affectionately in the city (The Age ofl Innocence (1 92o)). Yet powerful as this body of work is, it often lacks the immediacy which James had hoped Edith Wharton could command. There is a stiffness about The House of Mirth, especially in the authorial commentary on the heroine's higher nature, and there is a satirical brittleness about The Custom of the Country. Both are very episodic, and the episodes vary in quality; it is hardly a high point in American literature when Bertha Dorset pronounces in a voice of singular distinctness, 'Miss Bart is not going back to the yacht' (The House of Mirth, Book 2, Chapter 3)! In fact James had begun to modify his original advice (that Edith Wharton should stick to her Americanness) by the time he had read The Custom of the Country. He now felt that in the de Chelles episode in that novel she had passed by a 'magnificent subject' which ought to have been her main theme. This subject was the unprepared entry of a crude young American woman 'into the mysterious labyrinth of family life in the old French aristocracy'.2 It is, of course, the 'international' theme again. Actually, to be fair to Edith Wharton on this point, which is the object of this essay, she had already before 1913 shown great skill in handling the Franco-American subject in a series of works which have been too little read. The labyrinth of French family life, where James had trodden tentatively before, held no secrets for her. She was probably more deeply steeped in French life than he was. This process began early. Edith Wharton's parents, who had themselves personally witnessed the sacking of the Tuileries Palace in the Revolution of 1848, had her there in 1870o, for the next round as it were, though in the event she just missed the burning down. After I88o, when she was eighteen, she was in Paris virtually every year. Her father died in France