My "Dull-Witted Enemy": Symbolic Violence and Abject Maleness in Edith Wharton's Summer

Abstract

MY "DULL-WITTED ENEMY": SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND ABJECT MALENESS IN EDITH WHARTON'S SUMMER William E. Hummel Arizona State University "Where in New England did Mrs. Wharton unearth the scene and people for her latest novel?" the Boston Transcript cried in 1917 of Summer—a novel that, despite the querulous reviews it received, Edith Wharton ranked as one of her five favorites.1 Unable to offer a satisfying answer to this question, many reviewers expressed their dislike for a novel that Wharton considered an extension of Ethan Frome (1911), whichhad enjoyed greatpopular success.2 Butifreviewers were puzzled and exasperated, Wharton's creation of what Shari Benstock calls "a novel that indicts American provincialism while invoking rural beauty" did not escape the eyes of the expatriate intellectual of Wharton's lifetime ;3 writing anonymously for The Egoist, T.S. Eliot praised Wharton as a "satirist's satirist" and valorized the novel for dealing a "deathblow " to the New England novel of"stunted firs . . . granate [sic] boulders . . . [and] white farmhouses where pale gaunt women sew rag carpets."4 Eliot's praise of Summer is undoubtedly connected to the novel's harsh critique ofromantic love, which inflects Prufrock's own "restless nights in one-night cheap hotels." Still, many critics of Wharton's day remained unconvinced ofthe novel's literary merits; some, as Eliot himselfpredicted , found the novel "disgusting."5 While few scholars today would challenge Wharton's esteem for Summer, the question of just where Wharton "unearth[ed]" Charity, Lawyer Royall, and Lucius Harney has elicited provocative and divergent responses. Recent criticism has taught us that instead of surveying a New England landscape for the donnée oíSummer, Wharton dove deep into a psychobiography that allowed her to write over the scar tissues of her virtually celibate marriage with Teddy Wharton, her passionate but abbreviated love affair with Morton Fullerton, and perhaps her veiled, taboo desire for her own father, George Frederic Jones. The surfacing of the "Beatrice Palmato" fragment in 1974 was the key piece of information critics needed to respond to the Boston Transcript's flustered question: "The relationships among characters in Summer are unrealistically close," Gloria C. Erlich notes, "all spawned by the same central imagination, which seems to have been an incestuous one."6 216William E. Hummel Wharton knew that her fascination with incest would be deeply subversive ofthe cultural imperatives ofAmerica as it grudgingly let go of its Victorian sensibilities; in a letter to Bernard Berenson, eighteen years after the publication of Summer, Wharton wrote, "I've got an incest donnée up my sleeve that wd make them all [Faulkner and Céline] look like nursery-rhymes."7 She would have had an appreciably more difficult time predicting the dissension among recent feminist scholars faced with her incest donnée.8 Candace Waid, for example, boldly claims that in Summer Wharton "domesticates the horror of incest by marrying Charity Royall to Lawyer Royall, the only father she has ever known," and thereby restores "stable hierarchies and the benevolence ofpaternal authority."9 More cautiously, Cynthia Griffin Wolffcontends that "Royall is willing to assist Charity in the transition from a love that is extrasocial ... to a love that contains both passion and affection—both some element offreedom and some appropriate component ofmutual dependency ."10 On the other side of this particular feminist divide is Erlich, who cautions that "the father-derived figures in Wharton's work act as forces inhibiting sexual consummation with more appropriate men"; thus Julius Beaufort interrupts "almost every one ofNewland Archer's visits to Countess Olenska, breaks into their incipient tryst in the patroon's house and thus short-circuits the fulfillment of their passion."11 Amplifying Erlich's circumspection, Sandra M. Gilbert, in her much-anthologized essay, "Life's Empty Pack: Towards a Literary Daughteronomy," denounces Lawyer Royall as "ultimately, no more than the role his professional title and allegorical surname together denote: a regal law-giver, a mythologized superego whose occupation links him with the library and with culture, that is, with the complex realm of patriarchal history that both puzzles and imprisons the wild child he is trying to make into a desirable daughter/bride."12 In a sense, Wharton...