"Seduced and Abandoned": Convention and Reality in Edith Wharton's Summer

Abstract

"SEDUCED AND ABANDONED": CONVENTION AND REALITY IN EDITH WHARTON'S SUMMER Nancy A. Walker Stephens College R. W. B. Lewis and Cynthia Griffin Wolff have prepared the way for a revival of interest in the work of Edith Wharton,1 and she may finally have slipped out from under the imposing shadow of Henry James. While critical attention in recent years has been focused on her long novels of New York society in the nineteenth century, Wharton's small masterpiece Summer (1917) has either been largely ignored or relegated to the position given it by early reviewers: a less tragically powerful and therefore less significant work than Ethan Frome, with which it shares a setting in the Berkshire Mountains.2 Blake Nevius has seen the novel as one of the many instances in Wharton's fiction of the "baffling, wasteful submission of a superior nature to an inferior one" and says that lawyer Royall is "thwarted and humiliated by his passion for his self-centered ward Charity."3 More recently, Wolff, who correctly sees Summer as on one level an exploration of a woman's awakening to sexuality (and thereby invites comparison of the novel to Kate Chopin's The Awakening), overlooks the essential ambiguity of the novel when she calls it "a hymn to generativity and marriage."4 The complexity of Summer is due in large measure to Wharton's use of the conventional "seduced and abandoned" theme so pervasive in both popular and serious fiction of the period. The usual heroine in such a story is either a naive young girl who succumbs to the charm of the heartless seducer or (and especially in fiction in which the central consciousness is male) the virgin-turned-bitch who hounds the man into a hasty marriage, thus ruining his chances for success. Wharton's characterizations are far more realistic, and the novel enlarges upon the conventional theme to become a story about the ambiguity of human relationships. Charity Royall is admirably shrewd and strong rather than merely an innocent victim; Lucius Harney, the young architect with whom she has her first sexual experience, is, despite his air of worldliness, more weak than opportunistic; and lawyer Royall, Charity's guardian and eventually her husband, is both would-be seducer and rescuer of the seduced. Wharton emphasizes the complexity of human character and motivation by creating tension in Summer between the inevitability of fate—represented most strikingly by images of animals, prisons, seasonal cycles, and the Fall—and the suggestions of human sympathy and endurance. The name of the main character is the emblem of this 108Notes tension. Charity Royall is on one hand the recipient of the charity of North Dormer's nearest approach to royalty. Her guardian is twice her savior—first when he brings her down from the Mountain when she is a child, and finally when he marries her and provides her unborn child with some degree of legitimacy. But just as important, she herself is charitable, particularly to Lucius Harney, whom she absolves of all responsibility for his actions. To be the object of charity is itself an ambiguous condition, provoking both gratitude and resentment, but Charity Royall both recognizes and practices human compassion, and that fact raises her out of the pathos of her situation. In the end she is trapped in North Dormer, and the Mountain will continue to loom over the town to remind her of her barbarous origins, but though she is without choice, she is not without love. The novel is structured to present two different patterns of movement . The dominant pattern takes Charity first out of the narrow, isolated world of North Dormer and then back into that world. The second movement ameliorates the final grimness of the first by easing Charity closer to lawyer Royall. The first design is rendered primarily in the imagery and settings of the novel; the second is conveyed in three key conversations between Charity and her guardian, the occasions of his three proposals of marriage. In the dominant pattern of movement in the novel, Charity inhabits , actually or imaginatively, three distinct worlds. Most primitive is the Mountain, from which, at the age of five, she...