The "Queer Shadow" of Ogden Codman in Edith Wharton's Summer

Abstract

The "Queer Shadow" of Ogden Codman in Edith Wharton's Summer Emily J. Orlando (bio) "I have had a long letter from Coddy about Jean-Marie, of which I had sent him a [post card]. He knows it, & once tried to buy it; thinks its possibilities endless—& understands it better than any of the French friends who have seen it. What a queer stick!" —Edith Wharton, Letter to Minnie Jones, 1918 (Letters 407) "a queer stick is generally one who is not to be relied upon." —William Dickinson, A Supplement to the Glossary of the Dialect of Cumberland, 1905 One year after the publication of her novella Summer (1917), Edith Wharton intimated in a letter to Mary Berenson that the secret to a full life is "to decorate one's inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome any one who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same in the hours when one is inevitably alone" (Lewis 413). Although she likely would not have relished the comparison to her transatlantic modernist counterpart, Wharton thus anticipates Virginia Woolf 's assertion that the "room of one's own" that is a woman writer's birthright "has to be decorated" (247).1 A number of scholars have elucidated what architecture and house decoration meant to Edith Wharton.2 Wharton certainly proposes a way for women to claim authority in the domestic sphere in her account of the "perilous coquetry" with which Lizzie Hazeldean arranges her New York drawing room in "New Year's Day" (305). But what of the Wharton fiction that is not centered on decorated drawing rooms? The only drawing room described in Summer, for which Wharton returns to the rural Massachusetts setting of Ethan Frome (1911), is that [End Page 220] which is presided over by Miss Hatchard, an ineffectual, aging spinster who is no aspirational peer for Charity Royall, the "ruler" of the modest home of her guardian and eventual husband Mr. Royall (88, 15, 11). Unlike the showy Fifth Avenue mansions of The Custom of the Country, Summer depicts residences called simply "the faded red house" (sometimes "sad house"), "the brown house," and "the abandoned house." Yet, as this essay seeks to demonstrate, the impact of architecture—and especially the fraught collaboration with an architect that yielded Wharton's first book, The Decoration of Houses (1897)—is nonetheless pivotal to the novella, which ultimately reveals much about Wharton's fluency with, and searing critique of, the effete male subculture of late nineteenth-century architects and designers. The under-class, under-educated Charity Royall, bereft of a drawing "room of her own" to decorate and govern, is at the center of Wharton's critique of this subculture. The young and worldly Lucius Harney, Charity Royall's love interest and the catalyst for her sexual awakening, is, after all, a New England architect. The lack of architectural context offered in the scholarship on Summer is surprising for a novella in which architecture brings together the protagonists.3 It is "the architect's passion for improvement" that lures Harney to the sleepy village of North Dormer, whose name at once invokes the architectural term for a type of window and signifies the dormant sexuality he arouses in the novella's protagonist. It is there that Harney encounters and slips into an affair with Charity that is, at least for her, transformative. In a particularly telling moment, the handsome cosmopolitan, scanning the holdings at the Hatchard Memorial Library where Charity serves as librarian, leans in and tells her, in a remark that flags him as patronizing, "You don't seem strong on architecture" (8). Edith Wharton was, of course, very strong on architecture, despite its being a male-dominated profession in her time.4 As Richard Guy Wilson has noted, by 1890, the young, married Wharton had acquired an impressive knowledge of architecture and decoration "through her father's library, her travels, and [her mentor and friend Egerton] Winthrop" (138). Composed in France some twenty years later, and staged in houses far less grand than the Gilded Age "cottages" that Wharton disparages in The Decoration of Houses, Summer speaks to the author's career-long...