Thursday, April 29, 2010

This Day in Literary History (Edith Wharton, Chronicler of Troubled Marriages, Enters Her Own)


April 29, 1885—The fiction of Edith Wharton dwelt so obsessively on emotional constriction, the conflict between social convention and freedom, thwarted sexuality, and depression because it reflected her own marriage, which began with an exchange of vows at noon in Trinity Church chapel in New York.

At this distance, the union of Edith Newbold Jones with Teddy Wharton seems so…convenient. The groom was a Harvard friend of one of her brothers; the ceremony took place across the street from the Jones home at Twenty-Fifth Street (Trinity later became the Serbian Orthodox Church of St. Sava); and the couple would settle down on a small cottage across from the Jones estate in upper-crust Newport, Rhode Island. Moreover, Edith and Teddy were members of the upper crust.

But all kinds of omens appeared even from the beginning:

* There was a real question from the first if Edith truly loved Teddy. The bachelor, 11 years her senior, was certainly kind and charming. But two summers before—the same period when she met Teddy—Edith had encountered Walter Berry, a lawyer with a literary bent, a man she believed gave her “a fleeting hint of what the communion of kindred intelligences might be.” It sounds reminiscent of what Lily Bart’s would-be suitor, Lawrence Selden, desires in Edith's bestselling 1905 novel, The House of Mirth: “a republic of the spirit.” Unfortunately, Edith and Walter’s relationship, like Lily’s and Lawrence’s, became nothing more than a friendship. Berry preferred women who surpassed Edith in beauty but badly lagged her in intellect.


* The wedding invitations, written by Edith’s mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, never mentioned her daughter’s name—a telling lapse by a haughty matriarch, otherwise concerned about the smallest social nicety, who scoffed when her skittish daughter asked what could be expected on her wedding night—and never provided an answer.

* Nothing did happen on Edith and Teddy’s wedding night. It took weeks for the marriage to be consummated, and then, after a few years, husband and wife stopped having relations altogether.

* Before long, Edith realized that, aside from canines and motoring through the countryside, she and her husband had little else in common—especially when it came to matters of the intellect, where Teddy was utterly at sea among her bright friends.

* Despite having numerous cousins, Edith had no bridesmaids—likely indicating a distance from family members that would prove a handicap when she needed a support network in the years ahead.

* At the age of 35, Teddy still relied on his trust income of $2,000 a year. This was not uncommon at the time for a man of leisure such as himself, but the lack of a profession, along with any real instinct for managing money, would prove problematic.

*Teddy’s father was institutionalized at McLean Hospital, where he would commit suicide in 1891.

Though emotionally empty, the first years of the Wharton’s marriage were amiable enough, as Teddy was physically vigorous and frequently displayed what his wife called in her memoir A Backward Glance “sweetness of temper and boyish enjoyment of life.” After 1903, however, when they moved to a summer house in Western Massachusetts, relations between the two became profoundly troubled. The instability that plagued his father began to manifest itself in Teddy.

Several times, I have visited The Mount, the couple’s gleaming white Georgian mansion in the Berkshire Mountains, now a museum (and one that, like Lily Bart, has, in recent years, found itself in financial dire straits). One especially interesting feature of this home built to Edith's specifications is how she managed the issue of solitude for herself and her guests.

The front door, opening at ground level, contains locks, hinges and handles, a reminder that she believed a door should not only admit but also exclude. To secure privacy, Wharton placed doors not in the center but near the end of the long suite of rooms so that occupants could not be easily observed. Access to her own suite (separate from Teddy’s) was controlled with special care, with the stairway to the upper level set off from the public spaces of the first floor.

The arrangement not only enabled Wharton to linger in bed in the morning, free of care as she read or caught up on correspondence. It also provided an additional advantage she may not have initially sensed.

Unwary guests or nosy servants would be less likely to witness the quarrels and long silences that increasingly typified her relationship with Teddy, whose manic depression and neurasthenia grew in tandem with his wife’s literary success and self-confidence. A writer whose work was filled with secrets, Edith crafted a house that, consciously or not, protected her own.

In 1907, following an idyllic motoring excursion, Wharton believed that she had discovered a “kindred spirit” in guest Morton Fullerton, an American journalist. By the following spring, she had embarked on a passionate affair with him.

An urban sophisticate and aristocrat, Wharton projected her private drama of marital desolation, the yearning for freedom and fulfillment, and frustrated desire onto the impoverished farmer Ethan Frome, in the novel of the same name. Zeena, Ethan’s shrewish wife afflicted by hypochondria, represents a fictional stand-in for the now-quarrelsome, unstable Teddy. Ethan’s would-be lover, Mattie, completes the love triangle. (Ethan and Mattie even share the first initials of the author and Fullerton.)

One passage from Ethan Frome seems especially redolent of Edith’s feelings about her husband: “Ethan’s heart was jerking to and fro between two extremities of feeling, but for the moment compassion prevailed. His wife looked so hard and lonely, sitting there in the darkness with such thoughts.”

The novella’s initially tepid sales did not ease Wharton’s burden in maintaining The Mount. That financial millstone and the strains in her marriage were compounded when she discovered that Teddy had embezzled at least $50,000 of her trust fund to squander on his mistress. The idyllic environment she had created, built with money and an instinct for artifice, was now imploding for the same reasons.

Reluctantly, at the same time she decided to leave Teddy, Edith allowed him to sell the house in 1911. Unwilling ever to view the Mount again as a stranger, Wharton never returned to the Berkshires. She lived the rest of her life in France, dying 26 years later, cherishing memories of gardening, friends and “freedom from trivial obligations” in this rustic retreat.


After the couple’s divorce, Teddy stayed with a sister until her death, then was cared for by a trained nurse. After he died at age 78, Edith wrote a friend, the Cambridge don Gaillard Lapsley, that her ex-husband had achieved “a happy release, for the real Teddy went years ago, & these survivals of the body are ghastly beyond expression.”

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