(To read all posts about The Reef
click here.)
It's time to move on from Book One of
The Reef to the rest of the story and the theme I want to carry forward is what I call "Gender Performance". I don't use the expression the way some others do*.
For me the interesting thing is that to adopt any role first means to be alienated from it. To use a common example, if you get hired to wait tables, you learn the role by playing the part. As others beginning with Sartre have pointed out, waiters tend to over-play the part, that is to be a bit artificial about it, in order to learn it. You don't begin by considering what it feels like to be a waiter or even as yourself what a waiter believes. You begin by dressing in a certain way, walking in a certain way, talking in a certain way.
So what about becoming a woman? (Or a man, of course, but this book is about the task of becoming a woman.) In a sense it seems ridiculous because it seems a matter of what chromosomes you have. But it isn't really that way. You learn to play the part and our culture is full of games that little and not-so-little girls play on the way to becoming a woman.
Now the opposing idea is naturalness or authenticity: "just be the person you really are". Wharton plays with that idea by putting it into George's head. I think she means for us to think of it as a modern idea. In the great English Novels , "artificial" and "artifice" were compliments and someone like a Jane Austen heroine rated herself, and was rated by others, based on what she had made herself. When George Darrow sees Sophy Viner, he thinks he sees in her something he calls naturalness and he compares that with the artifice of Anna Leath.
And we should not forget that Darrow prefers artifice. He gets frustrated with the delay from Anna Leath—he gets frustrated with the reef that seems to block his approach—but there is never a time when he prefers what he calls the naturalism of Sophy. He just finds that easier.
But he bores of her.
But the thing we might wonder about is whether George is right to contrast the two women this way. He looks at Sophy's ambitions to be an actress and thinks she will not succeed because she is too natural and his experience is that great actors put their artifice into being a character on stage and are quite boring when not. That is probably true, but I don't think we should let George fool us into thinking that Sophy is not performing. I'd suggest that the real issue is that Sophy is putting so much into the act of being a woman that she doesn't have anything over to play parts on stage.
Consider this description of Sophy and George walking around Paris and her describing her life to him:
She had the gift of rapid definition, and his questions as to the life
she had led with the Farlows, during the interregnum between the Hoke
and Murrett eras, called up before him a queer little corner of Parisian
existence.
Now George thinks that he fully grasps Sophy and that he is seeing right to the bottom of her; he thinks that she is easy to define. But we might look at the expression "the gift of rapid definition" and see someone who has so mastered a role that we get a clear vision of what they are about. A bad waiter, someone who doesn't play the role well, might get mistaken for just another customer. And, I suppose, someone who doesn't feel comfortable playing the role of customer might be embarrassed by having someone assume they are a waiter and ask them where the men's room is. But if Sophy is really good at playing the part of being a woman, then a man might fool himself into thinking he is figuring out quickly what she means for him to be figuring out.
Okay, you may say, but is there any evidence that Sophy is doing anything like playing the part of being a woman? Yes, there is and I think it is a crucial scene if we want to understand book one. It's a little earlier in chapter four. George and Sophy have spent their first night in adjoining rooms in Paris and he goes and knocks on her door:
It instantly opened at his knock, and she came forth looking as if
she had been plunged into some sparkling element which had curled up all
her drooping tendrils and wrapped her in a shimmer of fresh leaves.
"Well,
what do you think of me?" she cried; and with a hand at her waist she
spun about as if to show off some miracle of Parisian dress-making.
"I think the missing trunk has come--and that it was worth waiting for!"
"You do like my dress?"
"I adore it! I always adore new dresses--why, you don't mean to say it's not a new one?"
She laughed out her triumph.
"No,
no, no! My trunk hasn't come, and this is only my old rag of
yesterday--but I never knew the trick to fail!" And, as he stared: "You
see," she joyously explained, "I've always had to dress in all kinds of
dreary left-overs, and sometimes, when everybody else was smart and new,
it used to make me awfully miserable. So one day, when Mrs. Murrett
dragged me down unexpectedly to fill a place at dinner, I suddenly
thought I'd try spinning around like that, and say to every one: 'Well,
what do you think of me?' And, do you know, they were all taken in,
including Mrs. Murrett, who didn't recognize my old turned and dyed
rags, and told me afterward it was awfully bad form to dress as if I
were somebody that people would expect to know! And ever since, whenever
I've particularly wanted to look nice, I've just asked people what they
thought of my new frock; and they're always, always taken in!"
And there is nothing to suggest George isn't fooled. In fact, as I will get to in a moment, there is plenty to suggest that he is much easier to fool than he realizes. But the thing I want to highlight is how good Sophy is at being a woman.
A hint of this, by the way, comes from their situation. Nowadays, we think of rooms with a connecting door as the stuff of economy hotels aimed at families doing the tourist thing. At the beginning of the century these "chambres communicantes", as they were called, were the height of modernity. Now note that George has put he and Sophy into these rooms and Sophy has accepted that. For what possible reason could he have done this other than the hope they would have sex? She has to have noted this and its significance.
George is the one who is just floating along lying to himself about what he is really doing at each stage. If you read the chapter carefully, you'll see lots of hints that show us that George is in full seduction mode. I described this before, again using the expression incorrectly, as "passive aggressive". Usually, we use passive aggressive to mean lying to others about our true intentions but in this case George is lying to himself about his own.
But Sophy knows him better than he realizes. She has seen him make a fool of himself in his pursuit of Lady Ulrica. In chapter two she tells him about how the other members of Mrs. Murrett's salon speculated, not terribly kindly, about this pursuit of his. And she did a bit of speculating of her own:
But of
course you don't remember. We were all invisible to you;
but we could see. And we all used to wonder about you----"
Again Darrow felt a redness in the temples. "What about
me?"
"Well--whether it was you or she who..."
He winced, but hid his disapproval. It made the time pass
to listen to her.
"And what, if one may ask, was your conclusion?"
"Well, Mrs. Bolt and Mademoiselle and the Countess naturally
thought it was she; but Professor Didymus and Jimmy
Brance--especially Jimmy----"
"Just a moment: who on earth is Jimmy Brance?"
She exclaimed in wonder: "You were absorbed--not to
remember Jimmy Brance! He must have been right about you,
after all." She let her amused scrutiny dwell on him. "But
how could you? She was false from head to foot!"
"False----?" In spite of time and satiety, the male instinct
of ownership rose up and repudiated the charge.
Miss Viner caught his look and laughed. "Oh, I only meant
externally! You see, she often used to come to my room after
tennis, or to touch up in the evenings, when they were going
on; and I assure you she took apart like a puzzle. In fact
I used to say to Jimmy--just to make him wild--:'I'll bet
you anything you like there's nothing wrong, because I know
she'd never dare un--'" She broke the word in two, and her
quick blush made her face like a shallow-petalled rose
shading to the deeper pink of the centre.
"Whether itw as you or she." that is a very significant line. Who led the dance between the two? Sophy thinks, and we have every reason to believe thinks correctly, that Lady Ulrica was in control and George was the easily fooled one. And notice the way Sophy evaluates Lady Ulrica as a woman. It's not that she is playing a role in a dance of seduction that Sophy sneers at but that she plays at being something she couldn't deliver" "I know she'd never dare un—". Sophy has no such doubts about herself.
And George is fooled completely. Both times.
By the way, you'll want to remember Jimmy Brance. He doesn't come up again for a long time but it's important to remember who he is when he does. For now, the connection between Sophy and Jimmy seems to have been a little intimate don't you think?
George is a man after all. He is proud of his ability to impress women sexually. But he misses so much. Look at how the chapter 5 ends. George has been in his room speculating about Sophy next door in an erotic way. All he sees in his mind's eye is sex. But Edith Wharton wants us to notice something else:
Now and then a sound from her room brought before him more
vividly the reality of the situation and the strangeness of
the vast swarming solitude in which he and she were
momentarily isolated, amid long lines of rooms each holding
its separate secret. The nearness of all these other
mysteries enclosing theirs gave Darrow a more intimate sense
of the girl's presence, and through the fumes of his cigar
his imagination continued to follow her to and fro, traced
the curve of her slim young arms as she raised them to undo
her hair, pictured the sliding down of her dress to the
waist and then to the knees, and the whiteness of her feet
as she slipped across the floor to bed...
He stood up and shook himself with a yawn, throwing away the
end of his cigar. His glance, in following it, lit on the
telegram which had dropped to the floor. The sounds in the
next room had ceased, and once more he felt alone and
unhappy.
Opening the window, he folded his arms on the sill and
looked out on the vast light-spangled mass of the city, and
then up at the dark sky, in which the morning planet stood.
It's just the morning planet to George, But Wharton wants us to remember that it is Venus and Venus is the goddess not of sex but of erotic love. George is musing idly about the possibility of something is just sex to him but it will be so much more to Sophy. George can't see that.
* "Gender performance" is an expression coined by people who do "gender theory". For those you you unfamiliar with this stuff, tit can get pretty wacky. You hear the word "theory" and you think science but there is a subsection of the academic world who use the word "theory" to mean, making stuff up to try to make the world a better place. They are quite literally anti-realist and I think it is safe to say that whole "theory" movement has proven to be a dead end. I'm not going there but there is, of course, nothing to stop you from
going there if you want.
