Wrapping up The Reef: Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits

(To read all posts about The Reef click here.)

This is the penultimate post on this. The remaining one will be a bit of oddball speculation about Catholicism in The Reef and in The Wings of the Dove.

It's an interesting twist on conventional plotting that both Book 3 and Book 4 end with a  sense of completion. Typically, the last scene of a middle book leaves at least a sense of something unresolved so you want to keep reading. Not in the case—the novel could have ended with either. If it wrapped up with Book 3 it would have been a happy ending. If it wrapped up with Book 4 it would have been a sad ending. And we go into Book 5 wondering which it will be.

I don't want to spoil it so just a few things you might want to look for.

Pay attention to the larger social picture. In our modern individualist understanding of marriage, it's up to the two people getting married and everyone else be damned. For the characters of this book—like the characters of any classic English novel—marriage is also an issue for first a family and then the larger society.  In Book 3, we saw how George's vision of social order led him to conspire against the marriage of Sophy an Owen. In book 5, one of the big issues for Anna in deciding whether she will accept George after all is the happiness of Owen and Effie.

Does Anna know what she wants? That has been a major, if not the major theme of the book. Here is a simple question: Does Anna ever make a  decision and, if you think she does, can you find the moment where she makes the decision?

There is moment in The Philadelphia Story where Tracy learns that Mike had not, contrary to what everyone had worried, taken advantage of her sexually when she was drunk.  She is both relieved that he didn't and demanding to know why not. Anna never gets drunk nor says anything quite that shocking but the sentiment is there. Watch for the moments when it happens.

The Wings of the Dove makes a big thing of willful renunciation as a way of absolving our sins. Wharton holds out the possibility here too but never allows it. It never works for anyone. Watch for it.

Another parallel with The Philadelphia Story: In the movie, Dexter tells Tracy she'll never be a complete human being until she can understand human frailty. George says something very similar to Anna in Chapter 32 of this book.

What I meant was that when you've lived a little longer you'll see what complex blunderers we all are: how we're struck blind sometimes, and mad sometimes—and then, when our sight and our senses come back, how we have to set to work, and build up, little by little, bit by bit, the precious things we'd smashed to atoms without knowing it. Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits."

She looked up quickly. "That's what I feel: that you ought to----"

He stood up, interrupting her with a gesture. "Oh, don't—don't say what you're going to! Men don't give their lives away like that. If you won't have mine, it's at least my own, to do the best I can with."

"The best you can—that's what I mean! How can there be a 'best' for you that's made of some one else's worst?"

He sat down again with a groan. "I don't know! It seemed such a slight thing--all on the surface—and I've gone aground on it because it was on the surface. I see the horror of it just as you do. But I see, a little more clearly, the extent, and the limits, of my wrong. It's not as black as you imagine."

Anna is hinting here that George could make it right by marrying Sophy. George, who embodies a more modern morality approaching our own, thinks he and Anna should be able to patch it up and thinks she needs to accept—to have more regard for—human frailty.

That last paragraph also includes the closest moment we get towards explaining the significance of the title for the thing George would have gone aground on would be a reef. That's what a reef is, something invisible just below the surface.  But what exactly did George go aground on?

And Anna. She too is aground. She keeps trying to move forward but she is stuck firmly on something. What?

Final thought
As I've pointed out: Wharton's own sexual experience was closer to Sophy's than to Anna's even though Anna's biography and social standing is much closer to hers. There are, of course, obvious reasons why a woman of Wharton's position wouldn't want anyone to identify her with a character who'd had an adventure. But she read this novel to the man she'd had the affair with and he would have known.

What George confesses to having done to Sophy is what Morton Fullerton did to Edith Wharton. He gave her the sexual and emotional satisfaction she'd wanted all her life and, like Sophy,  she could believe it was happening to her and she fell madly in love. And he tired of her. (By the way, it's painful to read the great novelist's love letters to Morton because Wharton is so much his student, as if she knew nothing of life until he showed her.)

Okay, keeping that in mind, could one (hidden) message in the novel be quite the opposite of what everyone assumes. Read it without knowing about Morton Fullerton and you might, as many critics do, see pure condemnation of George. But Sophy gets something loving and losing and so did Wharton. Could this have been Wharton's way of saying, "Anna Leath is what I would have become without you?"

Blogging the Reef: Gaining wisdom

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 Edith Wharton does not spare her female characters, not even the morally admirable ones such as Anna Leath. That is what makes her different from most current fiction. In a current novel handling this subject, George Darrow would be condemned and Anna vindicated even if heartbroken at the end. Wharton doesn't do that.

More than that, the most important theme in the novel is not the moral manipulative George/Morton but a character flaw in Anna. And that flaw has something to do with erotic love.

If we go back to Book 2, we find Anna remembering her youth when she first met George Darrow. She considers some other girls who were involved in sexual scandals and, while thinking them silly girls, still feels inadequate compared to them.

She perceived, indeed, that other girls, leading outwardly the same life as herself, and seemingly unaware of her world of hidden beauty, were yet possessed of some vital secret which escaped her. There seemed to be a kind of freemasonry between them; they were wider awake than she, more alert, and surer of their wants if not of their opinions. She supposed they were "cleverer", and accepted her inferiority good-humouredly, half aware, within herself, of a reserve of unused power which the others gave no sign of possessing.

Okay, it's Book 4 and Anna is a widow witha  daughter. She is no longer a virgin.  But notice what hasn't changed. Here she is meeting Sophy at a  point where she still suspects nothing:

She had always felt a romantic and almost humble admiration for those members of her sex who, from force of will, or the constraint of circumstances, had plunged into the conflict from which fate had so persistently excluded her. There were even moments when she fancied herself vaguely to blame for her immunity, and felt that she ought somehow to have affronted the perils and hardships which refused to come to her. And now, as she sat looking at Sophy Viner, so small, so slight, so visibly defenceless and undone, she still felt, through all the superiority of her worldly advantages and her seeming maturity, the same odd sense of ignorance and inexperience. 

So the mere fact of having sex isn't enough.  The big question is this: Is Anna justified in this feeling of inadequacy? I'd say quite bluntly that she is and, furthermore, that is precisely what this book is about. It is the central theme. Anna fails to be a woman.

My point here is not to let George off the hook. Yes, he has his failings, but the more important failing is Anna's.

And I think we get a very clear picture of what she should be in Sophy, whose name, I remind you again, means wisdom. It's not carnal knowledge that Sophy has that Ann does not. Rather it is an ability to learn from erotic love. (Remember also that Wharton was a huge fan of The Phaedrus.)

Read what Sophy says to George during their encounter in chapter 26. It helps here to know that in French the word aventure, so close to our English word "adventure", is the word used used to describe an affair. When Sophy says "as an adventure", it means something very close to what we might mean in saying "I tried to treat it as just an affair and not love".

He bowed his humbled head, but she went on almost exultantly: "Don't for a minute think I'm sorry! It was worth every penny it cost. My mistake was in being ashamed, just at first, of its having cost such a lot. I tried to carry it off as a joke--to talk of it to myself as an 'adventure'. I'd always wanted adventures, and you'd given me one, and I tried to take your attitude about it, to 'play the game' and convince myself that I hadn't risked any more on it than you. Then, when I met you again, I suddenly saw that I had risked more, but that I'd won more, too--such worlds! I'd been trying all the while to put everything I could between us; now I want to sweep everything away. I'd been trying to forget how you looked; now I want to remember you always. I'd been trying not to hear your voice; now I never want to hear any other. I've made my choice--that's all: I've had you and I mean to keep you." Her face was shining like her eyes. "To keep you hidden away here," she ended, and put her hand upon her breast.

Could Anna Leath say such a thing? Could she look back at  a failed love and tell herself that she had paid a price and won more for it? Of course not and that is why she says, in the bit I quoted higher up:

She had always felt a romantic and almost humble admiration for those members of her sex who, from force of will, or the constraint of circumstances, had plunged into the conflict from which fate had so persistently excluded her.

And she adds:

 There were even moments when she fancied herself vaguely to blame for her immunity, and felt that she ought somehow to have affronted the perils and hardships which refused to come to her. 

Or, as Rimbaud famously put it:

Par délicatesse
J'ai perdu ma vie.

And if we read to the end of Book 4, we get this telling bit of dramatic irony as Anna sees George slipping out of her life:

She felt a mortal weakness, a craven impulse to cry out to him to stay, a longing to throw herself into his arms, and take refuge there from the unendurable anguish he had caused her. Then the vision called up another thought: "I shall never know what that girl has known..." and the recoil of pride flung her back on the sharp edges of her anguish.

"I shall never know what that girl has known." Anna says more than she realizes. It's not that the romance with George will work. That is precisely the sort of pragmatic concern that has always sunk Anna Leath before. What she has never been able to do is to risk what Sophy risked and she never has had the knowledge that comes—win or fail—from such courage.

She has Book 5 to make it right or fail.

Blogging The Reef: Book 4

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Sophy steps out
One of the recurring claims you see in criticism of this novel is that it is a pity we are not given any access to Sophy Viners's interior life. Generally the claim is a moral one: that Wharton has slighted poor Sophy by giving the two higher class characters (Anna and George) an interior life and denying Sophy one. But she has done no such thing: Sophy has an interior life, we are just not given special access to it.

If anyone is guilty of snobbery here it is the critics who won't see that a woman like Sophy could have an inner life without a novelist having to tell us what it is.

More importantly, however, the novel simply would not work any other way. This is the case for two reasons.

The first is that we get a surprise from Sophy in book 4. She does something that we might have guessed but couldn't have know for sure. It is a revelation about her feelings for George and her choices as a consequence. And it is magnificently done: Sophy's actions are both a surprise but also within her character. It's a surprise and yet it makes perfect sense when it happens. If Wharton had been telling us what Sophy had been thinking leading up to it there would be no revelation.

The second issue is moral and, I think, one of the central themes of the novel. There are things that are acceptable in love and there are things that are not. George Darrow has behaved in a callous way towards Sophy. What did he do wrong? He has not paid sufficient attention to her interior life and, paradoxical as this may sound, it is absolutely necessary that we not have any privileged access to that interior life ourselves in order to appreciate this.

What I mean is this: we can figure out other people's interior lives without having access to their thoughts. In fact, that is the only access we do have outside of novels. Sit in a coffeeshop and discretely check out someone you don't know. Study their face and their actions and ask yourself how much you know of their interior life.

That is how we deal with other people all the time. As lovers we have to be aware of our loved one's interior life from what we can outwardly observe. To fail to do this is a sin. We can make mistakes, of course, but it is not acceptable to fail to try and understand their secret feelings and desires.

Now you may be tempted to say you can't be sure of anything but that is always the case. But there are lots of things we cannot know with 100 percent certainty that we nevertheless know. And his outward reading is how we decide how to treat people. If we go back and read book one carefully, we will see lots of evidence that George's kindness to Sophy is having a very profound effect on her.

And then he has sex with her. It shouldn't have come as  surprise to him that she has feelings, very profound feelings for her. But it did.

Why? Because George is a consumer of persons. He is someone who treats people as means and not as ends.

He's not a monster. He's a lot like you and me in fact. The depth of Wharton's moral charge here is against modern morality in general as much as it is against George. (And it is, as I have said before, a far more convincing portrait and charge than what Henry James gives us in The Wings of the Dove.

 Part 2 tomorrow whoops make that Monday. Busy weekend.

Getting caught up on The Reef

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There has been a slight break because I picked up another book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and got caught up in it. Much to my surprise.

Anyway, a few thoughts on Book three of The Reef before moving on.

There is something that looks like the turning point in the novel in Book 3 and something that actually is. The thing that looks like the turning point is the arrival of Adelaide Painter. Adelaide is a magnificent character worthy of Dickens. She seems to turn everything around.

We know better though because book three ends like a Shakespeare comedy with two marriages planned and everyone happy. Why do we know better? Because there is a thick handful of pages on our right still so we know there is a lot of book left. Something will go wrong if only to fill up the rest of the story. It may only be temporary as far as we know now; perhaps we will get hijinks and much hilarity before everything reverts to happiness again? Who knows?

What we do know is that someone has done something that will cause it all to gang aft gley. That someone is our buddy George Darrow and the thing he has done, the more significant turning point, is his conversation with Sophy in which he tried to sow seeds of doubt in her mind about her proposed marriage to Owen. You really want to read this one for yourself. George Darrow doesn't want that marriage to take place but the cards he has to play are extremely limited, What is he going to do? The answer to that is quite chilling.

A solution for society
But why does George want to stop the marriage? For most modern readers that is the real puzzle. We can appreciate that it would make him uncomfortable given his own behaviour but why does he have this righteous sense that it ought not to be allowed? He has no problems with his own marriage going ahead and his behaviour has been at least as bad as Sophy's and arguably worse.

The answer is, or at least seems, obvious. He feels this way because he is committed to some old-fashioned ideas about women and marriages. And that is true enough but it doesn't go far enough. For what makes George and Anna different from you and me is that they both see marriage as involving much more than just the two people getting married. A marriage is a social occasion and its impacts on multiple people need to be considered. And I don't mean here that they just worry about whether other people will object, they also want make sure a marriage is beneficial and not harmful to others.

And thus the root of George's old-fashioned considerations. He thinks that Owen marrying Sophy will harm multiple people in his circle.

And don't think that he thinks this way because he doesn't understand how other people feel. Read the conversation he has with Sophy and think about the tactic he uses to try and shake her away from Owen. It's chilling, as I say, and one of the reasons it is so chilling is because his insight into her character is so penetrating.

What he fails to see, is just how far-reaching his meddling will be just as he has failed to see how much of an impact his having had sex with Sophy had on her in the first place.

And don't hate George. I know, I keep saying this. But George is so much like us. For him morality is ultimately a matter of personal preference and moral argument is just a matter of trying to sway others to his moral preferences. That is the way most people think now.

The flip side is more complicated. On the surface it seems obvious.

Amiable?
In chapter 21, George and Anna have a conversation about the efforts she wants him to make and is making herself to try and help clear Owen's way to marry Sophy. A complex project because Anna wants to do it in a way such that the boy's grandmother will also be happy. George expresses unhappiness that Anna should need to be so involved in other's lives. Now, the irony here is that George is just as involved. The difference is, at lest as Wharton has the story unfold here, the reasons they each have to feel involved. George is involved because it is in his interest to be involved. Anna is involved because she genuinely cares about the happiness of others.

This did not seem to Darrow to simplify his case as much as she appeared to think; and once more he had a movement of recoil. "There's no possible reason for my being mixed up in this affair!"

Anna gave him a reproachful glance. "Not the fact that I am?" she reminded him; but even this only stiffened his resistance.

"Why should you be, either--to this extent?"

The question made her pause. She glanced about the hall, as if to be sure they had it to themselves; and then, in a lowered voice: "I don't know," she suddenly confessed; "but, somehow, if they're not happy I feel as if we shouldn't be."

"Oh, well--" Darrow acquiesced, in the tone of the man who perforce yields to so lovely an unreasonableness. Escape was, after all, impossible, and he could only resign himself to being led to Madame de Chantelle's door.

And we are entirely on Anna's side when we read that. It seems like perhaps Edith Wharton must have been too.  If we remember our Jane Austen, we will know that the most important virtue for Austen is to be amiable. And Austen makes an important distinction between merely being polite and genuinely amiable, the latter requiring us to actually have affection for other human beings. And reading the above we might easily conclude that Anna has genuine amiability and George does not.

But should we be? Is Anna really any better than George? For you can wish others to be happy for all sorts of reasons. We might consider young Effie and ask whether Anna's concern for her is enough. Anna clearly wants her daughter to be happy but she wants her to be happy so she can run away to South America with her soon-to-be new husband. Is her concern for Effie genuine love or is just a desire to make everyone happy so she can do what she wants?

How different is Anna from George after all? And did Wharton herself see that as a potential issue?

Blogging the Reef: Speak now or forever hold your peace

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This novel, as many others have noted before me, seems the most classicist of all the Wharton novels. The story arc is symmetrical reaching its peak here in book three; at the centre of the story. And it is a notable trait of classicist fiction that it doesn't pull any tricks on you. When we read the following in the middle of a classicist novel, we know things are about to go badly:

Anna Leath, from the terrace, watched the return of the little group.

She looked down on them, as they advanced across the garden, from the serene height of her unassailable happiness. There they were, coming toward her in the mild morning light, her child, her step-son, her promised husband: the three beings who filled her life.

No one now expects this to end happily for Anna. The mystery is not whether it will go wrong or even, for that matter, what will go wrong, but how it will go wrong.

And it's all up to George for now.

I put the old Anglican admonition to speak now or forever hold your peace in the title. That is quite literally George Darrow's predicament regarding the announcement of the engagement between Owen and Sophy. At first he doesn't speak but he makes this choice from base motives. He is driven by shame.

Here is a question: How would Darrow have behaved if he had been motivated primarily by guilt rather than primarily by shame? Would he have rushed to Anna and confessed all? That would require some real confession from Darrow but it would also put a burden on her to forgive him, or not. It certainly wouldn't make her happy.

Another option would have been for him to gently remove himself, tell Anna that he couldn't marry and make a great renunciation in the name of ... well, in the name of something. But what?

Being a classicist novel, the marriage that Anna wants is about more than just she and George. She wants a marriage that makes a social statement and has social implications just as the marriages of Pamella to Mr. B and Elizabeth to Mr. Darcy do. George could renounce his happiness on the grounds that his own behaviour has made him unworthy of her. In that case the great renunciation would mean something.

Except you can't quite picture our buddy Darrow doing that can you? It's not that he is unaware of the possibility. It just would never occur to him to do it. So all he can do is see the unhappiness that such a thing would cause and think it is better to keep quiet so as to ensure happiness. He behaves like a classical hero in being driven by shame and honour and accepting fate but he is no hero. And, as I have said before, don't dismiss or hate him on those grounds. Are we so different? Would we renounce our shot at a happy marriage on the grounds that our previous behaviour had compromised any real value such a marriage might have?

Darrow cannot, as it turns out, be quite so calm about Sophy's proposed marriage. And that is odd  given how, in Chapter 17, he remembers the affair.

The essential cheapness of the whole affair--as far as his share in it was concerned--came home to him with humiliating distinctness. He would have liked to be able to feel that, at the time at least, he had staked something more on it, and had somehow, in the sequel, had a more palpable loss to show. But the plain fact was that he hadn't spent a penny on it; which was no doubt the reason of the prodigious score it had since been rolling up. At any rate, beat about the case as he would, it was clear that he owed it to Anna--and incidentally to his own peace of mind--to find some way of securing Sophy Viner's future without leaving her installed at Givre when he and his wife should depart for their new post.

Notice the sense that he ought to have made some sort of sacrifice for it but is aware that it cost him nothing and that heightens his shame. The shame he remembers is his own, not hers.

And yet, he cannot accept the marriage. What upsets him? Again, it is honour and shame. In his view, a woman of Sophy's stature cannot marry Owen. He wishes her a happy life but he wishes her this happy life in her own place.

And that is an interesting sub-theme of the novel: men who cling to convention as a greater moral value than the rightness or wrongness of their own conduct. Fraser Leath, for all his anarchist tendencies, was a conventionalist beneath it all. George might be disheartened to realize how much he has in common with his predecessor.

Except that he never will realize for he never asks himself questions about the ends of life. He only cares about means.

He is also, as I've noted before, fatalistic. In Chapter 19, now fully informed of Owen and Sophy's intentions, he tosses and turns wondering what to do. All he knows is that he wants to stop this marriage. He doesn't even know why for, to know that, he'd have to seriously examine ends. The problem, by the way is NOT that he is not self aware enough to notice it. When he first learns of the marriage, he goes fora  walk in the storm:

In respect of his own attitude, he saw at once that the discovery made no appreciable change. If he had been bound to silence before, he was no less bound to it now; the only difference lay in the fact that what he had just learned had rendered his bondage more intolerable. Hitherto he had felt for Sophy Viner's defenseless state a sympathy profoundly tinged with compunction. But now he was half-conscious of an obscure indignation against her. Superior as he had fancied himself to ready-made judgments, he was aware of cherishing the common doubt as to the disinterestedness of the woman who tries to rise above her past.

"Superior as he was" he still resents Sophy rising above her state. And he is half conscious of an obscure indignation towards Sophy. Why isn't he fully conscious? Because he'd never ask the question. As far as he is concerned, he and Sophy are in clear different categories. He remains what he is even though he had an affair with her. She only confirms for him what she always was by having the affair.

I opened this with the suggest that this novel seems classicist. George Darrow behaves like a classical figure. He is the one whom, if this novel really were classicist, we should expect to face the tragic end and would redeem himself by making a great renunciation for the greater good. That is, in fact, exactly what Merton Densher (based on the same real-life model) does in The Wings of the Dove. It is most emphatically not the sort of thing we should expect from George Darrow.

Here is a thought. It is quite likely that Morris Fullerton was the lover of both Henry James and Edith Wharton. Who knew him better?

Or if, like me, you don't like that sort of autobiographical question, who understood the morality of men like George, Merton and Morris better? I'd say Wharton wins that one. In The Wings of the Dove, Henry James reveals himself as an old-fashioned romantic fool when he has Merton make his great renunciation. in The Reef Wharton gets it right. This is what trying to re-embrace that sort of classicist tragic ideal really gets you. Far from being in the thrall of the old master, The Reef is Wharton's refutation of his work.

George Darrow never makes a real moral decision. After he tosses and turns, George embraces fate:

When at last he fell asleep he had fatalistically committed his next step to the chances of the morrow.

Blogging The Reef: Working at love

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Before plunging into book three, I want to talk about two traps that I think have led so many people to misunderstand this book. The two are related:

1.  The first mistake is to read this book as if it were a Jamesian book. Right from the beginning all sorts of people, including Henry James himself, have read this book as Wharton emulating James. In fact, the exact opposite is what is happening. Edith Wharton disliked all of James' later fiction and hated The Wings of the Dove. It is better to read this book as her refutation of that novel than any imitation of "the Master".
2. The second mistake is to read Anna Leath as a spokesperson for Edith Wharton. Yes, her life and her marriage somewhat resemble Wharton's but, given what we now know about Wharton's affair with Morton Fullerton, the resemblances between that relationship and the one that takes place here between George Darrow and Sophy Viner are just a s striking. Yes, Sophy comes from a different social background than Wharton but she had every reason not to make it easy for readers to make any autobiographical inferences between Sophy and an affair that she herself had had.

The two issues are related.

If I might stick to the autobiographical issues for a moment, we might also consider that both Merton Densher and George Darrow are based on Morton Fullerton. And, knowing that, it is easy to see why Wharton would have some non-literary reasons for hating The Wings of the Dove. I don't mean that she would have read that story as a portrayal of her affair with Fullerton but there are certain similarities that would have caused her to be outraged at the moral conclusions James draws from the story where Merton/Morton is the one to make the great moral renunciation. Comparing the story of Merton-Kate-Milly to her own experiences with the man and the odd love triangle with Morton's cousin, it's not hard to see how she would be determined to retell the story and get the moral facts straight.

I was searching around the web and found a review of a collection of letters that featured this excerpt of letter that Wharton sent to Morton. Reading it, I think we might see certain similarities between Edith and Sophy. Remember that this letter was written at the height of her infatuation and the novel written looking back after she was over him:

Pascal’s terrible “il faut de l’adresse pour aimer” [“it takes skill to love”!] has a noble side if it means the exercise of tact, insight, sympathy, self-effacement; but it is the most sordid of counsels if it appeals to the instinct to dole out, dissemble, keep in suspense, in order to prolong a little a feeling that hasn’t enough vitality to survive without such aids.—There would have been the making of an accomplished flirt in me, because my lucidity shows me each move of the game—but that, in the same instant, a reaction of contempt makes me sweep all the counters off the board & cry out:—“Take them all—I don’t want to win—I want to lose everything to you!"—But I pause, remembering you once told me that, on this topic, I serve up the stalest of platitudes with an air of triumphant discovery!—

First, the translation of the French phrase provided above by Louis Aunchicloss misses a bit of nuance. To be sure, when Pascal says we need "l'adresse" to love that does me we need skill. But it is important to see that "l'adresse" can mean skill as in to be shrewd and calculating.

Knowing that, it's easier, I think, to see why Wharton calls this epigram "terrible" and "the most sordid of counsels". But was she right to do so? It certainly sounds nobler to say that "tact, insight, sympathy, self-effacement" are what love requires rather than to "dole out, dissemble, keep in suspense, in order to prolong a feeling". However, if you'll let me be a disgusting pig of a boy for a moment, I'd like to remind everyone that what Morton and Edith had was a sexual affair and that the first set of virtues seem a little less enticing and the second set downright awesome when you are talking about going to a hotel room and having sex. The temptation is to cruelly think, "No wonder he tired of her."

And we might also note that however good it made Edith feel to think and feel and write,  "I want to lose everything to you!" the problem here isn't that this thought of hers is just a stale platitude, it's a selfish behaviour. Erotic love requires effort and all the things that Wharton here derides as  are actually very good advice. What a bore it would be to be stuck with a woman who lazily clung to sense of self-justification that comes with thinking oneself tactful, insightful, sympathetic and self effacing and never made the effort or too the risk that would prolong a feeling.

And that remark about serving up stale platitudes with an air of triumphant discovery, it's not hard to image George Darrow saying that of Sophy at the end of their affair when he has lost interest in her. Darrow loves her excitement and enthusiasm for a while but eventually he loses that and she becomes something else to him. Much more about that in Book 3.

Blogging The Reef: Honour and Shame

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I said somewhere in one of my earlier posts that ways of life come as packages. Accept a crucial notion such as fate as a major moral force in life and whole lot of other stuff comes with it. One of the big things that comes with fate is an honour-shame morality. That is to accept a moral universe where the primary goal is protecting your honour and avoiding shame.

I put it that way advisedly, by the way, because gaining honour is a nearly impossible thing to do. Trying to increase your honour is a deadly dangerous thing to do because it upsets the moral order and others will try and slap you down.  Think of George Darrow's attitude to Sophy in this regard. He sees her possibility of marrying up as a questionable thing always. It doesn't sit well with him. Anna, on the other hand, while not completely comfortable about it, sees the possibility for it.

And if we watch Darrow carefully, we will notice that he is always on the watch to protect his honour. When (in Chapter 11) he and Anna discuss the "obstacle" that led her to put him off, his sole concern is in protecting his honour. He never has even a tinge of guilt about the thing but rather feels shame.

One of the reasons Darrow is so effective at manipulating people is that he never questions the ends. He never wonders whether someone who has done what he has done to Anna has the right to continue to pursue her. The possibility of shame—that she might not really want him—put him off completely but he never worries whether or not he is worthy of her. That he wants her is the only reason he needs. (and if that puts you in mind of Don Draper, you're absolutely right.)

There is a helpful little matrix to keep in mind when thinking about the differences between honour-shame morality and guilt-redemption morality that most of us know as Christian.

Situation one: You didn't do the bad thing and no one suspects you of having done it.

• Someone who operates on honour-shame feels justified.
• Someone who operates on guilt-redemption feels justified.

Situation two: you didn't do the bad thing but some or lots of others do suspect you of having done it.

• Someone who operates on honour-shame feels shamed.
• Someone who operates on guilt-redemption feels justified.

Situation three:  you did do the bad thing but no one suspects you of having done it.

• Someone who operates on honour-shame feels justified.
• Someone who operates on guilt-redemption feels guilt.

Situation four: you did do the bad thing and others suspect you of it.

• Someone who operates on honour-shame feels shamed.
• Someone who operates on guilt-redemption feels guily.

 Obviously, the crucial difference is in situations two and three and if we watch Darrow we will see this over and over again. In Chapter 11, for example, he doesn't dare challenge Anna as to whether the problems with the governess were really sufficient to 1) justify her putting him off and 2) to justify her taking ten whole days to write to explain. And they certainly weren't enough to justify the second. But he doesn't dare push that point because that risks exposing him to shame.

And notice how he lies. I should preface this by saying I think there are situations where lying is justified but notice that Darrow always lies to protect himself from shame, and sometimes to protect others from shame when it suits his purposes.

A final thought: there is no reason why the two moral syndromes can't co-exist in the same society. We all tend to bounce back and forth between the two. At home with your spouse, you'll tend to operate on guilt-redemption (I hope so anyway), but step onto a bus full of strangers and you'll probably start behaving in honour-shame terms. That is why the long-standing hypocrisy that puzzles morally immature people everywhere that it is okay to talk about some things in private but not in public.

And that brings me to Anna. She does go back and forth between the two. Listen to how she justifies her support for Owen's marriage even though it may not be a wise thing:

What I've most wanted for him, and shall want for Effie, is that they shall always feel free to make their own mistakes, and never, if possible, be persuaded to make other people's. Even if Owen's marriage is a mistake, and has to be paid for, I believe he'll learn and grow in the paying.

That is, if anything is, a statement of faith in the possibility of redemption.

 But there is one respect in which Anna is still like Darrow: she does not think quite so much of the ends as she might. She does not seem to really want things.She doesn't seem to dare to want.

Blogging The Reef: Things Elizabeth Bennett Wouldn't Do

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It may seem to some that I am being too easy on George Darrow and, if you are one of those people, it will shortly seem like I am being too hard on Anna Leath. I don't want to paint George as an angel, he most certainly isn't, but I also think we need to avoid making dismissive assessments of characters. I've written about this before: the tendency of some commentators to assess a character and then right them off as worthless.

And George Darrow is not worthless. He is an interesting and attractive character even if we would wish him better. And he provides a foil for Anna Leath and, in so doing, allows us to see some cracks in what might initially seem a faultless facade. This one for example:

Often she told herself that any silly girl who had waltzed through a season would know better than she how to attract a man and hold him ...

And "silly girl" here is not as abstract as it might sound; there is a specific silly girl.

Then one day, at a dinner, she saw him sitting next to one of the silly girls in question: the heroine of the elopement which had shaken West Fifty-fifth Street to its base. The young lady had come back from her adventure no less silly than when she went ...

And here is how young Anna Summers thinks about it:

All night she lay awake and wondered: "What was she saying to him? How shall I learn to say such things?" and she decided that her heart would tell her--that the next time they were alone together the irresistible word would spring to her lips.

Okay, let's think about Pride and Prejudice. I pick it because I assume everyone has read it. There is a moment in that novel that somewhat resembles this. Think of when Lydia (a silly girl if ever there was one) and George come to the Bennett house as a couple after having eloped. So here is the question, can you imagine Elizabeth Bennett looking at her sister Lydia and feeling like there must be something the young Lydia knows that she, Elizabeth, does not and feeling inadequate as a result?

The answer is never. It couldn't happen.

Here is how Anna Summers felt (with added emhasis):

She perceived, indeed, that other girls, leading outwardly the same life as herself, and seemingly unaware of her world of hidden beauty, were yet possessed of some vital secret which escaped her. There seemed to be a kind of freemasonry between them; they were wider awake than she, more alert, and surer of their wants if not of their opinions. She supposed they were "cleverer", and accepted her inferiority good-humouredly, half aware, within herself, of a reserve of unused power which the others gave no sign of possessing.

And what is the thing that they know they want and poor Anna doesn't? In a word: sex. Here she is with George during their first courtship:

She liked to hear his voice almost as much as to listen to what he was saying, and to listen to what he was saying almost as much as to feel that he was looking at her; but he wanted to kiss her, and she wanted to talk to him about books and pictures, and have him insinuate the eternal theme of their love into every subject they discussed.

But he wanted to kiss her! It isn't that she doesn't feel the desire. It's the getting over the stumbling block that stands between the place where speech ends and kissing starts. Something stops her from wanting to do that. What is the Reef between her and the ability to connect sexually with a man? That is something new and modern in fiction.

Let's revisit how Anna thought about things after becoming jealous at the sight of George and Kitty together:

All night she lay awake and wondered: "What was she saying to him? How shall I learn to say such things?" and she decided that her heart would tell her--that the next time they were alone together the irresistible word would spring to her lips.

Notice that the only solution Anna can think of is more talk. What shall she say? She doesn't have a clue what to do.

There is a great scene in the magnificent film 8 Femmes (Eight Women) where a spinster played by Isabelle Huppert confronts a maid who has seduced her employer and says, "How do you do that?" And the maid says the equivalent of, "Oh, you know.' The point being, "If you have to ask ..." But poor Anna does have to ask.

This partly consoled her for missing so much of what made their "good time"; but the resulting sense of exclusion, of being somehow laughingly but firmly debarred from a share of their privileges, threw her back on herself and deepened the reserve which made envious mothers cite her as a model of ladylike repression. Love, she told herself, would one day release her from this spell of unreality.

But it didn't.

Blogging The Reef: Givré

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And now we move onto book two and with that move a whole lot of things happen. For example, we move from Paris to a country Chateau called Givré. If you know how to pronounce "je" in French, the G here is pronounced the same way as the J in "je", a sort of sliding sound instead of a hard one. In any case, gee-vray. I'll get to what it means below.

What is really quite astounding is that almost the entire rest of the novel takes place at this big country house. We started with a very modern story set on trains and in hotels and theatres in the big city and now it's like the rest of the story is trying very hard to be a classic English novel only set in a French Chateau. Sort of like an Ann Radcliffe novel.

The other big shift is that we get another consciousness. Until now we have experienced everything through George Darrow's eyes. From now on we will alternate between Anna Leath's viewpoint and his. No other character gets a perspective.

There is one odd little transitional phase right at the beginning, however, where we are neither inside George nor Anna's consciousness but get straight third person narration. It's worth reading at some length:

The light of the October afternoon lay on an old high-roofed house which enclosed in its long expanse of brick and yellowish stone the breadth of a grassy court filled with the shadow and sound of limes.

From the escutcheoned piers at the entrance of the court a level drive, also shaded by limes, extended to a white- barred gate beyond which an equally level avenue of grass, cut through a wood, dwindled to a blue-green blur against a sky banked with still white slopes of cloud.

In the court, half-way between house and drive, a lady stood. She held a parasol above her head, and looked now at the house-front, with its double flight of steps meeting before a glazed door under sculptured trophies, now down the drive toward the grassy cutting through the wood. Her air was less of expectancy than of contemplation: she seemed not so much to be watching for any one, or listening for an approaching sound, as letting the whole aspect of the place sink into her while she held herself open to its influence. Yet it was no less apparent that the scene was not new to her. There was no eagerness of investigation in her survey: she seemed rather to be looking about her with eyes to which, for some intimate inward reason, details long since familiar had suddenly acquired an unwonted freshness.

If you were to reprint this novel leaving out all of book one I don't think anyone would notice. That reads like the beginning of a novel and not like the opening of a book two. Neither the house nor the lady are named.

The key word here is "unwonted", which is to say the lady was looking at the house in an unaccustomed way, seeing it in a way she had not seen it before.

And then, Wharton pulls an amazing little trick on us in the very next paragraph.

This was in fact the exact sensation of which Mrs. Leath was conscious as she came forth from the house and descended into the sunlit court. She had come to meet her step-son, who was likely to be returning at that hour from an afternoon's shooting in one of the more distant plantations, and she carried in her hand the letter which had sent her in search of him; but with her first step out of the house all thought of him had been effaced by another series of impressions.

And that tends to slide right by. We don't stop and think, isn't it amazing that our impressions of the scene correspond exactly to what this lady, now that we know a little more about her, was also experiencing. And we are now firmly on Mrs. Leath's side as a consequence. And that is the way Wharton wants it. We have been introduced to Darrow and we know some dirt on him. Now we don't get introduced to Anna Leath so much as we get pulled into so that we identify with her.

Or are we subject to the same illusions?

Here is what the illusions feels like:

The possibilities which the place had then represented were still vividly present to her. The mere phrase "a French chateau" had called up to her youthful fancy a throng of romantic associations, poetic, pictorial and emotional; and the serene face of the old house seated in its park among the poplar-bordered meadows of middle France, had seemed, on her first sight of it, to hold out to her a fate as noble and dignified as its own mien.

And here is what it feels like to see past it:

Though she could still call up that phase of feeling it had long since passed, and the house had for a time become to her the very symbol of narrowness and monotony.  Then, with the passing of years, it had gradually acquired a less inimical character, had become, not again a castle of dreams, evoker of fair images and romantic legend, but the shell of a life slowly adjusted to its dwelling: the place one came back to, the place where one had one's duties, one's habits and one's books, the place one would naturally live in till one died: a dull house, an inconvenient house, of which one knew all the defects, the shabbinesses, the discomforts, but to which one was so used that one could hardly, after so long a time, think one's self away from it without suffering a certain loss of identity.

If we pay attention, however, we will see that Anna Leath is a repeat offender in this regard. Her entire entire life has been spent trying to get beyond the illusions and get at real "life". That word "life" has incredible weight for her. She uses it as if it was loaded with special power the way many people use "love" and then have to pile adjectives such as "real" in front of it because the rest of us are not paying a profound enough reverence at the sound of it.

And, if we are willing to be just a tiny bit critical, we might also note that she has a history of failure. And it was precisely her desire to escape from one trap that led her to leap into another. To put it bluntly, is she seeing life anew or just turning the same illusions around again in her imagination?

If we don't like that question, we could just read her as a typical chick lit heroine whose life is a mess but we are on her side always as she tries to turn it around and we'll hope that George ill make a transition as wonderful as that Mr. Darcy did and that all will turn out wonderfully. That is what Anna Leath is hoping:

In Mrs. Leath's hand was the letter which had opened her eyes to these things, and a smile rose to her lips at the mere feeling of the paper between her fingers. The thrill it sent through her gave a keener edge to every sense. She felt, saw, breathed the shining world as though a thin impenetrable veil had suddenly been removed from it.

Just such a veil, she now perceived, had always hung between herself and life. It had been like the stage gauze which gives an illusive air of reality to the painted scene behind it, yet proves it, after all, to be no more than a painted scene.

So let's get back to Givré. The word comes from "givre" (notice there is no accent on the E in the basic form) which means frost. As with English, the word operates both as a noun and as a verb as in "to frost". "Givré" is the past participle of the verb: frosted.

And when something is covered with frost it is veiled.

So here is the question, does Anna Leath really understand the full consequences of removing the veil. Is the veil we see in form of life we see at Givré like real life only through a veil or are veils a condition of the kind of life that takes place there? Or, more broadly, is some sort of veil essential to any form of life?

I don't want to suggest I know the answer to those questions. And even if I did there is no reason anyone else should take me as an authority. But I think it is the question we need to be asking ourselves as we read this book.

Blogging The Reef: Gender Performance

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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.

Blogging the reef: "cisgender"

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Trust me, this post really does have something to do with Edith Wharton It will take a few paragraphs to get to the point.

I was reading some quite painful to read stuff yesterday and came upon a guy who identified himself as a "cisgender male". New to me.

Wikipedia quotes two people I've never heard of named Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook who say it means "individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity".

In the same article I first saw "cisgender" I also saw the question "What do you think of when you think of gender?" Honest answer: French grammar. I never think of sexuality when I hear the word "gender" and I never will. Which is why I will never use the word "cisgender". But you can see why people who really care about such things had to come up with a word. They wouldn't want to use "normal" would they?

But the thing that jumps out at me is how a tragic world view comes along with it. Here is the definition again with some added emphasis:

... individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity.

And the obvious question is: Assigned by whom? "The gods" is the only plausible answer. "The gods" here might mean "random genetic fluke" rather than "Hera and Zeus had an argument and I got punished for it" but either way it means FATE!  Primitivism is always and everywhere a crucial part of modernism.

So who do you think is the primitive modernist in The Reef? Our first temptation is probably to say Sophy Viner but I think that is wrong but there certainly seems to be evidence for it at first glance. Here is how she responds to having seen Oedipus on stage (Chapter 6):

When at length the fateful march of the cothurns was stayed by the single pause in the play, and Darrow had led Miss Viner out on the balcony overhanging the square before the theatre, he turned to see if she shared his feelings. But the rapturous look she gave him checked the depreciation on his lips.

"Oh, why did you bring me out here? One ought to creep away and sit in the dark till it begins again!"

"Is that the way they made you feel?"

"Didn't they you?...As if the gods were there all the while, just behind them, pulling the strings?" Her hands were pressed against the railing, her face shining and darkening under the wing-beats of successive impressions.

"As if the gods were behind them all the while, just behind them, pulling the strings." But do note that everything we learn of Sophy here comes through George. All we can say for certain is that here is that George sees this primitive fatalism in her and that it affects him powerfully. That could be because it really is in Sophy or it could be that it's something about George that responds so powerfully to her because he is driven by a primitive fatalism himself.

Either way, the great illusion of modernism is that you can reintroduce fate to human self understanding and somehow not have all the other stuff that went with it in the ancient world come along for the ride.

By the way, in comparing The Reef with The Wings of the Dove, one interesting data point is the unopened letter. In The Wings of the Dove (at the end of chapter 37) Merton hands Kate Croy a letter that Millie had written to him before her death for delivery to him after her death. Kate throws the letter into the fire unopened. In (chapter 8) The Reef, Sophy brings the letter that has finally arrived from Anna Leath to George Darrow and he throws it into the fire unopened. In both cases, the action signals an acceptance of fate by the person who does it. And both James and Wharton are absolutely correct to recognize this as a key element of modern morality.

Blogging the Reef: It is time to speak of Sophy

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There is a persistent strain in the criticism of this book that Edith Wharton is not fair to Sophy Viner. For much of the twentieth century it was common to suggest that Wharton looked down on Sophy and that her purpose to indict Sophy for snobbish reasons.


Since the 1980s, we have known better than to make that mistake because we now know that the Sophy's affair is based on one that Wharton herself had with a journalist named Morton Fullerton. Far from looking down on Sophy, Wharton identifies with her. And yet the sense remains that Sophy is not treated fairly in the novel. Why?

I think the current sense that there is something unfair in the treatment of Sophy derives from the feeling that Wharton has refused to allow Sophy to tell her own story. Meaning that we never get inside her head. There is never any free indirect speech telling us what Sophy thinks. So everything we learn about her comes through the consciousness of others. And there are very good reasons to doubt the motives of those others.

And yet, Sophy Viner remains a compelling and likeable character. In fact, she is easily the most likeable character in the book. This is a sad story entirely because of her. The other characters in this novel may have it hard but we never feel that any of them have had it harder than they deserve nor do we worry that they won't manage to pull through. Sophy Viner, on the other hand, will haunt you if you read this book. You'll wish you could meet her and help somehow.

So, no, Wharton is not unfair to her. Quite the contrary. And rather than ask whether Wharton should have let Sophy tell her story, I'd suggest that the real challenge to us is: Can we treat Sophy as an end and not a means? For all the other characters, especially George Darrow but also Anna Leath and even Owen Leath, treat her as a means to achieve some end of their own.

And let's talk some more about George because he has an interesting history. As I said above, the affair Sophy has is based on one that Wharton herself had with a man named Morton Fullerton. He has come up before on the blog. For Morton was Merton. Henry James based Merton Densher on Morton Fullerton. And that makes for an interesting contrast in itself. For James's Merton is a relatively moral character compared to Kate Croy who is a consumer of persons. Wharton's George Darrow is very much a consumer of persons with regards to Sophy.

Whose name, oddly enough, means wisdom. That could be an accident in that Wharton just needed a girls name and she liked the sound of Sophy but I don't think so.

A couple of things to note. Tragedy makes its appearance again and that, I think, should have us thinking of the contrast between this modern sad story and tragedy. Lily Bart's story is a tragedy but Sophy's is just sad. And, somehow that makes it worse.

Darrow, not surprisingly, wants to see her life in tragic terms. That, of course, is right in character as then she could be a purely aesthetic object, a means for his pleasure and not an end in her own right. (And I ask you, isn't that exactly what Merton tries to do with Milly Theale?)

Let's wrap up with a little erotic voyeurism as is only appropriate for the day after Valentine's.

The influence of Keats' The Eve of St. Agnes on Wharton's Ethan Frome is much discussed but I don't that anyone has noted the reference to it here. George is sitting in his room, which adjoins hers, and he listens to her moving and imagines what he might see if he were in her room (it's a sort of auditory voyeurism):

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...

That ellipsis is in the original. The source for that is this:

Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

And the affair is not unlike Porphyro and Madeline in some ways.

Blogging The Reef

Note: I am using the Everyman's Library edition of 1996.

(To read all posts about The Reef click here.)

Many of the critics who have written about this book have puzzled about the title. They point out that the word "reef" doesn't appear even once in this book. So we have a mystery and our first question is, "What is a 'Reef'?" It's a nautical term and it has two senses only one of which applies here.

In that sense a reef is something hard under the surface of the water that is a hazard to navigation that boats and ships may run into. Reefs don't move but they are hard to keep track of and hard or impossible to see. You could think of them as being like little islands that don't quite reach the surface. They are usually rock but they can be of other substances such as coral.


Now Wharton didn't do much in the way of writing by accident. That she calls this book The Reef and then never uses the word is intentional. We are faced with this mystery because she has set it for us to solve. And we get confirmation of this right from the first paragraph.

'Unexpected obstacle. Please don't come till thirtieth. Anna.'

For a reef is nothing but an unexpected obstacle. But we don't have a clue what that obstacle is nor does George Darrow who is the person Anna has sent this message to.

The other thing that ought to jump out at us about that paragraph is that the syntax is rather odd. Those aren't full sentences. The next paragraph, which consists of one long sentence, makes quite a contrast.

All the way from Charing Cross to Dover the train had hammered the words of the telegram into George Darrow's ears, ringing every change of irony on its commonplace syllables: rattling them out like a discharge of musketry, letting them, one by one, drip slowly and coldly into his brain, or shaking, tossing, transposing them like the dice in some game of the gods of malice; and now, as he emerged from his compartment at the pier, and stood facing the wind- swept platform and the angry sea beyond, they leapt out at him as if from the crest of the waves, stung and blinded him with a fresh fury of derision.

That sentence also explains why the first paragraph is written the way it is: it's a telegram. Telegrams don't exist anymore so we might miss that this is a very modern thing. Think of it as being a little like a text message. Telegrams were short because you paid for them by the word so people chopped out all the unnecessary words. Text messages are short because people get tired of typing with their thumbs.

So it's a mystery and it's a modern mystery. At least here at the beginning, this book is all about modern communications transport and cities.

At the same time there is a hint of an ancient mystery in the line:

... shaking, tossing, transposing them like the dice in some game of the gods of malice ...

Keep that in mind for the idea of classical tragedy will be a recurring theme. Not because we are to think of this story as a tragedy but rather so we will see that it is something different. Just like Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, this is a sad story and not a tragedy. The story of Lily Bart was more like a tragedy. This is a huge step forward into something new for Wharton. You could call this Wharton's version of modernism.

And the mystery is about Anna, whom we will soon know as Anna Leath. (Although we might, as I Wharton intends, see it as having something to do with all women in a modern world where the roles for them as women have changed.) She is the one who has sent this and our buddy George Darrow is wondering why. He's pretty sure there will be a perfectly good reason for the delay but he also suspects that Anna could have gotten around it if she'd pushed a bit harder. And he is wondering along these lines because this has happened before.

If I could hammer on the "modern" aspect of this a bit, consider how this scene simply could not have happened in Pride and Prejudice. This message is pretty close to instantaneous and the letters of Austen's fiction couldn't create such a conflict whereby someone was already leaving to go visit when it arrived as his train was pulling out.

Of course we should remember that we only have one side of the story. Is Anna also aware of the 'reef"? Well, yes, but we don't know that yet.

Final thought: notice how different this is from Henry James. Bang, right from the first sentence this novel is on theme. The Wings of the Dove isn't like that at all. It's theme teases out slowly over hundreds of pages. In every way, Wharton is a more focused writer. You can see why her books sold so much better than his.

Which leads me to a rather impertinent question: Why do critics prefer James to Wharton? And they do. For all the feminist readjustment whereby female artists have been reassessed versus their male contemporaries, the judgment regarding Wharton and James hasn't moved an inch in the last century. I find that really odd for I think if there is any novelist of this period who deserves the title "The Master" is is she. Whatever else you might say of the two, she is the one who is in complete control of the medium of the novel. He isn't.

Womanly virtues Wednesday: No real intimacy with nature

January twenty-fourth just past was the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Edith Wharton's birth. Let's have a look at chapter six of The House of Mirth in her honour. This is how it begins:

THE AFTERNOON was perfect. A deeper stillness possessed the air, and the glitter of the American autumn was tempered by a haze which diffused the brightness without dulling it.
In the woody hollows of the park there was already a faint chill; but as the ground rose the air grew lighter, and ascending the long slopes beyond the high-road, Lily and her companion reached a zone of lingering summer. The path wound across a meadow with scattered trees; then it dipped into a lane plumed with asters and purpling sprays of bramble, whence, through the light quiver of ash-leaves, the country unrolled itself in pastoral distances.

Higher up, the lane showed thickening tufts of fern and of the creeping glossy verdure of shaded slopes; trees began to overhang it, and the shade deepened to the checkered dusk of a beech-grove. The boles of the trees stood well apart, with only a light feathering of undergrowth; the path wound along the edge of the wood, now and then looking out on a sunlit pasture or on an orchard spangled with fruit.

I hear an echo, two echoes really, in that text. The obvious one is the opening of Tintern Abbey. It's the wrong season, but the scene that Lily Bart here surveys sounds like the one Wordsworth does at the opening of his poem:

The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door ...

And I think Edith Wharton means for us to see the comparison in order that she may contrast her heroine with the Romantics and Romanticism. For the very next paragraph begins this way:

Lily had no real intimacy with nature ...

And Wordsworth means to suggest intimacy with nature. I think Wordsworth was fooling himself, mistaking his alienation with modern society for intimacy with nature but that is a subject for another day. The important thing here is that Wharton wants us to know that Lily Bart is not natural. She is not easy or given to naturalness but there are times when nature seems to match her moods. Here is the next paragraph in whole:

Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations. The landscape outspread below her seemed an enlargement of her present mood, and she found something of herself in its calmness, its breadth, its long free reaches. On the nearer slopes the sugar-maples wavered like pyres of light; lower down was a massing of grey orchards, and here and there the lingering green of an oak-grove. Two or three red farm-houses dozed under the apple-trees, and the white wooden spire of a village church showed beyond the shoulder of the hill; while far below, in a haze of dust, the high-road ran between the fields. 

If she and her companion, Lawrence Selden, were to sit down we should expect them to talk of love. And they do just that.

Before I get to that discussion, however, the second echo. Edith Wharton kept a commonplace book and she wrote out long sections of Plato's Phaedrus in it and there is a very intentional echo of it here. Again, it is the wrong season but that is part of her point—it is very much the wrong season for love for Lily.

In Plato's work, Phaedrus and Socrates descend from the road they are on to a little stream and sit in the shade of a Plane tree. In this section of The House of Mirth, Lawrence and Lily leave the shade of the woods where there is also a faint chill and ascend to the open slope to find a "zone of lingering summer".

And Lily, while she may find the scene a fitting background to what she is feeling, is not noticing all that we might notice. She is not noticing that her immediate sense also matches her general place in life for her beauty is a bit like a lingering but about-to-leave summer.

Now, if this is really drawn from The Phaedrus would should expect erotic love and then cicadas to make an appearance.

Let's start with erotic love. Our two companions reach a comfortable place after their ascent and sit down:

Lily dropped down on the rock, glowing with her long climb. She sat quiet, her lips parted by the stress of the ascent, her eyes wandering peacefully over the broken ranges of the landscape. Selden stretched himself on the grass at her feet, tilting his hat against the level sun-rays, and clasping his hands behind his head, which rested against the side of the rock. He had no wish to make her talk; her quick-breathing silence seemed a part of the general hush and harmony of things. In his own mind there was only a lazy sense of pleasure, veiling the sharp edges of sensation as the September haze veiled the scene at their feet. But Lily, though her attitude was as calm as his, was throbbing inwardly with a rush of thoughts. There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive's gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight.

Yes, Wharton does want you to think what you are thinking. It's the most natural thing in the world to think of at that moment. Lily does think of it.

She could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which seemed to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her feet. Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations? How much of it was owing to the spell of the perfect afternoon, the scent of the fading woods, the thought of the dulness she had fled from? Lily had no definite experience by which to test the quality of her feelings. 

But it isn't going to happen for these two. Which is rather a shame for the glory of a woman such as Lily Bart laying back with her lips parted and breathing quickly is something to contemplate and a minor miracle for anyone lucky enough to there when it happens.

Instead, we learn that Lily has had a few fleeting feelings of love but never got past the barrier between it and her. And then our novel goes on to be about something else.

For, as with the Wordsworth echo, the point of the comparison is to draw our attention to the contrast. In the Phaedrus, Socrates convinces us that giving yourself sexually to a non-lover for pragmatic reasons is wrong. Lily is going to attempt exactly the opposite with tragic consequences.

Now on to the cicada. Here is a favourite paragraph from The Phaedrus that I have quoted before on this blog:

By Herè, a fair resting–place, full of summer sounds and scents. Here is this lofty and spreading plane–tree, and the agnus castus high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatest fragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane–tree is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images, this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delightful is the breeze:—so very sweet; and there is a sound in the air shrill and summerlike which makes answer to the chorus of the cicadae. But the greatest charm of all is the grass, like a pillow gently sloping to the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide.

Here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is what a cicada looks like.

That black bug is somewhere between one to two inches long. It's a big black bug. It doesn't quite make an appearance in Wharton's text but the unmistakeable suggestion of one does.

They stood silent for a while after this, smiling at each other like adventurous children who have climbed to a forbidden height from which they discover a new world. The actual world at their feet was veiling itself in dimness, and across the valley a clear moon rose in the denser blue.

Suddenly they heard a remote sound, like the hum of a giant insect, and following the high-road, which wound whiter through the surrounding twilight, a black object rushed across their vision.

Lily started from her attitude of absorption; her smile faded and she began to move toward the lane.

This "cicada song" is really a car driving by. It doesn't actually disrupt anything. Lawrence and Lily have been coming close to love but there are two barriers. One is her lack of naturalness and the other is society and the expectations of a young woman like Lily who would like to remain in society.

The rest of the novel is a novel of manners about that society and Lily's rather gruesome fate in it. To be honest, I don't like the rest of that novel much. It's universally praised as one of her greatest novels but I think it would have been better to have Wharton write about the first barrier. The lack of "naturalness" in Lily and how that invisible barrier worked against her.

For isn't that is a struggle for every woman? It's not just that society, for even our supposedly liberated society, will not tolerate too much "intimacy with nature" from a woman. And yet, we have to believe her capable of it, or we will also reject her. And the fear of that failure, shall we say "inner" failure, is really just as important and far more intriguing than society.

The good news is that she did in a great book that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves called The Reef. And I'll be blogging it here every Wednesday and Friday starting this Friday.