Hello Howell Humanities Students: Over the next three days, I'll post three topics for discussion, each from a noted literary critic, about Wharton's short fiction. Your assignment is to react to each post with a BRIEF post of your thoughts. Feel free to comment about other posts as well. Here is the first topic which is from Margaret B. McDowell who served as chairperson of the Women’s Studies Program and as associate professor of Rhetoric at the University of Iowa.
“Her [Wharton's] careful ordering of detail enabled Mrs. Wharton to attain in many of her shorter works a psychological complexity in characterization which would ordinarily be found only in the novel. In her short stories she usually illuminates, rather than resolves, the refractory situations that she subjects to her scrutiny. The characters and events often suggest intonations of the universal and ranges of significance beyond the literal.” (McDowell, p. 85)
“… Edith Wharton examined the role and status of women, the implications of marriage as seen through the eyes of a woman, the relationship between mother and child, and the rapidly changing views about divorce and about liaisons outside of marriage. Though she explored these subjects insistently, she approached the issues from varying angles and arrived at contradictory conclusions. If any consistent pattern of conviction emerges from the stories, which cover almost fifty years, it is that each woman must decide for herself what is best in her own situation … Certainly no American author before 1930 produced such penetrating studies of women who, instead of marrying, decide to risk social ostracism by contracting temporary alliances based on mutual trust and sexual desire.” (McDowell, p. 87)
McDowell, Margaret B. Edith Wharton. Boston, Mass.: Twayne Publishers, 1976.
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I was thinking about the first comment and it really rang true with me in regards to Roman Fever. I particularly liked that story because of the way Wharton slowly reveals the events that unfolded the last time Mrs Slade and Mrs Ansley were in Rome. As the quote says, nothing is really resolved at all, but rather the situation is illuminated for both the reader and the characters.
ReplyDeleteI also connected this critque to Roman Fever. McDowell's comment on how Wharton treated liasons outside of marriage can be seen when Grace confesses to her brief affair with Delphin and Alida is relatively undisturbed.
ReplyDeleteIn the first part of her quote, Miss McDowell expresses that a character with the depth of Mrs. Slade, Mrs. Ansely, and Mrs. Waythorn is commonly not found in such a short work. However, Edith Wharton's attention to detail and background give these characters much more than a name and situation. In The Other Two, Mrs. Waythorn is not detailed by her own thoughts, but by the thoughts of those she has been involved with, which can go into much more detail about her personality and habits than she could herself. Instead of solving the problem in the story, Wharton chose to focus on background detail, that, when shown to the reader, make a much more enjoyable and comparable character in Mrs. Waythorn. The Other Two did not present a so much solvable problem; but was really a comment on the lifestyle of an evolving woman. While in Wharton's other works, I have found this "evolving" woman to be annoying and selfish, the way Mrs. Waythorn was described by her husbands allows another view on Wharton's woman.
ReplyDeleteWhat I really like about Wharton is that she describes the changing role of women, as this critic says, but she does so a bit unconventionally. McDowell says, "she approached the issues from varying angles." Which she does. In high school, when we read about the role of women in literature, it is done with almost a sense of pity. In books like Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Awakening, the authors want you to feel bad for the female protagonist. Wharton seems to do the opposite. The female lead is shown almost as a villain in some of her work. The women in Roman Fever are sly, cunning, and constantly lie to each other despite their friendship. Alice from The Other Two is also quite a liar. And, to go back a bit, Zeena is the source of unhappiness in Ethan Frome.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to McDowell's first quote, Wharton's "Romam Fever" is a key example of this. Out of all of the other short stories that we read, this one had the least plot line (as Kelsey said in class) where as the others were literally short stories. "Roman Fever" simply brought to attention the incident between Mrs Ansely and Delphin years ago. At the end of this story, nothing is resolved.
ReplyDelete"Though she explored these subjects insistently, she approached the issues from varying angles and arrived at contradictory conclusions" (McDowell 87). The best example of these varying angles and contradictory conclusions is in The Other Two. At the beginning, Mrs. Waythorn is portrayed as the typical woman who lived a life of pity and regret. She depicted her husbands, especially Mr. Haskett, as villians who have wronged her. However, as the story progresses, Mr. Waythorn is able to clearly establish that his wife's previous husbands are not the monsters she depicted them to be. It's proven that his wife had lied to him about his previous marriage, which therefore leaves the reader to assume that Mrs. Waythorn was the cause of the problem, not her husbands. The fact that Mrs. Waythorn was devious about her past, and the fact that she was on her third husband, creates a new female characterization which had not been investigated in previous literature.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Kortney that Wharton has a certain way of prancing around the matters at hand. Rather than actually write about resoultions that the various characters could have came in contact with, she choses to spend more time and focus on the actual incident. She never really makes it a point to tell an actual short story about the events that led up to the event, and followed the quarrel as well. It seems as though Wharton never really obtained a plot line for this particular story.
ReplyDeleteMcDowell states that "...each woman must decide for herself what is best in her own situation..." I thought that this was very true for all three stories that we read. In Roman Fever both Grace and Alida must decide what to do after all the deceptions are revealed. In The Other Two, Mrs. Waythorn decides to divorce her first and second husbands and remarry a third time. Finally, in Souls Belated Lydia makes many decisions, including pretending to be married to Gannet, etc. All these women making decisions are very interesting, and it really made me wonder what decisions Wharton made in her own life.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Megan about how McDowell's first quote is clearly shown through in "Roman Fever" I personally didn't see the end coming. However, it was interesting to see the way Wharton portrayed the womens' previous trip to Rome and the current trip as well. In the end nothing at all was actually resolved, but rather made clear as it never had been before.
ReplyDeleteIn the Other Two, Mrs Wayworth divorced to times before marrying her third husband Mr. Wayworth. Her husband was fond of the fact that his wife was so able to justify herself in society as divorce was just starting to become more acceptable and common. This is a good example of how women were starting to explore their new freedom and do what they desired, not what society expected them to do.
ReplyDelete-olivia whalen...... my other email wasnt working.... again.