Reading ‘ The Yellow Wallpaper. ’ ” The Captive
Cott , Nancy . The Bonds of Womanhood:
“
Woman
’
s
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Sphere ” in New England 1780 – 1835 . New Haven :
per. ” Ed. Catherine Golden . New York : Femi-
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Cutter ,
Martha
J .
“ Frontiers
of
Language:
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Mother. ’ ”
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and Resistance . Ed. Susan Koppelman . Boston :
— — — . Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in Ameri-
Beacon Press , 1996 . 256 – 67 .
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— — — . “ The Writer as Doctor: New Models
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Gilman ’ s Later Fiction . ” Literature and Medicine
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1910 . The Works of Alice Dunbar - Nelson . Vol. 3 .
Sui Sin Far [Edith Eaton]. Mrs. Spring Fragrance
Ed. Gloria Hull . New York : Oxford University
and Other Writings . Ed. Amy Ling and Annette
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151 – 74 .
9
The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
Donna Campbell
In 1925, refl ecting on the work that had won her critical and popular acclaim during
her long career, Edith Wharton compared fi ction writing to another subject about
which she already knew a great deal: money. “ There is a sense in which the writing of
fi ction may be compared to the administering of a fortune, ” she wrote. “ True economy
consists in the drawing out of one ’ s subject of every drop of signifi cance it can give ”
( The Writing 43). Born in 1862 to a socially prominent New York family, Wharton
had known the advantages of wealth all her life, and the values of economy and thrift
that she proposes here seem at fi rst those of the “ Old New York ” of her fi ction, a world
in which careful expenditure and a lack of ostentation distinguish the true aristocrats
from the newly rich who try to crash their way into Old New York society. But Whar-
ton ’ s comment was born of hard - won experience, not inherited prejudices; as she writes
in her memoir A Backward Glance (1934), she had taught herself to become a profes-
sional writer, when, in completing The House of Mirth on a demanding schedule, she
learned the “ discipline of the daily task, that inscrutable ‘ inspiration of the writing
table ’ ” ( A Backward 941). Although Wharton ’ s reputation as an author rests largely
on classic novels such as The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of
the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920), the eighty - six short stories she
published during her career not only echo the themes of her longer works but dem-
onstrate her mastery of short fi ction. 1 As Gary Totten has shown in a recent analysis,
several factors have delayed equal recognition for the short fi ction. Among these are
twentieth - century critical prejudices about women as inferior authors (for example,
Wharton was often cast as a minor Henry James), the preference for Wharton ’ s novels
over her short stories, and critical preferences for experimental modernist techniques
in fi ction rather than the realist style that Wharton employed. Of criticism on
Wharton ’ s short fi ction, a handful of stories, including “ The Other Two, ” “ Roman
Fever, ” and the ghost stories, have received the bulk of the attention.
But if critics were slow to recognize their worth, Wharton knew that her stories
were good, as she intimated to Elisina Tyler shortly before her death (Totten 118).
Edith
Wharton
119
In addition to her sixteen novels and her books of travel writing and poetry, Wharton
published ten collections of short stories during her lifetime and had written a preface
and a new story for the eleventh, Ghosts , before her death in 1937. Her stories range
from classic comedies of manners such as “ The Other Two ” through marriage and
divor
ce tales, artist stories, historical romances, social satires, and, not least, a handful
of Gothic - infl ected ghost stories now considered among her best. Because Wharton
employed all of these forms throughout her long career, Barbara White asserts that
“ [t]he stories of any particular time period resemble each other more than the art or
marriage or ghost stories of another era
”
(White xiii) and should be considered
together. White defi nes these eras as the “ early stories, ” twenty - four of which were
published between 1891 and 1902; the “ middle period ” of thirty - fi ve stories pub-
lished between 1902 and 1914; and the “ later period ” composed of the twenty - six
stories published from 1915 to 1937 (xiii). A brief discussion of Wharton ’ s theories
of short fi ction, followed by an analysis of representative stories, shows the artistry
– and economy – with which Wharton used the forms of short fi ction.
Although Wharton ’ s critical essays, notably The Writing of Fiction
, have been
treated respectfully by critics, most agree that her essays on fi ction reveal less than
they might about the true foundations of her art. For example, The Writing of Fiction
has been characterized by Penelope Vita - Finzi as “ confused and repetitious ” (Vita -
Finzi 46), and the bulk of her critical prose has been seen, somewhat more charitably,
as “ limited in its reach and not intellectually as adventurous as that of some of her
contemporaries ” by Frederick Wegener ( Edith Wharton 30). Both critics acknowledge,
however, that Wharton took the obligations of writing about her craft seriously and
that she had considered at length the problem of writing short fi ction. 2 In chapter 2
of The Writing of Fiction , “ Telling a Short Story, ” Wharton credits French and Russian
writers such as Flaubert, Maupassant, and Turgenev with perfecting the modern short
story, but she also praises the English and American writers Hawthorne, Poe, “ Ste-
venson, James, and Conrad ” ( The Writing 27). The difference between the novel and
the short story, Wharton explains, is not merely one of length; rather, “ the situation
is the main concern of the short story ” as “ character [is] of the novel ” (37), a difference
that emphasizes the necessity for observing “ two ‘ unities ’ ” (34) of time and point of
view. For Wharton, the control of point of view is essential, and she frequently uses
nested frame stories (the narrator hears a story from another person, who in turn heard
it from a third, and so forth) to achieve the right balance of intimacy and distance.
Wharton also varies the gender of her point of view characters. As Elsa Nettels has
observed, “ Of the twenty - two fi rst - person narratives in the two - volume Collected
Stories , nineteen have male narrators ” (Nettels 245), but stories such as “ Souls Belated ”
and “ Roman Fever ” use limited omniscience rather than the fi rst person to render the
intense emotions of their female characters.
Wharton believed that structure and technique were as important as point of view.
The fi rst page of a short story must not only contain the kernel of the whole but must
also arrest the reader ’ s attention. Wharton illustrates this principle, which she calls
the story
’
s
“
attack,
”
with an anecdote from Benvenuto Cellini
’
s
Autobiography , in
120
Donna Campbell
which Cellini and his father, sitting by the hearth, saw a salamander in the fi re, after
which the father boxed the boy ’ s ears so that he would always remember the sight.
But a sensational opening does not in itself make a good story, for, Wharton continues,
“ it is useless to box your reader ’ s ear unless you have a salamander to show him, ” the
salamander being the “ living, moving something ” that animates the tale ( The Writing
40). Even with a “ salamander ” to show the reader, technique and above all time are
necessary for a story ’ s development. Like Henry James, who thought that novelists
like H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett squeezed out “ to the utmost the plump and
more or less juicy orange of a particular acquainted state ” (James 132) yet substituted
the “ squeezing ” of excessive detail for the shaping of material that constitutes “ true
technique ” , Wharton contends that the best stories are those that have been “ worked
over ” like the best chocolate or “ completely blent ” like a rich sauce until perfection
is achieved ( The Writing 41). That Wharton couched the intangible process of creating
art in such tangible and mundane terms – spending one ’ s money, seeing a salamander,
or blending a rich sauce – suggests the evident concern she had for demystifying the
process for her readers.
Less vivid than her analogies but equally signifi cant are the connections between
Wharton ’ s ideas and those of other writers. For example, Wharton ’ s insistence on the
importance of achieving a striking effect and the conscious application of techniques
to enhance this effect owes much to Edgar Allan Poe, who discusses these elements
in his review of Hawthorne ’ s Twice - Told Tales and in “ The Philosophy of Composi-
tion. ” To these two requirements, Wharton adds a third, that of “ economy of material ”
(42), in a manner that recalls Ernest Hemingway ’ s “ iceberg theory. ” In Death in the
Afternoon , Hemingway writes, “ If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is
writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is
writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the
writer had stated them ” (Hemingway 192). Wharton ’ s insistence on an opening that
“ shall be a clue to all the detail eliminated ” and on a story “ stripped of detail and
‘ cleared for action ’ ” (41) suggests a similar economy of approach.
Wharton also pays an unusual amount of attention to the genre of the supernatural
tale, devoting a full section of the chapter to ghost stories. She implies that the limits
of the short story are most strongly tested in this form, with its Poe - like emphasis
on producing an effect and evoking fear in one ’ s readers. Instead of artist stories like
“ The Figure in the Carpet ” or “ The Real Thing, ” she singles out Henry James ’ s “ The
Turn of the Screw ” for praise, noting its ability to evoke “ simple shivering animal
fear ” (32). Wharton ’ s theory of the short story may seem in retrospect less than revo-
lutionary, but her willingness to admit the ghost story as a legitimate form and to
see it as embodying some of the best characteristics of a good short story is uncon-
ventional. For Wharton, supernatural fi ction not only provides a different set of chal-
lenges – in satisfying the reader ’ s desire for verisimilitude and probability – but also
permits the expression of violence, cruelty, and extreme emotions in a manner at odds
with the more constrained surfaces of her artist and marriage tales.
The stories of the early period, from 1891 when Wharton published her fi rst story,
“ Mrs. Manstey
’ s View, ” through 1902 when she published her fi rst novel, The Valley
Edith
Wharton
121
of Decision , are more varied in subject matter and point of view than those written
later. For example, although Wharton is usually associated with stories set in New
York or Europe, several tales written before 1900, including “ A Coward, ” “ April
Showers, ” and “ Friends, ” take place in small towns of the sort that Wharton would
later satirize as Undine Spragg ’ s home town of Apex in The Custom of the Country .
“ Friends, ” with its plot of a jilted young woman who behaves generously to her rival,
even suggests the local color stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne
Jewett, as Barbara White, Janet Beer, and others have pointed out. Although Wharton
was later to regard her early stories as “ the excesses of youth ” and to resist her editor
Edward Burlingame ’ s effort to include them in her fi rst volume of stories, The Greater
Inclination (1899) ( Letters 36), these stories represent Wharton ’ s experimentation in
currently fashionable modes of expression that she would adopt temporarily and later
abandon, such as the story structured as a dialogue or playlet ( “ Copy: A Dialogue ” )
and the ironic fable.
Stories such as “ The Valley of Childish Things ” and “ The Fullness of Life ” are part
of the 1890s vogue for ironic fables, a form that Ambrose Bierce adopted for his Devil ’ s
Dictionary and Stephen Crane employed in the poems in The Black Riders and War is
Kind . “ The Fullness of Life, ” which Wharton later described as “ one long shriek ” ( Letters
36), is also a reaction to a nineteenth - century theme; as Alfred Bendixen notes, it is
“
Wharton
’
s response to those nineteenth
-
century fi ctions, most notably Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps ’ s The Gates Ajar , which imagined a heavenly refuge from earthly griefs ”
(Bendixen 7). “ The Fullness of Life ” depicts an unnamed woman being welcomed into
the afterlife by the Spirit of Life. The woman explains her marriage by saying that “ a
woman ’ s nature is like a great house full of rooms ” but that in her “ innermost room …
the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes. ” 3 Given a choice, however,
between a new partner who is a “ kindred soul ” ( Collected Short Stories I. 20) and waiting
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 27