Reworking the Maternal Imagery: "The Touchstone"

In "The Touchstone" (written and published in 1900, her thirty-eighth year) she tried to devise a way in which a separation of the good mother from the bad one might be accomplished. She set into dramatic interaction fragments of herself and of key childhood figures, but rather than have them reenact past scenes, she let them play out a reparative script that would refashion the maternal imagery.^[1] "The Touchstone" is a story of guilt, of spiritual redemption, of attaining adulthood by working through unfinished maternal relationships. It enacts a process of spiritual rebirth that the author longed to achieve for herself.

The plot of "The Touchstone" manipulates various levels of Wharton's formative experiences as they impinged on her current problems. The narrative course is set by her guilt for negative feelings toward her mother and a deep need to renegotiate the relationship before it was too late. In 1900 her mother was paralyzed and near death in distant Paris. Although living in various places on the east coast during this time, Wharton was making frequent trips to Europe, including Paris, but rarely visited her. Wharton's very efforts to rid herself of the reproving maternal image served only to increase her guilt. Her mother's impending death, which occurred in 1901, would forever bar her from repairing the actual relationship. At this critical time Wharton was fighting her way out of a long period of depression and beginning to perceive herself as a professional writer. Each act that marked a separation of past and future, such as abandoning her place in Newport society and building her own home in Lenox, Massachusetts, each expression of her long-denied autonomy generated guilt as well as exhilaration.

Wharton came to realize that her now-remote actual mother was less important to her than the internalized one that was inhibiting her autonomy. If the omnipresent accusing mother was part of herself and to some degree her own

creation, it might be susceptible to modification. Her way of working on this was to incorporate into the character of the novelist Margaret Aubyn not only troubling aspects of herself as woman and writer, but also aspects of the mother she carried within, the creation of her own childish psyche that she now needed to exorcise or transform. Removing the mother-daughter antagonism from the actual interpersonal arena and locating it within the daughter's psyche renders the struggle independent of time, space, and the real mother's actions or intentions.

Writing "The Touchstone" facilitated Wharton's transition into personal and professional autonomy. It reads like a projective vision of events waiting to happen, a life script to be enacted as soon as Wharton found the right actor for the male lead. In devising this story of a woman's one-sided, selfless love for an immature man, Wharton formed a template by which she would recognize the kind of emotional experience she was seeking unconsciously. Indeed, reading "The Touchstone" prospectively in the light of the later Fullerton affair helps us understand Wharton's puzzling relationship with this man.

The tale depicts the spiritual-emotional growth of an impoverished young lawyer, Stephen Glennard, who, needing money to marry a beautiful and equally impoverished young woman, surreptitiously sells love letters written to him by Margaret Aubyn, a deceased novelist who had once loved him. Only after Margaret's death does he realize to what extent she had infiltrated his soul. The marriage he achieves with the proceeds from sale of her letters is damaged by his feelings of guilt for having betrayed Aubyn's selfless love for him. The spirit of the dead novelist seems to him like that of an accusing mother whom he has wronged. His project, then, is to transmute this persecutory mother-figure into an enabling one.

The author cast certain aspects of herself as the ardent but graceless novelist Margaret Aubyn and other aspects of herself as Stephen Glennard, a man oppressed by the memory of

Aubyn's generosity. In the multivalent character of Margaret Aubyn, Wharton reworked specific elements that derived from her own past, reflected her present, and anticipated her future. As an unappeasable conscience figure, Aubyn represents the persecutory aspect of Wharton's inner mother, and as a formidable woman writer with little confidence in her sexual desirability, she represents aspects of Wharton herself at the time of writing. Given Aubyn's multiple functions in the story, she represents not the self-centered, withholding aspects of Wharton's actual mother, but rather the obverse, a masochistic mother figure who achieves psychic omnipresence by inducing guilt. Furthermore, as a character who found fulfillment by giving feminine nurturance and forgiveness to an ungrateful man, she became a prophetic model for Wharton's future relationship with Morton Fullerton.

Wharton depicted Margaret Aubyn much as she imagined she herself might be perceived by men—as a homely and aggressively intellectual woman. Wharton feared that no matter how smartly she might dress, men would miss her essential femininity. She felt particularly self-conscious about the jutting lower jaw that marred the shape of her lower lip, a characteristic that Kenneth Clark, a devoted friend, called "her letter-box mouth, always her least attractive feature."^[2] Of the consequences of such a defect, she wrote: "Just such a hairbreadth deflection from the line of beauty as had determined the curve of Mrs. Aubyn's lips" (11) made her "incapable ... of any hold upon the pulses" (4). Aubyn's moral superiority and "intellectual ascendancy" had made Glennard feel his own inferiority (11). She "combined with a kind of personal shyness an intellectual audacity that was like a deflected impulse of coquetry: one felt that if she had been prettier she would have had emotions instead of ideas" (10).

In short, says the narrator, "the attitude of looking up is a strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard's opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty" (11–12). Although Edith Wharton was not yet a celebrated writer in 1900, we can easily see that

whomever else Margaret Aubyn may have resembled,^[3] her creator was describing her own insecurities as a woman while imagining how achieving authorial success would serve only to exacerbate them. She was using "The Touchstone" to help locate and define a style of femininity compatible with childlessness and professional ambition, a style in which she herself could be successful.

To Stephen Glennard, Wharton consigned that part of herself seeking redemption from maternal tyranny. To him she entrusted the task of discovering the hidden beneficence, the occult capacity for nurturance folded into his inner vision of the dead Margaret Aubyn. Release of this hidden power required a violent personal agon. With the help of a spiritual guide in the form of his wife Alexa, Glennard is able to modify the destructive maternal image, to revise or rewrite it.

The story leads him through despair and guilt to a rebirth into fuller and freer adulthood. His violation of Aubyn's trust by publishing her letters and using the proceeds to fund his marriage to a second woman had generated a disabling sense of guilt. This moral lapse functions in the story as a "fall" that finally he must convert into something positive, an opportunity for emotional growth. By the end, he finds a way to liberate himself from the oppressive mother-figure that he had internalized as a voice of perpetual accusation. Having mastered the emotional alchemy necessary to transmute the negative presence into a nurturing one, he is freed to take on an adult role within his marriage.

Because the Aubyn-Glennard relationship occurred prior to the opening of the novella, it functions as a "prehistoric" event that haunts Glennard's life and diminishes his capacity for adult love. Glennard's revulsion against physical contact with such a mother figure as Aubyn serves a dual purpose in the story. Beyond signifying an oedipal barrier, it blinds him to Aubyn's essential femininity. Until he adjusts his relationship to this "first" woman, he can merely play-act the role of husband to the second. His marriage starts as a shallow pretense, symbolized by a picture-book house that "seemed no more

than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine" (28). For it to become a sturdy home that could withstand storms, Glennard must free himself from his mother-surrogate. First he must confront his disabling sense of guilt.

He finds himself imprisoned in "the windowless cell of . . . consciousness where self-criticism cowered" (32). His self-imposed guilt over publication of Aubyn's love letters brought her back into his life more forcibly than if he had married her. Although distanced first by geography and later by death, Margaret Aubyn has achieved psychic omnipresence, a state more threatening to Glennard than physical proximity. He becomes furious without a reasonable object for his rage.

Anger against whom? . . . against that mute memory to which his own act had suddenly given a voice of accusation? Yes, that was it; and his punishment henceforth would be the presence, the inescapable presence, of the woman he had so persistently evaded. She would always be there now. It was as though he had married her instead of the other. It was what she had always wanted—to be with him—and she had gained her point at last.
(32)

Glennard's initiation into sin alters his perception of personal relationships past and present, making him distrust himself and others. "Losing all sense of proportion where the Letters were concerned" (54), he begins to perceive everything as pointing to them and to his moral lapse. When virtually in the depths of despair, he sees in a magazine photograph of Margaret Aubyn, now dead, the femininity that had evaded him in living contact. That which was

feminine in her, the quality he had always missed, stole towards him from her unreproachful gaze; and now that it was too late, life had developed in him the subtler perceptions which could detect it in even this poor semblance of herself . . . Then a sense of shame rushed over him . . . The shame was deep, but it was a renovating anguish; he was like a man whom intolerable pain has roused from the creeping lethargy of death.
(61)

"Renovating anguish" and new perceptions arise from "the mere abstraction of a woman" found in a dim photograph. This disembodied image serves as transition from the maternal imago to a more realistic picture of the woman herself. As an abstraction from life, the photo is frozen and immutable, but vague enough to stir up memory and revive imagination. This movement cracks through his emotional stasis by rendering the imago susceptible to modification and preparing his soul for change.

Glennard arose the next day feeling spiritually revived, with a sense of Aubyn's nearness now become "the one reality in a world of shadows." He reexperiences their past in memory, at last prepared to reinterpret its meaning "like a man who has mastered the spirit of a foreign tongue" (61). However, he is now subject to remorse for failing to appreciate Aubyn while she was alive. The renewal process has only begun; there is more work to do.

Having avoided Aubyn's funeral, he must confront the reality of her death by visiting her grave for the first time. Here his first reaction is an esthetic one—what a hideous final dwelling place for this artistic woman! But he recovers his pious mood and experiences for an exalted moment amidst the odor of decaying flowers the presence of Aubyn's spirit, "not the imponderable presence of his inner vision, but a life that beat warm in his arms" (64). He has brought her back into a guilt-free intermediate region in which change can occur.

He can now benefit from the continuities between his first woman and his wife. Early in the story Glennard had placed Alexa's picture in the same silver frame where Aubyn's had "long throned," replacing one with the other but also recognizing their congruence. The women are counter-images of each other. Margaret Aubyn, like her creator, was a woman of the word—aggressively so, in that she not only spoke audaciously but made a successful literary career. The passive Alexa Trent spoke little, rarely read anything, and seldom wrote letters of more than one page (21). A woman of "smiling receptivity"

and few requirements, Alexa could sit with folded hands and wait for the movements of her husband's spirit. She preferred to leave troubling matters unspoken and resisted Glennard's requests for explanations.

To Glennard's astonishment, Alexa feels pity and love for poor neglected Margaret rather than the jealousy he expected. Alexa, the non-reader, insisted on reading precisely the book that her husband wished her to avoid, Aubyn's letters to himself. The two contrasted women reside in Glennard's psyche as polarities or complementarities. The first woman made possible his marriage to the second, and the second rescued the memory of the first, helping him refashion Margaret's memory into a usable past.

The theme of money running through "The Touchstone" stands for a base metal that awaits transmutation into gold. Margaret Aubyn's love, although experienced as tyrannical, provided a heritage that Glennard would eventually convert into usable currency. On the practical level, her letters funded his marriage, and, as her imperishable gift to him, they became the inheritance that he would either squander or invest. Of love and letters Aubyn gave liberally with little return. Glennard learns that

he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had irretrievably staked her all . . . they might have stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory of the affections.

It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to be a pensioner on his bounty . . . She had no wish to keep herself alive on the small change of his sentiment; she simply fed on her own funded passion, and the luxuries it allowed her made him, even then, dimly aware that she had the secret of an inexhaustible alchemy.
(13)

Even of her literary gifts Aubyn was lavish, squandering "her rarest vintage" in letters to him. He found such prodigality oppressive when he was tempted to sell the letters:

He was almost frightened now at the wealth in his hands; the obligation of her love had never weighed on him like this gift of her imagination; it was as though he had accepted from her

something to which even a reciprocal tenderness could not have justified his claim . . . [Suddenly realizing that the letters could "fund" his marriage] he could almost fancy some alchemistic process changing them to gold as he stared.
(15)

The temptation was a reverse alchemy that would debase to utilitarian purposes the high gift of a woman's imagination. But Aubyn's gift of imagination contained the seed of its own ultimate reversal. It lay dormant awaiting Glennard's need, enabling him eventually to convert neurotic guilt into a manageable sense of ordinary forgivable human sin. But not without suffering.

By giving without stint and allowing Glennard to exploit her, Aubyn had generated in him a guilt so oppressive that only after severe penance could he accept forgiveness. At first Alexa is too prompt with compassion; her ready forgiveness for his sale of the letters fails to meet his need for atonement. He says:

"Don't you see that it's become an obsession with me? That if I could strip myself down to the last lie—only there'd always be another one left under it!—and do penance naked in the marketplace, I should at least have the relief of easing one anguish by another? Don't you see that the worst of my torture is the impossibility of such amends?"
(80)

Glennard demands punishment from a woman, one who can judge as well as forgive, who can provide cleansing antisepsis as well as healing balm. In his festering moral anguish Glennard craves the sting of Alexa's scorn, "since her contempt would be a refuge from his own," very much like a child demanding punishment from his mother:

What he wanted now was not immunity but castigation: his wife's indignation might still reconcile him to himself. Therein lay his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was the moral antiseptic that he needed, her comprehension the one balm that could heal him.
(55)

Alexa's mediation guides Glennard through the conversion process. Her assumption of his burden made him feel "like a

child coming back to the sense of an enveloping presence; her nearness was a breast on which he leaned" (78). With her help, the internalized Aubyn was transformed from one of the punitive Furies or Erinyes to one of the gracious Eumenides. In the fullness of time, after months of grinding anguish, he was released from the dead woman's terrible grip and enabled to reincorporate her into his psychic system as a blessing. With this much emphasis on confession of sin and female intercession the tale suggests a yearning on Wharton's part to move from a deterministic Calvinistic ethos to a Catholic one offering the hope of absolution from sin.^[4]

The "great renewal" of the finale occurs gradually, like a spring thaw or like "laboriously learning the rudiments of a new language." Glennard has to grope for a correct view of Alexa "through the dense fog of his humiliation" (78). At the climactic moment, she helps him to a spiritual "turning" by offering a re-conception of his act—enlarging it from neurotic self-imposed guilt that bores ever inward to the broader concept of human sin, for which traditional remedies are available. Alexa's revisioning of Glennard's act, "an immense redistribution of meanings" (77), becomes the moral touchstone that allows him to perceive and acknowledge the true gold bequeathed him by Margaret Aubyn.

Like a good therapist, Alexa modifies Glennard's desperate fear of being a permanently doomed sinner by offering him the analogy of early Christians who purified rather than destroyed heathen temples. This transformational viewpoint allows him to eliminate the negative aspects of the Aubyn relationship and salvage the beneficial ones. His sexual resistance to the mother-figure, the unrecompensed benefits he took from her, his virtual destruction of her—are all in the nature of things, stages in achieving full adulthood. He says gropingly:

She wished the best for me so often, and now, at last, it's through her that it's come to me. But for her I shouldn't have known you—it's through her that I've found you.... I took everything from her—everything—even to the poor shelter of loyalty she's trusted in—the only thing I could have left her! I

took everything from her, I deceived her, I despoiled her—and she's given me you in return!
(81–82)

Alexa replies that Margaret Aubyn's sacrifice did not, as he thought, give him a wife, but rather gave him back to himself that he might become a real husband, thus lifting Glennard's burden of indebtedness. Because Aubyn's best recompense was the joy of giving (82), he need feel no guilt. Having destroyed and repaired the mother-figure, Glennard can now re-establish his marriage. The couple will progress from sojourning in a fragile holiday tent to dwelling in a sturdy, durable home.

By fusing a redemptive religious element with the psychological and the sexual, Wharton added the hope of grace and salvation to what otherwise must have seemed like psychic entrapment. In her own life, the triple nexus occurred early—in her childhood view of her mother as simultaneously an inscrutable Calvinist God and the super-ego that censored her thoughts and seemed to demand complete denial of the child's sexuality.

The needy child in Wharton saw herself as Stephen Glennard, who eventually learned to take from Margaret Aubyn what he required to assuage his anguish and to salvage his life. Lacking the kind of mothering she craved, Wharton substituted a vision of herself as provider of nurturance. This strategy is somewhat like that of elder daughters in motherless families who, deprived of nurturance themselves, bask vicariously in the maternal care they provide for younger siblings. Prominent in Wharton's childhood memories was a small furry dog, recipient of young Edith's tenderest empathic imagination. Reincarnations of Foxy were to accompany Wharton throughout life, pampered to the point of irritating less animal-infatuated friends. By assuming a maternal role with respect to small dogs, she could bring a measure of maternal solicitude under her own control, make sure that it was present in her world, and then identify with the recipient

of this, her own tenderness. Later in life she assumed a maternal posture toward Morton Fullerton, her lover, and following that toward other young men in her social circle.

About seven years after publication of "The Touchstone," the semi-maternal relationship between Margaret Aubyn and Glennard functioned as a paradigm for Edith Wharton's relationship to Morton Fullerton. In both life and fiction the older woman gave more than she received and in both she made of her relationship to a callow man a high imaginative experience.