Doyley Redux: The Buccaneers
With The Buccaneers, an unfinished and posthumously published novel,[4] Wharton recovers her light satiric touch and graceful style. Here, at the very end of her life and career, she confronts a version of her own "double mother" theme but advances it in time from the mother-nanny dichotomy of childhood to a mother-governess one of late adolescence. By this means, the auxiliary mother moves forward in the life course to help a young woman meet the sexual needs of young adulthood. In The Buccaneers a governess enters the life of Nan St. George when she is sixteen, a time of transition to the adult world of marriage and society. Nan's mother, needing social guidance, has retained a governess to "finish" her brilliant, artistic, but not quite pretty younger daughter, Annabel St. George, known as Nan.
Like her creator, Nan hungers for beauty, for rich experience, for a life that meets the needs of her imagination. Endowed with Wharton's own highly reactive temperament, the kind that would make adjustment to conventional life difficult, the essentially anarchic Nan needs a very specific kind of mother. Sharing Wharton's volatility, her tendency toward extremes of feeling, Nan needs an emotional environment that can contain her without imprisoning her.
Unlike Nan's flaccid mother, the governess has just the right traits. Laura Testvalley is "an adventuress, but a great-souled one" (357). She knows when to give in and when to hold the line, is intuitive about a young girl's feelings and ready with comfort and understanding. Her "astringent" style of sympathy sustains the girl without encouraging self-pity; "though Miss Testvalley was often kind, she was seldom tender" (335). These specific traits reflect Edith Wharton's distaste for sentimentality and preference for intellectual and personal toughness.
Although cannily prudent about the property basis of society, Laura Testvalley knows when to subordinate such concerns to love and personal fulfillment. She has had a complete
worldly education and can deal comfortably with sexuality in its many forms, whether it be casual, extramarital, or church-sanctified. Wharton supplies her with an Italian background and reinforces the significance of that Latin imagery by giving Brazil an oddly prominent role in the story. Any form of contact with Brazil seems to unravel Anglo-Saxon inhibitions and liberate the instincts. The experience of working on a Brazilian plantation loosens up the social behavior of several of the young men. The most unashamedly sensuous of the "buccaneering" girls, Conchita de Santos-Dios (but known by her step-father's name, Closson) comes from Brazil. Wharton perhaps borrows Thomas Mann's way of symbolizing sensuality and artistry by deriving it from "swifter, more perceptive" Latin blood. Laura Testvalley, a cousin to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, easily shrugged off her youthful sexual encounter with Lord Richard:
The Lord Richard chapter was a closed one, and she had no wish to re-open it. She had paid its cost in some brief fears and joys, and one night of agonizing tears; but perhaps her Italian blood had saved her from ever, then or after, regarding it as a moral issue. In her busy life there was no room for dead love-affairs.
(75)
She is later capable of trading on this old connection to get an invitation to the Assembly Ball for the girls she is trying to launch socially.
Laura Testvalley, with her knowledge of the world and appreciation of the needs of such a volatile girl as Nan, becomes the psychological mother. When lonely and disappointed, Nan would curl up in bed with Laura and ask her to read poetry to her, sometimes even falling asleep there. One evening Laura reads Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel" to Nan. They talk of love and romance until Nan drifts into slumber. "Miss Testvalley murmured on, ever more softly, to the end; then blowing out the candle, she slid down to Nan's side so gently that the sleeper did not move. 'She might have been my own daughter,' the governess thought, composing her nar-
row frame to rest, and listening in the darkness to Nan's peaceful breathing" (90).
Fulfilling the fantasy of many a nanny-reared child, Nan becomes her governess's favorite. In this special instance, a genuine filial bond is established that will eventually stand up to the ultimate tests—that Laura should sacrifice her own interests for Nan's and will return when needed even though, like every nanny or governess, she will have moved on to the care of other young ladies. Like an ideal mother, Laura Testvalley proves constant. She can be trusted to understand what is important, to arrange what is needed, to be available when called.
When the book opens, Nan's is one of three families of American girls watering at Saratoga whose mothers are liabilities to their daughters' social advancement. Lizzie Elmsworth's mother lacks polish. The mother of the sensuously beautiful Conchita Closson is a divorced and remarried Brazilian woman who stays in her room and smokes cigars. Nan's mother, lacking all real knowledge of society and terrified of associating with the wrong people, is capable only of sniffish negative reactions. Her "only way of guiding her children was to be always crying out to them not to do this or that" (10). She is especially incompetent to perform the important maternal function of placing her daughters on the marriage market.
The families are nouveau riche and socially insecure. They have tried to set their daughters up for advantageous marriages by buying expensive houses in New York and taking them to fashionable spas, but their efforts are unproductive. Laura Testvalley proposes taking the girls to England to remove them from their mothers' social scene. Since she has European connections and has "finished" the daughters of an English duchess, she is able to convince all three families that their girls would benefit from a London social season. Together the young ladies will "invade" England to capture titled husbands. Miss Testvalley leads the invasion "like a general." Her strategies produce dazzling social opportunities for all of the girls despite the social liabilities of their families.
All four buccaneering girls make society marriages in England. Conchita weds a scapegrace young nobleman who had once been for a brief period the lover of Laura Testvalley. Very promptly the young couple become unfaithful to each other. Lizzie Elmsworth marries a titled business man and Member of Parliament. Virginia, Nan's beautiful sister, captures a dull nobleman with whom she is quite content. According to Wharton's plot summary, Nan, "the least beautiful but by far the most brilliant and seductive of them all ... captures the greatest match in England, the young Duke of Tintagel" (358), ominously named for the husband whom Iseult wishes to leave because of her love for Tristan.
Nan's fairy tale unravels when her marriage turns out to be emotionally unsatisfying. The vibrant young Nan has subjected her free spirit to an ordered British life with the decent but dull Duke and his mother, the dowager duchess. The particulars of Nan's relationship to this mother-in-law receive considerable attention in the novel.
As an inexperienced American girl, she has fallen under the authority of Tintagel's mother, who faults Nan's social sense and her failure to provide heirs. The Tintagel dowager seems a judgmental presence to the entire household, all of whom "knew that her Grace's eye was on them," even though she has removed herself to the dower-house and is perfectly tactful. Much like Wharton's mother, the dowager duchess has "the awful gift of omnipresence, of exercising her influence from a distance" (275). Nevertheless, the author suggests that this disapproving mother-in-law contributes something valuable to Nan's maturation. Her subjugation to a regulated British life and the constraints of the dowager duchess provide the order and limits she needs if she is to control her unruly passions.
Having lost all joie de vivre and feeling cut off from the vital girl she had always been, Nan becomes alternately depressed and rebellious. Reluctantly, she comes "to see the use of having one's whims and one's rages submitted to some kind of control" (296). This "holding environment" proves to be a salutary stage in her development.
Much like Trollope's Glencora Palliser and a great deal like Edith Wharton, Nan has come to feel trapped in a dessicated marriage. Feeling inauthentic as Tintagel's Duchess, Nan compares herself inwardly to Goethe's Clärchen. She longs for the solace of her former governess, who had departed immediately after Nan's marriage to work with another family. Feeling depersonalized and isolated, Nan (now called more formally by her full name, Annabel) thinks:
The real break with the vanished Annabel had come, the new Annabel sometimes thought, when Miss Testvalley, her task at the St. Georges' ended, had vanished into the seclusion of another family.... Perhaps Annabel thought, if her beloved Val had remained with her, they might between them have rescued the old Annabel, or at least kept up communications with her ghost—a faint tap now and then against the walls which had built themselves up about the new Duchess. But as it was, there was the new Duchess isolated in her new world, no longer able to reach back to her past, and not having learned how to communicate with her present.
(262)
In order to maintain continuity with her old self and to carry it forward into full womanhood, Nan needs further contact with her psychological mother, the governess.
Like an ideal mother, Laura responds to Nan's call and returns in her time of need. On seeing Laura, the miserable young wife throws herself "on the brown cashmere bosom which had so often been her refuge. 'Of course you know, you darling old Val. I think there's nothing in the world you don't know.' And her tears broke out in a releasing shower" (335). Laura, who has in the meantime ripened physically and emotionally through an autumnal love affair of her own, will help release Nan from the prison of a loveless marriage and free her to find a joyous one with Guy Thwarte.
During her absence from Nan, Laura has captured the attentions of Guy Thwarte's father, an aging rake now ready to settle down. Under the love of this self-centered libertine, the forty-year-old governess blossoms physically: her eyes blaze, her skin glows, and her braided hair loosens into soft waves.
Wharton makes it very clear that middle-aged love can revitalize and empower a woman, even when the object of her love is less than admirable. Passion spreads its healing unction outward to the very skin and hair, like a banner for all to see. (Similarly, signs of sexual fulfillment become noticeable in the much younger Conchita, who has always resembled a glowing peach but becomes especially ripe after she takes on an adulterous relationship.)
Laura helps Nan to break free of her marriage and run off with Guy Thwarte, but at the cost of her opportunity to marry Guy's father. Sir Helmsley Thwarte has political plans for his son that are not compatible with the scandal of Guy's taking up with the duke's wife, and he becomes enraged with Laura. Knowing the consequences to herself, nevertheless, "the great old adventuress, seeing love, deep and abiding love, triumph for the first time in her career," promotes Nan's sexual fulfillment at the cost of her own (359).[5]
Through frank imagery the novel expresses the consequences of neglected sexuality. At the Temple of Love situated on the mossy banks of the Love River, Guy surprises his desolate Nan:
On the summit of the dome the neglected god [of love] spanned his bow unheeded, and underneath it a door swinging loose on broken hinges gave admittance to a room stored with the remnants of derelict croquet-sets and disabled shuttlecocks and graceless rings. It was evidently many a day since the lords of Longlands had visited the divinity who is supposed to rule the world.
(317–18)
With Laura's help, Guy, newly returned from Brazil to his family estate (called Honourslove), will rectify the neglect of Eros. We might say that in this last novel Wharton enjoyed honoring love in all its meanings.
In the course of the novel, the governess "finishes" Nan by leading her first from virginal adolescence into marriage and society and then out of her sterile marriage into the Temple of Love, bringing her finally into blooming womanhood with
a true and understanding partner, although his surname, Thwarte, is troubling in this context. Nan is made to pass from her family into an empty marriage, must experience the desolation of having committed herself to a life of lovelessness, and then, out of her despair, find the strength to choose love at any price.
Thus Wharton rewrites the conclusion of Tristan and Iseult, allowing Nan to choose love over duty, to free herself permanently from the Duke of Tintagel. In so doing Wharton also rewrites the conclusion of her own poem, "Ogrin the Hermit," which, in portraying Iseult's return to lawful marriage, dramatizes the conflict of love and duty, the sense of marriage as a prison. Except for the happy ending, the events of The Buccaneers poignantly echo those of Edith Wharton's amative experience. Unlike Wharton, Nan has at her side an ally who enables her to reject married imprisonment with Tintagel while still relatively young.
Laura's own rejuvenation through autumnal love puts her squarely on the side of passion. The author reinforces the theme of the older woman's right to passion by echoing it in the figure of Miss March, a sixty-year-old expatriate American. The girls have to stretch their imaginations to envision a younger Miss March who might once have loved and been lovable. Only Laura and Nan do not ridicule the idea that this quaint older lady has once been in love. Conchita offers to amuse the girls with Miss March's love story:
"I'll tell you something funny.... She was madly in love with Lord Brightlingsea—with my father-in-law. Isn't that a good one?"...
"Mercy! In love? But she must be sixty," cried Virginia, scandalized.
"Well," said Nan gravely, "I can imagine being in love at sixty."
(124)
The girls are troubled by Miss March's apparent lack of self-respect in visiting the family of Lord Brightlingsea, who now scarcely remembers who she is. At each of Miss March's
visits, the self-centered gentleman who had once been engaged to her has to be reminded by his wife and daughters that he has even met her before. "Nan sat brooding in her corner. 'I think it just shows she loves him better than she does her pride'" (124–25). The bitterness injected into this light-hearted novel by recurring images of female passion confronting male egotism and indifference seems to be a final resurgence of the Fullerton motif. Nan's and Laura's comprehension of Miss March's way of loving put the author's blessing on passion, even when it is not requited.
By buying Nan's growth with her own personal sacrifice, Laura perfects herself in Wharton's conception of the motherly role. In losing her opportunity to marry Guy's father, Laura sacrifices a precious chance to gain social elevation, financial security, and companionship in her declining years. Through this renunciation Laura avoids becoming Nan's mother-in-law, thereby retaining the elective character of their mother-daughter relationship. Furthermore, by sacrificing her own sexuality and going "back alone to old age and poverty" (359), Laura Testvalley abandons the amatory field, leaving the female sexual role to her surrogate daughter. In Wharton's oedipal world, the daughter can enter fully and lovingly into marriage only if the mother-figure has not preempted that role.
The "little brown governess" whose strong personality Wharton felt took over the novel[6] might be called a revenant of the author's own Nanny Doyley, a figure returned from the past to meet new needs, to reconcile Wharton to her past choices, and to protect her against what was yet to come, the helplessness of old age. Even in its unfinished state, The Buccaneers seems to bring Wharton's career full circle, both as an allusion to the Italian setting of her first novel, The Valley of Decision, and as a testament from age to youth, a yielding of place. In her own strange way, Wharton seems finally to have located in herself elements of both Nan, the "motherless girl," and Laura Testvalley, the childless woman. If only at the last, the two incomplete selves found each other.[7]