1—
Family Ties

"M'ama . . . non m'ama . . .  ," the prima donna sang, and "M'ama!," with a final burst of love triumphant.
The Age of Innocence

Although Edith Wharton was endowed by nature with good health and an appetite for sensuous experience, she suffered in youth a repression of her sexuality so massive that she claims to have known virtually nothing of the "process of generation till [she] had been married for several weeks" ("Life and 1," 33–34).^[1]

Her marriage to Edward Wharton was virtually celibate after this unfortunate beginning, so that her real sexual awakening was delayed until her mid-forties when she met and fell passionately in love with Morton Fullerton. She attributed her delayed sexual maturation and its attendant consequences to her mother's prudish exaggeration of the Victorian sexual code. Her childhood experiences served to magnify what social historian Peter Gay calls the "learned ignorance" about sexual matters imposed on women of Edith Wharton's time and class, the Gilded Age of old New York society.^[2] Her socially prominent parents, George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, epitomized the conservative values of that society.

Wharton's depiction of the cult of female purity in The Age of Innocence reveals that women knew how to work within that convention, to maintain the appearance of innocence

while knowing well enough the important facts of life. In the words of May Welland, the incarnation of "factitious purity," "You mustn't think that a girl knows as little as her parents imagine. One hears and one notices—one has one's feelings and ideas" (149). Created in the author's late maturity, May Welland was granted a sophistication about sexuality that Wharton herself had lacked during her nubile years and was to acquire very painfully later in life. To a greater degree than others, the youthful Edith Wharton accepted the cultural fiction of female innocence and imposed it all too rigidly on herself.

She opens The Age of Innocence with Newland Archer entering his opera box in the midst of a performance of Gounod's Faust on the eve of his engagement, as Marguerite is singing "M'ama . . . non m'ama! . . . M'ama" ("He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me"). The words highlighted by this dramatic moment suggest a bilingual pun connecting love and mother, a pun derived from Edith Wharton's earliest affective life—mama, no mama, yet, after all, mama. Having a bodily mother whom she felt was no mother to her spirit, receiving compensatory love from a nanny, but having no single figure who reliably embodied the mothering function, young Edith had no mama, had two mamas, yet after all had one real mama who, by virtue of occupying the maternal space, exercised a powerful psychic sway. And the simultaneous having and not having of a mother contributed to difficulties throughout her affective life, so that when young she repressed all knowledge of sexuality, when married she lived celibate, and when she finally achieved sexuality in a midlife romance, she loved under adulterous and humiliating circumstances.

Mother and Nanny

The division that Edith Wharton experienced between the biological and the nurturant aspects of mothering resulted in a general tendency to psychic splitting that was to permeate

her feeling, her thinking, and eventually the very texture of her fiction. Nurturing, she tells us, came not from her socially preoccupied mother, but from a very devoted nanny. The contrast between the nanny's loving behavior and her mother's remoteness and judgmental attitudes magnified the normal intra-psychic split of good and bad mother.

The split that relegated to Lucretia Jones only the negative aspects of mothering—domination, intrusiveness, power to injure—created a pattern that would dominate Edith Wharton's psychic life and extend even beyond her mother's death. Once Lucretia Jones was cast into the role of the bad mother and became thus inscribed in her daughter's imagination, rectification of the mother-daughter relationship seemed almost impossible. The longevity of Wharton's anger is shown by her selection of illustrations for her memoir, A Backward Glance, which was written in her seventies, decades after Lucretia's death; she chose pictures of herself at various ages, several pictures of her houses, and portraits of her father, grandparents and great-grandparents and Henry James, but not a single image of her husband or her mother. The frightened child developed into an adult who spent considerable energy negotiating with her mother's influence, an adult who eventually achieved autonomy, but only at great cost.^[3]

Outwardly, Edith Wharton's childhood situation was not exceptional for a girl of her class and time. She was born in 1862 into a socially prominent New York family that was "well-off, but not rich" if compared to such magnates as the Astors, to whom they were related through the Schmermerhorns.^[4] The family of George Frederic and Lucretia Jones lived comfortably on money derived from municipal real estate, which allowed them a fashionable existence in New York and Newport until post-Civil War inflation forced them to economize by living for many years in Europe, starting when Edith was four. Being a quick learner and voracious for knowledge, she

acquired fluency in the major European languages and a taste for continental scenes, architecture, and culture. Building on this base, she would later educate herself in languages, philosophy, religion, and literature, well beyond the accomplishments of most women of her time.

After the family returned to America in Edith's tenth year, she enjoyed the social life of both New York City and Newport—nannies, governesses (but little formal schooling), parties, and a fashionable debut. Altogether, she had a masterful intellect, social position, sufficient wealth to lead a fashionable life, and a privileged variety of experiences. Her memoir, A Backward Glance, claims that her "little-girl life, safe, guarded, monotonous, was cradled in the only world about which, according to Goethe, it is impossible to write poetry" (7), that is, an environment so satisfying that it provides insufficient conflict to inspire an artist.^[5]

But social and family conditions were not nearly so bland or so favorable as Wharton indicated. In "Life and I," an earlier and more candid manuscript version of her memoir, she reveals that she had felt neither cradled nor safe. For her, childhood was a series of terrors. She was worried, frightened, and subject to terrifying fears and compulsions. She suffered from wide emotional swings ranging from helplessness to grandiosity, felt divided between incompatible public and private selves, and was driven to extravagant and sometimes socially unacceptable activities.

By her own account, she suffered serious neurotic disturbances. She was afraid of animals other than small furry ones. Frequently she experienced terrifying panic attacks while waiting on the threshold of her parents' home, as if expecting that the door might be opened by a witch. She dreaded all tales of the supernatural, especially fairy tales, which feature good and bad mother figures—fairy godmothers, stepmothers, and witches.^[6]

These fears were later converted into psychosomatic or neurasthenic illnesses, such as extreme reactions to minor

differences in temperature, nausea, anorexia, and asthma. In 1908 she wrote to Sara Norton:

Tell Lily . . . that for twelve years I seldom knew what it was to be, for more than an hour or two of the twenty-four, without an intense feeling of nausea, and such unutterable fatigue that when I got up I was always more tired than when I lay down. This form of neurasthenia consumed the best years of my youth, and left, in some sort, an irreparable shade on my life . . . I worked through it, and came out on the other side, and so will she.^[7]

Wharton's agonizing symptoms conform remarkably well to those of the nineteenth-century neurasthenic woman as described by Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady . Although similar in many ways to hysteria, neurasthenia was considered a more "prestigious and attractive form of female nervousness than hysteria," comprising blushing, vertigo, headaches, neuralgia, insomnia, depression, and uterine irritability. With symptoms similar to those of hysterics, neurasthenics were thought to be more cooperative than hysterics, more ladylike and well-bred, more refined, and often more intellectually gifted and ambitious.^[8] Neurasthenia like Wharton's was thought to result from sexual repression and other denials of bodily appetites in order to conform to a ladylike ideal, as well as to conflicts about "women's ambitions for intellectual, social, and financial success."^[9]

Such pressures were particularly troublesome in Wharton's social milieu, which, in addition to fostering a repressive code of female behavior, distrusted intellectual ambition in general. Unlike Henry James, Wharton was born into the fashionable rather than the intellectual branch of the haute bourgeoisie, so that while living in America she had little contact with artists or literary people. As her friend Mrs. Winthrop Chanler put it: "The Four Hundred would have fled in a body from a poet, a painter, a musician or a clever Frenchman."^[10] The part of Edith Wharton that identified with the values of her social set became uneasy about the artist and intellectual

that was emerging from within, causing her to cultivate that artistic self in secret. Confused and lacking support for her emergent self, she rigidified the socially validated self into a virtual parody of the proprieties. Said a Newport acquaintance from the intellectual set, "Our acquaintance was slight, she belonging to the ultra-fashionable crowd, and I in quite another group. Though the intellectuals and the fashionables met, they never quite fused. She was slender, graceful and icy cold, with an exceedingly aristocratic bearing."^[11] The exaggerated quality of Edith Wharton's aristocratic demeanor was also related to fear of her mother's disapproval.

Wharton's memoirs point directly to disturbances in the mother-daughter relationship as the origin of her problems. She portrayed her mother as a beautiful, fashionable, narrowly conventional society woman of fairly trivial interests. At nineteen, after a fairly adventurous and partially secret courtship, Lucretia Rhinelander married Edith's father, twenty-three-year-old George Frederic Jones—handsome, well educated, and well-to-do—the typical New York gentleman of Wharton's stories.^[12] After settling in Gramercy Park, the bride entertained frequently and lavishly, "taking her place among the most elegant young married women of her day" (Backward Glance, 18). Rumor has it that the expression "keeping up with the Joneses" derived from the grand social presence of Lucretia Rhinelander Jones.

But Lucretia's elegance was at least partly compensatory. Although she had grown up enjoying an aristocratic family position, by the time of her coming out the Rhinelanders were often short of funds. Lucretia had to attend her own debut in a home-made gown and ill-fitting second-hand slippers. With experiences vacillating between pride and humiliation, Lucretia felt so insecure that she needed to fortify herself with external signs of social position—rigid proprieties and an inexhaustible supply of splendid clothes from Paris. Said her daughter with empathic relief at Lucretia's eventual reputation as the best-dressed woman in New York, "At last the home-made tarlatans and the inherited satin shoes were

avenged" (18). Despite this apparent triumph, Lucretia was unable to impart social confidence to her daughter, who also tended to fortify herself with lavish clothes.

The couple had two sons, Frederic and Henry, who were respectively sixteen and twelve years older than Edith, the only girl of the family. When Edith was born, her father was forty, her mother thirty-seven years old. Family patterns and relationships were well established by this time, putting Edith into a fairly isolated position with regard to her brothers and even to her mother, who probably had little interest in returning to childrearing after so long an interval. The mother seemed distant, self-involved, and probably by this time more attuned to the ways of men than to the needs of a small girl.

Wharton's autobiographical documents depict her mother as cold, reproving, and remote. Motherly comfort came only from Doyley, her nanny. Here is the constellation as depicted in A Backward Glance:

Peopling the background of these earliest scenes there were the tall, splendid father who was always so kind, and whose strong arms lifted one so high, and held one so safely; and my mother, who wore such beautiful flounced dresses . . . and all the other dim, impersonal attributes of a Mother, without, as yet anything much more definite; and two big brothers who were mostly away . . . but in the foreground with Foxy [her dog] there was one rich all-permeating presence: Doyley—a nurse who has always been there, who is as established as the sky and as warm as the sun, who understands everything, feels everything, can arrange everything, and combines all the powers of the Divinity with the compassion of a mortal heart like one's own! Doyley's presence was the warm cocoon in which my infancy lived safe and sheltered; the atmosphere without which I could not have breathed. It is thanks to Doyley that not one bitter memory, one uncomprehended injustice, darkened the days when the soul's flesh is so tender, and the remembrance of wrongs so acute.

(26)

In the foreground of this family picture stand a nursemaid and a furry dog—someone to love her and something to love! And just as Doyley was the forerunner of Wharton's beloved

servant Catherine Gross, that furry dog was the first of many that were to follow Wharton throughout life. Edith Wharton was usually seen holding one or more small dogs, cradling them in her lap, or draping them over her shoulders. Despite the benign atmosphere of A Backward Glance, bitter memories and injustices did indeed survive, and some were recorded in her abandoned autobiography, "Life and I." There she gives quite a different picture—a poignant account of mother's failure to provide the warm cocoon and of the consequences of living without one.

In many expressions of Wharton's spirit these joys and deficits of her formative years were to be recapitulated—the arms of the knightly father, and two female divinities, one remote, impersonal, disapproving, and sometimes punitive, the other a sheltering cocoon with powers of divine comfort. The child felt herself subjected to supernaturally beneficent and maleficent powers that controlled her bodily sensations—temperature, shelter, and the very breath of life. This feeling was to accompany her throughout life, causing restlessness and dissatisfaction with any one place or set of circumstances. She was always on the move, seeking the right place to be.

Despite the elaborate social life Wharton was to maintain in both America and Europe, she felt lonely, and despite elegant dwellings on two continents, she rarely felt at home. As she says of her perpetually displaced character Lily Bart, "the being to whom no four walls mean any more than others is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere." Having been unable fully to possess the cocoon that Doyley spun around her, Edith Wharton repeatedly sought and furnished new homes, perpetually seeking patriation in a home that would contain all the warring elements of her personality.

Doyley's very virtues altered the balance of forces within the Jones family. She became a standard of comfort against which Lucretia Jones looked inadequate to her daughter. Responding with all her grateful love to Doyley's nurturance, young Edith must have failed to give Lucretia signals that would have stimulated her latent maternal impulses and elic-

ited warmer responses. The child must also have felt guilt for failing to love her mother and feared some retribution for giving to an outsider the love properly belonging to a parent. A negative cycle was generated between mother and daughter, with the mother reacting to the child's rejection and the child allowing negative imagery to fill the sacred maternal space. Lucretia came to seem like the God of Calvinism—vigilant, omnipresent, and unappeasable. Edith experienced a monumental need to placate this mother, a need so powerful that she offered up her own sexuality on the altar of this angry deity.

Such a cycle generates its own dynamics. Edith's image of her mother as a terrifying omnipresent power rendered the actual mother inaccessible for emotional support and ineffective in transmitting a model of capable femininity. Rejecting her mother, Wharton willed herself to be unlike Lucretia Jones in important ways. She tried to emulate her mother's elegance but rejected her role as an adult sexual being and mother. This separation of ornamental beauty from adult female sexuality is the genesis of Wharton's most touching figure, the exquisite Lily Bart, who seeks a husband but unconsciously sabotages every incipient union. In general, Wharton characters who are fitted by nature to relish the pleasures of life but always undermine their own hopes are revenants of the ardent Edith Wharton, a "life-lover" who so managed her affairs as to frustrate her own urgent desire for love and sexual fulfillment.

Receiving most of her nurturance from a surrogate mother added a deep insecurity to Edith's young life. Although Doyley remained with the Jones family well beyond Edith's infancy, she must have had day's off when the child feared she might never return. Knowing that Doyley was a salaried employee, Edith must also have feared that she might be dismissed. Attachment to Doyley and her later surrogates did not compensate for the maternal deficit, mainly because even the divine Doyley did not and could not suffice to fill the maternal role. Young Edith's polarization of the two women

attributed to the mother power without love, to the nanny love without power. With mother perceived sometimes as a dim, aloof figure, sometimes as a punitive deity, and with nanny adored as an all-loving—but powerless angel, the child stood frozen between mutually canceling antitheses. As a remedial figure of Wharton's childhood, Nanny Doyley ameliorated the child's sense of maternal deprivation, but as a domestic servant without power in Wharton's destined social world, she lacked authority. A servant is not a mother, at least not while the real mother is present. Doyley's visibly subordinate position in the household prevented her from assuming full maternal powers in Edith's mind. Motherhood is more than comfort, it is power and social efficacy, attributes belonging to the biological mother—to the mistress of the house and wife of the father.

To elaborate Melanie Klein's imagery of the good and bad breast (which can be intensified when the split images derive from separate maternal figures), each extreme implies its opposite. Doyley's very goodness evoked her polar negation—a persecutory biological mother who is both wronged and wronging. Having hypostatized the rejected mother into a hostile force, a vengeful Fury, Edith consumed considerable energy in efforts at appeasement. The sacrifices she made to this image, sacrifices of sexual curiosity and denial of sexual impulses and all that followed from such repressions, served to increase her anger and thereby her guilt.

The persecuting image of Edith's mother as judgmental, forbidding, aloof yet omnipresent, may have been a projection of the child's need for punishment rather than an accurate description. To some degree, Lucretia Jones probably was self-centered and preoccupied, but Wharton's own memoirs contain evidence that her mother cared about her. The record is contradictory. Wharton reports her parents' concern when she came near death from typhoid fever at a German spa in her ninth year. In their despair the parents daringly secured advice from the czar's personal physician, who prescribed plunging the child into ice-cold baths. "At the suggestion my

mother's courage failed her; but she wrapped me in wet sheets, and I was saved" (Backward Glance, 41).

Mother and daughter took frequent carriage rides and made social calls together. Although young Edith felt herself to be homely and awkward in comparison to her beautiful mother, Lucretia Jones commissioned many paintings and photographs of her daughter and displayed them prominently.^[13] Lucretia not only supervised Edith's reading but paid scrupulous attention to her diction and usage. She denied her daughter writing paper, so that the child had to write on discarded wrapping paper, but bought her a prized volume of poetry for her birthday. Although she seemed not to encourage Edith's creative writing, she tried to jot down the child's improvised oral narrations and, as Edith discovered after Lucretia's death, even saved copies of the child's letters to aunts and other relatives ("Life and I," 15). What was probably the most misguided of her attempts to relate to her daughter was her publication of Edith's adolescent verses without the girl's knowledge or permission.^[14] This intrusive violation of her daughter's privacy was probably intended to be a pleasing surprise.

Regardless of the historical truth about Lucretia Jones, the internalized mother was experienced as a persecutory figure.^[15] Wharton wrote of having suffered "excruciating moral tortures" that seemed derived from her mother but were actually self-imposed. She recognized that her parents, nanny, and governesses really had not preached, scolded; or "evoked moral bogeys." Indeed, she found that her parents were "profoundly indifferent to the subtler problems of the consciousness. They had what might be called the code of worldly probity." Mother's rule was politeness, father's was kindness; and the only behavior they really condemned was ill breeding. They had not even treated lying as particularly naughty:

My compunction was entirely self-evolved .... I had never been subjected to any severe moral discipline, or even to that religious instruction which develops self-scrutiny in many children . . . I had, nevertheless, worked out of my inner mind a

rigid rule of absolute, unmitigated truth-telling, the least imperceptible deviation from which would inevitably be punished by the dark Power I knew as "God." Not content with this, I had further evolved the principle that it was "naughty" to say, or to think, anything about anyone that one could not, without offense, avow to the person in question.
["Life and I," 4–5; italics added]

Her moral suffering came from the conflict between her own impossibly high standards of truth and her mother's "code of worldly probity." The conflict was dramatized when she was berated by her mother for expressing publicly her thought that a certain elderly woman was as ugly as an old goat: "For years afterward I was never free from the oppressive sense that I had two absolutely inscrutable beings to please—God & my mother—who, while ostensibly upholding the same principles of behaviour, differed totally as to their application. And my mother was the most inscrutable of the two" (6–7).

With this oppressive presence the daughter craved to be reconciled. Through fiction she tried to imagine ways of freeing herself from guilt and from fear of her mother's punitive rage. She needed to bring her good and bad mother-figures into relationship—to fuse them into a single image of competent, authoritative, and reliable nurturance. She searched her imagination to create a usable maternal presence that would meet her unsatisfied infantile needs and also be capable of leading her into full womanhood.

She juxtaposes to an account of her burgeoning sensuality the anguish of being shamed by her mother for seeking sexual enlightenment:

Life, real Life, was . . . humming in my blood, flushing my cheeks and . . . running over me in vague tremors when I rode my poney [sic] . . . or raced & danced & tumbled with "the boys." And I didn't know—& if ... I asked my mother "What does it mean?" I was always told ... "It's not nice to ask about such things." . . . Once, when I was seven or eight, an older cousin had told me that babies were not found in flowers, but in people. This information had been given unsought, but as I had been told by mamma that it was "not nice" to enquire into

such matters, I had a vague sense of contamination, & went immediately to confess my involuntary offense. I received a severe scolding, & was left with a penetrating sense of "notniceness" which effectually kept me from pursuing my investigations farther; & this was literally all I knew of the processes of generation till I had been married for several weeks....

A few days before my marriage, I was seized with such a dread of the whole dark mystery, that I summoned up courage to appeal to my mother, & begged her, with a heart beating to suffocation, to tell me "what being married was like." Her handsome face at once took on the look of icy disapproval which I most dreaded. "I never heard such a ridiculous question!" she said impatiently; & I felt at once how vulgar she thought me.

But in the extremity of my need I persisted. "I'm afraid Mamma—I want to know what will happen to me!"

The coldness of her expression deepened to disgust [and the question went unanswered] . . . I record this brief conversation, because the training of which it was the beautiful and logical conclusion did more than anything else to falsify & misdirect my whole life .
("Life and I," 33–35; italics added)

The fear of being thought unclean appears to have driven out whatever sexual knowledge Edith had picked up through her friends, her experience, and her extensive reading. She would not allow herself even to think whatever her mother decreed to be "not nice." Believing that mother could monitor even her thoughts, she effectively banished sexual knowledge from her mind, even to the point of believing "that married people 'had' children because God saw the clergyman marrying them through the roof of the church!" (34). The illusion of maternal omniscience generated such exaggerated compliance, such extreme scrupulosity, that her entire sexual nature—feelings along with knowledge—were driven underground.

Riven by such conflicts, Edith Newbold Jones was so unprepared for her marriage in 1885 at the age of twenty-three that for the next twelve years she suffered depression, nausea, and headaches. In 1898, thirteen years after the wedding, she required several months of residential psychiatric treatment. Her account of her mother's refusal to impart any sexual infor

mation, even when implored for it on the eve of the wedding, is now a famous part of Wharton folklore. Even if true as reported, the kind of total ignorance that Edith professes must be attributed as much to her own repression as to her mother's prudery. I suspect that then, as now, few women first learned the "facts of life" from their mothers or required elementary instruction on the eve of their weddings. If M. Jeanne Peterson's study of Victorian gentlewomen is applicable to American women of Edith Wharton's class and generation, they "knew about sex and had levels of tolerance about sexual matters and sexual misbehavior that belie the Victorians' reputation for prudery."^[16]

Edith certainly was exposed to the usual stimuli that arouse sexual inquiry. She had many friends, especially among the boys of her acquaintance, whom she much preferred to girls. Her earliest recorded memory is of a highly pleasurable kiss from a small boy cousin, and she had two older brothers. She records episodes of flirtatiousness, which must have generated some somatic awareness of sexuality. In "Life and I" she documents a very normal curiosity about the first acts of husbands with respect to their brides: I confess to a weakness for 'the Lord of Burleigh,' based I think, on its documentary interest as a picture of love and marriage (Subjects which already interested me profoundly.) From this poem I drew the inference that a husband's first act after marriage was to give his wife a concert ('and a gentle consort made he')" (9).

Another childish verbal misunderstanding illuminates the nexus in the child's imagination of adulthood, sexuality, and guilt. She had pondered the similarity between the words "adult" and "adultery "—noting that "persons who had 'committed adultery' had to pay higher rates in travelling (probably as a punishment for their guilt), because I had seen somewhere ... the notice, 'Adults 50 cents, children 25 cents'" (10). These examples indicate that considerable mental energy had been devoted to sexual investigation, bearing out Freud's

view that speculation about the sexual activities of parents is the origin of intellectual curiosity—our first important attempt to puzzle out the unknown. He surmised that children would divine the facts of generation even if never informed of them.^[17]

Puberty and menstruation must have raised additional curiosity. After her early debut at seventeen, she joined a social circle of young married women, who must have communicated something of the realities of married life. If she really arrived at marriageable age believing that women become pregnant because God sees their weddings through the roof of the church, what prevented so intelligent a person from checking out this unlikely supposition?

Rather than join the general indignation against Lucretia Jones for her purported rejection of Edith's prenuptial questions about what happens to women when they marry, I am tempted to echo Lucretia's observation that Edith must have noticed that men and women are made differently, and that she "can hardly be as stupid as she pretends."^[18] The not-quite-credible wedding eve story may reflect displaced anger at Lucretia Jones's astonishing omission of Edith's name from the invitations to her own wedding, which reads, "Mrs. George Frederic Jones requests the honor of your presence at the marriage of her daughter to Mr. Edward R. Wharton, at Trinity Chapel, on Wednesday April Twenty-ninth at twelve o'clock."^[19]

Edith's request for sexual information could have masked a shy desire for intimacy with her mother—a sharing of womanly secrets. The Old Maid, Wharton's fictive treatment of such an interview on the eve of marriage, clearly points less toward sexual instruction than toward mother-daughter intimacy just before the daughter's entry into the married state. Imparting such information before a wedding may be a ritual designed to transmit female adulthood from mother to daughter, and this transmission is exactly what failed to occur in Edith Wharton's development.

The "No" of the Mother, the Realm of the Father

Wharton's conceptions of power, gender, and sexuality were derived from the complex politics of her family constellation. The partial displacement of Lucretia Jones by a nursemaid affected Edith's sexual development by altering the dynamics of the oedipal phase and making space in the child's psyche for unusually florid incestuous fantasies. Lucretia's inability to hold onto her own daughter's affection may have suggested a similar slackness in her hold on her husband, leaving a power gap into which the child's imagination might enter. And, as I discuss more fully in Chapter 4, the split maternal image might have suggested a fancy that her brother's tutor and not George Frederic Jones was really her father, thus rendering Mr. Jones more available as an object of sexual fantasies. Given the extravagance of Edith's imagination and the energy she put into sexual investigation, there are manifold possibilities for elaboration of the forces within the family system.

Balancing the two female figures of her childhood was the "tall, splendid father who was always so kind, and whose strong arms lifted one so high" (Backward Glance, 1), a figure who, unlike the mother, was immune from the rancor of childhood disappointments. Edith idealized him and identified with him. Married shortly after his graduation from Columbia College, he inherited enough money that he never had to work for a living. He lived a life of gentlemanly leisure, occupying himself largely with work on the boards of charitable and cultural institutions.

The recollection of a proud childhood walk with him is the opening note of A Backward Glance . In this radiant memory Wharton found the formation of one aspect of her selfhood: I may date from that hour the birth of the conscious and feminine me in the little girl's vague soul" (2). With her father as the mirror of her fine appearance, she came to experience

herself as a "subject for adornment." Her pride in being daddy's pretty little companion includes a romantic attachment to this handsome father, competition with her mother for this position, and a compassionate loyalty to him.

But as Adrienne Rich says, a nurturing father "must be loved at the mother's expense."^[20] Edith saw her father as a fellow victim of Lucretia's materialism and social ambitions. During the Civil War years, the Jones income suffered from fluctuations in real-estate values, causing the family to spend about eight of Edith's childhood years in Europe to reduce expenses. Edith remembered her father bent over his desk in "desperate calculations ... in the vain effort to squeeze my mother's expenditures into his narrowing income."^[21] To this image of paternal worries she juxtaposed that of her mother as a "born shopper" who indulged in unnecessary buying until the money "gave out."

She tended to visualize her father in his library, a small room decorated in the Walter Scott tradition, with an oak mantelpiece "sustained by vizored knights." The room was "lined with low bookcases where, behind glass doors, languished the younger son's meager portion of a fine old family library."^[22] This typically Victorian "gentleman's library" became Edith Wharton's schoolroom, her university, and her emotional center.

Beginning to sense her own mental powers, Edith turned to her father as the source of what she valued most in herself and to his library as the locus of her most valued experiences. With important consequences for her artistic persona, she came to regard him as the generator of her literary self. He taught her how to read and introduced her to poetry: "My first experience of rhyme was the hearing of the "Lays of Ancient Rome" read aloud by my father . . . The metre was intoxicating" ("Life and I," 9).

She found or read into this mild, wife-dominated gentleman a love of poetry and a literary talent frustrated by his wife's prosaic values. She wrote, expressing great pity for his lost sensibilities:

The new Tennysonian rhythms also moved my father greatly; and I imagine there was a time when his rather rudimentary love of verse might have been developed had he had any one with whom to share it. But my mother's matter-of-factness must have shrivelled up any such buds of fancy . . . and I have wondered since what stifled cravings had once germinated in him, and what manner of man he was really meant to be. That he was a lonely one, haunted by something unexpressed and unattained, I am sure.
(Backward Glance, 39)

The polarizing tendency described above with respect to the dual mother figures was also at work in Wharton's imagery of her two parents. She perceived them as negations, of each other, with all the good directed toward the father. Onto him she projected her own sense of victimization by a female, so that Lucretia seemed to shrivel the soul of this sensitive man. Wharton's fiction frequently echoes this pattern of shy male sensibility sacrificed to female crassness.

Edith's father gave her the freedom of his library. Her mother read novels avidly but forbade them to the daughter because of their sexual content. Young Edith obeyed her mother's rule but used her library privilege to frustrate its intent. She must have been something of a casuist, evading the ban on novels by reading plays, the first that she recalls being about a prostitute. From her readings in the Bible, poetry, and Elizabethan drama she must have found all the clues she needed to surmise "the facts of generation," but feeling guilty about knowledge forbidden by her Mother, managed to repress it. Lucretia Jones's prudery triumphed better than she knew or intended—Edith became distanced from her developing erotic feelings and transferred all her passion into the area of books and imagination.

She developed a rapturous relationship to the written word, to which her beloved father had introduced her. His library became a "secret garden," a locus of virtually ecstatic experiences, from the sensuous pleasures of luxurious bindings to those of the expanding imagination: "Whenever I try to recall my childhood it is in my father's library that it comes

to life. I am squatting on the thick Turkey rug . . . dragging out book after book in a secret ecstasy of communion . . . There was in me a secret retreat where I wished no one to intrude" (69–70; note the identification here of the library with her self or her body).

Activities connected with books, whether hearing stories read, making up her own stories, or browsing among the books, are described in "Life and I" in orgasmic language. She experienced a "sensuous rapture" from the spoken and written word even before she knew how to read. She tells of a "devastating passion" for the process of "making up," which consisted of pacing the floor holding a specific book (often upside-down) and ecstatically pouring out invented tales as if she were reading them. She managed to turn the pages at approximately the right intervals, hoping that the watching adults believed she could read. The rapture was tied to specific editions of specific books, so that "invention flagged unless I had the right print." She was under such urgent compulsion to repeat this activity that she would have to abandon playmates in order to relieve her tension at fairly frequent intervals.

I used to struggle as long as I could against my perilous obsession, & then, when the "pull" became too strong, I would politely [ask mother to make my excuses because] I must make up." And in another instant I would be shut up in her bedroom, & measuring the floor with rapid strides, while I poured out to my tattered Tauschnitz, the accumulated floods of my pent-up eloquence. Oh, the exquisite relief of those moments of escape from the effort of trying to "be like other children"! . . . I don't think I exaggerate or embellish in retrospect the ecstasy which transported my little body & soul when I shut myself in & caught up my precious Tauschnitz.
("Life and I," 12–13)

Even allowing for hyperbole, "making up," as she called it, sounds like what youngsters today call "making out." Young Edith would take the specific editions of books to which her rapture was cathected from her father's library to her mother's bedroom and then engage in this tension-relieving outburst of

narrative. She needed to make her mother a witness to her narrative frenzies. The whole cluster of activities—the locales, and the sequence and language in which she reports them—suggest that some erotic arousal had occurred in her father's library, and that she felt her mother should be aware of it.

Edith's reading probably stimulated sexual fantasies and perhaps some autoerotic activity. Indeed, a survey of Wharton's fiction and poetry reveals what Candace Waid calls an "extravagant desire for knowledge," which in the poem "Vesalius in Zante" focuses on the female reproductive system. Both Vesalius and his successor Fallopius, whose anatomical research led him to discover the fallopian tubes, "rent the veil of flesh and forced a way / into the secret fortalice of life." In this dramatic monologue the living female body is troped as a book or scroll that the anatomist violates in his lust for knowledge. Vesalius defends thus his dissection of a still-living cataleptic girl:

                                    If my blade
Once questioned living flesh, if once I tore
The pages of the Book in opening it,
See what the torn page yielded ere the light
Had paled its buried characters—and judge!^[23]

As Waid observes, "the juxtaposition of wounding and violation with the problem of penetrating the secrets of the female body culminates in these poems with an epistemologically and sexually charged concern with the female organs of reproduction."^[24] By imaging exploration of the secrets of the female body as the tearing open of a book, Wharton perhaps suggests the core fantasy or psychological nexus involved in her sexualization of books and libraries.

The eroticized images of the human hand that appear frequently in Wharton's work point in several directions. Some arise in connection with father figures, some with lovers, but they may also refer to autoerotic activity. The ecstatic poem "Life," published in 1908 and delirious with erotic excitement, is narrated by a water reed that has been ravished into

expression by Life, an allegorical female figure. Life, exclaims the reed, "in my live flank dug a finger-hole, / and wrung new music from it." As player of the reedpipe, Life sets the pipe's flanks aquiver with ecstasy: "into my frail flanks / Into my bursting veins, the whole sea poured / Its spaces and its thunder."^[25] A river reed played on by the hand and lips of a female figure and endowed with quivering flanks offers so many interpretive possibilities that one cannot confidently chart the metaphoric path. But the poem, with its multivalent eroticism and swift alternations of polarity, seems propelled by the flow between sexuality and creativity.

The hands that play the reedpipe in "Life" anticipate the role of hands in the incestuous "Beatrice Palmato" fragment that Wharton regarded as unpublishable (see Appendix). Hands are prominent not only in the name "Palmato" but in the fact that father-daughter incest had been carried on for years by means of mutual manual stimulation. The difference between the plot summary "Beatrice Palmato" and its appended "Unpublishable Fragment" illuminates the nature of Edith Wharton's preoccupation with incest. In the startlingly erotic, if not pornographic, depiction of incest in the "Fragment," a father and daughter joyously consummate shortly after the daughter's marriage the desire that had always permeated their relationship. This episode unfolds the incestuous implications concealed within the plot summary, while the summary supplies a familial frame for the "fragment."^[26]

The summary presents the parents of Beatrice Palmato, her first name probably an allusion to Beatrice Cenci, the sixteenth-century Roman woman whose name has a long association with incest. Cenci joined a plot to assassinate her father for his "unnatural" acts. Her mother, interestingly enough, was named Lucrezia. Beatrice Palmato's mother was a shy, silent, emotionally troubled woman, and her father, the half-Levantine, half-Portuguese Palmato, was a wealthy, cultivated, and artistic London banker. In this family, affective lines run in an oedipal direction; the mother passionately favors her son, the father his daughters. Following the suicide

of an older daughter for unspecified reasons, the mother suffers mental disturbances that require hospitalization, leaving Beatrice in the care of the father and a governess, whom the father marries after his wife's death in an insane asylum.

At age eighteen, the lively, brilliant, artistic Beatrice Palmato marries an amiable but dull country squire. Her friends are surprised at this match, as were Wharton's friends by her marriage to Teddy. Beatrice promptly loses her sparkle, slumping into a general depression, and brightens only during an extended trip to Paris with her father. Mr. Palmato dies uneventfully during Beatrice's twentieth year, the age at which Edith Wharton lost her father.

Beatrice bears two children and becomes morbidly jealous of her husband's affection for their daughter, a brilliant replica of herself. One day Beatrice grows furious at seeing her husband innocently kiss their little girl after a long absence. From this irrational outburst the husband suddenly recognizes "many mysterious things in their married life—the sense of some hidden power controlling her, and perpetually coming between them, and of some strange initiation, some profound moral perversion."^[27] His recognition of her moral condition leads Beatrice to commit suicide. Only subsequently, in conversation with her brother, does the husband connect the obscure barrier in his marriage to Mr. Palmato, but the act of incest is left unspecified. With the horror implied but unstated, the summary has the makings of a powerful story, but Wharton never wrote it.

In the "Unpublishable Fragment" she unfolds the "perversion" in the life of Beatrice, depicting with exquisite relish the same horrific experiences that the plot summary barely suggests. Between these two documents we have two sides of an incest experience—the daughter's pleasure in bringing to climax a lifetime of paternal seduction, and the same woman's horror as she lives out the consequences of incestuous abuse and imagines her own daughter becoming a victim of it. By virtue of the dual perspective created by these separate versions, Wharton offers a private and a social vision of the same

act—secret pleasure for a limited period within the daughter's consciousness, but dire consequences when that daughter tries to move out of the enclosed relationship into the social world of marriage and childrearing. For that outward move, Beatrice has become permanently incapacitated.

Curiously, Mr. Palmato deferred the consummation of his lust until a week after Beatrice had been deflowered by her bridegroom. Then, in a scene of sensuous luxury, father and daughter view each other's bodies for the first time. Wharton makes it very clear that hitherto Mr. Palmato had been stimulating Beatrice with his hand; now, in order to advance to the full sexual act, he brings her along by the established, familiar route. His hand "softly separated her legs, and began to slip up the old path it had so often travelled in darkness." He manipulates her genitals with his "subtle forefinger" and then penetrates them with his tongue. Next he presses "into her hand the strong fiery muscle that they used, in their old joke, to call his third hand."^[28]

The father exults in the idea that Beatrice's husband had served only as gatekeeper to this moment, the consummation of her true passion. He had felt that she would accept him fully only after she has experienced the "eagerness bred of privation ... the dull misery of her marriage," a stage not likely to have developed only a week after her wedding.^[29] The fragment concludes with genital intercourse, but only after carefully establishing the pair's long-continued practice of mutual masturbation.

Her bridal experiences, Mr. Palmato felt, would pale in comparison to what Beatrice's patient, imaginative, sexually accomplished father could offer. The particulars of Beatrice's unsatisfying marriage are so loaded with references to Wharton's own marriage that some degree of autobiographical allusion is likely in the incestuous experiences as well, though probably enhanced by the imagination of a woman long sexually deprived.

If, as seems plausible, young Edith had experienced some kind of incestuous stimulation, we can more easily under-

stand her emotional volatility and overactive sense of guilt. Such an event would also have contributed to the astonishing repression of all sexual knowledge and years of sexual abstinence that we have already seen.^[30] Her psychosomatic ailments and her protective attitude toward her father resemble the pattern of women who have been sexually abused in childhood. In general, such women tend either to become promiscuous or to fear sexuality and abjure sex altogether.^[31] An incest victim's sense of personal degradation motivates the Palmato plot summary; her voluptuous fantasies generate the "unpublishable fragment."

The half-Portuguese, half-Levantine Palmato, leading a life of cultured leisure not unlike that of George Frederic Jones, would have been an alien in London society. "Portuguese" may signify "Continental" and, according to the cultural stereotype, sexually liberated, but "Levantine" unmistakably means Jewish. The fact that Wharton went out of her way to endow this father with exotic racial origins suggests the kind of taboo that Leslie Fiedler long ago identified as the projection of our unacceptable sexual desires onto a despised minority.^[32] Although Wharton had some Jewish friends, including Bernard Berenson and Rosa Fitz-James, whom she must have regarded as exceptions, she shared the prejudices of her class and time and probably shared some of the projective tendencies as well. Her fictional references to Jews display the prevailing racial stereotypes, sometimes with an aura of erotic ambivalence.

Ambiguities in The House of Mirth regarding the character of Simon Rosedale, who is an object of disdain despite his many admirable traits, suggest that in Wharton's fiction Jews signify tabooed sexual attraction. She characterizes another Levantine, Ladislas Isador in A Son at the Front as a "clever, contriving devil" who is also a philanderer.

Ladislas Isador killed at the front! The words remained unmeaning; by no effort could Campton relate them to the fat middle-aged philanderer with his Jewish eyes, his Slav eloquence, his Levantine gift for getting on, and for getting out from under . . . What a mad world it was, in which the same

horrible and magnificent doom awaited the coward and the hero!
(180)

Whether Jewish or not, the father-derived figures in Wharton's work act as forces inhibiting sexual consummation with more appropriate men. We notice, for example, that Simon Rosedale is virtually omniscient about Lily Bart's attachments to other men and always lets her know that he has seen or heard of each event. Similarly, in The Age of Innocence the implicitly Jewish financier Julius Beaufort, after interrupting almost every one of Newland Archer's visits to Countess Olenska, breaks into their incipient tryst in the patroon's house and thus short-circuits the fulfillment of their passion. In this significantly named house of the father, desire between Newland and Ellen may not be consummated. Like Rosedale, Beaufort appears to have uncanny knowledge of the lovers' sexual intentions. In Wharton's fiction, the omniscient figure who intervenes between lovers usually inhibits the sexual act, but not for moral reasons. He comes between desire and its consummation, suggesting that he himself is the true object of desire.

Wharton's emphasis in the first pages of A Backward Glance on "the large safe hollow of her father's hand" links incestuous motifs echoing through erotic scenes in her fiction to the possibility of sexual stimulation by her father. There is no sign of anything like the flagrant sexual abuse experienced by Virginia Woolf,^[33] but Wharton's writings suggest that she might have experienced some variety or degree of seductive behavior. The case is at most circumstantial. If there was seductive behavior, it could well have been minor or ambiguous. Perhaps there was only some unintended contact or touching that was magnified by the decidedly inflammable imagination of the love-hungry daughter. Any kind of erotic exchange between Edith and her father would have provided yet another motive for rivalry with the mother, mixed with anger at her for not fulfilling her duty to maintain the boundary against incest.

"The House of the Dead Hand," written in 1898 and published in 1904, provides an early instance of the hand motif embedded in biographically relevant family symbolism.^[34] The Lombard family lives in Siena with an old woman servant in a gloomy mansion that displays over its threshold a female hand carved in sallow marble, which seems to be the emblem of "some evil mystery within the house" (Collected Stories, 509). The family constellation allies father and daughter in artistic sensibility against the dull triviality and incomprehension of the mother.

Like Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter," this Italian tale presents a father who coopts his daughter's sexuality and subordinates her freedom to his own lust for knowledge. Sounding a bit like Wharton's Fallopius, Dr. Lombard boasts that he has "violated the tomb" of the Renaissance, "laid open its dead body, and traced the course of every muscle, bone and artery" (514). Dr. Lombard's entrapment of his daughter also echoes that of Dr. Sloper in Henry James's "Washington Square."

Dr. Lombard has induced his daughter Sybilla to purchase with the money intended for her dowry a Leonardo painting of a lascivious woman posed in front of a crucifixion. This sensuous painting, really Sybilla's property, has become her father's peculiar treasure. He, not his daughter, controls access to the picture, which is kept hidden in the depths of the house, shrouded from light by blinds and a velvet curtain. From a vantage point marked by a pomegranate bud in the carpet, he allows chosen visitors to view it on condition that they never reproduce it in any way. Because Sybilla's dowry is tied up in the painting that her obsessed father will not let her sell, she cannot marry the man she loves. Even after Dr. Lombard's death, she fails to seize the opportunity for which she had long plotted; she would never feel free to sell the hated picture or to marry. The rest of her adult life will be governed by the dead hand of her father: I can't lock him out; I can never lock him out now" (529).

A father who cannot be locked out, who dominates his

daughter's personal treasure and forecloses her opportunities for marriage and reproductive life, surely suggests an incestuous relationship. But the fact that the marble hand above the threshold is a specifically female hand complicates the evil that it symbolizes. In contrast to her elderly father's vivacity, Sybilla seems passive, sullen, and lifeless, a little like the nineteenth-century depiction of masturbators, who ruin their health by expending vitality in a sexual dead-end. The dead hand over the threshold may have a dual significance—abuse of Sybilla by her father as well as self-abuse.

The story reeks with erotic symbolism such as dark corridors, the parting of velvet folds to reveal hidden treasure, a female image that can be contemplated but must never be reproduced. The hand symbol, however awkwardly presented, forms the center of an image constellation that is characteristic of Wharton's imagination—father-daughter relationships, fearful thresholds, lust for knowledge, and the often-recurring pomegranate.

We do not know what occurred in George Frederic Jones's library, but given the conjunction of books, libraries, and compulsive outbursts of oral narration using certain books as fetishes, one may hypothesize the existence of a psychic nexus that embraced Wharton's creative as well as her erotic life. Books and even words became libidinized, the library became a place of secret initiation:

But this increase of knowledge was as nought compared to the sensuous rapture produced by the sound & sight of the words . . . They were visible, almost tangible presences, with faces as distinct as those of the presences among whom I lived. And, like the Erlkönig's daughters, they sang to me so bewitchingly that they almost lured me from the wholesome noonday air of childhood into the strange supernatural region where the normal pleasures of my age seemed as insipid as the fruits of the earth to Persephone after she had eaten of the Pomegranate seed.
("Life and I," 10)

The garnet-colored seeds, sown throughout Wharton's work from early to late (as the title of a Wharton story, a poem, and of works by her fictive writers such as Margaret Aubyn), mark the trail we have been trying to follow toward the center of this imagery complex. As Candace Waid pursues it in Letters from the Underworld, "'insipid' means tasteless, but it also suggests a lack of 'sapience' or wisdom. The pomegranate seed in contrast is among the forbidden fruits ... associated with secret knowledge." Waid interprets Persephone's acceptance of her abduction into the dark realm of Pluto as rejection of her mother's "noonday fertility," an escape from that sunny but commonplace world.^[35] But when we refer Persephone's dark knowledge of the underworld to Wharton's reading in Ovid's Metamorphoses V, the story may also be a commentary on a maiden's sudden ravishment into a marriage for which she was unprepared.

In Ovid's version, the childlike Persephone, who wishes to remain a virgin, is innocently gathering flowers when her uncle Pluto, struck by an arrow from Eros, suddenly abducts her. Her cries to her mother avail her nothing. Through a crevice in the earth, she is carried into the underworld by the captor who had never sought her consent. Had she abstained from food while in Hades, she might have returned to her mother. But the seven pomegranate seeds that she ate there allowed her only seasonal visits to the sunlit world of her mother, the goddess of fertility. Although pomegranates traditionally symbolize female fertility, in this story they also suggest the male seed of which Persephone had accepted only a little, but enough to prevent annulment of her marriage, so that for half the year she remains a prisoner in her husband's house.

Wharton might have heard many personal themes in the Persephone-Demeter story, perhaps different ones over the years in which she pondered it. The maiden rapt all unprepared into marriage recalls Wharton's account of the marriage she entered in apparent ignorance of "the facts of generation." Additionally, it could have reverberated to a certain

reluctance on her part to accept the prescribed female destiny (the "marriage plot," as Carolyn Heilbrun describes it in Writing A Woman's Life ), in order to retain the autonomy necessary for pursuing her own creative life. Having yielded to social expectations by marrying, she might unconsciously have resisted the wifely role by cultivating sexual ignorance and later by fleeing to illness as a kind of Eriksonian moratorium, a private space in which her few seeds might germinate.

In one of her most moving poems, "Pomegranate Seed" (1912), Wharton draws together two of her most pressing concerns—her failure to participate in the chain of generation, and the way that failure separates daughter from mother. Demeter longs for the opportunity to show her daughter the ways of life in the warm sunlight, for Persephone to observe how a woman should,

Under the warm thatch, in the winnowing creel,
Lay the New infant, seedling of some warm
Noon dalliance in the golden granary,
Who shall in turn rise, walk, and drive the plough,
And in the mortal furrow leave his seed.^[36]

But as wife to Pluto, Persephone nurses only "waxen-pale dead babes." Procreatively, Persephone is at a dead end, whereas the bereft Demeter is part of the continuity of life. But as Demeter says in parting, "Thou knowest more than I." Through an uncle's act of rapine, Persephone has acquired a kind of sexual knowledge that not only sets her above her mother, but sets her off from common human experience. Perhaps with a peculiar pride, Persephone comes to treasure this dark knowledge as the jewel of her uniqueness, so rare that it makes ordinary life seem insipid.

"Pomegranate Seed" suggests the powerful mother-daughter yearning to which Wharton might have responded in the Persephone story. Unlike Ovid's version, which is fairly balanced between mother and daughter, most of Wharton's dramatic narrative focuses on the desperation of Demeter, "undaughtered" by her loss. The powerful expression of mother

love in this poem suggests that Wharton needed to imagine such a passion because she longed to be the recipient of it. In this way, she could experience herself as the loved daughter for whom Demeter so intensely searches.

Edith Wharton's very daunting task was to create an authorial self from the traumas and defenses of her childhood experience. Eventually she would be able to declare triumphantly, "Gods of heaven & Gods of hell I saw face to face & adored them ."^[37] But in the meantime, intellect, creativity, and secret erotic pleasure had become the realm of the father, bounded firmly by the "no" of the mother and therefore dissociated from the child's feminine self.

The Gender Split

So extravagantly did this gifted child experience life that she had to develop her own mechanisms for keeping herself in equilibrium. Of her mental state she said,

The picture I have drawn of myself ... is that of a morbid, self-scrutinizing and unhappy child. I was that—and yet I was also, at the same time, a creature of shouts and laughter, of ceaseless physical activity, of little wholesome vanities and glowing girlish enthusiasms. And I was also—and this most of all—the rapt creature who heard the choiring of the spheres, and trembled with a sensuous ecstasy at the sight of beautiful objects, or the sound of noble verse. I was all this in one, and at once, because I was like Egmont's Clarchen, "now wildly exultant, now deeply downcast," and always tossed on the waves of a passionate inner life. I never felt anything calmly —and I never have to this day!
("Life and I," 41; Wharton's italics)

This extreme responsiveness resulted in a fear of being overwhelmed by intense experiences, causing her to limit her exposure to them, to live as she said, "on a reduced diet" and let her imagination supply the richness. Imagination seems to have provided for Wharton the deepest experience of reality. For this reason she may have derived her best nourishment from what Emily Dickinson called "a banquet of abstemious-

ness." Wharton's description of what she made imaginatively of scarce and forbidden material offers a clue to what may have become her preferred style of experience. Having been forbidden in youth by her mother ever again even to glance at a "fashionable hetaera" who drove out in a canary-colored carriage, she thereafter dutifully looked away

when the forbidden brougham passed; but that one and only glimpse of the loveliness within it peopled my imagination with images of enchantment.... She was ... my first doorway to romance, destined to become for me successively Guinevere and Francesca da Rimini, Beatrix Esmond and the Dame aux Camélias . And in the impoverished emotional atmosphere of old New York such a glimpse was like the mirage of palm trees in the desert.^[38]

Tossed about on waves of feeling, young Edith was desperate for an ordering principle in her life and sought it in books. Isolated as the last child in an already grown family of two sons, she had come to feel that helplessness and bewilderment were female traits and that logic, rationality, and control were male. Viewing her childish ignorance of life as a girlish limitation and wishing to understand the adult world of her parents and brothers, she disdained children's books. Determined to find her own way out of being such a "helpless blundering thing, a mere 'little girl'" ("Life and I," 33), she would master chaos by means of philosophic books such as brother Harry's college text, Coppée's Elements of Logic . She developed strategies for developing the "male" side of her personality to defend and protect the terrified female self. She cultivated rational, analytic skills, and acquired immense stores of theoretical learning.

I can only suppose it answered to some hidden need to order my thoughts, & get things into some kind of logical relation to each other: a need which developed in me almost as early as the desire to be kissed & thought pretty! It originated, perhaps, in the sense that weighed on my whole childhood—the sense of bewilderment, of the need of guidance, the longing to under-

stand what it was all about . My little corner of the cosmos seemed like a dark trackless region "where ignorant armies clash by night," & I was oppressed by the sense that I was too small & ignorant & alone ever to find my way about in it.
("Life and I," 27–28; Wharton's italics)

Pride in her analytic faculty, which she considered a masculine attribute distinguishable from her feminine gifts, was to remain with her throughout life. Percy Lubbock expressed the dichotomy as both Wharton and her acquaintances perceived it: "More than one of her friends have already noted, without surprise, that she preferred the company of men; and indeed there are some obvious reasons why she should, two of the more obvious being that she had a very feminine consciousness and a very masculine mind." Lubbock further observed that "it was once said of Edith Wharton, and she liked and repeated the remark, that she was a 'self-made man.' "^[39]

A verbal slip that Wharton made in a letter to Bernard Berenson and herself caught and explained indicates that she thought of her creative self as masculine.^[40] In speaking of Berenson's praise of her work, she says that it titillates "the author's vanity to have his pet phrases quoted to him," then adds in postscript, "You see I'm getting a little confused about my own sex!" (Letters, 398–99).

Wharton's being was further split between the retained and the rejected aspects of her mother. The negative side of her feminine heritage was boundaries, limitation, denial; its only positive signification was the option of becoming a "subject of adornment." She learned to value the ornamental side of femininity while repressing the sexual, not unlike her own Lily Bart of The House of Mirth . Edith always longed to emulate her mother's beauty and elegance, yet she was psychologically barred from becoming a mother or even fully a wife.

The fact that young Edith carried from her father's library into her mother's bedroom books from which she pretended to read what she had really invented indicates her desire to unite the sexual and the creative parts of herself, to bring her

active self into the female realm and thereby to annihilate the artificial boundary between creation and her own feminine identity. Only at the end of her life, in her final novels, was Wharton able to imagine a way of doing this.

The loving and permissive father stands, in Wharton's memoirs, in marked contrast to the forbidding mother. There is a chiasmus here—a crossing-over of customary maternal and paternal traits that may be at the heart of Wharton's gender confusion. With her mother enthroned as the unsatisfiable super-ego and her father associated with the pleasures of indulgence, Wharton experienced a criss-crossing of identity lines. If we can follow them even a short way into the maze of gender identity, we may illuminate why Wharton invariably slipped into her female characterizations hints of masculinity. For example, the very "feminine" May Welland had large feet and hands too massive for needlework. She is described as athletic, boyish, and preferring strenuous hiking vacations to the cultural ones that Newland would have chosen. Female characters who write letters, such as Bertha Dorset of The House of Mirth and Elsie Ashby of the story "Pomegranate Seed," tend to have handwriting that incorporates "masculine curves" into a feminine script.

Wharton's fiction splits characters into polar opposites and splits situations into extreme alternatives. The Old Maid divides motherhood between a biological and a psychological mother. Fatherhood is radically split in A Son at the Front . Women characters are depicted in terms of polar oppositions in such stories as "The Touchstone."

Frequently, plot situations split into radical alternatives. The pregnant young Charity Royall (protagonist of Summer ) had better options than marrying her adoptive father. She might have had an abortion or else gone to the city and found work to support her illegitimate child. The marriage effectually banished all of Charity's hopes for a fuller life. Chapter 4 will show that in The Age of Innocence Newland Archer himself forced the situation in which he had to sacrifice love for duty. This mildly artistic gentleman settles amiably for a lim-

ited destiny, not because, as so many believe, Wharton was ready to defend social conventions, but because Archer was too inhibited emotionally to seize what he thought he wanted. He could imagine more than he could grasp. Indeed, whenever a wayward impulse tempted him, he rushed into the protection of the nearest conventional obstacle. Surrounded by people who had learned to accommodate to change, to accept European manners and divorcées, he outdid his elders in conformity. His own exaggerated conventionalism created the prison house of rules that hemmed him in. In this he was very much like the young Edith Wharton who tortured herself with extreme and self-imposed moral scruples.

A reasonable middle way, though usually present and visible in Wharton's texts, seems psychically unattainable by characters who reflect the author's bias toward extreme alternatives. Thus the social constraints that lead to almost tragic destinies for Wharton's protagonists, that destroy Lily Bart and limit Newland Archer, are externalizations of psychic inhibitions, rationalizations for giving up the fullness of life. Wharton's narratives reflect the conflict between her powerful appetite for experience and the bonds she imposed on her own raging desires.