Zakira’s Roses

Edith Wharton’s Domestic Settings
or GLS 819: Domestic Spaces

In her stories and novels, Edith Wharton communicates the emotional and political state of characters by describing their homes or ideas about the home. Edith Wharton “used domestic spaces both mimetically to identify characters and symbolically to reveal personality traits, but also thematically to explore their power to affect feelings and emotions” (Jones, 180-81). While most of the explorations of Edith Wharton’s architectural psychology focus on novels The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, her short stories also represent this perspective in distilled miniature.

Wharton’s short stories differ from her novels in that they focus on a single issue and cannot depend on the slow development of images and poetic associations to create characters and reactions in the audience. Instead, interpersonal relationships and plot problems in Wharton’s stories carry a sense of immediacy, of an issue that must be urgently resolved.  Despite sparse descriptions of rooms and places in these stories, Wharton did not see location as neutral. In her book The Writing of Fiction, Wharton suggests, “the impression produced by a landscape, a street or a house should always, to the novelist, be an event in the history of a soul” (quoted in Jones, 178).

In other words, for Wharton, places happen. They happen to the characters in the novel and their impressions impact character and reader alike. The settings, especially the household interior settings, have what Gaston Bachelard would term a “passionate liaison” with the bodies of the occupants (15).  This relationship exists for Wharton in both her stories and in her book on interior decorating, The Decoration of Houses. Wharton and Codman clearly describe a “relation” between location and occupant that can even be described as friendship (Jones, 180).  For Wharton and for Bachelard, then, poetic images of the house must taken as “events in life” (Bachelard, 47).

The interdependency of personality and setting is experienced in Wharton’s work through her manipulation of the traditional uses of rooms, her paralleling of characters’ emotional states with room and furniture descriptions, and through the engagement of principal characters with fantasy locations.   Through discussion of three of her stories we will explore how Wharton comments on the relationship between our interiors and exteriors.

In the first story, ‘The Pretext’, the impressions produced by settings indicate the cumulative experience and emotional condition of the characters. The patterns and reasons for movement help to define power relationships within the household.  The second story, ‘The Fullness of Life’, explores the internal or spiritual sense of home. In this story the notion of the home as a metaphor for self is eloquently and tragically described. In this story as well, questions of access and power must be explored.  The analysis of the third story, ‘The Other Two’, explores how the home operates as a primary site for social and political change. Access, control and power are all key themes in this story. Taken together, these three stories demonstrate a complexly articulated concept of “home” and its role as both setting and contributor to multiple levels of human experience.

Edith Wharton’s strong opinions about location and design developed from what she called a “secret sensitiveness” (Jones, 180). As a child she had intense reactions to beauty or ugliness, and Jones argues that in her fiction and non-fiction Wharton seeks to “explain not only the power of people to project feelings onto places, but the power of places to produce feelings in people” (180).   Jones cites Wharton’s friendships with aestheticians such as Vernon Lee and Bernard Berenson as further evidence of an intellectual as well as artistic interest in the effect of place on individuals.

While the young Edith Jones experienced fear at the sight of her aunt’s ancestral home at Rhinecliff, as an adult in fiction and non-fiction she continues to demonstrate the oppression of past generations. Wharton and Ogden argue that tradition can be a deterrent to true comfort and happiness. The “wants of dead and gone predecessors” tyrannize over every person, unconsciously or otherwise (DH, 19).  The challenge, according to Wharton and Ogden, is to reconcile the habit of following traditional ways of living with the necessity of arranging a home with “a view to our own comfort and convenience” (DH, 20).  To them, the individual will always feel uncomfortable in a home that has been designed with someone else in mind.

The influence of predecessors and ancestors in ‘The Pretext’ is felt more powerfully than that of the living.  The town of Wentworth, personified and more fully described than any other character in the story, behaves as a collectivity of ancestral voices that indeed “tyrannizes over the wants of others” (DH, 19).  The power that Wentworth has in dictating lifestyle and aesthetics is revealed in the discomfort, limitation, and smallness in Margaret’s home. Throughout the story, this setting’s effect transmits the unpleasantness of a life where desire is out of balance with ancestral rule.

The weight of tradition also attacks Margaret from an unexpected site: old London as communicated by Lady Caroline. While England had been a fantastic location in Margaret’s dream life, populated by gothic archways and other architectural features, the ghosts of English social constraints burst the imaginary which had sustained Margaret during her grief over Dawnish. Lady Caroline’s insensitive assumptions about Margaret’s age and unattractiveness transmit the very limitations and cruelties of generations past.   In Margaret’s drawing room, the site of her public self, her physical life is constrained by Wentworth’s conservatism and her imaginary life is shattered by London’s.

Margaret’s imaginary life is not to be discounted. It is so important that it is in a state of wild, intimate daydream that we are first introduced to her. She has retreated to her bedroom to engage in a romantic fantasy before her mirror.  Although in Wharton’s worldview the bedroom should be the space for creativity, production and empowerment, this room neither expresses individualism nor encourages daydream.  It is described as “cramped”, “plain”, and “prim” (CSS, 633). There is also virtually no sensual pleasure in this boudoir. The narrow mirror’s surface is “unflattering”, the wallpaper is as flat as her life, her drawer is “scentless” and her rocking chair is “stiff” (633).  We know from the dialogue between this room and Margaret’s own thoughts that her interior and exterior have both been “neatly sorted and easily accessible bundles on the high shelves of a perfectly ordered moral consciousness” (633).

Wharton does not begrudge plainness, and in The Decoration of Houses prefers a focus on personal comfort to ostentatious decoration (28). The problem here is that Margaret’s home is consistently described as physically and psychologically uncomfortable.  In response to this discomfort, Margaret retreats from the drawing room into the imaginaire.

Margaret’s drawing room is her public and social realm. This room is, in Wharton’s topology, her primary social communications tool.  The lady’s drawing room is her forum for family  and for company, and the “chief requisite is a gay first impression” (DH, 128). But Margaret’s room bears nothing attractive or sociable. Margaret’s own smallness of spirit is made even smaller in the emptiness of the “bare inanimate, pale void spaces” (CSS, 65) of the drawing room. While The Decoration of Houses suggests that monochromatic choices will lead to a “pleasing and restful” and “spacious” result (30), the impression of Margaret’s drawing room is rather of an empty space that does not invite one to stay. Devoid of colour and comfort, this “pale little,” “scant,” room is decorated with “chilly reproductions” and furnished with “slippery” chairs (CSS, 644-5).  The Wentworth moral consciousness sits in the “pale puritan corners of the room” (653), the only consciousness that can remain there for long. A room this inhospitable is the site for her Higher Thought Club to meet. Here Margaret showcases her research into English architecture.

Margaret’s interest in architecture mirrors Wharton’s, but her interest in ceilings only distracts her from the limitations in her own home. Whether it is the “heights of the shadowy vaulting” (CSS, 650) of the English Gothic, or the suffocating interior of the University dining hall, for Margaret a ceiling will always limit. It will be in nature where she finds her freedom and agency.  It is by the “mystic current” of the water that she feels the “nearness of youth and tempestuous tenderness” (CSS, 647-48).  In the moonlight with Dawnish she finds her playful, appealing words, an eloquence and “ingenuity in argument, of which she never dreamed herself capable” (CSS, 643).  Unconfined by the history of Wentworth or her own home, Margaret is able to find her voice.  She is able to feel love for Dawnish; she can determine her own destiny only outside the walls of her home.

Edith Wharton uses movement to indicate the level of agency or empowerment these characters possess. Margaret’s passivity in life is demonstrated by her lack of motion. She is visited but does not visit. With the exception of pursuing solitary intellectual activities, Margaret does not leave her home willingly. She prefers not to attend the event at the university, but the slightest word from a servant is enough to undermine her resolve.  She must subjugate her own wishes in favour of the household’s – even the servants’ expectations are more important than her whims (CSS, 639-40).  Such is the weight that the Wentworth collectivity has on her.

Margaret’s lack of movement is contrasted with the constant motion of her husband.  He is experienced through comings and goings, entries and exits.  She observes, “his retreating back” (CSS, 637), is interrupted when he “chances to come in” (CSS, 646), cleans the library since he “had not yet returned from the office” (CSS, 648).  His movements in and out of her life trample on her privacy, a right that Wharton considered paramount in home design (Chase, 145). Margaret’s boudoir is used by her husband as a hallway.  While she has limited access to the outside world, he has access to and comfort in a variety of worlds: streetscape, university establishment, home, and her boudoir.   Access in Wentworth translates as authority, and Mr. Ransom has authority in both public and private environs.

The home library is the personal room of her husband. It is dark, dusky and shadowy, with a “chaos of papers” (CSS, 648).  Margaret’s only role here, as in her husband’s life, is to straighten messes and hide in the shadows.  Her presence is invisible here.  Yet for a woman with such an active intellectual life, one could well have imagined for Margaret a library like Edith Wharton’s own: built to support the mind and enquiry, equipped for study and for exploration.  Instead she must go out to the college library, for she has no access to the study at home.

Just as she leaves the home in order to access her imagination and intellectual resources, Margaret’s study focuses on the ‘other.’  She does not mentally reside in Wentworth, but in architectural England. Even her relationship with Guy Dawnish is imagined over photographs of his other life in London and at Guise Hall.  Her imagination creates riches of the aesthetic poverty of Wentworth’s social codes. She imagines herself “a banished princess,” inheritor of a forbidden domain (CSS, 649).  Despite the pleasure these escapist fantasies give her, they are built on delicate foundations. With no private, safe space of her own Margaret has little opportunity for the Bachelardian daydream so important to the poetic imagination. Her dreams are easily crushed.

It may seem overly obvious to state that the individuals who enter her home likewise enter her psyche. Yet this is Margaret’s very dilemma. She is in many ways a ship tossed in the storm of human invaders. Guy Dawnish, whose visits we never see but only hear about through her fantasy, renders her backward in time to her youth. Lady Caroline, whose interaction is the longest and most physically active in the story, renders her forward in time to the present. Each of these shifts significantly changes her sense of self and validity in the view of others.

Margaret’s domestic space reflects her inner and worlds, “destitute of personal experience, but filled with a rich sense of privilege and distinction” (CSS, 637).  The imaginary and the ancestral battle in both her home and her psyche. Her empowerment and self-esteem are intricately linked to her domestic and intellectual environment. In this story, Margaret and her home are integrated in a perpetual dialogue. The rooms and their impressions are events, limitations and non-neutral communications in her personal history, yet Margaret’s disempowerment in the face of generational control is such that she appears unable to make her own mark on the home. The kind of individualism, symmetry and comfort described in the Decoration of Houses is beyond her reach.

Individualism is out of reach as well in ‘The Fullness of Life.’ At the heart of this story lies that portion of the marriage vow “until death do us part.” It questions if death does part a married couple, if there are different circumstances if one of the pair did not feel loved, and what constitutes a complete relationship. Here, as in ‘The Pretext,’ familiarity, routine and ‘otherness’ play thematic roles.   A soul newly arrived in the afterlife is united with her soul mate yet rejects the promise of eternal love in favour of demonstrating eternal commitment to her still-living husband. Whether you read this story as an awakening of her love for her husband or as surrender to social mores, there is both powerful irony and sincerity in this tale.

The first meaning of home in ‘The Fullness of Life’ is as a metaphor for personal interiority.   Woman’s nature is described as a “great house full of rooms,” some of which are regularly entered and other mysterious and unknown rooms, “the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned,” contain a solitary and waiting soul “in the innermost room, the holy of holies” (CSS, 14).  The woman is identified as equal to a house, made up of private, purpose-built rooms with limited access. On some level, she is identifying herself with property. A house is owned and occupied.

In this metaphor the soul sits alone, waiting for a footstep that never comes.  Bachelard warns us that metaphor can be the source of limitation: metaphors can trap us in images without resonance and poetic spontaneity (Bachelard, 76).  At the end of the story, this is exactly what has happened to her soul. Without the ability to imagine a spontaneous home outside of her lived experience, this woman’s soul reverts to metaphor and tradition. She waits alone for the sound of creaking boots for all eternity.

Home is also a subconscious operator triggering recollection of corporeal lived experience.  Gaston Bachelard imagines that words are “little houses” wherein we experience “secret movements of our own” (147). In the case of the protagonist of this story, her “soul is so sensitive to these simple images that it hears all the resonances in a harmonic reading” (Bachelard, 99).  From “home” she harmonizes “creaking boots” and a “slamming door,” the sport magazines and the rhythmic recurrences of her daily life. In these images and the layers of relationship and history she has built from them, she finds a personal, poetic truth her desires cannot dare contradict.  “An intimate component of faithful loyalty reacts upon the related images of nest and house” (Bachelard, 99). Home “would not be like home” (CSS, 18) unless it contains these images.

For this woman’s soul, home is defined by symbols of presence of her husband. The domestic space for her has been defined by the legal, spiritual and sexual marriage agreement.  Her husband’s routine serves as the active component of her daily life. Over time, with repetition and routine, “home” has become synonymous with “where her husband is.”  When she dies and enters the afterlife, the fantasy other world is bound to be where her husband is not. Her individual taste and interests, embodied in the soul mate, is in high contrast to her recollections of her husband.

Her soul mate loves art, poetry, nature, and architecture. He is sensitive to his surroundings and poetic. He has no body, no tangibility. Her husband, on the other hand, is portrayed as a brutish, uncultured character. His interests lie in dinner and sport; his influence in the house is felt in the form of creaking and slamming. He is all body, all tangibility.  There is no poetry, no daydream in her husband. In the soul mate, there is nothing but daydream until he tries to bring the dream into a building. When he wants to make a home with her and settle down into routine and daily life, this very word halts her fantasy and brings her back to corporeal memory, to the everyday and the banal.

In his last temptation, the soul mate pulls her down the shining steps to imagine an Italianate home with “polished columns and a sculptured cornice” (CSS, 18), “our favourite pictures” hanging on the wall and “the rooms lined with books” (CSS, 33). This home, with its individualized decoration, blending of interior space and exterior garden, and its extensive library, is the very ideal of The Decoration of Houses. However, while up until this point the conversation was led by the woman’s soul, the construction and structure of the ideal home was led by the male soul mate. Though suited ideally for her, this home is not of her creation the way The Mount was Wharton’s.

On the one hand we have all the undeniable poetic and emotional resonances of home, family and relationship. On the other hand, we have the uneasy reality that for this woman home cannot exist without her husband, that home is not where she is but where he is. Her individual wants and desires are therefore subordinate to the relationship she has.  Her sense of self-worth is a direct result of creating positive experience for her husband. She is held under that tyranny which Wharton and Codman try to encourage us to resist.  Even in the afterlife, she will fulfill her role as caretaker and lover to a man she never (until now) felt a connection with.  The routine of home has been built into her soul as well as her body. This is the strength of tradition: even though her body is now dead her soul will persist in the patterns of life. After all, she believes her husband will never be happy without her (CSS, 19).

We first meet ‘The Other Two’s Waythorn reveling in an unexpected feeling of newlywed excitement on the drawing room hearth. Through this introduction, the reader is invited to participate in the male experience of domesticity: awaiting a charmingly dressed wife, a “good dinner” and a “pleasant room” (OT, 433).  Beyond identifying the names of “softly lighted” (OT, 436) rooms, the house is not described; unlike the previous stories, this is a man’s story and his concerns are with his wife’s sexual past.

Waythorn must come to terms with a modern marriage: he has just become Alice’s third husband.  The story revolves around the insertion of Alice’s first husband, Haskett, in decision-making for their daughter Lily Haskett’s education and development.  In addition, Alice’s second husband, Varick, has recently become Waythorn’s client. As a man from a society that has not yet “adapted itself to the consequences of divorce” (OT, 434), Waythorn finds even he requires his wife to justify herself and her many marriages. It will be in repeated hearthside interactions that Waythorn’s traditionally masculine domestic values of access control, sexual primacy, and ownership are inverted.

Wharton and Codman saw the hearth, traditionally the “place about which people gather,” as the “focus of every rational scheme of arrangement” (DH, 23-4).  In ‘The Other Two,’ the hearth serves as the focal point for interpersonal communications and negotiation on the various household rights held by members of this turn-of-the-century blended family. Indeed, every kind of rational arrangement revolves around the hearth.

Occupation of the hearthrug is a subtle power symbol within this story. At the outset, Waythorn’s occupation of the hearthrug is equated with his mastery of the household. He first senses a shift in this position when Haskett “advanced to the hearth-rug, on which Waythorn was standing.”  This experience “left Waythorn deeply shaken” (OT, 446), because not only has his immediate personal space been invaded, but with that invasion comes the promise that Haskett will enforce his legal right to involvement with his own daughter.   In the final action on the hearth, Waythorn has invited Haskett to share cigars and fireside heat, marking “a fresh stage in their intercourse” (451).  They are joined by Varick and lighting his cigar from their own lit ones, experience a state of intimacy resulting, not only from their “blended cigar-smoke” but also from their mutual association with Alice.

Equated with comfort and a lived-in feeling (DH, 92) by Wharton and Codman, and with the heart of the home and the “place of the heart” (Chase, 146), the lit hearth’s complex associations make this an important site for discourse. In the Waythorn home, the hearthside transitions from sole and jealous ownership to shared experience and relationship.  Each stage of Waythorn’s process in accepting his place as third husband is punctuated by a change in the occupation of the hearth.

There are also two hearths in the story. One is in the Drawing Room, the other in the Library. Although our first encounter with Waythorn is as master of the drawing room hearth (and of Alice), subsequent encounters are located in the library. According to the Decoration of Houses, the library/smoking room/den is aligned with the master of the house, as “the master’s sense of comfort often expresses itself in a set of ‘office’ furniture” (DH, 154).  Transforming the public into the domestic is a key way for the master of the house to retain some control over the female-dominated design of the household interior. Mr. Waythorn’s traditionally masculine library follows this model.

Alice’s soft girlishness is contrasted against the “dark leather” of the “bachelor arm-chairs” (OT, 439).  Waythorn revels in ownership of her charms, “yielding again to the joy of possessorship” (440).   When his control of access to home and wife is threatened by the invasion of Haskett into his life, Waythorn is forced to change his perspective. In symmetry with the office or club decoration of the library, he attempts to use a business model to gain comfort with his wife’s prior relationships, suggesting that “he held so many shares in his wife’s personality and his predecessors were his partners in the business” (449).

Vanessa Chase observes that “the library is a retreat from the outer world where they can be themselves… the library, for Wharton, was thus not to be exclusive to men, but to be shared by both sexes and could even be sexually charged” (144). In this story after-dinner hours are spent in the library in conversation over liqueurs and coffee. Alice’s role in the library is to serve beverages, and in the early stage of Waythorn’s possession of her she fumbles, serving him Varick’s preference.  As Waythorn grows to accept his inability to wholly possess Alice, her empowerment and control in the library grows. Waythorn’s preference no longer matters.

At the end of the story, Alice arrives in the library (the male room) rather than the drawing room (the female room), to meet the three men she has been involved with rather than the single possessor. Her very presence transforms the space, her perfume taking over the scent of cigar-smoke.  Furthermore, she co-opts the male space and transforms it by having feminine furniture, a folding tea-table, brought into the room. She controls the men’s social experience. Without missing a beat, Alice serves tea to her three gentlemen.  Alice has successfully colonized the masculine library and has regendered the library “from an exclusively male space to one where men and women could meet on equal grounds” (Chase, 152). Alice has also nurtured a change in perspective about possession and control in her husband.

The Decoration of Houses places greater weight on individualism than on compliance with tradition. The room may have been designed as a library or drawing room, but the “individual tastes and habits” of the occupants must be considered (DH, 19).  In the Waythorn household, the library becomes a neutral zone that bridges both private and public as well as masculine and feminine space. While this room may have begun as “the privatized power center of the entire house” (Chase, 154), it ends as a comfortable social zone for the enjoyment of all members of the household and their diverse guests. In the microcosm of the Waythorn home, this environment of comfort, relaxation, and the intellect is the incubator for social transformation.

As we have seen, the houses of Wharton’s imagination are potent sources of personal and social empowerment. The men and women  in these stories have varying degrees of access, choice, and possession over these houses.  The enmeshment of women’s personality and her home is a critical problem for Wharton’s characters. As long as the home’s aesthetics are under someone else’s control, the women in these stories are unable to achieve personal power.

In ‘The Pretext,’ Margaret Ransom accepts that “nothing was changed in the setting of her life, perhaps nothing would ever change in it” (CSS, 654).  Her access to real and imaginary worlds is perhaps permanently limited.  In ‘The Fullness of Life,’ the soul of the departed woman would rather wait eternally for her husband than live in a home designed by her soul-mate for her fantasy self.  The triumph for Alice Waythorn rests in her ability to transform space so that she not only has a place, but so that she can dominate it.  To the modern eye, personal agency and empowerment appears only possible if the household is built with both eyes open. It could be speculated that Wharton is connecting divorce and modern marriage with increased power in the household.

In each situation the complex balance of personal desires and social requirements is negotiated in the very structure of the house itself.   Through the lens of house and home, Wharton is able to complete a subtle and dramatic analysis of the lives of unique women in turn of the century America.  In these stories, Woman and House serve as equivalent sites for the exercise of power, tyranny of tradition and social change.

Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Jolas, M., tr. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Chase, Vanessa. “Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses, and Gender in Turn-of-the-Century America.” Coleman, D. et al. Architecture and Feminism. Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, pp.130-161.

Fryer, Judith. Felicitous Space: the imaginative structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Fuss, Diana. “Introduction.”  The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers That Made Them. US: Taylor & Francis, Inc., 2004, pp 1-21.

Jones, Suzanne W. “Edith Wharton’s “secret sensitiveness,” The decoration of houses, and her fiction”, Journal of Modern Literature, 21 (2), Date: Winter 1997,pp. 177-200

Wharton, Edith. “The Pretext,” “The Fullness of Life.” The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, vol. 1.  US: Charles Sorihner’s, 1968, pp 12-20, pp 632-654.

Wharton, Edith. “The Other Two.”  Wharton: Collected Stories 1891-1910. US: Scribner & Sons, 2001, pp 433-453.

Wharton, Edith, and Ogden Codman, Jr.. The Decoration of Houses. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.