American Literature in Context

1900-1930

Ann Massa

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315535517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published between 1982 and 1983, this series examines the peculiarly American cultural context out of which the nation's literature has developed. Covering the years from 1900 to 1930, this fourth volume of American Literature in Context focuses on how American literature dealt with the challenges of the period including the First World War and the stock market crash. It examines key writers of the time such as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O'Neill who, unlike many Americans who sought escape, confronted reality, providing a rich and varied literature that reflects these turbulent years.

This book will be of interest to those studying American literature and American studies.

1

Edith Wharton (1862–1937)

Bridge at Bellomont usually lasted till the small hours; and when Lily went to bed that night she had played too long for her own good.

Feeling no desire for the self-communion which awaited her in her room, she lingered on the broad stairway, looking down into the hall below, where the last card-players were grouped about the tray of tall glasses and silver-collared decanters which the butler had just placed on a low table near the fire.

The hall was arcaded, with a gallery supported on columns of pale yellow marble. Tall clumps of flowering plants were grouped against a background of dark foliage in the angles of the walls. On the crimson carpet a deerhound and two or three spaniels dozed luxuriously before the fire, and the light from the great central lantern overhead shed a brightness on the women’s hair and struck sparks from their jewels as they moved.

There were moments when such scenes delighted Lily, when they gratified her sense of beauty and her craving for the external finish of life; there were others when they gave a sharper edge to the meagreness of her own opportunities. This was one of the moments when the sense of contrast was uppermost, and she turned away impatiently as Mrs. George Dorset, glittering in serpentine spangles, drew Percy Gryce in her wake to a confidential nook beneath the gallery.

It was not that Miss Bart was afraid of losing her newly-acquired hold over Mr. Gryce….* But the mere thought of that other woman, who could take a man up and toss him aside as she willed, without having to regard him as a possible factor in her plans, filled Lily Bart with envy. She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce – the mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his droning voice – but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.

It was a hateful fate – but how escape from it? What choice had she? To be herself, or a Gerty Farish. As she entered her bedroom, with its softly-shaded lights, her lace dressing-gown lying across the silken bedspread, her little embroidered slippers before the fire, a vase of carnations filling the air with perfume, and the last novels and magazines lying uncut on a table beside the reading-lamp, she had a vision of Miss Farish’s cramped flat, with its cheap conveniences and hideous wall-papers. No; she was not made for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises of poverty. Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in. But the luxury of others was not what she wanted. A few years ago it had sufficed her: she had taken her daily meed of pleasure without caring who provided it. Now she was beginning to chafe at the obligations it imposed, to feel herself a mere pensioner on the splendour which had once seemed to belong to her. There were even moments when she was conscious of having to pay her way… .

For in the last year she had found that her hostesses expected her to take a place at the card-table. It was one of the taxes she had to pay for their prolonged hospitality, and for the dresses and trinkets which occasionally replenished her insufficient wardrobe. And since she had played regularly the passion had grown on her… .

… But of course she had lost – she who needed every penny, while Bertha Dorset, whose husband showered money on her, must have pocketed at least five hundred, and Judy Trenor, who could have afforded to lose a thousand a night, had left the table clutching such a heap of bills that she had been unable to shake hands with her guests when they bade her good night.

A world in which such things could be seemed a miserable place to Lily Bart; but then she had never been able to understand the laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations.

She began to undress without ringing for her maid, whom she had sent to bed. She had been long enough in bondage to other people’s pleasure to be considerate of those who depended on hers, and in her bitter moods it sometimes struck her that she and her maid were in the same position, except that the latter received her wages more regularly.

As she sat before the mirror brushing her hair, her face looked hollow and pale, and she was frightened by two little lines near her mouth, faint flaws in the smooth curve of the cheek.

‘Oh, I must stop worrying!’ she exclaimed. ‘Unless it’s the electric light—’ she reflected, springing up from her seat and lighting the candles on the dressing-table.

She turned out the wall-lights, and peered at herself between the candle-flames. The white oval of her face swam out waveringly from a background of shadows, the uncertain light blurring it like a haze; but the two lines about the mouth remained.

Lily rose and undressed in haste.

‘It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think about,’ she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only defence against them.

But the odious things were there, and remained with her. She returned wearily to the thought of Percy Gryce, as a wayfarer picks up a heavy load and toils on after a brief rest. She was almost sure she had ‘landed’ him: a few days’ work and she would win her reward. But the reward itself seemed unpalatable just then: she could get no zest from the thought of victory. It would be a rest from worry, no more – and how little that would have seemed to her a few years earlier! Her ambitions had shrunk gradually in the desiccating air of failure. But why had she failed? Was it her own fault or that of destiny?

The House of Mirth (1905)¹

* * *

Much of Edith Wharton’s fiction affirmed the right of women (and men) to choose a role, assert an identity, discover an individuality; but she recognized that the early twentieth century, suffering as it did from a hangover of nineteenth-century attitudes, was an especially difficult time for the successful affirmation of the self. Edith Wharton was brought up in a New York which for her was ‘Fifth Avenue … with its double line of low brownstone houses, of a desperate uniformity of style’,² and that image, taken from her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), could well stand for the exclusive social system of manners, mores and money which so appalled her and which seemed to her to linger on far too long. She was also the product of a society which cast every woman in the role of wife, mother and hostess, and which, above all, required women to be desirable. She remembered, as a little girl, her father’s insistence that she look pretty when they went for walks; and ‘the [precocious] birth of the conscious and feminine me in the little girl’s soul’³ was to Mrs Wharton a vicious feature of the society she was to damn in fiction.

Lily Bart knows that she is valued only for her surfaces, and she herself subscribes to this system of values, with disastrous consequences. She places too much emphasis on the importance of her appearance, she undervalues and underplays her generosity, her humour, her irony, her quick mind, her instinct to follow her own impulses, not society’s dictates. And when age takes its toll of her looks, as she notices for the first time at the Bellomont house party, it is the beginning of the assumption of failure: ‘She was frightened by two little lines near her mouth, faint flaws in the smooth curve of the cheek.’ The scene prefigures a number of others in which Lily realizes she begins to look old: ‘and when a girl looks old to herself, how does she look to other people’ (p. 208).

She is the prisoner of her face and her body, and the emphasis in the Bellomont passage is on the premium of youth and beauty. No facial blemish, no maturation, no character is allowed Lily. She is valuable only so long as she is an unflawed surface. This she knows and this she in part resents. But she also delights in admiration, and admits to a pleasure-loving streak. She cannot resist the flattery of people and possessions; places look so much better when she comes down the staircase, steps into the room, sits at the table. Pictures compose themselves about her. She has been trained to excel at this, and has difficulty in retraining, however hard she tries. She has no talent for the social work which Gerty Farish undertakes, and the only alternative offered her is by her lawyer friend Lawrence Selden, in what he vaguely calls ‘the republic of the spirit’ (p. 79). As she points out to him, this, whatever it is, is easier for a man than for a woman.

Your coat’s a little shabby – but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like; they don’t make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop – and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership. (p. 14)

But she has not gone into partnership, and to be so decorative and not to have married while the less attractive Judy Trenors and Bertha Dorsets are secure wives and mothers make her conceive of some flaw in herself. For Mrs Wharton, the fact that Lily Bart has not married is no sin; it merely means that she has not fallen in love and that, while in theory she longs for the status and security of marriage, marriage has yet to appeal to her as a desirable way of life. But instead of being able to articulate and accept her state, Lily feels guilty and anxious. She does not understand why she has not married:

Had she shown an undue eagerness for victory? Had she lacked patience, pliancy or dissimulation? Whether she charged herself with these faults or absolved herself from them made no difference in the sum-total of her failure. Younger and plainer girls had been married off by dozens, and she was nine-and-twenty and still Miss Bart. (p. 45)

What Lily does not realize is that it is her success to have held out against the inducements of comfort and ease – that the instinct for independence and the refusal to settle for anything less than a loving relationship have been working well within her in spite of the overlay of convention, and in spite of her belief that she wants to conform. As a woman friend says of her:

She works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic…. Sometimes … I think it’s just flightiness and sometimes I think it’s because, at heart, she despises the things she’s trying for. And it’s the difficulty of deciding that makes her such an interesting study. (p. 218–19)

On Sunday morning at Bellomont she goes off for a long walk with Lawrence Selden, a man whose mind interests her, sending a message to Percy Gryce, whom she has worked so hard to impress – even boning up on his enthusiasm, Americana – that she is too unwell to go to church with him. Percy still plans to propose to her, but on his way back from church his carriage takes him past Lily and Selden, who are in animated and intimate conversation. Lily, seemingly both liar and flirt, has lost Percy Gryce. She does not think she has lost him deliberately; a psychiatrist might.

If Lily’s inconsistency makes for her social failure, it also gives her an individuality beyond that of her predictable contemporaries. In her own way she is struggling to use her gifts of beauty and independence properly. Almost certainly she should be a dress designer or an interior decorator. She is frustrated both by ‘society’, which would not then countenance such roles, and by an only partially awakened self, which can barely contemplate them. In spite of knowing she must not be imprudent or unconventional, that she must always be ready with fresh compliances, she cannot, at crucial moments, conform. She is incapable of playing her cards carefully if something other than the object or the man in question engages her mind or her attention. She has what Mrs Wharton calls ‘a warm fluidity’, a capacity to respond, to give; and often the circumstances of this ‘giving’ are admirable if curious, for she has that compelling degree of self-knowledge which means that she wants to get away from herself. She is the only person in the novel who gives and who expects nothing in return; even Lawrence Selden expects to see an ‘improvement’ in her ‘flirtatious’ conduct after they have talked. But this responsiveness is, of course, weakness as well as virtue. ‘Poor Lily, for all the hard glaze of her exterior, was inwardly as malleable as wax’ (p. 62). Her very being is in transition, her very type in the process of formation, and she suffers from the adaptability which this uncertainty, this inner formlessness, gives her. Her faculty for adapting herself, for entering into other people’s feelings, helps her survive socially and financially. It makes her an acceptable friend and secretary for Judy Trenor – she writes Judy’s letters, helps organize her parties (and can go to them) and is obliged to listen to her – but it hampers her judgement. So does her excessive response to environment.

Her faculty for renewing herself in new scenes, and casting off problems of conduct as easily as the surroundings in which they had arisen, made the mere change from one place to another seem, not merely a postponement, but a solution of her troubles. Moral complications existed for her only in the environment that had produced them; she did not mean to slight or ignore them, but they lost their reality when they changed their background. (p. 226)

She behaves with such pliancy after scandalous rumours link her name to Gus Trenor, Judy’s husband. Judy drops her; another ‘friend’, who is going to Europe, takes her on as a companion (it is Bertha Dorset, and true to the character which Wharton depicts so well at Bellomont – ‘glittering in serpentine spangles’ – Bertha eventually accuses Lily of being her husband’s mistress, so distracting attention from her own affair). Under the spell of the Mediterranean, Lily effectively forgets the complications of life in America. Such is her overdeveloped commitment to setting, to appearance and to place. Her swift change of mood demonstrates her capacity for obliterating her moral sense. The dangerous seeds of this responsiveness are evident at Bellomont where the lovely but superficial scene in the arcaded hall, brilliantly evoked by Mrs Wharton, ‘gratified her sense of beauty and her craving for the external finish of life’, where her luxurious bedroom seduces her into an unworthy affirmation of luxury for luxury’s sake. She wants very much to be a full member of Bellomont society, yet she is already somewhat disenchanted with it; she ‘could get no zest’ from the thought of joining it as Mrs Percy Gryce, nor does she know any man with whom she wishes to enter that society. It begins to occur to her that for the real Lily Bart society is no catch; indeed, it is ‘boring’. And yet she cannot turn her back. Her upbringing has so conditioned her that her intrinsic independence is frequently neutralized, and her sensitivity to art and beauty is becoming perverted to a response to the heavy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Half Title
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Edith Wharton
• 2 Henry Adams
• 3 Henry James
• 4 Gertrude Stein
• 5 Wallace Stevens
• 6 Ezra Pound
• 7 Sherwood Anderson
• 8 Sinclair Lewis
• 9 Jean Toomer
• 10 H. L. Mencken
• 11 F. Scott Fitzgerald
• 12 Ernest Hemingway
• 13 Eugene O'Neill
• 14 William Faulkner
• Bibliography
• Index