Edith Wharton - The Novel - Morality

 I first read Edith Wharton in college. I was a sophomore and the novel was Ethan Frone. I found her more interesting than Henry James, for all their territories overlapped. However, I did not read Wharton again until I was in prison when I decided if I was to write fiction again then I needed to fill in the holes of my literary education.

I found I still liked Wharton. She may even have something to teach us today. And although 2012 is not exactly current, Roxanna Robinson's essay, Edith Wharton: A Writer’s Reflections points out several I had not thought of (but then she has read more Wharton than I have):

Wharton’s deepest concern was morality. She wrote about the struggle between the body and the mind, that battlefield from which morality emerges. Central to her work are stifled and illicit passions, manifested in divorce, adultery, incest, and illegitimacy. She wrote about the struggle to integrate the life of the emotions within the life of the world. Her writing was stylistically decorous but socially transgressive: her prose is so elegant that her message comes as a shock, like a sword wrapped in satin.

This makes me think of Nick Lowe's early days when his pure pop hid some truly crazy things.  

What bothers me is the morality issue. I have heard other writers speak of this. When younger I worried about having a didactic and pedantic mindset. It is one I inherited; call it a Midwestern Protestant mindset overlaid with a residual Victorianism and an even more residual Scots Calvinism. In those days, morality was definitely out. What I have tried to do to escape my upbringing is to leave moral judgments to the reader. I have my opinions, such as no one is without stain, but preaching is not as good as showing.

Do we recognize any strictures today? I think so. They may not be the same sort of Wharton's upper-class New York society. Inter-racial dating and homosexuality I would not count as modern strictures. The same for divorce and the independent woman. One need only look at reality TV to see behavior that would have given my mother's mother a heart attack. 

But we do not live in the immoral society decried by so many TV preachers. And immorality is the result of violating society's strictures. Perhaps it is up to fiction to search for the moral rules. Toni Morrison and Kurt Vonnegut have just come to mind as I wrote that sentence. Figure that one out for yourselves. Recently, I read the review, The Unstable Truths of ‘The Last Language’. That review makes me think the Last Language is such a search; one that notices the slipperiness of our modern morality. Too much privilege has been given to the individual over the community. I blame Ayn Rand for that kind of thinking. Maybe Ibsen's Enemy of the People deserves some credit, too. The thing is the community is composed of individuals if we start picking out the trouble-makers with their questions and creativity, where do we stop before the community is wiped out, or what is left of the community is a group of gibbering idiots?

And here I think the following gives me some clues:

One of the brave things that Wharton does is to recognize the coexistence of the world of passion and the world of strictures. I don’t know another writer of her era who felt so seriously bound by the rules of society, and who took so seriously the great forces of emotion that were aligned against those rules. Since one of these rules was silence, it took great courage merely to declare the conflict, merely to write it down and speak it out.

I was also struck by Wharton’s courage in declaring a woman’s story to be a tragedy. I don’t mean the story of a beautiful woman betrayed by her lover, for many writers have made that into a tragedy. I mean the story of a woman on her own, forging her own way, and making her own terrible mistakes. Lily Bart is beautiful, but her story is hers alone, and depends on no one else for its outcome. She is the tragic hero of her own narrative, the sole agent of her own downfall, just as King Lear was, or Oedipus, and this is remarkable.

But most important to Wharton’s work is her own sense of compassion, something essential to all great fiction. It is Wharton’s empathy for her characters that makes our own possible. Wharton allows us to know them, to admire them, to understand their flaws and to forgive them — in short, to love them — as she does. For a writer, there is no greater skill.

I read emotion as having a heart and having a heart leads to compassion. Ibsen seems on point here: do we not understand and feel for both sides of the argument of Enemy of the People? Without being able to create empathy on both sides of a drama, we have the manipulation of the superhero movie.

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