The “Heroes” of Edith Wharton

WINIFRED LYNSKEY Punencan rn:~tena~lm--a~ readers have never cared ness of her motives. Mr. Wilson's -::.i'rp.....,..,-n.Teo ways been balked no of her n,....,''''~1~... 354 una CULrlDl.CI..C aware· THE "HEROES" OF EDITH WHARTON 355 with Walter Berry. The well-bred reticence of Mrs. Wharton in A Backward Glance and of Mrs. Whartonls friends in Mr. Percy Lubbock 's memoir is like an impenetrable shield. We do not know how Walter Berry failed Mrs. Wharton, if at all. We do not know how much she resented him, if at all. But we do know some things. Even in their well-bred reticence both Mrs. Wharton and her friends testify to the fact that Walter Berry was her life-long love. For twentyseven years he was her mentor, guide, and friend. He inspired and shaped her career. And in an autobiography which is on most counts a masterpiece of chilled restraint, Mrs. Wharton wrote of him: "Walter Berry was not a separate person ... but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.... I cannot picture what the life of the spirit would have been to me without him. He found me when my mind and soul were hungry and thirsty, and he fed them till our last hour together. It is such comradeships, made of seeing and dreaming, and thinking and laughing together, that make one feel that for those who have shared them there can be no parting." Edith Wharton lies buried beside Walter Berry. Edith Wharton's devotion to the man she loved is a fact. Her alleged bitter resentment is a psychiatric sunnise. Mr. Wilson's theory about Mrs. Wharton ignores the fact that her heroes were heroic to her. They could not be otherwise. A Wharton hero has an integral part in the plot and theme of the novel. If he is not permitted to play the role assigned to him, jf he is not permitted to carry the heavy burden of the novers theme, then her novels become so distorted as to be meaningless. To most readers, however, the bloodless Wharton hero is not a fustrate man. But if Mrs. V\'harton took a model from life for him, she chose no one but herself. The profiles of Mrs. '\Thaxton and the Wharton hero are distressingly similar. I say "distressingly similar" because the Archers, Seldens, and Marvells are, at best, cold and unapproachable and possessed of a painful moral and aesthetic superiority. Mrs. Wharton's heroes are deficient as men because they are not men. They are a sentimental projection of herself. In his spiritual and ethical biography, in his emotional frustration, and in his adjustment or compensation , a Wharton hero bears a close resemblance to his creator. The life of a Wharton hero is a struggle to escape from the stultifying environment of a wealthy society into a world of artistic and moral values. For twenty years of her adult life, Mrs. Wharton engaged in a similar struggle. When the smoke of battle had cleared away, Mrs. Wharton was where she had longed to be, the centre of a brilliant literary circle. Her husband had suffered a mental derange- 356 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY ment which caused him to be confined. No one has ever assumed that her husband was a casualty of Mrs. Wharton's one of the forces she If the Wharton hero does not yearn to ext)re:ss through he Marvell in The Custom of the IS Archer he discovers that money, even as a not produce a satisfactory life. "profession was the least real in his life. The realities behind him now: the books lanammg his old bookcases and on chairs sketches too-he could do channing things, if only he had kno-wn how to finish them on the table at his scattered sheets of prose and verse; channing things also, but like the sketches, unfinished ." Knowing a wealthy society for what it is, the Wharton hero tries to turn his on money. Wharton's mother to her little girl: "Never talk about money and think about it as little as H Edith he owes...