Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather by Judith Fryer (review)

172 Shorter Book Reviews Judith Fryer. Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Whartonand Willa Cather. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986. 403 pp. Illus. Remembering the excellence of Judith Fryer's 1976 book, The Faces of Eve, one anticipates liking and admiring Felicitous Space. One's expectations are not altogether dashed, for the new book does throw up a good bit of engaging commentary as it goes about exploring how Wharton and Cather structured and re-structured space and spaces-inner and outer, closed and open, architectural and natural-in their lives and in their writings. Not very far into the book, however, a reader is apt to find himself (maybe a herself would respond otherwise) increasingly irritated with Fryer's approaches and conclusions. And by the time they finish the book, some readers might be thinking that feminist preconceptions can be harmful to critical insight, or that Fryer herself is on her way to becoming a sort of feminist Leslie Fiedler. Like Fiedler in Love and Death, Fryer has assembled an imposing arrayof critical weaponry and impedimenta, which she wields energetically but not always discriminatingly, strewing superscript numbers on every page and forcing her readers to turn back repeatedly, and often bootlessly, to the more than fifty pages of notes accompanying less than 350 pages of text. An early chapter on The Custom of the Country, after opening with what turns out to be an irrelevant discussion of Poe and Mario Praz and Guy Davenport on interior decoration, and arguing unconvincingly that Wharton's novel is an ''urban pastoral," concludes limpingly that Undine Spragg exemplifies the "custom of the country'': ''to subvert community by destroying the kinds of structures that encourage and preserve communication.'' To arrive at such a banal and unexceptional conclusion, however, Fryer also drags in, tendentiously but not always pertinently, such names as inter alia, John Berger, Aubrey Beardsley, Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Marilyn Monroe, Sarah Bernhardt, Norman Mailer, John Singer Sargent, Alexis de Tocqueville, Herman Melville, and Rollo May. And this early chapter presages what will be happening throughout the book: matters don't connect, digressions start up willy-nilly, there is no center to hold on to. At the same time, and also like the Fiedler of thirty years ago, Fryer, in her pell-mell rush to make a point, is sometimes slipshod and careless with factual details, particularly if those details appertain to males. For example, a minor one, but one I think symptomatic of her willfully feminist readings-and misreadings: in writing of the Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson, who figures in the opening sentence of The Age of Innocence, Fryer quotes Henry James as saying, "What a pity she is not the heroine of the tale, and I didn't make her!" Fryer then goes on: "she must have seemed to him even more vital, more energetic, than someone like his Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse." She then Shorter Book Reviews 173 adds that the "powerful Nilsson would have been familiar to Wharton's readers." James, however, wrote "the heroine of a tale"; his comment came as a postscript to a letter written in 1870, long before he had begun to envision the character of Miriam Rooth; and Nilsson, who sang in public in London for the last time in 189 I, would have been "familiar" to but a handful of Wharton's readers thirty years later. Another, and a much more serious, instance of Fryer's careless feminism occurs when she takes John Berryman to task for admiring, even if a bit grudgingly, Dreiser's characterization of Cowperwood in The Titan. Fryer quotes fro111Berryman' s sketch of Cowperwoodand then proceeds with what is presumably a paraphrase: '' 'This is not a businessman, but a predator,' comparable in his ruthless cunning and blunt male egotism to nobody." She then observes, snidely, "It is curious--or perhaps not so curious-that Berryman identified 'city' only with 'blunt male egotism.' " What is "curiouser," however, is Fryer's misconstruing of Berryman. What he actually said is that Cowperwood is "comparable to nobody in Lapham and Babbit." Fryer's "blunt male egotism," which she employs more than once, is...