Misunderstanding, Motivation, and Marriage in Edith Wharton's Summer

No element of Edith Wharton's novel Summer (1917) has received more critical attention than the marriage between the book's young, pregnant protagonist Charity Royall and her much older guardian/foster father Lawyer Royall. The reasons that the marriage generates so much critical controversy seem fairly obvious: Charity marries her guardian at the end of her ecstatic summer romance with the visiting young architect Lucius Harney after twice before refusing Lawyer Royall's proposals; the marriage has incestuous overtones and locks Charity into the stifling existence she longs to escape when the novel opens. On the other hand, Charity, alone and pregnant, has few options other than to wed Royall: she rejects the possibility of abortion; she cannot marry Harney who has a previous fiancée; she has no way to support herself and her offspring other than prostitution; and she will not raise the child in the lawless, poverty-stricken Mountain community from which she comes. From this perspective, Royall can appear a benevolent figure and his decision not to consummate the marriage the night of the wedding seems considerate—at the least. Wharton herself encouraged such a positive reading of Royall, telling her friend Bernard Berenson, "Of course he's the book" when Berenson singled out the character for special praise.¹ While many critics and readers follow Wharton's lead in their assessment of Lawyer Royall and his marriage to his ward, others remain deeply troubled by the incestuous, patriarchal nature of the union.

Three critics writing in the early years of the "Wharton Revival" of the 1970s and 1980s helped establish the parameters of this critical debate.² In his 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning Wharton biography, R. W. B. Lewis calls Royall the novel's "center of attention" and while he recognizes him as "craggy and flawed, sometimes drunken and abusive," he also sees Royall as an "essentially decent person, a kindly wreck of a man." Lewis moves the site of incest in the novel from Lawyer Royall's red house in the village of North Dormer to the settlement of "illiterate outlaws" on the Mountain—the place of Charity's birth. Lewis concludes that "it is by artful contrast with the Mountainfolk that Lawyer Royall appears so basically humane."³ In this view, Royall's decision to marry Charity not only saves her from repeating her mother's life on the Mountain, but also proves the gesture of a "decent" and "humane" individual. In her Wharton biography published just two years later, Cynthia Griffin Wolff offers a more fully developed reading of Summer than does Lewis but she also views the marriage between Royall and Charity in a largely positive light. Wolff acknowledges that Charity will never again know the "ecstasy" of her affair with Harney but she goes on to argue that her marriage to Royall may mark "the beginning of love," which the girl has now grown mature and self-aware enough to experience.⁴ By contrast, in Edith Wharton's Argument with America (1980) Elizabeth Ammons calls Summer "Wharton's bluntest criticism of the patriarchal sexual economy" and she states in no uncertain terms that the "final union between Charity and Royall is not merely depressing; it is sick."⁵

These early readings tended to set the terms of the debate for the next two decades and while few subsequent critics have gone so far as Lewis' somewhat-qualified endorsement of Royall or of Ammons' outright condemnation of his marriage to Charity, most have fallen somewhere between the two. Writing in 1984, Barbara White seems ambivalent in her assessment of the Royall marriage. She notes that it proves hardly surprising "to find totally opposite readings because Wharton presents a double perspective on her heroine's experience. Yes, there is good in Royall, but he is also paternalistic. Yes, the relationship seems incestuous, but it also has positive potential."⁶ Writing a year later, Sandra M. Gilbert recognizes a similar "double perspective," noting that as "Wharton reluctantly observed, the daughter's summer of erotic content blooms only to prepare her for … an autumn and winter of civilized discontent...