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Novels: The House of Mirth / The Reef / The Custom of the Country / The Age of Innocence

door Edith Wharton

Andere auteurs: R. W. B. Lewis (Redacteur)

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The four novels in this Library of America volume show Wharton at the height of her powers as a social observer and critic, examining American and European lives with a vision rich in detail, satire, and tragedy. In all of them her strong and autobiographical impulse is disciplined by her writer's craft and her unfailing regard for her audience. The House of Mirth (1905), Wharton's tenth book and her first novel of contemporary life, was an immediate runaway bestseller, with 140,000 copies in print within three months of publication. The story of young Lily Bart and her tragic sojourn among the upper class of turn-of-the-century New York, it touches on the insidious effects of social convention and upon the sexual and financial aggression to which women of independent spirit were exposed. The Reef (1912) is the story of two couples whose marriage plans are upset by the revelation of a past affair between George Darrow (a mature bachelor) and Sophy Vener, who happens to be the fiancée of his future wife's stepson. Henry James called the novel "a triumph of method," and it shares the rich nuance of his own The Golden Bowl. The Custom of the Country (1913) is the amatory saga of Undine Spragg of Apex City--beautiful, spoiled, and ambitious--whose charms conquer New York and European society. Vulgar and voracious, she presides over a series of men, representing the old and new aristocracies of both continents, in a comedy drawn unmistakably from life. The Age of Innocence (1920) is set in the New York of Wharton's youth, when the rules and taboos of her social "tribe" held as-yet unchallenged sway. A quasi-anthropological study of a remembered culture and its curious conventions, it tells the story of the Countess Olenska (formerly Ellen Mingott), refugee from a disastrous European marriage, and Newland Archer, heir to a tradition of respectability and family honor, as they struggle uneasily against their sexual attraction. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.… (meer)
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Write what you know, says the common advice. An unspoken corollary: read what you don’t know. Although Wharton’s roots were geographically close to my own, the world she depicts is almost as alien to me as a distant planet. Yet her intimate knowledge of intricacies of Manhattan’s old society and its confrontation with the fabulous new wealth that sprang up in the corrupt aftermath of the Civil War gave her the material she needed to go from being a good, moderately successful author to a great and popular one. She found her theme in the particular difficulty of being a female offspring of wealth. They are cultivated like hothouse flowers to adorn the arm of a young man, preferably either from a venerable old society family or from European nobility.
This Library of America volume collects four of her full-length novels.
The first, The House of Mirth, presents Lily Bart, a woman who “had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.” Lily’s father dies, leaving her and her mother financially insecure. Unfortunately, mother had already inculcated in Lily a dread of anything tawdry. Mother is convinced that Lily’s exceptional beauty is as good as money in the bank but dies before Lily can be launched in society. From then on, Lily is an appendage, dependent on the goodwill of relatives.
When the book opens, we find Lily hasn’t invested her capital wisely. She’s approaching thirty and has been on the market too long. The bloom on the lily is beginning to fade. Unique among Lily’s admirers is Lawrence Selden. Unlike the other men, he is neither vapid nor wealthy. The first quality might be what Lily longs for, but the second means that he has no prospect.
Selden knows this but can’t help being fascinated by Lily. She seems divided: she embodies much of what Selden disdains yet appears to share his sense of the follies of her class. Lawrence is a sort of pre-Nick Carraway: he has a vantage point from which he can observe while also being an outsider. Spoiler alert: the tale doesn’t end well.
Of the four novels collected here, The Reef is the one in which the exploration of the two central male characters is as deep as the two main females. It is a comedy of manners about Americans who have relocated to the aristocratic French countryside. None of the quartet at the heart of the plot are particularly bad, but each is flawed; sometimes, the flaw is nothing more than a momentary lapse. The reader wishes them happiness, but this seems not to be. It appears that the author is suggesting that a degree of happiness may be attainable if they were all more honest about their feelings and more tolerant of each other. As one of them reflects: “Mankind would never have needed to invent tact if it had not first invented social complications.” My takeaway is that morality is something other than observing the social conventions of good behavior.
Going into the third novel included here, The Custom of the Country, I assumed the “custom” in question was the nonchalance with which the women of the new industrial wealthy class in America divorced and remarried, oblivious to what this would do to their standing in the aristocratic European circles in which they aspired to move. That's undeniably theme of the book, but the first time the phrase is used, it is in the mouth of one of the secondary characters, a member of the old Washington Square society now being pushed aside. He is an ironic but not unsympathetic observer of the new class. What he calls the custom of the country is the strict division of roles among the newly wealthy. The men occupy themselves with gaining (or losing) fortunes and never let the women know where the money comes from or why frugality might sometimes be necessary. The role of the women is limited to the ostentatious display of that wealth.
Perhaps that is the point. Indeed, Wharton herself was aware of the evanescence of the wealth she was born into. But her protagonist, Undine Spragg, is not. Like a water sprite, Undine squiggles away whenever anyone—her father, one of her husbands—tries to clue her in. She absolutely refuses to know. She is twinned here with another character, equally elusive: her first and fourth husband, Elmer Moffatt. Together, they are the embodiment of Henry Adams’s dynamo: As indomitable as the steam engine they harness, they are beyond morality, oblivious of the destruction they leave in their wake.
The Age of Innocence, the final novel included here, reminded me of The Old Man and the Sea. Not that the two novels are similar in the slightest way. But, as many have noted, Hemingway’s Nobel Prize honored him for a book that read as if someone had written a parody of Hemingway’s style. Similarly, The Age of Innocence is the book for which Wharton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (the first woman so honored). Yet it is written with a self-conscious nostalgia for old New York that had not weighed down the other novels collected here. Her characters seem preternaturally attuned to inventions or projects that lay in the future. For instance: "He remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York.”
Wharton even brings in her recently deceased friend Theodore Roosevelt for a cameo appearance.
To me, an even more serious flaw is that Wharton's previous expertise in intimating the subtle currents of a conversation and the dissonance between what was said and what was meant has partially deserted her. She is reduced to telling us what she was previously able to show us: “That was the only word that passed between them on the subject, but in the code in which they had both been trained it meant . . . ”, followed by Wharton detailing what it meant.
And yet . . . . In general, Wharton’s central female characters are more vital than their male counterparts, and in The Age of Innocence, she created her most memorable, Ellen Mingott, Countess Oleska. A woman from old New York who had been confronted with the life that old New York pretended didn’t exist, her experience left her truly principled, while the others in her set are merely respectful of convention. Not the same thing.
Wharton’s depiction of the farewell dinner given for Ellen before she returns to Europe can serve as an epitome of all four of the novels collected here: “It was the old New York way of taking life ‘without effusion of blood’: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than ’scenes,’ except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.”
Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (not included here) is one of those books I was supposed to have read in high school but didn’t. The world Wharton portrayed seemed too alien to me (strange that the dust-bowl migrant camps in California didn’t). For a long time, she appeared to me to be Henry James in a skirt. I was mistaken. Their milieu was the same, but Wharton’s language, perceptions, and values are her own. She is an ironist. At her best, she conveys a subtle awareness of the eddies and swirls of the inner lives of her characters and their elaborately choreographed interactions. What a strange, foreign world existed unsuspected by me just seventy years before I was born and only twenty miles from my home. ( )
  HenrySt123 | Jul 19, 2021 |
NA
  pszolovits | Feb 3, 2021 |
This is a very satisfying, beautiful edition, and The Age of Innocence is a supreme American novel.
And just want to add The House of Mirth to the 5-star review. Amazing, beautiful, perfect prose marred only by some lazy bigotry that Wharton shared with so many other writers. ( )
  JoePhelan | Dec 14, 2014 |
This review is of the novel, The Custom of the Country, which appears in this volume of the Library of America.

Undine Spragg was born to be admired. Her beauty and style turned heads in her mid-Western hometown of Apex, and later in the salons of New York and Paris. Undine Spragg was born to be indulged. Her father could always “find” the money to satisfy her whims and caprices (or, as she would have said, her needs) and settled on her an allowance he could sometimes ill afford, throughout several marriages; her husbands paid for her gowns, furs, jewels and parties as long as they could, or cared to, and when they stopped indulging Undine, Undine stopped caring for them. Undine Spragg was born to be dissatisfied. The more she had, the more she wanted, and the less she wanted what she had. She failed repeatedly to be the right sort of companion to the men who wanted her because she failed always to grasp the significance of anything that wasn’t relevant to her current desires. The less said about her mothering “skills”, the better. Unlike Scarlett O’Hara, another pampered heroine who I thought of often while reading The Custom of the Country, Undine Spragg had very little steel in her; when things got tough she didn’t face them and call upon inner reserves of strength to get her through; she just looked for another “friend” to bale her out. Not for Undine the unquenchable optimism of “Tomorrow is another day!” or the formidable resolve of “As God is my witness, I will never be hungry again!” Rather, by the end of Edith Wharton’s brilliant novel, Undine Spragg Moffatt Marvell desChelles Moffat has finally come to realize that, through her own ever-upward striving, she has sealed her fate, and disqualified herself from ever attaining that which, just now, she feels is the one thing she most wants in the world.
Wharton’s writing is witty, breathtakingly beautiful at times, compelling…how else could one read and enjoy 400 pages of the pointless carryings-on of anyone as unlikeable and useless as Undine Spragg? The novel is full of delicious irony, and one or two laugh-out-loud moments; the final chapter, in which we really meet Undine’s 9-year-old son and see things from his perspective, is as fine as anything I’ve ever read. I just wanted to scoop up this forlorn little being, whisk him back to his “French father”, and find him a woman with a heart to love him like a mother.
  laytonwoman3rd | Nov 8, 2014 |
There is something about the way Wharton describes the very rich of late 1800s America, in The House of Mirth, that can only really be captured with the very delicate paper of this edition. Of the story, it is the imperfect natures of the characters that draws me in and the fact that, whilst they resolve some issues, they are still flawed in the end. It may not be as gritty as some novelists with the setting, but it feels as though the emotions are...it helps to remind me that the glittering world of money isn't an Austen-esque world.
  VeritysVeranda | Sep 29, 2013 |
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AuteursnaamRolType auteurWerk?Status
Edith Whartonprimaire auteuralle editiesberekend
Lewis, R. W. B.RedacteurSecundaire auteuralle editiesbevestigd
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The four novels in this Library of America volume show Wharton at the height of her powers as a social observer and critic, examining American and European lives with a vision rich in detail, satire, and tragedy. In all of them her strong and autobiographical impulse is disciplined by her writer's craft and her unfailing regard for her audience. The House of Mirth (1905), Wharton's tenth book and her first novel of contemporary life, was an immediate runaway bestseller, with 140,000 copies in print within three months of publication. The story of young Lily Bart and her tragic sojourn among the upper class of turn-of-the-century New York, it touches on the insidious effects of social convention and upon the sexual and financial aggression to which women of independent spirit were exposed. The Reef (1912) is the story of two couples whose marriage plans are upset by the revelation of a past affair between George Darrow (a mature bachelor) and Sophy Vener, who happens to be the fiancée of his future wife's stepson. Henry James called the novel "a triumph of method," and it shares the rich nuance of his own The Golden Bowl. The Custom of the Country (1913) is the amatory saga of Undine Spragg of Apex City--beautiful, spoiled, and ambitious--whose charms conquer New York and European society. Vulgar and voracious, she presides over a series of men, representing the old and new aristocracies of both continents, in a comedy drawn unmistakably from life. The Age of Innocence (1920) is set in the New York of Wharton's youth, when the rules and taboos of her social "tribe" held as-yet unchallenged sway. A quasi-anthropological study of a remembered culture and its curious conventions, it tells the story of the Countess Olenska (formerly Ellen Mingott), refugee from a disastrous European marriage, and Newland Archer, heir to a tradition of respectability and family honor, as they struggle uneasily against their sexual attraction. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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