The repudiation of sisterhood in Edith Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1996 by Judy Hale Young

However, by writing only to Kenneth, Elsie denies her bond with Charlotte. Elsie lives up to her maiden name, Corder, as "the author of the ties that bind" (Waid 195); but they bind her only to Kenneth and keep Charlotte at a distance, keep her always in the position of potential, never actual, reader, Charlotte's own desire to read the letters intermittently overwhelms her and causes her to act in wildly uncharacteristic ways; such is the nature of her desire--the "unfeminine" desire to empower herself by acquiring masculine knowledge. Thus, when she decides to watch Kenneth as he opens the latest letter, "it was the first time she had ever tried to surprise another person's secret. . . . She simply felt as if she were fighting her way through a stifling fog that she must at all costs get out of" (206-08)--the fog of ignorance, silence, and powerlessness. Later, "she was ashamed of her persistence . . . yet resolved that no such scruples should arrest her" (218). Ultimately, in the final scene the strength of her desire overcomes her well-bred principles entirely when she opens and reads the letter with defiant abandon--"whatever ill comes, I mean to find out what's in it" (226).

But Charlotte's attempts to acquire masculine knowledge go essentially unrewarded. Try as she will, she cannot grasp the knowledge she seeks because she cannot read the letters. The nature of the letters as Elsie has created them ensures Charlotte's inability to read them. Elsie addresses her letters in every sense to a man: she sends them to Kenneth and marks them with Kenneth's name. Furthermore, the handwriting itself resists Charlotte's attempts to read: "the address was always written as though there were not enough ink in the pen" (201); "strain her eyes as she would, she could discern only a few faint strokes, so faint and faltering as to be nearly undecipherable" (227). Kenneth, however, while he also shows some difficulty with "decipher[ing] the faint writing" (202), can read the letters because he has read other letters like them--he has prior knowledge that allows him to partake of the knowledge they offer. As Charlotte tells her mother-in-law, "I remember [Kenneth's] saying to me once that if you were used to a handwriting the faintest stroke of it became legible. Now I see what he meant. He was used to it" (229). But Charlotte is not used to it, has had no opportunity to become used to it, to master the prior knowledge that Kenneth has. She thus signifies the woman who attempts to gain the knowledge and power implicit in the act of reading, but can do so only imperfectly. This imperfect ability springs both from her femaleness, which makes her a stranger to masculine discourse or, as in this case, masculinized discourse, and from her narrow and ineffective education, which Wharton elsewhere describes as the "ordinary teaching [of] French, German, music & drawing" ("Life and I," 1089). Charlotte is the woman reader who struggles with this socially sanctioned virtual illiteracy.