"For the use of the magazine morons": Edith Wharton rewrites the tale of the fantastic

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1996 by Gianfranca Balestra

the resemblance to Elsie's handsome resolute script chat Charlotte

had been on the point of exclaiming on it."

In the final version, instead, this passage is replaced by "`Why, I've seen that writing before,' but where she could not recall. The memory was just definite enough for her to identify the script whenever it looked up at her faintly from the same pale envelope" (201). It is on this sensation of something familiar and yet forgotten that the protracted hesitation is built into the tale, producing a perfect mechanism of the fantastic.

We can infer that Wharton had read the story to her friends in the manuscript version, with the immediate recognition of the handwriting on the envelope that rendered the supernatural source too explicit, and later decided to introduce this possible explanation gradually, by subtler means. Thus the mysterious handwriting is described in its indecipherably faint characters as visibly feminine in spite of its masculine curves. The reference to Elsie, eliminated from the beginning, is aptly brought back into the text in passages that inform the reader of the dominating personality of the dead wife, her "long coldly beautiful face" (204) depicted in the portrait that had hung on the library wall before its removal to the children's nursery. The new ending, then, operates as a sort of catalyst of all the hints disseminated in the course of the story: the shock of recognition, shared by Charlotte and her mother-in-law, is brought about by a masterly crescendo of looks and signs that culminate in the uncanny explanation: "What difference does it make if her letters are illegible to you and me? If even you can see her face on that blank wall, why shouldn't he read her writing on this blank paper? Don't you see that she's everywhere in this house, and the closer to him because to everyone else she's become invisible?" (229). The presence of Elsie's ghost is revealed precisely by her invisibility, the blank wall where her portrait used to hang, the illegible writing on the blank paper. A ghost is an absence; Kenneth, who is now absent, may have joined his dead wife and become a ghost himself. But evidence based on absence cannot satisfy reason, so that in the end the police are called, keeping open the possibility of an improbable rational explanation for the reader, if not for the protagonists.

As in the best tales of the fantastic, the supernatural is distilled and its essence suspended in a void: all the questions are not explicitly answered, and the reader is left in a disturbing cognitive stalemate. This is precisely w hat the positivistic readers, with their need for rational explanations, could not accept. The new ending, written to meet the requests of the publishers, substantiates a supernatural reading of the tale in a tour dc force of blanks that does not erase other interpretations for the active decoder of messages. Moreover, this ending is carefully wrought into the text after a series of changes and additions that prepare it with unquestionable artistry. There are no extant texts between the early manuscript and the published version of "Pomegranate Seed" to document the different phases of its production, but the final result is a masterful work, undoubtedly more successful than the first draft. Wharton listened to the comments of her readers--the friends to whom she read the tale at Christmas-time, the editors who presented their potentially destructive requests--possibly incorporated some of the suggestions, but refused damaging compromises, rewriting her story with unswerving mastery of her medium.