Wharton's New England: Seven Stories and Ethan Frome

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by Joseph Griffin

Wharton's New England: Seven Stories and Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, edited by Barbara A. White. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1995. xxx 254 pages. $14.95 paper.

The most recent selection of Edith Wharton's shorter fiction is Barbara A. White's Wharton's New England, published by the University Press of New England under a new imprint called Hardscrabble Books. Of 21 Wharton short stories set in New England, White has chosen seven of the best. "The Triumph of Night," "Bewitched," and "All Saints'" are ghost stories, fairly well known because Wharton's writing in this genre is often anthologized and because her collection Ghosts, comprising all of her spectral tales, is at this moment in print. "The Pretext" and "Xingu" are stories chosen from a number Wharton set in a fictional university town: "Xingu" is a Wharton staple; "The Pretext" is a gem not often made available to readers. "The Lamp of Psyche" and "The Angel at the Grave" defy easy categorization: the former is well known from its inclusion in the 1964 Scribner collection, Roman Fever and Other Stories; the latter, one of the earlier stories, has not often been reprinted. Wharton's novella Ethan Frome is also included in the collection.

White has written a brief note to each of the pieces in the collection, providing information about Wharton's writing of the particular item, its content and its reception. She has also included a list of all of Wharton's New England novels, short stories, nonfiction, and unpublished fragments. Her general introduction discusses the role New England plays in the entirety of Wharton's work.

White's introduction is both perceptive and enlightening. Wharton's interest in New England stemmed from her spending six months of the year at her "summer" home, the Mount, at Lennox in western Massachusetts, from 1899 through 1908. White draws particular attention to Wharton's stated concerns about "the dark unsuspected life--the sexual violence, even the incest--that went on behind the bleak walls of the farmhouses," concerns that emerged in Ethan Frome, Summer and "All Souls'." White also demonstrates the impact on Wharton's fiction of her contacts with more cultivated New Englanders. Her friendship with the Norton family, while generally positive, provided a reminder, in the person of its patriarch Charles Eliot Norton, of the authoritarian Puritan presence that continued to influence New England life. Other of Wharton's social contacts were without much redeeming value, and a number of short stories about academe and its fringe life can be traced back to the pretentiousness and pseudointellectualism, she encountered in the drawing rooms in and around Lennox. The whole of this resolves into a New York/Episcopalian--New England/Calvinist tension that is often settled in the fiction in favor of the former.

It is always tempting when examining collections of the kind under consideration here to criticize the collector's choices. White, understandably, was guided in her selections by her own likes and probably by the observations made in her introduction. Given the unavailability to readers of many good Wharton stories, however, it might have been preferable to exclude, for example, the ubiquitous Ethan Frome, and include stories long unread. I personally would have opted for "The Pelican," a tale of New England academe seldom taken very seriously and invariably the object of inadequate and superficial attention.