Ghostly presences: Edith Wharton's Sanctuary and the issue of maternal sacrifice

College Literature, Spring 1998 by Salas, Angela M

Too many Wharton scholars and their readers share an entrenched insistence that Sanctuary (1903) is a bad novella. Superficially quite different from much of Wharton's other fiction, this text has been systematically derided, ignored, and relegated to the status of footnote. A perfectly interesting and even compelling novella, Sanctuary may remain misread or unread if teachers and readers continue to take their cues from such biographers as R.W.B. Lewis and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, whose groundbreaking efforts in Wharton scholarship seem to have earned them the right to make sweeping commentary about what is good and worthy in Wharton's canon. Lewis reports that Wharton herself referred to Sanctuary as "Sank" and he dismisses this early novella as "a relatively undistinguished piece of fiction" (1975, 123), while Wolff dismisses the novella in a terse footnote. For his part, Blake Nevius suggests that Sanctuary was written in the 1890's, when Wharton was still learning her craft writing sentimental stories for Scribner's Magazine; he dismisses the flaws he perceives in the novella as those of an apprentice-piece, a work that does not represent the mature Wharton's vision (1953, 25-26).1

These critics and other, younger scholars such as Elizabeth Ammons,2 have been so effective in dismissing Sanctuary that Eleanor Dwight's recent (1994) pictorial biography of Edith Wharton, a lush and beautiful piece of work, omits the novella from its bibliography of Wharton's works. Dwight herself makes no mention of Sanctuary in her text. A scholar with excellent credentials and no evident wish to rewrite Edith Wharton's career, Dwight seems unaware of Sanctuary's existence; paradoxically, this omission manifests the book's effacement by earlier Wharton scholars. I suggest that overlooking Sanctuary requires that readers and critics ignore Edith Wharton's earliest (and arguably her most ambivalent) analysis of parental responsibility towards their offspring. Since this issue of parental, indeed familial, responsibility is so central to Wharton's work, knowledge of Sanctuary can add depth to our understanding of more popular Wharton novels, such as The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth. Even the "Bunner Sisters," with its handling of self-sacrifice and resentment, seems more dense when read with the knowledge that Wharton had wrestled with these problems of familial relationships from her earliest career.

Sanctuary seems to have little in common with those works, such as The House of Mirth (1905), which made Wharton's reputation; the dramatis personae of Sanctuary is limited to a few main characters, not a panoramic view of society's luminaries; the tensions at work are internally moral and ethical, not external; the novel does not proceed inexorably toward a tragedy-it begins with a murder-suicide. Sanctuary is, despite these differences from the "typical" Wharton work, an important part of Wharton's bibliography, and it is compelling and revealing in very interesting ways. This early work is an examination of the role of a mother in determining her child's moral make-up; a ghost story haunted by the dead yet omnipresent father who has contributed faulty genes to his son; it is a novella that reflects Wharton's preoccupation with the possibilities and costs of living an ethical and honorable life. In The House of Mirth and The Children, Wharton produced scathing portraits of the damage done by ineffectual or reluctant parents; in Sanctuary, she asks if a mother must efface herself for her children and if a father's contribution to his family is simply genetic and financial. Must a woman be self-sacrificing to be honorable? Is a father's sole responsibility to provide money and a name for his children? Sanctuary makes received wisdom about Wharton and her ambivalence towards feminist principles more tenuous and complicated than it might otherwise be by underscoring the marginalization of the father throughout the Industrial Revolution and by its implicit criticism of the mother as "hearth angel." 3

I am not the first to call for a critical reevaluation of Sanctuary. In his impressive study of Edith Wharton's neglected works, Lev Raphael suggests that scholars should note the motherless protagonist Kate's relationship to her father, who perceives her as "an outlying region, a subject province" (1991, 57). Raphael links the motherless Kate's awareness that she is not a person in the eyes of her father to her desperate decision to save an unborn child from its own father's taint (1991, 37). Raphael connects this to Wharton's own memory on the first page of A backward glance of being only a "soft anonymous morsel of humanity" in relation to her own father (19). According to Raphael, Kate's decision to snatch an unborn child from the doom of an inherited taint is both self-assertive for Kate and an attempt on her part to ensure that this child is not doomed to the abstraction and inadequacy which characterizes her own life. By making Denis Peyton's child such a real issue, even prior to its conception, Kate shows more concern and care about it than has been spent upon her, a real and feeling person. Concluding his argument, Raphael suggests that the problem with Sanctuary is not Kate's decision (which many critics consider silly), but with the "inappropriately happy ending" (39) a conclusion suggesting that, lonely and bereft though Kate might be, her sacrifice was not in vain since Dick has resisted his own moment of temptation. Raphael agrees with Ammons's assertion that Wharton paints a bleak picture of Kate's life and future, despite Dick's ecstatic cries that Kate saved him from drowning in moral sewage.