Posts Tagged ‘Edith Wharton’

28 Feb

‘Bunner Sisters’ by Edith Wharton – A Bleak Naturalistic Novella of the 1890s

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Bunner Sisters’ by Edith Wharton    (1892,1916) – 95 pages

‘The House of Mirth’, ‘Ethan Frome’, and ‘The Custom of a Country’ were wonderful, but I found ‘Bunner Sisters’ to be a sad excuse for a novella. The emphasis should be on the word ‘Sad’.

There is a reason that ‘Bunner Sisters’ was written in 1892 and several magazines rejected it at that time and it was not published until 1916. Hermoine Lee, in her introduction, mentions “the unflinching grimness” of the work. Yes, I agree.

In the late 1800s, the fiction of Emile Zola had a profound effect on the literary world.  In such novels as ‘L’Assommoir’, ‘Germinal’, and ‘Nana’, he started a new literary genre of extreme realism called naturalism.  With ‘Bunner Sisters’, Wharton wrote her own naturalistic novella suffused with pessimism in regard to the lower classes, especially its single women.

In ‘Bunner Sisters’, the older sister Ann Eliza and the younger sister Evelina live together in a shabby New York City neighborhood in the 1890s. The two sisters are beyond what was usually thought of as marriageable age. They keep a small shop selling artificial flowers and small hand-sewn articles for women, and they barely scratch out a living.

Ann Eliza decides to get Evelina a clock for her birthday with money she has saved, and that is when their real troubles begin. Enter the clock maker Herbert Ramy. He is a German, and he seems quite capable with clocks. Soon he starts coming around to the sisters’ house. At first Ann Eliza thinks he might be interested in her even though Evelina is the one who has had boyfriends before. Then Ann Eliza realizes that Evelina has her eyes and heart set on Mr. Ramy and decides to forgo her own possibilities in favor of her younger sister.

Did I mention that to the sisters Mr. Ramy sometimes looks sick with a dull look in his eyes and in need of care? The sisters figure he’s just a bachelor who doesn’t take good care of himself, but later we find out the real reason Mr. Ramy looks sick.

Things proceed as expected. I won’t divulge any more of the plot.

Edith Wharton usually wrote of the upper classes, but in this case she went slumming. Things were bad enough for poor people without Wharton embellishing their problems. Charles Dickens showed the severe effects of poverty on English youth and families, and here Edith Wharton shows the severe effects of poverty on American adult single females, especially if they let the wrong man take advantage of them. At least Dickens usually had an upbeat ending for his poor souls.

‘Bunner Sisters’ is a bleak read without any redeeming glimmer of hope at the end.

 

Grade:   C-

 

 

24 May

‘The Touchstone’ by Edith Wharton – A Novella about a Literary Misdeed

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

‘The Touchstone’ by Edith Wharton   (1900)  –  92 pages  Grade: B+

touchThe novella ‘The Touchstone’ has a tidy little literary plot. Here is the setup.

Stephen Glennard was good friends with the famous author Margaret Aubyn for a long time.  In fact she was infatuated with him and sent him hundreds of passionate love letters, but he kept rejecting her as a lover.  She suddenly died, and then she became a legend in the literary world.  Now it is three years after her death, and Glennard has met a new woman, Alexa Trent, he does want to marry.  However his current finances would not support such a marriage.

He then discovers that there is so much public interest in Margaret Aubyn that her correspondence would be worth a lot of money if published.   He secretly has the letters published in two volumes and thus gets the money that allows him to marry Miss Trent.  He removes his own name from the letters, and not even the publisher knows that these letters were written to him.

These “unloved letters” of Margaret Aubyn have a profound effect on readers, especially upon woman readers.  Soon Glennard’s new wife asks him to purchase the two volumes of Margaret Aubyn’s letters for her.  Glennard begins to feel extremely guilty about having had the letters published, and his guilt soon comes between him and his new wife.

I found this setup tremendously interesting, although the logistics are a bit questionable.  We are never told the ages of any of the participants, and also has there ever been a writer’s correspondence that was worth a whole lot of money?  Along the way in ‘The Touchstone’ we readers get some interesting viewpoints of the literary world.

“Literature travels faster than steam nowadays.  And the worst of it is that we can’t any of us give up reading; it is insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a virtue.” 

 But the ultimate story is about the endangered relationship between Glennard and his wife Alexa.

 “Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.”  

 ‘The Touchstone’ was Edith Wharton’s first novel, and perhaps she was still in thrall to Henry James.  Here, as in James, we have sensibilities so refined that it would be impossible for the average person to understand them.  Sometimes I feel like a bull in a china shop around such fine sensibilities.  Sometimes I just want James or Wharton to come out and say what they mean clearly and directly.  In later works such as ‘House of Mirth’ and ‘Custom of the Country’, the Henry James influence is somewhat lessened which is only beneficial to Wharton’s work.

Ultimately Edith Wharton developed into a more interesting writer than Henry James, because James’ theories on social class and fiction writing sometimes got in the way of his story telling.   Still it is very much to Henry James’ credit as a mentor that he developed such an excellent student as Edith Wharton.

It is only near the end of ‘The Touchstone’ that it became somewhat difficult to keep track of the characters’ feelings.  For most of the way, ‘The Touchstone’ is a very fine novella indeed.