Fighting Edith Wharton's ghost

The day before a war began, I stalked NYC looking for Edith Wharton

The day before a war began, I tried to stalk Edith Wharton through New York. 

I knew the war was coming. Despite assurances from officials quoted in the news and a friend of mine, a reporter, who told me that day that he’d spoken on background with a lot of people who knew things. “It’s not going to happen,” he said. “Putin is just bluffing.” But my brother, who is in the Army, had been deployed weeks before. He was sitting in a tank in another country — he couldn’t tell us where. But I could guess. I imagined my brother sitting there, teetering on the edge of something, ready to fall over into an abyss. And here I was in New York, standing in front of a Starbucks that had once been Edith Wharton’s home.

Wharton was a war novelist and a tireless volunteer. Among many philanthropic activities, she spent World War I in Paris serving as the head of the American Hostels for Refugees, feeding and clothing the people displaced by the conflict. She also oversaw an ambulance brigade and put together an anthology about war The Book of the Homeless. Many of her books are about war and the ensuing loss and devastation. But the eternal war of Wharton’s world that I was most interested in understanding was that of marriage.

Writing about Wharton in 2020, Sarah Blackwood noted that the historical foregrounding of Wharton’s more domestic novels isn't necessary “to establish the novel’s significance. Part of the genius of The Age of Innocence is how it insists that the story of a single, torn wedding dress is not qualitatively different from the story of a torn‑apart world, that novels of manners are as significant a contribution to human knowledge and feeling as are tales about combat.” 

Wharton saw marriage as a conflict among custom, culture, and freedom. You cannot call her a feminist, because she never really saw herself as one and had a healthy amount of disdain for the loud, the classless, activists, and strivers. But to read Wharton is to see inside the halls of American power, which are held together by the oppressive social bonds of marriage. And all oppression is a state of war. 

If you had asked me what specifically I was looking for on my walk the day I set out, I could not have told you. I put together a 13-page document to guide me, but what I was supposed to find, I wasn’t sure.

I had it in my mind that this would help me write my book about American marriage. My book which Wharton would have probably hated. Perhaps I would have some deep insight and it would be a chapter, one connecting the past and the present. After all, Wharton was a celebrated interior designer, so much of what she wants to say, she says through place, texture, and color. When Wharton talks about architecture or fashion, she is telling us something important. New York is a "hieroglyphic world," Newland Archer reflects in The Age of Innocence, "where the real thing was never said or done, or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs."

Walking her New York, I would find her ghost and maybe I’d reckon with it. Vivian Gornick once observed, “Wharton thought no one could have freedom, but [Henry] James knew no one wanted freedom.” But I wanted freedom and I felt like I had grasped some, if not all of it. Hadn’t I? And I wanted to find Wharton’s ghost and — if not fight her, contend with her. After all, the tragedy of so many of Wharton’s women is that they cannot imagine a world outside of the beautiful cage of class and money and power. When they are excluded from it, they perish. The ones who thrive outside, like Undine Spragg, are depicted as crass and disgusting. 

Wharton, after all, once noted, “It should be borne in mind of entrances in general that, while the main purpose of a door is to admit, its secondary purpose is to exclude.” And I believed, and still do, that so much of our cultural imagination for what is possible for women is still limited by these doors of power. 

The following year, on the walls of the Whitney, I’d see my search perfectly articulated in an introduction to the exhibit “Inheritance.” Its description reads, in part, “The poet Rio Cortez speaks of being framed by ‘our future knowing’ — even as we sit at this moment in time, we slide backwards and forward, thinking not only of our foremothers but also of descendents we will never know.” 

We are inheritors of narratives of the past. From bachelorette parties to changing our last names, we continue to follow customs in our country, rarely thinking about how they trap us. Breaking out of these narratives is the hardest work. It requires force and imagination, and it’s so lonely. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex, “And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”

It was February when I set out to stalk Edith Wharton. None of my friends wanted to go with me — the weather was bad and they all had work. I roped in one friend, a journalist, who viewed everything as an amusing distraction. If he was concerned by the 13-page document I sent to him ahead of time, he kept it to himself. Also, I informed him, I’d be reading from it during the walk.

When I read Wharton, I am pressing my face to the glass of a world that I, the middle-class daughter of Middle American strivers, have never seen. But it’s a world that oppresses me still, with its heavy-handed influence on the narratives we tell about appropriate women. Wharton is uncomfortable with women who hunger, who pull, who froth and foam, and need and take. “RIP Wharton,” I think as I order my Americano with steamed coconut milk. “You would have hated me, a striving daughter of a crass American lawyer and his dulcimer-playing wife, with my Target jeans and Abercrombie sweater.”

At the combination Starbucks/Edith Wharton home, I tried to step back into the world of Wharton. To the First World War and 1918 flu New York. This was the Jazz Age. This was Zelda Fitzgerald drunk and dancing on a table. Wharton described all novels as historical novels. Life, politics, technological advancement, war, disease, everything was happening too fast to keep up with. Wharton’s readers of her time, like us, would be reading Age of Innocence and House of Mirth as nostalgia. As a world that perhaps never truly existed, but is very real. 

I think Wharton would not have been surprised at the Starbucks at her former home, even as she loathed it. Honestly, she loathed the architecture of her time too. Why not the present? And, New York like everything is always changing, just like fiction, just like the stories we tell about the past. As Elif Batuman wrote in the New York Times, “The novel is a constantly evolving technology, always finding ways to convey more reality, to articulate more truths, to identify new equivalences.”

America is a relatively young country. And we are also a country that obliterates the past with the wrecking balls of nostalgia, capitalism, and actual wrecking balls. Still, pieces of Wharton’s New York remain — Madison Square, Fifth Avenue, the Met, and Grace Church.

We walked through each, talking about Wharton. My friend was a staunch defender of Wharton’s no-good husband, Teddy. I hated him. We talked about war and working in media. And at every stop, I’d read passages from Wharton, but it was hard to summon her. 

Finally, in Grace Church, we paused at the doors. I fumbled to pull up my proof of vaccination. A pandemic. A world on the edge of war. And here we were at a church that had seen it all. When we finally walked in, an organist was playing, flowers spilled over the altar, just like they had when Newland Archer married May Welland. The description of the wedding is told through Archer’s eyes and is stunning in its self-centeredness. He rarely mentions May by name; rarely thinks of her. He allows the wedding to happen to him, existing in a fugue state of passive obligation. The women are overdone; the men bored. And at the end Archer observes, “the same black abyss yawned before him.”

Archer cannot see the women around him even as he professes to love at least one of them —May’s cousin Ellen Olenska. May and Ellen possess an interiority that is never once punctured by his incurious and selfish mind. 

In Grace Church, I thought of my own wedding, which had passed in a similar fugue state. I had been exhausted from holding together all the traditions and narratives and adorning them with hydrangeas and roses. Here in that church, I felt overcome by the weight of the past. 

And I remembered how May and Newland never fled their destinies. Honestly, I don’t think Newland ever really wanted to. But Wharton allows Ellen Olenska to leave. To escape the narrow narrative of Newland Archer. She ends up in Paris. Doing what? We don’t know. But she’s escaped his gaze, escaped his oppressive and unseeing obsession. 

This exclusion is more powerful than its presence. And it occurs to me I am seeking out an author who would hate me, as a way to confront her with her legacy. A problematic mother. One who refuses to talk to me. But I am yours, I want to tell her, you made me. I carry your legacy whether you want me or not.

But in that church, I see Ellen Olenska a little differently. I see her through her absence. Through the door she closed behind her. And here is where I find peace with Wharton. Maybe Vivian Gornick hadn’t gotten it right exactly. Because Wharton lets one woman escape the altar and the male imagination. One woman finds freedom. And maybe it’s good Wharton kept me on the outside. Because that’s where it’s easier to run.

Later that night, I will return to my friend’s apartment, and read the news that Putin invaded Ukraine. I will text the journalist to tell him he was wrong. It’s peevish of me, but it feels important at the time. Then, my friend and I will drink whiskey and without intending to we will get drunk. And will I cry and tell her how I worry about my brother and the pandemic and this world of repetition. How did we get here? And where are we going? We both want to know. History has some of the answers. But the past is not absolute. The past is conditioned by our own experiences, both the singular and the collective. It’s always changing and so is our understanding of it. 

But that is later. At the last stop on my Wharton walk, I know I’ve found her. And she and I have reached a detente. When the organ music ends, the journalist and I leave the church. The sun has come out and we’ve been walking so far. We find a pub so my friend can watch a soccer match and I find myself sitting in a group of men shouting about a sport. I’m not wanted here, and more importantly, this is no longer where I want to be. So I get up and I walk away.

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The night after I walked Edith Wharton’s New York, I wrote this newsletter.

On the Dance Floor, Waiting for War

Also, I fully intended to have a whole chapter about Edith Wharton in my book but it never made it in, because it took me two years to figure out why I spent so much time looking for her.

But my book is good and you should buy it and read it, even if Edith would have hated it.