Loved this, I studied The Age of Innocence and I think I got sucked into the unrequited love triangle of it so I really appreciate seeing it through a new lens (especially as a single woman!) It also made me remember Spinster by Kate Bolick - who also writes beautifully about Wharton as a woman outside of marriage. I highly recommend, if you haven't read it!
Funny. Thanks for this. I read the Age of Innocence last weekend. I have time, so much time on weekends now my kids are grown and I’d never read her so I did. I thought it compelling—the half-lives that we will end up living if we cannot or will not look further. It was because I’d just read (the previous weekend—grown kids…,) ‘I’m mostly here to enjoy myself’ by Glynnis McNichol who has the brilliant idea of having a Where’s the fucking plaque tour of places in Paris where famous women lived and worked.
Thank you Lyz for the missing chapter from your book. It’s excellent and moving. Many of us were born on the outside of the power class, and there is one for EVERY community. There is a deep tension between wanting, even needing, to be accepted, and the oppression of control through expectations of conformity.
I understand chasing the ghosts of people who would have hated you. There was an older woman in my grad school program who reminded me so much of my grandmother, rigid with a bad sense of humor and only found you acceptable if you fit in the box she thought you belonged. I saw this and still tried to win her over to me, trying to prove to myself this type of person didn't universally see me as bad I suppose. I don't bother chasing this type of person anymore, but I relate to the mysterious nature of this quest.
I don’t think Wharton would have hated you or your book at all. While my own expertise tends more towards the Fitzgeralds, I have long read and thought about Wharton too. You’re right that she wouldn’t have considered herself a feminist. That word meant something very different in her day, but her view of marriage and many ways that it serves as an instrument of patriarchal oppression was way ahead of her time.
The women in her work are vibrant and intricate. They’re often cruel and manipulative. But Wharton gives us plenty of counterexamples that demonstrate that such awfulness is not innate or inevitable except under capitalism and patriarchy. And for what? The men are pretty much always bloodless and pathetic. Age of Innocence is brilliant, but so are a lot of her short stories, particularly “The Other Two” (about a twice-divorced woman told from the pov of her third husband) and “Roman Fever” (about two middle-aged women looking back on their youth).
How is it I have never read any Edith Wharton!? Adding it to the list right now. My brother-in-law listened to your book last week on his commute and loved it!
Thanks for this fascinating and unexpected glimpse into the genesis of This American Ex-Wife. Makes me want to reread your book and revisit Edith Wharton.
Age of Innocence and House of Mirth are two of my favorite books. I have always thought of Wharton as a feminist because of her acute sensitivity to the extremely narrow range of choices for women. The portrait of May Welland, who has internalized this message of extreme limitation to the point of limiting her own mental range, is especially poignant to me. However, it’s clear you know a great deal more about Wharton’s life and views than I do so perhaps I need to do some more research to have a broader view of her attitudes and opinions. At any rate, thanks for a very interesting and thought-provoking piece!
“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.”
Thank you for a thought-filled essay. You have helped me see the past better and to imagine a better future.
I love that you decided to find Edith Wharton's ghost. It reminds us that one is never truly gone if only an admirer or fan decides to search you out some 80 years after your death.
It also reminds me of the walking tours that a friend would lead for Faulkner fans in Mississippi, although with a little less racism.
Off topic, in college I read Anna Karenina shortly after Ethan Frome and always thought that the sled suicide pact Wharton imagined for her characters was ridiculous when there existed a fine (and effective) railway near by.
"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. "
Just thinking that this one needed repeating, at least once.... multiplied by...hmmm...now where did they hide the infinity symbol in this app...?...I know it must be in here somewhere....
Wharton was a hard woman to love, i think--but also a woman who so succinctly showed the terrible cost of trying to escape the script that society wants you to follow. And yet--later in life (her mid-fifties), she finally divorced her husband (who would today prob be diagnosed as bipolar; he was also a drunk & serially unfaithful); forced the literary world to take her seriously on her own terms; made more money for her writing than any other US male writer; and lived on her own in France. (Where, yes, she wrote about the war, raised money for Belgian orphans with The Book of the Homeless, AND was awarded the Legion of Honor or something like that from the French govt). So in her own way, she was, I think, pretty damn fierce. And probably would have really, really loved the Lyz Lenz critiques of patriarchy & capitalism b/c that's so much of what fuels her own work.
Wharton definitely hated socialism and feminism and critiques of power she was also very pro war. I think there is often a danger in reading writers who we admire and then fashioning them into people we want them to be rather than letting them be the people they are.
Loved this, I studied The Age of Innocence and I think I got sucked into the unrequited love triangle of it so I really appreciate seeing it through a new lens (especially as a single woman!) It also made me remember Spinster by Kate Bolick - who also writes beautifully about Wharton as a woman outside of marriage. I highly recommend, if you haven't read it!
Funny. Thanks for this. I read the Age of Innocence last weekend. I have time, so much time on weekends now my kids are grown and I’d never read her so I did. I thought it compelling—the half-lives that we will end up living if we cannot or will not look further. It was because I’d just read (the previous weekend—grown kids…,) ‘I’m mostly here to enjoy myself’ by Glynnis McNichol who has the brilliant idea of having a Where’s the fucking plaque tour of places in Paris where famous women lived and worked.
Thank you Lyz for the missing chapter from your book. It’s excellent and moving. Many of us were born on the outside of the power class, and there is one for EVERY community. There is a deep tension between wanting, even needing, to be accepted, and the oppression of control through expectations of conformity.
I understand chasing the ghosts of people who would have hated you. There was an older woman in my grad school program who reminded me so much of my grandmother, rigid with a bad sense of humor and only found you acceptable if you fit in the box she thought you belonged. I saw this and still tried to win her over to me, trying to prove to myself this type of person didn't universally see me as bad I suppose. I don't bother chasing this type of person anymore, but I relate to the mysterious nature of this quest.
I don’t think Wharton would have hated you or your book at all. While my own expertise tends more towards the Fitzgeralds, I have long read and thought about Wharton too. You’re right that she wouldn’t have considered herself a feminist. That word meant something very different in her day, but her view of marriage and many ways that it serves as an instrument of patriarchal oppression was way ahead of her time.
The women in her work are vibrant and intricate. They’re often cruel and manipulative. But Wharton gives us plenty of counterexamples that demonstrate that such awfulness is not innate or inevitable except under capitalism and patriarchy. And for what? The men are pretty much always bloodless and pathetic. Age of Innocence is brilliant, but so are a lot of her short stories, particularly “The Other Two” (about a twice-divorced woman told from the pov of her third husband) and “Roman Fever” (about two middle-aged women looking back on their youth).
Wharton was on record as hating feminists and socialists and while her prose transcends her politics her personal life didn’t
How is it I have never read any Edith Wharton!? Adding it to the list right now. My brother-in-law listened to your book last week on his commute and loved it!
Exquisite. Thank you for this.
Thanks for this fascinating and unexpected glimpse into the genesis of This American Ex-Wife. Makes me want to reread your book and revisit Edith Wharton.
This is gorgeous and gutting and hopeful and I love you.
The best. Thank you once again for your writing and your honesty. This one is really a keeper.
Age of Innocence and House of Mirth are two of my favorite books. I have always thought of Wharton as a feminist because of her acute sensitivity to the extremely narrow range of choices for women. The portrait of May Welland, who has internalized this message of extreme limitation to the point of limiting her own mental range, is especially poignant to me. However, it’s clear you know a great deal more about Wharton’s life and views than I do so perhaps I need to do some more research to have a broader view of her attitudes and opinions. At any rate, thanks for a very interesting and thought-provoking piece!
“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.”
Thank you for a thought-filled essay. You have helped me see the past better and to imagine a better future.
I love that you decided to find Edith Wharton's ghost. It reminds us that one is never truly gone if only an admirer or fan decides to search you out some 80 years after your death.
It also reminds me of the walking tours that a friend would lead for Faulkner fans in Mississippi, although with a little less racism.
Off topic, in college I read Anna Karenina shortly after Ethan Frome and always thought that the sled suicide pact Wharton imagined for her characters was ridiculous when there existed a fine (and effective) railway near by.
"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. "
Just thinking that this one needed repeating, at least once.... multiplied by...hmmm...now where did they hide the infinity symbol in this app...?...I know it must be in here somewhere....
So good I shared it with my mother.
Wharton was a hard woman to love, i think--but also a woman who so succinctly showed the terrible cost of trying to escape the script that society wants you to follow. And yet--later in life (her mid-fifties), she finally divorced her husband (who would today prob be diagnosed as bipolar; he was also a drunk & serially unfaithful); forced the literary world to take her seriously on her own terms; made more money for her writing than any other US male writer; and lived on her own in France. (Where, yes, she wrote about the war, raised money for Belgian orphans with The Book of the Homeless, AND was awarded the Legion of Honor or something like that from the French govt). So in her own way, she was, I think, pretty damn fierce. And probably would have really, really loved the Lyz Lenz critiques of patriarchy & capitalism b/c that's so much of what fuels her own work.
Wharton definitely hated socialism and feminism and critiques of power she was also very pro war. I think there is often a danger in reading writers who we admire and then fashioning them into people we want them to be rather than letting them be the people they are.