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Edith Wharton in Context
Essays on Intertextuality
By Adeline R. Tintner The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1999 the University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8894-2
CHAPTER 1
The "Fictioning" of Henry James in Wharton's "The Hermit and the Wild Woman" and "Ogrin the Hermit"
Originally published as "'The Hermit and the Wild Woman': Edith Wharton's 'Fictioning' of Henry James," Journal of Modern Literature 4, no. 1 (September 1974): 32–42.
By detailed biographical investigation and stylistic literary analysis, both Leon Edel and I were the first to show that Henry James disguised Edith Wharton as the scribbling Princess in his mock epic, "The Velvet Glove" (1909). It has not been recognized, however, that Edith had also disguised Henry James as the Hermit in her pseudo-life of a saint, "The Hermit and the Wild Woman" (1906), three years before and in her imitation medieval poem, "Ogrin the Hermit" (1909). (As late as 1934, she was to refer to Henry James's "hermit-like asceticism.")
It is my purpose to show, from a close reading of the story and the narrative poem, both acknowledged autobiographical exercises, that the Hermit of both pieces can be identified with certain aspects of Henry James. This reading is borne out by what is known of the relations between Edith Wharton and Henry James. Indeed, Percy Lubbock links her, the "wild woman," with him, "the literary hermit," on the opening pages of Portrait of Edith Wharton.
R. W. B. Lewis, who has emphasized the biographical aspects of the tale, sees Walter Berry as the Hermit. It "becomes uncomfortably clear that the relation between the Wild Woman and the Hermit is an elementary version, at several kinds of remove, of the relation between Edith Wharton and Walter Berry during the period when she was escaping or trying to escape from her own convent, her marriage." At this time the evidence for Fullerton's affair with Wharton had not yet emerged. Lewis quotes from Edith Wharton's diary: "I feel that all the mysticism in me — and the transcendentalism that in other women turns to religion — were poured into my feeling for you," in order to show how this feeling has been translated into a religious allegory where the wild woman, a renegade nun, feels the need to "sleep under the free heaven and to wash the dust from my body in cool water" (CS, 582). The expression of her love for Berry-Fullerton in this parable of a woman's need for refreshing waters seems understandable, but I cannot agree with Lewis's reading of the story, which leads him to conclude that Berry, "like the Hermit, evidently recoiled in some dismay at these revealed longings" and that the outcome of the story "appears as an only too familiar act of self-consoling prophecy: too late, her sometime lover would appreciate the true value of what he had missed" (CS, xix). The Hermit shows no personal feelings for the woman and the identification with Berry breaks down when it becomes clear from the text that the Hermit was not the object of the woman's longings nor does he at the end regret not having loved her. His sole concern is for the salvation of her soul and for the protection of his own reputation as a holy man. Lewis claims he finds further confirmation of his identification of the Hermit with Berry-Fullerton in Edith Wharton's narrative poem, "Ogrin the Hermit," in which the Hermit reappears, although Lewis is aware that the introduction of Tristan as lover of Iseult makes the Hermit someone other than Walter Berry.
This reading is confirmed in part by a narrative poem called "Ogrin the Hermit," which Mrs. Wharton wrote in the spring of 1909. The story, briefly, is this: Tristan and Iseult, fleeing Iseult's husband, King Mark, take refuge with the Hermit Ogrin. In the days that follow, while Tristan is away hunting, the Hermit pleads with Iseult to give up her sinful life with Tristan; but Iseult replies with an eloquent defense of the innocence, again almost the holiness, of pure and dedicated erotic love. The Hermit, despite himself, is convinced of the rightness of her course. The poem is rather better, as a literary exercise, than "The Hermit and the Wild Woman," and it is of still greater biographical interest, since a third figure (clearly not the husband) has been added. (CS, xix)
Since Lewis has identified the Hermit of the short story with Berry, he must continue to identify him with the Hermit Ogrin of the narrative poem, even though Tristan is a more reasonable analogue. Since Lewis's Ogrin is Berry, Tristan in his reading is simply an unidentified male. If, however, the Hermit of the short story is to be identified with Henry James, then the Tristan of the poem clearly becomes Berry, with whom Iseult is fleeing from her husband, Lord Mark (Edward Wharton).
I
"The Hermit and the Wild Woman" begins with references that could only apply to Henry James. His home is called "a cave in the hollow of a hill ... and across the valley ... another hill ... raised against the sky ..." and is immediately recognizable as Rye and Winchelsea, the two hill towns of the region where James lived. As a boy he had fled the civil war of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, as James may have avoided becoming involved in the American Civil War. Like James, the Hermit "had no wish to go back." Like James, the Hermit "would rather have been bred a clerk and scholar than knight's son." His father, his mother, and his sister were all dead, as were James's, and his "longing was to live hidden from life" (571). The Hermit loves pictures, as James did, especially pictures of angels, which may be a sly reference by Wharton to James's boyhood nickname of "Angel." He has a garden, as James did, over which he fusses. This kind of personality is very different from Walter Berry, an eminently sociable lawyer involved with people and life. The Hermit's chief pleasure is the composition of "lauds in honor of Christ and the saints," which corresponds to the great joy James took in his writing of fiction. What is more, as James was now dictating to a secretary, the Hermit dictates his lauds! Since he "feared to forget them ... he decided to ask a friendly priest ... to write them down" (CS, 573).
Given these analogical references to James, it is then easy to identify the Saint of the Rock who is such an example of holiness that the Hermit in emulation wishes to visit him even though he lives far away "in holiness and austerity in a desert place." Wharton seems to be saying with tongue in cheek that Henry has made a long ocean trip to see his brother, William, who lives in Vermont in order to ask his opinions about his work, only to be soundly criticized and upset. The Saint calls the Hermit "You fool" for coming all this way to praise solitude with him; "how can two sit together and praise solitude, since by so doing they put an end to the thing they praise?" (CS, 576). The Hermit finally is reduced to "tears" by the Saint's logic. The Hermit returns, as Henry had from his trip to America, to find his garden watered. Edith may mean two things by this: one, that the one solace Henry had had on his 1904–1905 trip to America had been his visits with her at Lenox and New York and, two, that she fixed up his "unkempt flower borders," referred to in A Backward Glance. He sees a woman "lean with wayfaring" (Edith and her travels) covered with "heathen charms" and "brown as a nut," with "nothing to please him in the sight" of her and therefore "he ran no danger in looking at her." This seems to fit Edith's relation with James much more closely than it does her relation with her lover. The renegade nun had fled her convent because she had been guilty of bathing in pools of water, a habit considered sinful, and is now hunted down. Lewis suggests with justice that the convent stands for Edith's marriage with Teddy Wharton from which at this time she was trying to escape (CS, xix). "The Hermit ... was much perturbed" by her story and would have driven her forth, yet "remembering the desire that drew him to his lauds, he dared not judge his sister's fault too harshly" (CS, 582). Edith sees herself and James as brother and sister, since both not only write but also have equally strong passions. Nevertheless, Edith wants James to remember that when he judges her he should remember his own weakness and intense passion for his work, as intense in him as her lust for life is in her. In her story the Hermit keeps "reasoning with her in love and charity, and exhorting her to return to the cloister" (CS, 583). This may be a reference to James's advice to Edith to save her marriage. The Hermit's function is to encourage her to "endure the condition of her life," her marriage. (His later letter of 1908 advises her to do just that.) Her troubles with Teddy are believed to have come to a head in 1905. While James was visiting her in America she may have confided the general condition of her life to James, and he may have been sworn to secrecy. If we are able to take our cues from the story, the Hermit "promised not to betray her presence" to her hunters, for "her innocency of mind made him feel she might be won back to holy living if only her freedom were assured" (CS, 584).
The Wild Woman, like Edith, is forced to travel, since they may "drag me back to the cloister" (CS, 584). Millicent Bell tells us that Edith's "chief desire ... was to get away [from Teddy] if she could." The Hermit, nevertheless, criticizes her for this wish and suggests solitude (James has written many letters referring to her as "rushing, ravening," engaged in a "prodigious devil's dance," and so forth), but her answer is that she must bathe herself in the waters of life. A "stream flows in the glen below us. ... Do you forbid me to bathe in it?" The Hermit says not he but "the laws of God" forbid it, and the Wild Woman, after a certain amount of argumentation on the Hermit's part, "agreed to embrace a life of reclusion" (CS, 585). After two years of their living a life of mutual prayers, a plague hits the land and the Wild Woman nurses the sick, thereby getting a reputation for saintliness. The Hermit still feels it "behooved him to exhort her again to return to the convent ... and that now she had ... tasted the sweets of godliness, it was her duty to confess her fault and give herself up to her superiors" (CS, 586). However, the Hermit had enjoyed working side by side with the Wild Woman, as he had with Edith Wharton when either of them stayed with the other. "And gradually it grew sweet to him to think that, nearby though unseen, was one who performed the same tasks at the same hours" (CS, 585). (At least Edith thought he liked the idea of her working while he did!) The Bishop comes to celebrate the Assumption in the Hermit's valley, as a response to the nursing of the plague-ridden inhabitants. The Hermit comes upon the Wild Woman's body lying in the sacred pool where she had been bathing in spite of his warnings just before the pilgrims arrive. At the moment he sights the Wild Woman's body, "Fear and rage possessed the Hermit's heart. ... At that moment he could have strangled her with his hands, so abhorrent was the touch of her flesh" (CS, 588). When he realizes she is dead, "a great pang smote him; for here was his work undone. ... One moment pity possessed him, the next he thought how the people would find him bending over the body of a naked woman, whom he had held up to them as holy, but whom they might now well take for the secret instrument of his undoing; and seeing how at her touch all the slow edifice of his holiness was demolished, and his soul in mortal jeopardy, he felt the earth reel around him and his eyes grew blind" (CS, 588). At this point in the story my reading differs sharply from Lewis's. These reactions are not those of a lover, but of a man fearful of his reputation. Edith paints James as disturbed by the moral dilemma; perhaps she surmised that he felt compromised by her behavior, although as far as I know there is no evidence for this feeling. Then when the Hermit realizes she is a saint a "fresh fear fell on [him] ... for he had cursed a dying saint ... and this new anguish ... smote down his enfeebled frame." Edith, in her fantasy, makes herself a saint, kills the James figure for having doubted her holiness (which turns out to be holier than his since he does not become a saint in the story), but she holds out a consolation prize for him, the satisfaction of his passion for his work. As he lies dying he "heard a peal of voices ... and the words of the chant were the words of his own lauds, so long hidden in the secret of his breast" (CS, 589).
Surely this is a caustic character sketch of James. If he recognized himself in this portrait, he can be exonerated from any imputation of malice in "The Velvet Glove." The Hermit has been concerned not with the Wild Woman, but with his own reputation for holiness and with his own glory as a creative writer of lauds, the medieval equivalent, perhaps, of James's New York Edition, which he was revising at this time. Edith shows that her feelings for her lover are holy, in spite of the breaking of her marriage vows, and that James, although he may be remembered for his writings, is simply not to be compared with her as a human being. The fable may be summarized finally as a justification of the way of Edith Wharton to Henry James, a justification that either actually took place, or that is here presented in fable. She shows James as pleading with her to restrict and confine her life to the accepted conventions; she fantasizes herself as having her cake and eating it, too. She dips into the forbidden water and comes out a saint. The Hermit (Henry James) is forced to accept her point of view, having been bribed with immortality as a writer, the secret passion of his life.
This daydream seems to be either a transcription of her discussions with James or a projection of the arguments she was preparing for him. Actually, the story is quite dull unless read as a roman à clef, in which case all the clever little innuendoes and all the changes in the plot become significant. The journey that the Hermit makes to the Saint of the Rock is meaningless until we see the Saint as a humorous projection of William James, and his behavior, critical and sarcastic, typical of his treatment of his younger brother, Henry. The latter's being reduced to tears and fatigue by his frustrating interview with his brother, whose good opinion of his work was so important to him, becomes touching and amusing, once we understand what it stands for. Wharton seems to be telling us to see the story as biographical from the very second sentence when the topography of Rye is sketched in, followed by the civil war analogue between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, especially when she mentions the "steel-colored line of men-at-arms," which corresponds to the gray uniforms of the Confederate army.
Once we are willing to accept the story as biographical, the characters define themselves. We learn from the correspondence between them made available by Percy Lubbock, Millicent Bell, and Leon Edel of the close association, personal and confidential, between Edith Wharton and Henry James, from the time he visited her at The Mount in 1904–1905 through the next few years, ending only with his death in 1916. In 1906 by means of this mock medieval saint's legend she tries to tell him that she must satisfy her need for life (expressed in the Wild Woman's need to immerse herself in the waters of life) just as he needs to satisfy his passion for dedicated work, which Wharton allegorizes in the love of his "lauds." She points out that the Hermit in his excessive love for his own writing is as guilty of sin as she is in her excessive needs. In fact, she is indicating that at least she sins from an excess of the desire to live. She is the nurturing force, and her watering his garden, which has become dried, and her resurrection of his plants seem to point to her refreshing influence on James for which she thinks he should be grateful. She seems to be telling James that he who has written just a few years before in The Ambassadors "live all you can" should be able to apply that principle to her life as well.
II
The narrative poem, "Ogrin the Hermit," appeared three years after "The Hermit and the Wild Woman." During that interval, four events took place. Edith Wharton had consummated her love for Morton Fullerton. She had confessed her marital crisis to James. He had responded with his famous letter of sympathy and understanding of October 1908. His story, "The Velvet Glove," had appeared in March 1909, written the year before and revised at the end of 1908. If we see it as a story about Edith Wharton, we must see it in relation to "The Hermit and the Wild Woman." If James had read the latter, he must surely have recognized himself, for he, too, planted at least one of his friends in The Golden Bowl.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Edith Wharton in Context by Adeline R. Tintner. Copyright © 1999 the University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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