Love American Style: Divorce and the American Novel, 1881-1976 (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS edited by William E.Cain Wellesley College A ROUTLEDGE SERIES

OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES:

THE SELF WIRED Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative Lisa Yaszek THE SPACE AND PLACE OF MODERNISM The Little Magazine in New York Adam McKible THE FIGURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton Jill M.Kress WORD OF MOUTH Food and Fiction after Freud Susanne Skubal THE WASTE FIX Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to The Sopranos William G.Little WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN? Family and Sectionalism in the Virginia Novels of Kennedy, Caruthers, and Tucker, 1830–1845 John L.Hare POETIC GESTURE Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language Kristine S.Santilli BORDER MODERNISM Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism Christopher Schedler THE MERCHANT OF MODERNISM The Economic Jew in Anglo-American Literature, 1864–1939 Gary Martin Levine

THE MAKING OF THE VICTORIAN NOVELIST Anxieties and Authorship in the Mass Market Bradley Deane Our OF TOUCH Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker Maureen F.Curtin WRITING THE CITY Urban Visions and Literary Modernism Desmond Harding FIGURES OF FINANCE CAPITALISM Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens Borislav Knezevic BALANCING THE BOOKS Faulkner, Morrison, and the Economies of Slavery Erik Dussere BEYOND THE SOUND BARRIER The Jazz Controversy in Twentieth-Century American Fiction Kristen K.Henson SEGREGATED MISCEGENATION On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin American Literary Traditions Carlos Hiraldo DEATH, MEN, AND MODERNISM Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf Ariela Freedman THE SELF IN THE CELL Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence James J.Miracky SATIRE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL V.S.Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie John Clement Ball THROUGH THE NEGATIVE The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Megan Williams

LOVE AMERICAN STYLE Divorce and the American Novel, 1881–1976

Kimberly A.Freeman

ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK & LONDON

Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 http://www.routledge-ny.com/ Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE http://www.routledge.co.uk/ Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data {TK} Freeman, Kimberly A., 1968– Love American Style: divorce and the American novel, 1881– 1976/Kimberly Freeman. p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-96783-X (Hardcover:alk. paper) 1. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Divorce in literature. 3. American fiction—19th century— History and criticism. 4. Domestic fiction, American- History and criticism. 5. Married people in literature. 6. Marriage in literature. 7. Love in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PS374.D55F74 2003 813’.6—dc21 2003008583 ISBN 0-203-50515-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-57901-1 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-96783-X (Print Edition)

In memory of Donna Katharine Bunn

Dedicated to Jon Dietrick

Contents Preface Acknowledgments

Chapter Americanizing Divorce: The Personal Is Political One

x xv

1

Chapter The “Enormous Fact” of American Life: Divorce in William Dean Two Howells’s A Modern Instance

22

Chapter Divorce, the American Custom, in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of Three the Country

48

Chapter Mary McCarthy’s A Charmed Life: Divorcing Fiction from Fact Four

77

Chapter Divorce Me: Romance and Realism in John Updike’s Marry Me: A 100 Five Romance Conclusion: Can the Circle Be Broken? Divorce and the Future of the American Novel

121

Notes

123

Bibliography

142

Index

147

Preface

Although the 1967 Norman Lear film Divorce American Style and the television sitcom Love American Style, which premiered in 1969, do not appear to be literally connected, they share more than syntactical structure, fireworks, and a red, white, and blue bubble font. Like Divorce American Style, the first episode of Love American Style also centers on divorce. While the former is about one couple’s divorce and eventual remarriage, the latter is about the reaction of one wife to her husband’s new fiancée. Primarily, they both claim an American peculiarity in divorce and love, respectively. This book aims to examine this peculiarity—what is “American” in either love or divorce? Divorce has taken on an “American” resonance during the twentieth century and become a popular cultural and historical concern. Cultural critic Barbara Defoe Whitehead asserts that “divorce has become an American way of life.”1 A brief list of the titles of books on the history of divorce suggests the popularity of this idea: Whitehead’s The Divorce Culture (1997), Joseph Epstein’s Divorced in America (1974), Glenda Riley’s Divorce: An American Tradition (1991), and Sheila Kessler’s The American Way of Divorce: Prescriptions for Change (1975). In Abortion and Divorce in Western Law: American Failures, European Challenges (1987), Mary Ann Glendon describes the legal history of divorce in the United States as peculiarly American and she argues that by increasingly alleviating individual responsibility for the consequences of divorce, American divorce legislation reflects a particularly American narcissism.2 Others associate it with an American love of starting anew, with mobility, with late capitalism, with consumerism, and, most fundamentally, with every individual citizen’s right to pursue happiness. Yet, in spite of the popular concern about divorce, there is surprisingly little study of divorce in American literary history. Although literary critics conducted a handful of studies of divorce in the works of particular au-thors, such as William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, and Robert Lowell, there has been little comparative study of divorce in American literature since sociologist James Barnett’s 1939 Divorce and the American Divorce Novel, 1858–1937: A Study in Literary Reflections of Social Influences. As useful and intriguing as Barnett’s work is from a historical and contextual point of view, his literary analysis amounts to little more than a chart—albeit, a long chart—comparing what he considers to be key elements in the novels.3 Similarly, many of the historians listed above analyze novels in their discussions of divorce yet again focus on the novels as reflections of cultural mores rather than looking at the novels as literary texts. While their historical analysis is astute and informative, often the literary analysis is fairly reductive, not really addressing the ambiguity and complexity of the novels.

A closer look at divorce in American novels is also intriguing because marriage has played so central a role in the history of the novel as a form. As Ian Watt, Elizabeth Hinz, and Joseph Allen Boone, among many others, have demonstrated, marriage has served an inextricable ideological and formal function in the development of the novel.4 Marriage has been pivotal to the plot and shape of the novel, serving as its comedic culmination, after a myriad of obstacles, as well as serving as the tragic and romantic framework for adultery. Divorce, then, with its rising incidence in both culture and literature, seems vital to the study of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel, especially in America, where so many associate divorce with American marriage. Divorce is just beginning to receive the critical attention it deserves. Most recently, in Tales of Liberation, Strategies of Containment: Divorce and the Representation of Womanhood in American Fiction: 1880–1920 (2000), Debra Ann MacComb has compared the portrayal of women in American novels concerning divorce. Examining novels by Henry James, Edith Wharton, Edna Ferber, in addition to stories in Good Housekeeping, MacComb concentrates on how women, “as inheritors of a national tradition sanctioning an individual’s pursuit of happiness and as guardians of a domestic sphere upholding communal value—negotiate feminine roles and values in and around faltering marriages will invariably test whether divorce functions in a text as a strategy for containment and preservation of old hegemonies, or as a legitimate mode of liberation which provides an expanded definition of what might constitute marriage.”5 MacComb rigorously contextualizes the novels and short stories she studies. Ultimately she argues, as her title suggests, that while these “divorce” stories may seem to offer tales of liberation for women, “Divorce, rather than setting women outside the inevitable trajectories of the marriage plot, anchors them ever more firmly within it.”6 By focusing on the portrayal of women, MacComb still approaches these novels from a sociological perspective—what they tell us about the status of women. What remains to be done, and what this study aims to do, is to examine how divorce has affected the form of the American novel itself. Divorce has been slighted in many histories of the novel, both of the novel in general and the novel in America. The neglect of divorce in American literature may be a lingering bias against the realist novel of manners that has been fostered by the contested, yet highly influential, romance thesis popularized by Richard Chase and Leslie Fiedler among others, which posits that romance is the form of “canonical” American novels.7 One result of the romance thesis is the creation of a hierarchy in which the romance, associated with quest stories and the metaphysical in works by such authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, occupies the top tiers, while the novel, associated with manners and realism in such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Dean Howells occupies lower tiers. Jane Tompkins and Joyce Warren point out that literary sentimentalism, both a dominant feminine aesthetic and a means of thinking about domesticity, is also slighted by paradigms such as those of Chase and Fiedler.8 Divorce, then, cast as a domestic theme, has often been considered more appropriate to realism than the metaphysical concerns of romance. However, in this study I argue that the subject of divorce bridges the romance and the realist novel of manners because it is at once romantic, in its invocation of adventure, self-fulfillment, and idealism, and realist in its social, domestic, and material consequences.

Further, I suggest that perhaps it is this dynamic between romance and realism that characterizes American literature more so than either one on its own. Because it embodies this tension, divorce has been particularly appealing as a symbol of an “American” personality. Authors, critics, and historians alike use divorce to “brand” characters, people, and relations “American.” Covering both romantic and realistic concerns, divorce also embodies a peculiarly American tension between individual liberty and social duty. In addition, divorce signifies severance, starting over, and breaking with the past. Such severance from the past offers divorce a consequent veneer of modernity, which has also characterized the formation of an American national identity, as is evident in Emerson’s calls for new art in “The American Scholar.” Finally, in juxtaposing societal demand and individual desire, divorce also exposes the matrices of identity that shape an American individual: intersecting, sometimes conflicting and sometimes complementary, ideals about nationality, gender, ethnicity, class, and aesthetics. Thus in seeking an identifiably American literary subject in their portrayals of divorce, numerous authors also suggest that divorce lends itself to the development of a modern “American” form. William Dean Howells, in particular, calls for an American realism in his editorials and his divorce novel A Modern Instance (1881). Just how the idea of divorce lends itself to an American literary form shall be the focus of this study. The introductory chapter comprises two main sections. First, I offer an overview of the history of divorce in America, which I hope will illustrate how divorce has functioned as both a political and national metaphor and a private metaphor of American individualism. Second, I review literary histories of the novel, which explore the importance of marriage in the rise of the novel and the abstraction of marriage from the romance that has characterized the American tradition, in order to suggest how divorce may contribute to an American tradition of the novel. Howells is credited with the first “serious” attempt at a literary portrayal of divorce, yet subsequent American authors who also write about divorce, such as Edith Wharton, Mary McCarthy, and John Updike, share this conflation of the ideal and the social that characterizes Howells’s treatment, creating novels that depict the American character torn between the individualist pull of romance and the social and moral impulse of realism, as the following chapters will demonstrate. These authors develop systems of repeated symbols and patterns that suggest a formal vocabulary for talking about an “American” novel of divorce: a fusion of realism and romance, a disruption of domesticity, the collapse of the boundary between the public and the private, the mobility of the divorced characters, and the juxtaposition of the East and the West. As the century progresses, these novels suggest there is decreasing faith in the certainty of social mores and, with Wharton, McCarthy, and Updike, an increasing reliance on oneself to generate meaning, both in the characters within the novels and in the authors’ use of “autobiographical” material. My second chapter centers on Howells’ A Modern Instance. Concerned about the sentimentalism in popular novels as well as the sensationalism in the presses, Howells sought to treat divorce as a serious literary subject. Like so many later critics, such as Chase and Fiedler, Howells is aware of this split in American literature between mass sentimentalism and a literary elite. Yet, rather than abandon the social for the realms of romance, as critics have argued the best American authors do, Howells calls for an American realism in which nothing is “unworthy of notice.”9 In contrast to the romantic

writer, the realist, writes Howells, “feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men; his soul is exalted, not by vain shows and shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which the truth alone lives.”10 Divorce, then, is one of the truths of American society that Howells sought to explore. In doing so, Howells draws upon the social history of divorce in America. He illustrates how divorce reflects western expansion, urbanization, and technology, as well as changing gender roles and rising expectations of emotional fulfillment in marriage. Further, Howells’s novel demonstrates how the tension between individual desire and social duty lies at the core of debates about divorce. Many critics and historians, who discuss Howells’s treatment of divorce in A Modern Instance, have argued that he is ultimately conservative, that he entrenches patriarchal notions of the institution of marriage rather than critiques or subverts them. However, I argue that Howells recognizes the subversive potential of divorce in that divorce depletes the idealistic component of the marriage contract, re-vealing it as primarily a social contract and in so doing opens the way for a moral, even a pragmatic, relativism that anticipates poststructuralist explorations into the tenuous construction of morality and meaning. In chapter three I focus on Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. Wharton, like Howells, is concerned with how to treat divorce in a literary way, specifically how to distinguish her novel from that of popular scandal stories of the day. Yet Wharton’s case is complicated by the autobiographical element of her own divorce. Using many of the same tropes as Howells, Wharton creates a soulless, superficial divorcée who mimics rather than practices social mores, disrupting traditional linear plots by generating multiple plots and finally circling back to where she was before the novel began. Ambivalent about the mores of old New York, Wharton seemingly condemns divorce through her creation of Undine and yet she has clearly benefited from it in her own life. In doing so, Wharton acknowledges the subversive quality of divorce, in particular the manner in which, in addition to undermining the fixity of marriage and thereby disrupting its meaning, divorce encourages cultural relativism and reveals the construction, and therefore potential deconstruction, of meaning. Chapter four explores Mary McCarthy’s divorce novel, A Charmed Life. Much more than either Wharton or Howells, McCarthy uses her own life as the basis for her novel. McCarthy does so because of what she views as the increasing relativism of morality, truth, and reality that Wharton and Howells anticipate. Divorce becomes a fecund metaphor for her questioning of such relativism. McCarthy uses elements of her own life because those are the only things she knows for sure. Like Wharton, McCarthy also uses many of the same literary tropes Howells uses in her depiction of divorce. In A Charmed Life, McCarthy fictionalizes her divorce from Edmund Wilson, examining numerous “truths,” including essential ideas about American identity, gender roles, art, and literary representation. In doing so, she obfuscates the boundaries between life and art and realism and romance. In John Updike’s Marry Me: A Romance, the focus of chapter five, Updike brings together many of the tropes and concerns of the earlier divorce novels. Using the similar symbols as McCarthy, Wharton, and Howells, Updike creates a suspended narrative, with three endings, that suggests a circularity created by the tension between the self and the social, the East and the West, the personal and the political, realism and romance, and of course, husband, wife, and mistress. The narrative multiplicity of these endings demonstrates how unhinged and immanent the construction of meaning has become in

the late twentieth century. Leaving his protagonist with the false decision between traveling east or west on one of the Virgin Islands—false because both get you to the same place eventually—Updike provides us with a poignant metaphor for the dilemmas, literary as well as sociological, divorce embodies. Further, like Wharton, Updike publishes this divorce novel the same year in which he files for divorce from his first wife. While Updike may not be fictionalizing his experiences as overtly as McCarthy, there still seems to be significant connections between his writing and his life that suggest divorce offers him new ways of thinking about both his life and his writing. These novels span the last century, during which divorce has become commonplace; it is now the subject of self-help books, do-it-yourself software programs, and 1–800 numbers. In the nineteenth century, divorce was a difficult legal procedure, sometimes involving travel, and carried a severe social stigma. By the late twentieth century, nofault divorce laws make divorce more easily attainable; now, it hardly raises an eyebrow. Thus it becomes both what some consider the bane of the American nation and popular material for lighthearted sitcoms and Hollywood romances. In addition, I would argue, it has also pointed to such contradictions inherent in American ideology that make it a ripe subject for the American novel.

Acknowledgments

Permission has been granted to reprint material that first appeared in somewhat different form elsewhere. Parts of chapter two were published in American Literary Realism 36.1 (Fall 2003). It is here reprinted with permission of the journal. For their intellectual and critical guidance, I would like to thank Veronica Makowsky, Jerry Phillips, Clare Eby, and Lynn Bloom—all from the University of Connecticut. Their support and suggestions contributed greatly to the dissertation from which this study developed. I would also like to thank my family for their years of support. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Jon Dietrick, for his intellectual, emotional, and culinary support.

CHAPTER ONE Americanizing Divorce

The Personal Is Political Perhaps more than any other national group in history, Americans have long exhibited a willingness to break unsatisfactory bonds and seek potentially more satisfying ties despite the costs.1

Divorce has had a powerful effect on American culture, literally and figuratively. A brief overview highlighting symbolic aspects of the history of divorce in the United States provides a useful foundation for studying divorce in American culture. However, I should note that this overview is necessarily general. Actual divorce legislation has varied and continues to vary widely among the states, and in that way also reflects both the American reverence for states’ rights and regional differences. Most southern states, for example, have had more conservative divorce legislation. My study focuses primarily on an Anglo-American middle class. The effects and history of divorce among other ethnicities and classes carries with it too many factors for the scope of the current study. For example, the influence of Catholicism on many immigrants curbed the tendency to divorce, as did the cost of legal divorce. Many marriages simply dissolved without the often-expensive legal procedure. Also, since slaves’ marriages were not considered legal, slaves were not considered eligible for divorce. Marriage was a “right” granted with manumission, and it thus has a more complicated significance among African Americans, reflecting myriad tensions encountered by seeking legitimation from the dominant white legal culture.2 Nonetheless, the power of divorce, as a reality and metaphor, has profound political and personal signification that transcends some of these class and ethnic boundaries as it becomes a symbol of American autonomy and citizens’ rights. Since the founding of the American colonies, attitudes toward divorce have reflected the heterogeneity of US regions. In the Puritan Northeast, marriage and divorce were considered a civil matter.3 In fact, the first di-vorce was granted to a colonial couple in 1639 from a Puritan court in Massachusetts.4 This is not to say that all Puritans accepted or condoned divorce, but many viewed it as preferable to the harmful consequences of forcing a couple to remain together, fearing repercussions such as physical and verbal abuse, abandonment, and, especially, adultery, which minister John Robinson called a “foul and filthy sin” and a “disease of marriage.”5 Viewing the family as the “basic unit of society,” Puritan leaders “hoped that divorce would preserve the institution of the

Love American style

2

family.6 Thus, as William O’Neill argues, the function of divorce as a “safety valve” began with the Puritans. In doing so, Puritans cast divorce as not only a necessary evil but a purer, more godly alternative to marital strife, especially sinful, culturally transgressive, and hence “scarlet” adultery.7 Adultery could not be controlled through legal and governing institutions as marriage and divorce could. Adultery, in fact, soon became associated with European, particularly aristocratic, decadence. Thus, by including divorce in the foundations of their legal systems, the Puritans distinguished themselves, politically and symbolically, from what they viewed as the corrupt, decadent Old World they left behind. In the South, colonies also considered marriage and divorce civil matters; however, adhering to Anglican beliefs and British law of the 1600s, which prohibited divorce, Southern colonies permitted what were called divorces of bed and board (a divorce of bed and board allowed a couple to separate and maintain different homes, but they were still considered legally married and unable to remarry) on the grounds of adultery only.8 In following British law, the southern colonies demonstrate, if not ultimately a political allegiance, still a greater comfort in identifying with Old World, aristocratic social structures and customs, as is also evident in their agrarian, feudal, and slave-based economy. The differences between the North and the South were eclipsed by their mutual desire for independence from Great Britain. Further, despite the differences between the north and the south, the Puritan legacy has had significant and lasting consequences. Glenda Riley suggests that Puritan ideas regarding marriage and divorce reflect integral facets of the “American” character: “By permitting divorce, Puritan leaders initiated a democratic innovation with far-reaching effects. They offered American colonists, whether rich or poor, upper- or lower-class, male or female, the possibility of remedying excessive marital incompatibility and changing their lives.”9 In essence, Riley is linking, almost crediting, permissive divorce legislature with the inchoate “American Dream,” an ideal that has come to transcend sectional differences to a large degree. While Riley may be projecting twentieth-century American values into her interpretation of the colonists, her argument nevertheless illustrates how many, including historians, have associated divorce with what they view as a particularly American heritage. The connection between an American identity and divorce grew still stronger during the American Revolution. On one level, securing the right to divorce was a site of dispute between the colonies and the British Empire. Not only did English law render divorce “nearly impossible,”10 but after a legal conflict surrounding the Keehlme divorce suit in Pennsylvania, which the Empire declared disallowed, Royal Instructions to the Governors of the Colonies “ordered colonial governors to reject all divorce bills.”11 Thus Riley surmises, This command probably added a small bit of fuel to the revolutionary fire that was beginning to blaze in the American colonies. When The Declaration of Independence presented the colonists’ grievances to a stunned world in 1776, the first complaint protested that King George III had refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.’ Surely colonial authorities who supported divorce, and those colonists who wished to divorce, saw divorce as being for the “public good” and resented its disallowance by English authorities.12

Americanizing divorce

3

Divorce then becomes a political metaphor central to the American Revolution. Riley goes so far as to describe The Declaration of Independence in terms of divorce, claiming that many colonists sought more “fulfilling” lives, culminating in the revolt against what they viewed as restrictive British rule. Riley posits, “In The Declaration of Independence, which was a divorce petition of great magnitude, discontented Americans listed their right to free themselves from a difficult situation, and declared their intention to seek greater happiness than they experienced within the British empire.”13 The language of The Declaration is illustrative: When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.14 Riley argues that the language of divorce in The Declaration stems from an actual divorce case Thomas Jefferson had prepared during the years leading up to the Revolution.15 Thus, taking his cue from a private divorce case, Jefferson writes the defining document of the American character, steeping it in the rhetoric of divorce. Further, Jefferson describes the “grounds” for this divorce in terms of tyranny: “a long train of abuses and usurpations” which have defined the “patient sufferance of these colonies.” In doing so, Jefferson invokes the grounds of male cruelty, casting the colonies as feminine, not in their powerlessness but in their purity and innocence, while casting colonists as their masculine defenders, in addition to other metaphors, such as the faithful child and the abusive parent. Framing the revolution in terms of marriage and divorce, such personal and private subjects, also added a personal angle to the war to which many colonists could relate. Thus, as Norma Basch writes, “the Declaration of Independence at once explained, decreed, and sanctified a divorce from the bonds of empire; and from the bonds of empire to the bonds of matrimony, it was but a short conceptual step.”16 Hence the Revolution, seen as a divorce, also became a personal metaphor. Divorce rates rose after the Revolution; thus, Riley argues that “many Americans began to believe that divorce was a citizen’s right in a democratic country dedicated to the principles of freedom and happiness.”17 The rapidity with which states passed legislation to include divorce, as Basch relates, suggests evidence of this belief in divorce as an individual’s right. Not only was there an increase in the occurrence of divorce but many states, especially in the North and the West, expanded the legal grounds for divorce.18 Although wide regional, and now state, differences still existed, all states, with the exception of South Carolina, which did not legalize divorce until 1949, included divorce. In fact, the legality of divorce was one commonality between various regions and states, and thus divorce helped to forge an early national identity: Shared notions about divorce were embedded in three dominant strands of early national culture: an essentially Protestant view of the moral order, a distinctly English legal heritage, and the indigenous political culture of the

Love American style

4

American Revolution…. That particular historical conjunction ensured that the moral premises for divorce would emanate from the New Testament, the forms for its implementation from the English ecclesiastical courts, and the political foundations for its legitimation from the singular experience of independence itself.19 Thus divorce, as an expression of independence and the right to pursue happiness, becomes symbolic for the United States as a whole, and for its individual citizens, who shall be free from both Great Britain and bad marriages to seek “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” After the Revolution, the divorce rate began a steady climb upward, paralleling and perhaps mirroring expansionist and industrialist forces shaping American culture, in particular the frontier and westward movement, urbanism, technology, and a rising nationalism. The population of the West grew; more than one-fourth of the American population lived west of the Appalachians in 1830 and by 1850, nearly one half did. The association of the western frontier with divorce is at once historical and symbolic. In attempting to encourage frontier settlement, many western states saw the advantage of permissive divorce laws that encouraged new settlers to start new families with ease: “Because westward migration involved huge distances and rudimentary communications, marital desertion was especially common and often led to divorce.”20 These laws were not intended to stimulate divorce, so much as settlement. Thus, many western states, such as South Dakota, began with short residency requirements, that allowed new settlers to benefit from their newly adopted state’s rights. Low-residency requirements, broad, even omnibus, grounds for divorce, and divorce in absentia in western cities made migratory divorces, in which a resident of one state with conservative laws could move to another for the purposes of getting a divorce, a possibility.21 Western cities, such as Indianapolis and Sioux Falls, became labeled “divorce mills.” The association of the West with divorce survived through the twentieth century. Moving further west, Reno, Nevada became and remained a haven for quick and easy divorces and marriages. In addition, California is credited (or blamed) with leading the way toward the current liberal “nofault” divorce law, which the state adopted in 1969.22 The no-fault laws that spread east from California during the 1970s mark the culmination of the symbolic links between the West and divorce. A no-fault divorce requires no grounds at all, other than some agreement that the couple no longer wants to remain married; divorce became a purely private, individual desire.23 The reasoning behind the no-fault divorce parallels nineteenth-century myths about the West: independence, mobility, renewal, and the ability to break from the past and start again with a new home, new job, and new wife or husband. The West was “known for its dedication to individualism, breaking ties, and reshaping institutions” notes Riley, and “although settlers carried established ideas and institutions westward, most refused to be bound by them.”24 However, it was also a place to found new, more ideal communities. Elaine Tyler May writes, “Whenever…Americans felt that their time-honored values needed to be reinvigorated, they looked to the West. The frontier always seemed to hold the promise of a perfect future where virtuous individuals could civilize the wilderness and create harmonious communities.”25 Thus, the West becomes a symbolic site of rebirth and the future, even if that rebirth has a wide variety of definitions and

Americanizing divorce

5

expectations. The West offers a perpetual chance at a personal revolution, such as divorce. Many American novelists, from Howells on, emphasize this association of the West with divorce by having characters who divorce “go west” or by having characters who are from the West. One telling example is Clare Booth Luce’s popular 1936 play and film The Women, which takes place mostly at a divorce “ranch” in Nevada. While Luce’s satirical play makes light of divorcées in the West, the reality was not so comedic. Although some women did migrate west and divorce, possibly because women had a better chance of supporting themselves in the West,26 migration was far more common for men: “Men went west, some believing that they would eventually reunite with their wives, others knowing they would not. Women refused to join their migrating husbands or left their western-based husbands and returned to their former homes.”27 The West and mobility not only became associated with divorce but with men, invoking notions of questing heroes and frontiersmen at home in nature and open spaces. In contrast, women became associated with the East, and stability was linked with women. And though women most often sued for divorce, the implication is that they sue for divorce in order to remarry. Rather than using divorce as a means of liberation, women employ divorce as the safety valve O’Neill describes, consequently fulfilling societal obligations to monitor marriage. Thus, divorce reflects many of the binaries that shape American regional identities: the East versus the West, mobility versus stability, individual pursuits versus societal obligations, and the masculine versus the feminine. These associations become clearest when they are transgressed, as will become clear in the post-Civil War backlash against divorce. Simply put, women who adopted this mobility and individuality were considered unfeminine. Wharton’s Undine Spragg of The Custom of the Country (1913) and Robert Grant’s Selma White of Unleavened Bread (1900) are early examples of literary divorcées from the West who fail to live up to such standards of femininity. During the nineteenth century, transportation technology, including the canal system and the railroad, both of which opened up westward travel, made movement between the states and coasts of the US both faster and more practical. One result was the increased ease of moving west and with taking up short-term residency in states with liberal divorce laws. Trains also made travel alone easier, for both men and women. Trains came to symbolize the speed, modernity, and mobility of America. Although it is difficult and reductive to say that trains encouraged divorce, both became increasingly commonplace during the nineteenth century. And divorce also becomes associated with modernity and mobility, which also begin to characterize the American entrepreneurial spirit. The symbolic parallels between divorce and transportation technology culminate in the twentieth century. What trains are to the nineteenth century, automobiles are to the twentieth. Jeremy Rifkin observes the etymology of “automobile,” noting it is comprised of the words “autonomy” and “mobility,” two ideas central to the modern American identity.28 The car enables not only mobility and speed but autonomy. Curiously, Glendon notes that the term “no-fault” as applied to divorce is the fault of journalists who adapted the term from car insurance legislation. For better or for worse, writes Glendon, “the term stuck, contributing to giving American divorce law its own unique cast.”29 Transportation technology thus plays a key symbolic role in American novels of divorce. From Howells’s and Wharton’s trains racing west for divorce to McCarthy’s fatal crash in A Charmed Life and the constant interruption of planes in Updike’s Marry Me, trains,

Love American style

6

planes, and automobiles both represent the mobility and modernity of divorced characters and literally facilitate their plots. Although many of the forces I have discussed existed prior to the Civil War, they increased exponentially after the War. The divorce rate rose after the Civil War, from 53,574 divorces granted between 1867 and 1871 to 89, 284 divorces granted between 1877 and 1881, a 66% increase.30 Divorce continued to function as a symbol of independence and a legal right throughout the first part of the nineteenth century, with ever expanding lists of grounds for divorce and ever more liberal divorce legislation as the country moved west. However, during Reconstruction there was a sharp conservative retreat in divorce legislation. James Barnett argues that pre-Civil War divorce laws reflected the expansionist, pioneer, and agrarian atmosphere of the 1830s, 40s, and 50s, but by the 1870s many of these liberal laws were repealed, especially in the Northeast.31 One explanation may be the tensions dividing the nation and the threat of secession. Once again, political events can be viewed in terms of marriage and divorce, as Riley’s description illustrates: “the Union and the Confederacy struggled to decide if they would dissolve the marriage between them. The decision in the Civil War was for indissoluble union, for a marriage of states that would endure through better or worse.”32 The Civil War is in some ways the inverse of the Revolution, which sanctified rebellion and dissolving contracts. The outcome of the Civil War instead suppresses dissolution, upholding the contract and, consequently, sanctifying union.33 There is a shift in the signification of independence and individualism. As Basch observes, By the 1850s, when access to a divorce was becoming ever easier and the number of decrees was rising, divorce served as a lightening rod for deepseated tensions over the positive and negative implications of freedom. The mid-century tendency to link divorce policy to the long-term destiny of the nation only intensified after the Civil War. In a discourse whose terms were dominated increasingly by conservative moral critics who embraced marriage as a signifier for law and order and deployed divorce as a trope for chaos, debates over the rules escalated into a battle for the very soul of the republic.34 With national rhetoric now calling for saving the Union, some began to see divorce as one the worst manifestations of individualism, the pursuit of personal happiness at the expense of the family, the nation, and God. As the politics of the Progressive Era were reflected in American marriages, so were those of the twentieth century, as Elaine Tyler May and Herbie DiFonzo have illustrated.35 The exuberance of the 20s created a rise in both marriage and divorce rates, while the depression saw a slip in marriage rates and an increase in desertion. The conflation of the personal and the political are also apparent in the rush to alter before World War II and the conservatism of Cold War, when getting married and staying married came to be viewed as patriotic duty. The decline in the divorce rate in the 50s is an anomaly in the steady rise in the divorce rate since the 1880s. Finally, the rebellion of the 60s and 70s and individualism of the 70s and 80s are also blamed for the boom in the divorce rate since the 50s.

Americanizing divorce

7

However, there have also been many continuities that have contributed to the rising American divorce rate. At the core of arguments both for and against divorce lies the idea of individualism. As Barnett explains, “At the close of the 1850 decade, the results of omnibus clauses, desertions of wives by husbands who had sought success on the frontier, and extension of grounds for divorce began to be felt.36 Thus, the post-Civil War conservative response is partly a regional response to the myth of the West. As Riley observes, during the late nineteenth century, critics of divorce believed the rising divorce rate and western divorce mills “were evidence that such long held American values as individualism, freedom from tyranny, and a search for personal happiness had flourished in the American West—and had gotten out of hand.”37 Such views led to the formation of the National Divorce Reform League, which aimed to curb what it viewed as permissive divorce legislation. At the same time, advocates for divorce believed, according to their interpretations of democratic principles, that the happiness of the individual must come before that of the nation. Their reasoning was that state control of such happiness reeks of tyranny, and is thus anti-American, and that, if the nation is comprised of happy and satisfied individuals, it will thus be a healthy nation. Perhaps the most dramatic elements of these debates about divorce were the contradictory ideas about individualism and gender. Basch notes that there is little mention of gender in divorce law and that “[b]oth opponents and proponents of divorce shifted their debates on the issues away from focusing on an adversarial contest between husbands and wives, which is how the law framed marital dissolutions, to stressing the wants of the un-gendered self versus the welfare of the whole society.”38 The implication here is that for those critical of divorce, litigants were selfish individualists who did not put the welfare of society before their own. Another way in which divorce was thought to contribute to this selfishness was discouraging conformity to expected gender roles, specifically that of the good husband and the good wife. In her review of numerous divorce cases from the late nineteenth century, Basch demonstrates that what characterized most suits was disappointment by either the wife, whose husband failed to satisfy or support her, or by the husband, whose wife failed to provide a comfortable home environment or to be properly chaste. In such cases, both the litigant and defendant could be accused of selfishness because neither would put social, gender duty before individual desire. However, much of the rhetoric surrounding the law was highly conscious of the effect of gender upon divorce. Many proponents of divorce, from Jefferson on, view divorce in positively feminist terms. Basch describes Jefferson’s feminist position on divorce: “Divorce could help to restore women ‘their natural right of equality.’”39 Later and more explicit feminists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, also linked liberal divorce legislation with feminism. Stanton, following Margaret Fuller and England’s Mary Wollstonecraft, associated marriage with slavery; hence, they saw divorce as a means of emancipating women. O’Neill reports that there is some evidence of increasing opportunities for women’s independence which made divorce seem, if not Utopian, at least attractive and feasible.40 Liberal divorce laws were thought by some, such as Benjamin O.Flower, to be the “tools that would free women from sexual slavery and create a new generation of pure, healthy men and women.41 Such Utopian perspectives on divorce and single womanhood continue through the present. Whitehead notes that Jessie Bernard’s influential study The Future of Marriage (1972), outlining the

Love American style

8

detrimental effects of marriage for women, ushered in a spate of advice literature aimed at women considering divorce.42 In this literature “divorce becomes the defining achievement of women’s lives, the great article of their freedom.”43 It is important to note, however, that these optimistic expectations for divorce have not been fulfilled. In reality, the escalating divorce rate has contributed to what many call the feminzation of poverty.44 Divorce also may have done little to further the women’s movement. As Basch notes “as divorce modified the asymmetrical relationship between men and women in marriage by punishing husbands for their faulty behavior and compensating their innocent wives, it implicitly legitimated the behavior it discouraged.”45 Further, not all feminists considered divorce liberating. Believing men and women did have specifically defined roles as husbands and wives, many sought the valorization of women, and even the right to vote, but still believed divorce a destructive, selfish force that placed individual desire before the benefit of the family and the nation. Many opponents of divorce, such as Walter Wilcox, blamed women’s emancipation as the primary cause for the escalation of the divorce rate.46 Anna B.Rogers, in her 1909 essay Why American Marriages Fail, blames female narcissism for the increasing divorce rate: “Marriage is woman’s work in the world—not man’s. From whatever point it is viewed, physical or spiritual, as a question of individual ethics, it is her specific share of the world’s work—first, last, and always; allotted to her by laws far stronger than she is. And the woman who fails to recognize this and acknowledge it has the germ of divorce in her veins at the outset.”47 The view that feminism caused the rampant divorce rate continues into the late twentieth century, in films such as Kramer vs. Kramer and Woody Allen’s Manhattan, in which a wife and mother (in both instances played by Meryl Streep) abandon marriages to pursue personal happiness. Whitehead, too, explicitly links feminism and divorce: “the values underlying women’s emancipation—independence, individualism, and self-expression—tend intrinsically to clash with the obligations imposed by family membership.”48 Thus, concludes Whitehead, the feminist pursuit of such independence contributed to the sky-rocketing divorce rate of the 1970s and 80s. While it seems misguided and reductive to blame feminism for the divorce rate, the women’s movement is both a contributor and a product of changing expectations about what it is to be female and male in America. And these changing expectations about appropriate gender behavior, many have argued, have contributed to the increasing divorce rate. In colonial culture, with both parties contributing to the management and economy of the home and/or small farm, the roles of men and women were less rigidly defined than they have been in later periods. After the Revolutionary War, national ideals were embodied in the domestic sphere.49 Republican motherhood was an American version of the companionate marriage, in which husbands and wives, though essentially different, created an ideal balance through marriage. The American role of wife and mother was expected to be responsible for the education and moral edification of the entire family, including husband as well as children; the home was “seen as the front line of action to produce virtuous citizens.”50 However, as many scholars have demonstrated, with the rise of Victorian mores during the nineteenth century, the roles of husbands and wives become increasingly differentiated, with husbands associated with the public world of commerce and government and wives associated with the private world of the hearth.51 Discussing Tocqueville’s observation that America was unique in the intensity of the separation

Americanizing divorce

9

between masculine and feminine spheres, Michael Kimmel writes that, though there has always been some division of labor between the sexes, “What was new—and distinctly American—were the strictness and the degrees to which women and men were now seen as having a separate sphere. The home became entirely the domain of wives; husbands were even less involved than before”52 Wives did their part for social improvement as well, including proper household management, wearing fashionable attire, and deporting themselves properly and chastely. When women failed to live up to these standards, as Basch has illustrated, they could become targets for divorce. Some critics have begun to question any simplistic separation of the private and public spheres, such as Lora Romero, Cathy Davidson, and Amy Kaplan, and calling attention to the porosity and fragility of these boundaries divorce reinforces their reassessment.53 Even more influential on divorce was the backlash against this image of the angel of the hearth, the New Woman of the early twentieth century, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has illustrated. Valuing independence and personal satisfaction, the New Woman was both less likely to stay in an unsatisfactory marriage and less likely to conform to expected wifely duties.54 It is important to note, however, that both the angel of the hearth and the New Woman are types and that few women probably lived up to the standards of either ideal. Rather it is the conflict between such ideals and their spectrum of variations, both as they have been internalized by women and reacted to by men, that gives rise to increased divorces. These conflicting notions about womanhood remain in the present, and as the personal accounts of divorce in Peggy Kaganoff and Susan Spano’s Women on Divorce (1997) attest, create conflicting expectations regarding both how women are to behave and what women are supposed to want, not only from marriage but from life. Expectations of American masculinity have gone through parallel shifts. Kimmel traces a history of American manhood, beginning with the birth of the idea of the “selfmade man” in America, a man distinct from the feminized taint of European aristocracy. A variation on the American Adam, the self-made man is autonomous, equal, restless, and alone, all virtues that conflict with family life.55 Further, the venue for proving oneself a self-made man was the public sphere, beginning with the wilderness and the frontier, then moving into the workplace.56 This ideal of the self-made man was one lure to the West and, consequently, one potential contributor to divorce. With the dominance of industrial capitalism after the Civil War, the market becomes the frontier upon which men must prove themselves.57 American Manhood, argues Kimmel, has been based upon exclusion, including that of keeping women out of the public sphere.58 However, Kimmel states, leaving women alone in charge of educating the next generation, including the boys, might result in feminization, some feared. Thus, Kimmel describes the fatherhood movement that accompanies the ideal of companionate marriage. Men not only had to prove themselves in the marketplace to support the family but also had to provide some sort of role model for their sons without being themselves feminized by domesticity.59 Kimmel links the stress caused by the tension between men’s public and private roles directly to the divorce rate: One source of strain was men’s efforts to juggle their roles as fathers and breadwinners, especially when many fathers weren’t very good at childrearing and had been so poorly trained for it. Men were groomed for work outside the home and had spent little time or energy developing the

Love American style

skills necessary for successful nurturing compassion, tenderness, attention to process.60

10

of

children—patience,

In addition, the very ideal values of masculinity—virility, control, dominance, mobility, strength, even the ability to drink large amounts of alcohol—came under attack with the rise of women’s movements in the progressive era and continue through the present day. These ideals of virility that once defined masculinity now demonize it. For a small example, to some feminist critics the traditional gesture of a man holding a door open for a woman becomes fraught with patriarchal implications. Beneath this gentlemanly gesture some see allusions to masculine dominance and feminine passivity. This is not to bemoan the loss of any of these ideals of masculinity, but to demonstrate some of the conflicting ideals that surround American masculinity and to suggest how these conflicts, both as men have internalized them and as women have come to have conflicting expectations, also contribute to the increase in divorce. As Peggy Kaganoff and Susan Spano’s Men on Divorce (1999), an anthology of autobiographical essays, demonstrates, divorce is tricky for men as well as women. Divorce could be a key to liberation for men from emasculating domesticity, or it could be emasculating proof of failure as a husband. Often it is both. Another factor contributing to the rising divorce rate is the urbanization of America during the nineteenth century. While many moved west, many also moved to cities.61 America’s shift from a predominantly agrarian economy to an industrial, urban economy parallels the rising divorce rate. The divorce rate is consistently higher in urban areas. In fact, as May notes, many blamed the city for the rising divorce rate: The city itself was the main villain. Whether it was the ‘mobility, dense population, and anonymity’ of the urban environment or the ‘breakdown of neighborhood control,’ these observers believed that the ‘repressive and coercive control of the primary group’ was lost, freeing the individual from ‘the usual social restraints.’ The result, they argued, was that city life fostered ‘juvenile delinquency, mental illness, and a high rate of divorce.’62 Although May notes that there has been no study directly linking divorce to urban living, higher rates of divorce in urban areas suggest at least parallels between urban living and divorce. Some of the results of urbanization are a decline in the economic function of the family because individuals could find work and support themselves on their own; increased anonymity, which weakened social taboos; the ability to “start over” as on the frontier; and industrialization, which brought many more women into the work force, thus making women less financially dependent and altering relations between husbands and wives. Urbanization also increases a sense of mobility through the transience of rented space. Increasingly, people are renting houses, and even more often, apartments, rather than building or owning their own homes, so that they are more apt to move, whether by choice or by circumstance. Also, work occurs more and more outside the home in an office or factory, rather than on the land near one’s home, thus exacerbating the division between public and private space, and consequently making marriage more

Americanizing divorce

11

of a private and personal affair, and more susceptible to whims of personal desire. O’Neill writes, “Mass divorce, therefore, now seems to me to have been not the leading edge of a moral revolution so much as the first of a series of adjustments by which the patriarchal family and the Protestant sexual ethic have accommodated themselves to the demands of an urban, industrial society.”63 Thus rather than the city causing the breakdown of the institution of marriage by encouraging divorce and overturning morality, divorce was a way of adapting the institution of marriage to the modern city. Changing expectations of marriage, especially an increased emphasis on love and emotional satisfaction, reinforced changing definitions of American femininity and masculinity. Riley notes that in the 1600s most Puritans believed that love developed during marriage rather than before it.64 Marriage was viewed as an important contract, but love was not necessarily integral to that contract. However, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, love becomes an essential component to the companionate marriage, in which husband and wife, each incomplete in themselves, were thought to complete each other. Underlying the rising importance of love in marriage was the implication of a sense of individual fulfillment from love and from marriage. In the late nineteenthcentury divorce cases she studies, Basch illustrates how many viewed marriage without romantic love as unsatisfactory.65 Thus, with increased expectations, there are increased chances for disappointment and the consequent increased desire to dissolve an unsatisfactory marriage. At the turn of the century and throughout the twentieth century, the chances of disappointment grow still greater. The work of sexologists, such as Richard von KrafftEbing and Havelock Ellis, and psychologists, such as Sigmund Freud (or at least the popular interpretations of their work) heightened an awareness of sexuality, not only normalizing sexual desire but also suggesting that sexual satisfaction was fundamental to marital satisfaction. Thus, there are yet more reasons to be dissatisfied in marriage and to seek divorce. Noting Margaret Sanger’s advice to women about the expressive and spiritual potentialities of sex, May writes, Sex was glorious, but only within marriage—and only if spiritualized at that. Women who had maintained a stance of abstinence and guilt regarding sex were expected to change their feelings totally and immediately upon entering the conjugal union…. The difficulty would be further heightened if the woman anticipated intercourse as something mystical, but still deplored physical aggression. If the reality of sexual intercourse proved disappointing, wives might turn to the divorce court in order to shed their ill-matched mates.66 Because of the delicate nature of the subject of sexual satisfaction as grounds for divorce, May has little direct evidence of couples seeking legal separation because of a lack of sexual satisfaction. However, she cites numerous cases of suits in which sex was an issue, from wives who abhorred sex and who were either suing their husbands for cruelty or being sued by husbands who did not believe their wives are performing their duties, to husbands who found their wives’ sexual appetites repellant. By the end of the twentieth century, sexual satisfaction was considered integral both to love and to marriage, as the

Love American style

12

wide range of marriage and sexual therapies attest. Thus, the “failure” of a couple’s sex life comes to be seen as a sign of other failures and may lead to the divorce court. Many historians link one more phenomenon to the spiraling divorce rate of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century America: the shift to a commercial, consumer culture. The dominance of consumer culture and advertising both exacerbates gender differentiation by its proliferation of images and products said to enhance masculinity and femininity and by its creation of a constant desire for the new and better. Thus, consumer culture heightens expectations, creating more superficial, unrealistic, and homogenous ideals that cannot be realized. In doing so, the desire for the ideal husband or wife parallels the consumer desire for new products, a desire that is inherently unquenchable. The ideal marriage becomes another commod-ity in the manufacturing of the American dream. Divorce, then, as Debra Ann MacComb has argued in her analysis of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, becomes a means of buying more marriage, making an unsatisfactory marriage disposable and enabling one new and improved.67 The evidence for the development of marriage and divorce into a commercial venture lies in the statistics. Riley notes the irony of the high divorce rate in the US: “Americans, a people who love weddings, romance, and living happily ever after, had generated the highest divorce rate in the world.”68 Rather than a contradiction, it is precisely because Americans love weddings, and the sense of beginning weddings bring, that Americans are so prone to divorce. Divorce, then, is a tool in the American pursuit of happiness, at least a consumer happiness, a pursuit sanctified and entrenched by The Declaration of Independence, though this was not necessarily what Jefferson had in mind. The conflation of business, divorce, and American ideality is not as superficial or crass as it at first seems. Rather the American proclivity to divorce is deeply rooted in a matrix of political and personal ideals. Divorce reflects then a continual dissatisfaction with the self and desire for improvement associated with the American personality since the Puritans and Benjamin Franklin. Not only does divorce reflect the search for the ideal but also the American belief in the individual’s right to pursue the ideal. This debate over the value of the individual in American society is integral to the definition of what it is to be an American. The individual is at once a romantic democratic entity with assured political rights, including the right to pursue personal happiness, and a republican entity with a responsibility to personal political duty and involvement. Being American both asks the right to transcend social constrictions and requires the duty to uphold expectations. Divorce, viewed as both a right and the ruin of society, embodies both of these tensions. Similar tensions between the Romantic individual, the artist, and/or the hero versus his responsibility to American society characterize debates in American literature, including the central question of just what American literature is.

LITERARY REFLECTIONS: DIVORCE AND THE AMERICAN CANON With the prevalence of divorce in popular American culture, it seems strange then that there is so little mention of divorce in canonical nineteenth- and even twentieth-century American literature. As I hope this overview has demonstrated, the idea of divorce can hold a distinctively American symbolic power. Embodying the myth of starting over, of

Americanizing divorce

13

transcending the past, divorce enables the American dream. Again, in practice, both historical and legal, divorce is not necessarily so liberating. Nevertheless, divorce seems a potent symbol for American romanticism, which is so concerned with the past and with starting anew. Yet, perhaps it is this very popularity of divorce that causes writers to scorn the subject in the attempt to distinguish their work from that of the popular presses. The Scarlet Letter would not have the same tragic impact if Hester Prynne divorced Chillingworth to marry Dimmesdale. Perhaps it was the increasing banality of divorce that led some American writers and many more critics to cast divorce as a subject more appropriate for the realistic mode of the novel of manners rather than the heroic mode of romance, which has formed the American canon. However, toward the end of the nineteenth century, some writers began to see the potential of divorce as a subject, and in doing so, use divorce to fuse realism and romance. In the process they use the topic of divorce to suggest that it is the dynamic of romance and realism that marks a work as distinctly American. One of the primary impulses behind the critical formulation of an American canon is the desire for a distinctly American literary identity. Some of the most influential twentieth-century theories of American literature have emphasized the aspects of the “best” and most “American” literature that transcend the forces that comprise any national identity. Russell Reising calls this search a paradox in the work of many theorists of American literature: “While many of them attempt to define the ‘radical’ or ‘oppositional’ nature of American literature, or…its complicity in the history of American exceptionalist rhetoric, the theorists tend to separate literary significance and reflection from the social and political significance.”69 Positing such abstraction from social concerns as the defining feature of American literature is, however, as Reising demonstrates, an impossible task because the United States is by definition a material phenomenon, determined by social, legal, political, geographical, and cultural structures, among other things. Thus, while some have argued that the universality of the best literature can transcend its material environment, if one is calling a body of literature “American,” “British,” or “Persian,” that literature has some material association that characterizes it as “American,” “British,” or “Persian.” As a social, material phenomenon divorce has thus often been ignored in American literary criticism. However, the critical neglect of divorce provides an intriguing approach into the “search” or “construction” of an American literary identity. In fact, Christopher Lasch even uses the term to describe this search: The infatuation with consensus; the vogue of a disembodied ‘history of ideas’ divorced from considerations of class or other determinants of social organization; the obsession with ‘American Studies’ which perpetuates a nationalistic myth of American uniqueness—these things reflect the degree to which historians have become apologists, in effect, for American national power in the holy war against communism.70 (italics mine) Although Lasch’s argument about the anticommunist motivation for this divorcing of ideas from material forces is beyond the scope of this study, his use of the word

Love American style

14

“divorce” is significant. By attempting to define some peculiarly American literary quality through severing the literature from its social environment, such critics invoke one of the most American facets of the symbolic power of divorce, the divorce of the individual, in this case the artist or even the work itself, from its social relation. For these critics what is particularly American is the degree to which an individual artist succeeds in divorcing himself or herself from the social world, as in transcendental romanticism, whereas European novels of manners and realism, and especially Soviet realism, are based on a marriage or engagement of the self to the world. In order to understand how divorce has been used by some writers to suggest an American form, it is helpful to note the centrality of the subject of marriage to the form of the novel. Influential studies, such as Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) and Ann Ducille’s The Coupling Convention (1993), begin with this assumption. Perhaps most influential has been Ian Watt’s study The Rise of the Novel (1957). Situating the birth of the novel in the sociological and philosophical milieu of eighteenthcentury England, Watt argues that the realism intrinsic to the form of the novel stems “from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses.”71 Thus the novel, based on autobiographical forms, uses the reality of the individual to shape its narrative structures. This individual perspective differs from previous literary forms, such as classical drama, that do not reflect space and time as the individual experiences them. Further, this individualist orientation causes the novelist to focus on verisimilar particulars of a character’s experience rather than universals. Watt also notes how the novel reflects the individualist tendencies of the age, including the promise of economic independence in capitalism, the rise of the conjugal family, and the increasing importance of and freedom in choosing a spouse. Although Watt argues that Defoe writes the first realist novels in English, he credits Richardson for solving one of the “major formal problems Defoe left unresolved.”72 Richardson’s solution, writes Watt, is “remarkably simple: he avoided an episodic plot by basing his novels on a single action, a courtship.”73 The appeal of Richardson’s solution is apparent in the subsequent history of the novel; the tradition of the novel comes to be defined by its comedic ending: “Yes, dear reader. I married him.” Thus marriage becomes not only an essential element of the novel’s content but also essential to its form. As such, it would seem divorce, as the disruption of marriage, would be an important subject for subsequent critics who study the history of marriage and the novel. However, most overlook it. Tony Tanner, in his study The Novel of Adultery, also asserts that marriage is “the central subject for the bourgeois novel.”74 However, Tanner distinguishes the idea of adultery from marriage, associating adultery with the sacred, and marriage with the mundane. Thus, although adultery is in many ways a social concern, it is often treated as a romantic one, especially in the European tradition. In fact, adultery is one of the central issues of courtly love, and motivates that plot. Citing Denis de Rougemont’s study Love in the Western World, Tanner notes that developing during an age in which marriages were traditionally arranged for political and social purposes, the trope of courtly love was by tradition adulterous. Because marriage itself was a social and political event, love was found elsewhere, as illustrated by the romance of Tristan and Iseult.75 Thus, writes Rougemont, “love has taken the form of adultery.”76 The wedlock or marriage novel, which Tanner calls a novel of contract, then becomes associated with British and American novels, and the adultery novel, a novel of

Americanizing divorce

15

transgression, becomes associated with a European tradition. Further, Tanner argues that the transgressive nature of adultery has an important impact on literary form. The results, Tanner suggests, of the failure of contract caused by adultery precipitates questions of the authority of representation and epistemological questions about language and novelistic representation, in other words, the contract or wedlock between writer and reader. Thus, writing of The Golden Bowl Tanner posits, “One effect of this [failure of contract] is a move from the more realistic novel of contract and transgression that I am describing, to what might be called the novel of metaphor.”77 In other words, it is the transgressions of adultery as it suggests the failure of the institution of marriage and the consequent crisis of the bourgeois novel that lead to new, tradition-breaking forms, such as modernism and postmodernism. Tanner dismisses divorce as “surface temporizing, a forensic palliative to cloak and muffle the profoundly disjunctive reverberations and implications of adultery.”78 Not only does Tanner assume that there is only one major cause for divorce, but he also creates a hierarchy of subject matter and form: adultery makes for a more “disjunctive” and subversive novel than divorce. Although Evelyn Hinz does not deal with the contrast between adultery and divorce, she also creates a hierarchy of subject and form that places divorce on the lower tiers. Basing her analysis in Northrop Frye’s system of low and high mimesis, Hinz distinguishes wedlock, which is the concern of the novel (particularly the realist novel), from hierogamy, which is a spiritual union and the concern of the Romance or what she designates the “mythic narrative.”79 The terminology is telling. In its “low” mimetic form, which is indigenous to the novel, Hinz emphasizes the compound “wed” and “lock.” In the comedic novel of manners, the weight is placed on “wed;” the whole novel moves toward the culmination in marriage. In contrast, in the tragic realist novel “the emphasis is upon ‘lock’ rather than upon ‘wed.’… Instead of being the means whereby the complications are resolved, then, marriage in these novels [by Hardy and James]…is the situation that generates the complications, and, consequently, instead of constituting the happy ending of the novel, marriage typically occurs early in the novels.”80 These novels describe the binding, often suffocating and sacrificial, nature of marriage, as in The Portrait of a Lady. While Hinz stud-ies Howells’s A Modern Instance, a novel of divorce, she does not consider divorce significant. Hinz lumps divorce with low mimesis, noting that divorce is simply a legal and ratified separation.81 Hinz groups such comedies and tragedies under low mimesis and the realistic novel because “ultimately, despite the difference in tone, the thematic function of marriage is the same: it symbolizes the entrance into society of the individual, the acquisition or restoration of a realistic attitude toward life, the movement from romantic illusion to a novelistic sense of reality.”82 In contrast, the hierogamy of high mimesis is a mythic marriage in which characters view society and history as profane and illusory, “symptomatic of man’s fallen condition.”83 The author who invokes hierogamy “struggles to liberate his narrative from history.”84 Hierogamous narratives, such as those of Queequeg and Ishmael, Dimmesdale and Hester, have neither endings of “happily ever after,” nor “cases of separation and incompatibility.”85 Thus Hinz privileges the metaphoric marriage of spirit over the literal marriage of people, consequently relegating divorce to the realms of low mimesis and setting a precedent for the critical dismissal of divorce in literature. Building on the work of Watt, Tanner, and Hinz, Joseph Allen Boone articulates what he calls a “Marriage Tradition” of narrative structure under which he also subsumes

Love American style

16

divorce. He devises three major categories: the plot of courtship, in which the plot is structured around various obstacles leading up to a wedding (Pamela, Pride and Prejudice); the plot of seduction, in which the plot follows the advances of a rake and the heroine’s protestations leading to her eventual rape or the consequences of that rape (Clarissa, Tess of the D’Urbervilles); and the plot of wedlock, which, as in Hinz, follows the dissolution after the wedding, the tragedy of the bad marriage (Amelia, A Modern Instance). Boone writes that these “wedlock” plots are “deadlock,” arguing that they do nothing to advance the originally subversive form of the novel, reinforcing a conservative patriarchal ideology.86 The defining characteristic of these narrative structures is a closed ending. Adapting the phrase “tie the knot” from marriage to narrative form, Boone writes, “In an important sense, then, we can identify one ‘fatal knot’ blocking the novel’s development with the romantic ideal of wedlock that intertwines the various strands of the novel’s marriage tradition into an apparently seamless unity.”87 In contrast, Boone offers three categories of counternarratives common to novels. The first are novels he believes struggle to untie this knot with “examinations of married life [that] are reproduced in the narrational ‘unease’ of decentered, multivocal, and ultimately open-ended structures that refuse to give pat answers to the unsettling questions that the dislocations in the prior narratives have raised.”88 Boone’s examples of this countertradition are primarily British: Wuthering Heights, The Golden Bowl, and To the Lighthouse. The second countertradition Boone describes is the male quest plot, in such American works as Moby Dick and Billy Budd; and the third is the tale of a female community, in such works as The County of the Pointed Firs and Herland.89 Boone’s only American example in his first four categories—the three that comprise his marriage tradition and the first countertradition of de-centered marriage novels—is Howells’s divorce novel A Modern Instance. Yet, although it might seem that a novel detailing the breakdown of a marriage would disrupt the marriage plot, Boone argues that Howells uses divorce to reinforce his “conservative social vision of wedlock.”90 While Boone’s specific criticism may be directed at Howells, he is using books as types, and he does not deal with any other divorce novels. Thus, his criticism of Howells seems emblematic of many treatments of divorce. He suggests, as have Hinz and Tanner, that divorce is merely an inversion of marriage and a means of conserving the institution of marriage. While on some level this view of divorce as conservative is certainly true, it is limited. The very idea of divorce also alters one of the fundaments of marriage—its permanence. Divorce takes the “lock” out of wedlock. This dissolution of marriage’s permanence is compounded by the increasing acceptance of divorce throughout the western world. Thus, if marriage is as central to the history of the novel as Tanner, Hinz, and Boone have argued, divorce certainly needs more examination than they have given it. All of these critics agree that novels that suggest the breakdown of marriage are form-breaking, or disruptive of this “deadlock” tradition, and yet none of them consider divorce an important development in the history of the novel. However, I would argue that many divorce novels are much more ambiguous and transgressive than these critics have allowed; they mark a retreat, in varying degrees, into the romantic illusion or individualism (what Hinz has called the mythic narrative) that characterizes the romance. Hinz and Boone do not distinguish between an American tradition and a European, or even a British tradition. However, in critical studies pursuing a definition of American

Americanizing divorce

17

literature, the critical hierarchies surrounding the treatment of marriage in the novel that Hinz, Boone, and Tanner delineate are perhaps even more extreme. As Leslie Fiedler points out, it is curious that the birth of the novel, as Watt has described it, coincides with the birth of America.91 However, the novel, as so many critics, including Fiedler, have argued, becomes a different beast in America. Arguing that Richardson is the father of the novel, Fiedler notes “the values of the Sentimental Love Religion, inextricably bound up with the example of Richardson, entered into the American novel at the moment of its creation.”92 However, since this “Richardsonian transplant” fails in America because America never had a feudal courtly culture, [t]he American novelist, then, was deprived of the privilege of defining his own middle-class values against a surviving tradition of gallantry or gauloiserie. Only in Puritanism could he discover an antithesis to his sentimental world-view, a source of tension to protect him from moral flac-cidity. But before the novel proper was invented, Puritanism had to decay.93 Gallantry, with its plots of adultery, becomes appropriate for the European novel.94 As Puritanism declined, however, the American novel was left, according to Fiedler, with only two forms. One is the sentimental novel, a form of realism, which what is left of Richardson in America. Fiedler writes that in the sentimental novel Clarissa-style heroines become dull monsters of virtue.95 The second form is the gothic romance, which is an evasion of these heroines by romantic heroes, a “flight from society into nature, from the world of women to the haunts of womanless men, which sets our novel apart from that of the rest of the world.”96 Fiedler’s distinction draws upon the Romance thesis famously articulated by Richard Chase in The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957). Chase argues that “since the earliest days the American novel, in its most original and characteristic form, has worked out its destiny and defined itself by incorporating an element of romance. This purpose has led me to propose a native tradition of the novel…springing from England, but as differing from the English tradition by its perpetual reassessment and reconstitution of romance within the novel form.”97 The result has been the creation of a hierarchy in American literature, in which “romance” novels, such as those of Hawthorne and Melville and many of their modernist and postmodernist successors, are considered first rank—in Chase’s words the “most original and characteristic” American form. In contrast, novels of manners, such as those of Howells and Wharton and their social realist successors, are both often considered second rank and less American in that they mimic a British and European form. Although this thesis has been widely disputed and is no longer the standard by which critics define “American” literature, it has still been influential in forming not only the canon of the American novel but also the canon of American literary criticism.98 As such, I suggest that lingering elements of the romance thesis, with its disregard for portrayals of American society, may explain why divorce, as one of the perhaps most vulgar and popular aspects of American society, has been ignored and dismissed by so many critics writing both about marriage and the novel and/or about the American novel.

Love American style

18

One central difference, Chase notes, between the premier American romance and the putatively less satisfactory American novel of manners involves their relative portrayals of marriage. Chase’s analysis of James Fenimore Cooper’s work is perhaps most illustrative of his argument about marriage. Defining the function of myth as a romantic element of the American novel that conflicts with the novel’s social nature, Chase argues that myth takes on metaphysical or theological meanings and it is Natty Bumppo’s mythic engagement that elevates the novel.99 Since other characters marry in Cooper’s novels, while Natty Bumppo refuses, “marriage is sanctioned but the real mythic action is the ritual reassertion of celibacy, the purification and escape from the taint of sex.”100 It is, perhaps, this taint of sex that sullies divorce, as well as marriage, as a symbol in American literature. The inverse of marriage, divorce becomes a conflation of sentimentality and implied carnality. It is just this conflation of sentimentality and materiality that seems to inspire Samuel Coale’s argument about divorce in American literature. “In contemporary times marriage and divorce seem the stuff not of great fiction but of soap-opera machinations, the faked glossy peek at the jet-set cavorting of a Harold Robbins or Sydney Sheldon,” writes Coale, “but one has to look very hard to find marriage and divorce encountered seriously as subjects in fiction beyond the free-wheeling, pinball careenings of soap-opera plots.”101 Thus, Coale claims, [n]ovelists of manners—Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, John P.Marquand, Louis Auchincloss—tackle the social pressures of marriages in their tales of Little Old New York and the battered boundaries of Babbitry, but our great romancers—Faulkner, James, Melville—always transcended mere social dimensions. If marriage and divorce have been seen in our culture, for the most part, as social contracts, legalistic dealings and conventional couplings, and American romancers stalked the ‘ultimate’ individual self in all its mysteries and speculative dimensions, then it follows that novelists of manners explored marriage for its intricate social patterns; romancers did not.102 I do not wish simply to dispute Coale’s argument. The limitations of Coale’s aesthetic hierarchy and his designation of “great fiction” are obvious in the light of the recent broadening of the literary canon to include works by women, “popular” writers, and writers of various ethnicities. What is interesting is his expansion of the link between content and genre to include divorce and marriage specifically. Coale creates a division between American popular culture, in which depictions of divorce are rampant, and high American art, in which depictions of divorce are scarce. Coale abstracts social forces, such as divorce, which he refers to as “mere social dimensions,” from “high” literature. In some ways, Coale and Boone are right. Divorce was a popular subject in both the newspapers and bestselling literature of the late nineteenth century. Not only did newspapers serve as a means through which a litigant for divorce could notify an unsuspecting spouse but newspapers and magazines themselves featured detailed accounts of divorces, the more scandalous the better.103 The “best” of these cases were often collected by editors into widely distributed pamphlets, the “best” meaning of course the most sordid and scandalous. However, Basch also illustrates that beneath the base

Americanizing divorce

19

appeal of scandal these pamphlets reflect significant and subversive forces: “Collectively, these mid-century stories dramatize the gnawing ambiguities of marital power unleashed by a new social freedom for urban women and the ascendant ethos of romantic love…. They turned on a confrontation over the social freedom of the wife and the conjugal authority trial.”104 Further, these pamphlets were careful to relate both sides of every story. Basch notes that the “trials also diverged sharply from nineteenth-century dramas by virtue of their indeterminacy, and it is their indeterminacy that constitutes their most subversive characteristic.”105 Thus, these plots are subversive not only in their lack of a moral recompense for transgressive desire and behavior but also in their resistance to readerly expectation.106 Such open-endedness sounds very like the subversive power for which Boone is praising certain novels that he claims revolt against the tradition of wedlock, suggesting that perhaps divorce can be a subversive subject that also revolts against this tradition of easy answers. However, the bestselling sentimental literature, as Basch describes it, often did seek closure for these divorce stories, framing divorce in “unequivocally bleak terms.”107 One of the most popular anti-divorce novelists was T.S.Arthur, author of The Hand but Not the Heart (1858) and Out in the World (1865).108 “Whereas newsmen unveiled and, in fact, spotlighted the erotic underside of romantic love,” writes Basch, “novelists emptied love of its erotic component. Fictional wives, like the litigants in trials, were victims and even martyrs, but unlike their real-life counterparts, they rarely rebelled; those who did paid a price.”109 The price they paid was for society’s benefit, again invoking the tension between the individual and society at large. The popularity and influence of these novels was felt in late nineteenth-century America: “Individual and collective experience were inseparable in the nineteenth-century divorce novel, a genre that through its didactic narratives and authorial asides contributed to the notion that divorce was a national dilemma.”110 The discrepancies between the ideals presented in the literature and the realities of divorce parallel discrepancies within the courtroom itself. According to DiFonzo, the key characteristic of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American divorce law is the schism between the legal and popular cultures of divorce. In order to curb rising divorce rates in the 1880s, many states sought to create restrictive divorce laws. In most states, only adultery, desertion, and cruelty were legal grounds for divorce. Yet, rather than actually curbing the divorce rate, these restrictive grounds encouraged creative ways of circumscribing the courts. In other words, couples often told a different story to the courts than the one that was actually the reason for seeking divorce: What was the narrative told by divorcing husbands and wives? The overwhelming evidence is that they told one story to each other and a different one in court. Among themselves, the parties usually negotiated a bittersweet end to their unhappy marriage. At times, one party just gave up and let the other have her or his way. The courtroom yarn could be anything but the truth, however, or the judge would be obliged to enforce the door-closing devices of condonation, collusion, connivance, or recrimination. Rather, the parties (or usually the wife alone, in her

Love American style

20

culturally conditioned role as the designated driver of divorce) related a fable of marital fault.111 Thus divorce law encouraged the creation of cultural fictions and a schism between narrative and truth; it was simultaneously cynical and idealistic. In this schism twentiethcentury American divorce enacts many of the insights of poststructuralism, in particular the idea of language as play in the schism between the signified and the signifies Thus in addition to revealing open-ended moral relativism, as Basch has illustrated, the popular culture of divorce also created a legal relativism. Unlike didactic novelists such as T.S.Arthur, this relativism affects the way some novelists handle divorce as well. William Dean Howells’s A Modern Instance ends with Mr. Atherton, its moral and legal center, declaring, “I don’t know. I don’t know!”112 Contrary to Boone and others, I argue that such a declaration does open up the ending of Howells’s novel, especially when considered in light of other ways in which divorce disrupts expected narrative convention, as each chapter will illustrate. As the relativism of divorce exposes the plasticity of popular and legal narratives, so it exposes the plasticity of the novel. At once romantic and realistic and progressive and conservative, divorce transgresses categories, embodying much of what has been called the postmodern condition. Thus rather than the dismissal of divorce as banal, vulgar, and not worthy of the attention of the “best” American writers, it seems time to reassess divorce and the American novel, and this study aims to encourage such reassessment.

CHAPTER TWO The “Enormous Fact” of American Life

Divorce in William Dean Howells’s A Modern Instance “We all know what an enormous fact it is in American life,” wrote William Dean Howells of divorce, the subject of his 1881 novel A Modern Instance in a letter to his editor James R.Osgood.1 Such “facts” are a crucial element of Howells’s call to realism in his editorials, written during the 1880s and collected in 1892 for Criticism and Fiction: “When realism…heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish too. Every true realist instinctively knows this, and it is perhaps the reason why he is careful of every fact, and feels himself bound to express or to indicate its meaning at the risk of over-moralizing.”2 Howells’s interest in the fact of divorce then reflects central tenets of his vision of the duty of the writer in postbellum America: the social and moral necessity of realism, the depiction of a distinctly American life, and, consequently, the creation of a distinctly American tradition of literary realism. In comparison to romance, which looks at life as it might be, or sentimentalism, which looks at life as it ought to be, realism, says Howells, looks at life as it is. After the Civil War, in which the United States was threatened with the divorce of the nation itself, many writers, historians, and artists sought still more actively to create an American tradition, indicative of a desire to reunite the nation by giving it a national character. Thus, divorce has poignant figurative and literal meanings in American culture. Howells emphasizes the political and personal force of the word “divorce” when he writes that divorce is not only an enormous fact in American life but a theme he considers “only less intense and pathetic than slavery.”3 In his hyperbolic comparison of the theme of divorce with slavery, Howells invokes the horrific tension which sparked the Civil War and makes the awareness of divorce “only less” central to American history and, thus, to an American identity, than the awareness of slavery and the Civil War. In this chapter, I shall explore Howells’s quest for America, to use Olov Fryckstedt’s terms,4 through his portrayal of divorce in A Modern In-stance. Howells uses divorce to demonstrate his advocacy of an American realism as a corrective to popular sentimental and romantic fiction and scandal-hungry journalism. Emphasizing the moral purpose guiding his advocacy of realism, Howells employs a series of figures that demonstrate the association of divorce with America, specifically the profession of writing, the house, technology, and the American West. Finally, although Howells sets out to deal with

The “Enormous Fact” of American Life

23

divorce, he is unable to do so in a way most critics find successful; however, I suggest that, as Howells demonstrates, divorce disrupts many readerly, and perhaps writerly, expectations. In doing so, divorce then may be more subversive to literary form than is usually acknowledged by critics because it disrupts form and defies categorization. Howells ultimately casts divorce as American, foreshadowing the worst aspects of what the modern American social character may become: fragmented, self-absorbed or selfreferential, and nihilistic. However, these same terms applied to literary form anticipate modernist and postmodernist explorations into the making of form and meaning that many subsequent divorce novelists, such as Wharton, McCarthy, and Updike, exploit.

AN AMERICAN FORM Responding to Matthew Arnold’s complaint that he found no “distinction,” a quality he considered vital to elevated civilization, in American life,5 Howells writes that an artist who can “catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face, need not fear the encounter, though it seems terrible to the sort nurtured in the superstition of the romance, the bizarre, the heroic, the distinguished, as the things alone worthy of painting or carving or writing.”6 Howells sought to redress this problem of superstition with realism, creating an “American” realism that could deal with the issues of his contemporary America by realistic portrayals of American manners.7 One of his first major attempts to study American manners is the novel A Modern Instance, it is also the first treatment of divorce by a canonical author.8 Most critics read Howells’s attempts to define realism as a response to changes taking place in post-Civil War America, specifically the expansion of industrial capitalism. In late nineteenth-century America, as Daniel Borus demonstrates, the prospects and perceptions of writers changed significantly. Writing itself became an industry and writers, perhaps none more than Howells, strove to create and define writing as a profession, rather than an art.9 This transformation into the “profession” of writing was due in part to changing perceptions of the American reading audience. Borus traces numerous causes and reflections of increasing literacy after the Civil War, including increased production of literary commodities, state support for free public libraries, and increased enrollment in schools.10 The expansion of the reading audience increased the sense of distance between author and audience. According to Borus, “the deepest root of the late nineteenth-century reading explosion was a transformation from community relations to ones in which strangers figured prominently. New information, new curiosities, and new needs to control all contributed their part.”11 One of the results of this transformation was a heightened awareness of the role of the novelist in the creation of a national identity.12 Not only was the writer a professional but a professional with a duty toward the building of the national conscience. Another consequence, argues Borus, is that due to this increased distance Howells casts the audience as passive, and particularly susceptible to bad reading.13 Thus Howells decries the effects of romanticism: “it must still be owned that the ‘gaudy hero and heroine’ are to blame for a great deal of harm in the world. That heroine long taught by example, if not precept, that Love, or the passion or fancy she mistook it for, was the chief interest of a life, which is really concerned with a great many other things.”14 The

Love American style

24

negative effects, writes Howells, can be easily measured “in the case of young men whose character they help so much to form or deform, and the women of all ages whom they keep so much in ignorance of the world they misrepresent.”15 Thus, as Alfred Habegger among others argues, for Howells the writer has a masculine, patriarchal duty toward his youthful and feminized audience; he must save and protect it from the misleading romantic ideas of popular novels.16 Howells makes the responsibility of the writer a central theme in A Modern Instance through his protagonist Bartley Hubbard. An editor and writer for newspapers, Bartley lacks all sense of responsibility as a writer. Good writing for Bartley is writing that sells. Bartley’s irresponsibility is juxtaposed with other writerly types in the novel, including Ben Halleck, Kinney, his editors Ricker and Witherby, and Atherton, most of whom have a much higher sense of morality. The problem Howells depicts is that although these other writers have a higher sense of moral responsibility, they are at times paralyzed by the modern moral dilemmas and scandals, such as divorce. In contrast, Bartley thinks he can use such scandals, including divorce, to his benefit, both in his writing and his life. Thus, although some critics, such as Joseph Allen Boone, have considered Bartley’s failures those of an individual rather than a type,17 Bartley’s moral shortcomings in both his marriage and his career are intimately related. Rather than creating one flawed character, Howells suggests a flawed type, the irresponsible writer of the popular presses, and it was against this type that Howells sought to distinguish his own career as a writer aware of his duty toward his audience. As Amy Kaplan has demonstrated, Howells draws a fairly explicit parallel between Bartley’s responsibility as a writer and editor and his responsibility as a husband, or at least a fiance.18 In the opening scene of the novel, in which we first witness Bartley’s and Marcia’s courtship, Howells depicts Bartley as a sort of editor or educator and Marcia as his audience, from whom he aims to draw a particular response. Pulling books from a table in the parlor, Bartley ridicules them, but such ridicule only entices Marcia, making her appreciate when he finally selects a poem worthy of reading.19 Marcia not only finds what she views as Bartley’s intellectual prowess attractive but she values it over her own. Marcia looks to him for interpretation of romantic poetry (MI, 7). After instructing Marcia in reading, Bartley instructs her in writing and the instruction becomes more directive and physical. Inviting Marcia for a sleigh ride the following Sunday, he tells her he shall put in writing her request for his advice. Bartley demands that Marcia answer in writing. Marcia plays along, coyly writing “No.” Bartley ignores and rewrites her answer: “This is very nice. But you haven’t spelled it correctly. Anybody would say this was No, to look at it; and you meant to write Yes. Take the pencil in your hand, Miss Gaylord, and I will steady your trembling nerves, so that you can form the characters. Stop! At the slightest resistance on your part, I will call out and alarm the house; or I will” (MI, 9). Howells then describes how Bartley takes her “soft fist” into his own and “changed the word, while she submitted, helpless with her smothered laughter” (MI, 9). This physically coerced revision continues as Bartley forces Marcia to sign the letter “Yours” (MI, 9). There is of course no real physical threat here, nor any real education. In fact the whole flirtation is a parody of the role of the instructor and editor. Both Marcia and Bartley use the hierarchy embedded in the teacher-student relationship as a vehicle to express their mutual sexual attraction, thus suggesting a hierarchical sexual relationship as well. Howells’s conflation of interpretation, response, writing, and

The “Enormous Fact” of American Life

25

sexual relations in this opening courtship scene highlights the educative and masculine responsibility Bartley, as a writer and editor, should play. Bartley’s frivolity in this role seems harmless flirtation; however, Howells suggests that it is his very frivolity, and ultimately by extension, the frivolity of the popular presses that causes Bartley to shirk his roles as writer, editor, and husband. Howells emphasizes Marcia’s role as a part of the audience by depicting her as an extremely sentimental young woman, who has given too much to her beloved, and thus is in need of the protection of the dutiful author. Howells consistently portrays Marcia as unrealistic and subject to emotional delusions, suggestive of popular romantic heroines. Her romantic sensibilities are what attract her to Bartley, who is in her eyes the suave, urban, fashionable, and college-educated stranger (MI, 49). Even more suggestive that Marcia is under the influence of sentimental popular novels is her jealousy. Although many critics, including Boone, read Marcia’s jealousy as simply her personal failure or distinct character flaw,20 there is evidence to suggest that her jealousy, even if an inherent flaw, has been fanned by popular literature. Commenting on Marcia’s unbalanced love for Bartley, Howells, in a narrative aside, writes: The spectacle of a love affair in which the woman gives more of her heart than the man gives of his is so pitiable that we are apt to attribute a kind of merit to her, as if it were a voluntary self-sacrifice for her to love more than her share. Not only other men, but other women, look on with this canonizing compassion; for women have a lively power of imagining themselves in the place of any sister who suffers in matters of sentiment, and are eager to espouse the common cause in commiserating her (MI, 48). Although Howells does not directly refer to popular literature, his description of this selfsacrificing woman is certainly suggestive of literary heroines. The language he uses, words such as “imagining” and “canonizing” and “sentiment,” are words we have come to associate with literature and the creation of cultural myths. This passage could easily describe what Howells views as the female response to the sentimental heroine. Howells then portrays Marcia as a woman trying to live up to such a literary idea, which in practice leads Marcia to be ridiculously jealous. Her idealization of Bartley and her own sense of sacrifice also lead to her disappointment in their marriage and subsequent collapse in divorce. For although Marica herself never gives up her illusions and expectations about marriage, her jealous anger is what causes Bartley to leave (MI, 275). Thus, Howells suggests a connection between the expectations encouraged by popular literature and the rising disappointment in marriage, which consequently increased the divorce rate.21 The aim of realism then is to curb such dangerous expectations by exposing and commenting on marriage and divorce as they really are in America, and not to amplify expectations or valorize passionate suffering. Bartley fails at his duties. A parallel lesson in interpretation occurs between Atherton, the Boston lawyer who becomes the moral center of the novel, and Ben Halleck, Bartley’s wealthy Bostonite college friend. A few years older and well established as a lawyer, Atherton takes on the role of the explicator for Halleck. In contrast to Bartley, Atherton does not approach

Love American style

26

interpretation lightly. Trained in the interpretation of law, Atherton realizes its moral significance. Howells explicitly links Atherton’s profession and literature. When Halleck comes to Atherton for advice about his relationship with the Hub-bards, he comes upon Atherton at “the hour of the night…when a lawyer permits himself a novel” (MI, 225). While Howells suggests that novel reading provided a leisurely, and habitual, break for lawyers, he also suggests that Atherton reads novels as carefully as he does law. Halleck has come to ask Atherton how he should react to Marcia Hubbard, whom he thought he had humiliated unintentionally and unavoidably by rescuing a drunken Bartley from the police and bringing him home. Halleck is particularly perplexed because Marcia does not seem the slightest bit embarrassed the next time they meet, and thus asks Atherton “Shouldn’t you expect her to make you pay somehow for your privity to her disgrace, to revenge her misery upon you? Isn’t there a theory that women forgive injuries, but never ignominies?” (MI, 225). Atherton replies, “That’s what the novelists teach, and we bachelors get most of our doctrine about women from them” (MI, 225). He then closes the novel he has been reading and continues, “We don’t go to nature for our impressions; but neither do the novelists, for that matter. Now and then, however, in the way of business, I get a glimpse of realities that make me doubt my prophets” (MI, 225–26). Not only does Atherton describe the novelists’ function as instructive but he distinguishes what the novelists teach from the “realities” of his own experience. Similarly, in Criticism and Fiction Howells writes that romanticism has “exhausted itself” and that it remains “for realism to assert that fidelity to experience and probability of motive are essential conditions of a great imaginative literature.”22 By putting the novel aside, Atherton suggests that it teaches vain and sentimental lessons and that Atherton means to revise or correct these lessons for Halleck, who seems entirely under the novelists’ influence. In turn what Howells suggests by portraying the lawyer Atherton as the corrective reader in the novel is that more novelists should perhaps model themselves on Atherton rather than on other popular novelists. And novelists should test their theories in the “realities” of their observations of experience and not just rely on romantic, sentimental, and fictional convention. Such a “reality-based” fiction is thus the foundation of the American realism Howells advocates. This scene between Atherton and Halleck also reinforces and complicates the gender hierarchies undergirding the interpretation Howells introduces in the previous reading scene between Hartley and Marcia. Atherton offers numerous possible “readings” of the situation, continually testing his theories against the “realities” of this particular case. Halleck is not convinced by any of these theories, all of which tend to ennoble Marica by depicting her as either a magnanimous or obtuse victim, or the patient wife of a drunk (MI, 227–28). However, when Atherton suggests a theory less favorable to Marcia, that Marcia is using her forgiveness of Bartley’s drunken escapade as a sort of weapon in domestic warfare, Halleck ardently defends his romantic notions of female suffering, arguing that women cannot act as basely as men (MI, 228). Atherton points out that Halleck’s theory is a false double standard that does not reflect the cases he has observed, and then Atherton extends his theory to suggest that Marcia probably provoked Bartley’s binge. Both Atherton and Halleck realize that Halleck is making more of Bartley’s indiscretion than either Bartley or Marcia because of his romantic theories. Thus Atherton comments that he is sorry Halleck has had to experience it. Halleck cannot stand Atherton’s pity: “Am I a nervous woman, that I must be kept from the unpleasant

The “Enormous Fact” of American Life

27

sights and disagreeable experiences? If there’s anything of the man about me, you insult it!” (MI, 228). Halleck’s offense is based in the notion that there is some feminine audience out there who must be protected from certain realities and that it is a masculine duty to protect them. Atherton has thus compromised Halleck’s masculinity by suggesting that he is included in this vulnerable, feminine audience, while Marcia finds her femininity reinforced by Bartley’s instructive, if frivolous, lessons of interpretation. This sense of the duty of the writer to protect and educate his audience is enmeshed in gender ideology. While the role of protector and educator is certainly parental, Howells sought to emphasize the paternal, and thus professional aspects of authorship in order to distinguish himself from the popular women writers of his day. Michael Davitt Bell, among many critics, argues that gender and professional anxieties motivated Howells’s theories of literature: “The problem, for Howells as for many of his contemporaries and successors, was that the ‘artist’ was by accepted definition not a ‘real’ man.”23 A parallel sentiment is evident in A Modern Instance. Throughout the novel Howells juxtaposes the “real” profession of law, through the characters of Squire Gaylord and Atherton, both of whom are lawyers, with various types of writers, including Hartley the newspaperman, Halleck the romantic poet, and Kinney the Emersonian philosopher. Just after Marcia and Hartley are officially engaged, Squire Gaylord, a lawyer and Marcia’s father, tells his wife that Hartley had “better give up his paper and go into the law. He’s done well in the paper, and he’s a smart writer; but editing a newspaper aint any work for a man. It’s all well enough as long as he’s single, but when he’s got a wife to look after, he’d better get down to work.”24 Gaylord links a man’s profession with his marital status, making both measures of masculinity. While Gaylord only refers to newspaper writing, the failures of Halleck and Kinney, both of whom remain unpublished writers and bachelors, suggest that more artistic and philosophic writing provides no more virile a profession. The lawyers in the novel, both of whom marry and remain so, should thus represent paragons of masculinity. Hartley, then, as a published and thus more “professional” writer, who constantly talks about going into law, hovers somewhere in between. Further, as a man who both marries and divorces in the course of the novel, his marital status reflects his ambiguous professional status and his ambiguous masculinity. Habegger argues that in addition to fearing that the writer was not masculine enough Howells was suspicious of masculinity. Habegger contends that the American man lived with incompatible expectations of being the good boy, responsible to his family and community, and the bad boy, brave and responsible mostly to himself.25 Howells, argues Habegger, was especially sensitive to the doubleness of gender expectations: “As a matter of fact, it seems that, because masculinity had come to signify a certain kind of jaunty aggression, Howells was fundamentally uncertain whether it was right to be a man.”26 Such a jaunty aggression characterizes Hartley Hubbard. With Hubbard, Habegger claims Howells comes the closest, prior to Dreiser, to representing the true American man.27 While it is doubtful there is any such thing as the true American man, the phrase is intriguing because once again, a critic is seeking to define some peculiarly American ideal, and this Americanness is embodied in a character who gets divorced. Bartley’s masculinity is shaped by contrasting images of “American” masculinity in other characters, particularly, Ben Halleck and Kinney.28 Both Halleck and Kinney are types of “American” men. Halleck is a figure of the settled old world of the East. Kinney is a figure of the frontier new world of the West. In contrast to Bartley, neither Halleck

Love American style

28

nor Kinney marry in the course of the novel. Although Howells does not explicitly make them artists, both characters have an artistic sensibility. Howells also portrays them both as ineffective, emasculated men of ideals. Halleck exudes something of a romantic, oldworld, European gentility, which has no power in modern America. Kinney embodies romantic American Emersonian idealism, which Howells suggests is also dated in modern America. Kaplan has noted what many critics have called a retreat into genteel values at the end of the novel in Howells’s focus on Ben Halleck.29 Ben is representative not only of the failure of those genteel values but also of the limitations of European literary romanticism. In the first scene in which we see Halleck, he has just returned from years in Europe and he quotes Wordsworth (MI, 169). Yet, Halleck’s most romantic notions are his views of women and marriage and his love for Marcia Hubbard. Years before he had actually met Marcia, Halleck had taken a picture of her on the street when she visited Boston and sent the picture home to his sister Olive, having marked the picture “My Lost Love” (MI, 166). Olive later teases him, “You don’t want to marry any of those girls as long as your heart’s set on that unknown charmer of yours” (MI, 166). The photo is a token of his ideal woman, ideal not only because of her beauty but because she was pure image, unattainable and unknowable. Halleck casts himself as the romantic lover described by Denis de Rougemont: “Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by the life itself. What stirs lyrical poets to their final flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering.”30 When Marcia becomes a material reality as Bartley Hubbard’s wife, Halleck burns the photograph (MI, 240). “There is something in a young man’s ideal of women, at once passionate and ascetic, so fine that any words are too gross for it,” writes the narrator in describing Halleck’s love for Marcia (MI, 197). Not even words can serve the “artistry” with which Halleck conceives of Marcia. Revering Ben as more of a brother than a lover, Marcia is never aware of Ben’s suffering, nor does she appear to return his affection. Howells’s manipulation of the myth of the ideal woman parodies the gentility of Halleck’s romantic idealism. Finally, Halleck’s unrequited passion for Marcia not only seems melodramatic but also renders him incapable of action and unsure of his own morality, effectively emasculating him. Atherton, the voice of law and, arguably, the voice nearest to Howells’s own, even accuses Halleck of talking like a woman (MI, 332). The Emersonian masculine ideal does not fare much better in A Modern Instance. Although Kinney, the woodsman cook, may be more sympathetic and charming than Halleck, Howells still depicts him as an ineffective, old bachelor. Kinney has led the life of a romantic hero, but has been domesticated without even being married (MI, 80). As Kinney shows Hartley around his cabin, he leads him into the parlor and kitchen, traditionally feminine spaces: “This is where I compose my favorite works,” Kinney tells Bartley, “That means pie, Mr. Hubbard” (MI, 83). Joel Porte has written a detailed and intriguing analysis of pie in A Modern Instance, tracing the Emersonian idealism of pie as a symbol of provincial American classlessness and community; eating pie can bring the high and the low together.31 Yet however appealing Kinney’s ideals are, they are more endearing than potent. Not only do we see little proof of Kinney’s theories about pie and tea as brain food, but the woodsmen themselves do not seem to appreciate his ideals, wanting donuts and not his health food; he is forced to leave the camp, suggesting his

The “Enormous Fact” of American Life

29

ideals are outdated and ineffective (MI, 248). Further the final image of Kinney is extremely maternal and yet impotent. In his last scene Kinney is feeding an emigrant woman and her children some coffee, still expounding his theories, though none of them can understand him because they do not speak English (MI, 345). Like Halleck’s ideals, Kinney’s are impotent and feminized; they lack the force of the dynamo era. Prior to Kinney’s revelation of his pie theory, we have already witnessed the indigestion pie has caused Bartley (MI, 17). Nonetheless, Bartley humors Kinney’s assertions. Thus, Howells not only undermines Kinney’s ideals, and hence those of Emerson, by making them the object of Bartley’s laughter, but suggests that his ideals have been ingested by Bartley but have turned sour.32 Hence, Emersonianism has been perverted in modern American man, who has taken the premises of self-reliance and used them only for his own benefit. “Emotionally and economically,” writes Habegger, “Bartley is a grotesque parody of self-reliance.”33 Further, this indigestion is what leads Bartley to propose to Marcia Gaylord in the first place, perhaps suggesting that Bartley still feels some discomfort at the isolation his self-absorption costs him. He goes to the Gaylord house for feminine comfort and ends up agreeing that he and Marcia are engaged (MI, 27–31). His self-absorption has in effect made him passive and effeminate, not even fulfilling the masculine duty of proposing. Ultimately, their marriage ends in divorce, suggesting that Bartley’s perversion of Emersonian ideals leads to solipsism and the isolation of the individual, to a fragmented society rather than a communal one. Bartley’s narcissistic approach to marriage mirrors his approach to his career. Bartley’s journalism represents the worst aspects of realism, such as the reduction of issues to spectacle, and appeals to marketability, as these aspects begin to appear in the mass journalism of postbellum America.34 Howells paints Bartley as a perversion of the ideal American writer, in that he writes solely for profit and not for aesthetics or edification.35 An opportunist, Bartley lacks a moral, theoretical framework around which to struc-ture his journalism. Thus Howells implies that Hartley approaches writing and publishing with a market mentality that is reactive rather than prescriptive. Bartley does not search for material that he believes needs to be covered from any sort of social or moral standpoint. Rather he lets his interpretation of the market and the whim of events— as suggested by the title of the newspaper. The Events, at which he gets a steady job— guide his selection. For example, Bartley’s awareness of the popular interest in the shipbuilding market enables him to sell his first article on logging camps to a Boston newspaper (MI, 129). Like Wharton’s trend-savvy Undine Spragg, Bartley always has his eye out for what’s new, and hence news worthy, creating the illusion that he is producing the news when he really seems to be the first to the table, the first to consume it. Further, Howells parallels Bartley’s professional opportunism and consumerism with his marriage, which is equally reactive. Bartley only asks Marcia to marry him the first time because Marcia pushes for it, then breaks off the engagement because Marcia wishes it. Finally, they marry only because Marcia has come running after him. A few minutes before, Bartley was wishing ill on all women simply because Marcia has made things difficult for him (MI, 104). In their haste to take advantage of the moment and be married, they forgo the legal document declaring their intent (MI, 257). Instead, Bartley offers the minister who “seemed quite dazed at the suddenness of their demand” and notes that something, meaning the legal declaration of intent to marry, is missing (MI, 107). Bartley offers him a bribe of five dollars instead, though the minister runs the risk

Love American style

30

of a sixty-dollar fee (MI, 107, 257). Bartley’s bribery commodifies the ceremony, making it, as Marcia notes, “tainted with fraud from the beginning” (MI, 257). Their lack of intent to marry is similar to Bartley’s lack of purpose in his writing. Both suggest Bartley’s reactive opportunism, in which convenience and money are the primary motivations. With Bartley’s indigestion from eating too much pie, Howells has foreshadowed Bartley’s proclivity to consume. In contrast Atherton advocates realism not for sales, as Bartley does, but for edification. Howells demonstrates this contrast through Atherton’s commentary upon divorce. When Halleck contends that a marriage such as the Hubbards’ “where selfrespect perishes with resentment, and the husband and wife are enslaved to each other” ought “to be broken up!,” Atherton replies, “I don’t think so…. The sort of men and women that marriage enslaves would be vastly more wretched and mischievous if they were set free. I believe that the hell people make for themselves isn’t at all a bad place for them. It’s the best place for them” (MI, 229). Atherton’s conviction that unhappily married couples ought to remain married does not seem simply didactic nor does it seem based on religious beliefs. Rather Atherton suggests that couples should not get divorced because they need to confront and deal with the realities of their marriage, even if that marriage is a hell. To divorce is to give in to romantic notions of an ideal mar-riage, or what one wants a marriage to be for selfish reasons. As a realist, Atherton sees the social function of marriage, and not just the romantic one. Again Ho wells gives Atherton the voice of realism, as the narrator describes the effects of Atherton’s theories on Halleck after he departs angrily. Going out of his way to pass by the Hubbards’ house on his way home, Halleck “wished to rehabilitate in its pathetic beauty the image which his friend’s conjectures had jarred, distorted, insulted; and he lingered for a moment before the door where this vision had claimed his pity for anguish that no after serenity could repudiate” (MI, 230). Despite his desire, Halleck is unable to resuscitate his romantic illusions. Atherton’s morally grounded realism has begun to break down Halleck’s ideals. Nevertheless, although Howells seems to be characterizing Atherton as the voice of morality and realism in this novel, even his masculinity and responsibility finally come in to question, as will be illustrated by the end of the novel, in the face of the type of man Bartley represents, a foreshadowing of the worst of what the American man and the American writer might become. Bartley Hubbard’s rising career and his marriage to Marcia comprise the focus of the first two thirds of the novel; however, Howells seems much less interested in Bartley after he loses his job and his marriage. No longer do we hear of Bartley’s struggles and development; instead, the focus shifts to Halleck and Atherton. Many critics consider this shift in A Modern Instance a failure. Kaplan offers an intriguing reason: When Hubbard loses his job and leaves his wife, he abandons the moorings of character and is banished from the novel, from the direct realism of realistic representation. Howells cannot make this suddenly anonymous figure, divorced from the institutions of domesticity and work, the focus for his representation…. Bartley’s decision to leave his wife takes him outside the structures of character and beyond the pale of representation.36

The “Enormous Fact” of American Life

31

The idea that Howells is uninterested, or has grown bored, in representing Bartley once he has divorced his wife complicates his own theory of realism. Severed from the realms of “domesticity and work” that characterize the realist novel, Bartley runs the risk of becoming the “gaudy” demoralized hero Howells believed he needed to protect his audience against. It is as if there is no place for Bartley in the novel as Howells has defined it. Yet, there is no place for him in romance either. For although Kaplan compares Bartley to Huck Finn in that they both have to leave the structures of domesticity, Mark Twain does eventually accommodate Huck Finn and present him in his own romance. Bartley gets no such representation. Bartley, however, becomes a forerunner of other divorced male characters, such as F.Scott Fitzgerald’s Dick Diver, and John Updike’s Piet Henema. In his portrayal of Bartley, Howells suggests a new type of American male, a self-absorbed protagonist who has neither a place in the woods nor a place in the house of marriage, nor a place yet in his American realist novel.

ABANDONING THE HOUSE OF MARRIAGE From a sociological and legal perspective, property, specifically the house, of course, plays a pivotal role in the process of divorce. Not only was desertion, which in its simplest terms is abandoning house and spouse, one of the only legal grounds for divorce in many states until the no-fault divorce legislation of the 1970s but it is often the center of legal wrangling once a divorce has begun. One poignant, if rather violent, recent example is the case of George Brooks, who, angry that he was ordered by the court to give his wife temporary possession of their home, “used a backhoe to knock down the back wall,” enacting the destruction of the divorce upon the physical symbol of the house.37 Similarly, in many novels, the house takes on a narrative or symbolic function that is key to designating form. In the romance tradition, the house is often a place of suffocation, a concentrated symbol of the bonds of civilization. The romance often tells stories that occur outside the house in nature, stories of the mobility of the individual, of adventures through the woods or sea, of transience and deracination. In contrast, in the novel of manners, the house is often the central location of the drama, reflective of the values of the civilization. The traditional plot of the novel of manners is that of the comedy; the heroine gets married at the end. Thus, the novel works toward marriage as its goal. Both the house and marriage frame the traditional novel of manners. However, as Howells illustrates, divorce complicates this standard symbology of the house, exiling the couple from the house and denying them the end the novel of manners often works toward. The house does become suffocating in the divorce novel, yet this expulsion is not as liberating as it often is in the romance. Rather there is a sense of loss and deracination. By emphasizing the ambivalence of a house that reflects both the novel of manners’s value of marriage and the romance’s value of individual freedom, Howells suggests that divorce, too, is ambivalent, at once realistic and romantic. The house is also central, as Mark Wigley has demonstrated, to western ideologies of marriage. Wigley writes, “Marriage is the reason for building a house. The house appears to make a space for the institution. But marriage is already spatial. It cannot be thought outside the house that is its condition of possibility before its space.”38 Analyzing Renaissance architectural theory, Wigley demonstrates how domestic architecture

Love American style

32

reinforces the hierarchized gender roles of traditional marriage. Wigley’s argument illuminates nineteenth-century houses as well. For example, in the upper-class house of nineteenth-century America, its very architecture reflects the institution of marriage, from the gendered designation of the drawing room as feminine to the designation of the study as masculine, as well as the servants’ quarters’ marking class.39 Architecture also reflects the mar-riage customs of a given culture. Tony Tanner, citing Vico, relates the formation of nations, marriage, and the house explicitly: “More generally, marriage is connected to the emergence of man’s ability to establish boundaries, which again is what distinguishes the human from the prehuman…. On these boundaries were to be fixed the confines first of families, then of gentes or houses, later of people, and finally of nations.”40 With the establishment of houses comes the establishment of private property, the ownership of which becomes integral to national identity. These boundaries established with property are ideological as well as physical, boundaries that define gender, ethnicity, class, and nationality. To build a house is also to build an identity on many levels. In the nineteenth-century American novel, such tensions are apparent in contrasting portraits of domesticity. The house often enfeebles the masculinity of the American male or, in opposition it is the sanctuary of republican motherhood. In her history of domesticity in the United States, Glenna Matthews describes a growing polarity between the gender roles played in the home during the period after the American Revolution. A new valorization of the home, wife, and mother develops: “If citizens must learn to place a high value on the public interest, this was a lesson they would need to begin in childhood…. The home in effect gained a function so political that the domestic sphere could influence the outcome of history.”41 The power of this ideology is demonstrated by the success and political influence of such novels as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The frugality and order of one’s home was not only political but nationalistic. Gwendolyn Wright in Building the Dream offers a history of the very deliberate way in which housing reflects ideals in various periods and regions of America, beginning with the Puritans and arguing for an American exceptionalism: Those who sought a new social order, whether they were radical orators or enterprising capitalists, have argued that American culture was malleable, in part because the physical environment of previous generations was less of a constraint than it had been in other countries. They contended that new models for housing, even more than improved factories or institutional buildings, would provide the proper setting for a great nation.42 Wright then demonstrates how the physical spaces of houses in regions of America are built to reflect the values of a given culture. For example, in New England, argues Wright, “Architecture aided the delicate duties of self-control and constant industriousness” so integral to the Puritan way of life because of the prominence of the communal space of the hall, where everyone could keep an eye on everyone else.43 The grandeur of a Southern plantation, with its big house and slave quarters, is perhaps an even more obvious example of how domestic architecture reinforces the ideology of a culture. In addition to regional characteristics, there is a national consciousness in the

The “Enormous Fact” of American Life

33

building of the house. Matthews summarizes Andrew Jackson Downing’s book The Architecture of Country Houses, which sold 16,000 copies by the end of the Civil War: “every American dwelling could represent the ‘home of a virtuous citizen.’”44 Thus the house is understandably a heavily weighted metaphor, signifying, among other things, much of what constitutes “identity.” Repeatedly, as in The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells uses houses in his novels to reflect the identity of the married couples who live in them.45 The first marriage he portrays in A Modern Instance is that of the Gaylords, a wellestablished but alienated old couple living in northern Maine. As Allen Stein has argued, the Gaylords’ marriage exemplifies nineteenth-century domestic ideals gone awry.46 The house completely engulfs both spouses. Squire Gaylord has moved his office into a study adjacent to the house. The space between the house and the study might be small, but it is definite, reflecting Squire Gaylord’s isolation from family life as well as from public life: A man is master of his own house generally through the exercise of a certain degree of brutality, but Squire Gaylord maintained his predominance by an enlightened absenteeism. No man living always at home was ever so little under his own roof. While he was more active in business life, he had kept an office in the heart of the village, where he spent all his days, and a great part of every night; but after he became rich enough to risk whatever loss of business the change might involve, he bought this large square house on the border of the village, and thenceforth made his home in the little detached office. (MI, 38–39) Squire Gaylord, as his feudal title and name suggest, attempts to revert nominally to a feudal mode of living, if not in practice. By shifting the center of his business back to his domain, Squire Gaylord shifts power back to his domain, making people come to him. Appropriately, then, Mrs. Gaylord has given all authority to her husband. She has sacrificed everything, including her dedication to her church: “Her life was silenced in every way, and, as often happens with aging wives in country towns, she seldom went out of her own door, and never appeared at the social or public solemnities of the village” (MI, 26). Their marriage also regresses from the idealized companionate marriage of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, as described by Matthews and Boone, to one in which the male is the sole hierarchical authority. The house symbolizes Mrs. Gaylord’s acceptance of her role as a silent, passive wife, as well as Mr. Gaylord’s dominance. Howells also contrasts the Gaylord marriage and house with the more successful marriage of the Hallecks. Their home not only reflects their solid citizenship, but their solid marriage and their continuing faith and dedication to the church (MI, 163–4). The Hallecks, the moral touchstones of the novel, have remained in their house for thirty years, even though Rumford Street is no longer so desirable, fashion having left them “high and dry” (MI, 162). Nonetheless, the narrator writes, “Rumford Street is one of those old-fashioned thoroughfares at the West End of Boston, which are now almost wholly abandoned to boarding-houses of the poorer class. Yet they are charming streets, quiet, clean, and respectable, and worthy still to be the homes, as they once were, of solid citizens” (MI, 163). The modern city has passed the Hallecks by. Similarly, the interior decor is described as out of date and “hideous”: “The old people thought it all beautiful,

Love American style

34

and those daughters who had come into the new house as little girls revered it; but Ben and his youngest sister, who had been born in the house, used the right of children of their parents’ declining years to laugh at it. Yet they laughed with a sort of filial tenderness” (MI, 165). Although, as many critics have argued, Howells appears to be offering the Hallecks as an alternative to the bad marriages of the Gaylords and Hubbards, he also seems to suggest that such marriages are out of date, unable to function and propagate as the ideal family should. Like their unfashionable but respectable address, the Hallecks, moral touchstones though they may be, seem helpless against the forces of modernity. Their youngest children, born in the house that is the symbol of both their marriage and their capitalist success, are, in contrast, not as successful in either marriage or the market as their parents. When he hears that Bartley is married, Mr. Halleck laments that his son Ben is not yet married (MI, 163). Olive, the younger sister, is no more of a success. She is not fashionable nor, apparently, marriageable (MI, 165). The youngest Halleck offspring are ultimately less fruitful and as isolated as the Gaylord’s Marcia and the orphaned Bartley Hubbard. Thus, although many critics have taken the Hallecks as the ideal of marriage in A Modern Instance, the final image of this model is rather bleak. Like the Emersonian idealism detailed by Kinney, their standard of marriage is endearing but dated, lacking the vigor to withstand the pressures of modern individualism. Critics also point to the Athertons’ marriage as a positive model in contrast to that of Marcia and Bartley. Because Atherton is both the executor of Clara’s estate and her social peer, their relationship is marked by a confusing blend of the professional and the personal. Although they attempt to keep their social relationship distinct from that of their business relationship, they fail to do so. This confusion both pulls them apart and brings them back together. Atherton says that he will take her business back only upon his conditions: “I can’t be subjected again to your—disappointments. …I’ve felt for a long time that this was no attitude for your attorney. You ought to have the right to question and censure; but I confess I can’t grant you this,” explains Atherton, concluding “If I take it back, you must come with it!” (MI, 310). Ellen Wright has argued that the Atherton’s marriage appears to be on equal footing from here on because Atherton discusses everything with Clara, including business.47 There also seems a genuine repartee in their discussions of morality, particularly discussions concerning the Hubbard divorce. Yet, Howells undercuts this equality, suggesting it is something of an illusion, like the house in which they live. After their marriage, they have to move to a new house: They had let Clara’s house on the hill, and she had bought another on the new land; she insisted upon the change, not only because everybody was leaving the hill, but also because, as she said, it would seem too much like taking Mr. Atherton to board, if they went to housekeeping where she had always lived; she wished to give him the effect before the world of having brought her to a house of his own. She had even furnished it anew for the most part, and had banished as far as possible the things that reminded her of the time when she was not his wife. He humored her in this fantastic self-indulgence, and philosophized her wish to give him the appearance of having the money, as something orderly in its origin, and not to be

The “Enormous Fact” of American Life

35

deprecated on other grounds, since probably it deceived nobody. (MI, 329–30) Both keep up pretenses and deliberately play gender roles, even though they do not necessarily believe in them themselves, nor are they sure the rest of the world does. This is not to say that Howells is totally deprecating their marriage by exposing such illusions, but he certainly qualifies it, suggesting that in practice, or tested against reality, there is no ideal marriage. In contrast, Marcia and Hartley are unable even to keep up the illusions of marriage roles: Marcia’s ideals are based on passion and possession and Hartley has no ideals at all. One central difference between the Hubbards and all of the other couples depicted in Howells’s novel is that the Hub-bards are the only couple who are forced to rent their home. And thus they are dependent upon other people, and well aware of the economics of the home. Their search for housing and the rented spaces they inhabit reflect the difficulties of their marriage.48 Much of this difficulty lies in the fact that they are a young married couple. The landladies tend to want single gentlemen because they give less trouble than wives (MI, 119). All they can afford to rent at first is a room without board, meaning there is no differentiated space, with its concomitant values of intimacy or privacy; there is no office or study for Hartley, certainly no drawing room, not even a kitchen for Marcia. Their first night in their new lodgings is the first night Marcia eats in a restaurant, and thus her first experience participating in a private domestic ritual is out in public (MI, 122). When they return to the boarding house, Marcia must stay downstairs and chat with the landlady because, as the landlady notes, she will just be in the way upstairs (MI, 124). When she does finally go to Hartley, she tells him she won’t say a word and curls up on the bed “near enough to put her hand on his shoulder if she wished” (MI, 126). With no kitchen, Marcia cannot cook; there is little to clean. She cannot even play her wifely duties in receiving guests (MI, 141). Thus, Marcia cannot fulfill her duties as a wife according to most nineteenth-century theories of domestic economy.49 The Hubbards eventually attempt to validate their marriage by renting a house of their own. After their first visit to the Hallecks’, Marcia decides she and Hartley really must rent a house, and Bartley concurs, “I don’t object to my own fireside. And I suppose we must.” (MI, 168). Bartley realizes the social pressure to conform to the standards of marriage, though he does so from the point of view of image rather than duty. The house seems to pull their marriage together for a while. Marcia is able to act as a wife and Bartley as a husband; they even have a child. They are able to have people over as well and are proud to show their marriage, as reflected in their house, to others. However, the fact that the house is rented emphasizes the real fragility of the Hubbards’ marriage. In the late nineteenth century, however, perceptions of domestic architecture are complicated because more and more people come to live in rented space as a result of industrial capitalism and urbanization. Thus, as Kaplan notes, there is a growing fascination for the realists, particularly Howells, in the depiction of rented space and hotels: “Rented spaces constitute a world filled with things neither known nor valued through well-worn contact, but cluttered instead with mass-produced furnishings and the unknown lives of strangers and their abandoned possessions, and valued through the measure of time and space as money.”50 The implication is that the values of class and gender, among other factors, associated with domestic architecture are no longer rooted

Love American style

36

in that architecture. As rented space, architecture becomes changeable, mobile, deracinated, as do the values upon which that space is built, if it even continues to be built with those values at all. The value of rented property is primarily monetary; it is not measured by the people who inhabit them and thus does not carry a stable identity, as does the Hallecks’ house. Thus rented space becomes mere commodity, reflecting the changeability and rapidity of modernity and the modern city itself. Like Henry Adams’s tailor adapting “the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron’s wants” in Adams’s illustration of the pitfalls of modernity, the individual or the family can change their house and their character. The marriages within these houses, then Howells suggests, are susceptible to divorce, and thus changeable. By the end of the novel, Bartley no longer even rents an apartment; he just pitches a tent (MI, 359). The Hubbards have thus tried on the roles of the ideal marriage, but they fail to fully realize these roles. Marcia’s resolve falters when she runs into Hannah Morrison, Bartley’s former printer’s assistant from Equity. Bartley’s flirtation with Hannah aroused Marcia’s jealously back in Equity, on their own street in Boston. Hannah tells Marcia to ask her husband how she came to be there. Hannah’s physical proximity to their house makes her rival’s question unbearable (MI, 275). The implication of adultery is too much for Marcia’s jealous nature. Bartley refuses to deny Marcia’s accusation of involvement with Hannah; he knows it won’t really help because Marcia wants to believe it. When asked what she will do, Marcia tells Hartley that she will never live with him again. Hartley retorts, “Very well. I doubt it, as far as you’re concerned; but if you go away now, you certainly won’t live with me again, for I shall not let you come back” (MI, 276). Hartley undercuts the severity of her threat by doubting her, and tries to assert dominance by countering with his own threat. Neither utters the word, but divorce is implied through the idea of not living together. Such a rupture of their domestic life constitutes divorce. Marcia responds, “it isn’t for what you won’t deny. I don’t believe that. It’s for what you’ve said now” (MI, 276). Thus, Marcia acknowledges that Bartley’s infidelity may be more a product of her jealous imagination than Bartley’s behavior. Further, she realizes that it is not really adultery that now threatens their marriage but the fact that he does not take their marriage seriously. The specter of divorce is what now threatens their marriage. Marcia takes their daughter and says good-bye. As she leaves, Hartley reminds her that if she goes, she cannot come back; however, “the outer door crashing to behind her was his answer” (MI, 276). So powerful a symbol of marriage is the house, that Howells does not need dialogue. The house speaks for itself. Their marriage has passed beyond the outer door of the house. The house continues to play a significant role after Hartley has abandoned Marcia. Atherton, who has become her lawyer through the Halleeks, insists that she must return to her father’s house. Atherton subscribes to the theory that marriage circulates women from fathers to husbands. When marriage fails, he views Marcia’s return to her father as the only logical option. On this point, Marcia adamantly disagrees: “He must find me here, in our house” (MI, 304). The voice of patriarchal law, Atherton insists that Marcia as a woman cannot remain alone in the house (MI, 304). If she does not return to her father’s house, then Atherton claims she must tell the Hallecks. Either way, Atherton expels Marcia from her house of marriage, either literally by forcing her to move back to her father’s or figuratively by exposure of her abandonment to the Hallecks. Marcia retorts, “I will never tell them!…. Let me go! I can starve there and freeze, and if he finds me

The “Enormous Fact” of American Life

37

dead in the house, none of them shall have the right to blame him—to say that he left me—that he deserted his little child!” (MI, 304). She wants to show the world that at least she held some ideals about their marriage, and the way to do this is to return to the house of their marriage, even if it is a rented house. Hartley too views his final argument with Marcia in terms of domesticity. Marcia’s outburst comes at a particularly vulnerable time for Hartley. Having lost not only his job but also the money he bet on the presidential election, Hartley has made up his mind to come clean. He could leave Boston and, if Marcia would forgive him, he could go back to Equity and become a lawyer (MI, 273). Planning to go to Halleck first and return the money, Hartley changes his mind, deciding, “he was willing to give himself the encouragement of Marcia’s pleasure, of her forgiveness and her praise in an affair that had its difficulties and would require all of his manful-ness” (MI, 274). In other words, Bartley, though his motivations may still be selfish, is looking for Marcia to play her role as wife, for in playing the wife she can give him the strength he needs to access “his manfulness.” However, Marcia is not at home and thus not playing her wifely role; her absence deflates Bartley’s resolve. When she does come in, visibly shaken, grabbing their daughter out of his arms, and accusing him of adultery, his resolve falls away completely: “The idiotic penitent that he had been a few moments ago, the soft, well-meaning dolt, was so far from him now as to be scarce within reach of his contempt” (MI, 275). Rather than manly, Bartley thinks of himself as effeminized, as “soft,” for wanting to play his role as a good husband. Thus Bartley gives up the role of a good husband and does not prevent Marcia from leaving. He even encourages her to do so by helping her button their daughter Flavia’s coat on her way out. Both Bartley and Marcia have completely failed in their roles as husband and wife and can no longer remain in the same house together. It is significant that until the middle of the twentieth century, desertion, the proof of which is the physical abandonment of the house, was the primary reason given for divorce. In fact, desertion along with adultery and extreme cruelty, which were difficult to prove, were the only legal grounds for divorce in most states at the end of the nineteenth century.51 If marriage and the house are integral to one another, as well as integral to establishing identity, then the effects of divorce upon that household are significant. They disrupt traditional notions of the role of marriage and identity in society, such as those of Atherton, who believes that the individual should sacrifice himself for the good of the community by remaining married. The idea of an essential or fixed identity is also disrupted by the increase of dwelling in rented spaces because rented space is changeable, and identity is thus protean. Divorce also troubles property relations by disrupting the orderly transfer of wealth (including the house) from one generation to the next. It seems appropriate then that Howells places the Hubbards in rented spaces, suggesting a connection between the transience of divorce and that of rented space. Mobility is one of the characteristics of the romance and modernity, but less so of the realistic, domestic novel. In the romance the action usually moves outside of the domestic sphere and of course domestic fiction takes place within. Romance is driven by the adventures of the unmarried, wandering hero; the domestic novel by the triumph of the heroine to retain order in her house and her husband. The divorce novel seems to make either one an impossibility; it is not at home in either category.

Love American style

38

INSIDE OUT Divorce also reflects Howells’s increasing concern about the popular press’s invasion of privacy in the late nineteenth century. Howells is not alone. Writing in The Harvard Law Review in 1890, Samuel D.Warren and Lewis D.Brandeis call for the need for legislation insuring the right to privacy: Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person and for securing to the individual what Judge Cooley calls the right ‘to be let alone.’ Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.’52 Warren and Brandeis could be describing Bartley Hubbard’s practice of journalism. In fact, the press’s invasion of a daughter’s wedding is the incident that prompted them to write this call to action. The institution of marriage itself marks one boundary between the public and private. On one level, a wedding is a very public ceremony and declaration, but it is a public declaration of a private relationship. It marks the end of public and chaperoned courtship. Weddings and divorces are, of course, common subjects of journalism such as Bartley’s. As Howells depicts it, divorce and scandal pages invite the outsider into the home, making a spectacle in court of what should remain private. Ironically Howells himself reveals the private dynamics of the dissolution of a marriage in A Modern Instance. From the beginning of the relationship, Howells portrays Bartley Hubbard and Marcia Gaylord as public spectacles. The novel opens with a street scene in Equity, which we as readers watch, along with the women who sit working at their windows on either side of the street. Like these town spectators, Howells turns our focus toward a cutter, a small horse-driven sleigh, moving down the street (MI, 2). This scene is important because it sets up the issue of boundaries between the public and the private surrounding courtship and marriage. Both Marcia and Bartley are public figures in some capacity, though in different ways. Marcia is public in that she both functions as a spectacle and is obsessed with spectacle. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen emphasizes the importance of the visibility of class, especially for the wife, who is supposed to represent the household’s standing: “the office of the woman [is] to consume vicariously for the head of the household; and her apparel is contrived with this object in view.”53 Marcia is continually described in terms of the image she impresses on others. Her beauty is a significant factor in Bartley’s decision to marry her (MI, 23). When Marcia first arrives in Boston with Bartley, however, she fears that she fails as a spectacle, that she is not impressive enough, and that failure is enough to make her fear that she has lost Bartley. Bartley responds sympathetically, “There wasn’t a woman in that room that could compare with you,— dress or looks” (Howells’s emphasis, p. 113). While Bartley may be distinguishing Marcia’s physical attributes from her clothes, he still fails to distinguish Marcia from the spectacle or image she projects.

The “Enormous Fact” of American Life

39

Bartley continues to exploit Marcia’s image as he uses the family: “It was rather Bartley’s ideal, as it is that of most young American fathers, to go out with his wife and baby in that way; he liked to have his friends see him; and he went out every afternoon he could spare” (MI, 195). The Hubbards’ leisurely and conspicuous afternoon strolls, to use Veblen’s terminology, are calculated. Similarly, Hartley seems indifferent to the idea of purchasing a house until he sees how fruitful it is to have others witness his domestic bliss. He is most in love with Marcia when others are looking at her, for example when Ben Halleck and Atherton first visit the Hubbards in their rented house and he and Marcia give them a tour of the house: “His heart swelled with satisfaction in Marcia; it was something like having fellows drop in upon you, and be asked out to supper in this easy way; it made Hartley feel good, and he would have liked to give Marcia a hug on the spot” (MI, 173). Marcia and Hartley are especially proud of the decor of the house, which illustrates Marcia’s ability to stretch dollars and be fashionable (MI, 173). Their house is as much a spectacle as their marriage; they show off the interior just as they show off their family walking through the park. Yet, Hartley pushes publicity beyond spectacle; he bases his career as a journalist on “spicy” stories that expose private issues to the public. From early in his career in Equity, Hartley is a public man: “He kept himself, from the beginning, pretty constantly in the popular eye” (MI, 19). Hartley uses his talent as a public man to further his career as a journalist. After Bartley’s initial successes with exposing the inner workings of the logging camp and an expose on the problems of boarding houses in Boston, he is hired at The Events. One of his first assignments is to take over the paper’s “Solid Men” series, in which prominent citizens are portrayed through intimate interviews, a new feature at the end of the nineteenth century.54 Bartley’s first assignment for the “Solid Men” series pushes the boundaries of public and private. As a college friend of Ben, the Halleck’s son, Bartley uses his familiarity to get Mr. Halleck, a prominent businessman, to trust him for an interview. Halleck initially thinks it will all be about leather, his industry. Bartley explains otherwise: “You may depend upon my not saying anything that will be disagreeable to you, Mr. Halleck…. We usually say something about the victim’s private residence, but I guess I’ll spare you that, Mr. Halleck” (MI, 162). As he says this Bartley slips his notebook back into his jacket, encouraging Mr. Halleck’s trust. Halleck responds, “You can say whatever you think best. There’s a good deal of talk about the intrusiveness of the newspapers; all I know is they’ve never intruded upon me. We shall not be afraid that you will abuse our house, Mr. Hubbard, because we expect you to come there again” (MI, 162). Bartley recognizes the threat underlying old-fashioned Halleck’s comment: if he abuses the rules of hospitality by public exposure, he will not be invited back to the house. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Halleck are offended by the interview or their portrayal in the newspaper; however, their daughter Olive is. Like Ben, Olive has grown up with more “refined” tastes than her parents and is more of a snob, but is also more sensitive to issues of propriety. Mr. and Mrs. Halleck do not seem to feel that their privacy has been invaded, as they have no reaction to the story. In fact they are impressed that a man as modern and fashionable as Hartley seems to them bothers to be kind enough to come visit “such plain folks as [they] are, whenever [they] ask him” (Ml, 284). However, the more cynical, and perhaps more perceptive, Olive, recognizes that paralleling her father’s story with the other scandalous tales that fill the paper is about as degrading as the revelation of

Love American style

40

their private lives. When Marcia’s mother praises Bartley’s ascent at The Events, Marcia responds, “The Events has got to be perfectly horrid, of late. It’s full of murders and all uncleanness,” recognizing the parallel titillation of a peek into the lives of the wealthy in Bartley’s article on the Hallecks (MI, 184). Bartley’s most serious offense in revealing the private to the public is his scurrilous adaptation of Kinney’s biography, which Kinney was going to use for his autobiography. After Kinney tells his life story to Hartley and Ricker, one of Bartley’s peers and rival editors, Ricker jokes with him: “What’s to prevent our interviewing you on this little personal history of yours, and using your material any way we like? It seems to me that you’ve put your head in the lion’s mouth” (MI, 250). Echoing Halleck’s assumption, Kinney replies that he is “amongst gentlemen” a status increasingly anachronistic in the modern era. Not long after, when Kinney has ventured west, Hubbard approaches Ricker to sell Kinney’s story, overstepping boundaries of trust set by both Kinney, the subject, and Withersby, his editor at The Events. Ricker protests that he thought Kinney was to use the material himself sometime. Hartley counters that Kinney can’t write “any more than a hen,” that “he can make tracks on paper, but nobody would print ‘em, much less buy ‘em” (MI, 253). In other words, Kinney can’t make the story marketable. Hartley supports his claim by asserting that he knows Kinney and that Kinney will be “tickled to death” if he ever sees the piece (MI, 253). Ricker accepts Bartley’s justification and the story, for which Hartley charges a high price, winking that he “can’t afford to do a dishonorable thing for less money” (MI, 253). Exposing Kinney’s private story without his permission proves to be Bartley’s undoing, both in his career and in his marriage. As Hartley exposes others’ private lives, divorce exposes his. The divorce process slowly turns the marriage inside out, continually making it more public. Marcia attempts to keep Bartley’s desertion and the end of her marriage to herself, but she cannot. After Hartley leaves, bill collectors come to Marcia; one even threatens her with the law. In fear, Marcia goes to Atherton for help. Atherton’s questions force her to admit that she does not know where Hartley is or when, if ever, he will return. Marcia admits that she tells Atherton only because he is a lawyer and will not tell anyone: “I want it kept a secret” (MI, 303). Marcia would rather believe Hartley is dead than that he has deserted her (MI, 303). Atherton, however, tells Marcia that it cannot remain a secret: “you have done well in coming to me, but let me convince you that this is a matter which can’t be kept. It must be known. Before you can begin to help yourself, you must let others help you” (MI, 304). The divorce forces itself out into the open. The notice of divorce itself is wholly public. Through the mail system the notice first arrives to Ben Halleck, not Marcia. Further, the notice arrives not in a letter, but as an advertisement in a newspaper. Howells emphasizes the accident of Halleck receiving the paper by describing its battered and “veteran appearance”: “it was tied up with string, now, and was scribbled with rejections in the hands of various Hallocks and Hallets” before it finally reaches Ben Halleck, who is still an outsider to the Hubbard marriage (322). The notice of divorce thus passes through countless spectators, both known and unknown, before Marcia, the wife being sued for the divorce, ever hears of it. The unusual privacy of their marriage ceremony, an elopement, contrasts with the publicity of the divorce court; there is nothing private about it. At first, as Marcia and her entourage enter the courtroom, there are only a few spectators, who watch them walk up the aisle in an ironic reversal of a wedding (MI, 348–49). The suit for divorce is about to

The “Enormous Fact” of American Life

41

be decided in Bartley’s favor because of the failure of the defendant to appear in court, but just at that moment Squire Gaylord announces their arrival and prepares to present a counter-suit, taking full advantage of the role of spectacle in court: “Squire Gaylord turned with an old-fashioned state and deliberation which had their effect, and cast a glance of professional satisfaction in the situation at the attorneys and the spectators” as he announces that he will be the defense in this case (MI, 350). Thus Howells suggests Gaylord’s interest in the case is not just familial or moral but also professional. Further, he implies that a major part of Gaylord’s attraction to the law is its dramatic possibilities, undermining Gaylord’s moral stance and professional status. Then as he rises on the bench, he pauses before speaking, heightening the effect of his image: “His lips compressed themselves to a waving line, and his high hawkbeak came down over them; the fierce light burned in his cavernous eyes, and his grizzled hair erected itself like a crest. He swayed slightly back and forth at the table, behind which he stood, and paused as if waiting for his hate to gather head” (MI, 352). The pause is effective and the crowd responds: “In this interval it struck several of the spectators, who had appreciative friends outside, that it was a pity they should miss the coming music, and they risked the loss of some strains themselves that they might step out and inform these dilettanti” (MI, 352). The announcement runs throughout the town. The crowd’s excitement and curiosity is roused further by Squire Gaylord’s pronouncement, “Sir, I think it will prejudice our cause with no one, when I say that we are here not only in the relation of attorney and client, but in that of father and daughter, and that I stand in this place singularly and sacredly privileged to demand justice for my own child!” (MI, 353). Thus, part of the titillation is Gaylord’s revelation of his private relationship with the defendant. Rather than suggesting an inappropriate bias, Gaylord’s status as Marcia’s father enhances his claims to defend her legally; his claims are cast as singular and sacred because they fuse the public and private. But Howells undercuts the sacredness of Gaylord’s claims by his manipulation of public image. Gaylord continues pushing and pulling the crowd, only stopped by Marcia’s screams “No, No, No!” (MI, 355). Marcia’s exclamation reveals that she is the only person in the courtroom who does not want this divorce. Her resistance arouses the crowd still further; their expectations of drama have been met. Gaylord’s manipulative oratory is exceeded by the dramatic action of his collapse. Marcia’s refusal of her father’s claim seems to shock her father, exposing the falsity of his oratory, the falsity of public spectacle here based on private relationship. Again, the image is not what it seems. This is the final blow for Gaylord; his last public performance leaves him silenced, fetching “his breath in convulsive gasps” (MI, 355). It is as though patriarchal law—Gaylord is after all both father and judge—has been complicit in its own collapse. Justice has not really been served. What Howells has presciently illustrated is what Herbie DiFonzo describes as the schism between the legal and cultural practices of divorce. Because of restrictive legal grounds for divorce, couples, whose private desire to divorce may have been mutual, are forced to “create” public grounds for divorce and the courts complied.55 Although Gaylord attempts to “correct” Bartley’s fictive claim of abandonment, he simply counters with a claim that, while on the surface true and legal, runs counter to the truth of at least one party of the marriage, Marcia, who does not want the divorce at all. Thus the divorce court drama simultaneously dismantles the boundary between the public and the private by exposing allegedly private events—adultery, desertion, and cruelty—to a public audience and

Love American style

42

reinforces that boundary by concealing then illegal grounds for divorce, such as dissatisfaction. In doing so, divorce dramas, albeit cynically, reveal the schism between truth and fiction, signifier and signified, anticipating postmodern plays on the construction of meaning. Bartley’s disappearance from the courtroom illustrates how he slips through the legal system, escaping legal reprobation; he also slips out of the world of the novel, moves, as Kaplan has argued, “beyond the pale of representation.”56 While the narrator and we no longer accompany Bartley as a character within the novel, we still read of his distant ending. By shifting the focus what had been his main character to hearing reports of that character, Howells, perhaps unintentionally, reveals Bartley as text. He becomes a story in the very tabloid journalism in which he made his career in the upcoming American tabloid press. Bartley’s end is entirely public, a poetic justice of sorts. In contrast, Marcia ends up entirely private, a recluse who will not leave her father’s house. The divorce has turned their lives into a dark parody of the ideal of the domestic economy, where the public male world is supported by that of the private, domestic female world. Hartley is consumed, ultimately killed, for publicizing another man’s “domestic relations,” as Howells so respectfully, demurely, and ambiguously calls them. Marcia is effectively buried by extreme privacy. Nevertheless, Howells, as a novelist, shares more with Hartley than he might care to admit. He also, creates potentially dangerous fictions and exposes the private to the public, even if that private world is one of his own creation. Thus one of the reasons Howells must kill Hartley off is, as Kaplan and others have argued, to exorcise some of his own culpability. In doing so, Howells, though perhaps inadvertently, refers to the plasticity or textuality of his novel, exposing a crack in his representation of “reality.”

GO WEST, YOUNG DIVORCÉES Once Hartley is forced out into the public realm, exiled from the surety and stability of the house of marriage, he travels west. Howells uses the West to further emphasize how “American” divorce is by emphasizing the “Americanness” of the West. The West was where American men and women went to remake themselves, to start anew, attempting to divorce themselves from history. The West is often portrayed as open spaces and wilderness, with a lack of cities, and houses that are miles apart, if there are houses at all. Thus, the individual is not bound or protected by the mores of civilization that are associated with the East. This myth, that of R.W.B.Lewis’s “American Adam,” is central to ideals of American identity, embodied by the cowboy and pioneer, as well as literary heroes, such as Natty Bummpo and Huck Finn. Such characters have shed their European heritage, thus differentiating themselves from Europe and becoming “truly American.” The West, then, and divorce, encourages the freedoms of American individualism. With the myth of the West was gaining in popularity as a literary trope, it is fitting that Howells has opportunistic Hartley travel west in order to obtain his divorce. Not only does Howells play on features of the myth of the West, such as rebellion, opportunity, and lawlessness but he taps into the legal history of divorce as well. Much of the association of the west with divorce is based in legal history. Divorce laws were much more liberal in the West than they were in the East in the late nineteenth century.57 Cities

The “Enormous Fact” of American Life

43

such as Sioux City, South Dakota and, later, Reno, Nevada developed reputations as divorce mills. Glenda Riley has even suggested that divorce laws in the West were more liberal in order to encourage men in particular to move out West, enabling them to leave a family behind in the East and start another out west. Thus divorce is associated with the myth of the American frontier, and the self-reliance and individualism that myth inspires, as it is embodied by the cowboy and pioneer, as well as literary heroes, such as Natty Bummpo and Huck Finn. The western frontier also comes to symbolize the American future, and in Howells’s work both the worst and the best possibilities of that future.58 At its best, the future of the western man or woman is the Emersonian self-reliant, self-made individual, who is independent, but still concerned with others and society at large, with duty and morality, such as Kitty Ellison in A Chance Acquaintance, as Fryckstedt has argued.59 At its worst, the West prophesies a decrepit modernity in which individualism is overly encouraged, leading to a solipsism in which one’s self is valued over one’s social duty. At its worst, the West becomes home to such characters as Bartley Hubbard, who places himself before all others without any sense of compunction. At the initial mention of the West in A Modern Instance, divorce is immediately evoked. Upon his first visit to Bartley and Marcia’s home in Boston, the Emersonian Kinney tells Bartley he is heading west to Illinois (MI, 245). Bartley responds immediately, “For a divorce?” This is not only the first explicit mention of the West in the novel; it is the first explicit use of the word “divorce.”60 Bartley is of course teasing the bachelor Kinney whose true aim is to make money. After Kinney has made his pile, he might consider marriage (MI, 245). The difference in Bartley’s and Kinney’s visions of the West is telling, suggesting the West at both its capitalist American “best”—the self-made fortune—and its American worst—quickie marriages and divorces. This association of divorce with the West is reinforced by the rest of the novel. When Bartley does finally desert Marcia, he heads west with “as yet nothing definite in his purpose, beyond the fact that he was to be rid of her: whether for a long or short time, or forever, he did not yet know; whether he meant ever to communicate with her, or seek or suffer a reconciliation, the locomotive that leaped westward into the dark with him knew as well as he” (MI, 277). Bartley’s train is not heading into the sunset, but into the dark, suggestive of oblivion and death, rather than a bright future. A few hours later in Cleveland, he decides “the solitude into which he had plunged stretched before him so vast, so sterile and hopeless, that he had not the courage to realize it” (MI, 277). Again, the image of the future invokes death more than a new life. In Bartley’s West there is no progeny, no future, but only impotence. The West is a great desert. Howells emphasizes this by naming the desert town where Bartley dies “Whited Sepulchre,” invoking both tombs and ghosts. Bartley is not a hero embracing the challenges of the wilderness, but a coward running away from problems. Even his suit for divorce from Marcia is cowardly. He puts a public notice of it in an Indiana paper but “by a series of accidents and errors” it fails “to reach her in its wanderings, and by a final blunder” falls into the hands of Ben Halleck (MI, 323). Bartley was not hoping she would see it at all until it was too late. Neither dutiful pater familias nor the adventurous American Adam nor pioneer courageously facing the vast solitude of the prairie, Bartley, illustrating the worst possibilities of American masculinity, is a coward, ultimately emasculated by events.

Love American style

44

To witness the divorce, the novel must also go west to Tecumseh, Indiana. The name “Tecumseh” ironically invokes the decimation of Native Americans that made the settlement of the West possible. Tecumseh resisted white settlement but lost. Now that settlement is not exactly the ideal West that Howells remembers from his childhood, nor is it the “blended hideousness of Sodom and Gomorrah” that Olive Halleck imagines (MI, 348). Tecumseh is “certainly very much more like a New England village,” though it is has a “more careless and unscrupulous air than the true New England village” (MI, 348). Further, “all aspect of village quiet and seclusion ceased, and a section of conventional American city, with flat-roofed brink blocks, showy hotel, stores, paved street, and stone sidewalks expressed the readiness of Tecumseh to fulfill the destiny of every western town after Chicago, and become a metropolis at a day’s notice, if need be” (MI, 348). The character of the village of Tecumseh is as changeable as its residents, as ready to reinvent itself and start anew as Adam. Tecumseh also suggests that if the West is thought of as the future, then the same futuristic impulse that characterizes the West eventually defaces the wilderness it once invoked by taming it and welcoming the newest settlements, newest marriages, and newest technologies. The result is that Tecumseh is simply another “conventional city,” not perhaps yet home to a Starbucks and Gap on every corner, but opening the way for such homogenous urbanity. Howells emphasizes Tecumseh’s western novelty by contrasting it with Boston’s eastern tradition. Howells seems to delight in his having his characters describe the established homes and neighborhoods of Boston, taking his readers on verbal walking tours with both Bartley and Halleck (MI, 123 and 169). Although Howells’s Boston is certainly thriving and becoming modern, it is a modernity tempered by characters such as the Athertons, and the Hallecks; even the Boston newspaper men, Bartley’s early colleagues, Ricker and Witherby, have a stronger sense of morality and social duty than does Bartley. Having overstepped the bounds of social duty in his own self-interest, Bartley must leave Boston and move west. Thus the modern western city has as changeable and empty a character as Bartley Hubbard, the divorced man. Bartley drifts further and further West, all the way to Arizona where he does not even establish himself in a hotel but merely pitches a tent from which he lives and prints a spicy paper (MI, 359). His travel west only ends with his death by shooting, suggesting that the West of the divorce town points not toward the future but toward the end of the future, death.

PLOTTING DIVORCE, COURTING RELATIVISM Many critics have read Bartley’s death in the desert of Arizona as Howells’s moral commentary on divorce: Hartley, the abandoning husband, meets his deserved end. The narrator himself suggests that Bartley’s shooting is “penalty or consequence as we choose to consider it” (MI, 359). One of the few moments of self-referentiality in the novel, the narrator’s intrusion both acknowledges his readers’ part in creating the meaning of the text and admits a degree of relativism in the creation of meaning. The killing of Hartley Hubbard is not as reductively moral about his divorce as it seems at first because the novel ends with Atherton’s ambiguous exclamation “Ah, I don’t know! I don’t know” (MI, 362). Specifically what Atherton does not know is how to advise Ben Halleck; however, he also implies that he is less sure about divorce and its consequent disruption

The “Enormous Fact” of American Life

45

and revaluation of morality and tradition, as well as implying he is less sure about his own interpretive and moral authority. He is no longer as sure about how wives and husbands should behave, and, for Atherton and I would argue Howells especially, the revaluation of marriage has profound implications on the social order and the literary representation of that order. Halleck has written Atherton asking whether it is ethical for him to ask for Marcia’s hand in marriage, now that she is widowed, especially considering that he was in love with Marcia while she was still married. Halleck fears he may have desired Bartley’s death. This admission comes as a surprise from a character who has had a definitive moral position on each ethical dilemma in the novel. As George Carrington argues, the profundity of Atherton’s proclamation is undercut by the descriptions of the domestic scene around him.61 In the final scene in their drawing room, his “hard”—to use Clara’s word—judgments of Ben Halleck and his love for Marcia Hubbard are softened by a feminine environment and by Clara’s questions. Finally, not even Atherton, seemingly the model of masculine success and the voice of morality, realism, and law in the novel, can say anything definitive. The law too seems powerless and emasculated in dealing with the modern issues of morality and marriage and the ethics of divorce.62 In contrast to many critics, however, I do not consider the inconclusive ending a failure. Howells’s own prescriptions for realism advocate the dramatic method in which narrative intrusions are kept to a minimum so that the audience must come to their own conclusions.63 This is not to say, of course, that the narrator can or does remain objective in A Modern Instance, but that Ho wells undercuts the judgments cast by the narration thus far by ending with the admission by Atherton that he does not know how to respond to Ben Halleck. In doing so, Howells suggests an ambiguity and relativism about divorce, and the novel ends with no definitive moral stance. Howells’s narrative manipulations lessen the objective realism of A Modern Instance, revealing its plasticity, and as Warren Hedges asserts, “Howells pushes the realist investigations of error to the point that it spawns an indeterminacy which undermines realism’s own claims…. As such, A Modern Instance, is an indispensable text, straddling the transition between realism and modernism.”64 Perhaps it is not as much Howells in this instance as his subject matter—divorce— that, as Kaplan has suggested, causes shifts in “location” in the narrative perspective, making it seem to fail as a realist novel, while not being a successful romance or novel of manners. Rather, divorce prefigures the characteristics of modernism in its fragmentation and transience as well as its transvaluation of the ideals upon which marriage, the novel, and the romance are based. Thus Howells ends his novel with this debate between Atherton, the realist, and Halleck, the romantic intellectual. By questioning how divorce affects these traditional values Halleck reveals his own modernity; by acknowledging that he cannot answer Halleck’s questions honestly, Atherton reveals his subjectivity. I am not arguing that Howells consciously foreshadowed modernist narrative. In fact, the self-consciousness in narrative that characterizes so many modernist texts is definitely lacking in A Modern Instance. Nevertheless, Howells was very self-conscious about form in his criticism and he was consciously looking for a modern and American form. The title A Modern Instance itself suggests Howells’s concern with modernity. Finally, Howells himself, unlike his critics, did not consider A Modern Instance a failure. As George Bennett writes, citing Henry J.Harper’s The House of Harper (1912), “Even in

Love American style

46

1893, after A Hazard of New Fortunes, he could say he had always ‘taken the most satisfaction in A Modern Instance’ because there he came closest to American life as he knew it. In 1912 he chose A Hazard of New Fortunes as his best book ‘for breadth and depth,’ but he continued to point out that his divorce story was his most intense.”65 Thus, perhaps, his divorce story is also his most modern as well as his most “American.” Finally, Howells creates a pattern of figures that subsequent writers—Edith Wharton, Mary McCarhty, John Updike, and others—also build upon to write American novels of divorce.

CHAPTER THREE Divorce, the American Custom, in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

In her autobiography A Backward Glance (1933), Wharton acknowledges that she “had a great admiration for ‘A Modern Instance,’ and ‘Silas Lapham,’ and should have liked to talk with their author about the art in which he stood so nearly among the first.”1 She writes, “Howells was the first to tell the tragic potentialities of life in the drab American small town; but the incurable moral timidity which again and again checked him on the verge of a masterpiece drew him back even from the logical conclusion of ‘A Modern Instance,’ and left Robert Grant the first in the field which he was eventually to share with Lewis and Dreiser.”2 Figuring prominently in both A Modern Instance (1881) and Grant’s Unleavened Bread (1900), divorce appears to be a common feature of the “drab American small town.” For Wharton too divorce was a popular theme; it is a major subject in The Custom of the Country (1913), The Mother’s Recompense (1925), Glimpses of the Moon (1922), and numerous short stories, such as “The Other Two” (1904). Yet Wharton leaves herself off her list, perhaps distancing her work from depictions of this same “drab American town.” In her 1927 essay, “The Great American Novel,” Wharton critiques the narrow definition of the American novel: “First of all, the novelist’s scene must be laid in the United States, and his story deal exclusively with citizens of those states; furthermore, if his work is really to deserve the epithet “American,” it must tell of persons so limited in education and opportunity that they live cut off from all the varied sources of culture which used to be considered the common heritage of English-speaking people. The great American novel must always be about Main Street, geographically, socially, and intellectually.”3 In fact, the most significant difference between Wharton’s divorce stories and those of Howells and Grant is her juxtaposition of the values of American divorcées with the mores of Europe. Such juxtaposition, Wharton claims, can be more fruitful for really seeing America than myopically never leaving its borders: It seems as though it would not only be truer to fact but would offer far more lights and shades, more contrasts and juxtapositions, to the novelist, if he depicted the modern American as a sort of missionary-drummer selling his wares and inculcating his beliefs from China to Peru, with all the unexpected (and, to the missionaries, mostly unperceived) reactions produced in the societies thus edified. It is not intended to suggest that the

Divorce, the American custom

49

wandering or the expatriate American is the only fit them for fiction, but that he is peculiarly typical of modern America—of its intense social acquisitiveness and insatiable appetite for new facts and new sights. The germ of European contacts is disseminated among thousands who have never crossed the Atlantic, just as other thousands who have done so remain blissfully immune from it; and to enjoin the modern novelist to depict only New Thermopylae in its pristine purity is singularly to limit its field.4 Although she does not say so explicitly, Wharton could be describing the travels of the ever-hungry Undine Spragg. In The Custom of the Country, Wharton takes America to Europe through the character Undine Spragg—an American divorcée—“a sort of missionary-drummer” selling divorce. Wharton, too, then seems to characterize America by divorce. While she criticizes Howells for his moral timidity, Wharton’s treatment of divorce has much in common with that of Howells. Like Howells, Wharton admires the realism of European and British novels of manners and calls for realistic portrayals of American manners. Second, Wharton characterizes divorce as “American,” using many of the same figures Howells uses, such as the house, the mythic West, and the popular press. Finally, Wharton also explores how American divorce disrupts social mores as well as narrative form. However, Wharton goes beyond Howells in emphasizing the plasticity or selfreferentiality of writing. Like Howells, Wharton’s divorced character becomes a “written” character within the novel, the subject of the popular presses. However, like so many people seeking divorces in restrictive courts, Wharton was hiding something. The same year she published The Custom of the Country, 1913, she divorced her husband, Teddy Wharton. Thus, even more than Howells, Wharton must have felt a need to distinguish the public from the private, creating fictions to protect the private. She kept her own divorce very quiet and does not mention it at all in her autobiography. Undine, then, as R.W.B.Lewis among others has suggested, is not a direct reflection of Wharton but a representation of what she feared she might become. Writing over thirty years after Howells’s A Modern Instance, Wharton still considers divorce a defining characteristic of modern America, and consequently, a subject central to the American novel. Further, she uses a similar system of symbols to do so, suggesting an inchoate tradition of the American divorce novel. However, Wharton is much more critical of gender roles and modernity. Unlike Howells, who is left speechless in the face of the transvaluation of morals, Wharton skewers some modern twentieth-century morals without simplistically or sentimentally calling for a return to the morals of the nineteenth century. Through her portrayal of divorce, Wharton reveals the limitations of each.

NOVELS LACKING MANNERS, OR THE AMERICAN NOVEL One of the ways in which Wharton writes the customs of “America” is to write about divorce. With her novel The Custom of the Country, Wharton suggests that if the successful domestic novel of manners ends in marriage and the successful romance in the freedom of the individual, divorce novels hover somewhere in between.5 Through

Love American style

50

Undine’s series of marriages and divorces Wharton chronicles the trivialization of manners brought on by the commercial capitalism that comes to characterize America. First, in order to demonstrate how Wharton uses divorce to characterize an American tradition, or the lack thereof depending upon one’s perspective, it is helpful to explore briefly Wharton’s own divorce and her relationship to the American literary tradition, a relationship which is as fraught with tensions about gender as is the issue of divorce itself. Wharton’s discomfort with divorce parallels her discomfort with the American literary tradition. Although Wharton writes of divorce often and was divorced herself, she was still fairly conservative about divorce. Divorce increasingly disturbed traditional expectations about the gender roles of both men and women during Wharton’s lifetime. It became symbolic of the individual’s anarchic refusal to submit to anything outside herself. Conservatives blamed feminism for the rapid increase in divorce rates.6 In contrast, feminists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, viewed divorce as potentially liberating for women.7 But such independence was not exactly Wharton’s impetus for divorcing her own husband. Teddy Wharton’s embezzling, adultery, and illnesses forced Wharton to separate herself from him.8 Teddy did not live up to traditional expectations of what a husband should be nor to Wharton’s own expectations. Perhaps she suspected that she was not quite the proper wife as well, at least not according to her mother’s Victorian standards of genteel womanhood. In her biography of Wharton, Cynthia Griffin Wolff surmises that Wharton’s mother considered writing “unladylike” and “common.”9 Her mother taught that proper ladies did not write, nor did they divorce. Further, if proper ladies did write, consequently not behaving as proper wives, there was a good chance they might end up divorced. Although Wharton was an independent woman, as her prolific writing career attests, her hesitancy in divorcing Teddy and, finally, her silence about her divorce, intimate that she was somewhat ashamed of the divorce. Louis Auchincloss believes that Wharton was more conservative in her attitudes toward divorce than many of her contemporaries: “Divorce had ceased to be a social disgrace even in Newport where Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt was able to shed her husband and marry Oliver H.P.Belmont without impairing her position. But Edith’s attitude in these matters was always ambivalent…. Even if Edith had to procure a divorce, she could never really regard herself as a “divorced woman.”10 Thus, Wharton’s simultaneously vitriolic and sympathetic portrayal of career divorcee, Undine Spragg, is suggestively cathartic. Although Wharton began writing before she divorced Teddy, there is a connection between Wharton’s literary and financial success and her divorce: both stimulated conflicting desires for Wharton, who valued tradition yet loathed its restrictions, particularly its restrictions for women. Similarly, Wharton’s relationship with the American literary tradition is fraught with conflicting expectations about gender. Sandra Gilbert notes that Wharton is often viewed as either an unfeminine monster or scribbling ultrafeminine authoress.11 Amy Kaplan writes, Although Wharton did not espouse realism as a cause, as Howells did, writing realistically was implicit in her more pronounced struggle to define the nature of professional authorship. Like Howells, she viewed writing as work rather than leisure and treated realism as a tenuous

Divorce, the American custom

51

balancing act negating the idealism of genteel culture while resisting the sentimentalism of mass culture. Yet Wharton’s evolving sense of realism and professionalism involved a complex relation to the changing contours of ‘woman’s place.’12 It was even more difficult for a female author to distinguish herself from the scribbling mob of women than a man. Wharton viewed herself as having “higher,” more literary aims than either the popular or polemical female authors successful in the America of her youth and many of the popular writers of her day. Recounting the prudish yet sentimental audiences and editors she encountered when she first began publishing her stories, Wharton writes that her story “‘The Touchstone’—a quiet title carefully chosen for one of the quietest of my stories—had little success in America.”13 However, the publisher John Lane bought the English rights and changed the name to “A Gift from the Grave” without consulting her. Thus, writes Wharton, “this seductive but misleading label must have been exactly to the taste of the sentimental novel-reader of the day, for to my mingled wrath and amusement the book sold rapidly in England, and I have often chuckled to think how defrauded the purchasers must have felt themselves after reading the first few pages.”14 Wharton intimates that with Lane’s title sales would probably have soared in America as well, but that it is artistic integrity that interests her, not sales. Wharton also notes the contradictory criticism she receives; some critique her for writing too much about illicit passions and some for not writing enough about them.15 Finally, in addition to the pressure Wharton describes from her contemporaries, there is perhaps even more from feminist critics in the later part of the twentieth century, in their attempts to fit Wharton into both an American canon, which is considered by many hard to do for a woman, and an American female canon, which has long been considered a second-rank canon. Many critics have noted Wharton’s discomfort with the tradition of women’s writing in the United States. To Wharton many domestic novels, such as the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, were sentimental, lacking an aesthetic purpose, and often overly driven by polemical purposes. Jeanne Boydston notes Wharton’s antipathy for the tradition of women writers in the United States, even though Wharton shares some of the same concerns about industrial America.16 Waid writes, All of Wharton’s references to American women writers imply the taint (often pastel) of an unacceptable sentimentalism…. For Wharton, whose views of women writers reflected her views of women’s lives in general, it was as women writer for women that they were most disadvantaged. Wharton felt that the limitations of a female audience hindered the growth of all women.17 Wharton regarded feminism with a similar suspicion because of its disregard for tradition. Wharton could never, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton did, proclaim divorce as liberation for women from the patriarchy, though she herself was divorced. In its emphasis on overthrowing tradition, feminism overthrew much that Wharton valued. Yet there is still a desire by critics, particularly feminist critics, to place Wharton in a context of a female tradition of novels. The desire is of course understandable because

Love American style

52

Wharton’s novels are so conducive to feminist analysis. Nonetheless, feminist approaches often need to be qualified, particularly with a novel like The Custom of the Country. The portrait of Undine is both sympathetic and scathing. Many critics make some link between Undine and Edith Wharton herself. Like Undine, Wharton is divorced, loves cars and travel, and has fame and boundless energy. Yet, Undine’s habits are the antithesis to Wharton’s own life of writing; Undine is, at first, only a consumer of tabloid presses, commercial ladies’ magazines, and sensational novels and, finally, she works toward becoming the subject. Thus, part of Wharton’s struggle in writing The Custom of the Country is to distinguish herself as both woman and author from Undine, but also to distinguish her novel, which dealt with the sensational and potentially sentimental topic of divorce, from that of sentimental popular novels and the sensational tabloid press. Hildegard Hoeller has called for a reassessment of Wharton’s and her critics’ dismissal of sentimentalism. The traditional trajectory of Wharton’s career is that she blossomed as a realist with The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, but slipped into sentimentalism, a form often associated with women writers, with her later novels, those written in the 1920s. In contrast, Hoeller argues that the critical dismissal of these later “sentimental” works ignores “a dialogue between the voices of realism and sentimental fiction, a self-referentiality in her fiction, which [she] consider[s] central to all of Wharton’s writing.”18 Acknowledging Wharton’s interest in the sentimental not only sheds new light on Wharton’s work and on Wharton’s relationship to other women writers but also on the place of the sentimental within the canon: Looking at the sentimental elements in her fictions allows us to see their self-referentiality—a term that has rarely been linked to sentimental writing and has often been reserved for ‘high’ canonical traditions such as realism or modernism. Looking at the voices of realism and sentimental fiction in Wharton’s fiction—rather than labeling Wharton a realist or a sentimental writer—allows a specific and detailed look at the aesthetics and ideologies of both genres and thus contributes to their reconsideration.19 Divorce, itself simultaneously realistic, romantic, and sentimental, provides Wharton with a subject perfectly suited to explore this dialectic between realism and sentimentalism and romance. Critics such as Samuel Coale consider divorce a sentimental subject, which is often thought to be comprised of banal, domestic “realities.” Consequently, Coale places authors, such as Wharton, who write about divorce in the second tier of American literature. Coale bases his argument on the “romance theory” popularized by Richard Chase and Leslie Fiedler, among others, which posits that the best American writers, such as Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, write metaphysical romances.20 This suspicion is evident even in the work of sympathetic critics who praise Wharton’s work, such as Gary Lindberg. Lindberg acknowledges Wharton’s supreme talent for demonstrating just how very important manners are, and yet he writes “For all Edith Wharton’s intelligence about manners and their effects…her fiction suffers from the absence of other kinds of intelligence, other imaginative resources.”21 Such critiques of

Divorce, the American custom

53

Wharton’s work are based on hierarchized dichotomies as old as the split between mind and body, idealism and materialism, and, of course, the masculine and the feminine. Feminists have long noted how these dichotomies serve to uphold the dominance of the masculine in patriarchal cultures. Thus, there is an inherent masculine bias in Coale’s and Lindberg’s criticism. In contrast, feminist critics often resuscitate the treatment of quotidian and material subjects in novels, such as divorce and marriage, recuperating them as feminist statements. Although Wharton herself does not address the debate about romance versus realism explicitly, she expresses some concern with the theory of the novel and the lack of a satisfactory American tradition. In The Writing of Fiction, Wharton describes two major categories of the novel, the novel of situation and the novel of character or manners. Although she claims that the novel of character is the superior form, she acknowledges that the best novels are a blend of such categories.22 However, Wharton demonstrates a bias toward European literature. The only American novelists she includes are Herman Melville, whose work she includes as examples of adventure novels (which she does not consider innovative, however enjoyable they may be to read), and Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose The Scarlet Letter she considers one of the only novels of pure situation in English.23 Wharton’s categories bare a curious if unintended relation to the critics’ categories of romance and realism. The American novels she calls adventure novels and novels of situation are what the critics have labeled great American romances. The European novels of character she admires, such as the work of Honoré Balzac and Marcel Proust, could also be considered realist novels of manners. Further she considers the modern novel to be born in the work of Balzac, and to culminate in the work of Proust.24 Her view of female American authors is still less enthusiastic. In A Backward Glance, she writes of Ethan Frome and the New England tale: “For years I had wanted to draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England, a life even in my time, and a thousandfold more a generation earlier, utterly unlike that seen through the rose-colored spectacles of my predecessors, Mary Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett.”25 Although Wharton’s criticism of Wilkins and Jewett suggests selective reading on her part—one would hardly call all of the works of Wilkins Freeman and Jewett “rosecolored”—her comment still demonstrates that Wharton felt there was a lack of realistic portrayals of American life by women writers and that she sought to redress that lack. Thus realism was important to Wharton, and particularly a realism documenting American manners. As many critics, particularly Nancy Bentley, have noted, Wharton uses an anthropological frame for her novels, attempting to document the manners of America.26 Thus, even though Wharton suggests that good novels transcend national borders, she is concerned with characterizing “American” customs, such as divorce, through the medium of the novel, thus situating herself, as a female author of the upper class, in a tradition of the American novel.27

THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY AS AN AMERICAN NOVEL These tensions around form, gender, and divorce shape the protagonist of The Custom of the Country, Undine Spragg, whose initials, as Candace Waid has pointed out, are U.S.28 In The Custom of the Country Wharton tackles the idea of divorce as distinctly American,

Love American style

54

and in doing so infuses the novel with debates about the most American literary mode. As a female embodiment of the Adatnic myth of America Undine looks only to the future, though she has no final goals. She is forever protean. However, she marries men, Ralph Marvell and Raymond de Chelles, who define themselves by the past. Her divorce from these men thus enacts attempts to divorce America from history, and American literature from its European heritage. Wharton links the past not only with social tradition but also with literary traditions, including romance and the novel of manners. Thus, there is a not only a battle of the sexes but a battle of forms running through many of the conflicts in The Custom of the Country. Further, through Charles Bowen’s seemingly realist observations of Undine’s marriages and divorces, Wharton questions the call, such as that of Howells, to define American literature by “realism” as it had been practiced. Finally, these tensions are also apparent in the way Wharton plays with genre in the style of this novel itself, reversing the plots of some male authors, such as James and Grant, with a feminist critique, however reserved and complicated her feminism may be. As R.W.B.Lewis has argued, America revels in the belief in the future and the new world, a world in which an American Adam can forge his identity from scratch, divorcing his identity from history.29 One of the primary reasons James repeatedly placed his novels in Europe is because he believed America’s novelty and “equality” left little for the novelist, whose subject was the relation of the past to the present and the individual in society, to write about.30 While Wharton concurs with James about the lack of complexity of American culture when compared to European culture,31 she nevertheless seeks to describe American manners in The Custom of the Country—as the title itself suggests—even if those manners reflect the value of the future and the individual more than they do the past and tradition. Wharton’s heroine Undine embodies this American myth of the future, or perhaps many of the worst aspects of it. As such, in her marriages to men who attach themselves to the past, namely Ralph Marvell and Raymond de Chelles, Undine feels trapped and bored by their pasts, ultimately divorcing them to escape into her remarriage with a man with whom she shares a belief in the future, Elmer Moffatt. Further, Wharton emphasizes Undine’s differences with her first two husbands and her similarity to Moffat by linking each character with a literary form. Thus, Wharton parallels the tensions that motivate Undine’s marriages and divorces with debates about literary form. Both Ralph and Raymond are associated with private libraries and old, dusty, worn books, suggesting a love and awareness of history, philosophy, and literature. Wharton’s characterization of Ralph is, perhaps, the most sympathetic characterization in the novel. She paints Ralph as a romantic poet figure, constantly struggling with the unfinished book.32 At first, Ralph mistakes Undine for his muse: “Ralph had never felt more convinced of his power to write a great poem; but now it was Undine’s hand which held the magic wand of expression” (CC, 82–83). Yet for as much sympathy as Wharton creates for Ralph as a character, there is also criticism. His romantic, idealistic ideology leaves him impotent, incapable of handling the very real, material changes occurring in America in the late nineteenth century. Carol Wershoven and Margaret McDowell both note that Ralph’s romantic visions estrange him from reality.33 McDowell writes, “Ralph Marvell in The Custom of the Country cannot fight against Undine Spragg’s ruthless demands because he is im-prisoned by a

Divorce, the American custom

55

code of romantic chivalry which prevents him from honestly evaluating his wife until it is too late.”34 Ralph’s idealization of Undine is the same as his idealism toward America and his belief in the endurance of his own heritage.35 Of Ralph’s idealism, Alexandra Collins writes, “Analogous to the world of the imagination, the enclosures of this vision continue to give him the sense of furtive possession, but they estrange him from the reality of an external social environment. Instead of developing an assertive public image, Ralph habitually retreats from confrontations.”36 Ralph is thus a victim of his past, concludes Collins.37 Further, Ralph is a victim of his class; the leisure class code he lives by is increasingly irrelevant in the modern world. In divorcing Ralph, Undine divorces not only his remote, “aboriginal” (in Wharton’s terms) past but also his romanticism as well, suggesting that such romanticism does not have the strength to endure in modern consumerist America. Undine, of course, has ideals of her own, as the fact that none of her husband fulfills them demonstrates. However, Undine’s ideals are those of advertising, not art. Likewise, a year or so into her marriage to Raymond de Chelles, Undine begins to note his similarity to Ralph, primarily that he spends long hours in his dusty library with his books.38 Although Raymond does not write, he is symbolic of traditions more ancient than America, more ancient than Undine can comprehend. The manners that comprise those traditions are the very manners upon which European novels of manners are based. Wharton illustrates the selflessness of Raymond’s attachment to tradition. Raymond knows how to live for his family, something greater than himself, which Undine could never do. However, through Undine’s eyes, Wharton illustrates the restrictions of Raymond’s duty to tradition, which forces him to comply with his mother’s demands, even though he may hate her (CC, 292). They must also live in relative poverty (for the ruling class anyway) and isolation, trapped in St. Désert when he could live the high life in Paris if he would only sell the château (CC, 297). In divorcing Raymond, Undine enacts the attempt of Americans to divorce themselves from their European past, as in the American Revolution, and its restrictions in order to found their own identities, based upon their own desires rather than those of their heritage. Ironically, also as in the American Revolution, Undine frees herself from a European heritage only to perpetuate her enslavement to American capitalism. Although Wharton’s sympathetic treatment of both Ralph and Raymond suggests that though she venerates tradition, she is also keenly aware of its limitations. Both Raymond and Ralph are victims of the past, weakened by their adherence to romance and heritage because they are blind to the power of the changes, however vulgar and quotidian, taking place around them. They are also, of course, critics of modernity and American deracination. In contrast, Undine believes in the myth of the future. As Debra MacComb argues, “Constantly unmaking her memory so as to update her identity. Undine cannot understand the significance of the past, whether of persons or their things, nor can she comprehend a notion of value beyond that of conspicuous and temporary display.”39 The embodiment of unquenchable capitalist desire, Undine sees no beauty in her surroundings, the romantic vistas of Italy or the history of St. Désert.40 She would rather be in the crowds of Fifth Avenue, St. Moritz, and Paris, seeing the people she has read about in the society pages of the popular press. More importantly, Undine would like to

Love American style

56

be seen by these society celebrities and become one herself. Wharton makes Undine’s genre that of ladies’ advice magazines and tabloid journalism. Rather than write text, Undine wants to become it, and she shares this desire with Elmer Moffatt, her first and last husband. Moffatt only reads magazines and newspapers. When Undine goes to visit him in his hotel in Paris, “There were no books in the room, but the florid console under the mirror was stacked with old numbers of Town Talk and the New York Radiator” (CC, 320). The placement of these popular, sensational magazines and newspapers under a mirror is, of course, overtly suggestive of the solipsism with which Undine and Moffatt read them. Further, newspapers also focus on the future, as the word “news” suggests; the emphasis is not on explaining the past, but on being the first, in order to be competitive, to publish what is “new.” As such, Undine’s and Moffatt’s newspapers trivialize the myth of the American Adam, who desires to recreate himself with each new move, or in Undine’s case, with each new marriage. Through her chronicle of Undine’s marriages and divorces, Wharton illustrates both the advantages and limitations of romance, European manners, and American sensational popular presses. Wharton also explores the advantages and limitations of realism in The Custom of the Country through the character of Charles Bowen. Although Bowen commits nothing to writing, his commentary resembles that of a sociologist or “objective” realist writer. Many critics take Bowen to be Wharton’s mouthpiece, and there does seem to be much in the novel to suggest that Wharton agrees with Bowen for the most part. Bowen comes to Undine’s defense, at least indirectly, by explaining that she is the “monstrously perfect result of the system” (CC, 120), shifting blame from Undine herself to American society. The reason for this epidemic of divorce, Bowen contends, is that “the average American looks down on his wife” (CC, 118). Specifically, he excludes her from business in order to keep the public and the private effectively separated. Wives are restricted to the drawing room, while husbands live in the office (CC, 119). This exaggerated sex distinction, in Sandra Gilbert’s terms, argues Bowen, is the custom of the country, and it is this custom that leads to so many divorces. In contrast, Bowen argues, European women are at the center of the picture, even if that perception is “old,” “barbarous,” and “possessive” (CC, 120). However, Bowen’s delivery and presumption are suspicious. Bowen explains his approach to those he studies: “I want to look down on them impartially from the heights of pure speculation. I want to get a general view of the whole problem of American marriages” (CC, 118).41 More like an anthropologist or romantic metaphysician, Bowen believes he can transcend the culture he is observing. However, Wharton subtly parodies Bowen as an objective commentator. He is aloof and condescending. Robert Caserio writes that there is something Jamesian about Bowen.42 As Caserio argues, “Having used Bowen to entice the Aboriginal mind’s trust in fiction as confident sociological and moral description, as not ideological but as self-evidently true, Wharton uses narrative form’s founding or funding in a lie to raise questions about the derivation of Bowen’s commentary.”43 This is not to say that there is not truth in Bowen’s observations, or to say that Bowen is not Wharton’s mouthpiece, but to suggest that Wharton’s characterization of Bowen as condescending implies her awareness of the limits of such observation. Bowen is as enslaved as those about whom is he commenting.44 Bowen’s

Divorce, the American custom

57

very involvement within the plot suggests that he cannot transcend the cultures he observes. For example, some of Bowen’s most insightful and amusing commentary occurs as he is observing the American crowd at the, aptly named, Nouveau Luxe café while waiting for his dinner appointment with de Chelles. Bowen and de Chelles exchange convincing critiques of the American “new class of world-compellers” who “bind themselves to slavish imitation of the superseded” (CC, 157). And Bowen observes de Chelles’s inherited sexism when de Chelles criticizes Ralph Marvell for letting his wife come to Paris in the company of Van Degen (CC, 159). De Chelles then asks why Americans still have the institution of marriage, revealing the gender hierarchies he believes inherent in marriage. Bowen jokes poignantly: “Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn’t be divorced without it” (CC, 160). Meanwhile, Bowen has been aware of de Chelles’s interest in Undine and Undine’s welcoming response. Nonetheless, Bowen introduces de Chelles to Undine, simply admiring how adeptly she maneuvers the situation so that she and de Chelles are at one table and Van Degen and himself at another (CC, 161). Bowen even acknowledges that his previous conclusions about Undine were wrong: He thought Undine too clear-headed to forfeit the advantages of her marriage; but it now struck him that she might have had a glimpse of larger opportunities. Bowen, at the thought, felt the pang of the sociologist over the individual havoc wrought by every social readjustment: it had so long been clear to him that poor Ralph was a survival, and destined, as such, to go down in any conflict with the rising forces. (CC, 161) Bowen seems fully aware of the complexity of the situation, acknowledging that Undine, though restricted in her choices and a product of the system, is as much a victimizer as a victim. Yet, to a degree Bowen has been a catalyst for Undine and de Chelles. He has not simply observed. For all of his observations, he does nothing to try to prevent any damage. Bowen’s lack of response has a number of interpretations. On one level, as Judith Fryer suggests, Bowen underestimates Undine’s power.45 Still, eventually he realizes he has done so. By not doing anything, he lets Ralph “go down.” While I do not think Wharton depicts Bowen’s false sense of objectivity as intentionally malicious, she does depict Bowen as paralyzed, powerless against “rising forces,” such as those Undine represents. Thus, Wharton presents the limitations of the anthropologist’s neutrality. Even more disturbing, Wharton implies the ineffectiveness of such observation. Bowen’s perceptive commentary never leads to any effective action in the novel. Thus, Wharton acknowledges the difficulty of the objective representation that realist and anthropological approaches propose. To many critics, such as Ellen Dupree, Wharton’s suspicion of realism’s descriptive authority reveals a feminist critique. As Dupree argues, In fact, it is highly unlikely that Wharton intended Bowen to serve as her raissoneur. She was opposed to authorial statements in literature…. Close reading reveals that she subverts Bowen’s ‘Progressive’ analysis of American society…and the condescending ‘woman question.’ Far from

Love American style

58

liberal, it is an expression of the patriarchal assumption that the lives of women will inevitably be misdirected if men do not play the greatest part in them. Predictably, Bowen’s statement that French women are permitted an influential role in their society because they are sexually important to the men is disproven when Undine arrives in France.46 In her marriage to Raymond, the French aristocrat, as many critics, such as Gilbert, Ammons, and Wolff, have noted, Undine is much more circumscribed in her marriage. She is forced to adopt her husband’s customs, and his religion, and is trapped in his aptly named estate, St. Desert. Thus, Undine’s experience in the novel directly contradicts Bowen’s explication.47 Wharton also reveals her suspicion regarding realism’s putative objectivity through allusions to other novels of bad marriages written by male authors, particularly Henry James, suggesting that their plots expose their masculine biases. Wharton rewrites the ending of The Portrait of a Lady, giving it a more feminist reading, albeit a qualified and hesitant feminism. As Dupree notes anachronistically, “just as Isabel’s example condemns Undine’s decision to escape the misery of her marriage, so patriarchy inevitably punishes the woman who puts her own interests first.”48 Unlike Isabel Archer, who rejects Casper Goodwood, Undine Spragg does leave her unhappy marriage and European estate to return to America to be the bride of a successful American businessman. Dupree reads The Portrait of a Lady as the antithesis of Grant’s Unleavened Bread, arguing that The Custom of the Country is a feminist response to both: Wharton would always believe that Unleavened Bread was a major American novel. In writing The Custom of the Country ‘against’ it, she was indicating her relationship both to Grant and to the movement in fiction of which he was a part. She had concluded that the liberalism of the Progressives was in fact never far from the traditional assumptions represented by The Portrait of a Lady, and that the problem novel was therefore no more open to the woman writer than the older novel of manners. Mimesis provided a means of unsettling the male discourse, of casting doubt on its ability to define Undine. She is to be found, after all, not in the story, but like Irigaray’s elusive feminine essence, always ‘elsewhere.’49 Dupree adopts her usage of mimesis from Luce Irigaray, meaning “a form of mimesis in which a woman deliberately exaggerates or mimics patriarchal discourse for the purpose of escaping its power to define her. By momentarily ‘jamming the theoretical machinery’ it is possible to expose the disparity between the discourse and what it presumes to describe.”50 However, such feminist applications of mimesis need to be qualified in the case of Undine Spragg, because mimesis, or perhaps more properly mimicry, is also Undine’s means of success. Undine, the soulless sprite named after a product that mimics curls, moves between social circles in the attempt to mimic the manners of those circles. Her desire for fashion, notoriety, and Mrs. Heeny’s news clippings are based on mimesis, the

Divorce, the American custom

59

mimicking of those women she considers successful in the hope that she will, in turn, be mimicked. As Susan Goodman writes, “Undine is never any more real that the story her publicist can manufacture for the morning paper.”51 Wharton does not seem to be responding only to a patriarchal tradition of literature, nor is there much in Wharton’s work to suggest a belief in some essential female otherness, as Dupree argues. As a supreme mimic, there is nothing essential about Undine, except perhaps her emptiness and voraciousness. Thus, as Wharton questions so many approaches to the American novel, including feminism, realism, romance, and the study of manners, she leaves us asking just what form she believes best suits an American novel. Wharton provides a hint in defending The Custom of the Country in an argument with Henry James. James thought that she had missed the true subject of the novel by not concentrating on Undine’s marriage “into the mysterious labyrinth of family life in the old French aristocracy,” suggesting that an American woman by herself is not the proper subject; she’s only important in the context of family life and French aristocracy—the innocent, bewildered American, one of James’s favorite subjects. Wharton argues that she “was chronicling the career of a particular young woman, and that to whatever hemisphere her fortunes carried her, [her] task was to record her ravages and pass on to her next phase” (BG, 182–83). In other words, she was writing about the modern and rootless individual. James is not convinced, believing the novel, which focuses on a central situation, superior to that of the chroniclenovel, “so that he could merely answer, by implication if not openly: ‘Then, my dear child, you chose the wrong kind of subject’” (BG, 182). Yet she seems to argue that because her form suits her subject it is not an inferior form. The link, Wharton suggests, that James implies between subject and form is significant in view of the question about just what the subject or custom is in The Custom of the Country—divorce and remarriage, the severance of roots and transience, which creates a plurality of situations rather than a central one. This connection between form and subject in her argument with James recurs in her later discussion of Proust. Wharton exults in having introduced Proust to James: Here, in the first volume of a long chronicle-novel—the very type of the unrolling tapestry which was so contrary to his own conception of form— he instantly recognized a new mastery, a new vision, and a structural design as yet unintelligible to him, but as surely there as hard bone under soft flesh in a living organism…. I look back with peculiar pleasure at having made Proust known to James, for the encounter gave him his last, and one of his strongest, artistic emotions. (BG, 324) Wharton seems to look back with a slight revenge as well for his earlier criticism of The Custom of the Country, and implicitly draws some parallel in form between The Custom of the Country and Proust’s work. While not necessarily writing about divorce, Proust is, of course, writing of changing French manners, using a psychological realism that helps to define modernist form. While by no means a modernist novel, the implication is that The Custom of the Country, as a chronicle-novel with diverse centers, is modern as well, and that divorce, which encourages such plurality, contrary to James’s criticism, is the right, modern, American subject.52

Love American style

60

However, rather than chronicle changing French aristocratic manners as does Proust, Wharton is writing a modern American novel which is defined by its superficial manners. As Nancy Morrow writes, “the world of The Custom of the Country reveals itself as one in which manners have become little more than empty gestures without a consistent oral foundation.”53 In doing so Wharton emends James’s observation that there are no manners in America about which to write, suggesting that there are manners, but that they have been depleted of significance because they have become as transient as fads in the increasingly commercial capitalist mass culture of modern America, the nouveau luxe Bowen has described (CC, 157). In this she foreshadows even post-modern concerns with the apparent relativity of meaning. Wharton’s scathing critique of Undine’s mimicry, however, suggests that Wharton herself never lets go of meaning, and denies that Undine can escape meaning either, because Wharton intends for us to judge her as well. Undine can mimic the manners of each new husband, but she does not know what they mean. She may learn the gestures and attire appropriate to a situation and mistake these for manners, but she never learns the deeper significance and morality from which those manners are derived. As Lindberg argues, Wharton’s own predisposition to expect greater moral insight from other changes in perception illuminates the comic failures of Undine Spragg. When Undine looks at Mabel Lipscomb from what she imagines as Ralph Marvell’s vantage point and when she sees her first husband, Elmer Moffatt, through the eyes of her third, Raymond de Chelles, the very fact that she can only recognize the touchstones of class discrimination—the grossness of gesture and the coarseness of phrase—measures her incapacity to develop new forms of moral awareness.54 Rather than progress. Undine develops inversely, becoming more solidly at the end of the novel what she was just before the novel began: the wife of Elmer Moffatt. In Moffatt, Undine finds a partner who is as adept a mimic as she is. As Waid illustrates, with regard to Moffatt’s art collection: “With [Undine’s] penchant for imitation, she incorporates an assortment of texts, which like Moffatt’s collections, might be said to form ‘an assemblage of unmatched specimens’: magazine articles, Sunday supplements, sentimental novels, and finally the clippings that make up her life story.”55 Theirs is a marriage of mimics, which Wharton suggests is emblematic of modern America. Further, the novel does end, as tradition suggests, with a marriage, but it is Undine’s fourth marriage, and it is to a man to whom she had already been married. Their remarriage has been made possible only by a number of divorces. In fact their marriage notice, which Mrs. Heeney shows to Paul, Undine’s son from her second marriage to Ralph Marvell, is written up with coverage of Undine’s divorce from Raymond de Chelles. Thus Wharton reverses the marriage we expect at the comedic ending of most novels of manners, mocking the heroine’s wedding by making it dependent upon divorce. In doing so, Wharton makes divorce central to her American novel of manners, emphasizing just how protean, and thus empty, American manners actually are. Wharton’s ending also mocks the individualism of the romance. Divorcing Raymond, Undine seems to be romantically escaping another unsatisfying marriage to follow her own desires and forge yet another new identity. Yet because Undine defines her identity

Divorce, the American custom

61

on the basis of what she reads in Town Talk, her identity is never her own; she is never an individual, never “herself.” In addition, by the end of the novel Undine is also becoming dissatisfied with her remarriage to Moffatt: Even now, however, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them. And there had been moments lately when she had had to confess to herself that Moffatt did not fit into this picture. (CC, 333) Undine’s dissatisfaction with Moffatt finally materializes in her desire to become the wife of an ambassador, which, according to Moffatt, she cannot become because “they won’t have divorced Ambassadresses” (CC, 335). Moffatt, himself, seems responsible for her dissatisfaction because he is the one who tells her about a woman, Mrs. Jim Driscoll, becoming an ambassadress, while simultaneously taking away Undine’s hope for becoming one herself. Moffatt’s teasing enacts the fundamental precept of commercial capitalism, to create unquenchable desires in consumers. The irony here is twofold. First, as Katharine Joslin writes, Undine is right in believing that an ambassdress is her true calling: “the ultimate irony of the novel is that Undine is an ambassadress, the representative American woman.”56 Thus what Wharton is suggesting is that Undine’s divorces define her, that they make her a representative American woman. This irony is compounded by yet another allusion to James, in this case to The Ambassadors. Unlike Lambert Strether, Undine would not hesitate to recommend that Chad return to America for the money, and she would not understand Madame de Vionnet’s refusal to get a divorce, especially in view of Chad’s potential wealth. Undine Spragg, Wharton suggests, is more of an emblem of modern America than Lambert Strether. Undine is so blinded by her desire that she cannot see that she already is the ambassadress she desires to be. The potential results of her blindness are tragic because, as the rest of the novel has demonstrated, Undine destroys everything in her path to obtain what she thinks she desires, and if her desire is unceasing, so is her path of destruction. However, in restricting the legal and official recognition of Undine’s status as an ambassador of America because of her divorces, Wharton suggests that Undine cannot have the divorce she most desires, the divorce from her past, which would enable her to become an entirely new individual. Thus, Wharton’s Undine Spragg becomes almost a proto-Jay Gatsby, who like so many representatives of America, “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”57 “Divorced” is the adjective that stains Undine, branding her with a past and marking her as an American.

HOTEL SWEET HOTEL, OR THE TRAVELING DIVORCEE Like Howells, Wharton also uses domestic architecture to brand Undine and divorce as American. Architecture is as dominant a subject in Wharton’s work as marriage and divorce, and all are intricately related, since she demonstrates how interdependent marriage and domestic space are. The dynamics of family relationships are played out not

Love American style

62

just in the house but with and through it. Thus, Wharton uses Undine’s restlessness in Ralph’s house and in the de Chelles château to illustrate the tensions of those marriages themselves, including those of literary and national identity. By jux-taposing houses and marriages and divorces, Wharton enacts the battle of literary genres in America. Many have also noted the link between Wharton’s own theories regarding domestic architecture and her theories regarding the novel. This link is illustrated by Wharton’s first book, The Decoration of Houses. Wharton (with Ogden Codman) writes, “A house, or room, must be planned as it is because it could not, in reason, be otherwise; must be decorated as it is because no other decoration would harmonize as well with the plan.”58 Kaplan and Wolff read The Decoration of Houses as Wharton’s response to her mother’s interior design, houses cluttered with ornament. Thus, writes Kaplan, The Decoration of Houses represents a step out of her mother’s drawing room. Wharton later explained the need for such a book on the grounds that interior decoration was a trivialized form of woman’s work, a mere ‘branch of dressmaking.’ Like novel writing, it remained the province of female amateurs. The Decoration of Houses thus served a double purpose: it contributed to the professionalization of interior design, one of the new fields open to women at the turn of the century, and its language served as a metaphor for Wharton’s developing views of professional authorship…. we see the drawing room is in fact an untidy and unstable place; the chief ornament, the lady, does not preside, but she yields herself to a commercial stereotype of the woman of the house only to find her identity dwarfed and effaced by the objects around her.59 Thus, Wharton associates ornament with a trivialized feminine approach to interior design and to the novel. As Waid observes, “What becomes increasingly apparent throughout Wharton’s writings is her tendency to stress structure and plot as the formal requirements of the real while denouncing a feminine aesthetic that focuses on surfaces.”60 Thus realistic description must go beyond such surfaces. The Decoration of Houses, argues Waid, rescues interior design from such ornamentation, making it a deeper structural form—architecture.61 Wharton approaches literature with the same attention to structure. Ralph Marvell’s admiration of the balance and organic style of the architecture of Washington Square echoes Wharton’s elaborate descriptions of good house planning in The Decoration of Houses. Upon entering the solid “Dutch interior” of his own home, Ralph says to himself: that what Popple called society was really just like the house it lived in: a muddle of misapplied ornament over a thin steel shell of utility. The steel shell was built up in Wall Street, the social trimmings were hastily added in Fifth Avenue; and the union between them was monstrous and factitious, as unlike the gradual homogeneous growth which flowers into what other countries know as society, as that between the Blois gargoyles

Divorce, the American custom

63

on Peter Van Degen’s roof and the skeleton walls supporting them. (CC, 44) Popple paints fashionable people whose celebrity rises and falls just like fashionable housing. In contrast, Ralph sees the virtue of his lineage in his family’s house: “Ralph Marvell, mounting his grandfather’s doorstep, looked up at the symmetrical old red house-front, with its frugal marble ornament, as he might have looked into a familiar human face” (CC, 44). In addition to personifying the house and thereby making it a character in its own right, Ralph continues, paralleling his mother and his uncle, Urban Dagonet, whom Ralph so closely identified with the old house in Washington Square that they might have passed for its inner consciousness as it might have stood for their outward form; and the question as to which the house now seemed to affirm their intrinsic rightness was that of the social disintegration expressed by widely different architectural physiognomies at the other end of Fifth Avenue. (CC, 44) Ralph judges newer aspects of New York society on the basis of domestic architecture. He contrasts the order and frugality of his own Washington Square house with the disorderly, though fashionable, domestic architecture at the other end. The rush and disorder of houses such as the Van Degens’ reflect the disorder of this new American society which Ralph compares with the gradual, organic development of architecture in “other countries,” implying the hierarchies of the East, of old Europe.62 To Ralph, there is a disturbing incongruity between the Blois gargoyles and steel. Blois was a favorite residence of French royalty. Steel, of course, becomes not only one of the primary industries in industrial capitalism itself but the basis for others, such as railroads and skyscraper architecture; it also becomes symbolic of American modernism and its rapidity of motion and fluidity of identity. Ralph’s description of this Van Degenish house foreshadows that of Moffatt’s hôtel in Paris in the last chapter with its museum of European treasures as ornament, but modern American plumbing. His description suggests that none of these modern, fashionable people understand the meaning of the old arts, any more than Undine can understand the old customs. The Van Degens and their ilk see the arts as mere costume, yet another form of mimicry. Yet although Ralph’s theories of design and architecture seem congruent with that of Wharton and Codman in The Decoration of Houses, his romantic blindness and naïveté qualify his claims about architecture. There is little chance of survival for such an idealistic poet under the demands of his marriage. Undine is never impressed with his houses. Their first house, the hand-me-down on West End Avenue, only appeases her while she is pregnant. She hides behind the house (CC, 115). Yet Ralph never recognizes the reality of her disapproval. His absorption in his romantic ideals results in his failure to see Undine’s dislike of their houses and foreshadows his failure to see problems in their marriage. Wharton links Ralph’s idealistic theories about decorating and architecture to his poetic idealism. It is significant that Ralph goes into the library to contemplate his failed

Love American style

64

marriage and that it is in the library, among his books, that he kills himself. The husband’s library, according to Mark Wigley, is the space from which private, romantic contemplation develops: “the husband is given this space of immaterial knowledge while the wife is given a dressing room, space of material masks, often her bedroom.”63 This space becomes the location for private writing, developing into the memoir of the private individual, eventually the romantic individual,64 Ralph’s writing, as Waid has noted, has shifted from attempts at romantic poetry to realist observation. During his honeymoon with Undine, he is inspired to write great poems about what he views as her mythic beauty (CC, 82–3); however, after their divorce, he views the subjects that “haunted” him during his marriage as “too lyrical or too tragic” or naturalistic (CC, 241). He now begins to write a novel, in which he hopes men “look no bigger than the insects they [are]” (CC, 241). Ralph’s new approach sounds anthropological, like that of Bowen, which is also romantic in that he believes he can transcend his own condition in order to comment upon it. However, Ralph does not transcend his situation. In fact, the confrontation with reality proves too much for Ralph. Upon learning that Undine had been married to Moffatt before she married him, and recognizing that Undine will succeed in taking Paul away from him, Ralph locks himself in his library: He bolted the door and stood looking about the room. For a moment he was conscious of seeing every detail with a distinctness he had never before known; then everything vanished but the single narrow panel of a drawer under one of the bookcases. He went up to the drawer, knelt down and slipped his hand into it…. He passed his left hand over the side of his head, and down the curve of the skull behind the ear. He said to himself: ‘My wife…this will make it all right for her…’ and a last flash of irony twitched through him. Then he felt again, more deliberately, for the spot he wanted, and put the muzzle of his revolver against it. (CC, 268) By killing himself in the library, Ralph succumbs to a total absorption in romanticism. From Goethe’s young Werther on, suicide is perhaps the ultimate romantic gesture: Whether its instigation is the ugly reality that Undine’s final letter forces him to face or an ironic sacrifice to Undine and Paul, it is romantic in origin. Because of the gendered nature of the library in domestic architecture, Wharton intimates that such absorption is a particularly masculine failure. Undine’s failures at “femininity” are also symbolized by the house. Wigley’s description of how architecture reinforces the gender roles in mar-riage helps explain Undine’s failure: “The role of architecture is explicitly the control of sexuality, or, more precisely, women’s sexuality, the chastity of the girl, the fidelity of the wife…. Marriage is the reason for building a house.”65 Describing how the house enacts the dynamics of marriage, Wigley writes, “the house then assumes the role of the man’s self-control. The virtuous woman becomes woman-plus-house or, rather, woman-as-housed, such that her virtue cannot be separated from the physical space.”66 Many critics have discussed the importance of the house, particularly as a gendered space, in Wharton’s work.67 Yet, Undine has not internalized such an image, as is evident in her lack of interest in domestic affairs, which is even more pronounced in her marriage to Raymond de Chelles

Divorce, the American custom

65

than it is in her marriage to Ralph. Wharton illustrates Undine’s initial attraction to de Chelles through architectural images. Undine hears about American women who had married into French aristocracy “and who led, in the high-walled houses beyond the Seine which she had once thought so dull and dingy, a life that made her own seem as undistinguished as the social existence of the Mealy House,” Apex’s hotel (CC, 164). To Van Degen, Undine calls de Chelles’s château a “wonderful old house” and a “real castle”; the house even causes her to consider becoming Roman Catholic (CC, 166). A consummate consumer, who always believes there is something better, Undine is intrigued by what remains hidden behind those walls. However, once she discovers the rigidity of the gender codes those walls are meant to contain, Undine cannot wait to get out. Undine suffocates under the “extreme domesticity of her new state” since “taking up her domicile in the Hotel de Chelles” (CC, 273). This sense of imprisonment and isolation only grows stronger when they have to move to the family château, Saint Desert. Not long after their arrival the Marquis dies and the entire family, including Undine, is forced to follow French customs of mourning (CC, 276). Contrary to Undine’s expectations again, there was no great inheritance awaiting Raymond as the first-born son and, in fact, “debts of honour” from a reckless younger brother and the cost of keeping up the out-of-date farms of Saint Desert, since the Marquis was suspicious of modern methods, actually reduce Raymond’s monthly income (CC, 278). Further, Raymond turns out to be a true husband, as is suggested in its etymology from the word husbandry: “To faire valoir the family acres had always, it appeared, been Raymond’s deepest-seated purpose, and all his frivolities dropped from him with the prospect of putting his hand to the plough” (CC, 278). When he is not managing the estate, he is in his library (CC, 285). Undine’s feelings of resentment and rebellion are also reflected in terms of the property. For example, she keeps fires lit precisely because the Marquise considers it against tradition (CC, 292). The pivotal instance of Undine’s rebellion is her attempt to sell the famous de Chelles tapestries. Undine suggests that her husband sell Saint Desert or at least the tapestries, but he says that she doesn’t understand the value and history of property in his family, or in Europe (CC, 297). Her response is “I understand that you care for all this old stuff more than you do for me, and that you’d rather see me unhappy and miserable than touch one of your great-grandfather’s armchairs” (CC, 297). Raymond expressly forbids her to sell the tapestries, but while he is away she draws up a contract anyway, with none other than her once and future husband, Elmer Moffatt. The fact that Raymond eventually sells the tapestries to Moffatt, and thus ironically to Undine, suggests just how desperate the de Chelles family’s financial situation has become, and consequently, how the modern, capitalist consumer forces symbolized by Undine are overtaking even the vestiges of European aristocracy. In contrast to Ralph and Raymond, it is fluidity and transience that Undine Spragg admires. To Undine staying in one home keeps one from being fashionable, suggesting that since the house is a reflection of one’s identity, it is more difficult to change that identity when one is rooted in property than floating between hotels. Thus, fashionable society, which must be ever changing, is better suited to the transience of hotels. As Susan Koprince comments,

Love American style

66

Guilty at once of social climbing and sexual looseness, of brash rebellion and purposeless wandering, Undine epitomizes, in fact, the worst features of the hotel society which Wharton depicts. Like the hotel itself, Undine displays an opulent but superficial beauty, a glittering face which masks her essential vulgarity. Like the hotel too, she embodies transience and impermanence; for as her multiple marriages indicate, she is incapable of establishing long-lasting family ties or attaching herself emotionally to any single dwelling.65 This fashionable transience is of course its own identity, but it is an identity based on ornament and exteriors rather than the “intrinsic” qualities that Ralph attributes to architecture or the family lineage embodied in Raymond’s home. Further, the narrator and de Chelles attribute Undine’s transient tendencies to her national character: “It was natural that Americans, who had no homes, who were born and died in hotels, should have contracted nomadic habits” (CC, 289). When Undine presents Raymond with Elmer Moffatt’s contract to purchase the de Chelles tapestries, he responds, “You come among us from,a country we don’t know, and can’t imagine, a country you care for so little that before you’ve been a day in ours you’ve forgotten the very house you were born in—if it wasn’t torn down before you knew it” (CC, 307). She retorts, “Now that I know what you feel about me I don’t want to stay in your house another day. And I don’t mean to—I mean to walk out of it this very hour!” (CC, 308). Again the marriage is referred to in terms of the house. It is not the marriage that Undine threatens to leave explicitly; it is not even Raymond. It is the house she will walk out of. Finally, Undine realizes that changing de Chelles’s habits and customs would be as difficult as “transporting the deep-rooted masonry of Saint Desert by means of the wheeled supports on which Apex, her mid-western American town of origin, architecture performed its easy transits” (CC, 308). Undine’s marriages to Elmer are, in contrast, marked by their mobility and homelessness. From the beginning “no one in Apex knew where young Moffatt had come from, and he offered no information on the subject” (CC, 309). He simply appears one day behind the counter of a shoe store, drifting from job to job, and eventually working his way up through Apex, New York, and Europe. The last chapter of the novel emphasizes the mobility of the Moffatts. Elmer and Undine finally redefine the French hotel into the American hotel, a place of transient rest rather than residence. Wharton uses Mrs. Heeny’s comment on the French for ironic emphasis: “oh, they call their houses hotels, do they? (CC, 274). Thus Wharton parallels the impermanence divorce gives marriage with the impermanence of a mobile hotel life, and the rootlessness that she suggests characterizes modern Americans.

TURN WEST, TURN EAST Wharton uses Undine’s mobility and her proclivity for divorce as the defining elements of Undine’s “westernness.”69 Undine, claims the narrator, has “pioneer blood” (CC, 35), yet embodies the modern western spirit of mobility in her early preference for hotel life, starting with the Mealy House in Apex (CC, 33). However, the lack of civilization in the

Divorce, the American custom

67

West initially drives the adolescent Undine to envy those girls who “of bliss ineffable!— went ‘east’” (CC, 33). Undine’s desire for mobility is vertical; the western desire for expansion is placed onto vertical social mobility rather than simply geographic space, but the geography is still significant. Undine’s western pioneer spirit has been abstracted from the land of the West itself and projected onto eastern society. Undine’s social, urban pioneering suggests F.Jackson Turner’s famous frontier thesis. Although Turner’s idealistic thesis about the influence of the West on the American character has been reevaluated and its capitalist, ideological assumptions exposed, it nonetheless embodies a powerful American myth. Turner argues, “The free lands are gone. The material forces that gave vitality to Western democracy are passing away. It is to the realm of the spirit, to the domain of ideals and legislation, that we must look for Western influence upon democracy in our own days.”70 The new pioneers of the frontier, he writes, are the captains of industry: While the individualism of the frontier, so prominent in the earliest days of the Western advance, has been preserved as an ideal, more and more these individuals struggling each with the other, dealing with vaster and vaster areas, with larger and larger problems, have found it necessary to combine under the leadership of the strongest. This is the explanation of the rise of those preeminent captains of industry whose genius has concentrated capital to control the fundamental resources of the nation.71 Moffatt is just such a pioneer, and Undine as well. As Katherine Joslin writes, The heroine of The Custom of the Country Undine Spragg, as a female ‘pioneer,’ listens for and responds to ‘the call of the Atlantic’ and the civilized as passionately as male pioneers had heard the call of the Pacific and ‘the wild’…. Her destiny is eastward, not westward bound; she travels back through the mystifying layers of culture, searching all along for clues to the ‘hieroglyphic’ worlds of the New York leisure class and the European aristocracy.72 Never satisfied, Undine continually moves east and, in her eyes, up, from the resort at Potash Springs to New York to France. Yet, Undine never shakes her western personality; rather, her western personality gives her both the strength and desire to keep moving east. Undine’s story is the chronicle of a new frontier: divorce. Wharton emphasizes the pioneering spirit of divorce by having all of the divorces occur in the West. In doing so, Wharton reflects the historical association between divorce and the West. Many thought they had to go west to get a divorce. As Debra Ann MacComb illustrates, the liberal divorce law and westward expansion have long been linked.73 Undine travels to Sioux Falls, keeping company with Mabel Lipscomb, to divorce Ralph, and then she travels all the way to Reno to divorce Raymond de Chelles. Her first divorce, from Moffatt, happens right in her western hometown, suggesting they are “at home” with divorce. Thus Wharton links Undine’s voracious consumerism with both her western upbringing and her taste for divorce.

Love American style

68

During her first meeting with Ralph’s grandfather, Mr. Dagonet, who is the epitome of old New York, Undine becomes aware of how differently New Yorkers view divorce. Undine has been telling the dinner party how unhappy Mabel Lipscomb is in marriage because her husband has disappointed her by not “being in the right set” (CC, 56). Mabel’s mobility has been hampered until, as Undine puts it, she can “get rid” of her husband (CC, 56). The party is stunned, and then even more so by Undine’s response to Mr. Dagonet that “a pretext so trivial” could be “fixed up” by lawyers, who could simply call it “desertion” (CC, 56). Ralph’s mother responds that in New York, unlike in other parts of the country, “a divorced woman is still—thank heaven!—at a decided disadvantage” (CC, 57), an adage which is later proven false by Undine’s apotheosis. Ralph, who is surprisingly blind to the warnings blaring from this conversation, jokes to Undine: “You see, Undine, you’d better think twice before you divorce me!” (CC, 57). Undine responds: “Oh, it all depends on you! Out in Apex, if a girl marries a man who don’t come up to what she expected, people consider it’s to her credit to want to change. You’d better think twice of that!” (CC, 57). On one level, there is a sort of feminism in Undine’s response. For her, divorce is both a tool for mobility and a right. It will be “to her credit” to divorce Ralph if he disappoints her. Yet, Undine’s feminism is entirely selfserving, consequently more reflective of her selfishness than of any greater movement of women’s rights. Wharton has taken the girl out of Apex, but Apex attitudes remain with the girl. In contrast, her first and fourth marriages to Elmer Moffatt begin in the West. Moffatt is the American Adam on Wall Street, more “successful” in Undine’s terms than any of her other husbands. Moffatt is even more transient and without history than Howells’s Bartley Hubbard, for whom we are at least given an account of his orphanhood. The points at which Undine finds Moffatt most attractive are those when he demonstrates the strength of his “individuality,” when he does not conform to the expectations of anyone, including family or society. Moffatt’s drunken outburst at the temperance society dinner in Apex and the “Eubaw Avenue scandal” (in which Moffatt is seen walking up the street with a prostitute early one Sunday morning) reveal to Undine his power (CC, 312). Further, Elmer incites such individuality in her. The day he is fired from the surveyor’s office, he asks Undine to go for a walk with him. She hesitates, but then “when she saw Millard Binch’s mother looking at her disapprovingly from the opposite street-corner” (CC, 312), she decides to go, placing herself in the position of the prostitute, asserting her own independence in doing so. Although Moffatt’s behavior is rebellious, it is not admirably so. Rather Wharton associates the sort of individualism Moffatt and Undine embody with its most base manifestations, such as drunkenness, and consequently, the selfishness with which Undine marries and divorces. In a week Elmer and Undine “were on a train together, Apex and all her plans and promises behind them, and a bigger and brighter blur ahead, into which they were plunging as the ‘Limited’ plunged into the sunset” (CC, 313). Thus, rather than a house, a train—pure mechanical, industrial motion—symbolizes their marriage and foreshadows Moffat’s triumph as a railroad tycoon. The indication that they are plunging into the sunset suggests that they are moving west. It is a marriage of individual adventurers, explorers, not family that attracts Undine. Yet, the word “plunging” invokes descent, movement downward. Thus Wharton depicts Moffatt and Undine as examples of the worst consequences of western individualism; they are both selfish, voracious consumers

Divorce, the American custom

69

with not only unquenchable desires but they are also domineering, gaining in speed and force. Still more troubling, Wharton intimates, is that this western American force embodied by Moffatt and Undine threatens to spread to consume what remains of first eastern, and finally, European traditions. Wharton exaggerates Undine’s and Moffatt’s American westernness by juxtaposing them with Europeans, alluding to Henry James’s frequent comparisons of the American girl with Europeans. One of the central differences in Wharton’s novel is, again, the western Americans’ comfort with divorce. This comfort is perhaps best revealed by their discomfort with adultery, which is characterized as a symptom of European decadence.74 Undine’s one actual affair with Peter Van Degen is a complete failure, especially from Undine’s point of view. Undine does not enter this affair because of an overwhelming passion or even an interest in sex; she begins the affair with the hope of a divorce and a new marriage. Although Van Degen is an American, he is quite comfortable with adultery, yet he tends to keep his affairs in Europe. His affair with Undine accelerates overseas. Undine’s hold over him in Paris is “stronger than when they had parted from America” (CC, 165). Undine believes in this power and is encouraged by the prevalence of divorce around her: “But all about them couples were unpairing and pairing again with an ease and rapidity that encouraged Undine to bide her time” (CC, 165). Undine wants Van Degen to enable her to stay in Europe, and he seems equally desperate to have her remain in Europe, offering to secure a house in the town ironically named Trouville and even wanting to bring his wife to Europe for the semblance of propriety (CC, 168–9). Yet Undine refuses simply to be his mistress, telling him she will never go back to Ralph, letting him think that she plans to marry de Chelles (CC, 171). Van Degen almost leaves her, letting it be so, but Undine’s game finally works. He says he will do anything that she says. Undine takes this as evidence that he will eventually marry her, and allows the affair to ignite, traipsing across Europe and the society pages (CC, 178). However, when they return to America and Van Degen learns of Undine’s callousness toward Ralph, he drops their affair (CC, 204). Although the specific instance to which Peter refers is Undine’s deliberate ignoring of Ralph’s illness, it is telling that he does not question her morality until he is back in the United States. It is as though it is American soil that “enlightens” his view of his affair with Undine. Thus, Van Degen ultimately does not just reject divorce but also punishes Undine for her adultery. Mrs. Rolliver, a.k.a. Indiana Frusk, Undine’s girlhood friend from Apex with the emphatically western name, explains Undine’s mistake in her affair with Van Degen: “And that is, to get your divorce first thing. A divorce is always a good thing to have: you can never tell when you may want it. You ought to have attended to that before you even began with Peter Van Degen” (CC, 196). For Frusk, divorce is a commodity; she treats it pragmatically, like an extra set of undergarments. Undine tries to defend her mistake by arguing that Clare Van Degen would never have granted Peter the divorce because although Clare is in love with Ralph, Clare thinks divorce “wrong—or rather awfully vulgar” (CC, 197). Indiana responds, ‘Vulgar?’ Indiana flamed. ‘If that isn’t just too much! A woman who’s in love with another woman’s husband? What does she think refined, I’d like to know? Having a lover, I suppose—like the women in these nasty

Love American style

70

French plays? I’ve told Mr. Rolliver I won’t go to the theatre with him again in Paris—it’s too utterly low. And the swell society’s just as bad: it’s simply rotten. Thank goodness I was brought up in a place where there’s some sense of decency left!…. It was New York that demoralized you—and I don’t blame you for it. Out at Apex you’d have acted different. You never would have given way to your feelings before you’d got your divorce.’ (CC, 197) Indiana’s version of morality is not only based in geography, the West being superior to the East in her view, but reveals a secular version of the Puritan argument that divorce was preferable to adultery. Frusk promotes serial monogamy rather than any belief in marital fidelity or permanence. Ironically, Undine’s status as an American divorcee is attractive to many fashionable Europeans. While she is unwelcome in the New York circle in Paris, she is welcome in the “smart” European set: “It appeared in some mysterious way to make her more available for their purpose, and she found that, in the character of the last American divorcee, she was even regarded as eligible to the small and intimate inner circle of their loosely-knit association” (CC, 200). What attracts them is not the divorce itself, but that divorce indicates to Europeans a moral looseness and freedom, the risqué divorcee. As Undine begins to realize the reason for their attraction, she is disturbed: “At first she could not make out what had entitled her to this privilege, and increasing enlightenment produced a revolt of the Apex puritanism which, despite some odd accommodations and compliances, still carried its head so high in her” (CC, 200). Thus, Undine realizes this “queer” and “different” set of Madame Adelschein’s admits her because they think she will be inclined to be as sexually permissive as they are. Undine puts her scruples on hold until she thinks her reputation may have harmed her chances of marriage with de Chelles, who sees her one evening with Madame Adelschein and restricts his greeting to a bow (CC, 201). However, the meeting may not have been as damaging as Undine believes, for although she quits Adelschein’s circle and Paris, she is eventually sought out by the Princess Estradina, the cousin of de Chelles. The Princess pursues Undine as a friend, so that she may use Undine as a cover for her own adulterous affairs (CC, 224). When Undine discovers the Princess’s ulterior motive, her “Apex puritanism” again surfaces and she vows not to be an accessory to such behavior. However, the Princess returns with her cousin, de Chelles, and Undine knows she must take advantage of this chance (CC, 225). The Princess encourages Undine and de Chelles’s attachment at first, but as it becomes clear that Undine wishes marriage and not an affair, the Princess turns cold. When Undine begins to plot her way around the French resistance to her marriage to de Chelles as a divorced woman with the talk of an annulment, “there was a perceptible decline in these signs of hospitality” (CC, 231). They have no problem with Undine having a affair with de Chelles, but marriage is another issue. Undine’s marriage to French aristocrat Raymond de Chelles enacts the plot of the novel of adultery without the romance, suggesting that the adultery plot does not work for Americans. There is hardly love between them. Raymond’s attraction to Undine seems purely sexual and evaporates upon marriage. He is not a pure ogre, certainly not the ogre Undine paints him to be later in her divorce suit, but Undine is expected to perform as

Divorce, the American custom

71

wife, to bear children, and remain at Saint Desert. Raymond has no moral qualms about pursuing affairs with other women, or ignoring Undine’s affairs if she were to do the same (CC, 313). By depicting de Chelles’s comfort with adultery, Wharton alludes to the European tradition of the novel of adultery. Tony Tanner, Joseph Allen Boone, and Judith Armstrong have explored the treatment of adultery in the novel, defining it as a particularly European, even particularly French, tradition, stemming from some of the oldest western literature; even The Iliad is propelled by the adultery of Helen with the presciently named Paris. This tradition expands with the idea of courtly love, and stories like that of Tristan and Iseult, so much so that “true love” or “real love” becomes associated with adulterous love in the continental tradition, according to Denis de Rougemont. Yet in The Custom of the Country, in which Wharton is so consciously trying to characterize the American personality, there is nothing romantic about adultery. Raymond does not appear to be any more in love with these other women than he was with Undine. Raymond only gets angry when she defies his will in selling the tapestries and when she threatens him with divorce. Adultery maintains the family but divorce disrupts it. Like Indiana Frusk, Elmer Moffatt believes exactly the opposite. At the end of the novel, Undine divorces Raymond de Chelles because she is persuaded by her first husband that adultery is a French custom and not suitable for an American. For Moffatt, as an American, divorce is preferable. Thus, Undine’s divorce and remarriage to Moffatt repatriate Undine as an American. Elmer rejects what seems to be Undine’s proposal of an affair in the “European” tradition of marriage, in which adultery seems not only accepted but expected. Elmer won’t have her that way; he wants her all his own, out in the open: “you were my wife once, and you were my wife first—and if you want to come back you’ve got to come that way: not slink through the back way when there’s no one watching, but walk in by the front door, with your head up, your Main Street look” (CC, 322). Elmer considers adultery a reminder of European duplicity and blind conformity to duty. In response to Undine’s suggestion, Elmer says, “We’re differently made out in Apex” (CC, 323). In America, he claims, an honest, open, public divorce is preferable to private indiscretions. He even blames Undine’s residence in Europe for causing her to suggest such an idea (CC, 323). Undine resists the notion of divorce because as a French wife she is a Catholic now. Elmer replies: “If you come along home with me I’ll see you get your divorce all right. Who cares what they do over here? You’re an American, ain’t you? What you want is the home-made article” (CC, 324). Moffatt, like Indiana, considers divorce a commodity. In addition, he demonstrates how national identity becomes linked with consumerism in modern Ameri-can capitalism. Not only is divorce an American right but it’s something you can purchase: “the home-made article.” Echoing the later twentieth-century slogan “Buy American,” Moffatt suggests in his modern American capitalist view that such purchasing power is central to his, and Undine’s, identity as Americans. Divorce, with mobility and promise of a renewable identity, may in fact be the American commodity. Moffatt does seem something of an observant cultural critic, particularly when placed in the context of the history of the American novel. The most enduring and influential novel of adultery in America is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Like Hester Prynne herself, the novel is marked by a flaming red “A,” most memorable as a signifier

Love American style

72

of sin and exclusion from the community. In the Puritan American colony, adultery is not a romantic means of pursuing illegitimate sexual gratification while maintaining the veneer of marriage, as it is at Saint Desert, but a disrupter of the community. As Glenda Riley notes, “some Puritans believed that forcing all estranged couples to remain harnessed by law would eventually undermine the social harmony they were trying to achieve. Adulterous relationships, non-functional families, physical and verbal abuse, and abandonment would surely result. They especially feared the destructive effects of adultery.”75 Divorce, then, Puritan leaders viewed as a safety valve.76 Although Elmer Moffatt is surely no Puritan, his sense of “morality” and his “work ethic” are traces of the Puritan heritage that have come to be characterized as particularly American. Thus, Wharton uses Undine’s western mobility to juxtapose America and Europe, suggesting that if adultery characterizes the French novel, divorce characterizes the American novel, and the West characterizes America. Wharton’s contrast of Europe and America culminates in the newspaper accounts of the Moffatts’ remarriage. Crowning Moffatt the “Railroad King,” a new-world super aristocratic of sorts, and thereby linking Moffatt explicitly with trains, motion, and commerce, one gossip columnist notes, Divorce and remarriage of Mrs Undine Spragg-de Chelles. American Marquise renounces ancient French title to wed Railroad King. Quick work untying and tying. Boy and girl romance renewed. Reno, November 23rd. The Marquise de Chelles, of Paris, France, formerly Mrs. Undine Spragg Marvell, of Apex City and New York, got a decree of divorce at a special session of the Court last night, and was remarried fifteen minutes later to Mr. Elmer Moffatt, the billionaire Railroad King, who was the Marquise’s first husband. (CC, 329–330) Undine is identified by an almost comic list of names and places, full of contradictions that emphasize the contrast of the Moffatts with Europeans. The titles “American Marquise” and “Railroad King” are contradictions in terms. These flashy oxymorons, meant to catch a reader’s eye, Wharton suggests, are all too common in American popular magazines, resulting in a loss of meaning. These titles mean nothing in this context. This passage also demonstrates the full appropriation by industrial capitalism of landowning aristocracies. Raymond’s Marquis title has been surpassed by the American equivalent, the business tycoon or robber baron; a king outranks a marquis. Further, Moffatt has made his millions in railroads, a symbol of modernity and rapidity. Thus, this passage also emphasizes the rapidity that characterizes the Moffatt marriage: “No case has ever been railroaded through the divorce courts of this State at a higher rate of speed” (CC, 330). The columnist’s commendation of the Moffatts’ speed reflects the technology and speed associated with modern America, a love of record-breaking novelties. Finally, the terse sound-bite sentences and sentence fragments discourage any real interest in character or motivation. Rather the language reduces Undine’s career to readymade phrases that encapsulate popular narratives, such as a “boy and girl romance renewed.” Such superficial, meaningless sound bites, intimates Wharton, are threatening to become the American form, just as divorce is becoming the American subject.

Divorce, the American custom

73

BECOMING TOWN TALK The hotel life and mobility that characterize divorce in Wharton’s work are also linked with what Wharton saw as the blurring of the distinction between the private and the public at the turn of the last century.77 Literature is implicated in this blurring between the public and the private because its subjects are so often of a private nature. Thus many authors, Howells and Wharton included, sought to distinguish literature from the popular journalism, memoirs, and magazine fiction that also dealt with private subjects. Such a distinction was particularly difficult to make when one wrote about a subject as popular and private, as spicy, as divorce. In The Custom of the Country, Wharton distinguishes her novel from the popular press by parodying the style, subject, and audience of that press in the final chapter of the book in which she describes the Moffatt marriage. Rather than making spectators feel that they have invaded a character’s private domain, as one feels one is doing in Ralph’s library and in the de Chelles château, the Moffatts invite and encourage the spectator because they live in a world that is constantly public. Not only do Undine and Moffatt move between a number of residences but they maintain those residences mostly as showplaces, as museums more than actual “homes.” On Fifth Avenue, Moffatt has built “an exact copy of the Pitti Palace in Florence” and they plan to spend their springs at the new hotel in Paris (CC, 330). The aim of their houses is not domesticity or privacy but spectacle and notoriety, something to be covered in Town Talk.78 Wharton’s own preference for domestic architecture emphasized privacy; as Fryer notes, “The Decoration of Houses emphasizes above all privacy and a sense of retreat: doors that lock and bolt mark the boundaries between public and private spaces.”79 Wharton’s value of privacy is exem-plified by the Mount, the only house she helped to design from the ground up. Fryer notes that while there are rooms that are specified as rooms for socializing, there are also rooms, such as Wharton’s bedroom, which are strictly off limits. In the Mount, Wharton demonstrates a deliberate progression from exterior public space to interior private space. Following an uninviting entry way on the bottom floor, which is half interior and half patio, the visitor must climb up a set of stairs to enter into a receiving hallway, which is more welcoming but still feels more like a waiting room or screen. The house feels like a maze of cut off rooms; there is little open space, and it is difficult to get a sense of the layout of the house while one is in it. On the main floor, there is a drawing room, dining room, and both Teddy and Edith’s libraries, each rooms of select public admittance. The top floor contains bedrooms and closets. The stairway between the first and second floor breaks on the second floor, starting a second stairway between that of the second and third floor, and creating a sense of even greater privacy on the top floor.80 In contrast, Undine’s and Moffatt’s hotel is mostly for spectacle, as is evident not only by the museum of belongings but by the fact that they only pop in for a visit when preparing to have a party there, such as the one with which the book closes. Wharton’s critique of such domestic theatricality is made most poignant through Paul, Undine’s son by Ralph Marvell. By introducing Paul’s perspective in the last chapter of the novel, Wharton reminds her readers that this is not just a satire of modern American marriage and/or divorce, but that there is a serious and tragic consequence, the isolation and emptiness of the children such marriages produce, proving that both marriage and divorce

Love American style

74

are social, not simply individual decisions.81 Wharton casts judgment on both the Moffatt house and hence their marriage through Paul’s tour of the house. Having arrived at the hotel his new stepfather has recently purchased, “home” for the Easter holidays from his “fashionable private school,” Paul walks around the “big and strange” house waiting for his mother and Elmer to return; they have rushed down to Deauville to rent a house for the summer (CC, 325). Paul’s own room, “in which there was not a toy or a book, or one of his dear battered relics (none of the new servants—they were always new—could find his things, or think where they had been put), seem[s] the loneliest spot in the house” (CC, 325–26). Paul attempts to relieve his loneliness by putting postcards in his album “but the newness and sumptuousness of the room embarrassed him—the white fur rugs and brocade chairs seemed maliciously on the watch for smears and ink-spots—and after a while he pushed the album aside and began to roam through the house” (CC, 326). Thus, Paul’s loneliness forces him to keep moving as well, and not to act too childish; ink spots would destroy the museum. As he moves through the house, the scene Wharton describes through his eyes emphasizes the museum-like quality of the house; Paul is afraid to touch anything. Even the books in the library are too valuable in their “dim browns and golds, and old faded red as rich as velvet” as artifacts to actually be read (CC, 326). In his isolation and boredom, Paul finally turns to Mrs. Heeny, the masseuse who acts as Undine’s coach, guiding her move up society’s ladder, because she is the only familiar if not well-liked face. Heeny, like a good coach, has kept track of Undine’s career through her collection of clippings from sources reminiscent of Bartley Hubbard’s “spicy journalism.” Undine and Moffatt become popular items for American gossip columns, consequently becoming progressively more public through the course of the novel. Heeny tells Paul he could make up a scrapbook from those of his mother alone and guides him through the clippings, telling him the significance of each, most of which focus on what Elmer buys and what Undine wears. None of the tales hold Paul’s interest: “he wanted to hear about his mother and Mr. Moffatt, and not about their things” (CC, 329). Thus, Paul asks why his mother is married to Mr. Moffatt now. Paul’s question suggests that Paul is interested in character, motivation, and manners and prefers to read a novel of manners more in line with the sort Wharton herself writes or those unused, ornate volumes in the library rather than the gossip column clippings. Heeny, exasperated, can think of only one response: “She’s married to him because she got a divorce” (CC, 329). Heeny’s dismissive response seems illogical but it also reflects the serial monogamy Wharton intimates is customary to America. With no reference to love or sexual attraction or social duty, Heeny’s explanation also emphasizes the cold practicality with which Undine practices her career of serial monogamy. Finally, the superficiality of Heeny’s response suggests the flatly literal reading encouraged by newspaper clippings. Unlike Paul, Heeny does not want to know anything more than the “facts” of the clipping that Undine has divorced de Chelles and remarried Moffatt. Heeny’s clippings also reveal to Paul the dubious truthfulness of the clippings, confirming for Paul his worst fears about his mother: “in the dazzling description of his mother’s latest nuptials one fact alone stood out for him—that she has said things that weren’t true of his French father. Something he had half-guessed in her, and averted his frightened thoughts from, took his little heart in an iron grasp” (CC, 330). His mother, just like the clippings, is not to be trusted. Although we do not see the courtroom drama,

Divorce, the American custom

75

as we do in Howells’s A Modern Instance, like Howells Wharton emphasizes the falsity of many of the suits for divorce and the press’s complicity in that falsity. In doing so, Wharton, also like Howells, admits to the problem of representation that cuts to the core of the realist project, a suspicion of text itself, in which she as an author, again like Howells, is also suspect. However, Wharton goes beyond Howells in exploiting this selfconsciousness of textuality, creating a heroine who revels in being in print and who has no “essence” or soul—as her name Undine suggests—outside of print and the public eye. Further, Undine utter lack of depth and round-ness, compared with Lily Bart for example, make Undine more of a parody than a “real” character, and thus a literary figure rather than a realistic depiction. In doing so, Wharton herself seems to be reveling in creation and textuality. Just as Paul is realizing the worst about his mother, the sound of a motor announces her and Moffatt’s arrival. Her greeting is anything but warm and intimate, as readers may expect of mothers in nineteenth-century domestic fiction. There is no public for whom to display such a greeting, though the meeting is in a ballroom with all the doors “open and all the lustres lit” (CC, 331). To make matters worse, Moffatt and Undine are in the center of the floor admiring their most recent acquisition, “the tapestries that had always hung in the gallery at Saint Désert” (CC, 331). It could hardly be more vicious if they had de Chelles’s head on a spear. For Paul, the combination of the tapestries and his mother’s presence makes him feel momentarily an illusion of home, “that he really was at home again, and not in a strange house” (CC, 331). He even takes his mother’s hand, but Undine immediately frees her hand to rush off and prepare for her party. She does not respond to Moffatt’s plea that she give Paul “a minute’s time” (CC, 331). Moffatt tries to console Paul himself, but only makes matters more bleak for Paul as he reveals the brutality with which he and Undine removed the tapestries from his French step-father (CC, 332). Although Moffatt appears to be more consoling than Undine, the best consolation he can come up with is to turn Paul into a newspaper clipping himself: “it looks as if one of these days you’d be the richest boy in America” (CC, 332). Auchincloss notes that the last chapter reads like such a clipping: “The language of the last chapter reads like a ladies’ magazine—or like the mind of Undine.”82 This seems intentional on Wharton’s part in order to distinguish the rest of her novel from such writing. Millicent Bell writes that Undine is “too well known to newspaper readers to be denied, especially in comparison to popular “molasses fiction.”83 Thus in the battle of styles or genres in The Custom of the Country, “molasses fiction” or sentimental writing and the gossip column appear to be the victors since they are the type of writing that concludes the novel. Nonetheless, because the writing is situated within Wharton’s novel, the novel itself has the last word. Rather than a promotion of such writing, Wharton is, of course, satirizing the victory of such writing, and in doing so she also writes a jeremiad. As Lindberg writes, Beneath the snobbish and comic surface of The Custom of the Country Edith Wharton is projecting a vision of social cataclysm at the turn of the century—she sees uninformed, rapacious appetite converging with the titanic, amoral powers released in the most dizzying age of American capitalism…. Nothing Undine destroys is realized so compellingly as Undine herself; her frightening powers seem to involve more authorial

Love American style

76

fantasy than social prophecy. Undine has all the irrepressible energy of a bad dream, and Moffatt has all the power to make one’s worst dreams become true.84 By showing the gossip column as the victor, Wharton also shows the victory of Undine’s and Moffatt’s values: the hotel life, the collapse of the distinction between public and private boundaries, and the transience of divorce. Further, Wharton laments these victories as particularly modern, American problems that detracted immensely from the quality of life, art, and culture, all of which deplete meaning from manners. Bell recounts a story of Wharton cutting out an ad for the novel Laddie, which calls it a true novel of America, one that does not take place in divorce courts.85 The assumption upon which this ad is based is telling: the American novel had become associated with, perhaps even characterized by, the divorce court, however debased that left the American novel. What the ad then calls for is a “true American novel,” one distinct from the “molasses fiction” and ladies’ magazines, one distinct from Mrs. Heeny’s clippings, a call reminiscent of Coale’s theory of the American romance. There is then an irony in Wharton’s attention to this ad, even beyond that of the dubious merit of an advertisement’s literary criticism. The Custom of the Country was not Wharton’s first treatment of divorce and marriage, nor was it her last; in fact, divorce became a more common subject in her later novels. Thus, perhaps what Wharton is suggesting is that it is difficult to imagine the modern American novel without some inclusion of divorce. The challenge then for Wharton was to write an American novel, which was not escapist romance, or “dirt for dirt’s sake” realism,86 or “molasses fiction.” Yet there are also other important distinctions to be addressed in the comparison of the novel with the gossip column: one proposes to be fiction and one fact. The exposure of the private lives of fictional characters is not the same thing as exposing the lives of real, living people. This distinction is made very clear if one compares Wharton’s autobiography A Backward Glance with the subject matter of her novels. Wharton’s own divorce and her affair with Morton Fullterton are well documented in numerous biographies, most notably Lewis and Wolff, yet Wharton herself never mentions either in her own account of her life. In fact, as many have noted, the fact that she finally finishes and publishes The Custom of the Country in 1913, the same year that she finally divorces Teddy, sells The Mount, and takes up permanent residence in France, suggests that there is a cathartic dimension to both the writing and the reading of fiction. Fiction creates a space where sensitive private issues may be explored without actually exposing real privacy. Written in the private space of her bed, but written with imagination, fiction, Wharton’s work suggests, can perhaps help to preserve the distinctions between the public and private, creating at least a veil if not a wall between them. In her creation of this fictional American divorcee, Wharton revels in the jouissance of texts, simultaneously reveal-ing truth and covering it, anticipating the postmodern play between autobiography and fiction that infuses later divorce novels by McCarthy and Updike.

CHAPTER FOUR Mary McCarthy’s A Charmed Life

Divorcing Fiction from Fact Mary McCarthy is known as much for her life as for her writing. Although some of her fiction was considered scandalous and The Group (1963) became a bestseller, she is remembered more for her autobiographies and her criticism than for her fiction. However, the distinction between these genres is particularly fuzzy in the case of McCarthy. In writing about these intimate relationships she has often revealed publicly things many thought should be left private.1 Much of her fiction, especially her early fiction, such as In the Company She Keeps (1942), A Charmed Life (1955), and even The Group, bears a striking resemblance to elements of her life. As she told Elizabeth Neibuhr in an interview for The Paris Review, what she tries to do is take “real plums” from her life and place them in “imaginary cake.”2 Many of these plums are her exhusbands: McCarthy was divorced three times, providing juicy ingredients for her “cake.” In fact, McCarthy’s frank use of these intimate relationships in her fiction is characteristic of her work and contributes to her reputation as a scandalous writer. Yet more than simply creating graphic and unromantic portrayals of her ex-husbands, McCarthy’s depiction of divorce builds on that of earlier novelists, such as William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton. For McCarthy, too, the idea of divorce serves as a vehicle for exploring the form of the modern American novel, particularly the fusion of realism and romance, yet McCarthy takes this exploration of form even further, marrying fact and fiction and illustrating how divorce exemplifies postmodernism. McCarthy uses divorce to question the limits of realistic representation, exploring the spectrum between fact and fiction. During the first half of the twentieth century, divorce courts encouraged fictionalizing grounds for divorce. Because of restrictive legal grounds, Herbie DiFonzo argues that those seeking divorce created an alternative system: “divorcers co-opted the trial bench, by and large, ignoring the fault threshold to divorce encoded in statute and case precedent and substituting a formulaic ritual which masked the underlying reality of mutual consent.”3 Divorce courts thus encouraged performance, rewarding those who stretched the truth of their marital discord to suit terms acceptable in court. For an extreme example in New York, where adultery and desertion were the only legal grounds for divorce, adulteries were sometimes staged with hired actresses and hired private eyes. In The Group, McCarthy maligns the premises of Norrine, the least liked character in the

Love American style

78

novel, by having her upstairs neighbor earn a living by being such an actress. Thus McCarthy was well aware of the performative qualities of divorce. With A Charmed Life it is as if McCarthy uses the performative nature of midtwentieth-century divorce as a model for the American novel. A novel is, of course, similarly a performance, and according to Ihab Hassan, such performativity is especially characteristic of the postmodern novel: “The postmodern text, verbal or nonverbal, invites performance: it wants to be written, revised, answered, acted out. Indeed, so much of postmodern art class itself performance, as it transgresses genre.”4 The genres which McCarthy transgresses most blatantly are autobiography and fiction, and she is not alone: “Autobiography has become rife, running both in high and low repute: it enjoys the sublime attention of literary theory, suffers the base association with cultural narcissism. More to the point: it has become the form that the contemporary imagination seeks to recover, as recent works of Saul Bellow, William Styron, John Earth, Bernard Malamud, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Michael Herr variously intimate. Yet autobiography remains an impossible—and deadly—form.”5 I would add McCarthy to Hassan’s list. McCarthy’s self-referential novel of divorce and autobiography calls for a reassessment of McCarthy’s fiction, which is much more critically sophisticated, much more postmodern, than she is often given credit for. Further, she illuminates the postmodern elements of divorce that suggest that divorce offers the novel much more than what Samuel Coale has called “soap opera machinations.”6 A Charmed Life is a prime example of the gray area between fact and fiction in McCarthy’s opus. The setting of the novel closely resembles a period in McCarthy’s life during the late 40s and early 50s. Like McCarthy, the novel’s protagonist, Martha Sinnott, has returned to a small artistic beach town for the winter season, a town which sounds very like that of Wellfleet or Truro, where McCarthy lived. Like McCarthy, Martha has returned with her new husband, even though her ex-husband lives in a neighboring town and is still well-known among the townspeople, who also remember them as a couple. Further, Martha’s ex, Miles Murphy, bears a strong resemblance to Edmund Wilson, McCarthy’s ex, as Martha’s current husband, John Sinnott, resembles McCarthy’s third husband, Bowden Broadwater, despite McCarthy’s protests to the contrary. Divorce and remarriage are recurring, if not central, themes in A Charmed Life, themes that work on many levels, both figurative and literal. The idea of divorce offers an instructive way of looking at this gray area between life and fiction in the work of Mary McCarthy and for framing her work in an American literary tradition. Like her divorce novel predecessors, Howells and Wharton, McCarthy advocates realism in the novel, and she uses many of the same figures to symbolize divorce that they use, such as the house and the East and the West. Yet, much more than Howells and Wharton, McCarthy exploits writerly elements in her divorce novel, collapsing boundaries Howells and Wharton questioned. In doing so, McCarthy questions writing’s ability to divorce fiction from fact and fact from fiction.

Mary McCarthy’s a charmed life

79

THE NOVEL IN CRISIS Irvin Stock has labeled McCarthy “a sort of neoclassicist in a country of romantics.”7 He is not alone in labeling America “a country of romantics.” Many critics, most famously Lionel Trilling, Richard Chase, and Leslie Fiedler, have characterized American literature as romantic, meaning an idealistic literature that focuses on metaphysical confrontations rather than on social engagement. That is not to say that there is no American tradition of realism, but that many critics and writers, beginning with Henry James, have argued that the so-called democratic, nonhierarchical structure of American society does not lend itself to realistic fiction. Thus the American writer has two choices: write about Europe if he wants to write a novel or write romance if he wants to write about America. The implications of this division are that imagination is more valued than social reality. Similarly, postmodern writers, such as Thomas Pynchon, John Earth, and Don DeLillo, are often seen as the inheritors of the romance tradition and praised for their completely unrealistic, densely symbolic novels. It is just such imagination that McCarthy is often accused of lacking, even by her admirers. Carol Brightman writes that McCarthy’s limitation is a failure of the imagination.8 Brightman’s critique privileges the romantic imagination over social realism; it also aligns Brightman with many of McCarthy’s other critics, particularly Norman Mailer, whose attacks on McCarthy reveal gender biases. Unfortunately this gender bias has come to be associated with the very division of romance and realism in America. Male writers are often associated with the imaginative, “higher” tier of romance and postmodernism while female writers are associated with domestic, quotidian social realism or maybe magic realism. Of course, this dichotomy has been disproved and discarded time again in recent criticism; however, it still influences many critics, even feminist critics, as in the case of Brightman. Rather than view McCarthy’s limitation as a failure of the imagination, I want to suggest that her so-called limited imagination was intentional because she was suspicious of the imagination, a mistrust based on what she perceived as the growing “irreality” of the modern world. McCarthy implies that the only reality that one can know for sure, at least as well as one can remember, is one’s own experience, leaving the writer who wishes to depict reality conflicted. Writing only from personal experience is both existential realism and idealistic solipsism. McCarthy’s novel A Charmed Life, as well as her commentary on this novel, demonstrate her suspicion of the imagination, and in doing so question the romance theory critics, many of whom were her contemporaries. McCarthy’s suspicion of the imagination stems from the increasingly horrible and unbelievable events of the twentieth century, such as the Nazi holocaust of the Jews and others and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American hydrogen bombs. Such events, she writes, render the once realistic world of the novel, which dealt with local, familiar everyday life, improbable and “unveracious.”9 The horror of such events is so great that if they comprise reality, our daily lives can no longer seem real. This is an epistemological and ethical problem for everyone in the late twentieth century. In fact, the Cold War encouraged such dualism, promoting materialism and the happy, clean,

Love American style

80

smiling nuclear family while threatening those very images with nuclear apocalypse. McCarthy writes, it presents a particular problem to the novelist: [I]f he writes about his province, he feels its inverisimiltude; if he tries, on the other hand, to write about people who make lampshades of human skin, like the infamous Use Koch, he feels still more the inverisimilitude of what he is asserting. His love of truth revolts. And yet this love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel. Putting two and two together, then, it would seem that the novel, with its common sense, is of all forms the least adapted to encompass the modern world, whose leading characteristic is irreality. (OC, 267) Realism no longer seems possible, yet pure romantic, symbolist, and post-modern abstraction is also a problem, according to McCarthy: “The souped-up novels that are being written today, with injections of myth and symbols to heighten or ‘deepen’ the material, are simply evasions and forms of self-flattery” (OC, 267). McCarthy places herself in a bind, positing realism as integral to the novel but doubting that such realism is still possible. McCarthy’s description foreshadows that of Hassan, who writes that much postmodern literature is a literature of silence and violence: “Literature, turning against itself, aspires to silence, leaving us with uneasy inti-mations of outrage and apocalypse. If there is an avant-garde in our time, it is probably bent on discovery through suicide. Thus, the term anti-literature, like antimatter, comes to symbolize not merely an inversion of forms but will and energy turned inside out. Is the future, then, all vagrancy and disaster for all who profess the word?”10 A hint of such violence runs through A Charmed Life—from the hand that crashes through a window in the opening scene to the car crash that kills the protagonist in the final scene. The shattering glass in both scenes tie the novel together and suggest refraction. Like the fragmented, “atomic” portrait of Martha, which looks like Martha “turned inside out” that becomes so central toward the novel’s end, McCarthy has painted a fragmented self, putting together bits and pieces of fact with fiction. Yet, by killing her self-referential protagonist, McCarthy has also committed a figurative suicide, echoing Hassan’s description of a future of “vagrancy and disaster for those who profess the word.” To stem such vagrancy, McCarthy aims for “facts.” Jean Strouse once wrote, “Mary McCarthy believed in fact the way some people believe in God.”11 Such belief is evident in McCarthy’s literary criticism, for example, the essay “The Fact in Fiction.” “Facts” and “fiction” are conflicting terms. Facts are, of course, associated with history, biography, and even autobiography. In history, biography, and autobiography fiction is associated with made-up stories, the artistic imagination, and even lies. Thus, McCarthy’s belief in the fact in fiction, as I will explain, makes her an advocate of realism in the novel. She is leery of novels that stray so far into the imagination that they abandon concrete reality. Echoing Howells, McCarthy claims, “The distinctive mark of the novel is its concern with the actual world, the world of fact, of the verifiable, of figures, even, and statistics” (OC, 250). A novel is marked by its lack of the supernatural: “There are no gods in the novel and no machinery for them; to speak, even metaphorically, of a deus ex

Mary McCarthy’s a charmed life

81

machina in a novel—that is, of the entrance of a provincial figure from above—is to imply a shortcoming” (OC, 252). In contrast, supernaturalism and metaphysics belong to other genres, such as romance and science fiction. While McCarthy does not categorically proclaim the novel the superior genre, she gives it an ethical preeminence. Further, she posits that it is a form in crisis, a form that is becoming more and more difficult to write (OC, 250). Although she acknowledges that there are many types of realism, including depictions of psychological, interior reality in addition to depictions of the “concrete” world, she argues that “the natural symbolism of reality has more messages to communicate than the dry Morse code of the disengaged mind” (OC, 241). The code to which McCarthy refers is vague, but suggests archetypes and formalist systems of symbols, the kind of analysis or writing which works best with mythology and romance. In doing so McCarthy invokes the romance theory of the American novel. McCarthy’s belief in facts and the communicative superiority of realistic symbolism suggests an affiliation with the tradition of American realism, which includes William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton. McCarthy, however, takes her belief in facts further than either Howells or Wharton: she uses “real” events and people explicitly in her fiction, thus fusing the “facts” of autobiography with the imagination of fiction. This fusion of autobiography and fiction is not simple, however, because McCarthy does not collapse the distinction between the two. In McCarthy’s popular and wellreceived autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), she aims for factual truth. In her introduction, she writes that she wishes she were writing fiction, but she is constricted by the facts of her life as best she can remember them.12 Throughout the memoir, she acknowledges the fictional components by including interstitial commentary on the autobiographical essays that sometimes revises the content of the essays after she has learned more about that situation or some family member has told her they remember it otherwise.13 In writing fiction, however, McCarthy seems equally limited. How does an author create factual truth in fiction using the imagination? McCarthy’s response, again, is to place “real plums” in “imaginary cake.” In other words, to take the people, places, and events of her own experience and create stories about them. Yet, if facts are so important to McCarthy, why does she need to write fiction at all? McCarthy’s fiction itself suggests that the impulse stems from a desire to learn from it or comment upon it, be that commentary moral, cathartic, or vengeful. Thus, fiction must be engaged in autobiographical reality because autobiography grounds fiction in reality and yet it must be fiction because the imagination allows that reality to be changed in a way that autobiography is not free to do. In fiction, a writer can explore other outcomes or change the ending for either dramatic or symbolic impact. Thus, McCarthy considers “The relation between life and literature…[to be] one of mutual plagiarism.”14 In using her own return to Wellfleet and her ex-marriage as the subject of A Charmed Life, McCarthy also criticizes dominant trends in American literary criticism, specifically the romance thesis. McCarthy attacks not only the critical idea that romance is somehow characteristic of the best American writing but attacks romance in its various definitions from a number of angles. She criticizes a European romantic tradition that, as far back as stories of Tristan and Iseult, glorifies adulterous love as metaphysical and transcendent.15 She also attacks the American ideal of the transcendent, romantic individual, by parodying Thoreau. Also, through the transformation of her protagonist Martha Sinnott,

Love American style

82

McCarthy criticizes the romance of artists, critics, and bohemians, demonstrating her “abhorrence of lives lived according to abstractions.”16 Undergirding her criticism may be a response to Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, published while she was married to him, in which he privileges the symbolist writing she is criticizing. Through A Charmed Life, she divorces herself from Wilson and symbolism. Finally, through the “romance” of Martha and her current husband John, McCarthy skewers the sentimental, popular definition of romance as reflected in Valentine’s Day, Hallmark cards, and Harlequin paperbacks; as she lets multiple meanings of this word slide together, McCarthy often attacks a few of its meanings simultaneously. McCarthy lampoons the romantic tradition of the European novel of adultery through her vicious characterization of the Vicomte M. de Harmonville, better known to the local residents as Paul. He has no land, just a title, suggesting that he is only the image of aristocracy with no material foundation or referent.17 Rather, Paul represents what is left of the decadence of European aristocracy. He is the character who arranges adulterous liaisons and abortions; he provides all of the liquor and antiques to the community (CL, 15). He is also a Catholic and the confessor of the community of latter-day Puritans. Paul’s distinction among this community is made most clear when he visits the Sinnotts, especially considering the obvious Puritan implications of their name. Paul says to John during an argument about taste: “You are a young American, of good family; very highprincipled, like your wife. You are thinking of la questions morale. But you must remember that ‘moral’ in French has a somewhat different meaning” (CL, 89). Paul suggests that morale in France has a more neutral meaning; it simply refers to mores. Paul also implies that for the French, who place duty to custom over individual pursuit, maintaining the appearance of a “moral” marriage is more important than individual morality. In doing so Paul invokes a literary tradition as described by Joseph Allen Boone and Tony Tanner that distinguishes European literature and morality from their American counterparts in that Europeans, particularly the French, are allegedly more comfortable with and accepting of adultery. Yet McCarthy’s portrayal of Paul emphasizes the seediness of adultery. Nothing about him is romantic. People are bored by his constant references to his noble family (CL, 87). He has lied about his service in the military and become a sort of parasitic pet in the community. The Americans like having him around because he handles so much of their dirty work. Mere contact with him appears to be tainting, as is suggested by the shoe black that comes off of his shoes, staining Martha’s white slip covers (CL, 83). McCarthy skewers the American ideal of the Thoreauvian romantic hero through the character of Sandy Gray. Sandy first appears practically rising out of a pond, his own little Walden. Martha and John refer to Thoreau in order to describe the pond (CL, 109). Sandy Gray is seen pre-dominantly through the eyes of Dolly Lamb, a timid artist whom John and Martha have convinced to come to New Leeds for a while. At first Dolly is fascinated with Sandy, seeing him as a romantic figure and admiring his idealism and his knowledge of the woods and the locals. However, he is also currently enmeshed in a custody battle over his children from his third wife. The court awarded his third wife the children when his fourth wife left him (CL, 137). Sandy quickly befriends Dolly and asks her to be a character witness in the upcoming trial. Dolly is surprised, as are the judge and lawyers, because Dolly has known Sandy for only a short while. Nonetheless, she defends him.

Mary McCarthy’s a charmed life

83

Dolly’s defense is based on transcendental philosophy. She claims he is different because he tries to live in accord with nature: “He knows the woods the way Thoreau did or the scouts in Fenimore Cooper” (CL, 238–39). He can sew and knit she notes, though some may question the masculinity of such talents: “Is that something to be ashamed of? Don’t you want a man to be self-sufficient? Isn’t that the American ideal?” (CL, 239). Her defense, however entertaining, does not work. Sandy loses the custody case. By the end of the trial, Dolly is ashamed of herself, not believing in her own testimony, fearing that if her defense works, she will be guilty of injustice. Thus, McCarthy dramatizes the falsity of many divorce trials. Dolly even wishes she could retract her testimony (CL, 245). What Dolly has realized is that the ideals by which Sandy Gray has lived his life, or at least professed to live by, are the basis of his numerous divorces. His ideals have allowed him to divorce not only wife and children but divorce himself from society and obligations to others. Even in the situations where a wife left him, it was because of his self-absorption. Dolly’s disillusion with Sandy Gray becomes complete the night after the trial. When he finally attempts to seduce Dolly to “thank” her for defending him, he cannot. The ultimate symbol of the failure of Sandy’s romantic idealism is his impotence. Although not as caustic as her portrayals of Sandy Gray and the Vicomte, McCarthy also critiques the romanticism of her protagonist, Martha Sinnott. Martha’s romanticism is that of the artist and critic who isolates herself from society. Martha shares this romanticism with both of her husbands, who believe in it even more stringently than she does. They all believe they are different from the bourgeois masses and therefore not susceptible to the influence of the culture around them (CL, 71). Martha and John have returned to New Leeds so that Martha can write; there were too many distractions in the city (CL, 8), so they have no wish to “mingle in the community” (CL, 9). Yet their isolation is flawed from the very first scene, where John cuts his hand accidentally breaking a window, symbolically breaking the hermetic seal of their newly bought house (CL, 3). People often disturb their isolation with visits and telephone calls. Indeed, their isolation only increases the community’s interest. Jane Coe spreads a rumor about the Sinnotts’ fighting, surmising they have begun to drink in private: “They say that’s very common with romantic couples like that. They move to the country and pull the shades and start drinking and the next thing you know there’s a suicide pact” (CL, 41). Here McCarthy conflates sentimental and idealistic definitions of romanticism. On one level, Jane’s comment suggests the sentimental romanticism of greeting cards, but she also invokes the romantic poetic trope of the suicide pact of which a key example is the poem “Axel” by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1890) that forms the basis for Wilson’s Axel’s Castle. In the poem, two lovers, Axel and Sara, find love too good for this world and make a suicide pact. Sara suggests that they give themselves at least one night of earthly love, but Axel argues that would trivialize and debase their love, so they drink a goblet of poison and the suicide rather than sex is their consummation.18 Although Jane’s prophecy may be melodramatic, what saves Martha and John from such a suicide pact, or at least alcoholism, is that Martha is becoming a realist, in that she becomes increasingly interested in facts and suspicious of idealism. In fact, the major thrust of the novel’s plot can be read as Martha’s development as a realist. From the beginning of the novel, McCarthy characterizes Martha as a person who, like McCarthy herself, loves fact. Martha only speaks literal truth: “that is her peculiarity” (CL, 12). Thus Martha struggles, as does McCarthy, with reconciling literal truth with romanticism.

Love American style

84

Martha would prefer to be a romantic, but her interest in fact will not let her. Her clear perceptions are making her marriage to the romantic John increasingly difficult: “This clarity of mind, as she grew older, was more and more wearisome to Martha. She was tired of knowing the truth as it piled up, leaving less and less room for hope and illusions…. They still ‘loved’ each other, but his love today was less a promise than a fact of life” (CL, 21). Thus it is not that they do not love each other, but that for Martha the “romance” is gone: “There lay the bleakness; for them, as they were constituted, through all eternity, this had been the optimum—there was not beyond. There was nothing” (CL, 22). Because of the “fact” that they had reached their optimum, there is nothing left to idealize, nothing metaphysical beyond the fact of their love. Again McCarthy conflates the sexual, sentimental, and idealistic meanings of the word romance, suggesting a commonality in etymology, that either artistic or sentimental, both meanings impose ideals onto reality, and, McCarthy suggests, reality often resists. Martha’s test, the point at which she must decide to live as a romantic or a realist, comes when she finds out she is pregnant. She is not sure whether the baby is Miles’s or John’s. Like a divorce court judge who goes along with a claim of infidelity, her doctor advises her to have it and pretend John is the father, but she does not want to live such a lie. Rather than live with uncertainty, Martha decides to abort the baby. Driving home from the Goes’ house, where she has just received the money to obtain her abortion, Martha decides that she may tell John about it, realizing that her earlier impulse, to have the baby and lie to him, had been “sentimental” (CL, 312). She does not think John will hate her, but that he will hate Miles: “Therefore, there was no reason to tell [John] unless she wanted praise at the price of peace in the community. Yet it would be good to have truth between them” (CL, 312). She reconciles her romanticism and her belief in the truth by acknowledging that her belief in the truth at the cost of all else was itself romantic. Thus she reaches a balance. She will be true to herself and not have to deceive John about the baby, but also not cause unnecessary discord in the community. Yet Martha’s practical realization does not fit into the community of New Leeds. As she heads around a curve, she hugs her side of the road and an on-coming car crashes into her: “in New Leeds, after sundown, she would have been safer on the wrong side of the road” (CL, 313), suggesting that romantic lies are safer in New Leeds than a confrontation with reality. There is an ironic twist to Martha’s death because McCarthy describes it as romantic, according to her own description of the realist novel. The degree of detail, realistic descriptions of place, domestic sphere, and emphasis on disillusion and the social and moral dilemmas of characters situate the novel in a realist tradition. Yet the end is highly dramatic and mythical, a deus ex machina car crash. McCarthy notes that many readers found fault with the ending because it was not believable in the development of the novel.19 However, McCarthy argues: There may be something wrong with the novel, I don’t know. But it was always supposed to have a fairy tale element in it. New Leeds is haunted! Therefore nobody should be surprised if something unexpected happens, or something catastrophic, for the place is also pregnant with catastrophe. But it may be that the treatment in between was too realistic, so that the

Mary McCarthy’s a charmed life

85

reader was led to expect a realistic confutation of everything going on in a rather moderate way. It was, to some extent, a symbolic story.20 Thus, as McCarthy herself notes, A Charmed Life does not live up to her own definition of realism. It is realistic, but it contains elements of the fantastic, hence the importance of the word “charmed” in the title. In fact, McCarthy is not sure any of her books are novels, according to her definition of the novel, revealing the limitations of most blanket definitions of the form. Some sort of distortion almost always occurs, often against her will. She uses A Charmed Life to explain her point: “I make a sort of inventory of all the town characteristics, just telling how they are. Now I did this with the intention of describing, well, this nice, ordinary, old-fashioned New England town. But it ended up differently. Something is distorted, the description takes on a sort of extravagance—I don’t know exactly how it happens. I know I don’t mean it to happen.”21 Like Hawthorne in “The Custom House,” McCarthy describes the imagination as a force outside one’s self. McCarthy’s commentary suggests a powerlessness against imagination. In fact, she intimates that she is “seduced” by the imagination. This seduction is intriguing both in terms of McCarthy’s life as a writer and also in terms of the American novel. McCarthy suggests that she is being seduced into writing the kind of fiction that her ex-husband Wilson so admired. Thus in a sense Wilson becomes linked to the romantic imagination, seducing her again, pulling her away from the “facts” and “real plums.” Yet, McCarthy does not think her situation is singular; she attributes her difficulties with realism to a lack of credibility she believes is “a difficulty I think all modern writers have.”22 Thus, McCarthy cannot write the realism she so admires due to the situation of the modern writer, both because of the self-consciousness she attributes to all writers after Henry James and the irreality of the postnuclear world. Divorce serves as an evocative metaphor for the dilemma McCarthy describes. Both romantic, in that it can symbolize a break from the past and a new beginning, and realistic, in that it is enmeshed in legal, social, and domestic systems, divorce offers McCarthy a subject, one she knows very well from experience, to demonstrate the dilemma of the late twentieth-century novelist.

THE NOVEL AS PICTURE WINDOW: DIVORCE, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AND THE DISSOLUTION OF PRIVACY McCarthy, like Wharton and Howells, relies heavily on the house as a symbol of marriage, because the house is so reflective of a given culture’s views on gender, ethnicity, and class. A correlative reason for building a house is to maintain the distinction between the public and the private. Yet this distinction is one of the first things to crumble when a couple gets divorced. Marriage and the house help reinforce the division between the public and the private. At least one member of the marriage is driven from the house and often much of their private life is revealed in some public fashion, be it a court of law, a newspaper, or rumor. McCarthy exploits the symbol of the house to test the boundaries between the public and the private. Much more than Wharton or Howells, McCarthy explores how the novel, especially the autobiographical novel,

Love American style

86

echoes divorce’s disruption of domesticity. It is as if she is letting us into her own house, and telling us of her own divorce. The picture window, an increasingly popular element of domestic architecture in forties and fifties suburbia, serves a metaphor for the domestic novel itself. Autobiography, another sort of picture window, can be seen as performing a similar deconstruction of the distinction between the private and the public, but with one obvious and integral difference. The autobiographer has much more control over the degree of revelation. Critics and admirers of McCarthy’s writing, both autobiographical and fictional, often express shock at just how revealing McCarthy can be, as she recounts intimate domestic squabbles and seductions in stories of her marriages, divorces, and affairs. Many have criticized her use of her private life in her fiction on the grounds of decorum.23 Yet in creating fictive accounts of her own divorces and fictive revelations of her private life, McCarthy asserts privacy, maintaining a level of control over what she reveals from her private life, as did the divorce litigants who created court-approved domestic fictions. In the case of A Charmed Life, McCarthy also reestablishes control over her own life, wresting it back from Wilson, a domineering husband. She divorces herself from him artistically as well as legally. As has been demonstrated, there is a long history of the house as a symbol of marriage. Many of the domestic ideals, such as the republican mother and the angel of the hearth, popularized by American literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively, still exert a strong influence on gender expectations in the twentieth century.24 As Glenna Matthews demonstrates, changing perceptions of the association of women with the domestic sphere have both empowered women and hurt them: “In effect, it empowered women by enabling them to claim moral superiority. But as the home changed, as domesticity declined in cultural value, woman’s moral nature, identified as different by women themselves, could once again be trivialized as it had been in earlier periods of American history.”25 Although women now have more mobility and the freedom to develop careers outside the home and outside marriage, the idea of the house itself, by being cast as a site of female oppression, has lost much of the power it once had, reducing the “angel of the hearth” and the “Republican mother” to a mere housewife, whose influence and tasks seem trivial. Hence even women devalue traditionally “feminine” tasks of the private, domestic world, privileging the “masculine” public world. Divorce is similarly both empowering and harmful to feminism. Divorce remains one of the key factors in the impoverishment of women. Further, the movement of women away from the house, which is increased by divorce, thrusts women into a public world, sometimes without the accustomed protections of the private world. McCarthy demonstrates this ambivalence through Martha Sinnott, who escapes the tyranny of one marriage only to get trapped in a different sort of tyranny in her next marriage, and who only escapes both by her death in an automobile accident. In the descriptions of houses so central to McCarthy’s portrayal of marriages and divorces in A Charmed Life, she expresses a similar ambivalence about the advances of feminism. All of the marriages in A Charmed Life are reflected in the couples’ houses, as Willene Schaefer Hardy has noted.26 Most important are the contrasting images of Martha’s two houses in New Leeds. Every day Martha and her current husband John drive past the burnt remains of the house where she lived with her ex-husband Miles Murphy. The burnt house is a rather blunt symbol of the failure of Martha’s marriage to

Mary McCarthy’s a charmed life

87

Miles and the threat of that failure to her new marriage, just as the constant and unexpected repairs in her new house suggest the fragility of her marriage to John. Miles dominated their marriage, causing Martha to do things against her will, reducing her to a woman so full of self-doubt that she was incapable of acting on her own (a marriage very similar to that of McCarthy and Wilson, according to many biographical accounts).27 Miles is a tyrant who wants a “submissive” wife (CL, 114). McCarthy, through Miles’s voice, describes Helen, Miles’s current, and ideal, wife: “She was not stupid, though stupid people thought so, but she had learned to efface herself, in the European way” (CL, 56). In retrospect, Martha realizes she could never have been such a wife because as a modern American woman and a feminist, she could not be so submissive. She doesn’t understand why she had ever let him seduce her: “Just at this point…there was a terrifying blank” (CL, 109). Martha does not want to acknowledge her weakness as his victim because to do so would make her an accomplice in his violence and her own victimhood: “He made his wives his accomplices; that was why they could not escape him” (CL, 115). Martha’s complicity is demonstrated by the house fire, which was caused by faulty wiring, the result of money-saving shortcuts Martha had let the workmen take at Miles’s insistence, even though she feared the fire hazard (CL, 13). Miles also had not let her tell the insurance company where the fire had started. Martha blames herself for the extent of the fire, thinking that she might have saved the house or at least the books and pictures if she had acted when she first smelled smoke and not thought it was just her imagination (CL, 13). Miles’s critique is significant for a couple of reasons. First, by denying the material facts of the situation Miles not only removes himself from material reality but places the power of his mind, his imagination, above it. Second, as a renowned critic what Miles has to say about the imagination carries more weight with the bohemians in New Leeds, including their friends the Goes and Matha herself. Thus, Martha doubts herself, seeking Miles’s approval. His lies are efforts to force the imagination, the mind, onto material reality. Miles’s attempt to dominate reality is apparent when he recounts the story of the fire to Jane and Warren Coe. He lies, telling them that she was beside herself when the insurance men came, wanting to blame the workmen: “She said it was her fault, really, that she’d instructed him to commit a violation—all poppycock. It was her neurotic way of confessing the truth, of saying, in symbolic language, that the fire was her fault; she was the firebug” (CL, 42). Thus McCarthy parallels Miles’s tyranny in their marriage with his attempts to tyrannize reality. In doing so McCarthy invokes ancient dichotomies, drawing further parallels, respectively: mind versus body, imagination versus materiality, romanticism versus realism, the masculine versus the feminine, and man versus wife. Thus Martha’s doubt in the face of Miles’s lies is not simply the result of her personal inadequacies. There are centuries of history, suggests McCarthy, that have privileged the male mind and imagination over the female body and materiality. McCarthy also intimates her own struggle against Wilson’s imagination to recount the reality of their marriage. McCarthy also uses this episode of the burnt house to illustrate how the imagination is predicated upon private space. Private space encourages the imagination because it is only in private space that there are no witnesses to say otherwise. In private space one has the right to be oneself and to embrace solipsism fully. The more witnesses there are to an event, the less likely it is that one can impose his imagination upon that event. Warren

Love American style

88

and Jane know Miles is lying about the cause of the fire, and their awareness foreshadows his fictitious version of the night Martha leaves him, also illustrated through symbols of the house. His revision of her story demonstrates the dominance of Miles’s imagination. And the burnt house suggests the violence of that dominance. The burned house is also a very public revelation of the failure of their marriage. The barrier between the private interior, and thus the unbounded imagination, and the public exterior, the material world, is literally and symbolically destroyed. Further, the charred remains stay there for everyone to see, including Martha and her current husband John. By burning the house down, McCarthy exposes the lies of her husband’s imagination, revealing how they contradict reality, and leaves these contradictions for all to see. Ironically, McCarthy must use her own imagination to do so. The burnt house is one significant difference between McCarthy and Wilson’s marriage and that of Martha and Miles. The burnt house becomes not only a symbol of Miles and Martha’s divorce but of the point at which McCarthy divorces fiction from life, suggesting again that divorce marks a point of suspension between imagination and reality, between romance and realism. The house fire foreshadows Martha’s divorce from Miles, and the battle between private imagination and public witness that is played out by their various versions of the pivotal night. Martha leaves Miles in a public manner. The popular account, the one told in town, is that “She had left her husband’s second house in the middle of the night in a nightgown, driving his Plymouth sedan, which ran out of gas and stranded her on the road to John’s cabin” (CL, 18). Miles confirms this account and elaborates, telling the Goes that Martha abandons him in the middle of the night, running away in her nightgown because she wants revenge for the fire and she wants a public drama: “And she took her revenge. I don’t blame her. She has the modern girl’s vindictive mania for publicity. She could have left me any time in broad daylight, without any fanfare. But she had to do it in a nightgown, at three o’clock in the morning” (CL, 43). Miles’s commentary about the greater publicity of Martha’s nighttime departure seems illogical. It seems many more people would witness her departure in “broad daylight.” Miles’s analysis only makes sense in terms of drama or literary convention; the melodrama of leaving at 3am in a nightgown, though few might see her, is for Miles more ostentatious than departing at midday. Nevertheless, Miles’s implicit critique of her modern “feminine” vindictiveness is telling. Miles’s belief that the publicity caused by what he views as the drama of Martha’s departure suggests the danger inherent in the public revelation of this story; its very publicity lessens his ability to make things up about it, to use his imagination, and thus emasculates him, for Miles seems to believe that his masculinity is dependent upon the power of his imagination. McCarthy hints at the wavering of Miles’s imagination by pointing out that he has told the story differently in the past, saying that he had locked her out of the house, expecting her to come in the kitchen door, which was unlocked (CL, 43). In this version, it is simply Martha’s feminine “illogic” that causes the problem. In Martha’s version Miles is even more at fault, and Martha has witnesses. She claims he woke her up, kicked her out of bed, down the stairs—step by step, out the front door, telling her not to come back. Martha’s story is backed by John, who saw the bruises, as did the cleaning woman and Miles’s son Barrett (from another marriage) who were watching from the balcony (CL, 43). The story is too well known for Miles to lie about it. Although their second house remains standing, in effect its interior has also been

Mary McCarthy’s a charmed life

89

exposed. By contrasting the witnessed, and hence public, reality of Martha’s version of this story, McCarthy suggests a feminist critique of the dominance of the masculine imagination. Nonetheless, the result of this exposure is ambivalent. Miles’s abuse and dominance are exposed but to little effect. Martha has not left Miles in some modern feminist assertion of self-respect but because he has locked her out publicly: “When she finally ran away, it was partly because of John, whom she had secretly fallen love with, but mainly because Miles, by pushing her out of the house, had seemed at last to give her license. That was why she flew out to the garage, in her nightgown, before he could revoke it. And even at that moment, as she turned on the ignition, she had the uneasy sense that she was taking advantage of Miles: he had not really meant for her to go” (CL, 104–105). Martha still feels guilty, though Miles has made it impossibly humiliating for her to not to leave. Martha’s guilt then suggests that on one level she is still seeking Miles’s approval, and not only his personal approval but the approval of the masculine tradition he represents. Because she has drawn the parallels between herself and Martha as well as between Wilson and Miles, McCarthy intimates, too, that perhaps she is still seeking Wilson’s approval, and metonymically the approval of the masculine critical tradition. Further, there are no real consequences for Miles. Not only does Martha still seek his approval but so does the entire town. The Goes do not confront Miles about his lies or his abuse; they still consider his attendance at their parties a boon, the pinnacle of intellectual approval (CL, 155, 170). Thus McCarthy rather darkly suggests the limits of such feminist exposure. The Miles Murphies and Edmund Wilsons, and their privilege of the imagination over reality, are still in charge of the dominant criticism, at least in McCarthy’s day. McCarthy’s fatalistic suggestion about the limits of feminism is confirmed in her second marriage. When she leaves Miles, Martha runs to John, who turns out to be a different sort of tyrant. While John is not physically abusive and considers Martha his equal, if not his better, his faith in her becomes constraining rather than supportive, a constraint which is reflected in their house. John does not want Martha to be the housewife at all, insisting she must be a writer (CL, 8). Yet he effectively imprisons Martha, trying to isolate her from all influences he deems distracting from her art, whether or not she wants the isolation. When Martha discovers that she is pregnant, she is thrilled but afraid to tell John, because she fears he will view the baby as another domestic chore that will distract her from her writing: “She loved domestic chores: the smell of furniture polish, the damp, hot scorch of fresh ironing. And she hated having her time hoarded and rationalized for her, because of her little bit of talent. She did not want to become what she called a machine à écrire” (CL, 253). John has the romantic idea of the artist who must be isolated. Thus John makes Martha a slave to the house not as a housewife but as a writer, practically locking her in her office (as Edmund Wilson did to McCarthy). John views the house as a writer’s refuge, conflating it with Martha; thus, he cannot stand any critique of the house because he views it as a critique of Martha (CL, 4). Nor can John stand any intrusion either into the house or into their life because they “waste Martha’s energy” (CL, 84). John’s desire to control Martha and her environment is evident in the opening scene of the novel, where it is paralleled in his attempt to force a stuck window open (CL, 3). The window shatters, deeply wounding John. Although

Love American style

90

Martha and John have come to the country to get away from the invasive pressures of the city, this small town proves even more invasive. Before they even move in there is scandal. First there is a scandal about the house they buy because the former owner committed suicide (CL, 18). In addition, “they had known perfectly well, despite the Goes’ assurances, that they would have to run the gauntlet of the village curiosity” (CL, 18). The shattered window foreshadows the invasion of their marriage by the public and Miles. When Miles seduces Martha, they are inside Martha and John’s house, but their adultery is visible to the whole neighborhood. There are still no curtains. Miles had turned the lights out when he finally persuaded her to get undressed: “but the fire illuminated the room so that anybody, looking in the window, could have seen their shadows, playing the beast with two backs, enlarged on the wall” (CL, 197). Whether or not anyone actually sees them is less important than the fact that Martha has enabled this exposure. The lack of repercussion for this exposure suggests that even if any one saw, they turned away, preferring to believe in romantic illusions. John, then, is not as different from his fellow New Leedsians as he imagines himself to be. He is so absorbed in his desire to control and isolate Martha that he is blind to this invasion. He lets his imagination overcome reality. To admit to faults in Martha, as to admit to faults in the house, would be an admission of his own powerlessness. Martha is still battling the force of the imagination as a masculine phenomenon, if to little effect. On one level, McCarthy’s novel itself is just such a picture window onto the private world of her marriages, a window that exposes the realities of adultery, abuse, and unhappiness that so many in either their idealization of marriage or of the imagination want to deny, to not see. Perhaps McCarthy’s most fatalistic acquiescence to the force of the imagination is Martha’s death. The shattering glass from the window John forces foreshadows the glass that shatters as Eleanor Considine’s car crashes into Martha, thus invoking the idea of a similar lack of control over the imagination. The timing of the crash is key. Martha has just arranged to abort her child. On one level, abortion can be read as an escape from the past, as well as the future of motherhood, in that it provides Martha the possibility of pretending Miles’s seduction never happened. However, for Martha the abortion is also a way of confronting Miles’s seduction and the ambiguity of her baby’s paternity. By aborting the child Martha is neither perpetuating the illusion that John is the father, as her doctor suggests, nor is she letting herself remain a victim of Miles. Aborting the child is in some way an active, aggressive response to Miles, through which Martha takes control of the situation. Further, her indeci-sion about whether or not to tell John about the pregnancy is also empowering because Martha realizes that it is her power to do so; she has some control over whether to live in the imaginative world of New Leeds or confront reality, though she does have to go to yet another male, and a male artist at that, to find the funds to pay for the abortion. However, just as Martha realizes this power, Considine crashes into her, symbolically crushing her newly found power. As a woman writer, a moderately successful artist, who is seemingly in control of her life and career, Considine seems a candidate for what Martha, and McCarthy perhaps, should want to become. However, Considine is a lonely and hollow divorcée, and, most importantly, “a cautionary example of everything Martha was trying not to be” (CL, 311). “Always scribbling something, plays in verse, mock

Mary McCarthy’s a charmed life

91

epics, love poems, elegiacs, vers de société,” Considine attends parties, when she is sober, carrying a notebook to transcribe conversations (CL, 311). She has a “good ear,” like Martha, which makes many people agree “that she might do something” (CL, 311). However, she is not taken seriously. McCarthy’s description suggests that more often than not Considine is drunk and unaware, not using her good ear to transcribe the reality of conversations she hears and observations she makes. Instead she writes light verse and sentimental, romantic pieces, and not even very good romantic pieces at that. Considine, McCarthy suggests, has been overcome by the forces of the imagination. Not only has Considine courted Miles after Martha had left him, but she is now courting Paul, impressed by his fictional title. Although it may seem that Considine is a strong woman because she is doing the courting, McCarthy intimates that she is really just seeking masculine approval for the powers of her own imagination. The implication is that there is no place in New Leeds for a female artist or for realism. Martha’s death is perhaps the most obvious and significant point at which McCarthy’s novel A Charmed Life differs from her life and autobiography and biography. McCarthy, of course, survives her return to Wellfleet and her marriages to Edmund Wilson and to Bowden Broadwater. Although McCarthy has made her private life public through both autobiography and through this novel, she cautions her readers: “Let the reader be warned: A Charmed Life, though derived, like all books, from experience, is not an autobiographical novel, and Miles Murphy must not be taken for a distinguished portrait of Wilson. Martha, I admit, is a bit like me.”28 Nonetheless, McCarthy uses many instances from her relationship with Wilson in the novel, from the first time they slept together and their ensuing marriage to the fight that instigates their divorce. John’s insistence that Martha write a play resembles Wilson’s insistence that McCarthy write fiction. In both instances, the husband forces his wife into the realm of the imagination. McCarthy acknowledges that she might never have written a “creative” word if it were not for Wilson and his belief in the writer she could be: To say this today may seem hard on Wilson, as well as ungrateful on my part for what he did, in the first months of our marriage, to push me into “creativity.” If he had not shut the door firmly on the little room he had shepherded me into…, I would not be the ‘Mary McCarthy’ you are now reading. Yet, awful to say, I am not particularly grateful.29 Martha Sinnott seems trapped in a situation similar to the one McCarthy describes above. Thus by publicly killing off Martha, McCarthy kills off this weaker aspect of herself; as she explains in a letter to Arthur Schlesinger, writing this novel made her believe in catharsis.30 However, McCarthy also acknowledges not only the power of the imagination but a masculine force behind that imagination. Thus McCarthy suggests the tenuousness of these dichotomies between autobiography and fiction, between the public and the private, between fact and imagination, and between masculine and feminine. Torn by a desire to wrest some control of the imagination back from its traditional male provenance by forcing the imagination to confront the facts of autobiography, McCarthy seems to acknowledge that she has to play by traditional rules; she gives in and writes a romantic ending, and she does it publicly. On a figurative level, the idea of divorce symbolizes the

Love American style

92

point at which these dichotomies separate, as well as the process of that separation. On a literal level, divorce allows McCarthy to write about her former marriages. She keeps her final, and most successful, marriage comparatively private.

THE GLOBALIZATION OF DIVORCE AND THE COLLAPSE OF GEOGRAPHY A significant cause of Martha’s car accident is the town itself. As the other car crashes into her, Martha realizes that “in New Leeds, after sundown, she would have been safer on the wrong side of the road,” meaning that they live unrealistically (CL, 313). New Leedsians do not believe in past crashes and act as if it could not happen to them. Her realization emphasizes the importance of geography in this novel; the town of New Leeds is a major character itself. Although McCarthy characterizes New Leeds as a “charmed,” bohemian community, she undermines the uniqueness of New Leeds by suggesting its “charm” originates in its “American” character and prophesying the spread of this character over the globe in the twentieth century. Yet McCarthy uses the word “charm” in a variety of meanings, invoking connotations of magic, quaint appeal, and beguiling deception. Even the positive connotations of the word charm refer to the appearance of a person, place, or thing; while its negative connotations suggest that appearance is deceptive, even dangerously so. Further, McCarthy characterizes the New Leedsian “charm” as particularly American because it is rooted in the “charming” American dream of divorcing the present from the past. McCarthy deconstructs the American dream of starting over through Martha, who resists the temptation to divorce the past from the present, confronting both mortality and the materiality of history. New Leeds is not unique; McCarthy portrays New Leeds as a metonym for the rest of America, thus McCarthy suggests America itself is caught up in its own sentimental romanticism, the Cold War veneer of normalcy in an increasingly unreal world. McCarthy’s critique of the American dream begins with her undermining the idea of the romantic individual, particularly the romantic status of the artist in America. For John and Martha, New Leeds is the “seacoast of Bohemia” (14). They have returned, ostensibly, so that Martha can write. Martha and John, like Miles and most of the “Bohemians” who come to New Leeds, believe they are different from the rest of the community (CL, 70). Yet, contrary to the idealism of the individual one expects of such an artistic community, New Leeds is homogenous and intrusive, more like Hawthorne’s Puritan Salem in The Scarlet Letter. Martha notes: “This horrible bohemian life you see up here, with lily cups and beards and plastics—it’s real leveling, worse than suburbia, where there’s a frank competition with your neighbors, to have the newest car or bake the best cakes” (CL, 119). Yet little in New Leeds is unique: Nothing in New Leeds happened only once. When Martha’s house burned to the ground while she was living with her first husband, it was the third house that year to catch on fire. Defective wiring, nodded the old-time winter residents, chewing the fat in the paper store. And while she thought she knew the cause better than the village chorus, the element of repetition still terrified Martha when she remembered the fire; it was as if she had

Mary McCarthy’s a charmed life

93

lost, at that time, the principle of individuation and was simply a number in a series. (CL, 12) Thus the artist is not the romantic individual in New Leeds but one of many who share a common denominator of divorce. The homogeneity of the community also suggests that it is not that unique, but is simply its own form of American suburbia, a place usually cast as highly anti-romantic.31 McCarthy also undermines New Leeds’s uniqueness by offering an immigrant perspective that suggests New Leeds is stereotypically “American.” At Sandy Gray’s custody trial against his ex-wife Clover, the pivotal testimony that turns the court against Sandy is from Mrs. Viera. Called upon to testify to the dirty conditions of Clover’s house, Mrs. Viera declares that it is filthy but no more so than any other house in New Leeds: “All the time. All the time. Summer people too. Everybody live like that here in America. Like pigs” (CL, 232). With the emphasis McCarthy places on the house as a symbol of marriage throughout the novel, the implications of such bad house-keeping are obvious, particularly when paralleled with the prevalence of divorce. The etymology of the word itself, “housekeeping,” suggests a permanence and a respect for the house. Inversely “bad housekeeping” then can suggest an impermanence, houses that are not kept. Further, behind housekeeping is the notion of economics. Thus, New Leeds households are uneconomic, meaning that they lack sys-tem, vision, proportion, and order. They are emblems of spiritual chaos. Mrs. Viera associates bad housekeeping with middle-class American life; she suggests that bad housekeeping, like divorce, is the norm. Mrs. Viera’s testimony thus extends beyond New Leeds. There is also some irony, of course, in Mrs. Viera’s perspective in that she is an immigrant and thus supposedly living the American dream of starting over. However, Mrs. Viera’s resistance to assimilation—she will not adopt American housekeeping habits—and her status as a maid, a member of the servant class in a society that mythically has no class structure, forces one to ask just how to what extent immigrants can really start over in America. The immigrant experience echoes that of early English immigrants, the Puritans, who landed on Cape Cod, the setting for A Charmed Life. The name of her fictional town itself, New Leeds, invokes many a Puritan name, such as “New” London and “New” York, names that imply that the settlers brought their home towns with them, divorced them from England, and made them shiny and “new.” Martha argues that this belief that one can start over characterizes New Leeds: That’s what’s wrong with this horrible place. Nobody will admit to knowing anything, until it’s been proven. Sandy Gray can pass for a decent man here because the contrary hasn’t been proved yet, to the community’s satisfaction. He’s ‘only’ had four wives run away from him. That isn’t a fair sample, statistically…. You act as if the human race had learned nothing, as if everything were possible, as if we could all start on a new phase every day. Or a new wife. It’s all the same. (CL, 284) Divorce is intricately related to this dream, often providing one of the steps toward severing the past. In fact, as is demonstrated in my introduction, many have viewed

Love American style

94

American independence from Great Britain in terms of divorce.32 This severance is also key to the American romance. Yet McCarthy explodes the idea that divorce separates anyone from the past. Throughout A Charmed Life divorced couples are still struggling with each other, still battling one another in court, and even still sleeping together. In the court scene during Sandy Gray’s suit for custody of his children, Dolly Lamb observes that most locals have been divorced. Jane also tries to comfort Miles’s new wife Helen: “‘Everybody does up here, you know, Helen,’ she chided. ‘I mean divorced couples meet their ex-mates. They all go to the same parties, and nobody thinks a thing of it. There wouldn’t be any social life if everybody felt like Miles” (CL, 70). McCarthy even relates the seasons of the area to divorce: “Winter here was a limbo—a windtorn parking area, closed shops and inns, vandalism, and divorces” (CL, 217). Thus McCarthy parallels divorce with a town without life, a town that has been abandoned and vandalized, and also held in suspension. She also debunks the romance of divorce, illustrating that one cannot divorce the past from the present. McCarthy’s novel, thus, begins in the “ever-after” which begins after the end of the “happily-ever-after” of the traditional, sentimental novel, yet all of this divorce results in a realism that breaks the illusion of the happy ending. This “ever-after” is characteristic of New Leeds. Martha and Miles are by no means the only divorces. There is some tension between the artists and the locals, but many of its inhabitants (with the exception of the Goes and Dolly Lamb), are united by a proclivity for divorce. Jane Coe notes that everyone returns to New Leeds with their exes, “Lots of the wives and husbands, too, came back with new spouses, the Goes assured him, and nobody thought a thing of it” (CL, 18). Divorce is thus integral to both the plot and the geography of A Charmed Life. At first Martha and John believe in the American dream of divorce, the dream that one can leave and start entirely anew. They fear the encroaching community; anything they do that resembles their neighbors’ behavior worries them, particularly forgetful things such as letting bare patches form in the lawn or going swimming with a watch on, suggesting the erosion of memory so common to New Leeds (CL, 14). Yet soon they find themselves behaving disturbingly like the villagers (CL, 15). Initially Martha blames her inability to escape the past on the town itself: It appalled her that the village was still churning up the past, tossing the old dirty linen back and forth impersonally, like one of the washing machines in the new laundromat. This was an aspect of their return that neither of them had ever foreseen: that Martha would be thrown back, seven years, into her own ancient history, to start up all the old battles, defensively, as if they had never been won. (CL, 20) Like Hester Prynne, Martha cannot escape her past. Perhaps the most graphic example of Martha’s inevitable confrontation with the past is Miles’s seduction, for lack of a better term; it resembles a rape, the past forcing itself upon the present (CL, 200–203). The seduction is problematized still further when Martha discovers she is pregnant, very possibly with Miles’s baby. Like Hawthorne’s Pearl, the baby is a material embodiment of the past, a physical presence she cannot deny. Martha’s doctor advises her to have the baby and raise it as though she knows for sure it is John’s, arguing that

Mary McCarthy’s a charmed life

95

chances are a thousand to one that the baby is Miles’s, though they can never be sure (CL, 265). The doctor argues that, because she is a married woman, raising the baby as though it is her husband’s is preferable to an abortion (CL, 266). Martha, however, realizes that she does not want to live with the doubt, and thus opts for abortion. Although in many ways an abortion may seem a revision or rejection of the past, for Martha it is a confrontation. For by getting an abortion Martha decides not to live in doubt about the paternity of the child, but decides to claim some responsibility for sleeping with Miles. She acknowledges the past rather than ignoring it, acting on her own advice to Warren: “you can’t reject the past” (CL, 278), echoing again Fitzgerald’s final lines of the The Great Gatsby. Divorce is never really final. Martha also questions the uniqueness of the New Leeds community, particularly its inability to admit that anything is wrong. She believes New Leedsian or American values of starting over and erasing history are spreading over the whole world, extinguishing an older European value of history (CL, 284). This shift is intimated in the story of Eleanor Considine. Considine, now a local poetess, is from the West, Ohio, and has a penchant for divorce and remarriage. Considine ran away from her “conventional husband, out west in Cincinnati, and married a young man, who had died of tetanus, all alone, in Mexico, from a cut she had neglected to have attended to. She had been married several times, once to her original husband, who supported the several children she had picked up en route” (CL, 311). Considine’s serial divorces and marriages reflect her carelessness and neglect, which are the result of her self-absorption, a perversion of American selfreliance and individualism. McCarthy thus invokes the myth of the West to characterize the ultimate in individualism, romantic freedom, and mobility as extremely American values.33 In doing so, McCarthy links the West to divorce in a way that is reminiscent of the treatment of the subject by William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton, who also have characters who take trains west for divorce. Eleanor Considine is a sort of bohemian Undine Spragg. Similarly to Howells and Wharton, McCarthy skewers the romanticism of the West. Eleanor Considine, like Undine and even Hartley Hubbard, is neither admirable nor enviable. Eleanor is also looking to marry into European aristocracy: she has her heart set on the Vicomte, Paul, a symbol of the East, however debased a symbol. Their marriage would be that of the American spirit with that of Europe, a marriage similar to Undine’s marriage to Raymond de Chelles, with many notable exceptions. The East and the West thus collapse into each other, each of parody of their former distinctions. Eleanor’s crash into Martha results thus in the triumph of the adulterated values of the West that Eleanor Considine embodies, the values of the Undine Spraggs and Hartley Hubbards. Even though it is unclear whether Eleanor herself survives the crash, it is almost irrelevant. The damage has been done. Martha and her fidelity to the past have been destroyed. This triumph demonstrates Martha’s claim that the mores of New Leeds are spreading over the entire world and suggests the collapse of distinctions and authenticity in the twentieth century described by postmodernism. Trying to divorce the materiality of history from the present and the inflated belief in the future have become global problems, not just “American” ones.

Love American style

96

DIVORCING THE ARTIST FROM THE CRITIC A lack of distinction is part of what creates McCarthy’s fears for the novel and her fears are reflected not only in the collapsing national distinctions but in the difficulty in distinguishing fiction from fact in her work, as well as critic from artist. These tensions are exacerbated by McCarthy’s reluctant feminism, for lack of a better word. All of these tensions are encapsulated in a pivotal symbol in A Charmed Life, the portrait Warren Coe paints of Martha and ex-husband Miles’s subsequent “purchase” of that portrait. The portrait of a lady is a common theme in literature and art, and as in many other instances, this portrait is more about the men who paint and purchase the portrait than it is about the subject of that portrait, in this case Martha Sinnott. Martha’s husbands, both Miles and John, have attempted to make Martha into her own living portrait, either of the submissive wife or the artist; both failed. However, McCarthy admits that Martha is very much like her and in doing so thus creates a portrait of herself, a portrait distinct from that of her husbands, a portrait that allows for a divorce, not only in the legal sense, but of McCarthy, the artist, from Wilson, the critic. As Howells’s Bartley Hubbard and Wharton’s Undine Spragg become text, revealing their plasticity divorce grants them to “construct” themselves as textual objects, so McCarthy has Martha become a portrait, an object of art. Yet, painting is arguably a more overtly plastic form of art than the novel, and the portrait Warren Coe paints of Martha is a very painterly portrait, with pieces of Martha floating about the canvas, bits of her which let the viewer reconstruct the pieces to make something of the portrait for themselves. Thus, McCarthy goes beyond Howells and Wharton in accentuating the construction of art. Further, McCarthy leaves the character present, even letting Martha discuss the value of her own portrait and creating a schism between Martha as portrait and Martha as character. It is questionable whether Warren is a good artist; few of his friends in New Leeds seem to think so. In fact the only piece that Miles has found worthwhile is the portrait of Martha. The portrait reminds Miles of “science fiction and a little of old-fashioned movie music and, most of all, of Jesuit sermons on Hell” (CL, 54). It is fury and conflict. Warren responds that it represents fission, a phase of the quantum fourth-dimension (CL, 54). Warren sees nothing but Martha “refracted all over the canvas” (CL, 53). Miles thinks he can make out her nose (CL, 53). Warren explains that next he plans on doing portraits in fusion: “the hydrogen-bomb formula” (CL, 60). McCarthy’s decision to describe Warren’s method of painting as fission, a nuclear state, is intriguing considering her statements on the effect of nuclear war and power on the novel. As I have noted, McCarthy argued that after events and forces as surreal as Hiroshima, realism in the novel became increasingly difficult if not impossible. The result is the fantastic, the unreal, “science fiction and…Jesuit sermons on Hell” (CL, 54). The self, even, seems unreal, like the fragmented broken glass that opens and closes the novel, bits of the Martha refracted through her husbands, bits of McCarthy refracted through her characters. Martha is reticent concerning what she thinks of the image of herself in the portrait and Miles’s desire to purchase the portrait. She has agreed with John not to discuss Miles Murphy openly in New Leeds (CL, 94). Yet she finds it difficult during a gossipy visit from the vicomte Paul, in which Paul states, “A strange whim, don’t you think…on Murphy’s part, to want to possess a likeness of his ex-wife? Something abnormal, I

Mary McCarthy’s a charmed life

97

find—a little in the manner of Bluebeard” (CL, 94). Martha agrees but remains silent. John winces. Paul continues, “After all,…it’s a distorted vision, poor Coe, a mutilation. Quelle horreur! Your wife’s eye rolling about the canvas like a marble. I wonder you permitted it” (CL, 95). Paul’s criticism lies in the fact that Martha is presented as an object and only seen in pieces. The Sinnotts still don’t speak until Paul finally mentions the price Warren charged Miles for the portrait, eighteen hundred dollars (CL, 95). Martha shifts from a discussion of herself as object/subject of art to herself as an artist, insisting, against all others, on the distinction between the price and value of art. Martha identifies more with Warren as an artist, than she does with being the object of the portrait. John and Paul feel Warren is obliged to charge this much in order to prove the value of the work to himself (CL, 97–8). However, Martha does not want to equate price with artistic value: “That won’t do in the arts. You can’t ‘make’ value by high pressure methods, like a business man’s price-fixing syndicate” (CL, 98–99). Paul counters by asking her if she has faith in her own work. She responds, “No,… I don’t. He does,” motioning toward her husband (CL, 99). Martha’s value has been determined by John and by Miles and by Warren. In arranging for her abortion, Martha feels she has taken control of her life, even though the random crash proves how little control she, or anyone else, finally has. In contrast, in writing this novel, McCarthy determines her own value, both as subject and as creator, by reclaiming a painfully submissive portion of her life and recreating it. In Intellectual Memoirs, McCarthy tries to explain her reason for marrying Wilson. She maintains that not only had she never intended to marry him but that she had never intended to sleep with him: No, I did not want to marry him. As a radical, I was against marriage. What happened is explained in A Charmed Life, in an analysis of the motive behind Martha’s first marriage. ‘The fatalistic side of her character accepted Miles as a punishment for the sin of having slept with him when she did not love him, when she loved, she still felt, someone else.”34 Thus McCarthy explicitly uses her characterization of Martha to explain her marriage to Wilson. In both, the motivation for marriage is not love, but a form of self-punishment, perhaps inspired by martyrs. In punishing themselves and their bodies, McCarthy and Martha, like Catholic saints, exert at least some sort of moral and mental power over themselves or at least their bodies, the power of the mind over reality. In revealing this connection and killing off Martha, McCarthy suggests some awareness of the dangers of abstraction from material reality inherent in such martyrdom, not only for the person involved but for society at large.

Love American style

98

However, at the same time, McCarthy demonstrates the strength and appeal of the power of the imagination to change reality. The struggle for McCarthy, and she implies for the twentieth-century novelist in general, is to find that balance between fact and fiction, so that neither is victimized by the other. Divorce seems to serve as an effective figuration of this balance between fact and fiction for McCarthy, marking that point at which fiction departs fact. She ends Intellectual Memoirs, which is the last explicit autobiography she will write, with the end of her marriage to Wilson. But she only exposes those lives after separation, or after divorce. She does not write about her last and most enduring marriage. It is as if the public revelation necessitated by divorce both allows McCarthy to use that factual material publicly and frees her imagination to write.

CHAPTER FIVE Divorce Me Romance and Realism in John Updike’s Marry Me: A Romance

In John Updike’s short story “The Music School,” protagonist Alfred Schweigen waits for his daughter to finish her piano lesson, contemplating the host, confession, and his own infidelity. He surmises, “My friends are like me. We are all pilgrims, faltering toward divorce.”1 His diction is suggestive. The word “pilgrims” is of course associated with the founding of American culture, invoking first grade history lessons of those who came over on the Mayflower, divorcing themselves from both England and the English church.2 Thus in making his pilgrims of the American 1960s falter toward divorce, Updike both invokes their Americanness and links that Americanness with divorce. On one level, Updike suggests the valorization of divorce as a shrine. However, unlike most pilgrims who set out ardently toward their shrine, these pilgrims falter, meaning they head for their shrine, divorce, perhaps accidentally, unaware of the values that take them there in the first place. During the sixties and seventies, divorce became an increasingly popular subject for Updike for a number reasons. First, Updike may very well just be reflecting the rise in prominence of divorce in American culture, beginning with the first “no-fault” divorce laws in California 1969.3 Second, like Edith Wharton and Mary McCarthy, there almost certainly is some autobiographical interest. Updike was divorced from his first wife in 1976, the same year in he publishes his divorce novel Marry Me: A Romance. In Marry Me, Updike reveals not only the realistic social upheaval divorce causes, reflects, and even inspires but also like Wharton, McCarthy, and William Dean Howells, how it disrupts foundational narratives about marriage, including realist novels of manners that celebrate it and romances that escape it. In doing so, Updike raises a central debate in American literary history: whether realism or romance is the most successful, most American form.4 While this debate may seem dated, it still has far reaching consequences because it asks fundamental questions about the role of liter-ature in a culture, from its level of engagement in a particular culture to its transcendence of culture, from its moral purpose to its ability to make meaning at all. In Marry Me, divorce, at once realistic and romantic, complicates this debate, collapsing polarities, suggesting postmodern antinomies not only in Updike’s work but in the critical history of American literature. Finally, Marry Me, perhaps most concisely among many other novels dealing with divorce by Updike, as well as other others from William Dean Howells and Edith

Divorce me romance and realism in John Updike’s marry me

101

Wharton to Saul Bellow and Diane Johnson, illustrates the potentially subversive and disruptive nature of divorce in the novel.5 Updike enacts these antinomies symbolically through the disruption of the family home. On one level the house provides a concrete, immobile, and popular symbol of marriage for many writers, shielding and containing marriages within it and creating a boundary that attempts to maintain polarities between the public and private, masculine and feminine, and romance and realism. Yet divorce breaks that containment, solidity, and boundary, forcing at least one spouse out into a public transience, where he or she is constantly mobile and abstracted from the fixed meaning suggested by the house and traditional narratives, thus reflecting the collapse of that boundary and the polarities it marks. Through divorce in Marry Me Updike breaks forms, or divorces himself from them, suggesting that the American “tradition” is a dynamic marriage of realism and romance, more postmodern antimony than codified tradition.

UPDIKE AND THE AMERICAN TRADITION Updike’s work is often categorized as contemporary domestic realism, in the tradition of Howells or Wharton, only dirtier.6 While perhaps extreme, Harold Bloom has called Updike “a minor novelist with a major style” whose pages the “American Sublime” will never touch because he is too buried in quotidian domestic realism.7 However, comparing Updike with John Fowles and postmodern experimentation, John Neary argues that Updike deconstructs such domestic realism8 and Judie Newman credits Marry Me as the novel that most demonstrates this shift from realism to experimentation with “fantastic, self-conscious and metafictional novels.”9 Updike’s awareness of the traditional critical schism between romance and realism in American literary history is apparent in his discussion of a paradigmatically “American” novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, its central concern, writes Updike, is “The axis of Earth-flesh-blood versus Heaven-mind-spirit with a little rotation becomes that of the world versus the self. In this opposition the self fights submergence.”10 Parallel dichotomies, with further rotation, might include the imagination versus reality, the self versus society, and romance versus realism. However, Updike qualifies this observation: ‘I feel that his principle was wrong…. Imagination is out of place; only the strictest realism can be right.”11 Up-dike reiterates a belief in realism in “Accuracy,” reprinted in Picked Up Pieces, an acceptance speech for the National Book Award for his 1964 novel The Centaur. He criticizes some modern fiction writers for being eccentric in the attempt to clear away artistic inheritances in order to write something new.12 Too often, he intimates, it is empty experimentation. Rather, writers must aim for accuracy: Fiction is a tissue of literal lies that refreshes and informs our sense of actuality. Reality is—chemically, atomically, biologically—a fabric of microscopic accuracies. Language approximates phenomena through a series of hesitations and qualifications; I miss, in much contemporary writing, this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence toward what exists that Cézanne has when he grapples for the shape and shade of

Love American style

102

a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs. The intensity of the grapple is the surest pleasure a writer receives.13 We must not, of course, make accuracy synonymous with realism. However, there is a definite concern here with material reality, as well as an interest in the larger metaphysical struggle with materiality and ideality. This struggle is apparent in Updike’s use of autobiographical material in his novels. Updike is not writing autobiography exactly but, like Mary McCarthy, writing from what he knows. He explains, “We must write where we stand; wherever we do stand, there is life and an imitation of the life we know, however narrow, is our only ground.”14 However, in writing what he knows, Updike is not only aiming for mimetic social realism; he seeks the romantic or symbolic meaning in the realities of what he knows. Up-dike’s mimesis is thus not the social realist mirror; it is subjective. For the novel Rabbit at Rest (1990), Updike won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Howells Medal. During his acceptance speech for the National Book Critics Award, Updike suggests that Rabbit is “a way into the matter of America.”15 He explains, again invoking the romance thesis, that most American classics focus on asocial, marginal fare, their heroes “expatriates seeking fulfillment elsewhere.”16 Further, he writes, something in our collective Puritan conscience insists, I fear, that to be worth writing our novels have to have, besides facts, an injection of the personal, the confessional, the spiritually urgent. It is this we grope for through our characters, this unprogrammable quality of testimony—of external evidences become interior signs—and to which a few characters do seem to grant us access.17 Thus, however essential facts are, the heroes of American fiction seek something more than the factual world in front of them, and American readers expect something more from their literature. I propose that divorce provides for Updike, as it has for Howells, Wharton, and McCarthy, another “way into the matter of America.” In dis-cussing the future of the novel, Updike notes how central the idea of love is to the form: Throughout, however, and right down to the classics of modernism, love is a pervasive, perhaps obsessive thread. The French say, ‘Without adultery, there is no novel,’ and while this may be more true of their novel than yours, it is indeed difficult to imagine a nove…without its—as the phrase goes—‘romantic interest.’18 Echoing Updike’s attribution of adultery to the French novel, Jerry Conant, the protagonist of Marry Me, says to his mistress, “Mistresses are for European novels. Here, there’s no institution except marriage.”19 The implication then is that love is essential to the American novel but adultery is not. Divorce, then, is embedded in Jerry’s statement that marriage is the only institution because love outside marriage is dependent upon divorce in a culture in which adultery earns a scarlet “A.” Thus again, Updike seems to be implying, that we Americans are all, himself perhaps included, “pilgrims faltering

Divorce me romance and realism in John Updike’s marry me

103

toward divorce.” Discussing his own nationality in a mock interview with his own character Bech in “Bech Meets Me,” Bech says, “[Updike] said that he was proAmerican in the sense that he was married to America and did not wish a divorce.”20 Thus the subject of divorce seems intertwined with Updike’s vision of America, and offers him, like Rabbit, a way into the matter of America and, I would argue, an American literary form, the fusion of realism and romance. Based in eastern Pennsylvania, the area in which he grew up, his earliest writing demonstrates Updike’s concern with realistic portrayals, with writing what he knows. Although his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), takes on the experience of those in a rest home, it is based on a rest home in his hometown of Shillingon, Pennsylvania. Similarly, the Brewer of the Rabbit novels resembles Shillington. Then as Updike moves east to New England, his novels begin to take place in New England. He often uses domestic themes, because, as he told Rhodes in an interview, he is a domestic creature.21 While Updike may not recount the details of his own separation, he begins to use separation and divorce more and more as themes in his writing, possibly reflecting both his own ensuing divorce and the upswing in the divorce rate during this time period. Updike wrote numerous short stories about divorce, most notably those collected in The Music School (1966) and Too Far to Go (1979), and perhaps, most famously, the novel Couples (1968). James Schiff claims Updike fictionalizes his own marriage crises in Marry Me and Too Far to Go and A Month of Sundays (1975), emerging as “America’s foremost writer of the bedroom.”22 Robert Luscher has noted the similarities between Updike’s life and Too Far to Go: “The genesis of these stories in the marital crises experienced by Updike and his first wife, Mary, also lends the volume unity and realism.”23 Both couples were married for twenty years, had four children, fol-lowed similar patterns in relocation, infidelity and reconciliation, and obtained “no-fault” divorces in Massachusetts.24 Updike filed for his no-fault divorce in 1976, the same year he published Marry Me. Although the first section, “The Wait,” was published even before Couples, both in 1968, he did not finish the book until 1976. During that time, Updike went through his own divorce and he acknowledges that some of the reasons he delayed finishing it were personal.25 While I do not want to argue for a direct connection, I do suggest that as divorce dissolves a marriage, so too it dissolves a way of life once thought stable; however, this dissolution of one reality opens up other possibilities. Thus, perhaps the experience of divorce widened the imaginative possibilities for Updike, and his adaptation of sociological themes into the romance of Marry Me is one result. Comparing Updike with John Fowles, John Neary argues that Updike moves away from realism26 and Judie Newman credits Marry Me as the novel that most demonstrates this shift: While Updike’s major achievements are essentially realistic novels, in a mimetic mode which emphasizes specificity of representation in a social context, a powerful undercurrent also runs through his work, in which more fantastic, self-conscious and metafictional novels center upon artistic questions…above all, Marry Me…. Each foregrounds the nature of illusion or myth…and each is highly self-conscious in form, moving away from the realist novel towards other genres: elegy (The Centaur), novella (Of the Farm), diary (A Month of Sundays), and romance (Marry Me).27

Love American style

104

Updike’s later novels are increasingly romantic and surreal. After Marry Me, he wrote The Coup (1978), which is about the military leader of an imaginary African nation. Later, Updike approaches the supernatural directly with his coven of witches in The Witches of Eastwick (1984). This shift in his focus is also apparent in his criticism. In the recent More Matter he writes, The world of literary art springs from the world and adheres to it but is distinctly different in substance. We enter it, as readers, expecting an intensity and shapeliness absent in our lives. A realm above nature is posed—a supernatural, in short. Aesthetic pleasure, like religious ecstasy, is a matter of inwardness, elevation, and escape.28 Yet although this statement seems like he is advocating the American sublime, to use Harold Bloom’s phrase,29 Updike still expresses a discomfort with post-modernism and a complete break with “reality” and form. He praises realists, such as Howells, while aware of their limitations. This balance between romance and realism marks the most memorable aspect of Marry Me: its ending, or more precisely, three endings, considered both a flaw and a triumph by critics. It is important to read these endings as coexisting, not as three possible endings from which the reader can choose, as in some children’s books, or as a literal, chronological progres-sion, as Margaret Halissy and Jeff Campbell do.30 Their coexistence is important because it demonstrates both the fusion of realism and romance as well as the paralysis this fusion creates for the writer and the protagonist. This paralysis results from the incongruity of romance with realism demonstrated in American literary history. Thus Marry Me marks a pivotal shift in Updike’s oeuvre. He exploits many schisms in the American novel, as do Howells, Wharton, and McCarthy, specifically mobility and stasis as symbolized by the house of marriage, the private versus the public, the West versus the East, and the desire to define “America” as unique, as distinct from its European heritage in particular. However, Updike expands the formal possibilities of the divorce novel to a much greater degree than any of his predecessors. Divorce, as both subject and symbol, enables Up-dike to make this shift from realism to romance.

THE ROMANCE OF MARRY ME Updike intended to make Marry Me distinct from his other novels as well as from his collections of short stories: Marry Me was always a book in my mind, not a collection, or collage, and was written pretty much in a piece, with the five chapters symmetrically alliterative as I have them, and their lengths in the proportion of a diadem. The central chapter, cut down from the length of a novel in itself, is flanked by two longish, less inward, more spoken chapters, and these in turn by brief idylls, partaking of the same texture, between real and unreal.31

Divorce me romance and realism in John Updike’s marry me

105

This shape and this weave of the real and unreal unsettles Updike, however. In an interview with Charlie Reilly, Updike explains that this discomfort led him to use the subtitle A Romance: “my unease about the book’s lack of, let’s say, ‘sociology’ led me to give it the subtitle as a way of cutting it off from the other novels.”32 Calling it a romance allows Updike more room for imagination. He does not feel as constricted by the “sociological” realism that characterizes the novel, even though the book does deal with the “sociological” issue of divorce. Donald Greiner applies Brook Thomas’s argument about such authors as Hawthorne to the Updike of Marry Me.33 He writes that, like Hawthorne, Updike creates his “peculiar brand of fiction not to avoid the rigors of verisimilitude but to show that social order is a human construct, that it does not inhere in society; ‘that to be interested in society is not necessarily to describe what is already there but to show how a possible world could be organized if human beings had the freedom to choose.’”34 In other words, the imagination creates other “realities.” However, not grounded to material reality, the possibilities of the imagination are boundless, creating a paralyzing profusion of possibilities in which choice becomes impossible. This idea of having too much freedom from which to choose lies at the center of Marry Me. The book is propelled by Jerry’s free-dom to choose whether to remain with his wife or to divorce and marry his mistress. However, this choice is never thoroughly resolved. Jerry is paralyzed by this freedom and his paralysis shapes the form of Marry Me. As Jerry is suspended in choice, so is the end—so are the ends—of the book, remaining forever in the romantic realm of possibility, enacting what Ihab Hassan has called the “indetermanence” that dominates postmodernism.35 Divorce symbolizes this freedom of the imagination because divorce makes other alternatives possible. The imaginative possibilities allotted by divorce allow Updike “to show illusion as a component of our daily lives, to which air and dreams are as essential as earth and blood.”36 To do so in Marry Me, Updike reaches back into literary history far beyond Hawthorne to the medieval romance; even the shape he envisions for the book, a diadem, is a courtly invocation.37 Indeed, Campbell thinks it is “too full of lovingly rendered naturalistic details” and thus that the older sense of romance, the medieval sense, is more appropriate.38 To emphasize this courtly aspect of the book, Up-dike even chose a medieval tapestry for the original cover.39 This is also why Updike places the story in the “Camelot” of the Kennedy era, which Updike romanticizes: “It’s a story that could only have happened in John Kennedy’s reign. He infused all of us with a romantic sense of ourselves that’s gone. Anything that happened before 1965 seems kind of innocent to me.”40 Hunt notes, “The Kennedy era was the age of Camelot in America and, in retrospect, it appears as remote as the age of the Round Table. That particular sense of a distant and irretrievable past is characteristic of Romance.”41 Their language is telling, illuminating Up-dike’s use of romance in Marry Me. In many ways Updike’s romanticization of the Kennedy era is characteristic of mid-century America. Such romantic nostalgia, argues D.Quentin Miller, is a central feature of Cold War ideology, “The zeigeist of Updike’s Cold War America is not paranoia, anticommunist hysteria, or anxiety, but rather nostalgia: a painful longing to return to the earlier, unfallen, innocent world of 1950s middle-class suburbia that no longer exists, and that only really ever existed in America’s imagination.”42 Thus, in contrast to critics who have attacked Updike for portraying an overly private world,

Love American style

106

especially in a character like Jerry Conant who’s self-absorption drives the whole novel, Miller demonstrates how “The presence of domestic dissolution in his stories corresponds with a heightened awareness of Cold War events; the breakdown of happy marriages illuminates the global tension that looms behind them.”43 Thus, Up-dike’s retreat into nostalgia is in response to the political public world, forming a microcosm of it. This sense of the irretrievable parallels the sense of the unattainable that is also characteristic of the medieval romance, specifically unattainable love. Such love in the romance only exists outside of marriage. Jerry only wants Sally if he cannot have her. The same year he published Marry Me, Updike also published his well-known review of Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World, which proposes the centrality of the love story at the heart of medieval romance to Western literary tradition, specifically the Tristan saga.44 The crux of the Tristan saga is that Tristan is in love with his Uncle Mark’s wife, Iseult, and it is her very unattainability as the wife of another man that characterizes Tristan’s love for her. Divorce is not an option for Iseult and Tristan; it is beside the point. The very possibility of divorce, and thus attainability, would deplete the myth of its significance and power. The whole point is that Tristan’s love for Iseult parallels the mortal’s quest to know God, which is the ultimate unattainability. This idea of unattainable desire is what motivates Jerry, the prime protagonist in Marry Me, however, Jerry is also aware that in the realm of possibility afforded by liberal American divorce laws, his romantic desire is out of place. Jerry seeks romance through adultery and yet denies that adultery can work in America as it does in French novels. Sally tells him he has made her feel being a mistress is too shabby for her and that if he can’t take her for a wife, he shouldn’t spoil her as a mistress (MM, 55). Jerry responds, “I don’t want you as a mistress; our lives just aren’t built for it. Mistresses are for European novels. Here, there’s no institution except marriage” (MM, 55). Barbara Leckie writes that the distinction Jerry makes between European novels and American marriages is essential to the “purity” he seeks: “Jerry is able to maintain this romantic image of adultery because, as he states, Americans, unlike Europeans, do not have a tradition of adultery.”45 In contrast, he realizes he doesn’t want a mistress and that marriage is the only option, which, by default, makes divorce necessary. In doing so, Jerry expresses the Puritan belief that divorce is preferable to adultery. Divorce, implies Jerry, is what their American lives were built for, reflecting the extent to which Americans hold impossible notions of love. In addition, Jerry notes the distinction between the imaginative world of novels, and the realistic world of their lives. The possibility of divorce thus both undermines the romance of adultery by proposing a pragmatic solution, and romantically opens up other imaginative solutions by undermining the permanence of marriage, which is what creates the romantic unattainability associated with romance in the first place. Applying Jerry’s comment to American literary history, Elizabeth Tallent writes, “So that leaves, for the troubled realm of American novels, only married men and magic tricks. Because what is the proposal of a married man to his married lover—the question, marry me?, in each of its variously plausible intonations—but sleight of hand, the dove pulled from the hero’s empty sleeve?”46 In Tallent’s question lies the implication that through his “married men and magic tricks” Updike reveals a suspicion of the imagination. In other words, Jerry’s fantasy question—“marry me?”—may be noble and idealistic, but it is also an evasion, since he is already married. Embedded in the question, if he is sincere, is also a proposal for divorce. Tallent concludes, “In this novel imaginary

Divorce me romance and realism in John Updike’s marry me

107

marriages can be conceived and discarded, all the while retaining something of their original enchanted lightness, the terrain the lovers have fashioned from thin air…. Hypothetical divorces are conjured up almost as playfully.”47 Thus Jerry’s idealization of American marriage makes divorce an element of magic and a catalyst of the fabulous, a key to romance, because the very real possibility of divorce allows him to imagine other marriages, other lives. Jerry sees himself as a romantic hero, and a particularly American romantic hero at that. At the same time, divorce depletes the mysticism of adultery. Thus while divorce opens one romantic tradition, its realism closes another; it is at once romantic and realistic. Jerry, then, seems the lone, and rather ridiculous, romantic in a country of pragmatists. His attempt to purchase a corkscrew in the first chapter sets this tone. He apologizes to Sally: “My poor brave lady. The dangers I expose you to. I’m sorry I’m late. I had to buy the wine and then I tried to buy a corkscrew and these absolute idiots, these Normal Rockwell types in some run-down country store, tried to sell me an auger instead” (MM, 11). Although Jerry’s tone suggests, as Hunt has argued,48 that on one level Jerry parodies the ideals of courtly love in describing his and Sally’s adulterous rendezvous— the crassness of the phallic implications undermining Jerry’s attempt at gallantry—he still demonstrates that such courtly love is out of place in the land of Norman Rockwell. In doing so Updike mixes romance and realism, which seem to go together here as well as oil and water. Realism and romance are juxtaposed throughout Marry Me and through their juxtaposition, Updike demythologizes both, revealing the attractions and delusions of each but making them both necessary to everyday American life. Updike’s characterization of Jerry problematizes the idea of romance because he is really the only character who seems guided by such romantic ideals. He sets up impossibilities, making himself a martyr. He also won’t divorce to remarry because that would shatter his illusions of romance and suffering, even though all the other characters, including his wife Ruth, view divorce as the pragmatic, if painful, solution. Jerry’s ideals lead to his hesitancy to act, invoking Henry James’s John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle,” who waits his entire life for something to happen to him, only to realize at the end of his life that he has missed the one thing that did happen to him, the love of May Bartram. Jerry still seems to be waiting for his beast to pounce. In contrast, Jerry’s wife Ruth is an earthy realist; she observes, after her affair with Sally’s husband Richard, that “any romance that does not end in marriage fails” (MM, 98). For Ruth, a romance only has value if it leads to one end, marriage. She does not experience the idealist and metaphysical potential of an affair. Because her romance with Richard will not lead to marriage, she sees no purpose in it and breaks it off. In contrast, Jerry cannot make up his mind. Through his paralysis and isolation and constant, irritating vacillation, Updike undercuts Jerry’s romantic idealism. Thus, Campbell suggests that Marry Me illustrates a “‘yes—but’ approach to the Tristan myth” since “Jerry’s romantic preten-sions are generally dismissed by insights and comments from Ruth, from whose point of view most of the book is narrated.”49 Thus, through the marriage of Jerry and Ruth, Updike illustrates the confrontation between romance and realism, or freedom and responsibility.

Love American style

108

DIVORCE ME, DIVORCE MY HOUSE That the endings of Marry Me all involve travel is significant because of what Jerry is traveling away from, the house of marriage. The house is of course a central symbol in domestic fiction or the novel of manners because it not only provides location but also reflects character, as Howells, Wharton, and McCarthy have illustrated. In turn, the house is pivotal in the romance because, as a symbol of the pressures of society and the material world, it is often what romantic heroes, from James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo in the Leatherstocking Tales to Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty, long to escape, which is why so many romances take place outside the house in nature. Equally central to the novel of manners, as well as equally confining in the romance, is the idea of marriage. Updike often makes this link the backbone of his fiction, taking great care to describe homes in detail, giving marriages and houses characters of their own, perhaps most apparent under the threat of divorce, as both structures begin to fragment. One of the key tensions creating this fragmentation leading to divorce is that between the social duty so characteristic of realism, particularly of the novel of manners, and the duty to self so characteristic of romance. It is this simultaneous desire to both build the marriage house and escape the marriage house that forms the crux of Jerry Conant’s crisis in Marry Me. Jerry proclaims the equation of marriage with its house explicitly. Jerry views his house and marriage to Ruth as the cause of his nighttime asthma attacks: “[H]e would break into a sweat, and cry out this was death, and ask her why she was smothering him, why she had had so many children, why she couldn’t keep the house dusted” (MM, 138). Jerry describes what he sees as Ruth’s failures as a wife in terms of the house. On one level she is too “wifely,” burdening him with their children. Yet she also fails because she cannot keep the place dusted. That insufficient dusting is important, especially when contrasted with his admiration of Sally’s pristine housekeeping (MM, 123). Dust, of course, suggests the earth, dirt itself, and as such invokes an earth-bound, material realism. Jerry associates Ruth herself with the earth. He tells Ruth, “With you, it’s a roll in the mud. Mother Mud. With her…it’s a butterfly alighting on a little flower” (MM, 148). In contrast, Sally is something ethereal, idealistic, something of the air. The lack of dust in Sally’s house emphasizes her ethereality. For Jerry, his house with Ruth symbolizes the materiality, fixity, and realism of their marriage. As the house belongs to marriage, adultery romantically occurs outside the house. Thus Marry Me opens with a description of Jerry and Sally’s rendezvous on an obscure stretch of Connecticut beach during March (MM, 9). Jerry views their affair as he views the never-tasted dunes that day, as pure, natural, untainted by human constructions and institutions like marriage, which is really the result of fallen man, even in biblical terms: “They felt no hurry; this was perhaps the bravest proof that they were, Jerry and Sally, the original man and woman” (MM, 13). Their love is a “pure” love, outside of marriage, such as that of Tristan and Iseult. Further, by painting Jerry’s dilemma as a particularly American dilemma, Updike alludes to a second tradition, that of the American Adam. Hunt suggests “that Updike’s employment of the Adam myth draws upon a traditional Adamic image of America itself, an image that was itself steeped in controversy a century ago, and that these fictions—when seen as social criticism—ought to be read in

Divorce me romance and realism in John Updike’s marry me

109

that tradition’s light.”50 Again, for the American Adam, for whom divorce is an option, adultery loses much of its romantic power. For the American Adam, adultery most realistically leads to divorce, and most romantically leads to remarriage. Still, for all of this romantic, woodsy description, Updike undercuts the “purity” of Jerry and Sally’s romance from the beginning. The “beach scruff and wandering paths held like a vast natural hotel hundreds of private patches of sand. This realm of hollows and ridges was deceptively complex. Each time, they were unable to find the exact place, the perfect place, where they had been before” (MM, 10). Thus they are unable to fix their adulterous affair in space, because no such place really exists. The reference to the beach as a “vast natural hotel” conjur`es up images of seedy extramarital meetings, such as their trysts in Washington, DC. Updike drives home his portrait of the Amercianness of this romance by having them meet in Washington, DC, the American capital. Like their difficulty finding that perfect spot on the beach again, they know this second trip to Washington, DC, will not be as perfect as the first, but here the illusion of purity is more difficult to maintain. Sally has a moment of clarity: But early in the morning, having slept on a vague sense of loss, she awoke to a sharp deserted feeling. The room was different from the first one. The walls, though it was the same hotel, were yellow instead of white, and instead of the flowered prints there were two pallid Holbein portraits. It was brightened enough beyond the blinds to see their faces, so dim they seemed real presences—small-mouthed, fastidious. How many adulterous and drunken couplings had they been compelled to witness…. She nudged him awake and made him passionate. In the heart of intimacy, he drowsily called her ‘Ruth.’ (MM, 36) In this hotel for a moment, Sally sees through Jerry’s fantasies and sees their romance from another angle, from which it looks like many other tawdry adulterous affairs those portraits have seen. The floral prints, invoking rose-tinted romanticism, give way to Holbeins, suggesting the detailed realism characteristic of the portrait painter. Although it is also outside the house, the hotel emphasizes the transience of romance rather than its purity. Shaken, Sally wakes Jerry, who still asleep calls her his wife’s name, showing that even then he is attempting to reclaim an “original” or “pure” love. When reality forces its way in, Jerry retreats even further into romantic illusion. They make love “lucidly, like Adam and Eve when the human world was of two halves purely” (MM, 37). Yet his ideals are becoming even more ridiculous and romantic, the stuff of fairy tales. He imagines telling Sally, You were a territory where I went on tip-toe to steal a magic mirror. You were a princess married to an ogre. I would go to meet you as a knight, to rescue you and would become instead the dragon, and ravish you…. What a lazy, lovely naked child you were, my mistress and temporary wife. (MM, 37) Jerry suggests that adultery is so foreign to Americans that even a mistress must be seen as a temporary wife. Further, he denies the reality of this hotel room in DC, coating it

Love American style

110

with a veneer of idealism, and conflating a number of romantic traditions, including that of the American frontier and the medieval epic. In Jerry’s vision, Updike even invokes Nobokov’s Lolita. Further, Jerry takes on all of the roles, both those of the hero and the enemy, the knight and the dragon. Sally can be both mistress and wife. In his imagination, Jerry can have it all ways, but not in reality. Jerry’s paradoxes here both suggest the power of the imagination and the danger of that power. By enabling Jerry and Sally to be any and all of these things, the imagination also abstracts things from their material referent, depleting them of meaning. Updike also undercuts the purity of their romance by linking it with technology and mobility, for while technology enables the mobility so necessary for romantic exploration in the twentieth century, such technology exacerbates the transience of exploration, moving further and further from the earth and thus further into the realm of abstraction. At first Sally’s flight to DC seems liberating: “Sally flew; she became a bird, a heroine. She took the sky on her back, leveled out on the cloudless prairie above the clouds— boiling, radiant, motionless” (MM, 28). She is supposed to go to the Smithsonian, but she does not: “At the door of the brownstone castle, she turns away” (MM, 30). While on one level the word “castle” invokes medievalism again, and thus romance, the word “brownstone” qualifies that romantic illusion, both because of the literal “stone” and the domestic, American inference suggested by “brownstone.” Instead, she prefers to walk around feeling “airy, free” (MM, 31). She travels light, just a toothbrush; she thinks of her husband, hating the schools, “prim places of Eastern exile” from which Richard had saved her, asking herself where had her gratitude gone and whether she is evil: “She couldn’t believe it, feeling still so full of sky from the airplane ride, sidewalk mica glinting under her” (MM, 31). Yet, this fantasy of flight becomes literally grounded when Sally and Jerry get stuck at the airport in the Eastern strike. They wait around and are forced to discuss their situation, to discuss marriage, to acknowledge that they are stuck, though the fantasy is about movement. There are constant references to marriage and adultery during their wait. At one point, the man tearing tickets for standbys jokes: “Keep cool, men, … Let the wife get him out of the house” (MM, 51). The crowd waiting with them is, of course, competitive and surly because everyone wants to get on a plane; however, they join together for one cause, placing one person before their own needs and desires, a bridesmaid who is trying to get to a wedding. The crowd even goes so far as to take up the chant “Bridesmaid” until she is safely on the plane (MM, 64). When Jerry and Sally stop moving, the idea of marriage seems everywhere. They even discuss moving west and settling down (MM, 65). This moving paralysis, really a treadmill, is what Jerry desires, akin to Mario Praz’s definition of the Romantic poet “ecstatic in front of a forever blank page.”51 He tells Sally, “You need me and I can’t give myself to you. I want you and I can’t have you. You’re like a set of golden stairs I can never finish climbing. I look down, and the earth is a little blue mist. I look up, and there’s this radiance I can never reach. It gives you your incredible beauty, and if I marry you I’ll destroy it” (MM, 49). His simile is curiously architectural and fantastic, a set of golden stairs floating in the sky attached to nothing; the house to which one expects the stairs to lead—the symbol of marriage—is missing. Jerry acknowledges that the legitimacy of their love doesn’t exist and “any attempt to

Divorce me romance and realism in John Updike’s marry me

111

start existing, to move out of this pain, will kill us” (MM, 50). The only moves are to acknowledge their affair as simply adultery or to move toward divorce. Yet Jerry also realizes that to divorce would remove the obstacle that perpetuates his love for Sally. During one of his many vacillations, he visits Sally to tell her he is losing his nerve to go through with the divorce. He feels that maybe if they got out of that house, the house of her marriage to Richard, he would be able to make a decision more easily, suggesting that maybe back out in the open space of adultery, he would again clearly feel their love. However, Jerry lapses into an interior dialogue, which Updike marks by italics: I love this house. Love my house, love me. you are the house, sort of. (MM, 255) In his imaginary conversation with Sally he can impose upon her just the right answer, and the answer here is significant. If the house is the symbol of marriage, then what Jerry seems to be acknowledging is that it is the very fact that Sally is married that he loves. Without this house, without this marriage, she would not be the Sally that he loves. In contrast, Ruth and Richard’s affair is brief, contained within the house and within marriage. Their affair takes place in the house while Jerry is working: “It was all matterof-fact, controlled, satisfactory; under this alien man there was time, time in which to make the trip to the edge and fall, fall and arrive where she had begun, pressed to the earth as if safe. The earth was her bed, hers and Jerry’s” (MM, 86). Somehow, this affair makes her more married. Richard ruffles her sense of safety by mentioning Jerry: He had been naughty to mention Jerry; it threatened to spoil it. The house shuddered, and a moment later a jet breaking the sound barrier boomed above them, in the blue that stood unbroken at the windows. On the other side of the house Geoffrey began to fret in his crib. Richard must go; she must use him while he was with her. She must learn. (MM, 87) The juxtaposition of images here is telling. The house itself seems to be reacting to the affair, threatening Ruth with what she might lose, her children, as the suggestion of flight from marriage, the jet, booms outside. Ruth wants to use the affair to make herself a better wife. She only succumbs to Richard when she feels safe within the boundaries of her house with Jerry. When Richard tries to kiss her outside, she feels most uncomfortable and breaks up with him. He takes her deep into the woods to discuss it: “Out of doors, in nature, the queerness of being kissed was clarified; it was something done to her, like the shampoos her mother used to give her at the kitchen sink with its long brass faucet” (MM, 94). The affair does tempt her; she has the desire to flee that she did not have before her affair, but she subordinates it to her duty as a wife. She places social duty over individual desires, as a realist would. Ruth pragmatically concludes, “The best she could say was she had done it to become a better wife” (MM, 97). There are increasing references to houses as marriages begin to unravel in Marry Me, too many to mention in detail. In addition to a mirror of the marriages, the house becomes

Love American style

112

a spousal weapon. Richard even refers to his house as his ex-home (MM, 234). As a contrast, Updike makes numerous references to planes passing overhead, emphasizing the contrast between the fixity associated with marriage and the transience associated with affairs. When Jerry finally asks Ruth if she thinks their marriage has been a mistake, a plane again rumbles overhead, and he suggests she leave Greenwood. They argue about who should have the house, but Ruth prevails (MM, 109). Similarly, Richard lays claim to his house: “This is my house and I’m not getting out of it because my wife’s turned into a whore” (MM, 219). As the “victimized” spouses, Ruth and Richard lay a jealous claim upon the house. Ruth says, “don’t let me see you thinking [of Sally]. Do it in New York. Do it at the beach. When you’re in my house, think of me” (MM, 177). And Sally tells Jerry that she swore to Richard that they never made love in his house (MM, 227). Their jealousy seems hypocritical and ironic, considering their own affair in Jerry and Ruth’s house. However, it is exactly because their affair was contained by the house and within their marriages that they are threatened by Sally’s and Jerry’s affair that could not be contained, and which, in turn, threatens to destroy their marriages. The houses also illustrate the battle between romance and realism that is played out by contrasting the affair of the romantics, Sally and Jerry, with the realists, Ruth and Richard, as Ruth’s visit to Sally illustrates. Ruth has convinced Jerry to promise to give Sally up for the rest of the summer, postponing any decisions about divorce. Ruth visits Sally, hoping to make Sally agree to her terms as well. Ruth tries to see this familiar house—for it was once a popular center of their social circle—afresh, with Jerry’s eyes. She notices the things that Jerry would love, such as “the square-armed sofas” and “the framed prints by mediocrities like Buffet and Wyeth” (MM, 123). She acknowledges that Sally has a gift of light, and a talent for housekeeping. Jerry has said so as well. Ruth remembers, Last night, as Ruth and Jerry talked and tossed in bed, sleepless like children under the threat of Christmas, growing actually silly, he had complained what a better housekeeper than she Sally was. Ruth had answered that Sally had Josie, but knew this was a weak truth: she could have a Josie too, if she had cared. She didn’t care; she thought housekeeping a second-rate passion. (MM, 123) Both Ruth and Jerry realize that his affair with Sally ironically makes them more married, hence the infantile, Christmasy excitement they feel as Jerry openly compares his wife with his mistress. But Ruth, the realist, has difficulty seeing Sally’s house through her husband’s rose-colored lenses. The illusions about Sally and her house evaporate: “In returning through the living room, Ruth saw that the square arms of the white sofa were worn and the Wyeth print was askew” (MM, 130). For the earthy Ruth, housekeeping is a denial of the dirty reality of living. Like Martha Sinnott, Ruth’s classification of housekeeping as second-rate suggests that she considers the pursuit of the “real” first rate. The house also demonstrates what they will all lose if they divorce, their belief in the ideal of marriage. For if marriage is based upon a permanent bond of commitment, trust, and selflessness, then dissolving that bond divorce depletes the commitment that defines marriage in the first place. After the showdown in the Mathiases’ living room, Richard has taken off, leaving Sally alone. Sally calls Jerry fearful, asking if she’ll be safe. Jerry

Divorce me romance and realism in John Updike’s marry me

113

tells her she will be safe, that she’s been alone in a house before, but Sally answers “Not like this” (MM, 228). Sally’s fear suggests that this is a new awareness of aloneness that divorce makes possible. Even if they are to remarry, after divorce Sally’s fear implies the awareness of the fragility and potential impermanence of every alliance. In opening up new possibilities and commitments, divorce also demonstrates how very alone we all are, an awareness the institution of marriage has served to buffer. This new awareness of the solitude of the individual becomes most apparent for Jerry and Sally when they attempt to find a house where Sally can live until they can live together (MM, 248). Sally asks, “You hate it don’t you?” and Jerry says that he doesn’t, “when I was a kid I dreamed of a place like this” (MM, 250). This house is not a place for adults. Jerry continues, “It—it almost seems too nice for us. Right now” (MM, 250). The materiality of the house makes the idea of their marriage a real possibility, and as such, Jerry realizes that their marriage would neither live up to this house nor his childhood fantasies. She nods yes and then says that they must get home because her son, Peter, will be there soon (MM, 251). The possibility of actually living in this house, and thus divorcing Richard to marry Jerry, seems to bring Sally back to the reality of the moment as well. She has to get to her present home and children. Their househunting forces Jerry and Sally to consider the material and social consequences of pursing marriage, bringing them back to the reality of the present and forcing them to consider the effects of their actions upon others. Hence, for the first time, a location seems “too good” for them. Their househunting thus seems to mark the end of their affair. During lunch back at the Mathiases’ house, Jerry tells Sally he has been wrong: “It’s wrong to want somebody in the same way you’d want a—lovely thing. Or an expensive house, or a high piece of land” (MM, 254). Jerry seems to acknowledge that his desire for Sally has been selfish. He tries to portray himself as having grown, having come to a realization that Sally is a real person, not an ideal or a commodity. “I suppose,” she answers. Her thoughts wander to the kids in the kitchen and the plane “rumbling over head,” Updike again invoking the thought of flight that characterized the ideal of their affair (MM, 254). However, now they embrace clumsily; he closes his eyes and sees the darkness between them widen, “so in his mind’s eye he saw them from a great height, clasped on a raft in the midst of an unbounded blood-red ocean. The airplane rattled the sky, receding” (MM, 255). Jerry’s abstraction from the scene, his rise to a “great height” suggests instead that it is himself that he has elevated and that he has thought of a new way of being heroic, the sacrifice of his affair with Sally, hence the “blood-red ocean.” He is so noble that he will let this flight pass him by. Jerry and Sally drive to the beach where they will not be known, hoping to get some perspective by being outside Sally and Richard’s house. Jerry exclaims it is the most beautiful place he has ever seen: “The waves, the whitecaps, the yellowish streaked rocks wore for him a religious brilliance; for as they walked they were deciding not to marry. Or, rather, Jerry was revealing that they would not” (MM, 256). The “religious brilliance” Jerry sees in the waves, in nature here, is no longer his ineffable love for Sally, but his love of his own sacrifice of Sally. When they get back to the house, Sally gives Jerry all of the keepsakes she has kept from their affair. They both realize neither will get divorced. As he leaves, Jerry says to Richard, “She’s your wife…. I’ve been with her these hours and she’s felt like your wife. They’re your children, it’s your house” (MM, 258). Thus, in giving up Sally, Jerry gives up Sally’s and Richard’s house, and gives

Love American style

114

them back their marriage. Richard thanks him sarcastically. Jerry listens, “standing there motionless like a burglar. The house was silent, their reunion was silent, there was no sound but that of Caesar’s claws rasping the driveway stones as the dog returned from some idle hunt in the woods to his accustomed lair inside the garage” (MM, 258). Caesar’s return from his fling in the woods foreshadows Jerry’s return to his accustomed lair with Ruth. Updike, then, parallels Jerry with Caesar, suggesting Jerry’s perception of himself as a noble beast, who has tamed his own earthly bestiality for the cause of domestication. This penultimate chapter ends with both marriages restored, and everyone seemingly sheltered in their respective houses of marriage. Jerry drives home, wishing “never to move from this safe moment, on this firm autumnal lawn, among small dirty faces clean of accusation” (MM, 259). By accepting these “dirty faces” Jerry seems to accept the earthly reality of his children and marriage. And to prove his new commitment as a dutiful husband, he heads to work, but he leaves a note, a valentine really, for Ruth: “ALL IS OFF. BE MINE,” yet again invoking the proprietary connotations of love and marriage. Ruth calls him at work, telling him she will take him back. Romance seems to have been restored to marriage. He is, however, uncomfortable at work. The city becomes like a “vast twinkling, gently floundering ship,” again an image of travel, but this one causes unease (MM, 261). He drives home, throwing Sally’s mementos out along the way, glad to be home. The last lines of the chapter read: “His house, his windows, his front steps, the voices of his children rose as a kind of dream out of the sleep of God” (MM, 265). The first half of this sentence sounds like the ending of a realist novel of manners, perhaps reminding one of Newland Archer renouncing Ellen Olenska, and devoting himself to May in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Or of Rabbit, though still “running,” returning to his wife, Janice. Yet, the second half of the sentence emphasizes the romantic and metaphysical aspects of Jerry’s return. He has not returned out of a sense of social duty so much as a sense that the sacrifice necessitated by conforming to social duty brings him closer to God, and hence the ineffable, than even his affair with Sally did.

EAST OR WEST? IT’S ALL THE SAME However, Marry Me does not end with Jerry returning to Ruth, though a few critics read it that way. Rather it ends with him simultaneously moving west with Sally, traveling to Europe with Ruth, and traveling to the Virgin Islands by himself. The simultaneous, and thus fantastic, endings are significant in themselves because of the way they break from traditional nov-elistic form, demonstrating Updike’s shift from realism to romance. However, the specifics of the endings are also significant, particularly in terms of the representation of divorce. Howells, Wharton, and McCarthy all illustrate how divorce is linked with the West, invoking the myth and “Americanness” of the West, individualism, new starts, American Adams. Similarly, in instances where divorce is avoided, diffused, or contained by adultery, the married couple travels East, as if going back to Europe, particularly France, allows them to be in a culture in which manners tolerate adultery, preferring adultery to divorce. In Marry Me, Jerry associates his wife with the East and his mistress with the West: “[Sally] came from Seattle and this made her in Jerry’ eyes a

Divorce me romance and realism in John Updike’s marry me

115

farm-girl. It was true, she had always felt uneasy in the East. There was a kind of Eastern woman, Ruth, for example, who never bothered with make-up or conspicuously flirted and beside whom Sally felt clumsy” (MM, 33). Sally is not only from the West, and thus linked symbolically with divorce, but she is also the child of divorce (MM, 47). Having both the East and the West exist for Jerry as possibilities means he does not have to choose. As Greiner notes, Jerry wants both the novel (his wife) and the romance (his mistress) and thus Updike gives him both and neither (MM, 187). In doing so, Updike proposes a symbolic explanation with the third ending. Jerry has taken American romantic expectation to its logical extreme; he exists on an untouchable “virgin” island, paralyzed, suspended in his movement east and west, really just going round in circles. Jerry’s suspension between the East and the West is foreshadowed in the scene where Jerry and Sally are stuck at the airport. Again, planes, of course, symbolize flight and flying or divorce, which is just what they are being prevented from doing. Although they are on “United” airlines (MM, 53), the striking airline, “Eastern,” has clogged the entire airport (MM, 45). The “Eastern” reference suggests the East and thus Europe, and the decadence of adultery. And, as I noted, references to adultery abound in the chapter entitled “The Wait.” Jerry suggests they try “American,” but American would leave them stranded until the next morning, and thus definitely caught by their spouses (MM, 54–55). For them to choose the “American” option would be for them to choose to be exposed, and to falter further toward divorce. They redeem their “United” tickets instead, wanting both to pretend they are united, as well as acknowledging that they are legally united with other people. Nonetheless, the next flight out is not until six. This reprieve allows them time to think, and their thoughts head west. Jerry fantasizes, “I see us…in Wyoming, with your children, and a horse, and a cold little lake we can swim in, and a garden we can make near the house” (MM, 54). The narrator explains, “She had once said, in passing, that she had always wanted to return to the West…and he had built their whole future on it” (MM, 54). She tells Jerry not to tease her.52 He continues elaborating upon their plans. It is just after this first real discussion of their move west that Sally tells him he’s made her feel being a mistress is too shabby for her and that if he can’t take her for a wife, he shouldn’t spoil her as a mistress. Sally wants the western solution of divorce. Jerry makes his crucial response that mistresses are for European novels and in America the only game is divorce (MM, 55). To move west would be to get divorced and remarry Sally. The fantasy of the West shapes the last chapter, entitled “Wyoming.” The title seems appropriate as Jerry and Sally disembark from a plane in Cheyenne. The chapter seems to reverse the “realistic” end of the chapter entitled “The Reacting of Richard” because Jerry and Sally live out their fantasy, leaving their spouses and moving together to the West. Updike even describes the West as mythical: “As they descended, a bit stiffly, the resounding steel steps, he inhaled and knew that this was home; the mythical western air released his lungs; he felt forever free from the threat of suffocation” (MM, 272). Updike describes the landscape of the West—the sky, the plains—in highly romantic terms (MM, 272–3). And Sally and Jerry wonder if they feel free. Through this fantasy, Updikes revisits the myth of the frontier, alluding to Turner’s thesis that the frontier exists only as an idea.

Love American style

116

Yet one of the children begins to complain of a sore throat and reality quickly descends and transforms the landscape. The transformation occurs during their taxi ride away from the airport, a taxi driven like a Western taxi by an American Indian: He guessed, from the guidebooks he had read, at buffalo grass, at shooting stars and bluebells; there were peaceful spaces between the clumps of sagebrush where nothing offered to grow. Rather than greet so much joy alone he eased an arm behind the children’s backs and interlaced his fingers with Sally’s. She had been staring, dazed, at the monotonous land. Her touch was bony and tense, with that texture of having done work that he loved. Though she returned his timid pressure, which offered to shelter her, the corner of her mouth crimped with a fractional regret, as if acknowledging that she could no longer give freely what, through earning it, he had imposed on her as a duty. It was as if a chemical had been dropped. The air changed, slightly, but enough to tip the precarious balance of their mutual illusion. The smell of sage intensified; their speed had increased; pale green growths scudded by so quickly their tint became blue…. The Indian’s head jutted impassively against the light. (MM, 275– 76) In some ways this overtly mythical opening to the chapter is the most realistic section of the book. The romance here is truly over: the children have sore throats, passion is now duty, and the West is arid, wild, and resistant to farming or “husbandry.” The Indian is now confined to a taxi. He is not the romantic, noble savage. Yet rather than continue with this realistic ending, deconstructing the fantasy of divorce and escape, and thus firmly fixing the book into the genre of a realistic novel with a remarriage (as in Couples), Updike simply quits the scene, replacing the silhouette of the Indian with those of the children: “The children’s heads, finely outlined in black, appeared frozen; Jerry called ‘Hey?’ and Sally didn’t answer; the desert around them, and they with it, evaporated, vanished, never had been” (MM, 275–76). This seemingly realistic ending dissolves, and his new life with Sally is revealed as a mirage of the plains. Thus Updike distorts genre distinctions by supplanting the romantic ending with a realistic one, only to have that realistic ending evaporate. Although realism seems to prevail in the second ending as well, romance soon surfaces and the tension between the romance and realism ends in dissolution. As this fantasy evaporates, we are suddenly disembarking from a plane in France with Jerry and Ruth (MM, 276). Readerly expectation makes us believe that Jerry has stayed married to Ruth and his whole life with Sally and children is fantasy. The plane nearly crashes, also suggesting Jerry has been suddenly jarred back into reality. He has a sense of dull loss, reminiscent again of Newland Archer looking up at Ellen Olenska’s window at the end of The Age of Innocence. However, this sense of realism too begins to waver. Jerry is amazed that his wife can speak French. Suddenly he feels he doesn’t know her. Then Marlene Dietrich appears in the terminal, looking young (MM, 277). The anachronistic appearance of a young Marlene Dietrich brings an element of the unreal to this ending as well, suggesting that this too is all in Jerry’s imagination.

Divorce me romance and realism in John Updike’s marry me

117

Traveling because Jerry’s lawyer suggested they go away awhile, he and Ruth have chosen the South of France as a place to re-ignite both their marriage and their painting careers (MM, 277).53 From their taxi, they look out at the “ancient agriculture” of France (MM, 278). Ruth inquires “isn’t this where all the kings in exile come?” (MM, 280). Ruth invokes the manners and customs of France’s courtly tradition, a tradition in which, according to Jerry, adultery is an institution and which thus allows room in their marriage for Ruth to take Jerry back and forgive, or at least look the other way. However, the efficacy of this European cure is immediately undermined. Their hotel is on the quai des Étas-Unis. Like Wharton’s Undine Spragg, they cannot leave America entirely behind them. In addition to not letting us forget Ruth’s and Jerry’s Americanness, Updike suggests their marriage is as much a fantasy as Jerry’s affair with Sally ever was. Updike uses images that echo Jerry’s statement to Sally that his love for her was like climbing a golden stairway in the clouds. In order to get to their hotel, Jerry and Ruth “climbed, endlessly, toward a wedding-cake façade, cool stairs of grayish-green marble” (MM, 280). Thus this ending in the East restores Jerry to his marriage the way a realistic novel might, but it also reveals that this reality is an illusion. This ending evaporates as well. The last ending, at least the last ending in the chronology of the book, finds Jerry disembarking in St. Croix (MM, 280). Alone and seemingly self-sufficient, Jerry flounders even more without Ruth or Sally to guide his direction east or west. His taxi driver asks which town Jerry wants to go to, but Jerry cannot decide. “Your decishun, man,” the driver rolls his eyes. Jerry says, “So I can’t go to both?” (MM, 281). Jerry is still trying to go both east and west, to have both Ruth and Sally, the novel and the romance. Jerry leaves it to his taxi driver to decide. As he and his taxi driver rumble through the land, Jerry notices, “There were houses, but no people” (MM, 283). Thus St. Croix seems truly a virgin island, untouched, uninhabited, a reflection of Jerry’s own isolation and self-absorption. Jerry has become a house without people, the isolated, romantic American hero. When the taxi driver begins to stop, Jerry asks whether he is east or west and the driver answers “West, mon. The end of the island. Did you want to go east?” (MM, 285). Although they are at the end of the island and Jerry has taken his western romanticism to its extreme end—total isolation—there is a sense of circularity in the driver’s response. It is so easy to go east and west on an island. In fact if one keeps going west, he will eventually be going back east. There is a similar sense of circularity to Jerry’s final words. Still in his taxi, Jerry unrolls his window to take in the air, “to mix himself up with the spaced houses, the drab and patient shops” (MM, 286): He inhaled the air. This was the place, it tasted right. He had always told her there was a place, and now he had found it, made good his promise, and brought them here. He was intensely, passingly happy. The existence of this place satisfied him that there was a dimension in which he did go, as was right, at that party, or the next, and stand, timid and exultant, above the downcast eyes of her gracious, sorrowing face, and say to Sally, Marry me. (MM, 286)

Love American style

118

Updike alludes to Hemingway’s Nick Adams in In Our Time, an overtly Adamic romantic American character, who ends alone in the woods, having found just the “right” spot on the river. However, in contrast to Nick Adams, who returns to his camp realizing that such solitude is only a respite, Jerry seems to remain on the island. The reality of his situation is that he is now living in pure fantasy, having long conversations with Sally, and even proposing marriage to her, even though she is not there. Jerry’s selfishness is related to his romanticism because romanticism privileges the self over others. Dee Birch Cameron has argued that “[e]nding a novel in this way raises the possibility that monocular vision, with its prospect of a life in which choices are made and bodies are necessarily either one place or another, may be illusory. Perhaps no one can know where he is or whom he is with.”54 However, her reading over-generalizes Jerry’s “monocular vision.” Rather his “monocular vision” and the consequent illusions seem to be the result of his romantic solipsism. Newman concurs, arguing that this solipsism reflects the extreme end of a country of romantics and that is why there are three endings. He has his choice of endings and directions, but seems mostly stuck on the island of self-absorption.55 While Jerry seems to suffer from his selfishness more than most of the other characters, he is not really unique or alone in his suffering, however isolated he may be. Sally perceives this general selfishness during “The Wait.” Watching the frustrated ticket girl, Suddenly Sally felt only sympathy for this girl: while she and Jerry had been making love, children had been compelled to assume the management of the world. And now the grown-ups, returning from their selfish beds, were angry to find that the world had fallen apart. How greedy we all are, how pushing! Ashamed, Sally closed her eyes and wished she were herself a child. A child before her father failed to return. All trips, she saw, have that possibility, of no return. (MM, 47) Sally’s observation brings together many of the ideas running through Marry Me. The inheritance of romanticism has resulted in selfishness and a childish and parentless nation. Finally, Sally links this greediness, as she calls it, directly to divorce, suggesting not necessarily that divorce is the cause of all this American solipsism but that it is emblematic of it. Thus Sally foresees Jerry’s end, his eventual suspension in travel, constantly moving east and west, west and east, but never really getting anywhere or returning. Jerry’s suspension enacts the juxtaposition of realism and romance. His hesitancy and inability to choose not only disrupts the families involved but disrupts the plot structure and confuses genre, so much so that there are three endings presented as possibilities: a romantic ending in which Jerry moves west with Sally, a conservative, realistic ending in which Jerry rejoins his wife and children for a restorative trip to France, and an ending in which the hero ends up alone on one of the Virgin islands, untouchable, isolated by his own desires, not caring in which direction he must go. Critical reactions to the variety of endings to Updike’s “romance” were diverse, displaying the critical split between the preference for realism and that for romance. Some critics, such as Alfred Kazin, thought Marry Me his best, most innovative work.56

Divorce me romance and realism in John Updike’s marry me

119

Others, such as George Searles, thought it his worst; Searles even recommends that Updike stick to writing novels of manners.57 However, the coexistence of these endings is essential to the form of this book as a romance. Leckie writes, “in Marry Me the tension between [Jerry’s] romantic version of adultery and Richard’s more pragmatic ‘philosophy of affairs’ is animated in the novel’s desperate translation of its organizing dilemma— Jerry’s indecision—into an aesthetics of doubt which shifts the open-ended sense of possibility desired by Jerry to the level of the novel’s form.”58 With the three endings, Updike creates a form that illustrates Jerry’s suspension and indecision. He creates an ending that is constantly in motion and in direct contrast to an ending suggesting the fixity of either marriage, divorce, or remarriage, or for that matter, genre, leaving the protagonist and the reader hanging in indeterminacy characteristic of postmodern literature as described by Hassan, which “strives for silence by accepting chance and improvisation; its principle becomes indeterminancy. By refusing order, order imposed or discovered, this kind of literature refuses purpose. Its forms are therefore nontelic; its world is the eternal present.”59 On one level, though he fuses romance and realism in Marry Me, Up-dike seems very critical of romance by leaving Jerry suspended there. However, even as Updike portrays Jerry in a critical light, it is clear that we are meant to feel some sympathy for him. Hence, he is the dominant protagonist. Thus, perhaps rather than only criticizing romanticism, Updike is demonstrating the incongruity between romanticism and realism that characterizes America. And Updike also seems to be suggesting that divorce in America embodies these conflicting modes, and that divorce gives the novelist both an American subject and an American form.

CONCLUSION Can the Circle Be Broken? Divorce and the Future of the American Novel

Suspended somewhere between the East, which evokes manners, adultery, realism, and a European tradition, and the West, which evokes self-reliance, divorce, romance, and an American tradition, Updike’s Jerry Conant is perhaps the representative American divorcé. The three endings of Updike’s Marry Me most concisely and dramatically illustrate my argument that divorce encapsulates the tension between romance and realism that shapes American literary history. Yet, the similarities among these novels— Howells’s A Modern Instance, Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, McCarthy’s A Charmed Life, and Updike’s Marry Me: A Romance—provide the basis for an American tradition of the divorce novel. These novels share repeated symbols and patterns that suggest a formalistic vocabulary for talking about an “American” novel of divorce. First, domestic space is a symbol of marriage and a central metaphor in the debate about realism and romance. In the romance tradition, the house is often a place of suffocation, a concentrated symbol of the bonds of civilization. In contrast, in the novel of manners, the house, the prize of marriage, is often the central location of the drama, reflective of the values of the civilization. In the divorce novel, the house is both a place that smothers romanticism and a place that cradles societal values. Second, divorce disrupts domestic space, and consequently, the boundaries between public and private. In addition to exposing private relations to public scrutiny in both court and the press, divorce exiles at least one spouse from the house of marriage, forcing that spouse to lead a deracinated, mobile existence. Third, through this mobility, many authors juxtapose the East (variously meaning both the east coast and Europe) and the West, linking the East with marriage, adultery, civilization, social duty, and the past, while linking the American West with divorce, the pioneer, romantic autonomy, mobility, and the future. Lastly, many of these novels have endings that critics consider flawed, suggesting a fusion or confusion of literary genres that conflicts with readerly expectation. I argue this confusion results from the incongruity of romance, as Richard Chase has argued, with realism that characterizes American literary history. While I have hoped to draw a broad sketch and outline a pattern and history of American divorce novels, the focus of the novels I have selected has dealt primarily with upper middle-class, white Anglo-Americans in order to keep this project within the feasible bounds. One might argue that the depiction of divorce itself is thus perhaps one

Conclusion

122

means of constructing this very identity. Divorce is often associated with the middle class, at least in literature. Yet the effects of ethnicity and class on divorce merit further study. The issues of sexuality underlying marriage and divorce and implications of deconstructing traditional heterosexual marriage latent in divorce also could be explored. In addition, the religious implications of divorce in American history, and the secularization of society that the legalization of divorce implies call for further study. There is yet one other thread in the divorce novel that is suggestive and calls for more attention. Beginning with McCarthy’s A Charmed Life and evident also in some of Updike’s divorce novels, such as Of the Farm (1965) and Toward the End of Time (1997), the threat, and in some cases the realization, of nuclear holocaust permeates some American divorce novels, suggesting the fragility of marriage, nation, and life in the nuclear era. Perhaps most telling is Carolyn See’s Golden Days (1996). Set in California and told from the point of view of a woman who has turned her trials as a divorcee into a profitable career—she advises women to invest in property and jewelry, hard materials rather than husbands—this novel ends in nuclear apocalypse. While all property is effectively destroyed or revealed as worthless—the jewels she carries as insurance actually meld into the narrator’s own flesh—the mood is actually hopeful, almost Utopian. Rather than an isolated antihero driving in circles in a taxi, there is a sense of community among the survivors. Conflicting ideologies of property, nation, ethnicity, marriage, divorce, and even gender have all been dissolved, giving these survivors the chance to divorce themselves from those ideologies, and, true to American idealism, to start again.

Notes

NOTES TO THE PREFACE 1

Barbara Defoe Whitehead, The Divorce Culture (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1997), p.3. 2 Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law: American Failures, European Challenges (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 105. Glendon explains, “the United States appears unique among Western countries in its relative carelessness about assuring either public or private responsibility for the economic casualties of divorce. More than any other country among those examined here, the United States has accepted the idea of nofault, no-responsibility divorce” (p. 64). The other countries Glendon studies are England, France, West Germany, and Sweden. 3 Barnett’s chart includes these categories: 1) emphasis of the novel, 2) divorce causation theory, 3) results attributed to divorce. A sample entry for T.S. Arthur’s The Hand but Not the Heart reads: 1) Emphasis, “Inadvisability of marrying without real love. Moral duty of upright divorced person not to remarry while former spouse is alive;” 2) Causation, “Hasty marriage, pressure of relative on girl to marry man with social position. Jealousy of husband;” 3) Results, “Woman is ennobled by suffering; man remarries and dies.” Divorce and the American Divorce Novel, 1858–1937: A Study in Literary Reflections of Social Influences (Philadelphia: Dissertation University of Pennsylvania, 1939), p. 96. 4 This partial listing of critics suggests the popularity of studying the role of marriage in the novel: Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgressions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Allen E Stein, After the Vows Were Spoken: Marriage in American Literary Realism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984); Evelyn J.Hinz, “Hierogamy versus Wedlock: Types of Plots and Their Relationship to Genres of Prose Fiction,” PMLA 91 (1976): 900–13; Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Judith Armstrong, The Novel of Adultery (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); and Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 5 Debra Ann MacComb, Tales of Liberation, Strategies of Containment: Divorce and the Representation of Womanhood in American Fiction: 1880–1920 (New York: Garland, 2000), p. 10. 6 Ibid, p.230. 7 Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). Leslie Fiedler. Love and Death in the American Novel (1960: reprint, New York: Anchor, 1992). 8 Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Joyce W.Warren, The (Other) American

Notes

124

Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993). 9 William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (1891 reprint: New York: New York University Press, 1959), p. 15. 10 Ibid, p. 15.

CHAPTER ONE NOTES 1

Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 5. 2 See Ann DuCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Sybille Kamme-Erkel, Happily Ever After? Marriage and Its Rejection in Afro-American Novels (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989). 3 Riley, Divorce, p. 11. Also see Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 4. 4 Riley, Divorce, p. 3. Riley notes the separatists were the first in the colonies to permit divorce in 1620 (p. 11). 5 Riley, Divorce, p. 10. Riley explains that Puritan officials in Massachusetts codified divorce procedures in 1660. Court records indicate that “female adultery, male cruelty, bigamy, desertion, failure to provide, and impotence” were all grounds for divorce. It is interesting to note how the grounds for divorce reflect and reinforce norms of gender behavior. Courts found women at fault in adulterous affairs primarily, as well as for bigamy and desertion, suggesting the courts judged women according to the ideals of female chastity and domesticity. Males, in contrast, were less likely to be found at fault for committing adultery, but were considered responsible by the court for supporting the family. Courts also found men at fault for the inability to produce children and for abusing their strength, suggesting that the courts held men to standards of virility (pp. 12–13). 6 Ibid, p. 11. 7 William O’Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 8 Riley, Divorce, p. 11, 25. 9 Ibid, p. 9. 10 Basch, Framing American Divorce, p. 24. 11 Riley, Divorce, p. 30. 12 Ibid, p. 30. 13 Ibid, p. 6. 14 Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence. 15 Riley writes, “Sometime in 1771 or 1772, Jefferson prepared notes for the divorce case of Dr. James Blair of Williamsburg, who wished to divorce his wife after nineteen months of turbulent marriage. In his notes, Jefferson tied revolutionary ideals to divorce in order to persuade the Virginia legislature to grant the colony’s first absolute divorce. Although Jefferson never submitted the case to the Virginia General Assembly due to Blair’s death, his plea employed the same principles that he, and many other Americans, would soon use for revolution.” She describes Jefferson’s notes: “His opening salvo concerned rationales for divorce. He maintained that it was cruel ‘to chain a man to misery till death.’ He then wrote that ‘liberty of divorce prevents and cures domestic quarrels,’ and ‘preserves liberty of affection.’” He viewed covenants unenforceable when they opposed the will of involved parties and “unproductive contracts were ‘dissoluble.’” Although he represented the husband, he thought divorce would be a boon to women; it would restore “their natural right

Notes

125

of equality” and he believed it was “cruel to confine Divorce or Repudiation to [a] husband who has so many ways of rendering his domestic affairs agreeable, by Command or desertion, whereas [a] wife [is] confined & subject” (p. 31). 16 Basch, Framing American Divorce, pp. 24–25. 17 Riley, Divorce, p. 34. 18 Adultery, desertion, and cruelty were the most common grounds for divorce, with cruelty, broadened to include the verbal as well as the physical, becoming an ever more common ground during the nineteenth century. Some states, such as Connecticut, had broader omnibus divorce laws, though many of these were repealed after the Civil War, except in the West, where divorce laws have always been more liberal. 19 Ibid,p.24. 20 Riley, Divorce, p. 47. 21 Divorce in absentia meant one spouse could divorce another without that other knowing because “notification of divorce proceedings could be ‘served through publication’ rather than being personally delivered to defendants. Specifically, notice of a divorce action could be published for three weeks in a ‘weekly newspaper of general circulation’ in the venue where the action was filed.” The absent defendant thus had no rights in the suit. Riley, Divorce, pp. 63–64. 22 Mary Ann Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law: American Failures, European Challenges (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 67. 23 Curiously, as Herbie DiFonzo argues, “no-fault” divorces were actually an attempt by conservative legislators, trying to curb rising divorce rates and the animosity created in many fault-based divorce suits. The initial idea was that couples would not have to blame one another and that the court would require counseling prior to allowing couples to attain a divorce; however, for various logistical reasons, the therapeutic feature of the plan was lost, and no-fault divorce alone was the legislation that passed. Herbie DiFonzo, Beneath the Fault Line: The Popular and Legal Culture of Divorce in Twentieth-Century America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), p. 137. 24 Riley, Divorce, p. 85. 25 Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) p.22. 26 Riley, Divorce, p. 90. 27 Riley, Divorce, p. 47. The most common ground for divorce was desertion and women obtained more divorces than did men; however, because laws often designated the husband’s domicile as the “home,” a woman who remained in the original home could still be considered a deserter, since she had not followed her husband. Riley, p. 87. 28 Rifkin, Jeremey. “An Afternoon with Jeremy Rifkin.” http://www.newciv.org/ worldtrans/whole/rifkin.html, p. 1. 29 Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law, p. 80. 30 Riley, Divorce, p. 28. Although many perceive the boom in the divorce rate as a recent development, it has been rising, with periods of decline and leveling off since the mid 1600s: “Although the divorce rate had been rising since the mid-1600s, it reached an unexpected high during the 1880s: one out of fourteen to sixteen marriages ended in divorce” and then the divorce rate hit its zenith in the 1980s, when approximately one in every two marriages ended in divorce (p. 5). According to the U.S. Bureau of Statistics, in 1980 the divorce rate was 10.6 per 1000 people. By 1990 only 4.7 per 1000 people, and the most recent data for 1998 is only 4.2 per 1000 people. 31 James Barnett, Divorce and the American Divorce Novel, 1858–1937: A Study in Literary Reflections of Social Influences (Philadelphia: Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1939), p. 21. 32 Riley, Divorce, p. 78.

Notes 33

126

The marriage and divorce metaphor for the regional differences highlighted in the Civil War continues to have a powerful appeal for some. One contemporary Southerner, who still argues for the secession of former Confederate states, casts the South as “Ms. Liberty” and the North as “Mr. Liberal,” writes, “I want a divorce. And I aim to get one.” Liz Michael, “Divorce, American Style,” http://www.lizmichael.com/. 26 November 2000. 34 Basch, Framing American Divorce, p. 16. 35 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1986) and J.Herbie DiFonzo, Beneath the Fault Line: The Popular and Legal Culture of Divorce in Twentieth-Century America. 36 Barnett, Divorce and the American Novel, p. 22. 37 Riley, Divorce, p. 107. 38 Basch, Framing American Divorce, p. 62. 39 Ibid, p. 117. 40 O’Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era, p. 25. 41 Cited in O’Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era, p. 210. 42 Barbara Defoe Whitehead, The Divorce Culture (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1997), p. 51f. 43 Whitehead, The Divorce Culture, p. 61. 44 Riley, Divorce, p. 166. 45 Basch, Framing American Divorce, p. 119. 46 May, Great Expectations, p. 2. 47 Ana A.Rogers, Why American Marriages Fail and Other Papers (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), p.7. 48 Whitehead, The Divorce Culture, p. 80. 49 Glenna Matthews, “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 7. 50 Ibid, p. 21. 51 This ideal is more popular in the North; in the South, the ideal of the southern gentlelady was more reminiscent of aristocracy than republicanism. 52 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 52. 53 In Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), Lora Romero calls for a reassessment of the critical involvement in constructing separate spheres and Cathy N. Davidson’s special issue of American Literature: No More Separate Spheres! 70.3 (September 1998) takes up Romero’s call by exploring issues of class and ethnicity, as well as critics’ own investment, especially that of feminists, in the idea of separate spheres. 54 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 55 Kimmel, Manhood in America, p. 24. 56 Ibid, p. 26. 57 Kimmel illustrates how standards of masculinity varied between the South and the North. 58 Ibid, p. 44. 59 Ibid, p. 159. 60 Ibid, p. 205. 61 Allen J.Brinkley notes, “In 1790, one person in thirty lived in a city…; in 1820, one in twenty; and in 1840, one in twelve.” By 1860 twenty percent of the nation’s population lived in cities. By 1900 the majority, meaning sixty percent were still in rural areas, but that also means that now 40% were in cities. By 1920, urban residents, at fifty-one and two tenths percent, outnumbered rural residents and by 1970 only one in every twenty people were farm dwellers. Allen J.Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People Vol. 1: to 1877 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), p. 217. 62 May, Great Expectations, p. 3.

Notes 63

127

O’Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era, p. viii. Riley, Divorce, p. 16. 65 Basch, Framing American Divorce, p. 119. 66 May, Great Expectations, p. 102. 67 Debra Ann MacComb, Tales of Liberation, Strategies of Containment: Divorce and the Representation of Womanhood in American Fiction, 1880–1920 (New York: Garland, 2000), p. 143. 68 Riley, Divorce, p. 5. 69 Russell J.Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature, (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 39. 70 Christopher Lasch, “The Culture of Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.” Toward a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Bartram Bernstein (New York: Pantheon, 1968), p. 323. 71 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, (1957; reprint, Berkeley: University of Califonia Press, 1967), p. 12. 72 Ibid, p. 135. 73 Ibid, p. 135. 74 Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgressions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 15. The central subject, Tanner writes, is “not marriage as a paradigm of the resolution of problems of bringing unity out of difference, harmony out of opposition, identity out of separation, concord out of discord…but marriage in all its social and domestic ramifications in a demythologized society. Or rather a society in which marriage is the mythology (at least the socially avowed one; it would be possible to say that money and profits made up a more secret mythology). Marriage, to put it at its simplest for the moment, is a means by which society attempts to bring into harmonious alignment patterns of passion and patterns of property; in bourgeois society it is not only a matter of putting your Gods where your treasure is …but also of putting your libido, loyalty, and all other possessions and products, including children, there as well…. It is the structure that maintains the Structure, or System” (p. 15). 75 Many critics, including Denis de Rougemont, have traced the mythic and religious elements of courtly love. Most simply, the code is that the beloved is unattainable because of the boundary of marriage and thus represents the ineffable. Further, because the beloved is unattainable, devotion to the beloved was characterized as a faithful suffering and thus paralleled the suffering of the faithful to God. See de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (1940; reprint, New York: Pantheon, 1956); Roger Boase’s The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love: A Critical Study of European Tradition (1977); and C.S.Lewis’s The Allegory of Love (1936). 76 Cited in Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, p. 88. 77 Ibid, p. 86. 78 Ibid, pp. 17–18. Tanner argues that “divorce is, of course, the main way in which society came to cope with adultery, but it is notable that, although the topic arises, in none of the novels I wish to consider does divorce occur, nor is it felt to offer any radical solutions to the problems that have arisen” (p. 17). However, Tanner focuses mainly on British and European novels. 79 Evelyn J.Hinz, “Hierogamy versus Wedlock: Types of Plots and Their Relationship to Genres of Prose Fiction.” PMLA 91 (1976): p. 90. 80 Ibid, p. 903. 81 Ibid, p. 904. 82 Ibid, p. 904. 83 Ibid, p. 905. 84 Ibid, p. 912. 85 Ibid, p. 912. 64

Notes 86

128

Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 9–10. 87 Ibid, p. 18. 88 Ibid, p. 20. 89 Although Boone argues that he does not distinguish between British and American novels, considering them all one tradition, his examples are suggestive in that he invokes, perhaps unconsciously, the hierarchy many critics, such as Richard Chase and Samuel Coale, argue distinguishes American literature from British literature. In British and European traditions, the bourgeois novel of manners is worthy of the highest critical praise and formal achievement, while in America, it is predominantly the romance (pp. 32f). 90 Ibid, p. 126. 91 Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960; reprint, New York: Anchor, 1992), p. 24. 92 Ibid, p. 75. 93 Ibid,p.77. 94 However, as Fiedler has written, adultery is not an American tradition; American treatments of this subject fail. The Scarlet Letter is both an exception and a case in point. Fiedler writes, “It is notorious that The Scarlet Letter is a seduction story without a seduction, a parable of the Fall with the Fall off stage and before the action proper begins…. Hawthorne is the only American novelist of classic stature who deals centrally in his most important works with the seduction theme; yet there is no seduction scene…in any of his works!” (pp. 224–55). Hawthorne evades depicting passion or sexuality, which “defends him against sentimentality” but also “prevents him from rendering sensuality” (p. 229). Thus, The Scarlet Letter illustrates Fiedler’s central argument: “Unable to break through the limitations of his era or to repress the shame he felt at trifling with them, Hawthorne ended by writing in the form of a love story an elegiac treatise on the death of love. The Scarlet Letter is, in one of its major aspects, a portrayal of attenuation of sex in America, the shrinking on our shores from Brobdingnagian parents to Lilliputian children” (p. 506). 95 Ibid, p. 75. 96 Ibid, p. 76. 97 Richard Chase, American Novel and Its Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), p. viii. 98 See Emily Miller Budick, Nineteenth-Century American Romance: Genre and the Construction of Democratic Culture (New York: Twayne, 1996). 99 Chase, The American Novel, p. 53. 100 Ibid, p. 55. 101 Samuel C.Coale, “Marriage in Contemporary American Literature: The Mismatched Marriages of Manichean Minds,” Thought 58.228 (1983): p.112. 102 Ibid, p.112 103 Basch, Framing American Divorce, p. 143. 104 Ibid, p. 144. Most of the people in these stories were of what Basch refers to as the “urban gentry.” 105 Ibid, p. 151. 106 This is not to suggest that divorce pamphlets were honest and beneficent for either their subjects or their audience at large. Basch notes their sympathy with the victims often amounted to exploitation (p. 167). 107 Ibid, p. 177. 108 Arthur, a writer for Godey’s Ladies Magazine and others, was also a well-known temperance writer, with such titles as Ten Nights in a Barroom. 109 Basch, Framing American Divorce, p. 144. 110 Ibid, p. 180. 111 DiFonzo, Beneath the Fault Line, p. 9.

Notes 112

129

William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance (1881; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 362.

CHAPTER TWO NOTES 1

William Dean Howells, “Letter, W.D.Howells to James R.Osgood, 18 February 1881,” A Modern Instance, ed. George Bennett (1881; reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. xxix. 2 Howells, Criticism and Fiction (1891; reprint, New York: New York University Press, 1959), p. 15. 3 Howells, “Letter,” p. xxix. 4 Olov Fryckstedt, In Quest of America: A Study of Howells’s Early Development as a Novelist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958). 5 Howells is responding to Arnold’s essay “Civilization in the United States,” originally published in the journal The Nineteenth Century. Arnold claims that for all its equality and material wealth, which makes for a lack of distinction among classes, the United States also lacks the distinction and beauty that make a society civilized and “interesting” (Arnold’s emphasis). Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States (Boston: De Wolfe, Fiske, and Co., 1888), pp. 160, 172. 6 Howells, Criticism and Fiction, p. 67. 7 For elaboration on Howells’s theories of American literature see William Alexander, William Dean Howells: The Realist as Humanist (New York: Burt Franklin Press, 1981); Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); George Bennett, William Dean Howells: The Realism of William Dean Howells (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1973.); Edwin Cady, The Realist at War. The Mature Years of William Dean Howells, 1885–1920 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1958); Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Hamden, CT: Archon Press, 1966); and Fryckstedt, In Quest of America: A Study of Howells’s Early Development as a Novelist. 8 James Barnett lists only two novels of divorce published prior to A Modern Instance: T.S.Aruthur’s The Hand but Not the Heart (New York: Derby and Jackson Publishers, 1858) and Out in the World (New York: Carelton Press, 1865). Both are highly sentimental novels, warning against the dangers of marriage without love. James Barnett, Divorce and the American Divorce Novel, 1858–1937: A Study in Literary Reflections of Social Influences (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939). Debra Ann MacComb writes that perhaps the first American literary treatment of divorce is Emma Embury’s “The Mistaken Choice; or Three Years of Married Life” (1841). MacComb, Tales of Liberation, Strategies of Containment: Divorce and the Representation of Womanhood in American Fiction, 1880– 1920 (New York: Garland, 2000), p. 21. 9 In addition to Bell, see Daniel H.Borus, Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Rodney Olsen, Dancing in Chains: The Youth of William Dean Howells (New York: New York University Press, 1991); Eric Sundquist, American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); and Howells’s own “The Man of Letters as Man of Business,” also collected in Criticism and Fiction, pp. 298–309. 10 Borus, Writing Realism, pp. 102–106. 11 Ibid, p. 106. 12 Ibid, p. 106. 13 Ibid, p. 108, 110–12.

Notes 14

130

Howells, Criticism and Fiction, p. 47. Ibid, p. 46. 16 See Bell, The Development of American Romance, Borus, Writing Realism, and Elise Miller, “The Feminization of American Realist Theory,” American Literary Realism, 23.1 (1990), 20–41. 17 Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 125. 18 Kaplan, Social Construction of American Realism, p. 26. 19 William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance (1881; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Press, 1957), p. 6. All further references will be abbreviated MI and appear in parentheses. 20 Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition, p. 125 21 For a historical account of the effects of popular literature and culture on the rising divorce rate, see Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 22 Howells, Criticism and Fiction, p. 15. 23 Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation, p. 22. 24 Howells’s emphasis, MI, p. 40. 25 Alfred Habegger, Gender, fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 204. 26 Ibid, p. 97. 27 Ibid, p. 91. 28 Many critics have noted the mirroring of Ben Halleck and Bartley Hubbard. Not only do they share the same initials, they went to the same school, and both failed law school. For elaboration see Cady, The Realist at War and Kaplan, The Construction of American Realism, as well as John C.Pryor, A Violation of the Sanctities: The Interrogation of the Popular Press in the Novels of Howells, James, Wharton, and Dreiser (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1994) and Kermit Vanderbilt, The Achievement of William Dean Howells: A Reinterpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). 29 Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, p. 38. 30 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion, (1940; reprint, New York: Pantheon Press, 1956), p. 1–2. 31 Joel Porte, “Manners, Morals, and Mince Pie: Howells’ America Revisited,” Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies 10 (1985). 32 Some of the Emersonian ideals Porte discusses are those of a classless democracy and a selfreliance that partakes in and reinforces community. Porte reads Bartley’s indigestion as solitary eating, not the communal ideal (p. 455). 33 Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature, p. 92. 34 Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, pg. 27. 35 Howells too began his life as a journalist, and as an editor of The Atlantic, he was painfully aware of the changes occurring due to the mass circulation of the press, both good changes, in that the press reached a wider, more democratic audience, and bad changes, in the homogenizing of that audience due to advertising. As Cady and Kaplan have argued, in many ways the creation and destruction of Bartley Hubbard can be seen as an exorcism of these tensions for Howells. 36 Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, p. 37. 37 Bob Thompson, “Is This Any Way to Run a Divorce?” The Washington Post Magazine (November 24, 2002): p. 16. 38 Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender” Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 336. 39 This can be seen in other cultures as well. Wigley demonstrates with examples from Renaissance and Greek architectural theory, from Xenophon to Alberti, and argues that the 15

Notes

131

domestication and subordination of the female links many of these cultures: “The building itself is subjected to the economic regime it enforces. Just as the house is a mechanism for the domestication of women, it is itself understood as a domesticated woman. Just as the woman whose excessive sexuality is transformed into economic work can become a surrogate figure of control for the man, the house is itself feminine, and can only become a surveillance mechanism when its excesses have been controlled by the architect” (p. 353). 40 Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgressions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 60. 41 Glenna Matthews, “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 7. 42 Gwendolyn Wright, Building the American Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1983), p. xv. 43 Ibid, p. 15. 44 Ibid, p. 42. 45 Sanguansri Khantavichian, “The Significance of the Imagery of Home in the Work of W.D.Howells” (Ph.D. diss., Tulane, 1985). 46 Allen F.Stein, After the Vows Were Spoken: Marriage in American Literary Realism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), p. 33. 47 Ellen F.Wright, “Given Bartley, Given Marcia: A Reconsideration of Howells’s A Modern Instance” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23.2 (1981): 214–231. 48 There is a comparable search for housing in A Hazard of New Fortunes. Yet Basil and Isabel March are happily married and own a house in Boston. Their search proves difficult because no rented space in New York can compare. 49 Khantiavachian, “The Significance of the Imagery of Home,” p. 66. 50 Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, p. 12. 51 See James H.Barnett, Divorce and the American Divorce Novel, 1858–1937: A Study in Literary Reflections of Social Influences (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1939); Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and William L.O’Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 52 Samuel D.Warren and Lewis D.Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” The Harvard Law Review, Vol. IV No. 5 (Dec. 15, 1890), p. 195. 53 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; reprint, New York: Penguin Press, 1994), p. 179. 54 It is for this series that Bartley Hubbard interviews Silas Lapham at the beginning of The Rise of Silas Lapham. 55 J.Herbie DiFonzo, Beneath the fault Line: The Popular and Legal Culture of Divorce in Twentieth-Century America (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997), p. 9. 56 Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, p. 37. 57 For a history of divorce law and the West, see Barnett. Also refer to Debra Ann MacComb, Tales of Liberation, Strategies of Containment: Divorce and the Representation of Womanhood in American Fiction, 1880–1910 (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000); William L.O’Neill Divorce in the Progressive Era; and Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition. 58 Howells’s ambivalent attraction to the West stems from the West of his childhood in Ohio, which had changed irrevocably when he returned to it as an adult. Many critics have discussed the pull of the West in the work of Howells. See Cady Realist at War, Fryckstedt, In Quest of America, and Vanderbilt, The Achievement of William Dean Howells. 59 Fryckstedt, In Quest of America, p. 125. 60 There are numerous other instances in which characters discuss unsuccessful marriages and the breaking up of marriages, but they do not yet use the word “divorce.”

Notes

132

61

George C.Carrington, Jr., The Immense Complex Drama: The World and Art of the Howells Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), p. 163. 62 This is a curious observation on Howells’s part. In postbellum America, divorce laws were growing more and more conservative, especially in New England and with the exception of the West. In contrast, the number of divorces was increasing rapidly. The law seemed to try to curb this number by making it harder and harder to get a divorce but to no avail. See Barnett, Divorce in the American Novel; O’Neill, Divorce and the Progressive Era; and Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition. 63 Boone, p. 127. I disagree with Boone’s assessment of the ending as mistakenly labeled open. Boone argues that both Atherton’s and Clara’s “perspectives uphold the status-quo: Atherton opts for the morally edifying tragedy of self-sacrifice; Clara, for the morally redemptive comedy of a ‘happy ending.’ Whatever Atherton finally chooses to advise Halleck, the pattern of Howells’ novel remains closed, the disturbances of the ‘modern instance’ of unhappy marriage safely brought to rest within the tragic framework of its structure.” Boone’s argument assumes that Howells is suggesting that there are only Clara’s and Atherton’s perspectives, but they have both been undercut or at least qualified. Neither perspective is presented as the moral, leaving open the possibility of other perspectives. 64 Warren Hedges, “Howells’s ‘Wretched Fetishes’: Character, Realism, and Other Modern Instances,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38.1 (1996), p. 46. 65 George Bennett, William Dean Howells: The Realism of William Dean Howells (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1973), p. 113.

CHAPTER THREE NOTES 1

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1933; reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 146– 147. 2 Ibid, pp. 147–148. 3 Wharton, “The Great American Novel” The Yale Review. (July, 1927): p. 647. 4 Ibid, p. 654. 5 Richard Chase popularized the “romance thesis” of American literature in which he claims American literature has divided into two streams: the romance, which focuses on the individual and metaphysical questions, and the novel, which focuses on the realistic portrayal of the manners of a culture. Chase argues that it is the romance that has come to define the best of American writing. Richard Chase, American Novel and Its Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). 6 William L.O’Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 62. 7 Elisabeth Griffith, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Marriage and Divorce: Feminist Theory and Domestic Experience,” Woman’s Being, Woman’s Place: Female Identity and Vocation in American History ed. Mary Kelley (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979), p. 242. 8 Many of Wharton’s biographers attest to the problems Teddy caused for Wharton as her husband. For details, see Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time (New York: Viking, 1971); Shari Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (New York: Scribner’s, 1994); R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 9 Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words, p. 43. 10 Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton, p. 97. 11 Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 2: Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 133.

Notes

133

Susan Goodman notes that Wharton often referred to herself as a “self-made man.” Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990), p.2. 12 Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 66. 13 Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 125. 14 Ibid, p. 126. 15 Ibid, p. 126–128. 16 Jeanne Boydston, “‘Grave Endearing Traditions’: Edith Wharton and the Domestic Novel.” Faith of a (Woman) Writer Eds. Alice Kessle-Harris and William McBrien, (New York: Hofstra University Press, 1988), p. 31. 17 Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underground: Fictions of Women and Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 8. 18 Hildegard Hoeller, Edith Wharton’s Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental fiction (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000), p. x. 19 Ibid, pp. xvii–xviii. 20 Samuel Coale, “Marriage in Contemporary American Literature: The Mismatched Marriages of Manichean Minds.” Thought 58.228 (1983). A very useful recent summary on the history of the romance theory debate is Emily Miller Budick’s Nineteenth-Century American Romance: Genre and the Construction of Democratic Culture (New York: Twayne, 1996). 21 Gary H.Lindberg, Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), p. 174. Recently, Carol Singley defends Wharton against attacks that she ignored metaphysics in her writing, examining Wharton’s concern with philosophical issues. Yet in doing so, Singley still holds the polarization of manners and metaphysics in place. Carol J.Singley, Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995). 22 Wharton later writes that this distinction is indeed not very useful at all (A Backward Glance, p. 200). 23 Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (1924; reprint, New York: Touchstone, 1997) pp. 52, 91. 24 Ibid, 47. 25 Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 293. 26 Nancy Bently, “Wharton and the Science of Manners.” The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, ed. Millicent Bell, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 47–67. 27 Wharton’s relationship with the United States is a complex one. Although she chose it for her main subject, like James, she chose not to live in the US, establishing a distance from her subject, and often defining America by what it is not, Europe. 28 Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters, p. 154. 29 R.W.B.Lewis, The American Adam, Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 14 30 In The Art of the Novel, ed. Richard P.Blackmur (1934; reprint, New York: Scribner’s, 1978), James discusses what he calls the international conflict of manners, a conflict he most often demonstrates by portraying the “bewildered American” among Europeans, in order to demonstrate how American innocence is revealed by the American’s lack of understanding about sophisticated European manners. However, when contemplating a reversal, setting a European into the American social milieu, which he eventually did in The Europeans, James writes that there would be scant results “promised by confronting the fruits of a constituted order with the fruits of no order at all. We may strike lights by opposing order to order, one sort to another sort; for in that case we get the correspondences and equivalents that make differences mean something; we get the interest and the tension of disparity where a certain parity may have been in question. Where it may not have been in question, where the dramatic encounter is but the poor concussion of positives on one side with negatives on the other, we get little beyond a consideration of the differences between fishes and fowls” (p.

Notes

134

132). In other words, America lacks the social order and manners that would make for a dramatic direct comparison with Europe. 31 Echoing James Wharton writes, “America has indeed deliberately dedicated herself to other ideals. What she has chosen—and realized—is a dead level of prosperity and security. Main Street abounds in the unnecessary, but lacks the one thing needful. Inheriting an old social organization which provided for nicely shaded degrees of culture and conduct, modern America has simplified and Taylorized it out of existence, forgetting that in such matters the process is necessarily one of impoverishment…. Great as may be the material advantage of these diffused conveniences, the safe and uniform life resulting from them offers to the artist’s imagination a surface as flat and monotonous as our own prairies.” “The Great American Novel,” p. 650. 32 Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters, p. 129 33 Margaret McDowell, Edith Wharton (Boston: Twayne, 1991). Carol Wershoven, Child Brides and Intruders (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993). 34 McDowell, Edith Wharton, p. 529. 35 Implicit in Wharton’s criticism of Ralph’s idealism is the suggestion that his abstract idealism is also a masculine failure. Ralph Marvell is one of the many “unsatisfactory men,” in Wharton’s body of fiction argues David Holbrook, Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man (New York: St. Martin’s 1991), p. 93. Entrapped in a world of visions, ideals, and aesthetics, Ralph Marvell cannot keep his wife, nor protect his son. 36 Alexandra Collins, “The Noyade of Marriage in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country,” English Studies in Canada. IX.2 (1983): p. 200. 37 Ibid, p. 200. 38 Wharton, The Custom of the Country (1913; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1987), p. 285. All further references will be abbreviated in text as CC. 39 MacComb, Tales of Liberation, p. 153. 40 Gary H.Lindberg reads Undine’s one “driving quality” as desire, and the novel as a narrative of desire. Lindberg, Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), p. 116. 41 Scholars have taken conflicting views on Wharton’s portrayal of Charles Bowen, some questioning his reliability as commentator. See Katherine Joslin, Edith Wharton (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991); Lindberg, Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners; and Geoffrey Walton, Edith Wharton: A Critical Interpretation (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970). 42 Robert Caserio, “Edith Wharton and the Fiction of Public Commentary” Western Humanities Review 40.3 (1986): p. 201. 43 Ibid, 199. 44 Ibid, 200. 45 Judith Fryer, Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Gather (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 111. 46 Ellen Dupree, “Jamming the Machinery: Mimesis in The Custom of the Country.” American Literary Realism. 22.2 (1990): p. 12. 47 Wharton does valorize the French woman in French Ways and Their Meaning, but she it is the new French woman she admires, a woman who, surviving the attack on culture and tradition after World War I, was able to strike a balance between modern independence and reverence for cultural traditions. French Ways and Their Meaning (1919; reprint, Lee, MA: Berkshire House, 1997). 48 Dupree, “Jamming the Machinery,” p. 14. 49 Ibid, p. 14–15. 50 Ibid, p. 5. 51 Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1990), p. 60.

Notes 52

135

James, himself, rarely focuses on divorce, thought it plays a tangential role in many of his novels. Although set in England, What Maisie Knew is a notable exception, and this novel has been viewed by some critics as the start of his “modern” period, or a transition novel into his late period. 53 Nancy Morrow. “Games and Conflict in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.” American Literary Realism 17.1 (1984): p. 33. 54 Lindberg, Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners, p. 57. 55 Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters, p. 167. 56 Joslin, Edith Wharton, p. 81. 57 F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; reprint, New York: Scribner’s, 1992),p. 182. 58 Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, The Decoration of Houses (1897; reprint, New York: Norton, 1997), p.13. 59 Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, p. 77. 60 Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters, p. 9. 61 Ibid, p. 9. 62 Wharton articulates similar standards for interior architecture in The Decoration of Houses. 63 Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” Sexuality and Space ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 348. 64 Wigley describes men’s studies as the first truly private spaces, creating masculine spaces of writing: “The private space is the space of private writing. It makes available the new literary form of the memoir which began as a record and consolidation of the family but increasingly became a celebration of the private individual…. This new form of privacy was produced, and only then could it be in any way ‘occupied,’ when it was inscribed in the public domain” (pp. 348–49). Wharton herself inverts Wigley’s description, using her bedroom as her private writing space—Lewis and Wolff describe Wharton’s habit of writing in bed—and, as Chase has noted, placing that bedroom above her library. Vanessa Chase, “Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses, and Gender in Turn-of-the-Century America,” Architecture and Feminism eds. Deborah Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol Henderson (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), p. 154. 65 Wigley, “Untitled,” p. 336. 66 Ibid, p. 337. 67 See Chase, “Edith Wharton, the Decoration of Houses, and Gender,” and Fryer, Felicitous Space. 68 Susan Koprince, “Edith Wharton’s Hotels,” Massachusetts Studies in English 10.1 (1985): p. 19. 69 Killioran links Undine’s deeply flawed personality with the myth of the West: “Something elemental about the West, its abundance of riches, and its ignorance of culture causes its inhabitants a bestial illness of soul.” Helen Killoran, Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), p. 54. 70 Frederick Turner, The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History (Boston: D.C.Heath, 1949), p. 28–29. 71 Ibid, 28. 72 Joslin,p. 71. 73 MacComb, p. 128. 74 Joseph Allen Boone and Tony Tanner all discuss the novel of adultery as a European, often particularly French, tradition. See Joseph Allen. Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgressions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). Also, in A Modern Instance, Howells also casts adultery as European, though in much less detail than Wharton. For example, when Squire Gaylord hires detectives to find Bartley, they immediately suspect he has run off with another woman, calling it “a case of European travel” (MI, 305).

Notes

136

75

Riley, Divorce, p. 10. Ibid, p. 11. 77 In “Edith Wharton’s Hotels,” Koprince explores Wharton’s dislike of modern American hotels, and how she uses them as symbols for the degeneracy of her characters, with particular emphasis on Kate Clephane in The Mother’s Recompense, another of Wharton’s divorcées. 78 Edmonds explores the importance of spectacle and theatre in The Custom of the Country, particularly as it shapes the formation of Undine’s identity. Mary K.Edmonds, “Customs, Costumes, and Customers in The Custom of the Country,” American Literary Realism 28.3 (1996): pp. 1–18. 79 Fryer, Felicitous Space, p. 11. 80 Chase argues that Wharton uses the creation of private space in her house to invert the traditional gender codes embedded in domestic architecture: “The privacy of penetration: the consecration of Wharton’s boudoir is bound to the woman’s penetration of the library. The inversions and revisions of gendered space, which create what she may have considered a modern as well as European home—that is, one in which the sexes interacted as equals— must be considered in relation to the kind of homes Wharton described in her novels” (pp. 155). In The Social Construction of American Realism, Amy Kaplan also notes how Wharton uses this inversion to explore issues of the marketplace and femininity: “If The Decoration of Houses takes Wharton as a writer out of her mother’s drawing room into the marketplace, it still leaves her precariously balanced with one foot in each realm…. If Decoration posits an ideal synthesis between the domestic interior and the public arena, Wharton’s early fiction about writers explores the breakdown of these two realms as they dissolve into the market” (p. 80). 81 Wharton uses a similar technique in her later divorce novel The Children, and as does James in What Maisie Knew. 82 Auchincloss, Edith Wharton, p. 105. 83 Millicent Bell, “Introduction: A Critical History.” The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 3. 84 Lindberg, Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners, p. 122. 85 Millicent Bell, “Introduction,” p. 3. 86 Wharton, The Writing of Fiction, p. 50. 76

CHAPTER FOUR NOTES 1

See Eleanor Widmer, “Finally a Lady: Mary McCarthy,” The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama ed. Warren French (Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1970). 2 Elisabeth Neibhur, “The Art of Fiction XXVII: Mary McCarthy—An Interview.” Conversations with Mary McCarthy. Ed. Carol Gelderman (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), p. 8. 3 Herbie DiFonzo, Beneath the Fault Line: The Popular and Legal Culture of Divorce in Twentieth-Century America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), p. 16. 4 Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), p. 172. 5 Ibid, p. 147. 6 Samuel Coale, “Marriage in Contemporary American Literature: The Mismatched Marriages of Manichean Minds,” Thought 58.228 (1983): p.112 7 Irvin Stock, Mary McCarthy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968), p. 5. 8 Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1992), p. 585.

Notes 9

137

Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1946), p. 267. Subsequent references are in text and abbreviated OC. 10 Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, p. 3. Also echoing McCarthy, Hassan links this silence and violence in literature to the unreal horrors of WWII: “The violence I associate with the new literature is obviously of a special kind; it presupposes Dachau and Hiroshima but is not necessarily limited by them” (p. 4). 11 Cited in Carol Gelderman “Just the Facts, Ma’am.” Performance of a Lifetime: A Festschrift Honoring Dorothy Harrell Brown. Essays on Women, Religion, and the Renaissance, eds. Barbara C.Ewell and Mary A.McCay (New Orleans: Loyola University Press, 1997), p. 34. 12 McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957; reprint, San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1985), p. 3. 13 The episode that is the basis for the chapter “A Tin Butterfly” in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood takes place at McCarthy’s Aunt Margaret and Uncle Myers’s house in Minneapolis where she and her brothers have been sent to live after their parents have died. The “tin butterfly” episode is pivotal in describing the mental and physical abuse McCarthy writes she encountered there. McCarthy recounts that trying to stir animosity between the siblings, her Uncle Myers framed her for stealing her youngest brother’s only toy, a tin butterfly. He then promptly beat her, and she writes that she felt martyred because she never gave into the lie. However, in the interstital afterword that McCarthy includes after each chapter, McCarthy notes, “I must make a…serious correction or doubt. An awful suspicion occurred to me as I was reading it over the other day. I suddenly remembered that in college I had stared writing a play on this subject. Could the idea that Uncle Myers put the butterfly at my place have been suggested to me by my teacher? I can almost hear her voice saying to me, excitedly: ‘Your uncle must have done it!’” McCarthy continues, explaining how she asked her brothers for their memories of the episode without getting any more clarity. McCarthy concludes that she is not sure which is fictional, her Uncle’s framing or her teacher’s advice. See Albert E.Stone “Modern American Autobiography: Texts and Transactions.” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect. Ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 102. Many autobiography critics have explored McCarthy’s commentary on “A Tin Butterfly” (p. 82). 14 Carol Gelderman, Mary McCarthy: A Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), p. 187. 15 See Judith Armstrong, The Novel of Adultery (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgressions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 16 Gelderman, Mary McCarthy: A Life, p. 123. 17 McCarthy, A Charmed Life (1955; reprint, San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1992), p. 311. Subsequent references will be in text and abbreviated CL. 18 Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (New York: Scribner’s, 1931), pp. 264–265. 19 Neibuhr, p. 20. 20 Ibid, p. 22. 21 Ibid, p. 25. 22 Ibid,p.25. 23 See Elizabeth Hardwick,“Mary McCarthy in New York.” The New York Review of Books 39.6 (Mar. 26,1992) and Widmer, “Finally a Lady.” 24 As Glenna Matthews explains, “the new valorization of ‘home,’ ‘mother,’ and ‘wife’ had profound consequences for American women. With home seen as the front line of action to produce virtuous citizens, women would need adequate training for their new tasks. More than one scholar has demonstrated how significant the ideology of Republican Motherhood was in promoting better education for women.” Matthews, “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 21.

Notes

138

25

Ibid, p. 90. Willene Schaefer Hardy, Mary McCarthy (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), p. 57–58. 27 See Brightman, Writing Dangerously, Gelderman, Mary McCarthy: A Life; and McCarthy’s Intellectual Memoirs (1933; reprint, San Diego: Harvest, 1992). 28 McCarthy, Intellectual Memoirs, pp. 98–89. 29 Ibid, p. 104. 30 Cited in Gelderman, Mary McCarthy: A Life, p. 186. 31 For a useful discussion of the anti-romanticism of suburbia, see Catherine Jurca’s White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 32 See Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 33 There is still another telling comparison in McCarthy’s earlier work The Company She Keeps (1942; reprint, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1990) in the character of Margaret Sargent, particularly in the story “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit.” Most of the story takes place on a train headed west where she is going to divorce her husband to marry another man, but she has an affair with yet another man on the train, realizing she doesn’t want to marry any of them. 34 Intellectual Memoirs, p. 101. 26

CHAPTER FIVE NOTES 1

Updike, The Music School: Short Stories (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 192. 2 Considering marriage and divorce secular, the Puritans legalized divorce from the beginning. They believed it preferable to adultery. See Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Norma Basch, framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 3 See Mary Ann Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law: American failures, European Challenges, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). 4 Responding to the valorization of realism by critics such as Vernon Parrington, twentiethcentury critics, such as Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957) and Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking, 1950), argued that romance is the most best, most characteristic form of American literature. While the debate is outmoded, the romance thesis remains influential for both critics and in determining the canon. For comparative histories of this critical tradition, See Emily Miller Budick, Nineteenth-Century American Romance: Genre and the Construction of Democratic Culture (New York: Twayne, 1996); Russell Riesing, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986); and Eric Sundquist, American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 5 Divorce, sometimes actually occurring and sometimes only a possibility, is a key element in many of Updike’s novels and short stories, such as the Rabbit tetralogy, Of the Farm (1965), Couples (1968), The Coup (1978), Too far to Go (1979), Problems (1979), and Trust Me (1987). Similarly, divorce is significant in Howells’s A Modern Instance, Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), The Children (1928), The Mother’s Recompense (1925), and Glimpses of the Moon (1922), Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) and Herzog (1964), Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce (1997). 6 Many critics debate the status of Updike. Some, such as George W.Hunt, S.J., in John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980);

Notes

139

James Schiff in John Updike Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1998), place him in the romance tradition. Others, such Robert. M.Luscher in John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne: New York, 1993) and George J.Searles in The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), see him firmly as a realist. While still others, such as Judie Newman in John Updike (New York: Martin’s, 1988) and Donald J.Greiner in John Updike’s Novels (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984), place him somewhere in between. 7 Bloom, himself, seems to be basing his critique in Chase’s paradigm. Leading up to this quotation, he has written that Updike continually “comes a little short of his own literary tradition,” one that begins with Hawthorne. Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Views: John Updike (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), pp. 6–7. 8 John Neary, Something and Nothingness: The Fiction of John Updike and John Fowles (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), pp. 160–162. 9 Judie Newman, John Updike, p. 79. 10 Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1983), p. 78. 11 Ibid, p. 79. 12 Updike, Picked Up Pieces (Greenwich: Fawcett Crest, 1975), p. 34. 13 Ibid, p. 34. 14 Ibid, p. 49. 15 Updike, More Matter: Essays and Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 813. 16 Ibid, p. 814. 17 Ibid, p. 185. 18 Updike, Picked Up Pieces, p. 36. 19 Updike, Marry Me: A Romance (New York: Fawcet Crest, 1976), p. 55. Subsequent references will be in text and abbreviated MM. 20 Updike, Picked Up Pieces, p. 29 21 Many critics, such as Newman, John Updike, have made links between the themes of his writing and his life, particularly those of marriage, divorce, and adultery suffusing the work, short stories and novels, written in the late 60s and early 70s. 22 Schiff, John Updike Revisited, p. 5. 23 Luscher. John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction, p. 109. 24 Ibid, p. 109. 25 Ibid, p. 172. 26 Neary, Something and Nothingness: The Fiction of John Updike and John Fowles. 27 Newman, John Updike, p. 79. 28 Updike, More Matter, p. 62. 29 Bloom, Modern Critical Views: John Updike, p. 6. 30 Jeff Campbell, Updike’s Novels: Thorns Spell a Word (Wichita Falls, TX: Midwestern State UP, 1987). Margaret M.Hallissy, “Marriage, Morality and Maturity in Updike’s Marry Me” Renascence 37.2:96–106. 31 Updike, Hugging the Shore, p. 857 32 Luscher, John Updike, p. 172. 33 Donald J Greiner, John Updike’s Novels. 34 Greiner citing Brook Thomas, p. 186. 35 In The Postmodern Turn, Hassan explains, “I have used that term to designate two central, constitutive tendencies in postmodernism: one of indeterminacy, the other of immanence. The two tendencies are not dialectical; for that are not exactly antithetical; nor do they lead to a synthesis. Each contains its own contradictions, and alludes to elements of the other” (p. 92). 36 Updike, Hugging the Shore, p. 857. 37 Ibid, p. 857. 38 Campbell, Updike’s Novels, p. 163.

Notes 39

140

Greiner, John Updike’s Novels, p. 188. Updike cited in Hunt, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things, p. 140. 41 Hunt, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things, p. 140. 42 D.Quentin Miller, John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), p. 3. 43 Ibid, p. 51. 44 Hunt, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things, Campbell, Updike’s Novels, and Greiner, John Updike’s Novels, have thoroughly explored the philosophical and theological significance and influence of de Rougemont on Updike. 45 Barbara Leckie, “The Adulterous Society’: John Updike’s Marry Me,” Modern Fiction Studies 37.1 (1991): p. 64. 46 Elizabeth Tallent, Married Men and Magic Tricks: John Updike’s Erotic Heroes (Berkeley: Creative Arts, 1982), p. 34. 47 Ibid, p. 35. 48 Hunt, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things, p. 142. 49 Campbell, Updike’s Novels, p. 168. 50 Hunt, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things, pp. 119–120. 51 Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, p. 14. 52 Even Ruth jokes about Sally and Jerry running off to Arizona or Wyoming (MM, 151). 53 The Maples, in Updike’s short story collection Too Far to Go, also head to Europe with the hope of reaffirming their marriage. 54 Dee Birch Cameron, “The Unitarian Wife and the One-Eyed Man: Updike’s Marry Me and ‘Sunday Teasing.’” Forum 21 (1980): p. 64. 55 Newman, John Updike, p. 94. 56 Rachael C.Burchard, John Updike: Yea Sayings (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), p. 79. 57 Searles, The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike, p. 158. 58 Leckie, “The Adulterous Society,’” p. 64. 59 Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, p. 10. 40

Bibliography

Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Armstrong, Judith. The Novel of Adultery. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Arthur, T.S. The Hand but Not the Heart. New York: Derby and Jackson, 1858. ——. Out in the World. New York: Carelton, 1865. Auchincloss, Louis. Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time. New York: Viking, 1971. Barnett, James H. Divorce and the American Divorce Novel, 1858–1937: A Study in Literary Reflections of Social Influences. Diss. U of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: 1939. Basch, Norma. Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Bennett, George. William Dean Howells: The Realism of William Dean Howells. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1973. Benstock, Sheri. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribner’s, 1994. Bently, Nancy. “Wharton and the Science of Manners.” The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Ed. Millicent Bell Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.47–67. Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Views: John Updike. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Boone, Joseph Allen. Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Borus, Daniel H. Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Brightman, Carol. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1992. Budick, Emily Miller. Nineteenth-Century American Romance: Genre and the Construction of Democratic Culture. New York: Twayne, 1996. Cady, Edwin. The Realist at War: The Mature Years of William Dean Howells, 1885–1920. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1958. ——. The Road to Realism: The Early Years of William Dean Howells. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1956. Cameron, Dee Birch. “The Unitarian Wife and the One-Eyed Man: Updike’s Marry Me and ‘Sunday Teasing.’” Forum 21 (1980): 54–64. Campbell, Jeff. Updike’s Novels: Thorns Spell a Word. Wichita Falls, TX: Midwestern State University Press, 1987. Carrington, George C., Jr. The Immense Complex Drama: The World and Art of the Howells Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966. Carter, Everett. Howells and the Age of Realism. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1966. Caserio, Robert. “Edith Wharton and the Fiction of Public Commentary.” Western Humanities Review 40.3 (1986): 189–208.

Bibliography

143

Chase, Richard. American Novel and Its Tradition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. Chase, Vanessa. “Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses, and Gender in Turn-of-the-Century America.” Architecture and Feminism. Eds. Deborah Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol Henderson. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996. 130–56. Coale, Samuel. “Marriage in Contemporary American Literature: The Mismatched Marriages of Manichean Minds.” Thought 58.228 (1983): 111–21. DiFonzo, Herbie J. Beneath the Fault Line: The Popular and Legal Culture of Divorce in Twentieth-Century America. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Dupree. Ellen “Jamming the Machinery: Mimesis in The Custom of the Country.” American Literary Realism 22.2 (1990): 5–15. Epstein, Joseph. Divorced in America. New York: E.P.Dutton, 1974. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. New York: Anchor, 1992. Fryer, Judith. Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Gather. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Gelderman, Carol. Mary McCarthy: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988. Glendon, Mary Ann. Abortion and Divorce in Western Law: American Failures, European Challenges. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Grant, Robert. Unleavened Bread. New York: Scribner’s, 1900. Greiner, Donald J. John Updike’s Novels. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984. Griffith, Elisabeth. “Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Marriage and Divorce: Feminist Theory and Domestic Experience.” Woman’s Being, Woman’s Place: Female Identity and Vocation in American History. Ed. Mary Kelley. Boston: G.K.Hall, 1979. 233–51. Habegger, Alfred. Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Hallissy, Margaret M. “Marriage, Morality and Maturity in Updike’s Marry Me.” Renascence 37.2:96–106. Hardwick, Elizabeth. “Mary McCarthy in New York.” The New York Review of Books 39.6 (Mar. 26, 1992): 3–4, 6. Hedges, Warren. “Howells’s ‘Wretched Fetishes’: Character, Realism, and Other Modern Instances.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38.1 (1996): 26–51. Hinz, Evelyn J. “Hierogamy versus Wedlock: Types of Plots and Their Relationship to Genres of Prose Fiction.” PMLA 91 (1976): 900–13. Hoeller, Hildegard. Edith Wharton’s Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000. Howells, William D. 1890. A Hazard of New Fortunes. New York: Signet, 1965. ——. A Chance Acquaintance. 1873. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971. ——. Criticism and Fiction. 1891. New York: New York UP, 1959. ——. “Letter, W.D.Howells to James R.Osgood, 18 February 1881.” A Modern Instance. Ed. George N.Bennett. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977. ——. 1881. A Modern Instance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. ——. The Rise of Silas Lapham. 1885. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. Hunt, George W., S.J.John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980. Johnson, Diane. Le Divorce. New York: Penguin, 1997. Kaganoff, Peggy and Susan Spano. Men on Divorce: The Other Side of the Story. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997. ——. Women on Divorce: A Bedside Companion. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995. Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Kessler, Sheila. The American Way of Divorce: Prescriptions for Change. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975.

Bibliography

144

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Koprince, Susan. “Edith Wharton’s Hotels.” Massachusetts Studies in English 10.1 (1985): 12–23. Leckie, Barbara. “The Adulterous Society’: John Updike’s Marry Me.” Modern Fiction Studies 37.1 (1991): 61–79. Lewis, R.W.B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Lindberg, Gary H. Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975. Luscher, Robert. M. John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne: New York, 1993. MacComb, Debra. Tales of Liberation, Strategies of Containment: Divorce and the Representation of Womanhood in American Fiction, 1880–1920. New York and London: Garland, 2000. Matthews, Glenna. “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. May, Elaine Tyler. Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. ——. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1986. McCarthy, Mary. A Charmed Life. 1955. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1992. ——. The Company She Keeps. 1942. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1990. ——. The Group. 1963. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1991. ——. Intellectual Memoirs. 1992. San Diego: Harvest, 1933. ——. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. 1957. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1985. ——. On the Contrary. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1946. McDowell, Margaret. Edith Wharton. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Miller, D.Quentin. John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Neibhur, Elisabeth. “The Art of Fiction XXVII: Mary McCarthy—An Interview.” Paris Review. 27 (1962). Conversations with Mary McCarthy. Ed. Carol Gelderman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. 5–26. Neary, John. Something and Nothingness: The fiction of John Updike and John Fowles. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. Newman, Judie. John Updike. New York: Martin’s, 1988. O’Neill, William L. Divorce in the Progressive Era. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1967. Reising, Russell. The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature. New York: Methuen, 1986. Riley, Glenda. Divorce: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Rougemont, Denis de. Love in the Western World. 1940. Trans. Montgomery Belgion. New York: Pantheon, 1956. Schiff, James. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. Searles, George J. The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. See, Carolyn. Golden Days. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Singley, Carol J. Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 Stein, Allen F. After the Vows Were Spoken: Marriage in American Literary Realism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984. Tallent, Elizabeth. Married Men and Magic Tricks: John Updike’s Erotic Heroes. Berkeley: Creative Arts, 1982. Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgressions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Updike, John. The Coup. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1978. ——. Couples. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1968. ——. Gertrude and Claudius. New York: Knopf, 2000. ——. Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: Knopf, 1983.

Bibliography

145

——. Marry Me: A Romance. New York: Fawcet Crest, 1976. ——. A Month of Sundays. 1976. New York: Ballantine, 1996. ——. More Matter: Essays and Criticism. New York: Knopf, 1999. ——. The Music School: Short Stories. New York: Knopf, 1966. ——. Picked Up Pieces. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Crest, 1975. ——. Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories. New York: Knopf, 1962. ——. The Poorhouse Fair. 1958. New York: Knopf, 1977. ——. Rabbit at Rest. New York: Knopf, 1990. ——. Rabbit Run. 1960. New York: Ballantine, 1991. ——. Too Far to Go. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1979. ——. Toward the End of Time. Knopf, 1997. ——. The Witches of Eastwick. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1984. Waid, Candace. Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underground: Fictions of Women and Writing. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. 1920. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ——. A Backward Glance. 1933. New York: Macmillan, 1964. ——. The Children. 1928. New York: Scribner’s, 1997. ——. The Custom of the Country. 1913. New York: Penguin, 1987. ——. French Ways and Their Meaning. 1919. Lee, MA: Berkshire House, 1997. ——. Glimpses of the Moon. 1922. New York: Scribner’s, 1996. ——. The Mother’s Recompense. 1925. New York: Scribner’s, 1986. ——. “The Other Two.” The Selected Stories of Edith Wharton. Ed. R.W.B. Lewis. New York: Scribner’s, 1991. ——. The Writing of Fiction. 1924. New York: Touchstone, 1997. Wharton, Edith and Ogden Codman. The Decoration of Houses. 1897. New York: Norton, 1997. Whitehead, Barbara Defoe. The Divorce Culture. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1997. Widmer, Eleanor. “Finally a Lady: Mary McCarthy.” The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama. Ed. Warren French. Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1970. Wigley, Mark. “Untitled: The Housing of Gender.” Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. 327–389. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the American Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Tecnology Press, 1983.

Index

abortion, 104, 109 “Accuracy” (Updike), 117 adultery, x, 2, 16–20, 41–42, 48, 79, 80–82, 94, 95, 104, 115, 118, 121–123, 124–131, 132, 134, 136, 139 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain), 35, 49 aesthetics, xi, 10, 136 African Americans, 1 Age of Innocence, The (Wharton), 59, 131, 134 Allen, Woody, 9 Alexander, William, 149n.7 Ambassadors, The (James), 70 Amelia (Fielding), 18 “American Adam,” 11, 49–50, 61, 62, 125, 132 American canon, the, 14, 16–23, 58–61, 62, 91, 103–106, 147n.94 American literary identity, ix, xii, 14–16, 18–21, 25–26, 27, 55, 56–61, 62, 70, 87, 91, 115, 117– 118, 120, 122, 137, 139–140 American national identity, ix, x, 1, 4, 14, 26, 27, 32, 35, 37, 49, 53, 55, 61, 70, 75–76, 81–83, 85, 87, 95, 100, 106–109, 110, 115, 117, 120, 125, 132, 134, 137 anthropology, 65–66 apocalypse, nuclear, 92, 98, 111–112, 140 Armstrong, Judith, 81 Armstrong, Nancy, 16, Arnold, Matthew, 26, 148n.5 Art of the Novel, The (James), 154n.30 Arthur, T.S., 22, 23, 141n.3, 138n.108 Hand but Not the Heart, The, 22 Out in the World, 22 Auchincloss, Louis, 21, 57–58 Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice, 18 autobiography, xii, xiii, 16, 56, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93–94, 99, 105–106, 112–113, 115, 117–119 autonomy, 1, 6 “Axel” (L’Isle d’Adam), 96 Axel’s Castle (Wilson), 94, 96 Backward Glance, A (Wharton), 55, 61, 87 Barnett, James, x, 7, 141n. 3 Barth, John, 90, 91

Index

148

Basch, Norma, 4, 7, 8, 13, 21–22, 23 “Beast in the Jungle, The” (James), 123 “Bech Meets Me” (Updike), 118 Bell, Mellicent, 86, 194n.7 Bell, Michael Davitt, 31 Bellow, Saul, 90, 116 Bennett, George, 53, 149n.7 Benstock, Shari, 153n.8 Bently, Nancy, 61 Bernard, Jessie, Future of Marriage, The, 9 Billy Budd (Melville), 18, 21 Bloom, Harold, 116, 119, 161n.7 Boase, Roger, 146n.75 Boone, Joseph Allen, x, 18–19, 23, 27, 81, 95, 152n.63 Borus, Daniel, 26–27 Boydston, Jeanne, 59 Brandeis, Lewis D., 43–44 Brightman, Carol, 91 Brinkley, Allen J., 143n.61 Broadwater, Bowden 90, 105 Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights, 59 Budick, Emily, 153n.20, 160n.4 Burchard, Rachel, 163n.56 Cady, Edwin, 149n.7, 150n.28 Cameron, Dee Birch, 135 Campbell, Jeff, 120, 123 capitalism, 11, 26, 34, 41, 46, 50, 56, 57, 63–64, 72, 75, 76, 78, 79, 82, 86 Carrington, George, 52 Carter, Evertt, 149n.7 Caserio, Robert, 65 Centaur, The (Updike), 119 Charmed Life, A, (McCarthy) xiii, 6, 89–113, 139, 140 Chase, Richard, xi, 20–21, 60, 91, 140, 153n.5 Chase, Vanessa, 156n.64, 147n.80 children, 42, 83–86, 95, 130, 132–130, 158n.81 Children, The (Wharton), 158n.81 Civil War, the 6, 7–8, 25, 26 Clarissa (Richardson), 18 class, xi, 36, 37, 99, 140 Coale, Samuel 21, 60, 87 Codman, Ogden, 71–72, 83 Cold War, the, 7, 92, 98, 107, 121 Collins, Alexandra, 63 Company She Keeps, The (McCarthy), 89, 160n.33 consumerism, ix, 1, 3, 13–14, 34, 59, 74, 75, 79, 81 Cooper, James Fenimore, 20, 49, 95, 123, 124 County of the Pointed Firs, The (Jewett), 18 Coup, The (Updike), 119

Index

149

Couples (Updike), 118, 119, 134 Custom of the Country, The (Wharton), xiii, 6, 14, 55–88, 110, 111, 134, 139 “Custom House, The” (Hawthorne), 98 Davidson, Cathy, 10, 145n.53 de Balzac, Honoré, 61 Declaration of Independence, The, 3–4, 14, Decoration of Houses, The (Wharton and Codman), 71–72, 83 Defoe, Daniel, 16 DeLillo, Don, 91 DiFonzo, Herbie, 7, 22–23, 48, 89–90, 143n.23 divorce, American colonies, in 1–4, 9 American national identity, and, ix, 1–2, 14, 55–56, 61, 107–108, 109, 115, 117, 141n.2 American Revolution, and, 2–4, 63 children, and, 42, 83–86, 95, 130, 132–133 Civil War, and the, 6, 7–8, 25, 26 Cold War, and the, 7, 121 commodity, as a, 34, 59, 79, 81 history of in United States, 1–14 individual right, as, ix, 1, 4, 14, 57 legal history of, 4, 7–8, 22–23, 36, 43, 48, 49, 57, 89–90, 122, 143n.18, 21, 23, 144n.27, 152n.62 liberation, as 8, 57, 59 morality, and, 8–9, 14, 23, 52, 57, 69, 94 “no-fault,” 5, 6, 115, 119, 143n.23 popular culture, in, ix, xiv, 14, 21–22, 48, 150n.21 postbellum America, 6–7, 11, 16, 33, 152n.62 Progressive Era, in the, 7 publicity, 21–22, 46–49 Puritans, and, 1–2, 12, 14, 20, 80, 82, 95, 142n.5 rates of, 4, 6, 7, 9–14, 22, 27, 29, 118, 144n.30, 150n.21 relativism, and, xiii, 23, 52 remarriage, and 52–53, 80, 90, 125, 132 social duty, and, 9, 14, 34–35, 57, 84, 130, 131 solipsism, 64, 78, 84, 96 World War II, and, 7 Divorce American Style (Lear), ix divorce courts, 12–13, 21–23, 44, 47, 56, 82, 87, 95–96, 99 divorce mills, 5 domestic architecture, 10, 26, 36–44, 45, 52, 56, 70–76, 83–85, 91, 99–104, 107–108, 116, 120, 124–131, 135, 139, 151n.31, 157n.80, 160n.24 hotels, versus, 75–76, 83–84, 125, 134 renting, 41–43, 75–76, 84, 91 domesticity, 10, 21–23, 35, 37, 40, 42, 48–49, 74, 99, 103, 124, 131 Downing, Frederick Jackson, 38 Dreiser, Theodore, 31, 55 Ducille, Ann, 16 Dupree, Ellen, 66–67 East, the, 32, 72, 76–83, 91, 110, 120, 121, 126, 127, 131–137, 139

Index

150

Edmonds, Mary K., 157n.78 Ellis, Havelock, 13 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 31, 32–33, 150n.32 Epstein, Joseph, ix Ethan Frome (Wharton), 61 ethnicity, xi, 1, 37, 99, 107–108, 140 Europe, 2, 16–21, 32, 49, 55–56, 60–62, 63, 64, 72, 75, 78–83, 91, 94–95, 100, 121, 131, 132, 134, 139 Faulkner, William, 21 feminism, 8–11, 57, 59–61, 62, 66–67, 78, 99–106, 111 Fer her, Edna, x Fiedler, Leslie, xi, 19–20, 60, 91 Fielding, Henry, 18 Fitzgerald, F.Scott, 35, 70, 110 Great Gatsby, The, 70, 110 Flower, Benjamin O., 9 Fowles, John, 116, 119 Franklin, Benjamin, 14 Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 61 French Ways and Their Meaning (Wharton), 156n.47 Freud, Sigmund, 13 Frycstedt, Olov, 25, 50 Frye, Northrop, 17 Fryer, Judith, 66, 83 Fuller, Margaret, 8 Future of Marriage, The (Bernard), 9 gender, xi, xiii, 5–6, 7–11, 13, 26–36, 37, 40, 52, 56, 57, 58, 73, 91, 95, 99–106, 111, 116, 124 femininity, 5–6, 9–10, 26–29, 37, 42–43, 57, 58, 71, 73–74, 99–110, 111, 115, 124 masculinity, 5–6, 10, 11, 26–35, 42, 50, 51, 73, 74, 95 “New Woman,” 10 “Separate Spheres,” 10, 64, 145n.53 “Republican Motherhood,” 10, 99, 100, 160n.24 Gelderman, Carol, 159n.11, 14 Gilbert, Sandra, 58 Gilman, Charlotte Perikins, 8 Herland, 19 Glendon, Mary Ann, ix, 6 Glimpses of the Moon (Wharton), 55 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 73 Golden Bowl, The (James), 17, 18 Golden Days (See), 140 Good Housekeeping, x Goodman, Susan, 156n.51 Grant, Robert, 6, 55, 62, 66 Unleavened Bread, 6, 55, 66 “Great American Novel, The” (Wharton), 55, 155n.31 Great Gatsby, The, (Fitzgerald) 70, 110 Greiner, Donald, 120, 132 Group, The (McCarthy), 89

Index

151

Habegger, Alfred, 31, 33 Halissy, Margaret, 120 Hand but Not the Heart, The (Arthur), 22 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 90 Hardy, Thomas, 16 Tess of the D’Ubervilles, 18 Hardy, Willene Schaefer, 100 Hassan, Ihab, 90, 92, 93, 137, 158n.10, 162n.35 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, xi, 13, 15, 60, 61, 82, 98, 107, 116, 120, 121 “Custom House, The,” 98 Scarlet Letter, The, 15, 18, 61, 82, 107, 109, 116 Hazard of New Fortunes, A (Howells), 38, 53, 151n.48 Hedges, Warren, 52 Hemingway, Ernest, In Our Time, 135 Herland (Gilman), 19 Herr, Michael, 90 Hinz, Elizabeth, x, 17–18, 19 Hoeller, Hildegard, 59–60 Holbein, Hans, 125 Holbrook, David, 155n.35 House of Mirth, The (Wharton), 59 Howells, William Dean, x, xi, xii, xiii, 5, 6, 19, 23, 25–53, 55, 56, 85, 89, 91, 93, 99, 110, 111, 115, 117, 116, 119, 120, 124, 129, 132, 139 Chance Acquaintance, 50 Criticism and Fiction, 25, 30 Hazard of New Fortunes, A, 38, 53 “Man of Letters as a Man of Business”, 149n.9 Modern Instance, A, xi, xii, xiii, 18, 19, 23, 25–53, 55, 56, 85, 110, 111, 139 Rise of Silas Lapham, The, 38, 55, 151n.54 Hunt, George W., S.J., 121 Iliad, The, 81 imagination, 91, 93, 98, 101–106, 117, 119, 120, 122, 126, 134, 136–137 In Our Time (Hemingway), 135 individualism, x, 7–8, 9, 11, 32, 33, 39, 49–50, 57, 69, 76, 78, 110, 132 Intellectual Memoirs (McCarthy), 112–113 Irigary, Luce, 67 L’Isle-Adam, Villiers de, “Axel,” 96 James, Henry, Jr., x, 17, 21, 62, 65, 66, 67–68, 78, 91, 98, 123, 154n.30, 156n.52 Ambassadors, The, 70 Art of the Novel, The, 154n.30 “Beast in the Jungle, The,” 123 Golden Bowl, The 17, 18 Portrait of a Lady, The, 17, 66 What Maisie Knew, 156n.52, 158n.81 Jefferson, Thomas, 3, 8, 14, 143n.15 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 61

Index

152

County of the Pointed Firs, The, 18 Johnson, Diane, 116 Joslin, Katherine, 77 jouissance, 87 journalism, 21, 26, 27–31, 33–35, 43–45, 56, 59, 64, 82–83, 85–86, 99 Jurca, Catherine, 160n.31 Kagonoff, Peggy and Susan Spano, Men on Divorce, 11 Women on Divorce, 10 Kamme-Erkel, Sybille, 142n.2 Kaplan, Amy, 10, 27, 32, 35, 41, 58, 71, 149n.9 Kennedy, John, 121 Kerouac, Jack 124 Kessler, Sheila, ix Khantavichian, Sanguansri, 151n.45 Killorian, Helen, 157n.69 Kimmel, Michael, 10–11 Koprince, Susan, 75 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 13 Kramer vs. Kramer (film), 9 Lasch, Christopher, 15 law, 27, 29–30, 48, 52 See also divorce: legal history of Lear, Norman, Divorce American Style (film), ix Leckie, Barbara, 122 Lewis, C.S., 146n.75 Lewis, R.W.B., 49, 56, 62 Lewis, Sinclair, 55 Lindberg, Gary, 60, 86, 155n.40 Lolita (Nabokov), 126 love, 12–14, 17, 22, 27, 80–81, 94, 97, 118, 123, 130–131 courtly, 17, 19, 81, 121–122, 123, 125, 134, 146n.75 Love American Style (television series), ix Lowell, Robert, x Luce, Clare Booth, The Women, 5 Luscher, Robert, 118 MacComb, Deborah Ann, x, 14, 63–64, 77 Mailer, Norman, 91 Malamud, Bernard, 90 “Man of Letters as a Man of Business” (Howells), 149n.9 market, 33–34, 46 marriage, x, 10, 12–14, 36, 42, 52 See also novel, form of companionate, 10, 12 criticism of, 8, 35

Index

153

domestic architecture, and, 36–44, 74–75, 99, 104, 124–131, 139 ideals of, xii, 10, 12, 29, 34–35, 57, 104, 123, 124–125 Marry Me: A Romance, (Updike) xiii, 6, 115–137, 139 endings of, 119, 121, 131–137, 139 Matthews, Glenna, 37, 99 May, Elaine Tyler, 5, 7, 13 McCarthy, Mary, xii, xiii-xiv, 6, 26, 53, 88, 89–113, 115, 117, 120, 124, 132, 139, 140 Charmed Life, A, xiii, 6, 89–113, 139, 140 Company She Keeps, The, 89, 160n.33 Group, The, 89 Intellectual Memoirs, 112–113 Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, 93, 158n.13 McDowell, Margaret, 62–63 Melville, Herman, xi, 60, 61 Billy Budd, 18, 21 Moby Dick, 18 Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (McCarthy), 93, 158n.13 Men on Divorce (Kagonoff and Spano), 11 Miller, D.Quentin, 121 mimesis, 17–18, 67–69, 117, 119 mobility, 6, 43, 56, 75–77, 82–83, 93, 110, 111, 116, 125–126, 139 Moby Dick (Melville), 18 Modern Instance, A (Howells), xi, xii, xiii, 18, 19, 23, 25–53, 55, 56, 85, 110, 111, 139 modernism, 17, 20, 26, 53, 117, 118 modernity, 6, 39, 41, 53, 56, 63, 66, 68, 74, 75–76, 81–83, 87 Month of Sundays, A (Updike), 118 More Matter (Updike), 119 Mother’s Recompense, The (Wharton), 55 Music School, The (Updike), 115, 118 Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita, 126 narcissism, 9, 26 See also solipsism National Divorce Reform League, 8 Native Americans, 51, 133 nature, 125, 128 Neary, John, 116, 119 Neibuhr, Elizabeth, 89 Newman, Judie, 116, 119, 135–136 novel, form of, x, 15–23, 26, 28–30, 43, 49, 50, 52–53, 59–61, 67–68, 89, 92–93, 98, 111–113, 118, 120, 132, 136–137, 139, 158n.10 adultery, and, x–xiii, 16–20, 80, 82, 94–95, 118, 122, 132, 133, 147n.94 divorce, and, x–xi, 17–23, 26, 43, 53, 62, 68, 82–83, 98, 90, 91, 113, 116, 120, 122, 137, 139–140, 147n.78, 149n.8 marriage, and, x, 15–21, 36, 43, 57, 62, 68, 115, 124 self-referentiality, and, 26, 53, 56, 59–60, 93, 116 See also plasticity novel of manners, xi, 15–17, 20, 36, 53, 56, 57, 60–61, 63, 67–69, 85, 115, 124, 131, 139 Of the Farm (Updike), 119, 140

Index

154

Olsen, Rodney, 149n.9 O’Neill, William, 2, 6, 8, 12 Osgood, James, 25 Out in the World (Arthur), 22 Pamela (Richardson), 18 paralysis, 120–121, 127, 132, 136 Parrington, Vernon, 160n.4 plasticity (textuality), 23, 49, 56, 83, 85–86, 111 Poorhouse Fair, The (Updike), 118 popular culture, ix, xiv, 14, 21–22, 48, 56, 64 Porte, Joel, 33, 150n.32 Portrait of a Lady, The (James), 17, 66 postbellum America, 6–7, 11, 16, 25, 26, 33 postmodernism, 17, 20, 23, 26, 48, 88, 90–92, 110, 116, 119, 121, 137, 158n.10, 162n.35 poststructuralism, xiii, 23 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 18 private versus the public, the, 21–22, 44–49, 56, 64, 83–88, 89, 99–100, 102–106, 113, 116, 120, 139 Proust, Marcel, 61, 68 Pryor, John C., 150n.28 Puritans, 1–2, 14, 37, 80, 82, 95, 108, 117, 122, 142n.5 Pynchon, Thomas, 91 Rabbit at Rest (Updike), 117 Rabbit, Run (Updike), 117, 118, 131 realism, xi–xiii, 15, 16–21, 25, 26, 29, 33–36, 52, 53, 43, 59–61, 62, 64–66, 67, 73, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 96–98, 103–106, 109, 111, 115, 116–117, 119, 120, 126–131, 132–137, 139 See also romance compared with realism religion, 140 Reilly, Charlie, 120 Reising, Russell, 15 Richardson, Samuel, 16, 18, 19, 20 Clarissa, 18 Pamela, 18 Rifkin, Jeremy, 6 Riley, Glenda, ix, 2, 3, 4, 14, 49, 82 Rise of Silas Lapham, The (Howells), 38, 55, 151n.54 Robbins, Harold, 21 Rogers, Anna B., 9 romanticism, xi, xiv, 14, 16–21, 27, 30, 31–34, 35, 36, 43, 53, 60, 61, 62–64, 67, 69, 72–73, 87, 89–93, 95–98, 101, 104, 107, 108, 110, 115, 119, 120, 121–128, 131–137, 139–140 compared with realism, xi, 16–23, 30, 61, 73, 89, 91, 95–98, 102, 116, 118, 120 124, 126–131, 132–137 romance theory, the, xi, 20–21, 57, 60, 91, 92–94, 116–117, 139, 153n.3 Rougemont, Denis de, 17, 32, 81, 121–122 Romero, Lora, 10, 145n.53 Scarlet Letter, The, (Hawthorne) 15, 18, 61, 82, 107, 109, 116, 147n.94 Schiff, James, 118 science fiction, 93, 111

Index

155

Searles, George, 161.n6 See, Carolyn Golden Days, 140 sentimentalism, xii, 22, 25–26, 27–30, 31, 58–61, 83, 86, 94, 96–97, 105, 107, 109 sexuality, 12–13, 21, 97, 140 Sheldon, Sydney, 21 Singley, Carol, 154n.21 slavery, 1, 8, 25, 37 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 10 sociology, 65, 119, 120 solipsism, 9, 64, 92, 96, 101, 121, 135–137 See also narcissism spectacle, 44–45, 48, 157n.78 See also public and private Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 8, 57, 59 Stein, Allen, 38 Stock, Irvin, 91 Stone, Albert, 159n.31 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 59 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 37 Styron, William 90 suburbia, 107–108 suicide, 73, 104 Sundquist, Eric, 149n.9, 161n.4 Tallent, Elizabeth, 122 Tanner, Tony, 16–17, 18, 19, 37, 81, 95, 146n.74, 148n.78 technology, 4, 6, 26 automobile, 6, 105, 110 planes, 6, 126–127, 128, 130, 132, 134 trains, 6, 50, 78, 82–83, 110 Tess of the D’Ubervilles (Hardy), 18 Theory of the Leisure Class, The (Veblen), 44 Thompson, Bob, 150n.37 Thoreau, Henry David, 94, 95–96 Tompkins, Jane, xi Too Far to Go (Updike), 118 Touchstone, The (Wharton), 58 Toward the End of Time (Updike), 140 Trilling, Lionel, 91, 161n.4 Turner, F.Jackson, 76–77 Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 35, 49 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 37 Unleavened Bread (Grant), 6, 55, 66 Updike, John, xii, xiii–xiv, 6, 26, 35, 53, 88, 115–137, 139, 140 “Accuracy,” 117 “Bech Meets Me,” 118 Centaur, The, 119 Coup, The, 119

Index

156

Couples, 118, 119, 134 Month of Sundays, A, 118 More Matter, 119 Music School, The, 115, 118 Of the Farm, 119, 140 Poorhouse Fair, The, 118 Rabbit at Rest, 117 Rabbit, Run, 117, 118, 131 Too Far to Go, 118, 163n.53 Toward the End of Time, 140 Witches of Eastwick, The, 119 urbanism, 4, 11–12, 39, 41, 51, 145n.61 Vanderbilt, Kermit, 150n.28 Veblen, Thorstein, Theory of the Leisure Class, The, 44 Waid, Candace, 59, 61, 71, 73 Walton, Geoffrey, 155n.41 Warren, Joyce, xi Warren, Samuel D., 43–44 Watt, Ian, x, 16, 18 Wershoven, Carol, 62 West, the, 4–6, 7–8, 11, 26, 32, 49–51, 56, 76–83, 91, 110, 120, 126, 127, 131–137, 139 What Maisie Knew (James), 156n.52, 158n.81 Wharton, Edith, ix, xi, xiii, 6, 14, 21, 26, 34, 53, 55–88, 89, 91, 93, 99, 110, 111, 115, 116, 117, 120, 124, 132, 134, 139 Age of Innocence, The, 59, 131, 134 Backward Glance, A, 55, 61, 87 Custom of the Country, The, xiii, 6, 14, 55–88, 110, 111, 134, 139 Decoration of Houses, The, with Ogden Codman, 71–72, 83 Ethan Frome, 61 French Ways and Their Meaning, 156n.47 Glimpses of the Moon, 55 “Great American Novel, The,” 55, 155n.31 House of Mirth, The, 59 Mother’s Recompense, The, 55 Touchstone, The, 58 Writing of Fiction, The, 60–61 Whitehead, Barbara Defoe, ix, 1, 9 Wigley, Marc, 36–37, 73, 74, 151n.39, 156n.64 Wilcox, Walter, 9 Wilson, Edmund, xiii, 90, 96, 99, 103, 105, 111, 112 Witches of Eastwick, The, (Updike), 119 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 57 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 8 Women, The (Luce), 5 Women on Divorce (Kagonoff and Spano), 10 Wordsworth, William, 32 World War II, 7, 92, 158n.10 Woolf, Virginia,

Index

157

To the Lighthouse, 18 Wright, Ellen, 39 Wright, Gwendolyn, 37 Writing of Fiction, The (Wharton), 60–61 writers, as artists, 49, 86, 98, 105, 111–113, 120 writers, as professionals, 26–35, 35, 47, 49, 57, 59, 86, 105, 107 Wuthering Heights (Brontë), 59