CRIES AND WHISPERS

EDITH WHARTON

Writing a story called "Beatrice Palmato," Edith Wharton got no further than an outline and a single two-page scene, exquisitely detailed and explicitly pornographic, in which a father lovingly completes the sexual initiation of his daughter. The date of composition is uncertain, and has been almost as hotly debated as the significance of the story since it was discovered among Wharton's papers more than forty years ago. R.W.B. Lewis first published the fragments in his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, in 1975, along with newfound evidence that Wharton, in middle age, had carried on a wildly passionate, adulterous love affair — from 1908 to 1910, or, roughly, between The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome — and the paired disclosures revolutionized the image of America's literary dowager queen. Wharton was suddenly up-to-date: familiar, approachable, a woman with her hair coming undone and her priorities in equally fetching disarray. Even feminist critics claimed that the sexual revelations made her "more intriguing and more likable" and allowed us to view her "with new compassion and increased respect." One could reasonably fear for Wharton's new likability when Shari Benstock's 1994 biography, a work of careful if killjoy revisionism, argued that the notorious affair had been more talk than action and the action confined to just a few nights. Wharton would have understood all too well the threat of inverted scandal, the implicit diminution. As a prophet of the female condition, she had noted wearily, back in 1915, "What a woman was criticized for doing yesterday she is ridiculed for not doing today."

There has been no place for "Beatrice Palmato" in the various collections of Wharton's stories that have appeared since its discovery; it is hardly more than a sketch, after all, the most famous story that she never wrote. But, like E. M. Forster's openly homosexual novel, Maurice, or the swooningly homoerotic letters of Henry James, or Virginia Woolf's memoir of childhood sexual abuse — all posthumously published, for good and ill — its existence has inevitably cast a lurid glare across the rigorously controlled and nuanced works that define the writer's achievement. Wharton's eighty-five published stories reflect a lifetime's occupation, extending from her first story to appear in print, in 1891, to one that she sent to her agent just before her death, in 1937. Aside from the sheer pleasure she took in their creation, they served their author at various times as a workshop for her novels, or as a means of earning quick money — Wharton was one of the highest-paid short-story writers in America — or as an emotional release that was unavailable to her in any other way. Far more than her novels, the stories are rooted in the fluctuations of her life; the longer, richer works, though unquestionably her greater accomplishment, stand at a magisterial remove. In the wake of "Beatrice Palmato," scholars have scoured the stories for telltale signs of father-daughter incest. But readers are apt to be struck with the exposure of far-more-everyday varieties of horror: moral cowardice; being unloved or unloving; making rational compromises in order to live and discovering that one has reasoned one's life away; and enduring unendurable loneliness, which Wharton seems to have done from 1891 to 1937.

* * *

Her life was, to all appearances, brilliantly social and successful — hardly a writer's life at all. Born into the commercial aristocracy of New York City in 1862, Edith Newbold Jones was the only daughter of a woman so fashionable that she was rumored to have made "keeping up with the Joneses" a proverbial necessity. Edith's father was a being of a different order: a devourer of books on exotic travel, deeply moved by Tennyson, a man who taught his small daughter to read and who might have embraced a literary life if his wife had not been closed to all it represented. At least this was how their daughter depicted the mismatched pair, in a memoir written during the last years of her life. There is some evidence that Lucretia Rhinelander Jones was not entirely indifferent to her daughter's literary calling; she did, for example, have a volume of Edith's adolescent Verses privately printed. What Wharton best remembered, though, was her mother's stern discouragement. Edith's father, the tall and blue-eyed George Frederic Jones, has left few records. Anything beyond what his daughter intended to reveal must be sought in what she may have revealed without intention.

The unearthing of "Beatrice Palmato" did not bring biographers to believe, en masse, that Edith Wharton had been the victim of her father's sexual advances. Lewis was quick to assert that the incest motif was "pure and utter fantasy." Cynthia Griffin Wolff, who discovered the fragment, wrote that, biographically, it provided no more than "an aperçu into the wellsprings of the girl's fantasy life," and Wharton's most recent biographer, Hermione Lee, takes a similar position. But some scholars have gone a more literal route. The legitimate desire to redress long-held, Freud-sanctioned doubts about women's reports of early abuse has led, alas, to the wresting of sexual "facts" from the haziest of fictions. Barbara A. White, the author of the only book-length study of Wharton's stories, strenuously argues for linking Wharton's identity with the ravished Beatrice, on the basis of evidence that becomes less convincing with every stretch on the rack of interpretation. Dead husbands, claustrophobic wives, anything remotely resembling a secret, even a voice speaking a foreign language on a radio: all become "a perfect paradigm for child sexual abuse." One cannot state with certainty that White is wrong, but with a different selection of plot details, one could as easily "prove" that Wharton had borne an illegitimate child or committed a murder.

Still, might there be something more to those dead husbands and claustrophobic wives? Edith Jones was twenty-three when, abandoned by two earlier suitors, she married the guileless and hapless Edward Wharton, a decision that Henry James would later call the "inconceivable thing." The marriage was a disaster: intellectually, emotionally, and, above all, sexually. Setting down the particulars forty-nine years later, Wharton reserved all blame for her mother, writing that Lucretia's refusal to answer her desperate questions, on the eve of her wedding, about what happened between...