Entrapment in the Literature of Edith Wharton - Framingham State ...

Entrapment in the Literature of Edith Wharton
Cory Welch
Department of English
EDITH WHARTON (1862-1937) IS HIGHLY REGARDED AS ONE OF THE MAJOR FIGURES OF
AMERICAN LITERATURE. SEVERAL OF HER WORKS, AMONG THEM THE HOUSE OF MIRTH,
ETHAN FROME, THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY, AND THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, RANK AMONG
THE FINEST AMERICAN NOVELS EVER WRITTEN. THE PUBLICATION OF THE HUGELY POPULAR
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, IN 1905, LAUNCHED A SUCCESSFUL LITERARY CAREER FOR WHARTON
IN WHICH SHE ULTIMATELY PUBLISHED OVER FORTY BOOKS OF ESSAYS, TRAVELOGUES,
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS, AND, OF COURSE, NOVELS. IN 1920, WHARTON WAS AWARDED
THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR THE AGE OF INNOCENCE.
EDITH WHARTON IS ACCLAIMED FOR HER BRILLIANT AND SCATHING PORTRAITS OF
ARISTOCRATIC NEW YORK SOCIETY, WHICH HAS ATTRACTED FREQUENT COMPARISONS TO
ANOTHER GREAT AMERICAN WRITER, WHARTON’S FRIEND AND CONTEMPORARY HENRY
JAMES. YET SHE HAS ALSO GARNERED CONSIDERABLE ACCLAIM FOR HER PORTRAYALS OF
THE WORKING-CLASS CITIZENRY AND THEIR OWN CIRCUMSTANCES IN DESOLATE, RURAL
WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS, IN WHAT ARE OFTEN CALLED HER “NEW ENGLAND NOVELS”—
SUMMER AND THE POWERFUL ETHAN FROME. CRITICAL RECEPTION OF EDITH WHARTON
HAS TENDED TO FOCUS EITHER ON HER THREE MAJOR HIGH SOCIETY NOVELS (THE HOUSE
OF MIRTH, THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY, AND THE AGE OF INNOCENCE) OR ON HER NEW
ENGLAND WORKS.
CORY WELCH’S ESSAY, “ENTRAPMENT IN THE LITERATURE OF EDITH WHARTON,” SEEKS TO
BRIDGE A CRITICAL DIVIDE THAT HAS STUMPED EDITH WHARTON’S CRITICS FOR NEARLY A
CENTURY. THE ESSAY SEEKS TO UNCOVER MAJOR THEMES IN EDITH WHARTON’S WORK NOT
EXCLUSIVE TO EITHER THE NEW ENGLAND NOVELS OR THE NEW YORK NOVELS. WELCH
EXAMINES THE ENTRAPMENT AND ISOLATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL WITHIN MORAL AND
SOCIETAL CONSTRUCTS IN WHARTON’S NOVELS, AND EXPLORES THE EXISTENTIAL
IMPLICATIONS AND RELEVANCE OF WHARTON’S ARTISTIC VISION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY READER.
The most remarkable thing about a century‟s worth of Edith Wharton criticism has been
its sheer inability to strike at the heart of her literature. The art of any great literary
figure will resist easy definition, but the attempts to nail Edith Wharton down to one or
two great “themes” have led too many critics to blatantly disregard contradictory facets
of her work—especially those facets which tend to discredit their own theories regarding
Mrs. Wharton‟s work.

Hence, we have the sticky situation of one critic, Elizabeth Ammons, proclaiming that
Wharton‟s work “records her public argument with America on the issue of freedom for
women over more than three decades” (Ammons ix), while apparently forgetting or
disregarding the fact that the protagonists of two of Wharton‟s most important novels,
Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence, are men. Or we have another critic, Irving
Howe, who claims that “Mrs. Wharton‟s great theme—the dispossession of the old New
York aristocracy by the vulgar new rich—is not quite so visible in The House of Mirth as
in The Custom of the Country or The Age of Innocence” (Howe 122). Of course, in
order for Wharton‟s great theme to be, in fact, the dispossession of the old aristocracy
by the noveau riche, we would have to overlook the very existence of Wharton‟s two
great “New England” novels, Summer and Ethan Frome, which obviously concern
neither members of the old aristocracy nor members of the “vulgar new rich.” Only the
most supremely skilled sophist would be able to underwrite Summer and Ethan Frome,
set amidst the poor working classes in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, with the New
York theme of old versus new society.
A peculiar offshoot to the criticism of upper-class mores, incidentally, has been the
robust cottage industry of Henry James-Edith Wharton parallelism. This sort of criticism
relegates Wharton‟s art to secondary status when placed next to James‟s
achievements, implying that Wharton, for the length of her career, sought only to
replicate the complexity of James‟s own portrayals of the dynamics of an evolving
society. This criticism often involves lengthy analyses of Wharton‟s attempt to imitate
(or even transcend!) James‟s “novel of manners,” and there is all too often the
acknowledgment that Wharton is merely second- or third-rate James—that her literature
will forever subside in the shadows of that great American novelist. Setting aside the
condescending, limiting assumption that a woman‟s art is merely a variation of a man‟s
art, the James-Wharton angle often emphasizes the “novel of manners” components of
Wharton‟s work and her abilities (or inabilities) to effectively portray the erosion of
traditional aristocratic values by the cruder values of new money. The result is that The
Custom of the Country is situated as Wharton‟s masterpiece—it is the novel that does
James one better. In her essay “Henry James‟s Heiress” (whose title perfectly

embodies the patriarchal assumptions of James-Wharton criticism), Q.D. Leavis
pronounces that The Custom of the Country “is undoubtedly her masterpiece . . . Here
the theme is explicitly „social disintegration‟” (Leavis 79). Not only is Leavis herself
laying claim to Wharton‟s (i.e., James‟s) great theme—that of “social disintegration”—
but she is significantly overlooking the obvious lack of upper-class turmoil in Ethan
Frome and Summer while severely misreading The Age of Innocence and The House of
Mirth, which at the very least are more concerned with the plights of an individual within
a society (be it a Newland Archer or a Lily Bart) than with the so-called disintegration of
that society itself.
Recent feminist criticism has mercifully sought to right some obvious wrongs
surrounding James-Wharton parallelism, but the considerable feminist criticism of Edith
Wharton‟s work that has arisen in the last thirty or so years has taken a variety of angles
that tend to overlook certain other contradictions in Wharton‟s work. For example,
Ammons‟s contention that the true focus of Wharton‟s fiction is the plight of women
would have to downplay the plights of the male protagonists of Ethan Frome and The
Age of Innocence, or would have to overlook Wharton‟s highly sympathetic portrayal of
Ralph in The Custom of the Country, or even her somewhat sensitive portrait of Mr.
Royall in Summer. Similarly, Wai Chee Dimock‟s criticism, that Wharton sees marriage
as the marketable asset for women within the construct of a capitalist society (67), is
hardly applicable to the more subtly defined relationships of the New England books,
where capitalist greed is not the underlying social constraint.
Indeed, the body of criticism that praises Wharton‟s castigation or outright satirization of
New York society, or that commends her subtle portrayals of the shifting social and
economic dynamics of the upper-class society, tends to disregard Wharton‟s equally
careful portraiture, in her New England books, of the circumstances of an entirely
different social class and milieu. And if the criticism surrounding the famous New York
novels (The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence)
blithely pronounces bold Wharton themes on class and society without regard to the
New England novels, the critics of Ethan Frome and Summer are guilty of the same

crime in regards the New York books. These critics see the New England books as
famous anomalies in Wharton‟s career—which only reinforces a notion that they are,
indeed, anomalies in Wharton‟s career. One critic of Summer, Kathleen Pfeiffer,
articulates the divide between the two camps whilst simultaneously conceding the
existence of an apparently unbridgeable divide between the books: “The discomfort [of
critics to contend with Summer] may be rooted in Summer‟s dramatic departure from
the novel of manners, the genre through which Wharton gained popularity. I believe
that Summer is anomalous in Wharton‟s oeuvre . . .” (Pfeiffer 142). The major flaw in
Wharton criticism is its inability to connect the seemingly disparate social tableaux of
her novels with certain overriding thematic elements unique to all of her novels—with
the result that critics sound more comfortable dividing Wharton‟s work into distinctive
genres rather than seeing what makes her tick through all her major fiction, New
England and New York novels alike.
In truth, Wharton‟s literature is uniquely existential. If there is indeed a major theme that
unites the two very different and seemingly unrelated socio-economic milieus of
Wharton‟s great fiction, it is the pervasive theme of absolute entrapment and isolation.
An individual‟s entrapment within his or her unique social situation is the Wharton theme
that transcends accepted paradigms of class, gender, and social dynamics—paradigms
that have too often been narrowly used to define her literature. In all of Wharton‟s
fiction—whether its concerns be upper-class New York or working-class Berkshires,
whether the characters are men or women, whether the genre is a novel of manners in
high-society New York or an allegory of forbidden love in wintry (or summery) New
England—her characters are ultimately trapped by social circumstances beyond their
control or by moral circumstances of their own making. Existential entrapment defines
Edith Wharton‟s great fiction, connecting characters as unlike one another as Lily Bart
and Ethan Frome, or Newland Archer and Undine Spragg. In a sense, Wharton‟s great
novels are variations on a tragic theme. Wharton‟s targets are not so much the social
systems of New York or the Berkshires—though she carefully, subtly, sometimes
brilliantly critiques the shifting social and cultural dynamics in our society as few
American novelists have. Wharton is most concerned in her art with the hopelessness

of an individual‟s social and moral interactions with society—an issue as supremely
relevant in the early twenty-first century as it was when Wharton began publishing
novels a century ago.
It should come as no surprise that so many of Edith Wharton‟s characters are endowed
with an inherent need to somehow better their lives in one sense or another, be it
financially, emotionally, or intellectually. Already, Wharton is suggesting, these
characters seek some form of escape from their current lives. There is Undine Spragg,
for instance, who hopes to better her life in purely socio-economic terms as she
relentlessly climbs rung after rung up the social ladder. Similarly, Lily Bart‟s quest for
marriage is in fact a personal quest for social and emotional betterment from her “old
maid” situation. It is no coincidence, also, that many of Wharton‟s main characters take
refuge in books or libraries—Lawrence Selden fascinates Lily with his curious mind and
his great interest in books; Newland Archer‟s personal refuge is his own study and his
newly arrived shipments of books; Ralph splits his writing dreams between being a
great literary critic or a great poet; even Charity finds herself working idly in a public
library amidst the dusty, lonely stacks. So many of Wharton‟s characters are driven by
a conception that there is a better life, a better world, a better place beyond their current
circumstances. This is the seed that Wharton plants in virtually all the major characters
throughout her novels, allowing her to pit a character‟s dreams against a character‟s
realities.
Ethan Frome, like so many of Wharton‟s protagonists or main characters, is initially
driven by intellectual precocity—a curiosity to see the world outside his narrow slice of
society, to engage his mind in understanding the greater mysteries of the world, to be
“aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things” (EF 13). Early in Ethan
Frome, Wharton forcefully establishes Ethan‟s own sense that he might belong in a
place well outside the barrenness of Starkfield—in the opening pages of the story, old
Ethan surprises the narrator by showing an interest in a volume of popular science. We
soon discover that the young Ethan is attracted to a bigger world—in this case, to a
world of culture and ideas far removed from a difficult Berkshires life:

He had always wanted to be an engineer, and to live in towns, where there were
lectures and big libraries and “fellows doing things.” A slight engineering job, put
in his way during his period of study at Worcester, increased his faith in his ability
as well as his eagerness to see the world[.] (30)
The initial seeds of Ethan Frome‟s tragedy are planted in this inherent curiosity, this
belief in engaging with a world larger than Starkfield. Even after several long winters in
Starkfield, even after his troubles with Zeena begin, “[there] was in him a slumbering
spark of sociability which the Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished” (30). This
vibrant, youthful ambition in Ethan‟s character makes up the backbone against which
larger, more powerful social and moral forces will conspire. Wharton‟s very direct
establishment of Ethan Frome‟s hope to achieve a better life allows her to trap him
within the harsh reality of his circumstances, and his plight is all the more tragic
because it is set against a strong initial yearning to escape.
And Wharton provides for Ethan, as she does for so many of her protagonists, a social
background that colludes to fully ensnare him in circumstances that will powerfully
contribute to the absolute, nightmarish entrapment that closes the short novel. Ethan‟s
social circumstances, situations beyond his control, begin to pull him away from his
hopeful future as an engineer: “His father‟s death, and the misfortunes following it, put a
premature end to Ethan‟s studies” (13). On the heels of that sudden death, Ethan‟s
mother falls ill, and Wharton‟s language already begins to connect Ethan‟s social straits
with a foreboding sense of entrapment and isolation: “Left alone . . . to carry the burden
of farm and mill, he had no time for convivial loiterings in the village; and when his
mother fell ill the loneliness of the house grew more oppressive than that of the fields”
(29). Soon after, his marriage to the seemingly robust and caring Zeena—a woman
who “let her husband see from the first that life on an isolated farm was not what she
had expected when she married”—soon becomes an overwhelming form of
imprisonment for Ethan, as she refuses to move to larger towns “which looked down on
her,” and develops her morbid “sickliness” to which Ethan will forever feel chained (30).

The Wharton-constructed layers of singularly destructive social happenstance seem
almost designed to prevent Ethan from attaining any sense of personal escape.
It is amusing to see Lionel Trilling castigate Edith Wharton for inflicting what he believes
is unnecessary cruelty on her characters in Ethan Frome —for not endowing them with
the qualities necessary to break free of their limiting environments. In all the great
literature, Trilling argues—in Dickens and Joyce and Balzac and Dostoevsky, for
example—the literary protagonists are imbued with qualities that allow them, “by
courage and choice,” to break free of their “brute circumstances” (129). Wharton,
Trilling says, has neither the heart nor the morality to endow her characters with such
attributes. As a result, he believes, “one cannot fail to see [in Wharton] a limitation of
heart, and this limitation makes itself manifest as a literary and moral deficiency of her
work”:
Whenever the characters of a story suffer, they do so at the behest of the
author— the author must justify his cruelty by the seriousness of his moral
intention. The author of Ethan Frome . . . could not lay claim to any such
justification. Her intention in writing the story was not adequate to the dreadful
fate she contrived for her characters . . . [In Ethan Frome] a perpetuity of
suffering memorializes a moment of passion. It is terrible to contemplate, it is
unforgettable, but the mind can do nothing with it, can only endure it. [. . .] In the
context of morality there is nothing to say about Ethan Frome. It presents no
moral issue at all. (126)
Trilling harshly accuses Wharton of possessing a “limitation of the heart” and “moral
deficiency” because she has presented, in Ethan Frome, a brutish situation from which
the characters cannot extricate themselves. It should be worth noting, though, that
Trilling assumes great literature to only be “moral” when literary characters‟ destinies
are commensurate to facing down their social circumstances. That Trilling feels forced
to “endure” the sufferings of Ethan and Mattie and Zeena is unusual in its unwillingness
to accept the singularly existentialist design of Ethan Frome.

It would be incorrect, though, to say that Ethan Frome “presents no moral issue at all,”
because Ethan and Mattie‟s attempts to break free of their environment reflect a
distinctive morality of choice. As Edith Wharton encloses and isolates her characters
throughout all her novels from any sort of true personal freedom, she presents them
with a series of moral choices that might lead to freedom, to escape. It should be noted
that these choices are more often than not presented under the aegis of a potential
lover forbidden by society—an Ellen Olenska, a Lawrence Selden, a Mr. Royal, a
Mattie. Nevertheless, the moral choices any given character makes ultimately consigns
him or her to a fate of absolute entrapment. In Wharton, the morality behind the escape
only serves to trap her characters more completely.
After an evening alone with Mattie (a chaste evening, contrary to popular
misrepresentation), and after a returned Zeena drives home to him what his life has
become—and what the rest of his life might be—Ethan conceives of escaping with
Mattie, escaping from his circumstances forever:
He knew a case of a man over the mountain—a young fellow of about his own
age—who had escaped from just such a life of misery by going West with the girl
he cared for . . . Ethan was fired by the thought. Why should he not leave with
Mattie the next day, instead of letting her go alone? (54)
Ethan‟s burning desire to escape is palpable, and much of the suspense from here to
the end of the little novel revolves especially around our own hopes that Ethan will go
through with it. But Wharton has something else in store for us. As Ethan writes his
goodbye note to Zeena, his pen falters, and he runs through the moral consequences of
escaping. It is Ethan‟s consideration of those moral consequences, in a series of
spellbinding passages, that proves his undoing—his decision to seriously consider
Zeena‟s position as an abandoned wife, and his decision not to bilk the good neighbors
out of money, decides Ethan to forget any true attempt at escaping.

Ethan‟s moral decisions ultimately help to define his absolute entrapment. After
weighing the options—his responsibility to Zeena and the farm versus his moral
responsibility to not cheat the *neighbors out of money—Ethan decides that his
entrapment is inevitable:
With the sudden perception of the point to which his madness had carried him,
the madness fell and he saw his life before him as it was. He was a poor man,
the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and
destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so
only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him . . . He turned and walked
slowly back to the farm. (58-9)
Ethan‟s tough moral decisions, along with a punishing social environment, have led him
down the inexorable destiny of living a life of total entrapment, and as punishing as this
short novel can be, it must be read against the sincerely moral framework that ultimately
guides Ethan‟s decision.
The famous climactic sledding scene fits snugly into the thematic project of Wharton‟s
literature in that several of her characters have believed that suicide is the only way to
truly avoid their trapped circumstances. In The Custom of the Country, Ralph kills
himself when he discovers the one light in his life, his son Paul, has been snatched from
him. In The House of Mirth, whether Lily deliberately kills herself or not is less important
than the fact that her horrible plight impels her to her wrecked state, which in turn leads
to her death. In Ethan Frome, in a fit of passionate despair, Ethan assents to Mattie‟s
pleas to end their lives, and attempts to crash both of them into the giant oak at the
bottom of the hill. That the suicide attempt fails is significant—in Ethan Frome, even an
attempt to escape entrapment is impossible, and it only leads to a scarier, bleaker form
of entrapment than death. It is hardly the only point in her literature that Wharton
suggests that even entrapment cannot be escaped—but it is certainly the darkest.

Newland Archer is, perhaps, the Wharton character who has it all. In The Age of
Innocence, Wharton has endowed her protagonist with privileged social status,
enormous wealth, a position of power and respect within his community, and, in May
Welland, a beautiful, doting, and socially prominent fiancé and wife. Indeed, the
protagonists of Wharton‟s other novels seem to be seeking all the very things Newland
actually possesses—he has Ethan‟s education, Undine‟s social position and financial
security, and Lily‟s perfect marriage match. True to the nature of so many of Wharton‟s
characters, though, Newland seeks the thing he does not have, the thing he craves
more than anything he actually has in his life. The man who has everything, who
possesses all the “positive” attributes his society could possibly expect from anyone, is
inherently unhappy with his situation—in other words, Newland is a typical Wharton
protagonist. Newland Archer is trapped in the glittery, narrow-minded high-society
world in which he successfully lives and thrives, and The Age of Innocence is ultimately
about his attempts—significantly, his failed attempts—to escape the confines of this
claustrophobic universe. The major conflicts of the novel revolve around the personal,
moral tensions pulling Newland away from high-society New York and the social
circumstances that prevail in keeping him forever and permanently ensconced in the
world that he spends much of the novel attempting to escape.
Early in The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton establishes Newland Archer‟s personal
sense of entrapment, establishes clear motivations for his want—his need—to escape
from this world. His awareness of the narrowness of his society, of its artificial
constructions and customs, of its power to subsume any sense of true will and free
thinking—these dictate Newland‟s conception of the society into which he has been
born and raised. Newland regards May Welland, his bride-to-be, as the “terrifying
product of the social system he belonged to and believed in” (28). As he reflects on his
upcoming marriage, “with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what
most of the other marriages about him were; a dull association of material and social
interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other” (29).
And on the disconcerting “unreality” of the world he lives in, “they all lived in a kind of
hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but

only represented by a set of arbitrary signs” (29). Wharton‟s language endows Newland
with the sense of being trapped by the world and values in which he lives and follows—
a sense he shares prominently with Ethan Frome. Regarding what he sees as the
artifice of feminine purity, Newland “felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious
purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and
grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he
wanted, what he had a right to” (30, italics mine). The language of entrapment and
oppression and isolation pervades all of Wharton‟s literature, and Newland‟s self-
awareness of the hypocrisy and artifice and narrowness of his society is laced with such
familiar Wharton language.
It should come as no surprise that Wharton offers Newland his escape in the form of
Ellen Olenska. Wharton similarly tempts Ethan with escape in the form of Mattie, and
Lawrence Selden is Lily Bart‟s thrilling (though impossible) alternative to her confining
social set and circumstances. It is significant in Wharton‟s literature that the
protagonists‟ hope for escape is bound to their sense that that escape presents itself in
the form of love, or the hope for love. The qualities of a Mattie or a Selden represent
ideals of escaping one‟s current circumstances—Mattie is Ethan‟s alternative to a
barren existence and frigid wife while Selden‟s “republic of the spirit” reflects for Lily the
vibrancy and emotional potential of relationships wholly absent from the likes of an
arrangement with a Percy Gryce. For Newland, Ellen represents an intellectual and
cultural freedom from the narrow confines of New York society, and his love for her is
inextricably bound to his hope of forever escaping the hypocrisy and artifice to which he
feels trapped. In Ellen, Wharton provides Newland with an olive branch of sorts, the key
that would bring Newland the happiness and escape he craves.
Of course, Newland does follow his inclinations to escape that world, to leave with Ellen.
Yet Edith Wharton, true to her art, ensures that Newland‟s social circumstances will
never allow him to consummate his relationship with Ellen, will never allow him to break
free from his society. As in all of her great literature, Wharton imposes a set of powerful
social situations that will ultimately prevent Newland from living the life that he wants for
himself, the life outside of a society he hates; the social circumstances overpower

Newland‟s ability to escape his sense of entrapment. For example, Newland schedules
himself to travel down to Washington, D.C. with the specific intention of meeting Ellen.
He is wholly intent on these plans, even to the point of leaving his job and lying to his
wife—until, significantly, these plans are completely upset with the external social
happenstance of the Beauforts‟ financial scandal and Mrs. Manson Mingott‟s
subsequent illness. Furthermore, after Ellen Olenska‟s social ejection from the New
York circles—with an ironic going-away dinner party that seems to finalize Newland‟s
and Ellen‟s split while fully articulating the hypocrisy and surface polish of the world
Newland cannot seem to escape—Newland takes it upon himself to announce that he
will be taking time from his profession to travel, to escape the world he finds so
confining, perhaps to meet Ellen along the way. Wholly intent on pursuing these new
plans, to the point of confronting his own wife with his own inner thoughts and dreams
(amazingly), Wharton imposes social circumstances from which he will not be able to
escape, circumstances that will forever bind him, entrap him—May informs him quietly,
devastatingly of their pregnancy, and it begins to drive home into Newland that he will
not be able to travel, will not be able to escape.
What is so extraordinary about the social circumstances that Wharton imposes upon
Newland is not so much that they further bind him to the very situation he had hoped to
escape—this is to be expected by Wharton. What is so remarkable about these
external influences is that they serve as powerful reminders of how close Newland had
actually come to escaping while simultaneously exposing the very hypocrisy and artifice
that Newland despises about his society. They seal his fate inexorably while jarringly
reminding him why he has felt so trapped in the first place—the sense of entrapment
feels complete. Even the man who has everything is fully and absolutely trapped in
Wharton‟s literature.
In fact, the sheer scope of Wharton‟s vision of entrapment, witnessed powerfully in the
bleak ending of Ethan Frome and the tragic final moments of The House of Mirth, has
tremendous implications even on the vision of escape for Newland in The Age of
Innocence. Upon hearing of Mrs. Manson Mingott‟s sudden illness, the entire family

coalesces around the globular matriarch, giving Newland the opportunity to pick up
Ellen at the train station. In their carriage ride home, Newland implores Ellen to imagine
a life together, a life outside the confines of a constrictive society:
“I want—I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like
that [mistress]—categories like that—won‟t exist. Where we shall be simply two
human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and
nothing else on earth will matter.”
She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. “Oh, my dear—where is that
country? Have you ever been there?” [ . . .]
“Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?” he asked.
“For us? But there‟s no us in that sense! We‟re near each other only if we stay
far from each other. Then we can be ourselves.” (174-5)
The alternative, Ellen implies, the fantasy where Newland does escape from his social
circumstances, does run away with Ellen, does escape from his entrapment—this
alternative is an impossible reality, an alternative that, simply put, does not exist. In this
small exchange, Ellen realizes what Newland does not—were he to escape in the way
he imagines, they would be just as trapped. Wharton darkly implies, along with Ellen,
that had Newland escaped the society he despises, he would somehow be just as
trapped as if he had stayed put. Indeed, for Edith Wharton, there is no happy escape.
The bittersweet, enigmatic ending of The Age of Innocence suggests that Newland
Archer, trapped as he was by his society, was nevertheless content and satisfied with
the life he ended up leading. Unlike a Lily or an Ethan, Newland lives a long and happy
life with his wife and his children and his profession and his civic responsibilities. When
his wife has died, though, and when Newland finally has the chance, in the last
moments of the novel, to visit Ellen Olenska, to break free past all the entrapment that

defined his life—even then, the man who has everything and who could have more
decides that the life to which he was consigned, to which he was inexorably trapped, is
a life worth preserving.
In the remarkable The Custom of the Country, Wharton has devised a character,
Undine Spragg, absolutely hell-bent on breaking through entrapment—no matter the
social or moral cost. Indeed, one critic (and many others) regards Undine as a
“monstrosity” (Nevius x). Yet Wharton‟s attempt to portray a character who is ultimately
not trapped comes at an extremely high price. While Wharton finds sufficient motivation
for Undine‟s despicable and amoral behavior, she nevertheless seems uneasy with the
result. In depicting a character who achieves what her other characters cannot,
Wharton feels supremely uncomfortable with the final result, and this is reflected
intensely in the flawed art of The Custom of the Country. The Custom of the Country is
ultimately a flawed masterpiece because there seems a disconnect between the
seeming “success” Wharton has constructed for Undine and Wharton‟s ultimate inability
to escape her great theme—entrapment. In the final analysis, Wharton herself cannot
imagine any character completely breaking free of social suffocation. The Custom of
the Country is a magnificent example of Wharton‟s own struggle to break a protagonist
free of entrapment.
Wharton certainly sees a motivation for understanding Undine‟s monstrous behavior. In
the novel‟s important “custom of the country” conversation between Charles Bowen and
Mrs. Fairford, Wharton outlines two distinctive spheres for gender in America—the
women belong in the domestic sphere while the men belong firmly in the professional
sphere:
“Where does the real life of most American men lie? In some woman‟s drawing
room or in their [own] offices? The answer‟s obvious, isn‟t it? The emotional
centre of gravity‟s not the same in the two hemispheres . . . In America the real
crime passionnel is a „big steal‟—there‟s more excitement in wrecking railway
than homes.” (130)

If the real excitement, the real success, is to be found in the business world, then
Wharton outfits her heroine with all the traits of a business mentality. She believes that
it is just these business-minded traits that will provide the basis for Undine‟s
motivations, and will explain her consistently despicable actions. Significantly, though,
in order for her to break a woman free of entrapment, Wharton must endow Undine with
so-called “masculine” qualities. One wonders if Wharton had not taken the lengths to
shape Undine into more of a man, if Undine would be able to truly escape some of her
circumstances.
One critic, Susan Goodman, draws similar parallels between Undine‟s actions and
maneuvers and those of shrewd American businessmen:
Undine‟s keen sense of business, her lack of emotional coloration, her ability to plan
and focus on long-term goals, her social instinct, imitative ability, and singular lack of
altruism should guarantee her the type of success and power her father chases on Wall
Street . . . [yet] her energy must be contained within the embossed walls of the drawing
room—the only deals she can hatch are on the marriage market. (60)
Goodman senses in Undine a character whose traits belong more to the business
sphere than to the domestic sphere, and Wharton consistently draws those parallels
throughout the novel. It is no coincidence, for example, that many of Undine‟s
applications to her father for money take place in his Wall Street office. It is also no
coincidence that during these transactions or interactions, Moffat is also present,
seeming to lurk right behind Mr. Spragg‟s office door. Undine is consistently straddled
between the two spheres, and Wharton is sure that Undine‟s characterization as a
businesswoman on the marriage market will ensure her ultimate success in breaking
through her social limitations.
The disconnect, however, between the “reality” which Wharton is attempting to portray
in her novel and the “unreality” of the character she has constructed is suggested in

several critics‟ responses to Undine as “monstrous.” Far from creating a character who
can realistically escape her trapped circumstances, Wharton has devised a wholly
artificial creation in Undine whose “monstrosity,” whose sheer artificiality seems to grant
her escape—not any natural reality underlying her character. The somewhat unreal
portrayal of her protagonist reflects a considerable uncertainty, on Wharton‟s part, with
the conception of truly representing escape from entrapment. Wharton has little affinity
to, and perhaps no understanding of, any character able to escape absolute
entrapment—this is evident in the un-naturalness of the events and characters of The
Custom of the Country; events and characters simply feel more natural and real in
novels such as Ethan Frome or The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth.
That Wharton is supremely uneasy in granting this immoral and monstrous character
success is evident as Undine moves to aristocratic Europe. In a situation of her own
making, Undine becomes fully entrapped by the customs of the aristocratic European
country, stuck in a marriage where she is granted no control, and where she is rarely
allowed to leave the country estate. Wharton soon engulfs the reader in Undine‟s sense
of absolute entrapment, and one truly feels Undine‟s suffocation, as powerfully as one
felt Ethan‟s and Newland‟s similar sense of entrapment:
[More] and more, as the days passed, she felt herself in the grasp of
circumstances stronger than any effort she could oppose to them. The very
absence of external pressure, of any tactless assertion of authority on her
husband‟s part, intensified the sense of her helplessness. (316)
Wharton is most comfortable, as she is here, when she recognizes that her characters‟
own moral decisions have ensnared them into helpless, isolating situations—this
powerful passage, situated as it is after other passages that demonstrate Undine‟s
newfound helplessness in her European marriage, drives home Wharton‟s overriding
feeling that Undine has put herself in this suffocating situation. Indeed, the passage is
poignant in its ability to make the reader feel for the character‟s own entrapment, and
one almost senses that Wharton would feel perfectly comfortable allowing her heroine

to languish in this state until, perhaps, she were to commit suicide—the ultimate deed of
entrapment.
Instead, however, Wharton extricates Undine from this entrapment, and one senses a
real disconnect underlying Wharton‟s attempt to break Undine free from her
powerlessness. It is extremely telling, for instance, that the only way Wharton is able to
break Undine free from her totally isolating helplessness is to construct a magically
chance encounter with Moffatt—whom Undine would likely never have met again in
reality. The highly coincidental encounter between Undine and Moffatt is a blatant deus
ex machina—it is the only way Wharton could devise an escape for her heroine, the
only way she could even allow Undine to continue to her “success.” That a fictional
conceit is what ultimately rescues Undine is very revealing about Wharton‟s unease in
The Custom of the Country with truly constructing a novel in which a character breaks
free of her helpless social circumstances.
Indeed, even as Wharton endows Undine with the successful, happy ending—she
marries the ultra-wealthy business tycoon Moffatt, her first true love and a man who can
now provide her with literally anything—one senses that Wharton continues to ensnare
her with a sense of entrapment. In the case of Undine, she will simply never be
happy—she will feel forever trapped by her social “limitations.” The final lines of the
novel sees Wharton subtly trapping the character who broke free to succeed at all
costs:
But under all the dazzle a tiny black cloud remained. She had learned there was
something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor
millions could ever buy for her. She could never be an Ambassador‟s wife; and
as she advanced to welcome her first guest she said to herself that it was the
one part she was really made for. (372)
In this novel, as in all her novels, Wharton feels disconnected from any true and honest
sense of breaking through entrapment and isolation. One senses Wharton feels far

more comfortable trapping her characters in their moral and social dilemmas. Thus,
even in the novel in which Wharton constructs a character who actually does break free
of her social limitations—though without a sense of moral direction—she cannot fully
extricate Undine from a sense that she is trapped by a situation of her own moral
making.
It is this sense that makes The Custom of the Country a unique novel in the Wharton
oeuvre. While much of her work masterfully captures the tragedy of characters who are
simply stuck, whether of their own making or not, The Custom of the Country attempts
to get a character unstuck—though the price is extraordinary. Undine commits the most
atrocious “moral” acts in order to achieve her so-called “success”—but even that
success feels suffocating.
Lionel Trilling‟s belief that Edith Wharton‟s literature is plagued by “a limitation of heart”
that “manifests as a moral deficiency of her work” is possibly the worst thing any critic
can say about an artist, literary or otherwise. Great art and literature stand the test of
time precisely because they address, with a very beautiful heart, the underlying moral
dilemmas and themes that define the human relationship with society. Perhaps the
following statement by Trilling, as it stands alone, is more poignant in relation to
Wharton‟s thematic project: “It is terrible to contemplate, it is unforgettable, but the mind
can do nothing with it, can only endure it” (126). Indeed, Edith Wharton‟s extraordinary
literature of entrapment is unforgettable, and it is terrible to contemplate, but that is
precisely why it is truly moral.
The theme of entrapment throughout Wharton‟s oeuvre should not be overlooked as a
major thrust—perhaps the major thrust of Edith Wharton‟s fiction. It defines the
suffocating power, the tragic nature of her work. As one reads and watches Wharton‟s
major characters and protagonists totally unable to escape from their own social and
personal circumstances, the sadness and tragedy of that inability, constructed by
Wharton the writer, demonstrates a powerful understanding of certain impossibilities of
life.

Blake Nevius, the literary critic who seems to have come closest to understanding that
there is indeed a true unity to all Wharton‟s novels—not some anomalous, irreconcilable
dichotomy between the high-society New York works and the beautiful New England
works—speaks of Wharton in terms of her ability as an artist to test the limits between
individual freedom and a responsibility to social circumstances:
Whatever vitality and in part whatever weaknesses her fiction may possess are
inseparable from her doubts about her own thesis. She is constantly testing her limits,
seeking to extend them here and there, discovering that they have more resiliency than
she expected, but always finding an ultimate sanction for them at the point where they
were originally fixed . . . The peculiar form of tension in her stories can be traced to her
effort to mediate between desire and circumstance, between individual freedom and
responsibility. (Nevius 249).
Nevius understands that Wharton‟s art is defined by her attempts to understand the
position of the individual within the construct of a society, and that a “tension” exists in
her work between individual freedom and responsibility. In studying the literature of
Edith Wharton, the role of the critic should be to somehow unmask that tension.
In truth, there is an inescapably existentialist underpinning to Wharton‟s major novels,
as characters—individuals—struggle impossibly to transcend certain moral and social
paradigms. In the end, Wharton‟s art insists that the individual cannot escape the
awesome, oppressive construct of society—and that, often, the individual will be forever
trapped, regardless of his or her moral actions, and certainly without regard to his or her
social environment. That is a theme that has helped defined the role of the individual
throughout the 20 th century, and will continue to do so in the centuries ahead.

Cory Welch, the co-founder of The Journal of Critical Thinking and its co-executive
editor for the journal's inaugural volume, is a recent alumnus of Framingham State
College. He majored in Political Science and English, was a member of the Honors
Program, and is preparing to attend graduate school to study literature.

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