The Children by Edith Wharton
May 6th 2008 06:50
Edith Wharton is usually compared with Henry James and usually judged to be his inferior. I find her to be a much greater artist. In her best works, she can play on your emotions like a surgeon carelessly cutting open a heart. The House of Mirth is easily the most agonising novel I have ever read. Nothing happens in it but somehow the plight of Lily Bart put me under some heavy torture of shame and anger.
The House of Mirth is my favorite but I also like The Age of Innocence and The Reef well and Summer, Madame de Treymes and The Touchstone are satisfactory reads too. I began but couldn't finish The Custom of the Country but what I'd read I liked immensely.
So it was with eager anticipation that I picked her novel The Children. It's not usually available in bookstores or on the net but it's been reissued by Virago Modern classics in 1985.
The Children has a delightful plot which promises much. It tells the story of a man in his forties, Martin Boynewho is on a cruise ship between Algiers and Venice. He is going to meet an old acquaintance in the hope that this encounter might turn more romantic. On the train he meets a bunch of unruly children manned by the eldest, the fifteen year old Judith. The children belong to his old friends. the Wheaters, who lead a very Bohmeian lifstyle and Martin is drawn into this gypsy like wonderland.
Wharton usually projected her own fear of sex onto her main protagonists(male or female) and the conflict of her novels is usually between the sexual innocence and the consequential powerlessness of the protogonists and the rapacious power used and enjoyed by those who have knowledge of sex, whether it's the other characters or the broader society. Martin, in this sense, is a standard Wharton hero: virginal, aged and not into that and he is educated by the contact of a fifteen year old who seems to know more about sex and life than him.
This would have been delightful if it had the same limbre, supple touch that marks the prose of The Reef or The Age of Innocence but Wharton was trying out the Jamesian technique of avoiding the important moments and trying to imply things through overwrougt descriptions of the secondary and the inconsequential minutiae. It never worked for James and it doesn't work for her. Consequently, all her characters suffer. She has a gaggle of children to cuten up the proceedings but she can't make any of them stick in memory (unlike say an Ann Tyler would). Her heroine, Judith is more of an intention than a fully realised character.
I knew that as she aged, Edith had become more and more bitter and her writing suffered for it and in The Children, you can feel some heavyhanded bitterness color the portrayal of the Wheater family. Sadly, it is not far off from some caricature you will find in the European media about the American tourists.
The Children should have been a handsome cap to an important career but it only showcases the declining powers of Edith Wharton.
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