Edith Wharton - “A Lady Doesn’t Write” - A BBC2 ‘Bookmark’ Documentary narrated by Ian Holm

[Music] edith wharton has been not popular for a long time because she committed the i mean the way i've seen it is that she committed the unforgivable sin you can you can kill somebody you can do all kinds of things but if you're a snob we don't forgive that i have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms there is the hall through which everyone passes in going in and out the drawing room where one receives formal visits [Music] the sitting room where the members of the family come and go as they list but beyond that far beyond our other rooms the handles of whose doors are never turned no one knows the way to them no one knows whether they lead and in the innermost room the holy of holies the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes no one before her and i'm not sure about after her no one before her had ever described portrayed the position of women in american society the the status of women the way they're treated what is expected of them and to put it into the single figure she used most often life for the american woman was a prison it was an entrapment and there's no there was no escape from it named after the building and housed our first government federal homes now remember i'm not talking about our fifth president i'm not talking about our 30th president of talking about our first that's what makes this spot so historically significant in history [Music] edith wharton grew up in the world of uneasy affluence and double values in late 19th century new york adultery and divorce were not unthinkable but they were certainly not discussed at the dinner table neither was writing edith warden guilty of these very indiscretions exiled herself to france in 1913 but she returned again and again to her memories of old new york she was born in 62 so uh 62 up to 1880. uh new york was still more or less dominated by what they called an old knickerbocker society which were families that had been there back into the 18th century who led la other leisurely lives not very active in business usually had a certain amount of inherited property mostly real estate and enjoyed the income from that and it was a quiet leisurely genteel rather static society what she called the age of innocence and of course it came into conflict with the uh the new fortunes that grew out of the post-civil war era they had to build schools and all the rest enormous fortunes dwarfing anything any old new yorker had at all and with the exception of the asters who owned a great deal of the city tell me have you always lived in new york no we're originally from west virginia ah i was super very poor you know when i was young right after the civil war you know we had a walk well right after that we had nothing mother used to cry because we couldn't buy new curtains and papa he used to always say the old men made money while the young men got killed well after it was all over we moved to new york and papa got rich on the pacific railroad or something and we got a house on madison avenue only as soon as we moved in mother realized no one lives on madison avenue anymore we're in the middle of woodlawn cemetery which is up in the bronx north of new york and if you if you want to see the great social change in new york you can see it all around you here the people around are the the stock shysters the the people who did the stock market scams and the rest of it and also the woolworths who built respectable shops they're also the macy's with department stores and the vanderbilts some of the families who had made sudden money in new york city in the 19th century and they wanted to show it boy did they want to show it they imported every kind of wonderful mausoleum they imported chapels from france they built themselves egyptian temples and this was when they were dead alive they merely wanted chateaus on fifth avenue and this of course was an extraordinary social comedy for wharton to observe and one with a great deal of pain in it it's the point at which an entire social class is buying its way into another class where values are clashing and where the daughters of the old guard are almost up for sale edith wharton was born edith newbold jones the youngest child of a family of impeccable pedigree the finest and most saleable old new york stock but however old or new the money was it was spent in the same places manhattan during the winter months and newport rhode island during the summers where new york fortunes of whatever vintage were spent on [Music] history cottages so once you go beyond this portal it is here 1891 and you'll be encountering many members of the astor family their domestics and of course their guests now they all think that you are all members of the 400 which is america's first social register that was established by the mrs astor the queen of american society and being a member of the 400 simply means that you have three generations of wealth in your family and you've never worked a day in your life so enjoy it while you can because it only lasts for 45 minutes and if there are no further questions all right i'll show you in right now this way well the 400 was supposedly in the 1890s the number of people who could fit in mrs astor's ballroom and uh therefore that represented the so-called cream of society and ward mcallister was a famous silly old ass uh used to draw up lists of uh uh who we thought were the the eligible to join the 400 and it became a famous phrase this is my mother mrs caroline webster's germanhorn astor the mrs astor the queen of american society but now this gown though this gown is absolutely exquisite it's breathtaking you see the bodice is black velvet the skirt is black satin the embroidery is done with 14 karat gold thread and the lace is encrusted with emerald rubies diamonds pearls and sapphires and the entire gown only weighs 40 pounds my mother did though pay 30 000 for this gown she's worn it once [Music] there was even one society matron who was driven almost to suicide because she couldn't have a seat at mrs astor's ball the ball of the great social dragon mrs astor on the divine with mrs astor where everybody wanted to be and nobody could ever dare tell her that this was because her hips were too wide she didn't fit well it was a society that seemed to be basically mostly on amusement and uh mrs chandler said in her book that they would the 400 would would run in a stampede to get away from from an artist or a writer or a clever frenchman [Music] mr minden crossing his marble hall between goddesses whose disabil was still slightly disconcerting to his traditions stepped out on the terrace above the cliffs the scene to mr minden's imagination never lost the keen edge of its costliness he had yet to learn millicent's trick of regarding a newport villa as a mere pierretere but he could not help reflecting that after all it was to him she owed her fine sense of relativity there are certain things one must possess in order not to be awed by them and it was he who had enabled millicent to take a newport villa for granted at length he decided to go and play with the little girls but on entering the nursery he found them dressing for a party they took no notice of him and he crept downstairs again his study table was heaped with bills and as it was bad for his digestion to look over them after luncheon he wandered on into the other rooms he did not stay long in the drawing room it evoked too vividly the evening hours when he delved for platitudes under the inattentive gays of listeners who obviously resented his not being somebody else [Music] the sight of the dining room increased his depression by recalling the long dinners where with the pantry draft on his neck he languished between the dullest women of the evening he turned away but the ballroom beyond roused even more disturbing associations an orchestra playing all night mr minden crept to bed at 11 carriages shouted for under his windows and tomorrow like the day after an earthquake in the library he felt less irritated but not more cheerful mr minden had never quite known what the library was for it was like one of those mysterious ruins over which archaeology endlessly disputes it could not have been intended for reading since no one in the house ever read i cannot remember a time when i did not want to make up stories my first attempt at the age of 11 was a novel which began oh how do you do mrs brown said mrs tompkins if only i had known you were going to call i should have tidied up the drawing room timorously i submitted this to my mother and never shall i forget the sudden drop of my creative frenzy when she returned it with the icy comment drawing rooms are always tidy as a child she liked to write and was told that it was not permissible and the only way she ever was able to do it was she got the people in the kitchen to give her old brown wrapping paper and she would write on that to the end of her life she rose early in the morning had a breakfast brought into her in bed and wrote from six till 11 in her bedroom where no one saw her because a lady does not write this is a nice chemise danita this would have been of course the first thing that someone of edith wharton's generation would have worn like the precursor of the slip back in the 1860s one french doctor described the chemise as being like the white symbol of a woman's modesty but of course by this time just already by the 1870s it's already all decorated with blue ribbons and the lace inserts so it's a much sexier garment than it used to be the new york mothers of that day usually gave a series of coming out entertainments for debutant daughters leading off the huge tea and expensive ball my mother thought this absurd she said her daughter could meet all the people she need know without being advertised by general entertainment and as my family kept open house and as the younger of my two brothers was very popular in society it was easy enough to launch me in this informal way i was therefore put into a low-necked bodies of pale green brocade above a white muslin skirt ruffled with rows and rows of valencian my hair was piled up on top of my head some friend of the family sent me a large bouquet of lilies of the valley and thus adorned i was taken by my parents to a ball at mrs morton's in fifth avenue de tocqueville when he arrived in the 1840s said that he had never found anywhere in the world when the worlds of men and the worlds of women were so separate and as the century went on this became a kind of pathology and you could not not play the social game because it was the one thing that you had so every rule became desperately important and who is this this is my new pupil mrs palmer miss annabelle's and george sin george yes sir no it's not a name i'm familiar with cost is terrible you have matrons in newport in their grand mansions in their grand social order who knew exactly when to leave calling cards and when to turn the corner down and when not who were taking hash in order to get through the day who were taking plural hydrate or chloroform to get through the day whose lives were so limited and so brutally constricted by the very social rules that mattered to the fortunes they were preserving as well i wish i had a dollar for every time that i've heard someone talk about scarlett o'hara getting laced up and people cringing at the size of the tiny corsets because most of them aren't really that small at all you almost never see anything smaller than 18 inches and there are plenty which are between 20 and 30 inches in the waist the course it really sort of served a dual function on the one hand it enhanced your feminine beauty because it emphasized the hourglass curves but it was also regarded as a necessity if you're going to be respectable so that if a woman was straight laced then she couldn't be loose morally that was the idea houses with ballrooms were still a few in new york almost the only ones were those are the asters the martians the belmonts and uh my cousins the shama horns as a rule hostesses who wished to give a dance hired the ballroom at del monaco's restaurant that my mother would never have consented to by making my first appearance in a public room so to mrs morton's we went to me the evening was a long cold agony of shines all my brother's friends asked me to dance but i was too much frightened to accept and cowered beside my mother in speechless misery soon after her her coming out party which was very painful for her she was shy she didn't like it but she went through it survived it and soon after that she met a young man named harry stevens who was the son of a very famous socialite of the new breed uh marietta stevens and they uh they they got along famously in harry pursued her in new york and again in newport and i think even in bar harbor and an engagement was announced and then uh very surprisingly it was called off the only reason assigned for the breaking of the engagement hitherto existing between harry stevens and miss edith jones is an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride miss jones is an ambitious author and it is said that in the eyes of mr stevens ambition is a grievous fault and then soon after that she met a young man named walter berry some years older very elegant and very intelligent the first sort of literate cultivated person she'd known they spent a summer in some proximity and she i think hoped he would propose to her he was not the marrying kind then or ever and he did not propose to her frederick king uh edith wharton's cousin who became her executor told me once that uh waldenberry used to yawn in your face when you talk to him and he made it awfully clear that nobody was quite good enough for him according to her she owed him an enormous amount that he she really got her started on writing and that he advised her and helped her underwriting all during her life the some of her friends notably percy lubbock claimed that he was a dry and uh supercilious dilite and that his effect on her writing and on herself uh if if any attorney would have been to the bad [Music] on the whole he knew no one better fitted to deal with the unexpected than mrs furvane she excelled in the rare art of taking things for granted and thursday felt a pardonable pride in the thought that she owed her excellence to his training early in his career thursday had made the mistake at the outset of his acquaintance with a lady of telling her that he loved her and exacting the same a vowel in return the latter part of that episode had been like the long walk back from a picnic when one has to carry all the crockery one has finished using it was the last time thursday ever allowed himself to be encumbered with the debris of a feast he thus incidentally learned that the privilege of loving her is one of the least favors that a charming woman can accord he had taught a good many women not to betray their feelings but he had never had such fine material to work with [Music] walter berry receded disappointingly into the distance although he remained a lifelong friend his place at the altar beside edith jones was taken instead by a gentleman from boston edward robbins wharton their wedding in 1885 was described by the new york times as quiet edith had no bridesmaids and her mother omitted her name from the wedding invitation years later henry james said to a friend it must come to edith that years ago she did an utterly inconceivable thing in marrying teddy wharton and yet at the time that was what the young woman was supposed to do he was a very eligible man and that even she wasn't supposed to be pursuing a career in letters she was supposed to be getting married she was um 23 i think which was a lot older then than it is now a young woman in new york could regard herself as really almost on the shelf when she was 23. and but i think she very much wanted to get away get out of the home get away from her mother and be on her own mr water was perfectly respectable he's rather nice looking he was a goody 13 years older than her and he had no particular occupation and he was perfectly willing to do anything that she wanted i think you could see it he was eligible he was there he wasn't out she obviously wasn't passionately in love with him and she didn't have any idea uh of how shallow and neurotic and difficult and rather pathetic a person he was if you were female and you were born around the turn of the century or before one of the things uh that would be your sociological truth would be that you would not be educated very much in addition you would know nothing about sex and you weren't really supposed to learn anything about sex this was a real crux for many of edith wharton's characters their ignorance uh even after marriage because men are not always considerate lovers so many women who had been married and had children knew nothing whatever about what i understand the chinese call high tide which is i think a lovely way to describe orgasm my heart beating wildly i asked my mother what marriage was really like but i've never heard such a ridiculous question i'm afraid mama i want to know what will happen to me you've seen enough pictures and statues in your life haven't you noticed that men are made differently from women yes well then if i haven't say don't ask me any more silly questions you can't be as stupid as you pretend she said is that her mother's failure to give her even the rudiments of a sexual education falsified and misdirected her whole life well that may be exaggerated but falsified and misdirected the start of her uh married life there's no doubt about it [Music] lance end thanks to my late cousin's testamentary discernment my husband and i had been able to buy a home of our own at newport it was an ugly wooden house with half an acre of rock and illimitable miles of atlantic ocean for as its name land's end denoted it stood on the edge of rhode island's easternmost cliffs and our windows looked straight across to the west coast of ireland i disliked the relaxing and depressing climate and the vapid watering place amusements in which the days were wasted but i loved land's end with its windows framing the endlessly changing moods of the misty atlantic and the night long sound of the surges against the cliffs [Music] she wrote a friend and quoting from goethe in fact but in english it was two souls have i had two souls what she meant then was the writer and the and the housekeeper and she had those those two souls and and she had a european and an american soul you might almost say a passive and an active soul if she had a masculine and a feminine soul for that matter newport remained the wharton summer residents throughout the 1890s and their marriage was placid companionable and childless during these years edith wharton took her first steps beyond the pale of polite society by beginning tentatively to submit her poetry and short stories for publication but any real progress made towards the life of a professional writer was delayed by a series of nervous breakdowns warden was subjected to a number of fashionable treatments but only extended absences from society provided her with any relief society however was where her husband felt at home though the trials of married life have been classified and catalogued with exhaustive accuracy there is one form of conjugal misery which has perhaps received inadequate attention and that is the suffering of the versatile woman whose husband is not equally adapted to all her moods scant justice has for instance been done to the misunderstood wife whose husband persists in understanding her mrs federal as wives go had been fairly exempt from trials of this nature for her husband if undistinguished by pronounced brutality or indifference had at least the negative merit of being her intellectual inferior what she most suffered from was his fatuous approval the maddening sense that however she conducted herself he would always admire her it was in part the attempt to escape this persistent approbation that had driven mrs federal to authorship she had fancy that even the most infatuated husband might be counted on to resent at least negatively an attack on the sanctity of the hearth these hopes featherell's attitude had already defeated he read the book with enthusiasm he pressed it on his friends he sent a copy to his mother and his very soul now hung on the verdict of the reviewers probably mrs edith wharton is the most distinguished of the crop of latter-day metropolitan authors some critics have said that mrs wharton's weakness is in the depicting of masculine character her men are subtle and complex ladies wearing mustaches this may lead one to wonder whether the fault is with mrs wharton's power of characterization or in the material she has for study [Music] scribners published her first collection in 1899 and it was called the greater inclination and it was a collection of short stories she was paid a 10 royalty which would be typical of authors today and uh the book sold in the end some 3 000 copies which is just about exactly what a book of short stories a first book of short stories would sell today by a talented writer like edith wharton nonetheless she immediately complained that the book was under advertised that scriveners had lost a chance to capitalize on the good reviews and in the background like a greek chorus was her husband teddy wharton uh immediately uh encouraging her to leave scribners for another publisher and her trusted friend and advisor walter berry who somewhat more diplomatically suggested that she simply in the future play one publisher off against another always striking out for more each time well in the history of scribner's relationship with edith wharton it is clear she learned her lesson well from walter berry for that is precisely what she she did thereafter she was a very shrewd [Music] businesswoman i am hearing a great deal of praise for the greater inclination mrs wharton's new collection of short stories brought out by scriptures a few weeks ago it's very generally regarded as one of the most promising books by a new writer of fiction published here in many years she said by the way not to relish the frequent references made by her readers to her indebtedness to mr henry james so her next book will probably not be marked by her adherence to the methods of a very questionable literary model edith wharton is always held up against henry james and found wanting to me the two are totally different james being much more concerned with the psychological aspects of life and wharton as i say always insisting almost in a deterministic way on your actual worldly situation and how it affects you she learned a lot of craftsmanship from henry james no doubt so did hemingway so did many another later writer but and she seemed to deal to some extent with the same social world and with the international routine moving back and forth between new york and paris and london but she had for one thing a much cleaner sense of social change of social history than james ever had he understood the big myths that were working out in history but not actual social change she was superb on that mrs archer who was fond of coining her social philosophy into axioms had once said we all have our pet common people and though the phrase was a daring one its truth was secretly admitted in many in exclusive bosom but the beauforts were not exactly common some people said they were even worse the question was who was beaufort he passed for an englishman was agreeable handsome ill-tempered hospitable and witty he had come to america with letters of recommendation from old mrs manson mingott's english son-in-law the banker and it speedily made himself an important position in the world of affairs but his habits were dissipated his tongue was bitter his antecedents were mysterious and when medora manson announced her cousin's engagement to him it was felt to be one more act of folly in poor medora's long record of imprudences but folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom and two years after young mrs beaufort's marriage it was admitted that she had the most distinguished house in new york part of the reason that she's been out of fashion is that she was a snob there's no question she was a difficult person i i was talking to my aunt who who knew her um recently about her and she said that there was something terrifying terrifying about edith warden of course my aunt was very young at the time but that there she was never mean that there was a big difference that she was just she knew exactly what she wanted she had a a standard of excellence that was very fierce and part of that standard was that she was an extraordinary friend she was my close friend of my grandmother's and demonstrated friendship all the time she i guess she was pretty careful who she chose to be a friend but once she was your friend you could count on her people who knew it's less well did not like it once if you hadn't gone through that barrier she could be chilly she could be sarcastic and uh she used to explain it to herself by saying that she was so shy that she was terribly shy but of course uh her exterior was rather glacial and magnificent and people didn't assume that she was shy at all they just thought that she was being aloof standoffish snobbish and sometimes downright rude wharton's newfound confidence and success as an author enabled her to build herself a house in the massachusetts countryside from which distance the new york society in which she found it impossible to live could safely be contemplated and set down on paper the month represented the culmination of her long-standing interest in matters decorative and architectural it was close to her ideal close to her heart and conceived entirely without her husband's counsel the deed for the property is signed only by edith wharton teddy's name does not appear obviously though he knew about it and agreed to it um he would not have particularly at that point in their relationship ever wanted to disagree with edith wharton about anything that she wanted to do he was totally dedicated to fulfilling her every wish when edith finally finished the house and and decorated the interior afforded her the opportunity now to invite all the people that she wanted to have in her social circle which she called her inner circle and it were it was people like henry james walter barry people who she got along with intellectually as well as personally and she had never had that kind of control over her daily life before that's probably why during her time here she was able to produce some of her greatest work she was extraordinarily productive [Music] it is too soon to say that the house of mirth will take its place with the great works of fiction it is not too soon to recognize its veracity its power its art mrs wharton makes no concession to the optimistic mood which is supposed to dominate american readers and no evasion of the inexorable logic of life she rises to a height not only far beyond the reach of her earlier work but where only a few of her contemporaries can find place with her wharton herself and a very interesting letter to one of her readers of the of the house of birth said that she was only trying to lift a little corner of the garment of what we call society uh and and in a sense expose that society later in a more uh uh i think in a deeper moment she said that a people can be judged uh and a frivolous topic can be important if you if you judge that people uh and that topic by what that frivolity can destroy uh and the answer is the figure of sacrifice the answer is uh her lily bart she had a few handsome dresses left survivals of her last phase of splendor the remaining dresses though they had lost their freshness still kept the long and airing lines the sweep and amplitude of the great artists stroke and as she spread them out on the bed the scenes in which they had been worn rose vividly before her an association lurked in every fold each fall of lace and gleam of embroidery was like a letter in the record of her past she was startled to find how the atmosphere of her old life enveloped her but after all it was the life she had been made for every dawning tendency in her had been carefully directed toward it all her interests and activities had been taught to center around it she was like some rare flower grown for exhibition a flower from which every bud had been nipped she put back the dresses one by one laying away with each some gleam of light some note of laughter some stray waft from the rosy shores of pleasure lily bart as much best we understand her was brought up much as edith jones had been brought up believing in the uh the uh goal of the young woman was to marry well she almost marries an american millionaire but she can't quite put up with him but she does believe that that even though she herself is not not very wealthy lily bart that by dressing well and acting well and poisoning herself well as she takes her seat and so on she can win when went her way but she can't quite do it i think this is part of the this is where another part of edith wharton comes lily bart cannot quite sell herself out the way she's been taught to do and that's her destruction the house of mirth she made an absolute fortune my great-grandfather i think wrote her in a letter that never in his experience had a book sold more briskly it was published in 1905 is that correct i'm a little hazy on dates she wrote so many books but 1905 house of mirth uh she made the equivalent today in pre-tax dollars of a million dollars on the house of mirth i mean it would be in a league with uh jacqueline suzanne or or sydney sheldon or any great commercial or stephen king i mean she would cringe at these analogies but my point is that these were sales and royalties equivalent to a great commercial writer not a quote-unquote literary writer with the coming of real success um teddy began very understandably from my point of view to get edgy and restless to go off more and more often on his hunting trips and and fishing trips uh and to be harder to deal with and to get insomnia and finally over the next years became really what we'd call a manic depressive long periods freezing melancholy followed by kind of madness and finally to the point where he embezzled 50 000 of her money and set up a housekeeping in boston with a mistress but that was the later later part of the marriage she seems to have been somebody that resisted the the the council or even the urge i think she woke up to the fact that she'd married an ass and she wasn't going to take his advice on anything but that i don't i mean her commitment was took her marriage about to stay with him and to look after him that's what she believed in and that's what she found uh it took a long time she didn't have a as far as we know her only extramarital affair until she was 47 years old and that was that was that was almost 20 years after she married was that wharton fullerton that was morton fullerton [Music] february 21st 1908 the other night at the theater when you came into the box i felt for the first time that indescribable current of communication flowing between myself and someone else felt it i mean uninterruptedly securely so that it penetrated every sense and every thought and i said to myself this must be what happy women feel morton fullerton was invited here by edith wharton at the urging or at i might say the introduction of henry james who suggested and urged her to receive him and he came and visited her at the mount and the two of them as was typical of edith he was invited on a motor flight in the afternoon to go off with a picnic and travel through the countryside and during the course of this particular mode of flight uh i think that edith became wharton became aware of the fact that this was a man who had more to offer her than pure intellectual challenge [Music] 20th april 1908 nothing else lives in me but you i have no conscious existence outside the thought of you the feeling of you i who dominated life stood aside from it so how i am humbled absorbed without a shred of will or identity left all i want is to be near you to feel my hands in yours was a small man a trivial man in many ways but henry james liked him enormously but he was in trouble with both sexes he was uh he was bisexual and uh he got in uh he got in bad trouble with women and with men he was he was rather what they would think what they call a cat april 1910 i seem not to exist for you i don't understand if i could lean on some feeling in you a good and loyal friendship if there's nothing else then i could go on bear things write and drench my life i don't know what you want or what i am you write to me like a lover you treat me like a casual acquaintance which are you what am i my life was better before i knew you she was unhappy in a straight extra-marital relationship she was brought up to not to believe in that she felt and said somehow that any love meaning heterosexual love relationship outside of marriage is unsatisfactory that's old new york speaking through edith wharton and she felt that way about fullerton that's one of those several reasons that it came to an end dear mr fullerton you have if they still survive a few notes and letters of no value to your archives but which happen to fill a deplorable lacuna in those of their writer i shall be in paris on monday next the 21st for a day only and i right to ask if you'd be kind enough to send them to me that day yours sincerely e wharton morton fullerton never did return her letters their relationship ceased to be sexual in 1910 but trailed on in a muted fashion for the rest of her life edith wharton was left with the remnants of a marriage that had become by 1911 somewhat impolite that was the worst moment in terms of exchanges of accusations and all that it was also the moment when she wrote the story ethan throne which was it came out about that time then ethan fromm is set in a rural section of massachusetts in starkville massachusetts and his country people and yet it's deeply reflecting her own life she changed the genders around as she did more often in other words she deals with a a person who's very unhappily married and is in love with somebody else but staying with teddy for the moment teddy appears as edith wharton's wife zenobia who is full of complaints and accusations and the claims of being misunderstood and mistreated and to some extent edith wharton puts herself into the figure of ethan from and the the drama is extremely intense could be stirring in that silent house he heard a step on the stairs and again for an instant the thought of tramps tore through him then the door opened and he saw his wife against the dog background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular one hand drawing a quilted counter pain to her flat breast while the other held a lamp the light on a level with her chin drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high bone face under its ring of crimping pins to ethan still in the rosy haze of his hour with matty the site came with the intense precision of the last dream before waking he felt as if he had never before known what his wife looked like she realized they had no future here to at all in fact she told teddy to do what he would what he wanted to with the mount and she returned to paris on um of course sailed to paris and she asked him though not to make any final decision until she arrived in paris it was very distressing to her to receive a telegraph from him while she was at sea that he had sold them out edith who was not uh beyond telling little untruths pretended she didn't know anything about it and that teddy did it behind her back but he didn't he he was he was she gave him the authority to do it nonetheless it was a terrible loss to her this wonderful place where she had come into herself and and meanwhile she she heard on all sides that teddy was dashing around europe with one woman and another so she did got documents uh proving his uh moments of infidelity and submitted him to a court in paris and she's granted a decree i always loved the wording of the decree because he had engaged vandalism not only in london but in monte carlo he had been misbehaving himself so she was she was free her marriage had been too concrete and misery to be surveyed philosophically her husband's personality seemed to be closing gradually in on her obscuring the sky and cutting off the air till she felt herself shut up among the decaying bodies of her starved hopes a sense of having been decoyed by some old world conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair if marriage was the slow lifelong acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance then marriage was a crime against human nature she's a woman who wasn't meant to be happy if you look at some of the early photographs the starved look of the look of the hunger for love that one can see on edith wharton's face but you also see an extremely intense child you see the brow furrowed you see the intensity you see the rigidity of her body as she stands in these poses at various moments in her life so that she really was a woman who wasn't meant to be happy but then she made something complex and beautiful out of her life there's an idea of women's lives the unchronicled story of women's lives and women women who didn't know uh when they passed from their beds to their graves and in a sense this is very much what wharton says at the beginning of a backward glance she talks about the the story that won't be spoken the stories of the women and her family uh the stories that she won't know edith wharton is currently and i'm very happy to see it happen currently a rather a heroine of american literary feminists she herself was not an ideological feminist in any way in fact when she met ideological feminists once or twice especially in england in the late 20s and 30s she rather steered clear at them they they put her off or bored her she was a feminist in the basic sense which is that i what is a feminist really it's a person who thinks that women matter who thinks that women matter as much as men matter and to me that's the basic definition of a feminist her politics would not have made us happy today but she certainly thought that women mattered and because she did she wrote novels that matter to women now the sale of the month and the divorce from teddy made an end to edith wharton's american life in france the gays she still trained on old new york softened the age of innocence for which he won the pulitzer prize in 1921 was a gentle tragedy not of death but of disappointment and the buccaneers which he left unfinished was a fairy tale of loveless marriage and female sacrifice wharton died in 1937 and was buried alone in a double plot in the cemetery in versailles near the grave of walterbury [Music] and so death is not the end after all in sheer gladness she heard herself exclaiming aloud have you never really known what it is to live the spirit of life asked her i have never known she replied that fullness of life which we all feel ourselves capable of knowing though my life has not been without scattered hints of it like the scent of earth which comes to one sometimes far out at sea so you

Channel: LEMAN PRODUCTIONS ARCHIVE

Views: 70,720

Rating: 4.8678899 out of 5

Keywords: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, The Fullness of Life, The Buccaneers, The Line of Least Resistance, Ethan Frome, Henry James, John Singer Sargent, Pulitzer, Ian Holm, Irene Worth, Leman Productions Archive, Vanderbilt, Ward Astor, The Astor Family, The 400, The Newport Daily News, Walter Berry, Munsey's Magazine, Charles Scribner, Literary World, Feminist Writers, Hemingway, BBC Bookmark, BBC Films, BBC Arts, Outlook Magazine, Who Painted The Skating Minister?

Id: Fucxnpp-Agg

Length: 49min 16sec (2956 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021