In treating marriage negatively and divorce positively, Wharton was, from her first novel, setting herself against popular gender ideology. As Kelly Mayhew writes in "The Discourse of Motherhood: Maternity in Wharton, Woolf, Morrison and Shelley," "there was a social movement to remind women of their 'proper place' in society as contented wives and mothers" (37). Mayhew argues that "the goal of this movement was to divert women's attention away from examining their own political subordination" (37); an unfortunate consequence of the movement was the stunting of women's personal and intellectual growth, thus facilitating their continued subordination. Lily Bart, the tragic protagonist of The House of Mirth, provides a perfect illustration of the consequences of the marriage-centered training of women. Perfectly aware, as Lawrence Selden puts it, that marriage is her "vocation" and what "[women like her] are brought up for" (House 9), she is "so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate" (House 7). That fate is to either find a husband on whom she can depend, or to perish in the attempt. Unfortunately for Lily, her inability to survive without some male protector is accompanied by enough sensitivity to make her resist the oppressions of marriage. "She might have married more than once--the conventional rich marriage which she had been taught to consider the sole end of existence--but when the opportunity came she had always shrunk from it" (House 156). In the end, Lily dies, alone and poverty-stricken as a result of her inability to marry. This, and her failure to unite with Lawrence Selden, seem tragic until one considers the examples of marriage Wharton presents. In light of those examples, Lily may, in fact, be better off dead.
In The House of Mirth, the uneasy marriage of the Dorsets provides the example of the oppressiveness of marriage and the desirability of divorce. George and Bertha Dorset exist in an uneasy union maintained by deception on her side and ignorance on his: the cruel, unfaithful Bertha "delights in making people miserable, and especially poor George," but "doesn't dare lose her hold on him on account of the money, and so when he isn't jealous she pretends to be" (House 44). The marriage, useful as it is for Bertha, requires constant subterfuge. For George, it is a misery from which he eventually becomes desperate to escape, and to which he must be reconciled by his wife with yet more deception (House 201-9). Marriage in The House of Mirth, therefore, is a mercenary institution, and one that requires scheming and deception to maintain.
The Dorsets' example is an extreme one, lacking as it is in anything approaching genuine affection or attachment, but no less oppressive is the love-match marriage of Newland Archer and May Welland in The Age of Innocence. The Archers' story, in fact, may be more alarming in its way, since it suggests that even the best of intentions and most respectful and affectionate of beginnings cannot redeem marriage from its oppressiveness. No mercenary considerations or actual infidelity mar this union, and yet one imagines that even without the specter of Ellen Olenska between them, Newland and May’s marriage is doomed to oppress them, not enhance their lives. How could it not, when "in future many problems would thus [through his wife's ignorant disapproval] be negatively solved for [Newland]” and “May's pressure was...bearing on the very angles he most wanted to keep" (Age 204), wearing down the very aspects of his personality that Newland considers most essential to his sense of self?
The Age of Innocence, an elegy to the "old New York" in which Wharton grew up, takes place in a society in which divorce was strongly discouraged, preventing Newland from regaining his freedom through divorce, as the unconventional Ellen Olenska attempts to do. Her desire for divorce is presented clearly as a desire for her freedom. It is clear that in leaving her European husband and returning to New York, Ellen has freed herself in the practical sense. A divorce will gain her nothing more than what she has already gotten from her husband: "'She's here--he's there; the Atlantic's between them. She'll never get back a dollar more of her money than what he's voluntarily returned to her" (Age 97-8). Neither does Ellen intend to remarry. What she wants, as she tells Newland, is "to cast off all my old life...I want to be free" (Age 107-8). Wharton thus argues for divorce not only on practical grounds, but on philosophical ones as well. The oppressiveness of marriage goes beyond the physical and practical constraints it imposes. Ellen Olenska is willing to "[wound] herself in her mad plunges against fate" (Age 95) to escape her marriage: the fact of being married, even without any practical consequences, is an intolerable prison.
Even where a Whartonian marriage is not a torment, as it is for George Dorset, Newland Archer, and Ellen Olenska, it can be an obstacle to realizing one's ambitions, and divorce therefore a means of advancement, as Wharton demonstrates in The Custom of the Country. Crude as the ambitions of that novel's heroine, Undine Spragg, are--the materialistic, greedy, selfish, social-climbing Undine lives primarily for the adulation of the crowds, for "the image of her own charm mirrored in the general admiration" (Custom 96)--they are ambitions, and she marries and divorces three different husbands in order to ensure her ascent. In her Midwestern youth, she married Elmer Moffatt for his "sense of being able to succeed" (Custom 340). Her divorce from him enables her to go with her parents to New York, where marriage to Ralph Marvell gives her an “in” to Eastern society. She quickly learns, however, that "she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and promiscuous" (Custom 117), and subsequently divorces Ralph for what she perceives as greener pastures. Had Peter Van Degen, the representative of that showy and promiscuous world which Undine longs to dominate, gotten his own divorce, she would have married him. Since he eventually chooses not to, she contrives to marry French nobleman Raymond de Chelles instead. Her marriage to him eventually sours as well; Undine ends it when she realizes that she will not be able to get what she wants out of it materially. That last divorce brings her around full circle to Elmer Moffatt, who has reached a point in his own ascent where he can offer wealth and influence to Undine as none of her previous husbands can. Even at the end of the novel, however, Wharton makes clear that this marriage, too, will eventually prove not enough for Undine: "She could never be an Ambassador's wife, and...she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for" (Custom 364).
Yet more examples of oppressive marriages and attempts to escape from them abound in Wharton's body of work. Discussing Kate Clephane, the main character in A Mother's Recompense, Mayhew writes, "we realize that she escaped New York not out of a mad lust for a man, but because she could not stand her marriage" (48). Ethan Frome, in the novel of the same title, is so miserable in his marriage to the embittered Zeena that he attempts suicide. The widow Anna Leath's unhappy first marriage in The Reef serves only to remind her of "the old vicious distinction between romance and reality" (Reef 92), since her husband's intellectual liberation and attractively unconventional stances were only pretensions laid over an oppressively conventional approach to life. Even her engagement to George Darrow quickly turns into "unendurable anguish" (Reef 284) once she realizes that he, with his past liaison with Sophy Viner, cannot match her ideal.
This examination of Wharton's work shows that to her, marriage, with its ties to social conventions and restrictions, represented oppression and imprisonment, while divorce, although socially condemned, served as a means of liberation. Marriage oppresses for any number of reasons, such as actual cruelty, simple incompatibility, or failure to live up to an ideal. Divorce liberates by working as a complete and final break not only from the other spouse, but also from the social conventions and restrictions which oppose it. In thus promoting divorce as a solution to marital problems, Wharton revealed a radical side to her "old New York" persona, and in making marriage and divorce central themes in so many of her works, she revealed their importance as some of the "great arguments" of her art.
Works Cited
"Edith Wharton." The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. C. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2007. 829-30. Print.
Mayhew, Kelly. "The Discourse of Motherhood: Maternity in Wharton, Woolf, Morrison and Shelley." Diss. San Diego State University, 1993. Print.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: Collier Books, 1986. Print.
---. The Custom of the Country. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005. Print.
---. The House of Mirth. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Print.
---. The Reef. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Print.
---. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Touchstone, 1997. Print.
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