Angel at the Grave

Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
From Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1891–1910

Interesting Links

“The Best Seller Who Hated Best Sellers” (Sheila Liming, Lapham’s Quarterly)

“Edith Wharton's Indictment of Gilded Age Inequality: Still Relevant” (Colette Shade, LitHub)

Previous Story of the Week Selections
• “Expiation,” Edith Wharton
• “Henry James at Work,” Theodora Bosanquet
• “Miss Grief,” Constance Fenimore Woolson
• “The Bookkeeper’s Wife,” Willa Cather

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Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1891–1910
Two novellas: The Touchstone and Sanctuary | 36 stories | 928 pages
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Amphioxus lanceolatus (now known as Branchiostoma lanceolatum), c. 1880–90, drawing by Italian illustrator Comingio Merculiano (1845–1915). The amphioxus plays a pivotal and unexpected role in Wharton’s story. (CC by 4.0, via ResearchGate)

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When Edith Wharton sought help for improving her early writings, she requested advice and suggestions most often from Walter Berry, one of her closest friends until his death in 1927. He helped Wharton arrange and polish the “lumpy pages” of material for her first book, The Decoration of Houses (1897), into something suitable for publication. During the next three decades, in person and in their correspondence, he gave her support, ideas, appreciation, and whimsy, including this seemingly inexplicable yet flirtatiously odd short poem he sent her in November 1900:

Then amphioxa:
Her buccal cirri sweep his rays,
And quivering down her not-
ochord and myotome, she says:
“I love you, Lance, a lot.”

The amphioxi (also known as lancelets) are fish-like invertebrate ocean-dwellers that were once proposed as a possible bridge between invertebrate and vertebrate animals. Joking references to related biological terms are sprinkled throughout Berry’s letters to Wharton during this period, and it all started when she shared with him the draft of a story, “Angel at the Grave.” A pivotal scene depended on the discovery of a tract published in the 1830s concerning the “missing link,” and Berry urged her to change it:

Why not take amphioxus, the real missing link between vertebrate and invertebrate—so much more important than the missing link between man and the anthropoid. Amphioxus is a persistent specialized type—not degenerate like the ascidian—and is undoubtedly the true ancestral line of vertebrates. . . . [French naturalist] St. Hilaire was the first to assert the existence of a direct relationship between vertebrate and invertebrate, and you remember the row between Cuvier and him in 1830 (especially Goethe’s account of it), the latter recognizing one universal type, while Cuvier claimed several entirely distinct types or plans of animal organization. The “unity of plan” theory was bitterly attacked and completely knocked out at that time. Just a little later, in 1836, William Yarrell, an Englishman, gave our “fish” the name amphioxus and was the first to describe the notochord as a cartilaginous vertebrae column. No attention was paid to this and it wasn’t till considerable time afterwards that the fact was “rediscovered.” . . . Such a discovery would be a miracle in 1830 in Mass., but then any important discovery would be just as miraculous. . . .

Even in this letter filled with scientific jargon, Berry couldn’t resist turning his suggestion into a joking response to the news that Wharton had sold her debut novel, The Valley of Decision:

Let me say right here that your backbone had no cartilage whatever when you agreed to give Scribner’s The Valley for only $2000 “advance royalties.” It should be $2000 cash and royalties beginning with the first volume sold. . . . I do send you lots of congratulations, and I’m so glad.

Wharton gratefully incorporated his suggestions into her story, and for the next few months the humble amphioxus became shorthand in their correspondence for hesitation and spinelessness: “I do hope you are vertebrating your notochord and getting back your taste,” he teased her as late as March of the following year, after the story had been published.

Wharton’s lifelong fascination with Darwin and evolution can be seen in the titles of her first three story collections: The Greater Inclination is from Edmond Kelly’s 1895 study, Evolution and Effort; Crucial Instances is a phrase used by Darwin in his discussion of the laws of inheritance in The Descent of Man, which itself provides the title for her third collection. In the memoir A Backward Glance, Wharton recalled how in the mid-1890s her friendship with Egerton Winthrop, an older acquaintance of her husband’s family, led to this new interest:

It was too late for me to acquire the mental discipline I had missed in the schoolroom, but my new friend directed and systematized my reading, and filled some of the worst gaps in my education. Through him I first came to know the great French novelists and the French historians and literary critics of the day, but his chief gift was to introduce me to the wonder-world of nineteenth century science. He it was who gave me Wallace’s “Darwin and Darwinism,” and “The Origin of Species,” and made known to me Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Romanes, Haeckel, Westermarck, and the various popular exponents of the great evolutionary movement.

In 1906, as Wharton’s literary star was ascending, her close friend Sara (“Sally”) Norton jotted down some notes in a journal recalling Edith’s transformation.

When she was twenty-two, with the reading of the “Origin of Species,” came the most exciting and important intellectual experience of her life. Henceforth, she was to regard the world from a new standpoint; the old faith lay dead—if that may be called faith which from childhood you have accepted without much serious thought. With new vision came new strength: the spirit found its wings.

To Wharton, the “old faith” included transcendentalism, and she mocked its adherents in her early stories. “Angel at the Grave,” which appeared in the February 1901 issue of The Atlantic, revolves around a philosopher who was a “friend of Emerson” vaguely associated with Brook Farm, the utopian community of transcendentalists. Similarly, “The Recovery,” published the same month in Harper’s, portrays a “a prehistoric relic who had known Emerson, and who was still sent about the country in cotton-wool to open educational institutions with a toothless oration on Brook Farm.”

Paulina Anson, the main character of “Angel at the Grave,” may well have been inspired by Sally Norton. In a biography of Wharton, Shari Benstock notes that Sally, the daughter of the prominent art historian and literary scholar Charles Eliot Norton, fell in love with Arthur Hugh Clough Jr., son of the English poet. When Clough proposed, Sally could not bring herself to leave her father—especially if it meant living in England—so she called off the relationship, assisted her father until his death, and remained at the family home for the rest of her life.

Like Sally Norton, Paulina Anson has turned down a marriage proposal and has chosen to dedicate her life to the legacy of her grandfather, Orestes Anson. Wharton’s story stages the clash between philosophy and science within the walls of the prison Paulina has created for herself. The options available to her are limited by the work of three men: the writings of her father, the decisions of the publisher of her father’s books, and the theories of a young scientist. Some critics have regarded the story and especially its “happy” ending as evidence of Wharton’s acceptance of the patriarchy. Instead, Emily J. Orlando argues in Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts, “it might be more useful to consider the ending as reflective of Wharton’s awareness of patriarchy’s stronghold. . . . Wharton’s stance here—as we might come to expect from her—is cautious and realist.” Despite the story’s many comic and satirical moments, many readers will finish it with conflicted feelings about Paulina’s past—and about the possibilities for her future.

The above excerpts from Berry’s letters have been transcribed from digital copies of the originals hosted at the Beinecke Library (Yale) website.

Notes: The name of Paulina’s grandfather, Orestes Anson, evokes the name of Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), a former transcendentalist and visitor at Brook Farm who converted to Catholicism. Coincidentally, he is prominently mentioned in the introduction to the previous Story of the Week selection as a leading critic of the fiction of Mary Agnes Tincker, the author of “From the Garden of a Friend.”

The Culprit Fay is a narrative poem published in 1816 by American poet Joseph Rodman Drake. Felicia Hemans was, aside from Byron, perhaps the most popular English-language poet of the nineteenth century; her poems, hymns, and songs were published between 1808 and her death at the age of 41 in 1835. Raphael Morghen (1758–1833) was an Italian engraver. Persephone, the queen of the underworld, was abducted by Hades through a well that opened up in a meadow near the Sicilian town of Enna. A Mechlin cap refers to a head covering that has been trimmed with lace produced in the Belgian town of Mechlin.

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The House stood a few yards back from the elm-shaded village street, in that semi-publicity sometimes cited as a democratic protest against old-world standards of domestic exclusiveness. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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