Through A Dusty Window

THE TWIN THEMES of isolation and imprisonment pervade the work of American women writers, whose art pulses with the strain of creating in a culture that relentlessly associates creativity with maleness. "The soul selects her own society, then shuts the door," begins one of Emily Dickinson's best-known poems. Dickinson's poetry reflects her unique physical, as well as spiritual, confinement; a life-long recluse, she shut herself up in her father's house and composed taut verses proclaiming the isolation of the human soul.

On the surface, Edith Wharton's life was very different. The society she selected included a host of American and European literary luminaries, who frequented dinner parties at her splendidly appointed homes and accompanied her on sight-seeing jaunts across the Continent. And yet the terrible aloneness of Wharton heroines like The House of Mirth's Lily Bart was their creator's as well; for, like Dickinson, Wharton imagined herself "as gazing out through the bars of a prison at the procession of life."

This vision of the female writer struggling to escape the prison of her soul is one of the dominant motifs of R.W.B Lewis's often masterful biography of Edith Wharton. Meticulously researched and infinitely detailed, Lewis's Edith Wharton depicts its subject as a vital and complex woman, haunted throughout her life by a dismally unsuccessful marriage, but taking her place nevertheless as one of the leading literary figures of her age.

Lewis is at his best when he attempts to outline the workings of Wharton's inner life, dismantling with obvious pleasure Percy Lubbock's depiction of her in Portrait of Edith Wharton as overly haughty and repressed. The Wharton who emerges from this biography is, by contrast, a woman whose pride is most often a cover for shyness, and whose dormant sensuality is a force that merely awaits release by the right man.

THAT MAN, according to Lewis, is American journalist Morton Fullerton, whose relationship with Wharton is detailed in by far the most fascinating section of the biography. Lewis makes use of some almost painfully revealing source material on their affair, including the private diary Wharton addressed to Fullerton and the love poems he inspired her to write, as well as correspondence from his jealous cousin and fiancee, Katherine Fullerton. Skillfully integrating the poems and journal entries with his text, Lewis illumines both the depth and power of Wharton's feelings for Fullerton and her yearning to escape the solitude that afflicted her before she met him. Initially unsure of his reaction to her, Wharton writes: My poor 'ame close' barred its shutters and bolted its doors again, and the dust gathered and the cobwebs thickened in the empty rooms, where for a moment I had heard an echo. Later, "now deeply, helplessly in love," she finds her personality being "swept away" by his, and wonders with fright, in Lewis's words, "whether it might not be the destiny of women to find their individuality blotted out by love."

Another of Lewis's central concerns in this biography is the relationship between Wharton's life and her art. According to Lewis, Wharton's "personal experience was never entirely real for her until it had been converted into literature"; her writings, into which she poured feelings deprived of any other outlet, constituted for her "the life she had most deeply and truly lived." Lewis convincingly traces the central themes in Wharton's work--the subduing of a larger spirit by a smaller one, the wrongful exertion of parental authority, the disillusionment of a woman with the man she loves--and finds their origin in the shaping events of her life, including her unhappy marriage to the charming intellectual lightweight (and later, manic-depressive) Teddy Wharton and her abortive relationship with Fullerton.

Not only does Lewis pinpoint the influence of Wharton's past experiences on her work; he also uses her novels and stories as revealing source material on the conflicts that plagued her during various periods in her life. These two techniques are obviously most useful when they are complementary, since extrapolating an author's personal characteristics on the basis of her fictional creations alone is a tricky business at best. Unfortunately, Lewis occasionally gets slightly carried away, blithely matching up Wharton's characters with members of her literary set, without much regard for the intervening creative process. It is not that Lewis is wrong; it's just that he's sometimes too simplistic.

Scholarly and thorough as it is, Lewis's biography is often frustrating to read. While dozens of American and European literary notables troop through its pages, relatively few exhibit the vitality of Wharton's own characters. There are important exceptions, of course, like Lewis's portrait of Wharton's friend and mentor Henry James, who felt during her visits that he was "being seized and carried off in the talons of some monstrous female bird of prey." But, in general, Lewis spends too much time chronicling in remorseless detail the comings and goings of the Wharton set, obscuring his very real insights under a mass of minutiae.

Lewis's treatment of Wharton's individual books is similarly annoying. Though he is adept at tracing the thematic continuity of her work, Lewis engages in only the most cursory literary criticism, offering plot summaries more often than analyses of her novels' style or structure. At the same time, he painstakingly sets down the exact proceeds from each of her published works.

LEWIS'S STYLE is formal and elegant; given a choice, he would rather be stiff than colloquial. Ironically enough, considering his awareness of the special problems Wharton faced as a woman writer, he sometimes allows his language to partake of sexual stereotyping. Describing two characters in her novel The Custom of the Country, for example, he writes: Marvell also, as it were, embodies Edith's feminine side; Moffatt her masculine side, her immense energy, her decisiveness in action, the vigor of her ironic humor. Later, he again refers to what he terms Wharton's "masculine vein of satiric humor."

Quibbling aside, Lewis's biography of Edith Wharton is important, in the first place, for its insistence on Wharton's full-bodied humanity, displayed in her "capacity for deep and abiding friendship" and her vulnerability to the losses that marked the course of her long and productive life. Edith Wharton stands as a testament to the creative powers of a woman for whom art and life were so intertwined that in her last reminiscences "the actualities of her experience, the men and women she had loved, seemed to her increasingly to be creatures of fiction, parts of some other narrative she had yet to compose."