Starting Over

Since my laptop crashed I've been frantically trying to write some portions of my thesis. My notes are mostly gone, so it's like a fresh start... which is usually good, but not always. I've started with a chapter on The Fruit of the Tree

Here's a little of what's been mustered:


Like many writers of her moment, Edith Wharton was deeply concerned with questions regarding nature and artifice. Although as scholar James L. Machor, author of Pastoral Cities, suggests, this concern was not a “central configuration of her work” but rather “a part of the imaginative pattern” (205). Still, even as a few threads in a finely wrought cloth, this part of the pattern is important and persistent across many of Wharton’s novels. Manchor looks to the canonical novel The House of Mirth for his example. There he finds that both the language and plot positioning of Nettie Crane’s story exhibit Wharton’s dissatisfaction with the notion of the “the home as pastoral enclave in the city” (206). For Manchor Lily Bart’s death “constitutes perhaps Wharton’s most ironic, tragic comment on the tenuous appeal but final inadequacy of urban-pastoral projections” (206). Although I find this reading quite compelling, I am somewhat troubled by its through reliance on the symbolic for it’s portrayal of the pastoral project. Of course when dealing with humanity and its cultural products, everything has a symbolic status, nevertheless I think an equally interesting critique of the urban-pastoral can be found in Wharton’s second, and less acclaimed novel, The Fruit of the Tree. In this work the urban-pastoral project in described in both symbolic and ecologic terms.

The opening pages of her 1907 novel The Fruit of the Tree establishes the tension between nature and artifice through Wharton’s descriptions of Justine Brent and John Amherst, two of the primary characters. Wharton presents Justine Brent in the following terms: “[s]he did not use, in speaking, the soothing inflection of her trade: she seemed to disdain to cajole or trick the sufferer. Her full young voice kept its cool note of authority, her sympathy revealing itself only in the expert touch of her hands and the constant vigilance of her dark steady eyes” (4). From this beginning Wharton develops traits in Justine that remain pivotal throughout the novel. Justine, although she fades into the background of the text for several chapters is really the main character, and it is through her perceptions that the reader first glimpses John Amherst who initially seems to be the main actor in the text.

Wharton states:
The nurse, sensitive by nature and training to all physical characteristics, was struck at once by the contrast between his alert face and figure and the silent way in which he moved. She noticed, too, that the same contrast was repeated in the face itself, its spare energetic outline, with the high nose and compressed lips of the mover of men, being curiously modified by the veiled inward gaze of the grey eyes he turned on her. It was one of the interests of Justine Brent's crowded yet lonely life to attempt a rapid mental classification of the persons she met; but the contradictions in Amherst's face baffled her, and she murmured inwardly "I don't know" (5)

Although this passage will likely slip from the readers mind as the text becomes powerfully focused on Amherst, this initial presentation of him is quite meaningful. Justine’s confusion regarding Amherst is well justified by the end of the novel, and so here Wharton is giving the reader exactly what she suggests in her description of Justine Brent, a character that is perceptive, honest, “sensitive to physical characteristics” and given to “rapid mental classification of the persons she met”. Justine Brent represents a scientific mind, a naturalist of sorts, in a highly urbanized setting. The contradictions in Amherst are troubling to her, but for the reader they seem perhaps enticing, after all the many appears to possess both a physique made for action and a mind made for reflection, two traits highly valued in men by western culture. If this troubles the perceptive Brent the reader might imagine that perhaps this is only because a girl in her “lonely” circumstance has not yet met a man possessing so many fine qualities.

However, Wharton’s prose continues to favor Brent’s perceptions. Outside of the hospital in the next chapter Justine “was amused to see that he [Amherst] failed to identify the uniformed nurse with the girl in her trim dark dress, soberly complete in all its accessories, who advanced to him, smiling under her little veil” (8). Brent can identify Amherst in the dim October evening, but he cannot pick her out, the language of this passage suggests that the reason for this is that Amherst has made her a social “type”, a nurse, rather than having examined her physical traits as is Justine Brent’s method.

Ode to the Wharton-l

So many people on the Wharton-l have offered great responses and suggestions. It seems I am behind the times. No surprise there. Apparently others have also suggested Adams as the location for The Fruit of the Tree.  This is great news. Now I have a place to really center my eco-historical research. 

I contacted the Massachusetts historical society in hopes that they might know of people doing environmental history research on the Berkshires. My aunt has also sent me a number of good leads on information regarding Adams and North Adams. Things are taking shape, or at the very least direction.

I'm reading Hudson River Bracketed right now, and am about  half way into the novel. This novel will present some challenges I think. I am hoping that some more direct water references will be made, but if not I could use this book as an example of how nature is used as an aesthetic. Plenty of room for this reading in the title alone.

Fruit of the Hoosic?

In my efforts to get some more work done on my thesis I've been concentrating my efforts on The Fruit of the Tree. I got myself onto the Wharton-l and started asking around to see what opinions other Wharton reserchers and readers might have. I have gotten back some interesting leads, one suggesting an edition of the novel edited by Donna Campell, and another directing me to a lecture given at the Mount last year by Dr. Jennie Kassanoff. I've emailed Dr. Kassanoff since I've been unable to find a copy of her lecture, and I'm on the look out for the Campbell edition in the University library. 

My theory at the moment is that the novel may well have been based on the Hoosic River Valley. I have a few reasons for this. 

1. The novel is set in the Moosuc River Valley (old spelling of Hoosic is Hoosuc. Similarity?)

2. The city of Adams is along the Hoosic and was the site of a large cotton mill

3. Adams mills were in the news quite a bit during 1906 due to worker strikes

4. Wharton was living in Lenox about 20 miles south of Adams

Even if there is no way to prove that Hanaford is based on Adams I think that I could make a strong case that the descriptions of fictional Hanaford strongly resemble the ecological and social concerns in Adams during the time in which the novel was written. 

My next challenge is finding sufficient environmental history regarding this region. I am particularly interested in how the river was engineered and otherwise degraded to benefit the mill in the time leading up to the 1907 publication date of Wharton's text. I am also very interested in any wetland drainage that may have occured in the area. Some contemporary sources indicate that there are few wetlands in the Hoosic Watershed but several older maps (1930's) show a number of small ponds in the area. This part of the search for information has been slow going so far. I think I might need to get in touch with some history folk for better leads. 

My interest in this wetlands aspect is due to the quote at the end of the novel: 

"And do you remember how we said that it was with most of us as it was
with Faust? That the moment one wanted to hold fast to was not, in most
lives, the moment of keenest personal happiness, but the other kind--the
kind that would have seemed grey and colourless at first: the moment
when the meaning of life began to come out from the mists--when one
could look out at last over the marsh one had drained?"

A tremor ran through Justine. "It was you who said that," she said,
half-smiling.

"But didn't you feel it with me? Don't you now?"

"Yes--I do now," she murmured.

He came close to her, and taking her hands in his, kissed them one after
the other.

"Dear," he said, "let us go out and look at the marsh we have drained."

A Water What?

In the course of an instructional video I learned the depressing fact that 60% of adults polled in a survey conducted by the USFS did not know what a watershed is. 10% of those who didn't know thought that watershed is a synonym for a waterworks. Ironically 65% of people boil or filter their tap water. This means that more people are concerned about the health of their water than know where their water comes from. In a way this is a good thing because it means that these people might want to know what they can do to protect their water and themselves.

The more I learn about water issues the more passionate I become about watershed heath. Many of the Pacific Northwest natives recognize water as the first food, the most sacred gift. Without water we are going nowhere fast. 

Soon my online class will be over and I'll have a few weeks to dedicate to my thesis. This information about watersheds couldn't have come at a better time.  

Edith Wharton in talking about her character Lily Bart said: "a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals". If Wharton was interested in illustrating the tragedy of how frivolity destroys I find that she was enormously successful, and the ecological implications of this are what I intend to locate in her works and describe in my thesis.