Silver Streams Issue 1 | Page 20

wives. Both marriages are depicted as being cycles of darkness perpetuating the controlling nature of men towards women. This is seen in The Custom of the Country when Wharton writes, “knowing that [...] everything would nevertheless go on in the same way – in his way – and that there was no more hope of shaking his resolve” (470). Here, we can see how Undine and Raymond’s relationship is a cycle of arguments and Raymond always acting and imposing things on Undine according to his values. Wharton italicizing the “his” is significant as it draws our attention to the fact that he is controlling the situation. Charity experiences the same sense of marriage as this detrimental cycle, though, for her it arguably carries a heavier weight. Wharton states, “She saw the old life closing on her, and hardly heeded his fanciful picture of renewal” (50). The patronizing nature of these relationships comes to light when we consider the way the relationships affect where the women will live. Having things be “his way” means Undine will remain at home in the drawing room, as opposed to being out with her American friends. Likewise, the patriarchal cycle for Charity remains as she succumbs to his “fanciful picture of renewal” and will once again remain in the red house, in North Dormer.

Viewing Undine and Charity through the feminist prisms of Fryer, Grand, and Ammons, illuminates how Wharton’s fiction shows the difficult place for women in marriage. While the marriages began differently, the misunderstandings between the couples differ, and how conscious of their situations Undine and Charity are vary, the unions remain similar in as many, and arguably, in far more significant ways. Both marriages disempower the women and entrap them in a cycle of life that is suffocating to them. While Undine does eventually break the cycle with divorce, her marriage itself does not represent any of this upward movement. Through the implication of the symbolic image of the imprisoning ring in both stories, the cage-esque spaces the women see themselves in, and patronizing manners of the men, Wharton opens our eyes to seeing the negative side of marriage for women in the early 20th century.

Works Cited

Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: U of Georgia Press, 1980. Print.

De Beauvior, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Knopp, 1952. Print.

Franzen. Jonathan. “A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy”. The New Yorker 12 February 2012. Print.

Fryer, Judith. Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Chapel Hill: Chapel Hill : U of North Carolina, 1986. Print.

Grand, Sarah. “The New Aspect of the Woman Question”. North American Review. (1894): 270-276. Print.

Wharton, Edith. The Custom of The Country. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1997. Print.

---.Summer. New York: Appleton, 1917. Print.