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"The Ways in Which the Heart Speaks": Letters in The Reef

1991; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/saf.1991.0032

2158-5806

Elizabeth Lennox Keyser,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

NOTES "THE WAYS IN WHICH THE HEART SPEAKS": LETTERS IN THE REEF Elizabeth Lennox Keyser Hollins College In a letter to her friend Louise Norcross, Emily Dickinson wrote that an "earnest letter is or should be life-warrant or death-warrant, for what is each instant but a gun, harmless because 'unloaded,' but that touched 'goes off'?"1 Dickinson's sense of the "awful power" of letters pervades the fiction of Edith Wharton from her early novella The Touchstone (1900) to her late tale of the supernatural, "Pomegranate Seed" (1936). Both are tales of a woman's "unloved letters ,"2 letters that nonetheless exercise power from beyond the grave. In The Touchstone Margaret Aubyn's letters first threaten to destroy but then transform the marriage of the man who regrets having exploited them. In "Pomegranate Seed" a dead wife's letters to her happily remarried husband estrange him from his new wife and prove in effect his death warrant. A third story, entitled "The Letters" (1910), provides still another variation on the theme of "unloved," or in this case unread, letters. In this ironic tale a man regains a woman's heart by attesting to the power of her long unacknowledged letters but nearly loses it again when she discovers, after their marriage, that he has never read them. In Wharton's novel The Reef, published two years later, letters figure even more significantly. The engagement of George Darrow and Anna Leath, like relationships in these shorter works as well as in The House of Mirth, founder on a reef of letters unwritten, unsent, unread, and disregarded. And Wharton's recently discovered letters to her lover, Morton Fullerton, written in the years immediately preceding as well as during composition of The Reef, suggest that in it she was attempting to assuage and avenge her own pain as a writer of "unloved letters." In Book I of The Reef, narrated from George Darrow's point of view, Wharton uses letters both to lay the foundation for her plot and to establish Darrow's character. At the very beginning, Anna's decision to telegraph "unexpected obstacle" rather than write postponing Darrow's visit helps create the situation that becomes an insuperable as well as unexpected obstacle to their marriage. Darrow, who receives the telegram on his way to Dover, magnifies his disappointment into a grievance against Anna: "Not the shadow of an excuse or a regret; not even the perfunctory 'have written' with which 96Notes it is usual to soften such blows. She didn't want him, and had taken the shortest way to tell him so."3 It is in this self-pitying and vengeful mood that Darrow encounters Sophy Viner at Dover, decides to escort her to Paris, and installs her in the Terminus Hotel. There, amused and touched by her mixture of self-sufficiency and vulnerability, worldly wisdom and naivete, Darrow diverts himself by attempting to show her a good time. His growing interest in her receives a check, however, when Sophy's "school-girl" struggle to write a letter to her friends the Farlows prompts an invidious comparison with Anna's "slender firm strokes of the pen" and "clear structure of the phrases" (p. 43). This train of thought encourages him to expect a letter from Anna, fills him with regret and revulsion at having "blundered into such an adventure," and makes him impatient with Sophy, who now strikes him as "positively stupid." "Fully persuaded" that a letter from Anna awaits him at the hotel, he becomes concerned lest someone observe and report his adventure, for "he did not want the woman he adored to think he could forget her for a moment" (p. 44). But on receiving the message "Pas de lettres" his "wounded vanity" makes Sophy appear "prettier and more interesting than before" (p. 45). Ironically, Darrow uses Anna's failure to write as justification for dallying with Sophy, yet he prolongs that dalliance by neglecting to mail Sophy's letter. During their evening at the theater, he remembers that "after luncheon she had given him her letter to post, and that he had never thought of it again" (p. 48). On her asking when the...