Edith Wharton, The Old Maid

wax authors & the value of confessing that you don't know

“And then, the babies; the babies who were supposed to ‘make up for everything,’ and didn’t — though they were such darlings, and one had no definite notion as to what it was that one had missed, and that they were to make up for.”

Maybe my favorite thing in reading (and therefore one of my favorite things in life) is when an esteemed author who has to that point been a wax museum figure springs unexpectedly to life. There Proust or Eliot or Sebald or whoever stands, gazing into the mists of literary greatness, droning on about landscapes I can't quite picture and people I can't quite keep straight — and then suddenly, almost eerily, he or she turns and addresses me.

Edith Wharton was, until I read The Old Maid (and, more specifically, until I read this sentence) entirely a wax museum figure to me. I'd made one attempt at reading House of Mirth, years ago, which I found approximately as mirthful as falling asleep during a historic home tour. And that was how the first few pages of The Old Maid were striking me too — until she leaned in and confessed her ambivalence about babies.

Suddenly I cared: about the narrator, Delia; about her cousin Charlotte; about the mysterious baby — even about the interiors of all those fancy houses she couldn’t get enough of describing. I was no longer peering into a dusty dollhouse; I was peering into a mind every bit as alive, every bit as intriguing and mysterious and familiar, as that of an old friend.

The sentence comes at a moment when Delia is talking about the sorts of marriages people in her social circle tend to enter into, and now she's asked herself, naturally enough, what comes afterward — what do these women do once they're married? The question seems, after all the elegant fluency of the first few pages, to have brought her up short. "Well — what?" she writes, as if we were the ones who’d asked her (and had shown up during dinner to do so). That mounting irritability is the first thing I love about this sentence, or the build-up to it — the sense that an interview that has thus far been proceeding via well-rehearsed slabs of verbiage has now arrived at the moment when the subject, well and truly annoyed by a question, pauses, considers whether to say something inadvisable, and does. 

The first way Wharton achieves this quality of anguish, of dropping into a new vocal register, is via repetition — that first clause And then, the babies followed by a semicolon and then the babies again places us firmly in the realm of the ear: we can hear the sigh in that semicolon. And then we get that air-quoted “make up for everything” — attributed to no one in particular, this is the first sense we get of there being any distance between the narrator and her sepia, mannered world. And then an em-dash (which lives in the same drawer as the semicolon in the writer’s toolbox: punctuation marks to be grabbed in the actual holding-nails-in-your-teeth muddle of live thought) — followed by though they were such darlings. This, I think, is when Delia’s pulse becomes unmistakable — that moment of self-doubt, the sense that she’s gone slightly too far, that she doesn’t want to be mistaken for doing some baby-trashing comedy bit (Those diapers, amirite?). The arrival of babies doesn’t do what people say it will, but it does do something. And how, anyway, are you supposed to measure the value of that something when you don't even know what you’d be doing in the alternate, baby-free world?

It’s this — Delia’s confession of true and significant lack of understanding — that makes the sentence an anti-Tolstoyan masterpiece. All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Before we’ve even thought it through (My cousin Bill’s family seemed awfully happy, and they seemed pretty different), we’re intimidated into assent. That Tolstoy must really know what he’s talking about, to proclaim a thing like that. Wharton’s sentence takes the opposite, and I think superior, approach. What if, instead of pretending to have some Olympian view onto humanity, she admitted to not really understanding what’s going on? To not knowing how even her own feelings work? Surely the curators of the Great Hall of Wax Authors (not to mention the ruling families of 1850’s New York) wouldn’t approve. But you, the individual reader, alone in your bed, or headphoned on the subway, would. And you, after all, are who she’s talking to.