A Jury of Her Peers by Elaine Showalter

Author:Elaine Showalter [Showalter, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

One of his cousins, Medora Manson, has tried to start “a ‘literary salon;' but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.” Her home is the closest thing he has seen to a bohemian enclave, and it is populated by weird men like Dr. Agathon Carver, the founder of the Valley of Love Community in Newport, and Professor Emerson Sillerton, who gives parties for “long-haired men and short-haired women,” and takes his bride on their honeymoon to “explore tombs in Yucatan instead of going to Paris or Italy.”

Newland's virginal society bride, May, stimulates his feelings of “pos-sessorship.” He would never dream of taking her to Yucatan, but he looks forward to reading Faust with her by the Italian lakes, “somewhat hazily confusing the scene of his projected honeymoon with the masterpieces of literature which it would be his manly privilege to reveal to his bride.” His manly but very literary regret is that sexually he can't offer her “a blank page” in exchange for her “unblemished one.” When New-land meets his distant cousin Ellen Olenska, who has returned to New York after a disastrous marriage to an abusive Polish count, he is immediately smitten by seeing the books scattered about her untidy drawing room—Bourget, Huysmans, the Goncourt brothers. When she asks him if the arts have a milieu in New York, he replies, “they're more like a very thinly settled outskirt.”

He dreams of a world with Ellen where she cannot be his wife but will be more than his mistress: “Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other.” But, she replies, “Oh my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there? I know so many who've tried to find it; and believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo—and it wasn't at all different from the old world they'd left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous.” Interestingly, Wharton puts her commentary on Archer's failed nineteenth-century marriage into the mouths of his grown children many years later. “You and mother never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything … A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact.” It sounds like the marriage of Julia and Samuel Howe, and their incarceration in the Perkins School. No one else at the time, with the possible exception of F. Scott Fitzgerald, was writing with such insight about sexuality, marriage, and the conflicting dreams of women and men.

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