"For the Use of the Magazine Morons": Edith Wharton Rewrites the Tale of the Fantastic

Abstract

Edith Wharton's relationship with reading public and market economy was ambiguously made up of acceptance and resistance, desire and mistrust. She obviously sought success and dealt with her publishers in a very professional and business-like manner, yearned establish a connection with her readers, but was aware of dangers involved in lowering her literary standards meet popular taste. In latter part of her career, pressed by economic necessity and a decrease in popularity, she appeared at times more willing compromise and come terms with requests of marketplace.(1) Her rewriting of two tales of fantastic, Pomegranate Seed (1931) and All Souls' (1937), is a good illustration of delicate balance between demands of text and of public, and Wharton's differing degrees of success in maintaining it. These are Wharton's last stories, written toward end of her life and generally considered among her best. Although they have received a good deal of recent critical attention, so far no examination of stories' production and publishing problems has been conducted on basis of manuscripts.(2) I would like offer here a reading of these two tales that takes into account their earlier manuscript versions and substantial variants introduced in published ones. I will try explain reasons for these changes by referring some yet unpublished correspondence between writer and her editors. I think that a closer look at Wharton's process will throw a different light on narrative focus of tales, partially undermining some earlier interpretations. My evaluation of revisions, and of their impact on final structure of texts, will take into consideration Wharton's ideas on ghost story as a genre, as well as recent theories of fantastic. In early essay entitled The Vice of Reading, Wharton stressed importance of an interchange of thought between writer and (513), but she also exposed harm literature of what she called the mechanical in bringing about demand for mediocre writing (519). In Preface Ghosts, collection of tales of supernatural published in 1937, she recalled: When I first began read, and then write ghost-stories, I was conscious of a common medium between myself and my readers, of their meeting me half way among primeval shadows, and filling in gaps in my narrative with sensations and divinations akin my own (2). At end of her career, Wharton had come instead frustrating conclusion that the faculty required for their enjoyment [of ghost stories] has become almost atrophied in modern man, and identified causes in those two world-wide enemies of imagination, wireless and cinema, thus elaborating on this issue: to a generation for whom everything which used be won by effort, and then slowly assimilated, is now served up cooked, seasoned and chopped into little bits, creative faculty (for reading should be a creative act as well as writing) is rapidly withering, together with power of sustained attention (2). As example of this unfortunate change in reading public she referred having been bombarded with anxious inquiries, following first publication of Pomegranate Seed, about how a ghost could write a letter, or put it into a letterbox (2). It is this kind of mechanical reader who undermines effect of a tale of fantastic and puts inappropriate demands on writer. A letter from Rutger Jewett, Wharton's editor at Appleton, confirms this positivistic trend: Every week since `Pomegranate Seed' was issued I have forwarded letters you which have been sent me by Post. Certainly story aroused interest. I am wondering if writers of these letters are trying make you give a material, physical explanation of psychic phenomena. …