Exploring Themes in Edith Wharton’s ‘Summer’
Summer, by Edith Wharton
Summer is the most sensual novel that Wharton published, and it is one of the few Wharton fictions in which a love affair is acted out, rather than being denied or deferred.
Setting: Set in a rural village, it is an intense and sensual evocation of the New England countryside in heat, rendered through the perceptions of a young woman close to nature: uneducated, inarticulate, speechless, throbbing with awakening eroticism.
Places: (The Mountain, The Village, The City, The Library, The Abandoned House, Royall’s House): The Mountain, The Village, The Abandoned House, and The City are the most important places in the story. The Mountain (unknown place, just pure Nature): freedom, wilderness, purity, innocence, peace, beauty, challenge, poverty, austerity. The Village: prejudices, tradition, gossip, social network, hypocrisy, friendship, security, isolation, stagnation, enclosure. The City, Nettleton (ortiga): change, opportunity, culture, independence, money, anonymity.
What does the title mean?
Summer: heat, holidays, fun, passion, romance, light/life, nature, stages of life (spring-youth, summer-early mature sexuality, autumn-maturity, winter-old age). The story is cyclical. It begins in summer and ends at the beginning of autumn. Other cyclical elements: the story starts with Charity leaving the house and ends with Charity reentering the house. Time – (Summer: a season, a stage in life)
“The first page of a novel ought to contain the germ of the whole.” Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction. Beginning of the story: “A girl came out of lawyer Royall’s house, at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood on.” She invites us to anticipate that North Dormer is a claustrophobic place.
Tale of initiation (departure – encounter with difficulties – return) like in Rip Van Winkle: We find many threshold scenes, which are typical of tales of initiation. Symbolic of opening to other experiences.
Themes
Sexual Awakening: More than anything else, Summer is the story of a young woman’s discovery of sexual desire. At the beginning of the novel, Charity is completely inexperienced when it comes to men; she has seen other people in the village break off into couples, but the young men of North Dormer hold no attraction for her. Harney is the first man Charity feels an interest in, and as she spends time with him, her feelings change and develop. But unlike the heroines of many other novels, Charity does not dream of a cozy cottage or the domestic life of a wife and mother. Her desire is for sexual fulfillment.
Acceptance of Social Conventions: As we can see during the novel, Charity is described as a young girl who does not care about what people might think about her. She renders this affirmation several times during the novel. Furthermore, she sneaks into the surroundings of Harney’s house to look at him through the window, which leads to rumors about a sexual relationship between them. Charity does not get concerned by these rumors or try to deny them in front of anyone. However, by the end of the novel, we can appreciate a Charity who has embraced the opportunity that she has been given not to let the community know she was pregnant with Harney’s baby. In this case, she takes into consideration her social position.
Topos
1) The Village: No culture, isolated. 2) The Big Town: As a place that is very seductive, but there is something seedy about it. 3) The Mountain: The place was bare and miserable, and the air heavy with the smell of dirt and stale tobacco. The first time Charity and Lucius go to The Mountain, the description we get is that of poverty, brutality, and bestiality. The Mountain is not an attractive place. 4) The Little Old House: The place in which Charity and Lucius’s passions are acted out and their love consummated. Houses are a metaphor of identity for Wharton. Social norms have been broken in the house. Rosebushes: image of passion running wild in nature. “Blossoms” in the end of the story, Charity is pregnant. “The door itself lay rotting”: no social norms there. “An old apple tree fallen across it”: the tree of knowledge (like the one in the Bible). The house is full of love, but it lacks stability and permanence. They pretend it is a house, but it is not a real house. In the tale of initiation, the first stage is departure.
Charity’s departure is shown with her leaving the house, in the encounter with Lucius, and in the 4th of July (openings ending with images of loss). The second stage is the encounter with difficulties. Charity’s difficulties are Royall, Annabel, the pregnancy, and The Mountain. She finds herself pregnant, with her boyfriend gone, her mother dead, she is alone, and these difficulties are expressed with great imagery in her coming back to the mountain.
The return is that she is rescued by Royall (for a second time, cyclical element) and comes back to the house as a married woman. It ends in images of paralysis and spiritual death. She has married her father figure (suggestion of incest even if he has never legally adopted her). But the ending may also be read as a positive stage in Charity’s life in the sense that she has grown up after experiencing loneliness and isolation, and she ends up taking responsibility for her child. In the end, from the few opportunities that she has, she chooses the best one.
At the beginning of the story, Charity is the typical adolescent girl; at the end of the story, she is a grown, changed woman. Royall’s speech in the middle of the story anticipates the tale of initiation that Charity experiences. It is a message of hope. ‘Come back for good’.
When she is going back to the village from the mountain, just before she encounters Royall, she passes by the grave of her mother, and in a tree, there is a bird singing that she stops to look at. That is an image of hope. There are many images of birds; she is depicted as a flying bird when she comes back from her encounters with Lucius, and at the end of the story, we are told that her wings have been clipped.
Is Summer a Bildungsroman? In Growing-Up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction, Barbara White has described stories of self-development as involving 4 stages: 1) Conflict with the social milieu 2) Departure from home 3) Encounter with difficulties, loneliness 4) Re-appreciation of familiar environment and self-discovery.
Is Summer a tale of initiation or a fable of regression?: Does the final return to the “red house” imply a realistic readjustment, or does it rather suggest Wharton’s bitter critique of female oppression and the limitations of women’s lives? Is “the red house” a site of potential (see Royall’s speech) or a site of confinement? As a Bildungsroman, typical of the form, Summer begins with Charity, a relatively sheltered young person on the verge of adulthood. Charity has no real responsibilities, and her basic needs are provided for. She is independent-minded but still rather childish, as when she murmurs, “How I hate everything!” She is not curious about books or about other people; she keeps telling herself that she does not care what anyone thinks of her but cannot stop comparing herself to Annabel Balch and the Nettleton ladies; she falls head over heels in love with the first city-born man she sees—in short, she is a spoiled child. As the story develops, we see several changes in Charity as a person and as a woman. She falls in love for the first time, and she has her heart broken for the first time. We can see the development in her through the relationship with Harney and with Mr. Royall. At the beginning, she is enthusiastic about dating Harney, as much as she ends up spying on him in his room, not caring about what others can say about her, whereas in the end, she finally understands her social position and marries Mr. Royall to prevent further rumors since she is already pregnant. Also, the way she comprehends and writes the letter to Harney once she is aware of his marriage and the way she ends up giving in to Mr. Royall’s requests show a prominent change in Charity’s personality and attitude.