The Reef by Edith Wharton

The Reef was published in 1912 and regarded by Wharton as her most autobiographical novel.

Wes:

Having finished The Reef a couple of weeks ago, it has been difficult for me to sit down and write my impressions of this novel after such a hiatus. From now on I will try to write the post up as soon as possible afterwards. I guess this is one of the symptoms of old age – the mind loses track of details needed to fill out one’s considerations about a story like this one. The Reef by Edith Wharton is a quite interesting story about love and hymeneal loyalties at the end of the Victorian era.     

George Darrow is a young American diplomatic staffer who has rekindled his first love after meeting Anna Leath at a diplomatic function in London. Though widowed with a child and step-son, she is relatively well off, living in France, and they both appear to have fallen back into a loving relationship that was interrupted some 12 years before in America when they were children. Now they plan to marry but Darrow is much disturbed when he obtains leave to meet her in France and gets a sudden letter from her stating there are “unexpected obstacles” and not to come visit for at least a fortnight. Not knowing what to do with his time, he meets an interestingly vivacious woman, Sophy Viner, at Dover, and they end up having an affair for some days in Paris as Darrow waits for word on when he can come to meet Anna. George has no long term designs on Sophy, he merely saw repression in her that generated “pity she inspired (that) made Darrow long to fill her few free hours to the brim.”

Forced after his leave to return to work, he finally gets to visit the Anna’s estate at Givré some months later. The plot thickens when he is shocked to find that Sophy has now been hired as governess for Anna’s daughter, Effie, and it really thickens when later the reader discovers that her brash and immature step-son, Owen, is secretly engaged to Sophy, a factor which is likely to cause much dissention with the mother-in-law, Madame de Chantelle, who will likely want better for her grandson. Anna promises her step-son she will defend his suit to her mother-in-law. Meanwhile, George wonders whether Sophy should be left with Effie while George and Anna move to Argentina and whether she is good enough for Owen. He also has to hide the fact that he and Sophy had a tryst after he had proposed to Anna. His feelings for Sophy at this point are summed up in this sentence, “The bare truth, indeed, was that he had hardly thought of her at all, either at that time or since, and that he was ashamed to base his judgment of her on his meager memory of their adventure.”  

As one can predict, Darrow tries to wean Sophy away from Owen and hide their relationship but is observed by the youth in his secretive discussions with Sophy. The entire affair is discovered and the relationships blow up under the Victorian ethos that an affair is a great and unforgivable shame to the woman and a minor misadventure or character flaw in the man. Anna vacillates between her new distrust of George and her love for him. Much of the second half of the book is absorbed with Anna’s dilemma on how she can build a marriage severely inhibited by her distrust. They break up and separate for a while and have conversations where neither he nor she can articulate what they really feel. A good synopsis of her feelings is the following when George wants her to tell him whether he should leave and both take a hiatus in their relationship:

She felt a mortal weakness, a craven impulse to cry out to him to stay, a longing to throw herself into his arms, and take refuge there from the unendurable anguish he had caused her. Then the vision called up another thought: ‘I shall never know what that girl has known…’ and the recoil of pride flung her back on the sharp edges of her anguish. ‘Good-bye,’ she said.

Sophy also found the situation unendurable and decided to leave and does. Ultimately, we find she has gone to India with her former employer from whom she originally fled to Paris and whose inn was where George and she first met when he was a lodger and she a servant. Anna and George get back together when George takes her to his room and she discovers that he really does love her and the 800 lb. gorilla in the room was her own distrust of him. She reasons that when they become intimate there “will be no room for any doubts between us.” This is essentially what happens. So I guess the Victorian ethos of the effects of illicit affairs really did win out in the end. George did not suffer a devastating and fatal blow by his actions but Sophy, on the other hand, was banished to the outer realm.

The extensive musings over Anna’s and George’s feelings were the highlights of the book for me. Just about every aspect of Anna’s deep feeling of betrayal and distrust were analyzed by the author as well as George’s rationale that his short affair was a fling largely caused by his doubt whether Anna’s really wanted to marry him. He really loved her and searched a way to show it to her to alleviate her despair. The book’s detailed analysis reminded me of Leonid Andreyev’s short stories The Seven that were Hanged where every conceivable fear and aspect of death by hanging are explicitly and excruciatingly discussed. They say this book is autobiographical so I’m sure something similar to Anna’s despair was felt by Edith Wharton at some point in her life.

One unresolved issue is why the book was called The Reef in the first place. That word never appears in the whole book. I looked it up and it is either an underwater ridge of sand or rocks at or near the surface or the part of a sail that the sailor can pull in or let out to change the wind effects on the ship. I can only surmise that the reef was the affair that wrecked or threatened to wreck the subsequent lives of the characters in the book. Overall, this was a good read and I rate this book as a 4 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best). 

Allison:

“What are you reading?” is a question that bounces between booksellers almost competitively. Woe to the dry spell, or a binge on books in the Self-Help section, because no one wants to sincerely answer their peers with When Panic Attacks or The Easy Way to Quit Smoking yet again (although were you in need of such books, I highly recommend both, even if they must be read thirty to thirty-five times for success). Worse, perhaps, are the parenting books I’ve been noodling through for the past few weeks. “What are you reading?” “Oh, you know, pseudo-scientific evidence that I am heinous monster, inflicting irreparable damage to my child’s delicate psyche—and you?”

What a relief it was to be able to answer this question instead with a sophisticated shrug, “Just a little Edith Wharton.”

“Oh Edith,” all my bookselling friends sigh. “Isn’t she wonderful?”

“Um. Yes?”

I bet she is wonderful. There were so many wonderful things about The Reef, but I doubt it’s the place to start. I started asking my colleagues what they liked about her books and they said her writing was like Jane Austen but snarkier, that her pointed commentary on manners of the day rivaled Henry James. James comparisons are textbook. The Reef in particular deals with strikingly similar topics as another of our book club books, Daisy Miller, written by James himself. James’ Daisy embodied an experimental rebellion in which young women of a certain status and class choose to entertain the company of men without chaperones, and with full disregard of reputation. Daisy is studied, through the eyes of our man Winterbourne, a would-be suitor—if he weren’t so casually and bewilderingly rebuffed by Daisy. Daisy is either naively, or intentionally asexual with Winterbourne. This is the crux of James’ story—does or doesn’t Daisy know the danger she is provoking by not following the traditional rules of courtship? One of the triumphs of Daisy Miller is that because we, the reader, are only situated with Winterbourne’s imperfect observations, we only know Daisy through his particular (male) gaze. The conflict lives inside Winterbourne and Daisy remains free and unencumbered by even James’ judgement. James doesn’t try to answer why Daisy behaves as she does, only how Winterbourne comes to think she behaves thus.

Likewise, the enigmatic woman, Sophy, of Wharton’s The Reef is left untethered to her own point-of-view.  Why Sophy is who she is, is only explained through the descriptions of Darrow and Anna who belong to a wealthy leisure class. Sophy is lower working class, a servant in Anna’s house, in fact, governess to her nine-year-old daughter. This distinction alone makes her an unsuitable bride for Anna’s step-son, Owen, according to the older generation—Owen’s grandmother. (This also presents an awkward logistical situation—when Sophy becomes Anna’s daughter-in-law it is assumed she will also remain under her employment as the governess. Allowed into the family, but only so much…) The problem with marrying a blue collar is that anyone who has had to work to survive has been left vulnerable to all manner of unsavory experiences. BUT! No one suspects that Anna’s fiancé, distinguished Mr. Darrow, might be the source of Sophy’s most scandalous history.

Let us be frank. Sophy’s social missteps are dated, the outrage inspired, almost silly, by contemporary customs. But, the pain and confusion caused by Darrow’s diversion—Ah! Here in lies the meat of the novel. The lengths he goes to conceal, his frustration with guilt and justification, and the mental banter Anna entertains, her frantic back and forth of what she can forgive versus forget—all of this is timeless, the universal innards of romantic heartache. And it is depicted with agonizing accuracy. Who among us hasn’t asked themselves, what will I endure to be loved? How much can I love that which hurts?

But back to Sophy, because Wharton is known for her social criticism above all else. What I found most interesting about this book is Darrow’s attempts to sum up the drive of Sophy, even as his own lived experiences are insufficient. But Darrow will try. Darrow thinks he understands how Sophy’s class complicates her prospects. In an attempt to both exonerate himself with Anna, and explain why Sophy should not be invited into this family, and justify why he would have gifted the pitiable wretch with a scandalous week of intimacy, Darrow describes Sophy’s life as somehow more life—more hardship, more passion, more stake, more filth, more intensity—just more. Anna could never understand, Darrow says, because she hasn’t lived. Darrow explains this to Anna, with a qualifier that maybe one day, with a little more experience, Anna might understand (what, is unclear), like Sophy does. “When?” I wonder. Certainly not after marriage to Darrow’s incredibly boring self.

Anna almost falls for it. Almost, except of course, Anna has lived.

For example, Anna has been married and widowed. Darrow has not. Anna (I think she is a couple years older than Darrow) was the second wife of an already widowed man who had a son by his previously alive wife (depicted in the novel so breathtakingly as a large gilded painting shut up in a library that no one but Anna visits during the marriage). Anna bore a child, she developed a significant, if not motherly relationship with her step-son, Owen. She navigated a marriage, she experienced the death of a spouse, whether beloved or not, the qualifications are scarcely important to my point. She continues to live in a house very much governed by the matriarchal mother of her dead husband.

This is life, this is life despite its padding by wealth and relative safety. Anna has lived.

It’s Anna’s life, in fact, that Darrow longs to lead. He wants desperately to be her husband. To sit at the fire and take walks in the rain, and all the other boring things he laments when Anna says, “no.” What Darrow is doing is romanticizing Sophy’s poverty, while trivializing Anna’s incarcerating wealth in a loveless, bleak marriage. It’s standard patriarchy, really. These women, he depicts as merely products of their environment rather than active participants, but it is Wharton, after all, who is telling the story. For all of Anna’s waffling, all of Sophy’s pining, in the end, it is the women who win. Despite Darrow’s markedly manipulative efforts, they take charge of their fates by cutting him out of the equation—and disrupting his gross misinterpretation of their lives.  

After writing this review, I think I like this book more than I initially thought. I’ve grown up writing with the understanding that even women writers cannot help but to write from under the influence of the male point-of-view, because that is the “standard,” the base from which we learn to craft. Edith Wharton’s greatest influence and contemporary is a not a woman, it’s Henry James, yet The Reef takes care of the interior of her women characters in a way that James (using only Daisy Miller as reference) was wise enough not to attempt.

I rate this a 3 on Dad’s scale of 1-10 (1 being highest), even though it was not much fun to read.  Wharton’s descriptions often jumped off the page and hit me in the gut as not only explicitly identifiable in my own life, but perhaps the single best way of conveying it. Ask me what it’s like to experience road rage while walking down the street with an umbrella in New York City during a rainstorm and I will recite some Edith Wharton. That’s pretty badass in my book.