Introduction
When Edith Wharton's short novel, Summer, appeared in 1917, it immediately became a publishing sensation. One of America's first novels to deal frankly with a young woman's sexual awakening, Summer shocked readers with its forthright exploration of desire and sexuality. Like its predecessor, Ethan Frome, which Wharton published in 1911, the novel is set in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, but the season is summer (not the cold winter of Ethan Frome) and the protagonist is Charity Royall, a young New England woman of humble origins who meets and falls in love with the worldly Lucius Harney, an architect from the city. In evocative and descriptive prose, Wharton conveys the ecstasy of Charity's first experience in sexual and romantic love, and pulls her heroine through the throes of loving a man who ultimately cannot choose her. Wharton's tale elicits the passion and despair of all great but ill-fated love affairs and enthralls the contemporary reader with its pathos just as it did nearly one hundred years ago.
Though best known for her novels of manners detailing upper-class New York society in works such as The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), Edith Wharton was the prolific author of more than two dozen novels, story collections, essays, and poems. She was also a highly regarded tastemaker and author of nonfiction manuals such as The Decoration of Houses (1897), Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), and Italian Backgrounds (1905). Born in 1862 into the privileged, aristocratic milieu of Old New York and financially independent at twenty-one years old, Wharton came of age during what is commonly called the Gilded Age; her life in many ways paralleled that of her wealthy but longing New York City characters. Wharton suffered the loss of her beloved father when she was twenty years old, and she was not particularly close to her two older brothers and famously critical mother. Her twenty-five-year childless marriage to Edward "Teddy" Wharton ended in divorce in 1913 and caused a minor scandal which led the author to relocate to France, where she died in 1937.
Summer, like Ethan Frome, grew out of the tumultuous decade of 1902 to 1912 that Wharton spent at the Mount, the house she helped design in Lenox, Massachusetts, where her marriage unraveled. From 1908 to 1910, Wharton engaged in a torrid love affair with the journalist Morton Fullerton. But while Ethan Frome suggests the pain and isolation that Wharton felt in her marriage to Teddy, Summer hints at Wharton's passionate involvement with Fullerton. The book, which Wharton considered one of her best, was highly praised by the most important authors and critics of the day, including Joseph Conrad, Howard Sturgis, and Percy Lubbock, and was compared to Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary. American readers, however, were scandalized by the book's content and Wharton was reproached for her taboo subjects-sex, divorce, abortion, and prostitution, all of which appear in the novel. After its initial publication in 1917, Summer fell out of print for nearly fifty years, and was only reprinted in 1964. Since then, the novel has seen a renewal of interest and appreciation but it remains, unjustifiably, less known that Ethan Frome.
After both Wharton's marriage and love affair had dissolved, and just before the breakout of World War I, the author moved to France and established two grand residences, one outside of Paris and the other on the Mediterranean coast. She contributed much time and money to war efforts, and wrote Summer during short breaks throughout 1916. For the rest of her life, Wharton lived in France and continued to write steadily, publishing one book nearly every year until her death. Her many years of critical and financial success culminated in her receiving two awards never before bestowed upon a woman: the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence (1920) and an honorary Doctor of Letters from Yale University.
In a radical departure from what was expected of young girls of her social milieu, the shy and introspective Edith Newbold Jones began writing as a child, and produced a short novel of social observation-the genre that would become her specialty-when she was eleven years old. After showing the work to her mother, who read the first line and responded critically, however, Wharton turned to poetry. Her father had her first collection of poems published in 1877 when she was fifteen. For the next decade, Wharton continued to practice writing fiction, poetry, and translation. She began publishing poetry regularly in 1889 in the day's most reputable journals: Scribner's Magazine, Harper's Monthly, and Century Monthly Magazine. She was twenty-seven years old, and her career had begun. Wharton would continue to publish in these three magazines for the rest of her literary career.
After her marriage to Teddy in 1885, Wharton determined to become skilled in the household arts and began studying interior decoration, architecture, furniture, and garden design. Her travels in Europe and a growing library contributed to her education in these fields, as did the experience of buying and "doing over" the homes she lived in as a newly married woman. The first was a cottage on the property of her parents' home in Newport, Rhode Island; the second, her own home in Newport, dubbed "Land's End;" and the third, a brownstone in New York City on Fourth Avenue and Seventy-Eighth Street (renumbered 884 Park Avenue in the twentieth century). Wharton worked on the redesign and decoration of the three properties with a friend from Newport, the architect Ogden Codman, Jr., and with him coauthored her first book, The Decoration of Houses, published in 1897. The manual became a best seller and is still in print. Wharton retained her enthusiasm for renovating and decorating houses throughout her life, and went on to oversee a number of properties both in the United States and France, the most famous of which is the Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts, now open to the public.
Wharton's love affair with the built environment extended to her fiction, in which houses and their interiors as well as gardens and the outlying landscape are illustrated with the precision of a painter's brush. Often in the Wharton novel, houses function as surrogates for people or as symbols of her characters, just as they did in her actual life. This is as true in her well-known New York novels as it is in the New England tales Summer and Ethan Frome. Summer is set in the fictional town of North Dormer, in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, the same geographic area where Wharton lived at the Mount. Like the fictionally named Starkfield of Ethan Frome, North Dormer is sleepy, gloomy, and culturally destitute. The names of both towns reflect their isolation and barrenness. In architecture, a "dormer" refers to a small window set high into a sloping roof, with the one on the north side receiving the least amount of sun. Because of its size and location, a dormer can be seen as an overlooked addition to a house's overall structure. Just so, North Dormer, the town, has been forgotten, as Wharton relays: "There it lay, a weather-beaten sunburnt village of the hills, abandoned of men, left apart by railway, trolley, telegraph, and all the forces that link life to life in modern communities. It had no shops, no theatres, no lectures, no 'business block'; only a church that was opened every other Sunday if the state of the roads permitted, and a library for which no new books had been bought for twenty years, and where the old ones mouldered undisturbed on the damp shelves." Wharton's picture of North Dormer highlights the effect of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century industrialization on small New England villages which at the time were increasingly "left apart" by mass transportation, commerce, and culture. When she lived at the Mount, she observed numerous hamlets like North Dormer on her frequent tours of the countryside and based her fictional, but highly realistic, descriptions of rural life on her firsthand observations.
Charity Royall and her guardian, Lawyer Royall, as he is known, are two of the town's few inhabitants, and together they dwell in his "sad" faded red house at the end of the town's one main road-an apt domicile for the lonesome and dejected pair. Frustrated with her position in life, yet too ignorant to change her course, Charity, a young girl in her early twenties, seesaws between feeling enraged at Lawyer Royall for subjecting her to the mundanity of North Dormer, and indebted to him for rescuing her from her birthplace-the "Mountain." The Mountain, Wharton writes, is a "bad place, and a shame to have come from;" it is an enclave of drunkards, beggars, and other indigents, including Charity's mother, who gave up her daughter to Royall when the child was five. Despite Royall's latent good soul, it is difficult to know who is more hardened by life, Charity or her guardian: "Though she felt no particular affection for him, and not the slightest gratitude, [Charity] pitied him because she was conscious that he was superior to the people about him, and that she was the only being between him and solitude." Until Charity takes a part-time job at the library and meets Lucius Harney, Royall functions as a similar sort of diversion for her.
Harney, an architect (not the first to figure prominently in a Wharton novel), represents the quintessential "outsider," and arrives in North Dormer to research its old buildings. Soon he and Charity begin spending time together. Charity is delighted by her new friend, but she can't help thinking incessantly about the way his hand feels on her back when he touches her inadvertently. The friendship moves beyond the platonic stage on the night of the Fourth of July when Harney suddenly kisses Charity while fireworks explode. After this night, the "comradeship" between the two grows into a love affair; they engage in frequent clandestine meetings in an abandoned house outside of town. Wharton openly depicts Charity's sexual awakening throughout the remaining summer months; she comes into full bloom, just as nature's flowers do during the long, hot days: "[Harney] had his arms about her, and his kisses were in her hair and on her lips. Under his touch things deep down in her struggled to the light and sprang up like flowers in sunshine." The extent to which Charity yields to-and enjoys-her passion for Harney becomes clear.
Wharton's novella, however, is about more than the titillating relationship between Charity and Harney. Ultimately, as its title suggests, it is about the seasons, the inevitable cycles of life: summer turning into fall into winter; flowers blooming, wilting, and dying. Charity's three-month liaison with Harney, which begins in mid-June and expires by September, follows such a course, with its peak coming at the midpoint of the summer. By August, the relationship has begun its decline. But the inevitable ending of the affair is by no means tragic. Rather, it reflects the natural course of all things. Just as flowers must die, Wharton offers, so too must love. It is precisely Charity's realization of this fact that makes her such a penetrating and intelligent young woman in spite of her ignorance of the wider world. Highly attuned to nature from the first, Charity has an uncanny ability to sense-and to respond to-the natural ebb and flow of life, as Wharton describes: "She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of blood in her responded." Thus, while Charity ardently reciprocates Harney's affection, she expects nothing from him or from the relationship. She dwells in the moment and gleans from it all that she can without asking for more. In fact, Charity emerges as the heroine of this short tale because she appears surer of the relationship's necessary ending than Harney does.
Not only does Charity have the wisdom to let Harney go, but she also comes to appreciate and accept Lawyer Royall in an entirely new way. Her change of mind begins when she hears a speech Royall gives during "Old Home Week," a popular turn-of-the-century celebration in New England towns during which Colonial customs were revisited and glorified. In his speech, Royall addresses the importance of embracing small-town life. He tells the crowd: "'You must try to make the best of ... your old town; and after a while ... I believe you'll be able to say, as I can say today: 'I'm glad I'm here.' Believe me ... the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.'" Royall's message-that one should return home "for good," not "for bad" or "for indifference," as he puts it-spills over to his acceptance of Charity and, finally, to hers of him. Thus, by the novel's end, and by summer's end, Charity has not only relinquished Harney, but she has come to terms with Royall, and with living in North Dormer. The girl who once "hated everything" lives up to her name, and in doing so, she becomes one of the most memorable, admirable, and, yes, charitable, female characters of twentieth-century fiction.
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