EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Edith Wharton and Holly Golightly
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER Edith Wharton was born 150 years ago into New York old wealth. Her mother discouraged her writing, although later had her youthful poems published privately. The young Edith knew she was destined to live the life into which she had been raised. She married a Boston socialite, Edward Wharton. The couple quickly acquired the habit of frequent trips to Europe. While in London, she met Henry James, the writer invariably described as her literary mentor.
But Wharton was more than his disciple. Her marriage to the spendthrift Wharton gradually collapsed and she turned to fiction. Her first novel, a historical romance called The Valley of Decision, was published in 1902 when she was 40. On reading it, James astutely advised her to write about what she knew.
Not only did Wharton know New York society, she understood women. In The House of Mirth (1905) she brought a female character beyond the victimhood of the Victorian heroine. Unlike Thomas Hardy’s vulnerable wronged maiden in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Lily Bart is intelligent and socially aware. She is also a risk taker, recklessly visiting a single man in his apartment. Lily is far more knowing than Isabel Archer in James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Wharton was dismantling the accepted notion of women as passive. Having long enjoyed the security of her aunt’s largesse, the orphaned Lily could toy with suitors. Suddenly she is 29, unmarried, no longer quite as eligible and, alas, no longer respectable.
In a later Wharton novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), New York lawyer Newland Archer is about to enter a socially approved marriage but falls in love with the estranged wife of a Polish count. Does he choose passion over convention? Not likely. Pioneering 18th-century novelists such as Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding regarded female virtue as both prize and time bomb, whereas the eponymous character in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) could be spirited and crafty as she had no social rank to lose. Yet throughout the Victorian era and into the 20th century, respectability and social acceptance were rated more highly than genuine goodness.
Fast forward to Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), in which the lively, amoral Holly Golightly, based on Capote’s mother, disregards all the rules and lives off her wits, often abandoning the men who have hired her for the evening by escaping with the cash they give her to tip the powder room attendant. Part of her income is earned by visiting a criminal in Sing Sing prison. Capote’s Holly disappears in Africa, much to the sorrow of the narrator, a writer. When Hollywood sank its 1960s teeth into the story, producers made plot changes and feared that Capote’s choice, Marilyn Monroe, would be too sexual a presence. Instead, the androgynous charm of Audrey Hepburn deflected the potential squalor. The happy-ever-after ending outraged Capote but delighted romantics who recognised that even free spirits crave love.