Edith Wharton “The Dilettante”
Thursdale
Vervain
Gaynor
Connection to Henry James key themes: old world culture vs. new world; American ingénue/innocent female gets roped into a relationship with an old world experienced/habitué who uses the ingénue (for money, power, sex)
Daisy Miller (American freshness—unwilling to follow social norms—but really willing to live life/face life)
Jamesian villains refuse to face life, act, are lost in books, removed from human connection, live “life-in-death”, materialistic, jaded, bored, aesthetes, upper class, hierarchical system; living in the past, not in present, out-dated; D.H. Lawrence “sex in the head”; selfish, self-centered, afraid of actual experience (“The Beast in the Jungle”); predatory European vampire sucking life out of innocent American; hyper-refined—hyper-conscious
Dilettante: dabbler, not serious, amateur,--dilettantes when it comes to living? Not fully committed to relationship—merely acting, roles, never embody roles fully; female cyborg, doesn’t show emotions, no thin ice, all calculation and contained—committed to shaping her but not to her (Pygmalion and Galatea); he used to calling the shots, treating the people in his life like characters in a story he’s writing—suddenly taken aback that Miss Gaynor has made a second visit.
Thursdale’s attraction to Miss Gaynor: this year’s model—status, wealth, power
Anticipating modernism (in which one of the central ideas is that traditional culture and the arts are not sufficient to the modern condition—dead, decadent, decaying, not life-giving or life-reflecting)
Thursdale likes the chiaroscuro effect of life (the subtle shadings, not broad strokes)
Aesthete Thursdale has created Mrs. Vervain into his ideal woman: not emotional, understands unspoken implications of situation, has no needs or desires he has any obligation to fulfill
Thursdale couldn’t wait to come see Mrs. V after leaving Miss G at the railroad station: stuck between modern and traditional—needs Mrs. V to analyze the situation to death—because he’s not in touch with him emotions—he understands his emotional through intellect, rationalization
Miss Gaynor wants to know if T’s “free”—multiple meanings—polysemic: 1) is he having an affair with Mrs V? 2) is he free from his own social boundaries/construction? 3) is he modern? 4) is he valueless?
“The unpardonable offence has been--in our not offending." Miss G is creeped out by the relationship—I better run like hell before he does this to me! Miss G (a Daisy Miller) sees that T and V has refused life—she wants a full, emotional life not a shadow of a life built on tenuous relationships
Miss Gaynor rejects Mrs Vervain’s lack of responsibility for her own life (feminist critique of T and V)—is it anger or pity? Miss Gaynor is the modern society rejecting old traditional life-denying social norms
Beginning of modernism: no pat answers to this story, no clear ending, ambivalence
Only see Gaynor through other’s perspectives, and how perspective changes how reader sees the character—she’s the new woman, the anti-Vervain,
Miss Gaynor is impenetrable, absent, unknowable ultimately—similar to the modern scientific theory that observation changes
the thing observed—Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
V and T are 19th C people living in 20th C world
Does Miss G’s words sound more like V or Miss G?
Mrs Vervain’s Psychological test
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