Edith Wharton - The Other Two

                Edith Wharton was brought up in a prosperous and fortunate family.  She lived in a time when the ritzy crowd dreaded the extreme social changes that occurred due to the post-civil war domination and immigration.  Edith Wharton became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature, for her novel The Age of Innocence (1921).  Even though she was wealthy and female, she was one of the few American citizens who traveled to the front lines in France during World War I.  Wharton wrote a series of articles about her experience in France and in 1916 she was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.  She stayed in France until her death in 1937.  She returned to the United States on one occasion to get an honorary doctorate from Yale.  In spite of the time that she spent away from the United States, Edith is admired for her novels that completely apprehended and moderately criticized the upper class in America.  An expression that was devised about Edith Wharton’s family was “Keeping up with the Joneses.”  She was born as Edith Newbold Jones and her privileged lifestyle led to many of her best works.  She had several significant ancestors, including Ebenezer Stevens who partook in the Boston Tea Party.  Wharton was divorced from her husband in 1913.  She didn’t see the divorce as immoral but as a “diploma of virtue.”  Edith was working on a novel, The Buccaneers, at the time of her death.  The unfinished novel was published in 1938.  In 1993, author Marion Mainwaring completed a version of the novel and it was published.   

            The story, The Other Two, was Edith’s way of reflecting on the social changes that the American society was experiencing.  This was a great story and it made sense.  The main character in the story is a high society man.  He is the prime example for the values that most men during this time held as a standard.  His position as a Wall Street Investor and as a man who has the earnings to have servants, gives us a clear parallel between himself and high society.  What he deems is a doorway into the psychology of high society as a whole.  This is obvious throughout the story as the main character is always concerned with what the society pages have to say about his wife.  The main character in this story is Mr. Waythorn and he is having trouble reconciling with his wife’s past marriages.  The reflection of a difficulty with the  issue of divorce is having within the society is also attributed to Wharton herself.  The author has been divorced and this story can reflect on her thoughts about the issue.  Mr. Waythorn is upset that his wife has had two divorces in the past.  A significant point in this story is the ease in which divorce is granted as well as Mr. Waythorn’s tense reunion with his wife’s two ex-husbands.  Edith was a person who did not divorce her husband easily due to her “devotions to family ties and the sanctities of tradition.”  In this short story there is an examination into how divorce can threaten society as it did with Mr. Waythorn.  At the end of the story there is a moment of understanding when the complex situation is acknowledged and everyone accepts the roles that they are given within the divorce.