SALAMANDERS IN THE FIRE: THE SHORT STORIES OF EDITH WHARTON

In the course of her writing career, Edith Wharton wrote eighty-six short stories. These stories span her entire career and cover a multitude of topics. The stories exhibit, however, a curious unity. From first to last, Wharton writes pessimistically about individuals struggling to establish a sense of self.; Wharton's work suggests that a woman's search for identity necessarily takes place later than a man's does. Unlike that of her male counterpart, a girl's emergence into adulthood is marked not by the acquisition of a powerful sense of self, but by marriage and submission to a husband. To be submissive is to submerge awareness of one's own feelings in favor of another's. Only after a woman's sense of self has re-emerged, that is, only after she has defined and accepted her own selfhood, can a woman freely act on her own feelings instead of on those of others.; This struggle for re-emergence provides one of the pervasive tensions in Wharton's short fiction. Moreover, a second tension complicates the struggle. In Wharton's work people are never entirely free of the dictates of society. In making their choices, they must consider the societal consequences of their actions, which makes them society's victims. Wharton, however, did not blame society alone for making it so difficult to experience self-fulfillment. Wharton's stories support my contention that she believed that people internalize societal expectations and thus sabotage their own efforts to be free of them.; Nearly every one of Wharton's short stories contains a character in some stage of submergence or re-emergence. After defining the stages in chapter I, I will examine, in chapter II, the reasons why characters can neither escape victimization nor rid themselves of internalized censors sufficiently to re-emerge. I will then analyze the stories as they represent submergence and re-emergence.; I will conclude with a chapter on Wharton's ghost stories, a genre she particularly enjoyed. Even aided by ghosts, Wharton's characters fail to succeed in the search for autonomy. It is thus in her ghost stories that Wharton's vision reaches its most pessimistic extreme.