We Came Along with a Hammer

Speaking of Wharton’s sense of sexual danger, how does softcore incest grab you?

The whole fur in a hot room motif appears again in “Beatrice Palmatto”, a pornographic fragment found among Wharton’s papers after her death: “The room was warm, and softly lit by one or two pink-shaded lamps. A little fire sparkled on the hearth, and a lustrous black bearskin run, on which a few purple velvet cushions had been flung, was spread out before it.” The cushions aren’t the only thing that ends up flung on the bearskin rug, shall we say.

(The entire 3-page excerpt may be found here in pdf form. Not something you’d want to be found reading at work, unless you work for Cinemax After Dark.)

I heard about Beatrice when I was googling about at bit after finishing the Age of Innocence — I often like to read reviews and criticism of a work just after I’ve done with it; it’s nice to bounce someone else’s ideas off your own — and fortunately Hermione Lee just wrote a new doorstop on Wharton last year, which was much reviewed.

When I heard about it, I immediately sought it out, because I was fascinated to see what the same woman who wrote something as uptight as the Age would make of an attempt to write some explicit erotica. Turns out she can manage to be quite straightforward if she likes. Which was interesting, and a good reminder of something to often forgotten: I think we moderns tend to feel that the people of previous centuries were as ignorant about sex as its utter absence in their published works would suggest, and that ain’t the case.

Obviously we acknowledge that they knew something of the matter: People continued to exist, after all. And because there was a great deal more repression in those days, there was definitely a lot more ignorance , especially for young people, than is the case today, when the most sheltered of sixth-graders is a google and click away from Dan Savage. But I still think there’s a sort general feeling when we read 19th century novels — particularly novels like the Age of Innocence — is that all these meaning glances across the room and opera fans brushing against thighs in apparently unstudied  manner and  glimpses of collarbone which give rise to a hard lump in the throat point to longing for the unknown, the undreamed of, the un-experienced.  When really it’s all solely unspoken, and when Newland eyes the Countess in the scene below

It was usual for ladies who received in the evenings to wear what were called “simple dinner dresses”: a close-fitting armour of whale-boned silk, slightly open in the neck, with lace ruffles filling in the crack, and tight sleeves with a flounce uncovering just enough wrist to show an Etruscan gold bracelet or a velvet band. But Madame Olenska, heedless of tradition, was attired in a long robe of red velvet bordered about the chin and down the front with glossy black fur. Archer remembered, on his last visit to Paris, seeing a portrait by the new painter, Carolus Duran, whose pictures were the sensation of the Salon, in which the lady wore one of these bold sheath-like robes with her chin nestling in fur. There was something perverse and provocative in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawing-room, and in the combination of a muffled throat and bare arms; but the effect was undeniably pleasing.

….he’s fully capable of imagining scene as perverse and pleasing as the one Wharton draws in Beatrice Palmatto.

This entry was posted on April 9, 2008 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.