Economic hauntings: wealth and class in Edith Wharton's ghost stories.(Essays)

In the last decade or so, Edith Wharton's ghost stories have finally begun to attract the critical attention they deserve. Although the stories are diverse in their approach, scholars tend to emphasize themes of repressed sexuality, and/or how the stories dramatize gender struggles, in particular the struggles of women to overcome the traditional roles that threaten to imprison them. (1) While sexual and gender politics undoubtedly inhabit the haunted space of Wharton's stories, a remarkable number of the ghost stories also exhibit anxiety over money and class. (2) In some of the ghost narration, this anxiety is plainly visible, reflecting Wharton's sharp critique of the corrupt nouveau riches and the decaying aristocracy. In other tales, however, less noticed ghosts expose the depth of Wharton's anxiety over class power and inherited wealth. For example, stories such as "Mr. Jones" and "All Souls'" reveal the exploited labor and rebellion of the servant classes along with a striking unease regarding inherited property, raising uncomfortable questions about the legitimacy of the class system on which Wharton depended for her own wealth.

Wharton, of course, was not alone in her anxiety over money and class. The period in which she wrote the ghost stories (1904-37) marks particularly anxious moments in the American public's ambivalent relationship with wealth. On the one hand, average Americans believed they too could achieve great wealth and strove to emulate the rich. However, media stories exposing the corrupt fortunes of the "Captains of Industry" and the extravagant consumption by the wealthy fueled resentment in a public concerned about the increasing gap between the rich and poor. Frequent labor unrest, Populist reforms, the specter of Socialism, the 1929 economic crash, and subsequent Depression all contributed to the wealthy classes' fear that they were under attack. A close examination of the ghost stories reveals Wharton's participation in and response to America's anxious debate over wealth and class during the rapidly changing economic landscape of the early twentieth century.

Given the tremendous economic changes she witnessed during her lifetime, Wharton's anxiety about wealth and class is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is the depth of anxiety and critique in the ghost stories regarding money, especially by an author who "never apologized for her wealth, using her earnings and inheritances to build elaborate homes and gardens in the United States and France, to take extensive and often exotic trips, and to create warm environments for friends ..." (Singley 2003, 7). Wharton certainly was not an economic revolutionary. As Barbara White writes of Wharton's worldview, "To some extent she was always socially and politically conservative in that she never showed any inclination to renounce her class and race privileges and never could imagine any institutions to replace the ones she criticized in her writings" (1991, 85). Nonetheless, Wharton's ghost stories in particular exhibit a deeper sense of economic crisis than has been recognized.

My reading of the ghost stories follows the critical view of Wharton as both an insider and outsider of upper-class society, a position that resulted in her own complex brand of social criticism. Benjamin Carson's reading of gender and class in The House of Mirth discusses this insider/outsider position. Drawing on Teresa de Lauretis's concept of "doubled vision," Carson writes, "While Wharton was undoubtedly of the 'ruling class,' she was not unaware of the constructedness of Woman and of gender (and gender roles). She was not so blinded by--she was not so 'inside'--myopic aristocratic ideology that she could not see the charade women were expected to act out" (2003, 695, 698). Singley also notes this double vision: "A member of the upper-class, Wharton was very aware of the differences that money and position could make, and she, no less than others, enjoyed its privileges. But as a self-supporting artist and intellectual who found her own class system confining, Wharton was uniquely situated to offer a critique of class" (1992, 281). (3) Analysis of the ghost stories reveals this "double vision," which allowed Wharton to explore economic issues in ways that were at times unexpectedly radical.

Before discussing Wharton's specific ghost stories, it is helpful to examine the anxious economic cultural climate of turn-of-the-century America. Many Americans were fascinated with the extreme fortunes of Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt, and sought new opportunities to make money for themselves. As Simon Bronner points out, "the preoccupation of the age was with wealth: new wealth, consuming wealth, widespread wealth. Americans wondered what to make of this recent good fortune, what to do with it, how to show it, and what it meant for the future. They embraced it, but worried about it" (1989b, 50). This anxiety increased with the growing disparity of incomes between the classes, and scandals exposing fortunes made through illegal means were eroding the belief that wealth was based on ethical, individual effort (Fluck 2003, 57). Moreover, critics raised concerns about millionaires' influence in government, and some feared America was becoming a plutocracy antithetical to democratic ideals (57-58). By the turn of the century, a wide range of critics, from Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class to Gustavus Myers in History of the Great American Fortunes, were painting unflattering portraits of the older aristocracy and new upper classes. In 1902, muckraking critic W. J. Ghent sardonically describes the next stage of America's society as a "benevolent feudalism," in which more and more power will be concentrated in the hands of a few "barons" (1949, 92-93). (4)

The defenders of capitalism did not remain silent in the face of these attacks. They believed passionately that the leaders of commerce strengthened democracy. One of these supporters, Andrew Carnegie, celebrated big business and fortunes as signs of America's inevitable progress. In his famous 1889 North American Review essay "Wealth," Carnegie writes that "we cannot evade" the law of capitalism, and

 
  while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for 
  the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every 
  department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which 
  we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment; the 
  concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of 
  a few; and the law of competition between these, as being not only 
  beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race. 
  (Carnegie 1962, 16-17)