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

Publication: College Literature

Publication Date: 01-JAN-08

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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)

Influenced heavily by the works of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, Carnegie's arguments (which soon became known as the Gospel of Wealth) reflect his society's obsession with Social Darwinism, the belief that the "most fit" in society are "naturally" in positions of power. (5) Carnegie was careful to emphasize, however, that with wealth and power comes great responsibility. In the following passage, he describes "the duty of the man of wealth" who is "animated by Christ's spirit":

To set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community--the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves. (Carnegie 1962, 25)

Ministers, such as William Lawrence, blend this religious tradition of good stewardship with evolutionary principles to support the gospel of wealth. In 1901, Lawrence writes, "[T]o seek for and earn wealth is a sign of a natural, vigorous, and strong character.... The race is to the strong" (1949, 70). At the same time, Lawrence says, the rich man uses his wealth "in the wisest way, for the relief of the poor, the upbuilding of social standards, and the upholding of righteousness among the people.... If ever Christ's words have been obeyed to the letter, they are obeyed to-day by those who are living out His precepts of the stewardship of wealth" (72). (6)

Despite these defenses of wealth and capitalism, criticism of the upper classes was mounting, and the attacks were not only from the muckrakers. In 1911 Frederick Townsend Martin, a member of the leisure class, blasts the extravagant waste of the "idle rich" in his enormously popular book The Passing of the Idle Rich. Martin is careful to defend capitalism and repeats the social Darwinist belief that wealth belongs in "the hands best qualified by nature to hold them" (1975, 90). But the dominant emotions of his book are that anxiety and fear regarding the economic inequalities in America. Martin writes, "Somewhere there is something wrong. I speak as a rich man.... We can no longer blind ourselves with idle phrases or drug our consciences with the outworn boast that the workingman of America is to-day the highest paid artisan of the world" (92-93). He goes on to warn, "We in America are moving fast toward social revolution. Conflicts between labour and capital are assuming the proportions of civil war.... To-day the class spirit in America is thoroughly aroused, and it is almost with terror that I ... raise my feeble voice in warning to the other members of my class" (96-97).

Pressure to address economic inequalities in the early twentieth century was also coming from the Progressive party, Congress, and the White House. Picking up where Theodore Roosevelt left off, Woodrow Wilson's first speeches to Congress in 1913 included the warning, "We must abolish anything that bears even the semblance of privilege or any kind of artificial advantage" (qtd. in Phillips 2002, 47). After several failed attempts, an amendment to impose a graduated income tax was ratified in 1913. (7) Also in 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment, aimed at limiting the power of wealth in government, was passed. For the first time, the people would elect their U.S. senators directly rather than allow their state legislatures to do so.

In the context of this turbulent debate over wealth and privilege, the economic anxiety in Wharton's "Afterward" (1909) is evident. In the story, Americans Mary and Ned Boyne buy their dream home in rural England, only to be haunted by Ned's former unethical business practices. Ned was hoping to escape his past, but the narrator describes how the couple "could not get far enough from the world, or plunge deep enough into the past" (1997, 60). Ned soon discovers that past ghosts will not rest. The haunting begins with the appearance of a mysterious man, whom Ned and Mary jokingly claim as their home's legendary ghost. One day the man pays them a visit, and Ned is never heard from again. Through her husband's lawyer, Mary learns how Ned made his fortune at the expense of Robert Elwell, the mysterious stranger. As a result of losing all his money, Elwell kills himself, and his ghost comes back for Ned, presumably murdering him. On one level, Wharton's critique in "Afterward" echoes the public's growing concern with the power of greed and lack of business ethics in America. However, Wharton not only joins the Progressive outcry against the period's corruption but also attempts to distinguish the moral aristocracy from those who gain wealth through unscrupulous means. Her problem is not with great wealth but with how wealth is acquired. Through the details of Ned's wrongdoing, the story's subtext functions as a defense of the Old Money class, a plea to the reader not to judge all the wealthy by the sensational cases making the news.

In "Afterward" the sordid facts of Elwell's lawsuit against Ned in the Blue Star Mine deal are laid out in the newspaper, as were the scandals in Wharton's day. The lawyer explains to Mary how Ned not only engaged in speculation; he also took advantage of Elwell, cheating him out of his rightful share of the profits. Using the Social Darwinist language of the time, the lawyer attempts to explain away Ned's...

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