Book review: “Twilight Sleep” by Edith Wharton

Seven years after Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize, she published Twilight Sleep which tells the same story from a different perspective.

In both novels, the story has to do with the clan and its power. The clan is the hidebound, stuffy, often witless but always powerful New York high society (and, by extension, any clan you can think of).  And its power is exerted to keep individuals — tempted to act with a free-spirited liveliness and bald emotion — from breaking the social code and disrupting the somnolent calm.

The Age of Innocence (1920) is a tragedy in which love is thwarted — and, even more, the hope of a vibrant life.

Newland Archer, engaged to be married, falls in love with the Countess Ellen Olenska, a bohemian presence on the edges of social acceptability. He wants to chuck his comfortable affluent existence to run away with her. But the clan, in its infuriatingly indirect yet forceful ways, cracks down on the couple, ensuring that Archer turns his back on his longing for happiness and falls into line in his place in the social ranks.

Twilight Sleep, which was originally serialized in 1927, is an acerbic comedy of manners centered on the rich, vain and domineering Pauline Manford and her family.

Wharton portrays Pauline and her circle and all of New York society as foolish and self-obsessed, so cushioned against anything that might be conceived of as sad or painful that they aren’t able to feel much at all. (The title comes from the fashionable 1920s twilight sleep approach to childbirth in which the mother is drugged to insensitivity and is awakened after the baby is born.)

 

A flirtation that gets out of hand

In this novel, the love element isn’t the soul-connectedness of Archer and Olenska but a flirtation that gets out of hand.

The bohemian in the tale is Lita Wyant, the wife of Pauline’s son by a first marriage and mother of her baby grandson (who is mentioned fairly often in the novel but whose name is never given). Unlike the Countess, Lita is flighty and self-absorbed and clueless.

A new scent — unrecognizable but exquisite. In its wake came Lita Wyant, half-dancing, half-drifting, fastening a necklace, humming a tune, her little round head, with the goldfish-colored hair, the mother-of-pearl complexion and screwed-up auburn eyes, turning sideways like a bird’s on her long throat.

She was astonished but delighted to see [her sister-in-law] Nona, indifferent to her husband’s non-arrival, and utterly unaware that lunch had been waiting for half an hour.

 

Her animal-ness

Her love interest, if he can be called that, is Pauline’s present husband Dexter, a high-powered lawyer who becomes increasingly infatuated with his stepson’s wife although he’s so distant from his emotions that he doesn’t realize what’s going on until the very end.

Early in the novel, Dexter, irritated by his wife and her controlling ways, feels “secretly drawn” to Lita as someone who doesn’t talk of altruistic duty as a way to mask a self-centered life.

But when you spoke of duty to Lita she just widened her eyes and said: “Is that out of the Marriage Service? ‘Love, honor and obey’ — such a funny combination! Who do you suppose invented it? I believe it must have been Pauline.”

One could never fix her attention on any subject beyond her own immediate satisfaction, and that animal sincerity seemed to Manford her greatest charm. Too great a charm … a terrible danger. He saw it now. He thought he had gone to her for relaxation, change — and he had just managed to pull himself up on the edge of a precipice.

It is Lita’s animal-ness that makes her particularly distinctive among the rich and cushioned.  Not just her “animal sincerity,” but also her “animal patience” and her “animal hush.”  She is a creature of instincts.  The clan locks away instincts along with spontaneity, honest words and raw feelings.

 

“The impulse to lay a hand”

For much of the novel, Dexter thinks he is working to keep Lita from divorcing Jim and going off to Hollywood to make movies for great pay. She is a “baleful siren” who is “only a misguided child.”

But, as the novel is nearing its end, he is spending more and more time with her alone, often in his Buick, such as on one drive:

Lita settled down beside him into one of the deep silences that enfolded her as softly as her furs. By turning his head a little he could just see the tip of her nose and the curve of her upper lip between hat-brim and silver fox; and the sense of her, so close and so still, sunk in that warm animal hush which he always found so restful, dispelled his last uneasiness, and made her presence at his side seem as safe and natural as his own daughter’s….She curled down more deeply at his side, with a contented laugh.

Manford, intent on the steering wheel, restrained the impulse to lay a hand over hers, and kept his profile steadily turned to her.

 

“Aimlessly kind”

Nona, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Pauline and Dexter, is the most sensible member of the family.  While still part of the clan, she is young enough and still unfettered enough to see society for what it is.  At one point, she ruminates about the many altruistic endeavors in which her mother and other matrons take part.

They were all inexorably earnest, aimlessly kind and fathomlessly pure; and all rather too well-dressed, except the “prominent woman” of the occasion, who usually wore dowdy clothes, and had steel-rimmed spectacles and straggling wisps of hair. Whatever the question dealt with, these ladies always seemed to be the same and always advocated with equal zeal Birth Control and unlimited maternity, free love or the return to the traditions of the American home; and neither they nor Mrs. Manford seemed aware that there was anything contradictory in these doctrines.

All they knew was that they were determined to force certain persons to do things that those persons preferred not to do.

 

“Bewildered little Iphigenia”

Pauline, like the rest of society, moved and lived in a manner to keep at far distance any sense of pain or sadness or death.  It was a society that “believed in panaceas” and believed that any problem could be fixed.  As Nona thought:

It was as if, in the beaming determination of the middle-aged, one and all of them, to ignore sorrow and evil, “think them away” as superannuated bogies, survivals of some obsolete European superstition unworthy of enlightened Americans, to whom plumbing and dentistry had given higher standards, and bi-focal glasses a clearer view of the universe — as if the demons the elder generation ignored, baulked of their natural prey, had cast their hungry shadow over the young.

Pauline and “all those bright-complexioned white-haired mothers” wore the armor of “massage and optimism and behave[ed] as if they had never heard of anything but the Good and the Beautiful.” And it was left the occasional young family member like Nona to face those demons — “to remember now and then that such things as wickedness, suffering and death had not yet been banished from the earth.”

These are Nona’s thoughts early in the novel about the wooly-headedness of her mother and her clan and about her own role in trying to bring some sense of reality to conversations.

Indeed, Wharton calls her “bewildered little Iphigenia,” and the reference to the sacrificial victim of Greek mythology turns out to be more than metaphoric.

 

A piece of good fortune

In the end, it’s Nona who pays the price for the family’s refusal to face facts — to see what is actually going on instead of insisting on only perceiving what they want to perceive.  She literally takes one — well, two — for the team.

In the middle of the night, two gunshots ring out in Lita’s bedroom, and Nona’s wounded.

The shooting is unfortunate inasmuch as Nona has to spend a few weeks in the hospital, but, for the family, for the clan, it’s a piece of good fortune.  It shatters a moment when the social code was about to be broken irrevocably by Dexter and Lita running off in scandal.

Instead, the moment is covered up.  The news is about an intruder.  Nona plays along and so do the servants, and no one’s the wiser.

 

“A convent!”

Lita is back with Jim, and they’re off for Paris. Pauline and Dexter, ostensibly never apart, are off to the West Coast and then Japan and India.

As Pauline is taking her leave of her daughter, she suggests that Nona needs to get married to find happiness.

“Marry!  I’d a thousand times rather go into a convent and have done with it,” she exclaimed.

This Romanist heresy is too much for the mother.  “I never heard anything so horrible,” she said.

The girl let her head drop back among the cushions.

“Oh, but I mean a convent where nobody believes in anything,” she said.

 

 

Patrick T. Reardon

3.11.25