Imagine a fictional town called Starkfield, Massachusetts, a bleak wintry landscape with horse-pulled carriage carrying a gaunt man called Ethan Frome. That’s a pretty good description of Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton’s most famous novella. This post, of course, is about Summer, her other novella, which she describes as the “hot Ethan”—a wild way to put such an innocent-seeming pastoral.
But Summer is set in the warm countryside of New England, in the nineteen-twenties, and in fact does address the stages of a woman’s sexual awakening. In the classic stranger-comes-to-town fashion, Lucius Harney, a young New York architect, comes to the town of North Dormer where Charity Royall lives, bringing an insatiable curiosity for houses and the history behind them. This awakes in Charity a desire to know more about her own history, among other desires.
By the humid months of midsummer she and Harney are spending nights in an empty cabin with candles lit near the window. The thing is, all this is done very elegantly, so your first thoughts aren’t really to equate the story with an erotic summer fling. But that’s the strange brilliance of Summer: its undertones make you read descriptions of summer lanes and warm fields twice. Besides which, there’s an overarching tone of festivities and extravagance, Fourth of July fireworks by the dock, which only speaks to the transience of summer.
Summer things are temporary, even in present-day. Summer romance, summer getaways, summer jobs, summer homes. Similarly to The Great Gatsby, a summer full of rowing, parties, lights across the dock, autumn soon comes to end the late-night festivities that were never supposed to last.
Wharton’s Summer begins with plenty of hope and fizzles out (in the wake of autumn) in what seems to me a very disturbing ending—involving an abortion and an unwanted elopement with someone much older. It’s all the more disturbing because Charity accepts her fate, calmly, resolving to make do. According to scholar Hermione Lee’s introduction, the ending is a metaphor for stoicism, or coming-of-age: an adult must accept unideal situations the way a child cannot.
So it’s during this brief window of summer that Charity Royall lets herself be reckless, young, irresponsible, like how many of us engage with summer things, letting rigid schedules melt into puddles leaking over June and July…because it’s all temporary. And the transience of summer lies in the knowledge that by the end of summer we must be adults again.
