Degradation and forbidden love in Edith Wharton's 'Summer.'

In Edith Wharton's 1917 novel Summer the relationship between the heroine, Charity Royall, and her lover, Lucius Harney, depicts a kind of feminine sexual awakening that is profoundly original in literature. As Cynthia Griffin Wolff notes in her introduction to the book, "Summer is not the first Bildungsroman to focus on this awakening to maturity as it occurs in a woman's life; however, it is the first to deal explicitly with sexual passion as an essential component of that process" (x). The precise way in which this sexual relationship is entered into by these young people has significant psychoanalytical ramifications. Specifically, Harney's need for a certain degradation of Charity to occur before he can find her sexually accessible, his subconscious need to separate feelings of sexual desire and attraction from feelings of genuine tenderness and high esteem, and Charity's own need to experience her sexuality as a forbidden pleasure, constitute driving forces in the revelation of their relationship within the novel. Freud's 1912 essay "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life" proves insightful in a close analysis of the relationship between Charity and Harney - particularly with regard to the factors that contribute to Harney's perspective and involvement.

The assumption that Wharton knew Feud's work is almost inevitable. Like Freud, Wharton exhibited great appreciation for the works of Arthur Schnitzler (Lawson 46, 129), the late-nineteenth-century "Vienna-born Jewish doctor" who is known for "epitomizing" Viennese impressionism in his literary works (Johnson 171-72), and whose stories, novels, and plays revealed a "perceptiveness with which they laid bare the inner, mainly the sensual, world of their characters" (Gay 130) As well, both Freud and Wharton admired the works of Goethe and Schiller. Freud "could quote [them] by the hour" (128), while Wharton reaffirmed "her loyalty to the older German literature and the German language" by immersing herself in the correspondence between the two (Lewis 394) "'Goethe always schillered when he wrote to Schiller, didn't he?' she observed" (394). Even more persuasive is the fact that Wharton often mentioned and discussed Freud among her friends during her excursion to Germany in 1913, as well as after her return to Paris that same year (352, 355). Freud's influence on Wharton then, though not unequivocally documented, is apparent in that they often expressed similar concerns about cultural expectations and restrictions, and in that they were both interested in critiquing the "attitudes to premarital and extramarital sexual experience, [and] the precarious relation between parents and children" that they perceived in the societies in which they lived (134).

Summer tells the story of the romance that develops between Charity Royall, a relatively inexperienced young girl of humble beginnings, and Lucius Harney, an ambitious young man from the city. Charity is living with her guardian, Mr. Royall, in North Dormer, Massachusetts, when Harney comes to stay with his cousin, Miss Hatchard, for the summer. After their coincidental meeting in the library where Charity works part-time, Harney and Charity begin to see more and more of each other until their friendship evolves into a torrid affair. The romance of this seemingly mismatched couple "breaks, or stretches, many conventions of romantic love stories and in the process creates a new picture of female sexuality" (French xlii).

First of all, the relationship has only progressed so far as Harney's giving Charity her first real kiss when Charity is publicly degraded by Mr. Royall. The scene of the first kiss is in itself a foreshadowing of the sexual ecstasy that is soon to follow for the young couple. Having spent the day together in Nettleton, Charity and Harney are sitting in the bleachers at a Fourth of July fireworks display when the kiss takes place. As Charity leans back to view the display, she feels "Harney's knees against her head" (100).

After a while the scattered fireworks ceased. A longer interval of darkness followed, and then the whole night broke into flower. From every point of the horizon, gold and silver arches sprang up and crossed each other, sky-orchards broke into blossom, shed their flaming petals and hung their branches with golden fruit; and all the while the air was filled with a soft supernatural hum, as though great birds were building nests in those invisible tree-tops. (100)

The sexual imagery in this passage is important to note; Charity is about to "break into flower" or "break into blossom" herself. She is at once becoming aware of her own sexual instincts and needs in response to her growing intimacy with Harney. She will soon "shed [her] flaming petals," so to speak, and enter into an awakening that will incur all the brilliance and excitement that the fireworks symbolize. In fact, she and Harney are soon to embark on building their own secret little nest where they may covertly experience this excitement.