Of donkeys and distance and faux erudition

This morning, for the first time in ages, I walked up the big horrible hill near our house, puzzling all the while over two questions: What happened to the donkeys? And what am I going to do with Edith Wharton? The two are not entirely unrelated.

Slogging up the gravel road, waving away clouds of gnats and mosquitoes, wandering past the meadow where the red-tailed hawk swooped and the creek where the kingfisher called and the woods where the pileated woodpecker cackled, I kept wondering whether I'd find donkeys at the top of the hill. 

For years our top-of-the-hill neighbors kept expanding their paddocks until placid donkey faces poked expectantly over fences on both sides of the road and far back into the woods. I enjoyed seeing the baby donkeys toddling toward adulthood, but I haven't been up there in a couple of months and hadn't thought about the donkeys until our neighbor's obituary appeared in the paper.

We didn't know our neighbor well enough to go to the funeral, but we knew he was old and in poor health and frankly, I don't know how he and his wife managed a large herd of donkeys on their own. The obituary didn't mention the wife--a mystery!--or the donkeys either, although that didn't surprise me so much. On our small country road where houses hide in the woods at a good distance from one another, we know our neighbors by their cars, their tractors, and their animals. I don't have any curiosity about what happened to the neighbor's tractor after his death, but I do wonder about the donkeys.

As I got closer to the top of the hill, it was clear that big changes were afoot. A section of woods and a dirt road had been cleared; pink flags marked the path of something or other; a pile of twisted metal debris sat alongside the road; and the larger paddock had disappeared entirely. The smaller paddock was still there, though, and four or five mini donkeys stood together in the shade, looking like a group of stolid neighborhood gossips leaning in for a tasty nugget of news. I wished they would turn and spill the scoop, but I had to carry my unanswered questions down the hill. If only I knew my neighbors better!

This dearth of intimacy between people is a central theme of Edith Wharton's fictions, where questions unasked or unanswered doom characters to painful isolation even in the midst of crowds. But that's not why I was thinking about Edith Wharton this morning. I've been re-reading some of her works in preparation for our upcoming visit to The Mount, the home Edith Wharton built in the Berkshires, which provided the impetus for her book The Decoration of Houses. Both house and book served as a declaration of Wharton's independence from her mother, while finding a place that felt like home made possible Wharton's early forays into authorship. The Mount eased Wharton's path toward literary production, and even on repeated readings her fictions never fails to enthrall, which makes me wonder: why do I so rarely put Edith Wharton on any of my syllabi?

I've taught The House of Mirth in the American Novel class, where it makes a nice accessible prelude to more challenging works like The Sound and the Fury or Their Eyes Were Watching God. And I've taught The Age of Innocence in the literature-into-film class, but I could imagine replacing it with Ethan Frome because of the way the 1993 film (with Liam Neeson!) makes cold and distance so palpable. But I don't include any of the wonderful short stories in American Lit Survey--and, even more surprisingly given Wharton's gift for social satire, I've never put any of her works on the comedy syllabus. What's wrong with me?

Part of the problem is that the world in which Wharton asks us to immerse ourselves can feel very distant from the world my students inhabit. Why should they care about the social niceties of the upper crust in nineteenth-century New York? Rich people problems! Why can't those tortured characters just drop their pretenses and say what they mean? (I can precious porcelain teacups shattering on the drawing-room floor...)

And the problem is even more complicated when it comes to Wharton's satires. Consider the opening lines of "Xingu," a short story that never fails to make me laugh out loud: "Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition."

Here Wharton invites us to observe the foibles of a group of women who aren't as smart as they think they are, but before we can observe how she skewers their pretensions, my students are going to run up against "indomitable" and "erudition," words that will inspire some of them to seek out the dictionary and others to give up on the story entirely and read an online summary.

And what a shame! Because they'll never get to know the priggish Mrs. Plinth, who issues stern warnings against discussion of topics she doesn't comprehend; or the striving Mrs. Leveret, who carries Appropriate Allusions as a hunter carries ammunition and whose greatest fear is that a visiting author, Osric Dane, might use a different volume; or Osric Dane herself, the author of The Wings of Death, a book the club discusses at some length without having actually read it. 

And worse yet, they'll never encounter the marvelous Mrs. Roby, whom the other women dismiss as an intellectual lightweight because "At Miss Van Vluyck's first off-hand mention of the pterodactyl Mrs. Roby had confusedly murmured: 'I know so little about metres--'" (How many of my students are equipped to get that joke? By the time I've explained about dactyls, how many will care?)

And if they aren't willing to follow the subtle stabs at pseudo-intellectualism in Wharton's book, how many students will appreciate the irony when the lightweight Mrs. Roby is the only huntress able to pierce Osric Dane's defenses, puncturing her arrogance and exposing her flaws? I picture a classroom in which I am the only one laughing when Mrs. Roby asserts that Osric Dane's novel is "immersed" in Xingu, which causes the other women to marvel and issue their own commentary on Xingu without any understanding of what the word means.

Here Wharton brutally satirizes non-readers who sit around trying to impress each other with their erudition despite their unwillingness to take the most basic steps toward learning, like doing the reading or looking up unfamiliar words. Yes: she's satirizing my classroom.

But my students will never know that unless I add "Xingu" to the syllabus.

So why don't I do that? That's another unanswered question I had to carry up and down the big horrible hill, without a single donkey to share the burden.