The Mother’s Recompense by Edith Wharton

There are times when I accuse myself of searching for moral and political significance in novels that I like simply because of the stories they tell and the skill with which they are written. There is no doubt that Edith Wharton wrote beautiful, sometimes even entrancing, prose. But she was a very rich woman who never renounced her wealth, and although she served in courageous ways during World War I, and after the war brought to the attention of the artistic world many writers and painters who were very poor and sometimes homeless, her political views were in most ways as conservative as those of the class from which she came and from which she never quite managed to extricate herself.

That said, I think Wharton is a feminist whose awareness of sexism deepened with age, and whose later works present female lead characters not simply as tragic castoffs from so-called high society, but as strong and principled women who refuse to play the roles society has dictated for them and who in most ways prefer their relative impoverishment to the moneyed lives they might have lived had they succumbed to class pressure.

In particular, I want to talk today about one of her late novels, The Mother’s Recompense, that was published in 1925 when Wharton was sixty-three and just eight years before her death. I hate to give away significant features of plot when I review books, but it is next to impossible to talk about The Mother’s Recompense without giving away one crucial feature of the plot. I don’t think giving away this part of the book will ruin it for serious readers, and at any rate, Wharton, herself, gives it away about a third of the way into the book.

Kate Clephane, the lead character in the book, has been ostracized from the wealthy New York society into which she had married, because she in desperation escapes from that woeful marriage and from the web of social constraints that were asphyxiating her. Even worse than the simple desertion, she left behind an infant daughter, Anne, whom she deeply loved. The desertion of husband is enough to outlaw her forever from this society, and while the desertion of the daughter is much worse, she knows had she attempted to take her young daughter along, she would certainly have been hounded down by the authorities and probably jailed. She could not have her daughter and leave her marriage, and so finally abandons both.

We readers are introduced to Kate many years later living on a very small income on the Riviera among a group of other outcasts (gamblers, alcoholics, and women with pasts). Kate is unaware that her ex-mother-in-law, a stern and unforgiving woman, has died and that her now grown daughter is finally free from the domineering grandmother who has presided over her life and fortune.  A grand change is about to happen in Kate’s life with the arrival of a simple telegram: “New York. Dearest mother, I want you to come home at once. I want you to come and live with me. Your daughter Anne.”

Despite Kate’s concerns that there may be no way for mother and daughter to live harmoniously together after her desertion, Kate and Anne seem at once not only to get along, but to quickly establish a deep and lasting connection. Unlike Wharton’s usually tragic women characters, it appears Kate has been rescued and the love she has for her daughter rekindled. Even the convention-bound, rigid society that had cast her out now seems to have forgotten her past sins and to welcome her back into a more forgiving and freer community, engineered in part by the younger generation who openly flaunt the old strictures.

Alas, we readers know that a significant event in Kate’s past, indeed the one and only love of her life, has not been discovered by the society to which she returns. Years after her original exile, Kate fell in love with and carried on an affair with a man, Chris Fenno, who was ten years younger than she. The affair begins during the war and ends before the war ends; somehow, war fever and Kate’s European life have kept this affair under wraps.

Anne has inherited the strength and intellect of her mother as well as the iron will of her grandmother; she seems less interested in men and marriage than in her life as an artist, and now that the forbidding and controlling grandmother is gone, she can devote herself to her newfound relationship with her mother and her art. Two strong women living together with no need of a man.

But just as Kate finally feels loved and safe, she discovers that there is, after all, a man who is important in her daughter’s life, although, private woman that her daughter is, only a select few seem to be aware of her relationship. Who could it be? Long before the reader is actually told of his identity, the clues mount up, and yes, Anne has fallen for the one man Kate cannot (personally or morally) accept into her daughter’s life, Chris Fenno.

But what to do in this moral dilemma? She knows that her daughter does not fall in love easily, and she discovers slowly that the iron will of the grandmother has been inherited by Anne. Should she tell her daughter the truth? That would surely end the relationship with Chris Fenno, but would it not also destroy the budding love between mother and daughter? And furthermore, even when Kate confronts Chris and seems to have successfully headed him off, threatening to tell all if continues with plans to marry Anne, her daughter tracks Chris down and demands and explanation.

I’m not about to give away the end of the book, but I will say that just as I deeply admired Lily Bart in Wharton’s The Age of Mirth, I admire Kate Clephane in this novel, but for different reasons. Lily Bart, an extraordinarily beautiful and accomplished woman, ultimately refuses to accept any of the wealthy men she might have married, and even as she begins to age and her beauty begins to fray, she proudly refuses the salvation possible via marriage. From a somewhat privileged background, but having no financial resources of her own, her life spirals downward and she is finally left a poor woman and an outcast from the only society she has known. I see Lily as a feminist hero precisely because she refuses to barter away her dignity as a person—refuses to use her beauty and talents as a way to snare a man. The novel is meant as a tragedy, but a tragedy with a real hero, Lily Bart. Kate Clephane, too, represents to me a proud and strong woman who refuses to be bought off with money and position. Her own dignity, in more modern terms, her authenticity, demands that she give up her life of luxury to return to her previous rather Spartan existence. But she is not a tragic figure. Nor, indeed, does Wharton present her as such. Unfortunate perhaps, but not tragic. I see Wharton’s women characters as progressively stronger and more admirable as she matures as both author and feminist.

Wallace Stegner

I want to talk to you this morning about one of the truly great American writers of the 20th century, Wallace Stegner. His biographer, as well as many admirers and even Stegner himself, insist that he has been marginalized by the Eastern intellectual press, treated as ‘merely’ a western writer—a historian and environmentalist who also writes fiction. While it is true that much of his environmental and conservationist writing focuses on what he calls the rape of the west, some of his finest novels have the action taking place in New England. Indeed, one of his finest novels, The Spectator Bird, has for its location Denmark. Anyone who reads him carefully will realize that he is a writer whose subject is the world and the beings who inhabit it, and he writes with an honesty and compassion matched by few.

Many writers find it difficult to combine writing and teaching; indeed, some writers find it difficult even to combine journal or essay writing with fiction. Stegner did it all. He was a gifted teacher whose students included Wendall Berry, Ken Kesey, Raymond Carver, Tillie Olsen, Edward Abbey, Larry McMurtry and many more. He wrote short stories, novels, essays on nature and conservation, literary criticism, and biography. And he wrote at a pace that I find staggering. He published his first novel when he was twenty-eight, and one of his very best, Crossing to Safety, when he was seventy-nine. In my opinion, his later novels were among his very best.

I returned to Stegner after not having read him for about twenty years when I discovered that I had not read his 1976 novel, The Spectator Bird. That excellent novel reignited my interest in Stegner, and I have since re-read Crossing to Safety, and am now reading his biography of Bernard DeVoto (another great conservationist) along with Jackson Benson’s excellent biography of Stegner.

Although very much a male author, Stegner wrote with a sensitivity and emotional intelligence rare among men. He does not write adventure novels, and his lead characters are not angry young men nor existentially tortured loners. Often enough, it is the female characters who nudge the males towards tolerance and understanding, and who urge compassion for all the little live things (the title of one of his novels), but he is not an essentialist who forgives men their brutality because of some inborn, inescapable nature. Stegner was small as a child, especially compared to his powerful father and athletic older brother, and as his biographer says:

Both the nonfictional and the fictional accounts of his growing up…make it clear that a dichotomy developed early in his consciousness between the proud, tough, intolerant rugged individualism represented by his father and the friendly, tolerant, neighborly tendencies toward caring and cooperation represented by his mother—and it was his mother whom he learned to admire.

He was married to the same woman all of his life, and it is obvious that several of his women characters are modeled on his wife, Mary.

I grew up as a Mormon in Salt Lake City, Utah, and have spent a good part of my adult life on the run from what I see as the silly doctrines and dangerous elitism of religious fundamentalists of any ilk. Stegner also grew up among Mormons and attended the University of Utah in the thirties when it was (even more that it is today) very heavily influenced by the church. However, he is so much more tolerant of Mormonism than I, and indeed wrote two sympathetic accounts of the westward movement of the Mormons. He admired the sense of cooperation and collectivism in the church, so unlike the individualism and gold-rush mentality of so much of western expansion. He remained friendly to Mormons and Mormonism all his life, and while he found the doctrines preposterous and distrusted the authoritarian structure of the church, his sympathetic treatment has caused me to take another look at my own past and my unmitigated criticism of the church.

So far I have talked mainly of Stegner’s fiction, and it is his fiction that most interests me and which sparked my interest in him as a writer. However, his environmentalism and his push for conservation are manifest not only in his essays (e.g., Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs) but in his fiction as well. I’ve spoken above about Stegner’s suspicion of the rugged individualism and get-rich-quick mentality of his father. That suspicion and distrust may well have triggered his later interest in and passion for nature and conservation. Again quoting from Benson’s biography of Stegner:

Stegner found the American Dream far more damaging than does Dreiser in An American Tragedy or Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. Almost alone among major writers of our time, he realized that the dream has not only twisted our lives and corroded our values, it has despoiled the very land that has given us such hope. And that hope, as represented by the frontier, is what has given the West such a symbolic role in representing the dream, has made the perpetuation of the mythic West possible. What motivates Bo Mason in The Big Rock Candy Mountain is what motivates poor people, dreaming the impossible dream of sudden riches, to hate unions and vote Republican. Like Willie Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, they wait for Uncle Ben to pass on the secret of wealth, while at the same time, the land and air are so polluted they cannot plant seeds that will grow in their own backyards. For Stegner, who was concerned with cooperation, empathy, and mutual support in basic relationships, the American Dream very often spelled disaster, not only for individuals, but for our society and our land.

When Stegner depicts in his writings someone who is successful, it is not for his material possessions or status due to wealth or fame, but for what he has made of himself morally and spiritually and what he has accomplished.

There is a conversational style to Stegner’s fiction that makes it easy to read and utterly believable, and renders the moralizing which is always there (at least under the surface) much more palatable than it would be otherwise. I think his novels get better as he ages, both in simplicity of style and in moral-political content, but I believe readers could start anywhere in his work and find it rewarding. I have not even mentioned yet his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Angle of Repose, but that may be a good starting point, and whatever order you then pursue, be sure to include Crossing to Safety, The Spectator Bird, and Recapitulation.

Torch by Cheryl Strayed

The fact is that as organic beings, we are situated towards death. Martin Heidegger announces that one of the universal and necessary conditions of being human is being-towards-death; he calls these universal and necessary conditions existentialia. So many authors have written about this experience of living in the shadow of death, but few have written as honestly and insightfully as Cheryl Strayed on experiencing the death of a loved one. In her 2005 novel, Torch, Strayed lays out the confusion of emotions that surround the death and dying of a thirty-eight year old woman, Teresa, and skillfully changes voices to describe the reactions of a college age daughter, Claire, a high school senior son, Josh, and a loving husband and step-father, Bruce. While it is Claire’s voice that is both the most convincing and complete, I was very impressed by Strayed’s ability to speak for the son and husband as well.

Strayed now lives in Portland, and since the debut of this sad and lovely little novel, she has published a memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail (2012), and has identified herself as the voice behind the advice column, Dear Sugar. So many excellent novels (especially first novels) are thinly veiled autobiographical sketches, and this is certainly true of Torch. Like Claire, Strayed lost her mother to cancer at an early age, and she experienced first-hand her own wild grief and the different, though no less profound, reactions of a brother and stepfather.

I won’t be giving away much of the story by telling you that about the first third of the novel describes the illness and death of Teresa, and the last two thirds focuses on the attempts of her family to deal with her death.

The mother, Teresa, in addition to working hard as a waitress, is also well known locally via her radio talk show, Modern Pioneers. Teresa’s children are alternately proud of their mother’s local fame and ashamed of the homespun stories and advice she delivers on her show and strives to live out in her daily life. At the end of each show, she invokes her listeners to “Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!”


Claire is called home from college when her mother gets the shocking diagnosis that she has only a short time to live—maybe weeks, maybe months, at most a year. For a little while, she and others in the family try to carry on with their normal routines, but as the disease rapidly progresses, each has to face the fact that there will be no return to normalcy—not now, not ever.

Claire stared at her mother as she slept or tried to sleep. The longer she watched her, the more foreign Teresa seemed to her, as if she hadn’t known her all her life. She’d felt the same peculiar dislocation years before, when it had been explained to how babies were made. It wasn’t the facts that had confused her, or the mystery of sex or birth or creation, but the question of why. Why should there be people at all? Or fish or lions or rats? Now she felt a new wonder washing over her. If there were to be people and fish and lions and rats, then why should they die? And why, most of all, should her mother die?

Bruce, the loving husband who has become a devoted father to Claire and Joshua, attempts first simply to deny that his wife is dying; her death seems inconceivable. It is she who is the glue of the family, the wise mother and pioneer. And when her death becomes inevitable, when she in fact dies, his second attempt at denial is to suppose that when she dies, so will he. He can see no other solution, though he worries about how his children will respond to this second death.

Joshua, still a senior in high school, also attempts first simply to deny. He refuses to visit his mother in the hospital, not only because he hates to see her so changed, hates to see her and hear her suffering, but because in some confused way he supposes his refusal will prevent her death. Even before she becomes so ill that she has to be in the hospital, Joshua has taken to staying away, not attending school, secreting himself in a storeroom above the restaurant where he worked before his mother became ill.

On occasion he made an appearance, showing up at home a couple of times a week for Bruce or Claire so they wouldn’t worry, and at least once a day he saw Lisa Bourdeaux {his girlfriend}. But mostly he liked to be alone, in silence, or listening to his music as he lay on the unfurled rug in the apartment or sat by the river on the rock, not remembering where the world was. Remembering it, but willing himself not to. Often this meant that he could not allow a single thought into his mind, and he got good at it, forcing his mind to go separate and blank, imagining himself not human, but rather an animal that hibernated or went into torpor.

Strayed is incredibly good at dissecting the grief of each member of the family, showing how their very different reactions sometimes drive them further apart when they so desperately need to be closer together. When Joshua asks his stepfather what he is going to do now that Teresa is dead, Bruce wants to reach out, wants to comfort his son.

And he almost reached out and put his hand on Joshua’s shoulder and said, ‘Suffer for a while, but then we’re going to be okay.'

But he said none of those things. He wasn’t that man. Not in this instant. He was so alone that he could not speak. He remained silent for so long that the silence seemed to absorb the question entirely, so that it would have been stranger to answer than to leave it be.

It would be a big mistake to suppose that Strayed is simply noting that boys and men attempt to deny or flee death and grief, while girls and women have to deal with it. In fact, she is both perceptive and exceedingly kind in her descriptions of the varied responses. Each character deals with the death and dying as she/he must, and while this is not a happy book, neither is it simply bleak and tragic. I would say that in the end she is hardest on Claire, perhaps because she expects the most from her, from herself. But in truth the author shows great empathy towards and understanding of each of her characters, and if there is no final summing up and redemption, there is acceptance and understanding of this universal and necessary condition of what it is to be human. This is a fine book, and I expect more from this wonderful writer.