Margaret Ransom (The Pretext)

Mrs. Margaret Ransom, the protagonist of the story, is a middle-aged woman who lives in a rather noble house (e.g.: “drawing room”, “library”, “dressing room”, “housemaid(‘s)”) in the Wentworth University City with her husband Mr. Robert Ransom.

She is described as a woman who is of an advanced age which is shown through different examples. “Her fair hair had grown thin—it no longer hid the blue veins in her candid forehead (…).” (Lewis, 1968, p. 632). The narrator describes her face as “grown middle-aged while it waited for the joys of youth.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 632). Furthermore, she is described more as an average looking woman or even, mainly titled as by herself, as not very pretty because of her aged facial and physical features (“lines in the corners of her eyes” (Lewis, 1968, p. 632)) which she tries to hide by wrapping “a bit of black velvet” around her neck to cover up “the shrunken lines of the throat”. In contrast to the external appearance of Mrs. Margaret Ransom, there are her inner emotions expressed in the very beginning of the story. The visitor, Guy Dawnish, with whom she has fallen in love, awakes feelings in her as for example, “some impetus of youth” (Lewis, 1968, p. 632), which are the reason for her development throughout the story. Due to this development, she can be described as a round character. Also, her facial features change because of her feelings towards Mr. Guy Dawnish. Through her blushing, her face becomes more distinctive and again, in her eyes, more beautiful. But this blushing at the same time triggers feelings which the protagonist does not like or even fear. “She now saw why bad women rouged. . . .” (Lewis, 1968, p. 633). This sentence shows that she already has a conflict going on in herself at the beginning of the short story. She has fallen in love with another man, a much younger man, which contrasts with the socially constructed prudery in which her marriage and her life is placed. Because she has never experienced other social convictions, she realizes that it must be wrong or rather socially unacceptable to blush because of any other man than her own husband.

Furthermore, Margaret Ransom is aware of being “as flat as the pattern of the wall-paper” (Lewis, 1968, p. 633) and that her life was and still is. Then again, she thinks of being different and having a “gayer exterior” (Lewis, 1968, p. 633) which may have caused a brighter and better life. She tries to change her exterior by backcombing her hair for example, but at the same time thinking about the problems of doing that because she is sure that none of her “rigid New England ancestry” (Lewis, 1968, p. 633) did so. This shows that the prudery and the strict boring way of life has always been a part of her ancestors and herself as well. The Wentworth tone is also a factor which influences the character of Mrs. Margaret Ransom (“Wentworth, with its ‘tone’, its backward references, its inflexible aversions and condemnations, its hard moral outline preserved intact against a whirling background of experiment, had been all the poetry and history of Margaret Ransom.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 636)). Additionally, falling in love with the young Mr. Guy Dawnish gives her the small hope of having a more colorful and exciting life (“but some impetus of youth revived, communicated to her by her talk with Guy Dawnish, now found expression in her girlish flight upstairs, her girlish impatience to bolt herself into her room with her throbs and her blushes.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 632)). But, as mentioned before, she is already married, though “unhappily” (Lee, 2007, p. 329), and any other form of “social relation between the sexes remained unhallowed and to be viewed askance.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 634). The struggle between passion or desire against convention is also an issue in other short stories of Edith Wharton (Scofield, 2006, p. 101). This can also be seen as a good example of the typical behavior of many female characters in the short stories of Edith Wharton who are of an advanced age and do not have much more to expect from life, but are revived by a new love (Kornetta, 1996, p. 193). Moreover, some of the women mentioned in the short stories of Edith Wharton tend to have a rather boring life and monotonous marriage and are unsatisfied with their everyday life. That this also applies to Mrs. Margaret Ransom is shown in different examples (“Her door-handle turned suddenly, (…). ‘Margaret!’ She started up, her brightness fading, and unbolted the door to admit her husband.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 634); “From where she sat she could look down the empty elm-shaded street, up which, at this hour every day, she was sure to see her husband's figure advancing. She would see it presently—she would see it for many years to come. She had a sudden aching sense of the length of the years that stretched before her.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 654)) This discontent is often shown through cleaning up the desks of the women’s husbands (Kornetta, 1996, p. 193; “When she reached home Ransom had not yet returned from the office, and she went straight to the library to tidy his writing-table. It was part of her daily duty to bring order out of the chaos of his papers (…). (Lewis, 1968, p. 648)).

In the third chapter of the short story Margaret Ransom goes to “the speeches” (Lewis, 1968, p. 635), an important evening for Mr. Robert Ransom, where he speaks in front of other university members. Of course, Margaret Ransom goes there to watch her husband speak because “the going was so manifestly part of a household solemnity” (Lewis, 1968, p. 639). At the end of the first chapter the reader again gets an impression of the inner thoughts and feelings of Mrs. Margaret Ransom. After she fixes “her eyes upon the inward vision” (Lewis, 1968, p. 633) her husband knocks on her dressing-room-door and her brightness fades (Lewis, 1968, p. 634) which can be seen as the dissatisfaction she feels in her marriage and the feelings towards Guy Dawnish of whom she thought about just seconds before. Her husband wants her to come to the speeches where she does not want to go at first for unknown reasons, maybe because she cannot stand seeing her husband and being with him in public, but this is just a personal interpretation. Furthermore, she turns to him as he approaches her because she does not want him to “suspect her of trying to avoid his eye.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 635) This could confirm the personal interpretation that she cannot stand his presence anymore. She again realizes that her behavior stands in contrast to the prudery and the social conventions which had always influenced her life because she asks herself “to what duplicity [she] was (she) already committed!” (Lewis, 1968, p. 635). Additionally, her husband comments on her backcombed hair and compares her to the Brant girl which is a heavy insult to Margaret Ransom because the Brant girl is a well-known girl in Wentworth, mostly for her bad manners and her behavior towards various men (Lewis, 1968, p. 635-36). This again can be seen as a hint on the prudery of the marriage and the behavior of women in this society.

Then, during the event the bad air and the many people in the room force the protagonist out of the building accompanied by Guy Dawnish (Lewis, 1968, p. 640). This is the first, and also the last time Margaret Ransom and Guy Dawnish get closer to each other, because he is about to leave America one week later. While they sit on a separated bench near the campus Mr. Dawnish makes clear how much of a pleasure it was to him meeting her and how much he appreciates her company (Lewis, 1968, p. 642 - 43). However, when he is about to tell her something what he wants her to hear before he leaves, she interrupts him and says that she wants him not to tell her and “to leave our . . . our friendship . . . as it has been—as—as a painter, if a friend asked him, might leave a picture—not quite finished, perhaps . . . but all the more exquisite. . . ."” (Lewis, 1968, p. 643). It seems that Margaret Ransom wants to keep the imagination of their “special” friendship in her mind as a romantic, imagined, but not realistic encounter. One could guess that maybe the social convictions of the Wentworth society and the prudery during that time held her back from following her heart, but it also could be possible that she thought Dawnish wanted to say something completely different. The story and the character itself leave this unanswered, but on the day of Guy Dawnish’s departure Margaret Ransom has “an hour of weakness” (Lewis, 1968, p. 644) in which she realizes that “to be alone with him for a moment became, after all, the one craving of her heart.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 644). Further, after his departure she has moments in which “she reproached herself for cowardice—for having deliberately missed her one moment with him, the moment in which she might have sounded the depths of life, for joy or anguish.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 645). At this point the reader gets to know her real feelings and notices that she might has made the wrong decision.

Mrs. Margaret Ransom then stays in contact with Mr. Guy Dawnish through writing letters but intervals between the arrivals of the letters grow bigger. During these intervals Margaret Ransom has “time to repossess herself, to regain some sort of normal contact with life.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 646). For her, these moments are particularly important because every time a letter from Dawnish arrived “she could never afterward remember what she had done or how the business of life had been carried on.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 646). This again shows that Margaret Ransom secretly still loves Guy Dawnish, but she realizes that “what had happened was as much outside the sphere of her marriage as some transaction in a star.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 645). Her character changes from a joyful girl revived with youth back to an average, faithful wife. The one moment with Guy Dawnish “had simply given her a secret life of incommunicable joys, as if all the wasted springs of her youth had been stored in some hidden pool, and she could return there now to bathe in them.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 646). She lives out her fantasies only in her mind which is not a problem in her eyes and she addresses the whole incident as “a mere passing explosion of gratitude, of boyish good-fellowship touched with the pang of leave-taking” (Lewis, 1968, p. 646). On the one hand this justifies her thoughts and her imagined journeys, on the other hand these travels become less frequent until “she even reached the point of telling herself that it was ‘better so’” (Lewis, 1968, p. 646). She even recovers to the point where she is able to visit the spot by the river where everything happened and sit there for a while (Lewis, 1968, p. 647). The reader gets the impression that she fully recovers but Margaret Ransom then receives a letter from a friend who is on a holiday in England. She writes Mrs. Ransom that she heard that Guy Dawnish was engaged by the time he was in Wentworth with the young beautiful Gwendolen Matcher, but he never told anyone about it. Furthermore, he dissolved the engagement with the girl from the wealthy family when he came back to England because he “’has formed an unfortunate attachment’” (Lewis, 1968, p. 647) which must have happened at Wentworth. These news make her “very sorry, yet so glad—so ineffably, impenitently glad.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 648). Margaret Ransom falls back into her old habits of travelling in spirit (Lewis, 1968, p. 649) and regaining a new spark of life so that she studies and reads a lot for the Higher Thought Club and because of her interest in English Gothic and architecture.

In the last part of the short story there is another twist in the plot when Mrs. Margaret Ransom is visited by Guy Dawnish’s aunt Lady Caroline Duckett. But the reason of the unexpected visit is not a pleasant one. Lady Caroline Duckett only comes to Wentworth to ask Mrs. Ransom to convince Guy Dawnish of not dissolving the engagement with Gwendolen Matcher. To Mrs. Margaret Ransom’s surprise, Lady Caroline Duckett does not think Mrs. Ransom is the reason for the dissolved engagement but maybe her daughter-in-law (Lewis, 1968, p. 651) or Mrs. Robert Ransom Junior (Lewis, 1968, p. 652). This assumption, that Mrs. Margaret Ransom simply is too old to be loved by the young Guy Dawnish and that there must be another Mrs. Ransom at Wentworth, is an immense humiliation and disappointment for Mrs. Margaret Ransom (Kornetta, 1996, p. 195). But it gets even worse when the story reaches its climax. After Mrs. Margaret Ransom can convince Lady Caroline Duckett of being the only Mrs. Ransom at Wentworth Lady Duckett sees no other possibility than that Guy Dawnish must have used Margaret Ransom as a “pretext” (Lewis, 1968, p. 653) to either “protect another woman or to dissolve his engagement” (Kornetta, 1996, p. 196). For Mrs. Margaret Ransom there is no doubt that this is just a lie. This assumption could, again, also be a fault of her own imagination because she already in the beginning of the short story sees no reason why a young guy like Dawnish should be in love with an old woman like her. She then does not even question the assumption made by Lady Caroline Duckett and realizes that it never could have been true love because Lady Caroline Duckett and everybody else at Wentworth only saw the two as friends all the time (Kornetta, 1996, p. 197). According to Kornetta (1996, p. 197), “the society, in which she lives - Wentworth with all its conservative ideas - and her education” made her think that Guy Dawnish could never have loved her.

After Lady Caroline Duckett leaves the Ransom House Mrs. Margaret Ransom is overwhelmed by her disappointment: “She felt no anger—only an unspeakable sadness, a sadness which she knew would never be appeased.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 654). After that she goes back to her working-table and sees the same street on which her husband walks home from work like every day. She notices that she will see this image for many years from now on which gives her a “sudden aching sense of the length of the years that stretched before her.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 654). She realizes that she is trapped in her marriage and her life and she goes back to her routines and to her reading what gives the reader a feeling of sadness and a wasted heart that could be full of love.

According to Lee (2007) the plot of “The Pretext” was given to Edith Wharton by Henry James and is based on real events so Edith Wharton tried to show her gratitude by naming her main character after the surname of a character who appears in one of James’s stories; the character’s name is ‘Ransom’ (p. 216).

Now the reader could ask if this short story has autobiographical elements. According to Lee (2007) “The Pretext” indeed was written in a rather complicated and sorrowful time in Edith Wharton’s life (p. 327 - 30). Edith Wharton completely fell in love with Morton Fullerton what should take a bitter turn after her dramatized departure from Paris. Fullerton stopped sending her letters which made Edith Wharton feel “entombed, suffocated” (Lee, 2007, p. 328). In these years of “passion, sorrow, and disappointment” (Lee, 2007, p. 357) she wrote stories expressing her feelings and the pain she felt. Among them “The Pretext”, in which she “cruelly caricatured” her feeling of “being too old for love, of returning to a ‘phantasmal’, lonely life after the end of the affair” (Lee, 2007, p. 348).

Sources:

Kornetta, R. (1996). Das Korsett im Kopf. Ehe und Ökonomie in den Kurzgeschichten Edith Whartons. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH.

Lee, H. (2008). Edith Wharton. London: Vintage.

Lewis, R. W. B. (1968). The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Scofield, M. (2006). The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story. New York: Cambridge University Press.