Homosexuality (Afterward)

Homosexuality as a topic was something Wharton was confronted with due to the acquaintances she had. Among those was her lover Morton Fullerton who was bisexual. This is important to know because “Afterward” along with “The Eyes” were both written in 1910, the time shortly after Wharton’s break-up with Fullerton (Kaye 10).

Wharton deliberately evaded to make homosexuality, or the traces of it, obvious in her stories, she wanted to hint at it, but not outright mention it (Kaye 12). This is most likely the reason why it is so hard to find homosexuality in her stories.

The homosexuality in “Afterward” is both, fearful and voluntary (Kaye 12). This becomes clearer once one understands that Edward Boyne left Lyng with the ghost of Robert Elwell voluntarily. The maids didn’t notice any fight between the two characters which clearly meant that Ned left voluntarily. Furthermore, the ghostly specter invades the life of Mary and Edward Boyne just like homosexuality invades a hetero marriage (Kaye 12). The same-sex suspicion is in “Afterward” converted into a supernatural event. By not mentioning the homosexuality it is psychologized, which was also how people looked at homosexuality at Wharton’s time, as a form of identity crisis (Kaye 13).

Ned is a criminal and the matter seems absolutely harmless. In chapter two, as Mary gets to know about the incident concerning the Blue Star Mine, the effect the whole matter has on her is dramatized and underlined. The terror she feels is described as “undefinable” and instead of saying that Elwell accused him of some sort of fraud, Edward instead tells his wife that Elwell accuses him of “pretty nearly every crime in the calendar” (Wharton 352; 353). This would definitely include homosexuality, which was at that time a crime (Kaye 13).

That homosexuality was a crime lead to a very thorough police network that was deployed in 1885 by the Labouchere Amendment (Parliament.uk). Said police network is hinted at in the story:

A confoundedly hard place to get lost in! That had been her husband’s phrase. And now, with the whole machinery of official investigation sweeping its flash-lights from shore to shore, and across the dividing straits; now, with Boyne’s name blazing from the walls of every town and village, his portrait (how that wrung her!) hawked up and down the country like the image of a hunted criminal; now the little compact, populous island, so policed, surveyed, and administered, revealed itself as a Sphinxlike guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his wife’s anguished eyes as if with the wicked joy of knowing something they would never know! (Wharton 364)

The actual crime of Edward Boyne is cheating, cheating on a financial level. However, this is just another hint at homosexuality, which is cheating on a relationship level. The homosexual supernatural adultery happens when Mary Boyne’s husband leaves Lyng with Bob Elwell. Therefore, his cheating leads to his disappearance with another man (Kaye 14).

Another important sign for homosexuality can be taken from:

“Did you think you’d seen it?” he asked, after an appreciable interval.

“Why, I actually took you for it, my dear, in my mad determination to spot it!”

“Me — just now?” His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with a faint echo of her laugh. “Really, dearest, you’d better give it up, if that’s the best you can do.”

“Oh, yes, I give it up. Have you?” she asked, turning round on him abruptly.

The parlor maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the light struck up into Boyne’s face as he bent above the tray she presented.

“Have you?” Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had disappeared on her errand of illumination.

“Have I what?” he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the sharp stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the letters.

“Given up trying to see the ghost.” Her heart beat a little at the experiment she was making.

Her husband, laying his letters aside, moved away into the shadow of the hearth.

“I never tried,” he said, tearing open the wrapper of a newspaper. (Wharton 350-351)

Mary has no reason to believe that her husband has a homosexual relationship with another man, yet her conversation with him sounds almost as if she interrogates him about a relationship with a stranger. There is no other reason for the heart beating mentioned in the text passage (Kaye 14).

Along with that, an earlier text passage says that Mary mistook Ned for the ghost:

As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself far down the perspective of bare limes: it looked a mere blot of deeper gray in the grayness, and for an instant, as it moved toward her, her heart thumped to the thought “It’s the ghost!”

She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man of whom, two months earlier, she had had a distant vision from the roof was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal himself as not having been Peters; and her spirit sank under the impending fear of the disclosure. But almost with the next tick of the clock the figure, gaining substance and character, showed itself even to her weak sight as her husband’s; and she turned to meet him, as he entered, with the confession of her folly. (Wharton 350)

This is a hint at the anxiety that Ned could be part of the other world, the supernatural one which can be understood as a stand-in for the fact that Ned has changed his sexual preferences and is now homosexual. By confusing him as the ghost, Ned is no longer just linked to the other man, he is the other man (Kaye 14).

With the context of homosexuality, the title of the story has another meaning. That homosexuality is the downfall of a hetero marriage is usually discovered not until long afterward. Because it is only afterward that a wife understands the secret of her former husband. Mary, in “Afterward” realizes only at the end, afterward, that her husband ultimately obeys another man (Kaye 15).

The conclusion is that to Wharton, the supernatural was easier to speak about than homosexuality, which got her to use the supernatural to hint at homosexuality. The supernatural break-ups in her gothic stories are in the end beyond human control, just like the attraction of a man to another man (Kaye 17).

• Kaye, Richard A. “”Unearthly Visitants”: Wharton’s Ghost Tales, Gothic Form, and The Literature of Homosexual Panic”. Edith Wharton Review. Vol. 11, No. 1 Spring, 1994: 10-18. Web. (online available under: https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/ewr11-1s94.pdf) (Retrieved 15/06/2019)

• Parliament.uk. “1885 Labouchere Amendment”. www.parliament.uk. 15. June. 2019. https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/copyright-parliament/

• Wharton, Edith. "Afterward". The Muse's Tragedy and Other Stories . Ed. Candace Waid. London: Penguin Books, 1992. 342-373. Print.