The house (Afterward)

Edith Wharton loved houses this is obvious if one takes into consideration that she supervised and designed several houses, such as The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts or that she wrote a book together with Ogden Codman. Said book was called “The Decoration of Houses” and was a book about interior design.

Wharton enjoyed a sense of simplicity when it came to house design. This simplicity was no longer something people seemed to care about in the 18^th century. Instead, people enjoyed using multiple styles in their Victorian homes. This Vulgarity bothered Wharton, despite the fact that it was a part of Victorian fashion to mix styles in order to show off wealth. By buying furniture, ornaments and other home décor, a person could try to show off their wealth by acquiring a lot of décor from different time periods. This usually resulted in heavily decorated homes that could also feel overcrowded, stuffed and quite oppressive. The thus claustrophobic feeling home was something that Wharton despised (Rives 10).

Her love for houses can be explained by a description of what she felt like in younger years. Her fear of the supernatural was especially strong whenever she returned from her daily walks outside, waiting for the door of her home to finally open. In those very moments, she felt immense terror, which only subsided once she escaped into the house (Fedorko 12).

In “Afterward” the isolated location of Lyng is connected to other elements of the story. Firstly, to Ned’s business. Ned is trying to escape his wrongdoing by hiding from the world. Secondly, the Boynes use the seclusion of the place to occupy themselves at every minute of their life. The monotonous regularity is here the hiding place for both characters. They hide from their own awareness. Edward wants to hide from his past with Bob Elwell, while Mary wants to keep her trusting perception of Ned. Therefore, both of them plan the details of their days in advance (Fedorko 54).

The library of Lyng is described as the central and most important feature of the entire house (Wharton 342). This is especially true in consideration of what happens in the library in “Afterward”. Firstly, it is the place where Mary’s trust in her husband gets shaken (Wharton 352-354). Secondly it is the place where her husband meets Bob Elwell and subsequently leaves with him (Wharton 359). Thirdly, it is the place where Mary Boyne is confronted with the whole truth in chapter five as Parvis visits her (Wharton 367-373). In a lot of Wharton’s stories, the characters make self-revising discoveries in libraries (Fedorko 144). Mary Boyne’s discovery is that she sent the ghost to her husband and there is also the revelation that her husband is a criminal. The truth about her husband finally shows her that her blind trust in him was foolish.

• Fedorko, Kathy A. Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995. Print.

• Rives, Darcie D. “Haunted by Violence: Edith Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses and Her Gothic Fiction”. Edith Wharton Review. Vol. 22, No. 1 Spring, 2006:8-15. Web. (online available under: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43512990?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents) (Retrieved 15/06/2019)

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