Emma Saxon

Emma Saxon is the deceased former maid of Mrs. Brympton who “died last spring [and] had been with her [mistress for] twenty years”.¹ She “worshiped the ground [her mistress] walked on”.² For Mrs. Brympton, Emma was “something of a companion”,³ and she even “loved her like a sister”.⁴ When Hartley first encounters her, she describes Emma as “a thin woman with a white face, and a dark gown and apron”.⁵

Emma also must have been liked and respected by the other servants as well because according to Mrs. Blinder, “no better walked the earth”.⁶ When Hartley asks about her appearance for the first time, Mrs. Blinder gives her a “kind of angry stare”,⁷ then “walk[s] off into the kitchen and shut[s] the door after her”,⁸ as if she is offended by the question. Moreover, when Hartley asks Agnes whom the room opposite of hers belongs to, Agnes accidentally replies “nobody's room”,⁹ which she, however, quickly changes to “[i]t's empty, I mean”,¹⁰ as if she does not want to say that Emma is a “nobody”. There is also another time when Mrs. Blinder dodges Hartley's attempt to find out more about Emma. It is when Hartley finds a photograph of a woman in the drawer of a sewing machine and asks Mrs. Blinder who that person is. After confirming that that is Emma Saxon, Mrs. Blinder ignores Hartley's comment that she has seen her before, and just flees into the kitchen with the excuse that she “must go down this very minute and put on the Virginia ham for Mr. Brympton's dinner”.¹¹

It seems like no one really wants to talk about what happened to Emma or who she is, so the reader does not get much information about her. The story does not reveal when exactly she died in spring, and how she died.

Although in the story it is stated that she is dead, her soul remains in the Brympton house. The reader can assume that she stays on because she still wants to protect her mistress from all evil like her husband Mr. Brympton, for example. He is also the only one besides Hartley who sees Emma at the end. The reason why he can see her, too, is maybe because he has something to do with her death. Emma seems to be some type of visualization of domestic horror or unhappiness infecting the home itself.

_________________

1 Lewis, R. W. B. The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. (Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968. 457-474, Print.), 457.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 458.

4 Ibid., 461.

5 Ibid., 458 f.

6 Ibid., 461.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., 459.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., 468.