Parallels between "The Lady's Maid's Bell" and Edith Wharton's life

As previously mentioned in the introduction above, just like the main character in her short story, Alice Hartley, Edith Wharton had suffered from typhoid fever as a child which, combined with her young age and book about robbery, led her imagine the worst things possible which traumatized her until her late 20s. Due to her terrifying experience, she became afraid of the supernatural and the unexplained to the point where she even had to destroy and burn down books containing ghost stories, or else she would not have felt safe.¹ It might be due to her traumatizing experience and her talent for expressing situations in an attractive and captivating way that she was able to write interesting ghost stories.

Although “The Lady's Maid's Bell” belongs to the category ghost stories, the topic marriage-question, as R.W.B. Lewis has called it, also plays a significant role in the story.² The reader does not only come upon an unhappy and unfulfilled marriage, but also realizes that men and women did not have equal rights within marriage at the time. This is due to the fact that back then in the 19^th century, women were often seen inferior to men in the American high society.³ As a man had to fulfill his duties as a husband, so had a woman as a wife.

Wharton was also “expected to follow her mother's [Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander] example in accepting […] responsibilities as a legacy of her social standing”.⁴ Those responsibilities included “making social calls, giving dinner parties, attending the opera, and supporting artistic and charity causes and church-sponsored events”.⁵ Just like how Mrs. Brympton feels imprisoned and trapped in her circumstances and marriage life, so did Edith Wharton due to the high expectations her mother and the society had of her. However, fearing the possibility of becoming a victim of gossip like her mother had,⁶ she “distrusted her mother and loved her father”.⁷ Wharton's father, George Frederic Jones, gave her access to his library that was “the primary source of her early learning”.⁸ She spent a lot of her time reading about a great variety of fields like history or poetry among others.⁹ The pleasure of reading is also conjured in “The Lady's Maid's Bell” and is “a sign not only of her [Edith Wharton] own love of reading but also of the importance of cultural literacy in her scale of values”.¹⁰ Just like Edith Wharton has spent a lot of time in her father's library, Mrs. Brympton also likes to spend time in the “big dark librabry where she [sits] in the winter afternoons”,¹¹ especially when Mr. Ranford is reading aloud to her. Furthermore, both of them like to exchange books with one another.

Before her marriage, Wharton met Walter Van Rensselaer Berry, “a young lawyer who was her distant cousin”¹² and whom Wharton described as “the love of her life”.¹³ However, although it seemed like he might propose to her, he did not, and he himself later explained that the reason for his hesitation was that at that time (1883), he was “just entering the law profession and had nothing to offer her”.¹⁴ In 1885, Wharton eventually got married to Edward Robbins Wharton who was thirteen years older than her, in Trinity Church chapel.¹⁵ Receiving no help or proper explanations about intimacy and sexuality in marriage from her mother,¹⁶ Wharton was left with an “emotional paralysis”¹⁷ and her marriage ended up being a “companionate marriage without children”.¹⁸ It was only twenty years later, when she had a secret affair with William Morton Fullerton, that she felt sexual pleasure, and their relationship “lasted for more than three years”.¹⁹

Edith Wharton's unhappy marriage is reflected in the unhappy marriage of Mrs. and Mr. Brympton. Readers could come to the conclusion that Mrs. Brympton is only happy when she is with Mr. Ranford, her potential lover, and not when she is with her husband.

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1 Fedorko, Kathy A. Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995, Print.), 11-12

2 Kornetta, Reiner. Das Korsett im Kopf. Ehe und Ökonomie in den Kurzgeschichten Edith Whartons.(Frankfurt am Main, New York: P. Lang, 1996. Print), 17

3 Ibid., 84.

4 Benstock, Shari. “Edith Wharton: A Brief Biography.” A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton, (edited by Carol J. Singley, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003 Print.), 20.

5 Ibid., 19.

6 Ibid., 20.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., 21.

9 Ibid., 22.

10 Ibid.

11 Lewis, R. W. B. The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. (Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968. 457-474, Print.), 462.

12 Benstock, Shari. “Edith Wharton: A Brief Biography.” A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton, (edited by Carol J. Singley, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003 Print.), 26.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid. f.

16 Fedorko, Kathy A. Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995, Print.), 14.

17 Benstock, Shari. “Edith Wharton: A Brief Biography.” A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton, (edited by Carol J. Singley, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003 Print.), 27.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 35.