Jane Budd (Lethbury)

Relations to other characters.

- Adopted daughter of Julian Lethbury and Alice Lethbury

- Fiancée (later wife) of Winstanley Budd

- Friend of Elise

Jane is a main character of the short story “The Mission of Jane”. Described from the perspective of her father Mr. Lethbury. Jane is a daughter of an unknown lady and was adopted by the Lethbury´s married couple. After the adoption, her mother wanted to rechristen her with another name, like Muriel or Gladys, that were on the peak of popularity at the time the story was published, but Mr. Lethbury insisted on leaving the name Jane. As a child she was very healthy and calm and didn´t cause any trouble to her parents. Was educated by Mr. Lethbury and the best teachers. At the beginning, she impressed Mr. Lethbury with her ability to concentrate herself and remember the fact; later her mind was described as the inflexible collection of fact that could be taken out at every point of time. Mocked her nursemaid and mother for not knowing what she knows. Later tried to use her knowledge to improve the household and soon won the control over the whole house, which made Mr. Lethbury avoid spending his time at home. Her first steps in the society weren´t successful even though she grew up in a pretty young woman: the young men were avoiding her, and her mother believed it was because of her outstanding intellect. Later she stops going out and committs herself to charity. Apparently didn´t want to marry Mr. Budd but knew it was expected from her to marry and leave the house, therefore tried to sabotage the engagement by taking a month to think and by trying to make Mr. Budd insecure. Her decision to wait a month takes her parents by surprise, since their prejudices about marriage were formed in the time when women had no voice in the decisions concerning their marriages. This indicates that Jane belongs to a new generation of women who manifests their self-respect and ability to make decisions concerning their destinies (Kornetta 153); however, like in the most of Edith Wharton´s fiction, a woman is offered no solution, and Jane marries Mr. Budd, who was her last chance to marry. After the wedding she cried and said she couldn´t leave her parents but was harshly interrupted by her husband, Mr. Budd, and was forced to leave the house with him. Her further destiny is unknown. The last sentence of the story reveals the mission of Jane: to draw her parents together.

In the story there are some obvious parallels between the author of the short story, Edith Wharton, and Jane. In her own family Edith Wharton often felt like a stranger and was encouraged to believe she was the ugly one in the family. She was mocked for using slang in her speech and “for having red hair and big hands and feet, for not being pretty” (Lee 30). This mockery had no actual reason behind it, since, according to Fraser, “… she was tall and lithe, with nice red hair and a slender, shapely figure that she maintained well into middle age” (paragraph 3). She also had a great interest for reading and writing the stories, but her mother was not pleased by her daughter´s interest and tried to limit Wharton´s reading. Her relatives found her keenness for reading not appropriate for a girl and referred to her as to “weird cousin Edith” (Lee 31). In “The Mission of Jane” Jane is an adopted child which underlines her alienation in the Lethburys´ house. Mr. Lethbury doesn´t directly describe his adoptive daughter as ugly and sees a “creditable collection of features” but points out that “one had to take an inventory of them to find out she was good-looking” (Wharton, “The Mission of Jane). Jane´s intelligence is also questioned in the story; her father describes her knowledge as the storage of facts and Jane herself as robotic, but Mr. Lethbury´s perspective prevents the readers from building their own opinion about Jane´s intellectual abilities. Because of her knowledge and a constant urge to show off with it, she becomes a bluestocking among her friends; the gentlemen are not interested in a girl with a pile of weird information in her head. Jane doesn´t find an appropriate way to apply her knowledge except for attempts to teach the cooks how to cook; this makes Jane look so similar to her creator: “Jane is Wharton as she knew herself: precocious but undirected, eager but insecure” (Singley 48). In contrast to Edith Wharton, Jane had better possibilities for education, nevertheless, the first teachers they both had were their own fathers and both Edith Wharton and Jane like to spend time with their fathers in the library.

The fact that Jane was an adopted child represents not only the alienation of the child in the family, but also reflects the rumors that Edith Wharton was not the daughter of her father. Hermione Lee writes:

“Persistent rumors circled around Lucretia´s [Edith Wharton´s mother] late child. She was, perhaps, the daughter of an eminent elderly Scottish peer, the lawyer Lord Brougham, who was living in Cannes when the Joneses were there in the early ´60s (and had red hair, and was an intellectual with an interest in science, like Edith)”. (Lee 32).

Edith Wharton was also believed to be the daughter of her brothers´ young English tutor, who had an affair with her mother. This allusion was concluded in the end of the story when Mr. Budd literally drags Jane to a brougham, the type of carriage that was designed by rumored real father of Edith Wharton, Lord Brougham, and called after him, to take Jane from her parents away.

Sources:

Fraser, Kennedy. “Warmed Through and Through”. Ornament and Silence. Essays on Women´s Lives from Edith Wharton to Germaine Greer. Kindle ed. New York: Vintage books, a division of Random house, Inc., 1998.

Kornetta, Reiner. Das Korsett im Kopf. Ehe und Ökonomie in den Kurzgeschichten Edith Wharton. Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang GmbH Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1996. Print.

Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. London: Vintage, 2008. Print

Singley, Carol J. Edith Wharton. Matters of Mind and Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.