Ralph Marvell’s pain, or something you can’t find in Jane Austen

In the blog post about chapter 15 in The Custom of the Country, I already quoted a few poignant passages about Ralph’s illusion. For example: 

“… Since then he had been walking with a ghost: the miserable ghost of his illusion. Only he had somehow vivified, coloured, substantiated it, by the force of his own great need—as a man might breathe a semblance of life into a dear drowned body that he cannot give up for dead. All this came to him with aching distinctness the morning after his talk with his wife on the stairs. He had accused himself, in midnight retrospect, of having failed to press home his conclusion because he dared not face the truth.” (Ch.16)

Edith Wharton’s writing is very good, particularly good when she writes about Ralph’s anguish and illness. 

“…It pressed him down again: down into a dim deep pool of sleep. He lay there for a long time, in a silent blackness far below light and sound; then he gradually floated to the surface with the buoyancy of a dead body. But his body had never been more alive. Jagged strokes of pain tore through it, hands dragged at it with nails that bit like teeth. They wound thongs about him, bound him, tied weights to him, tried to pull him down with them; but still he floated, floated, danced on the fiery waves of pain, with barbed light pouring down on him from an arrowy sky.
Charmed intervals of rest, blue sailings on melodious seas, alternated with the anguish. He became a leaf on the air, a feather on a current, a straw on the tide, the spray of the wave spinning itself to sunshine as the wave toppled over into gulfs of blue…” (Ch.22) 

That is great writing. I know I’ve said it before, but I love her prose. 

“It was an oppressive day in mid-August, with a yellow mist of heat in the sky, when at last he entered the big office-building. Swirls of dust lay on the mosaic floor, and a stale smell of decayed fruit and salt air and steaming asphalt filled the place like a fog.” (ibid.) 

Her writing is sensuous. If this passage doesn’t make you want to read The Custom of the Country, I don’t know what will. Personally I prefer her to Henry James. 

“… Now and then he got into the canoe and paddled himself through a winding chain of ponds to some lonely clearing in the forest; and there he lay on his back in the pine-needles and watched the great clouds form and dissolve themselves above his head.
All his past life seemed to be symbolized by the building-up and breaking-down of those fluctuating shapes, which incalculable wind-currents perpetually shifted and remodelled or swept from the zenith like a pinch of dust.” (Ch.23) 

And: 

“At first he had chafed under the taciturnity surrounding him: had passionately longed to cry out his humiliation, his rebellion, his despair. Then he began to feel the tonic effect of silence; and the next stage was reached when it became clear to him that there was nothing to say. There were thoughts and thoughts: they bubbled up perpetually from the black springs of his hidden misery, they stole on him in the darkness of night, they blotted out the light of day; but when it came to putting them into words and applying them to the external facts of the case, they seemed totally unrelated to it.” (ibid.) 

Now you’re thinking the title is a clickbait, and the post is only an excuse to point at some great passages in The Custom of the Country. Well, that’s partly it. 
Earlier I did a search on Twitter, going all the way back to 2010 (don’t ask me why), and discovered that: a) many people think Edith Wharton’s better than Jane Austen (mostly without explaining the reasons), and b) lots of people call Wharton the American Austen (again, without explaining why). 
I don’t want to compare them, because, except for the juvenilia, I’ve read all of Jane Austen’s work including the unfinished stuff, and am now reading the 2nd Edith Wharton novel. But I don’t think they have much in common. Even though both of their novels might be classed as novels of manners, their approaches are different—Jane Austen tends to stay with her heroine and focuses on her perspective, whereas Edith Wharton tends to switch between perspectives, like Tolstoy or George Eliot. In terms of style, Austen employs free indirect discourse a lot more, and masters it, whilst Wharton, I notice, often uses invert commas to distinguish the character’s phrasing/ language from her own. 
The 2 writers tackle different themes. Even though both are concerned about morality, Austen is more interested in balance, the different virtues, growth, self-awareness, and understanding of other people, whereas Wharton writes about individuality and the constraints of society, moral choice, and dignity. Put it this way, if Austen focuses on the inner world and mental/ moral growth, Wharton writes about the individual in society. 
The worlds they depict are also very different—the main thing, of course, is that in Jane Austen’s England, people know and stay in their places, so to speak, whereas Wharton’s American society has class anxiety, social climbers, and conflicts between old money and new money.  
I mean, I can kind of understand why some readers compare Wharton to Austen. After all, I do group them together in my mind—it’s the acute perception and deep understanding of people, the irony, the sharp tongue and biting satire, the wry humour, etc. Both don’t seem to think much of people, but if Austen seems to be amused by human foibles, Wharton appears more misanthropic, even angry (at least in The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country). 
Still, their styles are different, their methods are different, their concerns and themes are different, the worlds they depict are different, and Wharton seems angrier, less detached than Austen, so I don’t quite know what people mean when they say Wharton is the American Austen. 
Some others say Wharton is the darker and deeper Austen. Let’s rephrase that: Wharton, according to some people, is darker and deeper than Austen. 
Darker? Definitely. Look at the passages above about Ralph’s disillusionment, illness, and anguish. In The House of Mirth, there is plenty of suffering, self-loathing, self-doubt, and despair. Austen avoids such “odious subjects”. She also keeps scandals at a distance and, with the exception of Lady Susan, doesn’t come close to awful characters—imagine Austen placing a character such as Undine Spragg in the centre of her novel. 
Does this necessarily mean that Wharton is deeper, or more serious? I don’t think so. I just sometimes wish there were a bit more anguish in Austen. She does write about jealousy, displacement, alienation, loneliness, shame, disappointment, unhappiness… but not misery, anguish, self-loathing, bitterness… 
But then of course that is a silly thought. Jane Austen’s best works are perfect as they are, and now I’ve discovered Edith Wharton.