Before Edith Wharton was a novelist she was a decorator. This is not a trivial fact about her career because it foreshadows a central tenet of her method.
Her first book, published in 1897, was The Decoration of Houses, a manual on interior architecture written with the architect Ogden Codman. It is a serious technical document about proportion, the placement of doorways, and the aesthetic and practical failures of the late-Victorian American house. It argued, against the prevailing inclination of her milieu, that rooms should be governed by classical principles of symmetry and restraint rather than the cluttered, draped, over-upholstered fashion of the Gilded Age. The book was a commercial success and an enormous private one. It taught Wharton how to read a room before she ever wrote a novel.
She never stopped reading rooms. Every important moment in every major Wharton novel happens inside an interior that is doing as much narrative work as the dialogue. The room tells you who the character is, what their family has been, what they are about to lose, and what they have settled for. Significantly, Wharton did not describe rooms in order to set a scene. She described rooms in order to say what the dialogue did not.
This is what we mean, or what we ought to mean, when we say that Wharton’s interiors are character architecture.
Consider the opening of The House of Mirth. Lily Bart, beautiful and unmoored, visits Lawrence Selden’s apartment for tea. The apartment is small, book-lined, comfortable, and masculine in a bohemian bachelor register. It is a room a woman of Lily’s class would not have entered casually in 1905. Wharton focuses our attention on the room itself. The shabby armchairs. The tea things. The general atmosphere of slightly threadbare but wholly contented freedom. By the end of the visit you understand, without anyone having said so, that Selden’s freedom is one Lily cannot afford. His life is the thing she desires and the very thing she cannot have. The room unveils the entire plot in advance.
Or consider Ellen Olenska’s drawing room in The Age of Innocence. When Newland Archer first visits, he registers, with the precision of a man who has been trained to register such things, that the room is wrong. It is wrong by the standards of old New York. The flowers are arranged in the European manner. The seating is too informal. The few small objects she has placed about the room have a continental cast. A shawl is thrown over a chair. None of this is assembled for Newland’s benefit. Ellen has created a room that pleases her, and it pleases her in a way that violates every repression of the society she has returned to. Newland intuits, looking at the room, that he is in the presence of sensuality he has not been allowed to develop in himself.
Ellen’s languid shawl in an upperclass drawing room is a sexual provocation, and Newland reads it as one even though he cannot say so. Wharton was writing within, and about, a society that had no language for its own inhibitions, so she described them with furniture.
This is the technique. The room is not the setting of the scene; the room is the scene, and does in graphic detail what no conversation in the novel is permitted to do. I suspect readers who don’t like Wharton probably gloss over it as just florid description.
Ms. Wharton learned about rooms and scenes growing up in the suffocating interiors of her childhood, among the dark wallpapers, fringe, palms, and general atmosphere of a room designed to absorb sound and prevent any single object (or person) from standing out. She escaped the stifling life these rooms embodied, first by reading, then by traveling to Italy and France, where she encountered classical proportion and decided it was an education in how to live. The Decoration of Houses is a young woman’s rebellion against the society of her childhood. The novels are the same manifesto, written as fiction.
She did not stop there. In 1902, working with the architect Francis Hoppin and her Decoration of Houses co-author Ogden Codman, she designed and built a house of her own, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts. Defiance rendered in stucco and stone.
The Mount stands a few miles from the great Gilded Age estates of the Berkshires and the robber-baron mansions of nearby Newport. The difference is immediate. Where those houses are dark and cavernous, The Mount is startlingly white, glowing against the green of the surrounding landscape. Where they are heavy and labyrinthine, it is symmetrical and filled with light. Wharton imported her marble fireplaces from Italy and France. She designed elaborate plaster moldings for the ceilings. She positioned floor-to-ceiling windows to pull the gardens into every important room. Even the stable, ostensibly built for horses, is an exercise in classical proportion one could imagine living comfortably in today.
Edith Wharton was as exacting about the decoration of The Mount as she was about the decoration in her novels. Reading her autobiography, one cannot help noticing the coincidence that the house she built to exemplify her aesthetic principles became, almost on its own, an architectural theater where much of her personal story would be acted out. Her dear friend Henry James called the place “a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond,” and spent long summer weeks there. So did the novelist Howard Sturgis, the art historian Bernard Berenson, and Walter Berry, the friend Wharton credited with perfecting her prose style and near whom she would eventually be buried in Versailles.
If the Mount was a stage she built for her own life, then the people who came to stand on it were, almost without exception, those whose conversation she had desired since childhood. The house and its guests were the same project: a room arranged correctly, finally containing the right people.
The technical lesson here is one I think about constantly, and one almost no contemporary novelist seems to use.
A room is the fastest way to establish a character. It is faster than dialogue, faster than action, faster than backstory. A character’s room—what is in it, what is missing, what is arranged with care, what has gone unattended—is a more reliable index of who they are than anything they say about themselves. Wharton knew this because she spent a decade studying physical rooms before she wrote about fictional ones. She had developed an eye, and the eye transferred.
Most contemporary fiction does not do this. Rooms in modern novels tend to be either invisible (no description at all, the reader supplied a generic apartment) or exhaustively inventoried (a paragraph of objects with no organizing intelligence). Both fail for the same reason: the writer has not decided what the room argues. Wharton’s rooms always argue. The clutter nags. The restraint judges. The single Italian shawl on the chair is an assertion so devastating that a man's life is rearranged by it.
There is a related lesson about taste, which is harder to discuss but worth attempting. Wharton believed, and her novels operate on the assumption, that taste is also character information. Not in the snobbish sense of good taste being correlated with good character. Her novels are chock-full of vulgar, malicious people living in technically impeccable houses, and decent people in slightly wrong ones.
Rather, display is what we mean to show. Taste shows regardless.
What someone finds beautiful, what they choose to live with, what they leave bare, and how they fill space, reveals what they value. What a person values is who they are. In Wharton’s fiction, a character whose room is wrong in some specific way is a character whose values are arranged in a similar pattern. The reader, looking at the room, is handed evidence.
This is why Wharton’s novels, more than a century after they were written, still feel piercingly observant. She had developed a method for seeing character through environment. Her method survives the disappearance of the carriage and the calling card. It works on a studio apartment in Brooklyn. It works on the things one unpacks in a hotel suite. It works on the way someone arranges bric-a-brac on their desk.
The contemporary novelist who learns Wharton's method has access to a technique gone almost entirely dormant. There is no reason it must remain so.
This essay is part of an occasional series on Writers I Keep Returning To. Next: What Nancy Mitford Knew About People (And We’ve Forgotten).
Interesting.