Hannah Hecht's Blog

1. Last week, we learned about Edith Wharton, had a class discussion about The Touchstone, and watched the first half of the Hollywood production of Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. I enjoyed the biographical information about Wharton, especially because she had such an interesting life. She was born Edith Jones of “Keeping up with the Joneses” in New York in 1862, which meant that she lived a life of privilege. Her first book was a nonfiction piece about (and named) The Decoration of Houses. This makes sense with her later writing, since she really likes to focus on the architectural and interior design details in her works, although I noticed it more last semester in Summer. She married Teddy Wharton, who ended up having an affair in London, soliciting New York prostitutes, and embezzling all of the money that Wharton made through her carefully constructed public image. The book The Touchstone, her second published work, featured a man feeling guilty about selling a famous author’s love letters. I enjoyed our discussion and it helped me understand the book with more depth. The movie that we watched focused on a man’s affair with his wife’s cousin, a European countess who was treated badly by her husband. We’re going to finish the movie this week.

2. We read Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather for this week. In the book, Bartley Alexander, a prominent Boston architect has an affair with Hilda Burgoyne, a London-based British actress. He feels guilty about the affair, but has trouble deciding whether to break off the relationship with Hilda or to break it off with his wife, Winifred. While he’s working on his bridge in London and trying to decide which woman he wants to end the relationship with, his bridge collapses and he dies.

When the narrative begins, there is a lot on emphasis on Alexander’s feeling of entrapment. He thinks that his success (especially with that iconic Canadian bridge) has only brought him more obligations, although he had hoped that it would bring him freedom. Later on, he finds that freedom in London and with Hilda. I particularly enjoyed the very colorful depiction of London, partially because I have been there before and knew all of the places that Cather was talking about. Boston was much more dreary. Similarly, although Alexander obviously loved his wife, Winifred was painted much more as an everyday person in an everyday city. Hilda was exotic, expressive, and artistic.

The more literal bridge between his two lives consists of the awful, almost week-long journey from the U.S. to London. The journey first seems adventurous and exciting, but grows to be excruciatingly long and painful. The more figurative bridge between his two lives similarly starts off strong, as he confidently balances the two relationships. However, as the years go on, it takes a beating, and he realizes that he will not be able to maintain his two lives much longer. Just as the London bridge (or maybe the bridge in London) starts to collapse, his internal bridge is also collapsing. He cannot make a decision between the two women, and the issue remains unresolved when he dies at the end.

3. Most of the article “Alexander’s Bridge: The Other First Novel” by Loretta Wasserman mainly argues that despite critics’ and Cather’s own dismissal of her early novel, it is actually a strong and interesting novel that ought to be studied by Cather scholars and critics alike. I was really interested to learn that Cather tried to completely disregard this book. I haven’t previously read anything by Cather, but after reading the secondary reading, I think I understand her much better. Apparently, she ultimately decided to portray the American experience through Midwestern prairie-life narratives, but this work is completely different. I also thought that it was interesting that Cather, although she would later deny it, briefly considered becoming an expatriate. The central conflict in Alexander’s Bridge, the need to choose between the Boston woman and the London woman could kind of reflect Cather’s own conflicted feelings. To her (or at least to Alexander), London was flashy and exciting while the U.S. was much more customary. Eventually, America triumphed as the setting of her fiction, but this novel shows that she was, at one point, perhaps as fascinated with Europe as her expatriate contemporaries. The article says, and I quite agree, that her painting of London was much more exciting and colorful than her one of the U.S. I would be interested to read one of her more traditional works to contrast it with Alexander’s Bridge.