Edith Wharton's "The Other Two"

Discussion Leader for Tuesday's Class: Brian!

In my experience, students divide sharply on Wharton. Some love her work, responding particularly to the elegance and precision of her prose and the sharpness of her wit; others don't like her at all, finding it hard to "get into" her fiction because she seems so cold, the prose seems so detailed and self-conscious, and the subject matter is so elite (i.e. she often focuses on the "higher classes").

Major themes in Wharton's work include the effects of class on both behavior and consciousness (divorce, for example, often horrifies the established upper class as much for its offense against taste as for its violation of moral standards); the American belief in progress as actual and good (many "advances" Wharton welcomed; others she was contemptuous of); the contrast between European and American customs, morality, and sensibility; the confinement of marriage, especially for women; women's desire for and right to freedom in general, and particularly sexual and economic freedom, and the reality that, usually, the desire and right are thwarted; the preference of powerful, white, usually upper-class men for childish dependent women; the complexity and pain of relationships between women within patriarchal culture, including (and especially) rivalry and animosity among women.

So in terms of "The Other Two," where do Wharton's sympathies lie in this story? On what do you base your opinion?