ABSTRACT
“All Souls’” was Wharton’s last completed work, her last fictive portrait of the suffering, defeated women she created. On first encounter Sara Clayburn seems unlike Wharton’s other dispossessed, mutilated, despairing, or exiled heroines. She has attained and accepted the emblems of status and success in her society: wealth, position, marriage, a large country house with the long Colonial pedigree of her husband’s family and a maternal legacy of her mother-in-law’s servants, a house without even the encumbrance of husband or children. Unlike the other conflicted, indecisive, or dependent heroines, Mrs. Clayburn is described by her narrating cousin as “calm matter-of-fact,” “quick and imperious,” “a muscular resolute woman.” 1 She even prefers to live by herself in the country, knows how to load a gun, and, when necessary, swill down brandy. She seems the autonomous woman at last in Wharton. Yet when she twists her ankle and finds her servants inexplicably gone, the electricity and telephone mysteriously disconnected (although a snowstorm is piling up outside her windows), her hobbled journey through the suddenly “cold, orderly—and empty house” (262) reverberates with almost existential desolation. Any illusions of self-sufficiency and real contentment have crashed. When we acknowledge that it has been All Souls’ Eve and her servants perhaps beckoned by a mysterious woman to a witches’ coven in the nearby woods, this last fiction of Wharton becomes more than a tale of supernatural terror and revenge. It becomes a psychological study of a woman’s deep-felt loneliness and long-denied desires.
