ABSTRACT
Edith Wharton’s 1911 story “Autres Temps” chronicles a Mrs. Lidcote’s return to America from Europe after an “exile” of some eighteen years. The generational division in socio-cultural values represented in “Autres Temps” itself metaphorizes divorce—a seemingly unbridgable gap in attitude which divides Mrs. Lidcote from her daughter and her “set.” As Nancy Bentley has observed, divorcees were society’s “unmarried married” women, doubly defined by the matrimonial institution rather than liberated from it. The strategies employed by the female characters, from renegotiating the traditional hierarchical marital relation to the exploration of simultaneous domestic and extra-domestic roles, do indeed destabilize the marriage plot and interrogate the ideal. Bypassing the law for either sanctioning or dissolving marital partnerships, these women resist the institution that would have them contain their love within the bounds defined by money, contract and “business.”.
