“Afterward” (1910)

[spoilers] My first Edith Wharton horror story is in The Dark Descent and for once I don’t think editor David G. Hartwell was trying too hard to pump up the volume on literary credibility. Wharton is obviously good at this—far better than her mentor Henry James, who could rarely get out of his own way when it came to horror. I still need to take another look at “The Turn of the Screw.” At any rate, Wharton’s story does involve Americans living in Europe, or anyway England. Our young American couple rents a house in the English countryside that is reputed to be haunted. They joke about wanting to meet a ghost, but there’s an unusual twist to this one. It’s only later (“afterward”) that you understand the ghost or haunting. This is a strange, almost arch concept, not easily grasped, but the payoff is quite good. The couple seems like an ideal of American innocents, but shade soon begins to fall on the husband. We see he is worried about something and hiding it from his wife. We know we need to keep an eye on that. But mostly the Jamesian air holds sway of light banter, blue skies, and easy good fortune. Then Wharton springs a big surprise when the husband suddenly disappears and is never heard from again. She knocks us off balance as we are not prepared for the unexplained disappearance of a main character. The events of the day are detailed up to the point where peak annoyance has begun to turn to anxiety. The next section starts two weeks later, with a police investigation underway and the wife with a bad feeling. As the weeks and months elapse, she begins to remember things that are a little ghostly and only become more so as she gradually adds up clues and learns what her husband was involved in that enabled them to move to England and pursue their easy, carefree way of life. I’ve given away the main surprise of this story, but the surprise is not the point of it. Wharton is careful from the start to make her characters vividly felt, as normal or bland and humdrum as they may seem. While many things are explained, the ghost story aspect is not. It exists at the center of the story as a mystery that can’t be understood or penetrated even. And like all the folks in this story say, you only really get it afterward, as the inescapable futility of explanation becomes apparent. Very nicely done.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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