Edith Wharton
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Those who have sought insightful and
colorful ways to describe French behavior that is simultaneously
inscrutable, maddening, and delightful can stop their search. A
stunningly written gem of a book does it all with panache. French Ways
and Their Meanings by Edith Wharton could have been written yesterday.
Wharton is known as a penetrating observer of human behavior,
especially within New York high society. She also was a Francophile of
long duration and instinct and, in fact, is buried in the American
Cemetery in Versailles.
Her perceptions on the
French, including comparison with American culture, are so trenchant as
to leave the reader stammering. She places her observations in five
general areas: Reverence, Taste, Intellectual Honesty, Continuity, and
The New Frenchwoman. The following are mere morsels of fuller
discussions.
Love-making versus Pornography? From almost 100 years ago, plus ca change…“They
attach a great deal of importance to love-making, but they consider it
more simply and less solemnly than we do. They are cool, resourceful
and merry, crack jokes about the relations between the sexes, and are
used to the frank discussion of what someone tactfully called ‘the
operations of Nature.’ They are puzzled by our queer fear of our own
bodies, and accustomed to relate openly and unapologetically the
anecdotes that Anglo-Saxons snicker over privately and with apologies.
They define pornography as a taste for the nasty, and not as an
interest in the natural.”
Sex, Politics, Business Scandals in the Millenium? Listen to Wharton:
“If
in France there is a distinction between private and business morality
it is exactly the reverse of that prevailing in America, and the French
conscience rejects with abhorrence the business complaisances which the
rigidly virtuous American too often regards as not immoral because not
indictable.”
On French versus American women, a fascinating portrait of relations between the sexes:
“First
of all, she [the average Frenchwoman] is, in nearly all respects, as
different as possible from the average American woman… Is it because
she dresses better, or knows more about cooking, or is more
‘coquettish,’ or more ‘feminine,’ or more excitable, or more emotional,
or more immoral? All these reasons have been often suggested, but none
of them seems to furnish a complete answer… It is simply that, like the
men of her race, the Frenchwoman is grown up… For if Frenchman care too
much about other things to care as much as we do about making money,
the chief reason is largely because their relations with women are more
interesting.”
Wharton wittily triangulates
three well-known French qualities, aloofness, thriftiness, and the
“almost Chinese reverence” for manners:
“No one knows
more than the French about good manners: manners are codified in
France, and there is the possibility of an insult in the least
deviation for established procedure… The complaint of Anglo-Saxons
that, in traveling in France, they see little of the much-vaunted
French courtesy is not unjustified. The French are not courteous from
any vague sense of good-will toward mankind; they regard politeness as
a coin with which certain things are obtainable, and being notably
thrifty they are cautious about spending it on strangers…”
If
any of these observations perturb or delight you, search out this slim,
150 page book.* Wharton’s finely tuned insights cover much more than
these I have described, including Cardinal Richelieu (“a bad man and
great statesman”) and the French Academy, language as the “vessel” to
preserve a nation, the glacial movement of French bureaucracy,
geography as destiny, and “la gloire, l’amour, la volupte, et le
plaisir.” It is indispensable.* pub. 1919, repub. 1997, Edith Wharton Restoration at The Mount (Lenox, Mass.) and Berkshire House Publishers (Lee, Mass.)