The Cult of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Ancient Greek Religion as Reflected in Edith Wharton’s Novels

Abstract

The two basic conflicting forces throughout Wharton’s tragic novels have a great affinity with the cult of the Apollonian and Dionysian in ancient Greek religion and in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. On the one hand, it is the Apollonian ideal of civilized society and individual restraint, which is a beautiful illusion maintained in a bright appearance. When it encounters Dionysus, it is its defensive social rules, the social restrictions, and oppression it imposes on individuals; on the other hand, it is the awakening of Dionysian primitive passion, which tears off the social and individual protective veil of Apollo and reaches the Dionysian tragic cognition at the root of existence, requiring breaking social barriers and indulging the vitality of primitive nature. In this paper, the cult of the Apollonian and Dionysian in ancient Greek religion and as defined by Nietzsche in his The Birth of Tragedy is used to analyze the inner conflicts in the protagonists of Wharton’s tragic novels and the patterns of tragedy in each of her studied novels. Through such archetypal criticism of religious cults in Wharton’s major works, this paper attempts to refute most of the negative criticism of her novels.

1. Introduction

The critical reception of Edith Wharton has been mixed from the beginning. The unfavorable criticism of Wharton consists of variations on the following charges: Her narrow and privileged view of New York aristocracy repels the majority of readers; she is an inferior imitator of Henry James; her vision of life is too relentless. She is unable to see life with “the deep sympathy, smiling tenderness, and affectionate tolerance of the greatest novelists” (Tuttleton et al. 1992, p. 6), and she is liable to “take a human being and subject him or her to a cumulative process of torture… a primitive method of entertainment” (Tuttleton et al. 1992, p. 193). As to her style, she is accused of writing “too consciously well” (Herrick 1915, p. 40; Lubbock 1915, p. 182), and the brilliancy or simply cleverness is a “patrician quality, of the superficial, by the superficial, for the superficial” (Underwood 1914, p. 94). In an age of technical innovation, she is said to lack such impetus, and even her old-fashioned realism is shown to be inadequately realistic, well below Dreiser or Norris (Tuttleton et al. 1992, p. 295).

In 1938, the year after Wharton’s death, Edmund Wilson’s “Justice to Edith Wharton” claims that Wharton’s achievement had been underestimated. He points to the intensity of Wharton’s works as a result of secret personal anguish which makes her “important during a period… when there were few American writers worth reading” (Wilson 1962, p. 19). However, his recognition is still based on an allowance for her significant limitation: “Everything that is valuable in her work lies within a quite sharply delimited area” (Wilson 1962, p. 27).

Some of the essays are frankly condescending in their grudging recognition. Lionel Trilling, in his “The Morality of Inertia” comments as follows:

We can never speak of Edith Wharton without some degree of respect. She brought to her novels a strong if limited intelligence, notable powers of observation, and a genuine desire to tell the truth—a desire which in some part she satisfied. But she was a woman in whom we cannot fail to see a limitation of heart, and this limitation makes itself manifests as a literary and moral deficiency of her work, and of Ethan Frome especially. It appears in the deadness of her prose, and more flagrantly in the suffering of the characters. Whenever the characters of a story suffer, they do so at the behest of their author—the author is responsible for their suffering and must justify his cruelty by the seriousness of his moral intention. The author of Ethan Frome, seemed to me as I read the book again to test my memory of it, could not lay claim to any such justification.

(Trilling 1962, p. 138)

Some critics’ enthusiastic praises no less than charges place Wharton under the shadow of Henry James; for example, Q. D. Leavis’ article “Henry James’s Heiress: The Importance of Edith Wharton”. The undertone of these articles amounts to this: At most, she is “a gifted disciple” of Henry James, “but not nearly so gifted as the master” (Bell 1995, p. 6).

Irving Howe, in the introduction part of his collection of critical essays on Edith Wharton, contends that Henry James’ influence on Wharton’s works is either overestimated or misunderstood. He insists that “it is finally for the strength of her personal vision and the incisiveness of her mind that we should value her work” (Howe 1962, pp. 6–7). However, this personal vision, as Irving Howe maintains, has significant limitations:

In a final reckoning, of course, Mrs. Wharton’s vision of life has its severe limitations. She knew only too well how experience can grind men into hopelessness, how it can leave them persuaded that the need for choice contains within itself the seeds of tragedy and the impossibility of choice the sources of pain. Everything that reveals the power of the conditioned, everything that shreds our aspirations, she brought to full novelistic life. Where she failed was in giving imaginative embodiment to the human will seeking to resist defeat or move beyond it. She lacked James’ ultimate serenity. She lacked his gift for summoning in images of conduct the purity of children and the selflessness of girls. She lacked the vocabulary of happiness.

(Howe 1962, pp. 17–18)

Besides subjects, Wharton’s literary style was reproached. “The very elegance of her style was somehow felt to be a limitation that expressed a temperament too inhospitable to the emotions animating great art” (Tuttleton et al. 1992, p. 110). She was said to “have that rare thing, distinction in literary style,… but it is like the fine gowns of her heroines, a fashion of the times for interpreting decadent symptoms in human nature” (Tuttleton et al. 1992, p. 110).

Even when The Age of Innocence brought her wide acclaim, and Lyon Phelps said, “Edith Wharton is a writer to bring glory on the name of America, and this is her best book” (Tuttleton et al. 1992, p. 285), there were still a few dissents. In England, the novelist Katherine Mansfield found Wharton’s art too orderly and of the surface and asked for “a little wildness, a dark place or two in the soul” (Tuttleton et al. 1992, p. 292). In America, Vernon L. Parrington, though he praised her “immaculate art,” insisted that she had wasted it on trivial materials and said that there was “more hope for literature in the crudities of the young naturalists…. She is too well bred to be a snob, but she escapes it only by sheer intelligence” (Tuttleton et al. 1992, p. 295).

In 1953, Blake Nevius’s Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction points out the continuity of a theme threading through Wharton’s novels, “the spectacle of a large and generous nature… trapped by circumstances ironically of its own devising into consanguinity with a meaner nature” (Nevius 1953, pp. 9–10); thus, in his way, Nevius counteracts the conviction of Wharton as having a limited response to common experience and her elegant style as “a reflection of the well-dressed woman of fashion” (Bell 1995, p. 11).

In 1975, R. W. B. Lewis in his biography of Wharton disclosed to the reading public, forty years after Wharton’s death, her secret love affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton, thus absolved the critics’ conviction of her as ignorant of sexual passion and narrowly prudish. The revelation of this personal image of Wharton long hidden from view gave rise to, unsurprisingly, a flood of feminist criticism. Wharton began to be seen as one of feminism’s foremothers—who, though talented and rich, suffered the persisting ordeal of all women struggling for personal and professional self-definition in a male-dominated world (Bell 1995, p. 13). Her writings are seen as a woman artist’s life-long struggle against social restrictions. In spite of this, the confined treatment of Wharton’s novels as the record of female experience and views alone does not reinstate her in the rank of great writers for depicting the universal human condition.

This universal power latent in Wharton’s tragic writing is what the author of this paper wishes to reveal by disclosing the archetypal richness of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in ancient Greek religion and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy underneath the imagery patterns of her major novels, namely, Ethan Frome, Summer, The Reef, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.

2. The Apollonian and the Dionysian in Greek Religion and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy

The cults of the Apollonian and Dionysian were most famously developed in philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche in his work The Birth of Tragedy (1872). They have their roots in Greek religion and mythology, where they represent two contrasting yet complementary aspects of life and human experience. Apollo, in ancient Greek religion, was one of the most important deities in the Greek pantheon. He was the god of the sun, light, poetry, prophecy, and healing and was often associated with reason, order, and harmony. Apollo represented the rational and civilized aspects of life, emphasizing clarity, moderation, and self-restraint. His Delphi oracles were seen as sources of divine wisdom, offering guidance through rational interpretation of omens. In Greek art and culture, the Apollonian is characterized by qualities of form, structure, and plastic beauty. Apollo’s influence encouraged the pursuit of knowledge, the arts, and the cultivation of the mind. His festivals, such as the Pythian Games, celebrated these ideals through music, poetry, and athletic competitions. Dionysus, in ancient Greek religion, was the god of wine, fertility, theater, and ecstatic revelry. He represented the primal, instinctual, and chaotic forces of nature. Dionysian worship involved rituals that emphasized emotional release, the breaking down of individual boundaries, and a return to a cosmic union with nature. Dionysian worship included ecstatic dances, intoxication, and frenzied celebrations, which were thought to bring followers into direct communion with the divine and divinized nature.

The Dionysian aspect of Greek religion is associated with the irrational, emotional, and wild aspects of human nature. Unlike the orderly and measured Apollonian worship, Dionysian rituals often involved the abandonment of reason and a deep immersion in the passions. The most famous of these rituals was the Bacchanalia, where participants, often in a state of intoxication, would engage in ecstatic dances and other forms of worship to connect with the god. In Greek religion, these two deities and the forces they represent were not seen as opposing but as complementary aspects of life, as the Greeks recognized the need for both order and chaos, reason and emotion, form and formlessness. The balance between these forces was essential for the harmony of the individual and society. The concept of the Apollonian and Dionysian was later used by Nietzsche to explore the tension between these forces in art and culture, particularly in Greek tragedy. He argued that the greatest works of art, especially Greek tragedies, were born from the tension and interplay between the Apollonian and Dionysian, creating a profound and dynamic aesthetic experience. In brief, Apollo and Dionysus in Greek religion embody two fundamental aspects of existence: the rational, ordered, and harmonious versus the irrational, chaotic, and ecstatic. Together, they represent a holistic view of life that acknowledges the complexity and duality of human nature and experience.

In ancient Greek religion, Apollo was the god of the plastic arts, including painting and sculpture, while Dionysus was the god of music, the non-plastic arts. In Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, he attributes the evolution of art to the constant conflict and intermittent reconciliation between Apollo and Dionysus (Nietzsche 1956). These two artistic impulses developed side by side, often in fierce conflict, each inspiring the other to produce more powerful creativity in the process of coordinating the struggle, until through the Hellenic will, the two accepted the bond of marriage and gave birth to Greek tragedy, which exhibited the characteristics of both.

In ancient Greek religion, Apollo was the god of civilized society, for example, he was the god of medicine. In contrast, Dionysus was the god of nature and natural fertility, associated with wine and primitive (“uncivilized”) revelry rituals. Thus, Apollo and Dionysus represented the two basic states of dream and intoxication, respectively.

According to Nietzsche, dreams are essentially imagistic, thus related to plastic art. As Nietzsche argues in The Birth of Tragedy, dreams are presented in forms but at the same time give these forms a sense of illusion. Dreams represent the instinctive pleasures and needs of human nature, as dreamers often say, this is a dream, I will continue to dream. Dreams have a certain reality, but it is felt that there is a deeper reality buried beneath it. The reality we see in daily life, in Nietzsche’s predecessor Schopenhauer, and in Buddhist terms, is “The veil of maya”, which hides the ultimate reality of the unity of all things under the individual (Schopenhauer 1896).

In ancient Greek religion, Apollo is the bright sun god, and according to Nietzsche in his The Birth of Tragedy, represents individual forms. As Nietzsche argues in this book, Apollo’s domain includes individuation, self-restraint, form, beauty, and illusion. The maintenance of the illusion of dreams requires boundaries, self-restraint, and tranquility. Any indulgence of impulse will break this illusion. As Schopenhauer expressed it, “It is like an individual in a canoe on a turbulent sea, under the attack of huge waves, relying on the fragile raft of his individual spirit to sit quietly in the stormy world” (Schopenhauer 1896, p. 412). However, in the intoxication of Dionysus, the individuation is broken and the individual self is dissolved. Dionysus represents the collapse of the principle of individuation—intoxicating and terrifying. In ancient Greek religion, Dionysian emotions can be generated by alcohol or burst forth with spring, which penetrates all beings with the joy of the rebirth and proliferation of natural life. The Dionysian spirit is embodied in the collective rituals of singing, dancing, revelry, and indulgence in the worship of Dionysus, when the barriers between human individuals and primitive nature collapse and they merge into a rediscovered cosmic harmony. The dance and music of Dionysus express the pain and ecstasy of this intoxication.

Although the Apollonian spirit prevailed in early Greece, it has another hidden reality in Nietzsche’s view. According to him, although Apollo was one of the Olympian gods who exuded the luxury of life, beneath the bright and luxurious appearance of Olympian gods, Greek culture had a unique sensitivity to the pain of life, which was reflected in the Dionysian wisdom: that life itself is full of persistent contradictions, pain, and excess. The “curse of the individuation”, according to Nietzsche, is the torment of birth, aging, illness, and death that we endure as powerless individuals. Nietzsche pointed out the dark side of Greek religious mythology: the Titanic wars, the tortures suffered by Prometheus, Oedipus, and Orestes, and the wisdom of Silenus: it is best not to be born, and the next best thing is to die soon (Nietzsche 1956, p. 29). In Greek religion and Greek creativity, according to Nietzsche, Titanic terror precedes Olympian joy. In fact, Titanic terror drives the generation of Olympian joy. The Olympian gods who replace Titanic terror are born from Apollo’s impulse of beautiful illusion. The Olympian gods represent a deep need, that is, to conquer the terror and suffering of life with the illusion of artistic beauty, so that the pain of life can be endured. That is, according to Nietzsche, the essence of “Homer’s Naivete” is not the innate innocence of Romanticism, but the innocence regained after suffering. It sublimates suffering into beauty and creates beautiful illusions to overcome and cover up the painful facts of life. In the contest between the two impulses of Apollo and Dionysus, when Apollo is in an ascending state, he sets order and boundaries to hide the contradictions, pain, and excess revealed by Dionysus. The principle of moderation becomes an ideal, requiring individual boundaries, which is reflected in Apollo’s motto, “know thyself” and “self-control” (Nietzsche 1956, p. 45). But Dionysus cannot be suppressed forever. Along with the Dionysus worship ritual, Apollo must either give way completely, or strengthen and become defensive and rigid, or reach a compromise.

Greek tragedy, in Nietzsche’s view, began with lyric poetry. Greek poetry is accompanied by music and is inseparable from music. The Greek poet is first a composer. In his creation, he subordinates the individual to the metaphysical reality and reflects it in music. Later, he was influenced by Apollo and transformed musical symbols into concrete concepts and language. The Apollonian artist in lyric poetry, like a dreamer, can observe the reality outside of himself. The lyric poet’s thoughts are his own projection, but that is not the individual self, but the self that is identical to the original unified cosmic life. He is liberated from personal will and becomes the medium for the emergence of the original cosmic life.

According to Nietzsche, Greek tragedy begins with the chorus of Dionysus’s followers, the half-man, half-goat god Satyr, which symbolizes the great joy that cannot be eradicated from the foundation of life despite the tragic recognition of Dionysian wisdom. Like Hamlet, the audience sees the horror and absurdity of existence in tragedy. This knowledge itself leads to disgust and paralysis of action, leading to the Buddhist denial of the will to survive, which is Schopenhauer’s solution to survival (Schopenhauer 1896). However, in Nietzsche’s view, it is art that saves this knowledge. Terror is transformed into the sublime by art, and the absurd is domesticated into comedy. According to Nietzsche, the Greeks, although they have a unique sensitivity to the deep pain of life, are saved by the chorus of the Satyrs.

The effect of tragedy lies in the interaction between Apollonian drama and Dionysian music. The main function of the Apollonian element is to protect the audience from directly bearing the full power of Dionysian music, because the original pain aroused by this power is enough to destroy the body and mind, but to let him bear this power through an individual tragic hero in a myth. This tragic hero, like Atlas, bears all the original pain for us, so that we can experience the wisdom of Dionysus without being hurt. In turn, Dionysian music also pushes the power of Apollonian drama to a climax, and the drama gains an appeal that words and actions alone cannot achieve. The characters and actions of the drama are illuminated from the inside. However, the victory of Apollo is subordinate to the leading role of Dionysus. Through music, tragic myth acquires metaphysical intensity and significance, while the destruction of the individual brings a higher level of joy. Therefore, Dionysus, as the stronger party, forces Apollo to convey Dionysus’ wisdom, “Dionysus speaks in the language of Apollo, and Apollo, finally, the language of the Dionysiac, so the high goal of tragedy and all art is attained” (Nietzsche 1956, p. 57).

3. Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Summer, and The Reef

Nietzsche is a philosopher whom Edith Wharton loves (Shaffer-Koros 2004, pp. 7–10). After reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Wharton highly praises this work as “full of wit & originality & poetry”. “He has no system & not much logic, but wonderful flashes of insight, & a power of breaking through conventions that is most exhilarating, & clears the air as our thunderstorms do…. I think it salutary, now & then, to be made to realize what he calls ‘the re-evaluation of all values’” (Lewis and Lewis 1998, p. 159). Nietzsche’s criticism of what he deems as the repression in Christianity also finds sympathy in her. So she goes on to say, “there are times when I hate what Christianity has left in our blood—or rather, one might say, taken out of it—by its cursed assumption of the split between body & soul” (Lewis and Lewis 1998, p. 159). Although Wharton has not directly commented on Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, like Nietzsche, she has a great interest in Roman culture as the heir to great Greek classics (Shaffer-Koros 2004, pp. 7–10). The uninhibited, amoral Dionysian energy, for both Wharton and Nietzsche, provides a welcome release from what they deem as the repressive force of convention and Christian orthodox. As to the influence of German culture, Nietzsche was inspired by the opera of Wagner and by Goethe, and Wharton’s The Age of Innocence constantly refers to the opera performance of Goethe’s Faust.

The author found that the two basic conflicting forces throughout Wharton’s tragic novels are very similar to the Apollonian and Dionysian spirits in ancient Greek religion as discussed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. On the one hand, it is the Apollonian ideal of civilized society and individual restraint, which is a beautiful illusion maintained in a bright appearance. When it encounters Dionysus, it is its defensive social rules, the social restrictions, and oppression it imposes on individuals; on the other hand, it is the awakening of Dionysus’s primitive passion, which tears off the social and individual protective veil of Apollo and reaches the Dionysian tragic cognition at the root of survival, requiring breaking social barriers and indulging the vitality of primitive nature. Since Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy is “far less significant for the study of the historical facts of ancient Greek religion and Greek tragedy than his insight into the impulse and tension that produced tragic art” (Silk and Stern 1981, p. 21), the Apollo and Dionysian spirits defined by Nietzsche can be expanded to study Wharton’s tragic novels. As Nietzsche said, Dionysus and Apollo’s spirits exist not only in artistic impulses but also in the two basic states of human existence, dreams and drunkenness. Therefore, they can be used to analyze the inner conflicts of the protagonists of Wharton’s tragic novels and the pattern of tragedy in each of her studied novels. The following will analyze the Apollonian and Dionysian archetypes contained in the imagery patterns of several important tragic novels of Wharton, and how they are contained in the inner conflicts and social conflicts of the tragic protagonists of the novels.

In the existing Wharton criticism, a few commentators have studied the images in Wharton’s novels, such as Kenneth Bernard and Judith Funston, who studied the cold and clock images in Ethan Frome and The Old Maid, respectively, and Cynthia Wolff’s Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, which studied some images related to Wharton’s personal dilemma in Summer. However, no paper systematically studies the common image types in Wharton’s major tragic works. This paper discovers the common image types in Wharton’s five important tragic works, namely, the two forces prominent in ancient Greek religion and reflected in Greek tragedy as defined by her beloved philosopher Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy: The religious cult of the Apollonian spirit and Dionysian spirit demonstrates how these two spirits become the central conflicting forces in Wharton’s tragic novels.

Ethan Frome is the darkest novel on the spectrum of Wharton’s tragic novels. It tells the story of the protagonist Frome’s extramarital affair with his wife’s cousin Mattie Silver in a cold and wild village, and the tragic ending when they try to escape from the moral barriers of family and society. Its Rembrandt-like dark theme and the severe winter cold that marks the death of Dionysus, in the archetypal meaning of the image, outline the original pain and darkness of the world, which is the original darkness from which Dionysus draws its source. From there, the Dionysian flame of pain and intoxication burst out in Wharton’s subsequent novels. In this novel, the harsh winter of the Ice Age, the dominant darkness of Rembrandt’s chiascuro, the images of animals and hunger, the Titanic injuries, and the imprisonment of the characters, all resemble the dark abyss of Dionysus, which is reflected in the wise saying of Silenus: It is best not to be born, and the next best thing is to die soon. The predominant dark is imaged in Rembrandt’s chiascuro, for example, Maddie’s first appearance in the eyes of Frome:

She stood just as Zeena had stood, a lifted lamp in her hand, against the black background of the kitchen. She held the light at the same level, and it drew out with the same distinctness her slim young throat and the brown wrist no bigger than a child’s. Then, striking upward, it threw a lustrous fleck on her lips, edged her eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows.

(Wharton 1990a, p. 103)

The image of animals and hunger is found during Mattie and Frome’s suicidal ice-sledding. On their suicidal night, Ethan is hypersensitive to the repeated cry of the hungry sorrel: “He heard the old sorrel whinny across the road, and thought: ‘He’s wondering why he doesn’t get his supper’” (p. 149). The cry of the animal impinges again on his ears inexorably during his whole suicidal plunge: “Just as they started he heard the sorrel’s whinny again, and the familiar wistful call, and all the confused images it brought with it, went with him down the first reach of the road” (p. 150). When he comes back to consciousness after crashing into the elm, he seems to hear a small animal twittering in terrible pain. He stretches to reach it and touches Mattie’s hair and then knows the cry comes from Mattie.

Frome and Mattie’s love and pursuit of freedom ended with their injuries and lifelong shackles. The lovers became benumbed and the objects of each other’s mutually resentful torture.

Summer and The Reef are the Dionysian flames of pain and intoxication that burst out from the dark abyss of Silenus’s tragic understanding in Ethan Frome. Both novels are about the awakening of the heroines’ love, which brings about the social exiling of the heroines, making them tragic heroes defined as lonely exiles in the Western tragic tradition. In the contest between the spirit of Apollo and Dionysus, the two novels finally reach the affirmation of the Dionysian.

Summer tells the story of the adolescent sexual awakening of the illegitimate daughter Charity Royall. Her passionate love affair with a young man named Harney Royall (Dionysian passion) made her flee to the mountains after she became pregnant, fleeing to the mountains where her mother was exiled after breaking the rules and to the primitive tribe of fugitives. There she glimpsed the darkness at the center of existence—the abyss of sin, excess, and death (Silenus wisdom), and thus accepted the social order and limited happiness represented by her adoptive father (the ideal and limitation of civilization and self-restraint represented by Apollo).

Cynthia Wolff, Wharton’s biographer, pointed out that Wharton’s Summer was greatly influenced by Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring music concert in its creation. Wharton’s friend Jean Cocteau described “The Rite of Spring”: “Instead of a melodious cascade of florescence, the audience was greeted with rhythmic, mocking cacophony….a symphony impregnated with a wild pathos, with earth in the throes of birth, noises of farm and camp, little melodies that come to us out of the depths of the centuries, and panting of cattle, profound convulsions of nature, prehistoric georgics” (Wolff 2010, p. 275). Stravinsky’s description of the archetypal story of The Rite of Spring reveals that “I had a fleeting vision…. I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring” (Wolff 2010, p. 261).

Here spring appears as a primal unity of fertility, rebirth, pain, and intoxication, fully embodying the qualities of Dionysian music described by ancient Greek religion and Nietzsche. Charity Royall’s erotic awakening is full of natural imagery of spring, flowers, trees, and land. The girl becomes Daphne in the resurgence of nature in the spring, her body symbolically blending into nature, turning into budding branches and trunks. The wine, dance, chorus, and revelry of the festival she experiences echo the Dionysian ritual of sacrifice. The festival fireworks that explode into images of flowers and bird’s nests symbolize the physical passion of Dionysus. However, her subsequent pregnancy and escape to the mountains led her into a dark underground world, where she encountered the dark wisdom of Dionysus’s primitive pain. Among those exiled primitive tribal fugitives, those poor, sick, and degenerate mountain people whose heads emerged “like the heads of nocturnal animals” (Wharton 1990a, p. 288), and on the corpse of her mother who lies like “a dead dog in ditches” (Wharton 1990a, p. 290), Charity saw the negative image of Dionysus’s indulgence, which was the human fate and punishment entangled with sin and death in the Christian sense. Although Wharton had exalted Nietzsche’s criticism of what they see as the repressive force of Christian orthodox, the ethical dimension and self-restraint espoused by Christianity do provide a beneficial balance to Dionysian amoral energy and to the consequence of its tragic excess. The veil of Apollo civilization was torn, and the primitive Dionysian impulse under civilization revealed the pain, contradiction, and excess at the center of existence.

At this time, Mr. Royal’s marriage proposal and the move to bring her back to civilized society represented the salvation of the Apollonian spirit. It is true that the veil of civilization represented by Apollo is just an illusion, but it protects mankind from the heavy blow of the Dionysian tragic cognition at the center of existence. Charity learned humility, tolerance, and a restrained sense of human love. The ending is a compromise achieved after the struggle between the Apollonian and the Dionysian spirits. The Apollonian ascends, and Dionysus’s passion is integrated into the beautiful illusion of Apollo. Yet it is the mixed flame of Dionysian pain and intoxication that makes the final compromise so moving. Having tasted the intense Dionysian pain and intoxication of life, and having recognized the joy and destructive power of Dionysian passion, Charity is finally able to accept calmly and without complaint the restrictions of Apollo, the taboos of civilized society, and limited happiness after excessive experience of pain and ecstasy.

The Reef tells the story of the awakening and disillusionment of the aristocratic widow Anna. When she discovers that her long-cherished lover Darrow is secretly in love with another woman of lower social status, Sophie Viner, she struggles with the disappointment of being betrayed and the awakening desire. The two heroines in the book, Anna and Sophie, like the contrasting and complementary heroines in many of Wharton’s works, embody the opposing characteristics of Apollo and Dionysus. Anna’s aristocratic upbringing and peaceful and restrained character are often compared to perfect plastic art in the book, such as the balanced and symmetrical patterns of French villas and ancient Greek urns, which embody the beauty of Apollonian plastic art and the ideal principles of dream and moderation. Sophie is often described as nature itself without decoration, the freshness of her face is like “a field of daisies in a summer breeze” (Wharton 1990a, p. 366). It “reflects the freshness of the season, suggests the dapplings of sunlight through new leaves, the sound of the brook in the grass, the ripple of tree shadows over breezy meadows” (Wharton 1990a, p. 393). Even when she appreciates theatrical art, her passionate reaction has the intensity of natural phenomena: “The tumultuous rush of the drama seemed to have left her in a state of panting wonder, as though it had been a storm or some other natural cataclysm” (Wharton 1990a, p. 394), implying the primitive vitality of Dionysus. However, the love experience awakened in Anna under the Apollonian appearance is Dionysian. The interweaving of these two states makes Anna’s initial love experience mixed with the dual characteristics of Apollo and Dionysus, dream and drunkenness, which is manifested in the imagery of the dreamlike (Apollo) natural world (Dionysus embodies the primitive natural force) interwoven with the light (Apollo is the god of sunlight) and the fog (Apollo embodies the state of dream) in Anna’s vision. She seemed to be walking through “a silver tangle of an April wood” (Wharton 1990a, p. 435), “as if love was a shining medium in which she was immersed” (Wharton 1990a, p. 440). When Anna learned of Darrow’s betrayal, the veil of Apollo’s dream was torn, and the dark abyss of Dionysian passion was revealed. Anna realized the pain of excess and contradiction in the deep layer of life under the appearance and intoxication and experienced the dual influence of intoxication and enslavement, elevation, and defilement of Dionysian passion. Sophie became the guide of Dionysian wisdom for Anna. In the tossing and turning of disillusionment and passion, Anna, like Sophie, entered the primitive field of pain and intoxication bursting out from the tragic cognition revealed by the Dionysian spirit. Sophie and Anna’s tenacity in holding onto their betrayed love embodied the irresistible Dionysian will of life and its dark wisdom, thus transcending the classification of women by narrow-minded men like Darrow and the patriarchal society he represented—women as social decoration or object of desire.

The Reef is Wharton’s only novel without an ending, in which the heroine’s hesitation between Apollonian illusion and Dionysian wisdom, between life affirmation and the abyss of darkness, ultimately leads to no solution. But it is precisely the dilemma in this novel and its psychological portrayal of the pain of this dilemma that won Wharton the highest praise from Henry James.

4. Wharton’s The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence

The House of Mirth tells the story of the inner confusion experienced by the heroine Lily Bart, who is a decoration of the upper class, in the process of trying to improve her status. Her struggling will to survive (Dionysian wisdom) and her moral–aesthetic ideal (Apollonian spirit) ends in her final choice of the latter. When she was slandered and betrayed by the upper class, she refused to betray herself and her beloved and became impoverished and committed suicide. In this book, Lily Bart appears in a series of aesthetic images. In these images, she is a bright flower against the dingy and dark background—the beautiful illusion of Apollonian blossoming out of the soil of Dionysian primitive suffering. The flower of Apollonian conceals the root of Dionysian existential pain—the twisted and coiled roots, struggling to snatch nutrients for survival in the dark underground. Lily Bart died of her irreconcilable inner conflict between her moral–aesthetic ideal (Apollonian illusion) and her Dionysian will to survive tainted by society. These two come from Schopenhauer’s original conflict between will and appearance (absorbed by Nietzsche into his Dionysian–Apollonian conflict), and the final ending of the book is also Schopenhauerian: consciously giving up the Dionysian struggling will to achieve the Apollonian contemplation of the beauty of illusion, which is embodied in the beautiful and peaceful appearance of her wearing pure white clothes when she died. From beginning to end, the image surrounding Lily Bart is split into two completely opposite kinds of images on the surface and at the depth: the pure and beautiful aesthetic illusion of Apollonian and the jungle struggle image of Dionysian deep. Lily’s first impression to the reader is reflected through the eyes of her beloved Lawrence Selden (a semi-impoverished lawyer and Lily’s failed savior): “Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd” (Wharton 1990b, p. 3). Like Japanese prints, where dirty, dark backgrounds are used to set off beautiful, pure flowers or women’s faces, this chiaroscuro technique recurs in the description of Lily. (See, for example, Suzuki Harunobu’s (1724–1770) painting, “plum flowers at night” in https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_14272596 (accessed on 1 August 2024), where a dark background brings into relief beautiful woman and flowers.)

Lily’s Reynold stage look had a strong visual impact on the upper-class audience:

Her pale draperies, and the background of foliage against which she stood, served only to relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward from her poised foot to her lifted arm. The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part.

(Wharton 1990b, p. 142)

However, this untainted look of the Apollonian was only an illusion and appearance created by lighting and decorative effects and did not reveal the struggling will of the Dionysian core of Lily’s existence, which was expressed through painful and distorted images such as hunting beasts, Sirens, and lost children. When she tries to capture the wealthy Percy Gryce as her husband, she “tranquilly studied her prey through downcast lashes while she organized a method of attack” (Wharton 1990b, p. 18). Ordinary Gerty feels unable to compete with Lily, the beautiful Siren, for Lawrence’s love, “the mortal maid on the shore is helpless against the Siren who loves her prey” (Wharton 1990b, p. 175). Lily’s elegant self-control in social occasions often collapses in private, presenting her as a helpless child.

The love between Lawrence and Lily is not a passion of Dionysian pain and intoxication, but an Apollonian love, an admiration for the ideal mirror image, and illusion of each other. Lily admires Lawrence’s superiority in aristocratic society and does not see his complicity with that society. Like others in that society, Lawrence, like a connoisseur, treats Lily as an object of aesthetic contemplation, and except for the last moment of her life, he completely fails to understand and accept the dinginess and the cost of her Dionysian struggle for survival. Only at their last farewell moment, when Lily burned the love letters between Lawrence and her rival Bertha (which could have saved herself) in order to save his reputation, did he vaguely realize her struggle and suffering. However, even at Lily’s death, he did not realize the full sacrifice Lily made for him. Their tragedy is due to Lawrence’s and Lily’s cognitive mistake of separating the beauty of the Apollonian illusion from the painful Dionysian struggling will. Just as beautiful flowers and the ugly and deformed roots in the soil belong together, Nietzsche sees life as “a shocking plant bursting out of the terrible soil of primitive pain” (Nietzsche 1956, p. 23). Due to the separation of the Apollonian flower and Dionysian roots in her existence, Lily’s final consciousness on her deathbed is a heart-wrenching sense of exile and rootlessness:

It was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years. That was the feeling which possessed her now—the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them.

(Wharton 1990b, p. 336)

Lily’s meeting with her girlfriend Nettie before her death made her see another possibility of love, that is, love built on Dionysian wisdom, a small and simple refuge (the individual principle of Apollo) built on the abyss of the fully recognized dark Dionysian wisdom. That is Nettie’s limited, happy home, as Nettie said, “I knew he knew me” (Wharton 1990b, p. 337). But Lawrence and herself did not realize this Dionysian wisdom in time and could not accept the painful root of Dionysian struggling will under the illusion of Apollonian beauty. On her deathbed, in the pure white dress of her stage persona, Lily finally realizes her Apollonian moral–aesthetic illusion, but it is at the expense of her Dionysian will to live: The frozen beauty of Apollonian hides the suffering and sacrifice of Dionysian at the center of her existence.

After the Dionysian torrent of Summer and The Reef, The Age of Innocence represents the final victory of the Apollonian spirit, endowing this nostalgic novel looking back on the upper class of old New York with an autumnal spirit of reconciliation after the Dionysian struggle. Like many of Wharton’s novels, the contrasting heroines in this work, Ellen Olenska and May Welland, embody the mythological archetypes of Helen/Venus and the virgin goddess Diana/Artemis, respectively, and personify the Dionysian passion and the Apollonian ideal of moderation, while the hero, Newland Archer, plays out a Faustian tragic conflict in his heart between his passion for the former (his cousin Ellen) and his sense of responsibility for the latter (his wife May). The moral censorship of New York society suggests the rigid reaction and repressive effect of Apollonian civilization when it encounters Dionysian passion. Ultimately, Archer’s Apollonian social conscience triumphs over his Dionysian passion, but only years later, in the light of memory and new discoveries, can he truly weigh his gains and losses. May Welland is often associated with the image of the virgin goddess Diana/Artemis in the book with her noble simplicity and tranquility, and her transcendent beauty reflected by ice and snow, which embodies the Apollonian beauty of contemplation: “The bare vaulting of trees along the Mall was ceiled with lapis lazuli, and arched above snow that shone like splintered crystals. It was the weather to call out May’s radiance, and she burned like a young maple in the frost” (Wharton 1990b, p. 1080).

The whiteness of the lilies of the valley and the ice and snow surrounding her not only represent the ideal principles of Apollonian rationality and self-restraint but also the rigid and repressive effect of the Apollonian civilized society when it encounters the threat of the foreign god Dionysus. “Diana is the divinity of childbirth and fertility; she presides over the generation of life itself…. May’s devotion to an order by which the family can perpetual itself is absolute” (Wolff 1977, p. 315). At the critical moment, May, who has always been honest and tolerant, did not hesitate to use the lie of pregnancy to force Ellen to withdraw from Archer’s life. The love between May and Archer is the tranquil contemplation of Apollo: “Archer was delighted in the radiant good looks of his betrothed,” and “he was sincerely but placidly in love” (Wharton 1990b, p. 1051), unlike Archer’s Dionysian passion for Ellen, which “burned closer than his bones” (Wharton 1990b, p. 1297).

Ellen’s flower symbol is red or yellow roses—”sun-like gold” and “their flaming beauty is too fragrant and too strong” (Wharton 1990b, p. 1078). She often wears red, and her room exudes a certain “intimate exoticism” (Wharton 1990b, p. 1072). Her foreign background and her sexual temptation are reminiscent of Dionysus, who is also a foreign god. Just as Dionysus’ carnival spirit broke through the disciplined Greece, Ellen’s entry into the upper social circle of New York also brought the same disturbing effect. The rumors about her affairs made her a lonely exile in the social circle where she grew up. New York society’s exile of Ellen implies the Dionysian sacrificial ceremony. In the Dionysian sacrificial ritual, the life of the sacrifice is often an outsider and a “life-giving force”. Ellen is such an outsider and a life-giving force, as Archer commented that “she made the dinner a little less funereal than the usual Van der Luyden banquet” (Wharton 1990b, p. 1084).

The strict order and hypocrisy of New York society both reflect the rigidity and repression effect of the moderate principles of the Apollonian civilized society when it encounters the transgressive passion of Dionysus. However, this strict order, as implied in the Apollonian cult, is also implied as an illusory veil, covering up the barbaric, tribal sacrificial rituals under the veil of civilization. On the surface, it is a society of refinement and cultivation, where every nuance of politeness is observed, to the extent of circumlocution: “The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies” (Wharton 1990b, p. 1028). “In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs” (Wharton 1990b, p. 1050). However, the primitive rituals and barbarous customs under the polished surface of civilization are never lost out of sight. For example, Mrs Welland’s pretending reluctance to shorten her daughter’s engagement is analogized to the primitive ritual in which “the savage bride is dragged with shrieks from her parents’ tent” (Wharton 1990b, p. 1051). The interest groups of the society are repeatedly termed in the barbarous units of “tribe” or “clan”. Although this upper class exudes an elegant atmosphere everywhere, although all unpleasantness is communicated in code, innuendo, and pictographic symbols to avoid being unpleasant, the collective farewell party given to Ellen (actually an expulsion ceremony) hides the barbaric sacrificial ritual of the tribe to eliminate alien elements:

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. There was nothing on earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have done to proclaim their unalterable affection for the Countess Olenska now that her passage for Europe was engaged.

(Wharton 1990b, p. 1281)

However, the touching part of the images of May and Ellen is that their respective Apollonian and Dionysian archetypes hide their own opposites. Many years after Ellen was driven out of the social tribe and Archer returned to his traditional family with May, May herself died of illness while taking care of her son’s illness. Their son told Archer May’s last words: “She said we can trust you completely because you gave up the person you loved the most when she once asked you to” (Wharton 1990b, p. 1298). Archer then realizes that under May’s seemingly ignorant and “innocent” appearance (this is the source of the ironic and sentimental title of The Age of Innocence), there is a keen insight. Although she has never confided, May fully guessed the passion and depth of Archer’s feelings for Ellen and endured for decades the mental torture of her husband’s heart lying elsewhere, while maintaining an unchanging happy appearance and unshakable loyalty to the family. In other words, the ideal illusion of May’s Apollonian tranquility and moderation conceals her Dionysian wisdom—her understanding of passion and the core of her life of suffering. At the same time, Ellen’s Dionysian archetype also hides her admiration for the restrained ideal of Apollonian society represented by Archer and May. Ellen suffered the abuse of her European aristocratic husband with his indulgent life. As an outsider, she was able to appreciate the benefits of the New York society in which she grew up: the moderate principles, love sacrifice, and maintenance of family honor it required. Her love for Archer stems from the best values of New York society he represents, as she says to Archer,

You had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands—and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I’d never known before—and it’s better than anything I’ve known.

(Wharton 1990b, p. 1152)

She begged Archer, “Ah, don’t let us undo what you’ve done! I can’t go back now to that other way of thinking. I can’t love you unless I give you up” (Wharton 1990b, p. 1152).

Between responsibility and passion, tradition and transcendence, Archer staged a Faustian struggle in his heart. The novel meaningfully begins with watching Faust’s play. When Archer had the opportunity to reunite with Ellen several years after May’s death, he did not go upstairs to meet Ellen. Ellen’s back silhouette in the sunset was printed on the window, which was the arena of Apollo, the dreamy impression of the Apollonian left by the years, after the subsiding of Dionysian passion. At this time, Archer was unwilling to step in and destroy the impression of those years. He asked his son to tell Ellen: “Say I’m old-fashioned: that’s enough” (Wharton 1990b, p. 1302). He knew that that old-fashionedness was what Ellen once loved about him.

In his desire for knowledge beyond the traditional boundaries, Faust was punished by being demoted from the position of demigod to dust in the cosmic hierarchy. Archer chose to stay in the traditional land he was familiar with, starting with the passion of Dionysus and ending with the moderation and dreamy principles of Apollo. The two impulses complemented each other in his life, making him experience and understand the sad and rich meaning of life as a mortal being.

5. Conclusions

The above examined the Apollonian and Dionysian drives manifested in the imagery of Wharton’s five major novels. The “discordant concord” relationship of the two drives creates the tragic pattern of the books and the characters’ lives. Except for Ethan Frome, which is devoid of Apollonian elements and is equivalent to Nietzsche’s account of the pre-Hellenic phase—the dark Dionysiac world with the austere wisdom of Silenus, all the other four novels contain both Dionysiac and Apollonian elements in Nietzsche’s given sense. They create Wharton’s mythic cosmos and give a universal dimension to her personal vision.

The Apollonian spirit lies in the sphere of dream, beauty, and illusion, with its ideal of moderation and restraint manifested in the Delphic commandment “know thyself” and “nothing in excess”. The Dionysiac is linked with natural life and primitive worship, with its compound blaze of agony and ecstasy springing from the dark Dionysiac wisdom. Among Wharton’s major tragic novels examined in this paper, the dominant status of the two drives varies with books, and in their interaction, each is enriched by the other. In The House of Mirth, the tragic strife within Lily Bart between her Apollonian moral–aesthetic ideal and Dionysiac will-to-live ends in the ultimate triumph of the former. The dynamic Dionysiac will is finally chilled into the Apollonian static beauty of vision, but not before the Apollonian ideal was enriched by the Dionysiac suffering. Summer and The Reef bring the Dionysiac flood with their motif of sexual initiation. In their painful rapture, both Charity Royall and Anna Leath penetrated the Apollonian veil of beautiful illusion and reached the dark core of Dionysian knowledge. Summer ends with the final ascendancy of Apollonian wisdom with Charity’s reconciliation to a diminished life with Mr Royall, but in The Reef, the sharp opposition of the two drives remains an impasse. In The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer, tantalized by his choice between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac woman, stages within himself a Faustian struggle. The end represents the ultimate triumph of the Apollonian—the autumnal serenity brought by time.

The archetypal approach of analysis in this paper is by itself an implicit refutation to the negative criticism of Wharton cited in my introduction. Firstly, on the charge of Wharton as an inferior imitator of Henry James, this paper holds that the creative temperament manifested in Wharton’s best writings is not only distinct but also remote from Henry James. Wharton is distinguished from Henry James by the primal passion of her works, which carry the reminiscent glory of ancient tragedy. It is only in the depiction of polished social surfaces that they resemble each other—certain subject matters, subtle word-play, point of view, and the refinement of writing characteristic of the novel of manners. But beneath that surface, James’ writing lacks the primitive passion we find in Wharton’s writing. James is essentially a refined and highly sensitive intellectual, while although Wharton is brilliantly endowed in intellect, as reflected in the frequent sparkling of her wits, irony, and satire, her true obsessions are all intensely emotional, emotional almost in a primitive sense. Nearly all her tragic novels are, to a high degree, the catharsis of her private emotional trauma, which is universalized by its archetypal dimension represented by the cult of the Apollonian and Dionysian in ancient Greek religion and expounded by Nietzsche in his The Birth of Tragedy. James’ imagery is elaborately minute and painstakingly novel but lacks an archetypal dimension.

Secondly, on the charge that Wharton’s narrow and privileged view of New York aristocracy repels the majority of readers, the emphasis of this paper on the archetypal significance of Wharton’s imagery, especially its application of the Apollonian and Dionysian cult in ancient Greek religion and in Nietzsche’s theories on Greek tragedy, demonstrates that although Wharton’s vision is an intensely personal one, and her materials are largely drawn from her native social milieu, her works are universalized and deepened by their archetypal dimension and affinity with Greek tragedy. The Apollonian and the Dionysian are not only two artistic impulses giving rise to tragic art but also two elemental impulses in a man’s life. By showing that the central conflicts which shape Wharton’s tragic works are Apollonian and Dionysiac in nature, this paper contends that Wharton’s tragic novels have an archetypal and universal appeal, thus repudiating the views that Wharton’s works are “by the superficial, of the superficial, and for the superficial”. Beneath the narrow, polished social surface she depicts, there is a rich mine of archetypal imagery, drawn from the antithetical cults of the Apollonian and Dionysian in ancient Greek religion, which condenses man’s unconscious mind since ancient time and reveals a primordial tragic conflict that enlivens Greek tragedy as Nietzsche deems it.

Thirdly, on the charge that Wharton’s style lacks innovation, and even her old-fashioned realism is well beneath naturalist writers such as Dreiser and Norris, this paper holds that the mythic world Wharton created is not remote in nature from the modern myths created by experimental writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Frantz Kafka, who create in their own way their unique spiritual cosmos cast in mythical vision, and she is not inferior to the naturalistic writers, because she combines the best of their writing—an unflinching confrontation with the painful truth of life, and an open-eyed accuracy in observing its manifestations—with richly symbolic imagery revolving around the antithetical religious cults of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, together with their interaction of frictional harmony.

Fourthly, on the charge that the vision of Wharton’s fiction is too bleak and that she is apt to subject her characters to a series of torture for mere entertainment, this paper contends that although Wharton’s works do not seek transcendence in an unmixed optimism, they are not tableaux of gratuitous pain, but exalted and contagious in their mixed fire of agony and ecstasy as disclosed by the Dionysian. In most of her works, suffering has an ultimate redeeming power even when it brings a bleak ending: Characters arrive at a new realm of human knowledge through it and her works consequently achieve the classical vision of tragedy. Wharton’s works do not seek transcendence in philosophical speculations, whatever pain and joy Wharton’s characters felt is not something contemplated, but something lived with, lived with their flesh and blood. It is true that Ethan Frome is an utterly dark novel, but it is not a tableau of pain for the author’s entertainment. It is the visionary expression of Wharton’s personal trauma, which is ever seeking to resist defeat and move beyond it. Thus in her other novels, we see the tragic height Lily Bart rises to at the moment she is destroyed, the fiery initiation Anna Leath and Charity Royall go through, and the autumnal serenity that Newland Archer reaches in his old age.

Therefore, this article is criticism of the archetypal images of the Apollonian and Dionysian in ancient Greek religion and in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and the paralleled tragic conflicts contained in Wharton’s novels effectively refute the negative comments on her: Although her writing subjects are mostly limited to New York aristocratic society, the religious cult of the Apollonian and the Dionysian and their primordial tragic conflicts lend to her works a timeless and profound appeal. Wharton’s novels reveal a primordial vision of life that is crushing as much as elevating, as in ancient Greek religion and Greek tragedies, particularly as Nietzsche sees it.