Money, marriage markets and high human costs

Reading Edith Wharton and watching Killers of the Flower Moon

I’m halfway through reading Edith Wharton’s last novel, The Buccaneers. It’s a posthumous novel – Edith Wharton died in 1937 having only apparently completed two-thirds of the story. It was published in 1938 in the form she left it, just a few chapters shy of an ending. (In 1993 another author completed it for her, an act I don’t endorse and which a critic characterized as “literary necrophilia.”)

The novel is about money and marriage – how both are made and unmade and the human cost of both. It takes the marriage markets of the upper classes as its subject and dramatizes the parasitic love/hate relationship that exists between the old money set and the new money set, which aren’t so much different as just variants of greed.

In the novel, it’s the reputation for wealth – even if you don’t have the actual means to support it – that’s valuable. The price of buying into the pyramid scheme is high for the sacrificial virgins bred to inject new life – or rather, new money – into the old scam.

The Buccaneers of the story are five young women who are catapulted, like crinolined human cannonballs, into the upper-class marriage market by their miserably married money- and reputation-obsessed parents.

The novel has been adapted for TV twice. Once in the 90s by Masterpiece Theatre and just recently in 2023. Apple TV has just made an updated version that debuts this week. (I haven’t seen it. The trailer is not making me want to see it. And yet, I will no doubt try the first episode despite the fact that it looks kinda terrible.)

I remember seeing the Masterpiece Theatre version when I was a kid and I loved it because it skipped past the story’s obvious painful criticisms about the dismal collision between wealth, money, and women’s lives to affirm some redemptive romantic features.

In short, it goes full fantasy. And when I was a kid I liked fantasy.

After seeing the trailer for the new adaptation and remembering the old one, I decided to read the book. I’m glad I did. It’s not my favourite novel of hers by any stretch of the imagination, but now that I’m older and have been dunked in the marital soup only to be pulled out gasping for air, I can better appreciate the tender complications of the story, of Wharton’s depiction of the limits of marriage and love and money – and how they must, do and will interact despite illusions that their influence is something you can control.

At this point, it’s not the young women – the lifeblood of the dramatic action – that compel my attention as much as it is the tertiary adult women characters that frame the younger women’s stories. They’re the mothers of the young women, the bitter wives of the boorish aristocrats, the disappointed governesses, the jilted social climbers. These are the distressed, denied and barely-hanging-by-a-thread adult women that act as Ghosts of the Future for the young women.

I don’t know why I like these characters so much. But in them you can see something like the effect of unopposed market forces on the human spirit. It’s not pretty and you wonder why so many of them push the girls into the same traps they narrowly escaped or fell victim to themselves.

It's easy to miss these figures in the TV adaptations or to take them for granted – the camera loves youth and I like to look at beautiful things too – but they’re central to the world of the novel.

This is a long way of saying, always read the novel.

Speaking of adaptations. This weekend I finally got to see Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which is adapted from the non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann.

The book is awesome. I highly recommend it. It is the first book I’ve read that gives a visceral sense of the historical reality of settler colonialism – how that unjust project, once initiated by nations and governments, becomes manifest in terrible individual and collective actions.

The Scorsese film, which I am so-so on as a dramatic experience, does a good job of depicting how that malign project unfolds in a domestic sphere, in the grim union between one small, greedy man and his acutely vulnerable Osage wife. In a way, it’s a story that involves its own dark marriage market, too, albeit one forged by racism and opportunism and energized by a desire for erasure and extinction.

The film also has something interesting to say about how entertainment and history interact — or don’t.

There have been a lot of really great reviews of this film that I loved. Like this one and this one.

Other things I read / endorse this week:

This Vanity Fair piece on the Real Housewives franchise and Bethenny Frankel’s reality TV union push is mandatory reading for Real Housewives fans.  

This scholarly spin on Israel-Gaza and the ineffective logic of military ‘deterrence’

I got vaccinated this week and did these exercises immediately after which reduced my post-vaccination arm soreness by about 50 per cent. Endorse!