Sanctuary

Sanctuary by Edith Wharton (1903)

Kate Orme, engaged to Denis Peyton and radiant with the happiness of her betrothal, learns from Denis that a woman claiming to be the wife of his late step-brother Arthur has drowned herself and her child in the lake after her paternity suit was defeated in court. Questioning him, Kate forces from Denis a confession: he had known all along that the woman was in fact legally married to Arthur, and had suppressed this knowledge to defeat her claim and secure Arthur's inheritance for himself. Horrified, Kate insists that the only path to moral recovery is open confession — to the courts, whatever the cost to himself. Denis refuses, arguing the dead cannot be helped and that confession would only wreck his mother and himself for no purpose; he offers to release Kate from the engagement. Kate finds she has stopped loving him, yet does not immediately break with him, torn between despair at the world's moral compromises and a strange, expanding pity. She is confronted by Denis's mother, Mrs. Peyton, who defends Denis's conduct as providential and pressures Kate not to postpone the wedding, and by her own father, Mr. Orme, whose casual anecdote about a cousin's forgiveries-hushed scandal shows her that concealment is the accepted currency of respectable society. Isolated in her moral vision, Kate undergoes an inward transformation: rather than abandoning Denis outright, she resolves to marry him after all, reinterpreting her love as a redemptive, quasi-maternal mission — to become a safeguard for the child she and Denis might have, protecting it from inheriting his moral weakness, since he himself will not or cannot make atonement. The narrative then leaps forward: Kate, now the widowed Mrs. Denis Peyton, has raised her son Dick alone (Denis died after seven years of marriage, having spent much of the fortune). Dick has become a promising young architect in New York, partnered with the plodding Gill, and is entered in a major competition to design a new city museum, his chief rival being his devoted, poor, and talented friend Paul Darrow. Dick is also courted by Clemence Verney, a bright, frankly ambitious young woman who makes clear her regard for him is contingent on his professional success. Kate, watchful and self-effacing, fears her own influence over her son while dreading the moral laxity of the world around him. Darrow falls fatally ill with pneumonia while helping Dick, and before dying writes Dick a letter urging him to use Darrow's own finished competition designs if it would help him. After the funeral, Dick grows evasive with his mother, and Kate becomes convinced he means to incorporate Darrow's superior designs into his own entry — a temptation she recognizes as an echorm of Denis's old moral failure. Unwilling to intervene directly, Kate instead visits Clemence Verney and, through calculated frankness, ensures the girl learns of Darrow's letter and the opportunity it presents. Clemence argues strongly that using the designs would be legitimate and even a fitting tribute, unwittingly playing into Kate's hope that Dick, sensing his mother's and the girl's approval of moral compromise, would recoil from it himself. Dick, informed of Darrow's letter by Gill's phone call overheard by Kate, does indeed use Darrow's drawings — but that same night becomes engaged to Clemence, who reveals she has effectively made her acceptance contingent on his success. Kate's hope curdles into despair, believing she has driven her son toward the same corruption that ruined his father. That night, unable to bear the vigil, she goes to Dick's office and finds him alone amid a chaos of torn and discarded drawings — he has destroyed his tainted entry and abandoned the competition. Overcome, he tells her it was the felt presence of her unspoken judgment, her refusal either to interfere or to leave him, that finally made it impossible for him to go through with the deception, and that she alone kept him from moral ruin. The text ends here, with Dick's admission of his mother's redemptive influence over him.

By Edith Wharton · First published 1903 · Genre: Gothic Fiction, Psychological Fiction, Historical Fiction · 12 chapters · 32,290 words

First lines

It is not often that youth allows itself to feel undividedly happy: the sensation is too much the result of selection and elimination to be within reach of the awakening clutch on life. But Kate Orme, for once, had yielded herself to happiness; letting it permeate every faculty as a spring rain soaks into a germinating meadow. There was nothing to account for this sudden sense of beatitude; but was it not this precisely which made it so irresistible, so overwhelming? There had been, within the last two months -- since her engagement to Denis Peyton -- no distinct addition to the sum of her happiness, and no possibility, she would have affirmed, of adding perceptibly to a total already incalculable. Inwardly and outwardly the conditions of her life were unchanged; but whereas, before, the air had been full of flitting wings, now they seemed to pause over her and she could trust herself to their shelter.

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Romance · Novel · Classic · Literary Fiction · American Literature · Early 20th Century · Social Class · Wealth · Marriage · Infidelity · Adultery · Scandal

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