The Reef Book

This is Wharton's fifth novel. Published in 1912, it is considered, together with the previous Ethan Frome and the subsequent The Custom of the Country, as partly autobiographical. Not so much in deeds as in spirit. As I know very little about her life, I cannot agree nor disagree with this. Rather than engage in searching for the parallels between real life and its representation through a literary disguise, I was more interested in the dynamics of the plot, since it becomes the dynamics of human relationships, and the analysis of character.

This novel presents an imbroglio that reminded me of the very different work Huis clos, suivi de Les mouches. Less claustrophobic than Sartre's allegorical Hell, we have in the Reef four people caught in a situation out of which there is no possible happy exit. As one of them says: we are all bound together in this coil. There are the circumstances, and these unfold inevitably and irretrievably, similarly to the inexorable path of the Fates pushing the characters, if not to a tragedy, certainly to a drifting end. But there is also the determinant aspect of their various personalities; and their invariability, their being hopelessly what they are, also pushes them to their undesired final situation.

This is particularly apparent with the two female protagonists. Anna Leath and Sophy Viner, could be interpreted as the two possible sides, or two possible lives, of a single woman. The main cleavage between them is class and money, conditions that constrain and release both of them. If Sophy has to find a living, which will prevent her from following her dreams of entering into the theatre world, Anna has no qualms about her position and means. But Anna, in all her security, feels as if she were shut out of the world; as if her life her passing by her side without touching her. In contrast, the limits in Sophy's life allow her to embrace her destiny and live, if not more beautifully, at least more fully.

She had always felt a romantic and almost humble admiration for those members of her sex who, from force or will, or the constraint of circumstances, had plunged into the conflict from which fate had so persistently excluded her. There were even moments when she fancied herself vaguely to blame for her immunity, and felt that she ought somehow to affront the perils and hardships which refused to come to her.

And so the enigmatic title, The Reef, word that is not found in the text of the novel, looms like the unseen obstacle that will wreck the itinerary of their lives.