The Wandering Characters of The Buccaneers: Edith Wharton\u27s Diasporic View

Set in the 1870s, Edith Wharton\u27s posthumous and incomplete text of The Buccaneers deals with a marriage plot different from that of her previous novels. While The Age of Innocence (1920) records Newland Archer\u27s conflict between social order and personal fulfillment through his attachment to two contrastive woman figures and justifies his adherence to the old New York code to pay homage to conservative social dynamism in the 1870s, The Buccaneers focuses on the social intruders who ambitiously challenge tradition-bound high society both in America and England. Beautiful but undisciplined American daughters of the nouveaux riches challenge the English aristocracy with their social ambitions for “happy marriages after their failure in Old New York. Forming a strong bond to help one another in a totally different cultural milieu, they achieve brilliant social marriages, which eventually turn out a dreadful mistake. With many characters with varied cultural backgrounds on both sides of the Atlantic, the story develops ramifications under social milieus of hybridity. The middle of the novel marks a shift from a comic tone of cultural amalgamation to an individual conflict between social order and personal fulfillment. Married to one of the most distinguished dukes, Annabel Tintagel (né St. George) undergoes an identity crisis and cannot get along with her new identity as a duchess. Her inner turmoil results from being reduced to a subordinated gender role, but Wharton seems to add another factor to Annabel\u27s unsettlement: transculturation. Guy Thwarte, with whom Nan develops an attachment through their shared kinship toward the soil and historical buildings, also finds his old traditional life at Honourslove disrupted after he comes back from his four-year life in Brazil: he can neither recover the lost self nor fit into a designated future role as an heir. Both of them, after being transplanted from one culture to the other, find their subjectivity in dangling, not being able to achieve any sense of rootedness. The inner turmoil of Guy and Nan seems to project Wharton\u27s sense of dislocation in America and Europe after the World War I. Except the period when she was settled in the Mount at Lenox, Massachusetts, Wharton spent most of her life on travels or switching residences by the seasons. After the sale of the Mount in 1912, she took up her residence in France. Unlike modernist expatriates, she did not remain rootless. Through her transcultural experiences, Wharton had to create a new pattern of connections in exile, constructing an ambivalent point of view on modernist Europe and America. Such view of hers seems diasporic without any Jewish historical context: she is away from “home in a spatial and temporal sense but adheres to some attachment to “home in moralistic, emotional terms. Her “home is Europe and America in the 1870s, in which the core of her self was nurtured. Though physically located away from the heritage of her “home, she still associates herself with it by memory. With her decline in health and deaths of her close friends and relatives in the 1930s, she seems to be in desperate need to get back to her “home by writing The Buccaneers yet foregrounds the characters who find their subjectivity in dangling transcultural contexts. Guy and Nan seeks some relief from identity crisis in their attachment to the soil. However, Wharton does not allow them to settle in rural England in search of a place for their union but drives them out of England to South Africa without any immediate prospect of returning to their “home. Though Wharton was not able to complete the text, her projected conclusion in which Nan and Guy elope and presumably find a union of true minds and conceptions far away from England might reflect some social changes that had taken place in the course of Wharton\u27s lifetime. While some feminist critics regard this optimistic ending of the promising union as unique in Wharton\u27s marriage plots, the ending seems to project her sense of dislocation in her last years: she never recovers any solid sense of “home but faces the need to remold her subjectivity in different transcultural contexts