Wharton Journal

By Jessica Granse
February 19, 2009

"With sudden vividness Waythorn saw how the instinct had developed. She was ‘as easy as an old shoe’-a shoe that too many feet had worn. Her elasticity was the result of tension in many different directions," (841).

The fact that Waythorn’s new wife knows how to act in a way her husband would like is a direct result of experience from her previous two marriages. As he figures this out, it starts to eat away at him. This is an important observation of human nature. It is not enough for one to do things for another, but it’s also important how they know what you would like and their intention behind it or it loses all sincerity and thus is no longer a good thing.

"The Other Two" is a good portrayal of newlyweds, as well as on the complications of a new marriage after divorce. At the beginning of the story, Wharton really shows the feeling of a newly wed couple when Alice brings up that her ex-husband is demanding to come to the house for his weekly visit since the daughter’s sick. You notice that there was a little tension in the way they talk about it. When Alice brings it up, she’s very timid about it and apologetic. Waythorn seems unhappy, but says for her not to worry because there’s nothing he can really do about it and because they just got back from their honeymoon, so he didn’t want to start our their marriage fighting. From speaking with my mom, this is much like being newlyweds. You walk on eggshells so as to not start a fight the first while of the marriage and try harder than you do for the rest of it because you become more comfortable. They really present this in this instance. He’s just trying to be happy with the feeling he made the right choice because she’ll be a good wife because she’s so calm and level-headed as well as beautiful and caring. The truth is, though, she’s too good of a wife. Because she has had so much experience from her previous two marriages, she is able to put on a perfect wife appearance out of practice. She slips up by putting cognac in his coffee, which from watching her previous husband at his luncheon that day, he knows that it’s something he would do. He realizes that she was so used to putting cognac in Varick’s coffee that she was completely on auto-pilot when she put it in his. This pokes at him and pokes at him because he starts to question every single action of hers as being something she did because she was conditioned that way by her previous husbands, rather than something she did because she knew that would be how he wanted it. This drives him to grow a resentment for these kind actions because although he disliked them for them being the actions she did for her previous husbands, but he can’t say anything about it, because she plays the part so well. She is showing him this loving, caring wife whom does not get upset easily, but he resents it and it sickens him because he doesn’t feel like it’s sincere. She does these actions because she knows it’s what would please a man, not particularly that it would please him specifically. It’s enough to make one feel as if it doesn’t matter to Alice who wears the ring that matches the one on her finger. She has the dream of being happily married and being the perfect wife, but she doesn’t show any particulars as to whom the husband must be. This seems to relate a lot to Wharton’s personal life because of her own marriage. Her biographer, R.W.B. Lewis, says that she stayed in her unhappy marriage for 28 years for "moral conservatism and her devotion to family ties and the sanctities of tradition than to personal affection". This is a possibility for Alice. It’s possible that she married Waythorne in a third attempt at trying to have a perfect marriage. By doing all the right things, and what she believes Waythorne would like, because her other husbands liked these things, she believes maybe she can achieve this type of marriage. It says in Wikipedia that her writing style is characterized by a suble use of dramatic irony. In this case it’s ironic because the very things Alice does to make her husband happy, are what makes him miserable.