She had mistaken the rumbling of the chariot wheels for a peal of thunder, and imagined that a shower was coming up, and that it would assist her in making the corn grow. As readers of the story, we, like Charlotte, must make our own decisions and recognize our ambivalence about them. Besides, I am not upon the best of terms with King Pluto. You would hardly believe me, if I were to tell how quickly the baby prince got rid of his ailments, and grew fat, and rosy, and strong, and how he had two rows of ivory teeth in less time than any other little fellow, before or since. When Charlotte confronts him with his having kissed the letter, Kenneth continues to evade her questions and finally ends the conversation without having shown Charlotte the letter’s contents. More summaries and resources for teaching or studying Pomegranate Seed. But still, whenever the girl went among those gilded halls and chambers, it seemed as if she carried nature and sunshine along with her, and as if she scattered dewy blossoms on her right hand and on her left. Alone now, Charlotte reflects upon the former happiness of her brief marriage and resolves to help Kenneth in any way she can. Many preserving recipes, such as this small-batch pomegranate jam, call for fresh juice or seeds from a pomegranate.If you're unfamiliar with how to handle this fruit, here are a few tips on how to most efficiently open a pomegranate, extract the seeds, and get fresh-squeezed juice, no matter how you want to use them. But not one of these leafy damsels had seen Proserpina. Then, going a little farther, Ceres would, perhaps, come to a fountain, gushing out of a pebbly hollow in the earth, and would dabble with her hand in the water. Every atom of the gold and silver that lies under the earth belongs to me, to say nothing of the copper and iron, and of the coal mines, which supply me with abundance of fuel. "For each of those six pomegranate seeds you must spend one month of every year in King Pluto's palace. In reading “Pomegranate Seed,” we discover not answers to our questions, but new questions that we must answer—just as Charlotte, trying to find out when she and Kenneth will leave together, learns that he has left town and sits “blankly gazing into new darkness.”, If Charlotte reflects our own ambivalence about reading, then her double, Elsie, reflects Wharton’s anxiety about writing. Therefore, it’s best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publication’s requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. The seeds will sink to the bottom of the bowl, and the white membrane will float to the top. Clearly in Elsie Ashby, Wharton seeks to give her readers a ghost who can endure the technological discontinuities of the twentieth century, whose spell can’t be broken even by the “soulless roar of New York.” That Elsie also appears in the story as a figure traceable to Greco-Roman mythology lends her dimension and timelessness. skyscrapers, advertisements, telephones, wireless, airplanes, movies, motors [automobiles], and all the rest of the twentieth century; and on the other side of the door something I can’t explain, can’t relate to them. "Yes, and gladly, too," answered the queen, "if you will devote all your time to him. When Persephone left the underworld to re-visit her mother, Demeter, her husband, Hades, lord of the infernal regions, gave her a pomegranate seed to eat, because he knew that if he did so she would never be able to remain among the living, but would be drawn back to the company of the dead.” It must have seemed to Wharton that the world had become an alien place by 1931 if the editor of a popular journal did not know his classical mythology. "What is there to gratify her heart? The number of seeds in a pomegranate can vary from 200 to about 1,400. Kenneth, however, is a model of marital fidelity. The unwritten subtitle on this one is really “without creating a gigantic mess in your kitchen.” As delicious as they are, pomegranates are notorious for leaving your counters, your cupboards, and yourself splattered with sticky deep-red juice. A bowl that suctions to the table works well here! You are but half restored to your mother. Education: Hunter College High School, New York; Barnard College, Ne…, Jewett, Sarah Orne 2021 . ", "Never!" ", "No, no," answered Pluto, with his gloomy smile, "I will not trust you for that. .”, The summary of the Persephone myth that Wharton made for Loring lacks several important details. He alighted from the chariot, and taking Proserpina in his arms, carried her up a lofty flight of steps into the great hall of the palace. He set down the golden salver, with the wizened pomegranate upon it, and left the room. The weak tenderness of his mother has cost the poor boy an immortality. ", "Not yet, dark Hecate," replied Ceres. The stranger did not look remarkably good-natured, in spite of his smile; and as for his voice, its tones were deep and stern, and sounded as much like the rumbling of an earthquake underground than anything else. As a child, this future practitioner of the supernatural tale had a terrible fear of ghosts and ghost stories. Dear me! It was bordered on each side with rocks and precipices, between which the rumbling of the chariot wheels was reverberated with a noise like rolling thunder. So she lighted a torch, and set forth, resolving never to come back until Proserpina was discovered. If we take Mrs. Ashby (Kenneth’s mother) as the story’s Demeter figure because, like the goddess of the harvest, she has had a child taken away by death, then Kenneth Ashby becomes Wharton’s Persephone figure. . But she might just as well have talked to the wind that whistled past them, for Pluto urged on his horses, and went faster than ever. you have been gathering flowers? After nine months of marriage and nine letters, instead of becoming a secure and fertile (child-bearing) wife, Charlotte Ashby, through her self-fulfilling prophecy of guilt and inadequacy, has driven her husband into the arms of her rival, although the woman is a corpse. But when a poet gets into the habit of using his heartstrings to make chords for his lyre, he may thrum upon them as much as he will, without any great pain to himself. "What an ugly creature he is! Mother Ceres was exceedingly fond of her daughter Proserpina, and seldom let her go alone into the fields. message. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Proserpina's eyes being drawn to it by its brisk motion, she saw that this tail was neither more nor less than a live dragon, with fiery eyes, and fangs that had a very poisonous aspect. The old people shook their white heads, and said that the earth had grown aged like themselves, and was no longer capable of wearing the warm smile of summer on its face. Indeed, Wharton’s story provides an excellent example of the ways in which ambivalence toward reading and writing—like that which Hester Lynch Thrale acknowledges—shapes narrative by women. They call my name Pluto; and I am the king of diamonds and all other precious stones. Ghosts and the emotions with which audiences read stories about ghosts exist in a realm that is not much affected by history, politics, and economy. Wharton seems to be suggesting that this myth is a Greek and woman’s version of the Hebraic and masculine Garden of Eden and, like the Biblical legend, dramatizes the conflicts of men and women to establish an independent and sexual life. Pour the bowl full of pomegranate seeds and water into a strainer. But still the poor child screamed, and scattered her apron full of flowers along the way, and left a long cry trailing behind the chariot; and many mothers, to whose ears it came, ran quickly to see if any mischief had befallen their children. When Charlotte wakes up the next morning she finds that Kenneth has already left the house, telling the maid to inform her that he plans for them to begin their vacation that very day. Every little girl's flower bed showed nothing but dry stalks. Style "You have really amused me very much, sometimes. As much as I love powdering fruits and vegetables, dehydrated pomegranate arils are not good candidates for powdering for most folks. The sheet of paper inside the envelope is nearly blank, unreadable: “Her sight must be blurred, or else dazzled by the reflection of the lamplight on the smooth surface of the paper. Nineteenth-century letters may be defined as handwritten messages, usually inscribed with pencil or ink on paper and sent to specific persons…, Bliss What are all the splendors you speak of without affection? 1, 1970, Margaret B.] For help deciphering the barely legible script, then, Charlotte turns to the mother figure, who responds ambivalently with both caution and support. The very ghostliness of Elsie’s writing evokes Wharton’s own literary creativity, which she describes as an alienating and mysterious process that occurs “in some secret region on the sheer edge of consciousness.” It is also characteristic of Wharton to express her anxiety about the writing process in a ghost story; as Zilversmit points out, she often used such tales “as a metaphor of internal fears.”, Elsie Ashby can be read, then, as a ghost writer for Wharton herself; and her spectral letters suggest Wharton’s internal fears about her own appropriation of the male role of writer, what [Sandra M.] Gilbert and [Susan] Gubar call [in The Madwoman in The Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 1979] the “anxiety of authorship.” Not only does Elsie’s writing take the traditionally feminine from of letters—the “forgotten genre,” as [Patricia Meyer] Spacks calls it—but it is barely able to communicate. . If it were not for that, we should look like bunches of uprooted seaweed dried in the sun. The narrator of “Pomegranate Seed,” and therefore its reader, sees the events of the story through the eyes of Charlotte Ashby, even though it is not Charlotte herself who tells the story. In a moment, Proserpina lost sight of the pleasant vale of Enna, in which she had always dwelt. The Letters of Edith Wharton, by Edith Wharton. Such metaphors—as well as the cultural attitudes that they represent—force the female writer to experience her own authorship as “a painful wounding,” a “self-inflicted violence,” in which she writes upon the blank page of her body with her own blood. Like Margaret Aubyn in The Touchstone, whom [Mary Suzanne] Schriber calls [in Gender and the Writer’s Imagination: From Cooper to Wharton, 1987]“the only serious female artist figure whom Wharton dared to commit to paper,” Elsie is dead before her story even begins. . . At the portal of every palace, too, she made so loud a summons that the menials hurried to throw open the gate, thinking that it must be some great king or queen, who would demand a banquet for supper and a stately chamber to repose in. ", "I don't care for golden palaces and thrones," sobbed Proserpina. According to these critics, Charlotte is a reflection of the female reader, and Elsie is a version of the female writer. Clearly, much of the story’s effect is derived from the intrusion of something so old-fashioned as a ghost upon the lives of the modern-day Ashbys. Kenneth denies this, maintaining that the letters are about business. ", "O, never fear," answered her companion. Charlotte wrestles with the choice between the power of written discourse—traditionally a male domain—and the power of romance—traditionally a female domain. "If I were ever so hungry, I should never think of eating such a miserable, dry pomegranate as that.". The violets gushed up along the wayside. The earth did not produce it by any help of mine, nor of its own accord. . In one important way, the historical considerations that readers bring to the interpretation of other kinds of fiction do not apply to ghost stories. He refuses, declaring,“It is not easy to prove anything to a woman who’s once taken an idea into her head,” and yet he leaves to arrange their vacation together. Conflict King Pluto came from the underground after noticing a female wandering by the seaside and ends up kidnap Proserpina and take her back to his palace for her to be his maid. ", "Not half so pretty," said Proserpina, snatching the gems from Pluto's hand, and flinging them to the other end of the hall. . The best advice I can give you is, to take up your abode in this cavern, where we will be the two most wretched women in the world. Directions: Step 1: Use a knife to cut though the shell of the pomegranate. He continued eating, not glancing up. She cared not how she was dressed, nor had she ever thought of flinging away the wreath of withered poppies, which she put on the very morning of Proserpina's disappearance. All this while, the good creatures had been waiting on the bank of sponge, and once, every half minute or so, had popped up their four heads above water, to see if their playmate were yet coming back. Behold, up through its sandy and pebbly bed, along with the fountain's gush, a young woman with dripping hair would arise, and stand gazing at Mother Ceres, half out of the water, and undulating up and down with its ever- restless motion. I have never been in that part of the universe; but the royal palace, I am told, is built in a very noble style of architecture, and of the most splendid and costly materials. If death represents an internal and external restriction of Elsie’s art, then the fact that her writing transcends death, by crossing the very threshold of the grave, suggests the strength of her need to express herself—as if writing were more important than being. Unfortunately Persephone has eaten six pomegranate seeds in Hades’s garden, and for that reason is allowed to return to the world of the living for no more than six months at a time. In what way may we better understand the story’s characters and theme by using the myth as a guide? ." Ripe pomegranate Knife Large bowl with water. When they returned from their honeymoon, however, Kenneth found waiting for him a mysterious letter in a gray envelope. Short Stories for Students. Troubled by the most recent letter’s arrival, Charlotte decides to spy on Kenneth when he comes home. "No indeed," said Proserpina. HISTORICAL CONTEXT Significantly, she learns the answer not through Mrs. Ashby’s words, but through her gaze. The marriage ended in divorce in 1912, by which time Wharton was well established as a writer. "Phoebus!" For though he will be a strong man and a hero in his day, yet, on account of your folly, he will grow old, and finally die, like the sons of other women. Pomegranates, Punica granatum, are an amazing source of antioxidants as well as Vitamin C, so having some in your own backyard could mean year long pomegranates! cried Ceres, clasping her hands, and flinging herself at his feet. ", "We will wait, then," answered the sea nymphs. You need to get in there quickly and grab the goods intact with minimal muss, fuss, and collateral damage. A fisherman, it is true, had noticed her little footprints in the sand, as he went homeward along the beach with a basket of fish; a rustic had seen the child stooping to gather flowers; several persons had heard either the rattling of chariot wheels, or the rumbling of distant thunder; and one old woman, while plucking vervain and catnip, had heard a scream, but supposed it to be some childish nonsense, and therefore did not take the trouble to look up. You knew at once it was her writing?’. "Do you, indeed, my dear child?" Charlotte first stares at the letter “as if she could force her gaze to penetrate to what was within”; but the envelope is not only closed to her gaze, but “so tightly stuck that she had to hunt on her husband’s writing table for his ivory letter-opener.” In fact, opening the letter seems to confirm Kenneth’s death: when she rummages through his desk, the items on it “sent through her the icy chill emanating from the little personal effects of someone newly dead,” and when she opens the envelope, “the tearing of the paper. The cook's made dishes and artificial dainties were not half so delicious, in the good child's opinion, as the simple fare to which Mother Ceres had accustomed her. When Wharton sent a revised manuscript of “Pomegranate Seed” to the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1931, she complained in the accompanying letter that the editor of the magazine, Loring Schuyler, had failed to understand the allusion contained in the story’s title: “As for the title, Mr. Schuyler must refresh his classical mythology. Striking in its mythological resonances, “Pomegranate Seed” is also a powerful meditation on the supernatural, on the conflict between flesh and spirit, and on the constant risk of alienation in human life. In addition to granting legitimacy, masculine disguise provides protection from public exposure. The critics also propose that the relationships between the women in the story is dependent upon their connection to Kenneth Ashby. Vol.XII, No. O, we shall be very good friends, and you will find me more agreeable than you expect, when once we get out of this troublesome sunshine. Plot Summary Two or three times, moreover, she could not help thinking that a tuft of most splendid flowers had suddenly sprouted out of the earth before her very eyes, as if on purpose to tempt her a few steps farther. Charlotte is to expect news of when they will sail. But neither could Pan tell her what had become of Proserpina, any better than the rest of these wild people. . In a very short time, they had passed the great gateway (leaving the three-headed Cerberus, barking, and yelping, and growling, with threefold din, behind them), and emerged upon the surface of the earth. ", "Will not you stay a moment," asked Phoebus, "and hear me turn the pretty and touching story of Proserpina into extemporary verses?". The pomegranate tree requires a long, hot and dry season in order to produce good yield of high-quality fruit. It was a large shrub, completely covered with the most magnificent flowers in the world. Charlotte’s anxiety extends to her sense of herself as a typically passive woman and as a potential usurper of texts and the power that they represent. Then laughing at herself for so childish a notion, she made another effort: up came the shrub, and Proserpina staggered back, holding the stem triumphantly in her hand, and gazing at the deep hole which its roots had left in the soil. Do you see that tall gateway before us? "You do not know what fine times we will have in my palace. Source: Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, “Forbidden Reading and Ghostly Writing: Anxious Power in Wharton’s ‘Pomegranate Seed’,” in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. Sources Persephone (The Pomegranate Seeds) Persephone. In the chariot sat the figure of a man, richly dressed, with a crown on his head, all flaming with diamonds. The horror of the story is that on the one hand, Charlotte fears she cannot compete with the letter’s uncanny power over her husband; on the other hand, she attempts to master that power by appropriating and reading the letter, but with ambiguous results (she gains a mother, but loses a husband). Kenneth has even moved the portrait of Elsie that had hung in his library up to the nursery of his two children, in order that Charlotte might feel herself to be the mistress of the house. Nationality: American. ", "You kill me by saying so," cried Ceres, almost ready to faint. "It is the only one in the world," said the servant. Letters "But do you first come with your torch, and help me to seek for my lost child. But, just at the time when my story begins, the good lady was very busy, because she had the care of the wheat, and the Indian corn, and the rye and barley and, in short, of the crops of every kind, all over the earth; and as the season had thus far been uncommonly backward, it was necessary to make the harvest ripen more speedily than usual. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the theme of flesh vs. spirit supports an essentially didactic account of man’s corruption of nature. Pomegranates are prominent in Greek funerals. . Charlotte is able to make out only the words “mine” and “come.” She remarks: “I suppose everything’s pale about a ghost.” This is the first time the story uses the word “ghost,” but it is an appropriate term, for as Mrs. Ashby reaches for the phone to call the police, the impression is given that Kenneth has answered the call of Elsie, his first wife, and gone to join her in the other world. As the story is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a versified collection of Greco-Roman myths from the first century B.C., Hades is not Persephone’s husband. But, in Wharton’s modern retelling of the story itself, Charlotte Ashby is doomed by more than the displaced Oedipal competition with her mother. . Living female artists in Wharton’s fiction fare no better: although she often portrays artists of either gender with irony and ambivalence (Spacks, Female Imagination 249-54), she particularly satirizes female artists in such stories as “The Pelican,” “April Showers,” and “The Expiation.” Schriber concludes that “the younger Edith Wharton was not secure enough in her vocation to draw out of her foundering self a female protagonist who is an artist; the older Edith Wharton, realizing that women novelists were ignored by the culture, purposely did not assign her own gender to an artist, choosing instead to satirize the state of the arts as governed by men.” Wharton does, in fact, depict a successful female writer, Helen Dale, who refers to herself as “the greatest novelist . cried she, all in a tremble. But, then, you must consider, my dear child, that this vast palace is apt to be gloomy (although the precious stones certainly shine very bright), and that I am not of the most cheerful disposition, and that therefore it was a natural thing enough to seek for the society of some merrier creature than myself. Hasten home to your dear mother.". Well; I will be the nurse of this poor, sickly boy. 296-305. "We are just entering my dominions. ." This time, he did not have a plate set out for her, there was no steaming soup, nor was there hot porridge. "O my sweet violets, shall I never see you again?". But when barely legible letters addressed to her husband in a handwriting “visibly feminine” begin to arrive, Charlotte’s confidence erodes. The definitive collection of Wharton’s supernatural fiction, this volume contains eleven stories, plus the 1937 preface to Wharton’s Ghosts and a fragment from her autobiography. There was a never-ceasing gloom, it is true, which half hid itself among the innumerable pillars, gliding before the child as she wandered among them, and treading stealthily behind her in the echo of her footsteps. ", "You have promised to be my companion," answered Ceres. The reader realizes that the second wife’s guilt and insecurity have driven the husband away. And the best thing you can now do is, to let me go again. 1991 When Charlotte first confronts Kenneth about the mysterious letters: “A line of anger she had never seen before came out between his eyes, and she said to herself: ‘The upper part of his face is too narrow; this is the first time I ever noticed it?’” As the tale continues, the distance between husband and wife grows as Charlotte comes closer to understanding the truth about the letters Kenneth has been receiving. Neither was all the dazzle of the precious stones, which flamed with their own light, worth one gleam of natural sunshine; nor could the most brilliant of the many-colored gems, which Proserpina had for playthings, vie with the simple beauty of the flowers she used to gather. of the age,” and has authored many best-sellers. Daughter of Zeus and Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, Persephone is abducted by Hades, the god of death, and carried off to the underworld. . Set aside 2 tablespoons of seeds and store the rest in a sealed container in the fridge for future mealtimes. There they beheld a beautiful young man, with long, curling ringlets, which seemed to be made of golden sunbeams; his garments were like light summer clouds; and the expression of his face was so exceedingly vivid, that Hecate held her hands before her eyes, muttering that he ought to wear a black veil. As personification of crops and vegetation, Persephone divides the year between the upper and lower worlds, returning to earth every year with the return of the spring. The black horses had rushed along so swiftly, that they were already beyond the limits of the sunshine. That dear, dear mother! . In her greatest novels, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, Wharton indicts the wealthy families of New York as hypocritical, exclusionary, and materialistic. . Down, Cerberus! “Pomegranate Seed” is the only one of Wharton’s ghost stories to have an urban setting, and Wharton may have placed the story there as a sort of challenge to herself as a writer. Her case, on the contrary, looked more desperate than ever. Ascending a lofty flight of steps, she entered the portal, and found the royal household in very great alarm about the queen's baby. Unlike the polygamous lover of her mother, Zeus, Pluto desires and achieves a lasting marriage with the conflicted daughter. “Pomegranate Seed” recounts the rivalry between Charlotte Ashby and the ghost of her husband’s first wife. They immediately broke into so swift a gallop, that it seemed rather like flying through the air than running along the earth. Instead of standing on the doorstep, “shivering with the premonition of something inexplicable, intolerable, to be faced on the other side,” or secretly watching her husband’s correspondence with the letter, Charlotte crosses the threshold, usurping Kenneth’s library, desk, and letter-opener as well as the letter itself. PLOT SUMMARY A tradition of the Anglo-American novel since the eighteenth century, the novel of manners often presents class conflicts as it defines heroism through moral integrity and develops character through the practice of social norms or manners. Instead, Mrs. Ashby’s maternal instincts ultimately lead Charlotte back to a traditional feminine dependence on male authority, as she “resolutely” reaches for the telephone to call the police, advising Charlotte not to act but to wait for an explanation from Kenneth or the authorities.
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