The Buccaneers in Never too Late to Read Classics

Aug 07, 2015 Sara rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: american-classics, classics

The Buccaneers is Edith Wharton’s last and uncompleted novel. She had written approximately 89,000 words before her death and the novel was printed in its incomplete form by her publisher. In 1993 Marion Mainwaring, a noted Wharton scholar, completed the story, in line with notes that Wharton had left behind. She did a good job, since there is no obvious break in the voice between the beginning of the book and the end, but it seems clear to me that no one, even a great scholar, could ever know e The Buccaneers is Edith Wharton’s last and uncompleted novel. She had written approximately 89,000 words before her death and the novel was printed in its incomplete form by her publisher. In 1993 Marion Mainwaring, a noted Wharton scholar, completed the story, in line with notes that Wharton had left behind. She did a good job, since there is no obvious break in the voice between the beginning of the book and the end, but it seems clear to me that no one, even a great scholar, could ever know exactly how Wharton would have ended her work. If someone was going to guess, I think Mainwaring was a good choice, but I can’t help wishing Wharton could have done it herself and that it were as pure a Wharton as The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth.

Despite this, The Buccaneers is a masterful work of fiction, set in Wharton’s high-society world, and full of the angst and manipulation that makes me happy for just a moment not to have been among the fabulously wealthy, well-married women of the time. Love and marriage do not go together like a horse and carriage in Wharton’s world. Marriage is mostly an institution of convenience and profit, you get a name and I get money, and woe to the romantically inclined girl who stumbles into this world of harsh reality unawares.

It is the reality behind the mask in a Wharton that makes it so worthwhile to read her. She strips the conventions to the bone and calls them by name. She exposes what people are willing to do and become in an effort to climb a social ladder, where someone else is always contriving to knock them off or at least kick them down a rung. And, she is superbly adept at lending light to the less affluent who have to circle in this world and navigate its waters. One of her finest characters in The Buccaneers is Miss Laura Testvalley, a governess who knows her place and sees the world without any rose-colored glasses, but whose caring heart cannot resist loving and aiding her charge, Annabel St. George (Nan).

There is always the beauty of Wharton’s descriptive writing that would, alone, make me wish to read this book: It was dark when Folyat House loomed high and stately in Portman Square, light shining from its long rows of windows and torches flaming at the grand portal. Footmen jumped down from the barouche which had met the travelers at Paddington, opened the escutcheoned doors, and helped them out. Other footmen led them up steps and into an oval colonnaded lobby. The Glenloe girls’ eyes widened as the groom-of-the-chambers, attended by yet other footmen, conducted them into a great rectangular hall through an arch at the opposite end.” When I read that,I feel I am one of the Glenloe girls and can see the glamour of the hall and the bustle of the footmen providing their services to the titled and privileged in a stoic and efficient manner.

I loved seeing the five girls (who are the buccaneers) transform from innocent pawns in the game to active players. In the beginning, they are primarily spurred on by ambitious mothers, while they are, themselves, just happy to have a good time and attract the attention of the men. By the end, they are among the ones pulling the strings and conniving for power, and the wheat is separated from the chaff, as they say.

They change, even toward one another. “Virginia, who had seemed to Annabel so secure, so aloof, so disdainful of everything but her own pleasures, but who, as Lady Seadown, was enslaved to that dull half-sleeping Seadown, absorbed in questions of rank and precedence, and in awe--actually in awe--of her father-in-law’s stupid arrogance…”

Finally, they are seen, even by their husbands as pirates, conquerors, rulers who come to rule by stealth:
”What a gang of buccaneers you are!” he breathed to his wife.
“Buccaneers,” Lizzy reminded him gently, “were not notorious for paying fortunes for what they took.”

Several of these girls do pay heavily for what they take, and they pay more than money. Those who fail to toe society’s line pay a price and lose a lot, but those who adhere to it pay almost as much, if not more. Wharton does not traffic in happily ever after in her novels--people die, they are ruined, they are impoverished. I personally see the hand of Mainwaring in this novel most heavily in the lightness of the penalties exacted. I believe Wharton would have visited a harsher punishment on her characters in the end. She was unflinching when portraying the viciousness of society. She had seen it in her lifetime. She knew the costs. You need only think of Lily Bart to know that she did. I can’t help wondering, had fate allowed Wharton to finish this novel, if my dear Nan and Laura Testvalley would have been spared.
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