Third Time is the Charm?

Mary Kate Ryser-Oatman

Journal #14

Edith Wharton, "The Other Two"

February 20, 2009

"She dropped into her low chair by the tea table, and the two visitors, as if drawn by her smile, advanced to receive the cups she held out. She glanced about for Waythorn, and he took the third cup with a laugh" (Wharton 843).

Alice gave two tea cups to her ex-husbands, Haskett and Gus Varick, and then finally to her current third husband Waythorn. Waythorn finds this order amusing.

Throughout the entire story, Alice had been rekindling her social connections with her ex-husbands. Her new husband had been awkwardly working with Gus Varick, and Haskett comes by to visit his ill daughter. I find it interesting that Alice gives her new husband the third cup of tea; he is after all her current husband, and he is supposed to act as her 'authority.' Giving him the third cup of tea further shows that he is and will always be her third husband. She has emotional baggage from her first two marriages, including her daughter from her first marriage. Waythorn has this idea in his mind of possessing Alice, so that he can feel like he is her one and only husband, but she can never 'belong' to him. She has left a piece of her with each man, and a part of her life was spent with each of them. The situation they are in is more of a love square or love diamond; she says she has moved on and wants to be with Waythorn, but he keeps finding that she talks to her ex-husbands secretly and then lies about it. I thought it was ironic that all four of them were in the same room, being that there is great tension between Waythorn, the ex-husbands and Alice. Alice seems completely unaware of the awkwardness and tension, which I could not believe, because their situation is comical and disastrous. I think that Waythorn laughed when he took the tea because he finally realized how foolish he was for getting into this situation. He knows now that this is how it is going to be and he will never be able to change that.

Unlike Alice and Waythorn, Edith Wharton married someone who was in the same social class as her. According to Wikipedia, Edith Wharton and her husband had many things in common, but not all things, "...she married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was twelve years her senior. From a well-established Boston family, he was a sportsman and a gentleman of her social class and shared her love of travel, although they had little in common intellectually." Waythorn thought it was rather odd that Alice had married someone who wore a "made-up tie on an elastic" (Wharton 838). It shows her lower-class past and suggests that she might have tried to marry up the social ladder when she married Waythorn, or that she is attracted to men of all social classes. Edith Wharton married someone of her social class, as was expected in those times, but combining wealth and power do not always create a happy marriage, and Wharton is proof of that.