3.5 ⭐


By Benedicto “BenCab” Cabrera

n  Kate Orme was engaged in one of those rapid mental excursions that were forever sweeping her from the straight path of the actual into uncharted regions of conjecture. Her survey of life had always been marked by the tendency to seek out ultimate relations, to extend her researches to the limit of her imaginative experience. But hitherto she had been like some young captive brought up in a windowless palace whose painted walls she takes for the actual world. Now the palace had been shaken to its base, and through a cleft in the walls she looked out upon life. For the first moment all was indistinguishable blackness; then she began to detect vague shapes and confused gestures in the depths. There were people below there, men like Denis, girls like herself — for under the unlikeness she felt the strange affinity — all struggling in that awful coil of moral darkness, with agonised hands reaching up for rescue. n

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Stop trying to fix broken people as some self-sacrificing, sanctimonious act of charity. Misery and hypocritcal selfishness spurned on by jealousy will ensue. Just leave onto better pastures. Take a tentative leaf out of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and stop pretending to take the moral high ground when you stoop so low inwardly. A caustic but brief character study with a strikingly melodramatic ending

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n   Long after Mr Orme had left the topic, Kate remained lost in its contemplation. She had begun to perceive that the fair surface of life was honeycombed by a vast system of moral sewage. n

FIRST LINE REVIEW: "It is not often that youth allows itself to feel undividedly happy: the sensation is too much the result of selection and elimination to be within reach of the awakening clutch on life." Yeah, you have to read that sentence several times understand it, don't you? For me, that was the challenge of this novella. The writing was just a bit more dense that in the other pieces I've read by Wharton. And that made the final "pay off" at the end a bit more disappointing, as well.

For a modernist author, Edith Wharton is actually very traditional in Sanctuary, which is written almost like a classical work: with compositional equilibrium and morale and care for the metaphor. However, the novella isn’t pedantic (I don’t think there is a work of Edith Wharton that could be accused of this) and not even the theme – the power of education - would make you think so.

Shortly, this is the story of a young girl whose illusions about “happily ever after” are shattered just before her wedding, by learning that her fiancé not only did a blamable thing, but he is unable to see the evil in what he did, and neither does her father who seems to think too that such things are meant to be rather hidden and forgotten than assumed and dealt with. So Kate Orme makes a surprising decision: instead of cancelling the wedding she decides to go ahead with it in order to prevent Dennis to marry another woman and have children who will behave like him. In other words, she takes upon herself to save the world, to build a sanctuary that will protect the next generation against the evil the society not only accepts bur even encourages. And this sanctuary is the education she envisages for her children.

Part 2 shows a widowed Kate with a grown-up child. She succeeded in teaching her son to disregard material rewards but is aware of his incapacity of accepting failure. And here comes a turning point, when Dick is lured by another inheritance (there is a deliberate parallelism between him and his father here) to forget the values his mother tried to inoculate him, and he is conflicted because both his professional future and his future happiness depend on his decision.
But in the end, although he had tried to turn his back on his mother's teaching and see things from another perspective, all he had been taught takes over and wins the inner fight:
"His hands stole back into hers, and he leaned his head against her shoulder like a boy.
"I'm an abysmally weak fool, you know," he ended; "I'm not worth the fight you've put up for me. But I want you to know that it's your doing—that if you had let go an instant I should have gone under—and that if I'd gone under I should never have come up again alive.""

I know, it seems infinitely boring and irritatingly educational. Additionally, Kate is not a character easy to like - she seems lifeless like an annoying concept, rigid in her beliefs and incredibly egotistical and limited sometimes. But keep in mind this is Edith Wharton we are talking about – a younger one, true, but gifted nonetheless, so the story somehow sounds right and is worth reading since it announces her masterpieces.

No me ha gustado. No he podido terminarlo

I love Wharton and am planning on rereading her works this year. Sanctuary, one of her early novellas, is the story of a young, rather naive woman, Kate who discovers that her fiance, Denis, is morally bankrupt. And here’s my problem with the plot: Kate marries Denis despite her strong reservations, certain that she can guide any future child on a moral path, avoiding any genetic disposition that may be in his lineage. Part two reveals that Kate encouraged Denis to pursue a failed political endeavor; a career field still brimming with the pathetic and morally bankrupt. I’m surprised this family didn’t make it all the way to the White House. In the second half of the novella, Kate’s son, Dick, is now a young man and faced with a moral dilemma of his own. Has Kate’s moral instruction been successful?
Not my favorite Wharton by a long shot, but worth the read for the prose and look at how her writing skill evolved.

Me ha gustado el argumento pero he sido incapaz de empatizar con ninguno de los personajes ni de llegar a entenderles del todo

I read "Sanctuary" for my freshman seminar class. We were looking at the story through the lens of character development, and I think that this was evident in Kate's relationship with her son Dick. After class, we were asked to think about the meaning of "Sanctuary" and why the story is called sanctuary. I haven't thought too much about that yet!

This is an early work of Edith Wharton. She definitely had not developed her full talent at the time she wrote it. The plot is rather thin. However, glimmers of her art appear and Kate is a complex main character. The ending was a total surprise to me.

The opening line of Sanctuary stunned me.

“It is not often that youth allows itself to feel undividedly happy; the sensation is too much the result of selection and elimination to be within the awakening clutch of life.”

It’s a sad view of the world. And maybe a reminder of just how much the world has changed in the last hundred years or so.

Kate Orme is happy though. She is in love, and all her hopes and dreams are built around one person: her fiancé, Denis Peyton. But there are things she doesn’t know. Things that her elders believe should not be discussed in front of the young.

But Kate finds out. That Denis has done something terribly wrong to protect his family’s position in society. Kate begs him to do the moral thing, to put things right, but he will not. The engagement is broken.

Then she learns that Denis’s family understand and support his actions. And that similar things have happened in her own family.

Kate searches her soul and decides that, although she no longer loves him, she must marry Denis and try to remove the character taint which his yet to be conceived son risks inheriting.

It’s an extraordinary decision. Hard to understand today, but entirely natural given Kate’s moral instinctive moral code- where did that come from I wonder – and the strictures of the society she lived in.

Had Sanctuary ended then it would have been a striking short story, leaving behind much to ponder. But it went on.

The story is picked up several years later. Kate is a young widow, with a son. She does her best for her son, but the time comes when he is faced with a moral dilemma. What what will he do? Well the clue’s back in that opening line.

It’s much too neat and the second half of the story is rushed and not nearly as accomplished as the first half.

Maybe Sanctuary should have been developed into a novel. With a broader sweep, more depth and more room for character development the results could have been interesting.

As a novella, sadly, it doesn’t quite work.

Listened to on our way to and from Wharton's house "The Mount." Pleasant listen.

3.5/5 ⭐ tal vez no logré comprenderla completamente

Kate Orme, una joven que vivía en una burbuja, se entera de un proceder erróneo de su prometido Denis Peyton, y quiere que éste expíe su culpa públicamente antes de casarse. Tras la labor de convencimiento que realiza su futura suegra, Kate accede a casarse y no posponer la boda como tenía planeado.

“Porque ahora, por fin, la vida se mostraba ante ella tal y como era: no valiente ni engalanada ni victoriosa, sino desnuda, postrada y enferma, arrastrando sus lisiados miembros a través del fango y, a pesar de todo, alzando sus lastimeras manos hacia las estrellas. ”

Años después, viuda, convertida en Kate Peyton y madre de Dick Payton para quien había creado un Santuario protegido por su amor materno, el destino la pone en la encrucijada de cambiar el destino de su hijo, lo que la pondría a la altura moral de su fallecido esposo, algo por lo que había luchado en no convertirse y evitado a su hijo.

Aquello que había reprobado en Denis antes de casarse, se presenta en pro del futuro promisorio de Dick; todo por cuanto había trabajado para que su hijo se criara en la rectitud está a punto de desmoronarse, y es ella la que se debate en tomar una decisión mediada por esa moralidad y rectitud inculcada, y la felicidad de su retoño.

“Un amor como el suyo tenía una función: preparar y orientar. Pero debía saber también cómo retener su mano y cómo guardarse sus consejos, cómo ocuparse de su objeto mediante una influencia invisible más que con una intromisión tangible.”

Muchas madres decimos que haríamos cualquier cosa por nuestros hijos, aunque siempre sabemos que está bien, y qué está mal.

Al final, nuestros hijos son los que deben tomar sus propias decisiones, es lo que nos trata de decir La Wharton en “Santuario”; la calidad de la decisión dependerá siempre de los principios inculcados desde el seno materno o familiar.

Me ha gustado mucho cómo la autora nos da una lección que no siempre está a simple vista del lector.

Nota curiosa: Edith Wharton nunca fue madre.

@libros_aidasantillan