Each of these women is, in large measure, the product of a society in which she must live, but over which she has little or no control. Thus the flaws in such women—the grotesque mutilation of character that they display—become a measure of the moral disease that has permeated the environment that spawned and nourished them. Fully conscious of her own method, Wharton described it in her autobiography, A Backward Glance:

In what aspect could a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers be said to have, on the “old woe of the world,” any deeper bearing than the people composing such a society could guess. The answer was that a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals. The answer, in short, [to the problem of focusing the satire], was my heroine, Lily Bart.

Not surprisingly, Wharton uses the same method in her short stories. The women’s club in “Xingu” is a parody of any authentic intellectual activity, and its members are self-deceiving and silly and vain. Yet one must, perhaps, ask a larger question about even this frothy little tale. What alternatives were they offered? Were they silly by choice—by laziness and default; or would some more strenuous scholarly ambition on their part be inevitably doomed to defeat by society’s restrictions concerning “proper” activities for females?

The poignant tale of Alice Waythorn presents the case in its boldest and bleakest mode. Within the story, it is her husband who has the shocking and unwelcome realization: “She was ‘as easy as an old shoe’—a shoe that too many feet had worn. Her elasticity was the result of tension in too many different directions. Alice Haskett—Alice Varick—Alice Waythorn—she had been each in turn, and had left hanging to each name a little of her privacy, a little of her personality, a little of the inmost self where the unknown god abides.” Yet he cannot make the one step further to complete the insight; he was not the victim of this violation—he was a perpetrator of it and one of the trio of men who benefited from it. And it is these men, not the vague and dimly fashioned woman whom each had married in turn, that shaped the society in which such violations could become the norm.

“Roman Fever,” perhaps Wharton’s single most popular short story, also deploys this mode of satire by refraction. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley have been competing with each other for more than twenty years; now their daughters, Babs and Jenny, are continuing the competition. Yet the stakes are not clear (as they might be in a business transaction), nor is the eventual outcome. Who was the winner in this convoluted game? Within the fiction, the women perceive each other quite imperfectly. Can an astute reader make a more accurate assessment? It is a bold stroke on Wharton’s part to have the story conclude with a startling revelation. For what, in the end, are we to infer? Can there ever be a winner in a competition that has been defined in the way this one has?

“Souls Belated,” “Autres Temps . . .,” and “The Last Asset” are the most ambitious pieces here, for all address a complex and ultimately unsolvable paradox. On the one hand, all human beings require some relatively stable social system within which “identity” can be defined; we need significant and well-defined roles to play, and we need rules and standards to guide our judgment and shape our actions. Above all, perhaps, we need the assurance of order and continuity that only a coherent community can provide. On the other hand, the rules of any effective social system will inevitably limit our behavior. Some (like the prohibition against murder or theft) seem so clearly necessary that people scarcely ever question their validity. However, the validity of other rules is less clear, for they may have both a positive and a negative element. The marriage contract, for example, can serve to facilitate the kind of trust and commitment between a man and a woman that is the only basis for a vital and nourishing relationship; it becomes the foundation upon which a child’s well-being often depends; more trivially, perhaps, it simply “signals” to other people that a particular man and woman have the right to intimacy, privacy, and respect. Yet the very arrangement that ought to offer support is sometimes cruelly constraining. When love has ceased, men and women sometimes violate the network of rights and obligations that marriage has conferred upon them; sometimes they are driven to the extremity of dissolving the contract altogether. Yet such a sundering of social order is never without painful consequences: children are divided in their loyalties; friends and acquaintances are thrown into uncertainty about how to respond; and even the parties who sought “freedom” may find its consequences almost as painful as the constrictions of an unhappy marital union.

Could society exist without binding marriages? The result might be a chaotic state in which identity itself could not be sustained. Should men and women be forced to remain in marriages that have sunk into irretrievable misery? The result might be a desolation and despair so profound that even life itself loses value.