The Moving Finger: Why We Need to See Beautiful Women Grow Old
I recently read Somerset Maugham’s “The Painted Veil”. The movie of that same name has long been a favorite of mine, and I assumed the book would not vary too widely from the story as plotted in the movie. The movie plot tells a tragic, yet beautifully redemptive story about a failing marriage between two badly flawed people.
The book, it turns out, leaves the marriage in the ditch and tries to manufacture redemption for the protagonist/adulteress, Kitty, with pablums of the day: coming god-like into the free possession of oneself, so that love isn’t something demanded by duty, tradition, or hierarchy, but is purely an expression of all that the individual soul finds good.
Like many modern turn of the century artists, Maugham wrote about female sexuality as if society’s complex, imperfect structures depended on preserving it as an object of male possession. Of course, Maugham was going to pick up on contemporary social oppressions and hypocrisies. What I wasn’t expecting was that, in the name of freedom, he would make a bonfire of the whole structure where those hypocrisies and oppressions found a home.
Very soon after that I read Edith Wharton’s short story, “The Moving Finger”. Unlike Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was not really a modern writer, but her short story engages similar themes of possession of the female by men - bodily, or as a symbol of beauty. The title, taken from a few lines of poetry about age and regret, seems almost tangential to this problem of possession – at first.
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”― Omar Khayyám
I want to describe Wharton’s short story to you in more detail than Maugham’s “The Painted Veil” because I think Wharton’s story sheds considerable light on how Maugham really missed the boat in an otherwise good modern novel. (By all means, do watch the movie after this because it manages to save Maugham’s interesting story from sterile and sentimental self-salvation.)
Wharton describes Mrs. Grancy (we never hear her given name) as exceeding all expectations of the small circle of males who are long-time friends of Ralph Grancy. And Ralph Grancy shows his appreciation for his new wife by making her “the flower he had planted” in the center of his life. He sees her as the “tree…which gave him rest and shade at its foot and the wind of dreams in its upper branches.” Very promising, that. Better than your average Hallmark card.
The Grancys’ marriage seems magical to the narrator in the short story:
“Some human happiness is a landlocked lake; but the Grancys’ was an open sea, stretching a buoyant and illimitable surface to the voyaging interests of life. There was room and to spare on those waters for all our separate ventures; and always beyond the sunset, a mirage of the fortunate isles toward which our prows were bent.”
Well, a good marriage should draw others into its orbit. The profound intimacy found in marriage blesses those outside it with the warmth of wills being pried away from self-interest and bending toward the good of others. But here, the narrator seems to find this picture of happiness hardly real, even fanciful – a “mirage”.
One of Ralph Grancy’s friends, Claydon, is a professional artist, and he paints a portrait of Mrs. Grancy. This portrait takes the place of Mrs. Grancy so thoroughly for him that when he visits, he faces the painting when conversing with Mrs. Grancy in her own drawing room. Wharton tells us a number of things about this portrait:
Ralph Grancy recalls what he told his wife when he first got the portrait: “You’re my prisoner now – I shall never lose you. If you grew tired of me and left me you’d leave your real self there on the wall!”
The only thing Mrs. Grancy says in the entire short story is her reaction to seeing her portrait: “Ah, you’ve done me facing the east!” She might be underwhelmed by her own portrait. But she also might be making a foreboding reference to the Christian practice of burying people facing the east.
“Claydon had not set out to paint their Mrs. Grancy – or ours even- but Ralph’s;”
Mrs. Grancy’s death a few years later almost seems expected. It is as if there was a competition which she lost.
The rest of the story is preoccupied with different kinds of obsessions over the portrait: there’s Ralph’s conviction that his wife’s life was so centered around his own life that even dead, she wants her portrait to grow old with him; there’s the narrator’s suspicion that Ralph has thrown off a sorrow which should have been far deeper and permanent - all in favor of a fantasy or a ghost he has conjured up in the painting; we watch Claydon’s calculating certainty that he is the only one who understands the real Mrs. Grancy, and that the painting which symbolizes Mrs. Grancy must properly come back to him after Ralph’s death.
All this is so distracting to us, making us see the creeping irrationality of men intent on possessing a woman who must have been both beautiful and good, that we are tempted to jump over a truly lovely tribute that Ralph makes to his late wife: “It was like finding the climate in which I was meant to live. You know what she was – how indefinitely she multiplied one’s points of contact with life, how she lit up the caverns and bridged the abysses!”
Those lines show that Wharton had a fine instinct for what a woman is meant to be. But she puts these words in the mouth of a man who loved passionately instead of well, a man who for a time intimately experienced the best of female companionship, but for fear of losing her (or thinking her small enough to be meaningless without him) twisted that relationship into a sterile fantasy. And he began doing this before her death.
While Wharton is certainly aware of how people culturally misuse each other, I do not think that she is ultimately concerned with freeing females from societal expectations or from the male gaze.
I think that what Wharton is getting at here is the way we all (male and female) crave possession of symbols or even people, because our relationship to others and to the world is so unstable. In the context of a growing 20th century re-negotiation of female dependency and empowerment, she is making a legitimate observation about the futility of trying to fully possess another being. This is a modern theme, but her development is anything but modern.
Mr. Grancy and Claydon both loved Mrs. Grancy because her beauty and character symbolized something good. They both loved the painting because it reminded them of her. But they ended up loving the painting more because they could control it and possess it in a way that neither his wife nor the goodness she represented could be controlled or possessed.
The story starts out describing Mrs. Grancy’s death as “one of fate’s most irretrievable acts of vandalism”. It ends with worse vandalism. Ralph Grancy loved possessing the woman so much that he turns her into a fantasy by having Claydon periodically touch up the portrait to show Mrs. Grancy aging with him as the years go by. Claydon pretends to participate in the fantasy, eventually painting “the face of a woman who knows that her husband is dying”. He knows that Ralph will believe what he sees in the portrait and give up on life. Claydon thinks that when he inherits the painting on Ralph’s death that he can undo his vandalism. He can restore the painting, but can he restore his ability to love what is good?
The ultimate vandalism is that none of the men imagined that even if Mrs. Grancy grew old, became wicked, or died, what her beauty and goodness actually pointed to was something that no one can change. Trying to make any created being - even our own- so fully our own that its meaning is defined by us is ultimately an act of alienation, not participation
This is the artist’s paradox, to know that we must either deny or participate in what is eternally true, beautiful, and good. But at the same time, we are forced to admit that all our efforts at participation so often end up in vandalism. Whatever we control or possess as finite creatures will be faulty, incomplete, or a fantasy. You don’t have to be Christian to create good art that understands all that.
Are we doomed to always be vandals?
Christianity affirms the existence of real things that are lovely and true, but it also points to the fact that those things get their being and loveliness from an origin so transcendent, yet so immanently bound up with mankind, that the only way to participate in all that is to be possessed ourselves by the Artist who created those things.
In a world made by God and redeemed through Christ we see that people in themselves, and in their relations to each other, all point to, and depend on, one source of life. I have my doubts about whether Wharton explicitly understood why people, like eternal things, are beyond the full possession or control of themselves, other individual people, societies, or traditions. But, unlike Maugham, she doesn’t reach for sentimental modern solutions that barter ultimate meaning for the “freedom” of self-possession. Women remain inextricably involved in relationships with others because they were made to reflect life, not sterility.
Somerset Maugham’s solution to the problem of society’s oppressive painted veils was to try to escape them altogether. Emancipation from society, tradition, or religion were popular ideas at the turn of the last century. Those ideas have only grown more insistent at the beginning of our own century. Advertisements, children’s books, experts, motivational posters, memes, politicians, and preachers all nag us to take possession of ourselves in freedom from all historical, societal, or religious interpretations. They tell us to make our life, our bodies, and our thoughts point to no one but ourselves. They tell us that if beauty, truth, and goodness exist in reference to anyone but ourselves, those things become methods of control and slavery.
It all sounds terribly brave until you see how very lonely and sterile it is to own symbols that point only to fantasies, or to be free of symbols completely - to have nothing to which you point, nothing in which to participate.
This is why in a fallen world, it is a mercy for beautiful women to be beautiful and then to grow old, or for young men to grow strong and then to lose their strength in old age. For them and for the rest of us, we need to see that beauty does exist and that it is something in which we as a human race participate. But more importantly, this side of resurrection, we need to see that beauty, like truth, is something we do not ultimately possess or control. Symbols are for all of us because they point beyond all of us to the one who writes our being. The Moving Finger writes, and none who are possessed by Him will waste their piety, wit, or tears in an effort to escape their source of all eternal Life, Beauty, and Truth.