Edith Wharton is perhaps the most important gothic writer in all of American history. What made her career so unique, beyond the fact that she was a woman in a traditionally male-dominated field, was that she didn't write for money, fame, or even women's rights. Wharton wrote her gothic tales in an attempt to express and abandon her feelings of personal and feminine anxieties into a realm of the unknown. Growing up, Wharton had a very "traditional" upbringing. Her family encouraged her to become a well-mannered young woman and clearly preferred her to be well-versed in rituals and manners rather than books. This limitation common to women of her time led Wharton to feel some anxiety about her true ambitions. As a child, Wharton recalled that she "could not sleep in the room with a book containing a ghost story" and that she "often had to burn such books, because it frightened [her] to know that they were downstairs in the library" ( Wharton 303). Her fear of ghost stories, and of reading in general, stemmed from her anxiety to become a cultured and educated writer. Her gothic tales soon became the realm in which she could explore her fears and finally free herself from them: “my terror gradually faded, and I became what I am now: a woman scarcely conscious of physical fear” (Wharton 303). Traditional Gothic writing aims to reveal the ugly and horrible truth beneath the surface. Therefore, it is entirely plausible that Edith Wharton's gothic stories are actually a look at the truth behind society's treatment of women. By examining Wharton's gothic tales, particularly “Pomegranate Seed” and “Afterward,” we are able to understand how the oppressions imposed on women in Wharton's time manifest in traditional gothic elements. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Wharton's short story "Pomegranate Seed" follows the story of Charlotte Ashby, a young woman who investigates mysterious letters written to her previously widowed husband Kenneth. We quickly see that Charlotte is forced to deal not only with the letters themselves, but with the shadow of another woman over her marriage. Despite Charlotte's presence, the house still displays many of his first wife's influences, such as the furniture, the draperies, and even her portrait on the wall of Kenneth's library. This consistent female presence challenges Charlotte's female power as a wife: “as time passed she had to confess that she felt... more at ease and confident with her husband, since that long and cold and beautiful face on the wall of the library no longer followed it with watchful eyes” (Wharton 224). There is already a "ghost" floating in Charlotte's mind and her fears of not being able to replace Kenneth's first wife begin to "haunt" her. It is not revealed whether the characters are actually haunted by the wife, but the gothic elements of this story rely on the idea that the ghost is very real to Charlotte. Searching for clues about the letter's author, Charlotte begins delving into her husband's affairs, an area where women were certainly not welcome. We can see how this mystery contributes to Charlotte's anxiety about gaining knowledge. She feels an “anxious power,” meaning she “craves the power of language and yet feels anxious about the transgression involved in a woman's appropriation of that power” (Singley and Sweeney 177). The more Charlotte wants to question Kenneth about the letters and the strange draining effect they have on him, the more anxious she becomes. Wharton writes that “she was held back by fear offorce her privacy,” a statement that echoes the social limitations of a woman's boundaries over her husband's life (Wharton 235). The inherent ideals of submissive women lead Charlotte to feel “ashamed of her persistence, ashamed of discovering that bewildered face messy” (Wharton 240). Yet Charlotte persists in seeking the truth behind the mysterious letters. As Charlotte continues to push her feminine boundaries, it becomes clear that she is a traditional Gothic character who “enters the abyss…plunging into consciousness. beyond the realistic, where the 'real' story is told” (“Gothic” 137). Since she is a woman who challenges the rules of patriarchal society, we believe she will undoubtedly reveal a secret and terrible story that is kept hidden under the surface. He finally crosses the ultimate threshold when he reads one of the letters. We see his anxiety manifest in the disturbing details of the letter's opening: the “deep silence of the room” and the “human cry” dispelled by the tearing of the envelope (Wharton 250). . In the end, we are given no great epiphany or summary. Instead, true to the Gothic, Wharton's revelation of the letter's contents puts us in Charlotte's shoes: anxious and questioning our sensibilities. The letters in the story, implicitly suggested as being written by Kenneth's late first wife, function as an example of the haunting. Importantly, the letters are defined by their “visibly feminine” handwriting and therefore function as symbols of Charlotte's threatened femininity (Wharton 220). However, as the title suggests, the letters also appear to symbolize the pomegranate seeds from the Persephone myth. They function as a way to lure Kenneth into the realm of the dead, and as each is read, Kenneth becomes visibly "drained of life and courage" (Wharton 222). The letters bring the nature of the uncanny to Kenneth's attention and "when he returns to the familiar they seem strange" (Wharton 222). He begins to behave strangely towards Charlotte and even seems to pique her curiosity: "Her husband," writes Wharton, "submits to her cross-questioning with a kind of contemptuous composure, as if he were humoring an unreasonable child" (Wharton 230). By belittling her fears and treating her like the rest of society, Kenneth manages to stoke Charlotte's anxieties. It's making her question her motives, emotions and sanity. The idea that the female protagonist might not be entirely sane is an important element in Gothic. The reader cannot know whether the events of the story are truly supernatural or simply unnatural due to the unreliability of the main character. “After,” a short story written twenty years before “Pomegranate Seed,” explores many of the same issues of female oppression in an equally gothic setting. In this story we see a seemingly perfect marriage between Mary and Edward Boyne. The couple attempts to find a house in the English countryside with the "charm of having been a deep, dark reservoir of life for centuries" and are rewarded when they are told that the house they have chosen is haunted by a ghost who is not revealed until until long after it was witnessed (Wharton 61). This environment is the perfect setting to exploit Maria's feminine anxieties. She is seen living in a gilded cage, blissfully unaware of the ugly truths of the world and her husband's business. When the couple is informed of an unpleasant lawsuit against the husband, they begin to observe a mysterious male figure lurking in their home. Suddenly Edward disappears and Mary is forced to investigate the appearances of this figure. She is both terrified and attracted..