The French, Connoisseurs of Life
A Look at Edith Wharton's 1919 Classic, French Ways & Their Meaning
Sep 28, 2009
Edith Wharton’s French Ways and Their Meaning, published 1919, may be just shy of a century old, but its subject—the underpinnings of French life—grant it a timeless quality. Those elements which comprise ‘French ways’ have surely morphed throughout the last century. However, as Wharton elucidates, the French are more prone to a reverence for tradition than a thirst for change and development as America does.
Edith's Aim
Published just a year after the close of WWI, Wharton’s book was written to give Americans an appreciation for a people who stood beside their sons in battle. Wharton argues that despite the surface differences, France and America are in love with one thing above all: freedom, even at the cost of material comforts. She then proceeds through the hallmarks of French culture: reverence, taste, intellectual honesty, and continuity, asserting that the best way to study another nation is to focus on those values which our own nation is lacking.
French Aesthetic
Evident throughout Wharton’s writing is her deep love and appreciation for France, its history and its people. Such a bias compliments her role and purpose—to first praise, then represent most diplomatically, and then at last critique most tenderly the “French ways.” Wharton characterizes the Gallic people as “industrious, intelligent, and beautiful-loving” (Wharton, 34). They are a race of artists, and as such have a profound love and sense of beauty. In France, an appreciation for culture and beauty does not imply effeminacy as it does in America, where the average man may feel a certain dis-ease in the company of the delicate and romantic. Taste, which the French are known for, Wharton defines as the “environment where art lives.” The French cultivate a sense of beauty, that it may flourish in their midst.
French Language
The French language is an art itself. In 1635, when France was wallowing in the midst of chaos in dissension, Cardinal Richelieu paused to establish rules governing its language, ensuring that it would be “elegant, capable of dealing with the arts and sciences.” To this day in France, there remains an academy of “Forty Immortals,” guardians of refinement who preside over language and manners.
Wharton emphasizes the four words predominant in French literature, which are weakly translated into the English ‘glory’, ‘love’, ‘voluptuousness’, and ‘pleasure.’ A reader might be apt to think that a culture which stresses discipline and moderation (as the French do) would have the least appreciation for such concepts. Yet here lies one of life’s paradoxes, which the French mind grasps quite naturally.
French Cuisine
“They do not care for the raw material of sensation,” says Edith Wharton, “food must be exquisitely cooked, emotion eloquently expressed, desire emotionally heightened, every experience must be transmuted into terms of beauty before it touches their imagination” (136). Thus the French senses are heightened for the good things of life, for the very reason that they are not slaves to pleasure. The French excel at the delicate balance of moderation which makes abundant living possible. It is their temperance that allows for true enjoyment.
French Ascetism
Edith Wharton would explain that the French are capable of their joie de vivre because of their ascetism—that is, their tolerance for living sans comfort. “They want only enough leisure and freedom from material anxiety to enjoy what life and the arts have to offer” (93). Instead of evading life, or pursuing pleasure recklessly, the French would rather take the bad days as they come to be able to enjoy the happy times all the more fully. Americans have more money, while French people have more time. One need not be a great philosopher to tell which culture engenders a higher quality of existence.
Edith Wharton’s veritable ode to the lifestyle she admires offers an utterly refreshing read for the 21st Century American. Within the pages of French Ways and Their Meaning is the opportunity to reacquaint oneself with an ancient culture that has withstood the test of time and acquired a certain grace and sagacity when it comes to the art of living. The reverence for beauty that flows through the culture of France reveals the Gallic people to be not only connoisseurs of wine and cheese, but connoisseurs of life. For them, only la vie francaise will do.
French Ways and Their Meaning
Berkshire House Publishers, 1919.
ISBN: 0936399872
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