Social Advancement Theme Analysis

Mr. Waythorn might be the primary breadwinner in “The Other Two,” but it’s his wife, Alice Waythorn, who most embodies the ideals of social advancement and self-improvement that were prevalent during the Gilded Age, when the story was published. As a woman, Alice Waythorn takes full advantage of one of the few methods by which she may improve her social standing: marriage. As the story progresses, the reader—and Mr. Waythorn—learns that Alice Waythorn wasn’t always a woman of social and economic importance. Her first husband, Mr. Haskett, is a common man of limited means. Unsatisfied with the life he could provide her, she marries Mr. Varick, who provides her with material comforts but broke the bonds of marital fidelity. Unsatisfied, still, with Varick’s failure to honor his marriage vows, Alice marries “up” once more, to Mr. Waythorn, who she believes will provide her with wealth, status, and loyalty. But remarrying doesn’t permit Alice to improve herself—only to gain a new and improved identity each time she binds herself to a new, seemingly better husband. Alice can’t be fully blamed for her imperfect opportunism: the compromised social status of women at the turn of the century would have prevented her from seeking opportunity in other, more effective ways afforded to men. Still, Alice’s opportunistic, strategic marriages take a toll on the relationships she has with her husbands of past and present. In “The Other Two,” Wharton explores the drastic steps Alice takes to advance her social standing. Wharton melds the domestic sphere (the Waythorn marriage) with the social sphere (polite society) in order to illustrate the pervasive culture of social advancement and self-improvement in the Gilded Age, and the negative effects this culture has on sincerity and intimacy in personal relationships.

The perpetual shifting of identities that Alice undergoes makes it impossible for Mr. Waythorn to know or love the real Alice—he only knows the version of her that she has become to achieve and succeed at this current marriage. Waythorn reflects on his wife’s previous legal identities: “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 her inmost self where the unknown god abides.” Waythorn believes that Alice sacrifices her genuine self in order to move up in the world, fragmenting her personality further and further with each subsequent marriage, until there is only a sliver left of herself to give. What she gains in status, Waythorn concludes, she loses in personal identity. Waythorn states that “Haskett’s commonness had made Alice worship good breeding, while Varick’s liberal construction of the marriage bond had taught her to value the conjugal virtues.” Waythorn divides the different facets of his wife’s personality to the different men to whom she once belonged, once again emphasizing that her identity is a constantly shifting response to the men in her life.

Waythorn feels used by Alice’s method of social advancement. Waythorn is deeply “disturbed” when he first sees Haskett, who is harmless in his economic insignificance and commonness. On realizing that Alice left Haskett not for his brutishness (the story she’s spun for Waythorn) but for his lack of means, Waythorn realizes that husbands are not romantic companions to Alice, but tools by which she may move up in the world. With this, Waythorn comes to the conclusion that Alice might not love him as much as she loves the lifestyle his economic status allows her to enjoy. Once he learns the truth about Alice’s motivations to remarry, Waythorn talks about the past marriages in objective, nonromantic terms. Miserably, he has no choice but to realize that his marriage to Alice is, too, a continuation of this opportunistic pattern, and this diminishes the intimacy he feels towards his wife.

Waythorn repeatedly uses theater imagery in his musings about Alice and her opportunistic actions. The theatrical language and imagery imply a phoniness or staged quality to the way Waythorn perceives Alice’s personality and actions within their marriage. Waythorn describes Alice’s marriage to Varick as “a passport to the set whose recognition she coveted.” A set, or staging, is false, and disallows for intimacy between married partners. Waythorn also observes that “It was as if her whole aspect, every gesture, inflection, every allusion, were a studied negation of that period of her life.” He compares Alice’s role as wife to the studied mannerisms of an actress, and therefore considers their marriage to be only a performance.

Alice Waythorn sees marriage as the only viable means by which she may enter into polite society, and the result is a blurring of the line between the private world of intimacy (marriage and companionship) and the public world of society (social and economic status). Alice chooses her husbands, not as companions, but as passports into a richer, more prestigious way of life. The tragic result is a series of relationships devoid of intimacy and genuine connection, a problem that echoes the larger Gilded Age pattern of destructive social climbing that Wharton sought to critique.