SOURCE: Young, Judy Hale. “The Repudiation of Sisterhood in Edith Wharton's ‘Pomegranate Seed.’” Studies in Short Fiction 33, no. 1 (winter 1996): 1-11.

In the following essay, Young addresses the theme of the absence of communication among women in Wharton's “The Pomegranate Seed.”

“What the ghost really needs is not echoing passages and hidden doors behind tapestry, but only continuity and silence” (Ghost Stories 3). This passage in the author's Preface to The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton refers ostensibly to the physical silence that she found increasingly unavailable in her lifetime, to the “silent hours when at last the wireless has ceased to jazz” (3). In some of the stories in the collection, however, we find evidence of her ongoing concern with a different kind of silence, the emotional silence of those condemned to the condition of noncommunication with their fellow creatures. Wharton articulates this concern in her autobiography, A Backward Glance...