Editha

Editha Balcom is a young woman—sometimes called a “girl” (4)—from a town in northern New York. She encourages her fiancé, George Gearson, to enlist for the Spanish-American War. Her desire for him to fight is borne not of true patriotism but of a fixation on “the highest ideal” (2). Editha desires that the man who gets to marry her truly earn her love by being a “hero” and by doing “something to win her” (1). In convincing George to enlist, Editha relies on phrasing used in propaganda in newspapers, telling him “[t]here is nothing now but our country” (2) and that “God meant it to be war” (3). In doing so, she is careful to give the impression that she is letting him come to these conclusions himself. When George wavers, Editha packs up his letters and gifts to her, including her engagement ring, and writes him a letter in which she explains that she must return these items until he decides to enlist, for “[t]here is no honor above America with me” (4).

Editha tends to use romantic platitudes, behaving in a way she imagines is ideal. When she parts with him at the train station, she tells him she is his “for time and eternity—time and eternity,” a dramatic statement that “satisfied her famine for phrases” (7). After his death, when she visits George’s mother, she imagines herself going “down on her knees at the feet of the seated figure” and telling her, “I am George’s Editha” (9). Editha is surprised when George’s mother does not indulge her but rather accuses her of callously coercing George to go to war to procure glory for herself.

That Editha will forever live in her fantasy of the ideal is suggested at the end of the story when a portraitist sketches “Editha’s beauty, which lent itself wonderfully to the effects of a colorist” (11). When the artist, after hearing Editha’s story, affirms to Editha that Mrs. Gearson was “vulgar” (11), Editha feels light breaking through the darkness: “[F]rom that moment she rose from groveling in shame and self-pity, and began to live again in the ideal” (11).

Editha’s obsession with the ideal represents America’s obliviousness to the reality of war. Her romantic, patriotic, and religious professions are hollow and self-serving, exploiting America, the oppressed, and even George himself. In Editha, readers see the dangers of romanticism, which glorifies heroism while ignoring individuals’ sacrifices. Having never been to war herself, Editha cannot possibly know what she’s sending George into—unlike George’s mother who, as a widow of a Civil War soldier, knows only too well what war really means. Editha’s using the war as a way for George to prove his worthiness of her not only reinforces the shallowness of Editha’s patriotism but also suggests that romance, in addition to patriotism, is often empty and self-centered. That Howells describes her as a “girl” only reinforces her inability to foresee the consequences of her actions.