Manuscript - “Fame’s First Wooing”
In reference to the manuscript, Thomas Wolfe writes, “And it was still the same manuscript. Not a line of it had been changed, not a word cut, in spite of hints from Esther and Miss Scudder that it was too long for any publisher to handle. He had stubbornly refused to alter it, insisting that it would have to be printed as it was or not at all. And he had left the manuscript with Miss Scudder and gone away to Europe, convinced that her efforts to find a publisher would prove futile.” The manuscript typifies George’s outright “Fortune and Fame”; its publication guarantees George’s status for it would assert his dexterousness in writing. George withstands ‘sleepless nights’ during the groundwork of the manuscript because he is persuaded that the realization of the novel will be his superlative validation of his “Fame and fortune.”
Trap - “The Drunken Beggar on a Horseback”
Esther jack and George Webber’s romantic situation is emblematic of a passionate trap: “Esther Jack was much older than he, married and living with her husband and grown daughter. But she had given George her love, and given it so deeply, so exclusively, that he had come to feel himself caught as in a trap.” Although they are in love, George is conscious that theirs is a forbidden situation that is inept by all ethical and pious canons. Had Esther Jack been unmarried then the notion of being captured in the affair would have been insubstantial. A clandestine romance with a married woman is an dilemma that entangles one over-sentimentally.
