The Wild Palms: Analysis of Major Characters
"The Wild Palms" features a rich tapestry of characters, each navigating complex emotional landscapes and moral dilemmas. Central to the narrative is Harry Wilbourne, a 27-year-old intern in a New Orleans hospital, who embarks on a passionate but tumultuous affair with Charlotte Rittenmeyer, a disillusioned socialite and aspiring artist. Charlotte's decision to abandon her family for Harry introduces themes of love, sacrifice, and the search for meaning in a life filled with constraints.
Francis "Rat" Rittenmeyer, Charlotte's husband, embodies the emotional turmoil of betrayal while adhering to his Catholic values, refusing to divorce Charlotte but offering Harry a means of escape should she choose to return. The doctor in the story represents a potential future for Harry, illustrating what he might become without the transformative, albeit painful, experiences of love and loss. Additionally, Buck Buckner, who pressures Harry into performing an abortion for financial reasons, adds another layer of complexity to the choices faced by the characters.
Together, these characters create a narrative that explores the intersections of love, responsibility, and personal growth against the backdrop of societal expectations and moral ambiguity.
The Wild Palms: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: William Faulkner
First published: 1939
Genre: Novel
Locale: The United States
Plot: Tragicomedy
Time: 1927 and 1937
Harry Wilbourne, a twenty-seven-year-old intern working in a New Orleans hospital. He meets and falls in love with Charlotte Rittenmeyer, a local socialite and would-be artist. Harry has humble antecedents and has made his way through medical school on a $2,000 legacy left to him by his doctor father. Although he is unaccustomed to going out socially, he accompanies an acquaintance from the hospital to a party. Over the next several weeks, Harry's natural reticence is swept away by Charlotte's vivacity, and he agrees to run away with her. Their short, tempestuous love affair eventually provides Harry with insights into matters of the human heart.
Charlotte Rittenmeyer, a bored, failed artist who latches onto the mild-mannered Harry Wilbourne, an impoverished intern whom she meets at a local artist's salon. She willingly abandons her husband and two daughters to leave New Orleans and live with Harry, at first in Chicago, later in Utah, and finally in Texas, where she dies from a bungled abortion reluctantly performed by Harry. She helps Harry to discover love and the joys of sex, as well as to learn to relish life lived from day to day.
Francis “Rat” Rittenmeyer, Charlotte's husband, a sophisticated man about town. Because he is Catholic, he will not divorce his wife when she decides to elope with Harry; instead, he gives Harry a Pullman check to cover the cost of Charlotte's return trip should she ever decide to come back to him. Although he is deeply hurt by her betrayal, he behaves decently and even gives a cyanide capsule to Harry to spare him the long imprisonment awaiting him for inadvertently causing his wife's death.
The doctor, a short, somewhat fat, untidy, provincial, middle-aged man who appears at the beginning of the story to tend to the dying Charlotte. He functions as a stand-in for what Harry would have become without his experiences in love. He is outraged by Harry's behavior and turns him in to the police when he calls for an ambulance to take Charlotte to the hospital. He owns the beachside cabin Harry and Charlotte rent at the story's conclusion, as well as the cabin next door, where he lives with his childless wife.
The doctor's wife, known as Miss Martha, who is as settled and conventional as her husband but shows some compassion for Harry and Charlotte. She suggests that Harry be allowed to run away to avoid prosecution, but she is overruled by her more legalistic husband.
Buck Buckner, who runs a failing mining operation in the mountains of Utah. Harry and Charlotte go there in order to escape falling into a conventional middle-class “marriage” in Chicago. Buck persuades Harry to perform an abortion on his wife, Billie, because they cannot afford to raise a child. The operation is successful, but Harry is worried enough about its outcome that he makes Buck promise to take Billie to a proper doctor once they have fled the mountains.