Goluboff is an associate professor of English at Lake Forest College. In the following essay, he examines the influence of Greek mythology on Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed."

Edith Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed" is a remarkable story that has largely eluded modern anthologies of short fiction. Perhaps this is because anthologists don't consider ghost stories to be serious literature; more likely the omission is a result of how Wharton's ghost stories have been overshadowed by the fiction of social observation through which she made her reputation in the first decades of this century. Nevertheless, "Pomegranate Seed" is very much deserving of our attention both for the way it makes the conventions of the traditional ghost story work in a setting that is conspicuously modern, and for its deft use of Greek myth to lend classical resonance to the events in that modern setting.

When Wharton sent a revised manuscript of...