“Writing a War Story” by Edith Wharton is shocking—and it isn’t. Spending weeks crafting a war story for a magazine for soldiers, Ivy Spang is particularly proud of herself when she completes it. She buys copies of the magazine for the soldiers she looks after in the hospital, nervous but excited for them to read it. The men are outwardly impressed— but not by her story, but rather her portrait on the cover page. Reading this I was disgusted but unsurprised. In an age where things like last Saturday’s Women’s March are still very much needed, I see truth in Wharton’s short story even today.

What troubled me even more though was Spang’s conversation with Harold Harbard, another solider and famous novelist. Nervous for his opinion on her work, Spang enters his room to find him laughing at her story. When she works up the courage to ask him the reason for his laughter, their conversation goes like this:

“…But it’s queer—it’s puzzling. You’ve got hold of a wonderfully good subject; and that’s the main thing, of course—‘ Ivy interrupted him eagerly. ‘The subject is the main thing?’ ‘Why, naturally; it’s only the people without invention who tell you it isn’t.’ ‘Oh,’ she gasped, trying to readjust her carefully acquired theory of esthetics.”

Earlier in the story Spang experiences intense writer’s block. What helps her essentially is a magazine that insists that a ‘subject’, in fact, is not the most important part of a story, but rather the delivery and art form of it. What we see above is Harbard turning that logic on its head, and Spang not only resigning her own thoughts on the matter, but also preparing to reshape her entire mindset on it. She is hurt and disrespected by Harbard and yet, because he is a successful man in literature, she takes what he says as ultimate truth, disregarding all that she thought she knew.