“The Other Two” is a modernist short story. Like many other modernist writers, Wharton felt that literature had to evolve alongside society and that, in the 20th century, writers should seek to capture the suffering and alienation specific to industrialized modern society.
Though many modernist writers focused on telling stories about lower-class characters actively experiencing the negative effects of social and economic advancement (such as poverty and exploitation), Wharton focused on the particular struggles of the wealthy, using satire in the process. In “The Other Two,” Wharton is highlighting how wealthy people (like Waythorn) feel alienated not because of exploitation and oppression, but because of the particular social expectations of elite New York society that require them to behave with composure rather than sharing what they really feel or think.
In this way, “The Other Two” is also a comedy of manners, a type of literature that focuses on the ways that people behave according to the “manners” or etiquette expected of them in a given society, often with humorous results. Comedies of manners often juxtapose characters’ polite outward actions with their frustrated or devastated inner worlds, as channeled through the narrator. This is certainly the case in “The Other Two”—Waythorn is constantly frustrated with his interactions with his wife Alice and her two ex-husbands, yet she continues to act as if everything is fine, even through the final scene in the story.
