Seasonal Images by Wharton, Le Guin and JohnsonSummer Now in November The Left Hand of Darkness Yeats's expression of the circularity of the seasons dates back to literature at least until the poet Horace (Wirtjes 533). Traditionally, women's lives, centered on supporting the family, have mimicked the cycles of the seasons much more than those of men. Theirs were lives that repeated the motifs of every previous year, always reborn but never completely new. Women, therefore, have less experiential reason to see their lives as part of an inexorable march forward rather than as several turns on the great wheel of birth and death. Likewise, female writers pay more attention than their male counterparts to the circular and seasonal nature of their protagonists' lives. This is the case of Summer by Edith Wharton, Now in November by Josephine Johnson and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. All three novelists place the current movement of the protagonists against a backdrop of stillness. Both Wharton and Le Guin contrast the change of their protagonists with the apparent constancy of summer and winter, while Johnson contrasts a critical family transition from spring to autumn with the protagonist's assertion of identity from year to year. Therefore, each novelist, while describing the movement necessary to build a narrative arc, places this movement in a broader context of circularity and identity, represented for each by the recurring seasons. Edith Wharton's Summer, written in 1916, traces the sexual awakening of young Charity Royall from her carefree abandonment in June through her affair with visiting Lucius Harney in July and August, ending in the autumn with her de facto abandonment and marriage of convenience with the man who raised her, the lawyer Royall. As Peter L. Hays notes, seasonal imagery provides "an apt metaphor for Charity's development" (114). Hays links this development explicitly to the seasons, if simplistically, with Charity's "growth and maturation" during the summer leading to her "impending harvest, both of wisdom and child" in the fall (116). Yet, like Kate Chopin several years earlier in The Awakening, Wharton, I believe, avoids this simple ending. Indeed, another critic notes that "What Elizabeth Ammons says about The Reef applies with equal force to Summer: 'One man's fairy-tale fantasy of liberation appears to be but is not a dream of freedom for women. It is a glorification of the status quo'" (Crowley 87). Charity at the end of the novel neither realizes her dreams (love and freedom with Harney) nor bears her nightmares (poverty and prostitution as a single mother).).