The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton 9781350182936, 9781350182967, 9781350182943

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO EDITH WHARTON

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO EDITH WHARTON

Edited by Emily J. Orlando

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Emily J. Orlando and contributors, 2023 The editor and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Rebecca Heselton Cover image © Edith Wharton Collection, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 42, Box 53, Folder 1600, Date: 1925–38. Printed by Permission of the Estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis Agency. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-8293-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-8294-3 eBook: 978-1-3501-8295-0 Series: Bloomsbury Handbooks Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.blo​omsb​ury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

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I llustrations  

P reface   Dale M. Bauer

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F oreword   Nicholas Hudson, Anne Schuyler, and Susan Wissler

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A cknowledgments  

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1 Introduction: Broadening the Horizon of Edith Wharton Studies  Emily J. Orlando

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Part One  Edith Wharton and Identity 2 Single, White, Female: Miscegenation, Incest, and Reproduction in Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep  Meredith L. Goldsmith 3 Queer Wharton: The Exultations and Agonies of Kate Clephane’s Closet  Shannon Brennan

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4 Picturing Edith Wharton’s Modern Woman: Gender and the Social Construction of Age  Melanie V. Dawson

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5 Paralysis and Euthanasia in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree, The Shadow of a Doubt, and Ethan Frome  Maria-Novella Mercuri

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Part Two  Edith Wharton beyond the Novel 6 “Social Order and Individual Appetites”: Edith Wharton’s Short Stories, 1891–1904  Paul J. Ohler

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7 Edith Wharton in Verse  Emily Setina

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8 Edith Wharton and Film  Donna M. Campbell

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Part Three  Influences and Intertextualities 9 “The Chill Joy of Renunciation”: Feminine Sacrifice in Edith Wharton and Christina Rossetti  Margaret Jay Jessee 10 Edith Wharton and Willa Cather: Beyond “Surface Differences”  Julie Olin-Ammentorp 11 Consciousness in Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Reef and The Golden Bowl  Jill Kress Karn

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Part Four  Global and Cultural Contexts 12 Edith Wharton and the Narratives of Travel and Tourism  Gary Totten

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13 Seeking a Home for the Wretched Exotics: Edith Wharton’s Heterotopic Views of Greece  Myrto Drizou

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14 “Totally Vanished … Like a Pinch of Dust”: Edith Wharton and the Trope of Cultural Extinction  Nir Evron

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15 Edith Wharton and Pleasure  Virginia Ricard 16 The Mermaid as Capitalist: Networking and Upward Mobility in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country  Francesca Sawaya

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Part Five  Edith Wharton’s Library 17 Reading the Reader: Edith Wharton’s Library, Digital Methods, and the Uses of Data  Sheila Liming

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18 The Complete Works of Edith Wharton: Preparing the First Authoritative Edition  Carol J. Singley, Donna M. Campbell, and Frederick Wegener

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Afterword: Edith Wharton in the Twenty-First Century  Elaine Showalter

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B ibliography  

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C ontributors  

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ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1 “The Mount’s Stable, 2018” by Eric Limon 

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0.2 “The Mount’s Forecourt Overhead, 2019” by Tom Tranfaglia for Tricia McCormack Photography 

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1.1 “Edith Wharton and two dogs on outdoor terrace with six friends”

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8.1 The House of Mirth, 1918

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8.2 The Marriage Playground 122 17.1 Early edition of Racine’s Oeuvres with the binder’s mark

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17.2 Interior of a volume from an 1813 set of the complete works of Jonathan Swift

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17.3 Graph showing proportions of books included in the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org database

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PREFACE DALE M. BAUER

At a virtual book club hosted by the New York Times (January 28, 2021), novelist Claire Messud offered a brief talk on Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) and then took questions about Wharton’s writing. From around the globe, fans of Wharton’s fiction streamed in, with chat threads alongside the main event. What was fascinating in this double-sided display was the opposite tones of Messud and her audience: Messud focused on Undine as the “indomitable heroine” of the novel, devoted as Wharton’s figure is to material goods and fashion. Messud claimed that readers could take Undine as the heroine or antiheroine of Wharton’s novel, depending on their view of Wharton’s irony or sincerity. In contrast, the audience evaluated Undine’s morality, describing her as a “horrid mother” and a despicable human being, even invoking Meghan Markle and Melania Trump as current versions of Undine. These fans also nominated their favorite Wharton gems—from “Roman Fever” and “Xingu” to The Age of Innocence (1920) and The House of Mirth (1905)—or they relished descriptions of the writer’s historic Massachusetts home, The Mount. Finally, the most engaged discussion concerned Sofia Coppola’s upcoming adaptation of the novel and the various actresses who should play Undine, with Scarlett Johansson and Anya Taylor-Joy taking the lead. Yet this impressive virtual meeting of Wharton’s readers—over four thousand!—did not speak to what specialists research in contemporary Wharton studies; instead, the exchanges offered significant but conventional readings of the novel. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton will help to change such conventional interpretations since it profoundly advances how scholars understand Wharton’s context, history, and pursuits. Typically, Wharton scholars do not look for present-day avatars, except perhaps in the classroom. Rather, as Emily Orlando’s volume proves, Wharton scholars address the ways to represent the writer’s work in undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as engage other scholars and critics of American literature in researching women writers and the economies of women’s lives. That economy may be one of Messud’s interests, too, but her assessment is delivered with the insight of both a novelist and a sensitive, incisive reader, not with the authority—and the force of research—undergirding the following chapters. How is this confidence in Wharton’s literary historical study achieved? First, these scholars view Wharton as a writer who offered as many perspectives as she could, including the complexity within her narrative voice, throughout the vast range of her publications. That breadth of perspectives signifies today because of her versatility among topics and genres, especially in her desire to express herself through short fiction, novels, nonfiction, travel sketches, poetry, plays, speaking engagements, and more. In addition, scholars are also acutely aware of how Wharton’s personal circumstances might condition her writing, as in her family wealth or her often progressive, sometimes conservative politics. This division was part of the debate at the Edith Wharton Society’s virtual

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conference (July 2020), where major Wharton scholars addressed their commitment to studying this writer and the potential for future Wharton Studies.1 That roster consisted of Carol Singley, Jennie Kassanoff, Parley Ann Boswell, Emily Orlando, Laura Rattray, Melanie Dawson, Jennifer Haytock, and Julie Olin-Ammentorp. Broadly conceived and detailed below, their vision encompassed three main concerns: Wharton’s life and its relation to her art; the themes in her work that remain so fertile for new and future Wharton specialists; and Wharton’s place in and her contributions to literary history and its implications for literary historiography. First, Wharton scholars are alert to a writer concerned about aging, and how that point of view affords a methodological consideration or concept. Her perspective on aging enhances her sympathy toward maturing and leads her to a more generous vision of older women. Beyond debates over aging to which Wharton responded during the 1920s, she was also keenly aware of the rise of flaming youth, embodied in the figure of the flapper. Moreover, Wharton was fascinated with the increase in the number of “child marriages,” which Dawson defines as marriage between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, and the “satire of irresponsible parenthood.” This is the question that Wharton raises about middle age and sexuality. Second, these scholars also analyze the prevailing themes of investigation, as we see in studies like Kassanoff ’s reading of “Wharton’s pharmacopeia” in the treatment of drug-taking in Bunner Sisters ([1892] 1916). These studies reveal Wharton as a writer who, in the twentieth century, seemed extraordinarily attuned to issues of race and class; now, in the twenty-first, she appears as a writer psychologically committed to imagine in her characters the dynamics of what Orlando claims is the kind of “extortion” and the cultivating of social image that serves as a gloss on contemporary narcissism. Part of this narcissism concerns the critical discourse of the day, especially in terms of white privilege and white hegemony (with Lily Bart cast, for example, as the “white idol,” to borrow Kassanoff ’s phrase). These literary historians also participate in debates about canonicity and how crucial to the restoration of Wharton’s critical status has been the work of specialists—first, through the interventions of women’s studies scholars, then benefiting from the insights of queer/race/class studies. More recently, scholars have pursued new historical inquiries concerning modes of publication and circulation, including Wharton’s place among those writers devoted to serialization and her steady gaze directed at modes of publication. These investigations also take up Wharton’s connections to the world of theater, as Rattray argues. Finally, scholarly discussion must also turn, as a contemporary novelist’s appreciation does not, to what critical work remains to be done, toward what directions Wharton specialists should be moving. While many topics have emerged—including queerness and social purity—perhaps the most telling ones represent the expanding vision of Wharton’s international aspect, particularly her writings about Italy, Morocco, France, and Greece. Thus, this Bloomsbury handbook sets the stage for a “new” Wharton, one compelling readers to see Wharton in relation to women’s fiction of her day and, despite her resistance to the idea, as a competitor for space among women writers—from Christina Rossetti to Willa Cather and Mary Roberts Rinehart, among so many other authors to whom Wharton looked and with whom she competed. The Wharton who emerges is a writer who hungrily read other writers from all disciplines and who has fueled these new essays as inquiries for the Wharton Studies of the twenty-first century.

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NOTE 1 My thanks to the directors of the 2020 Edith Wharton Society Conference, Margaret Jay Jessee and Meg Toth, who arranged a virtual roundtable on July 16 after Covid-19 made impossible the New York City conference.

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FOREWORD NICHOLAS HUDSON, ANNE SCHUYLER, AND SUSAN WISSLER

“What is this place?” the visitor asks before paying the entrance fee. “Who was this Edith Wharton?” At The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home in Lenox, Massachusetts, we hear these questions all the time. How should we answer them? How do we present this immensely accomplished woman, one who may fascinate literary scholars, but who for many of our visitors seems old-fashioned and elitist, a figure out of the past with no relevance to their world? Over fifty thousand people visit The Mount in a typical year. Some of them are familiar with Wharton, but many are not. In our effort to engage all visitors, from the diehard Wharton aficionados to those who have never heard of her, we have the good fortune of the physical property itself. Those not familiar with Wharton’s writings can still feel an immediate response to the architecture, the gardens, and the natural beauty of the surrounding landscape. “No one fully knows our Edith,” claimed Henry James, “who hasn’t seen her in the act of creating a habitation for herself.”1 While we are unable to see Wharton in the act of creating a home, we can see the one she meticulously designed. What The Mount reveals about the famously private author enlightens and even surprises our visitors, who often bring a wide range of preconceptions, and sometimes misconceptions, with them. In 1897, while living in Newport, Wharton coauthored The Decoration of Houses with the architect and interior designer Ogden Codman, Jr. Their book challenged Victorian-era interior design by advocating classical principles of moderation, symmetry, and proportion. Wharton would apply these concepts when she and her husband Teddy left Newport and built The Mount in 1901. Both were deeply invested in creating the estate, yet Edith’s imprint is the more powerful. The money was mostly hers, the aesthetic was largely hers, and the name was entirely hers: “The Mount” was her great-grandfather’s estate on Long Island. Nearly 120 years have passed since the Whartons built The Mount. Some elements have changed and yet a remarkable number of features remain. Now, as then, the entrance gates open onto a tree-lined drive that passes the gatehouse, originally the home of her head gardener Thomas Reynolds. Beyond the gatehouse is a greenhouse and a grass field, once the site of an expansive kitchen garden designed by Wharton’s niece, the noted landscape architect Beatrix Jones Farrand. Continuing down the drive, the elegant Georgian Revival stable, often mistaken for the house, looms on the left. Designed by Hoppin & Koen, the same architectural firm that drew up the plans for the main house, the stable was Teddy Wharton’s passion. “Mr. Wharton’s pride is the stable, which is indeed one of the finest in Lenox,” wrote Berkshire Resort Topics in 1904.2 If our visitors let their imaginations go, they may hear the muffled whinnies of the Whartons’ carriage horses or the commotion of coachman William Parlett’s young family. He, his wife, and their three children lived on the stable’s second floor (Figure 0.1).

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FIGURE 0.1  “The Mount’s Stable, 2018” by Eric Limon. Reproduced with the permission of The Mount, Lenox, MA.

Just beyond the stable, the drive courses gently downward. A number of the sugar maples planted by Wharton and Farrand have been lost, yet their original design, flanking both sides of the drive, can still be appreciated as the maple allée draws visitors artfully into the innermost part of the estate. As the road bends, the visitor catches first sight of the house, a stately white structure built into a small hillside, the stylistic inspiration for the other buildings on the estate. Wharton, schooled in the precepts of the Italian Renaissance, sought to create a complete work of art, with all aspects of landscape and architecture blended in a harmonious whole. The modest forecourt, based on the French cour d’honneur, surprises many visitors, who bring expectations of grandiose entrances as seen in some of the other “cottages” of Lenox and, most notably, Newport (Figure 0.2). No fan of Newport, Wharton had something else in mind. The front of the house is arguably simple, even a touch austere. The back is far more expressive, with a broad, herringbone brick terrace and gracious Palladian staircase leading down to the gardens. Here, the harmony of house and landscape is most fully evident. The forecourt today, with its high whitewashed curved brick walls and superb acoustics, is an ideal starting place for our house tour. At the outset, we regularly ask if anyone has read any Wharton. Invariably someone mentions reading Ethan Frome in high school. Others have not read Wharton but have seen Martin Scorsese’s exquisite adaptation of The Age of Innocence, which is occasionally conflated with Pride and Prejudice. After separating Wharton from Jane Austen, and urging them to reread Ethan Frome, we start the tour using the house to tell Wharton’s story. Passing through the front door, you find yourself in the entrance hall. Built to resemble a grotto, it feels cool, earthy, and perhaps slightly dim despite the electric lights. For while

Foreword

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FIGURE 0.2  “The Mount’s Forecourt Overhead, 2019” by Tom Tranfaglia for Tricia McCormack Photography. Reproduced with the permission of The Mount, Lenox, MA.

The Mount may have been built on classical principles, it, like Wharton, was thoroughly modern. Without fail, our visitors are surprised to learn The Mount had electricity, thanks to George Westinghouse, who lived next door. A wrought-iron French-style staircase ascends to the main floor where a long, airy gallery with vaulted ceiling and terrazzo marble floor opens onto the dining room, drawing room, library, and den. Doors feature prominently in these rooms. Wharton wrote in The Decoration of Houses that while “the main purpose of a door is to admit, its secondary purpose is to exclude.”3 Throughout the house Wharton’s properly proportioned doors provide both versatility and seclusion. Her sense that “privacy would seem to be one of the first requisites of civilized life”4 is reflected in The Mount’s interiors. The oak-paneled library, in the northeast corner of the main floor, was likely one of Wharton’s favorite rooms; it certainly is one of ours. Many mistakenly believe us to be the repository of Wharton archives or the representative of her literary estate. We are neither. However, we do have an extensive collection of her books; more specifically, the surviving 2,700 volumes from Wharton’s own library. And it is our prized possession. For many visitors, especially scholars and writers, the library is The Mount’s soul. It is among her books, poring over her many notes and markings, that people often feel closest to Wharton. Frequently they are moved to tears.5 Directly above the library, on the third floor, is Wharton’s bedroom. This space also speaks eloquently to visitors. It is here that Wharton wrote, in bed, dogs by her side, dashing off page after page, famously letting them fall to the floor, to be assembled by her

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maid or secretary. Strewn across the bed are reproduced pages from her manuscript for The House of Mirth, which brings an immediacy to her as a writer. Time and again, visitors struggle to read Wharton’s forceful handwriting and decipher the numerous scratchedout passages. The room faces north and east, catching the morning light, and overlooking her formal French flower garden, a glorious mass of color from late spring through early fall. There is also a view to her pet cemetery where four of her dogs are buried, their graves marked by miniature tombstones. Wharton loved dogs, especially small ones, and her affection for these furry companions humanizes her for visitors, particularly children. Throughout the house, visitors are pleased and astonished by the rooms’ gracious yet comfortable proportions. “I could live here,” visitors regularly observe. This impression is no accident, as Wharton believed in, and practiced, the science and beauty of perfect proportion. Disdainful of cavernous interiors typical of Gilded Age mansions, she created a home to live in. Our visitors’ reactions over a hundred years later confirm how well she succeeded. The Whartons sold The Mount in 1911. Edith moved permanently to France and divorced Teddy in 1913. She never returned to The Mount, though she would write in her memoir, A Backward Glance (1934), that its “blessed influence still lives in me.”6 The property had a succession of residents, including private homeowners, a girls’ boarding school, and a theater company. The nonprofit organization Edith Wharton Restoration, Inc. was formed in 1978; assisted by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it bought the property in 1980. However, it was not until the late 1990s, upon receipt of nearly $4.5 million in federal and state grants, that major restoration began. Coincidentally, the 1990s brought renewed popular attention to Wharton, thanks to several film adaptations, most prominently The Age of Innocence. This contributed to a successful grand opening of the house in 2002, its centennial year. However, with increasing expenses compounded by the financial crisis of 2008, The Mount faced foreclosure. Working with our community lenders we were able to regain our financial footing and ultimately fully recover. But the harrowing episode forced us to reevaluate our relationship with the public. Our first decision was to take down the “velvet ropes”—that is, to remove the stanchions—allowing our visitors to walk where they chose, to touch, and, perhaps most importantly, to sit. For, as engaging as our docents might be, sometimes what visitors most appreciate is a chair: “Most of these house tours end up boring me, but because they were considerate enough to provide lots of seating along the way, I was able to listen and enjoy the docent’s talk which was quite interesting.”7 We field a wide range of visitor questions. Most often, it is a request for our favorite Wharton title. Men frequently ask if she had any connection to the Wharton Business School.8 Occasionally, we are asked if Edith Wharton and Henry James were lovers. Increasingly, the questions reflect ongoing social, political, and cultural conversations. Was Wharton a feminist? What was her attitude toward race? Was she anti-Semitic? How is her legacy changing as we move further into the twenty-first century? For us, these inquiries indicate a continued interest in Wharton and an eagerness to connect her to current affairs. This means we must present Wharton in full—her life, her literary work, and her social views—even when they may be uncomfortable for visitors. To meet this challenge, we rely on Wharton scholars to interpret the totality of her life and literature as we answer, in contemporary terms, what is this place, who was Edith Wharton, and, perhaps most importantly, why should we care?

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NOTES Quoted in Percy Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947), 129–30. 1 2 “‘The Mount,’ in Lenox,” Berkshire Resort Topics, September 10, 1904. 3 Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., The Decoration of Houses (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 107. 4 Ibid., 25. 5 Wharton scholar Sheila Liming began to digitize Wharton’s library in 2015. The result is on her website, http://sheil​alim​ing.com/ewl/home.html. 6 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance, in Novellas and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1990), 879. 7 Bgcglaze, September 2019, comment on TripAdvisor entry on The Mount, https://www.trip​ advi​sor.com/Attrac​tion​_Rev​iew-g41​639-d106​764-Revi​ews-The​_Mou​nt_E​dith​_Wha​rton​_s_ H​ome-Leno​x_Ma​ssac​huse​tts.html. 8 Teddy was the second cousin once removed to Joseph Wharton (1826–1909) who founded the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Cornelia Brooke Gilder, email message to Anne Schuyler, February 16, 2021.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As Edith Wharton so eloquently writes in her preface to A Backward Glance, “Everywhere on my path I have met with kindness and furtherance” (xx). It is a joy to acknowledge the many kind persons who helped bring this book to light. I must first thank David Avital at Bloomsbury for the invitation to assemble, introduce, and edit this volume. I owe a special debt of thanks to the anonymous readers whose excellent suggestions strengthened and enhanced the project. Special thanks to Dale Bauer, Shannon Brennan, Meredith Goldsmith, Paul Ohler, Nels Pearson, Laura Rattray, and Gary Totten for their generous feedback on the Introduction. My best reader, Jaime Osterman Alves, has painstakingly read every word of mine in print; my prose and my heart are better for her interventions. A great debt of thanks to Katherine (Kerry) Kircher for impeccable editorial assistance in the final stretch. Everyone at Bloomsbury Academic, and especially the amazing Ben Doyle and Laura Cope, has been a pleasure to work with. I bow down in gratitude to the all-star contributors from across the globe, who said yes and graciously lent their voices and expertise to this volume. Heartfelt thanks to the Watkins/Loomis Agency, which oversees the estate of Edith Wharton, and to the extraordinary team at Yale University’s Beinecke Research Library, particularly for permission to reprint the photograph gracing the cover and included in the Introduction. I thank Fairfield University for the spring 2021 sabbatical that allowed me to immerse myself in all things Wharton. I am exceedingly grateful to the family of Dr. E. Gerald Corrigan, Fairfield class of 1963, for the endowed chair in the Humanities and Social Sciences, which it has been my honor to hold since fall 2018. Thank you to my mentors at Saint Anselm College and the University of Maryland for their models of excellence and untold letters of reference. I cannot imagine my path without their kindness and furtherance. I thank my family for their unswerving support and faith in my abilities as a writer and human. It is my sense that my late parents Frank Orlando (my favorite Boston architect) and Anita Orlando (favorite woman artist) worked behind the scenes to birth this book. To Levi, Molly, and Carlo I extend thanks for dogged loyalty and good cheer. Of course, none of this would come together without the support of my husband, intellectual tourde-force and rightly loved human, Nels Pearson, with whom it has been my greatest blessing to share what Elizabeth Barrett Browning calls “the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life.” The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton is dedicated to the Edith Wharton Society, the staff at The Mount, my beloved students and colleagues at Fairfield University, and all who support the study and teaching of Edith Wharton. Emily J. Orlando

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CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Broadening the Horizon of Edith Wharton Studies EMILY J. ORLANDO

On hearing of Edith Wharton’s passing in 1937, Bernard Berenson confided to a mutual friend: “For me she can never be dead. She will remain while consciousness lasts in me … a cultural term of reference.”1 Millicent Bell more recently posited that Wharton “saw herself, like George Eliot, as an intellectual, interested in her culture in a broad sense—in questions of nationality and sociology and history as these affected all mankind … as an historian of class shifts and of changes in manners.”2 The American writer Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was one of the most important cultural critics and social historians of her time. Wharton’s suggestion that the secret to a well-lived life, particularly when “the fabric of our daily life has been torn to shreds, trampled on, destroyed,”3 is to remain “insatiable in intellectual curiosity,” “interested in big things,” and “unafraid of change”4 resounds with meaning for our post-pandemic moment. Nearly a hundred years after Berenson’s observation, and a quarter century after Bell’s, Edith Wharton retains her place on both sides of the Atlantic as a vibrant “cultural term of reference” and social historian. As this scholarly handbook will show, her writings across the genres provide the tools to critically examine the vicissitudes of our complicated, fractured world as we advance into the third decade of the new century. Since the “dazzling resurrection” in the 1990s of the writer’s reputation,5 Edith Wharton studies has evolved from a largely US-based project grounded in feminist literary criticism to an increasingly global, multidisciplinary enterprise. Wharton had been known, for the greater part of the twentieth century, much in the way her obituaries characterized her: novelist who chronicled Gilded Age New York, author of the sobering New England tale Ethan Frome (1911), and, following the publication of The Age of Innocence (1920), first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Wharton is now embraced by specialists in not only literary, cultural, and gender studies but also architecture, art history, museum studies, fashion studies, history, sociology, and anthropology.6 She is studied in classrooms more frequently than ever, is the subject of a peer-reviewed journal with a broad reach,7 and is regularly represented in book clubs, on “Jeopardy!,” and in frequently trending hashtags across social media.

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO EDITH WHARTON

The diverse range of voices who have recently cited Edith Wharton as a formative influence or favorite writer suggests the writer’s attractiveness beyond the academy, across generations and demographics.8 In the space of six months, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Vulture.com, and Entertainment Weekly prominently featured Wharton in their pages.9 For its second virtual book club meeting, which took up Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country, the Times drew over four thousand participants.10 As this book goes to press, Julian Fellowes’s Wharton-inspired miniseries The Gilded Age was just renewed by HBO for a second season while Sofia Coppola’s Apple TV adaptation of The Custom of the Country is in development—two narratives informed by Wharton’s command of the clash between the old guard and the new. Edith Wharton, it seems, is everywhere. The evidence suggests that her capacious body of work and remarkable accomplishments as a humanitarian speak to us more powerfully than ever before. Edith Newbold Jones Wharton, whose family members were among Mrs. Astor’s “Four Hundred,” was groomed for a career as a leisure-class wife but ultimately transformed herself into a consummate master of the rightly celebrated fiction as well as poetry, drama, memoir, and nonfiction prose on travel, literary criticism, gardening, architecture, and design. The very picture of cosmopolitanism, Wharton, comfortable with five languages, read voraciously and produced at an astonishing pace; “between 1897 and 1937 Wharton published at least one book almost every year of her life. (She has, altogether, forty-eight titles to her name.)”11 She lived and/or traveled in Italy, England, Spain, France, Germany, Morocco, and her native country before settling in France; although she questioned America’s conduct during the Great War, she never renounced citizenship. Wharton was also an unlikely war hero honored by the French and Belgian governments for her tireless philanthropic work in support of refugees. Indeed, the November 28, 1915 New York Sun wrote of Wharton that “no woman, probably no man not engaged in military service, has seen so much of the war” (“In the Land of Death”). A lifelong lover of dogs, she helped establish the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Edith Wharton’s oeuvre continually suggests that, like Walt Whitman, whom she featured in the 1924 novella “The Spark,” she is “large” and “contain[s]‌multitudes,” her contributions to the study of American culture extending far beyond the leisure class satires. Wharton is also, like her beloved poet, marked by contradiction—a point embraced by this book. As Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray have recently noted, “To study Wharton is to engage with an almost overwhelming volume of material,” some of it admittedly contradictory, “produced by a woman of enormous energies, interests, and areas of expertise.”12 Edith Wharton was one of the most popular, critically acclaimed, and handsomely paid writers of her time. She was as read as she was well read.13 She rose to prominence for a series of well-received short stories in the 1890s, collected as The Greater Inclination (1899). Indeed, in the stories, which she affectionately called her “smaller realisms,”14 Wharton was “doing New York” long before her friend and fellow realist Henry James famously implored her to do so.15 She distinguished herself as an authority on interior decor and architecture with The Decoration of Houses (1897), which, written with the architect and interior designer Ogden Codman, Jr., was recently called “the most important decorating book ever written” and the “pioneering guide” to which “all modern design books owe their existence.”16 Her triumphant novel of social commentary The House of Mirth (1905) and subsequent fictions made her famous.17 A kind of literary counterpart to the painter John Singer Sargent, Wharton was found to be particularly adept at capturing the New York aristocracy, which she critiques in “Souls Belated” (1899) as marked by “the

INTRODUCTION

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same fenced-in view of life, the same keep-off-the-grass morality, the same little cautious virtues and the same little frightened vices.”18 But Wharton is also now duly recognized as a writer who fixed her gaze on the less privileged and mastered genres beyond fiction.19 Edith Wharton was a best-selling author from The House of Mirth through the release of her memoir, A Backward Glance (1934). On receiving an honorary doctorate at Yale University in 1923, which made her the first woman so honored, Wharton was celebrated by critic William Lyon Phelps, who exercised profound influence on literary tastes,20 as an “American novelist of international fame” who had secured “a universally recognized place in the front rank of the world’s living novelists.”21 Nevertheless, a number of factors contributed to the waning of Wharton’s star in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in what Helen Killoran has called “the lull” of the years 1938–7522: a resistance to realism as a mode of representation, a distrust of Victorian themes, the charges of unnecessary cruelty and pessimism,23 a sexist and ageist preference for art that might “make it new,” and the short-sighted notion, articulated by Edmund Wilson and reinscribed by Alfred Kazin24 and Louis Auchincloss, that Wharton’s fiction after The Age of Innocence reflected a “drop in quality” and was not worth reading.25 Additionally, the establishment in the 1920s of a canon of American letters that excluded women, people of color, and members of the working class did little to secure Wharton’s status.26 As Pamela Knights has noted, “This image of Wharton as aloof and out-of-touch intensified in the 1930s, with the rise of new forms of social realism, in the exigencies of the Depression.”27 The younger, modernist literary establishment found her dated. The Wharton who had lamented her status as the literary equivalent of violet, old lace, tufted furniture, and chandeliers28 is the same who posited, in a 1925 letter to her friend Daisy Chanler, “as my work reaches its close, I feel so sure that it is either nothing, or far more than they know … And I wonder, a little desolately, which?”29 As we approach the one-hundred-year mark of that disclosure, Wharton’s staying power—particularly for what the economist Thomas Piketty has called our “new Gilded Age”—confirms that her corpus yields far more than anyone could have known. The decades-long Edith Wharton renaissance still underway emerged from a few transformative moments in the twentieth century: the 1968 lifting of the embargo on the writer’s papers at Yale University, R. W. B. Lewis’s prize-winning 1975 biography, the 1980 discovery of Wharton’s private letters to her one-time lover, the opportunistic journalist Morton Fullerton,30 the 1983 founding of the Edith Wharton Society and arrival the following year of the journal now named the Edith Wharton Review, and the many recuperative studies that followed. Four biographies succeeded Lewis’s: Cynthia Griffin Wolff ’s A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (1977), Shari Benstock’s No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (1994), Eleanor Dwight’s visual record Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life (1994), and Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton (2007), which contributed meaningfully to Wharton’s increasingly international appeal.31 Susan Goodman aptly notes that in Wharton’s case “definitive biography” is an oxymoron, given the breadth of her life and work.32 Our grasp of Wharton as artist, cultural critic, and humanitarian has been more fully fleshed out with the publication of letters edited by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (1988), Lyall H. Powers (1990), Daniel Bratton (2000), Shafquat Towheed (2007), and Irene Goldman-Price (2012). Wharton’s correspondence with Bernard and Mary Berenson, edited by Laura Rattray and Susan Barile, will further illuminate an extraordinary life. Readers new to the study of Edith Wharton will, it is hoped, recognize the inadequacies of earlier readings of her work. It is no longer a legitimate practice, if ever it was, to

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read Wharton as an imitation of her fellow cosmopolitan and friend Henry James—a comparison that made her cringe.33 Nor is it valid to write her off as a stuffy grand dame, the likes of which we find in prickly accounts by Vernon Parrington (1921)34 and Percy Lubbock (1947).35 Charges of Wharton as an icy elitist are complicated by the range of demographics treated in her fiction and by her enormous charitable initiatives, public and private. A reckoning with the full oeuvre also undermines any reading of Wharton as antifeminist. Although she would not have called herself “feminist”—a term in conflict with her patrician upbringing—and she regrettably “mocked organized feminism,”36 scholars have recognized in her work a fierce indictment of the limitations imposed upon women’s lives. Laura Rattray has shown that the understudied published and unpublished nonfiction reveals Wharton’s “unfettered, unapologetic feminism.”37 Wolff, Elizabeth Ammons, Elaine Showalter, Candace Waid, Judith Fryer, and Judith Fetterley, among many others, have offered transformative feminist readings of Wharton. Edith Wharton continually shows herself to resist categorization.38 Indeed, the writer would presciently opine that “when a critic thinks up a good label for me it lasts about ten years.”39 Literary scholars have recognized in Wharton her alignment with and contributions to several modes of representation: realism (Amy Kaplan, Hildegard Hoeller), naturalism (Donna Campbell, Donald Pizer, Gary Totten, Laura Saltz), sentimentalism (Hoeller), and modernism (Jennifer Haytock, Hoeller, Karin Roffman, Meredith Goldsmith, Robin Peel).40 In their edited collection, Goldsmith and Melanie Dawson reassess literary periodization, citing The Age of Innocence as illustrative of modernity’s persistent “backward glance” even as the novel looks toward modernity. Wharton more recently has been contextualized as a transatlantic and transnational writer by Brian Edwards, Donna Campbell, Virginia Ricard, Myrto Drizou, Alice Kelly, Sara Prieto, and Meredith Goldsmith and Emily Orlando’s Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism. Wharton’s politics are perhaps her greatest site of contention. Dale M. Bauer’s Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics (1994) turned our attention to Wharton’s postwar writings to reveal an author acutely invested in the cultural debates of her moment, including reproductive rights, authoritarian politics, and mass culture. Jennie A. Kassanoff ’s Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (2004) argues that confronting Wharton’s political conservativism helps us better understand the anxieties that continue to vex American culture, namely white hegemony, changing demographics, and systemic narratives that rationalize exclusion. Readers must wrestle with the fact that the Wharton who called attention to women’s oppression did not endorse their suffrage. As the essays in this collection attest, it is not the task of twenty-first-century readers to rescue Wharton from a “cancel culture”; among her Whitmanesque multitudes are her less salvageable political opinions. Emily Coit’s observations on Charles Eliot Norton, whose influence shaped the young Wharton, rings true for the writer this handbook takes as its subject: His elitism and racism are part of a liberalism that venerates democracy, and that liberalism is the close kin of the liberalisms that inform much educational work right up through the present. In studying a Norton who is not a villain, we confront elitism and racism that are unspectacular, cordial, full of good intentions and perhaps quite familiar.41 Readers can turn to Wharton, whose corpus reflects ambivalence toward a changing class structure, to help unpack the civil divisions that came to a crescendo in January 2021 in the Capitol rotunda whose walls display images of her democracy-defending forebear.

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INTRODUCTION

Edith Wharton’s stature as a central figure in American letters is no longer open to question. Wharton studies is now the “work of … sustained and steadied focus.”42 The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton is a collection of literary criticism and theory by an international range of eminent scholars exploring major themes from new critical perspectives across the full span of the writer’s work, including her achievements in genres for which she deserves to be better known, such as poetry, drama, the short story, and nonfiction prose. As such, the collection features essays that situate Wharton in queer studies, race studies, whiteness studies, age studies, disability studies, film studies, anthropological studies, economics, and the digital humanities, along with chapters on the places and cultures Wharton documented in her travel writing and speeches such as Italy, France, Morocco, and Greece. The collection includes new comparative studies of Wharton and under-recognized kindred literary spirits Christina Rossetti and Willa Cather along with a fresh take on the pairing with James. The handbook seeks to encourage readers to continue to think critically about Wharton’s writing in several genres from various academic fields and approaches. As well as surveying past and current scholarship, the collection proposes new directions in Wharton studies. Contributors, who are among the foremost scholars in the field, hail from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and Europe. This collection, then, underscores Wharton’s lasting impact for twenty-first-century readers.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES Taking as a point of entry Claire Messud’s New York Times book club discussion of The Custom of the Country, Dale Bauer’s preface sets the stage for new readings of Edith Wharton, underscoring what peer-reviewed scholars bring to any discussion of this writer: they reveal Wharton as acutely attuned to matters of race, class, gender, age, and sexuality, and they participate in debates about canonicity and how crucial to the restoration of Wharton’s status has been the work of specialists. Wharton emerges as a writer and cultural historian who hungrily read across all disciplines and who has fueled these new critical essays as inquiries for twenty-first-century Wharton studies and American literary studies in general. The Mount’s Executive Director Susan Wissler, Admission Supervisor and Research Assistant Nicholas Hudson, and Curatorial and Visitor Services Director Anne Schuyler provide a foreword from the vantage point of Wharton’s historic Massachusetts home, which the author designed according to architectural principles established in The Decoration of Houses. The contribution formally unites Edith Wharton Restoration and Wharton scholarship, setting the record straight on a certain Edith’s ties to the University of Pennsylvania’s business school. Part One, “Edith Wharton and Identity,” opens with Meredith L. Goldsmith’s “Single, White, Female: Miscegenation, Incest, and Reproduction in Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep.” The discussion of Wharton’s 1927 novel proves especially timely in light of twenty-first-century demonstrations of white supremacy. Jennifer Haytock rightly observed that “for scholars thinking about the function and meaning of whiteness today, reading the works of Edith Wharton offers ways both to make visible the cultural history and influences that have led to current damaging white behaviors and also to formulate strategies for rewriting whiteness.”43 Goldsmith’s essay redirects the scholarship on race and whiteness, unveiling an under-examined novel as a text of a blended, racialized family whose whiteness is in peril. Goldsmith ultimately argues that Wharton’s rejection

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of modernist New York, including Harlem culture, is fully compatible with her curiosity about modern complications of race and identity. Like Goldsmith, Shannon Brennan engages Wharton’s treatment of incest, mothering, and melodrama. “Queer Wharton: The Exultations and Agonies of Kate Clephane’s Closet” builds on an exciting area of inquiry launched by Eleanor Clark, Katherine Joslin, and others. The chapter argues that Wharton’s under-discussed novel The Mother’s Recompense (1925) surfaces lesbian, homoerotic, transgenerational, and incestuous sexuality—queer modes of desiring that repeat in the novelist’s oeuvre. For Brennan, Wharton consistently “queers” the grounds on which sexuality is associated with identity by picturing the conflict between desire’s dynamic, multiple pathways, and the insufficient and distorting vocabulary through which subjects are demanded to confess the “truth” of their sexuality. The chapter suggests that Wharton’s interest in the epistemology of the closet has significance for our understandings of her queer style, her use of melodrama, and her ambivalence about the intersections between “unknowable” sexuality and putatively “knowable” racial identity. Focusing on such fictions as “The Moving Finger,” The Children, and The House of Mirth, Melanie V. Dawson’s “Picturing Edith Wharton’s Modern Woman: Gender and the Social Construction of Age” explores the writer’s attention to the ways that the number of women’s lived years is reimagined so as to comport with ideals of youthful beauty, a practice that Wharton aligns with self-interested male viewers. Revealing a power dynamic rooted in the masculine adjudication of age-based values, Wharton portrays the construction of chronological time to be malleable to the body-centric values of a dawning modernity. Maria-Novella Mercuri extends the focus on bodily idealism and middle age in “Paralysis and Euthanasia in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree, The Shadow of a Doubt, and Ethan Frome.” The chapter considers three works in the context of disability studies and contemporary nursing theory and practice, analyzing the medical discourse in the under-examined 1907 novel The Fruit of the Tree, the treatment of euthanasia and assisted suicide in the recently published 1901 play The Shadow of a Doubt and the 1911 novella Ethan Frome, and Wharton’s general preoccupation with the nature of sympathy and individual free will. In so doing, Mercuri makes a convincing case for the 1907 novel’s surprising resonance for twenty-first-century readers. Part Two, “Edith Wharton beyond the Novel,” begins with Paul J. Ohler’s “‘Social Order and Individual Appetites’: Edith Wharton’s Short Stories, 1891–1904.” The chapter takes up Wharton’s early career modulations of naturalism before surveying a selection of the thirty-four stories she published before The House of Mirth and describing their varied forms and subjects in the context of her life writing, criticism, and correspondence. Emily Setina’s “Edith Wharton in Verse” surveys Wharton’s under-read poetry, published in periodicals and three volumes in her lifetime, offering an overview of the topics, modes, and forms that drew her attention as a poet and the work’s manuscript and publication history. The chapter argues that the paradox of strict form and strong feeling defines Wharton’s work in poetry, which she called “precision in ecstasy,” whether on subjects intimate or political, mythic or journalistic, and it locates the recent publication of poems by Wharton in relation to a wider drive to print formerly unpublished or disavowed work by nineteenth- and twentieth-century women—including Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Siddall, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Plath—to ask what this impetus tells us about the politics of reading women’s writing in the twenty-first century.

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Donna M. Campbell’s “Edith Wharton and Film” demonstrates that film adaptations of Wharton’s work for the screen reveal a significant, if sometimes overlooked, context for understanding her writings in print, with each adaptation disclosing a great deal about the cultural moment in which it was produced. The phases of adaptations of Wharton’s work from the silent era to the golden age of Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s, to the television adaptations of the 1950s and 1960s, and up to the modern Wharton revival of the 1990s and 2000s reveal the ways in which the treatment of Wharton’s themes was at times too revolutionary for her own day but surprisingly prescient for our own. Part Three, “Influences and Intertextualities,” builds on the scholarly work that has shown Wharton to be in conversation with her literary forebears and peers. As Julie OlinAmmentorp has observed, Wharton is studied not only with predecessors like Henry James, but also with William Dean Howells and Willa Cather (see Elsa Nettels’ fine Language and Gender in American Fiction [1997]), with Willa Cather and Zona Gale (Deborah Lindsay Williams’s Not in Sisterhood [2001]), and with women authors of the same era from a wide range of backgrounds (Elizabeth Ammons’s Conflicting Stories [1992]).44 Wharton has also been read in the context of Nella Larsen (e.g., Goldsmith, Orlando, Barbara Hochman), Ernest Hemingway (Lisa Tyler’s recent collection), and Djuna Barnes, Colette, and J. R. Ackerley (Juliana Schiesari). Margaret Jay Jessee’s “‘The Chill Joy of Renunciation’: Feminine Sacrifice in Edith Wharton and Christina Rossetti” considers Wharton’s engagement with a Victorian poet well represented on her bookshelves. The chapter suggests Wharton’s under-examined Bunner Sisters ([1892] 1916) as a kind of realist revision of Goblin Market (1862), Rossetti’s best-known narrative poem. While Rossetti’s sentimental text valorizes feminine self-sacrifice with a moment of religious ecstasy, Jessee’s chapter shows Wharton’s naturalism depicting self-sacrifice as a masochistic, needless gesture asked of women. Reading Wharton in the context of what she terms “intersectional intertextuality,” Julie Olin-Ammentorp’s “Edith Wharton and Willa Cather: Beyond ‘Surface Differences’ ” takes its cue from Wharton’s cultural study French Ways and Their Meaning and from the “spatial turn” that has occurred across disciplines, looking beyond the factors that have obstructed comparisons between Wharton and Willa Cather, such as the persistent categorization of Wharton as Eastern aristocrat and Cather as Western populist. OlinAmmentorp sets aside these conventional readings in favor of striking parallels and intersections in their lives and works. Her chapter shows that, in a new Gilded Age, literary criticism must speak to a broad range of cultural issues, including the conflict between the American profit motive and the human need for art and beauty especially acute in a post-pandemic universe. Jill Kress Karn’s “Consciousness in Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Reef and The Golden Bowl” discusses the connection between the exploration of consciousness and the reworking of the marriage plot in Wharton’s still under-studied 1912 novel and James’s The Golden Bowl (1904), arguing that the storyline, more than mere framework, becomes central to the examination of consciousness for both writers who work to reinvent the traditional narrative, initiating experiments that anticipate modernism. Part Four, “Global and Cultural Contexts,” begins with Gary Totten’s “Edith Wharton and the Narratives of Travel and Tourism.” Examining The Cruise of the Vanadis (the diary of an 1888 Aegean cruise [1992]), Italian Backgrounds (1905), A Motor-Flight through France (1908) and In Morocco (1920), the chapter unveils a writer who not only

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achieved an expanded sense of self because of travel but also—with a deep understanding of history, art, and modern mobility—reshaped approaches to conventional tourism. Wharton’s major travel narratives reflect cultural shifts related to women’s negotiations of modernity—including travel technologies, tourist culture, and changing gender roles— and tensions between colonial and cosmopolitan viewpoints. These aspects of Wharton’s travel writing emphasize her important and nuanced contributions to discourses of travel and tourism during her career. Myrto Drizou’s “Seeking a Home for the Wretched Exotics: Edith Wharton’s Heterotopic Views of Greece” takes its name from the writer’s description of herself, in a 1903 letter to Sara Norton, as an exiled American who, after European immersion, could never again find a home in the States. The chapter argues that Wharton was deeply attuned to the cultural, ethnic, religious, and geopolitical heterogeneity of the Greek landscape in ways that anticipated philosopher Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia. Looking primarily at Wharton’s diaries from her cruises on the Vanadis and the Osprey (1926), Drizou examines a diversity of sites—from ancient quarries that served as prison camps to monastic communities, palimpsestic churches, and famous ruins—to show how they invert and neutralize discourses, such as Orientalism and Western exceptionalism, making a mark on Wharton’s poetry and fiction. Nir Evron’s chapter shares with Drizou’s an interest in Wharton’s treatment of displacement and rootedness. “‘Totally Vanished … Like a Pinch of Dust’: Edith Wharton and the Trope of Cultural Extinction” illuminates Wharton’s repeated invocations, in her fiction and nonfiction, of the fate of cultural transience and the personal experiences of obsolescence and belatedness that it entails. The essay surveys some of the popular interpretations of this aspect of Wharton’s writing, focusing on A Backward Glance, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, while placing Wharton’s preoccupation with the terminal ending of cultural forms of life in a long historical tradition that stretches from the mid-eighteenth century to Wharton’s time and beyond. Virginia Ricard’s chapter continues the thread of interest in the intercultural as well as in the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia, examining the notion of pleasure as Wharton provocatively defined it in her speech “America at War” and her study French Ways and Their Meaning. Based on readings of passages from various works, including the “Beatrice Palmato” fragment and The Age of Innocence and from her correspondence, “Edith Wharton and Pleasure” shows how the writer considered the notion to be key to understanding the way societies work and essential to her view of art, history, and anthropology. Francesca Sawaya’s “The Mermaid as Capitalist: Networking and Upward Mobility in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country” analyzes Wharton’s satire of the upward mobility narrative in the context of Karl Polanyi’s writings on economics and anthropology. Replacing the Horatio Alger hero with a mermaid, Wharton demonstrates the central importance of—and problems with—social capital in the putatively level playing field of “free markets.” For Sawaya, Wharton, ever the social critic, documents the costs to a democratic society of interpreting the closed, in-group networks that create upward mobility as an equalizing economic opportunity. Part Five, “Edith Wharton’s Library,” begins with Sheila Liming’s “Reading the Reader: Edith Wharton’s Library, Digital Methods, and the Uses of Data,” which explores two interrelated archival sources: Edith Wharton’s library collection stored at The Mount and the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org website, built to grant students and scholars virtual access to The Mount’s collection. In considering these resources, the essay insists on the

INTRODUCTION

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significance of Wharton’s library to scholars’ continuing estimations of her literary legacy while assessing the uses of data and digital methods to print culture and related fields of scholarship. Liming’s initiative, along with Oxford University Press’s commitment to publish for the first time the authorized edition of Wharton’s complete writings, answers Carol ShafferKoros’s 2014 call for a long-overdue “standard text of all of Wharton’s work, and the digitization of the works and letters.”45 “The Complete Works of Edith Wharton: Preparing the First Authoritative Edition” by Carol J. Singley, Donna M. Campbell, and Frederick Wegener describes the process of assembling and publishing the authoritative edition, in thirty volumes, in print and online, in accordance with current standards in textual editing; and with an open-access digital component reflecting the latest developments in the digital humanities. With its full critical and textual introductions, notes, and emendations, the series makes available reliable texts of all of Wharton’s published and unpublished writing; organizes her writing generically and chronologically in new ways; allows readers to chart her compositional processes; and highlights discoveries of new Wharton texts and translations through archival research. Elaine Showalter’s afterword, “Edith Wharton in the Twenty-First Century,” follows up on her highly prescient 1995 essay on The Custom of the Country, which positioned Undine Spragg in the context of the meteoric rise of real estate mogul and eventual TV personality Donald Trump, long before his short but impactful residence at Pennsylvania Avenue. Showalter shows that our current moment has witnessed Wharton’s movement beyond academic criticism and high literary culture to become an iconic American writer, widely referenced across popular culture and increasingly cited by contemporary artists as a major influence on their work, confirming that her writings will remain relevant for generations to come. As the essays in this handbook demonstrate, Wharton studies continues to flourish. Returning to the line from Berenson, Edith Wharton persists “while consciousness lasts in [us]” because our world—for all its new technologies, conveniences, modes of travel, and communication—is not far removed from her own. For the postwar and post-flu-epidemic climate that engendered The Age of Innocence sounds rather like our own post-Covid-19 reality. In both historical moments, citizens of the world are drawn “even further back into conservativism, into a nativism that would eventually see the rise of many repressive political groups, among them the Ku Klux Klan.”46 We find ourselves living in an era when such fringe groups as the “Proud Boys” and “QAnon” and deniers of everything from the coronavirus to climate change and the Sandy Hook shooting are invited to the table under the auspices of free speech, and here Wharton’s distrust of false narratives—seen in Twilight Sleep and Hudson River Bracketed—resonates particularly well. The French critic Charles du Bos, who would collaborate with Wharton on war relief work, would say of her that “anarchy under any form, but most of all anarchy of judgement, was abhorrent to her.”47 Post-9/11 calls for “patriotism” and the alignment of the American flag with one political party harken back to Wharton’s poignant questioning, in a 1919 letter to Barrett Wendell, of the compulsion to profess national allegiance: How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be “American” before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries? It is really too easy a disguise for our shortcomings to dress them up as a form of patriotism.48 Her cosmopolitan critique of nationalist fervor remains instructive to us today.

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Edith Wharton seems to have foreseen the excesses, obsessions, and spectacles of our current climate. The scandals documented in Wharton’s narratives serve as harbingers of the sensations that flash across our hand-held screens. The insidious “Prince Andrew versus Virginia Giuffre” case touches on the same nerve as the sexual exploitation of minors in Wharton’s Summer (1917) and The Children (1928). The quid pro quo run-in between Wharton’s Lily Bart and Gus Trenor would today be understood as a #MeToo moment. Wharton’s Undine Spragg—as horrifying to progressive era readers as she is admired by Generation Z—can be conceived of as the original social media influencer conscious of her brand.49 For Undine and her creator know that “the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous” and that the turn-of-the-century “world where conspicuousness passed for distinction”50 foreshadows our own. The sexual double standard dictating that “genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair”51 would apply to Wharton herself who, on the sesquicentennial of her birth, would be assessed by a male novelist in terms of how she compares to Grace Kelly or Jackie Kennedy.52 The writer who would declare privacy “one of the first requisites of civilized life”53 and resisted baring all like “Lady Godiva during her memorable ride”54 would be appalled by what is broadcast across social media. Children forcibly separated from families due to morally dubious immigration policies echo the plight of war refugees for whose welfare Edith Wharton labored, while the distrust of the cultural other echoes the writer’s own complicated nationalist allegiances.55

FIGURE 1.1  “Edith Wharton and two dogs on outdoor terrace with six friends,” Edith Wharton Collection, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 42, Box 53, Folder 1600, Date: 1925–38. Reproduced with permission from Beinecke Library, the Watkins/Loomis Agency, and the Estate of Edith Wharton.

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INTRODUCTION

The image gracing this book’s cover, capturing a scene on the terrace of Edith Wharton’s French home, reflects the cultural work that this book takes as its task (Figure 1.1).56 The writer is in her element: she cradles in her lap her beloved dogs Linky and Coony,57 she sits outdoors at a well-appointed property she lovingly transformed, she surrounds herself with fashionably dressed cosmopolitans, and she smiles. The moment validates an idea expressed in The Age of Innocence: that “the air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.” As host, Wharton, by this point an internationally acclaimed artist, has brought together representatives of an admiring generation from diverse backgrounds that would outlive and perhaps learn from her. That sunlit terrace is doing something we hope this book will do: provide a foundation for future conversations with Edith Wharton at the center. Around the time this photograph was taken, Wharton would reflect in A Backward Glance that “the world is a welter and has always been one; but though all the cranks and the theorists cannot master the old floundering monster, … here and there a saint or a genius suddenly sends a little ray through the fog, and helps humanity to stumble on, and perhaps up.”58 Wharton’s writings arguably send a ray and help humanity stumble on and up in our own Gilded Age. It is the aim of this collection of essays, produced by leaders in the field at a time of global crisis, to make a meaningful contribution to the scholarship on and dialogue about the work of Edith Wharton and to open up new possibilities for understanding and embracing a writer whose corpus is as enormous as it is resonant. To borrow from Wharton’s preface to her anthology The Book of the Homeless (1916), in which she conceives of her volume, as she so often does, as a house: “You will see from the names of the builders what a gallant piece of architecture it is … So I efface myself from the threshold and ask you to walk in.”59

NOTES 1 Berenson’s letter to mutual friend Louis Gillet, quoted in Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 282. I wish to thank Jaime Osterman Alves, Dale Bauer, Shannon Brennan, Meredith Goldsmith, Paul Ohler, Nels Pearson, Laura Rattray, and Gary Totten for reading and offering generous feedback on this introduction. I owe a great debt of thanks to Katherine (Kerry) Kircher for impeccable editorial assistance. 2 Millicent Bell, introduction to Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 15. 3 Edith Wharton, “A Little Girl’s New York,” in Frederick Wegener (ed.), The Uncollected Critical Writings of Edith Wharton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 274–5. 4 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), xix. 5 Cynthia Griffin Wolff, introduction to A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xxiii. 6 Wharton is one of the only American women writers included in Oxford University Press’s prestigious Complete Works series and one of the few women featured at Chicago’s American Writers Museum. The Modern Language Association’s International Bibliography indicates a dramatic increase in the number of studies on Wharton produced annually over the past decade. In 2019 the Pennsylvania State University Press selected the Edith Wharton Review as the journal with which it would be represented in Project Muse, which speaks to the quality of critical attention Wharton attracts. Not even a pandemic could prevent the Edith Wharton Society and The Mount from gathering virtually in 2020 to commemorate The Age of Innocence’s centenary.

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  7 Edith Wharton Review editor Paul Ohler reports that users from eighty-five countries requested access to the journal in 2020 (February 9, 2021, email to EWR editorial board).   8 That roster includes Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist), Laura Bush (former first lady), Lisa Lucas (National Book Foundation), Peggy Noonan (Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist), Jennifer Egan (Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist), Ann LeSchander (The Park Bench), Stephin Merritt (The Magnetic Fields), Claire Messud (The Emperor’s Children), Meg Wolitzer (The Wife), Doug Hughes (Doubt), Stephanie Clifford (Everybody Rise), Brandon Taylor (Real Life), Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), Ali Benjamin (The Smash-Up), Vendela Vida (We Run the Tides), Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation), Kristin Hannah (The Four Winds), and the creative minds behind Sex and the City, Downton Abbey, and Gossip Girl.   9 Recent examples include: Hillary Kelly’s “‘The Age of Innocence’ at a Moment of Increased Appetite for Eating the Rich,” The New Yorker, December 26, 2020; “A Granted Prayer: An Unpublished Story by Edith Wharton,” edited by Sarah Whitehead, Atlantic, November 9, 2020; Claire Messud’s “How Can We Read Edith Wharton Today?,” New York Times, January 20, 2021; Isabella Biedenharn’s “Pop Culture of My Life: Roxane Gay on Vanderpump Rules and Edith Wharton,” Entertainment Weekly, July 30, 2020; 2020 Booker Prize finalist Brandon Taylor’s praise of Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Entertainment Weekly, January 1, 2021; and Matt Zoller Seitz’s “The Exquisite Violence of The Age of Innocence,” Vulture. com, January 22, 2021. 10 Claire Messud’s thoughtful remarks on The Custom of the Country were compromised by errors that underscore the need for popular culture to be in conversation with the scholarship. Perhaps most damagingly, she claimed Wharton is not assigned in school while high school and college syllabi from the 1990s onward overwhelmingly suggest otherwise. Additionally, Messud suggested Undine Spragg is from Iowa when Julie Olin-Ammentorp has shown that Wharton never specifies her midwestern state of origin. Further, Messud did not have a command of the film adaptations and did not seem aware that The Custom of the Country is one of Wharton’s most loved and increasingly taught novels. Claire Messud, “How Can We Read Edith Wharton Today?” New York Times, January 20, 2021, https://www.nyti​mes. com/2021/01/20/t-magaz​ine/edith-whar​ton-cus​tom-of-the-coun​try.html. 11 Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 8. 12 Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray, introduction to The New Edith Wharton Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 3. Recent discoveries in the many Wharton archives, by such scholars as Meredith Goldsmith, Alice Kelly, Laura Rattray, Mary Chinery, and Virginia Ricard, and newly published Wharton stories edited by Sarah Whitehead attest to how large and multitudinous is Wharton’s oeuvre. 13 In “Thirty Years of Wharton Studies,” Candace Waid recognizes Wharton as “one of the most allusive and alluded to writers of her own or any time.” Candace Waid, “Thirty Years of Wharton Studies,” Edith Wharton Review 30 (Spring 2014): 95. 14 R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, eds., The Letters of Edith Wharton (New York: Collier Books, 1988), 124. 15 Claudine Lesage’s Edith Wharton in France shows that Paul Bourget was well ahead of James on this matter. Claudine Lesage, Edith Wharton in France (Lenox, MA: Prospecta, in association with The Mount Press, 2018), 13–15. The oft-quoted line from James—“DO NEW YORK”—appears in his 1902 letter to Wharton in response to her historical novel The Valley of Decision (Lee, Edith Wharton, 218). 16 New York designer and historian Thomas Jayne in his 2018 book Classical Principles for Modern Design: Lessons from Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman’s The Decoration of Houses (New York: Monacelli, 2018), 7; Mitchell Owens, Architectural Digest, January 31, 2013.

INTRODUCTION

13

Architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson has called it “arguably the most influential book ever published by an American on interior decoration and design” (Julie Lasky, “Appreciating Edith Wharton’s Other Career,” New York Times, August 29, 2012, https://www.nyti​mes. com/2012/08/30/gar​den/appre​ciat​ing-edith-whart​ons-other-car​eer.html.). 17 The following resources provide an excellent overview of the criticism: Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews (1992), edited by James W. Tuttleton, Kristen O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray; The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton (2001), by Helen Killoran; Edith Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1990), edited by Kristin O. Lauer and Margaret P. Murray; Edith Wharton: A Descriptive Bibliography (1990), by Stephen Garrison. For a recent assessment of Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, see the excellent essay collections edited by Arielle Zibrak and by Meredith Goldsmith and Melanie Dawson, which reads the novel as a touchstone in what they call “T20 literature.” 18 Edith Wharton, “Souls Belated,” in R. W. B. Lewis (ed.), The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 122. 19 As the title suggests, Laura Rattray’s game-changing Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) directs long overdue attention to Wharton’s astonishing achievements in genres for which she is less known. 20 Bell, introduction to Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, 7. 21 Clare Colquitt, Susan Goodman, and Candace Waid, eds., A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 13. 22 Helen Killoran, Critical Reception of Edith Wharton (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001), 6. 23 Wharton was criticized for her “bitterness” (H. W. Boynton, “Some Stories of the Month,” Bookman 46 [September 1917]: 93–4, repr. in Tuttleton et al., Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 262) and for the “unforgivable” “utter remorselessness of … Ethan Frome” (Frederic Taber Cooper, Bookman 34 [November 1911]: 312, qtd. in Tuttleton et al., Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, 186). Even The Reef (1912) was singled out for its cruelty to its characters; one reviewer took Wharton to task for “taking a human being and subjecting him or her to a cumulative process of torture … a primitive method of entertainment” (qtd. in Bell, introduction to Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, 2). A review of Summer cited “Mrs. Wharton’s icy restraint” (qtd. in ibid., 3). Readers were, and are, often defensive against the more troubling lessons of Wharton’s fiction. Wharton certainly unveils the worst in human nature—and occasionally the best—but given the political, racial, and medical crises of 2020–1, her awareness of prejudices, racisms, sexisms, oppressions, social injustices speak as well to our times as to hers. In other words, perhaps Wharton is showing us things in ourselves that we have had to look hard at in recent months, even when the looking is uncomfortable, particularly for persons of privilege. 24 One of the chief criticisms Kazin levels at Wharton—“Yet what a subject lay before Edith Wharton in that world, if only she had been able, or willing, to use it!” (Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, fiftieth anniversary ed. [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995], 79)—echoes the complaint Harold Harbard directs at Wharton’s hapless Ivy Spang of “Writing a War Story”: “‘You’ve got hold of an awfully good subject,’ Harbard continued; ‘but you’ve rather mauled it, haven’t you?’ ” (ibid.). 25 Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time (New York: Viking, 1971), 171. A number of studies, some well-intentioned, contributed to the decline in Wharton’s reputation: Edmund Wilson, “Justice to Edith Wharton” (1938), repr. in The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 195–213);

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Q. D. Leavis, “Henry James’s Heiress: The Importance of Edith Wharton,” Scrutiny 8, no. 3 (December 1938), repr. in Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Irving Howe (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 73–88; Percy Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1947); Irving Howe, Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962); Auchincloss, Edith Wharton. Auchincloss’s account is compromised by his sexist comment, in the documentary Edith Wharton: The Sense of Harmony (Elizabeth Lennard, dir. [1999, independently distributed]), that “it’s notorious that Edith Wharton, who was rather a plain woman herself, wanted very much to have been beautiful … There are those who say … she would’ve given all her novels to be beautiful” (10:54 into the film). Auchincloss’s undue emphasis on Wharton’s looks anticipates Jonathan Franzen’s remarks in The New Yorker (2012). Auchincloss’s take on Wharton was challenged by Vivian Mercier’s review in the Nation titled “Whose Edith? A review of Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time, by Louis Auchincloss,” January 3, 1972, 21. As Katherine Joslin noted in Edith Wharton (London: Macmillan Education, 1991), Many readers and critics believed that she had adapted her style to fit the slick magazines of the 1920s; increasingly distant from the New York of her youth and middle age, many argued that she either borrowed depictions of modern America or reverted nostalgically to an idealized view of her past … The wholesale dismissal of her later works is more the result of a failure to read the novels, rather than their inferior quality … Not unlike other modernist works of the period, she sought a psychologically rich portrait of the stresses on the individual in the ceaselessly moving culture of the anxious twenties, a world she likened to an escalator, ever flowing but tending nowhere. (25)

The 1920s and 1930s novels have since been rightly reassessed and validated in formative readings by Katherine Joslin, Dale Bauer, Melanie Dawson, Janet Beer, Avril Horner, Meredith Goldsmith, and Jennifer Haytock. 26 As Paul Lauter has demonstrated, that list of authoritative texts was constructed by a white, male, privileged professoriate and the books hailed as classics were authored by writers from the same demographic. 27 Pamela Knights, The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 125. 28 “this violets and old lace affair” (November 1936 interview in New York Herald Tribune, quoted in Rattray, Edith Wharton in Context [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 310). In a 1925 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wharton would write “I feel that to your generation … I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers” (Lewis and Lewis, Letters, 481). 29 Lewis and Lewis, Letters, 483; ellipses are Wharton’s. 30 “In 1980 more than 300 pieces of Wharton’s correspondence to her lover [assumed to have been destroyed] were offered for sale … and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center was able to acquire the entire collection” (Alan Gribben, “‘The Heart Is Insatiable’: A Selection from Edith Wharton’s Letters to Morton Fullerton, 1907–1915,” in The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, New Series #31 [Austin: University of Texas Printing Division, 1985], 7). 31 Additionally, Alan Price’s excellent The End of the Age of Innocence (1996) comprehensively examined Wharton’s experience of the Great War. Of the most recent Wharton biography, Paul Ohler notes, “Lee uses the archive to rewrite R. W. B. Lewis’ ‘romantic, dramatic version of Wharton’s life before she succeeded as a novelist’ (Lee 79), a period that would be

INTRODUCTION

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substantially revised again by the appearance of the Wharton letters to Bahlmann in 2012” (Ohler, quoted in Haytock and Rattray, The New Edith Wharton Studies, 22). 32 Susan Goodman, “Edith Wharton’s Composed Lives,” in Clare Colquitt, Susan Goodman, and Candace Waid (eds.), A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 33. 33 Wharton consistently resisted the comparison writing, as early as 1904, “the continued cry that I am an echo of Mr. James (whose books of the last ten years I can’t read, much as I delight in the man) … makes me feel rather hopeless” (Lewis and Lewis, Letters, 91). In April 1899, for instance, John Barry suggested in Literary World that Wharton was merely replicating James’s worst literary faults (Tuttleton et al., Contemporary Reviews, x). She was even accused, in the August 1899 Critic, of plagiarizing James (ibid.). Critic Grant Overton summed it up nicely in 1923: “who, after reading the correspondence of Henry James, published since his death, believes any longer that Mrs Wharton ever owed anything to that man’s patronage so nicely tinctured with snobbery?” Grant Overton, “Edith Wharton and the Time-Spirit,” in American Nights Entertainment (New York: Little and Ives, 1923), 345. And yet the comparison haunted her literary debut in the 1890s and lingered until the late twentieth century. 34 Vernon L. Parrington, Jr., “Our Literary Aristocrat,” 1921, in Tuttleton et al., Contemporary Reviews, 293–5. 35 Lubbock’s impressionistic Portrait of Edith Wharton is marked by such lines as “she was a dazzling intruder, la femme fatale” (2); “she was a handful” (2); “If she was a novel of his [Henry James’s] own she did him credit; … All this was much more than her pretty little literary talent, the handful of clever little fictions of her own” (6). Susan Goodman notes that Lubbock’s account was compromised by his “troubled history with Wharton, who openly critiqued his wife and subtly disparaged his work” (Goodman, “Edith Wharton’s Composed Lives,” 27). As Joslin notes, Lubbock, “her one-time friend but long-term foe,” “had personal reasons for silencing the voice of Edith Wharton” (Edith Wharton, 128). 36 For an excellent discussion of Wharton and feminism, see Jennifer L. Fleissner, “Wharton, Marriage, and the New Woman,” in Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby and Benjamin Reiss (eds.), The Cambridge History of the American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 452–69, 454. 37 Rattray, Edith Wharton and Genre, 7. The distrust of feminist approaches to Edith Wharton’s fiction is inherent in James Tuttleton’s title “The Feminist Takeover of Edith Wharton” (Quadrant 33, issue 11 [November 1989]: 53–9) as well as Janet Malcolm’s “The Woman Who Hated Women.” Tuttleton is leery of “the appropriation of Mrs Wharton by the sorority of feminists” (56), questioning Wharton’s interest in “the so-called patriarchy” (56). Julie Olin-Ammentorp provides one of the most enlightened takes on Wharton’s relationship to feminist literary scholarship in “Edith Wharton’s Challenge to Feminist Criticism,” Studies in American Fiction 16, no. 2 (Autumn 1988): 237–44. 38 Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando, eds., Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016), 11. 39 Wharton, quoted in Laura Rattray, The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton, vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 2009), xx. 40 Reading Wharton in the context of religion and philosophy, Carol Singley’s Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) presents the writer as a novelist of morals rather than manners. 41 Emily Coit, American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture and the Genteel Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 7–8.

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2 Wolff, introduction to A Feast of Words, xxiii. 4 43 Haytock, “Edith Wharton and the Writing of Whiteness,” in Haytock and Rattray, The New Edith Wharton Studies, 158. 44 Olin-Ammentorp, “Thirty Years of Wharton Studies,” EWR 30 (Spring 2014): 84. 45 Ibid., 91. 46 Linda Wagner-Martin, introduction to The Portable Edith Wharton (New York: Penguin, 2003), xx. 47 Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton, 98. 48 Lewis and Lewis, Letters, 424. 49 A number of writers have elucidated the connections between Undine Spragg and popular culture. See Orlando, “Edith Wharton and the New Narcissism,” Women’s Studies 44, no. 6 (2015): 729–52; and Sage Mehta, “Edith Wharton Invented Kim Kardashian,” Salon.com, April 24, 2013, https://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/edith_wharton_anticip​ated​_kim​_kar​ dash​ian_​part​ner/. 50 Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (New York: Penguin, 2006), 117; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, ed. Elizabeth Ammons, 2nd Norton Critical ed. (New York: Norton, 2018), 186. 51 Edith Wharton, The Touchstone, in Wharton, Edith, Collected Stories, 1891–1910, ed. Maureen Howard (New York: Library of America, 2001), 170. 52 Jonathan Franzen, “A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy,” New Yorker, February 5, 2012. 53 Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., The Decoration of Houses (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 22. 54 Edith Wharton letter to Robert Greg, June 11, 1934, cited in Rattray, introduction to The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton, vol. 2, Novels and Life Writing, xxi. 55 See Melanie Dawson, “The Limits of Cosmopolitan Experience in Wharton’s The Buccaneers,” Legacy 31, no. 2 (2014): 258–80. Print. 56 Thank you to Daniel Bratton, Julie Olin-Ammentorp, and Shafquat Towheed for help confirming the details of this undated photograph from the Beinecke Archive, which seems to capture Sainte Claire du Vieux Château, Wharton’s home near Hyères in the south of France, to include a young Aldous Huxley, and to have been taken, perhaps, by Louis Bromfield. 57 Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, 248. 58 Wharton, A Backward Glance, 379. 59 Edith Wharton, Preface to The Book of the Homeless (Le Livre des Sans-foyer) (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), xxiv–xxv.

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PART ONE

Edith Wharton and Identity

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CHAPTER TWO

Single, White, Female: Miscegenation, Incest, and Reproduction in Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep MEREDITH L. GOLDSMITH

With the turn into the twenty-first century, Edith Wharton scholarship focused longoverdue attention on the inscription of race in her fiction. Dale Bauer’s Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics (1994) analyzed racialized and racist undercurrents in novels that posed challenges to gender and cultural norms.1 Jennie Kassanoff ’s Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (2004) argued that Wharton underwrote the nation’s prevailing ideologies of white supremacy, racism, and nativism in her major novels; Elizabeth Ammons, in “Edith Wharton and the Issue of Race” (1995), took a similar tack, arguing that Lily Bart is a model of the “dazzling, overdetermined” white heroine, whose critical decision in the novel is to die rather than marry a Jew, the immigrant entrepreneur Simon Rosedale.2 Scholarship in this vein continued with a much-contested article by Ammons on the writing of race in Ethan Frome (1911) and Hildegard Hoeller’s work on “invisible blackness” in the Old New York series.3 Yet scholarship on Wharton and race, with relatively few exceptions, continues to rehearse different versions of the same question: To what extent did she endorse the norms of the white Anglo-American (and European) cultural elite to which she belonged, and to what extent, if any, did she contravene them? These essays pay less attention to the question of why it would be necessary to analyze Wharton’s writing of race or what we might do with the results. This critical approach to Wharton has faltered for two reasons. With the exception of Bauer and Hoeller, this body of work elucidates only a limited set of texts, typically the most canonical of Wharton’s novels: The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence (1920). Second, because this body of work has focused on canonical texts, its premise becomes one of critical redirection: that, having ostensibly exhausted arguments about gender and class, the critic must redirect the argument toward previously

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unexplored categories. This essay attempts another redirection, this one temporal rather than thematic. Until recently, scholarship on race in Wharton has ignored the 1920s novels, typically dismissed as chaotic, unsuccessful social satires by a male literary critical elite of the early twentieth century that viewed her fiction through an ageist and misogynist lens (see, e.g., Vernon Parrington’s “Our Literary Aristocrat” [1992]). These novels, it is frequently claimed, demonstrate Wharton’s cynicism about the growing heterogeneity of American society and the loss of status of the traditional aristocratic classes. Wharton’s satirical novels of the 1920s—The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), The Mother’s Recompense (1925), Twilight Sleep (1927), and The Children (1928)—each explore, in their own way, the reproduction of the family, patriarchy, and the white elite. Wharton’s wealthy families are each engaged in a struggle for survival that mirrors the efforts of white elites to shore up their own perceived supremacy. The satirical tone of these novels, Twilight Sleep in particular, and their melodramatic plotlines (thwarted love, incestuous drives, adultery, divorce) mask their seriousness of purpose. Reading these novels against their critical dismissal, they emerge as even more disturbing and just as tightly structured as their turn-of-the-century counterparts. Twilight Sleep, written just as Wharton’s understanding of the American scene was believed to be waning, offers underappreciated insight into her racial thinking. This is Wharton’s most New York–centered, cosmopolitan novel of the 1920s, in which her white characters sample a smorgasbord of urban cultural differences. Written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and Jewish ascendance in Hollywood, the novel is simultaneously Wharton’s work that is most disgusted by people of color and Jews. Although Wharton was not directly familiar with the cultural landscape of 1920s New York, or the United States of the time more generally, her avid correspondence with her generational peers, Mary Cadwalader Jones and Gaillard Lapsley demonstrates her engagement, even at a distance, with its evolving culture.4 Wharton’s vicarious relationship with 1920s New York allowed her to explore her anxieties in even more depth: in Twilight Sleep New York becomes a setting for gothic and sentimental horrors as well as contemporary cultural conflicts. In the novel, the Manford/Wyant clan, a blended family uniting the nineteenthcentury New York aristocracy with the new-money industrialists and professional class of the early twentieth century, struggles to preserve its status in an environment thoroughly saturated with urban difference, in which they are surrounded by representatives of Black, Jewish, queer, Italian, and Indian identities, to name just a few. If, in modernist novels of the 1920s, “incest saves the family from marriage,” as Walter Benn Michaels has famously claimed, in Twilight Sleep, incestuous drives turn the family inward, defending against external threats of otherness.5 While Twilight Sleep defies attempts at summary, its titular metaphor evokes the scopolamine that has allowed its young antiheroine, Lita Wyant, to give birth painlessly. Its central conflict derives from Lita’s dissatisfaction in her marriage to Jim Wyant, the son of Pauline Manford and Arthur Wyant, whose marriage ended in divorce. Subsequently, Pauline has remarried the successful lawyer Dexter Manford, with whom she has a daughter, the twenty-something, single Nona Manford. Bored and dissatisfied in her marriage, Lita threatens to leave Jim for a career in Hollywood.6 As the novel vacillates between the perspectives of Nona, Pauline, and Dexter, Wharton intimately depicts marital dissatisfaction, alcoholism, middle-aged anomie, and incestuous attraction, to name just a few issues. As an unmarried daughter of the white elite, Nona Manford plays a critical role in the Manford/Wyant crisis. Despite her questionable origins, Lita has already entered the

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family to provide an heir, her infant son with Jim Wyant. While Nona would presumably marry next, her exogamy would open the family to the host of others it currently keeps at bay. Yet Nona’s marriage plot is unresolved as she is placed in a number of quasi-incestuous pairings—with her stepbrother, her father-in-law, and her married step-cousin, ironically her most appropriate suitor. In her ultimate rejection of marriage, Nona’s resistance to exogamy preserves the white family. The normative whiteness of the Manford/Wyant family emerges in their mores, habits, and appearances, as well as in their dismissive attitudes toward people of color and other marginalized groups.7 As Toni Morrison has famously argued in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, representations of whiteness emerge in dialogue with those of people of color and with notions of Blackness itself, which Morrison terms “the Africanist presence” in American literature.8 This dialogic representation of whiteness emerges in Wharton’s depictions of doubles, women placed in imagined proximities that highlight racialized differences. An initial brief comparison between Lita Wyant and Nona Manford emphasizes Lita’s skill at approximating whiteness, in contrast to Nona Manford. Nona and Lita, the novel’s central doubles, are frequently placed in tandem. As Wharton elucidates class comparisons in many other works, this homosocial contrast begins with a look in the mirror: Her glance caught her sister-in-law’s face in a mirror between two panels, and the reflection of her own beside it; she winced a little at the contrast. At her best she had none of that milky translucence, or the long lines which made Lita seem in perpetual motion … Perhaps it was Nona’s general brownness—she had Dexter Manford’s brown crinkled hair, his strong black lashes setting her rather usual-looking gray eyes, and the texture of her dusky healthy skin, compared to Lita’s seemed rough and opaque.9 Nona’s “general brownness” renders her inferior, in her own eyes, to Lita’s “milky translucence.” Racial tropes—her “crinkled hair” and “dusky,” “rough” “skin”—permeate this physical depiction, as if Nona herself is passing. While Nona is the child of two class arrivistes, rural Americans who have refashioned themselves as part of the New York aristocracy, her social status is impeccable and her origins unquestioned. Lita’s origins remain largely obscure—a “portionless orphan”10 raised by an aunt who is remotely connected to the Wyant clan, her parentage is never fully explored by the novel. It is not simply that whiteness is a performance here; for Lita, the imprimatur of whiteness masks her degraded social status. A more pronounced doubling moment occurs as Twilight Sleep, like Wharton’s other novels of the 1920s, mocks bohemian culture. In an early scene, at Tommy Ardwin’s studio, the implicitly gay designer is joined by the Jewish film director Klawhammer and “octoroon pianist” Jossie Keiler.11 In search of Lita, who has slipped away from a party at the Manfords, Ardwin asks Jossie, “‘You’re not Mrs. James Wyant disguised as a dryad, are you?’ There was a general guffaw as Miss Jossie Keiler, the octoroon pianist, scrambled to her pudgy feet and assembled a series of sausage arms and bolster legs in a provocative pose. ‘Knew I’d get found out,’ she lisped.”12 In this multilayered portrait, a Black woman serves as a grotesque parody of a white woman and demonstrates her inability to approximate the other woman’s status and beauty. Jossie is fat where Lita is thin, clumsy where she is lithe. In contrast to Lita’s sinuous composition Wharton depicts Jossie as a collection of parts that fail to make a whole—“sausage arms,” “bolster legs,” “hands like bluish mice,” “bludgeon arms.”13

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The sheer collection of disparate metaphors—food, furniture, rodents, weaponry— emphasizes Jossie’s incoherence as well as her vulgarity. Two nested allusions also call attention to Jossie’s incompatibility with whiteness.14 This may be the only time in Wharton’s novels that a character is identified as an “octoroon”—an African American likely light-skinned enough to pass for white and whose racial identification is anachronistic. If Jossie is light-skinned but unable to pass, thus rendering race an incomplete performance, Lita too may not have earned her otherwise unquestioned whiteness.15 With the absurd suggestion that Jossie is “Mrs. Wyant disguised as a dryad,” Wharton invokes The House of Mirth, evoking a previous generation’s model of femininity that fits neither Lita nor Jossie. Early in the novel, Lily Bart appears as a “dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing-room,” a creature of natural grace hemmed in by social forces, who evokes our sympathy rather than our contempt.16 Despite their differences, Lita shares with Lily a questionable upbringing and a need to marry to solidify her socioeconomic position. If Jossie cannot pass for white, Lita struggles to do so herself, and the novel draws them, in addition to Nona, into unexpected and disquieting proximities.17 Wharton’s portrayal of 1920s high society, as mediated by hostess Pauline Manford, depicts a white elite at the center surrounded by an increasingly heterogeneous, even multicultural society. Although one might view Pauline’s social events, where the Episcopal Bishop and Chief Rabbi of New York both appear at the dinner table, as a sign of a refreshing openness to difference, Wharton views them as a sign of the lack of discrimination of Pauline and her class. If New York is, in Pauline’s words, “the model and prototype of the pure American city,”18 its purity is circumscribed by those who occupy its margins. In addition to Jossie Keiler, Tommy Ardwin, and Klawhammer, Wharton presents the Mahatma, the ostensible “Hindu sage”19 who ministers to Pauline, Lita, and Nona; Amalasuntha, an Italian princess and a distant relation of the Wyants; and the working-class Maisie Bruss, Mrs. Manford’s maid. Despite Wharton’s disregard for these ethnic and working-class Americans, she gestures toward the dependence of white elites on a growing group of ethnic and working-class others for entertainment, emotional support, and household help. As the daughter by marriage, rather than by blood, whose transgressions jeopardize the stability of the family, Lita’s degraded and possibly hybrid origins reveal themselves through style. Her modish home contains Orientalist art objects (a “kakemono of a bearded sage” and “a white Sung vase”) and lush, eroticized flowers (mourning irises and arums); she embraces both Blackness and sensuality, suggested in her “black boudoir with its welter of ebony velvet cushions.”20 Lita’s racially and sexually charged decor functions as a metaphor for her own (in)difference and disinterest in assimilating to the Manford/ Wyant class. Where Lita consciously juxtaposes Black, white, and Asian, Kitty Landish, the aunt who raises her, engages in a vulgar mixing of objects from different traditions. Living in Viking Court, a rundown, Bohemian neighborhood whose residents claim mannered origins, her home is decorated with “the prows of Viking ships,” as well as “rugs woven on handlooms in Abyssinia.”21 Despite this mingling of Nordic whiteness and Africanness, “Mrs. Landish’s last hobby was for what she called ‘purism,’ and her chief desire to make everything in her surroundings conform to the habits and industries of a mythical past.”22 Where Lita manipulates stark juxtapositions of Orientalism, sexuality, and race, her aunt claims “purity” through a vulgar intermixture. Dale Bauer has discussed Wharton’s contempt for personality cults and faddism, visible in her depiction of Pauline’s attraction to the Mahatma and the second healer in

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the novel, Alvah Loft.23 The depiction of the Mahatma, perhaps the character referred to most frequently who never appears in the novel, transcends Wharton’s critique of fads, raising anxieties over miscegenation for the white New York elite. As the novel’s most widely discussed violation of social norms, the Dawnside episode serves to camouflage its unspoken scandals of incest and adultery. Here, anxieties over miscegenation are rendered by the number of young white women who go to his retreat for “rest-cures” and are represented, scantily clad, in a gossip magazine. Just as the young women are, Pauline is implicated in a scandalous attraction to the Mahatma as well: as she urges Dexter not to pursue a lawsuit against the Mahatma, she reminds him that “I should be the most deeply involved of all,” as she intends a rest-cure with the Mahatma herself, and that Nona had also been “intensely” “interested” in his lectures and “eurythmic exercises.”24 The publicity shots of young women at the Dawnside retreat emphasize the intersection of race and sex, as the image of “Oriental Sage in Native Garb” jostles against that of “Dawn-side Co-Eds.”25 The scandal around the Mahatma elicits Dexter’s anxiety around Lita’s sexual drives: as he examines the photos from Dawnside, his eyes hit a statue in Lita’s parlor, which he had “hardly noticed before, except to wonder why the young people admired ugliness.” In an echo of Jossie’s bodily incoherence, he has perceived the sculpture as a “mere bundle of lumpy limbs.”26 Now, in the “glare” that allows him to “study the picture,” he realizes, “That’s what they want—that’s their brutish idol!”27 The actual events at Dawnside are never explained, much as Wharton refuses to indicate what the statue is intended to depict (although some sexual content is suggested, given Nona and Lita’s amusement at Pauline’s polite characterization of the work as “Cubist”). The “brutish idol” suggests a male nude, possibly racialized and with its phallic qualities emphasized; the Dawnside pictures, in their apparent explicitness, have made women’s sexual desires palpable for Dexter. When Lita retrieves the photo, her response conveys erotic delight: “Her smile caressed it; her mouth looked like a pink pearl bursting on a row of pearly seeds.”28 While the paired threats of sexual agency and miscegenous desire initially repel Manford, they ultimately fuel his efforts to become Lita’s protector. The scandal at Dawnside deflects attention from the crises at the heart of the novel.29 White men of the elite consolidate their relationships through their contempt for the Mahatma, as Stan shares the gossip with Arthur Wyant, now an alcoholic in poor health. Arthur characterizes the Mahatma as black but in apparently Indian garb—“the nigger himself, in turban and ritual togs.”30 In contrast to Dexter’s shock at the headline and Arthur’s racist reaction, Pauline is “sick and unnerved” at the sight of Lita’s scantily clad body. Her reaction first evokes the turn-of-the-century language of a young woman exposed—“another denuded nymph,” a Lily Bart whose physical beauty is explicitly revealed. As in the depiction of Jossie Keiler, though, as Lita is racialized through association with the Mahatma, she too seems to split into component parts: “whose face, whose movements … Incredible!”31 Whether Pauline’s speechlessness arises from the sight of Lita’s beauty or her horror at her sexual expression, she views Lita as a series of parts that no longer fuse in a harmonious whole. As the Dawnside photographs are viewed by the novel’s characters, the episode recalls the aftermath of Lily Bart’s performance in the tableaux vivant, in which readers see Lily’s performance through the perspective of a series of viewers.32 As Wharton refuses to narrate what happened at Dawnside, we cannot be sure whether the readers’ reactions mark a conservative response to avant-garde spirituality and physicality or a reaction to genuine social transgression. Do the photos depict scantily clad women engaging in physical culture, or do they hint at lesbianism, miscegenation, or even group sex? The

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horror grows as the image circulates. The revelations of the events at “Dawnside,” a name linked to the novel’s prevailing metaphors of sleep and waking, suggest a growing realization both of women’s desires and the infiltration of racial difference into high society.33 If racial difference intersects with sex, representatives of religious and cultural difference commodify Lita’s sexuality even further. Lita aims to leave the Wyant/Manford milieu for a career in Hollywood, offered by the Jewish director Serge Klawhammer. Although many critics have explored the anti-Semitism of Wharton’s depictions of Simon Rosedale in The House of Mirth, they often conclude by noting Rosedale’s appealing qualities, including his genuine compassion for Lily and understanding of her social situation. However, by the 1920s, Wharton’s depiction of the Jewish entrepreneur character even becomes more sharply critical. Both here and in Fitzgerald’s novel of a few years before, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), Jewish filmmakers pose an explicit sexual threat to white femininity, declassing women of the elite in the bargain by providing them with potential employment. In a reference to the 1923 film based on Oscar Wilde’s Salome, starring Russian dancer Alla Nazimova, Klawhammer aims to bring Lita to Hollywood to perform in “Herodias,” the story of Salome’s mother.34 In his style, Klawhammer evokes Rosedale, “bulging a glossy shirt-front and solitaire pearl toward the company.”35 Yet Klawhammer is even more explicit in his assessment of women, with “eyes like needles behind tortoise-shelled glasses.” Like Jossie, he is a failed passer, with “deceptively blond” hair, “thick lips,” and a heavily “ringed hand,” evoking anti-Semitic, racist, and feminizing stereotypes. While Rosedale is fully smitten by Lily, Klawhammer seems to view women as interchangeable: gazing admiringly at Nona in Lita’s absence, “‘Don’t this lady dance?,’ he enquire[s]‌.”36 As this novel links thinness to race and class, it is no accident that both Klawhammer and Jossie are stout and characterized by food metaphors: “sausage arms” in Jossie’s case, and “a voice like melted butter” in Klawhammer’s.37 Although Klawhammer only appears once, he haunts the novel’s latter portion as he puts Jim and Lita’s marriage in jeopardy. Klawhammer “dangl[es]” a contract in front of Lita although the two have never met, demonstrating the effectiveness of her representation in the photos from Dawnside.38 Similarly, on the basis of a photo, Klawhammer offers a screen test to Michelangelo, Pauline’s distant relative and the son of Amalasuntha. Performing in this way would ethnicize Lita further: as Kitty Landish notes, “Funny, wouldn’t it be, if Michelangelo and Lita turned out to be the future Valentino and.”39 Implicitly comparing Lita to Nazimova, who was actually a first-generation Jewish immigrant, Landish emphasizes how the world of Hollywood could function as a medium for passing. But Klawhammer is viewed even more negatively than a facilitator of passing might be: As Arthur moves toward a breakdown, he blames Klawhammer for Jim and Lita’s impending split, calling him a “dirty Jew … the kind we used to horsewhip … Well, I don’t understand the new code.”40 If, in The House of Mirth, Lily’s degradation lies in her prospective marriage to a Jew, in Twilight Sleep, Lita’s crime inheres in working for one: under the “new code,” interactions between white women and Jewish men secure women’s independence, not their protection. By holding Klawhammer responsible for Jim and Lita’s possible break-up, Arthur—like the others—avoids addressing the couple’s marital dissatisfaction and Jim’s refusal to act to save the marriage. Arthur’s inertia played a role in the failure of his marriage to Pauline: if “the modern husband’s job is a purely passive one,” so was that of the previous generation, as Pauline recalls Arthur’s “inadequacy, his resultless planning, dreaming and dawdling.”41 The problems of white male aristocrats are thus displaced onto ethnic characters, just as Lita’s sexual display at

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Dawnside is viewed as an effect of the Mahatma’s influence, rather than an outgrowth of her own agency. Similarly, blackness constitutes a form of escape from the problems of white would-be lovers. After Stan’s repeated efforts to begin an illicit relationship with Nona, she finally agrees to a dinner followed by “nigger dancing at Housetop.”42 As she and Stan embrace in a taxi, she “struggles out of ” their “enfolding” to cry, “The Housetop!” to the driver, displacing her own physical desires into a multiracial setting.43 Nona and Wyant are the only two characters in the novel to use racial slurs, a hallmark of their shared class affiliations; it is a sign of Pauline and Dexter’s nouveau riche status, rather than any kind of progressive sentiments, that they do not use such language. The cabaret affords the couple both privacy and restraint: during the performance, “Nona could leave her hand in Heuston’s” unobserved.44 The set, “a New Orleans cotton-market,” evokes both slave market and minstrel show, in which African Americans are commodified and sexualized (“ripe fruit”), drawn in exaggerated contrasts (“crimson bursts of laughter splitting open on white teeth”), and linked to both their own labor and the wealth exacted by masters (“golden clouds of cotton-dust”).45 The performance affords the white audience, including Nona, a brief respite from the “ugly and disquieting” aspects of their lives.46 Racialized performers offer whites relief from stress and the opportunity for intimacy; sexualized male others like the Mahatma and Klawhammer provide escape from the complications of white relationships; and finally, working-class whites like Mrs. Bruss and Powder free the novel’s white elites from care. As a defense against this panoply of racialized and working-class others, the white family members are linked by a series of quasi-incestuous pairings. While Dexter Manford’s incestuous enthrallment with his daughter-in-law is the dominant horror of the novel, of which Nona Manford has “caught a startled glimpse” from the beginning, the incestuous drives of the novel emerge in Dexter’s relationship with his own daughter, displaced onto Lita; in filial relationships; and in more extended familial bonds.47 As Nancy Bentley has argued, Wharton and other nineteenth-century American novelists engaged in anticipatory and sometimes synchronous inscriptions of theories articulated in the ethnographic work of their day.48 Although Bentley does not explore Wharton’s 1920s novels, Twilight Sleep is no exception, and although Wharton rebuked Freud and psychoanalysis, calling Freud’s observations about the unconscious “sewerage,” Twilight Sleep echoes both Freudian and anthropological thinking of the early twentieth century, depicting a family in which what Gayle Rubin calls “the traffic in women”—the need of patriarchal families to make alliances and extend power through the exchange of women—operates in tandem with a kind of radical endogamy.49 Although the marriage plot works to reproduce the family, the Wyant/Manford clan turns inward while depending on outsiders like Lita to reproduce the next generation. Filial bonds and infertile unions mark this class, reducing its opportunities for perpetuation.50 As Jennie Kassanoff has charted a narrative of white race suicide in the death of Lily Bart, the celibacy of Nona Manford makes clear that whiteness is imperiled in Twilight Sleep. Having lowered the barriers of the family through Jim Wyant’s marriage to Lita, the family requires that Nona make a class- and racially appropriate marriage. From the early pages of the novel, Nona is characterized by her status as a prospective wife: “That wise little Nona, who is going to make some man so happy one of these days,” the Bishop intones as he chats with Pauline over dinner.51 Yet making a man outside the family happy does not seem to interest Nona, whose deepest heterosocial relationship is with her stepbrother, Jim, who has served as “brother, comrade, guardian, almost father” during

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her childhood.52 Jim’s attention counters her parents’ neglect in her early childhood, and her loneliness in the household increases after his departure for marriage. The closeness of the two children, coupled with their the age difference and Jim’s quasi-paternal role, suggests an incestuous tension, which does not dissipate with adulthood. As Jim and Lita’s marriage deteriorates, Nona wonders at her own and her parents’ efforts to “preserve this brittle plaything [Lita] for Jim, when somewhere in the world there might be a real human woman for him.”53 Given Nona’s loyalty to her brother, perhaps she imagines herself as the “real human woman” who would be Jim’s partner. Nona enjoys a similarly warm, yet sterile, relationship with her stepfather, Arthur Wyant. With the marriage of Pauline and Dexter, Arthur has extended his affection to her, in an unusual portrayal of a post-divorce family as kind of kinship network: Pauline, Dexter, and Arthur have reached an “understanding by their mutual tenderness for the progeny of the two marriages, and Manford loved Jim almost as much as Wyant loved Nona.”54 The novel’s in-laws and stepparents slip into a realm of influence that privileges nurture over nature—“You are old-fashioned, my child,” Wyant tells Nona. “I suppose that’s what I’ve done for you, in exchange for Manford’s modernizing Jim.”55 If Nona acts as his proximate daughter, she is also aware of the possibility that she could act as his nearwife: when they meet by chance at the hospital while Pauline’s housekeeper’s mother is undergoing surgery, she asks, “Won’t I do as a proxy [for Pauline]?” Arthur’s endogamous traits—during his marriage to Pauline, he has slept with a spinster cousin56—cause him to refuse Nona as proxy wife but to appreciate her as proxy daughter. As a paternal figure and a link to the previous generation, Arthur’s incestuous drives and paranoia about adultery—signaled in his name, “Exhibit A”—operate in tandem. As he fumes over the deterioration of Jim and Lita’s marriage, he imagines confronting a cuckolded husband about “that damned scoundrel and your wife”; when pressed by Nona, he identifies the lover as “anybody in particular.”57 In his characterization of the cuckold as an anonymous external force, Wyant echoes Fitzgerald’s Tom Buchanan, who claims, in outrage over Daisy’s liaison with Gatsby, that “the latest thing is to let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere from make love to your wife.”58 For Exhibit A, as for Tom Buchanan, adultery might constitute the first step toward abandoning the race or clan entirely. Nona’s relationship with Stan Heuston, her most likely partner, reproduces the incestuous tension of her bond with Jim Wyant. All of Nona’s prospective male partners are older than her—even while observing her at dinner, the Bishop notes the age difference between her and one of her potential suitors; Stan Heuston “was Jim’s cousin, and nearly twice her age; yes, and had been married before she left the schoolroom.”59 While Jim gives Nona time—“he had a way of not being in a hurry,” Nona notes—Stan gives her proximity; as Wharton writes, “[Nona] could never quite repress the sense of ease and well-being that his nearness gave.”60 The intimacies Wharton depicts are so satisfying as to negate Nona’s need to leave the family. However, Stan chooses a freedom that Nona cannot: staging an affair with the déclassée Cleo Merrick to force his wife to offer him a divorce, Stan’s liberation also marks his undoing with Nona. While the “sterile union” of Stan and Aggie fails to reproduce the elite class, it leaves Stan accessible to Nona for flirtation, if not an actual affair.61 After his prospective divorce, Stan’s availability risks endangering Nona’s position. As the only remotely appropriate man for Nona, Stan disappears from the novel, leaving her to the rejection of marriage she elects at the novel’s end. Nona’s self-sacrifice in the climax of the novel preserves the whiteness of the Manford clan and simultaneously prevents the consummation of an incestuous union. Although

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Wharton does not narrate the scene in full, implicitly, Nona has rushed into Lita’s bedroom just as Arthur finds Lita and Dexter in bed; Arthur shoots Nona while aiming for her father, although it is possible that he aims for Lita instead. The rhetoric of whiteness surfaces as Wharton narrates the aftermath of the shooting: Nona, “her face” “ashenwhite, and empty as a baby’s,” is linked to Dexter, “his stony face white with revenge” as he glares at Arthur, whose “body [is] emptied of all its strength.”62 Wharton renders elite whiteness as emptiness and frailty, while Lita, representative of vulgar origins, survives the attack. In the subsequent suppression of the incident, Wharton demonstrates the complicity of the white servant class with the elites. Like all the elite characters except Nona, who must recuperate from her injury, Arthur disappears and never faces charges for his attempted murder. Wharton implies that Powder, the Manfords’ butler, has perpetrated the cover-up: after the shooting, he steps forward to insist that there were “muddy footprints” on the “linoleum” in the kitchen and that a “tramp had been hanging about.”63 The implicitly racially coded “tramp” and the reference to “muddy footprints” are repeated as the family denies Arthur’s act of violence and Lita and Manford’s adultery, evoking contrasts between dirt and cleanliness, outsiders and insiders, and black and white. Pauline’s efforts to modernize and sanitize her world, including Cedarledge, invoke anxiety over white purity, displaced onto the image of “muddy footprints” in an otherwise hygienic space. Pauline’s fear of crime has led her to construct an elaborate system of protection at Cedarledge, in which a burglar-alarm will sound and the local fire engines will be summoned in case of forced entry. When Powder rushes in after the shooting, Pauline twice reassures herself that “the system worked.”64 The “system” operates as a larger metaphor for white privilege, diverting police scrutiny from Arthur and toward a hypothetical criminal.65 To effect the troubling closure of this novel, Arthur has shot his stepdaughter, and Powder has falsified evidence that protects the white family and could endanger innocent people. As he caters to the Manfords’ needs, Powder’s name evokes the gunpowder of the shooting, “taking a powder” (escape and evasion), and bleaching powders and creams that were sold to facilitate passing. The white working-class servant thus facilitates the “system” of class privilege, engineered by those in a greater position of power, allowing the wealthy to insulate themselves from attack and deflecting attention from their misdeeds. In this way, the climax of Twilight Sleep again echoes The Great Gatsby, in which Daisy’s act of vehicular manslaughter at the end of the novel is blamed on Gatsby and results in his death. Both Fitzgerald and Wharton show how the white elite class protects itself at the expense of both external and internal critical observers. When Nona pledges, on the novel’s last page, to “go into a convent … a convent where no one believes anything,” Pauline shudders at her daughter’s rejection of marriage.66 Celibacy, like incest, protects white elites from external encroachment, serving as a metaphor for the resistance to outmarriage writ large. In the metaphorical convent, Nona will be surrounded by other single white women, as she is at “The Singleton” (a possible reference to the Colony Club, the women’s club designed by lesbian Elsie DeWolfe).67 Nona’s name, a palindrome for “Anon,” as well as a gesture of refusal (No-na), suggests her nameless (because husbandless) status as an unmarried woman.68 Nona’s refusal of marriage also entails a rejection of reproduction: the novel’s other single white women— Aggie Heuston and Pauline’s secretary, Maisie Bruss—are also conspicuously childfree. As Stan Heuston disappears and the novel’s married couples depart in the aftermath of Nona’s shooting, this white female homosocial community remains. While Twilight Sleep

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begins with a utopian image of white reproductive femininity—an image of childbirth so serene that it invites women to produce babies “just like Fords”—it ends with a dystopian image of nonreproductive white femininity, offering little hope for the future.69 With this pessimistic closure, Twilight Sleep offers intriguing parallels with a literature that Wharton ostensibly despised—that of the Harlem Renaissance. As Emily Orlando has noted, Twilight Sleep was a favorite of Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen, whose close friend Carl Van Vechten had disparaged Wharton’s work in the Nation.70 Although Wharton disavowed 1920s modernism in its Anglo-American and African American varieties, Twilight Sleep discloses unexpected affinities between Wharton’s single white females and their New Negro counterparts. Centering gender, reproduction, and inheritance in modernism, Wharton’s novels, along with those of Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset, emphasize the common—if not willingly shared—intellectual project of middle- and upper-class women writers of the era, both Black and white. Take Pauline Manford’s famous vacillation between ideologies and ideas of her era. One of the best-known scenes of Twilight Sleep is Pauline’s mix-up of her speeches for Mother’s Day and the Birth Control committee. In her speech, Pauline first advocates “Personality” for women, imagining a future of “no more effaced wives, no more drudging mothers, no more human slaves” without realizing that she is giving a speech intended for Birth Control advocates to an audience of maternalists. She then quickly shifts into a “hymn to motherhood,” exhorting her audience toward “the glorious privilege, of bringing children into the world.”71 While critics have focused on Pauline’s intellectual inconsistency and dilettantism, the literature of the period demonstrates how both Black and white middle- and upper-class women of the period were forced to grapple with these incompatible ideologies. Although Helga Crane, of Quicksand, initially refuses marriage and reproduction, her Talented Tenth ex-fiancé James Vayle urges her to recognize the reproductive imperative of her class: “The race is sterile at the top … We’re the ones who must have the children if the race is to get anywhere.”72 This eugenic position, also articulated by W. E. B. DuBois, advocated intentional family planning on the part of the Black middle- and upper-classes to reproduce the Talented Tenth.73 Despite Helga’s disdain—like Lita’s—for daily childcare, she ends the novel in a series of debilitating pregnancies, culminating in the birth of her fifth child. While for Helga, the embrace of the conflicting ideologies of maternalism and self-expression is tragic rather than ironic, both novels demonstrate the effects of a clash of these political positions for women. Harlem Renaissance literature emphasizes how African American women denied work and educational opportunities—especially those with light skin—could use their beauty to pass into white social milieux for greater opportunities. Angela Murray, the heroine of Plum Bun (1929), leaves her warm Philadelphia family to enter the white artistic subculture of Greenwich Village. Angela’s betrayal of her family is rooted in a desire to remake herself: as she says to herself, life had given her a “new deal,” “the chance to begin all over again.”74 Similarly, Lita Wyant uses her strange beauty to pass into the leisure class and wishes to use it to move toward greater independence. Lita also stubbornly insists on “a new deal”—the freedom of the New Woman that she, as married woman of the elite, is denied.75 While Plum Bun allows Angela to realize her goals, concluding the novel as she starts her artistic career in Paris and reunites with the man she loves, Twilight Sleep allows the frustrated heroine fewer options, essentially bribing Lita to return to her marriage. In the aftermath of the shooting, the couple head to Paris for the spring, not for Lita’s artistic ambitions but to “see the Grand Prix,

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the new fashions and the new plays.”76 Where Angela embraces her developing talents, Lita returns to her earlier habits of desultory consumption; ironically, African American women’s fiction offers the class and racial passer opportunities that white women’s fiction may not. One last example recalls a pattern that Wharton’s fiction shares with works by Harlem Renaissance women. Twilight Sleep, like the novels of Larsen and Fauset, are novels of the family, exploring origins and inheritance as well as the marital and filial relationships that hold families together.77 The origins of Clare Kendry, the light-skinned African American heroine of Larsen’s novella Passing (1929), offer subtle parallels with Lita’s. Clare is raised by white spinster aunts, who could excuse the infidelity that has produced her light-skinned father, Bob, but not its interracial component.78 Like Ellen Olenska of The Age of Innocence, Lita is raised by an irresponsible aunt and viewed as a home-wrecker. The orphan Clare marries a white man she despises to escape a household where she is unloved and quite possibly abused; similarly, it is never clear that Lita marries Jim Wyant for love. Arresting beauties who exceed and intimidate their peers in style, both Lita and Clare are trapped in marriages they wish to destroy. Despite the fascinating qualities these heroines share, both Wharton and Larsen refrain from entering these heroines’ perspective. While readers often sympathize with Clare’s dilemma, rarely do they consider Lita’s. Both Passing and Twilight Sleep end with the broken relationship of the dual heroines and the death—or collapse—of one of the women. Although Nona has been shot, Lita has “been shattered by the night’s experience,” in a contrast to the bodily coherence she has projected at the beginning.79 The ambiguity of Wharton’s phrasing is telling, as is her refusal to depict the shooting itself. Is the trauma of “the night’s experience” her fatherin-law’s advances, Arthur’s attempted attack on Dexter, Nona’s discovery of the couple, or all three? Similarly, Passing ends shrouded in ambiguity as an emotionally broken Irene contemplates Clare’s dead body. Did Clare fall or was she pushed? Were she and Irene’s husband, Brian, lovers? How deep was Irene’s attraction to her former childhood friend? The envy, love, and hostility of the Nona/Lita pairing anticipates that of Irene and Clare just two years later, pointing toward connections between Wharton and Harlem Renaissance women’s fiction in their depiction of homosocial/homoerotic bonds. Why read Twilight Sleep in the second decade of the twenty-first century? As Jennifer Haytock has noted in a recent study of whiteness in The Children, “anti-racist reading must do more than identify negative representations of people of color in works by white writers; a critical analysis of whiteness includes reading for their inscription of more subtle habits of whiteness.”80 The novel’s titular metaphor suggests that one of the “subtle habits of whiteness,” in Haytock’s words, is the ability to deny painful political and personal realities, beginning with white characters’ awareness of their own privilege. For the characters of Twilight Sleep, those realities go further, encompassing the devastation wrought by the First World War, the global flu pandemic, and an era of racist lynchings and murders that terrorized African Americans. As contemporary readers of Twilight Sleep move into the 2020s, we have witnessed the insurrection at the Capitol, the coronavirus pandemic, and a long-overdue, still-incomplete reckoning with systemic racism, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. As Nona recovers from her shooting in the novel’s last chapter, her chronic insomnia—in opposition to the novel’s title—suggests a newfound, productive, and painful self-knowledge. If white critics like myself are to continue reading race in Wharton, Twilight Sleep can help us understand how the “system,” as Pauline puts it, works.

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NOTES   1 Dale Bauer, Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).   2 Jennie Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Ammons, “Edith Wharton and the Issue of Race,” in Millicent Bell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27.   3 Elizabeth Ammons, “The Myth of Imperiled Whiteness and Ethan Frome,” New England Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2008): 5–33; Hildegard Hoeller, “Invisible Blackness in Edith Wharton’s Old New York,” African American Review 44, nos. 1–2 (2011): 49–66.   4 In an infamous letter to Lapsley the same year as the publication of Twilight Sleep, Wharton articulated a secondhand, somewhat envious relation to the Harlem Renaissance. “Have you read [Carl Van Vechten’s novel] Nigger Heaven? It is so nauseating (& such rubbish too) that I despair of the Republic.” Continuing her invective, she noted that her friends Paul and Minnie Bourget had “seen the premiere of the play of the novel in New York, and had been taken by the ‘Jeunes’ into nigger society in Harlem, et c’etait comme dans le livre! And now I must stop & be sick” (qtd. in Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton [New York: Vintage, 2008], 614; original emphasis). In the visceral response provoked by the novel and the culture it depicts, Wharton wishes to purge the diversity summoned up by Harlem from her body. In a revealing letter to Lapsley two years earlier, Wharton encloses a letter from the Black artist Oliver Richard Reid, who had asked to paint her portrait as one of a series of celebrity images that included both Fannie Hurst and Paderewski. The horrified Wharton describes the letter to Lapsley as a “sign of the chaos là-bas” that made “one long for the Holy Church and the long arm of the Inquisition” (August 13, 1925). Here, racial panic intersects with Wharton’s perennial desire to curate her own image.   5 Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 42.   6 Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep (1927; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997), 18; hereafter TS. For a reading of how the traumas of the First World War are inscribed into the novel, see Phillip Barrish, American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 97–127.   7 For a similar point, see Jennifer Haytock, “Edith Wharton and the Writing of Whiteness,” in Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray (eds.), The New Edith Wharton Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 160.   8 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Random House, 1992), 5.   9 TS TSTS, 35. 10 Ibid., 30. 11 Ibid., 78. 12 Ibid.; original emphasis. 13 Ibid., 78–9. 14 Examples include Mrs. Catherine Mingott’s anonymous maid in The Age of Innocence (1920), the Fenno family maid Phemia in The Mother’s Recompense (1925), and Wharton’s family’s two cooks in A Backward Glance (1934). 15 The word “octoroon” harkens back to a writer whose work Wharton knew well, the popular nineteenth-century playwright Dion Boucicault. In The Age of Innocence, Archer rapturously

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views another well-known Boucicault play, The Shaugraun (1874), in which Boucicault’s portrayal of thwarted love echoes Archer’s passion for Ellen Olenska. In The Octoroon (1859), Zoe, a light-skinned enslaved African American woman, is forbidden to marry the white man she loves and ultimately commits suicide. 16 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905; New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). 17 For a related reading of the racial issues of the novel, see Barrish, American Literary Realism, 118. 18 TS, 85. 19 Ibid., 24. 20 Ibid., 31–2. 21 Ibid., 131–2. 22 Ibid. 23 See Bauer, Brave New Politics, 96, 120–6. 24 TS, 60, 59. 25 Ibid., 108. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 108–9; original emphasis. 28 Ibid., 110. 29 Ibid., 44. 30 Ibid., 92. 31 Ibid., 94. 32 In a sign of the noncommunication between Dexter and Pauline, they never discuss the photograph, although Pauline realizes that Dexter has seen it (ibid., 175). 33 See Jean C. Griffiths, “Lita Is—Jazz: The Harlem Renaissance, Cabaret Culture, and Racial Amalgamation in Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep,” Studies in the Novel 38, no. 1 (2006): 74– 94, for a related discussion of the Mahatma and racial difference in the novel. 34 The role of Herodias, which Klawhammer plans for Lita, is linked to female agency and incest as well as Salome’s violence against John the Baptist. Herodias left her first husband to marry Herod, and Herod, after Herodias has left him, has designs on his brother’s daughter. Lita’s second film opportunity also alludes to incest, as Lita and Michelangelo, would-be lovers, are offered the chance to costar as Lucrezia and Caesar Borgia, whose filial relationship was believed to be incestuous (TS, 250). 35 Ibid., 79. 36 Ibid. See Margaret Toth, “Shaping Modern Bodies: Edith Wharton on Weight, Dieting, and Visual Media,” Modern Fiction Studies 60, no. 4 (2014): 711–39. 37 TS, 78, 79. 38 Ibid., 175. 39 Ibid., 166. 40 Ibid., 267. 41 Ibid., 267, 26. 42 As Phillip Barrish notes, the Housetop is also a “House-stop,” in which Nona, and all the other white characters, can escape her intrafamilial conflicts (American Literary Realism, 118). 43 TS, 146. 44 Ibid., 147. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid.

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47 Ibid., 14. Written just two years before The Sound and the Fury, Twilight Sleep—like Faulkner’s work, a novel of an aristocratic family in crisis—is tellingly absent from Walter Benn Michaels’s discussion of modernist incest in Our America. 48 See Nancy Bentley, Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 49 For the “sewerage” reference, see The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989), 451. Letter to Henri Bergson, February 21, 1922. On the “traffic in women,” see Gayle Rubin’s classic work of feminist theory, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Rayna Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review, 1975), 157–210. 50 See Jennie Kassanoff, “Extinction, Taxidermy, Tableaux Vivants: Staging Race and Class in The House of Mirth,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 115, no. 1 (January 2000): 60–74. 51 TS, 65. 52 Ibid., 14. 53 Ibid., 242. 54 Ibid., 46. 55 Ibid.; original emphases. 56 Ibid., 40. 57 Ibid., 267. 58 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), 137. 59 TS, 47. 60 Ibid., 15, 47. 61 Ibid., 179. 62 Ibid., 299–300. 63 Ibid., 300. 64 Ibid., 298. 65 Ibid., 304. 66 Ibid., 315. 67 Ibid., 265. 68 The name “Nona” also evokes that of Nanda Brookenham of James’s The Awkward Age (1898), a multiply courted and ultimately single heroine who ends the novel under the protection of an older man. 69 Phillip Barrish suggests that Nona’s “convent where no one believes in anything” evokes a community of modernist women artists, where Nona’s cynical questioning of ruling ideologies would find good company (American Literary Realism, 15). The queerness of Nona and the novel’s other young women merits exploration. Early in the novel, Dexter notes that his daughter is “naturally straight,” so much so that “jazz and night-clubs couldn’t make her crooked” (TS, 109); Lita suffers, in contrast, from her “queer bringing up” (106). While at odds with Jim, Lita dances with the gay man Tommy Ardwin while her husband looks on, suggesting her possible queer affinities. Nona embraces singlehood, “see[s]‌it through with Maisie” when Mrs. Bruss is ill (264), and believes that heterosexual passion with Stan would violate her “own ideals of purity” (178). 70 Carl Van Vechten, “A Lady Who Defies Time,” Nation, February 14, 1923, vol. 116: 194–6. Van Vechten’s piece unflatteringly compares Wharton’s writing to that of middlebrow 1920s novelist Gertrude Atherton. As Van Vechten writes, “Usually (not always, to be sure), the work of Mrs. Wharton seems to me to be scrupulous, clever, and uninspired, while that of Mrs. Atherton is often careless, sprawling, but inspired” (194). On Wharton and Larsen,

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see Emily J. Orlando, “Irreverent Intimacy: Nella Larsen’s Revisions of Edith Wharton,” Twentieth-Century Literature 61, no. 1 (2015): 32–62. 71 TS, 97–8. 72 Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928; New York: Penguin, 2002), 104. 73 Daylanne English, “W.E.B. DuBois’s Family Crisis,” American Literature 72, no. 2 (2000): 291–319. 74 Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1929). 75 TS, 195. 76 Ibid., 304. 77 Wharton’s alternative title for The Children (1928), published the year after Twilight Sleep, was “The Family,” suggesting the importance of the construction of the family in Wharton’s corpus. See Jennifer Haytock’s “Judith Wheater’s Queer Vision: Edith Wharton’s Alternative Title for The Children,” Edith Wharton Review 36, no. 1 (2020): 1–24. 78 Nella Larsen, Passing (1929; New York: Penguin, 1997), 27. 79 TS, 303. 80 Haytock, “Edith Wharton and the Writing of Whiteness,” 160.

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CHAPTER THREE

Queer Wharton: The Exultations and Agonies of Kate Clephane’s Closet SHANNON BRENNAN

“Modern fiction really began,” announces Edith Wharton at the opening to The Writing of Fiction, “when the ‘action’ of the novel was transferred from the street to the soul.”1 Insisting that modern aesthetics are produced by a relocation from the public gaze of the street to the panoptic scrutiny of the self ’s interior, the author who counted among her friends and intimates such queer figures as Henry James, Morton Fullerton, and Ogden Codman, Jr., provocatively pre-echoes the famous prescription of Eve Sedgwick that “modern Western culture” has been inexhaustibly produced by “the epistemology of the closet.”2 Design doyenne, divorcée, and “self-made man,”3 Wharton is a chronicler of the queer closet—both its intimate comforts and its pains. Her first published book, The Decoration of Houses, argues that the most “luxurious and practical” bedroom plan is the suite in which “the small sitting-room or boudoir opens into [an] antechamber; and next comes the bedroom, beyond which are the dressing and bathrooms.”4 This preference for concentric zones of spatial intimacy producing the literal closet is matched by Wharton’s attention to the emotional labors that attend its psycho-spatial zone as a place of sexual knowing. Her attention to the “action” of the “soul,” particularly in her late novel The Mother’s Recompense (1925), offers harrowing insight into the ruminations, recriminations, and competing demands of self-disclosure and -concealment that characterize the mental operations of subjects whose desires move in directions counter to the imperatives of modern heteronormativity. At the same time, the novel joins with much of Wharton’s fiction by suggesting that the closet’s structure enables non-teleological fugues of affection and desire whose erotic appeal is in their queer unutterability. While Wharton’s work is chock full of queer characters—indecisive bachelors, boyish girls, the gender-bending Buckle salesman of “His Father’s Son”—it is in her stylistic commitment to the closet drama that Wharton’s queer dynamics come through with salient force. The Mother’s Recompense pictures the ongoing self-interrogation and incitement to discourse of Kate Clephane, a mother who learns that her erstwhile lover, for whom she harbors nearly overwhelming sexual desire, is engaged to the daughter with whom she has recently reunited, and for whom she expresses an erotic passion equally fervent.

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Published the same year as The Writing of Fiction, the novel’s abstract is captured by the summary Wharton provides there of the first modern tale: “a story of hopeless love and mute renunciation in which the stately tenor of the lives depicted is hardly ruffled by the exultations and agonies succeeding each other below the surface.”5 Critics have balked as much at the “exultations and agonies” of The Mother’s Recompense as they have at its “mute renunciation.” Kate Clephane’s horror of the Oedipal plot has been seen as too great; her refusal to marry an age-appropriate partner at the denouement, a punishment too harsh.6 Nicole Tonkovich notes that such readings decry the novel as “an affront to the standards of heterosexual normalcy” for reasons attributable to the gendered and sexualized logics that condition our response to genre.7 Kate Clephane’s horror of incest more properly belongs to the male protagonists of epic novels, the assumption goes, while the womanly genre of the “novel of manners” should, by all rights, conclude with a marriage. It is this gendered reception, Tonkovich suggests, that leads readers to see Kate’s “recompense” not in relation to the idyll she experiences with Anne but in relation to the presumed pain of her loss of a marriage to the stodgy Fred Landers. The “norms of genre, closure, and common sense,” Tonkovich writes, “locate us in a system of literary valuation still committed to valuing women by their relation to the family romance and the patriarchal ideal.”8 Queering Edith Wharton (whose work is already plenty queer) brings attention to the way that the author’s antiheteropatriarchal plots demand their own modes of reading against the grain of marital closure or reproductive futurity. Recent attention to Wharton’s interest in non-teleological time dovetails with the claim I pursue here: that Wharton builds for her characters closets from which “coming out” is not the ideal option. In The Mother’s Recompense, narrative energy is produced by (queer) melodramatic situation and is consistently rekindled by the perseverations of Kate Clephane, who is haunted both by the need to disclose her sexual past and to articulate to herself the shifting erotic objects that attract her in the present. In Wharton’s novel, maternal affection, incestuous sensuality, homoerotism, morbid heterosexuality, and cross-generational passion produce a swirl of inarticulable queer desires whose recognition, resignification, and deferred confession constitute the work’s narrative content; a novel, that is, in which the “action” does not primarily concern the street but the soul—or, more precisely, the closet. This essay begins with an overview of developments in queer Wharton scholarship, suggesting that Wharton’s queer dynamics are seen not only in her homoerotically desiring subjects but in the skepticism her work shows toward the taxonomies by which gendered and sexualized subjectivities are interpellated. Wharton, I suggest, values erotic indeterminacy for how it allows the always-queer course of desire. The second section of this essay examines how Wharton’s work departs from a white, male paradigm of closeted homosexuality by picturing the unique and multiplex ways that (white) women’s sexuality in the early twentieth century was queered—and disciplined. Staging for the reader the process through which Kate Clephane defines and transforms her multiform (homo)erotic drives, Wharton both pictures the painful epistemology of the closet and offers a portrait of desire’s erraticism. From here, I show how Wharton’s queer style—particularly her use of melodrama—surfaces homoerotism while staging an anti-identitarian drama of indeterminacy. Finally, I suggest how this resistance to sexual taxonomy carries with it an ambivalence toward the discourses of racialization that inform and give meaning to the very categories of white gendered (hetero)sexualization that Wharton’s novel means to flout.

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QUEERING EDITH WHARTON While readers have long recognized Wharton’s power as a critic of the white capitalist heteronormativity of the marriage market, attention to the presence in her work of queer identities and affinities has increased only little by little over the past few decades. Writing in 1966, Eleanor Clark noted “the curious omission of the word homosexual” from Wharton scholarship and biography at the time.9 The oversight was surprising, Clark noted, because “the androgynous element” and “male homosexual fantasy” both “pla[y]‌ through Wharton’s work.”10 Since Clark’s essay, Cynthia Griffin Wolff has set the record straight—or, rather, queer— by noting that Wharton’s social circle was made up of men whose sexual proclivities “tended to blur.”11 The observation paved the way for compelling readings of male homosexuality in Wharton’s fiction. Emily Orlando, for instance, notes the “queer shadow” of Wharton’s collaborator Ogden Codman, Jr., in the faithless architect Harney in Summer.12 Noting Wharton’s friendships with gay and bisexual men, Orlando nevertheless observes that queerness appears in that novel as metonym for duplicity, expressing Wharton’s “indictment [of an] arrogant male homosocial aesthetic culture” that relegated women to positions of inferiority.13 Readers of Wharton’s ghost tales have remarked similar notes of homophobic sentiment in the author’s experiments in the gothic: Clark finds the homosexual plot of Wharton’s “The Eyes” to be “lurid,” for example, and Carol Singley suggests that Wharton’s gothic tales associate homosexuality with selfishness.14 Judith Sensibar and Richard Kaye, on the other hand, illuminate Wharton’s sympathetic portrayals of male homosexuality. Sensibar’s Sedgwickian reading argues that Wharton’s The Children illustrates the cost that the stultifying fear of male homosexual desire visits on men and women.15 Kaye complicates this narrative. Noting the association made by Wharton’s friend André Gide between homosexuality, erotic ambivalence, and flirtation, Kaye suggests that Wharton’s work evinces sympathy for “ambivalent males”: men whose erotic hesitations defy the telos-driven norms of heterosexual consummation in favor of a potentially homosexual irresolution.16 Kaye’s reading of the queer valence of indecision in Wharton’s work has precipitated increasing attention to the author’s queer temporalities. Jennifer Haytock notes that Wharton’s The Children envisions an alternative to heteronormative developmental time.17 In another vein, Johanna Wagner and H. J. E. Champion take up the antireproductive role of flirtation among Wharton’s marriageable women.18 Attending to Lily Bart’s “flirtation without finality,” these scholars see in The House of Mirth a queer rejection of compulsory heterosexuality and its temporal demands.19 Yet Lily’s death at the novel’s conclusion, Champion notes, suggests a less sympathetic authorial judgment toward this queer female character than that afforded bachelors like Lawrence Selden and George Darrow.20 It is often in attending to Wharton’s “minor” women characters—the “queer” Princess Lilli Estradina in The Custom of the Country, the spinster Ally Hawes in Summer—that scholars have noticed sites of queer female homosocial erotics. While Katherine Joslin’s delightfully titled “Is Lily Gay?” focuses attention on The House of Mirth’s protagonist, the clearest articulation of lesbian desire in that novel can be seen in readings of Gerty Farish’s relation to Lily.21 Of course, queer affects are rarely unambiguously positive, and Meredith Goldsmith illustrates the relay between homosocial competition and homoerotic attraction that organizes much of the affective exchange between women of different classes in Summer.22

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Wharton was conversant with the (often mutually inconsistent) sexological discourses of her era.23 Yet what comes through most clearly in an overview of queer Wharton scholarship is a profound ambivalence, in the author’s oeuvre, toward the very terms that produce the need for feminist and antihomophobic readings: women, men, homosexual, heterosexual, mother, daughter. For Wharton, a writer who lamented the overt sexual expressiveness of modernist writing, as much as for the contemporary critic interested in the possibilities of queer reading, this ambivalence—more, this skepticism toward the putative fixity of the gendered and sexual categories through which modern subjects are meant to express their legibility—is precisely the point. Wharton’s closet dramas stage the interpellative process through which figures train their identities into legible forms, showing the distress of identitarian struggle, as well as the pleasures made possible in its irresolution.

KATE CLEPHANE AND THE QUEER CLOSET To recognize the stultifying effects of social discourses that insist the body confess its (sexual, gendered) secret is not to transcend those effects, just as understanding gender to be performative does not mean that one can halt the show. Such social fictions derive their power from the ways that they feel personal, guiding the subject to engage in closet dramas of legibility even before an audience is invoked. This is what makes The Mother’s Recompense such a queer case. The novel represents transgressive homosocial desire, incestuous desire, maternal love, and heterosexual attraction as layered webs of affection demanding identification and articulation. In so doing, the novel stages the demand for sexual confession that orders self-knowledge as much as social legibility, as well as the inadequacy of the terms through which such confession is meant to be framed. The novel’s queerness is not just in its gendered and sexual transgressions but in the way those transgressions demand of the subject ongoing epistemological labor. I argue that Wharton’s work both evokes and meaningfully departs from the model of the closet that Eve Sedgwick offers in her virtuosic study of Wharton’s gay, male, white Euro-American contemporaries such as Henry James and Marcel Proust. Sedgwick’s analysis describes how the obligation for men to participate in homosocial culture, competing against the requirement that they repudiate homosexual acts and identities, produced an ongoing compulsion toward erotic self-discipline that she calls “male homosexual panic.”24 The epistemology required, paradoxically, both self-scrutiny and self-ignorance: a compulsion to knowledge, because homosexual content must be recognized in order to be resisted; a compulsion to ignorance, because recognition would equate to familiarity. This twinned demand for utterance and secrecy defines the discursive structure of the closet, in which disclosure (to the self and to others) is “at once compulsory and forbidden.”25 While the objects of Sedgwick’s analysis emphasize the fact of the social compulsion toward ignorance and knowledge, The Mother’s Recompense offers detailed illustration of the affective and cognitive processes through which one’s psyche can be disciplined toward and away from particular contents. This difference is not merely stylistic, though style does matter; it is also reflective of the distinct gendered and sexualized imperatives that attend the subject of Wharton’s analysis. Whereas Sedgwick’s project investigates the production of a distinctly “homo/hetero” binary division, ordered around white men, Wharton’s work tracks the polyvalent interdicts that structure and queer white women’s sexuality.26 Thus, The Mother’s Recompense pictures a closet whose content is always

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sexual but in which lesbian sexuality is one among a nexus of other prohibited erotic—or, to use the novel’s term, “morbid”—affections: heterosexually incestuous, homosexually incestuous, maternal, excessively heterosexual, trans-generational. In The Mother’s Recompense, homosocial desire follows a route that scholars of Wharton’s biography have long recognized as significant to the writer’s imagination: the intimacy between mother and daughter.27 The novel encourages the reader to assign incestuous content to its situation: over Kate’s bed hangs a portrait of Beatrice Cenci, the Roman famous for murdering her sexually abusive father, and the novel’s situation is characterized as provoking “incestuous horror.”28 Yet the precise route of the incestuous threat in the novel is unclear: Is the fear that Anne, in marrying her mother’s former lover, will wed her father figure? That Kate has had sex with a man who will become her son? Or does the anxiety concern Kate’s erotic affection for her daughter? The question is rendered ironic through the structuring absence of a literal father in the text: the novel begins when the prohibition against Kate and Anne’s relationship has been removed with the death of Anne’s paternal grandmother. As such, the ambiguous threat of the novel would seem to turn less on the Oedipal taboo (whose structure undergirds the capitalist nuclear family and the traffic in women) and more on the erotic transgression of excess affection, expressed most immediately between Kate and Anne.29 In the reading that follows, I wish to acknowledge the explicitly homoerotic content of Wharton’s novel without flattening that content to render it simplistically legible as signifying one side of a gay/straight binary. For what is remarkable about The Mother’s Recompense is not only Kate’s homosexual desire, but the way that that desire figures as one among many, and the process that she uses to try to clarify, obscure, resignify, or retreat from the precise quality or object of her diverse erotic drives. This process of resignification is not an act of authorial repression; Kate’s sexual attraction to Anne (and Anne’s to her) is present on the surface of the novel. More intriguingly, Wharton tracks the disciplinary and epistemological processes through which queer desire is trained toward appropriate love objects. To the degree that homosexual desire has been understood in early-twentieth-century discourse as productive of social death, Kate’s declaration that “all her suicidal impulses seemed to end in the same way; by landing her in the arms of some man she didn’t care for” would seem an apt way of articulating the anti-homosocial and anti-erotic imperatives that condition her need to recognize herself as desiring something more appropriate, less “suicidal.”30 We first witness the training of Kate’s polymorphous sexuality when she encounters the adult daughter whom she has not seen since infancy. On witnessing Anne, Kate is overcome with an attraction whose quality begins as sexual and is transformed, with violence, into something maternal: She thirsted to have the girl to herself, where she could touch her hair, stroke her face, draw the gloves from her hands, kiss her over and over again, and little by little, from that tall black-swathed figure, disengage the round child’s body she had so long continued to feel against her own, like a warmth and an ache, as the amputated feel the life in a lost limb.31 The “thirst” to “touch,” “stroke,” and “kiss” leads to a scene of undressing, in which the “tall” erotic object—the grown woman, Anne—is transformed into the desexualized, “round child’s body,” before being metaphorized as the “lost limb” whose absence figures as castration. Through the process of fetishistic scopophilia Anne is transformed from sexual partner to chubby child, and finally to an originary position as part of Kate’s body.

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What we witness in this scene is a rhetorically violent and exacting process through which homoerotic desire demands alterations of its object so that it may be recoded as maternal—a kind of queer labor toward mothering. Because of their long separation, Kate’s erotic affection for her daughter is, in fact, always already queered, existing in slantwise relation to normative models of developmental parent-child nurturance. More than an Irigarayan maternal affection, the erotic puzzle they present is redolent of the query that Michel Foucault poses of “two men of noticeably different ages”: “They face each other without terms or convenient words … They have to invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship: that is to say, the sum of everything through which they can give each other pleasure.”32 Just as Kate’s relation to Anne is framed as an “experiment”33—what queer reader is unfamiliar with the term!—so the passionate urges that emerge between these adult woman are not easily mappable on the social grid of available relations. Questions concerning the nature of this experimental arrangement recur for Kate throughout the novel: “Was Anne’s feeling for her more than a sudden girlish enthusiasm for an agreeable older woman[?]‌”;34 “But daughters, she said to herself, don’t take a fancy to their mothers!”35 Such ambiguities lead Kate to track and reorient the polyvalent pathways of her desires and, when necessary, to identify Anne with qualities that render her a more heteronormatively appropriate object of erotic affection—or, alternatively, to resignify her own identity such that her affection is of a more heteronormatively legible valence. This impulse at first takes the form of a subtle gender transitivity—the attribution to Anne of masculine identity. On first encountering her daughter’s studio, Kate notes “an ungirlish absence of photographs … a sober handsome room … She recalled the pink and white trifles congesting her [own] maiden bower, and felt as if a rather serious-minded son were showing her his study.”36 “Ungirlish,” “sober,” and “handsome,” the room transforms daughter to son, at the same time bringing to mind Kate’s own “maiden bower.” Anne’s alteration into a sober young man transforms Kate to a virginal girl, rendering her affection for Anne both less transgressive (from “homo-” to “heterosexual”) and more so (the eros of the maternal bond becomes the heteroreproductive threat of the incest taboo). This attribution to Anne of masculine qualities continues throughout the novel (“Perhaps, it was only in the fact of being taller, statelier … which gave [Anne] that air of boyish aloofness. But no; it was the mystery of her eyes”).37 These scenes of gender transitivity are accompanied by interrogative flourishes (“but what did those eyes portend?”), suggesting the attribution of a sexual secret onto Anne—a “mystery,” as Kate repeatedly puts it, whose sign is meant to tell on the body itself. Anne’s “mystery” is a projection of Kate’s closet—a secret of sexuality that has the potential to signify in multiple directions. Investigating Anne’s “mystery,” Kate interrogates her daughter’s gender (and her own), her daughter’s body (and her own), the nature of her daughter’s appeal (and her own attraction)—and, ultimately, asks what these feelings make Anne—or what they make Kate. Kate recruits multiple strategies to negotiate her increasing awareness of her homoerotic desire. That desire comes through early in the novel: “Mrs. Clephane closed her eyes with a smile of pleasure, picturing Anne (as she had not yet seen her) with bare arms and shoulders, and the orient of the pearls merging with that of her young skin … Thence the mother’s fancy wandered to the effect Anne must produce on other imaginations; on those, particularly, of young men.”38 Here it is Kate, not Anne, who changes genders, moving from a reverie of homosexual encounter—the fantasy of Anne’s “bare” arms,

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which Kate has “not yet seen,” and her body’s “merging” with “the orient of the pearls” (the coded Orientalist language of exoticism linking with the familiar image of the “pearl” as metaphor for female sexuality)—to an attribution of that fantasy to the imaginations of “young men.” Kate, desiring Anne, becomes the man who might appropriately bear the erotic gaze, and homosexuality is rendered heterosexual through an attribution of desire to a conjured male subjectivity. Kate’s fantasy in this scene continues, leading her to imagine her quondam lover, Chris Fenno. The chain of rumination thus changes tactics: first permitting Kate’s scopophilia by attributing it to other men; then permitting Kate’s arousal by associating her response with a heteronormative erotic object—“It was the first time Chris had been present to her, in that insistent immediate way.”39 Kate’s attraction to Anne evokes a titillation not unlike the one she has felt for Chris, and the surrogation of one for the other testifies to the equivalence of the desire, even as it also substitutes a presumably appropriate heterosexual object for the queer one that initiated Kate’s reverie. The elision of Chris and Anne continues as the narrative develops. In another scene that precedes the discovery of Chris’s role in her daughter’s life, Kate “checked herself with a start. Why, in the very act of thinking of her daughter, had she suddenly strayed away into thinking of Chris? It was the first time it had happened to her to confront the two images, and she felt as if she had committed a sort of profanation.”40 The association, and its concomitant shame, “profanation,” or, tellingly, “morbid intensity,” builds again a few pages later: “each [moment] might give her the chance of … in some way getting closer to Anne. But this very feeling took a morbid intensity … Kate was frightened, sometimes, by its likeness to that other isolated and devouring emotion which her love for Chris had been.”41 These scenes offer a rich exploration of the caprice of erotic desire and the procedures through which desire’s potentialities are disciplined toward heteronormative objects. That Kate repeatedly identifies an equivalence between her homoerotic affection for Anne and her heterosexual fervor for Chris suggests that sexual desire takes a range of objects and forms; however, this pleasure only gains legibility as a result of distortions produced by systems of social signification that pervert its meanings and limit its possibilities. The point comes through as Kate remarks how her own nonparticipation in these systems has enabled her current relation to Anne: “Mrs. Clephane suddenly exclaimed to herself: ‘I am rewarded!’ It was a queer, almost blasphemous fancy—but it came to her so. She was rewarded for having given up her daughter; if she had not, could she ever have known such a moment as this? … She bowed her head in self-abasement.”42 Only by queering her maternal role has she been permitted access to the unique erotic and affective intensities of homosexual attraction that characterize her relation to Anne. Yet the “self-abasement” that immediately follows this recognition, like the subtle resignification of her imagination from a desire for Anne to a desire for Chris, suggests the degree to which Kate has consciously internalized social pressures concerning the permitted channels of sexual affection.

MELODRAMATIC PERSEVERATION AND QUEER STYLE In the scenes of dramatic inquiry that organize Wharton’s novel, the reader witnesses both a plenitude of erotic possibility and the disciplinary function of the closet, which both demands and prohibits knowledge of those sexual contents. The style of the novel brings this out through the depiction of Kate’s psychological perseverations. After learning that

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her daughter may have a heterosexual love interest, for instance, Kate meditates for three pages on the precise nature and meaning of her own feelings: Kate Clephane lay awake all night thinking … She understood now that [her sense of security] had been based on the idea … that she and Anne would always remain side by side. The idea was absurd, of course; if she followed it up, her mind recoiled from it. To keep Anne for the rest of her life … the aspiration was inconceivable … Only she did not want her to marry yet … So she put it to herself … To play the part of Anne’s mother … that was what she wanted … to depend on Anne, to feel that Anne depended on her; it was the one perfect companionship she had ever known … The mere possibility of a husband made everything incalculable again.43 Here, as throughout the novel, Kate’s mind revolves as she works to understand what erotic potentialities she wishes to realize. The original fantasy of homosocial companionship provokes her “recoil,” so it shifts to one of deferral, and then toward the camp desire to “play the part of Anne’s mother,” before returning to the conjugal language of joining with Anne in “perfect companionship.” Depictions of Kate’s interrogation of what she really feels, and why, continue throughout the novel—“Kate’s heart gave a great bound of relief or resentment—which?”44—and suggest that the epistemology of the closet, in Wharton’s portrayal, involves the scrutiny and resignification of feelings whose contents are obscure, if not because they are queer, then because it is only through interrogation that they can be rendered straight. This erotic hermeneutic reaches its moment of crisis when Kate stumbles upon an embrace between Anne and Chris and struggles to explicate her erotic response: In every cell of her body she felt that same embrace, felt the very texture of her lover’s cheek against her own, burned with the heat of his palm as it clasped Anne’s chin to press her closer. “Oh, not that—not that—not that!” … A dark fermentation boiled up into her brain … Jealous? Was she jealous of her daughter? Was she physically jealous? Was that the real secret of her repugnance, her instinctive revulsion? Was that why she had felt from the first as if some incestuous horror hung between them? She did not know—it was impossible to analyze her anguish.45 As powerful as Kate’s sexual excitement is the panicked interrogation to which it gives rise. The explanation that bursts forth—that she may be “jealous of her daughter”—is the one that has satisfied many critics, though it does not satisfy Kate herself. Naming a vague sense of “incestuous horror,” Kate nevertheless declines to specify where the incest, or the horror, originates. Her final commitment to irresolution—“She did not know—it was impossible to analyze her anguish”—has the sound of a refusal to acknowledge the “truth” of Kate’s affections; however, what is at play is not repression but a portrait of the problem of discursive formations of sexual normativity. In the drive to assign a singular content to Kate’s ambiguous sexualized feelings, three things become clear: first, the compulsion to confess that organizes the closet; second, the paucity of explanatory narratives available to Kate (to any modern subject) for understanding the very desire she is meant to confess—a poverty of vocabulary that stands in ironic relation to the strength of the demand for such confession; third, the slightly different social imperatives concerning homoerotism between women and between men. When placed in the context of the novel’s ongoing resignification of Kate’s desire (lesbian to maternal, homoerotic to heterosexual), the idea that Kate might not be able to analyze the source of her “anguish” seems exactly the point.

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It is not impossible to read Kate’s epistemological drama as an allegory of male homosexual panic: Kate as the gay man in the closet. More compelling, however, is the length to which Wharton goes to attribute a queer quality to female desire—and the way that this queering of women’s desire carries with it the unique potential for a variety of sexual possibilities. Kaye argues that Wharton’s The Reef pictures two parallel and “mirrored” “unsanctioned forms of erotic interest”:46 “‘perverse’ indecisive masculine behavior” indicative of male homosexuality and an “analogously prohibited desire,” in the female character Anna Leath, toward heterosexual incest.47 Yet what analysis of The Mother’s Recompense makes clear is that these two modes of desiring—homosexual and incestuous—are neither mirrors nor analogues in Wharton’s fiction, but, rather, overlapping queer modes of transgressive affection that both demand and forbid signification. Thus, Kate Clephane’s queer affections (maternal, lesbian, homoerotic, incestuous, trans-generational, morbidly heterosexual) accumulate—in part, perhaps, because the map of transgressive female erotic sexuality was less dependent in 1925 upon a binary formation than that of white male sexuality; in part as an illustration of the wide economy of sexual possibilities and transgressions that were (un)available to women. What we see, in other words, is an interest in how homosexuality intersects and consorts with other prohibited desires whose objects remain obscure (even as they are incited to confess themselves or be confessed). Expressing this fascination through extended moments of psychological perseveration, Wharton’s novel renders the epistemology of the closet a matter of style. Illicit attraction surfaces throughout the novel, allowing the reader to witness the subtle metamorphoses through which Kate’s knowledge of her sexual desire is transformed through processes that range from peripatetic to catechistic. This surface expression of sexual ambiguity is distinct from what Marlon Ross calls the “claustrophilia” of modern literature and theory.48 In his critique of the universalizing trope of the closet metaphor, Ross argues that a white male canon that values close reading is bound to supply closeted meaning, since “the literary texts themselves are produced in response to a literary establishment that values ‘deep’ hidden meanings as a sign of ‘high’ intellectual labor.”49 Yet The Mother’s Recompense, in articulating both erotic possibilities and discursive foreclosures, makes sexuality not a question of hidden meaning but, rather, of continuous psychological negotiation. Indeed, this picturing of the subject’s relation to social prohibition has led some critics to describe the novel, with some embarrassment, as containing traces of that most queer and lowbrow genre, the melodrama. Wharton employs a melodramatic imagination in The Mother’s Recompense to evoke the queer ambivalences of the closet. While dominant twentieth-century accounts of melodrama have understood the genre to pursue “moral clarity,” queer and feminist scholars have noted the gender and sexual ambiguities that dominate the form. Jonathan Goldberg argues that melodrama’s prolongation of “the impossible situation” sustains, rather than puts straight, paradoxes of identity raised through the confrontation with social prohibition.50 The queer, anti-teleological ethos that Goldberg identifies in the genre recalls Wharton’s interest in flirtation, hesitation, and nonreproduction. In The Mother’s Recompense, perseveration is a matter of queer style. The novel’s melodrama aestheticizes the relay through which Kate Clephane works to conform her desire to shapes that align with normative sexuality and, even as it does so, illustrates, against white cisheteropatriarchal logics of sexuality, the radical indeterminacy of identification and desire. The heart of the drama in The Mother’s Recompense, in other words, is not in its resolution but in the way that the novel prolongs its subject, and stages

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that prolongation, so that readers track the wayward movements of Kate’s desire and the process through which she identifies and trains it.

EROTIC TAXONOMY AND THE SEXUAL SECRET The stylistic commitment to erotic irresolution, multiplicity, and indeterminacy that dominates The Mother’s Recompense contrasts with the putative certainty and singularity of the sexual secret that Kate spends the majority of the novel contemplating: the secret of her sexual past with Chris. Kate’s urge to confess, and the question of whether the people in her new social circle will allow her to disclose what they already know, is so consistently emphasized that to enumerate its instances would take almost as many words as constitute the novel itself.51 A few examples: “If only there had been some one to whom she could confess herself ”;52 “Kate Clephane … looked about her at the faces of all the people in the other seats—the people who didn’t know. The whole world was divided, now, between people such as those, and the only two who did know”;53 “Silence fell— always the same silence. Kate glanced desperately about the imprisoning room. Every panel and moulding of its walls … seemed equally leagued against her, forbidding her, defying her, to speak.”54 The ongoing pressure to confess is matched by an equivalent interdiction against the very speech Kate feels compelled to give: “Every one to whom she had tried to communicate her secret without betraying it had had the same instantaneous revulsion. ‘Not that—don’t tell me that!’ ”55 This prohibition, summarized by Kate—“whatever I’m afraid to ask people they’ll be equally afraid to tell”56—reproduces the structure of what Sedgwick terms the “open secret”: a proscription against knowledge of a subject whose content is already known. The drama of recognition reaches its apex when Anne exclaims to Kate: “But then you’re in love with him, and I’ve known it all along!”57 What stands out is not the presumed content of the secret but Anne’s own avowal that she has “known it all along.” Kate’s ambiguous answering shrug leads Anne to retreat immediately from her claim of recognition, reproducing the secret that structures Kate Clephane’s closet. Yet the novel’s framing of the open secret also reveals the way that the attribution of singular content to undisclosed sexuality produces a distortion: all secrets become the sexual secret; all sexual secrets become one sexuality. Wharton’s work illustrates this reduction of meanings, while also showing how a heterosexual presumption attached to women might produce an open secret whose content is reductively straight (or queered only in predictable directions). What makes the drama compelling is the reader’s awareness that Kate’s secret—while framed, by her as much as by others, as singular and knowable—is, in fact, dynamic, multiply oriented, and irreducible to the singular and rather tired content that emerges through the available discourse of confession. Kate seems to feel she has a single secret to share, but the reader wonders: only one? This explains why Kate’s greatest terror is not of the rejection that will follow disclosure but of acceptance. Contemplating the response her confession might provoke among the circles in which her daughter travels, Kate conjures a vision of Anne’s confidante, Lilla—a young, twice-married flapper: No recoil of horror … would be as intolerable to her as Lilla’s careless stare and Lilla’s lazy: “Why, what on earth’s all the fuss about? Don’t that sort of thing happen all the time?” It did, no doubt; Mrs. Clephane had already tried to adjust her own mind to that. She had known such cases; everybody had; she had seen them smoothed

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over and lived down; but that she and Anne should ever figure as one of them was beyond human imagining. She would have felt herself befouled to the depths by Lilla’s tolerance.58 This horror at social “tolerance” drives Kate to flee the outcome that the novel would seem to frame as a consolation: marriage to Fred Landers. Following Anne’s marriage to Chris, Kate confesses her sexual past to Fred and is shocked to discover that he accepts her. She no sooner learns this than she books passage to return to exile abroad. The conclusion suggests the appeal as much as the agony of the closet. If the closet constitutes a place where the epistemologies of sexuality articulate themselves consistently and harrowingly, it is also a place where desire can be resignified, resisting teleological resolution toward single, pathologizable, or acceptable “truth.” Kate’s desire for Anne can be queerly maternal, homoerotic, sexually competitive, aligned with and against her attraction to Chris—all at once. The confession of the putatively singular secret secures and flattens its content. What is “befoul[ing]” is the limitation of erotism’s multiple queer meanings to a taxonomical category—“the sort of thing [that] happen[s]‌all the time.” While Kathy Fedorko notices that Wharton uses gothic fiction as a space to “utter the unutterable,” The Mother’s Recompense suggests that the act of utterance is implicitly linked to a limiting and pathologizing vocabulary that robs erotic experience of its most appealing, asignifying attraction.59 Consistent with this concern with taxonomic identity, the novel concludes by noting Kate’s burgeoning friendship-in-exile with Lord Charles, described as “so exactly what medical men call ‘a typical case.’ ”60 The implied question—a case of what?—goes unanswered, and the attribution of homosexual content to that empty signifier is baffled by the suggestion that Kate has considered falling in love with him. Yet the echo of the language Kate had earlier applied to her own situation—“she had known such cases”— draws the reader’s attention back to the question of what it means to be—rather, to be recognized as—a “case.” This resistance to determinate taxonomies of sexual identity powers Kate Clephane’s narrative and Edith Wharton’s queer consciousness. Yet the mention of the “typical case” suggests a troubling ambivalence in the author’s work around typological categories writ large. It bears noting that one of the novel’s many coming-out scenes (perhaps the most consequential) turns on what Toni Morrison would call an “Africanist presence”: the identity of an unnamed Black woman who functions not as character but as a foil against which the drama of white women’s sexuality becomes visible.61 Anne tells her mother that she has learned from Chris’s servant that he (Chris) was visited by a woman—to which Kate, unwittingly outing herself as that woman, responds: “The negress said so?” Anne repeats the word, and then continues: “How did you know it was a negress, mother?”62 The scene frames interrogatively a concern that occupies the whole of the novel: How—on what terms—does one “know” the sexualized, gendered, racialized, economic identities that dictate the licit and illicit paths of our desires?63 The Black woman who works at the Fenno household figures as threat because the presumption of her social legibility precisely defines her social prospects. Kate and Anne’s dialogue relies both on the assumed stability of this woman’s gendered and sexualized identity and (ironically) on the question of how one might “know” these qualities. The scene illustrates the intersectional dynamics that produce sexuality while also pointing out the implicit racialization of the closet. While its ordering taxonomies have always been predicated upon the mutuality between racist and sexological discourse, the epistemology

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of the closet differs radically for its differently racialized subjects, and Anne and Kate’s exchange relies on a tensile discourse by which gendered Blackness is fictionalized as uniquely public and visible on the body, in order to secure a closet for the queer white womanhood toward which the novel aspires. A writer who deeply valued privacy in design, and abhorred the open plan of modern architecture, Edith Wharton emphasizes the queer potentials of the closet. Queer Wharton scholarship has allowed us to follow the way that the author’s spatial and temporal consciousness collaborate to produce queer resistances against the determinacy of gendered lifeways and taxonomized sexual articulation. As we continue to queer our codes of reading, shrugging off the compulsion toward heterosexual union that dictates many formal expectations for her work, it is likely that our attention to the latent potentials of affection, erotism, and even social organization in the author’s work will increase. Haytock’s suggestion, for instance, that the tragedy of Wharton’s The Children concerns not “the disappointment of the middle-aged Martin Boyne … but rather … the careless destruction of Judith Wheater’s queer vision of family” points to the way that a departure from the heteroreproductive expectations that have ordered our reception of Wharton’s work allows us to see different ordering concerns, different protagonists, different tragedies.64 But queer readings may also shift our conception of what defines the “tragic” altogether—to see, perhaps, possibility in what once appeared as “mute renunciation.” In The Mother’s Recompense, the great disaster is achieved before Kate Clephane abandons Fred Landers; it occurs in the middle of the text, the moment Kate realizes her daughter will one day marry. The novel’s ending, in which Kate Clephane, single and economically stable, departs from a world of “ice-water and dyspepsia” to one where people have “emotions and passions—however selfish,”65 is perhaps the most propitious outcome that one could wish for. Yet this is probably the wrong lesson to take. Rather, the queer melodrama of The Mother’s Recompense, the anti-teleological energy of Wharton’s oeuvre, suggests that the wildest, most queer, most abundant energies and possibilities take place in the unresolved middle, not in the conclusion; in the soul and not the street—and attending to these may tell us more about queer potentiality than will a sexological and narratological focus on the way that things and people come out in the end.

NOTES Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 7. 1 2 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 68. 3 Percy Lubbock notes that Wharton liked and repeated the appellation. Percy Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947), 11. 4 Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., The Decoration of Houses (New York: Rizzoli, 2007), 169–70. 5 Wharton, The Writing of Fiction, 7. 6 Louis Auchincloss, introduction to The Mother’s Recompense, by Edith Wharton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996), ix; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 370; Adeline Tintner, “Mothers, Daughters, and Incest in the Late Novels of Edith Wharton,” in Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner (eds.), The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), 150–1.

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7 Nicole Tonkovich, “An Excess of Recompense: The Feminine Economy of The Mother’s Recompense,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 26, no. 3 (1994): 12. 8 Ibid., 29. 9 Eleanor Clark, “Angel of Devastation,” New York Review of Books, January 6, 1966, https:// www.nybo​oks.com/artic​les/1966/01/06/angel-of-deva​stat​ion/. 10 Ibid. 11 Wolff, A Feast of Words, 258. 12 Emily J. Orlando, “The ‘Queer Shadow’ of Ogden Codman in Edith Wharton’s Summer,” Studies in American Naturalism 12, no. 2 (2017): 220–43. 13 Ibid., 224. 14 Clark, “Angel”; Carol J. Singley, “Gothic Borrowings and Innovations in Edith Wharton’s ‘A Bottle of Perrier,’ ” in Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds.), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1992), 271–90. 15 Judith L. Sensibar, “Edith Wharton Reads the Bachelor Type: Her Critique of Modernism’s Representative Man,” American Literature 60, no. 4 (1988): 575–90. 16 Richard Kaye, “Edith Wharton and the ‘New Gomorrahs’ of Paris,” Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 4 (1997): 860–97. Scholars have often recognized male homosexuality in Wharton’s gothic tales, but male homoerotism also appears in works of short fiction like “His Father’s Son” and “The Spark.” 17 Jennifer Haytock, “Judith Wheater’s Queer Vision: Edith Wharton’s Alternative Title for The Children,” Edith Wharton Review 36, no. 1 (2020): 1–24. 18 Johanna Wagner, “The Conventional and the Queer: Lily Bart, an Unlivable Ideal,” SubStance 45, no. 1 (2016): 116–39; H. J. E. Champion, “‘Hold me, Gerty, hold me’: Lily Bart’s Queer Desire,” Edith Wharton Review 35, no. 2 (2020): 96–118. 19 Champion, “Hold me,” 114. 20 As Arielle Zibrak notes, Wharton’s tragic narrative resolutions have led many readers to characterize her as a “prude misogynist.” Zibrak’s competing claim that Wharton advocates for women’s sexual enjoyment offers queer potentials of its own. Arielle Zibrak, “The Woman Who Hated Sex: Undine Spragg and the Trouble with ‘Bother,’ ” Edith Wharton Review 32, nos 1–2 (2016): 2. 21 Katherine Joslin, “Is Lily Gay?” in Janet Beer (ed.), Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (London: Routledge, 2007), 97–115. 22 Goldsmith suggests Dr. Merkle’s proposal that Charity act as “companion” for “a lady friend in Boston” would be legible to Wharton’s readers as laden with Sapphic meaning. “‘Other People’s Clothes’: Homosociality, Consumer Culture, and Affective Reading in Edith Wharton’s Summer,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 27, no. 1 (2010): 109– 27. “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” a tale in which a literal closet acts as locus of homoerotic affinity and heterosexual threat, also begins with the proposal that the narrator act as “companion” for a woman who has lost her beloved female servant. 23 Lori Jirousek examines the role of male hysteria in Wharton’s gothic work, while Maria Farland describes the influence that Wharton’s reading in sexology had on her narratological notions of gender and “maturation.” Lori Jirousek, “Haunting Hysteria: Wharton, Freeman, and the Ghosts of Masculinity,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 29, no. 1 (1996): 29– 53; Maria Farland, “Ethan Frome and the ‘Springs’ of Masculinity,” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 4 (1996): 707–29. 24 Sedgwick, Epistemology, 182. 25 Ibid., 70.

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26 Desexualized through the language of friendship, or “derealized” as ghostly presence, lesbianism may not have appeared as a singular prohibition in early-twentieth-century England and America the way that male homosexual desire had done. While discourses of female “perversity” circulated among sexologists, and while the 1892 Alice Mitchell trial drew attention to female same-sex eroticism, the notion of the lesbian as an organized sexuality found its way into popular circulation but slowly. Wharton—a reader of French novels—had knowledge of these discourses. Still, the range of “morbid” attachments for women seems to have been both wider (including the very experience of sexual desire) and less precisely delimited. See Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 27 See, for instance, Josephine Donovan, After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1989); Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990); Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); and Gloria Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 28 Edith Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense, in Cynthia Griffin Wolf (ed.), Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1990), 723–4. 29 Gayle Rubin argues that (white) kinship is produced by men through the exchange of women. Thus, the incest theme in Wharton’s work is queer for its disruption of heteropatriarchal exchange. Indeed, Judith Fryer suggests the father-daughter incest of Wharton’s Beatrice Palmato fragment constitutes “an attack on the very foundations of the social order.” The homosocial queering of incest in The Mother’s Recompense evokes Adrienne Rich’s argument that the mother-daughter connection of infancy renders lesbianism the primary sexual orientation, an argument that chimes somewhat with Marianne Hirsch’s suggestion that Kate’s connection with Anne is “pre-oedipal,” contingent on the denial of maternal sexuality. Of course, incest frequently manifests, rather than resists, oppressive heteropatriarchal power. On connections between incest survivorship and lesbianism, see Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” in Gayle S. Rubin (ed.), Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 33–65; Judith Fryer, Felicitous Space (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 631–60; Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 30 Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense, 729. 31 Ibid., 574. 32 Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Paul Rabinow (ed.) and John Johnston (trans.), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: New Press, 1998), 136. 33 Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense, 677. 34 Ibid., 615. 35 Ibid., 670. 36 Ibid., 577. 37 Ibid., 594. 38 Ibid., 600. 39 Ibid., 601.

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Ibid., 610. Ibid., 617. Ibid., 604. Ibid., 606. Ibid., 636. Ibid., 723–4. Kaye, “Gomorrahs,” 862. Ibid., 885. Marlon B. Ross, “Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm,” in E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (eds.), Black Queer Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 162. 49 Ibid., 171. 50 Jonathan Goldberg, Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), xvi. 51 Melanie Dawson reads the confession drama as concerning generational conflicts about the meaning of “honest[y]‌,” while Avril Horner and Janet Beer argue that Kate’s inability to disclose her relationship to Chris hinges on the social incompatibility of women’s sexual desire with the role of mother. Melanie Dawson, “Wharton, Sex, and the Terrible Honesty of the 1920s,” Edith Wharton Review 32, nos. 1–2 (2016): 20–39; Avril Horner and Janet Beer, Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 52 Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense, 623. 53 Ibid., 650; original emphasis. 54 Ibid., 683. 55 Ibid., 717. 56 Ibid., 611. 57 Ibid., 728. 58 Ibid., 699. 59 Kathy A. Fedorko, Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), ix. 60 Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense, 761. 61 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 62 Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense, 673. The putative fixity of this character’s race and gender contrasts with the shifting racial and gendered construction of the Jewish character Simon Rosedale in The House of Mirth and the anxiety concerning cultural amalgamation in Twilight Sleep. See Lori Harrison-Kahan, “‘Queer myself for good and all’: The House of Mirth and the Fictions of Lily’s Whiteness,” Legacy 21, no. 1 (2004): 34–49; and Jean C. Griffin, “‘Lita Is—Jazz’: The Harlem Renaissance, Cabaret Culture, and Racial Amalgamation in Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep,” Studies in the Novel 38, no. 1 (2006): 74–94. If Wharton performs what Jennie Kassanoff calls a “multiform dialogue with racial questions of her day,” the dialogue staged in The Mother’s Recompense concerns whether the presumed stability of Black womanhood acts as the enabling opposition to white women’s queer elasticity or as an index of the relation between private desire and interpellated identity. Jennie Kassanoff, “Extinction, Taxidermy, Tableaux Vivants: Staging Race and Class in The House of Mirth,” PMLA 115, no. 1 (2000): 61. 63 On the racialized logics structuring the closet, see Ross, “Beyond the Closet,” and Siobhan Somerville, “Feminism, Queer Theory, and the Racial Closet,” Criticism 52, no. 2 (2010): 191–200. 64 Haytock, “Queer Vision,” 5. 65 Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense, 608.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Picturing Edith Wharton’s Modern Woman: Gender and the Social Construction of Age MELANIE V. DAWSON

Scarcely three months had elapsed since he had parted from [Lily] on the threshold of the Brys’ conservatory; but a subtle change had passed over the quality of her beauty. Then it had had a transparency through which the fluctuations of the spirit were sometimes tragically visible; now its impenetrable surface suggested a process of crystallization which had fused her whole being into one hard brilliant substance. The change had struck Mrs. Fisher as a rejuvenation: to Selden it seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm fluidity of youth is chilled into its final shape. —The House of Mirth When a man loved a woman she was always the age he wanted her to be; when he had ceased to, she was either too old for witchery or too young for technique. —The Children Age categories can be notoriously slippery matters to pin down, particularly when the individuals under scrutiny are assessed quickly or from afar. Viewers may gaze upon persons whose ages are illegible because their subjects are on the precipice of a new aspect of life, appearing more youthful at some moments or more mature at others. In Edith Wharton’s texts, such possibilities coexist, creating narrative tension around the question of age and its social significance. Even amid uncertainty, however, Wharton’s characters frequently consider the chronology and age-specific life experiences of those around them. As part of this consideration, many hazard guesses about the lives of others, but some viewers take more decisive action and make pronouncements about others’ ages. The curious act of assigning age to another person appears as a culturally meaningful, but intrusive, practice, for it presumes a degree of confidence over the judgments brought to bear on another’s life. Such judgments can be self-interested, even aggressive, reflecting a power dynamic in which male characters operate without questioning their

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assumptions. Frequently, the subject of this assessment is a woman. Demonstrating what age studies scholars describe as the social construction of age, such judgments conflate chronology with ideas about utility, complementary roles, social behavior, and beauty. Efforts to explore and assign ages, Wharton hints, are also overtly gendered exercises, featuring male characters who feel assured of their abilities to imagine the experiences of women in minute detail—a belief as marked in its assumptions as for the confidence that surrounds them. Even when impressions of a woman’s age are subject to surrounding circumstances—and desires—at issue is how and why a woman’s age is understood as a matter appropriate for masculine adjudication. A sense of age appears dependent on gendered ideas of beauty and availability, which encircle a woman’s role in a man’s desirous imagination; in this sense, assigning age is an imaginative act with far-reaching consequences. Engaging in the assignation of age to a woman can appear as an expression of what Laura Mulvey has described as scopophilia, or the “pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight.”1 While age-conscious viewing may be pleasurable, the realities attendant upon such assumptions are material for the women (and girls) at whom they are directed. In interrogating desires to construct and recreate identities rooted in age, Wharton’s fictions such as “The Moving Finger” (1901), like The House of Mirth (1905) and The Children (1928), depict the self-interested fictions behind constructions of women’s age, which are so common that they appear innocuous. As an element of Wharton’s narrative conflict, age is highly charged; the assignation of age to women constitutes an act of representational control, particularly when such assessments are not traceable to chronological or physical realities but rather to hazy impressions. As age studies scholars remind us, value systems rooted in age can be unexpectedly arbitrary; in other words, while age is tied to the realities (and anomalies) of corporeal, psychological, and mental experience, it also reflects norms that shift across time, a fact that attests to their malleability. Howard Chudacoff, for example, has argued that age-specific norms emerged by the end of the nineteenth century and helped shape “new values concerning age to a broader audience than was possible in previous eras,” solidifying the meanings associated with age categories and heightening age consciousness across American culture.2 Wharton’s work consistently attends to this intensification of age-based interests, for it addresses the ways women’s personal histories are vulnerable to interrogation and assessment or to the social construction of age. Moreover, narratives about women’s lives, which are adjusted and remade in light of presumptions about ideal life trajectories, bodies, and forms of beauty, demonstrate a variety of gender-specific judgments. These narrative incursions into women’s lives, Wharton suggests, constitute overt attempts to manipulate age-based identities. As Avril Horner and Janet Beer have argued, Wharton’s work challenged “society’s obsession with youth and youthfulness and its concomitant embrace of ageism.”3 This same society was concerned, too, with the privileging of youthful forms, according to Margaret Toth, Sheila Liming, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, whose projects explore aspects of youth culture and the era’s emerging beauty system.4 Wharton’s writing pursues these issues across her oeuvre, from her best-known novels, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence (1920), through her body-centric fictions such as The Mother’s Recompense (1925) and “The Looking Glass” (1935). As I have argued elsewhere, Wharton’s investment in an age-conscious modern culture was acute and multidimensional as she explored her characters’ capacity for imaging various facets of age in tandem with matters of social standing and cultural authority.5 Her fiction

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underscores the degree to which non-neutral, implicitly ageist assumptions encircled her female characters at all stages of life, for women were vulnerable to being defined— and limited—by such perceptions, both in terms of the ideals surrounding chronological experiences and in regard to individuals’ supposed value based on them. As a social construction prone to multiple and contested reassessments, age appears at the center of a series of conflicts that become indivisible from the male viewer and his ideals of women’s availability and compatibility. Age is thus at the center of interpersonal dynamics and is subject to a host of changing relations between Wharton’s men and women. The constructions and reconstructions of women’s ages in Wharton’s fiction thus offer up opportunities for a pointed scrutiny of gendered power dynamics, particularly in terms of the conceptual separation of those who assess and those who embody age’s physical signs. *** By the turn into the twentieth century, or the period of the T-20, when Wharton’s writing appeared in print, age-centric concerns were under debate in American culture, as they would be for much of the twentieth century.6 Longevity was increasing, and with it, new designations attributable to distinct phases of human development, the category of adolescence among them. With new freedoms, including coeducational opportunities, young people dominated much of what we think of today as the era’s emerging age-based concerns. Adulthood, too, attracted new scrutiny, as very young adults, middle-aged adults, and much older adults were contrasted with one another, particularly in terms of their maturity of behavior, experience, physique, and relation to the era’s technological innovations.7 Contrasts between young adults and those who were mature and, in turn, the middle-aged and the aged were as significant to a twentieth-century sense of age as were the much-publicized antics of the era’s adolescents. By the turn into the twentieth century, the meanings associated with age were shifting rapidly in the United States and Europe, as explorations of youth culture, the flapper era, and adolescence have demonstrated. According to Cynthia Port, “At the very moment that experienced women were beginning to have the potential for autonomy and authority, higher estimations of value began to shift to the young.”8 As a consequence, a “prolonged girlhood” emerged as an ideal, even for mature women, as the idea of a long youth privileged the qualities associated with youthfulness over those that signaled maturity.9 At the same time, girlhood could not last indefinitely, if it was to retain a defined or consistent meaning. In assessing the problem of how to perceive eras of life experience, Margaret Morganroth Gullette has argued that being assigned an age, namely in terms of being aged “by culture,” means that “appearance and selfhood” are conjoined—that your appearance “is your self.”10 It is an assumption that profoundly affects an individual’s perceived value. Too often, according to feminist age studies scholars, the aging process is equated with decline, which, for women in particular, becomes synonymous with loss, namely the loss of beauty or vitality. Gullette describes such constructions as “drastic biases in postindustrial, most-modern age ideology” that “naturalized themselves” across the twentieth century.11 An understanding of age through a bodily focus, moreover, speaks to the way in which chronology has become “the hardest of the bodily-linked constructs to dispute because two of its properties, change and continuity, seem unavoidable,” Gullette posits.12 Further, as Gullette and other age theorists also assert, for women, the construction of age via a set of bodily signs has been an index as limiting as it is potent.

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Amid the constructions of age and aging traceable to Wharton’s era, her fiction suggests that the subjective and historically specific ideals surrounding age were subject to intertwined cultural and personal dynamics. Accordingly, the logic of age-based idealism varies considerably or, in Wharton’s fiction, from character to character. For some individuals, growing older could mean a comforting vision of companionship across time, while for others, the aging process appears as an affront to the values of beauty and youth that they hold dear. Both tendencies appear in the short story, “The Moving Finger,” which demonstrates a woman’s vulnerability to men’s competing constructions of her personal value. *** A number of works across Wharton’s oeuvre attend to the contested values projected onto women’s bodies, but in “The Moving Finger,” both youthfulness and advancing age are constructed and then reconstructed.13 In the story, the object of the collective male gaze, Mrs. Grancy, is not only a charming woman who satisfies her viewers’ scopophilic interests but she is also the subject of a painting executed by Ralph Grancy’s good friend and frequent guest, Mr. Claydon, whose preferred vision of Mrs. Grancy is rooted in his aesthetic preference for bodily youth. Across the story, his vision competes with Mr. Grancy’s ideas about his wife’s portrait, a sign that the fiction is one of “a group of stories about idols intended … for possession or exhibition,” according to Emily Orlando.14 The conflict emerges a few years after the creation of the painting at the plot’s center when Claydon is asked to alter it. Reluctantly, he accedes to Mr. Grancy’s request that the painting be reworked, several times, in fact, so as to reflect Grancy’s changing desires as a viewer. These alterations dramatize the ways in which men’s assignation of age-based values, both implicitly and explicitly, affect the meanings attached to a woman’s role in life and beyond, without apparent expiration date. The story’s elaborate attention to the changing visions of Mrs. Grancy overlaps with Wharton’s interrogation of the personal preferences, indecisions, and recriminations that encircle images of idealized womanhood. And as befitting this emphasis on appearances, Mrs. Grancy is scarcely even a character in the story; rather, she is a device for interrogating perceptions of women’s value, as recognized by men who are motivated by divergent ideals of age and experience. It should also be noted that in this early story, the question of age is less obviously aligned with sexual desire (as it would be later) and is instead rooted in aesthetics and companionable ideals. In its attention to the unrealities and exaggerations attendant upon men’s impulses in assigning ages to women, “The Moving Finger” reflects some of the complex cultural energy coursing around twentieth-century questions about the meanings of age, and it propels them to an absurd level. By providing multiple perspectives on Mrs. Grancy’s age, the story underscores the role of a number of men in finding a woman youthful or aged, beautiful or comforting; indeed, as the plot develops, “the story recedes as the storytelling gentlemen proliferate at an alarming rate,” according to Barbara White, who attends to the gendered narrative constructions inherent in the tale.15 One of the strangest aspects of “The Moving Finger” is that it involves the age of a dead woman, as represented by her portrait. That a group of men debate this question of age and, while doing so, frequently confuse the deceased woman’s identity with her representation also position the central conflict in “The Moving Finger” as something of a farcical debate about a problem that has no basis in any actual reality; it is a problem, moreover, traceable to the construction of a woman’s value as linked to her beauty,

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which is in turn tied to her ability to resist the aging process. Around Mrs. Grancy are the unnamed narrator, Mr. Grancy, and Mr. Claydon; there is no objective account of Mrs. Grancy’s person, preferences, or chronological age beyond the narrator’s impression that she is likely “past thirty.”16 At the story’s beginning, her presence is described as a surprise, though a delightful one, to the men. The missing narrative details surrounding Mrs. Grancy’s prior life, appearance, and particulars constitute striking omissions in a realist text; while Wharton was skilled at sketching such backgrounds with a light touch, she rarely failed to assign an age—and an accompanying account of a society’s impressions about that age—where her female characters are concerned. A number of details surround the difficulties that Lily Bart faces at twenty-nine and Ellen Olenska at around thirty; there is, in addition, Kate Clephane, who cannot quite face the fact that she is in her early forties and whose age-based subjectivity is at the center of the narrative. In this story, however, an exact chronological age for Mrs. Grancy is difficult to ascertain, for it is always a matter of construction for the male narrator and the other men in the text.17 In his second marriage, readers learn, Ralph Grancy has found great joy and a rejuvenated sense of self in his new wife, a “joy which is rooted in young despair,” after a disastrous first marital union.18 As an agent of another’s revitalization, Mrs. Grancy’s work at first appears complementary and complete. It is also revealed that when Grancy fell in love with her, she was already mature in character. As the narrator asserts, “If she had lost the surface of eighteen she had kept its inner light; if her cheek lacked the gloss of immaturity her eyes were young with the stored youth of a life-time”—a description indicative of the narrator’s implicit preference for youthful femininity.19 Mrs. Grancy is, in sum, “the most beautiful and the most complete of explanations” for Grancy’s second marriage.20 Her “inner light” combines with a less obvious but significant maturity that the first Mrs. Grancy, an egotistical and hurtful person, lacked; it is in part the second Mrs. Grancy’s maturity that marks her as an ideal partner in life. Nevertheless, the narrative hints that the new Mrs. Grancy exists at some distance from a “real” embodiment of youth (a quality the narrator associates with the age of eighteen, which epitomizes youth for him). By contrast, Mrs. Grancy’s youth is of the “stored”-up variety, traceable to some other, prior phase in life.21 At the same time, her maturity emerges as a point of aesthetic concern for those men in the Grancy circle who value feminine beauty. In them, as Orlando rightly asserts, “Wharton shows that the men fancy a woman’s primary work is to please.”22 Mrs. Grancy, the subject of the scopophilic gaze, will have her age manipulated via the portrait painted for her husband, for the artwork reflects the youth-centric ideals held by Claydon. As a consequence of subsequent alterations to the painting, the story appears as a contest between naturally occurring and highly aestheticized visions of aging, a binary that opposes the ideals of spouse and artist. These positions become clear after Mrs. Grancy’s portrait is unveiled, for it highlights Mrs. Grancy’s youthful qualities, even though the actual Mrs. Grancy possesses a complex personal appearance. While welcoming and beloved, Mrs. Grancy is possessed of “complementary” graces and “needed the mate’s call to reveal the flash of color beneath her neutral-tinted wings,” like a female bird more prone to camouflage than showiness, the narrator comments.23 She appears, hence, as “the right frame” for her spouse, but when she is alone in a portrait’s frame, we are to understand that she benefits from an idealizing painterly vision, given her subtle appearance.24 Claydon, the Pygmalion-like figure who is drawn to youthful visions of womanhood, interjects them into Mrs. Grancy’s visage, creating an ideal more than a realistic

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representation. In his “interpretive light,” the narrator reveals, “Mrs. Grancy acquired the charm which makes some women’s faces like a book of which the last page is never turned. There was always something new to read in her eyes.”25 The portrait is pronounced by the narrator to be a masterpiece, one that both men (he and Claydon) visit at the Grancy household. Claydon may even journey to the Grancy abode in order to visit the portrait, for it becomes something of a joke that he prefers not to gaze upon the flesh-and-blood Mrs. Grancy so as to dwell instead upon the visage in the portrait, which pleases him better. Mrs. Grancy’s one comment in the story addresses the portrait; “Ah, you have done me facing the east!” she exclaims, obliquely noting the dawn of life attributed to her visage.26 Youthfulness is not the only value ascribed to the portrait, however, for the story also includes the fact that Claydon draws upon the love (namely Grancy’s) that enhances Mrs. Grancy’s beauty. “Love, the indefatigable artist,” is described as “perpetually seeking a happier ‘pose’ for his model.”27 This affection not only enhances Mrs. Grancy’s subtle beauty but, according to this description, also ascribes something experientially new to her person. That Claydon’s vision of his subject is a highly constructed one is immediately apparent, for he “had not set out to paint their Mrs. Grancy,” or that of the group of intimate friends who gather at the Grancy household, but “Ralph’s.”28 What results is a double idealizing attributable to artist and spouse, who prefer a woman with many “pages” left in her figurative book. An additional set of constructions affects the portrait after Mrs. Grancy dies. Left a widower, Grancy looks to the portrait for comfort. This time, however, Grancy’s idealized vision of his wife will privilege the companionate experience of aging over Mrs. Grancy’s previously constructed youthful beauty. With great reluctance, Claydon will age the portrait at the behest of Mr. Grancy. Whereas Claydon’s rendering of the portrait reflects the era’s emerging, youth-centered aesthetic, the ideal that will be the basis for the portrait’s alteration is profoundly idiosyncratic, for Grancy will assign (or actually, reassign) age to his wife’s visage. Grancy’s preferences are profoundly personal. When he returns to his home and painting a few years after his wife’s death, he is now “five-and-forty … gray and stooping, with the tired gait of an old man.”29 What he most desires is that the painting be altered so that Mrs. Grancy will appear to have aged alongside him, for it is “the picture of a young and radiant woman. She smiled at me coldly across the distance that divided us. I had the feeling that she didn’t even recognize me,” he announces. Meanwhile, in the mirror he sees a “gray-haired brown man whom she had never known.” He found “her,” he notes, a “strange woman” with whom to live. Believing that “she would have hated to be left behind,” he determines that “it’s the picture that stands between us; the picture that is dead and not my wife.”30 As befitting Mr. Grancy’s desire, the Mrs. Grancy of the portrait must be changed so as to hint at the companionship Grancy seeks; the altered artwork will strike him as if “she’d met me on the threshold and taken me in her arms!”31 At this juncture, and amid the contests over the kind of ideal the painting represents, the story suggests not only that women are particularly subject to the construction of their age but also that they are affected by the felt needs of the men who surround them, as those needs morph across time. In this sense, White’s description of the story as one of a series of “claustrophobic wife” stories is apt in its depiction of the limited space that Mrs. Grancy occupies in the tale—a space constructed by Grancy and his friends.32 After Mrs. Grancy’s portrait is aged by a horrified Claydon, only Mr. Grancy will be satisfied by the change. The narrator and Claydon, by contrast, treat the time-altered visage in the painting as an assault upon their ideals and “their” Mrs. Grancy. This view, which

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combines ageism with an implicit sexism, reflects a principle described by age scholars, namely that the “physical experience encompasses the whole of [a]‌being,” as Margaret Cruikshank argues.33 Moreover, she writes, the locus of this emphasis is on an explicitly gendered body, for “an old woman is an alien creature,” presumed to be “costly and crabby, and her life stage is seen as disconnected from youth and midlife rather than an outgrowth of them.”34 For Claydon and the narrator, the image of an aging Mrs. Grancy evokes anxieties that betray their alienation from the aged female form, for in their view, change across time constitutes an erasure of Mrs. Grancy’s personhood. Visible aging thus dissolves the inflexible, highly aestheticized identity they have assigned to Mrs. Grancy. Again, however, it should be underscored that these are anxieties that fixate on the age of an inanimate object, a fact that fails to dawn on either man. After the painting’s alteration, both Claydon and the narrator will avoid the portrait. The reinscription of Mrs. Grancy’s age functions as an echo of Grancy’s own altered status, a sign that Grancy embraces a complementary ideal, one that reflects his aging. It also underscores his emotional desire to age with his wife. His preference also constitutes a construction of his wife’s portrait’s age that appears dependent upon the perceived comforts “she” provides him, for in the altered painting he now finds an age-appropriate illusion compatible with the fantasy of a later-life harmony experienced together. While this vision appears rooted in affection, it nevertheless invokes the construction of a woman’s age at the behest of a man and in tandem with a man’s perceived needs. The overtly reconstructed portrait thus serves as a reminder that youth is not the only agecentric ideal. As Grancy describes the change in the portrait, he does so in markedly emotional terms, for “it’s what she would have wished … that we should grow old together.” He also asserts, “I like her better so,” for he does not want to have been “left behind.”35 The story is not, then, a contest between a youth-centered construction of age and a vision more accepting of change across time, but of two unrealistic visions, both of which are implicated in ideals about age. Neither is immune to gendered constructions of a woman’s idealized value, be it aesthetic or emotional. The idiosyncratic construction of age visible in such narratives underscores Wharton’s depiction of men’s specialized impressions of their own needs as responsible for the resulting age-based constructions of women’s roles. Across these interactions with the portrait, the men who view it seem to forget that Mrs. Grancy’s identity extends beyond her appearance. This eliding of personal identity with the age-specific body is again explained by the study of age, for as Margaret Morganroth Gullette notes, “appearance and selfhood” are “stickily intertwined,” such that appearance “is your self.”36 Kathleen Woodward, who similarly focuses on the corporeal form, writes that a resistance to the middle-aged body is rooted in fear, specifically the “fear of one’s body being found in a state of decay.”37 Medical approaches to aging are implicated in such beliefs, for as part of a representation of aging as “a progressive disease,” a focus on “pathology of old age” emerged in medical discourses, according to Stephen Katz.38 This concept of the “fragmenting,” pathologized body suggests that notions of mortality are transmissible, and they spread fear across a host of individuals whose resistance to age comes in the form of shutting out its visible signs.39 Within Wharton’s story, the initial representation of Mrs. Grancy stresses the stability associated with an unaging form. As she was first imagined on a portrait’s canvas, Mrs. Grancy has appeared to resist the forces of time and change that threaten the Grancy group’s social cohesion—and the lives of its members. As a consequence, the collective dismay at the changed portrait hints at the destabilizing consequences of change in the body—any body—across time. Whereas

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the first painting captured its subject’s youth in “the pale gold light, which irradiated her eyes and hair, or silhouetted her girlish outline,” the adjusted painting reveals “a veil of years” and “bright hair” that has “lost its elasticity, the cheek its clearness, the brow its light: the whole woman had waned.”40 In the face of the portrait’s vanished youth (which was always a construction), Grancy’s friends are horrified, including the narrator, who cries out, “I- I’ve lost her,” meaning not the actual Mrs. Grancy, who has long been dead, but the ideal represented in the painting.41 While this reaction reveals the degree to which the men feel that they have retained Mrs. Grancy via her representation, their response to the revised artwork hints at a belief that Mrs. Grancy’s very selfhood has now been rendered invisible, obscured behind a “veil” and made inaccessible. There remains, then, an insistence that there is a real and forever-youngish Mrs. Grancy behind the veil applied to her image, despite the fact that this supposed reality is a double representation, first of Mrs. Grancy, via a painting, and second through the overt construction of idealized youth within it. Such outsized reactions serve as reminders that where age is concerned, ideals of the unchanging body lead to aesthetic and behavioral exaggerations, but ones that operate so powerfully that their constructed nature becomes invisible. Combined with the fact that such a debate is about a person who no longer lives and who was never synonymous with her painted representation, the story suggests that constructing a woman’s age is a privilege wrought by and then rendered invisible by men who fail to see either act as an exercise of power. What becomes erased, namely, is the privilege inherent in creating an image separated from any lived reality. Alongside the imaginative act of constructing Mrs. Grancy’s image is, in Claydon’s case, a motivating distaste for the body past youth, which reflects the problematic bodily ideals of modern culture. In its depiction of such preferences, Wharton’s writing underscores a pervading resistance to personal change, or an idealism that resisted an acknowledgement of the aging process; such a stance overlaps with an emerging hostility to middle age—a concept that Claydon and the narrator implicitly dismiss as inappropriate to Mrs. Grancy.42 Within “The Moving Finger,” a second aging body is present but is not positioned as a site of conflict or pathology, a fact that reflects an aged-based double standard. Amid discussions of Mrs. Grancy’s portrait, Mr. Grancy is in the midst of a physical decline more real than any change attributed to Mrs. Grancy (via the portrait). Rather than focus on Mr. Grancy’s actual physical alteration, which indicates his precarious health, his friends treat it lightly until his impending death; instead, they continue to focus on the portrait of his wife and on the changes to it that they perceive as horrifying. All appear as signs of aging’s overt gendering within the story. For Grancy, meanwhile, stability cannot be found in the representation of a woman’s bodily youth; he instead locates constancy in an imaged relationship that endures, perhaps even beyond death. Grancy’s vision of companionable agedness (which has been crafted so as to correspond with his physical state) is rooted in imagination, based on Claydon’s idea of what Mrs. Grancy’s age would have wrought on her person, had she lived. It satisfies for a relatively short period of time. Ten years later, when Grancy nears the grave, he announces a preference for a wife who sympathizes with his illness. Before he dies, he again asks Claydon to alter the portrait, which is changed so as to reflect “the face of a woman who knows that her husband is dying.”43 This ideal does not signify age per se but indicates a projected sympathy for Grancy’s imperiled existence. Grancy takes apparent comfort in the fact that “she knew” he was gravely ill and would remain nearby, as befitting a loving caretaker.44 No longer altered to match Grancy, Mrs. Grancy’s visage is reimagined in tandem with her husband’s emotional need, an even more idiosyncratic ideal.

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Even when tied to unusual circumstances, constructions of women’s visages reflect contested interests in shaping and reshaping the representation of an ideal that implicates the aging process. Making such a change involves the even-more reluctant Claydon, who sees his portrait of Mrs. Grancy (always more real to him that the living woman had been) range further away from his vision. “I could have cut my hand off when the work was done,” Claydon later tells the narrator.45 As becomes clear after Grancy’s death, the changes were made as part of pact between the men so that Grancy’s vision would be dominant during his lifetime, after which the painting would be left to Claydon, who would then be free to alter it as he wished. Predictably, some time after Grancy’s death, the narrator finds the portrait restored to “the recovered radiance of youth,” for Claydon has, he nonsensically claims, “turned my real woman into a picture.”46 Constructed ideals of age, the story suggests, may persist long after a woman’s life has ended, and despite viewers’ claims, they may never have been “real.” Moreover, the impulse to adjust a woman’s age tends to persist, according to “The Moving Finger.” This impulse is perhaps the only stable one where Mrs. Grancy’s age is concerned. When Claydon narrates his objection to “sacrific[ing] her youth and beauty for [Grancy’s] sake,” or to “mak[ing] an old woman of her—of her who had been so divinely, unchangeably young!” such pronouncements suggest his inability to recognize his own artifice.47 Part of the inherent unnaturalness of valuing a woman’s “unchangeable” beauty is Claydon’s (and the narrator’s and Mr. Grancy’s) tendency to conflate the portrait and the mutable Mrs. Grancy. The painting’s image and its variable uses appear as the locus of pure fantasy, subject to repeated constructions, in response to the visions that Mrs. Grancy’s portrait’s viewers find complementary to their desires. From youthful new wife to partner in aging to affectionate caretaker who will usher her husband to the grave and beyond, Mrs. Grancy’s visage shifts, even as possessiveness about her appearance underscores the various delusions surrounding it, including Grancy’s belief that the painting is (or was) his “prisoner” and that he will never “lose” its subject. Or, as he reportedly says to the painting at one point, “If you grew tired of me and left me you’d leave your real self on the wall!”—a statement made slightly redeemable by its tacit acknowledgment that there is (or was) a “real” self beyond the painting.48 For Claydon, however, an inflexible, unrealistic ideal of youth predominates, as does a competing possessiveness. He believes that “she” (Mrs. Grancy, conflated with the painting) was by nature “unchangeably young”—a patent impossibility—and that the portrait should reflect this perplexing quality.49 But because his ideal appears even further divorced from Mrs. Grancy’s person than was Mr. Grancy’s, the reinstatement of Claydon’s preferred vision of a youthful Mrs. Grancy at the story’s end speaks not to human bonds but to the aesthetic ideals associated with the immutable female form. With its virulent politics of gendered scopophilia, oppositional aesthetic aggressions, and its frequent collapsing of individual and idealized image, the story speaks powerfully to the ways that a woman’s age is made to conform to men’s personal preferences. In the end, it is not the case that one representation of Mrs. Grancy is constructed and the others are not but that it is impossible to locate an ideal, an image, a response to Mrs. Grancy that is unconstructed, that is instead rooted in her personality or presence rather than her meaning to a man. These positions, outlined so clearly in the early years of Wharton’s work, would only grow more pronounced as her discussions of aging, beauty, and longevity grew more prominent and as the resistance to corporeal change became a

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central strand of modernity’s value system. They were ones that Wharton greeted with a skeptical eye. *** Lawrence Selden’s vision of Lily Bart at the opening of Book Two in The House of Mirth demonstrates an active construction of a woman’s age as he depicts Lily as experiencing a pressing chronological crisis, one implicitly linked to her social instability with the Dorsets. This depiction overlaps with reminders that Lily Bart is nearly thirty, a fact that has loomed across the plot and with it, presumptions about her value as a marital prospect. As viewed by Selden in Monte Carlo, Lily appears, suddenly, as irrevocably altered by time, or as “chilled” and crystalized and therefore no longer filled with the youthful plasticity, or “warm fluidity of youth” he understands as admirable. While others perceive Lily as “even more handsomer than … ten years ago” and as appearing “ten years younger,” Selden’s judgment occupies a prominent place in the narrative.50 There is, however, a larger question encircling Selden’s perspective, namely of his disinterest. His vision of Lily as mature, even as past her prime, reflects much more than her appearance. In this respect, his construction of a woman’s age is no less emotional than that of Ralph Grancy. Because the narrative’s emphasis on Lily’s age is often conveyed through Selden’s perspective, his assignation of a non-youthful status to Lily marks a sharp contrast with his previous (and fairly recent) impressions of her beauty and plasticity, namely ones made in the midst of their most overtly romantic conversations. What followed “the transiency” of the “exquisite moments” they shared, then, were doubts about Lily’s sexual purity.51 This sequence of events suggests that after witnessing Lily leave the Trenor mansion when Judy Trenor was out of town, and amid gossip about an affair with Gus Trenor, Selden radically revised his impression of Lily. Immediately after, he fled New York in order to avoid her. Now, feeling a “disturbance” at the prospect of encountering Lily again, Selden focuses on his “disillusionment,” alongside what he sees as a less attractive female countenance.52 Doubts about Lily’s sexual and moral life thus appear indivisible from Selden’s sense of other lost personal qualities, namely youthful beauty in an homage to Victorian truisms about a woman’s virtue. Selden’s critical gaze assesses Lily’s outwardly blithe existence, which he associates with the “assumptions and elisions, her shortcuts and long détours” he somewhat loosely describes.53 He acknowledges, too, his own desire to “get well” and to “eject the last drop of poison from his blood,” as if Lily is the source of an illness for which he seeks a cure. Observing that “she took up the thread of their intercourse as though that thread had not been snapped with a violence from which he still reeled,” Selden now notes in Lily a “facility” that “sickened him,” or an adaptability that he associates with what he thinks he knows of her sexual history.54 He also finds her appearance unnatural and, through a host of circumlocutions, he conflates youth and innocence. Selden’s sense of having discovered much of what he did not want to see in Lily’s private life positions his impressions of Lily’s agedness as rooted in emotional responses rather than in physical qualities alone. Meanwhile, Selden’s age is not mentioned, nor is the impression of his looks assessed relative to his chronological standing. In part, such omissions are a consequence of a narrative that exposes gendered constructions of age where women’s appearances are judged in tandem with men’s preferences for youth, primarily of the bodily variety. Selden’s construction of Lily as a stillbeautiful woman nearing a de-facto point of expiration underscores the ageism associated

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with her milieu. From both feminist and age-based standpoints, however, Selden’s judgments appear doubly problematic, for they are wrapped up in Lily’s presumptive availability to him, namely as a woman he would accept. Before his fateful observation of Lily outside the Trenor mansion, Selden found Lily the epitome of womanly value, having seen her as aloof from the “cheapened and vulgarized” world.55 After, he judges her as fallen. At their last meeting, after the display of her “noble buoyancy” and “soaring grace” at the Wellington Brys’s tableaux vivants, his predominant impressions were of the “eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part.”56 There is in this description no hint of Lily’s inflexibility of feature or an approaching exemption from physical loveliness; as there is in the first epigraph to this essay, there is only the “eternality” of Lily’s beauty. My point is not that one scene (in Monte Carlo) is constructed while the other is not, but that both narrative descriptions are visible as constructions made malleable to Selden’s shifting desires, much as with Mrs. Grancy’s portrait in “The Moving Finger.” Such overt and limiting constructions of age interest Wharton, too, when the object of attention is a teen, as is the case in The Children, which appeared two decades after The House of Mirth and nearly three decades after “The Moving Finger,” a trajectory that underscores the coherence of Wharton’s vision of the gendering of age markers. In the second epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, traceable to Martin Boyne’s internal calculations, a man perceives his straightforward relation to a woman’s age. This character, whose moral vision is confused by an attraction to a young person thirty years his junior, exhibits no hesitation in finding the assignation of age his special privilege as a man in love. Thus the “woman” who attracts him must appear eminently suitable and the one who does not must be considered a mismatch—despite the incongruous facts. Judith Wheater, the girl he loves, is fifteen; the one he does not is a virtual peer to his forty-six years. Boyne, the novel’s protagonist, is particularly ill-equipped to navigate the complexities of the age-based identities that affect him profoundly. The desire he holds for a teen leads him to belie that age is a reality that shapes his life, even as he finds himself caught between his growing sexual investment in Judith and his official attachment to his middle-aged fiancée, the widowed Rose Sellars. His idea that “a man” (like himself) can construct a woman’s age “when” he loves her, notably, applies to each woman in his life.57 In the case of Mrs. Sellars, he remains caught between the indeterminate signs that encircle her: her svelte, youthful figure and bodily lightness and, in contrast, her practiced social skills, which make her seem much more mature. In regard to Judith, he alternately constructs her as a child and a woman, although it is clear that he wants to find her womanly. It is a dynamic that critics have found problematic, given Judith’s position as an uneducated minor and Boyne’s as resisting any vestige of age appropriateness in order to construct his world according to the outlines of his private desires. Notably, he decides he can remake the age of everyone but himself.58 Such imaginative manipulations of aging reflect Cynthia Port’s argument that “the fetishizing of youthfulness and obsession with ‘ages’ that emerged early in the twentieth century posed dangers for all women.” Fed by an “age ideology” that was supported by “the historical, political, cultural, and economic conditions” of the era, a dismissiveness of aging permeated “high and low literary culture,” Port contends.59 While Port suggests an unconscious and largely uncritical adoption of age ideology, Wharton’s texts reveal an acute awareness of age’s susceptibility to manipulation for women and girls who are at the focal point of an appraising male gaze. Ideals of beauty, sexuality, and marriageability contribute to Wharton’s sense that age is imbricated in a host of gender-specific judgments. The fact

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that a dead woman is the locus of age-based contestations underscores their ridiculousness, but similar judgments also infiltrate Lily Bart’s most perilous moments and nearly contribute to the entrapment of a minor by a much older man in The Children, in part because of the unremarked construction and reconstruction of women’s ages. The serious consequences of these acts of construction, thus considered, are impossible to ignore. In exposing the construction and remaking of women’s age, Wharton’s fiction, it should be noted, highlights the extreme contortions of the male gaze when it feeds an age-based imagination. Even while characters in these plots fail to note the calculations about age that encircle women, their implications are clear in Wharton’s narratives. Assigning age to another living being is an absurd act, complete with fantastical contortions of imagination, which stress the virulence of a gendered ideology. Displaying an acknowledgment that ageism was an implicit, but powerful, dimension of the appraising male gaze, Wharton’s fictions reveal the illogical play of the mind that reworked chronology, remade physical features, and even rewrote matters of life and death in the service of convenient ideals about women’s relation to the forces of time and change.

NOTES 1 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 833–44, 836–7. 2 Howard Chudacoff, “How Old Are You?”: Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 6. 3 Avril Horner and Janet Beer, Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 166. 4 See Margaret Toth, “Shaping Modern Bodies: Edith Wharton on Weight, Dieting, and Visual Media,” Modern Fiction Studies 60, no. 4 (2014): 711–39; Sheila Liming, “Suffer the Little Vixens: Sex and Realist Terror in ‘Jazz Age’ America,” Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 3 (2015): 99–118; and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Gazing in Edith Wharton’s ‘Looking Glass,’ ” Narrative 3 (1995): 139–60. 5 See Melanie V. Dawson, Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020). 6 See Melanie V. Dawson and Meredith L. Goldsmith, “Introduction,” in Melanie V. Dawson and Meredith L. Goldsmith (eds.), American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018), 1–23. 7 See Sari Edelstein, Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), on privileges of adulthood as the product of an overly rigorous social construction. 8 Cynthia Port, “‘Ages Are the Stuff!’: The Traffic in Ages in Interwar Britain,” NWSA Journal 18, no. 1 (2006): 148. 9 Ibid., 149. 10 Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Aged by Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 7. 11 Ibid., 29. 12 Ibid., 107. 13 See Emily J. Orlando, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), who notes that the story’s title is adopted from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (207n7).

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4 Orlando, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts, 28. 1 15 Barbara White, Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1991), 64. 16 Edith Wharton, “The Moving Finger,” in Maureen Howard (ed.), Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, 1891–1910 (New York: Library of America, 2001), 308. 17 By this I mean that even with Ellen Olenska and Lily Bart, there are character histories that enable the tracing of their life stories for a decade or more. Both have lived in and around New York society; Mrs. Grancy, however, has no objective chronological history aside from the narrator’s impressions. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Orlando, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts, 37. 23 Wharton, “Moving,” 308. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 309. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 312. 30 Ibid., 316. 31 Ibid., 317. 32 White, Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction, 50. 33 Margaret Cruikshank, Learning to Be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 5. 34 Ibid. 35 Wharton, “Moving,” 314. 36 Gullette, Aged, 7; original emphasis. 37 Kathleen Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 183. 38 Stephen Katz, Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 43, 47. 39 Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents, 183. 40 Wharton, “Moving,” 313, 314. 41 Ibid., 314. 42 See Patricia Cohen, In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2012). According to Cohen, middle age appears as “a companion to America’s entry into the modern world,” as interests in it overlap with the dawn of the twentieth century (7). 43 Wharton, “Moving,” 318; original emphasis. 44 Ibid., 319. 45 Ibid., 321. 46 Ibid., 320–1. 47 Ibid., 321. 48 Ibid., 315. 49 Ibid., 321. 50 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Penguin, 1986), 198, 197. 51 Ibid., 138. 52 Ibid., 187.

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3 Ibid., 192. 5 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 135. 56 Ibid., 134–5. 57 Edith Wharton, The Children (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997), 41. 58 See Dawson, Edith Wharton, ­chapter 4, “Watching the Flame of Youth.” 59 Port, “‘Ages Are the Stuff,’ ” 156–7.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Paralysis and Euthanasia in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree, The Shadow of a Doubt, and Ethan Frome MARIA-NOVELLA MERCURI

Critics have long reviled The Fruit of the Tree (1907), Wharton’s third novel, for the multiplicity of its thematic issues, which even now suggests a lack of focus.1 Henry James was the first to criticize what he called the “strangely infirm composition and construction”2 of this novel, and, though defining it, in his letter to Wharton of November 14, 1907, as “a thing of the highest & finest ability & lucidity,” still expressed concerns about “the composition & conduct” of the “thing.”3 Admittedly, The Fruit of the Tree could not be farther from James’s ideal novel, that is, a minute analysis, conducted from every conceivable point of view, of one central situation. It is ostensibly an industrial novel, dealing with the conditions of work and life in the workers’ village surrounding a textile factory as well as with “the emerging discourses of two newly professionalised fields, medical nursing and engineering.”4 Critics were disconcerted by Wharton’s sudden interest in Massachusetts textile factories, an uncongenial subject for a socially privileged writer known for her best-selling The House of Mirth (1905), in which she had successfully described the American upper class. Scholars have suggested that she must have wanted to try her hand at popular realism because the crusade to improve the conditions of life and work of factory operatives insured the popularity of any novel with muckraking overtones. In addition, The Fruit is also a psychological novel exploring the difficulties, adjustments, and compromises individuals must accept in wedlock. The marriage theme is eminently Whartonian, and in this novel she also touches on its “custom of the country” aspect: the American view of upper class women as merely objects of conspicuous consumption advertising their husbands’ wealth and power. This was another issue likely to grant her a large audience, because, as Elizabeth Ammons remarks, “the Woman Movement by the turn of the century … was stimulating a new literature in America. In the imaginative realm, fiction about the New Woman burgeoned.”5 Certainly The Fruit of the Tree is also a New Woman novel, as one of its main characters, Justine Brent, is a trained surgical nurse, financially independent and independent minded. The profession

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and the personality of this character trigger the subject of the morality of euthanasia, also chosen, according to Grace Kellogg, because so-called problem-novels “were at the height of their popularity.”6 By tackling simultaneously several hotly debated issues of the day, The Fruit of the Tree was thus bound to be noticed, and it was.7 But, though certainly intent on creating another best-seller, Wharton was also determined to give her new novel a wider scope and focus than The House of Mirth. She promised Edward Burlingame, her editor at Scribner’s, that her new book would deal with “life in New York and in a manufacturing town, with the House of Mirth in the middle of the block, but a good many houses adjoining.”8 She also gave considerable attention to the structure of her new novel, as evident in her letter to Robert Grant of November 19, 1907, in which she thanks him for his “really helpful analysis,” mentions her “desire for construction & breadth,” and comments: “I am very glad, though, that you do feel a structural unity in the thing, for some people have criticised the book for the lack of this very thing, & this rather discouraged me.”9 As regards the euthanasia plotline, there is no doubt that Wharton chose to include it because the topic resonated very powerfully with her. In this chapter, first, I intend to highlight her deep and long-standing anxieties about incurable disease, physical suffering, and paralysis and the way she expressed them in her fiction. Second, I want to analyze in more detail the medical discourse in The Fruit of the Tree through the character and the vicissitudes of Justine Brent as a professional nurse. This reflects a recent and fruitful approach to a critical consideration of the novel, which proves crucial for the understanding of its narrative rhetoric. Although the final part of The Fruit of the Tree was revised in Paris at the beginning of 1907, this book, the last Wharton wrote in America, is very much the product of her years of residence at The Mount, the house she had built in Lenox, in the Berkshire hills. To this setting belong also the two novellas Wharton wrote later in France: Ethan Frome (1911) and Summer (1917). Among the details from her life in Lenox that went into the making of both The Fruit of the Tree and Ethan Frome are the accidents that occurred in her neighborhood. Lee mentions “a fatal sledding accident, that killed one girl and injured two others, had occurred in Lenox in March 1904,”10 and sledding scenes appear in both The Fruit and Ethan. In addition, Ethel Cram had her skull fractured in a carriage accident in July 1905 and lingered for two months in a coma before dying. Wharton wrote to Sally Norton on September 15, 1905, that in such cases “it would be better to let life ebb out quietly.”11 When, three years later, another friend, Mrs. Hartmann Kuhn, was affected by an incurable illness, Wharton wrote to Sally in July 1908: “If I had morphia in hand, as she has, how quickly I’d cut the knot!”12 Mrs. Kuhn did eventually take her own life with an overdose of morphia. Wharton’s interest in the ongoing debate around euthanasia was well known to her friends, and in spring 1906, when she was already at work on The Fruit, Gaillard Lapsley introduced her to G. Lowes Dickinson, author of the newly published “Euthanasia: From the Note-Book of an Alpinist.”13 Lee also notes that in the period 1905–6 Wharton was involved with the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and that she thought that both dogs and people “had the right to be put down in extreme circumstances.”14 Wharton’s view on decay and impairment is reiterated in her 1910 letter to John Hugh Smith, in which she says that “a peaceful death is infinitely preferable to a gradual failure of body and mind.”15 Euthanasia was certainly, as the anonymous Athenaeum reviewer of The Fruit of the Tree put it, a problem “essentially of our own day.”16 Physician-assisted suicide had been the object of a crusade by the Cincinnati heiress Anne Hall since her mother’s agonizing

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death from liver cancer in 1901. The first significant public debate on euthanasia was held at the meeting of the American Humane Association in 1905, and the ensuing publicity gained Hall important supporters.17 One of them was Charles Eliot Norton, Wharton’s friend and mentor, who had supported euthanasia since the death of his own mother in 1879; the letter he wrote Hall, entitled “An Appeal to Reason As Well As Compassion,” was widely read and caused much sensation. He must have certainly discussed the issue with Wharton.18 The controversy had reached its climax in 1906, and on March 12, Wharton felt it necessary to emphasize to Burlingame: “My story is not a thesis for or against ‘euthanasia.’ ”19 That the problem had fascinated her at the very least since 1901 is apparent from The Shadow of a Doubt (1901),20 a play she wrote in that year and that shows striking similarities to, but also important differences from, the plot of The Fruit of the Tree. The protagonist of the play is a nurse, Kate, who has euthanized a female patient (Agnes Osterlagh) and married her husband (John Derwent) and is now being blackmailed by one of Agnes’s physicians, Dr. Caruthers. Kate administered the chloroform to Agnes with the consent of her other doctor, Sir Hector Blair, who did not believe Agnes would recover. Moreover, Kate is in possession of a letter written by Agnes before her death, in which Agnes begs her to help her die because she is in great pain. There is therefore no doubt about Kate’s motivation. Nevertheless, she submits to the blackmailing to avoid a scandal that would wreck John’s diplomatic career and does not produce Agnes’s letter until the last act, set two years later. She had expected her husband to believe her without evidence, but after realizing that he doubted her she had left him to live independently and in poverty. In the third act, however, both John and Agnes’s father beg her to return to the family: the former has discovered that he loves her too much to live without her, the latter is convinced by the evidence of the letter, which however he asks Kate to burn to protect Agnes’s memory.21 The discrepancy in these details is very significant. In The Shadow of a Doubt it is clear that the mercy killing has the sanction of the physician in charge. In The Fruit of the Tree, on the contrary, Justine defies the professional judgment of the two doctors overseeing Bessy’s case, Garford and Wyant, and takes on herself the whole burden of the decision and its consequences. Nor is there in the novel the customary stage device of the letter, which unequivocally exculpates the nurse. Laura Rattray remarks that, while writing a play on the subject of euthanasia was “brave and controversial”—so much so that the play ended up not being performed—including it as only one of several plotlines in The Fruit of the Tree “partially blunted” its impact.22 However, as the rest of this chapter will show, the theme is quite pervasive in the novel and fundamental to connect all the other strands: there is a “lesson learned” dynamic in this novel suggesting that, ultimately, dependency and ethical responsibility form the basis of social relationship. The development of the nurse’s character in the direction of a new moral autonomy is due, in my view, to Wharton’s reading of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer between 1901 and 1907.23

JUSTINE’S CHARACTER Although the title of The Fruit of the Tree obviously suggests a “Miltonic” reading of this novel,24 Wharton’s reading of Nietzsche in the period when she was writing The Fruit of the Tree offers a clue to another interpretation. In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche uses the metaphor of “the fruit of the tree” to indicate what to

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him seems the highest product of the slow progress of humanity toward civilization: the autonomous conscience of the exceptional human being: Let us place ourselves at the other end of this enormous process, at the point where the tree finally bears its fruit, where society and its morality of custom finally reveal the end to which they were merely a means: there we find as the ripest fruit on their tree the sovereign individual, the individual who resembles no one but himself, who has once again broken away from the morality of custom, the autonomous supra-moral individual.25 As Cynthia Griffin Wolff noted, Wharton changed the title of the novel from ‘Justine Brent’ to ‘The Fruit of the Tree’ after having written about one hundred thousand words,26 that is, when Justine decides to put Bessy out of her misery: at that point, Justine is herself, in the Nietzschean sense, the “fruit of the tree,” the “sovereign individual” strong enough to follow their reason in opposition to customary morality. Independent and strong-minded, Justine is drawn by circumstances to question the assumption that one must “be content to think for the race,” relinquishing the hope of “lifting one’s individual life to a clearer height of conduct” through the exercise of one’s own free will. She finally solves her moral dilemma—whether to kill Bessy or not—by turning onto it “the full light of acquired knowledge.”27 Therefore, Justine is connected to the theme of euthanasia both in her professional capacity as a nurse and as a developing human being who wrestles first with the choice of committing the mercy killing and then with the consequences of her action. Among these unintended consequences, there is also the fact that Amherst, now her husband, may be compelled to sever his connection to Westmore, thus jeopardizing their joint effort at improving the situation of its workers. Through the central character of Justine, her evolving relationship to Amherst, and her juxtaposition to the other female character, Bessy, Wharton ultimately succeeds in interweaving and linking the three thematic strands of the plot. Before turning to consider how euthanasia is handled in the novel, I want to focus on what the text tells us about Justine, a unique female figure in the Wharton canon, and her interpretation of the new type of woman that was emerging, in society and in literature, at the turn of the century. Though belonging by birth to an impoverished family of “Old New York,” she has embraced a profession—that of trained nurse—and gained financial independence. She thus combines the best characteristics of her social milieu—intellectual refinement, manners, education, fidelity to traditional values—with others that make her a thoroughly New Woman: spiritual independence, training, commitment to a profession, economic selfsufficiency, and social activism.28 The generous and caring side of Justine’s personality is presented in the very first pages of the novel. She has a great capacity for putting herself in other people’s emotional or existential situations and is eager and able to alleviate other people’s mental and bodily sufferings. The way this fundamental aspect of her character—the ability to feel sympathy and compassion—is described and continuously insisted upon reminds one of Schopenhauer’s definition of “the noble person” in section 66 of book IV of The World as Will and Representation. While there exists, in most people, a strong distinction between their own ego and that of others, the “noble person” is incapable of seeing this distinction as significant: He recognizes immediately, and without reasons or arguments, that the in-itself of his own phenomenon is also that of others, namely that will to live which constitutes the

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inner nature of everything, and lives in all; in fact, he recognizes that this extends even to the animals and to the whole of nature; and he will therefore not cause suffering even to an animal … Himself, his will, he recognizes in every creature, and hence in the sufferer also.29 The text of the novel highlights the difference between sympathy and compassion: “It was characteristic of Justine that where she sympathised least she sometimes pitied most”30— this is what she feels for Wyant, in whom she perceives the early symptoms of drugaddiction. Bessy, toward whom Justine has felt protective since they were at school together, is often the object of her compassion, long before the fatal accident.31 As regards Amherst, whom she pities and sympathizes with during the years of his unhappy first marriage, it is toward him that she commits her greatest act of self-denying compassion when, at the end of the novel, she refrains from telling him the truth about Bessy and allows him to exorcise her ghost in his own way. The text also explicitly distinguishes philanthropy from compassion: Justine sounds a Nietzschean note when, to make it clear to Wyant that her decision to become a nurse had had nothing philanthropic in it, she defines philanthropy as “one of the subtlest forms of self-indulgence.”32 Later she explains to Bessy that she is not at all philanthropic, because she never “felt inclined to do good in the abstract.”33 Human nature must “find its real self—the self to be interested in— outside of what we conventionally call the ‘self ’: the particular Justine or Bessy who is clamouring for her particular morsel of life.”34 Justine’s interest in the lives of others is “a warm personal sympathy,”35 “the vivid imaginative concern of a heart open to every human appeal.”36 This sympathetic relationship to fellow humans and the sense of personal wholeness Justine craves are connected to, and part of, an empathy toward the whole universe that reminds one of Schopenhauer’s definition of the will to life, which manifests itself in everything that exists, whether involving a conscious end or not. It is an incessant striving that can become purposeful action in mankind while remaining blind and unconscious in nature, the difference between the two being only the degree of manifestation of the will. In the human being, acts of will are acts of the body, whose organs are nothing but objectified will: thus—and this is an important point for Wharton—Schopenhauer rejects the traditional separation between the mental and physical nature of human beings, as well as the separation between them and the rest of nature. Schopenhauer sees the human capacity for thought and action simply as a development on the same line as any other that, in other species, helps the preservation of life—an evolutionary tool, as Wharton would say with her post-Darwinian consciousness. Justine feels the voice of a “vaster human consciousness”37 speak within her; her self is “wide open to the currents of life,” and her personal emotions are “enriched and deepened by a sense of participation in all that the world about her was doing, suffering and enjoying.”38 Thus her decision to become a professional nurse is the means of connecting herself with the rest of humanity (as Westmore is for Amherst). However, when book II opens, three years after her mother’s death and her first visit to Hanaford, we see the surfacing of a new aspect of her personality. After three years of solitude what prevails in her is not the sense of duty but the irresistible youthful yearning for a life fulfilling for both body and mind: “She wanted happiness, and a life of her own, as passionately as young flesh-and-blood ever wanted them.”39 Her intelligence and sensitivity coexist with a frank animal nature, and her aspiration to a full realization of the self is an intrinsic part of the “naturalness” of this character so insistently conveyed

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through natural imagery.40 No longer sure of wanting to devote herself to nursing for the rest of her life, even a loveless marriage “was growing conceivable to her.” She reproaches herself with “instability” for this, unaware that a natural desire for emotional and sexual fulfillment is prevailing over self-abnegation: “Youth and womanhood were in fact crying out in her for their individual satisfaction.” The happiness she wants, however, must come “bathed in the light of imagination and penetrated by the sense of larger affinities,”41 and she has not lost her desire “to do her part in the vast personal work of easing the world’s misery”;42 she is simply ready to let this desire take a direction insuring a measure of personal fulfillment. All this comes to her in her marriage to Amherst, who perceives the “interpenetration of spirit and flesh that made her body seem like the bright projection of her mind”43 and feels that her sympathy to the workers is different from his because “she felt with her brain.”44 This harmony of body and soul ensures that their marriage is based not only on physical passion but also on a free and complete mental communion45 and “an inextricable mingling of thought and sensation.”46 This identity between body and mind, which is for Schopenhauer the clue to the sense of unity of all things, material or immaterial, is admirably expressed in the Dantean image with which Justine verbalizes her sense of being a fragment of the universe, “a little fleeting particle of the power that moves the sun and the other stars.”47

THE THEME OF EUTHANASIA Euthanasia is presented at the very beginning of the novel and in conjunction with the theme of industrial reform, because it is at the bedside of Dillon, a maimed factory worker, that nurse Brent and assistant manager Amherst first meet. While the euthanasia subplot involving Bessy can be seen as an evolution of the one in The Shadow of a Doubt, the Dillon case is strongly reminiscent of the situation in Jack London’s The Iron Heel, also published in 1907, in which the heroine, Avis, converts to socialism after her lover Ernest Everhard takes her to visit a worker whose arm has been crushed by a factory machine. Like Everhard, Amherst explains the accident as due to the desire to “get the maximum of profit out of the minimum of floor-space” even at the cost of maiming “an operative now and then.”48 Dillon will be unemployed following the amputation, his wife has contracted tuberculosis sweeping the dusty floors of the badly ventilated factory, and they have three young children. In Amherst’s view, all the good of life has gone for Dillon, and he says: “‘I know what I should do if I could get anywhere near Dillon—give him an overdose of morphine, and let the widow collect his life-insurance, and make a fresh start’ … ‘In your work, don’t you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?’ ”49 It is worth noting at this point that Amherst’s view that giving Dillon a lethal dose of morphine would be merciful both to him and to his family is a boldly nonconformist idea about euthanasia echoing Wharton’s, but that the narrative does not support it. We will meet Mr. and Mrs. Dillon again in chapter XXI “in the small hot sitting room” of which she is obviously very proud: “The Dillons had been placed in charge of one of the old factory tenements, now transformed into a lodging house for unmarried operatives.” They have “shown themselves admirably adapted to their new duties”50 and live a prosperous and contented life. Had Justine euthanized Dillon on the basis of Amherst’s bitter remark, the fate of the family would have been disastrous. This is an aspect of the Dillon subplot worth keeping in mind, and I will return to it in my discussion of Justine’s professional behavior.

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This first mention of euthanasia is followed by several others. An interesting allusion occurs in chapter XV. Dr. Wyant has proposed to Justine and begs her for an immediate answer: “Won’t you put me out of my misery?” She smiled, but not unkindly. “Do you want an anaesthetic?” “No—a clean cut with a knife!” “You forget that we are not allowed to despatch hopeless cases—more’s the pity!”51 This odd reference to euthanasia in the midst of courting shows that Justine can only think of Wyant in terms of their common professional interests, and that sentimentally he is to her a “hopeless case.” After Bessy’s accident, Wyant fights for her life with great determination, his efforts motivated not only by professional duty but also by ambition: he covets the fame and boost to his career that would result from his success in such a desperate case. However, he knows that Bessy is likely to remain paralyzed and comments that “keeping people alive in such cases is one of the refinements of cruelty that it was left for Christianity to invent.” Nevertheless, “it’s got to be! Science herself says so—not for the patient, of course, but for herself—for unborn generations, rather. Queer, isn’t it? The two creeds are at one.”52 During Bessy’s nineteen days of agony, Justine must resume her role as a nurse, which she had resisted because of her closeness to the patient. She is thus forced to witness the suffering of her friend, which grows as the morphine and other opiates lose their effect. But Wyant and Garford have been told by her lawyer, Tredegar, to keep Bessy alive at any cost until her father’s return, because her current will leaves Amherst in control of Westmore. After having interrogated science through Dr. Wyant, Justine turns to religion in the person of Pastor Lynde, to whom she explains that Bessy’s unlikely survival “would probably be death-in-life: complete paralysis of the lower body.” Though appalled at this “dreadful fate,” Lynde still rejoices at the “wonderful ways of prolonging life” devised by modern science, because, he says, “as a Christian … I could hardly do otherwise.” Justine insists: “‘So that—one may say—Christianity recognizes no exceptions?’ ‘None— none,’ its authorized exponent pronounced emphatically.”53 A third scene takes place between Tredegar and Justine, who explains to the lawyer that Bessy can be kept alive until her father’s return only using substances that strengthen her heart but intensify her pain. Tredegar’s reaction is, for a moment, a humane outburst: “I wish to God she had been killed! … It’s infernal—the time they can make it last!” Nevertheless, society has decreed that “human life is sacred … It’s the universal consensus—the result of the world’s accumulated experience—necessary for the general welfare.”54 These three scenes dramatizing Justine’s conflict with science, religion, and society echo the deathbed scene in another New Woman novel, Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), in which Edith summons Dr. Galbraith, Bishop Beale, and Sir Mosley Menteith as the representatives of society’s arrangement leading to her tragedy.55 Like the protagonist of Wharton’s Sanctuary (1903), Justine wrestles with the idea that “the social health must be preserved” even at the cost of individual suffering, and that the principles regulating social life must be accepted even when they appear incomprehensible or unjust, because they are “the result of long experience and the collective instinct of selfpreservation.”56 But it is worth noting that Justine’s struggle with this view is connected to her professional expertise: “In her hospital experience she had encountered cases when the useless agonies of death were mercifully shortened by the physician: why was not this a case

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for such treatment?”57 Wharton is here simply stating a well-known fact, recently revealed by Dr. Walter Kempster, an eminent Milwaukee physician, and numerous other colleagues.58 Moreover, the desire for death seems the only thought that Bessy can express through the fog of narcotics enveloping her brain: “Once or twice she turned her dull eyes on Justine, breathing out: ‘I want to die’ … She had even ceased to ask for Cicely.”59 What Justine is being asked to perform is in fact an assisted suicide. Justine’s moral conflict and incessant psychological stress are described in a crescendo culminating in an analepsis of the conversation she had had with Amherst at Dillon’s bedside, four years earlier: Justine’s remembrance flew back to their first meeting at Hanaford … Amherst’s indignation and pity … his shudder of revolt at the man’s doom … “In your work, don’t you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?” And then, after her conventional murmur of protest: “To save what, when all the good of life is gone?”60 This powerful trigger is strengthened by her finding Amherst’s marginal notes in his copy of Bacon’s essays: La vraie morale se moque de la morale … We perish because we follow other people’s examples … Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae—bugbears to frighten children. 61 These are maxims from Pascal, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius that encourage individual moral autonomy and that, in Justine’s psychological situation, seem directly to bear on and solve her dilemma: “She rose and filled the syringe—and returning with it, bent above the bed.”62 She feels that Amherst would understand and approve of her desire to free Bessy from useless pain. Later, and to his horror, she will show him this copy of Bacon as if to prove to him that he had implicitly endorsed her mercy killing of his wife.63 When book IV and chapter XXX open after an ellipsis of eighteen months Justine has undergone another deep change: she has lost her former “elfin immaturity, as of a flitting Ariel with untouched heart and senses,” and acquired, as Amherst perceives, a new “subtle quality which calls up thoughts of love.”64 The mercy killing has unquestionably had a traumatic effect on her, and this may in part account for her inability to tell Amherst about the terrible weeks of Bessy’s agony: “At his first allusion to her own part in them, she shrank into a state of distress which seemed to plead with him to refrain from even the tenderest touch on her feelings.”65 Justine cannot bring herself to tell Amherst of the mercy killing because, although she justifies it rationally, it is nevertheless a deeply affecting, trauma-inducing event. She then convinces herself that her act concerns only Bessy and will not have repercussions on Bessy’s husband and family. Her mercy killing of her friend is rational and compassionate, but her marrying Amherst without speaking about it, and then continuing to hide it, even paying Wyant’s blackmail with Amherst’s money, is irrational and inconsiderate and represents a lie of omission denying the trust and truth that had seemed the foundation of their marriage. After her discussion with Amherst, Justine comes to realize that a decision she thought of as merely personal has affected other people’s lives, and that each individual life is inextricably linked to those of other beings because “man can commit no act alone.” Drawn by her nature and by circumstances to question the assumption that one must “be content to think for the race,” relinquishing the hope of “lifting one’s individual life to a clearer height of conduct” through the exercise of one’s own free will, she is now led

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to reflect on the social and moral implications of euthanasia, an act that, at first, she had regarded only as a decision concerning exclusively the individual conscience. She now recognizes that every challenge to the authority of tradition calls into play, even for the most enlightened human being, “emotions rooted far below reason and judgement, in the dark primal depths of inherited feeling.”66 In the end, though still refusing to hold herself to blame, she comes to the conclusion that “life is not a matter of abstract principles, but a succession of pitiful compromises with fate, of concessions to old tradition, old beliefs, old charities and frailties. That was what her act had taught her.”67 Nevertheless, Justine’s retrospective assessment of her act contains an element of self-rebuke only as regards its consequences: “She should have held herself apart from ordinary human ties.”68 And the novel is never unsympathetic toward Justine, whose compassion and humaneness are contrasted with Wyant’s insensitivity to the physical suffering of his patient, and with the inflexibility of law, religion, and science. Moreover, in Mattie Silver of Ethan Frome Wharton gives a terrible picture of what Bessy’s life would have been if Wyant had succeeded. Although published in 1911, Ethan Frome started its life in 1907, as a fragment written by Wharton in Paris to practice her French. At the time, she was reading Beyond Good and Evil,69 and echoes of this book and of Genealogy are evident in the portrayal of the eponymous hero of Ethan Frome, which exemplifies the situation described by Nietzsche of the strong dominated by the weak and doomed to destruction by the inability to assert his individuality and fight for his self-preservation. Ethan’s fate is sealed when he gives up his studies to return to the frozen world of his youth to look after his parents. Compassion and sense of duty toward his parents and later his hypochondriac wife Zeena gradually stills his will to life and to personal fulfillment. Later he is as incapable of abandoning Zeena as of separating from Mattie. Self-annihilation seems to him the only solution, but he fails also in his attempted suicide, dooming not only himself but also Mattie: she survives her accident but what is left to her is just a living death, which Ethan is condemned to witness day after day. Even more harrowingly, Mattie’s sweet nature does not survive the destruction of her young body. The relationship between Ethan and the chronically ill Zeena epitomizes what Nietzsche calls the “conspiracy” of the sick against the healthy, a tyranny that is the will to power of the weakest, by which they force their misery on the more fortunate and stimulate in them a sense of guilt for their good fortune.70 The strong must not be dependent on any person, nor on pity, nor on any of their own virtues.71 The sick woman in particular knows how to wield her power: “Her techniques of domination, compulsion, and tyranny are unsurpassed in their refinement. To that end, the sick woman spares nothing living, nothing dead.”72 Ethan knows that he is beaten, that Zeena has destroyed his ability to think and act independently and seems to have derived new strength from the process: She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen selfabsorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding. It was the sense of his helplessness that sharpened his antipathy … Now she had mastered him and he abhorred her.73 Indeed, after the terrible accident that crushes Ethan both physically and mentally, Zeena finds strength enough to look after both him and Mattie for twenty-four years. The most harrowing aspect of Mattie’s dreadful fate is that she is transformed into a parasitic organism totally dependent on Zeena. The two women exchange places in the Frome household, and Zeena becomes the active helper while Mattie is a shapeless lump stuck in

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an armchair. Their roles are reversed also in the sense that Mattie is now the tormentor. She is first introduced in the prologue as a querulously droning female voice, and in the epilogue she is presented as a quickly turning head on a completely immobile body; all the vitality she has left is concentrated in her dark eyes, but even from them her soul is absent, and their light is merely “the bright witch-like stare that disease of the spine sometimes gives.”74 She fully illustrates Wharton’s horror of physical paralysis as a tragedy for the soul as much as for the body: physical imprisonment inexorably causes atrophy of the spirit, and Wharton puts a strong endorsement of euthanasia in the mouth of Mrs. Hale, who scandalizes the parson saying that it would have been better if Mattie had died. However, I believe, with James Tuttleton, that The Fruit of the Tree does not endorse euthanasia “in the specific circumstances Justine commits it.”75 I turn now to consider the issue of Justine’s professional commitment to nursing, and of how the novel explores “the problems of empathy in nursing theory and practice.”76

JUSTINE AS A PROFESSIONAL NURSE There is a dualism in Justine’s attitude to her profession that is already evident from the first chapters of the novel, in which she is described in succession as “a dispassionate professional” and as “a girl shaken with indignant pity.”77 She herself recognizes sympathy as the curse of her “trade” and defines herself as “a wretched sentimentalist,”78 while also declaring that she dislikes sentimentality.79 As she explains to Bessy: “I’m so fatally interested in people that before I know it I’ve slipped into their skins; and then, of course, if anything goes wrong with them, it’s just as if it had gone wrong with me.”80 However, as Ann Jurecic notes, Justine’s ability to empathize with other people’s situations and with her patients’ suffering is a double-edged sword for a professional nurse. “The capacity for emotional identification with others simultaneously enables and disables her professionally”81 because in the professional nurse “emotion is contained by scientific reason and rationality is tempered by mercy.”82 This is why Justine is ultimately unable to commit to nursing as a profession, and when she gives it up to become Bessy’s companion in her luxurious home, she loses her autonomy and takes on Mrs. Ansell’s semi-dependent role as Bessy’s personal nurse, her secretary, her confidante, her housekeeper, and her daughter’s governess.83 When she gives up nursing a second time and definitely to be reunited with her husband, she accepts, according to Ellen Dupree, a traditional role in their marriage and goes to great lengths to protect it, first hiding the mercy killing from Amherst and then accepting Wyant’s blackmail; this “destabilizes” her identity.84 Mary Marchand also thinks that the fact that Justine shows Amherst his comments on the volume of Bacon’s essays proves that at this point Justine’s independence of mind has somewhat subsided: she “wants to relinquish some measure of autonomy in regard to the mercy-killing.”85 And, although not disputing that Justine’s decision to euthanize Bessy is dispassionate and rational, Marchand also thinks, with Jurecic and Dupree, that the fact that she always sympathizes too much with her patients undermines her professionalism.86 Rebecca Garden defines The Fruit of the Tree as a “rich and complex resource” for analyzing the issue of empathy (or sympathy, as Wharton defines it).87 Sympathy in this novel “is, as with empathy in nursing theory, the ability of the caregiver to sensitively recognize, think critically about, and respond to suffering in another,” and the novel analyses “women’s motivations for being sympathetic.”88 She sees Justine as subject to “a false dichotomy of sympathy and caring as conflicting with professionalism,” which should on the contrary be “integrated aspects of nursing identity and practice.” The conjunction

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of expertise and sympathy that Justine shows at Dillon’s bedside is “quickly superseded” and, in subsequent chapters, she oscillates between professionalism and sentimentalism, thus showing the unreliability of sympathy.89 After her mother’s death, she discovers that her choice to become a nurse had been driven by her own personal need rather than by abstract social principles: “She feeds off of her compulsion to care, using her work to dissociate from her own loss by losing herself in another person’s pain.”90 As Garden argues, the consequences of sympathetic over-involvement for a health-care professional are problematic. If a sympathetic act is performed for the benefit of the performer rather than the sufferer, it becomes “the exploitation rather than the alleviation of another’s sufferings.”91 Garden regards Justine’s mercy killing of Bessy as an act in some measure selfish because “Justine’s sympathy makes Bessy’s pain intolerable not only to Bessy but also to Justine.”92 Garden also correctly points out that Justine and Amherst’s belief that Dillon’s disablement makes death preferable to life shows an attitude that many disabled people, activists, and associations for disability rights would nowadays take exception to. The problem is even more complex in the case of Bessy, whose recovery would involve, in Justine’s opinion, even more severe disablement. Complete paralysis of the lower body is an eventuality that Justine finds as unbearable as Bessy’s pain, and it is reasonable to suggest that she administers the fatal injection also to relieve herself from an intolerable situation. I agree with Garden that the situation Wharton presents us with in this part of the novel, because it includes a professional nurse as central character, highlights the potential problem of sympathy as leading to the objectification of patients. However, it seems to me that the novel shows that a lack of sympathy is more likely to lead to the dehumanization of patients, as shown in Wyant’s treatment of Bessy as a “beautiful case” and a “prototype for experimentation.”93

CONCLUSION I have been rereading The Fruit of the Tree for decades, and I have come to think that James was right when he defined it a “remarkably rich & accomplished & distinguished book—of more kinds of interest than anyone now going can pretend to achieve.”94 I have continued to discover new stimulating aspects in it, and I have also been pleasantly surprised to see that students react positively to this novel and find its themes still relevant. From a pedagogical point of view, The Fruit of the Tree bridges the gap between humanities and health studies, because it addresses the question of the agency of disabled people, offers useful insight into the Victorian model of the female caregiver, and can be a resource for theoretical and practical training in nursing. Moreover, euthanasia and assisted suicide are still controversial topics; nursing is still, more than ever, a difficult and under-rewarded profession mainly practiced by women; and women are still, in all jobs, controlled and dominated by male colleagues. Moreover, while it is possible not to notice that slave labor underpins wealth in other classics such as Jane Eyre or Mansfield Park, it is not possible to read The Fruit of the Tree without being constantly aware that the price for the beauty surrounding the owners of Westmore is paid for, day after day, with the health and happiness of the human beings exploited in their factories. In fact, I am convinced that the disappointing evaluations given by so many scholars of The Fruit of the Tree are due to their failing to see that this is more a novel about labor, vocation, and professionalism than one about love, marriage, and the relation of the sexes, and this is the aspect that most makes it, in my view, a thought-compelling read. Furthermore, the novel is not at all as disorganized as some scholars have thought it,

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because Wharton succeeds in linking together all the three strands—the issue of industrial reform, the morality and social acceptability of euthanasia, and the woman question— by making them appear as different aspects of one major moral theme: the problem of the responsibility each individual has toward other individuals and toward society as a whole, and of how compatible socialization is with moral and intellectual autonomy. This interlocking of characters, plot, and moral theme makes of this novel a coherent whole, and the moral dilemma emerges from events triggered by the characters’ choices that are fully compatible with their psychology. Wharton analyses the ambiguous nature and consequences of both a superfluity and a lack of sympathy but does not unequivocally suggest a “right way” of exercising it. As the anonymous reviewer of the Nation noted at the time of publication of The Fruit of the Tree, “Mrs. Wharton has embodied life, not lectured about it, and it is unnecessary to reduce the interpretation to the last analysis in order to feel its meaning.”95

NOTES 1 Laura Rattray, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 3. 2 Millicent Bell, Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship (New York: Braziller, 1965), 259. 3 Lyall H. Powers, Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900–1915 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 78. 4 Donna M. Campbell, “Introduction.” In The Fruit of the Tree (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), v–l, xix. 5 Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 26. 6 Grace Kellogg, The Two Lives of Edith Wharton: The Woman and Her Work (New York: Appleton Century, 1965), 175. 7 R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 180. 8 Bell, Edith Wharton and Henry James, 264. 9 R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, eds., The Letters of Edith Wharton (London: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 124; original emphasis. 10 Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Chatto and Windus, 2007), 207. 11 Ibid. 12 Shari Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), 154. 13 Campbell, “Introduction,” xv. 14 Ibid. 15 Keri Slatus, “Medical Testing: Nursing, Sympathy, and Moral Code in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree,” Edith Wharton Review 33, no. 2 (2017): 312. 16 Anon, “New Novels: The Fruit of the Tree by Edith Wharton,” Atheneum, no. 4181 (December 14, 1907): 762. 17 Jacob M. Appel, “A Duty to Kill? A Duty to Die? Rethinking the Euthanasia Controversy of 1906,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78 (2004): 616. 18 Blake Nevius, Edith Wharton: A Critical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), 299. 19 Jennie Kassanoff, “Corporate Thinking: Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree,” Arizona Quarterly, no. 53 (1997): 23.

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20 Mary Chinery and Laura Rattray, “The Shadow of a Doubt: Discovering a New Work by Edith Wharton,” Edith Wharton Review 33, no. 1 (2017): 88–112. 21 Edith Wharton,“The Shadow of a Doubt: A Play in Three Acts,” Edith Wharton Review 33, no. 1 (2017): 115–256. 22 Rattray, Edith Wharton and Genre, 5. 23 Maria-Novella Mercuri, “Edith Wharton’s Relationship to German Literature: A Study in Creative Affinity,” PhD diss., University College London, 1998. 24 See Deborah Carlin, “To Form a More Imperfect Union: Gender, Tradition and the Text in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree,” in Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds.), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1992), 57–77; Teresa Tavares, “New Women, New Men, Or What You Will in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree,” Edith Wharton Review, no. 31 (2005): 1–15. 25 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1887] 1996), 41; original emphasis. 26 Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 137. 27 Edith Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree (Boston: Northeastern University Press, [1907] 2000), 526. 28 The often lampooned and satirized “New Woman” was an avatar of the ideals of the Women’s Movement in the Late Victorian and Edwardian period. The term itself emerged from the polemical debate between Sara Grand and Ouida in articles they published in the North American Review in 1894. However, free-thinking heroines had appeared already in the previous decade, for example, in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Sarah Grand’s Ideala (1888). Real and fictional New Women condemned the social construction of femininity, the legal subordination of women, the lack of educational and professional options for them, and the institution of marriage. Marriage was the object of a heated public debate following the publication of articles by Mona Caird in the Westminster Review in 1888. The critique of marriage is also central to Wharton’s long and short fiction, which insistently deals with the predicament of women confined to domesticity, excluded from participation in social and cultural life, and financially dependent on husbands and male relatives. However, despite her criticism of patriarchy and appreciation of free-thinking, Wharton had a limited understanding of the ideals of the Women’s Movement, did not support the battles for suffrage and higher education, and hated the aspiration to sexual equality and the rejection of motherhood that are important themes of much New Woman literature. See Lee, Edith Wharton, 606–8, for Wharton’s “anti-feminism.” 29 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), 372–3. 30 Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree, 227. 31 Ibid., 351, 377. 32 Ibid., 156. 33 Ibid., 231. 34 Ibid., 229. 35 Ibid., 458. 36 Ibid., 457. 37 Ibid., 223. 38 Ibid., 228. 39 Ibid., 222–3.

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40 Maria-Novella Mercuri, The Fruit of the Tree e la narrativa di Edith Wharton (Salerno: Edisud, 1990). 41 Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree, 223–4. 42 Ibid., 147. 43 Ibid., 277. 44 Ibid., 446. 45 Ibid., 453, 561. 46 Ibid., 608. 47 Ibid., 222. 48 Ibid., 11. 49 Ibid., 15. 50 Ibid., 457. 51 Ibid., 241. 52 Ibid., 402. 53 Ibid., 405–7. 54 Ibid., 417. 55 Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (New York: Cassell, 1893), 300. 56 Edith Wharton, “Sanctuary,” in Marilyn French (ed.), Madame de Treymes and Others: Four Short Novels (London: Virago, 1984), 85–162. 57 Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree, 419. 58 See Appel, “A Duty to Kill? A Duty to Die?” 59 Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree, 423–4. 60 Ibid., 428; original emphases. 61 Ibid., 433; original emphasis. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 523. 64 Ibid., 449. 65 Ibid., 447. 66 Ibid., 526. 67 Ibid., 624. 68 Ibid., 555. 69 Richard H. Lawson, Edith Wharton and German Literature (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974), 31. 70 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 101. 71 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, [1886] 1990), 58–9. 72 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 102. 73 Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (London: Penguin, [1911] 2005), 64–5. 74 Ibid., 95. 75 James Tuttleton, “The Fruit of the Tree: Justine and the Perils of Abstract Idealism,” in Millicent Bell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 163. 76 Rebecca Garden, “Sympathy, Disability and the Nurse: Female Power in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree,” Journal of Medical Humanities 31 (2010): 224. 77 Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree, 14. 78 Ibid., 13. 79 Ibid., 240. 80 Ibid., 231.

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81 Ann Jurecic, “The Fall of the Knowledgeable Woman: The Diminished Female Healer in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree,” American Literary Review 29, no. 1 (1996): 35. 82 Ibid., 40. 83 Ibid., 44. 84 Ellen Dupree, “The New Woman, Progressivism and the Woman Writer in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree,” American Literary Realism 31 (1999): 58. 85 Mary V. Marchand, “Death to Lady Bountiful: Women and Reform in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree,” Legacy 18, no. 1 (2001): 74; original emphasis. 86 Ibid., 72. 87 Garden, “Sympathy, Disability and the Nurse,” 224. 88 Ibid., 226. 89 Ibid., 228. 90 Ibid., 229. 91 Ibid., 226. 92 Ibid., 238. 93 Slatus, “Medical Testing,” 317. 94 Powers, Henry James and Edith Wharton, 78. 95 Anon, “Review of The Fruit of the Tree,” Nation 85 (October 17, 1907), 352.

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PART TWO

Edith Wharton beyond the Novel

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CHAPTER SIX

“Social Order and Individual Appetites”: Edith Wharton’s Short Stories, 1891–1904 PAUL J. OHLER

Most often considered a novelist of the twentieth century, Edith Wharton was first a nineteenth-century poet and magazine short-story writer. In 1891, the year her first story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” was published, Walt Whitman, who Wharton thought “the greatest of American poets,”1 was working on the last edition of Leaves of Grass. The volume version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was published after its serialization in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, a novel Wharton would use as a model for her story “The Moving Finger” (1902). Queen Victoria’s reign was ten years from its conclusion, and Wharton, at the age of twenty-nine, had been publishing poetry since 1879, when “Only a Child,” about the suicide of a boy, appeared in The New York World. The following year, Wharton began to establish professional ties with magazines that would later publish her short stories when five of her poems appeared in the Atlantic. In 1889, as Wharton began to compose her first stories, Century Magazine accepted “The Sonnet” and Scribner’s Magazine published “The Last Giustiniani.” On learning this news, she wrote to her governess Anna Bahlmann, who later became her literary secretary, “I feel very much pleased getting into the two best magazines in the country at once,”2 and it was the latter that would soon publish “Mrs. Manstey’s View.” Fortunately, Wharton’s correspondence, life writing, and literary criticism together provide the means to consider the first stage of her work in the genre, which produced many stories engaged with what became a focus of her novels, the conflict, as she expressed it, between “social order and individual appetites.”3 Between 1891 and 1904, Wharton published nine uncollected stories and three collections, The Greater Inclination (1899), Crucial Instances (1901), and The Descent of Man (1904). When one includes “The Letter,” added to the Macmillan edition of The Descent of Man to satisfy the publisher’s desire for a longer book, Wharton published thirty-four of her eighty-seven stories during the period. (The next stage of her shortstory publication did not begin until 1908 with the collection The Hermit and the Wild Woman.) The diverse group of stories published in her first period, which includes the

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8,000-word “The Reckoning” (1902) and the 15,000-word “The Confessional” (1901), illustrates Wharton’s movement toward longer forms, one aspect of her challenge to what she called “the machine-made ‘magazine story’ to which one or the other of half a dozen ‘standardized’ endings’ is automatically adjusted at the four-thousand-five hundredth word.”4 The magazines, supported to varying degrees by advertising, exemplified a new consumerism, and, as Amy Kaplan suggestively argues, Wharton’s “identity as an author and … [her] narrative forms were shaped by her immersion in this very modern culture.”5 She exploited the new publishing opportunities made available by a flourishing magazine industry and made plain her literary ambitions by writing poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. Revising her stories for the collections, though, was a key step in resituating ephemeral magazine writing in the explicitly literary form of a book published by the prestigious firm of Charles Scribner’s Sons, and then in a British edition, most often handled by Macmillan.6 The stories present subjects, themes, and literary forms whose evolution indicates Wharton’s shifting conception of the aesthetic possibilities of the genre. The five initial stories are diverse, taking up age and poverty, disappointment in marriage, the situation of a writer, psychological individuation told in the form of a fable, and moral failure. In “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” Wharton subtly reworked the literary naturalism she engaged with as an author intent on establishing her work outside the traditions of women’s writing, especially US local color fiction, yet she soon rejected naturalism.7 In subsequent stories, she combined first economic then ideological determinism, both often related to a socially and intellectually limiting understanding of female identity, with protomodernist psychological portraiture. The latter was indebted to Wharton’s many literary models, including Henry James’s fiction. Numerous contemporary reviews of her first three collections commented on James’s influence, with some asserting the superiority of Wharton’s writing. However, these comparisons became a career-long theme, which bothered Wharton intensely and had a pernicious effect on the reception of her works, especially after her death in 1937. She took much from James, learning his lessons better than many of her contemporaries, including, as James thought, Joseph Conrad,8 but she also took what she needed and threw off this influence, minting in the 1890s a style with the capacity to render conflicts between human desires and coercive circumstances. Frequently, Wharton gave her readers women reasoning about their circumstances and taking action to amend them. Such rejoinders saw female characters attempting to become, as in “The Muse’s Tragedy” (1899), something more than a “perfectly tuned instrument on which [men] … never tired of playing.”9 The publication of “Mrs. Manstey’s View” in the July 1891 issue of Scribner’s Magazine meant Wharton was now engaged with a thriving US magazine culture characterized by rapid changes to the business of publishing, including the proliferation of publications with different targeted audiences interested in different kinds of writing. Scribner’s Magazine commenced business in 1887. It sought to compete with Century Magazine, undercutting by a dime its price of thirty-five cents per copy, which Century had in common with Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, other esteemed magazines that published “a range of genres penned by some of the English-speaking world’s best writers of journalism, fiction, and poetry.”10 Twenty-one of the stories appeared first in magazines. “The Rembrandt” (1900) and “Expiation” (1903), for example, were published in Cosmopolitan, which “emerged as one of the finest mid-priced magazines.”11 Cosmopolitan “attracted a sizable readership late in the nineteenth century because it was an affordable, quality general magazine that gave readers of a nascent middle-class society informative articles on serious topics and fine fiction from the best authors of the era.”12 Wharton enjoyed great success

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as a magazine writer, yet evidence in her correspondence with her editors, and her own statements, illustrates that she felt her work was formally constrained by this primary publishing context. Her short fiction, though, spoke back to it, reflexively depicting interactions between editors and writers, the business of publishing, and the reading public in “That Good May Come” (1894), “April Showers” (1900), the dialog “Copy” (1900), “Expiation,” and “The Descent of Man” (1904). Some stories, such as “April Showers,” gently parody sentimental and local color magazine fiction by women; others, such as “The Quicksand” (1904), where the wealth created by her husband’s sensationalistic newspaper the Radiator raises ethical issues for Kate Peyton, pose the question of what responsibilities are entailed by wealth, here in the context of her reflecting on whether one can “purify money by putting it to good use.”13 The story represents the appetite of readers for gossip over explicitly literary writing, as does “That Good May Come.” Marriage is a central subject in a handful of stories, most notably “The Reckoning” and “Souls Belated” (1899). “The Portrait” (1899) and other stories depict artists whose quest for deeper verities is confounded by the ethics of representation, which, in the context of the stories, Sigrid Cordell crystallizes with the question: “Can one create art without speaking for the subject and without appropriating the subject?”14 The short fiction she published between 1891 and 1904, then, illustrates her evolving, intertwined commercial and aesthetic goals in the period Wharton became an extraordinary artist on the verge of international fame. When one includes “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” Wharton published only five uncollected stories between the summer of 1891 and fall 1898, but it was a time marked by intermittent illness, uneasy adjustment to married life, and exploration of other interests, such as architecture. Working with the Boston architect Ogden Codman, Jr., Wharton wrote The Decoration of Houses, an influential book published by Scribner’s in 1897. It “distinguished her as a writer highly attuned to the aesthetics, form, taste, and a reverence for what she and Codman called ‘the best models.’ ”15 Also a work of scholarship, it viewed “house decoration as a branch of architecture” rather than “the superficial application of ornament.”16 It articulated a connection between built environments and a hierarchy of values. The “close study of the best models”17 endorsed proportion and symmetry in contemporary architecture and decoration, implicitly validating Wharton’s belief in tradition as accumulated knowledge whose lessons must be reiterated in each generation. This principle animates “The Lamp of Psyche” (1895), where Delia Corbett’s beliefs about her seemingly perfect husband dissolve when she discovers the truth of his jest that “I haven’t any ideals,”18 identifying needed renovations to the ethical principles of the wealthy. After The Decoration of Houses was published, Wharton entered a period of intensive work on her short fiction. Between November 1898 and December 1903, she published twenty-six stories, with sixteen of them appearing in Youth’s Companion, Cosmopolitan, Lippincott’s, Century, Scribner’s Magazine, Bookman, and Harper’s Monthly Magazine. Many of the magazine stories were subsequently revised for publication in Wharton’s first three collections, some remained uncollected, and others were written expressly for the volumes. Wharton had a remarkable capacity for self-education, and this combined with foreign travel in her youth to stock her mind with images and ideas that fed, often in an observable way, into her writing practice. She also had tutors, the intellectual guidance of Anna Bahlmann, her governess and later literary secretary, and the help of friends. In 1884, Egerton Winthrop introduced her to what Wharton described as “the wonder-world of nineteenth-century science … and the various popular exponents of the great evolutionary movement.”19 This presented a new vision, for “both individual and society now had …

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an evolutionary significance; what one generation attained would be inherited by the next, altering the species.”20 This idea was key to Wharton’s enlightened traditionalism; contradictions between her apparently conservative politics and the fictional analysis of, for example, women’s loss of autonomy in marriage, or the root causes of ethical disengagement in her social caste, are in part resolved by understanding her belief that each generation had a responsibility to the next. Wharton may not have been progressive, but she believed in progress. Her depictions of the limits of intelligence and reason as instruments of female autonomy less powerful than social concepts that identify women have a diagnostic quality. Aside from supplying a way to think about cultural inheritance, the work of Darwin and his followers would be an explicit subject of “The Angel at the Grave” (1901) and provide the ironic title of “The Descent of Man.” In both stories, modern scientific materialism has, unfortunately in Wharton’s view, less authority than a corrosive, excessively optimistic spiritualism. In 1893, Edward Burlingame of Scribner’s solicited a volume of Wharton’s stories. She responded positively to Burlingame, writing “how much I am flattered by … [your] proposition to publish my stories in a volume … I have several more, which you have not seen.”21 Wharton was conscious she had much to learn, having published only “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” with a second story, “The Fulness of Life”—Wharton used an alternate spelling—slated for the December 1893 issue of Scribner’s Magazine. As the latter story was undergoing revision, Wharton wrote to Bahlmann to report, “I had a long letter from the Editor of Scribner’s saying that he was much pleased with ‘The Fulness of Life,’ & thought it would be ‘a very exceptional success’ if I would make it a little less ‘soulful,’ & in ‘a quieter vein.’ ”22 In 1894, she wrote to Burlingame about a manuscript that would become “Friends,” asking that he “have no tender hearted compunctions about criticizing my stories,”23 indicating a willingness to accept editorial input, which would lessen as her career progressed. The requirements of magazine editors, each of whom served commercial imperatives linked to an audience whose tastes were reflected in their advice, would prove a source of conflict as her career developed. Burlingame’s offer to publish a collection was based in part on his reading of the 30,000-word “Bunner Sisters” in 1892, which he commended while declining publication. Unpublished until 1916, “Bunner Sisters,” a key text in Wharton’s oeuvre, shares subjects with other early stories, particularly female poverty and violence against women, but it also exemplifies Wharton’s readiness to modify forms for her own purposes. Donna Campbell argues that “Bunner Sisters” “provides in miniature an account of the literary shift from local color to naturalism from the standpoint of a woman writer who prepared herself to meet the challenge … Wharton’s strategy … was to engage, transform, and finally dismiss both genres with her highly conscious fiction.”24 Wharton reprioritized the aims of the naturalism she inherited, pushing past portrayals of deterministic environments to fictionally analyze the ideas that produced them. By October 1895, she had published another three stories in Scribner’s: “The Fulness of Life,” “That Good May Come,” and “The Lamp of Psyche,” and in Century Magazine “The Valley of Childish Things, and Other Emblems,” a story indebted to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retellings of Greek myth for children in The Wonder Book (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853).25 Composed of a “group of ironical fables about American infantilism and wastefulness,”26 the story lights on the careless discarding of female intellectual capacity Wharton associated with gendered expectations of women. One section begins thus: “There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die.”27 The line described Wharton too, a woman whose

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“alleged preponderance of intellectuality” was the reason given by Town Topics: The Journal of Society in October 1882 for the termination of her engagement to Harry Leyden Stevens.28 Even the earliest stories—six of the first seven have a girl or woman at their center—developed forms with which to represent the complexities of women’s pursuit of freedom in private and public life, an important aspect of her career-long “complex cultural argument about America at the turn of the century”29 initiated in the stories. In the mid-1890s, Burlingame asked Wharton to revise for The Greater Inclination stories she had published in magazines between 1891 and 1895, including “The Lamp of Psyche.” She tried to improve passages in a copy of the story from Scribner’s Magazine, but she abandoned the effort and declined the request. Wharton’s response to Burlingame reveals why she did so: “as to the old stories of which you speak so kindly, I regard them as the excesses of youth. They were all written ‘at the top of my voice,’ & The Fulness of Life is one long shriek.—I may not write any better, but at least I hope that I write in a lower key, & I fear that the voice of those early tales will drown all the others.”30 She then broke off correspondence, eventually writing in December 1895 to inform Burlingame that “since I last wrote you over a year ago I have been very ill.”31 Looking back on the period, Wharton wrote in a letter to Sara Norton that “neurasthenia consumed the best years of my youth, & left … an irreparable shade on my life,”32 and it also informed portraits in her short fiction of acute mental illness. Whatever increase in the quality of the stories Wharton sought during the years leading up to The Greater Inclination, the first product of her “excesses of youth” was “Mrs. Manstey’s View.” Its impoverished, isolated widow occupies a third-floor room in a New York boarding house. The view she prizes includes a beautiful ailanthus tree and “a fence foamed over every May by lilac waves of wistaria.”33 Her temperament is at odds with urban life, for “at heart Mrs. Manstey was an artist”34 who has dreamed of living in the country. She fixates on the beauty of the natural world from her vantage above a decrepit man-made environment of “ash barrels … [and] broken bottles.”35 Her view is “not a striking one, but to her at least it was full of vision and beauty.”36 Tender-hearted and artistic, her daily experience of nature sustains her. Creating interactions of natural and urban environments with its protagonist, it is a work of fictionalized urbanism concerned with environmental degradation and its subjective effects. Sigrid Cordell finds that the story signals not only Wharton’s identification with naturalist writers but also her desire to make “a statement about the difference between power and opportunity in creating art,”37 an insight into Wharton’s modulation of received literary forms. Mrs. Manstey nevertheless conforms to Donald Pizer’s classic formulation of characters in naturalist fiction. She is of the lower class, her “fictional world is that of the commonplace and unheroic,” and she demonstrates some of the “qualities … usually associated with the heroic or adventurous, such as acts of violence and passion … which culminate in desperate moments and violent death.”38 Mrs. Manstey learns that Mrs. Black, the owner of an adjacent building, will build an extension that will block her view. Mrs. Sampson, the landlady, wonders how Mrs. Black “can afford to build an extension in these hard times,”39 a reference to the long-term consequences of the panic of 1873, depicted decades later in The Age of Innocence (1920) where Julius Beaufort’s failure and shame are linked to his “unlawful speculations.”40 The panic led to a depression, which was followed by the 1884 collapse of multiple New York banks. The city’s laissez-faire regulatory climate is reflected in Mrs. Sampson’s statement that “if people have got a mind to build extensions there’s no law to prevent ‘em,”41

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though city and state governments attempted to control development. That night, Mrs. Manstey silently steals out and attempts to burn down the partially constructed building. She dies of pneumonia a few days later. Imagining the psychological impact of the city on an artistic woman attuned to nature, the story also inaugurates Wharton’s interest in depicting female anger, which appears in the ghost stories “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” (1902) and the later “Kerfol” (1916). Whereas Mrs. Manstey proceeds methodically, even heroically, to carry out her plan against the products of an implacable, ecologically effacing profit motive, her rage elicits the remark that the “old woman is crazy”42 rather than a recognition of her loss, which is conceptually unrecognizable to her auditors. Depictions of disturbed women with minds at the edge of reason are present also in the psychological paralysis of the wife of a dying man in “A Journey,” Julia Westall’s debilitating anxiety at the conclusion of “The Reckoning,” and the attempted suicide of Ruby Glenn in “A Cup of Cold Water” (1899). Wharton’s visits to the major galleries of London, Paris, and Italy, her intensive study of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843–60) and The Stones of Venice (1851–3), the writings of J. A. Symonds, Vernon Lee, and others provided a store of evocative visual analogies of ideas and emotional states present in her novels. Glimmerings of this exist in connections made between art and spiritual fulfillment in “The Fulness of Life,” a story Wharton “sent to Burlingame in 1891 and published without changes … despite his regular requests for revisions.”43 Best known for its statement that “a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms,”44 it is told from the perspective of a woman who has entered heaven. The story presents a collage of visual impressions and the moods and emotions they evoke. Heaven is rendered in the sfumato style described as “the silver crescent of a river in the valley, and a blue stencilling of trees along its curve—something suggestive in its ineffable hue of an azure background of Leonardo’s.”45 The materialist protagonist—“I believed in Darwin”—encounters “the Spirit of Life” who asks if she found “the fulness of life” in marriage; she answers “dear no.”46 The extended metaphor of a woman as a great house where “in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes”47 dissolves into a memory of her visit to the church of Or San Michele in Florence. Here, the greatest sense of happiness overtook her, and “life in all its varied manifestations of beauty and strangeness seemed weaving a rhythmical dance around me.”48 The spirit introduces her to a like-minded man, a soulmate, but she rejects him, opting to wait for her husband because “no one else would know how to look after him, he is so helpless.”49 Marriage displaces fulfillment, being an obligation for women so ingrained that it cannot be refused, even in heaven. After the 1893 “shriek” of “The Fulness of Life,” Scribner’s Magazine next published another of Wharton’s “excesses of youth,” “That Good May Come,” in May 1894. It is a type of story W. D. Howells might have discussed in his 1896 essay “New York Low Life in Fiction,” which begins by considering Abraham Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of New York (1896). Howells writes that fiction “is only just beginning to deal with” 50 the reality of urban life evoked in Wharton’s story, but in addition to dealing with urban poverty it depicts the situation of a writer. The main character is a poet named Maurice Birkton. He lives with his mother and sister in a “thinly disguised tenement in one of those ignoble quarters of New York where the shabby has lapsed into the degraded.”51 The setting is notable for its relation to another text Howells discusses, Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which takes place within blocks of the setting of both Yekl and Wharton’s story. Characters in “That Good May Come” are subject to determinative socioeconomic factors, here a “grim diurnal spectacle of poverty and degradation.”52 Birkton’s Catholic

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family lives near the Jewish ghetto of the lower east side described in Yekl. They attend the Church of the Precious Blood, evidently modeled on the Church of the Most Precious Blood at 113 Baxter Street, immediately north of what was the dangerous Five Points area. Only a few blocks long, Baxter Street intersects with Hester Street, the location of the sweatshop where Yekl, known as Jake, works. One contemporary account finds that “Baxter Street is another scene of misery, and, alas, of crime … Drunken rows, fights, and stabbing affrays are of nightly occurrence.”53 Wharton’s setting is geographically similar to Crane’s in Maggie, but it explores an artist’s moral dilemma and is less focused on reproducing, for example, the Bowery idiom present in Crane’s novella. “That Good May Come” finds Birkton discussing his lack of success as a poet with his friend Helfenridge. His neoclassical verse, nearly sixty lines of which Wharton wrote for the story, has been rejected by Scribner’s Magazine, where the story appeared, and The Century Magazine. (Wharton’s poetry, unlike her protagonist’s, had been accepted by both.) Writing reviews for the Symbolic Weekly Review and the Inter Oceanic brings in little money, so Birkton pens an “idiotic squib”54 about a rumored affair between a man named Blason and Mrs. Tolquitt. He sells it to the Social Kite for 150 dollars. Birkton hands the money to his mother so she can purchase a communion dress for his sister. Believing he has betrayed his artistic creed, he “won’t touch a penny of it.”55 Desiccated by poverty, his mother’s “small, pale face was like a palimpsest on which the record of suffering had been … deeply written.”56 She resembles the poor, though more agential, Mrs. Fontage of “The Rembrandt” (1900), a naturalistic moment that seems out of key as the story progresses. “Mrs. Manstey’s View” and “That Good May Come,” like “Bunner Sisters” and to a lesser extent “The Rembrandt” whose “distressed gentlewoman” lives in a house on a “shabby” New York street in a room “unconcealably poor,”57 illustrate Wharton’s sense, as she expressed it in a piece of unpublished criticism, that “to the student of human nature, poverty is a powerful lens … Wealth keeps us at arm’s length from life, poverty thrusts us into stifling propinquity with it.”58 Embedded in a tenement setting, Birkton’s crisis, one triggered by his writing for a mass market magazine that values the salacious over the edifying, disrupts his perception that a poet connected to the roots of Western culture has a valued role in perpetuating it. In 1898, Wharton was again working after a period of illness, and her first collection was near completion. She searched for a title to satisfy her sense that “each of the stories is really a study in motives.”59 According to Sheila Liming, The Greater Inclination was a phrase Wharton discovered in Edmond Kelly’s Evolution and Effort (1895), one of the many books on evolution she was reading. It refers, as Liming explains, “to man’s ability to dictate and define the meaning of life for himself by virtue of his cognitive efforts. [Kelly’s theory was] that man possesses two types of ‘inclination,’ the ‘lesser,’ which is drawn from nature and concurrent with a will to survive, and the ‘greater’ faculties of logic, empathy, and free will.”60 The meaning of the title was undoubtedly obscure to many of Wharton’s readers, but it manifests a characterological constant: a desire to perceive clearly one’s dimly sensed disposition. It took her six years to complete The Greater Inclination, but Crucial Instances and The Descent of Man would not be similarly delayed. In her memoir, Wharton recalled that its publication “broke the chains which held me so long in a kind of torpor. For nearly twelve years I had tried to adjust myself to the life I had led since my marriage [in 1885]; but now I was overmastered by the longing to meet people who shared my interests.”61

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With The Greater Inclination, Wharton moved past her uncollected naturalist stories of determinative environments and their impacts on lower-class characters. The impulse to do so was present from the start. Mrs. Manstey’s history and psychology are distinctive, and this placed Wharton’s characterization in tension with naturalistic depersonalization. What strongly differentiates Mrs. Manstey is her reliance on nature as a ground for authenticity. She seeks meaning, as it is engraved on Lily Bart’s ring in The House of Mirth, “BEYOND!”62 the enclosing bars of economic circumstance. Characters in The Greater Inclination fulfill what Sarah Whitehead describes as Wharton’s “interest in perception and its relation to meaning … the ‘essentially modernist concern’ of the nature of perception and the psychology of the perceiver.”63 Whitehead points to Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction (1924) for evidence, where it is “the story-teller’s first care to choose th[e]‌reflecting mind deliberately … and when it is done, to live inside the mind chosen, trying to feel, see and react exactly as the latter would.”64 Some stories in The Greater Inclination depict characters alienated or made psychologically unstable by elements of modern urban life, as is the case with the acutely ill “reflecting mind” in “A Journey.” Whitehead’s observation about “perception and its relation to meaning” is exemplified by a “narrative gap” found elsewhere in the short fiction.65 “A Journey” concludes with the protagonist’s escalating anxiety. This “terror,”66 like Mrs. Manstey’s rage, or in “The Reckoning” Julia Westall’s anxious perception that there was “something sinister about the aspect of the street,”67 creates the antithesis of “standardized” conclusions. “A Journey” concludes without narratorial comment, the protagonist losing consciousness as “she flung up her arms, struggling to catch at something, and fell face downward, striking her head against the dead man’s berth.”68 “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” extends the use of ambiguity, narrative gaps, and an unreliable “reflecting mind” to a ghost story haunted by the impact of male prerogative on female characters. The story is set in a remote and “gloomy”69 country house where the overtly masculine Brympton abuses his wife, assesses female servants for their sexual attractiveness, and has, perhaps, murdered Emma Saxon, his wife’s last maid. Her ghost protects Mrs. Brympton from the master with the help of the new maid, the sickly Alice Hartley, who has recently recovered from typhoid. Events such as Emma Saxon’s journey to the house of Mrs. Brympton’s gentle male friend Ranford—an alternative masculinity present in other stories—edge toward modernist forms by confining the reader to Alice Hartley’s impressions of them. Wharton withholds narrative closure and suspends her readers in her protagonist’s unreliable perceptions. This resonates with Wharton’s praise of ambiguity in Conrad and Kipling, who she identifies among a larger group of short story writers whose work has “reached out in fresh directions.”70 Disorienting gaps in other stories compelled editors to make Wharton “adapt to her readers by adding explanations at the end of some ghost stories in order to make them more intelligible,”71 another point of negotiation with the magazines. This was one end of a spectrum of effects; at the other lay stories that partially conformed to the norms of women’s writing, even as they parodied them. Two other uncollected stories reveal aspects of Wharton’s complex response to popular forms of women’s writing. “Friends” (1900) and “April Showers,” both published in the family magazine The Youth’s Companion, conform to tropes of sentimental writing and New England regionalism and delicately parody the lifeways of rapidly modernizing locales. From Wharton’s perspective, they were literary forms enjoying too much favor, which she expressed in “The Great American Novel” (1927) in the observation that “the public … likes best what it has had before; the magazine editor encourages the young

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writer to repeat his effects; and the critic urges him to confine himself to the portrayal of life in the American small town.”72 Both stories have been viewed as attempts to adopt regionalist forms. Janet Beer suggests “Friends” is responsive to being read as local color writing. She views it as one of a group of stories in multiple generic categories, including the gothic, which have “the epistemology of women’s lives as a common concern or rationale.”73 “April Showers” features a provincial young woman named Theodora who has written a novel. Its final line, “But Guy’s heart slept under the violets on Muriel’s grave,” is, she believes, “a beautiful ending.”74 The story depicts the writing of fiction and a literary market that thrives on the sale of what Theodora’s uncle calls “sentimental trash.”75 She recalls “the early struggles of famous authors, the notorious antagonism of publishers and editors to any new writer of exceptional promise,” and questions whether she should “write the book down to the average reader’s level.”76 Wharton muses over her own creative situation as much as her character’s when Theodora refuses “the inartistic expedient of modifying her work to suit the popular taste.”77 It is an ironic comment, for Theodora’s literary models are the stories referred to by Wharton’s quip. Theodora ties her manuscript with a blue ribbon and sends the novel to Home Circle magazine, likely a reference to Home Journal, owned by Nathaniel P. Willis (1806–1867), a publication that brought parents and children together to “circle around the family table.”78 Willis was the brother of popular novelist and columnist Fanny Fern, pen name of Sara Willis (1811–1872), some of whose early work appeared in Home Journal. In the story, Theodora unknowingly chooses the same title for her novel as a new book by the popular novelist Kathleen Kyd, and it is accidentally accepted. Theodora is elated until she buys the issue of Home Circle, which she believes contains her work, and finds Kathleen Kyd’s April Showers instead. The story ends with Theodora returning home to her understanding father, who tells her that he too once had literary ambitions. The two instances of alliterative pen names in the story, Gladys Glynn is the other, suggest Wharton’s models were Fanny Fern and Grace Greenwood, pen name of Sara Jane Lippincott (1823–1904), an author and journalist whose work was published in Home Journal. Willis’s father founded The Youth’s Companion, making these details an elaborate allusion. Lightly dusted with parodic exaggerations and readable against Wharton’s assertion that she did not mind “being called cynical and depressing by the sentimentalists,” 79 both stories can be viewed as playful assemblages of ironically deployed forms Wharton hoped to surpass as she consolidated her status as a professional author. “The Duchess at Prayer” (1901), a gothic story that appeared in Scribner’s Magazine and Crucial Instances, relies, like “The Fulness of Life,” on her extensive knowledge of Italian art, architecture, and history, but its literary sources include Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842), the frame narrative of Balzac’s “La Grande Bretèche” (1831), and a chapter in J. A. Symonds’s Renaissance in Italy (1875–86) about Violante, Duchess of Palliano (sic), who was murdered by her husband. Symonds based his chapter on transcripts made from court records by Stendhal, born Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), upon which he based his novella “La Duchesse de Palliano,” published anonymously in Revue des deux Mondes in 1837 and collected in Chroniques italiennes (1855). As with other supernatural tales featuring representations of male command over female sexuality, it opens from a male perspective, takes for its setting an ancient estate similar to the settings of the ghost stories, and slips into the past using an embedded narrative told to the narrator by “the oldest man I had ever seen,”80 who heard it as a young man from his now long-dead grandmother. The embedded narrative takes place in the late seventeenth century. It depicts the authority of Ercole II, Duke of Ferrara (1508–1559), over his pious

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young “first Duchess.”81 She looks favorably on a young man, her husband’s cousin the Cavaliere Ascanio, who becomes her lover. He is another example of Wharton’s tendency to contrast violent older husbands with younger, gentler men. The influence of Browning’s poem is confirmed by the duke’s commission of a piece of art depicting his wife, though it is not a painting, as in “My Last Duchess” (1842). Wharton’s duke directs Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) to create a statue of the duchess. She often prays in the chapel and descends to the crypt, which contains a relic of Saint Blandina. Here, she frequently meets Ascanio. He is sealed in the crypt when the duke returns unexpectedly from a journey with the statue and has it placed over the crypt’s entrance. He then poisons his wife, and the following morning a young girl, the grandmother of the old man relating the tale to the narrator, hears a “low moaning”82 in the chapel and finds the face of statue, as it was noted by the narrator earlier, “frozen in horror.”83 Wharton’s historical gothic here and in “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” restores to the present a lost history of women’s experience with masculine violence. The story depicts continuity between this history and the male narrator’s present when he gazes at the symbol of the duke’s power. This occurs at the beginning of “The Duchess at Prayer” when the narrator perceives the duke’s coat of arms as the vanishing point of a composition: “From the loggia, with its vanishing frescoes, I looked down an avenue barred by a ladder of cypress-shadows to the ducal escutcheon and mutilated vases of the gate.”84 The narrator transports the reader back to the period of the story’s events, moving “down” the “ladder” of garden shadows to the past. The scene connects the narrator’s perspective and the Duke’s emblem, and the reader encounters a literary representation of pictorial continuous narrative, familiar to Wharton from her extensive study of Italian medieval and renaissance art. The framed scene holds stories both past and present, and the unnamed narrator, as oblivious here of the danger to women of male violence as the nameless narrator of “Kerfol,” signifies its futurity by relating its past without judgment. Portraying the patina of decay worn by buildings, along with symbolic emanations of power rendered in highly visual language, is one technique Wharton uses to create continuity between a historical social order and the present. Later in her career, Wharton theorized her creation of character psychology as a function of social order in “Telling a Short Story,” a chapter in The Writing of Fiction (1924). She proposes the distinction “that situation is the main concern of the short story, character of the novel; and it follows that the effect produced by the short story depends almost entirely on its form or presentation.”85 Whartonian “situation” is more than mere circumstance, however. It is “made out of the conflicts … produced between social order and individual appetites.”86 Virginia Ricard is right to question whether “the ‘situations’ presented in her stories [are] still ‘situations,’ ”87 yet formal issues are also suggested by the passage. Considering them yields insights into Wharton’s sense of the limitations of naturalism and women’s writing. The “scene of conflict” is not “external” but psychological, “shifted from incident to character.” “Crucial moments” play out as interior events that flare into moments of emotional intensity commensurate with their subjective significance. Wharton writes of these moments that “there must be something that makes them crucial, some recognizable relation to a familiar social or moral standard.”88 What she formulates as “situation,” then, is the interplay between a character’s epistemology and the events and circumstances that pressure the validity of their beliefs; one finds it in characters reflecting, worrying, and reasoning against external pressures such as economic precarity, and belief systems that inflict one identity on all women. The “social or moral standard” found in stories of marriage such as “The Reckoning” and “Souls

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Belated” recasts women’s inklings of selves outside the mainstream into a static icon of the feminine. It is an enforceable abstraction given form by the horrified expression on the face of the statue in “The Duchess at Prayer,” which manifests its historically durable nature. Whether the pressures on characters are the result of coercive gender typology, or spatiotemporal, as with Wharton’s renderings of an alienating and rapidly developing city, they pushed her toward a stylistic hybridization of naturalism and psychological impressionism in many stories. Wharton put these forms and themes into practice in “A Cup of Cold Water.” Here, the protagonist Woburn’s alignment with a hypocritical upper-class morality is disrupted when he renews its failed forms in saving a woman’s life. This, in turn, prompts him to face the consequences of his own wrongdoing. An employee at a bank, he has embezzled and spent fifty-thousand dollars to fund a lifestyle sufficient to wed Miss Talcott, a woman from a wealthy family. He senses his crimes have been discovered and books passage on a ship that will sail at dawn. Leaving the warmth of the Gildermere ballroom, he reflects on Miss Talcott. Woburn believes her incapable of sympathy when he calculates her eventual reaction to his crime. She cannot, he estimates, comprehend the “incalculable interplay of motives that justifies the subtlest casuistry of compassion” foreshadowing his later behavior, nor understand “intermediate tints of the moral spectrum.”89 Like the wealthy Corbett in “The Lamp of Psyche,” who did not fight in the US Civil War and answers “I don’t think I know”90 when asked why, Miss Talcott is not disposed to such reasoning. Once Woburn withdraws from the stratum he has aspired to, its people strike him as “mincing women … apathetic men who looked as much alike as the figures that children cut out of a folded sheet of paper.”91 This awareness, the result of his crime, terminates his affinity with the wealthy and its non-relation to an ethical system it disregards. Unblinkered by his acts, Woburn now understands “Miss Talcott’s opinions had no connection with the actual.”92 He reflects upon his likely reacceptance to Miss Talcott’s world were he to make a fortune and return, but this insight leads him to ask “what was the stanchest code of ethics but a trunk with a series of false bottoms? Now and then one had the illusion of getting down to absolute right or wrong, but it was only a false bottom—a removable hypothesis … There was no getting beyond the relative.”93 Woburn’s criminality has produced clarity. Walking downtown to board the ship that will take him to Halifax, he decides to sleep at a hotel. As he prepares for bed, he hears the click of a revolver in the room next to his. He breaks down the door and prevents a woman named Ruby Glenn from committing suicide. She has left her husband for a lover who has abandoned her. At dawn, Woburn takes her to the train station and buys her a ticket home with the last of his money, then returns to the bank to face the justice he knows awaits him. Beyond the pale of wealth, he saw in the city what before was invisible, “a hundred details which had escaped his observation … a shabby man lurking in the shadow … [a woman] sunk in the apathy of despair or drink.”94 Out of this new vision emerges empathy, embodied in his aid of Ruby. He has discovered “absolute right and wrong,” which exists, at least, in individual action. To avoid the oblivious sameness of the upper class he now despises, Woburn resigns himself to the fate rendered by that system, recalling a line from Hamlet “the saddest, he thought, in the play—For every man hath business and desire.”95 Wharton considers here the failure of the wealthy to take ethical standards seriously; they cannot be relied upon to help imagine and implement a better world. “A Cup of Cold Water” does more than exhibit what Edmund Wilson called her preoccupation with the “artificial moral problems of [Paul] Bourget.”96 It fictionally configures links between the quest for freedom and the quest for enlightenment,

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illuminating a wider failure of belief in a secularized world and why the resulting society must be mended. Questions of freedom circulate in stories of marriage and a loss of women’s autonomy. Matrimony is mandatory yet psychologically destructive. In the modern marriage of “The Reckoning” where “the marriage law of the new dispensation will be: THOU SHALT NOT BE UNFAITHFUL—TO THYSELF”97 old patterns play out as Alice Westall’s third husband invokes this principle to leave her for a younger woman. In “Souls Belated,” Lydia fails in her attempt to imagine and enact personal freedom beyond the horizon of marriage. She travels in Italy with her lover Gannett while still married to Tillotson. Lydia recalls she has received the document finalizing her divorce. It looms between her and Gannett. Freed from the dullness of her marriage to Tillotson, a man who accepts the elaborate sameness imposed by his wealth, she and Gannett reside at the Hotel Bellosguardo. It is peopled by vacationing elites, including Lord Trevenna and Mrs. Cope, lovers who have left London for the relative privacy of Italy to await her divorce. The setting is one of enforced compliance with social codes and their internalization by women as surveillant second selves. Lydia and Gannett believe in their nonconformance, their personal resolution of a conflict between “social order and appetite.” Their resistance and, ultimately, conformance to that order are illustrated through dialogue, yet, moving beyond “Souls Belated,” a female character’s speech often enunciates concern over whether there is a self beyond the prescribed roles of lover, wife, mother, muse, spinster, or work of art, as in “The Moving Finger,” “The Duchess at Prayer,” and “The Muse’s Tragedy,” where Mary Anerton’s public persona as Rendle’s lover and inspiration is a fiction she has produced. In “Souls Belated” and “The Muse’s Tragedy,” moneyed mobility and dissatisfied, expatriate female characters struggle with what they believe are external conditions, which Lydia believes offer spaces where an authentic self can be cast. What she finds is that she is, in part, made of what she hates. In 1888, Wharton embarked on an eighty-two-day cruise of the Aegean with her husband and family friend James Van Alen, which contributed to her development as a fiction writer and supplied her with images she drew upon for her stories. She recalled those “four months in the Aegean were the greatest step forward in my making.”98 The diary of the voyage, published under the title The Cruise of the Vanadis (2004), makes detailed observations about people, their built environments, customs, and history. It expresses Wharton’s fascination with architecture in its descriptions of the environments she moved through, where “the Cathedral square … its quaintly sculptured fountain … traceried windows … Gothic doors … fine late Renaissance carvings”99 embody religious and political authority. “A Coward” (1899), set in Greece, contains a minor example of Wharton’s use of the diary in her fiction. It portrays the penitent Carstyle living in shame after abandoning his sick friend, who has died in the collapsed building Carstyle fled during an earthquake in Greece. He seeks an opportunity to redeem himself through a heroic act in order, he says, to “set myself right with the man I was meant to be.”100 Wharton draws on the diary to describe the bazaar at Chios where Carstyle notes the alien custom of adorning “donkeys with necklaces of large blue beads to protect them from the evil eye.”101 Her diary’s description of the 1881 Chios earthquake informs the central event in the story. The diary allows one to consider Wharton’s prose in the period immediately prior to the start of her career as a writer of short fiction. The literary qualities of the diary emerge in balanced, carefully cadenced sentences and precise rendering of visual detail. Traveling on the Vanadis took Wharton beyond the cities of France and Italy she knew.

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When her party met the yacht in Algiers, she wrote, “We were surrounded by the first Arabs we had ever seen—startlingly picturesque in the flashes of lantern-light, with their white burnouses and long white cloaks.”102 They sailed to Tunis, then Malta, then further east. What came into view as the Vanadis carried Wharton and her party from port to port elicited near anthropological descriptions familiar to readers of her novels and their portrayals of manners and customs of the United States and Europe. She took in Smyrna’s “Eastern sights … the lemonade sellers in their yellow silk coats, the Jewesses in long silk robes & little velvet caps … the Turkish women in bright, coloured striped garments with black veils over their faces,”103 the attention to which would surface in equally colorful novelistic evocations of art and architecture, the ideas they represent, and even material objects such as dresses designed by Jacques Doucet, Charles Frederick Worth, and others. One story related to the voyage is set in Venice, a historical meeting point of Eastern and Western cultures since at least the early thirteenth century. Such comings together were of great interest to Wharton, who in her diary wrote “nothing, in fact, can be more curious than the mixture of Orientalism and European civilization which meets one at every turn in Smyrna.”104 The Lascar—a term used to describe Indian or Caribbean sailors working on British ships—leaning over the rail of the “East Indiaman”105 at the beginning of “A Venetian Night’s Entertainment” (1903) set in 1760, reflects Wharton’s Aegean encounters between East and West. In Venice “were people of every nation on earth, Chinamen, Turks, Spaniards.”106 There are colonial images, even orientalism itself, in the modern sense, present in an Englishman’s prints of “heathen mosques and palaces, of the Grand Turk’s Seraglio.”107 Wharton depicts the Byzantine character of the buildings, and she documents Islamic architectural influence, describing the ribbed lanterns atop the domes of St. Marks in Venice “where the very churches wore turbans like so many Moslem idolaters.”108 The story is a brisk and colorful piece of magazine fiction, but Wharton’s characteristic allusiveness is present too. The protagonist, Tony Bracknell, resembles the naive country boy Robin of Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molinieux” (1832), a story hinging on the malleable morality of a youth who seeks to capitalize on his relative’s position in colonial Boston, home also to Tony. In the story’s elaborate conspiracy to trick the young innocent out of his money, moreover, is a contrast between old-world corruption and the shadowy past of Tony’s new-world innocence. He sails on a ship named the Hepzibah B., which smuggles into a seemingly frivolous tale the first name of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hepzibah Pyncheon. Her faded colonial lineage and poverty in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), a source for “The Angel at the Grave” (1901), symbolizes, like Robin’s story in “My Kinsman, Major Molinieux,” dark truths about the history of the United States. They are truths the unknowing Tony, who has visited Salem many times, carries forth as the adventuring innocent abroad, including his naive assumption about the exceptionality of the American way of life. Edith Wharton’s short stories are a complex body of work related in myriad ways to her novels. They also constitute a separate achievement, the fullness of which remains under-acknowledged. Much more could be said about Wharton’s stories to 1904. The conditions of female authorship depicted in “Copy” and “Expiation,” which express a gap between authorial persona and person, deserve further study. So too does Wharton’s work with dramatic dialogues in “The Twilight of the God” and “Copy,” which can now be studied alongside Wharton’s only extant, full-length play, The Shadow of a Doubt, discovered by Mary Chinery and Laura Rattray. In the minds of characters like the widowed Mrs. Fontage of “The Rembrandt” or the artistically liberated painter Keniston

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of “The Recovery” (1901) an ostensible European openness to aesthetic experiences absent from US culture provides, respectively, a glimpse of a life unfulfilled or a path toward renewed artistic vision. In the stories examined here, Wharton the “conservative modernist”109 promotes in her fiction the value of intelligence and emotional awareness over a view of the world founded on “sentimental trash,” gossip, and pop psychology, anticipating modernism’s reaction to the ubiquity of mass culture, a movement in the arts that exerted an influence of its own on her stories.

NOTES 1 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934), 224. 2 Irene Goldman-Price, ed., My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 82. 3 Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 13–14. 4 Ibid., 50–1. 5 Amy Kaplan, “Edith Wharton’s Profession of Authorship,” ELH 53, no. 2 (1986): 433– 57, 453. 6 See Shafquat Towheed, ed., The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 10–14. Towheed’s important introductory essay describes Wharton’s work with her American and British publishers and establishes what she sought to achieve by revising her fiction as it moved from serial form to US first edition, and then a final, authoritative British edition “with the necessary authorial corrections and revisions” (11). 7 See Donna M. Campbell, “Edith Wharton and the ‘Authoresses’: The Critique of Local Color in Wharton’s Early Fiction,” Studies in American Fiction 22, no. 2 (Autumn 1994): 169– 83, 180. 8 See Henry James, “The Younger Generation,” Times Literary Supplement, April 2, 1914, 158. 9 Edith Wharton, “The Muse’s Tragedy,” in The Greater Inclination (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 1–24, 16. 10 Amanda Hinnant and Berkley Hudson, “The Magazine Revolution, 1880–1920,” in Christine Bold (ed.), US Popular Print Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 113–31, 114. 11 Ibid., 115. 12 James Landers, The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010), ix. 13 Edith Wharton “The Quicksand,” in The Descent of Man and Other Stories (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 109–37, 134. 14 Sigrid Cordell, Fictions of Dissent (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), 89. 15 Emily J. Orlando, “‘Perilous Coquetry’: Oscar Wilde’s Influence on Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman,” American Literary Realism 50, no. 1 (Fall 2017): 25–48, 25. 16 Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., The Decoration of Houses (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), xxi; original emphases. 17 Ibid., 2. 18 Edith Wharton, “The Lamp of Psyche,” Scribner’s Magazine, October 1895, 423. 19 Wharton, A Backward Glance, 94. 20 Sharon Kim, “Lamarckism and the Construction of Transcendence in The House of Mirth,” Studies in the Novel 38, no. 2 (2006): 187–210, 188. 21 R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, eds., The Letters of Edith Wharton (New York: Collier, 1988), 31.

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2 Goldman-Price, My Dear Governess, 97. 2 23 Lewis and Lewis, The Letters of Edith Wharton, 32. 24 Campbell, “Edith Wharton and the ‘Authoresses,’ ” 180. 25 Maureen Howard, “Remarks on Edith Wharton’s Collected Stories,” Library of America, January 24, 2001, www.loa.org/news-and-views/141. 26 Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007), 160. Wharton struck out two sections in the typescript of the story that will be published in Paul Ohler, ed., Volume II, Short Stories I: 1891–1904 of the Complete Works of Edith Wharton. 27 Edith Wharton, “The Valley of Childish Things, and Other Emblems,” Century Magazine 52 (July 1896): 468. 28 Quoted in Lee, Edith Wharton, 60. 29 Ibid., 120. 30 Lewis and Lewis, The Letters of Edith Wharton, 36. 31 Ibid., 35. 32 Ibid., 140. 33 Edith Wharton, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” Scribner’s Magazine, July 1891, 118. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 117. 36 Ibid. 37 Cordell, Fictions of Dissent, 80. 38 Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, rev. ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 11. 39 Wharton, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” 119. 40 Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York: D. Appleton, 1920), 261. 41 Wharton, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” 119. 42 Ibid., 121. 43 Sarah Whitehead, “The Business of the Magazine Short Story,” in Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray (eds.), The New Edith Wharton Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 48–61, 51. 44 Edith Wharton, “The Fulness of Life,” Scribner’s Magazine, December 1893, 700. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 701. 49 Ibid., 704. 50 William Dean Howells, “New York Low Life in Fiction,” New York World, July 1896, 18. 51 Edith Wharton, “That Good May Come,” Scribner’s Magazine, May 1894, 631. 52 Ibid., 633. 53 James McCabe, New York by Sunlight and Gaslight (Philadelphia: Douglass Brothers, 1882), 589–90. 54 Wharton, “That Good May Come,” 630. 55 Ibid., 640. 56 Ibid., 631. 57 Edith Wharton, “The Rembrandt,” in Crucial Instances (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 123–49, 127. 58 M. Bell, Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of their Friendship (New York: G. Braziller, 1965), 293. 59 Lewis and Lewis, The Letters of Edith Wharton, 36.

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60 Sheila Liming, “‘It’s Painful to See Them Think’: Wharton, Fin de Siècle Science, and the Authentication of Female Intelligence,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 49, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 137–60, 143. Liming notes Wharton marked the passage and added “Exact reasoning” (144). 61 Wharton, A Backward Glance, 156. 62 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 249. 63 Sarah Whitehead, “Make It Short: Edith Wharton’s Modernist Practices in Her Short Stories,” Journal of the Short Story in English 58 (Spring 2012): para 7. 64 Wharton, The Writing of Fiction, 46. 65 Whitehead, “Make It Short,” para 13. 66 Edith Wharton, “A Journey,” in The Greater Inclination (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 27–45, 44. 67 Edith Wharton, “The Reckoning,” in The Descent of Man and Other Stories (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 161–97, 189. 68 Edith Wharton, “A Journey,” 45. 69 Edith Wharton, “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” in The Descent of Man and Other Stories (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 243–78; 245. 70 Wharton, The Writing of Fiction, 33. 71 Agnès Berbinau-Dezalay, “Reading and Readers in Edith Wharton’s Short Fiction,” Journal of the Short Story in English 58 (Spring 2012): para 26. 72 Edith Wharton, “The Great American Novel,” in Frederick Wegener (ed.), Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 151–9, 155. 73 Janet Beer, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1997), 116. 74 Edith Wharton, “April Showers,” Youth’s Companion, January 1900, 25. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Cortland Auser, Nathaniel P. Willis (New York: Twayne, 1969), 125–6. 79 Lewis and Lewis, The Letters of Edith Wharton, 39. 80 Edith Wharton, “The Duchess at Prayer,” in Crucial Instances (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 1–32, 2. 81 Ibid., 5. 82 Ibid., 32. 83 Ibid., 6. 84 Ibid., 1. 85 Wharton, The Writing of Fiction, 48. 86 Ibid., 13–14. 87 Virginia Ricard, “Introduction,” in “The Short Stories of Edith Wharton,” ed. Virginia Ricard, special issue, Journal of the Short Story in English 58 (Spring 2012): para 7; original emphasis. 88 Wharton, The Writing of Fiction, 14; original emphasis. 89 Edith Wharton, “A Cup of Cold Water,” in The Greater Inclination (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 183–226, 185. 90 Edith Wharton, “The Lamp of Psyche,” Scribner’s Magazine, October 1895, 418–28, 427. 91 Edith Wharton, “A Cup of Cold Water,” 194–5. 92 Ibid., 186–7. 93 Ibid., 197.

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94 Ibid., 194. 95 Ibid., 223; original emphasis. 96 Edmund Wilson, “Justice to Edith Wharton,” in The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1941), 194–213, 195. 97 Wharton, “The Reckoning,” 161. 98 Wharton, A Backward Glance, 131. 99 Edith Wharton, The Cruise of the Vanadis (New York: Rizzoli, 2004), 62. 100 Edith Wharton, “A Coward,” in The Greater Inclination (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 131–55, 154. 101 Ibid., 152. 102 Wharton, The Cruise of the Vanadis, 35. 103 Ibid., 149. 104 Ibid. 105 Edith Wharton, “A Venetian Night’s Entertainment,” in The Descent of Man and Other Stories (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 281–312, 281. 106 Ibid., 282. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid., 284. 109 Lee, Edith Wharton, 456.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Edith Wharton in Verse EMILY SETINA

“One asks why it is that Mrs. Wharton should be known rather as novelist than poet,” wrote the critic Robert Sencourt in a July 1931 essay for the literary journal Bookman.1 He expressed “amazement” that Wharton’s poems “should be almost unknown; that they have never once been quoted in an anthology; and that the name of her who wrote them is mentioned in no books, or essays on poetry. They are beyond all argument the best that have been written by an American woman, and most American men.”2 A critical curiosity, Sencourt’s essay conjures up an alternate literary history in which poetry—with, or more so than, the novel—would be at the center of Edith Wharton’s reputation. For all his enthusiasm, though, Sencourt is not the champion a poet would choose. He condescends to Wharton’s gender even as he lavishes praise on her writing, frames his commentary with racist and chauvinistic views about “the virility of the Colonial tradition” (which he credits for bolstering her high standards), and proves a bad judge of other poets, notably dismissing Emily Dickinson as an author of “poignant cries.”3 Not even Sencourt’s friends went along with his evaluation of Wharton. Responding to the essay in December 1930, half a year before its publication, T. S. Eliot wrote, “Judging solely by the extracts you give, I cannot concur with your admiration of Mrs Wharton’s verse … this poetry leaves me feeling as cold as if I had been reading the Sonnets of Mr Santayana or stroking a dead fish.”4 Eliot’s comparison of Wharton’s poems to those of his own former Harvard professor, the distinguished philosopher George Santayana, implied that Wharton’s genius, too, lay outside poetry. The “dead fish” comparison is harder to read as generously. Wharton is not remembered as a poet. More than ninety years after Sencourt’s essay, even a poetry enthusiast might be most surprised to learn not that her poetry has been neglected but that she wrote poetry at all. Out of print for most of the twentieth century, the poems have generated little popular readership or academic criticism. When considered by scholars over the past several decades, they have primarily been read in the context of biography. Most prominent in this regard is “Terminus” (1909), a fiftytwo-line poem interpreted as a sketch of a night spent with her lover Morton Fullerton, a poem that Wharton never intended to publish. A singular seven-page copy survives in Fullerton’s handwriting, with his explanatory gloss. “Account of a night spent at the Charing Cross Hotel in London,” the description in the Wharton Collection at Yale’s Beinecke Library reads, echoing Fullerton’s note. “Wharton presumably destroyed the original.”5 The reception history of this and other poems by Wharton suggests that their value lay not in their “musical[ity]” and “moving … intricacy,” as Sencourt had argued, but instead—unfashionably for a poet whose last decades coincided with a modernist

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insistence on impersonality—in their diaristic disclosures about the author’s emotional life and private relationships.6 That Wharton’s poems span many years and multiple periods, from the Victorian 1870s to the late Modernist 1930s, has made them even more difficult to interpret and assess coherently, and easier to ignore. That situation of long neglect, however, is changing. The publication of Louis Auchincloss’s Selected Poems (2005) and Irene Goldman-Price’s Selected Poems of Edith Wharton (2019) has brought previously unpublished poems by Wharton into print and made formerly out-of-print pieces widely accessible for the first time in a century.7 The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, in progress from Oxford University Press, is projected to start with the author’s poetry. Volume 1: Poems will collect the pieces that Wharton published during her lifetime, restoring the genre to its proper place in the chronology of her career.8 These editions offer tools to support reappraisal of a neglected body of writing. New criticism also makes a strong case for reassessment. In Edith Wharton and Genre (2020), Laura Rattray provides the most comprehensive critical account to date of the poetry and its reception, arguing that Wharton is overdue recognition “as a significant poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”9 To fully understand Wharton as an artist, Rattray contends, requires acquaintance with her work in the “less familiar genres,” prime among them poetry.10 Neither extreme of judgment that Wharton’s poems sustained from early-twentieth-century critics—from Sencourt’s adulation to Eliot’s distaste—does justice to the range of affect and interests contained in writing that, as Rattray writes, “can be dull and predictable, but also subversive, blasphemous, feminist, transgressive—and deeply unsettling.”11 Surveying Wharton’s still little-read poetry, this chapter offers an overview of topics, modes, and forms that drew her attention as a poet and the work’s manuscript and publication history. Wharton described poetry as “precision in ecstasy,” and this paradox of strict form and strong feeling defines her writing in verse, whether on subjects intimate or political, mythic or journalistic.12 I look closely at several poems that exemplify aspects of her poetics and recurrent themes, while suggesting how they may speak, in varied ways, to a reader discovering the poems now. Finally, I place the critical recovery of Wharton’s poetry in the context of a wider drive to bring formerly unpublished or outof-print work by women poets into print—a movement that raises questions about the politics of reading women’s writing in the twenty-first century. Wharton’s poems may look, in retrospect, like sidenotes to the fiction, but Wharton saw them differently. Though she could be modest about her writing in the genre, she understood poetry as a serious, substantial part of her literary achievement. In a 1902 letter to the Scribner’s editor William Crary Brownell, she professed doubt that she had “ever reached the ‘poetry line,’ ” yet she wrote more than two hundred poems in her lifetime and published poems in three volumes—Verses (1878), printed privately while she was still a teenager; Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse (1909); and Twelve Poems (1926).13 As a seventeen-year-old she had a poem printed in a major newspaper; as an eighteen-year-old, she published five poems in the Atlantic Monthly (an achievement facilitated by family connections, Rattray notes).14 For decades, her poems appeared in newspapers and important literary journals, including Harper’s, Scribner’s, Literary Digest, and the Yale Review. Goldman-Price puts the total number of poems Wharton published during her lifetime at one hundred—a count that makes her a more prolific poet in print than, for example, Elizabeth Bishop.15 Wharton kept other poems private and unpublished, transcribed in a notebook or shared only narrowly. The last book she worked on before her death was the posthumously published Eternal Passion in English

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Poetry (1939), an anthology of love poems that collected poets whom Wharton had long counted as favorites and influences, including William Shakespeare, John Donne, the Brownings, the Rossettis, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Alfred Tennyson. Her breadth of writing and publication in poetry, as both Rattray and Goldman-Price note, shows that the genre mattered to Wharton across her life and that it should matter, too, to readers interested in her full identity as an artist.

POETIC APPRENTICESHIP AND FIRST PUBLICATIONS Adding to an enlarged understanding of poetry’s role in Wharton’s career was the recovery and publication in 2012 of letters to her governess Anna Bahlmann, who was twenty-four when she began working with a twelve-year-old Edith Jones. Their correspondence shows a young writer serving a determined, enthusiastic apprenticeship in poetry, in conversation with a well-read, multilingual, sympathetic tutor who engaged her charge on subjects from classical myth to contemporary English and American literature.16 As a teenager, Edith sought Bahlmann’s criticism, regularly sending drafts of poems for her comment. In a letter from August 1876, the writer thanked Bahlmann for “frank criticism” of two poems she was translating from Goethe, and then debated details of word choice and rhythm across another page before stopping herself, worried that she would wear out her audience.17 When she wrote of the Goethe translations again that September, it was to send Bahlmann thanks for her responses, from “a grateful poetaster.”18 In addition to soliciting her teacher’s opinions about poetry, the pupil shared her own. As a thirteenand fourteen-year-old, she criticized Henry Wordsworth Longfellow’s poetry as “lifeless” and lacking in “fire & passion & reality,” praised James Russell Lowell’s facility with blank verse, and likened her neighbor’s Newport estate to the setting of Tennyson’s 1847 poem “The Princess.”19 As their editor Goldman-Price writes, the letters testify to an “intense literary apprenticeship in language, cadence, poetic subject, and tone.”20 They indicate the foundational place that verse could hold in a precocious, well-to-do, latenineteenth-century girl’s education, and they show that Wharton’s poetic identity had its genesis in hard work and epistolary exchange. Poetry was a privileged, heightened language she shared with a trusted teacher and friend, and an arena of achievement in which to test her skill and ambition. Where biographers have discussed Wharton’s poetry more often in relation to the midlife affair with Fullerton, Goldman-Price’s editing of the Bahlmann letters suggests that Wharton’s passion for poetry started in a very different, and differently intimate, relationship. Goldman-Price identifies five periods of greatest poetic activity across Wharton’s life: her teenage years; her thirties, when she wrote the poems that filled a large notebook now at Indiana University’s Lilly Library; her forties, culminating in Artemis to Actæon; the First World War; and her sixties and seventies while she was traveling in Greece and living in the South of France.21 The earliest of these periods, coinciding with her exchanges with Bahlmann, yielded Wharton’s first published book, which debuted anonymously when she was sixteen. Titled simply Verses, the book (or pamphlet, as it is sometimes described) was printed privately by a Newport firm, C. E. Hammett, Jr., and funded by her parents.22 Digitized images of Wharton’s personal copy, in Yale’s collection, illustrate the prettiness of the book’s presentation, with ornamental flourishes and borders embellishing text. No author’s name appears on the pale-blue paper wrapper, but the author inscribed the flyleaf with a wry identification in swooping letters: “Edith Jones / Who wrote these verses, she this volume owns, / Her unpoetic name is Edith

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Jones.”23 The title page’s printed epigraph, taken from Bettine Brentano, known as a young, female admirer and correspondent of Goethe, reads, “Be friendly, pray, to these fancies of mine.” Verses runs to thirty-eight pages and includes two dozen original poems and five translations from German. Wharton would later disparage the book, claiming that “nothing” in it “showed the slightest spark of originality or talent,” save for the poem “Opportunities,” a moralistic, epigrammatic eight-line poem in rhyming couplets.24 But the book demonstrates the skill and versatility of a young poet testing and adapting varied forms and modes, including the sonnet, ballad, quatrain, blank verse, dramatic monologue, occasional poetry, and even the blazon. Blake Nevius, writing in 1952, described a pervasive elegiac mood in the book: “In slightly over half the poems the poet looks back regretfully across the dead years or … borrows on future grief.”25 He attributed the nostalgic tone, in a poet so young, to “stock romantic attitudes,” which resulted in a collection that, while demonstrating the author’s wide reading, failed to sound “the authentic personal note.”26 But the terms Nevius used, “authentic” and “personal,” are not the right terms by which to measure Wharton’s early poetry, drawn as its writer was to performative modes and social themes. Strikingly, the poem that seems most directly to refer to the sixteen-year-old author’s lived experience, the elaborately titled “What We Shall Say Fifty Years Hence, of Our Fancy-Dress Quadrille (Danced at Swanhurst, August 8th, 1878),” imagines a speaker who reflects on the event from half a century’s distance. The poems in Verses look forward to themes and modes that characterize Wharton’s later poetry, as modeled in three poems clustered under the collective heading “Sonnets.”27 Their grouping at the book’s start seems meant to display the young poet’s formal dexterity. “Le Viol d’Amour,” a title corrected in the author’s copy to “La Viole d’Amour,” is a Petrarchan sonnet. It takes its title from a baroque stringed instrument, whose French name translates literally to “viola of love.” A poem about seduction addressed to “sound” itself, “more sweet than scent / Of violets,” it was written when Wharton was thirteen.28 The themes of love and music play on a knowledge of literary convention and etymology—“sonnet,” from the Italian sonetto, “little song.” As the opening poem of Verses, this sonnet serves as a precocious ars poetica, announcing the primacy of music to the work while also demonstrating that emphasis through rhyme and sibilance. A second sonnet, “Vespers,” also written at age thirteen, is spoken by an attendant to a lady at prayer. The archaic diction and medieval imagery recall Keats’s “Eve of Saint Agnes” and the gothic settings of Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting. The description of a static scene—martyrs’ images in stained glass, a lady silently kneeling—anticipates Wharton’s later ekphrastic poetry (poems about works of visual art), including her reflections on medieval architecture and sculpture in “Chartres” and “The Tomb of Ilaria Giunigi.” The third sonnet in Verses takes another persona, this time an identifiable historical figure: the devotee of Goethe cited in the book’s epigraph, reprinted below the poem’s title. Like “Lines on Chaucer,” also in Verses, and later poems to Dante and Swinburne, “Bettine to Goethe” pays tribute to a poet Wharton admired, in this case through a child’s profession of love for an aging writer. Music, ekphrasis, an homage to another artist—each would remain a staple theme or mode of Wharton’s verse. The same is true of dramatic monologue, of which there are several early examples in Verses. It is unsurprising, given her later success as a novelist, to find Wharton drawn to a lyric mode that let her create characters and write from their points of view. She experiments with differently gendered and historicized identities for speakers in Verses. “A Woman I Know,” written in three quatrains, seems at first to be a traditional blazon,

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a poem describing, part by idealized part, a female object of desire. In its final couplet, however, the poem turns into a gossipy warning or lament, spoken by one man to another: “But beneath the bright breast where her heart ought to be, / What is there? Why a trap to catch fools, sir, like me!”29 “Some Woman to Some Man,” the collection’s only poem in blank verse, suggests that all romantic partnerships, to some degree, end alike. Sliding from romantic hope to disillusionment, the opening lines—“We might have loved each other after all, / Have lived and learned together! Yet I doubt it”—succinctly “preview,” Rattray writes, “a major motif of Wharton’s mature work.”30 In contrast to the purposeful vagueness of “Some Woman to Some Man,” the dramatic monologue “Raffaelle to the Fornarina” works in sensual detail and takes a historical figure as its speaker, the Italian Renaissance painter. The poem reprises, in more intimate terms than “A Woman I Know,” an interest in male spectatorship and the changeable meaning of a female body. The painter instructs a woman posing to him to transform herself from a seductive nude, a version of the woman pictured touching her breast in Raphael’s La Fornarina, into a Madonna, a figure of “sacred innocence,” with “naught … to woo the grosser sense.”31 “Subdue the pointed twinkle of your eye,” he counsels, “and let your mouth awhile / Be pressed into a faint, ascetic smile.”32 As he narrates a living woman’s transformation into her visual representation, this Raphael suggests the influence of Browning’s speakers in dramatic monologues such as “My Last Duchess” (1842) and “Andrea del Sarto” (1855). In the poem that precedes “Raffaelle to the Fornarina,” the act of spectatorship takes on a more extreme ethical charge. Set in “A. D. 107,” as the subtitle announces, and calibrated for maximum melodrama, “The Last Token” is spoken by a female prisoner condemned to be eaten alive, who in her last minute of life looks up to see her beloved, “one who sits and waits to see me dead.”33 Safe in the crowd, he throws her a rose. This symbolic “token” contrasts with the boldness of the speaker who “meet[s]‌[his] eyes,” even as she feels the “lions’ hungry breath.”34 These poems show a young writer working through issues of gender in tandem with choices of persona and character. She takes up the perspectives of men looking at women and, alternately, of a woman doomed but emboldened by punishment. The ballad “May Marian” further exemplifies a recurring fascination with the cruelty of collective judgment and its hazards for women. Deploying a traditionally anonymous, communal verse form, it tells the story of a woman harshly punished for a transgression against gender, class, and social norms—for being foolish enough to believe that the man with whom she falls in love also loves her in return. The title character, a “country lass” who spends her days sitting and working, is spotted by a gentleman riding through town.35 Obeying her “silly heart,” she trades her gown for a “footboy’s cap and mantle” to follow him to London.36 When they arrive, however, the gentleman tells May Marian that he is already betrothed and that she can stay at his mansion only as serving woman to his bride. She travels home alone, weeping. Arriving at her mother’s door, she vows to “wander never more” but receives cold welcome: “The door was shut against her, / To her prayer came answer none.”37 Exhausted, she collapses in the street and dies. A stern final stanza warns ladies to beware being “too lightly won.” 38 The ballad ostensibly faults May Marian for being led astray, but she is a figure of pathos more than ridicule in the poem. The poet makes no comment on the disparity between her offense and its drastic consequences, only urging female readers to avoid her wretched fate. Where May Marian brings suffering upon herself, the victim of “Only a Child,” as the title suggests, is an innocent. Edith Jones wrote the scathing protest poem the year after the publication of Verses, and it appeared in the New York World in May 1879

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as her first publicly published poem, under the pseudonym “Eadgyth.” She had read a newspaper account of a child who hung himself while held in solitary confinement at a home for vagrant and delinquent children, and she composed the poem immediately, sending it to the World the next day. Her title renders judgment against the people she holds responsible for the tragedy—the hypocritical Christians at the Quaker House of Refuge in Philadelphia where the child died, and all adults who permit such things to happen to children. Like “May Marian,” “Only a Child” uses ballad form, but joins the ballad’s conventional four-line stanza into compound eight-line stanzas. This expansion of the form opens further room for the poet to develop images meant to arouse pity— for the child whose “Poor little hands!,” a repeated exclamation across the ten stanzas, were forced to such a measure—and to indict the “Christian town” that allowed such a crime: They found him hanging dead, you know,   In the cell where he had lain Through many a day of restless woe   And night of sleepless pain. The heart had ceased its beating,   The little hands were numb, And the piteous voice entreating   In death at last was dumb. No doubt it was a painful fact   For them to contemplate; They felt the horror of the act,   But felt it rather late. There was none to lay the blame to—   That, each one understands; And the jury found—he came to   His death by his own hands!39 Channeling outrage against social injustice into art, “Only a Child” finds in poetry a form of activism and political speech, a function poetry would take again for Wharton in her wartime writing. Though the news that inspired it dates to the late nineteenth century, the poem’s anger still feels fresh. The poem speaks, as well, to issues with urgency for the present: around child separation, the treatment of minors in the criminal justice system, and the effects of solitary confinement. While the author of Verses looks to history for inspiration, the poet who wrote “Only a Child” feels unexpectedly contemporary.

FROM THE POETRY NOTEBOOK TO ARTEMIS TO ACTÆON Wharton continued to publish poems in periodicals in the ensuing decades, while also writing many more poems than appeared in print. The major artifact of this work is a large poetry notebook she kept between 1889 and 1893, beginning in her late twenties and continuing into her early thirties, which she filled “not with drafts,” as Goldman-Price writes, “but with finished poems written in her best hand.”40 The Lilly Library, which owns the notebook, identifies fifty-two individual titles in its contents.41 Goldman-Price includes thirty-seven of them in her Selected Poems, making a substantial number of the poems newly accessible. In

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the notebook, Wharton pushes forward themes of earlier work and expands its range. She composes Romantic lyrics that seek to translate nature’s force and beauty and to convey emotional states (“The Northwind,” “The Southwind,” “Beaulieu Wood,” “October in Newport,” “Song [Come, for the leaf is alight],” “Song [Mirth of life’s blooming time]”). She writes sonnets that attempt to define large ideas and abstractions: “Beauty,” “Renunciation,” “Death,” “Life” (a title shared by two notebook sonnets). She writes narrative poems that examine more specific intersections of gender and poverty, as in “The Rose,” a poem about a woman who disappoints her hungry children by bringing home not food for them to eat but a discarded rose whose beauty reminds her of a happier past. That the disheveled rose “fell last night from Edith’s hair” offers a clue to Wharton’s consciousness of both her implication in and distance from the lives she imagines.42 Ten poems in the notebook have women’s or female figure’s names in their titles, including “Phyllis,” “Demeter,” “Esther” (a dramatic monologue about desire, seduction, and strategy spoken by the biblical queen), “The Duchess of Palliano,” and “The ‘Beata Beatrix’ of Rossetti.” Another is titled “The Dead Wife.” These titles announce an interest that runs through Wharton’s poetry, like her fiction, in representing women’s experiences and developing strong female characters. “Cynthia,” a Pygmalion tale gone wrong, told in heroic couplets, ends with the transformed urchin back on the street, a ruined woman betrayed by the older man who had tried to save her after first trying to take her as a consort. Before leaving, she points out the sexism in his version of salvation: “And now you teach me that the Christ, who died / To wash the world of sin, was crucified / For men, but not for women.”43 Wharton drew on historical accounts of Renaissance Italy to write “Lucrezia Buonvisi Remembers” and “Lucrezia Buonvisi’s Lover (Dying at Viareggio),” dramatic monologues that voice two sides of a single drama—an affair that ended in the murder of Lucrezia Buonvisi’s husband, perhaps with her participation. Speaking from the nunnery to which she fled after the crime, Lucrezia recounts the unhappiness of a marriage in which she felt entrapped, the liberating thrill of the affair, and her visceral terror of punishment. Rattray identifies the poem, which does not judge or vilify its speaker, as among the works in verse that reveal a more “overtly feminist” Wharton than conveyed solely in her fiction.44 Like the title figure in “Cynthia,” Lucrezia is expected to feel shame, but refuses, viewing it as a hypocritical affect, a humiliation “sweeter than honey on many a saintly tongue.”45 Notebook poems thematizing art show Wharton thinking reflexively about form and continuing to reckon with male influences. Several poems are named for stanza forms and meters, suggesting they may have begun as composition exercises that she assigned herself: “Terza Rima,” “Dactylics,” “Sapphics.” Swinburne is addressed in a sonnet bearing his name, and the author of the Divine Comedy in “Dante,” which compares the reader to a stargazer who sees a “new planet swim upon his sight,” a direct echo of Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816).46 “Cor Cordium,” in praise of Shelley, and “Browning in the Abbey” also pay tribute to poets beloved by Wharton. Still other poems develop her relationship not to male predecessors but to figures of poetry itself. Drawing on spatial metaphors, “The Sonnet’s Boundaries,” itself a sonnet, praises the form as a respite from extremes, whether “the epic’s Alpine way” or “lyric’s flight.”47 The sonnet’s rules—its fourteen iambic pentameter lines and set rhyme patterns—are to the poet a “close-railed balcony” from which to safely survey broad vistas.48 Another meta-poetic sonnet, “A Vision,” imagines the form as a mysteriously radiant female figure emerging from the waves to meet the solitary poet. The sonnet is revealed as both self and other to its author: “I heard her murmur in a voice like mine, / ‘I am the Sonnet thou

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hast tried to sing!’ ”49 Visual art offers inspiration in two ekphrastic poems, both centered on representations of female figures, one divine and one mortal.50 “The So-Called Venus of Milo” addresses the famous marble sculpture, while “The Tomb of Ilaria Giunigi” speaks to the fourteenth-century noblewoman with a warmth surprising in a meditation on funereal art. “Ilaria, though that wert so fair and dear,” the poem begins, and ends by reenvisioning death as an exchange of life for art, “when thy soul / Cast the sweet robing of the flesh aside, / Into these lovelier marble limbs it stole.”51 Rather than imagine what a male artist might see, as in the earlier “Raffaelle to the Fornarina,” each poem speaks directly to its subject. Wharton included “The Tomb of Ilaria Giunigi” in her collection Artemis to Actæon, published with Scribner in New York in 1909, reprinted in London by Macmillan the same year. She also gathered in the book poems that had appeared in Scribner’s, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere in the two decades prior to the volume’s publication. Since the revelation of Wharton’s previously secret relationship with Morton Fullerton, Artemis to Actæon, despite its long composition history, has been closely associated with the affair, which lasted from about 1908 to 1911, overlapping with the book’s preparation and publication.52 Some of the collection, Auchincloss writes, was “almost surely … inspired” by the affair, and Goldman-Price notes that the relationship “gave rise to dozens of poems, some of which she sent to him or recorded in a secret diary, and others she collected.”53 Certainly, Wharton seems to have imagined the book as a powerful means of communication with her lover. Inside the copy that she gave him, she inscribed a poem that did not appear in print, “[As birds from some green tropic gloom].” The poem’s migrating tropical birds, as they “wing onward to an unknown doom,” offer an analogy for her poems, dispersed to readers.54 She entreats this poem’s reader to greet her doomed birds with tenderness: “let them fold their happy wings / One wondering moment in your breast.”55 Sadly for Wharton, as Goldman-Price observes, the book’s intended first audience was not a careful one. Only “The Mortal Lease,” written for Fullerton, she notes, “seems to have been read” in his copy of the book.56 Though Wharton was a successful professional novelist by the time Artemis to Actæon was published, she was reviewed, for her major volume of poetry, as an ingenue.57 “In sonnet form, Miss Wharton should some day achieve something,” the Manchester Guardian reported in 1909.58 The reviewer missed the sophistication that Wharton had already achieved in the form, on display especially in “The Mortal Lease,” a sequence of eight sonnets. It is a love poem but, as Goldman-Price writes, “clearly a public one rather than solely [for] herself or the beloved,” with its formal diction and intricate philosophical argument about mortality and desire in a modern, skeptical world.59 Rattray identifies “The Mortal Lease” and the allegorical “Life,” also in Artemis to Actæon, as Wharton’s “most erotically charged” published poems.60 With its classical references and language of desire, “Life” doubles as an erotic poem and a poem about art—it suggests the two are one. “Nay, lift me to thy lips, Life, and once more / Pour the wild music through me,” the poem begins.61 The speaker’s metamorphosis into an instrument of art is imaged as sensual violence: “a groping shape of mystery … / Severed, and rapt me … / Pierced, fashioned, lipped me.”62 Alluding to the musician flayed for challenging Apollo, the speaker is a “Marsyas-mortal” who pleads to be used for art even as it brings great pain.63 As the poem progresses, the speaker and “Life” become passionately enmeshed, “Life and I / Clung lip to lip,” and their initial roles are reversed: life “became the flute and I the player.”64 The poem attempts to capture in visceral terms the difficult, jumbled interrelation of life, art, and human artist.

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In the book’s dramatic monologues, Wharton explores further aspects of love, violence, and desire through figures mythic and historical. The title poem “Artemis to Actæon,” written in blank verse and employing archaic diction, is spoken by the goddess of the hunt to the mortal she punished for seeing her at her bath, turning him into a stag to be torn apart by his own hounds. As in “Life,” the poem depicts love as pain. “The gods, they say, have all: not so!” the goddess claims, arguing that man’s longing “incarnates us, pale people of your dreams, / Who are but what you make us.”65 While Artemis might pardon a lesser mortal his offense, Actæon’s destruction signals his distinction. Rather than linger in a dull life, he will “drink fate’s utmost at a draught”: “Because I love thee thou shall die!”66 Anticipating the feminist reappropriation of classical figures by poets such as H.D., Sylvia Plath, Rita Dove, Eavan Boland, Louise Glück, and A. E. Stallings, Wharton uses myth as a vehicle to explore transgressive female desire. Her reimagining of another figure, the thirteenth-century saint Margaret of Cortona, ignited controversy when Harper’s published the poem in 1901. Wharton’s Margaret, speaking from her deathbed, confesses that she would gladly trade divine love for human if her dead lover returned. “He was my Christ—he led me out of hell,” Margaret asserts, speaking not of the Christian Savior but of her lover.67 The Catholic press forced Harper’s to issue an apology for printing blasphemy, but Wharton, undeterred, put “Margaret of Cortona” in the opening section of Artemis to Actæon. She did not shy away from difficult speakers or subjects: another notable dramatic monologue, appearing immediately before “Margaret” in Artemis to Actæon, takes the voice of Vesalius, the scientist-physician exiled for dissecting a still-living woman. “The girl they brought me, pinioned hand and foot,” he remembers, and then exclaims, “Think what she purchased with that one heart-flutter / That whispered its dark secret to my blade!”68 Critics have underread the creepiness of these speakers and Wharton’s subversive handling of gender and other issues in the dramatic monologues, Rattray argues, as in the uncollected poem “The Last Giustiniani,” spoken by a monk. The last of his bloodline, he leaves cloistered life, taking a young bride to produce an heir, and discovers, belatedly, the pleasures of sensual life. While the poem has been read as a celebration of marriage, that interpretation overlooks more sinister themes: the act of sexual possession renders the bride of Giustiniani, “O sweetness, whiteness, youth, / Best gift of God,” a silent object of eugenicist fantasy.69 In contrast to these dark, ornately wrought poems of desire are the private, unpublished love poems: “Terminus,” dated 1909, with its long, loose lines of free verse celebrating a carnal connection between equals, and the untitled “[I have had your love and I have seen it go],” a spare lyric of love lost, dated to 1913. The theme of loss in varied forms would become a recurring note of her late poetry.

WAR POETRY AND TWELVE POEMS During the First World War Wharton channeled energy toward varied forms of writing: newspaper articles, editorial work, and fiction.70 Throughout the war, Wharton also returned to poetry, deployed both as a mode of political speech and part of the ritual of mourning.71 In her idealism and sustained faith in the necessity, however terrible, of combat, her poems from 1915 to 1919 diverge from responses by soldier-poets like Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke and other civilian and modernist poets bitterly critical of war’s costs, who rejected sentimental or heroic views of it. The poems Wharton wrote in the first year of fighting—“Belgium,” “The Tryst,” “Battle Sleep,” “The Great Blue Tent”—vary in tone and meter but are “unified in their emphasis on nobility and

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idealism,” Julie Olin-Ammentorp writes.72 “Battle Sleep” depicts a dreamy prewar world with “prewar, romantic diction,” while “The Great Blue Tent,” published in the New York Times in August 1915, more than a year and a half before the United States entered the conflict, is a propagandistic poem meant to stir patriotic consciences and encourage American involvement.73 Wharton wrote about poetry in less worldly terms, as a vehicle of “rapture,” but she was savvy enough to recognize that its emotional punch could be put to work for a cause, and her wartime poetry is largely written in this activist mode.74 Her interest in women’s experiences and voices—even amid a conflict whose art focused largely on male sacrifice—is evident in “The Tryst,” her contribution to The Book of the Homeless (1916), the anthology she edited to raise money for displaced civilians. A speaker recounts her meeting with a refugee, one of the war’s “homeless.” Wharton emphasizes the woman’s resilience even as the poem enumerates war’s horrors. Her husband and child murdered, her house destroyed, the woman nonetheless plans to return to her country to memorialize her dead and nurture the living in their place: “Where my husband fell I will put a stone, / and mother a child instead of my own.”75 Wharton broached the theme of soldiers’ sacrifice in both patriotic and introspective moods. Written days after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, and subtitled “To the American Private in the Great War,” her poem “You and You” takes, as Olin-Ammentorp writes, a “strong martial rhythm” as it cheers on the soldiers who won the war. All of them deserve thanks, it proclaims, “but you, you Dead, most of all!”76 With its ambitious enumeration of the country’s varied landscapes and soldiers’ civilian occupations, the poem recalls the catalogs of another wartime American poet, Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass was among Wharton’s favorite books.77 In “Elegy,” dated 1918 but not published until Twelve Poems, she narrows her frame, preoccupied less with what the dead have won for the living than with what they have lost for themselves, the “young dead who gave / All that they were, and might become.”78 She mourns that incalculable loss at a tangible level, by surveying a mutable natural world, which “we / With tired eyes” enjoy even as it is forever denied to them.79 Wharton continued to write poetry after the war, with a “final flowering” of verse in her sixties and seventies.80 A last book of original poetry, Twelve Poems, was issued in a limited run of 130 copies, printed on handmade paper by the Medici Society of London. Where the title “Artemis to Actæon & c.” is held aloft by golden putti on the Scribner’s volume, Twelve Poems looks like a modernist text, its cover bearing only its minimalist title and author’s name, stamped in capital letters. The book includes several war poems: “The Tryst,” “Battle Sleep,” “Elegy,” and “With the Tide,” an elegy for Theodore Roosevelt that, Olin-Ammentorp notes, blends mythic elements with “descriptions derived from the war.”81 Wharton begins the volume with meditations on the French landscape. In “Les Salettes” a sunset over the Mediterranean prompts an elegiac affirmation: “And life is Beauty, fringed with tears.”82 A poem near the book’s end, “The First Year,” also looks back at a life, but with a macabre twist. Revisiting a premise she had explored in poems such as “All Souls” and “All Saints” in Artemis to Actæon and anticipating themes of the late ghost stories—including her last published story, also titled “All Souls” (1937)— Wharton imagines the return of the dead. As in the notebook poem “The Dead Wife,” a woman returns from the grave to find another wife in her place. In “The First Year” the strange wife, rather than a living replacement, is herself a ghost—one the deceased speaker realizes was part of her marriage all along.83 Where a ghostly double is a source of misery in this disquieting poem, the preceding text in Twelve Poems envisions a spirit double as a source of joy. “La Folle du Logis” is an ode to imagination, “You strange familiar, nearer than my flesh / Yet distant as a star,” “my sister.”84 Wharton had started

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her career writing poems celebrating other poets’ imaginations; here, she claims the “Wild wingèd thing” as her own.85

READING A FAMOUS NOVELIST AS A FORGOTTEN POET What does it tell us about Wharton’s career and our own reading practices that her long neglected poems are coming back into circulation now? The renewed interest in Wharton’s verse emerges amid a wider drive over the past twenty years to publish out-ofprint or previously unknown work by women poets. In some cases, as in a new volume of Emily Dickinson and the reissue of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, the books aim to restore famous poems to the state their authors left them in, “as she preserved them,” before an editor or executor—for Plath, an estranged husband—imposed changes.86 In other cases, editors have recovered significant work that the poet herself drastically amended or cut from her canon, as in recent volumes of Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein.87 These volumes can be controversial, raising questions about authorial control and editorial ethics; the 2006 publication of manuscripts by Elizabeth Bishop was condemned by the critic Helen Vendler as a “betrayal” of the poet’s standards.88 But these publications can also serve as a means to redress past oversights and reveal facets of works and writers we thought we knew. Writing after the publication of Ariel: The Restored Edition and Plath’s unabridged journals, Anita Helle noted that these resources expand our view of Plath in two ways: first, she “appears to have been a more prolific writer, by any standard (versatility, volume, publication, discarded and abandoned lines, and unpublished manuscripts) than the narrower range of her ‘canonized’ reputation … would allow. Second, [her work] engages a much broader range of cultural and historical reference” than previously appreciated.89 As a way of gauging what impact additional materials might have on interpretation, Helle points to the precedent of feminist scholarship on Virginia Woolf in the 1970s and 1980s when the Woolf archive was opened and diaries and letters brought into print, complicating an earlier, more limited assessment of the author’s range and scope of concerns.90 New engagement with Wharton’s work across genres similarly brings into view a more complex writer. Wharton’s poetry, as we are coming to know it, includes verse both public and private, written across two centuries. That she filled the 1889–93 notebook with clean copies of finished poems suggests a kind of professionalism even in her unpublished work. The sense that poetry for Wharton was a less mediated, more revealing form than fiction, or even the curated self-presentation of memoir, has nevertheless persisted. Introducing the Selected Poems, Auchincloss described poetry as serving a sort of therapeutic purpose for Wharton, as a release for feeling: “Poetry was important to Wharton because it enabled her to express the deeply emotional side of her nature that she kept under such tight control, not only in her life but in the ordered sweep of her fiction.”91 Auchincloss reproduces R. W. B. Lewis’s claim that “for the expression of her most private and vital emotions she turned to poetry.”92 To depict emotional release as its essential quality, however, undersells the dedication to craft that the writer brought to her verse and the intellectual energy that drives many of her strongest poems. Wharton began her career as a poet, and late in life she claimed poetry as her “chiefest passion and … greatest joy.”93 Given the sexism that Rattray shows marked the initial reception of Wharton’s poems and the value that Wharton herself accorded to the genre, there is ample reason not to let prior publication history or first readers have the last word on her verse.

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NOTES

1 2 3 4

Robert Sencourt, “The Poetry of Edith Wharton,” Bookman 80 (July 1931): 484. Ibid., 486. Ibid., 479, 486. T. S. Eliot, letter to R. E. Gordon George (Robert Sencourt), December 30, 1930, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 5, 1930–31, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 447; quoted in Laura Rattray, Edith Wharton and Genre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 48. 5 Item description for Edith Wharton, “Terminus,” holograph copy by Morton Fullerton, 1909, box 21, folder 682, MSS 42, Edith Wharton Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT, Yale University Library, https://coll​ecti​ons.libr​ary.yale.edu/cata​log/2017​618 (accessed June 1, 2021). 6 Sencourt, “The Poetry of Edith Wharton,” 486. 7 Louis Auchincloss, ed., Edith Wharton: Selected Poems (New York: Library of America, 2005); and Irene Goldman-Price, ed., Selected Poems of Edith Wharton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019). 8 “Volumes,” Complete Works of Edith Wharton, https://whart​onco​mple​tewo​rks.org/volu​ mes/ (accessed June 1, 2021). 9 Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 10. 10 Ibid., 2. An example of this cross-genre approach is found in Julie Olin-Ammentorp’s Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), which analyzes the war poetry in the context of the author’s wider war writing and includes an appendix with texts of Wharton’s “War-Related Poems” (235–44). 11 Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 48. 12 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934), 170. 13 Edith Wharton, letter to William Crary Brownell, November 6, 1902, in R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, eds., The Letters of Edith Wharton (New York: Collier, 1989), 75; quoted in Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 20. 14 Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 25. 15 Goldman-Price, introduction to Selected Poems, xvi. Bishop, a “famous perfectionist,” published “eighty-odd” poems in her lifetime. Helen Vendler, “The Art of Losing,” New Republic, April 3, 2006, 33. 16 Irene Goldman-Price, introduction to Edith Wharton, My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann, ed. Goldman-Price (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 5. 17 Wharton, My Dear Governess, 30. 18 Ibid., 35. 19 Ibid., 28, 32. 20 Irene Goldman-Price, “Young Edith Jones: Sources and Texts of Early Poems by Edith Wharton,” Resources for American Literary Study 34 (2009): 102. 21 Goldman-Price, introduction to Selected Poems, xvi–xviii. 22 In “Life and I,” Wharton writes that it was her mother who first transcribed the poems, in a “blank book in which she copied many of them,” and then “perpetrated the folly of having a ‘selection’ privately printed.” In Laura Rattray, ed., The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton, vol. 2 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 199. 23 Edith Wharton, handwritten inscription in Verses (Newport, RI: C.E. Hammett, Jr., 1878), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, Yale University Library, https://coll​ecti​ons.libr​ary.yale.edu/cata​log/12315​066 (accessed June 1, 2021).

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4 Wharton, “Life and I,” 199. 2 25 Blake Nevius, “‘Pussie’ Jones’s Verses: A Bibliographical Note on Edith Wharton,” American Literature 23, no. 4 (January 1952): 497. 26 Ibid., 496–7. 27 Verses, writes Rattray, presents “many of Wharton’s mature themes in bud: hieroglyphic worlds, unexpressed longings, lost time and opportunities, thwarted passion” (Wharton and Genre, 23). 28 Wharton, Verses, 3. 29 Ibid., 28. 30 Ibid., 20; Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 23. 31 Wharton, Verses, 18. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 17. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 15. 36 Ibid., 13. 37 Ibid., 14. 38 Ibid., 15. 39 Wharton, Selected Poems, 37–8. 40 Goldman-Price, introduction to Selected Poems, xvii. 41 Finding aid, Wharton MSS., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University,  http://weba​ p p1.dlib.indi​ a na.edu/find ​ i nga ​ i ds/view?doc.view=enti ​ r e_t​ ext&docId=InU-Li-VAC3​308 (accessed June 1, 2021). 42 Goldman-Price sees in this line a vein of self-examination that Wharton explores further in The House of Mirth (Selected Poems, 43). 43 Wharton, Selected Poems, 160. 44 Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 7. 45 Wharton, Selected Poems, 187. 46 Ibid., 223. 47 Ibid., 218. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 219. 50 She copied the line “Sculpte, lime, cisèle” (“sculpt, file, chisel”), from Théophile Gautier’s “L’art,” on the notebook’s first page. Its presence suggests a guiding analogy between the visual artist’s and poet’s work. Quoted in Goldman-Price, introduction to Selected Poems, xv. 51 Wharton, Selected Poems, 235. 52 Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 35. 53 Auchincloss, introduction to Edith Wharton, xv; Goldman-Price, introduction to Selected Poems, xviii. 54 Wharton, Selected Poems, 221. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 10. Where contemporary reviewers saw Wharton’s monologues as derivative of Browning and to a smaller extent Tennyson, Rattray argues that it was Wharton’s experience as a playwright that was the larger influence (39). 58 Quoted in ibid., 19. 59 Goldman-Price in Wharton, Selected Poems, 132. 60 Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 38.

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1 Wharton, Selected Poems, 28. 6 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 30. 64 Ibid., 32. 65 Ibid., 162–3. 66 Ibid., 164; original emphasis. 67 Ibid., 153. 68 Ibid., 166. 69 Ibid., 174; Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 35. 70 Olin-Ammentorp notes that Wharton claimed her literary output decreased during the war, but “she actually wrote a good deal in the period—though not always in the genres, novel and short story, that had established her literary success before the war” (Edith Wharton’s Writings, 1). 71 Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 41. 72 Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton’s Writings, 42. 73 Ibid., 45. 74 Wharton, “Life and I,” 188; quoted in Goldman-Price, introduction to Selected Poems, xiii. 75 Wharton, Selected Poems, 60. 76 Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton’s Writings, 92; Wharton, Selected Poems, 70. 77 Wharton included Leaves of Grass on a list of favorite books that she prepared in 1898—a list, as Kenneth M. Price notes, “devoid of American novelists.” To Walt Whitman, America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 37. On her admiration for Whitman, see also Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 39. 78 Wharton, Selected Poems, 71. 79 Ibid. Wharton’s elegies for individual members of the dead include “Beaumetz, February 23rd 1915,” for her friend Jean du Breuil de Saint-Germain. On Wharton’s grieving of his death and writing of the poem, see Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton’s Writings, 46–7. 80 Goldman-Price, introduction to Selected Poems, xviii. 81 Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton’s Writings, 95. 82 Wharton, Selected Poems, 21. 83 For a ghost story on a similar theme, see “Pomegranate Seed” (1931), in which a young wife gradually realizes the malevolent force that a dead first wife exerts on her new marriage. In R. W. B. Lewis, ed., Short Stories of Edith Wharton, 1910–1937 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 763–88. 84 Wharton, Selected Poems, 24, 26. 85 Ibid., 24. 86 Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition (New York: Harper Collins, 2004); Cristanne Miller, ed., Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2016). Similarly, Serena Trowbridge, ed., My Ladys Soul: The Poems of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2018), reclaims a woman known as a Pre-Raphaelite muse and wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti “as a creative artist in her own right,” printing Siddall’s poems as she left them rather than as her brother-in-law William Michael Rossetti edited them in the 1890s. 87 These editions include Robin Schulze, ed., Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Heather Cass White, ed., New Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017). See also Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition, ed. Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina (New

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Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); and Logan Esdale, ed., Ida: A Novel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 88 Vendler, “The Art of Losing,” 33. The poems had been published in the New Yorker and Alice Quinn, ed., Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006). 89 Anita Helle, “Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Memory,” Feminist Studies 31, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 635. 90 Helle, “Lessons from the Archive,” 642. 91 Auchincloss, introduction to Selected Poems, xiv. 92 Quoted in ibid., xv. 93 Wharton, A Backward Glance, 130.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Edith Wharton and Film DONNA M. CAMPBELL

Edith Wharton was decidedly not a movie fan. As Scott Marshall reports, Wharton apparently saw only one movie in her life, when Walter Berry “insisted on going to the Cinema at Bilbao” in 1914; the film, “Comment on visite une ville au galop,” she noted with amusement, showed “panting travellers [spinning] by,” inspiring Berry to say, “we ought to start by 9 sharp tomorrow.”1 Yet from Summer through Twilight Sleep, The Glimpses of the Moon, Hudson River Bracketed, and The Gods Arrive, Wharton’s novels are filled with references to motion pictures and moviemaking, as Marshall, Parley Ann Boswell, Linda Costanzo Cahir, and Bethany Wood, among others, have shown. Drawing on early film history as well as readings of the films themselves, this essay analyzes available scenarios and contemporary publicity to contextualize Wharton’s films as the audiences of her time would have understood them, including now-lost silent films that were made during her lifetime, such as The House of Mirth, The Glimpses of the Moon, and The Age of Innocence, or those that remain largely inaccessible, such as The Marriage Playground. The phases of adaptations of Wharton’s work, from the silent era to the golden age of Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s, to the television adaptations of the 1950s and 1960s, and up to the modern Wharton revival of the 1990s and 2000s, reveal the ways in which the treatment of Wharton’s themes was at times too revolutionary for her own day but surprisingly prescient for our own. The era of silent films and the rise of sound film roughly coincide with the earliest adaptations of Wharton’s works, including The House of Mirth (1918), The Glimpses of the Moon (1923), The Age of Innocence (1924), and The Marriage Playground (1929). The House of Mirth is a lost film, yet available information about its contents suggests both that it was a prestige picture in Metro’s “All Star” series and that it bears little resemblance to the 1906 play based on Wharton’s novel that she wrote with Clyde Fitch.2 A lengthy narrative synopsis in Picture-Play Magazine by Jane McNaughton Baxter reveals the changes that the well-known screenwriter June Mathis and director Albert Capellani made when adapting the book. The characters of Gus Trenor and George Dorset were combined into “Gus Dorset,” whose threats and near-assault on Lily were rendered physically as she escaped “shrinking from the memory of Dorset’s hot kisses [and] the brief struggle at the locked door”; the film’s “Bertha Dorset” doubles Judy Trenor’s resentment at Lily’s cadging money from Gus with Bertha’s jealousy of Lily over Selden.3 Other cinematic changes streamline the settings as well as the action: in the showdown with Bertha, for example, Bertha orders Lily to leave her house after finding a brooch that Lily had dropped in the struggle with Gus, the screenwriters thus neatly omitting any

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need for an expensive scene on a yacht. Aside from the omission of Lily’s career in the hat shop, the most significant change is the ending, in which Lily nobly sends Bertha’s letters back to her and places a chloroform-soaked handkerchief over her face (rather than taking chloral hydrate). In the nick of time, she hears Selden arriving in time to save her and declare his love, thus giving the moviegoing public the “tragedy with a happy ending” that W. D. Howells had told Wharton the American public wanted.4 A prerelease review in Wid’s Daily suggested that the ending was in doubt up to the last: “In the book, shero dies … but the Metro press sheets [promise] a different ending.”5 Reviews were mixed, with “Jolo,” the reviewer for Variety, declaring the society it depicted “despicable” and proclaiming the film a “distinctly rotten mess, well produced”6 (see Figure 8.1). The Glimpses of the Moon (1923), the second of Wharton’s lost films of the silent era, featured a stellar director (Alan Dwan, fresh from directing Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood) and cast, with Bebe Daniels as Susan Branch and David Powell as Nick Lansing. Ads in The Saturday Evening Post touted the film as “the season’s most gorgeous society love drama” and claimed that the novel’s bestselling appearance in The Pictorial Review had given it an audience of twenty-five million readers.7 For those who had not read Wharton’s bestseller, Paramount tilted the scales by casting the well-known screen vamp Nita Naldi as Ursula Gillow, thus ensuring that even uninformed audiences would know that this was the story of a marriage threatened by a designing woman. Those few reviews that did not gush over the women’s high fashion touched on the plot’s most innovative feature—the trial marriage escape clause in the marriage contract—but even with this titillating theme, the film failed to live up to expectations after its opening. A roundup of brief reviews in Film Daily praised its “sumptuousness” but faulted the film’s failure to capture Wharton’s “delicate shadings”; another called it “dull entertainment.”8 This last echoed the opinion of Burton Rascoe about the novel itself; having already lambasted it once in the New-York Tribune, in “Mrs. Wharton and Some Others,” Rascoe doubled down on his views of Wharton’s “cold and unsympathetic” character Susy, which, in combination with padding out a novelette’s worth of incident to fill a complete novel, made Wharton in Rascoe’s eyes a lesser artist than Willa Cather.9 The Age of Innocence was adapted twice in the silent and early sound era, first as a 1924 Warner Brothers film, now lost, and later as a 1928 Broadway play that served as the basis for a 1934 film. Like The House of Mirth before it, the screenplay for the Warner Brothers production was written by one of the studio’s most prolific women screenwriters, Olga Printzlau, whose previous adaptations of literary works included J. M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. Updated to a 1920s setting, with its silky drop-waist fashions and glittering bandeaux, the film granted an unsavory agency to Ellen Olenska, whose efforts to ensnare Newland Archer erase Wharton’s sense of both as victims. As Wood shows in her extensive analysis of the two 1920s productions, casting Beverly Bayne in the lead role of Ellen tied her to European decadence and to adultery by drawing on fan gossip about her lengthy affair with a married man, her frequent costar Francis X. Bushman. For good measure, the film prominently featured the character of Count Olenski, whose general debauchery and attempted sexual violence against Ellen confirmed the stereotype of degenerate European aristocracy epitomized by the actor-director Erich von Stroheim, known as “the man you love to hate.”10 Wharton had no hand in the 1924 film version beyond collecting her $9,000 fee, but her presence was everywhere in the 1928 dramatic adaptation of The Age of Innocence and the 1934 film based on it. Collaborating with playwright Edward Sheldon, a friend of

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FIGURE 8.1  The House of Mirth, 1918. Wikimedia Commons.

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Wharton’s, Margaret Ayer Barnes simplified the intricate network of family relationships so that May Welland became “May Van Der Luyden”; eliminated some characters, such as the secretary, M. Rivière; and intensified the theme of Count Olenski’s physical cruelty to Ellen by detailing his affairs, his having a child with a tenant’s wife although Ellen cannot have children, and his sexual violence against “a child … the daughter of a tenant.”11 Sillerton Jackson now speaks openly about Ellen’s possible affair with Beaufort, described as “an Austrian Jew” who had rescued Ellen from Olenski and later begs Ellen to sail away with him to the French West Indies.12 For her part, May actively breaks her engagement to Newland rather than simply expressing concerns about another woman in Newland’s life, leaving him free to begin again with Ellen. Although some dialogue from the book appears—“Each time you happen to me all over again” and Newland’s meditation on May’s possible death, now voiced as part of his plea to Ellen—whole scenes are restaged for dramatic effect: when Archer kisses Ellen at the end of act II, after he has left a letter telling May that he is leaving her, the curtain drops, suggesting that they consummate their affair.13 The greatest character change, however, lies in Newland’s political career: the novel’s Archer, inspired to “active service” by then-governor Theodore Roosevelt, serves for a year in the New York State Assembly before dropping back into “obscure if useful municipal work.”14 The play’s Newland Archer is a political idealist and veteran of the Western wars against Native Americans who attacks Tammany Hall and tells Ellen, in an anachronistic boast filled more with the confidence of a fully realized world power in 1924 rather than the emerging nation of 1870, that “I shouldn’t be surprised if [the United States] ended up being the greatest nation on earth.”15 Ellen’s foreignness, insisted upon in most of the characters’ speeches about her, renders her unfit to help him realize his political ambitions, while with May’s help Newland, the obscure municipal functionary of the novel, rises from senator to secretary of state.16 The choice between May and Ellen, duty to family and duty to self, is framed instead as duty to country, rendering his decision to stay with May as patriotic. According to John Dennis Anderson, Archer’s political sentiments were solely the invention of Barnes and Sheldon; Wharton expressed her displeasure at Newland’s engaging in something as “vulgar” as a political career and “‘common’ Indian fights.”17 Staged by noted producer Guthrie McClintic and starring not Ethel Barrymore’s choice of Ann Harding, an actress noted for her skill at playing unconventional women who suffer for their individuality, but Katharine Cornell, whom Wharton declared her idea of the perfect Ellen Olenska, the play ran for 207 performances from November 27, 1928, through May 1929.18 In the sound era, the second film version of The Age of Innocence was released by RKO on September 14, 1934; it was based on the 1924 play but featured a screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman, a writing team also responsible for adapting literary properties such as The Little Minister, Little Women, Imitation of Life, Stella Dallas, and Magnificent Obsession.19 Modern critics Boswell and Cahir have dismissed this version, with Boswell calling it an unremarkable example of “the Hollywood subgenre of the ‘teacup drama’ ” and Cahir declaring it “void of any genuine emotion,” while Margaret Toth assesses the film more positively in her reading of it in the context of early film theory.20 A closer examination reveals that considerable care went into the film, which follows the novel much more closely than it does the Barnes play. As Anne-Marie Evans notes, The Age of Innocence cannily reunited the “popular and well-known cast” of Irene Dunne and John Boles, who had earlier portrayed suffering, star-crossed lovers in Back Street.21 The secondary players seem cast entirely according to type: an always-sinister

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Lionel Atwill, complete with monocle, as Beaufort; Laura Hope Crews (later Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind) as the ever-fussing Mrs. Welland; and Helen Westley, who made a specialty of feisty grandmothers, as Granny Mingott, with an inserted scene of a comic showdown with Ellen’s maid Nastasia over taking her medicine. In addition to Wharton’s language being retained in important moments, some minor but telling observations are moved from description to narrative: Ellen comments on the color of the houses, “like cold chocolate sauce”; Granny Mingott attributes her illness to eating chicken salad at night; and Archer, rather than merely thinking that his family has paved the way for Ellen to be Beaufort’s mistress, as in the book, says so aloud, adding, for good measure, “We’re so busy protecting women’s honor that we don’t care what happens to the women.”22 While it eschews the dramatic contrivances of the play, such as the repeated threat of Olenski’s imminent arrival, Ellen’s infertility, Archer’s war record and political career, and Beaufort’s attempts to make Ellen leave with him, the film incorporates its symbolic flowers and architectural cues. For example, the film stages one encounter in the Van der Luydens’ conservatory at Skuytercliff, when Ellen brushes against a sensitive plant that closes at her touch and likens it to herself. These scenes, in which Archer and Ellen frankly discuss their love amid the green world of the conservatory, contrast with their meeting in the mummified spaces of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Ellen replies to Newland’s proposal to find another world with the entire response from the novel—“Oh, my dear—Where is that country?”—before commenting on the “forgotten people” whose household artifacts are now labeled “‘Use unknown.’ ”23 In addition to the flowers and vegetation associated with the pair, the star-crossed nature of their relationship is signaled architecturally: their meetings often begin on a staircase, with Ellen above Newland and the bars of the bannisters in between, evoking imprisonment and their diverging rather than intersecting paths. The last of these scenes occurs as Ellen sails for Russia, and Newland, who has raced up the inclined plane of the gangplank to meet her, is crushed when she says, as in the book, “Oh, if you and May could come.”24 The mixed success of the movie may owe something to its subject matter and to the subdued nature of the period between the raucous Pre-Codes of the early part of the year and the screwball comedies of the middle and later 1930s, a genre in which Dunne especially would excel, yet the adaptation reveals the writers’ respect for Wharton’s language and the details of the characters as well as the novel’s overall themes.25 Based on The Children, The Marriage Playground (1929) adds an inappropriate age disparity to the central plots of love and loss in most other Wharton film vehicles. Clearly a prestige film, The Marriage Playground was given Paramount’s customary glossy production design; a script by screenwriter Doris Anderson, whose credited adaptations include numerous drawing-room comedies by well-known authors such as W. Somerset Maugham; and European director Lothar Mendes, as if only European sophistication would do where Wharton’s books were concerned. But the film transforms Wharton’s essentially tragic novel of lost youth and missed opportunities into a society comedy of manners crossed with a love story emphasizing the stratagems by which Martin and Judy join forces to keep the children together and evade the selfish, feckless adults—in this case including Martin’s fiancée Rose Sellars—who attempt to separate them. The other children, or “steps,” are as in the novel each given a predominant trait to distinguish them from one another, such as Zinnie’s greed and worldliness and Blanca’s tattling, but as Boswell astutely notes, the film adds comic business, including a mock divorce court, that recalls the Our Gang shorts featuring a “troop of comic rascals” more than it does Wharton’s novel.26 In addition, the film leans toward comedy in its portrayal of the

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FIGURE 8.2  The Marriage Playground; from left, Frederic March, Mary Brian, 1929. Everett Collection, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo.

various parents as distracted nitwits: in one chaotic scene when all the parents gather in a tent, Kay Francis’s Lady Wrench and Lilyan Tashman’s Joyce Wheater get into a fight because both are wearing the same dress, the in-joke being that in the late 1920s and early 1930s, both actresses were noted fashion icons in the movie industry (see Figure 8.2). Enabling this youth-against-age plot and shift to romantic comedy is the film’s adjustment in ages, with the novel’s 15-year-old Judith now a nearly 18-year-old Judy played by 24-year-old Mary Brian and the 46-year-old Martin played by 27-year-old matinee idol Fredric March. This change eliminated both the novel’s uneasy overtones of Boyne’s sexual attraction to an underage Judith and its unhappy ending, for the film has Judith’s parents reuniting and agreeing to take the “steps” as a group, at which news Judy and Martin run off to be married. The action concludes the double-pursuit plot that the film employs to paper over any viewer distaste for the older man-younger woman plot. In the principal pursuit plot, Martin and Judy join forces to track down the prodigal parents, but in the romantic subplot Judy chases Martin rather than the other way around, declaring her love for him to Scropy at the midpoint of the film and taking comically erroneous lessons in trapping a husband from the worldly wise Zinnie. At least twice characters raise the possibility of Judy marrying, which Martin dismisses as preposterous, saying “she’s only a child,” yet the film raises the age problem merely to overcome audience objections to it. Indeed, audiences were already primed to accept the romance, for March had earlier that year starred in another film with a similar dual-pursuit plot: in The Wild Party, March, as an anthropology professor in a women’s college, rescues his student Stella Ames, played

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by the exuberant “It Girl” Clara Bow, from a roadhouse gang of drunken men, and Stella in turn pursues him until he gives up the stodgy life of academe for field work, taking her with him. In such a cultural climate, Wharton’s careful delineation of Boyne’s anguish at his sexual interest in Judith was destined to be subsumed in a conventional romance, for the rash of collegiate films released in the late 1920s portrayed the romance of older man and much-younger woman as entirely normative.27 Edith Wharton adaptations of the later 1930s include one masterpiece, one lost film, and one might-have-been: the masterpiece is The Old Maid, starring Bette Davis; the lost film is Strange Wives (1935); and the might-have-been is an adaptation of Ethan Frome, also starring Davis, that never came to fruition. Strange Wives, based on “Bread Upon the Waters,” which was published in Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan in 1934 and retitled as “Charm Incorporated” in The World Over (1936), is a lost film, yet reviews suggest something of its contents. Wharton’s comic tale of Mr. Targatt’s (the “target”) attempts to find congenial work for his Russian wife’s large family of freeloading aristocrats, the Kouradjines, was released by Universal on December 10, 1934. Billing it as a “hectic farce comedy” but “clean,” possibly a reassurance for exhibitors accustomed to Pre-Code farces that were anything but, the Motion Picture Herald describes Targatt, now “Jimmy King,” as a bachelor stockbroker who marries Nadja, and perforce her family, against the advice of his best friend. Hoping at first to “exploit them to sell his securities,” Jimmy can barely get rid of them, but after telling off one of his wife’s suitors, he is left alone and happy with Nadja. Although Variety called the film unconvincing and described Jimmy as “spending money like the Government,” Film Daily declared “Nobody could dislike this one,” the consensus being that it was (like Wharton’s original) meant to be a funny, light take on the problems of intrusive relatives and Russian refugees, both of which were in ample supply in movies during the mid-1930s.28 The Old Maid (1939) is based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatic adaptation by Zoe Akins, which had a successful run of 305 performances on Broadway from January through September 1935. Originally slated for its Broadway stars, Judith Anderson as Delia and Helen Menken as Charlotte, the film version starred Warner Brothers’ powerhouse actresses Bette Davis as Charlotte and Miriam Hopkins as Delia, surrounded by a strong supporting cast, including Donald Crisp as wise, kindly Dr. Lanskell, who had played wise, kindly Dr. Livingstone to Davis’s Julie Marsden in Jezebel the year before. The film is structured through its wedding sequences, each one represented visually through the transitional device of wedding invitations, and it follows the play closely, preserving the high emotional drama from Wharton’s novella of Charlotte’s declaration to Delia: “I call my own baby my own baby.” Changes to the script included dropping the play’s manufactured drama of racist threats about Tina’s being left with an African American family, moving the time period to the beginning of the Civil War, and opening the action to include Clem Spender. The Spender scenes, absent in the play and inserted in the film, emphasize Clem as the desirable object of Charlotte and Delia’s lifelong struggle. No longer a painter and a wastrel, he proves his worth by making his fortune, returning to marry the faithless Delia, and joining the Union army at the start of the war. As in the Barnes play of The Age of Innocence, giving Wharton’s dilettantish men a patriotic purpose renders them simpler and more intelligible to a Depression-era audience accustomed to seeing work as a desirable component of masculinity, yet this strategy erases her subtle critique of how the social system enables the men’s essential uselessness. Played by Davis’s frequent costar and dependable Warner Brothers’ leading man George Brent, Spender enters the female-dominated space of Delia’s room as her bridesmaids

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flutter around her. He angrily castigates Delia in a series of witty, truth-telling lines and gives her the cameo necklace that was to be her engagement present, substituting for the Clem-associated clock in the novel, that she wears for the rest of her life. Except for the two major scenes that open the movie to broader moments in history—at the train station where Charlotte seeks Clem among the departing soldiers, and at her day nursery after the war—the film takes place in Delia Ralston’s house. The movements of Charlotte within its overstuffed domestic settings emphasize her uncertain and divided interiority. Davis places herself in corners only to emerge as an attacking conscience for her daughter, or, more frequently, to address Delia and others while ascending or descending a staircase, epitomizing her shifting positions within the family hierarchy.29 Like the play, the film opens out the parameters of Charlotte’s inner life, allowing the audience to see her repression as an old maid as a performance that she consciously enacts rather than as a character trait. As Martin Shingler observes, “Lying proved to be one of the most dominant themes of the Bette Davis films,” and Davis’s performance of living a lie, supported by a monologue about her efforts at restraint, reinforces Wharton’s point about the hypocrisy and repression of a society that denies a mother the right to recognize her child openly.30 Two waves of television productions, one in the 1950s and 1960s when the demand for live drama made adaptations of the classics a necessity, and one in the 1980s, when Wharton’s rising critical reputation drew attention to the essentially dramatic qualities of her fiction, introduced Wharton to a new and broader audience. The first wave began in 1951, when “The Touchstone” appeared as an episode of The Ford Theatre Hour, one of several live drama series produced in New York and sponsored as prestige projects by a single company. In subsequent years, Goodyear Playhouse aired “Roman Fever” in 1952, and the DuPont Show of the Month produced “Ethan Frome” in 1960, with Julie Harris as Mattie and Sterling Hayden as Ethan. Matinee Theatre, which featured live onehour television performances in color five days a week from 1955 to 1958, produced six adaptations of her work: “Roman Fever” (November 18, 1955) was followed at intervals by “The Touchstone,” “The Old Maid” (with Akins again providing the “teleplay”), “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” “Madame de Treymes,” and “The House of Mirth.” More unusual choices included “Grey Reminder,” an adaptation of “Pomegranate Seed,” for the supernatural series Lights Out in 1953, and the rarely adapted “Confession,” loosely based on the Lizzie Borden murders and itself originally conceived of by Wharton as the play “Kate Spain,” for General Electric Theater in 1953; the Lizzie Borden murders were a popular subject, as evidenced by the Alfred Hitchcock Presents version of the Borden legend, “The Older Sister” (1956). Because most of these shows were broadcast live and not considered special events, and the kinescopes, and, after 1956, the videotapes, sometimes used to record them were expensive, the performances themselves with few exceptions were not preserved. Yet the sheer volume of Wharton adaptations speaks to a recognition of her prestige in the marketplace as a known quantity providing solid entertainment as well as a touch of class. A second wave of television adaptations of Wharton’s works appeared in the 1980s, including The House of Mirth and Summer in the PBS series Great Performances in 1981; and a trio of ghost stories produced for Granada Television’s Shades of Darkness and later broadcast as part of PBS’s Mystery in 1983. The 1981 version of Summer stars 35-year-old Michael Ontkean as Harney and 51-year-old John Cullum as Royall, pairing the 16-yearold Diane Lane with actors who were respectively twice and thrice her age, a casting decision that reinforces the viewer’s sense of uneasiness about Charity’s relationships.

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The production of this 1981 adaptation itself reflects its times: its plot of an out-ofwedlock pregnancy, a badge of unimaginable shame in 1917 but inconsequential today as it was for Wharton, would have been too controversial for a film released thirty years earlier under the Production Code. Yet thirty years after its release, in 2021, when the focus of controversy has shifted to an awareness of the exploitation of underage women, a production decision to cast a 16-year-old actress as the 17-year-old Charity would be considered entirely unacceptable, a discomfort entirely in line with the uneasiness about age and quasi-familial relationships in Wharton’s novel. The adaptation gives full rein to Wharton’s depiction of Charity’s awakening sexuality, lingering on the scene in which she watches Harney through the window and sees him as more of an object of desire than a person in his own right. Except for his early attempt to enter Charity’s room, Royall is an almost wholly sympathetic figure; his drunken episode with Julia Hawes is omitted, as is Charity’s visit to the abortionist Dr. Merkle, an elision of the seamier sides of sexuality that allows Royall’s love for Charity, although inappropriate, to be seen in a more acceptable light. Emphasizing connections among the women in the novel, the film’s scenes move in a counterpoint between ceremonial passages to adulthood, such as Charity’s graduation, disrupted by biological ones, such as Charity’s fainting at the Old Home Week celebration. The film begins with Charity’s journey into adulthood at the funeral of her adoptive mother, Mrs. Royall, and completes that journey with the funeral of her biological mother and her imminent marriage to Royall, which the film endorses by ending on a freeze-frame of their hands clasped and raised in the air. “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” “Afterward,” and “Bewitched” in the Shades of Darkness series (1983) follow Wharton’s stories closely with occasional deviations in their settings. Transposed seamlessly from the Hudson River valley to an English country house and from first-person narration to third, “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” follows Alice Hartley, a lady’s maid, as she attends to the ailing Mrs. Brympton, bears messages to her mistress’s friend Mr. Ranford, and contends with the brutish and abusive Mr. Brympton, and in this she is allied with her equally protective ghostly predecessor Emma Saxon. A slight difference is that the film version suggests that Mrs. Brympton, dressed in traveling clothes and in the midst of packing when Brympton bursts in, may have been about to escape the house with Ranford. Adapted by Upstairs, Downstairs screenwriter Alfred Shaughnessy, “Afterward” likewise unfolds largely as in Wharton’s text, with some emphasis on Ned Boyne’s technically legal but morally corrupt business dealings that led to Robert Elwell’s suicide and the full horror of Mary’s recognition that the ghost of Ewell came twice, because he was “not quite dead” the first time. One of Wharton’s ghost stories without an actual ghost, “Bewitched” depends for its effects on the lingering gothic atmospherics of Puritan New England, in its isolated setting and its names (“Brand” from Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand,” Cory from the Salem witch trials, and “Ora” from Poe’s “lost Lenore”), where believing that straying husband Saul Rutledge has been bewitched by a dead woman, Ora Brand, is more palatable than the fact of his adultery with her still-living sister Venny. The teleplay reproduces Wharton’s dialogue and situations almost exactly but makes a few crucial changes: the setting of Lamer’s pond, where witches once were tried by ducking, is now a cold, windswept village by the sea, an equally liminal and haunted space that enables Ora’s light, ghostly footsteps in the snow to become more plausibly human footprints on the sandy shore. The story’s climactic moment, when Brand shoots his revolver at “something white and wraithlike,” becomes in the film a debate between Brand and Hibbing, the minister, both of whom insist that what Brand shot was Ora; and Bosworth, the reader’s surrogate and voice of rationality, who bursts

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out, “That was Venny.”31 He is not believed, however, and keeps silent about the polite fiction of Venny’s death by consumption, which logically must have been the result of her father’s wild shot into the dark hut. Both film and story conclude that rationality has no purchase in this haunted place where religious and folk superstitions combine to execute the living in service to piety about the dead. The third and greatest wave of Edith Wharton adaptations began in the 1990s and early 2000s with The Children (1990), Ethan Frome (1993), The Age of Innocence (1993), The Buccaneers (1995), and Passion’s Way (1996, adapted from The Reef) culminating in The House of Mirth (2000). The Children retains Wharton’s uncomfortable emphasis on the age difference that grows excruciating for Martin Boyne (Ben Kingsley), here correctly portrayed as a few decades rather than a few years older than Judith. Kingsley’s Martin is fully conscious of his unsuitability as Judy, behaving innocently like the child she is, repeatedly pursues him with hugs and kisses from which he flees with an anguished, inarticulate cry, lensed through distorted camera angles that mirror his inner turmoil. His comfort with having the children swarm over him in their usual knockabout fashion—at one point Judith tosses Chip into a startled Martin’s arms—heightens the sense of physical distance he feels from the beautiful and sympathetic Rose Sellars (Kim Novak). The settings reinforce his fluctuating emotions: scenes with Judith, including one in which they nearly kiss, are often staged in his room with a conspicuously boxed-in but always unmade bed. In addition to its obvious sexual connotations, the bed signifies internal turmoil framed by a rigid external order reflecting both Martin’s turbulent emotions and his recollection, in the book, of the chorus of Lemures from Faust: “Who made the room so mean and bare— / Where are the chairs, the tables where? / It was lent for a moment only.”32 With the eighteen-year-old Siri Neal as a plainly unsuitable fifteen-year-old Judith, the film refuses to indulge Martin’s fantasies about Judith as anything but a painful delusion. Ethan Frome shifts the narrator’s profession from engineer to minister, a change that provides a rationale for the townspeople to answer his questions, but with a cast that included major stars Liam Neeson as Ethan, Joan Allen as Zeena, and Patricia Arquette as Mattie, Wharton’s strategy of an outside narrator becomes secondary to its tragic love story. The film reinforces Wharton’s emphasis on the symbolism that renders emotions that the characters cannot express. For example, Wharton’s famous use of red (Mattie’s scarf, Zeena’s pickle dish) is embodied in the invented subplot of a fox killing Ethan’s chickens; he pours strychnine into a trap to poison it, which succeeds only on the night that he and Mattie consummate their affair, a deviation from the novel. In the morning, Zeena, who with an anguished face has listened to Ethan and Mattie’s tryst from the room next door, announces that she must have heard the fox dying in the night. As Ethan nails the blood-stained carcass to the barn door, the symbolic color red, indicative of the passion that Zeena withholds and that Mattie, with her red scarf, promises, comes to stand also for the destruction that animal impulses can bring: to preserve his domestic life, signified by the chickens, Ethan must kill his wild passion (the fox). Told that she must leave, Mattie rushes to the barn and tries to drink the strychnine before Ethan stops her, thus establishing her suicidal frame of mind even before the sledding scene and reinforcing the idea that passion kills. In this complicated exchange of red as both passion and death, another of the film’s inventions has Ethan insisting on buying Mattie a present before she leaves; she chooses a red comb for her hair, which she wears as they take their last, fateful sled ride. The Buccaneers, a five-part miniseries produced by the BBC and WGBH Boston, adapts Wharton’s novel about four young American “dollar princesses” as they invade

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London society like the “Buccaneers” of the title: Lizzie Emsworth, who marries a rising politician, Hector Robinson; the half-Brazilian Conchita Closson, who marries the younger son of the Marquess of Brightlingsea and facilitates the marriages of her friends; and Virginia and Annabel (Nan) St. George, whose marriages to the elder son of the Marquess of Brightlingsea and the Duke of Tintagel, respectively, lead to social success but personal tragedy. Guiding them is Nan’s governess, Laura Testvalley, from the Italian “Testavaglia,” related to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and enough of a romantic to jettison her own chances at marriage to Sir Helmsley Thwarte by enabling Nan’s elopement with his son, Guy. As she did for many of her novels, Wharton left a concise synopsis that included the ending, but screenwriter Maggie Wadey updated some plot points and invented others to reinforce Wharton’s themes. Thus Wharton’s Ushant, Duke of Tintagel, “kindly but dull and arrogant” in Wharton’s original scenario for the book, becomes the mercurial Julius Folyot, Duke of Trevennick, who retains the Wharton character’s passion for clocks and his ruined Cornish castle but whose kindliness alternates with physical and sexual abuse, including an initial refusal to consummate their marriage and later a rape that results in Nan’s pregnancy.33 Other modern touches round out the motives for Wharton’s characters. Julius’s homosexuality, revealed when Nan finds him in the arms of a stableboy, and his alternating abuse of Nan and desperate cry “I am not a monster!” reinforces Wharton’s themes of entrapment by making Julius an additional victim of the social system of which he is the perfect specimen. When Conchita Closson, Lady Richard Brightlingsea, asks Nan for a loan of five hundred pounds, the vaguely defined reference to creditors in the novel is more explicit and compelling: Conchita is pregnant with her lover’s child and must have an abortion. She cannot pass the child off as her husband’s, as is customary, because he, like his prototype, the real-life Lord Randolph Churchill, has suffered for some time from syphilis, precluding their intimate relationship. The film retains many of the novel’s set pieces, such as the riotous Virginia reel and the aristocracy’s comic ignorance of American geography, but the necessary streamlining of characters elides the novel’s racial themes in what is arguably Wharton’s novel most concerned with race. Lady Brightlingsea still wires anxiously to inquire “Is she black?” about Conchita, yet the film omits the death of Guy’s Brazilian wife, Paquita, before he returns to Honourslove with her.34 The series thereby misses the opportunity to reinforce the novel’s themes of outsider status, “foreign” birth, and racial non-Englishness, a category that includes the American buccaneers who, like the “invaders” in The Age of Innocence and The Custom of the Country, conquer the older civilizations that they invade but do so at a cost. As the most Jamesian of Wharton’s novels, The Reef, dramatized as Passion’s Way (1996), poses challenges in representing the allusiveness, interiority, and insularity in a plot within which the action is unspoken in the characters’ attempts not to reveal emotion. As The Reef shifts focus from Darrow’s thoughts to Anna’s, his are rendered in visual terms, through flashbacks; hers through voiceover, and increasingly spoken aloud, as when she declares “he is mine” rather than simply exulting quietly. The character of Darrow differs markedly from novel to film. For example, both Anna and Sophy are primarily of instrumental, external, and incidental interest to the novel’s George Darrow: he is coldly bored by Sophy long before he leaves her in Paris, kissing her because he does not want to hear her speak, and he pictures Anna as an ornament to the drawing room and a gracious hostess rather than as someone he loves. In contrast, the film’s Charles Darrow, played by Timothy Dalton, is hurt emotionally rather than in his pride, and his efforts to shut Sophy up result less from snobbery than from an attempt to salve a guilty conscience. The

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most notable change is in the final scene, one of the most inconclusive of Wharton’s many ambiguous endings. In the novel, Anna’s jealousy leads her to a dead end in the sordid menage of Sophy’s actress sister, leaving open the question of whether Anna will reunite with Darrow. The film eliminates the sordid sister and shows Sophy ending as she had begun, hurrying for a train with her former employer while Anna, duty discharged, meets Darrow at the hotel and reclaims him for her own. The House of Mirth (2000) retains the novel’s setting and period authenticity but subtly shifts characters and themes to render them more legible for a twenty-first-century audience. Written and directed by Terence Davies, the film proceeds at a leisurely pace, with upper-class characters who stroll and talk but never raise a sweat even in their diversions—a scene at Monte Carlo is particularly languid—until the last chapters of the novel when Lily descends to a working-class milieu. The result is to implicitly contrast Lily’s increasing inner desperation with the measured, unhurried surface that she adopts as part of her social persona, a productive tension that becomes increasingly significant as Lily searches for a degree of rest and respite available only to the wealthy in the world she has left behind. In settings as in his choice of music and scene composition, Davies establishes that this is a novel not only about social mobility but about physical movement: Lily executes many of her misguided actions when she is in motion—walking, on a train, on a boat—a visual representation of her continual fleeing from the difficulties that she sees as the Furies. The most frequent setting for these missteps is the variety of staircases that signal her gradual descent. In contrast, Wharton’s other primary system of signification, that of the parallels between enslavement, spectacle, and speculation, culminating in the tableaux vivants sequence, is pared to a minimum, with Lily enacting Watteau’s Ceres (Summer) rather than Reynolds’s Mrs. Lloyd. As Emily Orlando contends, Wharton’s choice of Reynolds was both multilayered and deliberate, with the central figure of Mrs. Lloyd—upright, active, a woman writing with a sense of agency—serving as a visual rejection of the Pre-Raphaelite painters’ models “sleepily stretched out for the hungry voyeur.”35 The substitute painting likewise portrays a single female figure in a diaphanous gown, but it positions Lily as a passive figure who does not write but must instead be read as a fleeting temporal season with its promise of decreased fertility.36 In combining the characters of Gerty and Grace Stepney, and in endowing Grace with Gerty’s love for Selden, Davies has said that he wished to have Grace’s malice toward Lily motivated by sexual jealousy rather than moral rectitude. Yet character changes subtly shift the social balance between selfish and unselfish, wealthy and impoverished characters, as Gerty Farish and Netty Struther, both unselfish but impoverished, are missing altogether; only the selfish Grace remains. When a distraught Lily, after her near-rape by Gus Trenor, turns to Grace rather than Gerty, Grace, who in her new configuration loves Selden, lies that Selden had never spoken of Lily, thus adding to Lily’s sense of isolation. The net result is to reinforce the film’s presentation of an opportunistic and transactional upper-class social set without any of the novel’s mitigating interactions with those of other classes. In keeping with the moral compass of this bleak universe, the film’s Lily decides to blackmail Bertha after all, taking Selden’s letters to the Dorsets, only to be informed that they have left for the country; only then does she visit Selden and slip the letters into the fire. With her last hope gone, and now her last scruple violated, she cannot even leave the “real Lily Bart” with Selden and drinks from the bottle of chloral, spilling the red liquid like blood as her life ebbs away.37 When Selden discovers the letters the next day (as he does not in the book) and deduces what she has done for him, he races to her rooming house and arrives too late, with only an impersonally indifferent Irish maidservant, rather than

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Gerty, to break the news to him. Without Gerty, Netty, or the hallucination of Netty’s child to comfort her last moments, Lily’s isolation is permanent and deadly, despite the movie Selden’s confession of love to the tableau mort of her body. The best-known of the modern Wharton adaptations, The Age of Innocence (1993), preserves the novel’s structure and Wharton’s narrative voice while rendering visually its complex layers of meaning. Its seemingly stately linear progression of events is energized through innovative camerawork and framing that distort temporality and emphasize the self-imprisonment of Newland and Ellen. For example, beginning with title montage of opening flowers that dissolves to and closes in on the artificial daisy that introduces the opera scene from Faust, director Martin Scorsese establishes the juxtaposition of the natural, ephemeral world and the highly artificial, stylized version of it on the stage, an analogue for the artificiality of New York society within which natural sentiment— Newland’s expression of feeling at the scene—is rare because it is spontaneous rather than routinized. To contrast with the constraint of old New York society and its emotional repression, the film uses “color-outs,” a means of flooding the end of a scene with color to represent the character’s emotions rather than a fade to black.38 The relentless camera angles from Newland’s point of view mirror a narrative technique that Wharton uses to great effect here and in The House of Mirth: an almost claustrophobic focus on the perspectives of the point of view character, whose judgments we accept with the help of the narrative voice until a shattering encounter reveals just how badly he has misjudged the antagonist. In The Age of Innocence, the defining moment occurs when May, having lied to Ellen about the certainty of her pregnancy, tells Newland, “And you see I was right.”39 Scorsese has called Newland’s recognition of his entrapment the “checkmate” moment, one that Newland will recall the rest of his life; to underscore the nature of his memory, the scene is shot in “three cuts, three separate close-ups” shot at differing speeds and from a perspective that emphasizes visually May’s looming stature as his unacknowledged jailer.40 With such techniques, like earlier and later Scorsese films, The Age of Innocence shares a certain macabre humor in the protagonist’s recognition that he is caught in an inescapable system, yet the humor is secondary to the emotional violence wrought by the rigidity of Archer’s society. As Scorsese explained when the film was released, “It’s refined violence. It’s emotional and psychological violence just as deadly as Joe Pesci getting shot in Goodfellas.”41 The many film adaptations of Wharton’s work for the screen thus reveal a significant, if sometimes overlooked, context for understanding her work in print, with each adaptation revealing as much or more about the moment in which it was produced as it does about the work itself. Based on the evidence of advertising and reviews, the earlier silent versions took great care to provide a sumptuous production physically—hiring the tall, blond actress Katherine Harris to portray Lily Bart, for example, or Fredric March as Boyne—even while radically reworking elements of the plot to provide a happy ending for audiences. In the 1930s, Wharton’s heroines could behave as before, but her male characters required an upgrade to become socially useful if they were to hold the audience’s attention; by the 1950s, her stories were deemed sufficiently brief and suspenseful to meet the demands of a fifty-minute telecast with commercials. The Wharton revival of the 1980s through the 2000s responded to fresh admiration for her complex critiques of social forces. Indeed, new adaptations now underway include Sofia Coppola’s adaptation of The Custom of the Country and Russ Barry’s production of Bunner Sisters.42 Although film adaptations have not caught up with current work on Wharton’s views on race, they demonstrate her prescience and continued relevance as an

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artist, in part through what they dare not say (about sexual exploitation of women, for one thing) that Wharton could—and did.

NOTES 1 Scott Marshall, “Edith Wharton on Film and Television,” Edith Wharton Review 13, no. 2 (1996): 15; Edith Wharton, The Letters of Edith Wharton, edited by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Collier, 1988), 325. 2 For Wharton as a playwright and the history of Wharton and Fitch’s collaboration, see Laura Rattray, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction (London: Palgrave, 2020), ­chapter 3. 3 Jane McNaughton Baxter, “The House of Mirth,” Picture-Play Magazine 9 (September 1918), 41. https://arch​ive.org/deta​ils/pic​ture​play​maga​z09u​nse/page/n45/mode/2up?view=thea​ter. 4 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934), 147. 5 “Wid,” “Complicated Romantic Tangle Cleverly Worked Out with Great Cast,” Wid’s Daily Column, Film Daily, August 10, 1918, n.p. https://arch​ive.org/deta​ils/fil​mdai​lyvo​lume​556n​ ewy/page/142/mode/2up?view=thea​ter. As movie industry shorthand used in Film Daily, Variety, and other trade papers, “shero” meant heroine or “she-hero.” 6 “Jolo,” Review of The House of Mirth, Variety, August 23, 1918. 7 “Glimpses of the Moon” (advertisement), Saturday Evening Post, March 24, 1923, in Motion Picture News, vol. 27, no. 17, April 28, 1923, n.p. https://arch​ive.org/deta​ils/motio​npic​ture​ new0​0mot​i_0/page/1982/mode/2up?view=thea​ter. 8 “Glimpses of the Moon,” in Newspaper Opinions, The Film Daily, April 4, 1923, 4. https:// arch​ive.org/deta​ils/filmda​ily2​324n​ewy/page/n597/mode/2up?view=thea​ter. 9 Burton Rascoe, “An Entomologist of Society,” in James W. Tuttleton et al. (eds.), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 310; “Mrs. Wharton and Some Others,” Shadowland: Expressing the Arts 7, no. 2 (1922): 35. 10 “So Ends Our Night” (advertisement), Film Daily, January 22, 1941, 4. 11 Margaret Ayer Barnes, “The Age of Innocence,” Margaret Ayer Barnes Collection, Bryn Mawr College, box 2, Bryn Mawr College Library, 1928, 2–49. https://archi​ves.trico​lib.brynm​awr. edu/repos​itor​ies/6/archi​val_​obje​cts/95970#!%23rep​o_de​ets. 12 Ibid., 2–4, 3–10. 13 Ibid., 3–16, 3–17. 14 Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York: D. Appleton, 1920), 349. 15 Barnes, “The Age of Innocence,” 1–25. 16 Ibid., 3–35. 17 John Dennis Anderson, “Stage Adaptations of Wharton’s Fiction,” in Laura Rattray (ed.), Edith Wharton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 161. 18 The standard references for release dates for films and dramatic performances are the American Film Institute Catalog (https://afi​cata​log.afi.com/) and the Internet Broadway Database (https://www.ibdb.com/). All production and distribution dates except as noted are derived from these sources. 19 Enforcement of the MPPDA Production Code began in July 1934, so this is not a “PreCode” film. 20 Parley Ann Boswell, Edith Wharton on Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 96; Linda Costanzo Cahir, “Wharton and the Age of Film,” in Carol J. Singley (ed.), A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 219; Margaret Toth, “Edith Wharton’s Prose Spectacle in the Age of Cinema,” in Arielle Zibrak

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(ed.), Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 39–58. 21 Anne-Marie Evans, “Wharton’s Writings on Screen,” in Laura Rattray (ed.), Edith Wharton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 170. A star of musicals as well as melodramas, Boles made something of a specialty of seemingly ideal but ultimately selfish men: Stephen Dallas in Stella Dallas, Bart Carter in Seed, Walter Saxel in Back Street, and Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence. 22 Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 69, 281; dialogue from Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman’s screenplay for The Age of Innocence (dir. Philip Moeller), based on the novel by Edith Wharton. RKO, September 21, 1934. Burbank, CA; Warner Home Video, 2011, DVD. 23 Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 293, 312. 24 Ibid., 344. 25 In the early 1930s, Dunne had made her name as a suffering woman in historical sagas (Cimarron, Stingaree), musicals (Showboat, Roberta), and contemporary melodramas (Magnificent Obsession, No Other Woman), but beginning with Theodora Goes Wild (1936), she branched out by starring in some of the best screwball comedies ever made (The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife). 26 Parley Ann Boswell, Edith Wharton on Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 91. 27 For an extensive discussion of this dynamic in the 1920s, see Melanie V. Dawson, Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020); for a detailed comparison of the film and the novel, see Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “From The Children to The Marriage Playground and Back Again: Filmic Readings of Edith Wharton,” Literature/Film Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1999): 45–9. 28 “Strange Wives,” Motion Picture Herald, December 8, 1934, 41; “Strange Wives,” Variety, February 5, 1935, 31; “Strange Wives,” Film Daily, February 1, 1935, 13. 29 Davis credited her training as a dancer with Martha Graham for the full-body expressiveness she showed in these scenes: “Every time I climbed a flight of stairs in films—and I spent half my life on them—it was Graham, step by step” (qtd. in Ed Sikov, Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis [New York: Henry Holt, 2007], 29). 30 Martin Shingler, “Bette Davis,” Screen 49, no. 1 (2008): 74. 31 Edith Wharton, “Bewitched,” in R. W. B. Lewis (ed.), The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 418. For an extended discussion of the three stories adapted in the Shades of Darkness series, see Margaret Toth, “Seeing Edith Wharton’s Ghosts: The Alternative Gaze on Page and Screen” (Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 47, no. 1, 2017), 26–55. 32 Edith Wharton, The Children (New York: D. Appleton, 1928), 332. 33 Edith Wharton, The Buccaneers, in Viola Hopkins Winner (ed.), Fast and Loose and the Buccaneers (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 478. 34 Ibid., 212. 35 Emily J. Orlando, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 64. 36 In his lecture at the Edith Wharton in London Conference (July 15, 2003), Davies suggested that the choice of painting was perhaps less significant for the film than the scene itself, and it may be that the sight of Lily as a woman surrounded by images of fulfilled but transient fertility would have registered more immediately with an audience watching the film. In “Some Notes on Mrs. Lloyd, Mrs. Lloyd, and Lily Bart,” Michael Erben argues that the

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betrothal portrait of Joanna Leigh Lloyd links Lily with a history of enslavement (Edith Wharton Review 33, no. 2 [2017]: 361–70). 37 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 217. 38 Martin Scorsese, “Martin Scorsese Interviewed,” in Robert Ribera (ed.), Martin Scorsese Interviews, Revised and Updated (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 134– 51, 136. 39 Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 346. 40 Scorsese, “Martin Scorsese Interviewed,” 135, 134. 41 “Interview: Martin Scorsese,” Charlie Rose, October 8, 1993, PBS, https://arch​ive.org/deta​ ils/Char​lie-Rose-1993-10-08. For a reading of Scorsese’s film in the context of its paintings as a visual language, see Françoise Sammarcelli, “Of Arts, Codes, and Transcoding: Revisiting Intersemiotic Conversations in The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920) and Martin Scorsese (1993),” Edith Wharton Review 36, no. 2 (2020): 125–47. 42 Other Wharton adaptations have been announced in the media but have not yet been produced, such as the rumored six-part miniseries titled The Custom of the Country, starring Scarlett Johansson (Entertainment Weekly, October 7, 2014, https://ew.com/arti​ cle/2014/10/07/scarl​ett-johans​son-takes-lead-in-sony-tvs-cus​tom-of-the-coun​try/) and Ben Stiller’s The Mountain, a Wharton-inspired period horror film based on Summer (Slashfilm, October 21, 2011, https://www.slashf​i lm.com/518​177/ben-stil​ler-dir​ect-the-mount​ain/).

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PART THREE

Influences and Intertextualities

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CHAPTER NINE

“The Chill Joy of Renunciation”: Feminine Sacrifice in Edith Wharton and Christina Rossetti MARGARET JAY JESSEE

Is it death or is it life? Life out of death. That night long Lizzie watch’d by her, Counted her pulse’s flagging stir, Felt for her breath —Christina Rossetti, “ Goblin Market” ([1862] 2008)1 Evelina never spoke or opened her eyes, but in the still hour before dawn Ann Eliza saw that the restless hand outside the bed-clothes had stopped its twitching. She stooped over and felt no breath on her sister’s lips. —Edith Wharton, Bunner Sisters ([1916] 1995)2 Edith Wharton’s treatment of the theme of self-sacrifice has been critically described as rather brutal, even as moments of “masochistic” suffering.3 Her characters like Ethan Frome (Ethan Frome, 1911), Ann Eliza Bunner (Bunner Sisters, 1916), and Kate Orme (Sanctuary, 1903) sacrifice their own futures, their own chance at happiness, without ever being asked to do so. Typically, we associate masochistic self-sacrifice with sentimental literature, not with a realist writer like Edith Wharton. Despite her reputation as a satirist of old New York, many of Wharton’s works incorporate the sentimental, romantic, and melodramatic, as critics like Donna Campbell, Hildegard Hoeller, and Jennifer Haytock have noted. Novels like Summer (1917), Ethan Frome, and Bunner Sisters incorporate sentimentalism despite their departure from a romantic resolution to the plots. This self-sacrifice could very well be considered “masochistic” as the sacrifice itself does not save anyone else’s fate. The key difference, of course, is that in Wharton’s works, the sentimental act does not lead to a unified, virtuous wholeness or a redemptive tragic ending as it does in most Victorian literature. Instead, in Wharton’s fiction, sacrifice most

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often results in a bleak nothingness as the sacrifice made is without the sentimentalized tragic ending. There is no redemption after death. This self-effacing sacrifice that ends without any religious reunification or redemption is perhaps most famously exemplified in The Age of Innocence (1920). Newland’s son, Dallas, tells Newland that his mother, May, “knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted” to which Newland replies, “She never asked me.”4 What is particularly telling about this moment is that it really never was Newland who made the sacrifice. It is Ellen who sacrifices Newland to May because May, in a sense, asks her to. Newland’s letting go of Ellen has less to do with his sacrifice than it does with his inaction after Ellen sacrifices him. Though The Age of Innocence certainly has a bleak ending, it is not a Victorian tragic marriage plot. From what the reader can interpret from the ending frame narrative, Newland and May lived a contented life together though both had to settle for the knowledge that Newland was more in love with Ellen. Neither is it a redemption tale. There are no real winners at the end of the novel. Instead, despite suffering and sacrifice’s frequent appearance in sentimental works, Wharton’s use of self-effacing sacrifice is not itself sentimental. Wharton’s fiction incorporates the sentimental, the melodramatic, in order to highlight the senselessness of self-sacrifice in a modern world. The tragedy of The Age of Innocence is that all of the main characters give up a chance at real happiness for reasons none of them seem to fully understand. This tragedy is highlighted through its use of sentimentality to show the very real problems with giving up happiness for romanticized notions of valor in suffering and self-sacrifice. That is, by incorporating the sentimentalized notion of sacrifice, Wharton manages to highlight its uselessness in the real modern world. I argue that Wharton reimagines virtuous, religious moments of ecstasy achieved through self-sacrifice as a meaningless act of martyrdom in modern capitalist America. Wharton’s style of naturalism encapsulates the romantic and sentimental as it simultaneously highlights the way sentimentality neglects to capture material reality. Sacrifice as a romanticized construct pervades Wharton’s texts. Characters, in particular women, sacrifice themselves unnecessarily in moments that use sentimentalism to highlight a darker material reality. Specifically, Edith Wharton’s novel Bunner Sisters, written in 1892 though published in 1916, can be read as a modern retelling of Christina Rossetti’s most well-known work, her sentimental poem “Goblin Market,” written in 1859 and published in 1862. I suggest that both writers incorporate the sentimental, the melodramatic, as a means of revealing a loss of innocence and social injustices against women. I will analyze here the way Bunner Sisters and “Goblin Market” transgress literary, generic boundaries as they depict sisterly suffering and sacrifice. Both works incorporate a masochistic feminine sacrifice, yet while Rossetti’s valorizes the act with a moment of religious ecstasy, Wharton’s novel depicts suffering and sacrifice as meaningless, unnecessary gestures asked of women. Emily Orlando, in her Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (2007), develops a reading of the Pre-Raphaelite influence on Edith Wharton’s works, particularly that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.5 Orlando, less extensively, also discusses Christina Rossetti’s influence on Wharton,6 and we know that Wharton possessed Christina Rossetti’s collections of poetry in her library.7 Orlando makes connections between the Pre-Raphaelite’s works and some of Wharton’s tales as they embrace two significant shared themes: one, the objectification of women for display, and two, the representation of sexually overpowering women or appropriating their “fertile gardens,” a conquest typically marked by violence. I would add to the list of shared themes that of feminine self-sacrifice. Both Wharton’s story and Rossetti’s poem concern isolated sisters, one of whom is the more hesitant while the other

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more impetuous and yearning. In both, the sisters searching for some excitement fall prey to sinister men, and in both, the more pious sister must sacrifice herself in an attempt to restore her sister’s literal life, which represents metaphoric virtue. Buying and selling are prominent in both plots, and the economic marketplace in each work is, at least in part, a metaphor for the exchange of sexual goods. The goblin fruits in “Goblin Market” drug Laura, and Evelina is seduced into marrying an opioid-addicted, goblin-like man in Bunner Sisters. Even Wharton’s main character’s name, Ann Eliza, recalls Rossetti’s Lizzie in “Goblin Market.” Interestingly, Wharton describes Ann Eliza’s “figure” as “Pre-Raphaelite,” suggesting an androgyny, though that figure is forced into feminine curves by the stiffness of her old-style dress.8 That is, Ann Eliza’s very body represents a Pre-Raphaelite theme. Laura and Lizzie, the two main characters in Rossetti’s poem, are faced with the temptation of eating fruit sold by goblins. The two are aware that this fruit could be dangerous, but Laura falls to temptation and partakes anyway. The effect of succumbing to the sensual consumption of the Goblin men’s fruit is that Laura no longer hears their call and thus cannot again consume their fruit despite her ever-increasing desire for more. Like an addict denied her drug, Laura falls ill. In an attempt to save her sister, Lizzie tries to buy some of the evil goblin fruit, and in a metaphoric attempted rape scene, the goblins reject her money and cover her body in the sweet juices while violently trying to force her to eat. Lizzie manages to resist actual consumption of the fruit while allowing the goblin to turn her body into a vessel of purity and the fruit into a tonic. In a notably erotic scene, the juices, once poison, now become a remedy through Laura’s self-sacrifice. Readers learn in the final stanza that the sisters both become wives and mothers, and their ideal feminine virtue is restored. The husbands are never present in the poem, which suggests a moral that sisterhood is the true dependable relationship in life. Similarly, Edith Wharton’s Evelina and Ann Eliza are faced with the temptation to experience a fuller and potentially sexual life than the more sheltered one they have been leading. The call in Bunner Sisters is to marry the only available suitor to come their way in a very long time, Herman Ramy. The sisters own a shop named “The Bunner Sisters,” which serves as their home where they share each moment of their lives down to sleeping in one bed, as do Laura and Lizzie in “Goblin Market.” Ann Eliza fantasizes about a life beyond their very sheltered, predictable existence after meeting Herman who is described in goblin-like terms. Herman Ramy is a “shortish man,” who appears older than his years, has “yellowish teeth,” “sunken cheeks,” “prominent eyes,” and a “bulging forehead.”9 He is stooped with “knotty joints and square finger-tips rimmed with grime.” When he is using opioids, he is sickly with a face “the colour of yellow ashes.”10 In Rossetti’s poem, the goblins take on a variety of animalistic qualities: they are “cat-like and rat-like,” “Ratel- and Wombat-like”; they “hobble,” are “snail-paced” and “chatter like magpies, flutter like pigeons.”11 The animals Rossetti uses in her descriptions are nuisance animals such as weasels and crows. These are stubborn, smart, smarmy animals that destroy peace and harm gardens. Weasels and snails repulse rather than delight. Both Herman Ramey and the goblin men are described as repellent, yet in both texts, they manage to lure the sisters with a type of power that runs counter to their physical appearance. Herman sells Ann Eliza a clock for Evelina’s birthday, and the constant ticking lures Ann Eliza toward him like the goblin call. Like the disappearing call after Laura consumes the fruit, the clock stops ticking one day, affecting Evelina as “somethin’ dead.”12 Despite Ann Eliza’s interest in Ramy, like Rossetti’s Laura, she resists her desire for him. This resistance is not because she knows temptation will lead to death in Ann Eliza’s case, however. Ann Eliza sacrifices her own chance at happiness based on a wholly unnecessary sense

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of duty. After Evelina and Herman marry and move to St. Louis, Ann Eliza and Evelina independently realize that Herman is a drug addict, his addiction opening Evelina’s eyes to knowledge she never wanted. After Herman leaves Evelina for another woman, and after she loses a baby, Evelina returns to Ann Eliza’s bed sick and destitute. Ann Eliza sells all of her furniture and possessions to pay for doctors and medicine to save her sister. The sacrifice is for naught, as Evelina dies and Ann Eliza ends up penniless, homeless, and without any possibilities for help. Despite her years of experience in a women’s shop, Ann Eliza is not a particularly talented milliner, and her advanced age of approximately thirty causes shop owners to turn her away from posted positions. The last line of Bunner Sisters is particularly heartbreaking in its ironically hopeful tone: “She walked on, looking for another shop window with a sign in it.”13 Two sisters, seemingly alone in the world, chance upon men who awaken their desires. The sisters, once representative of two sides of one whole, are forced into opposition. One sister, hearing the voice of opportunity to experience never-before tried pleasures succumbs to temptation while the other sacrifices her own desire, thus allowing her sister that opportunity instead. They willingly give up their own desire for self-fulfillment. The men, having little preference which sister they are able to acquire, evoke passion and offer a chance to gain knowledge and to leave behind loneliness and ignorance in return for feminine sexuality. The deviation between the two narratives comes as Lizzie’s sacrifice redeems Laura and the two are able to become one again while Ann Eliza’s martyrdom is in vain. Ann Eliza loses everything, including her sister.

“WEIRD CURVES” AND “UNRULY” WOMEN Nina Bannett argues that despite Wharton’s repeated criticism of Victorian-era sentimentality, her novel Summer “does not devalue or parody sentimentalism.”14 Instead, the novel “re-imagines it in the face of a morally bankrupt male world, particularly as it affects women’s choices.”15 According to Bannett, for texts to be considered sentimental, they must share a number of themes, including “an emphasis on suffering that leads to moral regeneration.”16 Certainly Lizzie’s metaphoric assault in order to save her sister’s life and redeem her virtue emphasizes suffering that leads to moral regeneration. However, in Wharton’s Summer as well as in Bunner Sisters, suffering leads to resignation, to settling for the only option left, which is really no option at all. Thus in Wharton’s works, sympathy is not gained by the characters as much as it is evoked in the readers for the characters. Without redemption, Charity Royall and Ann Eliza Bunner are left in a pitiable position, neither completely tragic nor redemptive. They are cast into an undetermined but bleak future. It is in Bannett’s elaboration on her list of sentimental characteristics in Summer that there appears an even more telling connection between Wharton’s work and Rossetti’s poem. Key to a sentimental use of sympathy is “a focus on separation and reunion (typically with religious overtones)” and a need for female friendship (or sisterhood).17 In Rossetti’s poem, Laura and Lizzie are described as one: “Golden head by golden head, / Like two pigeons in one nest / Folded in each other’s wings, / They lay down in their curtained bed: / Like two blossoms on one stem.”18 It is only after Laura succumbs to her desires that the sisters are described as diverging onto two different paths. Similarly, Ann Eliza and Evelina are “the Bunner sisters” of their shop’s name. They sleep in the same bed, work in the same shop, and talk to all of the same people. It is only after Evelina marries Herman Ramy that the sisters are separated for the first time in their lives. Both sets of sisters are reunited, but only one set undergoes a true reunification.

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In “Goblin Market,” Laura and Lizzie become reunified as one again through a sacrificial scene with both religious and sexual undertones. Wharton’s Ann Eliza lacks the eroticism of Rossetti’s Lizzie, however. Interestingly, though the Bunner sisters again share a bed after Evelina’s regret-filled return, it is Evelina’s conversion to Catholicism that severs the two forever. As Melanie Dawson argues, Evelina’s experience with motherhood, though brief, unites her with her baby, and as a result, she must convert so that she and the christened baby may live an eternal life together.19 Evelina chooses a religious reunification with her child instead of her sister. Thus despite the Calvinistic self-effacing sacrifices Ann Eliza has made, the result is not a religious reunification for her at all. Unlike Lizzie and Laura, Ann Eliza and Evelina are forever severed. Bunner Sisters is best described as a work of American literary naturalism, as many critics have already argued.20 Despite its pessimistic ending, George Becker’s oft-cited description of American literary naturalism as “pessimistic materialistic determinism” is too limiting in that it tends to negate works that grapple with domesticity and sentiment.21 As Mary E. Papke argues in her introduction to the collection on American literary naturalism titled Twisted from the Ordinary, despite naturalism in America’s reputation as “erupting” in the 1890s, these critical overviews “should not blind us to its deep affinities with frontier, gothic, romance, transcendental, and sentimental literature.”22 Papke argues that it is “the social construction of its authors, their recognition of a particular set of economic, social, psychological, and natural pressures upon individuals” that differentiate naturalist texts. And these pressures are rooted in “new scientistic thinking” of the time.23 Naturalist texts, Papke suggests, “have their foundations in” both “sentimentalism and realism, naive and critical alike, in melodrama and in the grotesque, in the narcissistic and the masochistic, in scenarios of profound cultural and individual crisis.”24 Thus as a naturalist writer, Edith Wharton did not reject the sentimental or the melodramatic in her scientistic focus. She incorporates those romantic genres throughout her career. The sentimental and the melodramatic shape the character, tone, and sensibilities of her work. But it is in her disruption of these genres that Wharton reveals her “profound cultural and individual” crises. Importantly, Wharton’s unique literary naturalism is resistant and transgressive. In her extended study of naturalism and women’s writing, Bitter Tastes, Donna Campbell argues that naturalism is excessive by nature, and as such, putting women at the center of the movement (as opposed to the periphery) reveals an “unruly counterpart” to the “rules” of naturalism.25 For Campbell, “unruly” naturalism “expresses an interest less in the philosophical consistency in its treatment of determinism than in the complex, sometimes uneven working of social forces that operate on female characters constrained with the extra complications of women’s biological and social functioning.”26 Importantly, Campbell suggests that while women did write “classic” naturalism with Darwinian, overly determined themes, “they transgress its boundaries with ‘unruly’ features … such as sentimentalism.”27 Wharton’s unruly naturalism in Bunner Sisters is registered in the sentimental and melodramatic elements, elements in common with Christina Rossetti’s poem. It is key, then, that Wharton’s use of sentimentality is a part of what makes her an “unruly” naturalist writer. Arguably, sentimentality as a generic mode is itself resistant, unruly. Jane Tompkins’s foundational study of the cultural work that sentimental literature did throughout the nineteenth century, her 1985 Sensational Designs, opened the genre up to new and important re-visions of its role in literary history.28 As a result, critics began to rethink the role women writers played in the literary history of affect

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and cultural progress. As Hildegard Hoeller argues, the conversation around literary sentimentalism “has become both more expansive and more nuanced, mostly overcoming the polarized tendency either to applaud or to fail sentimentalism for its ideological message or to agonize over the is-it-any-good question.”29 Edith Wharton herself considered sentimental literature to be overwrought and not what Hoeller refers to as “any good,” but when Wharton incorporates sentimentalism, she is doing so in order to highlight social injustices and material reality for women in particular, something we now readily attribute to sentimental writers. As Hoeller suggests, “The debate has moved beyond a bifurcated focus on either the cultural work or the aesthetics of sentimental writing, indicating that the distinction itself fails to capture the very workings.”30 That is, sentimentalism is a complex literary device with a dynamic relationship between its cultural work and its aesthetics, especially in women’s literature. What makes the similarities between Wharton’s novel and Rossetti’s poem particularly telling is their shared transgression, their similarly resistant texts. “Goblin Market” resists the traditional Victorian, sentimental narrative poem even as it exemplifies it. Rossetti has famously said that “Goblin Market” is merely a fictitious tale intended for children, that there is no religious or sexual allegory to the narrative poem. And the early critical accounts seem to follow this line of argument.31 Mrs. Charles Eliot Norton, in 1863, asked, “Is it a fable—or a mere fairy story—or an allegory against the pleasure of sinful love—or what is it?”32 Critics have grappled with “what” the poem “is” since its publication.33 Obviously, most contemporary readers ignore Rossetti’s proclamation on this, but it is important to note that the poem does convey its themes of rape, desire, and religious redemption through corporeal sacrifice within a fairly-tale-like lyric. The rhythm and rhyme feel sing-song as the poem conveys its tale of mystical creatures. Just beneath a dream-like surface lurks cultural engagement with themes of religious piety, rape, market capitalism, and queer familial relationships. “Goblin Market” is not the simplistic children’s poem it imitates, marking the poem as an “unruly” example of the sentimental poem in Victorian women’s writing. Lizzie’s sexualized self-sacrifice can certainly be seen as an act of masochism—as an act whereby Lizzie gains sexualized pleasure through a painful self-sacrifice. Marianne Noble conducts a close reading of the relationship between feminism and masochism in her analysis of what she terms “weird curves” in sentimental literature by women.34 Noble challenges feminist approaches to sentimentalism that “have argued that the pleasures of the genre offered female readers lay not in its celebrations of the pleasures of submission but in its assertion of female desires for autonomy and agency.”35 Many women writers, Noble argues, “are in a double-bind, conflicted between their understanding of selfhood and their language of sexuality.”36 Using “masochistic fantasies of loss of self-control,” then, “are a way of resolving that conflict, a way of responding to culturally determined forms of desire and of maintaining aesthetic and personal control.”37 The masochistic pleasure in women’s sentimental literature is a “weird curve,” Noble suggests, because “it is in one sense unnatural, a reaction to the constraints upon women’s lives,” but this sacrifice “is also a form of self-expression, beautiful—or at least fascinating—once one can see beyond its weirdness.”38 While Noble does not directly discuss Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” I am hard-pressed to think of a more fitting example of a beautiful, weird aesthetic example of feminine self-sacrifice. Rossetti’s “weird turn” in “Goblin Market” is accentuated by its focus on both the carnal and the religious. Daun Jung argues that the contrasting strands in Rossetti’s poem demonstrate her “unique feminist-religious poetics that contains both a utopian solution

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for and subversive critiques against Victorian society and mores.”39 Jung describes Rossetti’s juxtaposition of the “spirituality and materiality” as “strikingly unconventional”: “The poem seems to carry intensively physical expressions and carnal desires in its spiritual journal towards a complete sisterhood.”40 Part of the Victorian spiritual journey is selfsacrifice. It is inherent in the religious allegory as well as in Victorian feminine expectations. As Jung suggests, “Despite this strong mixture of grim economic materiality and subversive sexuality, ‘Goblin Market,’ on the other hand, seeks a highly religious and spiritual utopian vision of female growth in the end through female rites of passage—i.e. suffering and sacrifice.”41 While a resistant text with all of its deviations from a more traditional Victorian fairy tale, ultimately, “Goblin Market” valorizes women’s self-sacrifice. Though the sisters marry, readers never see the husbands. The poem suggests it is women who suffer and sacrifice for a greater virtue while the men remain on the margins. Importantly, Lizzie’s selfless act is not the first time we see her character as potentially the target of the Goblin men’s sexualized temptation. From the beginning of the poem, Lizzie “blushes” when she hears the Goblins call to her. While she resists her temptation, she is not appalled. Instead, she finds fulfillment in the act of resisting. She manages to cover her own eyes “lest they should look” to the Goblin men.42 After Laura succumbs to the temptation and consumes the addictive fruits, Lizzie becomes more maternal. She then takes on the role of protector because she knows from prior experience with Jeanie that Laura is destined to waste away into death unless something is done. But before Laura succumbs, Lizzie is Laura’s equal, a maid who is both tempted by shame and embarrassed by that temptation. After Laura feels the need to satiate her desire again but no longer can hear the Goblin call, the sisters become separated—they diverge into new roles rather than equals. Lizzie becomes the guardian while Laura is the helpless, childlike sister. Laura’s shift necessitates Lizzie’s desire for sisterly/maternal masochistic sacrifice. In Wharton’s “unruly” naturalist text, Ann Eliza is similarly thrust into the role of maternal helper due to Evelina’s selfishness. However, Wharton’s sisters are no longer representative of Christ-like religious ecstasy in self-sacrifice. The spiritual emphasis on suffering and sacrifice has been separated from the sentimental in Bunner Sisters. What is left is a commodified marketplace for women without the sentimental beauty inherent in Victorian depictions of feminine suffering and sacrifice. Removed is the sensual, erotic element of Lizzie’s sacrifice. Wharton’s characters suffer at the hands of brutal misfortune and senseless acts of sacrifice. The function of the marketplace in both texts suggests an important connection between buying, selling, and feminine sexuality. Laura “stretch’d her gleaming neck” to hear the goblin “shrill repeated cry” to “come buy, come buy,”43 and Ann Eliza, while nursing Evelina’s deteriorating health, sees “a man with a hand-cart full of pansy and geranium plants who stopped outside the window, signaling to Ann Eliza to buy.”44 The women are consistently asked to purchase, to buy new things. 45 In both texts, women’s bodies ultimately suffer as a result of their having to enter the marketplace. While Rossetti’s goblins continue to cry out until the desire for their fruit becomes the beckoning call, the clock that Ann Eliza purchases from Herman acts as the purchased good still luring the maidens: “Whenever she reached this stage in her reflections she lifted a furtive glance to the clock, whose loud staccato tick was becoming a part of her inmost being. The seed sown by these long hours of meditation germinated at last in the secret wish to go to market some morning in Evelina’s stead.”46 Ann Eliza’s very being is becoming in sync with the purchase, with the item she was lured to come buy. This purchase was itself a sacrifice for Ann Eliza, and its purchase brings the desire to return to the marketplace, to return to buy more.47

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It is the difference in marketplace politics that sets the scene for Wharton’s much more pessimistic take on such a similar story. As women, Ann Eliza and Evelina have limited chances at entrepreneurship. While they opened and run their own shop, they are on the outskirts of the bustling city of New York, tucked away in a dingier side alley off Broadway. The sisters barely make enough to eat, and after Ann Eliza sells everything she owns to try to keep Evelina alive, her role as an old maid makes her both unmarriageable and unemployable. Evelina and Ann Eliza each must marry to escape their poverty, but Ann Eliza, as the older sister, arguably must do so first. Ann Eliza enters the marketplace to purchase the clock, which took money she was saving for her own clothes, one of her first gestures of unnecessary self-sacrifice. This act brings Herman into their lives. When Ann Eliza rejects Herman so that her sister could have an opportunity to escape their poverty, she inadvertently causes Evelina’s actual death as well as her own figurative one. She is no longer “worth” anything in a modern, capitalist city. Her value is stripped by her feminine sacrifices for another woman. Instead of sacrifice in order to obtain a marriage and thus a more certain future, the sacrifice here is sisterly—an act deemed wholly irresponsible in a capitalist patriarchy. In subtle but fascinating ways, Wharton manages to link romanticized feminine bodily sacrifice with a capitalist reality in Bunner Sisters. Unlike the bucolic natural world in “Goblin Market,” Ann Eliza and Evelina live full-time in a very small, very urban shop in New York City. They rarely venture farther than a few blocks away, and they never go out into the more natural world. Ann Eliza in particular seems to suffer as a result of this limited experience with movement, walking, fresh air, and light. Like Rossetti’s Lizzie, Ann Eliza does sacrifice her body for Evelina’s redemption. These moments come when the sisters venture into nature from their city alley. So that Evelina can spend time with Ramy, Ann Eliza agrees to join Herman and her on jaunts to Central Park and to one of Herman’s friends’ homes in the country. Both times, Ann Eliza becomes exhausted, overheated, and finds walking so long to be painful. But she bears it in order to act as chaperone in what she assumes are Herman’s attempts to court Evelina. Going into nature is not rejuvenating as it is in more traditional sentimental texts, but it is because of the urban life the sisters have lived that this is true. The public transportation to get to nature is so strenuous for Ann Eliza that she becomes tired before she ever makes it out of the city. The city functions much like it does in Victorian sentimental literature, but in Wharton’s novel, the country does not replenish. Instead, it becomes an exhausting space Ann Eliza must escape from in order to rest in the city. Similarly, when Evelina and Herman move out west, it is there that she succumbs to illness and fatigue. Having to navigate the role of a wife so far away from the city, having to survive without any money, and dealing with the subsequent physical suffering all work to haunt any idealized notions of escaping the city for a better life. That is, in Bunner Sisters, nature is not romanticized. Instead, nature is relative to the material realities of people. The female body plays a significant role in both Bunner Sisters and “Goblin Market,” especially as hair represents women’s youth and sexuality, as was common in much Victorian literature.48 Laura’s “golden head” is accentuated and becomes her means of buying the goblin fruit: she reluctantly exchanges a “golden curl” of her hair at the goblin’s suggestion that she sacrifice a piece of her body since she does not have any money.49 Evelina, too, has “pale hair” that she often touches and fusses with, using pins to maintain a curl. Their blonde curls represent their youthful beauty, and Ann Eliza is particularly appreciative of Evelina’s lovely hair. In fact, the most significant moment of sacrifice for Ann Eliza incorporates Evelina’s hair. After deciding that Herman Ramy is interested in marrying Evelina, Ann Eliza

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sacrifices her own desire for him: “Grief held up its torch to the frail fabric of Ann Eliza’s illusions, and with a firm heart she watched them shrivel into ashes; then, rising from her knees full of the chill joy of renunciation, she laid a kiss on the crimping pins of the sleeping Evelina and crept under the bedspread at her side.”50 The “joy” of her sacrifice, her “renunciation,” is “chill,” evoking a sacrifice that cools after a burn. There is an element of discomfort in the pleasure of sacrifice, a sense that Ann Eliza’s renunciation is really a familiar lack of excitement and passion. In a moment reminiscent of the final moment Laura and Lizzie lie together as “two pigeons in one nest / Folded in each other’s wings”51 before Laura’s fall, Ann Eliza and Evelina remain joined, but just as in Rossetti’s poem, their growing separation is looming. Hair, then, is linked to sexual capital and a painful personal sacrifice in both texts. The irony, of course, is that in this moment, Ann Eliza sacrifices Herman to her sister because the neighbor, Miss Mellins, mentions her assumption that Ramy is courting Evelina. In reality, Ramy thought he was courting Ann Eliza. Miss Mellins reads the Police Gazette and Fireside Weekly, so her interest in sensationalized gossip is reflected in her “proneness to adventure” by the fact that these sensationalized magazines are where she “derived her chief mental nourishment.”52 Likely, Miss Mellins is herself jealous of the attention both sisters are receiving from Herman and finds some satisfaction in dashing Ann Eliza’s hopes based on pure conjecture. Thus Ann Eliza’s sacrifice is based on a mistake, on a misunderstanding, further compounding the senselessness of the act. While Lizzie’s renunciation of the goblin men is wholly warranted and justified, Ann Eliza’s is needless. She sacrifices her own chance to experience a more full life, and Wharton does not provide that act any virtuous meaning. As Donna Campbell argues, characters like Ann Eliza reveal “the essentially ruthless biological competition that women’s naturalism establishes and that these writers’ immersion in Darwinian theories of evolution would predict” because “for one woman to succeed” at marrying, “in true Darwinian fashion another woman must fail.”53 While Rossetti’s poem valorizes the selfless act of sisterly love, Wharton’s story highlights “the primitive and ruthless competition of other women.”54 Wharton, then, is an “unruly” writer of American naturalism with all of its aesthetic relationship with sentimentalism and melodrama. Christina Rossetti’s poem makes a “weird curve” as it sexualizes the asexual Victorian interest in religious piety and queers the Victorian emphasis on sisterly love. For all of their shared commitment to their respective genres, both writers resist, transgress, and disrupt the very forms they use to contain their stories of sacrifice. Women’s self-effacing sacrifice is unruly, weird, disruptive. While Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” might manage to present a virtuous resolution, Wharton’s Bunner Sisters situates that very sentimental, redemptive ending as a means of literary betrayal. Her sentimental aesthetic elements are betrayed by the material reality the Bunner sisters inhabit. Because Victorian sentimentalism assures a just but tragic marriage plot or a satisfyingly happy conclusion, Wharton provides neither. Her modern take on the role of gendered sacrifice in the face of materialistic capitalism is that it provides no redemption or resolution at all.

MELODRAMA AND THE INNOCENT SPACE Deborah Gussman argues that Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s 1884 story “Old Maids” serves as a “blueprint” for Wharton’s Bunner Sisters, citing many of the similarities in plot, character names, and theme that I list here.55 She suggests that Wharton pays “mixed tribute” to Sedgwick as is said of the same type of tribute Wharton’s The Age of Innocence

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pays to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881).56 Gussman’s reading of Bunner Sisters’s far more bleak ending than Sedgwick’s tale is as a destabilizing force. That is, Gussman reads Wharton’s ending as one that helps to “heal” the fatal marriage plot of Sedgwick’s story, and as a result, Gussman shares with Jennifer Fleissner the more positive reading of the ending as it results in Ann Eliza’s “potential for ‘innumerable beginnings.’ ”57 Of course there is no way to know definitively if either “Old Maids” and “Goblin Market” (or even both) served as inspiration for Wharton’s novel, but that such representative texts of sentimentality in literature should share so much in common with Bunner Sisters certainly suggests that Wharton’s novel deploys key elements of sentimentality while simultaneously disrupting the genre. As a disruption of sentimentality, Bunner Sisters rewrites nature, desire, marriage, and death into a far more modern frame. Arguably, the significant difference between Bunner Sisters and either Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” or Sedgwick’s “Old Maids” is the rewriting of the allegorical self-sacrifice plot and the fatal marriage plot. As a naturalist writer, Wharton draws on the more romantic genres in order to show important deviations from them. As Frank Norris suggests, American literary naturalism shares more with the romance than it does with American realism as described by its greatest champion, William Dean Howells.58 But what is important in the comparison between “Goblin Market” and Bunner Sisters is that it reveals the way both texts function as “unruly” and a “weird curve.” That is, neither Rossetti’s poem nor Wharton’s novel conform to their generic expectations. While “Goblin Market” conflates female desire, market capitalism, and rape within a fairy-tale lyric, Bunner Sisters resolves a melodramatic plot within a naturalistic, bleak conclusion. These texts share a resistance to the dominant norms of their genres. The striking contrast of the endings between the two suggests the way Edith Wharton’s works manage to rewrite the woman-authored domestic plot as a modern reinvention of the sentimental tale. While Gussman and Fleissner read Bunner Sisters’s ending with potential possibilities for Ann Eliza, this positive reading is in opposition to an important moment of nonlinear narrative time in the novel: when Herman Ramy proposes to Ann Eliza, the narrative voice explains that “when Ann Eliza, in later days, looked back on that afternoon, she felt that there had been something prophetic in the quality of its solitude; it seemed to distill the triple essence of loneliness in which all her after-life was to be lived.”59 If we read Wharton’s reference to Ann Eliza’s endless possibilities as unironic at the end of Bunner Sisters, it is only with the knowledge that none of those possibilities led to a happy or fulfilled life. The ending, then, is always already pessimistic before the novel ever concludes. Arguably, what both Gussman and Fleissner grapple with in their reading of the possibilities of Wharton’s ending is a sense of diversion from the sentimental or melodramatic genres the novel asks readers to accept. We read the ending as a disruption of genre because it is a complex and multilayered tragic close. Donna Campbell argues that the early part of Bunner Sisters incorporates melodramatic themes. Early on in the story, the sisters selflessly help each other to always focus on the good and the virtuous, highlighting each small beauty among their drab and dying surroundings. It is later in the text, Campbell explains, that the dank and abysmal reality descends upon the sisters as a result of Herman Ramy’s destruction, and suddenly, the novel represents “real life.”60 Ralph J. Poole and Ilka Saal, drawing on Peter Brooks’s notions of melodrama as a mode of expression, remind us that reading the melodrama as merely “the affirmation rather than the questioning of a given set of moral imperatives” fails because that reading does

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not “take into account” the way melodrama functions as both a “nostalgic” yearning “for a lost innocence” but also as documentation of “the social injustices” surrounding the texts.61 In this reading, the melodrama can deviate from its traditional trajectory when it is doing so to reveal a particular social issue. The traditional melodrama typically begins with the personification of innocence as virtue. The sisters in “Goblin Market” are maids who would certainly live a pious life without the intrusion of the goblin men’s temptations. This is also true of Ann Eliza and Evelina in Wharton’s tale. The sisters live a pious and virtuous life, rather happily and contentedly, until Ann Eliza inadvertently brings Herman Ramy into their sphere. In the traditional melodrama, innocence is threatened by an evil villain just like the goblin men and Herman Ramy, and the villain represents evil as an intrusion into the space of virtue through attempts to seduce or destroy the innocent heroine. Importantly, the traditional melodrama ends with a rebuffing of evil, and what is left is a new version of an innocent space—a space Lizzie and Laura inhabit after Laura’s homoerotic feminine selfsacrifice. The ending of the melodrama is not a going back to a former state of innocence; rather, the end result of the traditional melodrama is a reformation of the society into a new version of an innocent space, something the poem creates with a final stanza set in the future where Laura’s young girls are taught that sisters are the only people to be counted on. Unlike the traditional melodrama, however, Bunner Sisters ends in tragedy. Ann Eliza’s self-sacrifice results in her walking the streets alone, Evelina has died, and Ann-Eliza, now destitute, is too old to get a new job yet too young to be able to live without work. Ann Eliza’s self-sacrifice, acts that seem noble early in the story, transform into acts of melodramatic sentimentality in an ever-increasingly isolated and modern world. Wharton’s story makes a modern social commentary that female self-effacing sacrifice, so valued in Victorian society, ultimately leaves a woman with nothing except the sentimentalized delusion that she has done a selfless thing. Rossetti’s happy ending is rewritten with a modern resolution, one that ultimately suggests the masochism and futility of feminine self-sacrifice.

NOTES 1 Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market,” in Simon Humphries (ed.), Christina Rossetti: Poems and Prose (London: Oxford University Press, [1862] 2008), lines 524–7. 2 Edith Wharton, Bunner Sisters, Madame de Treymes and Three Novels, ed. Susan Mary Alsop (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, [1916] 1995), 283–396. 3 See Angela M. Salas, “Ghostly Presences: Edith Wharton’s Sanctuary and the Issue of Maternal Sacrifice,” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 25 no. 2 (1998): 109–21; and Jo Agnew McManis, “Edith Wharton’s Hymns to Respectability,” Southern Review 7 no. 4 (1971): 986–98. 4 Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, ed. Michael Nowlin (Ontario, CA: Broadview, [1920] 2002), 336. 5 Emily J. Orlando, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (Tuscaloosca: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 132. 6 Though much of her discussion is on the relationship between Dante Rossetti’s visual art and Edith Wharton’s narratives, Orlando conducts a convincing comparative analysis between Christina Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio” and Wharton’s “The Muse’s Tragedy” as well as

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a brief analysis of the similarities between the speaker’s voice in Christina Rossetti’s “Who Shall Deliver Me?” and the narrative voice in several of Wharton’s narratives with characters who work in the world of art. 7 Orlando notes that Edith Wharton had three volumes of Christina Rossetti’s poetry: Poems (1875); Poems, New and Enlarged Edition (1890); and Poems (1895). See George Ramsden, Edith Wharton’s Library (Settrington, UK: Stone Trough, 1999). 8 Wharton, Bunner Sisters, 288. 9 Ibid., 306–7. 10 Ibid., 325. 11 Rossetti, “Goblin Market,” lines 339–42. 12 Ibid., 300; original emphasis. 13 Ibid., 396. 14 Nina Bannett, “Reclaiming Sentimentalism in Edith Wharton’s Summer,” Edith Wharton Review 31 no. 1–2 (2015): 30. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Rossetti, “Goblin Market,” lines 185–8. 19 Melanie V. Dawson, Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020), 20–2. 20 See especially Gary Totten, “‘Objects Long Preserved’: Reading and Writing the Shop Window in Edith Wharton’s ‘Bunner Sisters,’” Studies in American Naturalism 6 no. 2 (2011): 34– 160; Donna M. Campbell, Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016); and Melanie Dawson, Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020). 21 Qtd. in Donald Pizer, ed., “McTeague and American Naturalism,” in Frank Norris and American Naturalism (London: Anthem, 2018), 53–60. 22 Mary E. Papke, “Preface,” in Mary E. Papke (ed.), Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), VIII. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., IX. 25 Campbell, Bitter Tastes, 4. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 29 Hildegard Hoeller, “From Agony to Ecstasy: The New Studies of American Sentimentality,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 52, no. 4 (2006): 340. 30 Ibid., 342. 31 Thomas Burnett Swann, Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossetti (Francistown: Marshall Jones, 1960), shares the fairy-tale reading of the poem. Published in 1960, Swann devotes a chapter of his book to “Goblin Market” in which he describes the poem as a magical fairy tale complete with “princesses and landscapes, the personified animals and plants, and the little people” (93). Swann draws comparisons between “Goblin Market” and Matthew Arnold’s “The Forsaken Merman” in that both have a child-like meter, themes of kinship, and allegory (93–5). Swann is complimentary of “Goblin Market” and Rossetti’s ability as a poet, but it is perhaps telling that this admiration is in conjunction with a reading of it as a “fanciful” work of magic and childishness (101).

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32 Qtd. in Daun Jung, “A Subversive or Utopian Fairy Tale? Re-reading Goblin Market as a Quest for Female Self,” Feminist Studies in English Literature 24, no. 3 (2016): 41–60. 33 What Christina Rossetti actually believed about the allegorical nature of her poem is hard to pinpoint. As Frances Thomas notes in Christina Rossetti: A Biography (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), Rossetti “had few close friends, no husband or child, left no diaries, and burned most of the letters she received. The basic facts about Rossetti are that, born in 1830, she was the youngest of four children including Dante Gabriel who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” and thus, “we know nothing of how ‘Goblin Market’ was written, but one day there it is; April 17, 1859, to be precise” (165). 34 Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 35 Ibid., 5. 36 Ibid., 20. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 4. 39 Jung, “A Subversive or Utopian Fairy Tale,” 43. 40 Ibid., 42. 41 Ibid., 42–3. 42 Rossetti, “Goblin Market,” line 51. 43 Ibid., lines 81, 89, 4. 44 Wharton, Bunner Sisters, 392. 45 Though we have no further description of the vendor, the timing of his appearance is telling: Ann Eliza has just scarified everything she has for Evelina and has nothing with which to pay him. His sudden and brief presence at this moment is wholly ironic. 46 Ibid., 296. 47 For a similar criticism citing the allusions to female sexuality as a commodity in the poem, see Mary Wilson Carpenter, “‘Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me’: The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’ ” Victorian Poetry 9 no. 4 (1991): 415–34. She cites the sexual economic language of the poem as can be seen in the title to her essay. Carpenter suggests that it is in “this scene of compulsory heterosexuality” that “‘Goblin Market’ shows that female erotic pleasure cannot be imagined without pain, yet the poem not only affirms the female body and its appetites but constructs ‘sisterhood’ as a saving female homoerotic bond” (215). 48 For a full discussion of the fetishized preoccupation of hair in the Victorian era, see especially Galia Olfek, Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009). 49 Rossetti, “Goblin Market,” lines 184, 125. 50 Wharton, Bunner Sisters, 315. 51 Rossetti, “Goblin Market,” lines 184–5. 52 Wharton, Bunner Sisters, 311. 53 Campbell, Bitter Tastes, 326. 54 Ibid., 327. 55 Deborah Gussman, “Edith Wharton’s ‘New Visions’: An Exploration of the Influence of Catherine Maria Sedgwick on Bunner Sisters and The Old Maid,” in Myrto Drizou (ed.), Critical Insights: Edith Wharton (Amenia, NY: Salem, 2017), 65–80. 56 Ibid., 73. 57 Jennifer L. Fleissner, “The Biological Clock: Edith Wharton, Naturalism, and the Temporality of Womanhood,” American Literature 78 (2006): 519–48; Gussman suggests this reading in “New Visions” (75).

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58 In Frank Norris’s “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” in The Responsibilities of the Novelist, and Other Literary Essays (New York: Doubleday Page, 1903), 211–20, he famously describes Howellsian realism as “the drama of a broken teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block, the excitement of an afternoon call, the adventure of an invitation to dinner.” For naturalists, Norris suggests, romance is their true foundation because it “is the kind of fiction that takes cognizance of variations from the type of normal life.” It is realism that “is the kind of fiction that confines itself to the type of normal life.” Norris goes as far as to assure readers that Emile Zola was actually a romantic, not a realist, as those in realism had previously claimed. 59 Wharton, Bunner Sisters, 341. 60 Donna M. Campbell, “Edith Wharton and the ‘Authoresses’: The Critique of Local Color in Wharton’s Early Fiction,” Studies in American Fiction 22, no. 2 (1994): 169–83. 61 Ralph J. Poole and Ilka Saal, “Introduction,” in Ralph J. Poole and Ilka Saal (eds.), Passionate Politics: The Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 4.

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CHAPTER TEN

Edith Wharton and Willa Cather: Beyond “Surface Differences” JULIE OLIN-AMMENTORP

Unfortunately surface differences—as the word implies—are the ones that strike the eye first … We must dig down to the deep faiths and principles from which every race draws its enduring life to find how like in fundamental things are the two people whose destinies have been so widely different. —Edith Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning (1919)1

“SURFACE DIFFERENCES” In the passage above, taken from Edith Wharton’s French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), the “two people” Wharton refers to are not two individuals but two nations, the French and the American. Transposed to a different context, however, this remark also applies perfectly to the two authors who are the subject of this essay, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. In some ways, of course, Wharton’s and Cather’s “destinies” have not been “widely different,” but the same: both were applauded as major American novelists during their lifetimes, though they were sometimes denigrated as “escapist” or “out of touch” later in their careers; they were later sidelined by literary criticism, regardless of the fact that their major works of fiction have always remained in print and widely read; in the 1970s and 1980s, when the first major biographies of both authors appeared, both benefitted from a new wave of criticism propelled by feminism. Wharton and Cather now enjoy, as well they should, the status of major American authors both inside the United States and internationally, and both inside the academy and far beyond it. At the same time, a general sense of the differences between the two authors prevails, and many readers familiar with one author are unfamiliar with the other. Another of Wharton’s remarks from French Ways and Their Meaning is almost startlingly applicable: “The observer … will be struck first by the superficial dissemblances, and they will give his picture the sharp suggestiveness of a good caricature.”2 The word “caricature,” in fact, conjures Edward Sorel’s humorous 2015 illustration accompanying an announcement of Harold Bloom’s The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime in Vanity Fair.3 Sorel shows Wharton and Cather among several other American authors,

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including James Baldwin and Ernest Hemingway, all of them very upset to be excluded from Bloom’s book. Like any good caricaturist, Sorel draws on popular perceptions to make each author immediately recognizable: Wharton is the “grande dame,” wearing a flowing floor-length gown, a multistrand pearl necklace reminiscent of one she wears in an oftenreproduced portrait, and peering up at a God-sized Bloom through a lorgnette; Cather, standing behind and somewhat obscured by Wharton, wears the middy blouse she sports in the famous Edward Steichen portrait, looking more middle-class and approachable than Wharton (if rather uncharacteristically alarmed). The popular images Sorel captures often haunt more scholarly perceptions of the two authors as well: Wharton as polished Eastern “literary aristocrat,” as she was dubbed in the 1920s, and Cather as the middle-class, Middle Western author who wrote about “ordinary” people. The sense of Wharton and Cather as vastly different is hardly new, having its source in influential reviews written during the authors’ lifetimes. Vernon Parrington was the critic, who, in a review of Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, labeled her “our outstanding literary aristocrat.”4 Although the phrase sounds positive, he coined it to devalue Wharton and her work, arguing that the novel, though beautifully written, was socially irrelevant: Wharton had “waste[d]‌” her “talents upon rich nobodies,” so that “it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether one reads the book or not.”5 Early critics also had a powerful influence on our image of Cather. Randolph Bourne, another important voice, wrote of her 1918 novel My Ántonia: “Here at last is an American novel, redolent of the Western prairie,” which tells the story “of the struggling pioneer life, of the comfortable middle classes of the bleak little towns.”6 By choosing these terms, he helped create the image of Cather as Western and as a writer of everyday people, while linking both the West and the middle classes to the very concept of Americanness. It is notable that Wharton and Cather were both categorized not simply on subject matter but in terms of social class and place and, further, relative to perceptions of “Americanness.” Bourne ties Cather and her work to the West, to “struggling pioneer life,” and to the middle classes (who, though “comfortable,” live in towns he describes as “bleak”). Parrington ties Wharton to the East, and specifically to New York City and the upper classes. Further, his critique of The Age of Innocence implies that the novel is not really an American novel: “There is more hope for our literature in the honest crudities of the younger naturalists, than in her classic irony; they at least are trying to understand America as it is.”7 These views of Wharton and Cather, both penned over a century ago, continue to define two of the most significant issues that have kept the works of these authors apart: not class and race, as has all too often been true in literary studies, but class and place—social class and geography. Moreover, they demonstrate the degree to which place and class are imbricated. Wharton, it is implied, is an aristocrat to some extent not only because she was wealthy but because she was a New Yorker; Cather is “of the people” not only because she was from the middle classes but because she was from the Midwest. Only when we look below the surface differences—exactly as Wharton urged American soldiers to do in their experience of France—can we see “how like” the two authors are in many regards, how many of the same “deep faiths and principles” they shared.

LITERARY PRINCIPLES For they did share many of the same “faiths and principles,” beginning with their literary beliefs. Despite growing up in very different locations—Wharton in New York City, Newport, Rhode Island, and Europe, and Cather in Virginia and Nebraska—they

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inhabited the same literary world, reading, admiring, and being influenced by many of the same nineteenth-century realist authors. Early in their careers, both were devotees of Henry James; James’s work was informed by the French and Russian naturalists, whom Wharton and Cather also admired—along with a panoply of other authors, including Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, George Eliot. Cather was also influenced by Wharton herself, who was nearly twelve years her senior and who had published eighteen books (including her 1905 bestseller, The House of Mirth) by 1912, the year in which Cather published her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge. Given their similar influences, it is less of a surprise that they often shared the same literary principles, sometimes stating them in remarkably similar terms. Drawing on ideas earlier articulated by James and the French naturalists, both objected to a certain trend in fiction to enumerate details. Instead, they stressed the importance of selection. In her most famous statement on art, “The Novel Démeublé” (1922), Cather stressed that “out of the teeming, gleaming stream of the present [the novel] must select the eternal material of art … The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification”; in The Writing of Fiction (1925), Wharton emphasized repeatedly “the need of selection,” remarking that “the art of rendering life in fiction can never, in the last analysis, be anything … but the disengaging of crucial moments from the welter of existence.”8 They shared the same standard of literary greatness, stating that in a great work of fiction, an author creates a world that, though fictive, feels alive to its readers. Cather praised Sarah Orne Jewett’s fiction by saying that her best works were “not stories at all, but life itself,” while Wharton remarked that “the test of the novel is that its people should be alive.”9 In reading great fiction, readers experience characters as if they were actual people: Wharton praised Tolstoy by saying that when he “touched the dead bones” of a character “they arose and walked”; Cather wrote that the novelist’s job was to “vivify,” to “make men and women and breathe into them until they become living souls.”10 Even their literary styles, often perceived as quite different, are sometimes remarkably similar. Wharton is often seen as the satirical, mannered epigrammaticist, Cather as the creator of lyrical, nearly translucent prose. Yet as a young theater critic, Cather was known as the “meatax young girl” because of her biting reviews;11 she knew how to turn a satirical phrase and used this skill (as well as devastating understatement) throughout her works. In a much-quoted passage from “The Novel Démeublé,” for instance, she wrote that “the novel manufactured to entertain great multitudes of people must be considered exactly like a cheap soap or a cheap perfume, or cheap furniture.”12 Wharton could not have said it any more incisively. Indeed, both expressed an identical disdain for popular fiction and shared many other literary views. By the same token, we often associate Cather with the many lyrical passages in her fiction and rarely associate Wharton with the lyric. Yet if Cather “writes like Wharton” at some points, at others Wharton writes “like Cather,” including lyrical passages about beautiful landscapes, often considered a hallmark of Cather’s style. “The same deep faiths and principles” also emerge in the social worlds Wharton and Cather depict, despite the perceived differences between their usual subjects. Both displayed the same deep sensitivity to the dynamics and challenges of the individual life and the ways in which the individual is always impinged upon by social parameters. Frequently the works of the two authors reverberate, sounding the same deep notes beneath surface differences in situation. Wharton’s 1920 novel of Old New York, The Age of Innocence, for instance, may seem a long way from Cather’s 1935 novel Lucy Gayheart, set in Nebraska; yet the novels reflect the same underlying sensibility. Both are

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chronicles about unfulfilled, deeply romantic love: Newland Archer’s for Ellen Olenska, and Harry Gordon’s for Lucy Gayheart; both portray the same social restrictions and social limitations, the same human tendency sometimes to jeopardize our own happiness, and the same heartbreak—as well as heartbreak survived and outlived. One might expect the difference in setting to affect the situation significantly, and that Archer’s New York City would be a much bigger place, geographically, culturally, and socially, than Gordon’s Haverford, Nebraska. Yet this is not the case: both locations display the dynamics often associated with small towns. In the Old New York Wharton depicts, “everybody in New York has always known everybody else,” and on any given evening, everyone knows exactly where everyone else is.13 In Haverford as well, “everybody” knows “everybody else.” Cather conveys this reality poignantly: Lives roll along so close to one another … On the sidewalks along which everybody comes and goes, you must … at some time pass within a few inches of the man who cheated and betrayed you, or the woman you desire more than anything else in the world. Her skirt brushes against you. You say good-morning, and go on. It is a close shave.14 This is exactly the dynamic that Wharton illustrates in Newland Archer and Ellen, who, despite the apparent differences between New York and Haverford, have the same experience as Harry and Lucy, suffering the same agonizing “close shave” on nearly a daily basis—and yet somehow carrying on with their daily lives. As this suggests, Cather’s social world, though seemingly remote from Wharton’s, offers so many of the same human realities and situations that her words often illuminate Wharton’s worlds as much as her own. One significant example is that both novelists repeatedly depict unhappy, embattled, or even failed marriages; happy ones appear only rarely in the works of either writer. Even the triumphant conclusion of My Ántonia, in which Cather depicts the full and happy family life of Ántonia Shimerda, now Ántonia Cuzak, at home with her many children and her husband, includes a note of doubt. Jim Burden, the novel’s narrator, remarks that “it did rather seem to me that Cuzak [Ántonia’s husband] had been made the instrument of Ántonia’s special mission. This was a fine life … but it was n’t the kind of life he had wanted to live. I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two!”15 How many Wharton characters, from Newland Archer to Ethan Frome and Charity Royall, might say the same?

THE PLACE OF CULTURE, THE CULTURE OF PLACE The powerful resonances between Wharton’s and Cather’s works also draw our attention to the issue of place in fiction and biography, asking us to consider it in deeper and more complex ways. As one example: the works just discussed, The Age of Innocence and Lucy Gayheart, also quietly highlight the centrality of place and individual attachments to specific places. A second unresolved romantic situation in Lucy Gayheart is Lucy’s love for the singer Clement Sebastian, who becomes her mentor while she is studying music in Chicago. For Lucy, the entire city becomes imbued with his presence; she develops “a very individual map of Chicago,” with each point on that map linked to her relationship to Sebastian.16 This is exactly how Newland Archer thinks about Paris when he revisits the city for the first time in many years near the end of The Age of Innocence: “Archer knew that Madame Olenska lived in a square near one of the avenues radiating from the Invalides; and he had … [forgotten] the central splendor that lit it up. Now, by some

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queer process of association, that golden light became for him the pervading illumination in which she lived.”17 On the map of Paris, and even within Archer’s line of vision, the “golden light” references the gilded dome of the Invalides, which “draw[s]‌up into itself all the rays of the afternoon light”;18 but it also refers to Ellen’s presence in just that part of the city. Archer’s “individual map” of Paris centers on Ellen Olenska, as Lucy’s map of Chicago centers on Clement Sebastian—and as Harry Gordon’s Haverford, at the end of Lucy Gayheart, centers on “three light footprints” that the young Lucy had impressed on a just-poured concrete sidewalk in front of her house.19 Wharton and Cather too had their “individual maps” of specific places—and to a surprising extent, those maps intersected both figuratively and cartographically. Far from living in separate “worlds” as is so often assumed, the two inhabited what the historian Nancy L. Green calls “a common time-space capsule.”20 Wharton and Cather published in many of the same magazines and were reviewed by many of the same reviewers, who sometimes compared them to each other; they were aware of each other’s work, though Cather commented on Wharton’s more often, and usually more favorably, than the reverse.21 Biographically, Wharton’s and Cather’s “different” lives were also remarkably parallel. Neither was born into a literary life; both struggled to achieve it against strong odds. As aspiring writers, both perceived the world of literature as if it were a mythical and yet geographic place: Wharton called it “The Land of Letters,” Cather “the Kingdom of Art.” Even this sense of a mythical literary land was clearly rooted in similar childhood experiences. While Wharton and Cather spent their early years in very different locations, both experienced, at an impressionable age, the shock of moving from a place they found beautiful to one they found ugly—an experience that jolted them into an awareness of the direct relationship between place and culture. Wharton, though born in New York, had moved to Europe at age four. When she returned to New York City six years later, she was appalled by the city’s appearance, later recalling: “I was only ten years old, but I had been fed on beauty since my babyhood, & my first thought was: ‘How ugly it is!’ ”22 Similarly, when Cather moved from the rolling landscape of western Virginia to Nebraska at age nine, her first experience of Nebraska was one of “discovering ugliness … You simply can’t imagine anything so bleak and desolate as a Nebraska ranch” at that time, as she later explained.23 As Hermione Lee (who has written biographies of both authors) observed, “Dramatic early dislocations often make a writer.”24 She said this of Cather— but it is equally true of Wharton. These jarring relocations increased their sensitivity to place and culture, both as local culture and as the aesthetic; as adults, both worked their way back to a place where they could satisfy their need for beauty. Well after those childhood dislocations, Wharton and Cather continued to articulate the force of geography in their own lives. As a young woman recently graduated from college who had returned to her rural hometown, Cather in 1896 saw Red Cloud as provincial and longed for wider horizons. Describing a local dance, she remarked, “The men fell down every now and then and you had to help them up. Yet this was a dance of the elite and bon ton of Red Cloud.”25 People had come to “expect something unusual of me,” she wrote, but asked, “How can I ‘do anything’ here? I have’nt [sic] seen enough of the world or anything else.”26 Wharton noted the crucial importance of place to an author’s experience. Working on her memoir, she asked her friend and fellow author Mary Berenson for advice about writing of her childhood: “I’m hopelessly stuck, & feel how much easier it wd [would] have been if I’d lived in Florence with picturesque people instead of stodging in New York!”27 Thinking of her later wealth of experience in

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Europe, she asked Mary’s husband, art historian Bernard Berenson, not to urge a certain biography on her: “It always saddens me to read of those starved existences … I feel as sad as I do when I read Emerson’s Journals, & think of the rich & dramatic lives of his European contemporaries.”28 These instances are just a few of the many that point to the importance of place in Wharton’s and Cather’s lives, in their writing, and in the American culture they reflected on throughout their lifetimes. It is more than a coincidence, then, that they lived in, visited, and portrayed many of the same places in their lives and fiction. Indeed, three places are central to their lives and works: New York City, the American West, and France. An emphasis on place as a category larger and deeper than “setting” both draws this to our attention and helps us understand why these places should resonate for both, and indeed why their works often resonate so deeply. Ironically, place as an issue is often dismissed in literary studies. Many twentieth- and twenty-first-century theoretical approaches, even those attuned to culture, politics, and history, have been more attuned to “abstract space” or to theories of space than to specific places.29 Yet the “spatial turn” that has occurred in many disciplines, and which finds its roots in the work of Henri Lefebvre, Gaston Bachelard, and others, draws attention back to the importance of place.30 Recent work has built increasingly on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (literally, time-space), itself built on Einstein’s theories about the continuity of time and space. In his influential essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Bakhtin argued that in literary works, “Time … thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”31 Yet Bakhtin, in spite of emphasizing the continuity of time and space, argued that time was more important than space or place in literature, and many have followed his lead. Fortunately, others have insisted on the importance of place. These include the geographer Yu-Fu Tuan, whose 1974 volume Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values reconceptualized the field of geography, arguing for the profound connection between place and human culture. More recent works reiterate the importance of place, including Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2007), which posits the idea of the “geocritic,” who (in the words of his translator, Robert Tally Jr.) “orchestrates a number of different points of view” to reconceptualize our concepts of specific spaces and places.32 The geographers Barney Warf and Santa Arias, in their introduction to their landmark anthology The Spatial Turn (2009), also emphasized the importance of place: The spatial turn … involve[s]‌a reworking of the very notion and significance of spatiality to offer a perspective in which space is every bit as important as time in the unfolding of human affairs …. Geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly used reason that everything happens in space, but because where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen.33 It is noteworthy, however, that these principles were anticipated by Cather and Wharton decades earlier (as literary writers often anticipate theorists), with both recognizing the importance of place and the imbrication of place and culture. In an 1895 theater review, Cather remarked of a young actress, “If Miss Wheeler had half a chance she would be an actress of merit. But she has not had the chance. She was a raw Kansas City girl, who had never even seen any of the greatest acting … I wish Miss Wheeler had been born further east. Geography is a terribly fatal thing sometimes.”34 In her 1923 novel A Son at the Front, Wharton nearly paraphrases Cather’s remark about the fatality of geography. The

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protagonist, John Campton, is an American who finds out that his son, accidentally born in France twenty-five years earlier, will be called up for military service in the First World War. He fumes: “It was grotesque that the whole of joy or anguish should suddenly be found to hang on a geographical accident.”35

INTERSECTIONAL INTERTEXTUALITY: WHARTON AND CATHER IN NEW YORK Using place as an axis of organization—thinking as a geocritic—can be a powerful tool, one that immediately pulls into focus previously overlooked similarities and comparisons and thus suggests new ideas. Noting the importance of New York City in the lives and works of Wharton and Cather and placing them literally onto the same map offers a vivid and important example, immediately reshaping the general geographic perceptions of them. While Wharton is often thought of as a New Yorker and Cather as a Westerner, Midwesterner, or more specifically a Nebraskan, Cather was at least as much a New Yorker as Wharton. Although Wharton was born in New York, she lived there only until age four, and again for a period in her mid-teens. As an adult, she lived there only intermittently, and nearly abandoned the city after 1906—the year in which Cather moved there. In contrast, Cather lived there from 1906 until her death in 1947, a span of over forty years. Moreover, the authors’ lives and works intersect in specific locations within the city. Cather first lived in and around Washington Square, where Wharton had lived in 1882 and 1883; the building Cather lived in from 1908 until 1912, 82 Washington Place West, is about a four-minute walk from Wharton’s old address at 7 Washington Square North. In Cather’s fine 1920 story “Coming, Aphrodite!,” the painter Don Hedger and singer Eden Bower live on the south side of Washington Square, visiting and crossing the park repeatedly, as do characters in Wharton’s novels The Age of Innocence and The Custom of the Country (1913). Other New York locations appear repeatedly in their fictions and in their lives. Paul in Cather’s landmark story “Paul’s Case” arrives in New York on the ferry that docks at the west end of West 23rd Street, where Wharton’s Ellen Olenska lives in a neighborhood that her relatives find insufficiently fashionable; Wharton was born at 14 West 23rd Street, and Cather worked at McClure’s Magazine, located on East 23rd Street. The Fifth Avenue Hotel, located opposite Wharton’s birthplace, was not only a place she observed as a child but a central location in her novella New Year’s Day (1924); it also figures in Cather’s novel My Mortal Enemy (1926). Other New York locations, from Central Park to Grace Church to the millionaires’ mansions that then lined Fifth Avenue, appear in the lives and works of both authors. Focusing on place also challenges the sense of Wharton and Cather as belonging to vastly different social classes. Beginning in 1932, for instance, Cather lived at 570 Park Avenue, a highly prestigious address that is located only sixteen blocks south of where the young Mrs. Wharton had lived with her husband at 882–884 Park Avenue. What might initially seem merely a geographic coincidence—many literary works, after all, are set in New York—is in fact much more meaningful: Wharton’s and Cather’s works in New York offer what we might call intersectional intertextuality, texts set in the same geographic place that speak to each other profoundly. Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Cather’s story “Paul’s Case,” both published in 1905, tell nearly the same story once we look beneath their surface differences. Both depict the lives of people who are not only attracted to beauty but also have a deep need for it; neither Lily nor Paul is

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able to accept the compromises society asks them to make in order to achieve a life that will include the beauty they crave. Indeed, both are asked to subordinate this need to a society dominated by business interests: Lily would need to barter herself into a wealthy but deadening marriage, Paul to dedicate himself to a tedious life in business, which offers only limited rewards. Moreover, both The House of Mirth and “Paul’s Case” take New York City as a primary setting, functioning simultaneously as an actual place and as a semi-symbolic backdrop portraying the polarities Lily’s and Paul’s lives demonstrate: the tension between money-making and business (symbolized by Wall Street on the southern tip of Manhattan) and the need for beauty (represented by the city’s fine arts scene further north, perhaps most conspicuously embodied by the Metropolitan Museum of Art). In between these two poles are, of course, some of the most expensive, and in many cases also the most beautiful, objects that money can buy. Both works suggest the importance of beauty in individual lives and in our collective cultural life but also the predominance of business interests and of money-making for its own sake. New York as a geographical manifestation of the tension between money and beauty, the wealthy and the artistic, emerges elsewhere in Wharton’s and Cather’s work, including Cather’s “Coming, Aphrodite!,” which again nods intertextually at The House of Mirth. In Cather’s story, the young Bohemian painter Don Hedger, who lives an isolated life on Washington Square, thinks only of his art. He gets along “well enough with janitresses and wash-women”36 but is suspicious of women of higher social classes: He felt an unreasoning antipathy toward the well-dressed women he saw coming out of big shops, or driving in the Park. If, on his way to the Art Museum, he noticed a pretty girl standing on the steps of one of the houses on upper Fifth Avenue, he frowned at her and went by with his shoulders hunched up as if he were cold. He had never known such girls … but he believed them all to be artificial and, in an aesthetic sense, perverted. He saw them enslaved by desire of merchandise and manufactured articles, effective only in making life complicated and insincere and in embroidering it with ugly and meaningless trivialities.37 Don Hedger is looking askance at someone very much like Wharton’s Lily Bart. Don and Lily inhabit not only the same place but also the same timeframe; moreover, the two works exist on the same continuum of thought. Although Wharton’s Lily is more sympathetic than the social automata Don believes upper-class women to be, Lily could easily be seen in the terms Don Hedger uses. In fact, Lily sometimes sees herself this way, confessing to something like being “enslaved by desire of merchandise and manufactured articles” when she admits that she is “horribly poor—and very expensive. I must have a great deal of money.”38 Lily might even agree with Don’s charge that the wealthy life to which she aspires is made up of “complicated and insincere” behaviors and “meaningless trivialities”: during one elaborate dinner party, she looks down a table lined by those she calls her friends and thinks, “What a long stretch of vacuity! How dreary and trivial these people were!”39 In other ways as well, New York City demonstrates the intersection of Wharton’s and Cather’s worlds. Wharton often depicts the upper class of New York society, women who, like Lily Bart in her more fortunate years or May Welland and so many others in The Age of Innocence, spend much of their lives paying social calls and would be horrified by the idea of working for pay or, indeed, of needing to do so. In many ways Wharton’s New York seems a separate world from the New York Cather depicts, in which women often work in a range of positions. Yet if Lily stands at the edges of “Coming, Aphrodite!,” she also experiences a moment in which she finds herself in Cather’s New York—a city not of

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shopping and sociability but of women who are professionals or serious amateurs pursuing their own goals. Near the end of The House of Mirth, Lily finds herself in a restaurant: The room was full of women and girls, all too much engaged in the rapid absorption of tea and pie to remark her entrance … The sallow preoccupied women, with their bags and note-books and rolls of music, were all engrossed in their own affairs, and even those who sat by themselves were busy running over proof-sheets or devouring magazines between their hurried gulps of tea. Lily alone was stranded in a great waste of disoccupation.40 Lily’s sense of aloneness, of vacant idleness, is made even greater by the busy women around her, who seem to have emerged from a Cather novel, or from Cather’s life: the woman studying music could easily be Thea Kronborg, the aspiring opera singer of Cather’s 1913 novel The Song of the Lark, or Eden Bower in “Coming, Aphrodite!”; the one reading proofs could be Cather herself, who would arrive in New York to work at McClure’s only a year after The House of Mirth was published. Yet, paradoxically, Cather’s New York reminds us that biographically, Wharton’s New York was also one of busy women: for instance, Wharton’s sister-in-law Mary Cadwalader Jones, an important literary hostess, also served as her agent and fact-checker and was the author of a travel book for American women.41 Wharton’s and Cather’s fictional and factual New Yorks are far closer than we often think. Using place as an axis of organization pulls into focus other significant intersections in Wharton’s and Cather’s worlds. Although Cather is far more associated with the “West” (broadly defined, as it has always been) than Wharton, the West is far more common in Wharton than we usually think. In The Custom of the Country, Wharton’s Undine Spragg famously, or infamously, storms out of the West “like one of the tornados of her native state”42—but she does not do so alone. Close on her heels is Elmer Moffatt, who gradually (and often unethically) accrues a huge fortune. Wharton’s depiction of him is fascinating: while successful, he is also crude and underhanded—a sharp contrast to Cather’s Midwestern millionaire, the “beer prince”43 Fred Ottenburg in The Song of the Lark, who is charming, cultivated, musical—everything Elmer is not. While this initial contrast suggests the difference between Wharton’s and Cather’s general view of Westerners (Wharton’s was often negative, while Cather’s was positive), further scrutiny of these characters shows that they are not so different after all. In spite of his many faults, the “bad” Moffatt is not only astute but sometimes displays a kind heart, and gradually develops a genuine appreciation of the beautiful. In contrast, the “good” Ottenburg can be profoundly duplicitous, marrying a close friend’s fiancé and later proposing a bigamous marriage to Thea without revealing that he is already married. What these men share, and what Wharton and Cather admire, is a certain Western energy that is also capable of appreciating beauty. As surely as Undine brings her tornado-like temper to New York, both Moffatt and Ottenburg bring a more constructive energy; both navigate the West and the city easily, and both are portrayed as morally complex. They are not so much contrasting portrayals of Westerners as complementary ones.

EAST AND WEST, EUROPE AND AMERICA At the time that Wharton was being pegged as “Eastern” and Cather as “Western,” American culture was in the process of rethinking both its geographic and its social identification. Literature and literary reviews reflected the larger cultural struggle about

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whether the nation was to be identified with Eastern cities, seen as powerful, refined, and upper-class, while also typed as tending toward the effete, and hence feminine; or with the expansive, vigorous, middle- and working-classes of the West and Midwest, also typed as somewhat crude and as masculine.44 This is the period in which “the western,” first as a novel and later as a film genre, was developed and hailed as typically and uniquely American, regardless of the fact that “the West” as depicted in these works offered an already-romanticized view. Nevertheless, the alignment of “American” with “western” extended abroad: Virginia Woolf, for instance, wrote in an essay significantly entitled “American Fiction” that she was uninterested in the work of Edith Wharton, as her work did “not give us [in England] anything that we have not got already.”45 Instead she turned to works by Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis (while nodding to Cather in passing). The salience of Woolf ’s commentary makes it clear that it was crucial for American novelists to establish their relationship to this change. The westward shift in “American” identity offered a particular challenge to Wharton, who wrote to her publisher in 1904 that as a novelist, “I write about what I see … which is surely better than doing cowboys de chic.”46 Although associated with the West, Cather had to fight a similar battle, struggling with the association between “the West” and masculinity. When her 1913 novel O Pioneers! was successful, she wrote that she was “very proud” of one of her positive reviews, adding, “I used to meet [western novelist David Graham] Phillips … and I used to think ‘you big stuffed-shirt-and-checked-pants, I know more about the real west than you do, but I could never make anybody believe it, because I wear skirts and don’t shave.’ But you see people do believe it … and I call that very jolly.”47 Yet to some extent, Cather’s rising reputation was lifted by the tide of the westward shift, while Wharton had to struggle against the change. As all of this establishes, concepts of place are essential, though frequently insufficiently considered, in literary history. Perhaps most importantly, the identifications of authors with places are nearly always more complex than they seem. Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, the 1902 novel that is often called the first “western,” was a Harvard graduate and classmate of Theodore Roosevelt and an acquaintance of Wharton;48 Mark Twain, surely one of the most Western and most “American” of authors, lived most of his adult life in Hartford, Connecticut, in an elaborate Gilded Age mansion (again challenging associations of place and class).49 Returning to Parrington’s review of Wharton: part of his dismissal of her as a “literary aristocrat” is that she wrote of “nobodies” whose “windows opened onto London, Paris, and Rome”—thus further associating her with places themselves associated with upper-class elitism. Of course Wharton was familiar with London, Paris, and Rome; all figured prominently in her life and in many of her fictions. Parrington might have been surprised to learn, however, that the “Western” Willa Cather was drawn to the same three cities. Before her first trip to Italy in 1908, Cather wrote her brother excitedly that she would soon be seeing Rome, remarking that “Rome, London, and Paris were serious matters” in her education: “they were the three principal cities of Nebraska, so to speak.”50 Had Parrington known this, or been aware of Cather’s excitement about visiting London and Paris on her first trip to Europe in 1902, would he have dismissed her also as an “aristocrat” who was also inherently un-American? Yet Cather remains firmly seen as American today due partly to her association with the West and with the middle class—nor indeed do I argue that it should be seen otherwise. At the same time, Cather’s ancestry reminds us again of the complexity, even the potential fallacy, of common associations between class and place. Insofar as the American sense of class is linked to wealth, the alignment of Wharton with “aristocracy” and Cather with

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the middle classes is more or less correct, as both the house museums dedicated to them— The Mount, an impressive mansion in Lenox, Massachusetts, and the modest Cather Childhood Home in Red Cloud, Nebraska—suggest. Yet as already noted, Cather lived on Park Avenue in New York for the last fifteen years of her life. And if we determine aristocratic standing by ancestry—the standard Wharton references in both her memoir and in her fiction—it was Wharton who comes from the middle classes, while Cather’s ancestors “had fought for Charles I” and been “given land in Ireland” by Charles II in appreciation; the Cather family had its own coat of arms.51 Perhaps it is the Western, middle-class Cather, not the wealthy Eastern Wharton, who is our literary aristocrat. What I am arguing for, however, is not really a “reclassification” of Cather but for the need to break down categorizations that compartmentalize and limit our sense of authors, their importance, their scope—their place, as it were, in literature and in culture. If Cather has her roots in aristocracy, Wharton also wrote importantly of the middle and lower classes, both in her early works, as scholars like Laura Rattray have persuasively demonstrated,52 and in major but less-studied novels such as Summer. Further, both authors consistently and searchingly, though often quietly, queried American culture. New York vividly represented the tension between beauty and business, while the West was the source of raw American energy; for both, France stood as the crucial third place in thinking about what American culture lacked. Both idealized France to some extent, yet they found in French culture a meaningful alternative to American culture: a balance between energy and order, between practicality and artistry—a culture that, in its architecture, its landscapes, and even its food, offered the possibility of beauty in everyday life. Wharton in direct ways—in French Ways and Their Meaning—and Cather in indirect ones, most saliently her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop—advocated for the incorporation of a more considered and thoughtful approach to American life, something beyond the mere fact of money-making and the tallying of “success” by how many dollars one had accrued.

REMOVING OBSTACLES This essay opened with a quotation from Wharton’s French Ways and Their Meaning; in another passage from that work, Wharton wrote, “If beauty is only skin deep, so too are some of the greatest obstacles between peoples who were made to understand each other.”53 I hope that this essay has chipped away at some of the “obstacles” that have been used to block an understanding between these two major authors. In the same way, I hope that scholars and general readers alike can deliberately move away from some of the reflexive categorizations that have prevented us from perceiving important intertextual conversations between a range of authors. In her recent study Cather among the Moderns, Janis Stout models exactly this kind of work, tracing important but overlooked connections between Cather and a range of literary and cultural figures. In one chapter, for instance, she links Cather’s use of the vernacular in her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (a work that offers problematic portrayals of enslaved people in Virginia), to that of Sterling A. Brown, long a professor at Howard University, who also employed the vernacular in his poetic portrayals of southern Black people—and who was influenced by Robert Frost, who was not only one of Cather’s correspondents (she admired his work) but also a champion of the use of everyday American speech in poetry. Stout’s nuanced and detailed argument concludes with a discussion of the blues singer Ma Rainey, thus linking Cather by association not

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only to this famous singer but to August Wilson, whose celebrated play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom commemorates her.54 Earlier I suggested the term “intersectional intertextuality,” using the word “intersectional” as a geographer or cartographer might. Following Stout’s example of breaking down old obstacles to see new connections, we can also think of the term “intersectional” in the social-scientific sense, looking at the intersections of race, class, gender, and so on in addition to the geographic. As mentioned earlier, Wharton and Cather lived close to each other near Washington Square. A historical plaque on the building on Washington Square West in which Cather lived commemorates her residence there; it also notes that Richard Wright lived there in 1945, while he was writing his landmark autobiography Black Boy.55 This multilayered intersection may prompt us to ask how Cather’s and Wright’s works might resonate with each other, and, by extension, how Wright’s works might resonate with Wharton’s. Focusing on place reminds us that beyond New York, Paris was a crucial part of the experience of all three writers, with Wharton living there for decades, Cather visiting the city for extended periods, and Wright living there from 1946 until his death in 1960, most of those years in the Luxembourg quarter at 14 rue Monsieur-le-Prince,56 not far from Wharton’s residence on the rue de Varenne or from the hotels where Cather stayed. Wright played a major role in the city’s long association with African American authors, from James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has written so beautifully about his experience in Paris, and who also expressed his admiration of Wharton’s “empathy and ambivalence” in The Age of Innocence.57 Beyond shaping a list of American writers to whom Paris was personally and culturally important, what might a serious analysis of their representations of Paris, and of French culture vis-à-vis American culture, reveal? Among many other things, the works of all these authors illustrate that one must leave the United States, at least temporarily, in order to understand it—and, ultimately, to influence it, helping others see beyond the “surface differences” to the “deep faiths and principles” beneath, including the faith in literature itself.

NOTES 1 Edith Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning (New York: Appleton, 1919), 16. 2 Ibid., vi. 3 Edward Sorel, illustration accompanying article on Harold Bloom’s The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. Vanity Fair, April 24, 2015, https:// www.van​ityf​air.com/cult​ure/2015/04/har​old-bloom-the-dae​mon-knows-12-auth​ors. 4 Vernon Parrington, “Our Literary Aristocrat,” in James W. Tuttleton, Kristin O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray (eds.), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 295. 5 Ibid., 295, 294. 6 Margaret Anne O’Connor, Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 84. 7 James W. Tuttleton, Kristin O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray, eds., Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 295. 8 Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé,” in Willa Cather on Writing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 40; Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 11, 14.

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9 Cather, “The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett,” in Willa Cather on Writing, 49; original emphasis. Wharton, Writing of Fiction, 36. 10 Wharton, “Visibility in Fiction,” in Frederick Wegener (ed.), Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 16; Cather, qtd. in Bernice Slote, The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893–1896 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 46, 48. 11 James Woodress, Willa Cather (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 92. 12 Cather, “The Novel Démeublé,” 36. 13 Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 30, 101. 14 Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart, ed. David Porter, Kari Ronning, and Frederick Link (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 175–6. 15 Willa Cather, My Ántonia, ed. Charles Mignon, Kari Ronning, and James Woodress (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 355. 16 Cather, Lucy Gayheart, 26. 17 Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 358. 18 Ibid. 19 Cather, Lucy Gayheart, 242. 20 Nancy L. Green, The Other Americans in Paris: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880–1941 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 3. 21 For details and for further elaboration on my argument about Wharton and Cather in general, see my Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019). For specifics of the two authors sharing the same “time-space capsule,” see especially 39–52. 22 Edith Wharton, “Life and I,” in Laura Rattray (ed.), The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton, vol. 2 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 192. 23 Willa Cather, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013), 88. 24 Hermione Lee, Willa Cather: Double Lives (New York: Vintage, 1989), 30. 25 Cather, Selected Letters, 25. 26 Ibid., 28. 27 Wharton, Letters, 553. 28 Wharton to B. Berenson, February 22, 1930. Biblioteca Berenson, I Tatti—the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. 29 Bart Eeckhout, “Why Would the Spatial Be So Special? A Critical Analysis of the Spatial Turn in American Studies,” in Massimo Bacigalupo and Gregory Dowling (eds.), Ambassadors: American Studies in a Changing World (Rapallo, Italy: Azienda Grafica Busco Edizioni, 2006), 24. Readers interested in the relationship between regionalism and place should also consult June Howard, The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 30 For a good overview of the foundations of the field, see Eeckhout, “Why Would the Spatial Be So Special?” especially 21–4. 31 Mikael Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (trans.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 32 Robert T. Tally, Jr., “Translator’s Preface,” in Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), xi.

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33 Barney Warf and Santa Arias, The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009), 1; original emphases. 34 Cather, qtd. in Slote, The Kingdom of Art, 282. 35 Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 18. 36 Willa Cather, “Coming, Aphrodite!” in Mark J. Madigan, Frederick Link, Charles Mignon, Judith Boss, and Kari Ronning (eds.), Youth and the Bright Medusa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 24. 37 Ibid., 25. 38 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 14. 39 Ibid., 87. 40 Ibid., 488–9. 41 Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Knopf, 2007), 741; Laura Rattray, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction (New York: Palgrave, 2020), 94. 42 Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941), 123. 43 Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark, ed. Ann Moseley and Kari Ronning (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 295. 44 For elaboration, see my Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), especially 149–60. 45 Virginia Woolf, “American Fiction,” in Collected Essays, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, 1967), 111. 46 Wharton, Letters, 91. 47 Cather, Selected Letters, 183. 48 R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (London: Constable, 1975), 94, 168. 49 See Ann Ryan and Joseph McCullough, eds., Cosmopolitan Twain (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), for further commentary on Twain, place, and class. 50 Cather, Selected Letters, 105. 51 Woodress, Willa Cather, 13. 52 See Laura Rattray, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction, and her essay “Edith Wharton’s Unprivileged Lives,” in Laura Rattray (ed.), Edith Wharton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 113–28. 53 Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning, 16. 54 Janis Stout, Willa Cather among the Moderns (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019), 168–74. The connection to August Wilson is my own. 55 The historical marker is slightly inaccurate. According to Hazel Rowley’s Richard Wright: The Life and Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), Wright did live at 82 Washington Square West in NYC in 1945 (321). But he moved there only in mid-September 1945, not when he was writing Black Boy, as the historical marker states; Black Boy had been published in March 1945 by the Book-of-the-Month Club (290). 56 Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times, 374. 57 Coates published reflections on living in France in the Atlantic in 2013; many are available online. His appreciation of The Age of Innocence, “The Age of Awesome,” was also published in the Atlantic (April 22, 2011), https://www.thea​tlan​tic.com/entert​ainm​ent/arch​ive/2011/04/ the-age-of-awes​ome/237​713/ (accessed May 14, 2021).

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Consciousness in Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Reef and The Golden Bowl JILL KRESS KARN

Throughout the course of their writing lives, Edith Wharton and Henry James explored in remarkably varied ways the development and the expression of consciousness. In portraying the mind, awareness, and the self, each author remained committed to the representation of a character’s inner life, though both experimented with the means by which to achieve that end. The fiction of the early twentieth century reveals Wharton and James repeatedly refashioning consciousness. And yet, their novels nonetheless frequently resort to the same narrative scenario—the marriage plot—as a pattern for the story of the mind. Though their fiction becomes increasingly nuanced and experimental, both Wharton and James place the intricate depiction of consciousness within a conventional form. Why is the marriage plot an apt vehicle for telling the story of consciousness? Why, especially given each novelist’s ability to create afresh the house of fiction, would these writers reiterate the same plot? Even avant-garde novels that anticipate modernism— The Golden Bowl (1904) and The Reef (1912)—retell the courtship tale. This chapter argues that the marriage plot becomes more than framework or backdrop, that it indeed emerges as a crucial aspect of the knotted tangle that is consciousness for Wharton and James. Riddled with questions about love, sexuality, personal identity, the private versus the public self, experience, communication, inner life, and awakening, the marriage plot ushers in a host of possibilities for the examination of the conscious life. Though Shakespeare’s comedies advance toward marriage as both the desired and only possible end, the marriage plot as a convention flourished in narrative form once the novel achieved primacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both Wharton and James inherited the marriage plot from perhaps its most astute craftswoman, Jane Austen, who herself appropriated and radically transformed it, borrowing from Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and, most notably, Samuel Richardson.1 Richardson’s Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (1740), widely considered the first modern English novel, employed an epistolary style and centered on a marriage plot. His later, massive Clarissa: Or the

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History of a Young Lady (1748) features an extended courtship, a nefarious suitor, and a marriage scheme gone wrong. Neither Wharton nor James gives much credit to Austen, though they follow her lead in taking the old form and repurposing it for their own ends.2 The revamping of the marriage plot moves us far from Austen’s social comedy where a wedding brings fulfillment and closure. Nonetheless, Wharton and James owe a great deal to Austen’s legacy—her masterful exploitation of the tradition of the marriage plot as a means to uncover the developing consciousness of its heroine. Wharton and James continue that exploration and further manipulate the formal structure of the marriage plot creating ambivalent, complex resolutions, thwarting our expectations for a happy ending.3 Moreover, both novels experiment with point of view, narration, and chronology and draw attention to subjectivity, equivocation, openness, and the inadequacy of language—all attributes of modernism. In The Golden Bowl, James divides the point of view and plays with the trajectory of the heroine’s journey, radically abbreviating the anticipation stage of courtship, indeed, beginning the narrative with the marriage compact settled. His heroine, Maggie Verver, emerges slowly, or rather, our sense that she is to be the heroine only becomes evident three hundred pages into the novel. We hear about her in book one, then more significantly from her as she becomes the center of consciousness at the start of book two and for the rest of the novel. As the story that fills out The Golden Bowl gradually—sometimes haltingly— evolves, the timeline adjusts so that rather than move forward, we move inward. James increasingly positions the narrative inside his heroine’s mind; still, Maggie will discover the mistake of attempting to preserve consciousness as pure inward treasure. The fullness of consciousness radiates beyond her and comes through interaction and through attention to the network of relations around her. James comprehends through the figure of his heroine a larger expression of consciousness as a function of social awareness, an ever-extending arrangement of alliances and relations that shape the self.4 As Paul Armstrong explains, Maggie achieves “awareness … by conversing with others and interpreting the text of what they say and do not say.”5 Armstrong names the growth of her consciousness as equal parts revelation and obfuscation: Maggie “learns to read the inwardness of other characters while holding herself opaque.”6 This sense of consciousness as a tool for detection and cover emerges gradually and coincides with Maggie’s reluctant understanding of the complexity of married life. James begins her awakening with a reflection on marriage as separation from the former self—in the case of Maggie, the self that is the beloved daughter—a reflection that crystallizes over time. For Maggie, understanding comes in retrospect, and it comes precisely as she considers her primary relationships. Book two, “The Princess,” begins: “It was not till many days had passed that the Princess began to accept the idea of having done, a little, something she was not always doing, or indeed that of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a new tone.”7 Immediately after this reflection, James’s much-discussed image of the pagoda surfaces as the manifestation of what Maggie ponders when she looks backward. If introspection relies at least in part on retrospection, then the “many days” that pass nudge Maggie toward the acceptance of what she has done in rearranging the relationships around her. James’s language suggests hesitation: pauses, commas, multiple clauses, and qualifiers show his heroine edging toward her realizations. For even as she approaches this deeper perception materialized as the pagoda, Maggie hangs back: she only “beg[ins] to accept” and likewise attempts to diminish the impact by calling it only “a little.” The pagoda attests to a shift in narrative, appearing as it does in its lurid, awkward bulk; it provides ineluctable proof of what Maggie has activated both by her awareness

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and by her gesture. Maggie’s sense “that she had made, at a particular hour, made by the mere touch of her hand, a difference” (299) ushers in a new way of seeing, particularly, a new way of seeing herself. The novel splits in two precisely at this moment of awareness and conflict. James indicates that seeing the self means seeing one’s self with respect to— with respect to others, with respect to others’ ideas of one’s self, with respect to the throes and entanglement of relationships. Reflecting on her seemingly innocuous trajectory toward marriage, Maggie’s mind asserts language that is decidedly absolute: That it was remarkable they should have been able at once so to separate and so to keep together had never for a moment, from however far back, been equivocal to her; that it was remarkable had in fact quite counted, at first and always, and for each of them equally, as part of their inspiration and their support. (301) James’s “they” seems deliberately vague: we cannot immediately tell whether Maggie and her father or Maggie and her husband have managed the precarious and enviable feat of, at once, “separating” and “keeping together.” However, the “never for a moment,” “at first and always,” is definitive language, language that suggests an obvious, unerring path. The desire to maintain her status as both devoted daughter and devoted wife had never been ambiguous, never dubious—it had never been, Maggie thinks, “equivocal to her,” until now. That Maggie’s consciousness admits equivocation makes a decided impression; it is a beginning. Here at this place of indeterminacy she will inhabit more fully what James calls “her considering mind” (300), a lovely depiction of consciousness that suggests its ongoing, dynamic nature. Crucially, in the majority of their novels, Wharton and James make marriage the crucible for the development of a heroine’s consciousness. Both writers will revise many of the conventions of the recognizable courtship script, particularly in resisting a happy outcome. James’s female center of consciousness in the novels of his major phase becomes conflicted, self-aware, more subversive than the prototypical ingenue.8 Yet even the heroine of a revised marriage plot comes up against familiar questions: Who am I separate from my family of origin? What does marriage do to a self? How may I remain an individual inside a marriage bond? The intimacy and nearness that marriage brings provide as much dread as enchantment. Accordingly, Maggie’s slow dawning of a deepening consciousness must be accompanied by abrupt lessons in action. She must grow in awareness when she would rather remain blessedly unaware; she must learn deception rather than transparency; she must practice withdrawal, though she longs to be enveloped and embraced. When we enter Maggie’s mind in book two, readers already know what she does not yet know: that her husband once loved her beautiful and penniless friend; that this friend has now married her father and become, once again, her husband’s lover. James holds this knowledge tantalizingly before us when, in book one, the Prince sees his former lover, Charlotte: “he knew her narrow hands, he knew her long fingers … he knew the special beauty of movement and line when she turned her back … knew above all the extraordinary fineness of her flexible waist” (35– 6). The Prince, of course, “knows” Charlotte in the biblical sense. James’s language not only exposes the lovers’ sexual past, the succession of images attesting to the liaison also shows his sensitivity to the deeply relational aspect of knowing. And while Maggie may not grasp where she stands when we first dip into her consciousness in book two, her impulse, her defensive reaction, is to think. What’s more, her continued contemplation of her position, especially as she detects a shift in the equilibrium of relationships, registers as an intensification of her married state: “She had, all the same, never felt so

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absorbingly married, so abjectly conscious of a master of her fate. He could do what he would with her; in fact what was actually happening was that he was actually doing it” (313). Maggie’s reaction indicates a surrender to this “fate,” which James depicts most vividly in her repeated submission to her husband’s embrace after his return from a tryst with his former lover. To be “so absorbingly married” here threatens to swallow Maggie up; it means concession, possibly effacement, and, at least at the outset, renunciation of any influence she might claim. Sexuality in The Golden Bowl—both Maggie’s grappling with desire as part of her identity, and the Prince’s coercive use of sexual intimacy as a way to contain his wife— remains central to James’s exploration of consciousness. James frequently intermingles psychological and sexual language in his fiction, which underscores his sensitivity to the shaping force of each not simply for his heroines but also for his conception of the novel. Maggie must confront her own desire, an encounter that coincides, and sometimes clashes, with her increasing ability to fathom the minds, motives, and shifting alliances around her. As Maggie makes a move, the Prince and Charlotte countermove, demanding she remake her strategy.9 After boldly uncharacteristic behavior at a dinner party, Maggie sits in the carriage on the way home with her husband, willing herself to keep him at a distance. James draws out the scene, suggesting that the Prince’s prodigious, sexual presence interferes with Maggie’s intensely processing consciousness. Her husband, on taking his place beside her, had, during a minute or two, for her watching sense, neither said nor done anything; he had been, for that sense, as if thinking, waiting, deciding; yes, it was still before he spoke that he, as she felt it to be, definitively acted. He put his arm round her and drew her close—indulged in the demonstration, the long, firm embrace by his single arm, the infinite pressure of her whole person to his own, that such opportunities had so often suggested and prescribed. Held, accordingly, and, as she could but too intimately feel, exquisitely solicited, she had said the thing she was intending and desiring to say, and as to which she felt, even more than she felt anything else, that whatever he might do she mustn’t be irresponsible. Yes, she was in his exerted grasp, and she knew what that was; but she was at the same time in the grasp of her conceived responsibility, and the extraordinary thing was that, of the two intensities, the second was presently to become the sharper. (339) James gives us Maggie as she considers in silence her husband’s response. Her “watching sense” becomes not simply an observing capacity, but also a guard, a patrol that has been duly alerted and stands wary. As Amerigo moves closer, Maggie’s consciousness registers the message that his embrace delivers. Maggie rightly comprehends that touch equals delay; furthermore, Amerigo’s forceful action of placing “the infinite pressure of her whole person to his own” extends beyond caress to suggest restraint. James’s prose becomes magnificently excessive and wordy, a buffer full of commas and clauses and delays, as if in collusion with his heroine to fend off the Prince’s hold.10 For Maggie retains her own hold here: just as she knows that she has said what needed to be said, she also recognizes her susceptibility to the Prince’s charm—a magnetism she must resist in order to keep her head. In acknowledging her husband’s sexual charisma, Maggie starts to disarm it. Her mind remains watchful; she has begun to establish herself as a person to be reckoned with. Yet as the scene in the carriage continues, James avows that the work of constituting a deepening and developing consciousness invariably brings pain.

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She should have but to lay her head back on his shoulder with a certain movement to make it definite for him that she didn’t resist. To this, as they went, every throb of her consciousness prompted her—every throb, that is, but one—the throb of her deeper need to know where she “really” was. By the time she had uttered the rest of her idea, therefore, she was still keeping her head and intending to keep it; though she was also staring out of the carriage window with eyes into which the tears of suffered pain had risen, indistinguishable, perhaps, happily, in the dusk. She was making an effort that horribly hurt her, and, as she couldn’t cry out, her eyes swam in her silence. (339–40) Consciousness, as James depicts it, becomes a vigilant, “throbbing” pulse that directs Maggie’s behavior; a measure of her desire, it penetrates with an ache. Indeed, Maggie’s wish to let down her guard palpitates forcefully. Her ability to communicate abdication to the Prince with the smallest of physical gestures also means that she can communicate the reverse. If consciousness, like an off-stage manager who holds the script and cues the actors, “prompts” her to release herself, then it also vibrates and thrills with resistance, with another, “deeper need”—the “need to know where she ‘really’ was.” “Keeping her head” is not only the mental work of figuring out what is going on around her; “keeping her head” means quite literally keeping it raised, keeping it from resting on her husband’s shoulder. Both Wharton and James make transparent the connection between physical intimacy and psychic or psychological control. To lay her head back would be, for Maggie in this instance, tantamount to surrendering consciousness. Maggie’s longing for intimacy with her husband translates into a passionate need to read his mind; as a consequence, consciousness sometimes resembles mind-reading in The Golden Bowl.11 Yet this “mind-reading” usually consists of one character’s (frequently inaccurate, always elaborate) projections of thought onto the other. The misfires accompanying these exchanges reflect the brokenness in relations. Sharon Cameron notes this movement in the novel: “relation repeatedly defines itself at the moment when characters are blocked in their attempts to understand each other or to be understood.”12 Brad Evans elaborates: “The relation in late James is a constant. It becomes visible thematically by being broken and stylistically by being opaque.”13 Maggie’s competing desires to be at one with the Prince and to understand more fully the relations around her make her negotiations seem like dangerous leaps from a speeding coach, the figure James creates with flourish: “She had seen herself at last, in the picture she was studying, suddenly jump from the coach; whereupon, frankly, with the wonder of the sight, her eyes opened wider and her heart stood still for a moment” (315). As Ruth Bernard Yeazell explains, threatening knowledge gets conveyed through powerful and extravagant metaphors in late James.14 And here, James layers one figure atop another: Maggie sees herself, a displacement that suggests she can step outside of herself, but the self she sees is “in[side] a picture.” While studying this “picture,” Maggie discovers the self that is “herself ” engaging in a reckless act—she “suddenly jump[s]‌from the coach.” The picture does not remain static that Maggie might scrutinize it; instead, she sees herself move in it—or perhaps beyond it—a movement so violent that it makes her heart “[stand] still.” Maggie’s ability to see herself, indeed, James’s representation of his character as watching herself in order to determine what she will do, resembles that of his earlier heroine: Catherine Sloper of Washington Square (1880). Catherine’s crisis of identity and autonomy culminates in a moment similarly watchful: “She watched herself as she would have watched another person, and wondered what she would do. It was as if this other person, who was both herself

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and not herself, had suddenly sprung into being, inspiring her with a natural curiosity as to the performance of untested functions.”15 The startling intensity of these moments— one the violence of abrupt movement, the other a sudden “springing into being” of another self—demonstrates James’s imagination of consciousness as involving a fracture or, rather, a doubling—the self, relating to itself. In The Golden Bowl, separation between a self that watches and a self that acts creates tremendous tension and strain, a dilemma that plagues Wharton’s female leads as well. The heroine’s ability to keep alive her performance, to prevent others from knowing what she knows, remains paramount to her ability to protect herself, to “keep her head”—all gestures that preclude intimacy. Further, these gestures insist upon a self with discrete boundaries, a notion that both Wharton and James continually challenge. Alone with her father, Maggie suspects he might be preparing to ask her a question, to probe. She sees it coming; she “dreads” it; she even undertakes to “check, yes even to disconcert, magnificently, by her apparent manner of receiving it, any restless imagination he might have about its importance” (356). The intense inner work that Maggie sustains appears to formulate consciousness as separate, whole, detached—without the overflow and interconnections that cause distress. In the plainest sense, Maggie attempts to sever relations by denying that they exist. James’s own ambivalence about consciousness— inward source, outward flow—emerges in figures that multiply and collide. Maggie comes to consciousness, like many a Jamesian heroine, as an awakening to crisis. Her growing understanding of what she must do in order to maintain the balance among the enmeshed foursome requires that she occupy a false position. She knew, from this instant, knew in advance and as well as anything would ever teach her, that she must never intermit for a solitary second her so highly undertaking to prove that there was nothing the matter with her. She saw of a sudden, everything she might say or do in the light of that undertaking, established connections from it with any number of remote matters. (356–7; original emphasis) Lily Cui discusses the “staging” of consciousness in late James, emphasizing the significance of theatricality in his major fiction.16 Maggie’s behavior in this moment indicates an intense need for masquerade. James’s strange use of the verb “intermit” suggests the danger of suspension and the pressure to continue without interruption the illusion of a continuous self. The trouble with these imaginative leaps that are everywhere inside The Golden Bowl is that they attempt to preserve a private self that James simultaneously undermines. For the notion of character in late James breaks down; consciousness shuttles back and forth between minds; reflection provides no refuge. James wants a self that is not static, but open, expanding, outward reaching; but that movement also makes the self vulnerable, exposed. Even as Maggie’s focalizing consciousness directs attention away from disruption, she feels the air vibrate with her father’s understanding exactly what her mind is working out. “She asked herself if it weren’t thinkable, from the perfectly practical point of view, that she should simply sacrifice him” and hears him “say … in so many words: ‘Sacrifice me, my own love; do sacrifice me, do sacrifice me!’ ” (359; original emphasis). The melodrama of this moment almost eclipses the strange sensation that Maggie cannot think a thought without interference, without exposure. Her accidental discovery of the golden bowl after the Prince and Charlotte had already encountered it appears, in this light, less implausible coincidence than part of the pattern of revisiting and overlapping that defines consciousness in this book.

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As Maggie confronts her husband over the broken bowl, James indicates that his heroine’s processing of the bowl’s meaning reverberates beyond what is already a duplicated conversation, first with her friend, Fanny Assingham, then with the Prince: “But she was singularly able—it had been marvellously ‘given’ her, she afterwards said to herself—to abide, for her light, for her clue, by her own order” (443). Remarkable as the entire conversation is—a conversation that culminates in Maggie’s direct, blunt accusation thrust at her husband, her putting before him the case, “the case of your having for so long so successfully deceived me” (445)—more remarkable still is the projected depiction of Maggie going over this scene again, in the future, telling it to herself: “She afterwards said to herself.” Projecting forward to a time when Maggie will think back—what Dorrit Cohn calls “anticipating the time of retrospection”17—James emphasizes both the interconnectedness of thought and the sense of consciousness as something requiring revision and reseeing. In the midst of Maggie’s ambush of the Prince, as she lays before him her interpretation of the bowl’s meaning, James reminds us of the doubling-back that constitutes consciousness in The Golden Bowl. For James revisits two pivotal scenes in the second volume, presenting them as moments in need of reassessment: Maggie and Charlotte’s encounter on the terrace, and Charlotte’s escape outdoors in the heat of an August afternoon. Both scenes get overprocessed, suggesting a consciousness endlessly circling round, looping back to reconsider, recount, reimagine. Cara Lewis asserts a parallel between reading the novel and viewing sculpture—an activity she calls “reading in the round”—contending that such a reading helps remake our understanding of narrative temporality.18 In fact, Maggie circles back not only to particular scenes but also particular words. Her meditations in book two obsessively handle, even fondle, the language of “relation”—a word James compulsively reproduces: It all left her, as she wandered off, with the strangest of impressions—the sense, forced upon her as never yet, of an appeal, a positive confidence, from the four pairs of eyes … that seemed to speak on the part of each, of some relation to be contrived by her, a relation with herself, which would spare the individual the danger, the actual present strain, of the relation with the others. (469) If Maggie here must contrive of a new “relation” to negate the messy relations between her husband, her father, and her stepmother, then the primary “relation” that will set things right is not a rearrangement of the foursome, but a new relation “with herself.” James’s repetition of the word “relation” conveys the delicacy of extricating one relation from another at the same time the word, thrice layered over itself, obscures. And though alliances become suspect in The Golden Bowl, James indicates that they are, nonetheless, the only imagined way out. Maggie must be the maker of an alliance with herself, she must “contrive”—as in devise, as in scheme, as in plot—another liaison. In this late novel, James plays with the idea of “relations” to the extent that we see how managing these entanglements cannot be separated from consciousness, from gaining impressions, and experiencing the full activity of a waking life. From this standpoint, the encounter between Maggie and Charlotte on the terrace must be revisited, both replayed in Maggie’s mind and repeated—though oddly flipped—when Maggie pursues Charlotte outdoors. James explicitly calls attention to the replication, referencing the language of relations: “The relation, to-day, had turned itself round: Charlotte was seeing her come, through patches of lingering noon, quite as she had watched Charlotte menace her through the starless dark” (515). James brings his

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heroine back to the scene as a way to understand systematically the varied interpretations one might attribute to relation. Maggie revisits the scene in memory, then reproduces the scene, as it were, by duplicating Charlotte’s action. James’s reprise of the scene provides a hiatus, an interval during which Maggie might defer suffering—the suffering inevitably associated with consciousness in this novel. James writes: “Maggie lived over again the minutes in question—had found herself repeatedly doing so; to the degree that the whole evening hung together, to her aftersense, as a thing appointed by some occult power that had dealt with her” (501). Though the “living over” of the scene helps Maggie stave off an inevitable outcome, the language sounds oppressive and ominous; it moves Maggie into the position of victim, subject to an “occult power.” At the same time, in reproducing the scene, James twists her mental picture, reverses it, and thus positions the heroine where she might remake the outcome of the tale. Though he overturns many romance plot conventions, James ends The Golden Bowl, like many a courtship tale, placing his heroine on the threshold. The strange final scene of the novel with its less-than-satisfying embrace accentuates the ambivalence with which James holds the possibilities of closure for the marriage plot. The denouement keeps the reader confined to Maggie’s mind and shows her still questioning what marriage means or will mean for her. Wharton’s highly experimental novel The Reef similarly begins and ends with its heroine unresolved, questioning, undeniably in the middle of something, or on the brink. If James’s characters intricately construct the subtlest of subterfuges in The Golden Bowl, characters in The Reef seem unable to keep anything and everything from flaring up, breaking open, or coming undone. As Julian Barnes memorably puts it: “this novel is about being emotionally ‘unhoused,’ about having your roof blown off,”19 an observation Wharton might have appreciated given her fascination with connections between architecture and the mind. Consciousness in The Reef spirals outward, the mind trails off, a phenomenon Wharton accentuates through her extensive use of ellipses.20 Wharton purposely presents her heroine’s vision as incomplete; the narrative resolutely refuses to resolve. Despite Wharton’s distrust of modern art and literature, The Reef employs many of the hallmarks of modernist style—fragmentation, shifting point of view, radical disruption of linear flow, manipulation of chronology, an unsettled ending. As such The Reef appears more interested in achieving an opening of perspective, an opening of narrative, which brings together Wharton’s interest in revolutionizing the formal possibilities for the novel alongside her bold attention to the intricacies of domestic and social relations. Most discussions of The Reef appear unable to resist rehearsing details of Wharton’s personal life alongside, or in lieu of, engagement with the text. This displaced focus on biography ironically highlights the complexity of Wharton’s query into the private versus public aspects of personal identity, the keen investigation of which saturates her fictional world. By looking closely at moments where Wharton articulates a vision of consciousness in The Reef, this discussion uncovers a fuller and more profound understanding of her insight into knowledge, experience, and relations as they inform her remodeling of the marriage plot. The formal structure of The Reef instructs our understanding of Wharton’s exploration of consciousness and the relationship between self-knowledge and social awareness. Wharton’s wider attention first to characters on the periphery—Darrow, Owen, Sophy— makes way for the protagonist, Anna Leath’s focalized, exclusive third-person point of view. Wharton delays our fullest entry into Anna’s consciousness almost until book five, and then brings us into her mind with a long, breathless, disordered rush. Anna’s meditations coincide with Wharton’s sensitive attention to the disruption and eruption of possibilities

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for the heroine as she contemplates how marriage might shape her understanding of herself.21 Jennifer Fleissner identifies the notion of “drift” in Wharton’s novels, what she calls “the plot of indeterminate ongoingness” for her modern heroines, suggesting that Wharton understands the “social self ” for women to be a self “constantly in relation to its world.”22 Anna struggles to forge a path that coincides with, or allows for, her personal desires; she awakens to the understanding of selfhood as constant relation to others, thus her preoccupations over relationships, her sense of responsibility for their proper arrangement, forge her consciousness for the majority of the book. Even in moments of exquisite private reflection, Anna’s character remains attuned to the web of associations surrounding her. Indeed, the repeated vacillations that influence the action and delay marriage correlate with the protagonist’s attempts to arrange rightly the alliances that bind her. Wharton’s attention to Anna’s inner life in early chapters focuses conspicuously on “sensation” over and above words traditionally associated with perception or thought.23 As Anna meditates on the promise of her new life with Darrow, her response becomes visceral, a physical manifestation of her delighted awareness: She could not recall having run a yard since she had romped with Owen in his schooldays; nor did she know what impulse moved her now. She only knew that run she must, that no other motion, short of flight, would have been buoyant enough for her humour. She seemed to be keeping pace with some inward rhythm, seeking to give bodily expression to the lyric rush of her thoughts.24 Wharton aligns Anna’s “lyric rush of … thoughts” with the impulse to move her body, giving physical expression to the dash and flight of mental life. The playful depiction of Anna’s felicity, her wish to bring together “inward rhythm” and outward expression, suggests Wharton’s interest in a correspondence between the sensual pleasures of the body and the dynamic vivacity of thought. Wharton eschews ponderous imagery, creating metaphors for consciousness that tend toward fluctuations and flashes, darkness and light, current and movement. In the early stages of her love affair, for instance, Anna feels “a torrent of light in her veins” (123), a figure that fuses mental illumination and physical exhilaration. Wharton frequently reports her heroine’s “feelings … richer, deeper, more complete. For the first time everything in her, from head to foot, seemed to be feeding the same full current of sensation” (123). Wharton’s attention to “sensation” points to the relationship between sensuality and thought that shapes her conception of consciousness and culminates in her depiction of Anna’s sexual experience. Wharton will push beyond typical marriage plot endings that leave the heroine on the cusp of sexual experience; instead, she makes the complexity of sexual passion integral to the language of consciousness and the self. Wharton emphasizes, nonetheless, that sexual experience does not equal enlightenment. Elizabeth Ammons argues persuasively that The Reef exposes the fairy-tale-like misconceptions surrounding female fantasies about love and marriage.25 Anna’s dreaminess, her wistful appreciation of new love, in fact, lead her into dark passages where she finds that relationships and attachments shape self-understanding. Though Wharton spends many pages attending to the thoughts and experiences of other characters, Anna emerges as the organizing center of the narrative. Anna’s repeated wish to extricate herself from the messy interrelations between the foursome proves futile, however. Wharton shows her heroine alternately receptive and resistant to the intertwining of lives and motivations that she uncovers. Accordingly, Anna intuits, even

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before learning the relations between the primary players, “We’re all bound together in this coil” (275). At the same time, Anna notes the limits of her ability to read others, a constraint directly linked to her unwillingness to examine herself: She had never been more conscious of her inability to deal with the oblique and the torturous. She had lacked the hard teachings of experience, and an instinctive disdain for whatever was less clear and open than her own conscience had kept her from learning anything of the intricacies and contradictions of other hearts. (281–2) Anna’s resistance to seeing beyond herself or her “clear and open conscience” indicates constraint that stems from prudery. Nonetheless, registering the “oblique and torturous” course, she edges toward a more comprehensive consciousness, sensitive to the “intricacies and contradictions of other hearts.” As Anna begins to see these same “contradictions” in her own heart, she longs for, but cannot sustain, a protected self. Wharton’s exploration of consciousness unsettles traditional notions of selfhood and reveals introspection to be not a sanctuary, but a vague, obscure passage. As Anna discovers, her “flashes” of consciousness expose a menacing darkness, which amounts to self-alienation: “It was only the flash of a primitive instinct, but it lasted long enough to make her ashamed of the darknesses it lit up in her heart” (282); “she had been able for the first time to clear a way through the darkness and confusion of her thoughts” (299–300); “all within her was too dark and violent” (310). Eventually, Anna appears self-consciously drawn to darkness: “She shrank from lighting the lights, and groped her way about … She seemed immeasurably far off from every one, and most of all from herself ” (312). Scott DeShong contends that blindness and darkness in The Reef belie any possibility for epiphany and further aid the narrative’s “playing out of irresolution.”26 One might assert, alternatively, that Anna has a profusion of conflicting epiphanies such that she does not know what to make of them. At one point, Anna listens as Darrow’s explanation of his affair with Sophy unfolds; her reaction shows “light” as a destructive rather than illuminating force: Anna listened to him in speechless misery. Every word he spoke threw back a disintegrating light on their own past … She would have liked to stop her ears, to close her eyes, to shut out every sight and sound and suggestion of a world in which such things could be; and at the same time she was tormented by the desire to know more, to understand better, to feel herself less ignorant and inexpert in matters which made so much of the stuff of human experience. (294) Anna’s relationship to knowledge is deeply conflicted; when she considers personal experience—“their own past”—and how casting back the light “disintegrates” and damages her memories with Darrow, we see her petulant wish to annul, to wipe out what she knows. The passage turns, though, and her interest in a broader knowledge, “the stuff of human experience,” prevails, notwithstanding the “torment” it brings. Still, moments later, her “imagination recoil[s]‌from the vision of a sudden debasing familiarity: it seemed to her that her thoughts would never again be pure” (294). A later confrontation with Darrow brings this reflection: “in herself, she discerned for the first time instincts and desires, which, mute and unmarked, had gone to and fro in the dim passages of her mind, and now hailed each other with a cry of mutiny” (317). Wharton records these swings and vacillations, which make consciousness a dizzying prospect; Anna’s wish for “purity,” her fledgling sense of “dim passages” in her mind, shuttle her back and forth between poles of resolution.

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As Wharton approaches the conclusion of the novel, Anna’s consciousness becomes increasingly troubled; the possibilities for communion halt as language, instead of providing an opportunity for communication, alienates and bewilders. He paused, as if conscious of the futility of going on with whatever he had meant to say, and again, for a short space, they confronted each other, no longer as enemies—so it seemed to her—but as beings of different language who had forgotten the few words they had learned of each other’s speech. (295) Anna’s reading of this moment of confrontation betrays disillusionment; her thought, which intrudes upon the reporting of Darrow’s experience—“so it seemed to her”—only indicates that he remains unreachable. The exchange likewise admits the strange paradox of interconnectedness: Anna cannot extricate her own (sexual, mental, emotional) experience from Darrow’s (nor Sophy’s, nor Owen’s), yet this association does not provide intimacy so much as estrangement. Anna does not speak Darrow’s language and remains ambivalent about understanding and knowing: “Why had she forced the truth out of Darrow? If only she had held her tongue nothing would ever have been known … But she had probed, insisted, cross-examined, not rested till she had dragged the secret to the light” (322). Anna fantasizes that “holding her tongue” would repress knowledge, yet elsewhere Wharton indicates the naivete of such a vision. Neither Anna nor Darrow nor any character in The Reef seems able to control the transmission of knowledge, not simply because words remain untranslatable but also because thoughts, feelings, truths travel along a network of relations that disclose how one person’s experience spirals into another’s. Wharton writes: “The truth had come to light by the force of its irresistible pressure; and the perception gave her a startled sense of hidden powers, of a chaos of attractions and repulsions far beneath the ordered surfaces of intercourse” (353–4). Wharton depicts Anna’s consciousness as an expanding “perception” of something beyond herself, an acknowledgment of correspondences and connections that course and flow “far beneath” what she imagines as order. Anna herself, regardless of her desire for proper arrangements, emerges as a disrupter. Her exchanges with Darrow, with her family, reveal the brokenness that Wharton uncovers in all relations. One wonders to what extent Wharton may have been playing on marriage plot tropes such as the convention of delay in courtship or the device of letter writing. But letters do not helpfully turn the plot in The Reef: they remain undelivered, or they are burned before they are read. The most telling communication comes in the first words of the novel, Anna’s telegram—an inherently fragmented form of communication. When Anna and Darrow finally come together, the result of their union seems equivocal. The scene of Anna and Darrow’s sexual encounter remains unrepresented in the pages of the novel, yet Wharton, significantly, describes Anna’s arousal as a mingling of sensation and thought: “The faint warmth of her girlish love came back to her, gathering heat as it passed through her thoughts” (343). Though the language attributed to Anna gets overly sentimentalized, Wharton indicates that memory informs intimacy: thoughts have “heat.” Anna must go back in order to move forward in her liaison with Darrow; yet the space between their night together and their ensuing travel on the train causes yet another shift in her understanding of herself. Sexual release does not provide liberation or quietude; instead, Wharton’s depiction of Anna’s mind in the aftermath of physical intimacy accentuates the anxiety that permeates the novel. Arielle Zibrak contends that anxiety is what Wharton’s fiction has historically produced, and that male writers in particular, who “draw little distinction between the author’s life and her fictional world,”

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bristle over Wharton’s candid depiction of women’s lives.27 Certainly, Wharton writes her way into unrest, unafraid of the disquietude and equivocation that characterizes The Reef. Part of what feels risky about the novel comes from Wharton’s willingness to lay bare her heroine’s anguished debasement as well as her intimate look into the deep complexity of human emotion.28 Wharton’s commitment to keeping consciousness open, unfolding, in process, means not just withholding the assurance of a happy ending, but resisting any ending at all, making it impossible for her heroine to find a solution to her quandary.29 Perhaps a better way to put it is that Wharton leaves the solution up in the air, not unlike James’s preferred narrative conclusion. For as bewildering as is the finale of The Reef, an ending, Dianne Chambers notes, “edging toward incoherence,”30 Wharton’s daring decision to release Anna, to expose her to the reality of an undetermined path, insists upon another option beyond what the novel, at its close, previously promised for female leads—marriage or death. Despite what frustrations we experience in reading The Reef and The Golden Bowl, each moves us and challenges us to understand more profoundly the mind, human emotion, the complexity of relationships. These books, after all, are books about love, or rather how we think about love. Over the span of two centuries and multiple literary “movements,” Wharton and James investigate the question of consciousness, the idea of the self, the conflict between our privacy and our relations with others; they explore—in a way that corresponds with our own searching—how a person navigates the interiorized and socialized aspects of identity, and they contend with the anxiety that emerges, the irresolution each ultimately chooses to embrace. Their reworking of the marriage plot, their continued engagement with the language of consciousness, their sometimesobsessive scrutiny of human experience—all show Wharton and James anticipating new possibilities for the modern novel. To these writers we owe a deeper understanding of the culture of modernism, a penetrating sense of the elusive capacity of language, and an appreciation for the precarious balance between the social structures that invariably contain us and the unboundedness of the conscious mind.

NOTES 1 Lisa O’Connell discusses the history of the marriage plot novel, calling attention to Jane Austen’s transformation of the genre from clerical and gentlemanly fiction to a heroinecentered story punctuated by female desire and subjective reflection. See Lisa O’Connell, The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Most scholarship on the marriage plot concentrates on the eighteenth century. See Katherine Sobba Green, The Courtship Novel 1740–1820: A Feminized Genre (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1991); Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Karen Tracey, Plots and Proposals: American Women’s Fiction, 1850–90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Helen Thompson, Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Chris Roulston, Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010); Laura E. Thomason, The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth- Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014); Talia Schaffer, Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Heidi

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Giles, “Resolving the Institution of Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Courtship Novels,” Rocky Mountain Review (Spring 2012): 76–82, explores the development of the marriage plot specifically focusing on the word “resolve” and the idea of “resolution” within courtship novels. 2 Wharton calls Austen one of “the great English observers” (34) whose “delicate genius flourished on the very edge of a tidal wave of prudery” (62). Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925). 3 Joseph Boone states that “the innovative complexities” of James’s novel “work to subvert the ideological structures of institutionalized wedlock by outmaneuvering the ‘rules’ that govern the traditional marriage plot.” Joseph Boone, “Modernist Maneuverings in the Marriage Plot: Breaking Ideologies of Gender and Genre in James’s The Golden Bowl,” PMLA 101 (1986): 374–88, 382. Boone cites James’s criticism of George Eliot’s optimistic conclusions, “her inclination to compromise with the old tradition … which exacts that a serious story of manners shall close with the factitious happiness of a fairy-tale.” See Henry James, “The Novels of George Eliot,” Atlantic Monthly 18 (October 1866): 479–92. 4 For a discussion of James’s shift toward a consciousness defined by relations, see Jill Kress Karn, “William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism,” in David H. Evans (ed.), Understanding James, Understanding Modernism (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 121–40. 5 Paul Armstrong, The Phenomenology of Henry James (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 160. 6 Paul Armstrong, “Henry James and Neuroscience: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Differences,” Henry James Review 39 (2018): 133–51. 7 Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 299. All subsequent references will be to this edition of the text. 8 Donatella Izzo states that in his last women characters, James explicitly “discard[s]‌all remaining subjection to sanctioned nineteenth-century roles” creating women who “seem to experiment with them in a self-aware performative fashion.” Donatella Izzo, “Nothing Personal: Women Characters, Gender Ideology, and Literary Representation,” in Greg Zacharias (ed.), A Companion to Henry James (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 356. 9 Jonathan Freedman assesses Maggie’s strategizing in the context of economic game theory, stating the novel “might be read as a trenchant allegory of life in a disenchanted, economically driven world in which strategies and counter-strategies, moves and counter-moves, construct social and even … intimate life.” Jonathan Freedman, “What Maggie Knew: Game Theory, The Golden Bowl, and the Possibilities of Aesthetic Knowledge,” Cambridge Quarterly 37 (2008): 98–113, 99. 10 Suzie Gibson asserts: “Maggie’s love is made all the more visible and palpable through her suffering. The hesitations and deliberations of James’s late style also parallel the immense control that Maggie exerts over herself in concealing her knowledge.” Suzie Gibson, “Love’s Negative Dialectic in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl,” Philosophy and Literature 39 (2015): 1–14, 5. 11 As I have argued elsewhere, characters in The Golden Bowl understand their own minds by imagining the minds of others. See Jill M. Kress, The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton (New York: Routledge 2002). 12 Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 100. 13 Brad Evans, “Relating in Henry James (The Artwork of Network),” Henry James Review 36 (2015): 4.

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14 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 41–8. 15 Henry James, Washington Square (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 70. 16 Lily Cui, “‘So as Not to Arrive’: The Object-Theater of Late Jamesian Consciousness,” Henry James Review 36 (2016): 64–81. 17 Dorrit Cohn, “‘First Shock of Complete Perception’: The Opening Episode of The Golden Bowl, Volume 2,” Henry James Review 22 (Winter 2001): 7. 18 Cara L. Lewis, Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 21–2. 19 Julian Barnes introduces the Everyman’s Library edition; Edith Wharton, The Reef (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1996). 20 Jean Frantz Blackall, “Edith Wharton’s Art of Ellipsis,” Journal of Narrative Technique 17 (Spring 1987): 145–62. 21 Pamela Knights, “The Marriage Market,” in Laura Rattray (ed.), Edith Wharton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 223–33, shows Wharton’s keen attention to courtship practices and the marriage market. 22 Jennifer L. Fleissner, “Wharton, Marriage, and the New Woman,” in Leonard Cassuto (ed.), The Cambridge History of the American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 463. 23 Jennifer Haytock, Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (New York: Macmillan, 2008), notes Wharton’s frequent use of the words “sensation” and “impression” as she examines the nuanced relationship between The Reef and Impressionism. 24 Edith Wharton, The Reef (New York: Appleton, 1912), 99. All subsequent references will be to this edition of the text. 25 Elizabeth Ammons, “Fairy-Tale Love and The Reef,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 47 (1976): 615–28. 26 Scott DeShong, “Protagonism in The Reef: Wharton’s Novelistic Discourse,” Edith Wharton Review 8 (1991): 19. Robin Peel, “Vulgarity, Bohemia, and Edith Wharton’s The Reef,” American Literary Realism 37 (Spring 2005): 199, claims that the novel “seems to promise an epiphany,” which leads to Anna’s decision to “refuse to marry a man who dallied with the attractions of the demimonde.” 27 Arielle Zibrak, “The Woman Who Hated Sex: Undine Spragg and the Trouble with ‘Bother,’” Edith Wharton Review 32 (2016): 1–19. 28 Jessica Levine, Delicate Pursuit: Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton (New York: Routledge, 2002), 91, asserts: “in dealing with its sexual matter, The Reef begins by employing various kinds of distance, which break down as the story unfolds.” 29 Linda Wagner-Martin, “Wharton and the Romance Plot,” in Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray (eds.), The New Edith Wharton Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 195, notes that “Anna was caught in a narrative that defied the conventional romance plot: no matter what she chooses to do, loving Darrow brings problems.” 30 Dianne Chambers, Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 79. Chambers names “passion and its complicated connection to discursive power” as central to The Reef, asserting that women’s voices challenge masculine storytelling.

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Global and Cultural Contexts

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Edith Wharton and the Narratives of Travel and Tourism GARY TOTTEN

Edith Wharton’s travel narratives reflect subjects and conventions typical of the genre while introducing important innovations. This chapter discusses her book-length travel texts, including The Cruise of the Vanadis (1888), Italian Backgrounds (1905), A MotorFlight through France (1908), and In Morocco (1920).1 Like other travelers of her era and class, she valued travel for its aesthetic, educational, and leisure experiences and as a way to construct and assert one’s identity.2 Indeed, Wharton’s friends and acquaintances sometimes wrote and thought of her specifically in relation to travel. Henry James, in a letter to Wharton on October 4, 1907, employs automobile metaphors to describe her invitations to go motoring as her “silver-sounding toot” and to characterize her life in general as “the wondrous cushioned general Car of your so wondrously india-rubbertyred & deep-cushioned fortune.”3 Alfred White, then her general agent, mourned Wharton by referring to her travels, writing to Bernard Berenson after her death, “I can’t believe she’s gone forever—it seems she’s on one of her little motor trips and will come back again.”4 Yet her travel narratives also provide us with the insights of a writer who—with knowledge of and interests in history, art, and modern mobility—reshaped approaches to travel writing and tourism. Even while she celebrates the joy of sightseeing, her aesthetic sensibility and interest in sights located off the beaten tourist track dominate her discussion of local culture, emphasizing her ability to appreciate both the cultural value of serious travel and the pleasures of tourism—one of her important contributions to the genre.5 We should not overlook Wharton’s narration of her mobility as a woman. Laura Rattray rightfully notes, referring to A Motor-Flight through France, that Wharton did not explicitly “identify as a woman traveller” or present her French travels as “gendered.”6 Still, we must attend to the ways in which, in Sidonie Smith’s terms, Wharton’s travel experiences and narratives “define the meaning of a particular mode of motion in new and different ways and, in doing so, disentangle travel from its masculine logic.” Regardless of the identities travel writers emphasize, attending to the gendered implications of women’s travel is important critical work that travel-writing scholars have been doing for some time, and to which Wharton scholars must also turn to grasp the significance of Wharton’s

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travel texts. Notwithstanding the importance of Wharton’s class and racial privilege to our interpretation of her travel narratives, we must also ask how her travel narratives disrupt and challenge representations of femininity as “sedentary, degrading, and constraining” and of women’s travel as passive or “timid.”7 These narratives underscore tensions between imperialist and cosmopolitan viewpoints; track cultural shifts related to women’s negotiation of modernity, including travel technologies and tourist culture; and display the diverse range of women’s mobility and expertise. Wharton’s representation of mobility shifted over the course of her travel writing, from a focus on picturesque and touristic sights, such as in The Cruise of the Vanadis and Italian Backgrounds, to complex discussions of the relationship between history and tourism in A Motor-Flight through France. With In Morocco, she additionally addressed issues of gender, race, and culture. Her cultural observations are not without complications, however, and although we admire her sharp critiques of gender and other cultural dynamics, we must also acknowledge how she embraces imperialistic and stereotypical notions in her travel narratives. Ultimately, such complications enrich the complexity and impact of these texts and emphasize her rich and nuanced contributions as a woman traveler and travel writer. Wharton highlights her love of travel from an early age in her autobiography A Backward Glance (1934), remarking that “as the offspring of born travelers, I was expected, even in infancy, to know how to travel,” and she claims that she returns from a “wild early pilgrimage” to Spain with “an incurable passion for the road.”8 Significantly, Wharton also registers the limitations on her travel as a young, single woman, noting that once married to Edward “Teddy” Wharton, her mobility would be less restricted, and “thenceforth my thirst for travel was to be gratified.” However, Wharton takes the lead in her and Teddy’s journeys, and she finds satisfaction in the fact that “he soon caught my love of the road.”9 Wharton describes the pleasures of the road in particularly effusive language in A Backward Glance, where she recounts her first automobile experience in 1903, a one-hundred-mile round trip from Rome to Caprarola with her friend, George Meyer, American ambassador to Italy. Wharton sat beside Meyer in the upper seat of the open car with Teddy seated by the chauffeur. Wharton’s delight in the unexpected speed (they are back in Rome in time for dinner) and physical experience “over humps and bumps, through ditches and across gutters” is obvious. “I swore then and there that as soon as I could make money enough I would buy a motor,” she proclaims, and she bought a Panhard-Levassor automobile in 1904.10 Her description of this journey in Italian Backgrounds has similar references to the car’s speed, as “once free of the gates, our motor started on its steady rush along the white highway” (137), and she describes the road as something “luring” them on and “racing ahead … the motor pant[ing] after it like a pack on the trail” (138). The roads she travels possess personalities related to speed, and her later drive from Viterbo to Montefiascone is more “prosaic” and better “travelled at a sober pace, in a Viterban posting-chaise, behind two plodding horses” in contrast to “the great bursts of splendor which mark the way from Rome to Caprarola” (142). As I have noted elsewhere, Wharton’s interest in speed predates Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which celebrates modernity and the machine while rejecting the past and tradition.11 Wharton celebrates the car’s speed but does not turn her back on history or tradition as the Futurists do, and her representations of the automobile do not replicate the Futurist’s fascist, antifeminist, and anti-intellectual impulses. The experience of speed in Wharton’s travel narratives is often associated with the surprise of discovery as she comes upon structures and views, especially off the beaten tourist track. For Wharton, the car represents both

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a time machine, insofar as it allows her access to history, and a magic carpet to exotic locales, as she expresses in In Morocco. Yet even the car’s “magical” properties are no match for mechanical trouble in the desert near El-Ksar, where she notes, “If one loses one’s way in Morocco, civilization vanishes as though it were a magic carpet rolled up by a Djinn” (13–14). After a lengthy delay, she relishes the suggestion of a visit to Moulay Idriss, which may not have materialized but for the change in plans precipitated by the car being stuck in the sand (47), an intriguing paradox that counters the notion of speed with an experience of immobility that enhances the travel experience. The escapist qualities of Wharton’s Moroccan travel book are sometimes compromised by its political contexts. Wharton dedicates In Morocco to General Hubert Lyautey, resident-general of France in Morocco, and his wife, Madame Lyautey. They are Wharton’s guides, granting her access to places that ordinary tourists could not enter, such as the Sultan’s harem in Rabat, allowing her to provide readers a unique view of Morocco during an important period of transition (viii) and before improved roads bring more tourists (ix). However, when she writes the preface for the second edition in 1927, she admires the fine system of roads that the French colonial powers have introduced into “this guidebook-less and almost roadless empire” but which have not diminished “the magic and mystery of forbidden days” or “mar[red] [its] ancient wonder.”12 As Frederick Wegener notes, Wharton would have associated an improved highway system with imperialist expansion, given her interest in early-twentieth-century treatises on the subject, such as Archibald Coolidge’s The United States as World Power (1908) or Morton Fullerton’s reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine in Problems of Power (1913).13 Sarah Bird Wright ascribes Wharton’s point of view in this second preface to her desire to vindicate the French protectorate in managing to “save Morocco from itself,”14 and Wharton devotes a chapter to General Lyautey’s act of saving Morocco from cultural and physical destruction. As Wegener notes, writing about Morocco and other North African countries was important during the early twentieth century as a way to introduce the French to the idea of the benefits of annexing Northern Africa to the British Empire.15 At the end of In Morocco, Wharton lists some of the books she consulted for her travel narrative, including titles by Augustin Bernard, M. Louis Chatelain, and Andre Chevrillon, whose Moroccan travel writing she referred to as “exceptionally sensitive”16 in A Backward Glance, suggesting her validation of the French protectorate’s aims.17 While Wharton emphasizes her unique role in making Morocco visible to Western readers, she does so without some of the cultural awareness that later writers demonstrate.18 She notes in her preface to the first edition of In Morocco that although more of Morocco’s past will be visible in the coming years due to excavation and exploration (ix), “the strange survival of medieval life … will gradually disappear” (x). Yet in her second edition preface, Morocco’s medieval mystery remains intact: “To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines” (16; original emphasis); Wharton’s book and perspective seem intended as just such an illuminated manuscript, and in these prefaces and the text itself, she implies that making Moroccan art, architecture, and history visible is her chief aim rather than illuminating current cultural issues. Wharton’s narration of automobile travel in particular is distinctive for its relationship to the historical contexts of travel. Beginning with Motor-Flight through In Morocco, Wharton demonstrates how automobile travel allows travelers a “more intimate relation with history”19—via access to art, architecture, and various historical sites—and reflects Smith’s contentions that women travelers redefine masculinist modes of travel, “discover

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elasticities of and in motion … and reimagine [their] relationship to technology and rethink its history, even as it remakes [them].” Even as the car provides a travel experience that might allow one to pass by or ignore certain places and experiences, it is also, as Smith argues, a less touristic form of travel than the train, which, due to rigid schedules and routes is less spontaneous.20 Wharton’s experience of traveling by car allows her to imagine new relationships between history and technology, and thus to highlight new forms of traveling experiences and identities for women.21 Wharton’s Mediterranean cruise highlights her early interaction with travel technologies—in this case, the yacht. This trip after her marriage to Teddy came about because of her offhand remark to her friend James Van Alen, while in Italy, that she would love to cruise the Mediterranean. Despite the exorbitant expense and outcry from both their families (disapproving of the financial risk and the flaunting of domestic conventions and conservatism expected of newly married couples of their class), they embarked on their journey with Van Alen and a crew of sixteen aboard the chartered yacht the Vanadis to explore the Aegean and its seldom visited islands, which Wharton describes as “the greatest step forward in my making.”22 Similar to her travel by car, Wharton’s class privilege is on full display here, as access to yachts, automobiles, and helmsmen and chauffeurs able to sail or drive them marks her travel as an exclusionary experience. Yet we might also view Wharton, in Hermione Lee’s terms, as “no ordinary American tourist … She may have been fussy and grand, but she was game for anything,”23 always eager to leave the well-worn paths of the tourist guidebooks, as her Aegean cruise bears out. The Cruise of the Vanadis is a journal seemingly reserved for Wharton’s own impressions and not, as with later published travel narratives, to guide and instruct her readers. This is apparent when she notes that in writing of the Cathedral of Monreale in Palermo as lacking “depth and variety of colour,” she recognizes she is “running counter to the opinion of the highest authorities; but this Journal is written not to record other people’s opinions, but to note as exactly as possible the impressions which I myself received” (46). Both her assertion of her own impressions, even if they contradict the “highest authorities,”24 and her emphasis here and elsewhere about her knowledge of architecture and other aspects of Italian culture establish her expertise, an important challenge to gender ideologies in her travel writing that I discuss below. Wharton’s impressions frequently dwell on the picturesque nature of the places and people of the Aegean, and she is disappointed when the sights do not meet her expectations. She notes at Syra, for example, that its mercantile activity makes it “very uninteresting to the traveler who has hoped in sailing Eastward to leave the practicalities of life behind” (88). It is clear early in the journal that scenes of cultural difference represent one such departure from “practicalities” for Wharton. As their journey begins and they are making their way through the custom house and the mud of the landing, she notes that “we were surrounded by the first Arabs we had ever seen—startlingly picturesque in the flashes of lantern-light, with their white burnouses and long white cloaks” (1–2). She focuses on these and similar figures throughout the trip, consistently fascinated by the “pageantry of … Eastern streetscene[s]‌” (5). Later, walking into an Arab quarter in Tunis, she writes that one “leaves behind in a moment the recent civilization” that has resulted in a new hotel and boulevard (built by the French protectorate), and “nothing can be conceived more purely Oriental than the Bazaars of Tunis,” an exotic spectacle of “picturesque groups crouched” in doorways and a cavalcade of “veiled women shuffling to and fro, the negroes, the dogs, the donkey, the coffee-shops” (13). Wharton claims that as “hard as it is to write of these things vividly, it is harder still to forget a first sight of the bazaars of

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Tunis” (14), and later, of Taormina in Sicily, she similarly writes that “no words of mine can give any idea of the beauty of it all” (39), an intriguing reflection on the relationship between writing and seeing that provides a template for understanding her travel writing in general. In these comments, Wharton reveals her belief that aesthetic judgment and appreciation require a discerning eye—of the connoisseur, as Wright suggests—or, as she later notes in French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), the “seeing eye” of the trained observer who possesses good taste.25 Throughout her travel narratives, she defines such a person as one who seeks out the aesthetic and cultural riches that others might overlook. Her ability to fully experience and value this beauty and difference is hampered by her assertion of her Western perspective and attraction to the picturesque nature of foreign Others. Similar to her travels in Morocco almost thirty years later, she views the inhabitants of the Aegean islands through the lens of European art (e.g., the Jewesses of Tunis in terms of pictures of Judith or Herodias in The Cruise of the Vanadis [8]‌or women in a harem in Rabat in terms of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s shepherdess in In Morocco [174]). (These comparisons are more culturally apt in Italian Backgrounds, where she views the Italian landscape through the lens of European art, the forests, rivers, and meadows reminding her of the work of Claude, Giorgione, or Bonifazio [27].)26 Her contrast of civilized and “Oriental” is particularly pronounced in the art references in Cruise of the Vanadis, and this same contrast informs her views of places such as Smyrna, where she concludes that nothing is “more curious than the mixture of Orientalism and European civilization which meets one at every turn … I could not get used to seeing the tramways blocked by trains of loaded camels, the voitures-de-place filled with veiled Turkish women, and the savage-looking Turks and Albanians with weapons in their belts, side by side with fashionably-dressed Levantines and Europeans” (155; emphasis added). That she is possibly unsettled by this unfamiliar cosmopolitan scene, which she cannot “get used to seeing,” is further implied when she is informed of the high rate of murder in the city; “the Turks said they [the murderers] were Greeks,” she writes, “but in a cosmopolitan place like Smyrna it seems more likely that they were made up of the dregs of different nations” (157). Wharton uses the word “cosmopolitan” in The Cruise of the Vanadis to refer to a varied group (earlier in the trip, in Tunis, she also notices a “cosmopolitan crowd” near a railway station [11]), and this somewhat superficial use of the term gestures toward her complicated relationship with a broader concept of cosmopolitanism that challenges national allegiances and imagines what it means to be a citizen of the world. We might view Wharton’s cultural observations as, in Nancy Bentley’s words, demonstrating “neither blind nostalgia nor a consistent progressivism.” Bentley contends that Wharton’s “sophisticated sense of the international is … a cover or alibi for her inattention to the global” and the negative effects of global travel on the colonized.27 Michael Nowlin characterizes her cosmopolitanism as “hazy,” embracing both elitist and liberal notions about power and “critical self-consciousness.”28 As Bruce Robbins and Kwame Anthony Appiah remind us, pure forms of culture or cosmopolitanism are idealistic, and most individuals experience various forms “of overlapping allegiances.”29 As I have argued elsewhere, Wharton’s cosmopolitan vision is “diverse, complex, and sometimes problematic … and in her work and life she engages in a complicated series of negotiations in regard to the allegiances—to institutions, populations, and cultural ideals—that are both required and rejected by cosmopolitanism.”30 While Wharton might possess an awareness of these complications, evident in novels such as The Age of Innocence (1920) or The Buccaneers (1938), she remains dedicated to various “certainties,” such as her reliance on the imagery of European art as a way to understand

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Eastern culture or strict demarcations between European and “Oriental” cultures.31 Relatedly, her privileging of history throughout her travel narratives also problematizes a truly cosmopolitan perspective. We see this in Wharton’s emphasis on Morocco’s rich but static past, with little specific comment on the contemporary moment and what modernization and tourism might mean for the country. Furthermore, as I noted earlier, her concern about the romance of Morocco that will be lost through modernization exists in an unusual tension with her commendation of the colonial government’s preservation of Morocco’s dilapidated buildings. This same tension between historical and contemporary realities informs her approach to harems, which, as a woman, Wharton is uniquely able to visit. In these moments, similar to the court ceremonies, “to which so few foreigners have had access,” and in which she feels that “the hidden sumptuousness of the native life is revealed” (IM 162), Wharton witnesses living Moroccan culture. Yet her view of such life remains detached as she dwells on the country’s past, mystery, and exotic nature. At Rabat, the harem women remain “fairy-tale figure[s]‌” (173), and the Sultan is a symbol of “the strange soul of Islam” (169) and the contradictions between “flux and … stability,” barbarity and sensuality, “exquisite workmanship,” and “immediate neglect … of the thing once made” (157) in North African culture. These perspectives prevent her from achieving the cultural intimacy that would represent a cosmopolitan viewpoint, a curious stance for a writer and traveler who in Italian Backgrounds criticizes the view that “in Rome for centuries it has been the fashion to look only on a city which has almost disappeared, and to close the eyes to one which is still alive and actual” (181). Despite these assertions, Wharton does not recognize the ways in which she closes her eyes to Morocco. Wharton’s emphasis on the traveler’s visual sense coincides in important ways with her views about tourist culture and guidebooks. Even as a young woman, Wharton is aware of tourists and their impact on the travel experience. In an April 14,1886, letter to Anna Bahlmann, written while on her yearly spring travels to Italy with Teddy, and just one year after their marriage, she shares a disappointing day at the Sistine Chapel “crowded with a horde of Baedeker-bearing tourists, all reading aloud little sentences to each other ‘sotte voce.’ ” More than just an interesting reference to tourists in her early correspondence, the episode reflects her sensitivity to the aesthetic experiences of travel and her developing artistic taste and erudition regarding art and architecture (she is also disappointed that the chapel has been “stripped of everything churchlike”),32 and thus her annoyance at the tourist intrusion in this experience. Her obvious disdain for the tourist horde also underscores her relationship to tourist guidebooks and her developing authority about the architecture and art that she visits on her travels. In In Morocco, she writes that “to land in a country without a guide-book, is a sensation to rouse the hunger of the repletest sight-seer” (3; original emphasis). She finds parallels between the country’s land and architecture, claiming that the “bending of passages, so characteristic a device of the Moroccan builder, is like an architectural expression of the tortuous secret soul of the land” (17), an apt analogy for the Moroccan guidebook that Wharton sees herself as creating as she leads readers deep into the labyrinths and interiors of Morocco’s built and cultural environments. In a similar vein, but through an art historical lens, “The foreground is conventional” (173), Wharton writes in Italian Backgrounds, and it is only in the background [of early Italian Renaissance art] that the artist finds himself free to express his personality … One must look past and beyond the central figures …

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Relegated to the middle distance, and reduced to insignificant size, is the real picture, the picture which had its birth in the artist’s brain and reflects his impression of the life about him. (174) So it is with Italy itself. The country is divided into a foreground and background. “The foreground,” Wharton insists, “is the property of the guide-book and of its product, the mechanical sight-seer; the background, that of the dawdler, the dreamer and the serious student of Italy. This distinction does not imply any depreciation of the foreground. It must be known thoroughly before the middle distance can be enjoyed: there is no short cut to an intimacy with Italy” (177). Each city, too, has sights available to these various kinds of travelers: “its premier plan asterisked for the hasty traveler, its middle distance for the ‘happy few’ who remain more than three days, and its boundless horizon for the idler who refuses to measure art by time” (179). She bemoans the ways in which the art and architecture of Italy has become conventionalized and “stiffened into symbols” in museums and through their fame (177). “To enjoy them, one must let in on them the open air of an observation detached from tradition. Since they cannot be evaded they must be deconventionalized: and to effect this they must be considered in relation to the life of which they are merely the ornamental façade” (177–8). Rattray suggests that Wharton’s call to deconventionalize amounts to a kind of modernist manifesto,33 yet, at the same time, the notion of an “open air of observation detached from tradition” also coincides with Wharton’s remarks at various moments in her travel narratives that she prefers to allow her own observations to dominate while eschewing the routes and recommendations of travel guidebooks. Wharton notes that guidebooks can both help and hinder the traveler in their understanding of history and place, and sometimes she is more inclined to rely on other reading, including literature, to guide her travels. In Italian Backgrounds, Wharton claims that the “Mediterranean Hand book” proves untrustworthy on several occasions (87), and on the approach to Santorin, she writes she is “unprepared for the beauty of the approach, for the ‘Mediterranean Handbook’ merely gives a few dry statistics about the volcanic origin of the island, and I know of no book of travel in which it is mentioned.” She argues that “lack of books about this part of the world” is actually a benefit and “lends an undeniable zest to travelling and makes the approach to each island as thrilling as a discovery” (91). Some of Wharton’s most memorable travel experiences occur when she strikes out on her own and receives no, or bad, travel advice. For example, near the end of her Aegean cruise, a treacherous road and poor advice about how long it will take to travel to Cettinje, the capital of Montenegro, lead to some hair-raising moments (CV 219). Yet she is rewarded with some of the “wildest scenes I have ever beheld” (223) and “magnificent beyond words” (231). Sometimes, she must actively seek out these scenes, and in Malta, she notes that the Strada Reale “is provokingly British and modern” and “one has to wander into the side streets for picturesque effects” (19), suggesting a differentiation between the tourist or mere sightseer and the more serious traveler (the “dawdler” or “idler” she identifies in Italian Backgrounds). Even as she enjoys these stunning scenes unscripted by travel discourse, she also acknowledges how guidebooks can provide the impetus for exciting discoveries. For example, in Italian Backgrounds, she consults “the invaluable guide-book of GsellFels” to seek out a church. The guidebook offers only a “vague allusion,” though, so she must make inquiries of the locals who lead her along the way. Similar to moments in Motor-Flight, Wharton reports that they “suddenly” come upon this church (IB 29),

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and the suddenness of such discoveries is both physical and emotional, for she observes that while “the dilletante will always allow for the heightening of emotion that attends any unexpected artistic ‘find’; … the Via Crucis of Cerveno remains in my memory as among the best examples of its kind” (30). Later that evening, in Lovere, made famous by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the eighteenth-century English poet and woman of letters, Wharton contemplates these scenes as fodder for her travel narrative. She considers how Lady Montagu takes an unassuming scene or town and, with the help of its “surroundings,” provides a kind of “substructure of one of those Turneresque visions which, in Italy, are perpetually intruding between the most conscientious traveler and his actual surroundings.” It is “almost impossible to see Italy steadily and see it whole,” Wharton insists, because “the onset of impressions and memories is at times so overwhelming that observation is lost in mere sensation.” Although describing the work of Lady Montagu, Wharton could just as easily be describing her own travel writing and its similarly vivid and picturesque scenes often located within the ordinary. Wharton again refers here to the difficult relationship between seeing and writing (compounded by her feeling of inadequacy in relation to Lady Montagu): “I hesitate to record my impressions of the scene” (33), she admits, because “there is no telling, in such cases, how much the eye receives and how much it contributes; and if ever the boundaries between fact and fancy waver, it may well be under the spell of the Italian midsummer madness” (35). The influence of such “madness” allows Wharton to not only craft a particular kind of narrative but also act as a tourist. While she is critical of tourists and their behavior, on occasion, she also counts herself as one of them. She notes of their flight to Splügen to avoid the August heat of Italy that they had enjoyed “all the midsummer tourist can hope for—solitude, cool air and fine scenery” (17). As groups of tourists arrive in the village on diligences from Italy, Wharton relates how, despite their disdain for these tourists who choose to travel to Italy in the heat of the summer, they, too, begin to feel the itch to be in Italy. “We tried to quell the rising madness by interrogating the travelers,” she writes. “Was it very hot on the lakes and in Milan? ‘Terribly!’ they answered, and mopped their brows. ‘Unimaginative idiots!’ we grumbled.” But they also think of the “empty hotels and railway carriages, the absence of tourists and Baedekers!” (19), and before long they are on their way to explore the Bergamasque Alps in Italy. Wharton tells us that the name of the Alps attracts her and that she has “often journeyed thus in pursuit of a name, and [has] seldom been unrewarded”—even the lettering on the maps she is using and the names of the villages are enticing (22). Yet the difference between the tourist and the more serious traveler remains important in a town such as Tirano, which “hold[s]‌in reserve for the observant eye a treasure of quiet impressions” while “the hurried sight-seer may discover only dull streets and featureless housefronts” (25). Wharton appreciates the accumulation of small but significant details in the houses, churches, gardens, and squares and concludes that it is in places such as Tirano, “where there are no salient beauties to fix the eye, that one appreciates the value of these details, that one realizes what may be called the negative strength of the Italian artistic sense” (26). The “Italian midsummer madness” (35) has, after all, worked its magic on Wharton and her fellow travelers, for in the end, they realize that they have “not seen the Bergamasque Alps after all” (38). The side trips and less-travelled paths have distracted them from their initial goal despite Wharton’s touristic attraction to names and fonts on maps. When they confirm with the help of a map that they have not seen the Alps, she observes that “our pleasure had certainly been enhanced by our delusion; and we remembered with fresh admiration Goethe’s profound saying—a saying which Italy inspired—O, wie beliget uns Menschen

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ein falscher Befriff!” (38), which translates to “Oh, how we humans are animated by a misconception!” Indeed, the misconceptions of Wharton’s touristic travel methods have allowed for experiences surpassing the possibilities that the names might have offered. Her overall impression of small towns in Italy is that their “inexhaustible richness … is a surprise to the most experienced traveler” (124). She is drawn to these sights, which she is at times only able to experience, paradoxically, because of her tourist impulses. At the beginning of all of her published travel narratives discussed here, Wharton announces the pleasures and excitement of travel, a feature that further illuminates the relationship between the serious traveler and the sightseeing tourist. In Italian Backgrounds, her first sentence claims that “one of the chief pleasures of travel” is the “mind curious in contrasts” (3), both of landscape and culture. Wharton’s tendency to provide narrative with which to situate her travel experiences documents these pleasures. For example, in the first few pages of Italian Backgrounds, she provides a possible backstory for the people occupying the “rude old centaur-like houses” in a Swiss village on the border with Italy—these “are the houses of people conscious of Italy, who have transplanted to their bleak heights, either from poverty or invention, or an impulse as sentimental as our modern habit of ‘collecting,’ the thick walls, the small windows, the jutting eaves of dwellings designed under a sultry sky” (4). Sometimes, she provides a narrative of what she sees passing in front of her, such as her description of how Splügen’s town square comes alive in the evening as colorful characters assemble. These descriptions can cover several pages, and this level of detail and type of narrative structure forges continuities between people, architecture, and landscape in ways that suggest an engagement with geography and culture that go beyond the surface level of tourist experience. Indeed, soon after this lengthy description, Wharton observes that in the height of the season, it is difficult to “light on a nook neglected by the tourist; but at Splügen he still sweeps by in a cloud of diligence dust, or pauses only to gulp a flask of Paradiso and a rosy trout from the Suretta lakes.” Thus, “one’s enjoyment of the place is … enhanced by the pleasing spectacle of the misguided hundreds who pass it by, and from the vantage of the solitary meadows above the village, one may watch the throngs descending … with something of the satisfaction that mediaeval schoolmen believed to be the portion of angels looking down upon the damned” (5). Here, Wharton places herself in the position of the traveler who is able to enjoy the true advantages of a locale and remain above the madding crowd. Of course, Wharton herself is, ironically, engaged in the very technologies—automobile travel, tourism, and travel writing—that allow tourists access to hidden or hard to reach sights. Wharton’s developing distinctions between tourists and travelers also coincide with her discussions of historic restoration in A Motor-Flight through France and In Morocco— namely, her opposition to the restoration of ancient structures, especially when such restoration results in an aesthetically inferior result. Wharton’s references to the evidence of technological advancement related to tourism, such as roads and railways in Morocco and France, suggest her preference for travel experiences prior to mass tourism. Wharton’s concern about restoration and modern improvement and their infringement on history is most pronounced in A Motor-Flight through France. As just some examples of many, Wharton observes that the “intimate aspect” of the past is hidden behind “ugly … railway embankments” (1–2), that the “poetry” of old gothic towns such as Rouen are overtaken by industrial and commercial changes (18), and that the ruins of old structures are removed to build roadways, “eager to efface all traces of its long crowded past” (137). She also notes such affronts to beauty in Italian Backgrounds in Varallo’s “modern improvement,”

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after which one “would hardly guess that it was once the most picturesque town in North Italy” (54). Yet successful renovation, such as at Vatopedi on Mount Athos, which are “made scrupulously like the original,” allow one to “admire the neatness and brightness of this great group of buildings without feeling that it involves the loss of anything that might have been better worth seeing” (CV 179). In Morocco, too, she is glad for colonial restoration efforts when they seem to preserve buildings that the natives (she imagines) would otherwise allow to fall into ruin. Given her seemingly unprecedented access to such sites, historical and renovated, any restrictions to her mobility because of her gender stand out in the narratives. In an episode at Zante in The Cruise of the Vanadis, Wharton and her companions visit a Greek church with the English banker Mr. Crowe. It is Wharton’s first time inside such a church, and the detail with which she describes its layout suggests that she is able to move about freely, even though she also writes that the gallery at the opposite end is “shut off by an iron grating” and “reserved for the women, the men being alone allowed to enter the body of the church” (68). At Mount Athos, women are not allowed ashore, so here she dwells on the history, legends, and other local information. When the men go ashore, she takes the launch on a “voyage of discovery, determined to go as near the forbidden shores as I could” (175). Rough seas prevent her from attaining the photographs she hopes for, but she comes so close to shore that a group of monks “clambered hurriedly down the hill to prevent my landing, and with their shocks of black hair and long woolen robes flying behind them they were a wild enough looking set to frighten any intruder away” (176). Wharton notes that Teddy and Van Alen are somewhat disappointed by their experience on shore, but she experiences scenes of great beauty as she sails around the island, which she describes in effusive detail. When the men do have a more positive experience at a monastery, she is left to describe it secondhand (181). Wharton makes up for these few moments in which her mobility is restricted with many more scenes in which she asserts her expertise, sometimes to discuss incorrectly categorized art and architecture. In Lindos, she writes about a church “not described in any book of travel that I have read, and is merely mentioned by Newton,” who calls it Byzantine (CV 124–5). She notes that to call the church Byzantine “is absurd,” and she provides an explanation of what would constitute such a style (126). Near the end of the voyage, she similarly notes of the Palace of Diocleatian in Spalato that Murray’s dates might be a mistake due to the Romanesque features of the building (243). One of the most distinctive features of Italian Backgrounds is Wharton’s identification of a group of terra-cotta statues at San Vivaldo as the work of an earlier period and artist than what was previously determined. This amazing discovery is represented by Wharton in the contexts of tourist culture and her assertion of expertise. Wharton begins her chapter about the discovery, “A Tuscan Shrine,” with the comment that “one of the rarest and most delicate pleasures of the continental tourist is to circumvent the compiler of his guide-book,” who so thoroughly anticipates the routes of the traveler that one is hard-pressed to find any untrammeled ground. The only recourse, she asserts, “lies in approaching the places he describes by a route which he has not taken” (85) and to find “a few miles unmeasured by the guide-book” (86). Indeed, it is “in the intervals between such systematized study of the past, in the parentheses of travel, that one obtains those more intimate glimpses which help to compose the image of each city, to preserve its personality in the traveller’s mind” (170). With such an agenda, she sets off for San Vivaldo, deliberately avoiding routes suggested by the guidebooks. She describes the journey as containing “the thrill of explorers sighting a new continent” (88). Perhaps because they are traveling a more

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unfamiliar route, and one not pre-charted by a guidebook, she again emphasizes the sudden nature of their arrival at San Vivaldo and underscores the sense of discovery, the lane they are on “making a sudden twist” and “descend[ing] abruptly between mossy banks and [bringing] us out on a grass-plot before a rectangular monastic building”—San Vivaldo (91). Wharton describes in great detail the features of San Vivaldo’s terra-cottas, and other works she has seen, that lead her to conclude that they are earlier works than previously determined. Her careful explanation of her observations and reasoning leads to her surprised conclusion that “a remarkable example of late quattro-cento art had remained undiscovered, within a few hours’ journey from Florence, for nearly four hundred years” (103). She notes that “to the infrequent sight-seers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there would be nothing surprising” in the incorrect attribution lasting for centuries. The seclusion of San Vivaldo would only have made it more possible for the mistake to go unnoticed, and furthermore, “the perception of differences in style is a recently-developed faculty” (104). These and other factors allow Wharton “the rare sensation of an artistic discovery made in the heart of the most carefully-explored artistic hunting-ground of Europe” (105). While she confirms her discovery by having the terra-cottas photographed and sent to a Professor Ridolfi, this is in some ways a mere afterthought to her own assertion of expertise.34 This discovery reminds us of many other moments in her travel narratives that, while not necessarily documenting such auspicious finds, nonetheless, through her excruciatingly detailed descriptions of art, architecture, and history, emphasize Wharton’s impressive and wide-ranging expertise. In her representation of the pleasures of both the tourist and serious traveler, the unique travel experiences of women, and the authority and expertise of the woman travel writer, Wharton contributes to a changing landscape of travel writing in the early twentieth century. Her impressive body of travel writing not only sheds light on her personal feelings about and experiences of travel but also provides significant cultural and critical insights into her life, work, and times. When she observes that her cruise on the Vanadis was one of only two times in her life that she was “able to put all practical cares out of my mind for months,”35 and then proclaims at the end of the journey that it was, “from first to last … a success” (CV 252), it is clear that travel improves her quality and enjoyment of life. Beyond this personal impact, Wharton’s insistence that a satisfying travel experience combines the joys of the tourist and the satisfactions found off the beaten track for the serious traveler allows her to make a unique and lasting contribution to the genre of travel writing, even as her texts introduce complications related to gender, race, and class. Scholars must continue to examine Wharton’s travel writing if we are to more fully understand and appreciate the complexity and cultural contours of her work.

NOTES 1 The Cruise of the Vanadis (1888; Courtesy, Hyères Public Library, Heritage Collections, Hyères [Var, France], MS 59) is the diary of Wharton’s 1888 Aegean cruise, published posthumously in 1992; Italian Backgrounds (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905) contains travel essays published between 1895 and 1903; A Motor-Flight through France, ed. Mary Suzanne Schriber (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, [1908] 1991), details Wharton’s automobile trips by car through France between 1906 and 1908; and In Morocco (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920) recounts her trip to Morocco in

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the fall of 1917; subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text as CV, IB, MF, and IM, respectively. Although some scholars categorize additional works as travel writing, such as Italian Villas and Their Gardens (New York: Century, 1904), Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), or French Ways and Their Meaning (New York: Appleton, 1919)—texts that could also be viewed as nonfiction writing on a variety of subjects—I focus on the specific works listed above per the decision reached in consultation with the general series editors of Oxford University Press’s The Complete Works of Edith Wharton about the contents of the volume I am editing on Wharton’s travel writing. On defining the genre of the travel narrative, some critics, such as Jan Borm, view it as a hybrid or “generic in-betweener.” Jan Borm, “Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology,” in Glen Hooper and Tim Youngs (eds.), Perspectives on Travel Writing (London: Ashgate, 2004), 13; Jan Borm, “‘In-Betweeners?’—On the Travel Book and Ethnographies,” Studies in Travel Writing 4, no. 1 (2000): 78. 2 James Buzard notes that the nineteenth-century grand tour was meant to enhance one’s education and attain “historical consciousness and artistic taste” (“The Grand Tour and After [1660–1840],” in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs [eds.], The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 40). William W. Stowe also observes of nineteenth-century American travelers to Europe that they used travel to “construct and claim” an identity “defined by gender, class, race, and nationality” (Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994], xi). 3 Henry James, Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900–1915, ed. Lyall H. Powers (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 75. 4 Alfred White, qtd. in Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life (New York: Abrams, 1994), 282. 5 Wharton’s astute travel observations lead critics such as Sarah Bird Wright to designate her travel as a form of connoisseurship. See Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing: The Making of a Connoisseur (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), for a discussion of the influence of Wharton’s aesthetic taste on her travel experiences and writing. 6 Laura Rattray, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 103. 7 Sidonie Smith, Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 28, 175. 8 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Simon and Schuster, [1934] 1998), 28, 31. 9 Ibid., 90, 96. 10 Ibid., 137; Mary Suzanne Schriber, Introduction, in A Motor-Flight through France, by Edith Wharton, xxii. 11 Gary Totten, “The Dialectic of History and Technology in Wharton’s A Motor-Flight through France,” Studies in Travel Writing 17, no. 2 (2013): 133–4. 12 Edith Wharton, Preface, in In Morocco (London: Century, 1927), 15, 16. 13 Frederick Wegener, “‘Rabid Imperialist’: Edith Wharton and the Obligations of Empire in Modern American Fiction,” American Literature 72 (December 2000): 785–6. 14 Wright, Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing, 105. 15 Wegener, “Rabid Imperialist,” 791. 16 Wharton, Backward Glance, 287–8. 17 See also Spencer D. Segalia, “Re-inventing Colonialism: Race and Gender in Edith Wharton’s In Morocco,” Edith Wharton Review 17, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 22–30, who argues that a new form of colonial perspective emerges in In Morocco, informed by Lyautey’s theories of

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colonization, Orientalist discourse, Euro-American racial discourse, and Wharton’s views on women’s roles. 18 For example, George Orwell writes in his 1939 essay “Marrakech” about the dehumanizing effects of colonialism in Morocco, which renders the native invisible (“Marrakech” [1939], in George Orwell: A Collection of Essays [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954], 187, 190, 192). 19 Totten, “Dialectic,” 143. 20 Smith, Moving Lives, 28, 179. 21 Totten, “Dialectic,” 143. 22 Wharton, Backward Glance, 96, 97, 98. 23 Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 84. 24 Wharton’s contradiction of authorities here reminds us of her enthusiasm in Italian Backgrounds for Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who were, in Emily J. Orlando’s words, “Italian artists who otherwise had been disregarded” by experts. Emily J. Orlando, “‘One Long Vision of Beauty’: Edith Wharton and Italian Visual Culture,” Edith Wharton Review 36, no. 1 (2020): 30. 25 Edith Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning (New York: D. Appleton, 1919), 51. 26 For discussion of the relationship between art, women, and the natural world in Wharton’s works, see Gary Totten, “Women, Art, and the Natural World in Edith Wharton’s Works,” in Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray (eds.), The New Edith Wharton Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 175–88. For analysis of the role of the visual arts in Wharton’s works, see Emily J. Orlando, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007). 27 Nancy Bentley, “Wharton, Travel, and Modernity,” in Carol J. Singley (ed.), A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 148, 161. 28 Michael Nowlin, “Edith Wharton’s Higher Provincialism: French Ways for Americans and the Ends of The Age of Innocence,” Journal of American Studies 38, no. 1 (2004): 91. 29 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006) ; Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanism,” Social Text 31–2 (1992): 173. 30 Gary Totten, “Afterword: Edith Wharton and the Promise of Cosmopolitanism,” in Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando (eds.), Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016), 255. 31 See Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando, “Introduction: Edith Wharton: A Citizen of the World,” in Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism, ed. Goldsmith and Orlando (Gainesville: University Press of Florida), 1–15; and Melanie Dawson, “The Limits of Cosmopolitan Experience in Wharton’s The Buccaneers,” Legacy 31, no. 2 (2014): 258–80, for discussion of Wharton’s awareness of cosmopolitanism’s limits in The Age of Innocence (1920) and The Buccaneers (1938), respectively. 32 Edith Wharton, My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann, ed. Irene Goldman-Price (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 69. 33 Rattray, Edith Wharton and Genre, 93. 34 D. Medina Lasansky notes that Wharton’s claim about the San Vivaldo terra-cottas was “irksome” to the Italian art connoisseur Bernard Berenson, who “never publicly acknowledged the significance of Wharton’s claims,” although he and his wife, Mary, later would become Wharton’s good friends. D. Medina Lasansky, “Beyond the Guidebook: Edith Wharton’s Rediscovery of San Vivaldo,” in Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando (eds.), Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida), 148. 35 Wharton, Backward Glance, 100.

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Seeking a Home for the Wretched Exotics: Edith Wharton’s Heterotopic Views of Greece MYRTO DRIZOU

In a 1903 letter to Sara Norton, Edith Wharton expresses her dismay at the stark difference between America and Europe, which she defines in temporal and aesthetic terms; having recently returned to America, Wharton is struck by “the contrast between the old & the new, between the stored beauty & tradition & amenity over there [Europe], & the crassness here [America].”1 The lack of taste in all aspects of American life—from the “sight of American streets” to the “hearing of American voices, & the wild, dishevelled backwoods look of everything”—gives rise to a debilitating feeling of homelessness that Wharton famously describes as the root of a new, displaced identity: “we are none of us Americans, we don’t think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most déplacé & useless class on earth!”2 Although she seemingly frames this identity as an artificial, sterile formation, Wharton never relinquishes its tensions and ambivalences; rather, she consciously turns them into an enduring compass for her life and art. As a déplacé American who developed a sense of patria in the Old World, Wharton ceaselessly mined the richness of European culture and history to reflect on her American origins. Her travels across Europe, her visits to North Africa (still under colonial rule), and her journeys throughout the Mediterranean populated a deep archive of impressions that housed Wharton’s cross-cultural experience. Her mobility across European and American cultures allayed by a competing desire for rootedness has been widely analyzed by scholars who have approached Wharton’s politics of place through various discourses, including transatlanticism, (trans)nationalism, (post)colonialism, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism.3 As Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando argue in their introduction to the volume Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism, Wharton espoused a worldview similar to Kwame Anthony Appiah’s model of “rooted cosmopolitanism”—a mobility “between local and global identifications” that allows for flexible allegiances and multiple forms of attachment.4 Central to Wharton’s rooted cosmopolitanism is a

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strong sense of place that finds its primary embodiment in France, Wharton’s adopted homeland. Critics have rightfully focused on France and Italy as the cornerstones of Wharton’s encounter with European culture.5 In Wharton’s eyes, France represented an ideal of historical continuity, cultural rootedness, and aesthetic sophistication as opposed to the vulgarity and transience of her native culture. As Virginia Ricard aptly summarizes, “France became Wharton’s frame of reference, a sort of counterland that allowed her to comprehend and interpret the country she came from.”6 Italy, in particular, provided Wharton with an aesthetic apprenticeship into the marvels of art, history, gardens, and architecture, all of which would leave indelible traces on her oeuvre.7 Starved for beauty and tradition, Wharton would find in Italy a theater “in which she saw acted out the survival of the ancient and the classical.”8 In both Italy and France, then, Wharton saw the continuity of an aesthetic, cultural, and historical past that would enrich and solidify the present.9 This sense of time as a longue durée that holds a culture—and, by extension, an individual—anchored in place is a major thread in Wharton’s work. This thread is complicated, however, when one looks at Wharton’s engagement with another European culture, one that registers the temporal and spatial tensions of modernity within (and against) a narrative of continuity with the past. In this essay, I shift the focus of critical inquiry to Wharton’s encounter with Greece, a cultural topos that was formative for her views on art. As critics have pointed out, Wharton took great interest in Greek antiquity, incorporating classical aesthetic principles, such as order, symmetry, and balance, and mythical tropes, such as the ambivalence of Persephone, the monstrosity of the Sphinx, the persecution by the Furies, and the power of the Fates.10 While Wharton’s investment in ancient Greek literature and civilization has been widely acknowledged, her perspective of Greek modernity has received relatively little attention other than in the context of her travel canon. Yet Wharton’s thoughts on modern Greece, as revealed in The Cruise of the Vanadis, the diary of her 1888, Odyssey-inspired Mediterranean cruise, and the unpublished entries of a diary she kept during her second, ten-week Osprey cruise in the Mediterranean (1926), illuminate more than what Sarah Bird Wright describes as Wharton’s “rhetorical construction of an independent or autonomous stance of connoisseurship,” which underlies her travel writing and serves as cultural capital for her fiction.11 Wharton’s travel writings on Greece demonstrate her keen attunement to the coordinates of time and place as markers of a dynamic relation between antiquity and modernity that both stabilizes and disrupts the construction of cultural identities. Nowhere is this more evident than in the topos of Greece. Seen as the originary site of democracy and the navel of ancient literature and arts, Greece has been constructed as the cradle of Western civilization. The geographical topos of Greece, however, sits— often uneasily—between West and East, shaped by a narrative of historical continuity that is simultaneously refracted by long periods of Ottoman, Genoese, Venetian, English, and Italian rule all the way down to the twentieth century. A tangled history of military conflict, political negotiation, economic dependency, and cultural exchange—set against the backdrop of a strong linguistic and literary tradition that dilates back in time—turns modern Greece into the ur-site of both cultural rootedness and displacement.12 As I have elsewhere argued, Wharton’s impressions of her travels to Greece create a cultural narrative that serves as an inspiring, albeit cautionary, tale for American modernity; whereas The Cruise of the Vanadis lingers on tropes of decay, contamination, and decline, Wharton’s “Osprey” notes thirty-eight years later revel in the wonder of a culture that Wharton sees returning to its classical origins.13

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The intersections of time and place in Wharton’s perception of Greece merit further discussion as they question the binary of cultural continuity and rootedness (best represented by the French longue durée), on one hand, and the identification of rupture and displacement (mostly associated with American modernity), on the other. Irreducible to either paradigm, Wharton’s views of Greece evoke the poststructuralist concept of “heterotopia” that Michel Foucault has used to address the “fatal intersection of time with space.”14 In his oft-cited text “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault focuses on sites that “have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.”15 In contrast to utopias, these sites—cemeteries, prisons, libraries, museums, and colonies, among others—are real insofar as they are “effectively enacted utopia[s]‌in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and in-verted.”16 Whether exposing the illusions of the sites they reflect or serving as compensation—creating spaces that aspire to perfection—heterotopias share a resistance to being emplaced, that is, to being strictly defined by conventional spatial and temporal boundaries. In fact, such sites are also “heterochronies” since they “function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.”17 The long lineage of Greek culture sets it apart as the heterotopia of Western civilization. Imagined as a creative fountain of ancient myth, the originary source of classical ideals, and an inexhaustible archive of ageless ruins, the topos of Greece is both mythical and real; ancient and modern; timeless and timely. Though it stands aside as the pinnacle of excellence, it shares its legacy with the West, becoming part of other cultures as their imagined origin and aspired point of return. At the same time, modern Greece is frequently conceptualized as a strangely “other” space, “Europe’s cultural backwater,” contaminated by its contact with the East, especially after its nearly four-hundred-year rule by the Ottoman Empire.18 On the fringe of Europe yet also at the root of it, modern Greece has a peculiar status for the West. As Western Europeans fashioned themselves as the descendants of classical culture, they excommunicated modern Greeks as the undeserving progeny of their glorious ancestors. The colonial undertones of this discourse have not gone unnoticed by Modern Greek Studies scholars, who have described Greece not only as a heterotopia but also as a “crypto-colony,” one of the “buffer zones between the colonized lands and those as yet untamed.”19 Such accounts of Greek culture bear direct relevance to Wharton’s definition of “Greece,” which draws a wider orbit than usually accounted for in Wharton scholarship. In fact, most critics continue to read Greece as an immutable topos of ancient myth and classical ideals. Wharton, however, was attuned to the dynamic register of Greek culture in ways that anticipated the Foucauldian heterotopic discourse. Including a range of sites, from ancient quarries that served as prison camps to monastic communities, palimpsestic churches, and famous ruins, Wharton’s impressions of Greece often invert (and neutralize) the Westerner’s perspective and make a mark on other genres, including her poetry and fiction.

“YEA! IF ONLY A MAGIC COAT WERE MINE / TO CARRY ME TO PLACES STRANGE” In her epigraph to The Cruise of the Vanadis (which she borrows from her beloved Goethe), Wharton expresses the ardent desire of visiting a place outside the bounds of

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reality. The wish for a “magic coat” that will carry her to “places strange” gives an aura of exoticism and unconventionality to a journey she would not exchange either for “costly treasures” or “for a king’s coat fine.”20 In 1888, the 26-year-old Edith and her husband Edward (“Teddy”) defied their families’ objections and the significant cost that a fourmonth cruise in the Mediterranean Sea would entail. Along with their friend, James Van Alen, the Whartons boarded the steam yacht Vanadis in Algiers and followed a route inspired by Odysseus’ journey in Homer’s epic. The trajectory included Tunis; Malta; Sicily; the Ionian islands of Corfu, Zante, Cephalonia, and Ithaca; the Aegean islands of Milos, Syros, Naxos, Santorini, Amorgos, Astypalaia, Rhodes, Tinos, Patmos, Chios, and Mytilene; the city of Smyrna on the Coast of Asia Minor; the monasteries of Mount Athos in the Chalkidiki peninsula of northern Greece; Euboea, Marathon, and Athens; Montenegro; and the Dalmatian coast, before returning to Ancona in Italy.21 The route was arduous but well-planned, allowing the ambitious travelers to explore a range of sites, from colorful bazaars in northern Africa to ruins of ancient temples, Greek theaters, craggy islands, medieval monasteries, modern towns, and remote villages. Crowned as “a taste of heaven” and the “greatest step forward in [her] making,” this journey gave Wharton the opportunity to develop her artistic and authorial eye by sailing into a magical, largely untrodden, and often described as perilous territory.22 The trope of a Mediterranean escape from the conventions of New York society is also frequently used in Wharton’s fiction. Bertha Dorset’s proposal of a Mediterranean cruise to Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (1905) offers Lily the illusion of escape from her moral and financial trouble. In The Custom of the Country (1913), Clare Van Degen meaningfully suggests an Aegean cruise to Ralph Marvell to visit “out-of-the-way places” that can encourage “a new growth.”23 In The Age of Innocence (1920), references to Mediterranean ports, such as Athens and Smyrna, and the legendary city of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), add cultural capital and offer contrasting mirages of escape from Newland Archer’s claustrophobic existence. Such escape is always fleeting, best figured in the flying ship and exclamatory “Beyond!” that seal not only Lily Bart’s correspondence but also her homeless, errant existence.24 As “the greatest reserve of the imagination,” the boat is, according to Foucault, the heterotopia par excellence; a “floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.”25 For Wharton’s entrapped heroines and heroes, the yacht symbolizes the promise of being lost in a strangely “other” space that cannot be chartered by conventions, enabling a mobility associated with freedom. For Wharton herself, the Vanadis yacht became invested with what she called a “home-like feeling” that gave her a sense of rootedness while allowing her to float across borders, from one place to the next, while being protected from rumors of brigandage and health-related threats.26 As a shield from danger and a vantage point for perspective, the Vanadis also calibrates Wharton’s views of the shores, changing her attraction to a place depending on what she can see as she comes closer or veers further afar. This shifting angle is indicative of a dominant modality in Wharton’s diary of the cruise. While she sustains the (wealthy) Westerner’s vantage point, Wharton displays consistent interest in places that modulate and invert this perspective as a heterotopic site would do. When she visits the Greek theater near Euryalus in Sicily, Wharton notes the beauty of the flowers on the hillside, which she describes in more detail than the theater itself. She lingers, however, on the “Ear of Dionysius,” a sounding cavern with an earlike entrance that intensified the uncanniness of the nearby quarry, out of which it was carved, and which served as a work camp for the prisoners of the tyrant in antiquity.27

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Anticipating the Foucauldian emphasis on prisons as heterotopias of deviation, Wharton imagines the tyrant overseeing the prisoners’ confidences as he remains hidden in his upper chamber. The amplification and distortion of sound would disclose the prisoners’ voices but also withhold the words’ meaning, just as the cave gives mysterious answers to Wharton’s guide’s cries. These undecipherable answers become the literal manifestation of a heterotopia’s function, that is, to invert and neutralize the space(s) it is supposed to reflect. Just as the guide’s voice returns amplified and mysterious, the heterotopic space of the quarry enables Wharton’s reflections on the prisoners’ plight, even so briefly. Loyal to her love for gardens and nature, Wharton subsequently reverts to detailed descriptions of wildflowers on the way to seeing more quarries. The uncanniness of the quarry, though, will echo through Wharton’s imagination. In “Latomia dei Cappucini,” an undated poem that was probably written during the Vanadis cruise, Wharton imagines the plight of the Athenian soldiers in the Quarry of the Capuchins, where they were imprisoned after their defeat in the war between Athens and Syracuse in the fifth century bce. In the first section of the poem, the romantic beauty of the sunset skies gives way to “shadowy places” below, echoing the sigh of “a long mournful cry from Salamis.”28 This sigh captures the longing of an Athenian warrior who reminisces about home, imprisoned as he is in the quarry. A small island outside Athens, Salamis is the site of the Greeks’ legendary victory against the Persians in 480 bce; hence, it usually evokes memories of glory. In the quarry, however, such memories are reflected as hollow shells of futile pursuits. The only comfort is the warrior’s burning wish to “stand once more upon the shining steps / That from the city [of Athens] to the goddess lead.”29 As he imagines standing on the steps of the Parthenon, overlooking the city and nearing the sky, the warrior envisions himself becoming one with his beloved city. This vision—“One moment only”—projects the warrior’s memory to the future before dissolving into the encroaching eternity of death.30 By the end of the poem, the speaker wonders whether he will have the same fate as Cleobis, his fellow Athenian, who died the night before. The finality of the closing line, “Cleobis, then I.—,” leaves no doubt as to the outcome, turning the quarry into another heterotopia of deviation, a purgatory before death.31 The epigraph of the poem, “They were destroyed with an utter destruction,” is also mentioned in The Cruise of the Vanadis, where Wharton briefly mentions the most “tragically famous” quarry.32 As Irene Goldman-Price points out, the epigraph comes from John Wesley’s commentary on Lk. 11:32, addressing the fate of the Jews.33 As such, the poem becomes a heterotopia itself, reflecting the suffering of different cultures across place and time. This sweeping gesture does not discard the singularity of individual experience. In an elegiac mode, Wharton singles out the crowning moment of the soldier’s union with the eternal soul of the city, which is contrasted with the passing of the body and the finality of death. These reverberating temporalities allow Wharton to refract the linearity of time (and the continuity of human pain) into a range of different experiences that unite heterogeneous places and cultures. Throughout the Vanadis cruise, Wharton remains keen on places that allow for such heterogeneity in perspective. For example, she describes a range of colorful bazaars and religious processions with words such as “fanciful” and “picturesque” that suggest an Orientalizing discourse.34 Wharton’s “Orient,” though, not only reflects but also inverts the Western romanticization of the East. Her “purple East” is a heterogeneous but not amorphous topography that encompasses the bazaars of northern Africa and Asia Minor; the ruins of theatres and temples in southern Italy and Greece; the Greek Orthodox

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festivals and processions on the Aegean and Ionian islands; citadels of exiled knights in Rhodes; medieval monasteries; and Byzantine churches.35 All in all, these spaces constitute the fabric of a culturally, racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse space that seems to stretch across antiquity and modernity in its own various formations. Smyrna (modern-day Izmir), for instance, draws Wharton’s attention as a topos that defuses all boundaries between East and West. The city, which had ancient Greek roots in the Ionian civilization—allegedly being the birthplace of Homer—and boasted of a significant Greek population until the Greek-Turkish War of 1919–22, was still part of the Ottoman Empire during Wharton’s visit. It was a remarkably cosmopolitan city that displayed a “medley of different types which [Wharton] had never seen equalled anywhere”: Turkish women, “Jewesses,” Greek priests, old Turks, “negresses,” gypsies.36 Rather than a timeless, abstract space, then, Wharton’s “Orient” is a dynamic heterotopia that lies outside of time insofar as it stretches to the past while keeping the pulse of the present. Most telling is Wharton’s description of Mount Athos, a rocky strip of the Chalkidiki Peninsula in northern Greece. Mount Athos, often referred to as the “Sacred” or “Holy Mountain,” is an autonomous monastic community of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, dating back to Byzantine times. Perched on the lush slopes of Mount Athos against the luminous blue of the northern Aegean, this World Heritage site includes twenty monasteries (mostly Greek, but also Slavonic, e.g., Russian) that house important collections of books and art, and serve as places of worship, hermitage, and retreat. Similarly to a Foucauldian heterotopia that requires a specific ritual or permission to enter, Mount Athos remains forbidden to women and female animals. Long before Virginia Woolf imagined her androgynous character Orlando “minding her goats” on Mount Athos, Wharton offered an extensive description of this site in The Vanadis Cruise.37 Though she was not allowed to enter due to her gender, Wharton was not daunted. She embarked on “a voyage of discovery, determined to go as near the forbidden shores as [she] could,” but was prevented by hurried caloyers, who are described as a “wild enough looking set to frighten any intruder away.”38 Not being able to get on shore, Wharton again uses her perspective from the Vanadis to calibrate her impressions of the landscape, the architecture, and the caloyers’ habits. The secluded topography and thousand-year-long history of Mount Athos embody Wharton’s ideal of an “archaic” life that is as “curiously preserved” as the “frescoes on the chapel walls.”39 As Wharton reflects, life on the peninsula seems to have gone on “unbroken” since the tenth century—“a life unaffected by modern inventions, discoveries, and revolutions, a life as primly mediaeval as when the hermit Athanasius laid the first stone of Lavra [the first monastery to be built].”40 Seemingly untouched but not impervious to modernity, Mount Athos retains its connections to the world through the telegraph-wire, which Wharton classifies under “discordant elements” along with Russico, the Russian monastery, rumored to be a “hot-bed of Russian political spies.”41 With a dose of humorous prejudice, Wharton shows herself not impervious to modernity either, since she reproduces political stereotypes and dismisses Russian architecture as gaudy and disproportionate. In contrast to such Eastern, discordant elements, Wharton rejoices at the prosperity of the monks’ ordered life, which reminds her of rural Switzerland or Tyrol. The regularity of habits is emphasized by the prompt appearance of hermits on balconies, just like “cuckoos in Swiss clocks when the hour strikes.”42 Earlier in her account of Mount Athos, Wharton compares the monasteries to Swiss chalets perched on medieval fortresses. Even though she constructs the art, history, and culture of Mount Athos as part of the West,

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Wharton is constantly confronted with the unclassifiable dynamics of this community, which remains on Ottoman territory yet enjoys rare political autonomy. As a case in point, when Wharton meets the Turkish governor of the nearby town Karyes, she is struck by his appearance—he dons a Turkish fez and large swords but also wears a frock-coat and Rhodian boots—and by his commentary “in the strangest possible French.”43 As if he were exiled, the governor has been pining for two years in a place where no women or theater are allowed, stressing the biological and cultural sterility of this way of life.44 Wharton’s imaginative eye, however, can see much more; it does not take long for her to detect—and recreate—the heterotopic theatricality of Mount Athos. Facing the peninsula from the Vanadis yacht (her own heterotopic site), Wharton sees a naturally buttressed, well-staged, medieval-looking polis, whose cultural heterogeneity and religious practice enact a religious and political autonomy that has withstood the Islamic discourse of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Mount Athos is not the only secluded place that attracts Wharton’s attention; in fact, she remains interested in sites that reconfigure displacement or exile as resistance. During her first visit to the island of Rhodes—she visited again in 1926—Wharton notes the long history of the Order of St. John who has left a profound mark on the island. Originally providing care and support to pilgrims and Crusaders in Jerusalem, the order was driven away by Turks in the thirteenth century; the knights found temporary home first in Cyprus and then to Rhodes, where they stayed till the sixteenth century; at that point, they were vanquished by Ottoman forces. In 1888, Rhodes was still under Ottoman rule, which forced all Christian inhabitants to live outside the city walls. The trope of exile also stands out in Wharton’s description of the town of Lindos, where she notes the Persian plates made by prisoners at the time of the knights; one of the plates bears the inscription “how long shall we linger in exile,” expressing a sentiment similar to that of the Athenian warrior trapped in the Sicilian quarry.45 Wharton’s commentary on the church of Lindos rehearses a mode of cultural authority and artistic expertise, which she will regularly adopt in later descriptions of architecture in Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) and Italian Backgrounds (1905). Noting that the church is not described in any travel book she has read, Wharton stresses that it is also rarely mentioned by Newton; here, she is referencing the British archeologist Charles Thomas Newton who conducted excavations in Rhodes and Cyprus and discovered the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World on the southern coast of Asia Minor.46 Wharton takes issue with Newton’s description of the church as “Byzantine”; for her, the term is not apt for the style of the church “unless he [Newton] uses the term geographically, as dividing the East from the West.”47 Because of the construction of the church by Provençal knights in the thirteenth century and the pointed shape in the tunnel-vaulting (prominent at the time in Provence), Wharton concludes that the pointed arch in Lindos has undergone what she describes as a “double journey, having been carried to Provence from the East either by the Greeks, or in later times by Provençal travelers, and taken back to Saracenic lands by the very Provençals who first made it known to western Europe.”48 Both a literal construction and a symbolic representation of a heterotopic inversion, the pointed arch of the Lindos church neutralizes the boundary between East and West and allows Wharton to contest conventional definitions of art and topography. Climbing on to the Knights’ Citadel right after, Wharton takes note of their guide’s emphasis on “chaotic ruins of Greek temples on which the Christian fortress was built.”49 History thus emerges as the paradigm of a dynamic palimpsest rather than the formation of a unidirectional, linear continuity.

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The crowning heterotopic site in The Cruise of the Vanadis is undoubtedly Athens, dominated by Wharton’s impressions of the Acropolis. With her sharp artistic eye, Wharton stages the first glimpse of the Acropolis as a sublime experience that resembles a sacred moment of aesthetic creation. Rising across the shadow of the sunlit Lycabettus hill, the Athenian Acropolis—where the Parthenon stands out—emerges as a “huge platform of silver, crowned by a range of silvery colonnades, and relieved against an ethereal background of sapphire mountains.”50 Wharton’s description echoes the romantic overtones of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s verse, which she quotes right afterwards: “a city such as visions / Build from the purple crags and silver towers / Of battlemented clouds.”51 Wrested away from reality and rising among the clouds, the Acropolis is set apart as an ethereal vision of another place and time, celebrating the timelessness of ancient Greece as the originary topos of Western civilization. This idealized view is typical of most Europeans and Americans who visited Greece with the rise of Hellenism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; arguably, though, this view continues to influence contemporary perceptions of Greek antiquity. As critic Artemis Leontis points out, “Of individual sites of ruin in Greece, the Acropolis is the most frequented and the most formidable—the one in which all meet their erasure of sacredness, harmony, beauty, and grandeur.”52 Leontis draws attention to two geographical axes that serve as main points of reference for the Western traveler confronting the Acropolis: on one hand, there is home—which “exists on the horizon line dividing the ideal from the actual”—and, on the other hand, there are the “local surroundings, [which] in contrast, represent the fallen present.”53 To configure the relation between the two, “one is compelled to map out the international entwinement of spaces that occupy the imagination of the traveler occupying the site of the Acropolis.”54 In Wharton’s case, the imagination of the homeless “wretched exotic”—who is displaced by the provincialism and vulgarity of American culture—is eager for an adopted home of cosmopolitan refinement and aesthetic proportion. Wharton’s gaze (in sync with the Western traveler’s perspective) recasts the Acropolis in its original garb, “invest[ing] the sunburnt ruins of the Parthenon and the Erectheum with the tints which must once have belonged to them.”55 In doing so, Wharton aestheticizes past glory, dissolving the distance between present and past in a romanticized view of classical antiquity.56 At the same time, however, she is not losing perspective of the modern surroundings of the Acropolis, which she describes in detail. When Wharton visited Greece in 1888, the fledgling Greek state was ruled by King George I, who was originally a Danish prince. He succeeded King Otto I, who was deposed in 1862 after being installed on the Greek throne by the European powers in 1832. Otto moved the capital of the new state from Nafplio to Athens, which was then a rather decrepit town of small population and little political significance. As Hanink notes, “European travelers often remarked that it [Athens] resembled an African village: it was dotted with palm trees, and camels and donkeys were the chief means of transport over the steep and narrow streets.”57 To Greece’s Northern European rulers, Athens represented an opportunity to modernize the city by reviving the spirit of its classical past. Hence, the nineteenth century saw a host of imperious, neoclassical buildings rise throughout Athens as old ones were purged from the cityscape. This movement of purification followed the principles of Classical Revival, the architectural movement that developed in Europe and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As such, the city’s modernization ironically turned Athens into a mirage of Northern European capitals, which were, in turn, simulated upon a fantasy of Athens in the past. This irony would not elude Wharton’s perceptive vision.

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When she mentions the “huge white Palace of King George,” she plainly dismisses it as “not a thing of beauty” except for its lovely gardens.58 Wharton describes Athens as a “white, glaring town” with broad avenues, well-kept houses and gardens, good shops and restaurants, cab-stands, and musicians’ bands playing in the square; “in short,” she concludes, “it has the neat, prosperous air of a German Residenz, incongruously overshadowed by the Acropolis.”59 The epithets “glaring” and “white” might suggest the blinding effect of the Greek sunlight; in the context of the Athenian classical revival, however, they evoke an aggressive (and aesthetically discordant) appropriation that aims to purify Athens of Eastern (mostly Ottoman) influences. While Wharton keeps a distance from this purifying gesture, she partly enacts it herself, as her descriptions include little to no reference to modern Greek people. Similarly to other Western travelers and thinkers, Wharton participates in what Vangelis Calotychos defines as a “discourse of ab-sense,” which “denies presence, immediacy, and specificity to modern Greeks,” reducing the materiality of Greek customs, actions, and beliefs to a semantic status that leads back to a glorious, immemorial past and a projected, eternal future.60 Wharton is drawn to the immemorial time of the Acropolis that seems to absorb all other sites and times into its orbit. No other sight—including the Byzantine churches that Wharton “knew to be interesting”—could hold her more than a moment; she would hurry back to the Acropolis each afternoon.61 Captivated by the seemingly magical aura of the Acropolis, Wharton wishes that she could visit Athens again to recover a sense of proportion by seeing more of the city.62 Wharton’s wish to see Athens one more time would be fulfilled later in life, when she visited Greece during the Osprey cruise in 1926. Along with her friends Daisy Chanler, Robert Norton, Logan Pearsall Smith, and Harry Lawrence (who was the director of the Medici Society in London), Wharton sailed on a ten-week “magical cruise” that filled her with “euphoria” and “unbroken bliss” for the entirety of the journey.63 The itinerary included many stops of the Vanadis cruise but also some iconic sites Wharton had not visited before, such as Delphi; Mistra, Olympia, and other places in the Peloponnese; Crete; Cyprus; and Alexandria (in Egypt). The “Osprey” Notes, Wharton’s entries from her unpublished (and unfinished) diary of the cruise, express her wonder at the serenity and beauty of the Greek landscape. During this visit, Wharton and her company stayed in Athens for ten days. The entry that describes Athens in the diary is rather short; in roughly fourteen lines, Wharton mentions some excursions to surrounding sites, such as Aegina and Eleusis, and affirms that most of her time was spent on the Acropolis and the museums that housed archeological treasures. The concluding, epigrammatic sentence centers on the Acropolis; in Wharton’s words, “Acropolis morning & afternoon & by moonlight, the night before we left.”64 Singled out as the gist of Wharton’s visit in a self-standing, pithy paragraph, this sentence encapsulates the centrality that the Acropolis occupied in Wharton’s (and every Western traveler’s) imagination. As the physical cornerstone of ancient Athens and the projected stage of classical fantasies, the Acropolis is, indeed, central to the Athenian landscape but also lies strangely outside it; in fact, the word “acropolis” can be translated as “the edge [or] the margin of the city” in Greek. This double register has further temporal connotations. Just like the Acropolis has appropriated all of Wharton’s time, compressing the conventional markers of a day—morning, afternoon, moonlight— into its immeasurable grandeur, it has also displaced the “real” time of Greek modernity in favor of a revered, immemorial past.65 As a result, modern Greek culture—and, by extension, modern Greeks—have been pushed to the margins of their own historical

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legacy, and modern Greece has been constructed as a heterotopia of deviation in relation to Europe, the self-appointed custodian of the classical past. This is a discursive gesture, but it is one with significant political consequences. During the nineteenth century, a great number of ruins and other works of art were transported to European museums under the pretext that they would be better appreciated and cared for in a space “other” than modern Greece.66 When the actual ruins were impossible to carry, they were replicated in the architecture of buildings that aspired to recreate classical glory. While not immune to this discourse, Wharton appears critical of its results. In The Cruise of the Vanadis, she singles out the Athens Academy of Sciences as a successful attempt to “reproduce a Greek building of the Ionic order.”67 For Wharton, this harmonious outcome demonstrates “how perfectly suited Greek architecture was to the Greek climate and landscape, and how grotesque are the classic reproductions in northern countries, with their smoke-blackened columns and weather-beaten sculptures.”68 Wharton’s astute comment echoes her lifelong love for careful preservation rather than intrusive restoration. Hailing from her aesthetic principles, Wharton’s identification of ancient ruins and native landscape performs an important cultural gesture: it defuses the Europeans’ appropriation of classical culture by exposing their otherness to core classical principles. Wharton thus turns the European heterotopic discourse on its head, enacting a symbolic return of antiquity to its native culture and geography. In her undated poem “Dactylics,” written in dactylic meter and probably inspired by the Vanadis cruise, Wharton weaves an ode to the native landscape of Athens by apostrophizing a violet; as Irene Goldman-Price points out, the violet was associated with Athens, which was sometimes referred to as “the violet-crowned city.”69 The lone flower, delicate and lonely, is swaying to the sea breeze; in the speaker’s “backlooking eyes,” it seems like a “vagrant astray,” wandering on the foam of the blue Aegean Sea.70 Turning her imagination to the past, Wharton reconstructs the lore of ancient history and myth—from Artemis, Hylas (a youth who served as Heracles’ companion), and the Dryads to Pericles’ statesmanship (the foundation of the so-called Golden Age of Athens). The speaker offers the poem as comfort to the grieving violet when the latter wonders: “Where are the uplands Egean, the Attic ravines, / Hylas, the Dryads?”71 In an emotional response, the speaker affirms that “[they lie] here in [the speaker’s] heart.”72 Sympathetic at its core, the poet’s imagination becomes the healing tissue for the displaced past, the exiled present, and the uncertain future. In this sense, “Dactylics,” just like “Latomia dei Cappucini” analyzed earlier in this essay, reverberates with different temporalities, which radiate out of the experience of displaced Athenians, namely, the flower that represents the spirit of the city and the soldier who represents the flower of the city’s youth, respectively. Though both poems lament the loss of an enchanted, glorious past, they do so in different modes. Whereas “Latomia dei Cappucini” enacts an elegiac mode that is reinforced by the setting of the quarry—a heterotopia of deviation that turns into a forced work and death camp for imprisoned soldiers—“Dactylics” gestures to a heterotopia of compensation, the creative imagination that reflects, preserves, and potentially transfigures the image of the past.

“CHARTRES, THE PARTHENON, THE PYRAMIDS” As I have shown so far, Wharton’s diaries of her visits to Greece—most notably, The Cruise of the Vanadis—reflect the cultural, ethnic, religious, and geopolitical heterogeneity of the Greek landscape in ways that anticipate the Foucauldian discourse of heterotopias. Among

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Wharton’s heterotopic sites are the uncanny quarry/prison near Syracuse (founded as a colony by ancient Greeks); the heterogeneous mirage of cultures in the predominantly Greek city of Smyrna; the reclusive (male-only) monastic community of Mount Athos in the Northern Aegean; the palimpsestic Byzantine church in the Rhodian town of Lindos; and the urbanized modern Athens modeled as a (neo)classical European city crowned by the Acropolis. Strongly attuned to the dynamic register of these sites, Wharton often inverts and neutralizes discourses such as Orientalism and Western exceptionalism, and qualifies her cultural politics of displacement, homelessness, and exile. Wharton’s heterotopic sites extend beyond her travel diaries of Greece, yet often develop in relation to Greek texts, themes, and characters. In her diptych, Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and The Gods Arrive (1932), for example, Wharton addresses the maturation of the creative imagination as a Ulyssean journey that includes a range of sites, such as the Midwestern city of Euphoria, the exclusive library of the Willows, the medieval Cathedral of Chartres, the cryptic Cretan labyrinth, and the English colony of Oubli-sur-Mer. Of these sites, the library at the old, secluded house of the Willows most influences the hero’s development into a writer. For Vance Weston, Wharton’s protagonist, the old house, protected from view by two ancient willows and a forbidding sheath of trees, is seemingly impervious to time, preserved as it is in the same state ever since its owner died. The promise of “vastness, fantasy, and secrecy” the house whispers to Vance takes him back to an immemorial past, best represented by the books that remain untouched in the library; confronting this accumulated knowledge, Vance comes to the realization that “it all seemed part of the incomprehensible past … a past so remote, so full of elusive mystery.”73 This epiphany will become Vance’s compass throughout his creative journey. The cultural ideal of accumulated knowledge, traditions, and memories that Vance sees in the Willows’ library offers the same stronghold of continuity that Wharton identifies in the long lineage of French civilization. For both Vance and Wharton, this lineage serves as counterweight to the transient, disjointed character of American modernity. For Vance, the uncanny site of the Willows “[makes] the walls of the present fall” and opens up to his memories of childhood.74 Just as the quarry helps Wharton listen to the imprisoned soldiers whose voices reverberate literally in space (and figuratively through time), the old house helps Vance feel its “muffled reverberations which his hand might set going if he could find the rope.”75 This rope, I want to suggest, is the heterotopic prism of Greek culture, as Vance’s encounter with the longue durée of the past is refracted by Greek antiquity. When Halo Spear—the woman who will become his muse, lover, critic, and, eventually, mother to his child—speaks to Vance about literature, she evokes rich cadences, “as if she [has] swept the rubbish of the centuries from some broken statue, noble in its ruin.”76 Even for Halo’s brother, Lorry, whose aesthetic views demolish traditional ideas of taste, the Willows is compared to the Parthenon; their aura, sublime in its historical orbit and its aesthetic appeal, though, is canceled out in the aesthetic of capitalist modernity, represented by the view of factory chimneys that Lorry finds inviting.77 For Vance, however, the connection between the Willows and the Parthenon is far deeper. In fact, it reaches down to the core of human experience, which is heterotopic in its essence: as the embodiment of “centuries of struggle, passion, and aspiration,” the house “[is] to him the very emblem of man’s long effort, [is] Chartres, the Parthenon, the Pyramids.”78 As each of these sites becomes reflective of—and is reflected in—the others, they form a rope that extends across time, space, and cultures, holding it all together. Greece has shown Wharton how the rope may

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be continuous but not necessarily linear, engendering “other spaces” that could eventually house the “wretched exotic.”

NOTES 1 Edith Wharton to Sara Norton, June 5, 1903, in The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), 84. 2 Ibid.; original emphasis. 3 The copious literature is a testament to the complexity of Wharton’s aesthetic and political vision, as developed through her encounter with different cultures. For some representative works, see Katherine Joslin and Alan Price, eds., Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe (New York: Peter Lang, 1993); Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando, eds., Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016); and Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray, eds., The New Edith Wharton Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), Part II (International Wharton). 4 Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando, “Introduction: Edith Wharton: A Citizen of the World,” in Goldsmith and Orlando, Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism, 5. 5 Teresa Gómez Reus calls attention to Wharton’s travels to Spain before the First World War and during the 1920s. While Wharton planned to write a travelogue of her late travels tentatively titled “A Motor-Flight through Spain” (following the example of her 1908 travelogue A Motor-Flight through France), she never finished or published it; as Gómez Reus argues, Wharton was attracted to the mystique of Spain but could not find “that vital interchange between life and art that she so persistently looked for in Europe.” See Gómez Reus, “‘Remember Spain!’ Edith Wharton and the Book She Never Wrote,” English Studies 98, no. 2 (2017): 191. See also Patricia Fra López, ed., Edith Wharton: Back to Compostela/Regreso a Compostela (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 2011). 6 Virginia Ricard, “Edith Wharton’s French Engagement,” in Haytock and Rattray, The New Edith Wharton Studies, 81. 7 For more on Wharton and Italian art, see Emily J. Orlando, “‘One Long Vision of Beauty’: Edith Wharton and Italian Visual Culture,” Edith Wharton Review 36, no. 1 (2020): 25–47. 8 Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Vintage, 2007), 107. 9 Tellingly, Wharton gives the title “Continuity” to one of the essays in French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), her elaborate study of French manners, history, and culture. 10 For a great discussion of Wharton’s layered allusions to myth, see Helen Killoran, Edith Wharton: Art and Illusion (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996). For more on Wharton’s engagement with Greek myth, see Candace Waid, Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Sarah Whitehead, “Demeter Forgiven: Wharton’s Use of the Persephone Myth in Her Short Stories,” Edith Wharton Review 26, no. 1 (2010): 17–25; and Rocki Wentzel, “Classical Reception in Edith Wharton’s Late Fiction,” Edith Wharton Review 29, no. 1 (2013): 20–32. For Wharton’s use of classical principles, see Judith P. Saunders, “Literary Influences,” in Laura Rattray (ed.), Edith Wharton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 325–34; and Carol J. Singley, Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 11 Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888–1920 (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995), 35. Wharton’s diary of the Vanadis cruise was first published in 1992 after being discovered by French scholar Claudine Lesage at the municipal library of

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Hyères in 1991; see The Vanadis Cruise (New York: Rizzoli, 2004). The “Osprey” Notes and Accounts can be found in the Edith Wharton Collection (Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). Later references to the “Osprey” Notes are published with permission of Yale University. 12 I use the term “Greece” to address not only the geographical territory and political entity of the modern Greek state but also the broader discourse of Hellenic culture, language, art, and ideas from the pre-classical times to the present. This long cultural lineage encompasses a large area of the Mediterranean, where the Greek legacy has left a mark through commerce, colonization, and art since antiquity. Cases in point are southern Italy and Sicily as well as the coast of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) and major Byzantine sites, including Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). Wharton visits several of these places and remains attuned to the complex history and geography of “Greece” as a dynamic cultural discourse. 13 See Myrto Drizou, “Edith Wharton’s Odyssey,” in Haytock and Rattray, The New Edith Wharton Studies, 65–79. 14 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22. 15 Ibid., 24. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 26. 18 Dimitris Tziovas, “Introduction: Decolonizing Antiquity, Heritage Politics, and Performing the Past,” in Dimitris Tziovas (ed.), Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2. The Byzantine Empire is seen as the carrier of the Greek legacy throughout the Middle Ages. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottomans with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Greece became part of the Ottoman Empire until the Greek War of Independence in 1821. The modern Greek state was established in 1832, when the European powers acknowledged the sovereignty of Greece. The borders of the Greek state kept being contracted and expanded throughout the Balkan and Greco-Turkish wars until the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. 19 Michael Herzfeld, “The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-colonialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 900–1. For more on the complex politics of antiquity and modernity in Greece, see Tziovas, Re-imagining the Past; and Johanna Hanink, The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). For more on Greece as heterotopia, see Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 20 Wharton, Vanadis, 32. 21 For easier reference, I am using modern spelling for the names of sites that Wharton visited during the Vanadis and Osprey cruises. Hence, some of the names are spelled slightly differently than in The Cruise of the Vanadis and the “Osprey” Notes. 22 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Touchstone, [1934] 1998), 100, 98. 23 Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (New York: Vintage, [1913] 2012), 299. 24 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (New York: Norton, [1905] 2018), 135. 25 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 27. 26 Wharton, Vanadis, 35. 27 Ibid., 54. 28 Irene Goldman-Price, ed., Selected Poems of Edith Wharton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 2019), 4, lines 5–6.

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9 Ibid., 5, lines 21–2. 2 30 Ibid., line 38. 31 Ibid., 6, line 57. 32 Wharton, Vanadis, 57. 33 Goldman-Price, Selected Poems of Edith Wharton, 4. 34 Wharton, Vanadis, 40. 35 Ibid., 203. 36 Ibid., 149. 37 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (London: Vintage, [1928] 2016), 104. 38 Wharton, Vanadis, 174, 175. 39 Ibid., 173. 40 Ibid., 177. 41 Ibid., 172–3. 42 Ibid., 179. 43 Ibid., 175. 44 Ibid. The French in Wharton’s text reads: “[he has been pining away] avec rien que des masculins et pas de théâtre.” 45 Ibid., 128. 46 Wharton mentions that the brother of their guide, Mr. Biliotti, excavated with Newton the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Ibid., 124. 47 Ibid., 129. 48 Ibid., 129–30. 49 Ibid., 130. 50 Ibid., 187–8. 51 Ibid., 188. The quoted verse is from Shelley’s poem “Athens.” 52 Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, 44–5. 53 Ibid., 47. 54 Ibid. 55 Wharton, Vanadis, 189. 56 For more on this, see Drizou, “Edith Wharton’s Odyssey.” 57 Hanink, The Classical Debt, 153–4. 58 Wharton, Vanadis, 188. 59 Ibid. 60 Vangelis Calotychos, Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics (New York: Berg, 2003), 47. 61 Wharton, Vanadis, 189. 62 Ibid. 63 Wharton, A Backward Glance, 372, 373. 64 Wharton, “Osprey” Notes and Accounts (Yacht) (1926), Edith Wharton Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 51, folder 1535. 65 In his study of the Greek State Conservation Department’s policies in Rethemnos, Crete, anthropologist Michael Herzfeld introduces the distinction between “social” and “monumental” time, that is, the localized time/space of social life versus the state-imposed atemporal monumentalization of it. This distinction is useful to consider the different temporalities of the Acropolis as well. See Michael Herzfeld, A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 66 This is most evident in Lord Elgin’s controversial removal of the Parthenon marbles, which remain on display at the British Museum in London. For a contextualization of the

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removal and the ensuing debate over the marbles’ restoration to Greece, see Hanink, The Classical Debt. 67 Wharton, Vanadis, 188. 68 Ibid., 188–9. 69 Goldman-Price, Selected Poems of Edith Wharton, 81. 70 Ibid., lines 3–4. 71 Ibid., 82, lines 16–17. 72 Ibid., line 18. 73 Edith Wharton, Hudson River Bracketed (New York: Appleton, 1929), 57, 61–2. 74 Ibid., 338. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 66. 77 Ibid., 74. 78 Ibid., 354.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Totally Vanished … Like a Pinch of Dust”: Edith Wharton and the Trope of Cultural Extinction NIR EVRON

The small society into which I was born was “good” in the most prosaic sense of the term, and its only interest, for the generality of readers, lies in the fact of its sudden and total extinction. —Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934)1 The specter of cultural extinction haunts Edith Wharton’s fiction, both before but especially after the Great War. Ralph Marvell of The Custom of the Country (1913) likens his old New-York family to “those vanishing denizens of the American continent doomed to rapid extinction.”2 The genteel Raycies in False Dawn (1924) meet with a similar fate: “totally vanished … like a pinch of dust.”3 Newland Archer of The Age of Innocence (1920) ends his life as a “prehistoric” relic from a society that had long since become the stuff of legends.4 And the same is true of a slew of minor characters in Wharton’s subsequent works, the primary symbolic function of whom is to recall the shattered cultural universe of which they are the last living vestiges: think of the prematurely aged Arthur Wyant of Twilight Sleep (1927) or even of The Children’s (1928) Rose Sellars, whose anachronistic sensibilities “[leave] on her hands the picture of a vanished world wherein you didn’t speak to people who were discredited.”5 The tropes of collective transience and personal belatedness likewise figure centrally in Wharton’s nonfiction. A Backward Glance, for instance, not only invokes the “Atlantisfate” of old New York as its raison d’être,6 but also views the men and women who populate its pages through this metaphor. Of Egerton Winthrop, Wharton remarks that he “was typical of the American gentleman of his day … [a]‌type [that] has vanished with the conditions that produced it”7; of Henry James she observes that “the manners he was qualified by nature and situation to observe were those of the little vanishing group of people among whom he had grown up.”8 Individual life, Wharton consistently held, is inextricably interwoven with the culture that sustains it, such that any disturbance to that

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delicate web necessarily registers in the intimate experiences of each of its human nodes. Like the fictional Newland Archer who lives to see his cultural way of life displaced by a new and bewildering world, the aging James of Wharton’s memoir stands helpless before the “financial and industrial [realities] of modern American life”—a “material” that he is neither equipped to understand nor able to master in fiction.9 These descriptions of members of her close milieu dovetail with Wharton’s oftexpressed concerns that she herself had likewise become obsolete. In a 1922 letter to Anglo-Russian novelist William Gerhardie, she complains that she had become accustomed “to being regarded as a deplorable example of what people used to read in the Dark Ages.”10 To admirer and rival F. Scott Fitzgerald, she writes that his generation must view her as “the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.”11 These well-known statements illustrate that Wharton was not only aware that “to the eyes of the younger generation, her polite and cultivated formality might well seem quaintly behind the times,” as a 1936 review in Times magazine put it, but that she had already been describing herself in such terms for well over a decade.12 How are we to understand Wharton’s persistent self-description as a belated survival, a leftover from an extinct cultural order? Is this merely a rhetorical flourish? Is it an exercise in nostalgia or an expression of elite ennui? Is it, perhaps, a clever bit of image management on the part of an astute self-promoter? Lisa Mendelman has recently suggested that Wharton’s late penchant for casting herself in the role of the Victorian fogey—especially in her correspondence with members of the younger set—was a canny “double-move” on her part, intended to puncture the modernists’ “narcissistic delusions of grandeur,” on the one hand, while tacitly asserting the tested value of “the past that modernism [defined] itself against,” on the other.13 Jennie Kassanoff ’s and Hermione Lee’s overlapping readings of Wharton’s antimodernism imply a darker agenda. Wharton’s opposition to the anarchic tendencies of the new style, they claim, was “tangled up with her [regressive] attitudes to class, race, and democracy.”14 From this perspective, the real point of Wharton’s repeated assertions of belatedness was to indicate that she belonged to Miss Bart’s lily-white America, as opposed to Simon Rosedale’s multiethnic one. Last, Nancy Bentley’s analysis of Wharton’s narrative strategies offers yet another reading of her antiquarian mode of self-presentation. Wharton, Bentley argues, shared “the assumptions that made modern museums possible, assumptions that the authentic and the real are in some sense precarious, in need of preservation.”15 This view implies that Wharton’s self-description as a survival from a superseded cultural order was motivated by the paradoxical modern axiology that she inhabited and endorsed, wherein genuine value—noncommercial, unreproducible, lasting—is the property of remnants and relics. Thus, while Wharton’s description of old New York as an “antiquarian object” may appear elegiac, it is, in fact, part of a broader, uncoordinated effort of cultural reinvention and class preservation. Seen by Bentley’s lights, Wharton’s preservationist rhetoric becomes a clue for understanding how “in spite of a pervasive sense of WASP decline—indeed, in part through that very sense—the northeastern elite expanded its social influence.”16 Common to these representative readings is the assumption that the manner in which Wharton chose to present herself and her milieu in the latter part of her career is not to be taken at face value. In Wharton’s recurring identification with an “obsolete [and] outmoded” past, Mendelman sees a PR move17; when she confesses to a sense of oldfashionedness, Lee and Kassanoff hear the shrill note of racial bigotry; and when she

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presents herself as a member of a social order that has been “simplified and Taylorized … out of existence,”18 Bentley detects a political stratagem. Now, Wharton was, to be sure, a shrewd operator who engaged in constant image maintenance vis-à-vis rivals, publishers, and critics. That she was touched by the endemic racism of her class is, alas, likewise undeniable. And there is also much to say in favor of Bentley’s contextualization of Wharton’s writing within the early-twentieth-century project of securing WASP privilege and power. Still, in this essay I want to ask what happens when we try to take Wharton at her word. Is there a way of viewing her self-description as a leftover from a vanished form of life as a credible—even if hyperbolic—statement? Can we read her accounts of the extinction of her culture as expressing a certain truth about herself and her world rather than as a conscious or unconscious ruse to be unmasked? To address this question need not entail deciding whether old New York really met with its irrevocable demise sometime on or about the Great War, as Wharton often declares. Nor do we need to assess how earnest she was when making such claims. These are legitimate queries, but they are also, I suspect, irresolvable. A more promising approach is to ask about the vocabulary that Wharton employs when she claims to have lived through the “sudden and total extinction” of her world. Where does the repository of assumptions and metaphors that informs this and similar statements come from? How did it shape Wharton’s self-understanding and literary style? What light does it shed on her ongoing relevance today?19 To bring these issues into focus requires placing Wharton within a significantly longer historical trajectory than is typically the case in historicist studies of her work. Specifically, we need to view her invocations of collective transience against the longue durée of culturalist thought from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. By “culturalism,” I mean the structure of thought and feeling that begins to take shape in the late eighteenth century as a counterreaction to Enlightenment thought and policy, and which has been tied to key nineteenth-century political, artistic, and intellectual developments: from the rise of nationalism and birth of the realist novel to the emergence of modern anthropology. What these diverse expressions have in common is a premise that has long since become banal to us, but which was deeply contested when it first appeared. This is the idea, to quote Clifford Geertz, that the individual self—whatever else it might be—is “so entangled with where [it] is, who [it] is, and what [it] believes that it is inseparable from them.”20 This notion appears for the first time in the years leading up to the French Revolution, and it was its gradual and halting acceptance in the course of the long century that followed that set the stage for the modern concept of “culture,” as a complex, integrated, and time-bound whole that constructs (as opposed to merely influences) the individuals that comprise it, and which underwrites so much in Wharton’s outlook and writing. If, as Pamela Knights argues about The Age of Innocence, “any observation about an individual character—about his or her consciousness, emotions, body, history, or language—also entangles us in the collective experience of the group, in the welter of trifles, the matrix of social knowledge, within and out of which Wharton’s subjects are composed,”21 this is because Wharton is writing from within a culturalist tradition that extends from the thinkers of the counter-Enlightenment to her contemporaries, Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, John Dewey, and William James among others. What was so revolutionary about the culturalist idea when it first appeared was not the truism, which no one ever bothered to deny, that women and men are “entangled” with their social-historical environments. It was the further claim that culture’s “welter

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of trifles,” to use Knights’s terms, forms the very substance of the self, the stuff of which individuals are “composed.” That human beings are deeply influenced by circumstances of birth and social status was as apparent to Plato and Herodotus as it was to Locke and Kant; that they are nothing but their cultural and historical moment is a late-modern notion, and a profoundly destabilizing one at that. Destabilizing for several reasons. First, the culturalist view of the self undercuts the belief that had sustained the Enlightenment project: that human nature is one, universal and indivisible. Their many disagreements notwithstanding, the leading thinkers of the European Enlightenment—Spinoza and Voltaire, Locke and Hume, Kant and Samuel Johnson—all insisted that the colorful tapestry of human difference was a facade masking an underlying unity. Human beings may appear in a fantastic range of cultural and historical variations, but they are ultimately cast from a single, uniform, and unchanging mold. For some (Spinoza and Kant), that human essence was rational; for others (Hume and perhaps Johnson), it was passional. But thinkers on both sides of this internal divide agreed that the most vital part of the individual—the part that makes her human—is also the part that remains untouched by the contingent peculiarities of her social environment. This view, as Arthur O. Lovejoy writes in his classic intellectual history, “was the central and dominating fact in the intellectual history of Europe from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century.”22 Culturalism was its rejection. Setting themselves expressly against Enlightenment uniformitarianism, the early exponents of the culturalist view—most notably, Johann Gottfried Herder and Edmund Burke, later followed by the Romantic poets and the German Idealists—argued that local and individual differences mattered more than similarities; that diversity was to be cultivated rather than overcome; that abstract reasoning was a dangerous lure rather than a panacea; and that there is no single model of human perfection, either moral or aesthetic, that all human groups should strive to attain. On a deeper level, however, what set Herder against Kant, Burke against the French philosophes, and Wordsworth and Coleridge against the neoclassical poets was the question of which self-image the West should adopt. If the Enlightenment thinkers insisted that the part of the self that matters most is composed from a substance wholly alien to the sociohistorical environment in which we find it, the early culturalists maintained that the self was, in fact, not a thing apart from its culture but wholly coextensive with and expressive of it. Already in its day (and still in ours), the culturalist repudiation of Enlightenment uniformitarianism amounted to a philosophical scandal. As Geertz explains: If one discards the notion that Man, with a capital “M,” is to be looked for “behind,” “under,” or “beyond” his customs and replaces it with the notion that he, uncapitalized is to be looked for “in” them, one is in some danger of losing sight of him altogether. Either he dissolves, without residue, into his time and place, or he becomes … engulfed in one or another of the terrible determinisms with which we have been plagued from Hegel forward.23 In other words, it was the culturalist eschewal of the idea of a uniform and universal human nature that inflicted upon us those two great scourges of modern thought: relativism and determinism. Yet these philosophical implications, it should be said, left Wharton unperturbed. Having never placed much stock in the reality of that fabled creature, “Man, with a capital ‘M,’ ” she remained unmoved by threats to its existence. “Man,” she wrote echoing Burke, is merely a “hollow unreality,” a philosophical artifact dreamed up by

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“the eighteenth-century demagogues who were the first inventors of ‘standardization.’ ” As for “human nature,” she added in good culturalist fashion, it is anyway inseparable “from the web of customs, manners, culture it has elaborately spun about itself,”24 so that the attempt to speak about it in an abstract and general way—in the manner of the philosophical “demagogues” she decries—was an ill-conceived venture. But if Wharton met the philosophical implications of the culturalist view with indifference, she was keenly aware of the heightened sense of precarity and transience that it produces. During the postwar years, she repeatedly reflects on the friability of culture and the violence of history. She shared the view of her contemporary and social acquaintance, Paul Valéry, “that the abyss of history is deep enough to bury all the world … that a civilization is fragile as a life.”25 In her memoir, she describes the war as an extinction event, an historical tidal wave that engulfed the “social organization” into which she was born, and “swept [it] to oblivion with the rest.”26 In the introduction to the 1936 edition of The House of Mirth she compares the postwar era to that “cataclysmic period from the execution of Louis XVI to the battle of Waterloo,” when “a new world was born, differing as radically from the old world which it destroyed as that strange amalgam of new forces that grew out of the fall of the Roman empire differed from the civilization it overthrew.”27 As Wharton saw the matter, the world in which she had been raised and the world of the 1930s were foreign entities, barely mutually comprehensible to their respective members. “What would the New Yorker of the present day say to those [old-New-York] interiors, and the lives lived in them?” she asks in 1934, and answers: “[both] would be equally unintelligible to any New Yorker under fifty.”28 Wharton and Valéry, like many of their contemporaries, attributed this sense of rupture and its attendant consciousness of dislocation and mutability to the Great War. But that interpretation can only be half the explanation. “An event,” as Marshall Sahlins points out, “is not simply a phenomenal happening … Only as it is appropriated in and through the cultural scheme does it acquire an historical significance.”29 Therefore, if we wish to understand the way the events of 1914–18 registered in the minds and writings of Wharton and her contemporaries, we must inquire about the interpretative scheme that this period activated, and that gave rise to the postwar preoccupation with the theme of cultural transience. Which brings us back to the culturalist patterns of thought and feeling that had been gaining ground on both sides of the Atlantic for well over a century before the outbreak of the Great War. The early culturalist idea, that sociohistorical contingencies are not mere trappings but the very building blocks of the self, did more than fly in the face of the philosophical consensus of its day. It represented a bold transvaluation of everything that Dr. Johnson, voicing a longstanding philosophical and theological view, dismissed as “accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions.”30 To say with Burke and Herder that human beings are of one substance with the manners, customs, and beliefs of their respective communities was to invest these local and transitory circumstances with unprecedented significance, while also changing the definition of what it means to be a person. From mere impediments that had to be cleared away so that the “real” self—however conceived— could come into view, factors such as language, mores, folk traditions, and social rituals became the fabric from which a human subject is woven. On this view, to strip a person of the “transient” trappings of her cultural identity is not to reveal some underlying human core or “nature” but to deny that person of her humanity. The philosophical conundrums that followed in the wake of this culturalist reorientation have already been discussed. Let me, then, spotlight what might be called (for lack of

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a better term) its existential implications. Culturalism introduced new anxieties and vulnerabilities into the human repertoire (or at least brought them into sharper relief than ever before). For the more reconciled individuals became to viewing themselves as cultural creatures, continuous with the network of social relations and institutions that make up their sociohistorical habitat, the more they perceived their personal fates as dependent on how that particular habitat fares. Should their way of life be violently disrupted or destroyed, they stand to lose the only context in which their individual identities make sense. And so, insofar as being able to locate oneself within a culturally demarcated space has become “a hallmark of what it means to be a subject in modernity,” as Susan Hegeman argues, then so has living with the amplified awareness of the brittle and timebound nature of one’s social identity.31 A self conceived in culturalist terms is, at once, more conscious of its dependence on the sociohistorical frameworks that it inhabits and less secure in their stability and continuity over time. The late-eighteenth-century emergence of culturalist modes of thought and feeling was a necessary condition for the emergence of the cultural-extinction motif, but it was not a sufficient one. Before the idea of extinction (cultural or otherwise)32 could become thinkable—let alone a poignant subject for artistic representation—a specific conception of temporality had first to be available, one in which time is construed as a series of unique, immanent, and unrepeatable events. “For only when time is perceived as a line and change as irreversible,” as Fiona Stafford argues, “can ‘the last’ have any meaning.”33 Such a view was alien to the ancient Greek world whose historical thought was dominated by cyclical metaphors of cosmic birth, degeneration, and rebirth. Plato and Aristotle both professed cyclical views of time, as did the Pythagoreans, who sometimes argued that each round of creation produced the exact same universe down to the smallest detail, so that “the course of the world’s history would contain an endless number of Trojan Wars … and an endless number of Platos would [compose] an endless number of Republics.”34 This cyclical conception had no place for irrevocable endings and was therefore incompatible with the notion of extinction. This is also the case with the Judeo-Christian eschatological model that shaped the intellectual landscape of the West, from the period of St. Augustine and well into the eighteenth century. Here, it is true, time is no longer understood as an eternal recurrence of the same but as an arrow-like movement from a singular beginning to a predetermined end. But despite its linearity, the Judeo-Christian picture was as inhospitable to the idea of extinction as the cyclical view that it displaced. For the understanding of the End that this tradition inculcated in its believers was modeled on the biblical story of the flood: an allencompassing, theologically charged apocalypse, in which creation as a whole stands in judgment before its Creator. What this millenarian scheme precluded was the possibility of local extinction events, such that spell the terminal ending of a distinct group while leaving the rest of creation untouched. To bring that possibility into view a new temporal paradigm was needed, one that would retain the linearity of the Judeo-Christian model while eschewing its eschatology. Consequently, it is only in the second half of the eighteenth century, following the rise of the mechanistic view of the universe and the gradual waning of the apocalyptic model, that we begin to discern “a growing interest in disappearing families, tribes, and communities … [reflecting] a new awareness of cultural relativism, which involved not only ideas of time and history, but also of race.”35 More accurately, what occurs during this period is a confluence between the new secularized view of time as a sequence of

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unrepeatable events and the emergent culturalist transvaluation of the mundane and the transient, which together produce the enhanced awareness—typical of us moderns—of the mortality of communal human arrangements. This existential reconceptualization of life “in terms of loss,” as Peter Fritzsche emphasizes in his study of post-1789 historical thought, “was not an abstract or bookish matter at all, but deeply, personally felt.”36 And it quickly registered in the field of art, too. The first literary representations of the nascent preoccupation with local and relative endings are to be found in poems such as Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written at a Country Churchyard” (1751), James Macpherson’s Ossianic corpus (1760–5), and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), each of which describes the fading away of a culturally and geographically marked form of life. By demonstrating “that an elegy could lament the passing of a society or of a way of life as poetically as the death of a single individual,” these poems cleared the path down which all subsequent cultural elegists— Wharton included—will travel.37 The theme of cultural extinction finds its way into the novel at the turn of the nineteenth century with the publication of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and Walter Scott’s runaway bestseller Waverley (1814). Edgeworth’s novel is a comic-elegiac account of the decline and fall of the Rackrent line, which serves as a representative of the semi-feudal Irish landowning class “long since … extinct in Ireland.”38 Framed as a backward glance at the foibles and inequities—but also laudable sense of hospitality and local charm—of that vanished world, Castle Rackrent initiates a long tradition of novelistic writing, wherein, in James Clifford’s words, “whole cultures (knowable worlds) [are described] from a specific temporal distance and with a presumption of their transience.”39 This formula is next taken up by Walter Scott who transports it from preUnion Ireland to the Scotland of the Jacobite Rebellion (1745–6). Likewise framed as a retrospective cultural elegy, the novel traces the disastrous history of the uprising, which spells the end of the clan-based society of the Scottish Highlands—a form of life that Scott depicts, at once, as bracingly heroic and hopelessly outdated. Maria Edgeworth, whom Wharton read but rarely discussed,40 and Walter Scott, whom she continued to “reread … in an effort to discover why others admired [him] so much,” may seem like vague reference points for her thought and work.41 But they are important, not only for understanding the literary origin of the vocabulary of cultural extinction on which Wharton draws but also in order to gauge her distinct contribution to the literary tradition that Clifford outlines above. For Edgeworth’s and Scott’s widely circulating texts are not only the first novelistic iterations of the cultural-extinction motif, they also launch two of the nineteenth-century genres in which Wharton specialized—the regionalist tale and the realist novel, respectively. Castle Rackrent’s significance for the emergence of nineteenth-century regionalist fiction, first in Europe and then in America, has long been recognized. In this slim novel, as Walter Allen, Judith Fetterley, Marjorie Pryse, and Josephine Donovan have variously argued,42 Maria Edgeworth gave fiction a local habitation and a name. And she did more than this: she perceived the relation between the local habitation and the people who dwell in it. She invented, in other words, the regional novel, in which the very nature of the novelist’s characters is conditioned, receives its bias and expression, from the fact that they live in a countryside differentiated by a traditional way of life from other countrysides.43

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Put differently, Edgeworth’s novel was perhaps the first literary text to translate the incipient culturalist paradigm—then strongly associated with Edgeworth’s fellow Irishman, Edmund Burke—into a fictional register.44 Edgeworth’s innovative use of dialect, her focus on the nuances of gesture, speech, and habit that separate one social group from another, and her emphatic insistence on the shaping power of (what we today call) culture were quickly taken up and reproduced by writers across the transatlantic world, turning Castle Rackrent, as Fetterley and Pryse observe, into “a stunning origin text for regionalism.”45 Walter Scott’s influence was arguably still greater. Like his Irish predecessor, Scott wedded the elegiac regard for fading premodern communities that he found in Gray, Macpherson, and Goldsmith (and which he had already explored in his own earlier poetry), with the techniques developed by his realist predecessors, Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, to produce historically sensitive accounts of vanishing lifeworlds on the colonial fringes of the expanding British Empire. However, whereas Edgeworth deliberately focuses in proto-regionalist fashion on the “the most minute facts relative to the domestic lives, not only of the great and good, but even of the worthless and insignificant,”46 Scott paints his picture on a broad historical canvas that aspires to total epic representation of a fateful historical transition in the life of a distinct cultural group. In his hands, the realist novel begins its transformation from a rambling mode of didactic entertainment into a tool for sociohistorical analysis. His breakout novel, Waverley, as Georg Lukács followed by Ian Duncan, Harry S. Shaw, and James Buzard have forcefully argued, would go on to inspire not just conscious epigones such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton but also Thackeray and George Eliot, Balzac and Flaubert, Turgenev and Tolstoy—the cadre of writers that Wharton held in the highest esteem. By the time Wharton began her writing career, Edgeworth’s and Scott’s genre-defining novels had already become relics themselves. But the sister traditions that they initiated— regionalist and metropolitan realism—were still going strong. The main difference between these two branches of the realist tree is to be sought not so much in literary technique but in the ideological work that each genre performed. Schematically speaking, while Scott’s followers took up his holistic and historicist view of society, and employed it to produce progressive, nation-building narratives of social integration at the hegemonic center, Edgeworth’s regionalist disciples adopted her focus on the local and the domestic to produce intimate depictions of vanishing enclaves of traditional life on the national or imperial periphery. Thus, a kind of division of labor was set up in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The metropolitan realist novel, associated with the likes of Balzac and Dickens, took up Scott’s maximalist ambition to total representation and set itself up as representer and tutor to the rising middle classes. Regionalist realism, meanwhile, adopted Edgeworth’s localism and elegaism and tasked itself with mediating to those selfsame urban readers the distinctive folkways of disappearing cultures on the geographical and economic fringes of the nation.47 The first affirmed its urban readers in the stability of their national and class identities, while the second, via its traditional gesture of pushing the prospect of cultural extinction away from the metropolitan center and toward its peripheral “others,” reassured that selfsame urban readership in its immunity to that unsettling possibility. As Richard Brodhead puts this point in connection with American nineteenth-century regionalism, the ideological work performed by the genre’s tales of cultural extinction on the periphery “was not just to mourn lost cultures but to purvey a certain story of contemporary cultures and the relations among them: to tell local cultures

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into a history of their supersession by modern order now risen to national dominance.”48 That is, American regionalism’s popularity between the 1880s and 1920s stemmed (at least in part) from the metaphysical comfort it held out to its primarily urban, middle-class readership. Contained in the genre’s staple conceit of depicting quaint local communities at the moment when they begin slipping into oblivion was an unspoken reassurance that the “modern order,” from which those readers typically hailed and with which they identified, was somehow immune to that fate. Like Edgeworth before them and the professional ethnographers who followed, the nineteenth-century regionalists often framed their sketches in preservationist terms. Sarah Orne Jewett’s stated intention to salvage “what is simplest and best and purest” in New England’s “fast waning” country life is one example of this rhetoric; Mary Wilkins Freeman’s expressed desire to “preserve in literature … this old and probably disappearing type of New England character” is another.49 And despite her offhand dismissal of these two women writers, it is clear that Wharton’s mission in texts such as A Backward Glance, The Age of Innocence, and Old New York (1924)—the mission of recovering the “fragments” and “moral treasures” of the world of her youth “before the last of those who knew the live structure are swept away with it”—is of a piece with theirs.50 Wharton liked to distinguish her regionalist prose in Ethan Frome (1911) and Summer (1917) from that of her predecessors on the basis of her credentials as a hardnosed realist. Whereas they depicted rural life through “rose-coloured spectacles,” she claimed to describe it “as it really was.”51 But this invidious distinction is not only unfair to Jewett and Wilkins Freeman but it also fails to capture the real significance of Wharton’s work for the history of American regionalism and realism alike. When placed in the context of the long trajectory of the cultural-extinction trope from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, Wharton’s oeuvre is revealed as a pivot point, a representative body of work in which the fate of cultural transience, long reserved to modernity’s designated foils—the various “natives,” “primitives,” and “rural folk” that it propped up for the purpose of negative self-identification—begins to be applied to social formations associated with its hegemonic, metropolitan core. The Age of Innocence, with its conspicuous “savaging” of hypercivilized New York society, is exemplary in this regard. As Bentley argues, the novel’s persistent use of anthropological jargon in its description of that milieu (with its “clans,” “totem terrors,” and “sacred taboos”) is not merely a stylistic embellishment; it is a way for Wharton to isolate “culture” (in that word’s newly professionalized anthropological meaning) “as the true site of social origins and transformations.”52 But, through that very maneuver, Wharton is also rendering that elite society, her native grounds, to the fate that nineteenth-century literary and scientific discourse reserved to aliens and strangers. What Wharton does in her Pulitzer Prize–winning elegy to her native New York is to fuse the retrospective elegaism of the regionalist genre with the trademark setting and social cast of the realist novel, thereby effectively regionalizing the metropole or parochializing the center. In so doing, she not only blurs the distinction between a progressive civilization at the metropolitan core and vanishing natives on modernity’s periphery but also traverses the divide between the two dominant genres of realist writing that issued from Edgeworth’s and Scott’s literary experiments, and which served to uphold that distinction. A comparison with James Fenimore Cooper, another American writer deeply preoccupied with the transience of cultural worlds, is instructive here. For it is to his Leatherstocking Tales, which had turned the figure of the Native American into the ultimate icon of cultural extinction, that Wharton’s Ralph Marvell alludes when he

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compares his social milieu to “those vanishing denizens of the American continent.” Cooper’s debt to Walter Scott is well known, but his novels imported not only Scott’s thematic focus on vanishing forms of life but also his (and Edgeworth’s) association of extinction with peripherality, which in his fictions receives a markedly racial meaning. For all the sympathy they extend to the wronged indigenous peoples that they depict, the Leatherstocking Tales draw a clear and insurmountable boundary between the progressive white civilization at the nation’s symbolic core and a moribund native culture located on its ever-shrinking “frontier.” And so, even while Cooper invites his readers to keen over the sad fate of the “wise race of the Mohicans,” his novels furnish those readers with a comfortably secure position from which to do so.53 “The pale faces are masters of the earth,” Chief Tamenund acknowledges at the end of The Last of the Mohicans (1826),54 before exiting the novel and, by implication, the world’s stage, thereby affirming the racialized historical scheme that the novel projects. Cultural extinction, in Cooper’s early-nineteenth-century texts, thus becomes the lot of history’s nonwhite losers, to be observed with wistfulness but also with a significant measure of reassurance from a secure position on the right side of Enlightenment, Civilization, and Progress. The sacred racial boundary that separates white and red in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales becomes geographical and cultural in post–Civil War regionalist fiction. But the function of this constructed boundary—the function of staving off the unsettling consciousness of precarity and impermanence that are encoded in the historicist and culturalist assumptions of modern life—remains the same. As Amy Kaplan argues in a landmark essay, the “rural ‘others’ ” that late-nineteenth-century regionalist fiction purveyed to its mainly urban consumers served to provide these middle-class readers both with “a nostalgic point of origin” and with a cultural reference point against which to “measure [their own] cosmopolitan development.”55 That is, much like the Native Americans of Cooper’s tales, regionalism’s vanishing rural folk were there to confirm—by their very demise—the ascendency of the metropole and essential rightness of the values and institutions that centered in it. Yet despite the metaphysical comfort it provided, the skewed nineteenth-century distribution of human possibilities—between vanishing “cultures” on modernity’s margins and a progressing “civilization” at its presumptive core—begins to unravel in the early decades of the twentieth century, as writers and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic begin to apply terms and metaphors that had hitherto been applied to “exotic” peoples and marginal communities to groups associated with the metropolitan, hegemonic base. Thorstein Veblen’s primitivist account of genteel society in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Freud’s attempt to establish psychological continuities between neurotic behavior and various animistic practices in Totem and Taboo (1913), Ruth Benedict’s relativistic insistence, in Patterns of Culture (1934), that “our” institutions and achievements are neither unique nor privileged but merely different from those of so-called primitive peoples—these are some of the better-known theoretical manifestations of this shift. One of the implications of the increased semantic traffic between the formerly segregated realms of the “modern” and the “primitive,” the “civilized” and the “savage,” is the transposition of the cultural-extinction trope from the periphery to the center. Wharton’s work is an early and influential example of this transposition, but we might also think of Fitzgerald’s novella, The Rich Boy (1926), Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (1932), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous (1977), and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997)—all of which follow Wharton’s lead

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and cast hegemonic social groups in the role that Cooper reserved for white modernity’s others, the role of the vanishing native. To view New York society as a “culture,” in the sense whose historical development I have outlined in this essay, is to view it both as an all-pervasive, identity-shaping power and as a contingent and time-bound human creation. “It seems cruel,” as Ellen Olenska sums up this perspective in The Age of Innocence, “that after a while nothing matters … any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labelled: ‘Use unknown.’ ”56 To see one’s identity in these culturalist terms is to accept that the beliefs, practices, and institutions that make up one’s world are neither ordained nor necessary but simply one possible cultural arrangement among others. This is the view that informs the claim made by another of Wharton’s contemporaries, the Austrian American economist Joseph Schumpeter, that “to realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.”57 And it also informs Freud’s claim that “value … is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.”58 What is common to these statements is the culturalist assumption that the principles, values, and institutions that are, in Ellen’s words, “necessary and important” for us—whoever we may be—are neither autonomous nor freestanding but contingent parts of a vulnerable, transient, intersubjective “world”—a culture. Coming to terms with the culturalist idea, that the things that matter most to us will someday cease to matter, without, however, losing our sense of their value in the present, was for Wharton (as for Ellen, Schumpeter, and Freud) the mark of moral maturity. Fostering this kind of moral awareness is, I believe, a particularly urgent task today. We live in precarious times, in which the future of long-standing social and political institutions suddenly seems to have been thrown into question. The deepening crisis of liberal democracy, the rising inequality between the global North and South, the looming threat of environmental catastrophe, and, most recently, the severely disruptive worldwide outbreak of the Covid-19 virus—these threats confront us jointly with the unsettling probability that the world that we will leave behind us will be radically different, not only from the one we inherited but also from the one we currently inhabit. Most of us, I suspect, will live to see much of what we take today for granted, up to and including our social and professional identities, become obsolete if not wholly extinct. Wharton is, in this respect, our contemporary. She confronted an analogous historical scenario armed with a similar set of assumptions and metaphors. Her writing does not offer solutions to the quintessentially modern predicament of outliving one’s cultural world— the predicament that she embodies most forcefully in the figure of Newland Archer. But if we take seriously her considered reflections on value and time, culture and extinction, she may help us acknowledge and perhaps better come to terms with it.

NOTES 1 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance, in Cynthia Griffin Wolff (ed.), Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1990), 767–1068, 781. 2 Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country, in R. W. B. Lewis (ed.), Edith Wharton: Novels (New York: Library of America, 1990), 621–1014, 669.

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3 Edith Wharton, False Dawn in Wolff, Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings, 315– 70, 365. 4 Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, ed. Candace Waid (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 213. 5 Edith Wharton, The Children (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 153. 6 Wharton, A Backward Glance, 827. 7 Ibid., 856. 8 Ibid., 916. 9 Ibid. 10 R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 442. 11 She was not far off; he once described her “as having fought the good fight with stone-age weapons.” See Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Vintage, 2008), 616. 12 “‘Cultivated Garden’ Time (4 May 1936), 80,” in James W. Tuttleton, Kristin O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray (eds.), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 536–7, 536. 13 Lisa Mendelman, Modern Sentimentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 152. 14 Lee, Edith Wharton, 607; Jennie Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 15 Nancy Bentley, The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, and Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 109. 16 Ibid., 113. 17 Mendelman, Sentimentalism, 152. 18 Edith Wharton, “The Great American Novel,” in Frederick Wegener (ed.), Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 154. 19 Some portions of the following text have appeared, in more developed form, in my book The Blossom Which We Are: The Novel and the Transience of Cultural Worlds and are used here by permission of the State University of New York Press. (c) 2020 State University of New York. All rights reserved. 20 Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 33–54, 35. 21 Pamela Knights, “Forms of Disembodiment: The Social Subject in The Age of Innocence,” in Millicent Bell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 20–46, 21. 22 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 293. 23 Geertz, “Impact,” 19. 24 Wharton, “The Great American Novel,” 155–6. 25 Paul Valéry, “Disillusionment,” in Marvin Perry, Matthew Bera, and James Krukones (eds.), Sources of European History Since 1900 (Boston, MA: Cengage, 2011), 78. 26 Wharton, A Backward Glance, 827. 27 Edith Wharton, “Introduction to the 1936 Edition,” in Carol J. Singley (ed.), Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 31–7, 32. 28 Edith Wharton, “A Little Girl’s New York,” in Frederick Wegener (ed.), Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 274–88, 276–7. 29 Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), xiv. 30 Quoted in Geertz, “Impact,” 35. 31 Susan Hegeman, The Cultural Return (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 25.

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32 The idea of biological species extinction, frequently associated with the figures of Georges Cuvier, Charles Lyell, and Darwin, long predates the nineteenth century. For instance, as part of his polemic against the anthropocentric interpretation of the universe, Montaigne argued that “we cannot doubt that there is an infinity of things which exist now in the world, or which formerly existed and have now ceased to be, which have never been seen by any man or been of use to any.” Given the prevailing assumptions of his day, Montaigne was here—as in so much else—a thinker ahead of his time. Yet it is important to recognize that his objection to the idea of humanity as the center of creation was based in moral, not scientific, considerations: he disliked its hubris. It would only be in the course of the eighteenth century, as naturalists began to worry about the pressing question of how the accumulating fossil record could be reconciled with the biblical account of the earth’s genesis, that evidence-based argument for species extinction began to appear. Montaigne quoted in Lovejoy, Chain, 124. 33 Fiona Stafford, The Last of the Race (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 42. 34 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (New York: Dover, 1955), 12. 35 Stafford, The Last, 83. 36 Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 203. 37 Earl Miner, “The Making of ‘The Deserted Village,’ ” Huntington Library Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1959): 125–41, 140. 38 Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui, ed. Marilyn Butler (London: Penguin, 1992), 63. 39 James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in James Clifford and George Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 114. 40 Edith’s father gave her a copy of Edgeworth’s Tales and Novels for her thirteenth birthday. Years later she would write to her former governess Anna Bahlmann that she had “just been reading a very interesting life [sic] of Miss Edgeworth … [who had always been] an attractive personality to me.” See Edith Wharton, My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann, ed. Irene Goldman-Price (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 7, 110. 41 Lewis, Edith Wharton, 521. 42 See Walter Allen, The English Novel: A Short Critical History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986); Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); and Josephine Donovan, European Local-Color Literature: National Tales, Dorfgeschichten, Romans Champetres (New York: Continuum, 2010). 43 Allen, The English Novel, 103. 44 Edgeworth’s father Richard knew Burke socially, and Maria was an admirer of his writing. She even once considered writing an essay on Burke’s thought and style, but that intention never materialized. 45 Fetterley and Pryse, Writing Out of Place, 69. 46 Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, 63. 47 None of the categories used in this argument—“periphery,” “center,” “regionalism,” and “realism”—should be taken as absolute. Not only do many writers trouble their stability (Was George Eliot a realist or regionalist? What about Ivan Turgenev?) but the very division of national and imperial spaces into clearly demarcated “centers” and “peripheries” is fraught

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with complications (Where does Middlemarch fall? How about Dickens’s Tom-All-Alone’s?). But such complications do not gainsay the utility of these terms. After all, all our theoretical classifications and definitions are susceptible to deconstruction and counterexample. What such complexities recommend, rather, is that the specificities of the center-periphery relationship have to be worked out on a case-by-case basis and in reference to the particular cultural and historical circumstances that obtain in each. 48 Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 121. 49 Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven and Other Stories, ed. Richard Cary (New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1966), 33; Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1893), 5. 50 Wharton, A Backward Glance, 781. 51 Ibid., 1002. 52 Bentley, Ethnography, 2. 53 James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, in James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales, vol. 1, ed. Blake Nevius (New York: Library of America, 1985), 467–878, 878. 54 Ibid., 877. 55 Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, Empire,” in Emory Elliott (ed.), The Columbia History of the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 240–66, 251. 56 Wharton, Innocence, 186. 57 Schumpeter is quoted in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 167. 58 Sigmund Freud, “On Transience,” in James Strachey (trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works XIV (London: Hogarth, 1957), 305–7, 306.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Edith Wharton and Pleasure VIRGINIA RICARD

“Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition,” wrote Edmund Burke in 1857.1 Yet for Edith Wharton the meaning of both terms seems to have been clear. She was an ardent admirer of Balzac and for her, as well as for her great predecessor, pleasure was no minor phenomenon. It was, on the contrary, a matter of consequence. In fact, pleasure became a yardstick with which Wharton could measure the world. Not only her own pleasure, indeed not only individual pleasure, but the place and meaning of pleasure in society, in different societies, and more particularly in the societies that she knew well, on either side of the Atlantic. It was an anthropological concept that helped her to think about history and contemporary society. She saw it as an organizing principle that divided mankind between those who seek it and those who shun it. She also understood that any society that hoped to endure had to accommodate pleasure, at the very least to accept it as a principal stimulus of human endeavor. This chapter shows that Wharton took pleasure extraordinarily seriously, that she found it in activities not usually set apart for amusement, and that her delight was unashamed whatever the source.

PLEASURE HATING AND PLEASURE LOVING Unlike Santayana’s last Puritan, Wharton would surely never have said, “I hate pleasure. I hate what is called having a good time.”2 Enjoyment was not to be taken lightly. In “America at War” (1918), a lecture given in Paris during the final months of the First World War in which she briefly outlined American history for a French audience, she expressed her relief at being able to think of herself as a descendant of the pleasure-loving Dutch rather than of the Puritans whose denial of pleasure she presented as one of the founding precepts of the American nation: Right from the beginning of the seventeenth century, you had, side by side, dark and fanatic Massachusetts, founded in 1620 to establish “the reign of the spirit,” and the state of New York founded seven years earlier to establish the dominion of the dollar … Thus, side by side, were two groups representing the two principal motives of human action: the will to sacrifice everything to intellectual and moral convictions and the desire for wealth and the enjoyment of life. I, who am a descendant of the Dutch merchants and of their English successors, confess that I am glad not to have been brought up in the shadow of the gloomy theocracy of Massachusetts.3

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Human societies, she continued, are made up of two kinds of people, those who are willing to abandon “the pleasures of an organized society, [and] certain well-being” and those who, on the contrary, have “a taste for lavish meals and the comforts of rest beneath an eiderdown … a healthy enjoyment of earthly goods.” Wharton, grateful to belong to the second category, clearly did not want her listeners to forget any of the dismal details of the pleasureless lives of the early settlers in New England: Picture them, less than a hundred disappointed and distraught men, women and children, desperately hanging onto a rock lashed by the Atlantic Ocean. They had left home heading for balmy Virginia, where the crown had granted them land, and it was only by cruel ill luck that a storm had cast them down on the bleak New England coast. Picture them facing cold, hunger, and Indians, without the help of a government, struggling alone … And what sort of life did people lead in those bleak hamlets, which is what the so-called townships of the New World really were? Stranded in the midst of immense forests, built on the edge of a stormy sea, and surrounded by ever-menacing natives, their humble wooden dwellings were buried in snow for six months a year … The inhabitants of these tiny hamlets never left home except to go through the snow to listen to the minister who ruled over the parish. No one was allowed to miss the sermon, and in the flimsy wooden churches, where there was not even a stove to keep out the cold, everyone was chilled to the bone while the minister spoke for hours on end … The length of the sermons and prayers was such that the poor parishioners more often than not had to go home through the perilous forest in the middle of the night.4 Much of this was probably an effort to counter her French audience’s vision of the likes of Undine Spragg, the American big-spenders who treated Paris and Cannes as their private amusement parks—a vision Wharton shared and had in fact helped to propagate in France, in particular with the translation of The House of Mirth (1905).5 In her talk she wanted to show that the original Americans were entirely unlike the ignorant and vulgar people satirized in Chez les heureux du monde (the title of the French translation of The House of Mirth) and caricatured on the French stage or in French novels in the period leading up to the Great War.6 “Are you really so far from believing that our grandparents went to America mainly to acquire dollars so that their grandsons could spend them merrily in the luxurious hotels of old Europe?” she asked her listeners. Condemning both the ancestors who hated pleasure (“fanatics” she calls them) and the descendants who loved it too much, Wharton openly expressed her own preference for comfort, enjoyment, pleasure, and for societies where pleasure was not disparaged. What she admired were the complex old societies where pleasure and purpose could merge. Looking back at her childhood and young adulthood, she lamented the strict separation in New York between the leisure class and “scholars, artists and men of letters”: “It is only in sophisticated societies that the intellectual recognize the uses of the frivolous, and that the frivolous know how to make their houses attractive to their betters.”7 In The Age of Innocence (1920), old New York is evidently not one of those sophisticated societies. The narrator tells us that Beaufort “was as illiterate as old Mrs. Mingott, and considered ‘fellows who wrote’ as the mere paid purveyors of rich men’s pleasures; and no one rich enough to influence his opinion had ever questioned it.”8

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PLEASURE AND ART It comes as no surprise to find that Wharton’s most explicit comment on the rift between the pleasure-loving and those who despise pleasure, or at least certain kinds of pleasure, is to be found in French Ways and Their Meaning (1919). More remarkable is the manner in which she associates pleasure with what she calls “intellectual honesty.” In fact, her discussion of pleasure is almost entirely relegated to chapter IV, which bears that title, and to the conclusion in which she writes that the object of her book is “to explain the fundamental difference between the exiles of the Mayflower and the conquerors of Valmy and Jéna.”9 Her argument is that the French are fearless and free, that they are afraid of nothing that concerns mankind, “neither of pleasure and mirth nor of exultations and agonies.” In consequence, they “talk and write freely about subjects and situations that Anglo-Saxons … have agreed not to mention.”10 They see “the normal pleasures, physical and aesthetic … as wholesome, nourishing, and necessary for the background of a laborious life of business or study” and they are “used to the frank discussion of … ‘the operations of Nature.’ ”11 The French are concerned with volupté, which, Wharton says, has little to do with voluptuousness and nothing at all to do with fat cross-legged sultans in seraglios, but is instead “the intangible charm that imagination extracts from things tangible.”12 Indeed “the word ‘volupté’ is free from the vulgarity of our ‘voluptuousness,’ ” free from the vulgarity that “Anglo-Saxon minds” so easily lend it.13 “‘Le plaisir,’ ” Wharton writes, “stands for the frankly permitted, the freely taken, delight of the senses … No suggestions of furtive vice degrade or coarsen it, because it has, like love, its open place in speech and practice.”14 By contrast, “nasty prying” and “morbid self-examination,” “solemnity” or the absence of a sense of humor, a “queer fear of our own bodies,” anecdotes privately snickered over, and more generally pruriency and self-righteousness all characterize those who fear pleasure.15 The descendants of the founders of New England may wish “to prove the superior purity of Anglo-Saxon morals,” but the problem of what to do with pleasure, with the tingle of pleasure, with the feeling of pleasure, and with the human pursuit of pleasure, remains. The French are able “to express emotion where AngloSaxons can only choke with it.”16 This, in Wharton’s eyes, is the crux of the question, since “artistic creativeness requires … a free play of the mind on all the facts of life.”17 Thus, it is their openness to pleasure that explains that “the French are a race of creative artists.”18 In the final analysis, pleasure is the very motor of creativity for “no real art can be based on a humbugging attitude toward life, and it is their intellectual honesty which makes them exact and enjoy its fearless representation.”19 As Wharton sees it, the general attitude to pleasure in all its forms, including sexual pleasure, is what determines the role and place of art in a society. For the French, she writes, “the enjoyment of beauty and the exercise of the critical intelligence are two of the things best worth living for.”20 The French do not despise culture: instead of “ridiculing knowledge as the affectation of a self-conscious clique, they are obliged to esteem it, to pretend to have it, and to try and talk its language—which is not a bad way of beginning to acquire it.”21 The enjoyment of beauty and knowledge is open to all in other words. Wharton’s ideal of pleasure is a democratic one, and she has no scorn for those who attempt to experience the finer pleasures without necessarily having the requisite knowledge or mastering the necessary language: The notion that art and knowledge could ever, in a civilised state, be regarded as negligible, or subordinated to merely material interests, would never occur to them. It

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does not follow that everything they create is beautiful, or that their ideas are always valuable or interesting; what matters is the esteem in which the whole race holds ideas and their noble expression.22 In 1919, Wharton thought that it was still necessary to explain to Americans (the principal readers of French Ways) that pleasure does not corrupt, deprave, or debauch, that it is an essential ingredient of creativity, and that it is not the private purlieu of an elite. Many of the American characters in her novels require some convincing.

POSTPONING PLEASURE Newland Archer is a case in point. The Age of Innocence begins with an almost programmatic description of his arrival at the opera. We learn that “he had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation. This was especially the case when the pleasure was a delicate one, as his pleasures mostly were.”23 At the end of the novel, Archer understands what his preference for anticipation actually means: “Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.”24 Indeed, The Age of Innocence is a tale of postponed pleasure, of missed opportunity. Archer’s encounter with Ellen Olenska develops around the question of the place and meaning of pleasure in France and New York. Well-read Archer, who thinks of himself as knowing, teaches the more experienced Ellen about the “finer” pleasures buried beneath what she sees as the dreary lives of old New Yorkers: “It was you” she says, “who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison.” She suddenly sees her old life in a new light: “It seems as if I’d never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid.” But Archer realizes that to have experienced exquisite pleasures is in itself an achievement: “It’s something to have had them—!”25 To be sure, his relationship with Olenska opens Archer’s eyes to a world he had thought he knew—to new horizons of pleasure that the plot then cruelly deprives him of. The narrative dramatizes this broadening of Archer’s consciousness, yet leaves him among people repeatedly presented as tribal, almost primitive in some of their ways—the result, we are told, of “a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses.”26 A final dinner party, organized for Ellen before her return to Europe—much like a dinner party given by Madame Verdurin where the guests who laugh at a stuttering member of the party are described by Proust’s narrator as “a band of anthropophogites” who smell blood27—resembles a reunion of cannibals about to pounce on their prey. Much of The Age of Innocence is organized around the melancholy motif of the vanity of human pleasures. A minor character like Medora is an anti-Pascalian adept of divertissement—diversion, entertainment—anything that helps to forget the prospect of death. “To me,” she says, “the only death is monotony. I always say to Ellen: Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all the deadly sins.”28 It is Medora who makes Archer see that Madame Olenska cannot be expected to live without pleasures of any kind and that he was wrong to convince her not to divorce, since this made her more rather than less vulnerable to enticements of every sort and in particular to the attractions of Paris. Earlier outlines of The Age of Innocence show that the failure of the relationship between Ellen and Newland is the result of their very different perceptions of the nature and importance

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of pleasure. In one version, Archer marries May but meets Countess Olenska secretly in Florida. In another, Ellen and Newland marry but soon separate. Ellen returns to Europe, and Newland goes back to live with his mother. In both versions, monotony and the inability to live outside the confines of society are the source of the pair’s romantic disillusion. In the novel as Wharton finally wrote it, the echoes of Ecclesiastes are difficult to miss: Ellen’s promise to “come to” Archer is exacted during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum where the Cesnola Collection is presented as a “necropolis” and the objects in it are reminders that “nothing matters” since death erases all human striving. “It seems cruel,” Ellen says, “that after a while nothing matters.” Although Archer protests, he never actually seizes the day.29 In the final chapter, the reader is reminded of the distance between the two protagonists: Ellen’s life in Paris after she leaves New York is something Archer can only dream about: Sitting alone at night in his library, after the household had gone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak of spring down the avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers and statues in the public gardens, the whiff of lilacs from the flower-carts, the majestic roll of the river under the great bridges, and the life of art and study and pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting. Now the spectacle was before him in its glory.30 In Paris with his grown-up son and now a man of almost sixty, Archer is still prepared to forego pleasure, to contemplate an existence such as Madame Olenska’s from afar, perhaps because he feels it is already too late for “the flower of life.”

THE REEF The Reef, published eight years earlier, tells another story of pleasure postponed. The beginning of the novel clearly announces the agenda: deferral. Almost the first word of The Reef is “obstacle” and it refers only to the first impediment that must be overcome. The plot concerns another love triangle, composed this time of George Darrow, Anna Leath—a young widow—and Sophy Viner. Darrow and Anna Leath had known and been attracted to each other in their youth. When they meet again and fall in love after more than twelve years, the reader learns that “Mrs. Leath … contrived to make [Darrow] understand that what was so inevitably coming was not to come too soon.” Darrow, not quite grasping just how long he would be expected to dangle, is at first “content to wait.”31 He remembers the time he had gone to visit Anna in the country as a young man. She had been out when he arrived, and he had gone out to look for her: She was not in the garden, but beyond it he had seen her approaching down a long shady path. Without hastening her step she had smiled and signed to him to wait; and charmed by the lights and shadows that played upon her as she moved, and by the pleasure of watching her slow advance toward him, he had obeyed her and stood still. And so she seemed now to be walking to him down the years, the light and shade of old memories and new hopes playing variously on her, and each step giving him the vision of a different grace. She did not waver or turn aside; he knew she would come straight to where he stood; but something in her eyes said “Wait,” and again he obeyed and waited.32 The reader too must be prepared to wait. However, fate—or coincidence—decides otherwise. George Darrow and Sophy Viner are, through a series of fortuitous circumstances, thrown together for a few days in Paris and become lovers. Although

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neither the reader nor Darrow knows this, Sophy, a young, needy American girl, is on her way to her new position as Anna’s daughter Effie’s governess. The novel is an examination of the consequences for the protagonists themselves, and for all those close to them, of illicit pleasure. Darrow—perhaps, like Wharton, a descendant of the Dutch rather than the Puritans—has a “healthy enjoyment of life,”33 and he is delighted to watch Sophy having a good time. He takes her to the theatre and realizes that it “was wonderfully pleasant to be able to give such pleasure”:34 he notices her quite “disproportionate pleasure”;35 “pleasure danced in her eyes and on her lips”;36 “she was an extraordinary conductor of sensation: she seemed to transmit it physically”;37 afterwards he recalls “with a faint smile of retrospective pleasure the girl’s enjoyment of her evening, and the innumerable fine feelers of sensation she had thrown out to its impressions”;38 he realizes that “she was starving, poor child, for a little amusement, a little personal life.”39 After two days filled with all the pleasures afforded by Paris—its theatres, its restaurants, walks in the bois—and the barely alluded-to nights, strong-minded Sophy must leave. (“This is goodbye, you know. I must telegraph at once to say I’m coming.”40) The two meet again, in very different circumstances, at Givré, Anna Leath’s home in the country. From then on the word “pleasure” almost disappears from the novel. The contrast drawn between the two women—Anna and Sophy—makes their different attitudes to pleasure clearly visible. Unlike Sophy, Anna is not “an extraordinary conductor of sensation”—she does not seem to transmit her sensations physically. Instead, Darrow admires her as he would a picture, a Whistler perhaps, “a fine portrait kept down to a few tones,” or perhaps a precious, fragile Greek vase. What strikes his imagination now is precisely “the proud shy set of her head, the way her dark hair clasped it, and the girlish thinness of her neck above the slight swell of the breast … the quality of reticence in her beauty on which the play of light is the only pattern.”41 The similarities between this description of Anna and the earlier memory of her quoted above (“charmed by the lights and shadows that played upon her as she moved”; “the play of light is the only pattern”) contribute to the feeling of disjunction, of disparateness, between George and Anna. She is a vision rather than an object of desire. The discovery of what has taken place in Paris between Sophy Viner and George Darrow puts an end to Anna Leath’s reticence however—to “her slow advance toward him … down the years.” Suddenly she finds herself in the throes of desire, of jealousy, and of self-disgust. She no longer wishes to defer pleasure. Here too, the narrative dramatizes the broadening of a consciousness. But in this case, more palpably than in Archer’s, it is to the existence of sexual pleasure that Anna becomes alert. This is the “Racinian” passion—with its “unity, intensity, gracility”—that Henry James, Charles Du Bos, and Régis Michaud all referred to in the encomiums they bestowed on the novel.42 For Anna as for Eriphile—a character in Racine’s “Iphigénie” to whom Henry James compared Anna in his letter to Wharton—love is almost a physiological disorder. Like Phèdre, another Racinian heroine, Anna is tortured by her own feelings. Sexual passion is shown to be agonizing as well as fulfilling. Yet at the end of The Reef, once she has overcome her misgivings, Anna has more, rather than less, real dignity than at the beginning. Wharton’s absence of judgment of Sophy (noticed by a number of critics) and of Darrow (usually overlooked) is also remarkable. It is surely wrong to say that George Darrow is a hypocrite (unless one would prefer him to behave like a cad and to denounce Sophy),43 that the Paris episode is “sordid,”44 or that the episode represents the “covert, underground, and generally shabby areas of life.”45 Wharton shows on the contrary that

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pleasure is an essential part of any relationship, and that women as well as men can enter into sexual relationships that often take place outside of the confines of society without their becoming automatically “shabby,” “shoddy,” or ”dingy” although there is always a threat of their doing so. Anna Leath is tormented by what she has missed but, more daring than Archer, she finally demands the fulfillment of her desires. Afterwards, she goes to tell Sophy she is prepared to give up Darrow, but Sophy has already gone abroad and there is no indication that Anna really will relinquish Darrow or her newfound pleasure. Given her many changes of heart, we have some reason to think that, on the contrary, she will now be able to accept him as he is. Or, to use Wharton’s own terms, with full knowledge of “the operations of Nature” and some experience of volupté (i.e., “the intangible charm that imagination extracts from things tangible”), the no longer “immature”46 Anna Leath will find that she is now able to love an imperfect husband, a man with his own inner conflicts. Many critics have explained Anna Leath’s initial avoidance of pleasure as the result of her “gentility.” Wharton, if we are to believe what she writes in French Ways of the difference between “the exiles of the Mayflower and the conquerors of Valmy and Jéna,” seems instead to present it as the result of the “austere, arduous, and joyless past”—the Puritan past that Anna finally manages to put behind her. Unsurprisingly, French critics— who read the untranslated novel in English—were enthusiastic, whereas their American and English equivalents have consistently damned it with faint praise.47 In The Age of Innocence, Ellen Olenska complains of the lack of privacy in American houses in which, she says, it is impossible to have a conversation without being overheard, as if one were on stage. In The Reef, on the other hand, Anna struggles with the opposite problem: an absence of transparency. Too much takes place that can only be guessed at. Critics too have found the novel, or at the very least Darrow’s part in it, “murky.”48 Certainly the final chapter does a great deal to suggest the general “seediness,” or “tawdriness,” of the world “beyond.” Yet, precisely, Wharton seems to want to show that Anna is now prepared to accept the existence of the passions, not all of which need be examined in the light of day—or proclaimed from a stage. In this reading, the reef is a hidden obstacle—not the obstacle Anna mentions in her telegram at the beginning of the novel but another far greater hazard, lying just below the surface, a reef that, if explored, may yield unexpected pleasures—a vein of gold.

A LIFE APART Wharton’s now well-known relationship with Morton Fullerton, which all her biographers connect with The Reef,49 was certainly an intense and productive one. In “L’Âme close,” the so-called love diary (October 29, 1907–June 12, 1908), Wharton bravely sets out to describe her own discovery of pleasure (or perhaps “‘le plaisir,’ … something so much more definite and more evocative than what we mean when we speak of pleasure”50). Rather than sway her in her determination to follow her calling, this “life transforming” experience, as Price and McBride (who analyzed and published the diary) call it,51 never allowed her to forget her vocation as an artist. It may even be said that with this discovery, Wharton came into her own. With hindsight, and thanks to the posthumous revelation of Wharton’s romance, critics also often read the poems Wharton wrote during this period as autobiographical, as an exploration of her feelings for “this man who changed her inner life forever.”52 The poems are remarkable for their directness and Wharton’s willingness to explore her experience and put it into words. But she does not, as one critic claimed,

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seem to have seen the advent of pleasure as “a self betrayal that threatened her artistic voice.” And it is difficult to see in the poem “Life” (1908?) “a strong impulse to relinquish her artist’s voice as the price for her sexuality.”53 On the contrary, it is astonishing and moving to watch a woman of forty-six transmuting her experience of sexual passion into art with such seriousness: sexual passion seems to have strengthened rather than weakened her voice as a writer. Charles Du Bos, who reviewed Artemis to Actaeon, which he read in English, wrote a long, thoughtful article in which he took particular notice of a passage in the poem “Artemis to Actaeon”: “but I / Devined in thee the questioning foot that never / Revisits the cold hearth of yesterday / Or calls achievement home.”54 These lines, he says, mark out Wharton—intellectually—as a “nomad” and can be read as an “epigraph to her whole oeuvre.” “Nomadic spirits” like Wharton (opposed by Du Bos to “conservative spirits”) are often led to attach importance and intensity to “the moment” (as opposed to durée). Love in her poetry, he writes, “resembles a dizzying suspended garden.” As an example of the intensity he sees in her poems, Du Bos then translates part of the fifth sonnet of “The Mortal Lease” (1909) for his francophone readers. Laura Rattray notes that in all the poems of this period, pain is “never far from the surface.”55 However, intensity of feeling is sufficient compensation even for a life of grief: “If in that moment we are all we are / We live enough. Let this for all requite.” In the poems as in The Reef, intense pleasure and pain are closely bound. Once again, French Ways helps us to understand the connection between these polarities. In the final pages of the book, Wharton names Shakespeare and Keats as the representatives in English of the interweaving of pleasure and pain. “‘Volupté,’ ” she writes, “means ‘ode to the Nightingale’ and ‘ode to a Grecian Urn’: it means Romeo and Juliet as well as Antony and Cleopatra.”56 Then she adds: The French sense of “volupté” is found only exceptionally in the Anglo-Saxon imagination … One turns to Shakespeare or Keats to find it formulated in our speech … “le Plaisir” … has found its expression in English also, but only on the lips of genius: for instance in “the bursting of joy’s grape” in the “Ode to Melancholy” [sic] (it is always in Keats that one seeks such utterances); whereas to the French it is part of the general fearless and joyful contact with life.57 Indeed, Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” (1820) suggests that joy and pain are to be taken together and counsels the acceptance of “aching pleasure”: it is better to embrace melancholy and accept “the wakeful anguish of the soul.” Like Keats’s ode, Wharton’s “The Mortal Lease” is a paean to the creative possibilities of melancholy. The speaker readily obeys the command, “Live to-day”: “And every sense in me lept up to obey, / Seeing the routed phantoms backward roll” (sonnet IV). At the end of his review, Du Bos translates four lines from Wharton’s poem “Experience” (1893) (“O Death, we come full-handed to thy gate / Rich with strange burden of the mingled years, / Gains and renunciations, mirth and tears, / And love’s oblivion, and remembering hate”), which again express the combination of pain and pleasure that constitutes experience—all we have in the face of death. He almost makes Wharton a French poet, comparing her “rousing yet staccato rhythms” to the music of César Franck, a representative—perhaps the representative—of French music in the second half of the nineteenth century, known for his peculiar combination of sensuality and otherworldliness. Far more surprising than either Wharton’s poems—even the posthumously discovered “Terminus”—or the “love diary” is the erotic fragment “Beatrice Palmato,” with its allusion to masturbation, its description of sexual arousal, and the much-discussed father-daughter

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incest. As Maxime Rovère—the French translator of Wharton’s fragment—points out, nothing in either her biography or the rest of her work prepares the reader for the audacity of this piece.58 Wharton sets out to anatomize carnal pleasure—the pleasurable fulfillment of bodily needs. But as a letter to Bernard Berenson shows, the fragment was not written merely as an attempt to see what she was capable of: not only did she not destroy it but she was proud of it and seems to have known exactly what she was doing.59 Rovère suggests that the introduction of the incest theme was one of Wharton’s “strategies of avoidance.”60 The fragment would have been more daring, in other words, without the allusion to incest, since by introducing it (it is only alluded to in the fragment but is central in the story), Wharton ensured that her fragment would remain unpublished in her lifetime, that it would fall definitely beyond the pale.61 Just how are we to read this flagrant obscenity? Anyone familiar with Wharton’s novels and short stories has come across the notion of “beyond.” In her illuminating new book Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction (2020), Laura Rattray discusses “the allure, but also the dangers, especially for women … of going ‘beyond.’ ” “‘Beyondness,’ ” she writes, “ultimately brings The House of Mirth’s Lily Bart to the shabby and dingy existence she most feared, on the ‘rubbish heap’ from which only chloral provides an effective release.”62 In The Age of Innocence, Ellen Olenska warns Archer against the “beyond,” and the Gannetts in “Souls Belated” quickly discover its disadvantages. Yet Wharton did write the fragment, and (if the incest donnée she mentions in her letter to Berenson is indeed “Beatrice Palmato”) she did compare it to the work of such modernist writers as Faulkner, Céline, and Moravia. Unlike her characters, Wharton did venture beyond, well beyond, the remit of the novelist of high society as she is so often referred to. If Wharton’s deeply affecting discovery of sexual passion had no place other than beyond the pale, the problem of what was to be done with such passions remains. Were they merely to be hidden away, dismissed as “unpleasant” (in Mrs. Welland’s euphemistic phrase), despised—abandoned to what Michel Foucault called heterotopias?63 Wharton suggests a different solution. In French Ways, she expresses a preference for the “free play of the mind on all the facts of life.”64 She knew there were such places as the Terminus Hotel, with “soot-sodden chintz and the grime of its brasses,” but she also knew they were sometimes the site of “wonderful … long secret night[s]‌” of pleasure.65 Her admiration for Walt Whitman, her absence of prudishness (which the chapter on “Intellectual Honesty” in French Ways associates with philistinism), her fortitude and readiness to confront all aspects of human experience testify to her own intellectual probity. “Beyondness,” apartness, or perhaps more simply privacy are necessary to the imagination and to art, to “artistic creativeness.” Art as well as artists—no matter how monstrous, how unacceptable to polite society the objects of their art—must not be relegated to the unfrequented margins.

THE PLEASURE OF READING AND WRITING In another letter to Bernard Berenson, Wharton eagerly approves his assertion (in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art)66 that “what is true of life is true of art: its ultimate aim is ecstasy.” That statement, she writes, “coincided so thrillingly with the ‘aesthetic’ of my own métier that I’ve so long yearned to write that I could hug you” (Letters 388).67 Wharton, as we have seen, thought that the fearless experience of pleasure was necessary to artistic creativity. If we are to believe this letter to Berenson, she also thought that to give pleasure—ecstasy even—was the object of her métier. Like Wordsworth, she wrote under one injunction, “under one restriction only, namely that of the necessity of giving

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immediate pleasure to a Human Being,”68 as he famously put it in his Preface (1800) to the Lyrical Ballads. Wharton knew, from her own experience—and wrote at length about—the pleasures of reading and of thinking about books. In an essay published in the Saturday Review of Literature in October 1934, she begins by discussing what it means to conjure up a literary work long after one has laid it down: “After all, what constitutes the ultimate proof of creative genius but the degree to which it penetrates and becomes part of the intelligence on which it acts?” she asks. On holiday in Scotland, she then gets out her “fishing-line” and examines what she has retained of À la recherche du temps perdu. Fishing for Proust turns out to be an enjoyable activity that she describes in sensuous language: by Wharton’s account, the French author is a gorgeous, hefty, aquatic animal with “glittering, palpitating flanks.”69 Unquestionably, a good catch. It is remarkable that in “A Reconsideration of Proust” Wharton should describe remembering a work of literature in physical terms, in terms of pleasurable bodily sensations. Marcel Proust’s masterpiece is a shining thing of physical beauty; it has “mass or four-squareness”; and most important, it is alive, “a living, bounding presence” that “leaps into sight.” Wharton represents the activity of mental reconstitution as a sport and fishing up Proust as “a more interesting feat than any ‘study’ [she] might have written after conscientiously rereading him.”70 Far from her own library, far from any library in fact, the intellectual pursuit of reconsidering Proust is not unconnected with the body: the reader of the Saturday Review is invited to feel the brisk air of the West Highlands. He too must feel the pleasure of appreciating a great work of art. For Wharton, pleasure appears to be the ultimate goal, the very purpose of reading and of thinking about reading. She was neither the first nor the only writer to notice the effect of great art on the body. “The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine,” wrote Nabokov, another admirer of Proust’s, “is, or should be the only instrument used upon a book.” He ends the introductory essay to his Lectures on Literature (1980) with these words: It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not so much with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.71 According to Nabokov’s anatomy the spine is the organ of pleasure. Using “a formula” that merges “the precision of poetry and the intuition of science” (in a typically Nabokovian hypallage) the “wise reader” of a “book of genius” feels a telltale tingle of pleasure although he makes it clear that the feeling has nothing to do with the heart and is entirely unsentimental: the reader “must keep a little aloof, a little detached,” we are told. Reading, for both Nabokov and Wharton, is an intellectual activity, but its final aim seems to be that physical tingle of pleasure. However, for Wharton, even the pleasure of reading was never far from pain. The word “ecstasy,” used by Berenson and repeated by Wharton, draws attention to the proximity between these polar opposites. According to the OED, “ecstasy” means “the state of being ‘beside oneself,’ thrown into a frenzy or a stupor, with anxiety, astonishment, fear, or passion.”72 Ecstasy is closer to Barthes’s idea of jouissance than to pleasure: pleasure arises from “cultural enjoyment and identity,” writes Stephen Heath in the introduction to his translation of Image, Music, Text (1977), “whereas jouissance shatters that identity.”73 Perhaps, more simply, Wharton’s idea of ecstasy is the one

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developed by Walter Pater in the conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873): “we are all condamnés [under sentence of death] … we have an interval … our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.”74 The “intensity” of Wharton’s poetry noted by Charles Du Bos (also an admirer of Pater’s) draws attention to this connection between the art critic and Wharton. To feel and to give intense pleasure is to expand the moment, to amplify our portion. Wharton clearly had a disposition toward pleasure. In old age she thought of herself as an “incorrigible life-lover” although she recognized (in the same sentence) that “bodily suffering strikes at the roots of all … joys.”75 Pleasure was to be found in all, or at least many, human activities—reading, writing, designing homes, gardening, traveling, conversation, friendship—in which she enthusiastically engaged and to which she attached value precisely because of the pleasure they afforded. Even fishing for Proust on holiday in Scotland was fun. In fact, for Wharton, there was no clear distinction between work, obligation, “business,” and pleasure: work (in this case writing an article), obligation (answering an editor’s request for a reconsideration of Proust), and the “business” of being a public figure, a well-known writer whose opinion counted, all seemed to fuse with pleasure. Enjoyment transformed even the most mundane activities, and pleasure provided consolation, solace in the face of transience. Yet she was no hedonist. The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, to name only those few, all denounce societies in which pleasures (the plural here is an indication of insignificance) have become the chief object of life. Wharton was familiar with Talleyrand’s famous encomium to pre-revolutionary France, “Anyone who did not live in the years around 1780, does not know what it means to feel the pleasure of being alive.”76 But she also knew, as one of Proust’s characters in his Sodome et Gomorrhe puts it, that the saying made Talleyrand “one of the inventors of dilettantism.”77 Pleasure alone is not enough, in other words. In fact it is a sign of weakness. In his Les Origines de la France contemporaine, Taine also quoted Talleyrand’s famous phrase but adds that “the more an aristocracy is polished, the frailer it becomes.”78 Pleasure and polish in themselves could not hold the world together, in other words. No society that did not practice discipline, thrift, hard work, and self-sacrifice could last. In “America at War,” Wharton readily admitted that it was not the pleasure-loving Dutch but “those who sacrificed everything for their ideas,” those who were willing to “abandon the pleasures of an organized society” who “shaped the soul of the United States most profoundly.” And at the end of French Ways, Wharton repeated that it was the peculiar combination of asceticism and the love of pleasure that made the French creative. Pleasure may lead to greater perfection but discipline, hard work, habit, sacrifice—as well as a capacity to confront the unknown, a capacity for adventure—were the qualities essential to both continuity and art. In The Writing of Fiction, Wharton puts the problem another way: “style … is discipline,” and discipline demands self-consecration and effort. She then provides a translation of a passage about Bergotte, Proust’s “great writer”: The severity of his taste, his unwillingness to write anything of which he could not say, in his favourite phrase: “C’est doux” [harmonious, delicious], this determination, which had caused him to spend so many seemingly fruitless years in the “precious” carving of trifles, was in reality the secret of his strength; for habit makes the style of the writer as it makes the character of the man, and the author who has several times contented himself with expressing his thought in an approximately pleasing way has once and for all set a boundary to his talent, and will never pass beyond.79

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“Self-consecration,” “effort,” “severity of taste,” “determination,” patience, and “habit” are not usually the qualities associated with pleasure, but Wharton’s attention to style, and to the great writer’s honing and continual “carving” of language, demonstrate that it is through constraint and effort that art—and pleasure—emerge. The approximately pleasing will never do. As Undine Spragg has to learn the hard way, there are no short cuts.

NOTES 1 Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful (New York: John B. Alden, 1885), 24–5. 2 George Santayana, The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 371. 3 Edith Wharton, “America at War: Explaining the National Character in 1918,” trans. Virginia Ricard, Times Literary Supplement, February 16, 2018, 3–5, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/artic​ les/amer​ica-at-war-whar​ton/ (accessed January 22, 2021). 4 Ibid. 5 For a discussion of the French reviews of The House of Mirth and its translation, Chez les Heureux du monde, see my “Edith Wharton’s French Engagement,” in Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray (eds.), The New Edith Wharton Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 80–95. 6 There are many examples of such caricatures. In “America at War,” Wharton herself refers to the adaptation to the stage of Abel Hermant’s Les Transatlantiques (Théatre du Gymnase 1897), in which a young French duke marries the daughter of an American millionaire, Jerry Shaw. Les Transatlantiques is a farce of cross-cultural misunderstanding and reconciliation. 7 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Library of America, 1990), 855. 8 Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York: D. Appleton, 1920), 101. 9 Edith Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning (New York: D. Appleton, 1919), 80. 10 Ibid., 77. 11 Ibid., 78, 79. 12 Ibid., 150. 13 Ibid., 78. 14 Ibid., 151. 15 Ibid., 78, 79, 70. 16 Ibid., 84. 17 Ibid., 111. 18 Ibid., 150. It goes without saying that Wharton uses “race,” here and elsewhere, in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sense of “nation” or “people.” 19 Ibid., 85. 20 Ibid., 88. 21 Ibid., 87. 22 Ibid., 29; original emphasis. 23 Wharton, Innocence, 2. 24 Ibid., 350. 25 Ibid., 243. 26 Ibid., 43. Women in The Age of Innocence are clearly more powerful than men. 27 Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe (Paris: Gallimard Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1988), 325. 28 Wharton, Innocence, 209. 29 Ibid., 311–12.

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0 Ibid., 367. 3 31 Edith Wharton, The Reef (New York: Library of America, 1985), 354. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 357. 34 Ibid., 373–4. 35 Ibid., 377. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 387. 38 Ibid., 391. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 402; original emphasis. 41 Ibid., 443. 42 Lyall H. Powers, ed., Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900–1915 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 237–42. Note 5 to James’s letter quotes Charles Du Bos’s comments on The Reef in his contribution to Percy Lubbock’s Portrait of Edith Wharton (1947). Régis Michaud, “Le Roman aux États-Unis: Mrs Wharton—L’Écueil,” La Revue du mois, July– December 1913, 106–9. 43 See, for example, Stephen Orgel, “Introduction” to The Reef by Edith Wharton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), xiii, xv, xvii. 44 Ibid., xi. 45 See, for example, James W. Gargano, “The Reef: The Genteel Woman’s Quest for Knowledge,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 10, no. 1 (1976): 44. 46 Immaturity was Wharton’s blanket diagnosis of the condition of American women who, she said, did not fully take part in the lives of men. See, in particular, “The New Frenchwoman” in Wharton, French Ways (39–47). 47 See, for example, the reviews cited in Shari Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 272. 48 Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Vintage, 2008), 355. 49 See, for example, Benstock, No Gifts from Chance, 260. 50 Wharton, French Ways, 52. 51 Kenneth M. Price and Phyllis McBride, “‘The Life Apart’: Text and Contexts of Edith Wharton’s Love Diary,” American Literature 66, no. 4 (1994): 663–88. 52 Irene Goldman-Price, ed., Selected Poems of Edith Wharton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019), 122. 53 Catherine Bancroft, “Lost Lands: Metaphors of Sexual Awakening in Edith Wharton’s Poetry, 1908–1909,” quoted in Laura Rattray, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 37. 54 Charles Du Bos, “Artemis to Actéon (sic) and other verse par Edith Wharton,” Gil Blas (Paris), August 8, 1909, n.p. 55 Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 38. 56 Wharton, French Ways, 151. 57 Ibid. 58 Edith Wharton, Beatrice Palmato: Fragment érotique et autres textes, trans. Maxime Rovère (Paris: Payot, 2014). 59 In her letter dated August 14, 1935, Wharton writes that listening to Ugo Ojetti, probably during a visit to Pavillon Colombe, “was a good deal better than hearing dear Morra read Moravia … because Faulkner and Céline did it first & did it nastier. (I’ve got an incest

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donnée up my sleeve that wd make them all look like nursery-rhymes.)” R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, The Letters of Edith Wharton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), 589. 60 Rovère, Beatrice Palmato, 21. 61 In an appendix to his biography Lewis writes that “no respectable magazine in the world would have published it.” R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton (London: Constable, 1975), 544. 62 Rattray, Wharton and Genre, 4. 63 Heterotopias, said Foucault in a lecture to a group of architects, are spaces that, unlike utopias, are real and exist in all societies, and yet are different from all other places within that culture. They are spaces for those who wish to be nowhere, or whom society wishes to be nowhere. Foucault named in particular ships, trains, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and the hotels in which young women are deflowered on their honeymoons. Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits II: 1976–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1571–81. 64 Wharton, French Ways, 15. 65 Wharton, Selected Poems, 127. 66 In the the chapter on Leonardo in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, third series (London: Bell, 1916), Bernard Berenson, wrote, “What is true of life is true of art, which, regarded comprehensively is its guide. Its ultimate aim is ecstasy and any diversion that prevents us reaching that state is bad” (34). 67 The Letters of Edith Wharton, 388. 68 Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads [1798], ed. W. J. B. Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 167. 69 Edith Wharton, “A Reconsideration of Proust,” Saturday Review of Literature XI, no. 15 (1934): 233–4. 70 Ibid., 233. 71 Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (New York: Harvest, 1980), 6. 72 OED online, https://www-oed-com.ezpr​oxy.u-borde​aux-montai​gne.fr/view/Entry/59423? rskey=v7X​Oe0&res​ult=1&isA​dvan​ced=false#eid. 73 Stephen Heath, “Introduction” to his translation of Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 9. 74 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), 96. 75 The Letters of Edith Wharton, 598. 76 My translation. The original quote reads, “Qui n’a pas vécu dans les années voisines de 1780 n’a pas connu le plaisir de vivre.” It comes from a letter to the historian and statesman François Guizot, and was quoted by him in his Mémoires pour servir pour l’histoire de mon temps (Paris: Michel-Lévy, 1858–67), 1, 6. 77 Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 269. My translation. The French reads, “Vous verrez qu’il n’y a pas de milieu où l’on sente mieux ‘la douceur de vivre’ comme disait un des inventeurs du dilettantisme.” The full translation is: “You’ll find that there is no milieu in which one feels ‘the pleasure of being alive’ more acutely, as one of the inventors of dilettantism put it.” 78 My translation. The French reads, “Plus une aristocratie se polit, plus elle se désarme.” Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1986), 125. 79 Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 24–5; original emphasis.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Mermaid as Capitalist: Networking and Upward Mobility in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country FRANCESCA SAWAYA

Part of the exhilaration of reading Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) is surely due to the novel’s brilliant and multilayered satire of the upward mobility narrative. A ubiquitous version of economic personhood in the United States since the nineteenthcentury, the upward mobility narrative focuses on the young man whose individual moral worth and hard work enable him to cross hereditary or fixed class lines to achieve economic success. The fantasy behind this myth, so closely aligned with what Karl Polanyi has called the “utopian” fantasy of a free market, is that capitalism is radically democratic and meritocratic, that it not only provides the opportunities that create a level playing field for the young man but also rewards his hard work and moral virtue.1 Closely wedded to a belief in the free market, the upward mobility narrative remains to this day a popular and resilient one in the American cultural imaginary. The problem, however, with this narrative of economic personhood is that like that of the free market, it is a fantasy. If Polanyi has described how “the road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized interventionism,” so also the myth of upward mobility has been sustained by its own specific forms of interventionism, what Pamela Laird calls “social capital” or “the necessity for connections and connectability.”2 Social capital varies dramatically in different historical moments according to gender, race, ethnicity, and location and determines the possibilities for upward mobility. Andrew Carnegie, for example, arrived in the United States a poor immigrant and became one of the most famous millionaires of his time. But as Laird demonstrates at length, Carnegie depended on the tightly knit familial and background networks of the Scottish community of Pittsburgh, parlaying his gender and ethnicity—the cultural and social attributes that made him connectable—into the kind of connections that enabled his spectacular economic rise. A Black man or woman or even a Scottish woman would not be connectable in that location and time period and could not therefore make the connections necessary to rise. Equally important, Laird also

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points out that nineteenth-century upward mobility narratives, whether nonfictional ones like that of Carnegie, or fictional ones like Horatio Alger, do not shy away from the issue of social capital. They provide clear and open records of the gatekeepers or mentors who aided them, and they furthermore advocate for this system of intervention. At every stage of the real Carnegie’s rise, just as in Horatio Alger’s fictional text Ragged Dick, a man from another class steps forward to aid them in their rise; in turn, Carnegie and Dick select others like them that they also aid in their economic rise. Bruce Robbins digs more deeply into the significance of these direct depictions of social capital in upward mobility narratives, depictions that directly challenge both the notion of a free market and a level playing field. Focusing not simply on US upward mobility narratives, but on a broader transatlantic array of texts, Robbins argues that the mentor is not only a characteristic feature in these narratives but is also depicted with such erotic fervor and emotion that we might well regard these narratives as a kind of political unconscious that expresses a broader desire for structural forms of aid and intervention. In short, these narratives actually have embedded in them the dream for social democracy and for the welfare state. Robbins’s admittedly “counterintuitive” argument helpfully defamiliarizes the upward mobility narrative, displacing the individual story to help us see the larger economic anxieties as well as hopes that undergird this mythic literary form associated with liberal capitalism.3 While I agree with Laird that upward mobility narratives characteristically acknowledge aid and with Robbins that such acknowledgments reveal implicit critiques of liberal capitalism, upward mobility narratives nonetheless continue to legitimate the belief in the inextricable link between democracy and free markets. Having taught a freshman class on upward mobility narratives for five years, I have watched again and again as my bright students—left and right alike—insistently read the intervention of mentors in simply personal terms, as the charitable aid that one worthy person proffers to another that s/he deems worthy. Like Americans more generally, my students rarely recognize social capital at work, and even when it is pointed out to them, they remain dubious. Why is this? I would suggest that reading these stories only for their “personal” details is habitual and, more important, habitually soothing: it confirms us in our sense that our economic system and democratic commitments align perfectly. We do not read for the “abstract” details of the structural working of social capital because it is disturbing to our most flattering hopes for ourselves and our nation. But another reading also suggests itself. In Polanyi, social intervention is read as a sign of the humanity of humans, of their need to palliate the “catastrophic dislocation” (33) caused by the “utopian” fiction of free markets. While Polanyi neither discusses social capital nor the upward mobility narrative, we might build on his argument that the working of in-group networks is a sign that in no matter how attenuated and closed a form, humans resist such catastrophic dislocation and try to help each other. As I have argued elsewhere, combining Polanyi and Robbins, we can see social capital not simply as an aspirational desire for a welfare system; it actually did function as a welfare system in the boom-and-bust economies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 And yet, it did so only within closed, in-group networks. As Laird puts it, we cannot and must not forget this “dark side” of social capital.5 What makes The Custom of the Country’s satire so powerful is the way it builds on the form of a familiar and personal upward mobility narrative, even as it also carefully establishes the larger abstract system into which that narrative fits to provide a clear-eyed account of the dark side of social capital within putatively “free” markets. Our eyes are carefully trained by Wharton to focus on an upward mobility narrative at once familiar

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and unfamiliar: a personal story of a young Midwestern woman, rather than man, and her “meteoric flight” upward.6 At one level, Wharton’s text, like all upward mobility narratives, plays with the notion of capitalism as a democratizing force: if a man can climb, so also can a woman, the narrative insists. At the same time, and from a different vantage point, Wharton does not let the story simply be a personal narrative. She consistently tracks a broader and abstract story of social capital underneath the young woman’s upward mobility narrative, one that she consistently obscures narratively, but also always renders visible enough to tease at our consciousness. While our eyes are focused on a familiar story of upward mobility, rendered even more fascinating because of its gendering, we can just barely make out a more difficult and abstract story of upward mobility’s broader significance in “free” markets—the cost to a democratic society of interpreting in-group networks as personal and humane, rather than as structural and profoundly undemocratic. Most important, and perhaps most comically, both the personal and the structural stories hinge on Wharton’s deeply satirical revision of a mythic figure as ubiquitous to the nineteenth century as the Alger hero: the mermaid. As our eyes are childishly distracted by the dazzling mermaid placed comically in the framework of an Alger hero’s narrative, we ignore the structural problems that social capital creates in putatively free markets. I want to begin with a quick dive, as it were, into the famous mermaid story from which Wharton borrows for her novel. I then turn to the two levels at which Wharton analyzes social capital and finally to the deeply ironic conclusion she comes to in her multilayered satirical account of the myth of upward mobility.

MERMAID MOBILITY Cultural historians have long puzzled over why mermaids were so central to nineteenthcentury transatlantic culture. Celeste Olalquiaga, who has provided perhaps the most capacious and sophisticated analysis of the nineteenth-century “mermaid resurgence,” describes it as nonetheless “befuddling.”7 Vaughn Scribner, after attempting a rough periodization of the century’s “mer-mania,” throws up his hands and states, “It is impossible to wrap up the nineteenth century [mermaid] in a tidy package.”8 While Wharton borrows freely from a diversity of mermaid iconography from the period, she nonetheless focuses on a specific mermaid story for her upwardly mobile (anti) heroine: Undine (1811) by Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte Fouqué.9 This story was one of the most popular mermaid tales of the nineteenth century and would have been deeply familiar to her readership.10 Equally important, and comically, the story is itself a deeply ambivalent upward mobility narrative. Because twenty-first-century readers have little familiarity with Fouqué’s story, a quick contextualization and summary of Undine will be necessary. Characteristically categorized as a romantic kunstmärchen, a made-up romantic fairy tale, it is also a German “colonial fantasy,” its gendered narrative inextinguishably linked to the history of intra-European competition over empire. 11 Proliferating in the late eighteenth century through the early to mid-nineteenth century, German colonial fantasy, Susanne Zantop argues, is notable for being “purely imaginary,” on the one hand, and “wish-fulfilling,” on the other, since Germany had failed in all its early colonization efforts.12 These fantasies became even more intense during France’s occupation of Germany, when Undine was penned. Zantop explains that colonial fantasies are focused on “the drive for colonial possession” and often rely on the form of the contact narrative

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to depict “sexual conquest and surrender, love and blissful domestic relations between colonizer and colonized, set in colonial territory.”13 Undine, following the protocols of both kunstmärchen and colonial fantasy, begins in a vaguely sketched medieval past, in a location described as alternately littoral and archipelagic. It proceeds by charting a tragic cross-racial contact narrative. The Knight Huldbrand travels through a wild and uncharted forest to arrive at a fisherman’s home where he meets Undine, the preternaturally beautiful but also willful and soulless daughter of the Prince of the Mediterranean Sea. Because “all beings aspire to be higher than they are,” the Prince of the Mediterranean Sea has dreamed that Undine “should become possessed of a soul” by marrying a human man and has therefore placed her in the fisherman’s house and brought Huldbrand to it.14 Promptly after the wedding night, in Fouqué’s self-revealing and literal-minded colonial fantasy, Undine moves successfully upward, becoming a soul-endowed woman. This move upward from mermaid to soulful woman is signified by Undine becoming abject and self-effacing, rather than willful, even as she retains the powers she has as a mermaid.15 Eventually, the retention of these powers so disturbs her husband that he betrays her with a “human” woman. Undine is forced to return to her natural element and to her father’s people in the water. Later, however, in the story’s presumptive and unexplained theology of mermaid/human relations, she must return to earth to kill her treacherous human husband—against her own will. The bizarre, weepy, watery sex/death shenanigans of the final scene were apparently deeply moving and familiar to nineteenth-century readers and audiences, given how frequently they were discussed, staged, revised, and—as is the case with Wharton—satirized. In my analysis, I will ignore for a moment the ambivalent oscillations of Fouqué’s Undine, as well as how deeply The Custom of the Country is saturated with reflections on both the story and its numerous revisions. Instead, I will simply use the most explicit and extended discussion of Undine in Wharton’s novel as a beginning to discuss the two levels of economic analysis in which Wharton engages in The Custom of the Country: the personal upward mobility narrative and its larger abstract significance. In a conversation that helps precipitate Undine’s first major move upward, Ralph Marvell and Mrs. Spragg discuss Undine’s name. With Fouqué’s Undine and its “attributes of romance” in his mind, Ralph asks Mrs. Spragg how they knew to use the mermaid story, “It’s a wonderful find— how could you tell it would be such a fit?”16 It comes “quite easily” to Mrs. Spragg to answer the question about Undine’s name in a different way than Ralph expects: “Why we called her after a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born”—and then to explain, as he [Ralph] remained struck and silent: “It’s from undoolay, you know the French for crimping; father always thought the name made it take. He was quite a scholar, and had the greatest knack for finding names … No, father didn’t start in as a druggist … But after he made such a success with his hairwaver he got speculating in land out at Apex, and somehow everything went.” (49; original emphases) The “somehow” is important here. Mrs. Spragg goes on to explain that after Mr. Spragg makes a fortune on his hair waver, two of their children die of typhoid, and the land that Mr. Spragg sells as part of the “Pure Water [M]‌ove” (50, 123) solidifies the family’s fortune: “Ralph Marvell was too little versed in affairs to read between the lines of Mrs. Spragg’s untutored narrative, and he understood no more than she the occult connection between Mr. Spragg’s domestic misfortunes and his business triumph” (50). Ralph is “struck and silent” in this scene, not only by the flat materialization of Fouqué’s Undine,

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but also because he does not understand the underlying economic story any more than Mrs. Spragg does, let alone the reader. The story is obscure to both of them and likewise, at this point, to the reader. It is, in short, “occult”—magical, mysterious, hidden. Wharton’s first joke here is that Undine Spragg is clearly not Fouqué’s Undine. Her second joke is that she is. Ralph will end up dead, not because mermaids have to kill treacherous humans, but instead because Ralph is so fixated on the romantic kunstmärchen and colonial fantasy of Undine, on its premises about men and women, self and other, that when confronted with Undine as a human reality, he commits suicide. Discovering from Elmer that Undine was not a virgin when they married, Ralph feels like an anachronistic Knight Huldbrand. He is “stumbling about in his inherited prejudices like a modern man in mediaeval armour” (288). “How on earth can I go on living here?” (288), the reader of the romantic kunstmärchen-cum-colonial fantasy says to himself when confronted with Undine as a human reality. Their marriage is not one of virgin territory, of spiritual uplift, of “sexual conquest and surrender, love and blissful domestic relations between colonizer and colonized, set in colonial territory,” as Zantop puts it, and as Ralph has in fact dreamed. Instead, Undine represents flatly materialist realities: she is a human woman, whose name represents a commodity sold on the market, and furthermore, this commodity allowed for an economic rise, not a spiritual one. But Undine Spragg is also the mermaid Undine—a materialized version of an “occult” economic story. Olalquiaga has usefully pointed out that mermaids have historically created “apprehension in the West”: “For a culture bent on fixed definitions and clearly delimitated categories, nothing is so threatening as a being that constantly transits between forms and states,” and we have in both Mr. Spragg and Undine’s story an exemplary figuration of the mermaid’s “metamorphical” nature.17 Undine is the material signifier of what the mermaid really is: rather than a mythic being, she represents the literally fabulous narrative of financial or economic metamorphosis. But, again, there are two levels of this metamorphosis, as we have learned from Mrs. Spragg and Ralph’s discussion of Undine’s name: one of personal upward mobility that is explained and clear, and one of the Pure Water Move, which ironically of course—given its name—is not. Continuing to track only the personal story in Custom, I want to focus on Undine’s upward mobility narrative. Borrowing from Fouqué, Wharton structures the novel satirically as two main sets of contact narratives: first, of the “race” of “Invaders” (48) in relation to the “Aborigines” (45) (in Ralph’s terms; another comical revision of the “colonial fantasy” of Undine); and then second, of the “Invaders” going back even further in time to what we might call, in the logic of the novel, real “Aborigines,” that is, to Europe.18 Wharton combines both the allure of tragic cross-“race” sexual narratives of colonial fantasy with the more prosaic details of the upward mobility story—of making the connections that enable connectability. Combined comically together, these familiar narratives help keep the reader’s attention focused on Undine. Consider, for example, the section of Wharton’s book that is most indebted to Fouqué’s mermaid story: the contact narrative and Alger story as it plays out in the United States.19 In this contact narrative, Wharton plays with the figure of Undine the mermaid as, on the one hand, beautiful virgin territory and, on the other hand, as an emblem of a dangerous sexuality and terrifying, monstrous otherness. To Ralph, Undine represents “virgin innocence,” “freshness [and] … malleability”; she is furthermore at “the age when the flexible soul offers itself to the first grasp” (50). At the same time and in contradistinction to the notion of virgin land, she is also described as a siren. In the opening scenes, her “reddish-gold” (5) hair is described as “glittering meshes” in which

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men repeatedly become entangled (36, 43). Along with these meshes, so characteristic of the mermaid as siren, Undine also spends much time gazing into mirrors, the mermaid’s characteristic implement. Her movements are “flexibl[e]‌,” and she is “always doubling and twisting on herself ” (5), and “twist[ing] and sparkl[ing]” (15), in ways inextricably alluring and snake-like. Unsurprisingly then, as Ralph gets to know her better, she also embodies a terrifying otherness. At moments, Undine appears to Ralph as “immeasurably alien” (134), even “inaccessible, implacable—her eyes like the eyes of an enemy” (101). But one of the many pleasures of Wharton’s text is that all these contradictorily innocent, alluring, and terrifying associations that link Undine to the fantastical figure of the mermaid actually point to flatly materialist goals, achieved through relatively conventional networking strategies of upward mobility.20 From the beginning of the novel, then, along with language that depicts Undine as virgin territory, siren-like, and terrifyingly other is the prosaic language of the Alger narrative: “as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement; she honestly wanted the best” (16). This sentiment is, of course, powerfully satirized, since Undine is fundamentally empty (“I want what the others want” [61]); nonetheless, her story is still an Algeresque record of social capital, of being aided by a few individuals to succeed. She is able to marry Ralph after asking her first husband, Elmer Moffatt, for aid and offering to return that aid, “Oh, Elmer, if you ever liked me, help me now, and I’ll help you if I get the chance!” (70). Indeed, as it turns out, Elmer is a useful connection in more ways than one: he does not reveal that Undine has been married to him and is not virgin territory, and he actually ends up helping Mr. Spragg finance the wedding. Later, Elmer and Undine network together again resulting in Ralph making the money that enables Undine to travel to France (164–5) to court both Peter Van Degen and Raymond de Chelles. Next, Undine thinks that “a talk with [Elmer] … might help to shed some light” on her “affairs” (252), namely the challenge she faces in marrying Raymond. Elmer again helps out with practical financial advice: he suggests she raise money for such a marriage by extorting Ralph over the custody of Paul (253–6). As Elmer himself says when he sees Undine at Raymond’s chateau: “So this is what I helped you to get” when “[I]‌len[t] you a hand” (328). Even more satirically, Wharton also draws on the characteristic trope of an Alger narrative in demonstrating that chance plays an important role in connections and connectability. In France, Princess Estradina’s “thin little hand … [is] held out” to Undine. Estradina’s “random gesture” is such a “miracle” (236) that Undine comes to have a belief in “providential ‘design,’ and vague impulses of piety stirred in her” (240). “Her sole graces,” Undine thinks to herself, as Wharton lays on thickly and comically the familiar language of upward mobility, “was her unaided personality” (236; emphasis added). Of course, Undine and the reader later learn that the Princess’s gesture is less miraculous and providential, less about Undine’s “graces” or worthy “personality” than that Estradina needs the cover of a friendship with Undine to meet her lover. Nonetheless, in this relentlessly networking and networked world, the Princess “pay[s]‌for what I get!” (243), and she rewards Undine by reintroducing Raymond to Undine. Of course, Undine’s Algeresque story of connections and connectability is nonetheless also quite different than the usual young man’s upward mobility narrative in that it focuses on sexuality and marriage, rather than finances. Carefully and purposively, Wharton trains our eye on Undine’s sexual and domestic shenanigans, insistently personalizing the story—of a woman who betrays and abandons her husband, her child, even her parents when needed and returns to them only if there is a financial reason. Undine’s ruthlessness is center stage, and Wharton frequently positions us to read Undine

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through a “misogynistic” lens (49), as Beth Kowaleski-Wallace has convincingly argued.21 Kowaleski-Wallace’s larger point is that Wharton is challenging the reader to reflect on the social construction of womanhood, on the way in which readers presume women are and should always be only mothers, not “other[s]‌” (49). In a similar fashion, I would argue that Wharton asks us to reflect on the gendered exclusivity of social capital in upward mobility narratives, or to put it another way, the double standard by which we judge a woman’s use of connections and connectability. Wharton’s challenge to the reader’s reflectiveness emerges especially through comparisons of Undine to her father. Undine at first turns to her father for funds to travel to Europe to court Peter Van Degen, but he rebuffs her because “Mr. Spragg’s private rule of conduct was as simple as his business morality was complicated” (145), or again, in case the reader has not caught that formulation, Wharton repeats that Mr. Spragg’s “code of domestic conduct [was] as rigid as its exponent’s business principles were elastic” (151). This depiction of a double standard of ethical codes might suggest Wharton wants to protect the domestic realm from incursion, but such protections do not and cannot exist in the world that Wharton depicts. The daughter, after all, is the product of the father. Her business-like abilities (in sexuality) are both inherited and learned. So, for example, in Undine’s attempt to have Peter Van Degen propose to her, Wharton writes of Undine that “her impatience to enjoy was curbed by an instinct for holding off and biding her time that resembled the patient skill with which her father had conducted the sale of his ‘bad’ real estate in the Pure Water Move days” (122–3). Repeatedly, Wharton uses this specific mixture of language—at once emphasizing inherited abilities (“instinct”) and learned expertise (“patient skill”) (see also 72, 143). A double standard is clearly at work if Undine has both inherited and developed the skills her father uses to move upward, and yet is judged differently than he is. Of course, such a double standard should also return our readerly reflectiveness on her father, to think more carefully about his upward mobility narrative. I discuss below this boomeranging reflexiveness as the second and abstract level of Wharton’s analysis. For now, however, Wharton highlights a double standard of judgment not just through a comparison of Undine and her father but also through one between Undine and Elmer Moffatt. Scholars have long sought to explain Wharton’s attraction to Elmer Moffatt. Certainly Wharton’s hope that the robber baron can be associated with aesthetics constitutes a large part of her apparent fondness for her character, a hope shared by writers of the period as different as Henry James and Theodore Dreiser. Wharton imagines that a financier’s understanding of “difficult and complex” issues, as well as “personal idiosyncrasies” (159), is as deep and meaningful as that of an artist, whether an actor or novelist. Likewise, Wharton suggests that underneath Elmer’s callow exterior, the financier is actually motivated by “aesthetic emotions” (345), which will redeem him as he becomes the “greatest collector in America” (356), a beneficent philanthropist, celebrated for “waiving his claim to a Velasquez that was wanted for the Louvre” (362). But a significant part of Wharton’s attraction to Elmer is also that he explodes the palliative and sanctimonious clichés of American culture, including that of the public/ private divide.22 Elmer is in fact radically democratic. He treats Undine, a woman, as he does everyone else, as both a connection and as connectable. We see how Elmer helps Undine rise, but Undine also helps Elmer rise—returning favor for favor. If Undine buys Elmer’s silence of their past marriage with a vow of helping him, she also later comes through, proving “her good faith” (152) by introducing Elmer to Ralph, which enables Elmer to get back on his feet. Later, after Elmer mentors her by advising her to extort

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Ralph, she returns the favor and helps him by getting him into “private collections” in France to which he does not have access, “picking up ‘tips,’ ferreting out rare things and getting [him] a sight of hidden treasures” (343). To Elmer, Undine is a connection and connectable. It is indeed toward the end of the novel, as Undine remembers why she first married Elmer, that we have perhaps one of the deepest critiques of the way a double standard is applied to women’s upward mobility narratives, rather than men’s, and a depiction of Elmer as operating in a far more democratic manner than any of the paternalistic men in the book—American or French. In this moment, the mermaid reminisces about the reason that she married Elmer the first time: “All her own attempts to get what she wanted had come to nothing; but she had always attributed her lack of success to the fact that she had had no one to second her.” By contrast, she sees Elmer as crossing the gender exclusive lines of social capital “to lift her on wings” (340). Written in free indirect discourse to embody Undine’s consciousness, in prose that is at once practical (“lift”) and purple (“on wings”), we suddenly see clearly how Elmer has consistently supported Undine’s ambition and aspirations. And Elmer continuously works in the novel across the lines of gender to help, and be helped by, her. He is one of the few male figures in nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century literature who crosses gendered boundary lines to aid and mentor a woman to move up economically outside of marriage to her, whose consistently “cool scrutiny” (164) of Undine, whatever else it is, matches her equal and frequently described “coolness” (93). He recognizes her as a human being, like himself, not as virgin territory, siren, or monstrous alien: “I mean to have the best, you know; not just get ahead of the other fellows,” he says to Undine near the end of the novel, “It was what you were always after, wasn’t it?” (330). Elmer is impressive because he reaches out his hand, across the gender divide, to aid and mentor a woman in her economic rise; and in turn asks for aid from her as he ascends.23 This kind of equal and democratic treatment of women may not be what Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, or Emma Goldman in their different ways aimed for, but it is something striking, perhaps even dazzling.

MERMAN COLLUSION IN THE ERA OF NATIONAL SUBSIDY The reader’s eye is caught, then, by the familiar but also unconventional and multiply dazzling personal upward mobility narrative of a mermaid. Indeed, mermaid mobility forces us to recognize the gendered double standards of the Alger narrative and what it takes to challenge them. Nonetheless, Wharton complicates this personal, gendered narrative by creating another carefully blurred, cautionary tale of the significance of social capital more generally in putatively free markets. This is the “occult” story of the Pure Water Move, a story that appears only in the margins of Undine’s personal upward mobility narrative. This story is partially obscured because Undine’s character and her “meteoric flight” upward are so carefully elaborated. But the partially obscured story is again about in-group networks. This is a world not of mermaids and all the conflicting tropes associated with them, but of monstrous mermen: a “dim underworld of affairs where men of the Moffatt and Driscoll type moved like shadowy destructive monsters beneath the darting small fry of the surface” (157). As Mary Ellis Gibson puts it, Wharton relies on watery metaphors to depict this “submarine world” of “submarine monsters” (64). Here, Elmer is the merman king. If Undine has her hair and her mirrors, Elmer has

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his merman accoutrement: pearls. We meet him first at the theatre, where he is described as half human, half shark and as wearing “a shining shirt-front fastened with a large imitation pearl” and having “a ruddy plump snub face without an angle in it, which yet looked sharper than a razor” (62). “Imitation” pearls will become real pearls over the course of the novel, which ends with Elmer giving Undine a pearl necklace “composed of five hundred perfectly matched pearls that took thirty years to collect,” a gift that has the effect of making “the price of pearls” go up “over fifty per cent” (257). But this story of mermen in which Elmer plays the leading part is not a personal one per se. We do not see Elmer’s machinations clearly the way we see Undine’s. This is the story of the ironically named “Pure Water Move,” and it involves a closed social circuit between businessmen and the state in what one scholar of the period calls the “era of national subsidy,” what we now call corporate welfare, in which public resources are exploited to create massive profits for a few networked individuals.24 It is a story of “Invaders,” never expanding beyond an original circle of individuals, even as those individuals’ fortunes rise together. This story begins with the Pure Water Move, in Apex. While Undine is a child playing with one Indiana Frusk, we learn that State Representative James J. Rolliver has built up his fortune as well as Mr. Spragg’s by selling worthless private land to the government at inflated prices to create, and also control, public utilities. If Elmer helps fund Undine’s wedding to Ralph, it is because he extorts Mr. Spragg to explain something (we do not know what) about this deal to the New York financier Harmon B. Driscoll so that Driscoll can take over Apex’s “water-supply” as well as its “street railroads” (79). This enables Undine’s wedding to Ralph. However, immediately thereafter this exchange of information leads to the government’s comically named Ararat Trust investigation (119–20, 131), presumably under Representative Rolliver. Driscoll, Elmer, and Mr. Spragg’s collusion helps them, but then somehow (again, in ways we do not know) appears to lead to their economic decline. Mysteriously, however, Rolliver and Driscoll apparently pair up; and Driscoll recovers, while Rolliver becomes a senator and marries Undine’s childhood frenemy, Indiana Frusk. Somehow also Elmer’s and Mr. Spragg’s fortunes decline (144, 153). When Undine returns the aid Elmer has given her to marry Ralph and helps him rise again (163), he disappears for many chapters of the book. But when Elmer also reappears in Europe, he is again mysteriously “stone broke” (256). Nonetheless, the Pure Water Move story picks up again. Elmer is now apparently able, again, to parlay what information he has to his advantage in the revived Ararat Trust investigation, playing Senator Rolliver and Driscoll against each other to his own personal benefit (256, 275), while Mr. Spragg inexplicably continues his economic descent. Soon Elmer is again allied with Senator Rolliver and aims to “buy up all the works of public utility at Apex” (277). The Apex Consolidation Company (299) is the project in which Ralph unquestioningly invests in order to raise money to gain custody of Paul. Again, the Pure Water Move story disappears for many pages, until we learn that Senator Rolliver is now under Moffatt’s control (“Old Jim’s all right. He’s in Congress now. I’ve got to have somebody up in Washington,” Elmer says [328]). More importantly, Elmer tells Undine, “Wall Street acts as if it couldn’t get along without me” (351). Moffatt is now not just the director of the Apex Consolidated Company but also a “billionaire Railroad King” (358), as well “the greatest collector in America” (356). There is, of course, much satirical pleasure to glean from a novel in which the characters that have peopled the small, desolate, provincial town that Undine and Elmer sought to escape in their upward mobility narrative are the same people they find when they enter the national and international stage because of the partially obscured Pure Water Move.

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Likewise, there is much pleasure in watching the artist, Wharton, “dim” the light on this story, letting it appear only in the margins while the dazzling personal narrative of Undine attracts our eyes. But at the same time, if Wharton demonstrates that a double standard is applied to the personal upward mobility narrative of Undine as a woman, this larger abstract story of the workings of social capital presents us with an even more striking double standard. Our eyes, mesmerized by a personal story about a mermaid, ignore the broader meaning of social capital, of not simply its unequal distribution in America but its finally closed-off nature in a market that is not free. The invisible workings of social capital, in Wharton’s narrative, are fundamentally undemocratic; they do not alleviate the depredations of capitalist economies but enforce them.

KEEPING EACH OTHER WARM And yet, Wharton does not end the story with this moral of the corrosive way that social capital enforces the unfree workings of the market. Not at all. Whatever Wharton’s politics are, and they have been much debated, they are not radically utopian.25 If Wharton’s larger point is one in which mermen, even more than mermaids, operate in a cool and watery underworld that “drown[s]‌… the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation,” as Marx and Engels put it, Wharton does not predict this can change because we know more about how this watery world works.26 Instead, she chooses to double back in her conclusion, insisting on the countervailing possibility of human warmth as inherent in the workings of what she has demonstrated are the fundamentally closed circuits of social capital. A comparison of the mermaid and the merman’s story at the end demonstrates this. There is no doubt that one of the deepest ironies of the book is that the mermaid’s story ends where it begins with the mermaid again gazing into a mirror (362) and examining “the glitter of her hair” (363), but dissatisfied with what she has and frustrated by what she cannot have: “under all the dazzle a tiny black cloud remained” (364). Having overcome the double standards for upward mobility and networked effectively with Elmer to rise, Undine will nonetheless always be dissatisfied, frustrated in what she will never achieve. There is yet again a double standard: Elmer could be an ambassador if he were not married to her, but Undine never can play that role as a divorced woman. Nonetheless, in the ending of the novel, Wharton suggests through Undine’s dissatisfaction that upward mobility is itself a moving target, a fantasy that creates continual dissatisfaction. By contrast, the merman is satisfied: “Well, I guess this is all right” (363). At the same time, he is wisely, even apparently compassionately, networking to the very end. This networking is figured for the first time in the novel as a site of human warmth. In the last scenes of the book, Elmer creates a fresh new network with Paul. “Embracing” the lonely and devastated boy with “firm and friendly” arms (360), Elmer looks at him “with a queer smile” and says: “If we two chaps stick together it won’t be so bad—we can keep each other warm, don’t you see? I like you first rate, you know; when you’re big enough I mean to put you in my business. And it looks as if one of these days you’d be the richest boy in America.” (361) There are multiple ironies here. For one, we seem to be returning to the kind of paternalism, of exclusive male-to-male, even homoerotic relations, that “Aborigines” like Ralph and Raymond had previously represented (“If we two chaps stick together”).

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These relations exclude women. Perhaps also, and presciently, Wharton suggests here that as inherited fortunes become the norm in the United States, as they were in European countries like France, upward mobility narratives will not even be an issue in America anymore.27 Family fortunes will preclude the possibility of any Invaders at all, as they become themselves a closed-off network of Aborigines. But finally, what we notice is that the typically “cool” merman offers the one bright spot of humanity in the novel’s ending. While there is much that is creepy about the “queer” smile that Elmer levels at Paul, we return here to a notion that Wharton utterly dismantled in using the Pure Water Move to describe the costs of social capital in a democracy: that social capital—no matter how paternalist, exclusive, or destructive—is nevertheless the only dependable site of human warmth in the “icy water” of capitalist economies.

NOTES 1 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944), 138. Thank you to Josh Piker and Emily Orlando for their suggestions on this essay. 2 Ibid., 140; Pamela Laird, Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 2. 3 Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), xvi, 8. 4 See Francesca Sawaya, The Difficult Art of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), ­chapter 3. 5 Laird, Pull, 10. 6 This is Wharton’s term in her description of the novel to Frederick Macmillan as she was writing it. See EW to FM, September 19, 1902, Lenox in The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–1930, ed. Shafquat Towheed (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 108. 7 Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1998] 2002), 186. 8 Vaughn Scribner, Merpeople: A Human History (London: Reaktion, 2020), 20, 168. 9 A small and obvious example of Wharton borrowing from nineteenth-century mermaid iconography would be that when Ralph refers to the “noyade of [his] marriage” (136) with Undine, the immediate image that cannot help but come to mind is that of Sir Edward BurneJones’s famous 1886 painting “The Depths of the Sea,” of a siren-like mermaid who has either drowned a human man or is collecting a drowned human man and apparently carting him down to her mermaid lair. For a synoptic account of the range of mermaid imagery in nineteenth-century culture from which Wharton appears to be borrowing, see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 10 Wharton apparently first read Undine in German in 1880 at the very beginning of her publication career, as she worked on her ability to tell a good story. See Irene GoldmanPrice, ed., My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 51–3. For a fascinating account of Undine’s remarkable popularity in a transatlantic context across the nineteenth century, see David Blamires, Telling Tales: The Impact of Germany on English Children’s Books, 1780–1918 (Cambridge: Open Book, 2009). For a short but helpful account of how the story was particularly picked up by women readers, see Barbara Sicherman, Well-Read Lives: How

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Books Inspired a Generation of American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 11 On the kunstmärchen, see Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, [2002] 2015), especially ­chapter 2. Scholars have characteristically gestured toward Wharton’s borrowing of Undine but have rarely examined Fouqué’s story in any detail or the breadth of Wharton’s use and satire of it. For the most detailed reading of the relation of Fouqué’s story to the novel, see Beverly Hume, “The Fall of the House of Marvell: Wharton’s Poesque Romance in The Custom of the Country,” American Literary Realism 40, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 137–53. Even Hume, however, mostly reads Wharton’s use of Fouqué through Poe. 12 Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1880 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 3. 13 Ibid., 2. 14 Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte Fouqué, Undine, adapted by W. L. Courtney; illustrations by Arthur Rackham (London: William Heinemann, 1909), 62. 15 See Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 17, on the “poisonous pedagogy” of willfulness in nineteenth-century fairy tales and the ways the “willful subject” is therefore “often but not always a child, often but not always a girl.” In borrowing from Undine, Wharton certainly pushes back against this “poisonous pedagogy,” albeit with some ambivalence. 16 Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (New York: Penguin, 2006), 51, 49. All other citations refer to this edition. 17 Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom, 251. 18 This language in The Custom of the Country has led to much interesting debate. Mary Ellis Gibson borrows from Mary Douglas’s examination of social symbols of promiscuity and fastidiousness to describe Wharton’s ethnographic language as an ambivalent response to social change; Nancy Bentley focuses more particularly on the ways Wharton’s novel borrows from ethnographic discourse in a futile attempt to capture and fix the changing status of women in capitalism within the realist novel; Jennie Kassanoff, by contrast, focuses on Wharton’s “conservative” and antidemocratic reading of the hybridity of American identity and her idealization of a racially pure French identity. I have benefited from the way all these arguments highlight the significance of race to the novel, but my argument takes a different tack in suggesting that this language is also informed by Wharton’s knowing and satirical borrowing from and revision of Fouqué’s kunstmärchen/colonial fantasy Undine. See Mary Ellis Gibson, “Edith Wharton and the Ethnography of Old New York,” Studies in American Fiction 13, no. 1 (Spring 1985); Nancy Bentley, The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Jennie Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 19 While Kassanoff and Virginia Ricard have insisted on Wharton’s idealization of France in life, I would argue that in Custom, France’s social customs are as rigorously satirized as American ones; indeed, they seem to provide the original model for the American racialized paternalism that Wharton critiques in relation to Ralph. Women are not actually depicted as “in the very middle of the picture” (126), as Bowen claims; indeed, the French section of the novel is the one that most sympathetically endorses Undine’s critical and ethnographic perspective of the nation’s customs. In free indirect discourse, Wharton has Undine suddenly take on herself an ethnographic vantage point. Undine sees French women as destroying their lives for a “huge voracious fetish they called The Family” (315). She furthermore analyzes them as “diligent chatelaines” whose “interminable conversations were carried on to the click

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of knitting needles” that furnish “the innumerable rooms of Saint Désert” with “embroidered hangings and tapestry chairs” (314). If Undine’s “idle” hands are juxtaposed to the active ones of her French female relatives, and are also treated ironically, Undine is depicted as understandably “restless” under the ancient and pointless French custom of women tatting seat covers for a house that does not “belong to them” (315). See Virginia Ricard, “Edith Wharton’s French Engagement,” in Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray (eds.), The New Edith Wharton Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 80–95. 20 A corollary pleasure is that while Wharton’s racial politics are deeply problematic, as Kassanoff has particularly demonstrated, Wharton nonetheless flips the gendered and racialized script of tragic colonial fantasy: the racialized woman is not finally the victim of the “European’s” desire for virgin territory, as in so many colonial fantasies; instead, the “European” becomes the victim of “encounter.” 21 Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, “The Reader as Misogynist in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country,” Modern Language Studies 21, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 45–53. 22 See, for example, his hilarious drunken speech to the local temperance society in Apex, and likewise his use of “facts” (284) to counter Ralph’s romantic understanding of Undine. 23 Martha Patterson convincingly argues that Wharton depicts Undine as a New Woman in the context of the emergence of corporate capitalism. But I disagree with Patterson’s characterization of Undine as a “tractable” (80) employee of Elmer’s. Like Bentley, I see questions of Undine’s agency, and of agency more generally, in Custom, as deeply complicated. Particularly, I see simple accounts of individual agency challenged by what the novel describes as the necessity for social capital. See Martha Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 24 Kevin Phillips citing Carter Goodrich in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway, 2002), 242. 25 I have found Dale Bauer and Jennie Kassanoff ’s quite different arguments about Wharton’s politics particularly compelling for this essay. See Dale Bauer, Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); and Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race. 26 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 475. 27 Thomas Piketty has persuasively argued that comparably high rates of economic inequality in the Gilded Age/Belle Époque and today are the result of inherited wealth. See Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Belknap, 2013).

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PART FIVE

Edith Wharton’s Library

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Reading the Reader: Edith Wharton’s Library, Digital Methods, and the Uses of Data SHEILA LIMING

Edith Wharton’s private library collection formed the basis of an education that would, over time, lay the foundation for much of her success as a popular author. When she died in 1937, Wharton left behind a collection of what is estimated to be nearly 5,000 books, many of them rare collector’s editions or association copies. While portions of the collection were destroyed in the wake of her death—many of them due to the London Blitz of 1941—the library’s surviving 2,700 volumes of them shed light on Wharton’s habits as a reader and on the relationship between reading and authorial success in the early twentieth century. These remaining volumes are held today at The Mount, Wharton’s historic home located in Lenox, Massachusetts. Collectively, they reveal networks of social support that complicate Wharton’s claims to autodidacticism; they encourage us to question Wharton’s commitment to what Irene Goldman-Price labels a “myth of selfmaking”1 and help us to reconsider Wharton’s work in the context of intertextual, and interpersonal, networks of exchange. For all of these reasons, it is important that contemporary scholars, students, and readers work to understand who Wharton was as a reader, something that her surviving library collection helps to make more clear. Wharton’s books offer a rich trove of information about how she consumed and cared for texts of various kinds along the way to writing books herself. But, of course, it is not every contemporary scholar or every reader of Wharton who has access to this collection or to its physical surroundings at The Mount. As such, this essay has two preliminary aims: first, it argues in favor of the significance of Wharton’s library to scholars’ continuing estimations of her literary legacy; and second, it narrates and details my efforts to create a digital repository for the virtual housing of Wharton’s library books. Beginning in the summer of 2015, I started work on a project that, in collaboration with The Mount, resulted in the website EdithWhartonsLibrary.org. Today, that website is complete to the extent that it furnishes metadata—that is, information about

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information contained in physical resources—and digital records for each and every book in Wharton’s library. However, maintenance work on the website continues, and is likely to continue for decades hence, making it very much a live document of ongoing scholarly negotiation. In this essay, I show how digital methods can be put to use in the service of “reading” Wharton’s library collection at The Mount and how that work contributes to scholars’ efforts to access not just the person who was Edith Wharton but, likewise, the particular moment of print culture that witnessed her rise as a popular author beginning in the early twentieth century. It begins by surveying aspects of the library collection as a whole, isolating important textual examples and contextualizing them with respect to Wharton’s investments as a collector, her activities as a reader, and her aspirations as an author. It then continues with an explanation of the methods that were employed in building the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org virtual library before transitioning to a discussion of the role that data—especially metadata—plays with reference to contemporary literary scholarship. At heart, it argues in favor of viewing Wharton through the lens of her collection and through the stakes of collecting more generally. I foreground discussions of methodology in order to show how the ability to virtually peruse Wharton’s library collection benefits not just Wharton scholarship but also connects such work to the larger fields of book history, print ecology, material culture, and American literary studies more generally. My reading of Wharton’s library, overall, casts the acts of bibliophilia and book collecting in connection with early-twentieth-century anxieties about the instability of information and the declining value of print. And, at the same time, it outlines some of the challenges that contemporary scholars face in building, using, and relying on digital tools like the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org website—tools that grant virtual access to print archives or collections but remain fundamentally tied to physical objects and to the fates of the institutions that oversee them.

THE LIBRARY AS PROPERTY The first library to figure prominently in Wharton’s life was her father’s private one, housed at the family’s various homes in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. In her autobiographical writings, she delights in describing George F. Jones’s library, which, though reportedly “modest” in size, granted the young Edith Jones access to the “wide expanse of the classics.”2 But this was not the extent of the Jones family’s interactions with libraries. Jones also belonged to the New York Society Library (NYSL), which, today, is one of the oldest surviving private subscription, or membership, libraries in the United States. The NYSL proudly boasts of its historical connections to the Wharton family name, explaining on its website that “Edith’s father George Frederic Jones was a Library shareholder who often took out books for himself and his family.”3 What these statements conceal, though, is the fact that Wharton’s father did this because certain de facto restrictions prevented women—particularly young women—from using the library in a more direct manner, even as the NYSL’s bylaws technically permitted their membership. Had the young Wharton ventured to visit the NYSL in person, she would have been discouraged, though not expressly prohibited, from spending time there and from browsing on her own;4 as such, her father and brothers were tasked with doing this for her, checking out books on her behalf in order to shield her from social censure. Her other options for obtaining books would have included borrowing and exchanging with some of the other women in her social circle, many of whom also benefitted from familial

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memberships in the NYSL. Her relationships with women like Daisy Chanler and Minnie Cadwalader Jones (the latter was Wharton’s sister-in-law and married to her brother Fredric) thus grew in part from the attachments that the Jones family had formed through their membership in this somewhat exclusive, private institution. For Wharton, a product of the upper classes who was reared in the later decades of the nineteenth century, books carried expectations about ownership. If she was not reading books owned by her father, Wharton was thus limited to reading books owned by other family members or friends, or else library materials that had been scrutinized by them before being passed on to her. This situation helps to explain how, for Wharton, the idea of owning and amassing a personal collection of library books became such a significant and compelling project—one that justified not just the expenditure of her personal income but, likewise, an entire lifetime of effort and care. Though Wharton was later involved in charitable operations involving public libraries, most notably via the Lenox Library in Massachusetts,5 she did not frequent these institutions herself. For a woman of her class position, a library was a thing not to be visited but to be owned, maintained, and privately enjoyed. Wharton’s enjoyment of her personal library collection translated, in plain material terms, into a lifelong financial investment in it. That process started with the acquisition of about two hundred odd volumes from her father’s library following the event of his death in 1882, when Wharton was only twenty. Those volumes were not, strictly speaking, her rightful property; in fact, they were willed to her brothers. But Wharton succeeded in securing them nonetheless, with disagreements among the Jones heirs resulting in a “bitter fall-out” that continued to plague Wharton’s relationships with her brothers, according to biographer Hermione Lee.6 Decades later, even, Wharton’s library collection would continue to bear witness to these conflicts, with many volumes containing her brothers’ signatures of ownership, suggesting that they had been similarly seized. All of this is indicative of the way that Wharton tended to pursue and acquire books—aggressively, it would appear, since those books, like so much private property in the United States during this era, were not intended for ownership by a woman. Owing, perhaps, to her difficulties in procuring them in the first place, Wharton would often invest in the physical protection of her books by having them custom bound. For instance, a list of “Volumes a Rèlier,” or “books to rebound,” containing notes in Wharton’s hand and likely dating from the 1920s or 1930s can be found among the archival materials relating to the author held at Yale’s Beinecke Library. This list features physical descriptions and notes about custom bindings (“papier,” “toile,” “peau”) and color preferences.7 The practice of having quality editions custom-bound was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, the period in which Wharton was born; in fact, Wharton, in her treatise The Decoration of Houses, which was cowritten with the architect Ogden Codman, Jr., comments on how shelves of custom-bound books create an effect that is “as decorative as a fine tapestry.”8 But such appreciation began to wane in the twentieth century, the era that saw both Wharton’s ascendance as an author and the expansion of inexpensive, large-scale printing technologies. While Wharton’s own books were released in affordable, hardback editions, bound in modest cloth coverings and cheaply printed on wood-pulp paper in print runs that numbered in the thousands, Wharton was collecting extravagant, handsomely bound rare editions and adding them to her private library. These volumes included the work of famous nineteenth-century bookbinding firms such as Chambolle-Duru, Lavaux, Champs-Stroobants, Lortic, and the Doves Bindery, which was a subsidiary of the T.J. Cobden-Sanderson’s Doves Press

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and noted among the early-twentieth-century Arts and Crafts Movement in England. One thing that the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org database makes possible is a targeted search for these specific artists and binderies. Taking one—the Lortic bookbinding brand—as an example, it is possible to tailor search results to focus on this bindery alone. Through performing such detailed searches, we can better see the extent to which Wharton, along with the members of her circle who gifted these items to her, were investing in the physical presentation and conservation of their books. Such levels of investment and care, I want to argue, are indicative of what it meant not just to read but to own books during this era, for those who were privileged enough to do so. The name Lortic held a lot of weight in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France, even after the firm’s founder, Marcellin Lortic, ceded control of production to his sons, Marcellin II and Paul, in 1884. The Lortic bindery continued to be regarded as one of the finest producers of its day and was much in demand among high-profile book collectors, including Robert Hoe, a founding member of the New York City–based bibliophilic society, the Grolier Club. Wharton, for her own part, was familiar with both Hoe and the contents of his prized collection; she owned a copy of O. A. Bierstadt’s 1895 work The Library of Robert Hoe: A Contribution to the History of Bibliophilism in America, which was given to her by her close friend Walter Berry,9 another avid collector and, in many ways, a more serious and erudite one than her. A penciled inscription in Berry’s hand graces a front endpaper and reads: “Edith Wharton—Christmas 1897” (Bierstadt). The book itself offers readers a descriptive tour of Hoe’s personal library, making it something of an analogue counterpart to the modern-day EdithWhartonsLibrary.org site (which grants access to scanned front matter and material from Wharton’s copy of Hoe’s book).10 By the 1890s, Hoe, who had experienced success as a manufacturer of printing presses, had already made a name for himself as a collector. When he died in 1909, his collection was appraised for millions of dollars in preparation for sale at auction, an event that was deemed “of unprecedented importance in the annals of book sales.”11 One of the items being auctioned off was a Gutenberg Bible, considered by many collectors to be a “holy grail” of sorts, given that so few copies remain; there are forty-nine today, but even fewer were presumed to be in existence at the time of Hoe’s death. Bierstadt’s volume, though, is not arranged as a catalogue; instead of a summative list, it describes standout items from Hoe’s collection in great detail. Among those details are accounts of fine and collectible bindings, with Bierstadt explaining, “In closing a book one naturally casts a loving glance upon its cover. So, in parting from a library, the bindings may leave a final impression upon the mental retina.”12 Hoe’s fondness for fine material details led him to acquire many books bound by the celebrated Lortic, and the same held true for Wharton. Most notable among Wharton’s collection of Lortic works is a two-volume set of collected works by Racine. They are dated 1687 and, though they do not constitute a first edition, they come very close: together, they form part of the second collected edition of Racine’s works, which was notable for being the first version to include continuous pagination. The two volumes are uniformly bound in full grain, red morocco leather, with elaborate gilt decorations on the spine, gilt edges, gilt-ruled boards, and marbled endpapers, all of which would have been added by the Lortic bindery to the original seventeenth-century text block, at the customer’s request. The Lortic firm’s penciled mark appears on the fly, alongside a printed label with the name of a previous owner, “H. Chevreul.” Wharton owned this book, but did she herself commission the binding and extravagant material improvements done by Lortic? This is difficult to ascertain but also somewhat unlikely: in her memoir A Backward Glance, for

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instance, she explains that she received other rare volumes by Racine as gifts from friends. “I happened to one day mention [to Monsieur Auguste Laugel] that another of my friends, also a learned bibliophile, knowing my admiration for Racine, had given me the rare first editions of ‘Athalie’ and ‘Ester.’ ” Wharton’s interlocutor in this instance, Laugel, was “one of the most accomplished bibliophiles of his day,” and her stated appreciation for the gifted Racine volumes resulted in yet another present, this time from him: [I]‌had never been able to add to them a copy of the far rarer, almost unfindable “Phèdre.” The next day Monsieur Laugel sent me the missing treasure; and I never look at the slim exquisite volume without a grateful thought for my delightful old friend, the perfect model of the distinguished and cultivated French gentlemen of his day.13 Though the two-volume set with the handsome Lortic binding includes Phèdre, here, Wharton is actually talking about a different, rarer edition of the same work. Wharton’s library contains, in all, five early, custom-bound editions of works by Racine—all of which, it appears, were given to her by friends and fellow collectors. Though Wharton does not name the year in which she received the coveted “Phèdre” from Laugel, she mentions the event in connection with her early years in Paris, a period that also saw the publication of works by her, including Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910) and Ethan Frome (1911). The Lortic bindery, and others like it headquartered in France, continued to be held in high esteem during these early decades of the twentieth century, but the demand for the types of custom bindings it produced was declining thanks to the expansion of cheap print technologies. As the print history scholar Michael Winship explains, this era was marked by the “rapid growth” and “modernization” of the publishing industry;14 Ellen Mazur Thomson contributes more evidence to this discussion, noting how “new technologies of manufacture played a key role in driving this intense interest in the aesthetics of mass produced objects,” through which “the value of the individual objects, including books, was changed.”15 It was by this system and these new technologies that Wharton’s own books were published. The two previously mentioned titles, for instance, were first released in massproduced, cloth-bound editions that sold for about $1.50 per copy (about $42 today, accounting for inflation—a bit expensive for today’s publishing market, but reasonable compared to the price of other new titles appearing in the early 1900s).16 In contrast to such editions, the lavish leather bindings created by firms like Lortic would have added substantially to the cost and value of a book. For instance, a March 2017 auction catalogue from the rare books dealer Asher Books listed a Lortic-bound volume by the sixteenth-century Dutch poet Jan van der Moot—an item that was formerly the property of the aforementioned collector Robert Hoe—for €75,000 (about $90,000). Of course, age, rarity, and other considerations (like who owned the book previously) must also be considered with regards to the value of such an item, but Asher Books makes much of the Lortic binding, in particular, labeling it a “beautiful” volume that is “emblematic” of the work of the Lortic sons, Marcellin II and Paul.17 One thing that the EdithWhartonsLibrary. org database makes possible is a visual comparison of, say, Wharton’s own, first-edition copy of Tales of Men and Ghosts and the Lortic-bound works of Racine—two books that entered into her life at a similar point in history, as we have seen, yet differ remarkably in their physical attributes. Today, scholars of book history use “binder’s marks”—penciled initials, or sometimes job numbers, often appearing scribbled on a fly leaf at either the front or rear of a

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FIGURE 17.1  Early edition of Racine’s Oeuvres with the binder’s mark (top of right page, at center) and job number (left page) in pencil. http://edith​whar​tons​libr​ary.org/ewl/items/ show/1552. Image reproduced courtesy of The Mount.

book—to identify the work of these nineteenth-century artisans (see Figure 17.1). While Wharton’s own experiences as a collector would have granted her familiarity with the world of custom bookbinding, those impressions were likely strengthened by connections that hit even closer to home: Wharton’s brother, Frederic Rhinelander Jones, who was married to the aforementioned Minnie (Mary) Cadwalader Jones, went into business as a professional bookbinder in the 1870s, during the period that was dubbed “le temps fameux,” or the renaissance of bookbinding, by the French bibliophile Henri Beraldi.18 Whereas European practitioners had been producing extravagant bindings for a century already, American artisans were only beginning to gain notoriety for their craft at this time. William L. Andrews, in his self-published 1895 treatise The Art of Bookbinding, observes as much; while he admits that “the American amateur of books may still need to send his choicest books to France to be bound,” nevertheless, “a taste for good and artistic binding has thus been developed and is increasing among us [Americans],” and a whole native industry alongside it.19 The young Wharton thus gained exposure to this growing industry and, at the same time, to the lessons in aesthetics that it was known to preach. As a collector, Wharton continued to demonstrate an appreciation for quality bindings, something that is evident today if

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one browses through the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org site or conducts targeted searches using the names of specific binders or firms. It is one thing to read about these material and aesthetic details, as in Bierstadt’s descriptions of volumes in his The Library of Robert Hoe or in George Ramsden’s Edith Wharton’s Library catalogue. But it is another to see and confirm them for oneself. Ramsden, who was responsible for amassing much of the remaining library before selling the collection to The Mount in 2005, took particular interest in fine bindings and often makes note of them in his catalogue. However, he is prone to error on the subject: he calls Lortic by the name “Lortig” and overlooks, for instance, the binder’s mark that identifies the two-volume text by Racine as the work of that same firm (mistakenly naming, instead, the publisher Denys Thierry as the binder).20 In this way, the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org database expands upon Ramsden’s work while also making Wharton’s library visible— albeit in a highly mediated, digital way—to scholars and students who would seek to learn from and interact with its contents.

BUILDING A VIRTUAL LIBRARY It was from my own, firsthand experiences working with the Wharton library collection at The Mount that I became convinced of the need for a more accessible, digital complement to it. During the summer of 2013, I spent a month working onsite in Lenox in connection with another project, my doctoral dissertation on American women writers’ engagement with the rhetoric of evolutionary biology. In particular, I was interested in the volumes of science, or science-adjacent subjects, that could be found in Wharton’s library. But I encountered obstacles to that research where access and navigability were concerned: before arriving at The Mount, I did not know what was actually in the library. Instead, all I had to work from were references to texts that I had encountered in my reading of Wharton’s fiction, her letters, and other historical sources. This led me, easily enough, to sources like Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Ernest Haeckel. But lesser-known sources associated with this same branch of disciplinary knowledge—like the little-known Edmond Kelly, whose work Evolution and Effort (1898) inspired Wharton (and gave her the title for her 1899 book of stories, The Greater Inclination)—eluded me at first, since I did not know that I needed to be looking for them. And while George Ramsden’s Edith Wharton’s Library catalogue provided an entrée to the collection, summarily noting, in the instance of Kelly, “many passages marked,”21 this information did not help to enlarge my understanding of Kelly’s book or Wharton’s specific interests in it. The first step to building the virtual library that I, and others, needed to complement the real one stored at The Mount involved purchasing equipment and software, and that meant securing funding. I cobbled together funds from different sources (including professional development grants and competitive, statewide grants) in order to purchase a portable digital book scanner that could be set up and installed at The Mount, along with optical character recognition (OCR)-capable software that would convert scanned files to .pdfs, which would make the text of the image files searchable. The process of scanning and capturing those files took four years; for a month each summer, I would occupy a corner of The Mount’s third floor attic in order to painstakingly scan, alter, correct, save, and tag image files corresponding to each of the 2,700 books in the library. Throughout this process, I had help, most notably from Julie Quain, a retired librarian and veteran volunteer at The Mount, who assisted me in locating books, positioning them in the

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scanner, and identifying ephemera, handwritten annotations, or other pertinent details within each volume, so that those materials could be likewise cataloged and captured. One particular challenge that Quain and I faced in scanning these materials arose in relation with the material condition of the books themselves. Upon her death, Wharton split the contents of her library between two young heirs, each of them a son of a friend.22 One of those heirs was Colin Clark, son of the famed British art historian and television personality Sir Kenneth Clark. The Clarks stored their portion of Wharton’s library at one of their private residences, Saltwood Castle, an eleventh-century structure located in Kent, in the south of England. The age of the building, along with its location near the coast, meant that the Wharton library books were exposed to constant moisture for nearly seventy years. As a result, many of them became damaged: leather spines deteriorated and collapsed, mold colonies sprouted between damp pages, and insects fed on the crumbling, hand-stitched bindings. A twenty-four volume set containing the complete works of Jonathan Swift, for instance, had been badly damaged in a fire and its pages were stained black with smoke (see Figure 17.2). In order to avoid causing further damage to these sensitive materials, Julie and I had to use a “touchless” book scanner— one that did not operate by sandwiching the book between plates of glass, or using jets of air to manipulate and turn pages. This made the pace of our labor a bit slower overall; though the touchless scanner could be operated with books held at 45-degree angles so as not to put additional stress on their aging spines, it meant that we could only scan and capture one page at a time. Afterwards, we had the option of digitally joining the images back together using the scanner software, so that they would appear side-by-side in the finished, digital files. Though the pace was somewhat regrettable, spending time with the physical books in this way had the advantage of allowing us to identify good candidates for material preservation and to thus save some of the items in the library even as we were busy creating new, digital pathways for accessing them. During the summer of 2015, I started uploading completed image files to a beta version of the library website, which I built using the Omeka digital exhibitions platform. I chose Omeka because, in addition to being open source (and thus free to use), it was designed specifically for use by libraries, museums, and archives. This distinguishes it from platforms like Scalar, which is optimized for web-based publishing, not database navigation and storage. By contrast, Omeka allows users to create a searchable database that can be browsed in a variety of ways, just like a physical library: such options include targeted search (retrievable through metadata, OCR text, and custom tags), “Collections” browsing (which allows multivolume sets of books—like both of Wharton’s editions of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume À la recherche du temps perdu—to be grouped together); and general item browsing, which presents visitors with comprehensive lists of items in the library that can be modified and organized according to their custom criteria. The idea was to create a website that would mimic the experience of visiting the actual library at The Mount, for those who could not travel to visit it for themselves. And rather than serving as a virtual replacement for the experience of seeing and physically handling Wharton’s books, the idea was to provide a taste of what that experience could potentially entail, alongside the presentation of useful information and data that helped to describe the physical items themselves. A beta version of the site EdithWhartonsLibrary.org—stored initially under my own private domain, which made it publicly visible but not identifiable by search engines— launched in 2016 with about one thousand scanned files. That summer, at the Edith Wharton Society conference in Washington, DC, Quain and I, alongside Nynke Dorhout,

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FIGURE 17.2  Interior of a volume from an 1813 set of the complete works of Jonathan Swift with evidence of damage from smoke and fire. http://edith​whar​tons​libr​ary.org/ewl/items/ show/32. Image reproduced courtesy of The Mount.

who is The Mount’s staff librarian, presented the rough draft version of the site and solicited feedback from participants in our workshop. We provided conference attendees with a tour of the site’s basic features and functions and then passed out business cards with the private web URL, so that participants could continue to browse it on their own time. We then encouraged these beta users to take advantage of the built-in “Contact” function on the site, so they could report issues or ask questions relating to their experiences with it. This initial community of users proved helpful in identifying issues such as typos, errors, or missing publication dates and thus contributed to preparing the site for its eventual, public launch. Meanwhile, I was grateful for the assistance of my students at the University of North Dakota, who also contributed work to the site. Between 2015 and 2020, I benefitted from the help of five undergraduate research assistants, who were annually engaged in creating new item records within Omeka and then adding information to them, including appropriate metadata that was used to describe corresponding physical items in the library. These records were formatted in adherence to Dublin Core standards for metadata; Omeka features a built-in set of fields that correspond to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative’s system of protocols for the description of resources. The “Dublin” in Dublin Core is a reference to the city of Dublin, Ohio, where the standards were

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first developed during a 1995 meeting of library professionals associated with the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), as it was known at the time. In the case of the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org website, the Dublin Core protocols had to be consistently applied to the description of items in the library itself so that metadata stored on the site would accurately reflect information about the collection as a whole. So, for example, for the field labeled “Creator,” which in Dublin Core refers to “An entity primarily responsible for making the resource,” we included names of authors (or, in cases where no authors were identified, compilers or editors). Similarly, for the field labeled “Source,” defined as “A related resource from which the described resource is derived,” we listed, where applicable, the specific, private residence (i.e., house) owned by Wharton where the book had previously been stored.23 We did this by consulting the bookplates that, in Wharton’s library books, often appear affixed to inside covers. Over her lifetime, Wharton had three bookplates made to identify books that were stored at three of her private residences, thus marking the items as the property, in effect, of that particular house. Those three houses were: Land’s End (located in Newport, Rhode Island), Pavillon Colombe (Saint-Bricesous-Forêt, France), and Sainte-Claire-du-Château (Hyères, France).24 In keeping track of which books were stored where, it becomes possible to glimpse parts of Wharton’s library collection as they existed at various points in time for her personally, something that I will describe in more detail in the next section. In addition to the previously mentioned undergraduate research assistants, I had students in one of my classes, English 428: Digital Humanities, upload and tag images files in connection with a class assignment that was designed to deepen their familiarity with digital archival resources. While they combed through .pdf versions of Wharton’s books in order to develop appropriate content tags that could be used to aid searches performed by users of the site, they were also asked to identify poor or insufficient images—cases where the scanned file had turned out too bright or was not clear enough to be picked up and read by the OCR software. In both instances, though, the work that these students did was carried out first in the service of education, and thus without the expectation of perfection. I knew that, in having students perform work on the EdithWhartonsLibrary. org database, I would be dealing with a higher likelihood of errors and typos appearing on the site. However, that danger was, for me, offset by the advantages of seeing the stakes of students’ learning in these scenarios increased. Students appeared to relish the knowledge that they were contributing to a scholarly resource that would be used and consulted by professionals in the field for years to come. And, at the same time, they were granted new opportunities for learning about the field of early-twentieth-century literary production, as their work on the website was supported by in-class discussions about Wharton’s contemporaries. Students took notice, for instance, of figures like Vernon Lee, whose books are included in Wharton’s library (often accompanied by thoughtful inscriptions from the author)25 though they are not often read today. In this way, students’ work on the website granted them better, more contextually informed glimpses of the scene of literary production in the early 1900s. Moreover, their repeated engagements with the website’s digital records necessitated some discussion of print history methods, too, as they had to learn how to identify publishers, distinguish between different types of paper and bindings, confirm publication dates, research first editions, and tag books according to genre. These activities provided a hands-on complement to the reading they were doing about the field of the digital humanities, which, according to Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto, has the potential to “emphasize the study both of the original and of its very materiality” while “refocus[ing] our attention

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on the materials of scholarship long taken for granted.”26 In their textbook The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars (2015), Gardiner and Musto assert that new, digital methodologies may be profitably explored within the context of humanities research projects that, on the surface, might appear quite traditional. This has proven to be the case with the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org website, which, while it imitates the experience of browsing Wharton’s physical library at The Mount, mounts an argument for the continued primacy of physical, archival resources while also serving to draw new audiences to them.

THE MANY LIBRARIES OF EDITH WHARTON The pleasure of browsing a physical collection is not something that can be effectively recreated within digital spaces. But digital search has its own advantages, including the ability to specify search criteria in order to reveal isolated swathes of information. We saw previously how the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org site makes targeted search not just for titles and authors but also for bookbinders, even, possible. In this section, I provide an overview of some other ways in which the site can be used and show how data can enhance our contemporary understandings of the wider world that Wharton inhabited. For instance, returning to the subject of Wharton’s earliest interactions with libraries, especially her father’s collections, tags on the website can be used to identify association copies and previous owners. If one wanted to consult a list of just those books that Wharton took from her father’s “gentleman’s library,” as she called it, it would be possible to do so by searching under keywords like “George Jones” or “G.F. Jones.” The same is true where other figures from Wharton’s biography are concerned: for instance, a search for the name “Walter Berry” returns nearly a hundred items, most of which previously belonged to this close friend of Wharton’s and are bound in his signature style, with quarter-blue morocco coverings added by the renowned French bookbinding firm Champs-Stroobants. Indeed, aside from Wharton’s own family members, Walter Berry emerges as the single largest source of books in her collection. Many of those books, we know, were Berry’s gifts to her and contain inscriptions that indicate as much; but others—including a rare first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a work for which Wharton had little personal fondness or appreciation—were acquired following Berry’s death, likely on account of their value. In this way, it is possible to gauge Wharton’s actions as a reader and a collector with reference to various members of her social network. In a similar way, refined search criteria can be used to show which books Wharton kept where—to shed light on Wharton’s many little libraries, in other words. Though not all of the physical books that are represented within the digital database contain bookplates, the vast majority of them do. Starting with Land’s End, the summer home in Rhode Island that Wharton shared with her husband, Teddy, at the start of their marriage, we see a relatively humble amount of items marked with the Dublin Core source code “LE.” Of all the thousands of remaining library books, only 252, apparently, were with Wharton and Teddy at their first house in Newport; or, at least, that is how many have been marked with a bookplate belonging to that residence specifically. This grants us a somewhat modest view of Wharton’s library before she made a name for herself as an author, and would appear to suggest that her activities as a collector of books increased along with her efforts at writing some years later. However, it is important to remember that the information represented on the EdithWhartonsLibrary. org website comprises only half of the story of Wharton’s library. The other half of

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it remains unknowable to us today, since a sizable portion of the library—William Royal Tyler Jr.’s inheritance—was destroyed long ago, during the Blitz of 1941. Upon inheriting his half of the library, Tyler stored it in a London warehouse that came under German fire, and no detailed records were made taking stock of its contents. What this digital database offers, then, are varieties of leads with regards to new scholarship: it invites scholars to ask new questions about the connections between what Wharton read—or what other authors like her might have been reading in the early twentieth century—and what she wrote. Similarly, one can use the site’s Advanced Search criteria option to take a look at all three of the residences for which Wharton had custom bookplates made. In doing so, we are presented with a larger portrait of the link that appears tenuously suggested above— the one that binds Wharton’s investments in books as property to her investments in her own success as an author and, conversely, displays them in relation to the returns she received on her work as an author (see Figure 17.3). In contrast to the 252 books that remain from Wharton’s time at Land’s End, we can see that far more were to be found in the libraries held at her two French homes, residences that she owned and frequented much later in life. Above all, it was at her house in the Paris suburbs, called “Pavillon Colombe,” that the majority of those books appear to have been installed. All of this data, however, conceals information that cannot be ascertained via any study of Wharton’s library, though. For instance, Wharton never had a bookplate made for the books she stored at The Mount, despite the fact that she oversaw the design of the house herself, including the space of the library there. Likewise, she never commissioned a bookplate for her apartment in Paris on the Rue de Varenne, though that address saw a lot of significant activity with regards to her work as a writer, in serving as her home during some of her busiest and most productive years. Wharton’s use of bookplates, much like her interest and investment in custom-bound fine editions, was likewise typical of collectors during this era. Indeed, the “golden age of bookbinding,” as it was previously called, overlapped with the “golden age of the bookplate” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was during this era that improved printing technologies—the same technologies that helped to make books more affordable to collectors as well as to everyday readers—made custom bookplates an increasingly feasible and popular option for marking one’s property. In London, The Journal of the Ex Libris Society launched with its first issue in 1892, extolling the art of bookplate design and declaring that “objects, once placed in situ, ought to be conserved with pious care as things in ward for the future,” in the words of one contributor.27 Bookplates afforded one means of encouraging such conservation. Wharton commissioned bookplate designs for each of her homes in France, relying on the American printer Daniel Berkeley Updike, who was renowned for his work with Boston’s Merrymount Press and had, previously, contributed to the design of two of Wharton’s books, The Decoration of Houses (1897) and The Book of the Homeless (1916). In his own treatise on typographical design, In the Day’s Work (1924), Updike argues that “decoration is the art of leaving things out!”28—a principle that he put into practice in his sparse designs for Wharton’s bookplates. Despite being created for use in two separate residences, the bookplates form a visual echo in featuring only a decorative colored border (red for one house, green for the other) around clean, identically printed lines of plain text. The EdithWhartonsLibrary.org website allows one to see these bookplates and, along with them, to visualize Wharton’s plans for organizing the contents of her many little

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900

Books in Wharton’s Library, by Bookplate / Residence 810

800 724

700 600 500 400 300

252

200 100 0

Land’s End

Sainte-Claire-du-Château

Pavillon Colombe

FIGURE 17.3  Graph showing proportions of books included in the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org database that can be attributed to three of Wharton’s addresses: Land’s End (Newport, RI), Pavillon Colombe (Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France), and Sainte-Claire-du-Château (Hyères, France).

libraries. At the same time, it grants remote access to books like Daniel Berkeley Updike’s In the Day’s Work—titles published as part of a limited print run, but owned by Wharton as a testament to a social bond or professional relationship. For, indeed, Wharton owned several books that were printed and designed by the very master typographer who she had hired to create her bookplates, and who she knew socially and professionally dating from the time of his work on her and Codman’s volume The Decoration of Houses. Among the Updike books in her collection is a 1907 edition of Erasmus’s Against War, which was printed as part of the Merrymount Press’s “Humanists’ Library” series. The series includes classic titles by figures deemed central to the history of Western art and philosophy like Da Vinci and Sir Philip Sidney, with each title released in a new, tasteful, modernized edition that was representative of Updike’s spare and restrained style. The full text of Against War can be perused on the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org site;29 where many items are represented only via select images—most often those that serve to demonstrate proof of Wharton’s ownership and edition details—certain texts are included in whole. Updike’s version of Against War, having been released in an edition of only about three hundred copies, was one that was singled out, by myself and staff members at The Mount, to be represented and made fully accessible on the site. This brings me, finally, to the discussion of a final challenge associated with building the library database: copyright. Many of Wharton’s own works remain under copyright, which means that her personal copies of them—the ones held at The Mount—could not be scanned and shared publicly via the library site. The same is true for many of the

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books she owned, including works by certain contemporary writers that she was drawn to later in her life, like the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana. His Obiter Scripta, published in 1936, was one of the last books that Wharton bought, and it is clear that she read it, judging by the marginalia and penciled markings she added to it.30 Where such titles are concerned, metadata is even more important, because it helps to describe and render an informed image of what the physical object itself looks like, or is like, materially speaking. Meanwhile, some books in Wharton’s library were found to be readily available elsewhere through larger online databases like the HathiTrust digital library. In the interest of avoiding the replication of labor and material, works that could be accessed elsewhere online (in the same edition and format as the version contained in Wharton’s library) were only scanned to show proof of her ownership, ephemeral details that had been added to the text, or markings and annotations. Thus, while Wharton’s library appears intact and “complete” in a sense via EdithWhartonsLibrary.org, some materials on it are only represented in part. The continuing challenge has been to figure out which materials may still need to be scanned and added in their entirety, which involves identifying those instances in which distinguishing details like annotations and marginalia might have been overlooked in the scanning process. This is why I say that work on the site remains ongoing; however, the labor that is needed is not solely my own. Rather, work on the site requires the input of scholars and users who can help to identify items from the library that need to be made fully accessible for the purposes of future research and study. The site remains reliant on the existence of The Mount as an institution; in a similar way, it recruits contemporary scholars and students to take part in the future of Wharton studies and print culture research by soliciting their assistance and participation. Just as a library is a document of intertextual exchange, with authors speaking to each other across generations, so must a virtual library or digital resource like the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org site play host to the questions that we would ask of each other in the service of trying to find out what we need to know.

NOTES 1 Irene Goldman-Price, My Dear Governess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 2. 2 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 66. 3 New York Society Library, “Edith Wharton’s New York City: A Backward Glance,” March 2012, Nysoclib.org, January 8, 2018, https://www.nysoc​lib.org/eve​nts/edith-whart​onsnew-york-city-backw​ard-gla​nce (accessed February 2, 2021). 4 Austin Baxter Keep, History of the New York Society Library (New York: DeVinne, 1908), 188. 5 Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Vintage, 2008), 152, 775 (n. 77). 6 Ibid., 61, 137. 7 Edith Wharton, “Volumes à Relier,” Edith Wharton Papers, box 50, folder 1504, YCAL 42, Series 4. Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. 8 Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., The Decoration of Houses (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 130. 9 Indeed, so “close” was Wharton’s relationship with Walter Berry that their graves are located in close proximity to each other in the Cimetière des Gonards, located outside of Paris in Versailles. 10 For Berry’s inscription and other details relating to Wharton’s copy of this text, see O. A. Bierstadt, The Library of Robert Hoe: A Contribution to the History of Bibliophilism

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in America (New York: Duprat, 1895), http://edith​whar​tons​libr​ary.org/ewl/items/show/184 (accessed February 16, 2021). 11 Anderson Auction Company, Catalogue of the Library of Robert Hoe of New York (selfpublished, 1911), vii, https://ia802​706.us.arch​ive.org/33/items/lib​robe​rtho​e01a​ndeu​oft/lib​ robe​rtho​e01a​ndeu​oft.pdf (accessed February 2, 2021). 12 Bierstadt, The Library of Robert Hoe, 206. 13 Wharton, A Backward Glance, 291–2. 14 Michael Winship, “The Rise of a National Book Trade System in the United States,” in Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway (eds.), A History of the Book in America, vol. 4 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 57. 15 Ellen Mazur Thomson, “Aesthetic Issues in Book Cover Design 1880–1910,” Journal of Design History 23, no. 3 (2010): 229. 16 This price is reflected in advertisements dating from the early 1900s that are included in certain first-edition volumes of Wharton’s fiction published during that same era. For instance, my own first-edition copy of The House of Mirth (1905) features advertisements for previous titles by Wharton, including the short story collections The Descent of Man (1903), Crucial Instances (1901), and The Greater Inclination (1899), all priced at $1.50. 17 Asher Rare Books, “Bound by Lortic frères,” Antiquariaat Forum, March 2017, https://www. ash​erbo​oks.com/uplo​ads/catalo​gue/55/55_at​tach​emen​t_ca​talo​gue.pdf (accessed February 1, 2021). 18 Qtd. in Thompson, “Aesthetic Issues in Book Cover Design,” 229. 19 William L. Andrews, The Art of Bookbinding (self-published, 1895), 44, https://libr​ary.si.edu/ digi​tal-libr​ary/book/sho​rthi​stor​ical​s00a​ndr (accessed February 1, 2021). 20 George Ramsden, Edith Wharton’s Library (Settrington, UK: Stone Trough, 1999), 101–2. 21 Ibid., 69. 22 For a more detailed discussion of what happened to Wharton’s library following her death—including how her chosen heir treated their portions of the collection—see Sheila Liming, What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), particularly the book’s conclusion, “The Afterlives of Edith Wharton’s Library.” 23 Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), “Properties in the /elements/1.1/ namespace,” https://www.dub​linc​ore.org/spe​cifi​cati​ons/dub​lin-core/dcmi-terms/#sect​ion-3 (accessed February 2, 2021). 24 It is worth noting that Wharton never commissioned a bookplate for her library at The Mount. In What a Library Means to a Woman, I speculate that this was because, after laboring over her designs for the physical space of the library at The Mount, she did not envision abandoning that space or ever removing her books from it. Later, after her divorce from Teddy Wharton had more or less forced her to do exactly that, we see that Wharton discovered a renewed interest in bookplates and immediately had them designed for her two residences in France. See Liming, What a Library Means to a Woman, 68–9. 25 See, for example, Lee’s kind inscription to Wharton contained in the volume Louis Norbert: “To Edith Wharton just in time to thank her again for the enchanting two days she has given me. Vernon (reduce da Siena) May 24, 1914,” available online via the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org site: http://edith​whar​tons​libr​ary.org/ewl/items/show/1202 (accessed February 4, 2021). 26 Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto, The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 43.

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27 John Leighton, “Book-Plates, Ancient and Modern, with Examples,” Journal of the Ex Libris Society 1 (1892): 2, HathiTrust Digital Library, https://babel.hat​hitr​ust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp. 390​1507​6071​888&view=1up&seq=1 (accessed February 16, 2021). 28 Daniel Berkeley Updike, In the Day’s Work (Boston: Merrymount, 1924), 48. 29 http://edith​whar​tons​libr​ary.org/ewl/items/show/626. 30 Many of those markings and annotations are visible in the digital preview of Santayana’s text, which is available online at http://edith​whar​tons​libr​ary.org/ewl/items/show/1603.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Complete Works of Edith Wharton: Preparing the First Authoritative Edition CAROL J. SINGLEY, DONNA M. CAMPBELL, AND FREDERICK WEGENER

For the first time, all of Edith Wharton’s writings will become available to scholars and readers. The Complete Works of Edith Wharton (CWEWh) is a scholarly critical edition that is being published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in thirty volumes, both in print and online. OUP is now one of a relatively small number of academic publishers producing multivolume projects of this kind, which underscores CWEWh’s significance as a timely, distinctive tribute to Wharton’s accomplishments as both an American and a female writer. This historic undertaking presents Wharton’s work in new ways and ensures that readers will have access to reliable texts of her writings. CWEWh will be issued in hardcover volumes and through the latest technology in the Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) series. Prepared in accordance with accepted practices in scholarly editing, each volume offers a full critical and textual apparatus that allows readers to move seamlessly between text and commentary and to trace the evolution of Wharton’s writing in minute detail. No previous edition of Wharton’s work aims for this high level of editorial detail and accuracy. The project is international in scope, with volume editors from the United States, Canada, England, France, Italy, and Australia. These esteemed scholars bring both critical and textual expertise to the volumes that they are editing. A public website at whartoncompleteworks.org provides information about Wharton and volumes in the series, including a complete table of contents of CWEWh. Updates on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, can enable CWEWh to attain global reach as well as intimacy. In addition to producing Wharton’s texts in print and online, CWEWh will launch a Digital Wharton component, with free, online public access to writings within the proprietary parameters set by OUP. These digital materials and tools complement rather than compete with CWEWh because the digital project can feature supplementary material, such as relevant audio, film clips, and color illustrations, that will not appear in the OUP edition.

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An online presence similar to that of The Mark Twain Project or The Walt Whitman Archive might be possible, as well as collaboration with the Edith Wharton Society, which has developed a vibrant website over many years. CWEWh has the potential to participate in such initiatives in the digital humanities. In the following sections, we describe the evolution of the project and its editorial principles and practices; the discoveries and new understandings of Wharton’s life and writing that have resulted, even at this relatively early stage, from work on CWEWh; and the possibilities for Digital Wharton and its promise of new ways of discovering Wharton’s work.

IMPORTANCE OF THE PROJECT Edith Wharton’s achievements in American literature as a novelist of manners are well known, yet few readers likely appreciate the full scope of her work. As scholars of Wharton well know, she wrote in multiple genres: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. Her corpus includes twenty-five novels and novellas, some of them works of historical fiction and others contemporaneous, set in her native New York City as well as in New England, Europe, and Africa. These fictions display modernist sensibilities and techniques as well as the realistic and naturalistic ones for which she is most celebrated. She wrote eighty-seven short stories spanning all five decades of her career, including gothic and ghostly tales. She published three books of poetry; composed numerous plays; and authored books of nonfiction ranging from a memoir to books about travel, architecture, interior design, horticulture, war, and narrative theory. She was a savvy businesswoman as well as artist, publishing and negotiating advantageous contracts with Charles Scribner’s Sons and D. Appleton & Company in the United States, and with Macmillan in England. Her stories appeared in leading magazines of her day: The Saturday Evening Post, Century Magazine, Scribner’s Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Magazine, and Ladies’ Home Journal. Despite Wharton’s importance in American letters, there has never been a complete edition of her works. Readers of this Pulitzer Prize–winning author thus scramble for reliable versions of her writings, making the need for CWEWh clear. Most collections are selective and out of print and reflect idiosyncratic editorial decisions. For example, no more than four novels (The Age of Innocence, The Children, Hudson River Bracketed, and The Gods Arrive) are included in the Centennial Edition (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962), marking the anniversary of Wharton’s birth. The Constable Edith Wharton (London, 1965–6) comprises only five novels: The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, Summer, and The Age of Innocence. Comparatively expansive, the 1980s Scribner/Macmillan Hudson River Editions of Wharton’s work number over a dozen volumes, including her autobiography, A Backward Glance, but otherwise are confined to works of fiction. None of these series is equipped with notes or other critical apparatus. Five Library of America volumes to date encompass much of Wharton’s fiction and life writings but still give only a partial sense of her accomplishment, with limited textual and explanatory notes. R. W. B. Lewis’s two-volume The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton and its Hudson River Editions reprint are out of print and have no critical apparatus. Anita Brookner’s The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton includes only twentyeight short stories. Wharton’s nonfiction writing is also underrepresented. Frederick Wegener brought much-needed attention to Wharton’s literary criticism in Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings (1996), but the volume is long out of print.

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The multiplication of inexpensive editions of Wharton’s work has provided accessibility but at a cost. Many publishers have released titles that are in the public domain, but these editions include no scholarly apparatus and make no attempt to establish a definitive text. Indeed, the proliferation of Wharton’s work in paperback increases the likelihood of corruption of her texts. One example is the 1997 Simon & Schuster trade-paperback edition of The Writing of Fiction (1925), in which the dedication to Wharton’s friend Gaillard Lapsley has been relocated unnoticeably to the copyright page, and which omits not only the table of contents but also the all-important epigraph from Thomas Traherne’s poem “A Vision,” originally placed on the title page: “Order the beauty even of Beauty is.” Similar problems occur with online venues in which her writings have been reproduced. Project Gutenberg texts by design omit information about the specific editions and printings used to transcribe the text, information that would permit the reader to make conclusive determinations of printings necessary for using them in scholarly work. Similarly, Google Books reproduces first and subsequent editions and printings, but without the physical features of the printed text, it may be difficult to ascertain which printing or edition exists in digital form. In addition, thirdparty publishers sometimes make minor alterations in marks of punctuation that can have significant impact on the meaning of the text and restrict access to editions or, worse, rely on uncorrected scanned versions that are riddled with typos. For these and other reasons, neither Gutenberg nor Google Books can be relied on for accurate texts of Wharton’s writing. CWEWh avoids these lapses by presenting a critical edition that not only provides readers with complete texts but also charts the composition, publication, and reception of each text through Wharton’s lifetime. Furthermore, readers will benefit from scholarly annotations of Wharton’s many references to literature, art, history, people, places, and events, as well as from historical and textual introductions, all of which make it possible to recognize the range of her literary and intellectual endowments.

DEVELOPMENT The CWEWh project was launched at OUP’s invitation and has been under contract since 2017. The project is now well on its way, with contracts signed on more than half of the volumes, scholars enlisted for several other volumes, and an editorial board consisting of General Editor Carol J. Singley and Associate Editors Donna M. Campbell and Frederick Wegener. Each of the thirty volumes takes at least four years to complete. Volumes are advancing in three cohorts of ten volumes each, and several in the first cohort are expected to appear within this decade. A clear editorial policy and a set of editorial practices that evolve as the volumes develop give CWEWh a unified vision and also help to sustain it during the extended timeline that is customary for a project of this magnitude. CWEWh benefits from a corps of committed volume editors, all of them distinguished scholars with impressive records of publication. They have dedicated themselves to learning, and mastering, the complex skills of scholarly textual editing demanded by this project. Whereas each volume of some editions, such as The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition published by the University of Nebraska Press, have multiple editors (one to write an historical introduction and explanatory notes, and another person, or a team, to prepare the textual essay and textual notes), CWEWh relies on a single editor to perform all of these functions, except for volumes 29, Translations and Adaptations, and

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30, Unpublished Fiction and Plays, which involve material that calls for a division of labor among two or more collaborators. The series aims to meet the highest standards of scholarship and textual editing. Volume editors are encouraged to submit their manuscript to the Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE) for vetting in order to earn the committee’s seal of approval, a highly regarded mark of distinction. Essential to helping editors produce volumes that meet the CSE’s demanding standards has been the preparation of an array of materials, including detailed editorial guidelines, appendices, and addenda. When needed, General Editor Singley consults CSE members and members of CWEWh’s advisory board on textual matters, and their counsel has been of enormous help to the project. A dedicated website for CWEWh volume editors also provides guidance, as do virtually held meetings on topics ranging from acquiring Wharton-lifetime versions of any text, to transcribing and collating different versions of the text, to writing explanatory notes. The work of CWEWh is variously supported but relies greatly on the scholarly service of its editors, who are part of a monumental enterprise that pays ultimate tribute to a uniquely valued American writer: that of establishing accurate, durable editions of her writings. Both series and volume editors have been successful in obtaining grants or release time from their respective institutions to support archival research and recruit editorial and digital assistance, which is often performed by advanced undergraduates or graduate students who gain valuable skills in editing and publishing in the process.

ORGANIZATION AND EDITORIAL POLICIES It was important early on to define what is meant by “complete works.” We decided that CWEWh will include all of Wharton’s works published during her lifetime as well as material that she herself did not publish, that she intended for publication, or that is literarily valuable in its own right as an illustration of her narrative technique and thematic concerns. These ancillary texts include, for example, the alternative endings of The Age of Innocence (1920), which Wharton drafted but rejected; the French draft of Ethan Frome (1911), which predated work on the novel in English; and the dramatized version of The House of Mirth (1905), which she wrote with playwright Clyde Fitch a year after the novel was published. Such writings will be transcribed and placed in appendices to the relevant volumes. In addition, we wished to address the large body of Wharton’s unpublished poems, stories, novels, and plays, and, with OUP’s agreement, we decided to include all of this material, much of it unfinished, as well. This decision led to our adding a final volume 30, Unpublished Fiction and Plays. The next task was to decide how to organize Wharton’s voluminous writings. Which should take precedence, genre or chronology? After deliberation, we have chosen both to organize her work by genre and to arrange her texts chronologically within each volume. Each novel typically appears in its own volume, as does The Writing of Fiction. Wharton first wrote poems as an adolescent; thus volume 1, Poems, opens the series, with her three books of poetry presented in chronological order, accompanied by uncollected and unpublished poems. Volumes 2, 3, and 4 include the short stories, the next genre Wharton explored with critical and commercial success. The volumes of short stories are followed by volume 5, Critical Writings; volume 6, Writings on Architecture, Design, and Gardens; and volume 7, Novellas. In the case of Old New York, that quartet of novellas appears on its own in volume 20. Interspersed are volumes of writings in other

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genres, presented chronologically as Wharton published them. In addition to volumes 29, Translations and Adaptations, and 30, Unpublished Fiction and Plays, volume 9 is dedicated to Travel Writings, volumes 15 and 16 to War Writings, and volume 27 to Life Writings. The volumes will be published in the order in which the respective volume editors complete them. This structure has led to major reconfigurations of her work in several areas. In short, CWEWh is redesigning the generic categories by which Wharton is known and celebrated. For example, her book on interior design, The Decoration of Houses (1897), along with related shorter pieces, initially constituted all of volume 6. But when we considered that Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904)—originally to be included in volume 9, Travel Writings—has so much in common with The Decoration of Houses, we moved it to volume 6 and retitled the volume Writings on Architecture, Design, and Gardens. With that shift, CWEWh more adequately presents Wharton as a prolific, versatile expert in these three fields. We similarly debated the not-so-clear line between Wharton’s nonfiction war writings and life writings and reexamined the classification of her work as both a literary and a cultural critic. For example, Wharton’s 1915 essay on Jean du Breuil de Saint-Germain is arguably suitable for volume 15, War Writings: Nonfiction, or volume 27, Life Writings, but we left this piece where we had originally placed it, in volume 5, Critical Writings. And when we realized the amount of others’ work that Wharton translated, we were surprised to find that there was enough material, together with her unpublished dramatization of Manon Lescaut, to fill a separate volume 29, Translations and Adaptations, coedited by scholars fluent in French, German, and Italian. We gave considerable thought to how to arrange Wharton’s eighty-seven short stories, which we group into three volumes of roughly equal size. Many of her short stories, but not all, appeared first in magazines and then in collections that Wharton assembled. Should CWEWh follow the chronological order of magazine publication or of the publication of those collections? We decided on the former as the best way to present not only the development of Wharton’s craft in this mode but also the history of her publication in magazines. Each of these three volumes will also include a list of the reprinted stories in the order in which Wharton organized them in her eleven short-story collections. The single most important decision in a project of this kind involves the choice of copy-text: the specific version serving as the basis of a scholarly edition of any given work. A related task is to develop and implement principles and practices that also reflect currently accepted norms in textual editing. After research, deliberation, and consultation, we established a policy that handles all extant iterations of Wharton’s work across its many forms: manuscripts, typescripts, galleys, page proofs, errata/correction sheets, magazine versions, and books. For the first time, Wharton’s works will appear with a record of all changes made to each text. Principles guiding the production of CWEWh volumes are based in authorial intention. For all works that Wharton published in book form, and for the prefaces, forewords, and introductions that she wrote either to her own books or to books by others, CWEWh has adopted the first printing of the first American edition as the copy-text, emended by the volume editor for two reasons: (1) to correct any typographical errors uncorrected by Wharton in later printings or editions, and (2) to incorporate any changes made subsequently by Wharton. In other words, for each of her lifetime book-form publications, CWEWh will produce a critical text approximating Wharton’s final intentions as closely as possible. For works that Wharton published only in periodical or pamphlet form (uncollected poems, short stories, essays, reviews,

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and public letters, or reports on charitable and other organizations), that version will be the copy-text. In the case of short stories originally appearing in magazines and later collected by Wharton in one of her short-story volumes, the book-form version will be the copy-text. For all works that were unpublished in Wharton’s lifetime but that survive in manuscript or typescript, the latest extant version will be the copy-text. That version remains the copy-text even in the case of any such work that has been published since Wharton’s death (e.g., The Cruise of the Vanadis; The Buccaneers; many poems; her essay “Gardening in France”; the autobiographical fragment, “Life and I”; and juvenilia like the novelette Fast and Loose), as she cannot have had a hand in preparing the posthumously edited publication. Any unpublished work will be presented as it appears in the manuscript or typescript that is the copy-text, indicating all of Wharton’s deletions, interlineal insertions, and other markings—an invaluable service to readers. One of the first, and most exacting, steps that volume editors must take is to acquire all Wharton-lifetime versions of a work that she published so that they can record every variant that both predates and postdates the copy-text. For popular novels such as The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, or The Age of Innocence, there are over a dozen editions and printings each, all of which must be scrutinized in search of any variants. CWEWh volume editors are employing a range of collation methods, including sight collation (involving word-by-word comparison of the copy-text with all other relevant versions), machine collation (such as with a Hinman Collator or Lindstrand Comparator, available at some research libraries), and computer technologies, such as Python, to detect these variants. Their meticulous efforts are generating new, unprecedentedly accurate versions of Wharton’s works as well as a record of emendations that allows readers to follow the complete development of the text. Some changes that Wharton authorized will be incorporated for the first time—for example, those documented in unpublished letters to her editor or publisher, uncovered through archival research, or found in her markings in her own copies of her books that are held in her library, the contents of which have been digitized by Sheila Liming, at The Mount (Wharton’s home in Lenox, Massachusetts). Guided by the objective to present each text in the form over which Wharton had control and with which she would have been most been satisfied, CWEWh’s volume editors are emending certain texts accordingly. The arduous work of collation already has resulted in fresh corrections and critical insights that will inform future Wharton scholarship. For example, Stephen Garrison, in his indispensable descriptive bibliography, notes nine errors in the first edition that were corrected in the fourth or fifth printing of Ethan Frome, but collation has turned up seven additional errors in the first edition.1 In many cases, comparing manuscripts and typescripts with the magazine and book versions yields fascinating insights into Wharton’s critical choices, especially because she took such an active interest in every stage of her writing, from composition to publication; thoroughly revised and proofread her work; and supervised reprintings and new editions. For example, in The Custom of the Country (1913), which will occupy volume 14, Wharton first described the Apex neighborhood where Elmer Moffatt resides as a young man as an “Irish red-light slum” but later decided to cross out the ethnic attribute. In the incomplete manuscript of The Writing of Fiction, volume 25, Wharton refers to the “vivid little figures” in Jane Austen’s novels, but in the published version she replaces this potentially disparaging phrase with the more neutral word “characters.” Volume editors are sure to capture many expressively resonant authorial alterations of this sort as work on CWEWh progresses.

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DISCOVERIES AND SURPRISES One of the great rewards of undertaking a scholarly edition of a writer’s complete works is often the discovery of texts that have eluded critics, biographers, and bibliographers alike. CWEWh is no exception, as diligent, resourceful sleuthing—in Wharton’s unpublished correspondence, in other archival materials, and elsewhere—has significantly enlarged her oeuvre by turning up several hitherto unknown works dating from all periods of her career. In this respect, as in so many others, our project has benefited from the development of digital media without which such writings would have continued to be much less readily detectable. For instance, searches of online newspaper and magazine archives have yielded multiple new findings. In one of them, a letter to the editor of the Newport Daily News, Wharton announces the release of “the first report of the association for decorating the Newport schools” and solicits donations to the association, which “was started, in July, 1897,” a year earlier. This letter and the report itself, composed by Wharton as the association’s secretary, will be reprinted for the first time in CWEWh, volume 6, Writings on Architecture, Design, and Gardens.2 The same goes for a clipping, now sourced through Newspapers.com, that had to be entered as “insufficiently identified” when bibliographed by Garrison: “Letter in the [New York?] Daily News, undated, entitled ‘More Money Needed,’ asking for money to decorate Newport schools.”3 Supplementing her previously reprinted talk on “Schoolroom Decoration,” as well as the chapter on “the school-room” in The Decoration of Houses, these texts considerably enhance our otherwise meager knowledge of a fascinating, underappreciated chapter, only glancingly mentioned by her biographers, of Wharton’s life in Newport in the 1890s.4 At the other end of her career, a letter to the editor of the Spectator correcting a misprint was cited by Wegener as unpublished when “A Cycle of Reviewing” (1928) was first reprinted.5 A search of the Spectator Archive, launched in 2013, reveals that it was in fact published in a subsequent issue, and her letter will now accompany Wharton’s essay in volume 5, Critical Writings.6 These are not the only texts of their kind to have been uncovered thus far. Among Wharton’s nonfictional war-related prose, Alan Price has located nearly two dozen public letters, apart from those already tabulated, that she sent to the New York Times, the European edition of the New York Herald, and other newspapers. As a result, volume 15, War Writings: Nonfiction, will provide the fullest ever documentation of Wharton’s fundraising efforts in support of the various charitable organizations that she created and managed in France during the Great War. An appendix to the volume, moreover, will contain a transcription of the 1915 notebook (never before cited) in which Wharton recorded her travels across French battlefields, and which informed her work on the articles that make up Fighting France (1915). Exhaustively combing through the Scribner’s-archive files on Raymond Recouly, the journalist and close friend who facilitated her visits to the front as an aide-de-camp to one of the French generals, Price has made a striking discovery there as well. Arranging with Charles Scribner to have her sister-in-law, Mary Cadwalader (“Minnie”) Jones, translate several of Recouly’s pseudonymously written articles on the war for Scribner’s Magazine, Wharton informed its editor at one point, “I ought to have told you that I translated only the article on the Offensive in Champagne.”7 This unexpected revelation adds “The French Offensive in Champagne (September–October, 1915),” one of Wharton’s most substantial exercises along such lines, to the wartime poems and prose that she translated

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for The Book of the Homeless (1916), and it will now join them, along with her Englishing of other writers’ works, in volume 29, Translations and Adaptations.8 Since the Recouly translation is unattributed both in periodical and in book form, Wharton’s responsibility for it would never have been ascertained without the kind of dogged archival research in which CWEWh volume editors are engaged. It was Price who also brought to our attention the surfacing of an expansive two-part essay about Hyères, the town in southern France that Wharton visited for the first few months of 1919, and where she would soon purchase the chateau at Ste-Claire. Although written for a newsletter issued in 1919 by the American Red Cross at its base hospital there for convalescent soldiers, and although addressed to them, Wharton’s essay focuses specifically on the town’s history and highlights, with scant reference to the war itself. It was therefore agreed that “Hyères”—a vivid and evocative portrait of the place where she would later be wintering for the rest of her life—belongs more aptly in volume 9, Travel Writings.9 The Travel Writings volume will also bring to light two other formerly submerged works. We were led to one of them by a letter that Wharton received in the spring of 1924 from Gaston Liebert, consul-general of France at the time and director of the French Bureau of Information in New York. Established a year earlier, the bureau was one of several “state-sponsored agencies” that “saw their role,” according to one historian, “as primarily an instructional one, namely, first to teach the world about, and then to remind it of, France’s especial genius” and that advocated “the steady promotion of France as the cultural capital of the world, as a country committed to ideas and aesthetic pursuits.”10 In such a campaign, designed principally “to combat German postwar propaganda in the United States,” their activities and publications reflected “a continued reliance on the sympathetic understanding of prominent American Francophiles.”11 It is therefore not surprising that Liebert would turn for help to a figure like Wharton, who had explained his nation’s people and customs to an American audience so reverently only a few years earlier in French Ways and Their Meaning (1919). Writing in the spring of 1924, Liebert informed her, “You should have received a letter from the French Office of Tourism in New York … asking you if you would kindly write a short article for the Bulletin published by this office under the title ‘Le Voyageur en France.’ ”12 The letter mentioned by Liebert has not survived, but he then elaborates on the rationale behind the proposed article: “The idea … is to put before the eyes of the American public appreciations of France, and of the visits which one makes there, by eminent people whose names are known and considered friendly.”13 In her reply, Wharton enclosed a corrected typescript of “Travelling in France,” the English title she gave “the little article that you are requesting for the Bulletin published by the ‘French Bureau of Information.’ ”14 Launched in January 1923 as “A Monthly Bulletin of Official Information Concerning Travel in France Published by the Office Français du Tourisme,” which functioned as “the New York branch of the Office National du Tourisme” in Paris (“the official source of all information pertaining to touring and travel in France and her colonies”),15 Le Voyageur en France ran for six years, printing articles on museums, resorts, historical sites, regional attractions, modes of travel to and within the country, accommodations, amenities, expenses, and other aspects of 1920s France. A few months after she submitted “Travelling in France,” the magazine published it under a different title.16 Retrieving that essay together with the equally long-lost “Hyères,” volume 9, Travel Writings, thus markedly augments the known output of Wharton’s writing in this mode.

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That volume will also afford CWEWh an opportunity to emend the presentation of “Les Oeuvres de Mme Lyautey au Maroc” (1918) when it was republished for the first time, flanked by an introductory article and an English translation, over twenty years ago.17 Unrealized at that time was the fact that France-Maroc, the official propaganda organ of the French protectorate in the country that Wharton toured so memorably in 1917, had not printed her essay solely in French in every copy of the issue in which it appeared. As announced by a leading Parisian newspaper, “Our colleague FranceMaroc … is publishing a deluxe issue on tourism in Morocco, specially dedicated to our American and English allies … The journal France-Maroc publishes three editions of this special issue: an edition for France, an English one for the United States and England, a Spanish edition for South America.”18 Issued separately by France-Maroc as a free-standing publication, the rare Edition Anglaise indeed concludes with a supplement paginated in roman numerals and featuring English translations of several contributions, including Wharton’s.19 The unearthing of this edition certainly clears up the statement made at the end of her one extant letter to the editor of France-Maroc, as written by Wharton’s secretary: “Madame Wharton instructs me to enclose the corrected proofs of her article on Mme Lyautey’s charities, as well as the end of the English translation of this article.”20 Thought to have been one of four texts published only in French during her lifetime, “Les Oeuvres de Mme Lyautey au Maroc” will also therefore now appear in volume 9, Travel Writings, in Wharton’s own English version.21 One reason such texts escaped detection for so long has to do, no doubt, with the obscurity of the journals in which they appeared. It also has something to do perhaps with the inconspicuousness of the material that led to their excavation in the first place. Rather than catalogued in separately labeled folders in the collection of Wharton’s papers at the Beinecke, her letter to the editor of France-Maroc, her exchange with the French Bureau of Information, and the typescript of “Travelling in France” are interspersed with a mass of other miscellaneous documents in files of professional correspondence marked “‘F’ general”—demanding especially persistent thoroughness, and more than a bit of luck, in order to be found in that particular archival haystack. Another case in point involves a pair of later, heretofore mislaid publications hiding in an even scarcer foreign-language periodical, and sure to be considered of singular value not only by scholars of Wharton’s work. Similarly happened upon in one of the professional-correspondence folders catalogued under “‘S’ general,” two letters from the winter of 1931–2 opened up another unexpectedly fruitful avenue to pursue. “Do forgive me,” Wharton asked of a “Countess Senni” on New Year’s Eve, “for not sending the garden article with this letter. I should have so liked to have it ready for the first of January, but unluckily I have been overcome by an attack of after-Christmas fatigue, and there is nothing for it but to take a few days’ rest. However … the article will surely go to you next week.” Three months later, Wharton wrote, “I expect to send you in a day or two an article called ‘The Spring in a French Riviera Garden,’ ” evidently different from “the garden article” mentioned in her first letter: “I hope it will be in time for your April number.”22 What the Countess Senni’s “April number” would be an issue of is not spelled out and required additional exploration. Unnamed in A Backward Glance (1934), in any of her published letters, by any of the novelist’s biographers, or virtually anywhere else for that matter, Wharton’s correspondent remains at best a nebulous presence in literary and cultural studies. By the early 1930s, however, Mary Gayley Senni (1884–1971) had become a reputable figure in her own right, whose life turns out to have intersected Wharton’s in tantalizing

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ways. Born in Pennsylvania, Mary was the oldest daughter of Julia Gardiner Gayley and James Gayley, one of Andrew Carnegie’s closest associates and an inventive chemist and metallurgist. Appointed the first vice president of US Steel in 1901, Gayley moved his family to New York City, where his wife and children were promptly befriended by Mary Cadwalader Jones, who lent the Gayleys her Reef Point home in Bar Harbor the following summer and who introduced Julia into her social circles.23 In 1907, Mary married Giulio Senni, a papal count, and permanently resettled in a villa just south of Rome, where they had met several years earlier, and where she would later be an internationally recognized rosarian and hybridizer of irises after developing a passionate interest in gardening. In 1931, not long before receiving Wharton’s letter about “the garden article,” the Countess Senni devised the original plan for il Roseto Comunale di Roma, the celebrated municipal rose garden now located on the Aventine hill. If her friendship with Minnie Jones had not already made the Countess Senni known to Wharton, they would certainly have been acquainted through Iris Origo, daughter of the novelist’s old New York friends the Cuttings, and a fellow expatriate American who had moved to Tuscany in 1924 after marrying an Italian count herself.24 An equally devoted floraphile long before her career as an accomplished biographer and memoirist, Origo “was thinking of founding a garden club for amateur gardeners, with its own journal,” around the time she “had been introduced to Mary Senni, a renowned plantswoman.” Noting that “her enthusiasm for gardening is most delightful and infectious,” Origo “became a frequent visitor to the Sennis’ house,” and Mary “helped Iris with the gardening magazine, Il Giardino Fiorito [literally, ‘the flower garden’], which ran to fifteen issues, went out to 120 subscribers, and was full of serious and informative pieces about gardens.”25 In fact, Il Giardino Fiorito was a monthly magazine issued for fifteen years by the Societa’ Italiana “Amici dei Fiori,” cofounded in 1931 with other collaborators by Mario Calvino and Eva Mameli Calvino, respected botanists and floriculture adepts (and, remarkably enough, Italo Calvino’s parents).26 Largely edited by them, Il Giardino Fiorito featured numerous articles by Origo and Senni (also named on the masthead among its “consiglio,” or advisors) as well as articles by Mary Berenson, Sybil Lubbock, and Alice Martineau, who had profiled the garden at the Ste-Claire chateau nearly a decade earlier in a book that Wharton prefaced.27 And Wharton herself, as it turns out, is to be numbered among the magazine’s contributors. Shortly before she promised to send Senni “the garden article,” as she would call it, Wharton identified its destination in cutting short a letter to her old friend Margaret (“Daisy”) Chanler: “Now I must turn from you to write an article for Ctess Senni’s ‘Giardino Fiorito.’ ”28 Although neither one was delivered in time for “your April number,” both of the articles Wharton mentions in her two letters to Senni in fact appeared in Il Giardino Fiorito a few months apart in 1932.29 They prove to be uncredited Italian translations of “A French Riviera Garden in Spring” and “December in a French Riviera Garden,” of which corrected manuscripts and typescripts (along with a manuscript, “in an unknown hand,” of the latter in Italian) have long been extant.30 Multiplying the number of texts that Wharton did not publish in English, and her only works printed in Italian alone during her lifetime, the Il Giardino Fiorito pieces expand the portion of her output represented by Italian Villas and Their Gardens and the posthumously published “Gardening in France.”31 Combined also with the aforementioned public letters further documenting her school-decoration endeavors in Newport, their placement in CWEWh will help make volume 6, Writings on Architecture, Design, and Gardens, a source of exceptionally keen interest to scholars.

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Numerous public letters, two travel essays, Wharton’s translation of a third travel essay appearing simultaneously in French, her English translation of a text written by someone else in another language, and two gardening essays in Italian constitute a wealth of newfound material restored in CWEWh, and authoritatively solidify the Wharton corpus, often in surprising ways. If anything, the project’s volume editors might well anticipate the reemergence of other fugitive writings as work on its thirty volumes proceeds over the coming years.

DIGITAL WHARTON In addition to its print edition and an online version available for purchase by library subscription through OUP’s Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO), CWEWh will have a freely available ancillary website called Digital Wharton. Digital Wharton will be an open-access portal to the visual, historical, biographical, and social contexts of Wharton’s life and art, and it will provide news and information about CWEWh, its editors, and the status of each volume. Each of the demonstration projects currently under development will make the edition available and attractive to different sectors of general and scholarly audiences, honoring OUP’s proprietary rights while generating interest in the text through links to Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO). At present, Digital Wharton is composed of two currently available sites about the edition itself, one a public-facing site, which provides information about the edition, and the other a private website allowing volume editors to share resources, exchange ideas, post material for discussion, and so on. The public site (https://whart​onco​mple​tewo​rks. org) contains information about volumes and volume editors, editorial policy, and news; posts are published automatically to the associated CWEWh Facebook page (https://www. faceb​ook.com/CWE​Whar​ton/) and to Twitter (@WhartonWorks). In addition, publicly available information about letters, manuscripts, and archives is linked from the Edith Wharton Society site. Two exhibits are currently in development: “Mapping Wharton’s World,” which will use GIS (geographic information systems) technologies such as ArcGIS (Aeronautical Reconnaissance Coverage Geographic Information System) and ArcGIS Storymaps to provide insight into geospatial contexts; and “Wharton’s Evolving Craft,” which uses links and media to illuminate the writer’s texts and the processes she employed in composing them. A major part of “Wharton’s Evolving Craft” will be an exhibit showcasing the materials in volume 30, Unpublished Fiction and Plays, which under a special arrangement with OUP will be freely available and not within the Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) paywall for a period of five years. As part of “Wharton’s Evolving Craft,” the CWEWh editors had originally hoped to offer a corpus of digital texts that would be useful to researchers for data analysis as well as for reading. Toward that end, we discussed the possibility of using standard XML (extensible markup language) and descriptors of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative at https://tei-c.org/), as the abovementioned model digital sites have done.32 Developed by an international consortium of digital scholars, the TEI has produced common standards for “encoding methods for machine-readable texts,” and it is the principal markup underlying major digital editions. For example, The Walt Whitman Archive and The Mark Twain Project include multiple manuscripts, drafts, editions, notebooks, and letters, and the underlying TEI markup for the transcriptions produces visibly different versions of the texts. Other uses of the TEI include the Shakespeare and Company Project, a digital archive that maps the lending records and networks of modernist authors who borrowed

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books from Sylvia Beach’s famous bookstore in Paris; and the Winnifred Eaton Archive, a site devoted to recovering the works of the rediscovered Chinese Canadian writer, who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna. These sites follow the best practices in the digital humanities, and we have consulted them extensively as models for features to include in Digital Wharton. With these sites as models, our initial conception of “Wharton’s Evolving Craft” was a site featuring a Wharton-specific set of category tags for marking names, places, dates, genres, and a host of other elements. The manuscripts of many of Wharton’s works, some of which are already available online, could then be transcribed to display the changes that she made. For example, the manuscript of The House of Mirth includes changes to the text made variously in orange, blue, and gray pencil as well as additions in brown ink, along with crossed-out words and additions above and below the line. Encoded with different tags, all the instances of a certain color would stand out, allowing the reader to discern patterns of revisions that Wharton made as she composed the text. Differences between the serial version of The House of Mirth in Scribner’s Magazine and the first American edition could also be rendered in the same way: in a single, seemingly mundane sentence from the first page—“It was a Monday in early September”—Wharton changed the time from “Monday” to “mid-afternoon” to “Thursday” and finally back to “Monday” to get the timing just right in order to show when Lawrence Selden would have been likely to return to town after a country weekend.33 Still, although the TEI is the most versatile markup standard, applying this labor-intensive approach of encoding to a full-scale online edition in thirty volumes would be a major challenge, requiring infrastructure, training, and a dedicated team of workers. The solution proved to be using Scalar as a site for “Wharton’s Evolving Craft” and other parts of Digital Wharton. Scalar is “a free, open source authoring and publishing platform” designed to showcase “long-form, born-digital scholarship online.”34 Because of its partnership with archives such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its participation in Critical Commons, an archive of materials cleared for use in media projects, Scalar simplifies the inclusion of metadata and provides a rich environment for incorporating images, films, maps, and sound media into documents. More intuitive and flexible than creating documents using the TEI, Scalar permits a richly annotated environment to present different features to different audiences through a series of paths all based on a single text. Those interested in how Wharton wrote might follow a path comparing the text of the first edition with manuscript or serial versions, tables of textual differences, or manuscript dilemmas, with related elements appearing on a single screen. Readers interested in the initial publications of her work could interact with exhibits on editorial and advertising contexts that juxtapose magazine publication with images from the printed book. To engage students and the general public, Digital Wharton is developing an interactive game of paleography, where readers can attempt to decipher Wharton’s handwriting and create their own transcriptions. Exposing twenty-first-century readers to late-nineteenth-century cursive, and recovering a mode of writing—by hand—that has become increasingly unfamiliar, this element of the project will also encourage readers to consider their own forms of written communication. For those focusing on Wharton’s texts and their contexts, annotations beyond the history of the book will include film, music, maps, and other media as well: 1920s jazz for Twilight Sleep, a train journey captured on silent film for The House of Mirth, and Wharton’s inspirations for the tapestries and chateau of Saint Désert that bores Undine Spragg so thoroughly in The Custom of the Country. Nonlinear paths could include a

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thematic path for The House of Mirth leading directly to all of the scenes in which Lily Bart has tea or makes a fateful decision. In The Age of Innocence, spatial paths and maps could trace the pattern of Ellen Olenska’s and Newland Archer’s travels toward and away from each other, with digital reconstructions of the interiors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Patroon’s House. And a map-driven rather than print-driven path through A Motor-Flight through France (1908) and Fighting France will provide an overlay of maps charting both texts, enriched by photographs, to render a dual chronological perspective on events between the peacefulness of 1908 and the horrors of 1915. Visual representations of character networks in Scalar will show connections between the intertwined families of Wharton’s old New York, including characters who appear in more than one novel, like Mrs. Manson Mingott. Additional visualizations will indicate the relative frequency and proximity of character interactions: who speaks to whom, and when? Honoring the integrity of Wharton’s texts, these innovations provide new ways of illuminating their meaning. The chief exhibit of “Wharton’s Evolving Craft” will be volume 30, Unpublished Fiction and Plays, which will make previously unpublished works available in a digital scholarly critical edition for a limited time. While individual volumes in CWEWh will reproduce some of the outlines and summaries that Wharton routinely compiled when planning a novel, this volume will collect the stories, plays, and fragments that she began and then did not publish. Some of these have appeared in print since Wharton’s death in 1937, including Viola Hopkins Winner’s edition of Fast and Loose and the unfinished The Buccaneers, and Laura Rattray’s two-volume set of Unpublished Writings containing five plays and three of Wharton’s unfinished novels. In her biography of Wharton, Hermione Lee discusses seven of Wharton’s unpublished novels or novellas, two plays, and three stories; yet this is but a fraction of the extant unpublished material. Moreover, the reception of recent publications of Wharton’s previously unpublished work indicates a strong interest on the part of the public. The Shadow of a Doubt, a Wharton play brought to light and edited by Laura Rattray and Mary Chinery, was published in The Edith Wharton Review, the journal of the Edith Wharton Society, and produced as a radio play by BBC Radio 3 in 2020.35 Virginia Ricard’s translation of Wharton’s lecture “L’Amérique en guerre” was published in The Times Literary Supplement, as was the previously unpublished short story “Coming Home,” edited and introduced by Alice Kelly. More recently, “A Granted Prayer,” edited and introduced by Sarah Whitehead, was published in the Atlantic.36 The Edith Wharton papers at the Beinecke and at the Lilly Library contain numerous stories, many incomplete, that reveal valuable traces of her published work, and these have long been planned to appear in volume 30. Making Wharton’s unpublished works freely available for the term agreed to by OUP will benefit both those new to Wharton and those who will gain fresh insights into her work. Digital Wharton cannot substitute for a fully marked-up and freely available online edition, as we discovered, but it is not intended to do so, and we believe that the visual accompaniment to CWEWh in Scalar provides many benefits. As a companion to the print edition, Digital Wharton enhances both the effective cross-dissemination of information contained in the CWEWh volumes and the experience of reading Wharton’s work for new generations of scholars, educators, students, and general readers. CWEWh constructs a new narrative of Wharton’s work by bringing all of her published and unpublished writings together in an authoritative edition, with the use of various traditional and new media and technologies. Volume editors will be able to draw on the explosion of scholarship sparked by the “Wharton Revival” that took off in the 1960s and

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appearing since then in countless articles, in scores of monographs, and in the Edith Wharton Review. Ultimately, CWEWh will provide readers with reliable texts and tools that allow them to freshly appreciate and understand this distinguished American writer’s manifold achievements and to continue generating the kinds of scholarship her writing richly deserves.

NOTES 1 Stephen Garrison, Edith Wharton: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 144. 2 “Schoolroom Decoration,” Newport Daily News, October 29, 1898, 8; “First Annual Report of the Association for Decorating Newport Schools, August, 1898,” in Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Newport, R.I., Together with the Report of the Head-Master of the Rogers High School and the Thirty-Third Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools. 1897–98 (Newport: F. W. Marshall, 1898), 101–3. These texts will be preceded in volume 6 by the Wharton-authored proposal, also previously unreprinted, to form such an enterprise: “An Art Association,” in Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Newport, R.I., Together with the Report of the Head Master of the Rogers High School and the Thirty-Second Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools. 1896–97 (Newport: F. W. Marshall, 1897), 88–90. 3 Garrison, Edith Wharton, 489; “More Money Needed. Continuation of the Work of Decorating Public Schoolrooms Desirable,” Newport Daily News, October 4, 1897, 8. 4 Edith Wharton, Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings, ed. Frederick Wegener (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 57–61; Shari Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), 84; Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Knopf, 2007), 130. 5 Wharton, Uncollected Critical Writings, 159–63 and n.5. 6 “Points from Letters: ‘A Cycle of Reviewing,’ ” Spectator 141 (November 17, 1928): 737. 7 Edith Wharton to Robert Bridges, April 28, 1916 (Recouly, Raymond, 1876–1950, folder 1, Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, Subseries 3a Author Files | 1768–1989, Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton University). Printed by permission of the estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis Agency. 8 Captain X [Raymond Recouly], “The French Offensive in Champagne (September–October, 1915),” Scribner’s Magazine 59 (May 1916): 537–50; reprinted as the second chapter of General Joffre and His Battles (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 67–111. 9 “Hyères,” Hyeres Weekly News, no. 1 (March 8, 1919): [1, 3]; Hyeres and There Weekly News, no. 2 (March 15, 1919): [1]‌. 10 Robert J. Young, Marketing Marianne: French Propaganda in America, 1900–1940 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 82, 81. 11 Ibid., 82, 86. 12 “Vous avez dû recevoir une lettre de l’Office Français du Tourisme de New York … vous demandant de bien vouloir écrire un petit article dans le Bulletin publié par cet office sous le titre ‘Le Voyageur en France’”; Gaston Liebert to Edith Wharton, April 10, 1924, Edith Wharton Collection, box 36, folder 1094, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University (hereafter Beinecke). 13 “L’idée . . . est de mettre sous les yeux du public américain des appréciations sur la France et les séjours que l’on y fait, par des personnalités dont le nom lui est connu et sympathique.” 14 “le petit article que vous sollicitez pour le Bulletin publié par le ‘French Bureau of Information’”; Edith Wharton to [Gaston Liebert], May 10, 1924, Edith Wharton Collection, box 36, folder

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1094 (Beinecke). Excerpts from this and subsequent letters of Wharton’s in this archive are printed by permission of the estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis Agency. The exchange with Liebert is filed with the typescript of Wharton’s essay. 15 Le Voyageur en France 1, no. 1 (January 1923): 1. Little is known, even in French-language sources, about the magazine, about “J. Steinhart,” its editor, or about the director of the Office Français du Tourisme, Joseph Perret. 16 “Mrs. Edith Wharton Expresses Her Views on Traveling in France,” Le Voyageur en France 2, no. 8 (August 1924): 5. The magazine had also recommended In Morocco (1920) to its readers and reviewed A Son at the Front (1923) in previous issues (“Editorial: Tunisia Past and Present,” Le Voyageur en France 1, no. 12 [December 1923]: 5; “Books of Interest to Tourists,” Le Voyageur en France 2, no. 5 [May 1924]: 12). 17 Frederick Wegener, “Edith Wharton on French Colonial Charities for Women: An Unknown Travel Essay”; Edith Wharton, “Les Oeuvres de Mme Lyautey au Maroc”; “Madame Lyautey’s Charitable Works in Morocco,” trans. Louise M. Wills, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 17 (Spring 1998): 11–21, 23–7, 29–36. 18 “Notre confrère France-Maroc … publie un numéro deluxe sur ‘Le Tourisme au Maroc,’ spécialement dédié à nos alliés américains et anglais … La revue France-Maroc publie trois éditions de ce numéro spécial: une édition pour la France, une anglaise pour les Etats-Unis et l’Angleterre, une édition espagnole pour l’Amérique du Sud” (“Le Tourisme au Maroc,” Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, no. 340 [Decembre 6, 1918]: 2). 19 “Madame Lyautey’s Charities in Morocco,” Le Maroc et le Tourism: Numéro dédié aux Alliés, France-Maroc nos. 10–11 (Octobre 15–Novembre 15, 1918): viii–ix. To our knowledge, this version of Wharton’s essay has been cited only once, by an historian, and then without reference to the unusual circumstances under which it was published (Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980], 146). Wharton scholars will find it notable that her essay, in both incarnations, immediately follows one by Walter Berry (“Impressions d’un Américain au Maroc”; “Impressions of Morocco by an American,” Le Maroc et le Tourism: Numéro dédié aux Alliés, France-Maroc nos. 10–11 [October 15–November 15, 1918]: 301–6, v–vii). 20 “Madame Wharton me charge de vous remettre inclus les épreuves corrigées de son article sur les Oeuvres de Mme Lyautey, ainsi que la fin de la traduction anglaise de cet article”; Edith Wharton to [Alfred de Tarde], September 23, 1918, Edith Wharton Collection, box 36, folder 1094 (Beinecke). It appears that the Édition Française alone, from which the text of “Les Oeuvres de Mme Lyautey au Maroc” was drawn when initially discovered, is bound with the other 1918 issues in the few American libraries that hold a complete run of FranceMaroc, making the English version of Wharton’s essay that much more elusive. (The French edition of the issue is also the only one accessible through Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.) The English edition, of which copies are held in fewer than half a dozen special-collection libraries in the United States, was digitized in 2015 by the Internet Archive. 21 However, the 1920 supplement to The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature turned up a lone entry of yet a fifth such piece, “Les Marocaines chez elles” (Moroccan Women at Home) (Revue des deux mondes 43 [June 15, 1918]: 864–82). The earliest of Wharton’s articles chronicling her trip to Morocco, its contents reappear in English, not unmodified, as part of the “Harems and Ceremonies” chapter of In Morocco and will occupy an appendix to the Travel Writings volume both in the original French and in a new translation. 22 Edith Wharton to Countess Senni, December 31, 1931, and March 7, 1932, Edith Wharton Collection, box 39, folder 1185 (Beinecke).

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23 See Margaret A. Brucia, “Countess Mary Senni and the Irises at Garland Farm,” Beatrix Farrand Society News (2020): 2–5. 24 Wharton concludes the second of her letters to Senni quoted above by declaring, “You and Iris must really come here in April, even if I am not able to go to San Remo for the flower show. I shall probably be here until May this year” (Wharton to the Countess Senni, March 7, 1932, Edith Wharton Collection). 25 Caroline Moorehead, Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia (Boston: David R. Godine, 2002), 160. 26 On the Calvinos and Il Giardino Fiorito, see Paola Govoni, “The Making of Italo Calvino: Women and Men in the ‘Two Cultures’ Home Laboratory,” in Paola Govoni and Zelda Alice Franceschi (eds.), Writing about Lives in Science: (Auto)Biography, Gender, and Genre (Gottingen: V&R unipress, 2014), 216. 27 Mrs. Philip Martineau, Gardening in Sunny Lands: The Riviera, California, Australia (New York: D. Appleton, 1924), 174–7; Wharton, introduction, 17–19 (rpt. in Wharton, Uncollected Critical Writings, 246–8). 28 Edith Wharton to Margaret Winthrop Chanler, December 14, 1931, Edith Wharton Collection, box 24, folder 740 (Beinecke). As Wharton went on to explain, “I met her in Rome, & we are already swapping plants!” Indeed, it would have been primarily as kindred horticulturists that she and Senni “hooked,” to use one of Wharton’s favorite terms for the cementing of friendships. “Need I say that I accept with joy,” as she put it near the end of her New-Year’s-Eve letter, “the offer of any irises you feel disposed to give me. I have many empty spaces which will welcome them gladly, and any of the varieties you propose will be a delight to me, as I have hardly any of them” (Wharton to the Countess Senni, December 31, 1931, Edith Wharton Collection). 29 “La Primavera in un Giardino della Riviera Francese,” Il Giardino Fiorito 2, no. 5 (Maggio 1932): 94–6; “Il Dicembre in un Giardino della Riviera Francese,” Il Giardino Fiorito 2, no. 12 (Dicembre 1932): 221–3. The former, identified at the end as “Dall’inglese di Edith Wharton,” is the lead article in the May 1932 issue, preceding one of the many essays that Eva Mameli Calvino herself contributed to Il Giardino Fiorito, as well as one by Mario Calvino—a juxtaposition in print that would have delighted their son, if he knew of it, given his immersion from a young age in American literature. (We thank Samantha D’Acunto, Reference Librarian at the New York Botanical Garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library, for enabling one of us to examine its periodical-collection holdings of Il Giardino Fiorito, which included the issues containing Wharton’s articles. The library is one of only five in the United States where copies of the magazine can be found, nowhere in a complete set.) 30 “A French Riviera Garden in Spring,” box 19, folder 598–9; “December in a French Riviera Garden,” box 19, folders 592–3; “Il Dicembre in un Giardino della Riviera Francese,” box 19, folder 594, Edith Wharton Collection (Beinecke). Across the top left-hand corner of “Spring in a French Riviera Garden” (its title in the typescript), the words “Countess Senni” are written. Across the top left-hand corner of the typescript of “December in a French Riviera Garden,” someone wrote “envoyé á [sent to] Better Homes and Gardens,” no doubt misleading researchers who have sought to determine where Wharton’s article might have been published. 31 Daniel Bratton, ed., Yrs. Ever Affly: The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Louis Bromfield (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), 135–9. 32 As Syd Bauman and Julia Flanders explain, XML is “a general mechanism for defining data structures,” whereas TEI is an encoding language, like HTML, that “describes the structure of documents” within those structures; Flanders uses the analogy of XML as the

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material composing a toolbox and encoding languages such as TEI or HTML as building the compartments within the toolbox to hold headings, paragraphs, and other features of a text (“XML and TEI”). 33 A small demonstration project of this passage using a template developed by the Versioning Machine (http://v-mach​ine.org/) is available at https://pub​lic.wsu.edu/~campbe​lld/amlit/ v-mach​ine%202/samp​les/hm.html. 34 “About Scalar,” Alliance for Digital Networking Culture, https://sca​lar.me/anvc/sca​lar/ (accessed March 1, 2021). 35 Laura Rattray and Mary Chinery, eds., “The Shadow of a Doubt: A Play in Three Acts, by Edith Wharton,” Edith Wharton Review 33, no. 1 (2017): 113–257. 36 Edith Wharton, “America at War: Edith Wharton on the National Character in 1918,” trans. Virginia Ricard, TLS, February 14, 2018, 3–5; Alice Kelly, “An Unknown First World War Story by Edith Wharton,” TLS, November 6, 2015, 1–16; Sarah Whitehead, “A Granted Prayer: An Unpublished Story by Edith Wharton,” Atlantic, November 9, 2020 (https:// www.thea​tlan​tic.com/books/arch​ive/2020/11/edith-whar​ton-a-gran​ted-pra​yer-an-unpu​blis​ hed-story/616​974/). An interview with Professor Ricard about the text she translated was published at the whartoncompleteworks.org site on February 20, 2018 (https://whart​on co​mple​tewo​rks.org/2018/02/20/interv​iew-with-virgi​nia-ric​ard-tra​nsla​tor-of-newly-dis​cove​ red-edith-whar​ton-lect​ure-fra​nce-and-its-all​ies-at-war/).

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Afterword: Edith Wharton in the Twenty-First Century ELAINE SHOWALTER

In 1987, in a memoir and business-advice book his publisher called a “classic work,” Donald Trump revealed the methods and secrets that had enabled him to become rich and famous. As Trump (or rather, his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz) explained, “Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”1 If you wanted to succeed in business or real estate, he suggested, “Wharton was the place to go … The real entrepreneurs all seem to go to Wharton.”2 He meant the school, but if he ever read books, he might have taken his notions of the high life from the novels. Like Elmer Moffatt in The Custom of the Country (1913) whose mansion on Fifth Avenue is “an exact copy of the Pitti Palace, Florence,”3 Trump bragged about the Trump Tower, “as close as you’re going to get, in the 20th century, to the quality of Versailles.”4 Edith Wharton had no admiration for the vulgar taste of American tycoons, but she was a self-made literary businesswoman, and as Laura Rattray notes, she “remains a marketable asset” today. In June 2009, some of her letters were auctioned at Christie’s for $182,500, “while the surviving half of her library raised an eye-watering $2.6 million in 2006.”5 She scorned American popular culture, but references to her name and her novels turn up everywhere from magazines to music, evidence that in the twenty-first century, she has become truly iconic. Lifestyle magazines and blogs write about the decor and gardens of The Mount where Wharton reigned as “the nation’s first style consultant, a Victorian Martha Stewart.”6 Janie Wilcox, the Undine-like heroine of Candace Bushnell’s novel Trading Up (2003), hopes to persuade a studio head to make a movie of The Custom of the Country, while a feminist journalist declares that a “twenty-first-century Undine would have a million followers on Instagram.”7 And in her novel about San Francisco teenage girls We Run the Tides (2021), Vendela Vida named the schools after Wharton characters: the Spragg School for Girls, the Viner School, and Olenska School of Ballet.8 The twenty-first century has so far marked a high point in both Wharton’s critical reputation and her literary influence. The critical revival began with Hermione Lee’s discriminating and generous biography in 2007, which observed that “much still remains

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to be done with the posthumous life of Edith Wharton.”9 Popular recognition came soon after. The 150th anniversary of Wharton’s birth in 2012 was celebrated by a ravishing feature in the September issue of Vogue, photographed at The Mount by Annie Leibovitz with an essay on Wharton by Colm Tóibín, and male novelists and actors posing as fictional and historical characters, including Jonathan Safran Foer as the Beaux-Arts architect Ogden Codman, Jr., Junot Diaz as Wharton’s friend Walter Berry, Jeffrey Eugenides as Henry James, and James Corden as Teddy Roosevelt.10 As one blogger rejoiced, “Edith Wharton is ‘in Vogue’ again.”11 Speaking at The Mount in 2013, Julian Fellowes declared that Wharton’s work, especially The Custom of the Country, had been a “tremendous influence on me and on my writing.”12 “I felt this was my book … The novel was talking to me in a most extreme and immediate way.” One result was Downton Abbey, an international hit about the manners of the Gilded Age. In addition, novelists, including Diane Johnson, Margaret Drabble, Colm Tóibín, Elif Batuman, and Brandon Taylor, have written introductions to Wharton’s novels and essays about her imaginative impact. In 2019, Batuman wrote for the New York Times that twenty-five years after she had first read The Age of Innocence it seemed even more current. “Every age is an age of innocence,” she realized, “because every age has its own unsaid, half known truths.”13 Writing about The House of Mirth, Jennifer Egan imagined an ending for a new era, in which Selden and Gerty fall in love after Lily’s death. “That’s one interpretation,” she writes, “but there are infinite others—of those scenes, and of the novel as a whole. Fiction is the dream life of the culture that makes it, and its enduring mysteries are what keep us coming back.”14 Still, The Custom of the Country stands out. Writing about it in the Guardian, Margaret Drabble argued that it summed up Wharton’s genius—and superiority to James. It “is one of the most enjoyable great novels ever written. Not all enjoyable novels are great, and not all great novels are enjoyable. This is, supremely, both … Where Henry James dimly suggests,” Drabble concludes, “Wharton analyzes and illustrates … It is a privilege to see the world in her company.”15 And indeed we need her literary company now. As Claire Messud notes, the parallels between Wharton’s time and ours, “when the disparities between rich and poor are again, and disastrously, as great as they were in Wharton’s time,” we need “a cultural anthropologist who might hold up a mirror to our failings and our future, with eagle-eyed clarity and a small measure of compassion.”16 If we want to understand contemporary ambition and art, gender, money, and marriage, Wharton is still the place to go.

NOTES 1 Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, Trump: The Art of the Deal (New York: Random House, 1987), 1. 2 Ibid., 15. As this book’s foreword confirms, Edith Wharton was distantly related by marriage to Joseph Wharton, founder of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 3 Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (New York: Modern Library, 2010), 359. 4 Trump with Schwartz, Trump, 41. 5 Laura Rattray, ed., Edith Wharton in Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Preface, xix. 6 Michael Perkins, “The Age of Elegance,” normaleye.com. 7 Jia Tollentino, “What Edith Wharton Knew a Century Ago,” New Yorker, September 9, 2019. 8 https://live hub.com/vendela-vida-on-finding-humor-in-the-darker-side-of-teenage-life/ (accessed February 16, 2020.

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9 Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007), 753. 10 http://www.vogue.com/magaz​ine/arti​c le/the-cus​tom-of-the-coun​try-Edith-Whar​ton-est ​ ate-in-the-ber​kshi​res#1. 11 https://amer​ican​litb​ookgroup.wordpress.com/tag/colm-toibin-and-edith-wharton (accessed September 17, 2012). 12 https://www.silver​pett​icoa​trev​iew.com/2020/05/19/cus​tom-of-the-coun​try-edith-whar​tonada​ptat​ion/. 13 Elif Batuman, “The Age of ‘The Age of Innocence,’ ” New York Times, November 1, 2019. 14 https://amp.theg​uard​ian.com/books/2020/jan/11/the-house-of-mirth-jenni​fer-egan-on-edithwhart​ons-mast​erpi​ece. 15 Margaret Drabble, “The Beautiful and the Damned,” Guardian, June 18, 2004. 16 Claire Messud, “How Can We Read Edith Wharton Today?” New York Times Style Magazine, January 20, 2021.

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Wharton, Edith. “The Reef.” In Edith Wharton: Novels, edited by R. W. B. Lewis, 349–619. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1985. Wharton, Edith. The Reef. New York: Appleton, 1912. Wharton, Edith. “The Rembrandt.” In Crucial Instances, 123–49. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901. Wharton, Edith. “Sanctuary.” In Madame de Treymes and Others: Four Short Novels, edited by Marilyn French, 85–162. London: Virago, 1984. Wharton, Edith. Selected Poems of Edith Wharton. Edited by Irene Goldman-Price. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019. Wharton, Edith. A Son at the Front. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923. Wharton, Edith. “Souls Belated.” In The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, edited by R. W. B. Lewis, vol. 1, 104–26. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968. Wharton, Edith. “That Good May Come.” Scribner’s Magazine, May 1894. Wharton, Edith. “The Touchstone.” In Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, 1891–1910, edited by Maureen Howard, 162–233. New York: Library of America, 2001. Wharton, Edith. Twilight Sleep. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997. Wharton, Edith. “The Valley of Childish Things, and Other Emblems.” Century Magazine, July 1896. Wharton, Edith. “A Venetian Night’s Entertainment.” In The Descent of Man and Other Stories, 218–312. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904. Wharton, Edith. Verses. Newport, RI: C.E. Hammett, Jr., 1878. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Yale University Library. https://coll​ecti​ons.libr​ary.yale.edu/cata​log/12315​066. Wharton, Edith. “Visibility in Fiction.” In Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings, edited by Frederick Wegener, 163–9. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Wharton, Edith. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925. Wharton, Edith. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Wharton, Edith, and Ogden Codman, Jr. The Decoration of Houses. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897. Wharton, Edith, and Ogden Codman, Jr. The Decoration of Houses. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Wharton, Edith, and Ogden Codman, Jr. The Decoration of Houses. New York: Rizzoli, 2007. White, Barbara. Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1991. Whitehead, Sarah. “The Business of the Magazine Short Story.” In The New Edith Wharton Studies, edited by Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray, 48–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Whitehead, Sarah. “Demeter Forgiven: Wharton’s Use of the Persephone Myth in Her Short Stories.” Edith Wharton Review 26, no. 1 (2010): 17–25. Whitehead, Sarah. “Make It Short: Edith Wharton’s Modernist Practices in Her Short Stories.” Journal of the Short Story in English 58 (Spring 2012): 25–43. Wilson, Edmund. “Justice to Edith Wharton.” In The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature, 194–213. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Wilson, Edmund. “Justice to Edith Wharton.” Reprinted in The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, [1938] 1947. Winship, Michael. “The Rise of a National Book Trade System in the United States.” In A History of the Book in America, edited by Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, 56–77. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

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313

CONTRIBUTORS

Dale M. Bauer, Professor Emerita at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is the author of Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community (1988), Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics (1994), Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860–1940 (2009), and Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Serial Novels (2020). She is the coeditor, with S. Jaret McKinstry, of Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic (1991) and coeditor (with Philip Gould) of The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing (2001). She is also the editor of The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature (2012). Shannon Brennan is Associate Professor of English at Carthage College, where she teaches courses in American Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her writing on Edith Wharton has appeared in Legacy: A Journal of Women Writers and The New Edith Wharton Studies, and she is Associate Editor of the Edith Wharton Review. Donna M. Campbell is Professor of English at Washington State University and author of Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885–1915 (1997) and Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing (2016). Her recent work on Wharton has appeared in the New Edith Wharton Studies, Edith Wharton in Context, the Journal of Popular Culture, the Edith Wharton Review, A Companion to the American Short Story, Studies in American Fiction, and Studies in American Naturalism. She is an associate editor of The Complete Works of Edith Wharton and editor of The House of Mirth. Melanie V. Dawson is Professor of English at William & Mary and the author of multiple books and articles focused on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature, among them Emotional Reinventions: Realist-Era Representations Beyond Sympathy (2015) and Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age (2020). She is coeditor of two recent projects: American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity (2018) with Meredith Goldsmith, and, with Sari Edelstein, a fall 2019 age studies special issue of Studies in American Fiction. Myrto Drizou is Assistant Professor of English at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. She is Associate Editor of the Edith Wharton Review and editor of the volume Edith Wharton for Critical Insights (2017). Her work on Wharton has appeared in The New Edith Wharton Studies (2019); Gothic Landscapes (2016); 49th Parallel (2016); and American Writers in Exile (2015). She has also published on American literary naturalism, including editing a special issue for the New Centennial Review (2020) and coediting the forthcoming volume New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Edinburgh UP). She serves as Vice President of the Edith Wharton Society.

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Contributors

Nir Evron is Senior Lecturer of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of The Blossom Which We Are: The Novel and the Transience of Cultural Worlds (2020). Among his recent publications are articles on Edith Wharton, the history of American regionalism, the crisis of the humanities, and Hannah Arendt. Meredith L. Goldsmith is Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer and Professor of English at Ursinus College, where she also served as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Founding Director of the Teaching and Learning Institute. She has published extensively on Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, and Anzia Yezierska, and is the coeditor of three anthologies of literary scholarship on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature. She also served as the editor of the Edith Wharton Review and is past president of the Edith Wharton Society. Nicholas Hudson is the Admission Supervisor and Research Assistant at The Mount, developing and writing material for exhibits, lectures, tours, and digital platforms. He earned an MA in Eastern Classics from St. John’s College, Santa Fe, NM, and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Margaret Jay Jessee is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is the author of Female Physicians in American Literature: Abortion in 19th-Century Literature and Culture (2022). Her scholarship on Edith Wharton has appeared in JML: Journal of Modern Literature; Critical Insights: Edith Wharton, edited by Myrto Drizou; and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays, edited by Arielle Zibrak. Her current projects include editing The Valley of Decision for The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Jill Kress Karn is the author of The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton (2002). Her most recent work “William James, Henry James and the Turn toward Modernism,” including a discussion of The Wings of the Dove, appears in Understanding James, Understanding Modernism (2017). She teaches literature and creative writing at Villanova University. Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College, United States. She is the author of What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books and creator of the web database EdithWhartonsLibrary.org. Her other books include Office, published through Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series; a new edition of The Age of Innocence for W.W. Norton; and a scholarly edition of Twilight Sleep for Oxford University Press. Her work has appeared in such venues as Criticism, Novel, JML: Journal of Modern Literature, Edith Wharton Review, the Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books. Maria-Novella Mercuri teaches Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London, UK. She graduated in Anglo-American literature from the University of Florence, Italy, with a thesis on The Fruit of the Tree and wrote her PhD dissertation on Edith Wharton at the UCL Department of German. She is currently working on a comparative study of Wharton’s fiction and selected German authors. She has translated into Italian two

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Contributors

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volumes of Wharton’s stories set in Italy and is now working on the translation of The Fruit of the Tree. Paul J. Ohler is Associate Professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. He is the author of Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception” (2006), and essays in the Edith Wharton Review, English Studies in Canada, and America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture. His recent work includes an essay in The New Edith Wharton Studies and one in Studies in American Naturalism. He is currently preparing Short Stories I: 1891–1903 of The Complete Works of Edith Wharton. He is past president of the Edith Wharton Society and editor of the Edith Wharton Review. Julie Olin-Ammentorp is Professor of English at Le Moyne College. She is the author of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture (2019) and of Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War (2004). In addition, she has published over twenty-five articles, including essays on Wharton, Cather, and others. She has served on the Board of Governors of the Willa Cather Foundation and is a past president of the Edith Wharton Society. Emily J. Orlando is Professor of English and the E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Fairfield University. She is the author of Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts and coeditor, with Meredith Goldsmith, of Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism. She has published on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, especially Wharton, Nella Larsen, Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Siddall, and the PreRaphaelites. A past president of the Edith Wharton Society, she curated the Wharton installation for the American Writers Museum and is preparing for publication an annotated edition of Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman’s The Decoration of Houses. Virginia Ricard is Associate Professor at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne where she teaches American Literature and Translation. She was a recipient of the Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship at the Lilly Library and in 2012 edited a volume of essays devoted to Wharton’s short stories (JSSE). Her most recent publications on Wharton include a translation of “America at War” (TLS, 2018), “The Uses of Boundaries: Edith Wharton and Place” (2019), “Edith Wharton’s French Engagement” (2020), “‘Isn’t That French?’: Edith Wharton Revisits the International Theme” (2020), “Edith Wharton au tournant” (2020), and “Edith Wharton, translator” (forthcoming, 2022). Francesca Sawaya is Professor of English and American Studies at the College of William & Mary. She is the author of Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity, Professionalism, and American Writing, 1890–1950 (2004) and The Difficult Art of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market (2014). She is currently at work on a book on nineteenth-century mermaids. Anne Schuyler is the Curatorial and Visitor Services Director at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home in Lenox, Massachusetts, having joined the organization in 2006. She has produced multiple exhibits highlighting, among other topics, Wharton’s humanitarian work during the First World War and servant life at The Mount. She holds a BA in International Relations from the University of Virginia and a Professional Certificate in Public History from Northeastern University.

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Contributors

Emily Setina is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She coedited Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition (2012), and her essays have appeared in PMLA, MLN, Modernism/modernity, and other venues. Her forthcoming book examines photography’s role in the literary work and public selfpresentation of Stein, Marianne Moore, and Virginia Woolf. With Susannah Hollister, she is writing a biography of the poet Kenneth Koch. Elaine Showalter is Professor Emerita of English and Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. She has written ten books, including A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (2009), which was awarded the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism. Her most recent book, The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe: A Biography, was published in 2016. Carol J. Singley, Professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden, is the author of Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (1995) and Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and National Identity in Literature (2013), and coauthor of Maison de Deuil, Maison de Liesse? (House of Mourning, House of Mirth?) (2013). She is the editor of seven books on Wharton and other topics in American literature, general editor of the thirty-volume The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, cofounder of the Alliance for Study of Adoption and Culture, and a past president of the Edith Wharton Society. Gary Totten is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the editor-in-chief of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. He is the author of African American Travel Narratives from Abroad (2015) and the editor of Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing (2015) and Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture (2007). His articles on Edith Wharton and her contemporaries have appeared in journals and essay collections, and he is past president of the Edith Wharton Society. He is currently editing a volume of Wharton’s travel writings. Frederick Wegener is Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Long Beach. His publications include Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings, the Penguin Classics edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor, and numerous articles on Wharton, as well as articles on Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, William Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles W. Chesnutt, and others. He is currently an Associate Editor of The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, to be published in thirty volumes, and at work on the volume that will contain The Writing of Fiction. Susan Wissler has been the Executive Director of The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home in Lenox, Massachusetts, since 2008. With the support of the board of trustees, she retired all of The Mount’s debt, secured funding for major restoration of the historic main house and stable, and brought a renewed vibrancy to the estate with an ever-widening array of cultural programming. She holds a BA from Brown University and a JD from Columbia University. She is the editor of Claudine Lesage’s Edith Wharton in France (2019).

317

INDEX

À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust, M.) 232, 260 “The Absent Presence: Discourses of Cryptocolonialism” (Herzfeld, M.) 205 n.19 Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 283 n.19 Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco 283 n.19 Ackerman, Robert Allen (dir.) Passion’s Way (Film) 126–7 Acropolis 200–1, 203 adultery 20, 23, 26–7, 118, 125 Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age (Edelstein, S.) 62 n.7 Aegean cruise 7, 182, 185, 196 Aegean islands 94, 183, 196, 198–9 Aegean Sea 94–5, 182, 198, 202–3 “Aesthetic Issues in Book Cover Design 1880– 1910” (Thomson, E.) 267 nn.7, 18 African 21–2, 45, 200, 270 African American 22, 25, 28–9, 123, 160 After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow (Donovan, J.) 48 n.27 “Afterward” (Wharton, E.) 125 “Afterword: Edith Wharton and the Promise of Cosmopolitanism” (Totten, G.) 191 n.30 Against War (Erasmus, D.) 265 “The Age of Awesome” (Coates, T.) 162 n.57 “The Age of Elegance” (Perkins, M.) 288 n.6 The Age of Innocence (1920) (Wharton, E.) 1, 3–4, 8–9, 11, 19, 29, 52, 87, 117–18, 123, 127, 129, 131 n.6, 132 n.39, 136, 143, 150–2, 155–6, 160, 162 n.39, 183, 196, 209, 211, 217, 219, 224, 226, 229, 231, 233, 234 n.26, 270, 272, 274, 281, 288 The Age of Innocence (1934 Film) (dir. Moeller, P.) 118, 120, 131 n.22 The Age of Innocence (1993 Film) (dir. Scorsese, M.) 126, 129 “The Age of Innocence” (Barnes, M. A.) 130 nn.11, 15

“ ‘The Age of Innocence’ at a Moment of Increased Appetite for Eating the Rich” (Kelly, H.) 12 n.9 “The Age of ‘The Age of Innocence’ ” (Batuman, E.) 289 n.13 Aged by Culture (Gullette, M.) 62 n.10, 63 n.36 ageism 3, 5–6, 20, 51–62, 95, 121–2, 124–6 “ ‘Ages Are the Stuff!’: The Traffic in Ages in Interwar Britain” (Port, C.) 62 n.8, 64 n.59 Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Woodward, K.) 63 nn.37, 39 Ahmed, Sara 248 n.15 Willful Subjects 248 n.15 Akins, Zoe 123–4 Alcott, Louisa May Little Women 120 Alexander’s Bridge (Cather, W.) 151 Algiers 95, 196 Alighieri, Dante 70, 104, 107 Divine Comedy 107 “All Saints” (Wharton, E.) 110 “All Souls” (Wharton, E.) 110 Allen, Walter 215, 221 nn.42–3 The English Novel: A Short Critical History 221 nn.42–3 Alps 186 Alsop, Susan Mary 145 n.2 (ed.) Bunner Sisters, Madame de Treymes and Three Novels 145 n.2 “L’Âme close” (Wharton, E.) 229; see also ‘The Life Apart’: Text and Contexts of Edith Wharton’s Love Diary America & American 1–5, 7–9, 20–2, 25, 38, 52–3, 65–6, 83–4, 86–7, 91, 93, 95–6, 101, 103, 110, 118, 120, 126–7, 144, 149–50, 154–5, 157–60, 180, 182, 193–5, 200, 203, 209–10, 215–19, 223–4, 226, 228–9, 233, 237–8, 241, 243–4, 246–7, 254–5, 258–9, 264, 266, 269–70, 272–3, 276–8, 280, 282, 287

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“America at War: Edith Wharton on the National Character in 1918” (Wharton, E., tr. Ricard, V.) 285 n.36 “America at War: Explaining the National Character in 1918” (Wharton, E., tr. Ricard, V.) 8, 223, 233, 234 nn.3, 6 American Civil War 93, 123, 218 “American Fiction” (Woolf, V.) 158, 162 n.45 American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity (Dawson, M.; Goldsmith, M.) 62 n.6 American literary naturalism 139, 143–4 American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 248 n.11 American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige (Barrish, P.) 30 n.6, 31 nn.17, 42, 32 n.69 American Pastoral (Roth, P.) 218 American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture and the Genteel Tradition (Coit, E.) 15 n.41 L’Amérique en guerre (Wharton, E., tr. Ricard, V.) 281 Ammons, Elizabeth 4, 7, 19, 30 nn.2–3, 65, 76 n.5, 171, 176 n.25, 205 n.24 Conflicting Stories 7 “Edith Wharton and the Issue of Race” 19, 30 n.2 Edith Wharton’s Argument with America 76 n.5 “Fairy-Tale Love and The Reef” 176 n.25 “The Myth of Imperiled Whiteness and Ethan Frome” 30 n.3 Ancona (Italy) 196 Anderson Auction Company 267 n.11 Catalogue of the Library of Robert Hoe of New York 267 n.11 Anderson, John Dennis 120, 130 n.17 “Stage Adaptations of Wharton’s Fiction” 130 n.17 “Andrea del Sarto” (Browning, R.) 105 Andrews, William L. 258, 267 n.19 The Art of Bookbinding 258, 267 n.19 “The Angel at the Grave” (Wharton, E.) 86, 95 “Angel of Devastation” (Clark, E.) 47 nn.9, 14 Anglo-American 19, 28 Anglo-Saxon 225, 230 The Apparitional Lesbian (Castle, T.) 48 n.26 “An Appeal to Reason As Well As Compassion” (Norton, C.) 67 Appel, Jacob M. 76 n.17, 78 n.58

Index

“A Duty to Kill? A Duty to Die? Rethinking the Euthanasia Controversy of 1906” 76 n.17, 78 n.58 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 183, 191 n.29, 193 Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers 191 n.29 “Appreciating Edith Wharton’s Other Career” (Lasky, J.) 13 n.16 “April Showers” (Wharton, E.) 85, 90–1, 98 n.74 An Archive of Feelings (Cvetkovich, A.) 48 n.29 Arias, Santa 154, 162 n.33 The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives 154, 162 n.33 Ariel (Plath, S.) 111 Ariel: The Restored Edition (Plath, S.) 111, 114 n.86 Armstrong, Paul 164, 175 nn.5–6 “Henry James and Neuroscience: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Differences” 175 n.6 The Phenomenology of Henry James 175 n.5 Arnold, Matthew 146 n.31 “The Forsaken Merman” 146 n.31 The Art of Bookbinding (Andrews, W.) 258, 267 n.19 “The Art of Losing” (Vendler, H.) 112 n.15, 115 n.88 “Artemis to Actéon (sic) and other verse par Edith Wharton” (du Bos, C.) 235 n.54 “Artemis to Actæon” (Wharton, E.) 109, 230 Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse (Wharton, E.) 102–3, 108–10, 230 The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience (Olalquiaga, C.) 247 n.7, 248 n.17 The Athenaeum 66 Athens 196–7, 200–3 “Athens” (Shelley, P.) 206 n.51 The Atlantic 2, 83, 281 The Atlantic Monthly 84, 102, 108, 270 Auchincloss, Louis 3, 102, 108, 111, 112 n.7, 115 n.91 Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time 13 n.25, 14 n.25 (ed.) Edith Wharton: Selected Poems 102, 111, 112 n.7, 115 n.91 Auser, Cortland 98 n.78 Nathaniel P. Willis 98 n.78 Austen, Jane 163–4, 174 n.1, 274 Mansfield Park 75 The Awkward Age (James, H.) 32 n.68

Index

Back Street (Film) (dir. Stahl, J.) 120 A Backward Glance (1934) (Wharton, E.) 3, 8, 11, 180–1, 209, 217, 256, 270, 277 Bacon, Francis 72, 74 Bahlmann, Anna 83, 85–6, 103, 184 Bakhtin, Mikhail 154, 161 n.31 “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” 154, 161 n.31 Baldwin, James 149, 160 de Balzac, Honoré 91, 151, 216, 223 “La Grande Bretèche” 91 Bancroft, Catherine 235 n.53 “Lost Lands: Metaphors of Sexual Awakening in Edith Wharton’s Poetry, 1908–1909” 235 n.53 Bannet, Eve Tavor 174 n.1 The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel 174 n.1 Bannett, Nina 138, 146 n.14 “Reclaiming Sentimentalism in Edith Wharton’s Summer” 146 n.14 Barnes, Margaret Ayer 120, 123, 130 nn.11, 15 “The Age of Innocence” 130 nn.11, 15 Barrie, J. M. 118 The Little Minister 120 What Every Woman Knows 118 Barrish, Phillip 30 n.6, 31 nn.17, 42, 32 n.69 American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige 30 n.6, 31 nn.17, 42, 32 n.69 Barthes, Roland 232, 236 n.73 Image, Music, Text 232, 236 n.73 “Battle Sleep” (Wharton, E.) 109–10 Batuman, Elif 288, 289 n.13 “The Age of ‘The Age of Innocence’ ” 289 n.13 Bauer, Dale 4–5, 19, 22, 30 n.1, 31 n.23, 249 n.25 Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics 4, 19, 30 n.1, 31 n.23, 249 n.25 Baxter, Jane McNaughton 117, 130 n.3 “The House of Mirth” 124, 130 n.3 “The ‘Beata Beatrix’ of Rossetti” (Wharton, E.) 107 “Beatrice Palmato” (Wharton, E.) 230–1 Beatrice Palmato: Fragment érotique et autres textes (Wharton, E., tr. Rovère, M.) 8, 48 n.29, 235 n.58, 236 n.60 “Beaulieu Wood” (Wharton, E.) 107 The Beautiful and Damned (Fitzgerald, F. Scott) 24, 118 “The Beautiful and the Damned” (Drabble, M.) 289 n.15

319

“Beauty” (Wharton, E.) 107, 271 Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924 (Moore, M., ed. Schulze, R.) 114 n.87 Beer, Janet 49 n.51, 52, 62 n.3, 91, 98 n.73 Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman 49 n.51, 62 n.3 Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction 98 n.73 Beinecke Library 101, 255, 277, 281 “Belgium” (Wharton, E.) 109 Bell, Millicent 1, 11 n.2, 13 nn.20, 23, 76 nn.2, 8, 97 n.58 (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton 11 n.2, 13 nn.20, 23 Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of their Friendship 76 nn.2, 8, 97 n.58 Bendixen, Alfred 47 n.14 (ed.) Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays 47 n.14 Benedict, Ruth 218 Patterns of Culture 218 Benn Michaels, Walter 20, 30 n.5 Our America: Nativism, Modernism, Pluralism 30 n.5 Benstock, Shari 3, 76 n.12, 235 nn.47, 49, 282 n.4 No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton 3, 76 n.12, 235 nn.47, 49, 282 n.4 Bentley, Nancy 25, 32 n.48, 183, 191 n.27, 210–11, 217, 220 n.15, 222 n.52, 248 n.18 The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, and Wharton 32 n.48, 220 n.15, 222 n.52, 248 n.18 “Wharton, Travel, and Modernity” 191 n.27 Berbinau-Dezalay, Agnès 98 n.71 “Reading and Readers in Edith Wharton’s Short Fiction” 98 n.71 Berenson, Bernard 1, 9, 154, 179, 231–2 The Study and Criticism of Italian Art 231, 236 n.66 Berenson, Mary 3, 153, 278 Bergamasque Alps 186 Berlin, Isaiah 222 n.57 Four Essays on Liberty 222 n.57 Berry, Walter 117, 256, 263, 266 n.9, 288 “The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett” (Cather, W.) 161 n.9 Bette Davis (Shingler, M.) 131 n.30

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Bettine to Goethe (Wharton, E.) 104 “Bewitched” (Wharton, E.) 125, 131 n.31 Beyle, Marie-Henri 91; see also Stendahl Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche, F., tr. Hollingdale, R.) 73, 78 n.71 “Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm” (Ross, M.) 49 nn.48, 63 Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915 (Patterson, M.) 249 n.23 “Beyond the Guidebook: Edith Wharton’s Rediscovery of San Vivaldo” (Lasansky, D. M.) 191 n.34 Biedenharn, Isabella 12 n.9 “Pop Culture of My Life: Roxane Gay on Vanderpump Rules and Edith Wharton” 12 n.9 Bierstadt, O. A. 256, 259, 266 n.10, 267 n.12 The Library of Robert Hoe: A Contribution to the History of Bibliophilism in America 256, 259, 266 n.10, 267 n.12 The Biological Clock: Edith Wharton, Naturalism, and the Temporality of Womanhood (Fleissner, J. L.) 147 n.57 Bishop, Elizabeth 102, 111 Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments 115 n.88 Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing (Campbell, D.) 139, 146 nn.20, 25, 147 n.53 Black Boy (Wright, R.) 160 Blackall, Jean Frantz 176 n.20 “Edith Wharton’s Art of Ellipsis” 176 n.20 blackmail 67, 72, 74, 128 Blamires, David 247 n.10 Telling Tales: The Impact of Germany on English Children’s Books, 1780–1918 247 n.10 Bloom, Harold 149–50, 160 n.3 The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime 149, 160 n.3 The Blossom Which We Are: The Novel and the Transience of Cultural Worlds (Evron, N.) 220 n.19 Bohemian 21–2, 156 The Book of the Homeless (Le Livre des Sansfoyer) (Wharton, E.) 11, 16 n.59, 110, 264, 276 Book-Plates, Ancient and Modern, with Examples (Leighton, J.) 268 n.27 The Bookman 85, 101

Index

Boone, Joseph 175 n.3 “Modernist Maneuverings in the Marriage Plot: Breaking Ideologies of Gender and Genre in James’s The Golden Bowl” 175 n.3 du Bos, Charles 9 “Artemis to Actéon (sic) and other verse par Edith Wharton” 235 n.54 Boston 85, 95, 126, 264 Boswell, Parley Ann 117, 120, 130 n.20, 131 n.26 Edith Wharton on Film 130 n.20 Bourne, Randolph 150 Boynton, H. W. 13 n.23 “Some Stories of the Month” 13 n.23 Bratton, Daniel 3, 284 n.31 Yrs. Ever Affly: The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Louis Bromfield 284 n.31 Braudy, Leo 62 n.1 (ed.) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings 62 n.1 “Bread Upon the Waters” (Wharton, E.) 123; see also Charm Incorporated Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy (Zipes, J.) 248 n.11 Brennan, Shannon 6 Brian, Mary 122 British Empire 181, 216 Brodhead, Richard 216, 222 n.48 Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America 222 n.48 Broner, E. M. 46 n.6 (ed.) The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature 46 n.6 Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre 75 Brookner, Anita 270 (ed.) The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton 270 Brownell, William Crary 102, 112 n.13 “Browning in the Abbey” (Wharton, E.) 107 Browning, Robert 91–2, 103, 105 “Andrea del Sarto” 105 “My Last Duchess” 91–2, 105 Brucia, Margaret A. 284 n.23 “Countess Mary Senni and the Irises at Garland Farm” 284 n.23 The Buccaneers (Wharton, E.) 126–7, 131 n.33, 183, 274, 281 Bunner Sisters (Wharton, E.) 7, 86, 89, 129, 135–9, 141–5

Index

Bunner Sisters, Madame de Treymes and Three Novels (Wharton, E., ed. Alsop, S. M.) 145 n.2 Burke, Edmund 212–13, 216, 223, 234 n.1 On the Sublime and Beautiful 234 n.1 Burlingame, Edward 66–7, 86–8 Bury, John Bagnell 221 n.34 The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth 221 n.34 Bushnell, Candace 287 Trading Up 287 “The Business of the Magazine Short Story” (Whitehead, S.) 97 n.43 Butler, Marilyn 221 n.38 (ed.) Castle Rackrent and Ennui 215–16, 221 nn.38, 46 Buzard, James 190 n.2, 216 “The Grand Tour and After (1660–1840)” 190 n.2 Byzantine 95, 188, 198–9, 201, 203 Cahan, Abraham 88 Yekl: A Tale of New York 88–9 Cahir, Linda Costanzo 117, 120, 130 n.20 “Wharton and the Age of Film” 130 n.20 Calotychos, Vangelis 201, 206 n.60 Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics 206 n.60 Calvino, Eve, Italo & Mario 278 The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (ed. Bell, M.) 11 n.2, 13 nn.20, 23 The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton (Knights, P.) 14 n.27 Cameron, Sharon 167, 175 n.12 Thinking in Henry James 175 n.12 Campbell, Donna M. 4, 7, 9, 76 nn.4, 13, 86, 96 n.7, 97 n.24, 135, 139, 143–4, 146 n.20, 147 n.53, 148 n.60, 271 Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing 139, 146 nn.20, 25, 147 n.53 “Edith Wharton and the ‘Authoresses’: The Critique of Local Color in Wharton’s Early Fiction” 96 n.7, 97 n.24, 148 n.60 Cannes (France) 224 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty, T.) 249 n.27 Caprarola 180 Carlin, Deborah 77 n.24 “To Form a More Imperfect Union: Gender, Tradition and the Text in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” 77 n.24 Carnegie, Andrew 237–8, 278

321

Carpenter, Mary Wilson 147 n.47 “ ‘Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me’: The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ ” 147 n.47 Cary, Richard 222 n.49 (ed.) Deephaven and Other Stories 222 n.49 Castle Rackrent and Ennui (Edgeworth, M., ed. Butler, M.) 215–16, 221 nn.38, 46 Castle, Terry 48 n.26 The Apparitional Lesbian 48 n.26 Catalogue of the Library of Robert Hoe of New York (Anderson Auction Company) 267 n.11 Cather among the Moderns (Stout, J.) 159, 162 n.54 Cather, Willa 5, 7, 118, 149–60, 160 n.8, 161 nn.9–10, 12, 14–15, 23, 162 n.36, 271 Alexander’s Bridge 151 “The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett” 161 n.9 “Coming, Aphrodite!” 155–7, 162 n.36 Death Comes for the Archbishop 159 Lucy Gayheart 151–3, 161 nn.14, 16, 19 My Mortal Enemy 155 My Ántonia 150, 152, 161 n.15 “The Novel Démeublé” 151, 160 n.8, 161 n.12 O Pioneers! 158 “Paul’s Case” 155–6 Sapphira and the Slave Girl 159 The Selected Letters of Willa Cather 161 nn.23, 25, 162 nn.47, 50 The Song of the Lark 157, 162 n.43 The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time (Howard, J.) 161 n.29 The Century Magazine 83–6, 89, 270 Ceres (Watteau, J.) 128 Chalkidiki Peninsula 196, 198 Chambers, Dianne 174, 176 n.30 Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton 176 n.30 Chambolle-Duru 255 Champion, H. J. E. 37, 47 n.18 “ ‘Hold me, Gerty, hold me’: Lily Bart’s Queer Desire” 47 nn.18–19 Champs-Stroobants 255, 263 Chanler, Margaret (aka Mrs. Winthrop Chanler; Daisy Chanler & Daisy Terry) 3, 201, 255, 278, 284 n.28 Charing Cross Hotel 101 Charles Scribner’s Sons 66, 84–6, 102, 108, 110, 270, 275

322

“Charm Incorporated” (Wharton, E.) 123; see also “Bread Upon the Waters” Chartres 203 “Chartres” (Wharton, E.) 104 Chez les heureux du monde (Wharton, E.) 224 Chicago 152–3 The Children (1928) (Wharton, E.) 6, 10, 20, 29, 37, 46, 51–2, 61–2, 64 n.57, 121, 209, 220 n.5, 270 The Children (1990 Film) (dir. Palmer, T.) 126 Chinery, Mary 77 n.20, 95, 281, 285 n.35 (ed.) “The Shadow of a Doubt: A Play in Three Acts, by Edith Wharton” 77 n.21, 285 n.35 “The Shadow of a Doubt: Discovering a New Work by Edith Wharton” 77 n.20 Christina Rossetti: A Biography (Thomas, F.) 147 n.33 Chroniques italiennes (Stendhal) 91 Chudacoff, Howard 52, 62 n.2 “How Old Are You?”: Age Consciousness in American Culture 62 n.2 Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (Richardson, S.) 163–4 Clark, Eleanor 6, 37, 47 nn.9, 14 “Angel of Devastation” 47 nn.9, 14 The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity (Hanink, J.) 205 n.19, 206 n.57, 207 n.66 Classical Principles for Modern Design: Lessons from Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman’s The Decoration of Houses (Jayne, T.) 12 n.16 “Classical Reception in Edith Wharton’s Late Fiction” (Wentzel, R.) 204 n.10 Clifford, James 215, 221 n.39 “On Ethnographic Allegory” 221 n.39 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 12 n.8, 160 “The Age of Awesome” 162 n.57 Codman, Ogden (Jr.) 2, 16 n.53, 35, 37, 46 n.4, 85, 96 n.16, 255, 265, 266 n.8, 288 The Decoration of Houses 2, 5, 16 n.53, 35, 46 n.4, 85, 255, 264–5, 266 n.8, 273, 275 Cohen, Marshall 62 n.1 (ed.) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings 62 n.1 Cohen, Patricia 63 n.42 In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age 63 n.42 Cohn, Dorrit 169, 176 n.17

Index

“ ‘First Shock of Complete Perception’: The Opening Episode of The Golden Bowl, Volume 2” 176 n.17 Coit, Emily 4, 15 n.41 American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture and the Genteel Tradition 15 n.41 Coleridge, Samuel T. 212, 236 n.68 Lyrical Ballads 232, 236 n.68 The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton (Wharton, E., ed. Lewis, R. W. B.) 270 The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton (ed. Brookner, A.) 270 Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770– 1880 (Zantop, S.) 248 n.12 Colquitt, Clare 13 n.21 (ed.) A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton 13 n.21 “Coming, Aphrodite!” (Cather, W.) 155–7, 162 n.36 “Coming Home” (Wharton, E., ed. Kelly, A.) 281 “Comparative Cosmopolitanism” (Robbins, B.) 191 n.29 The Complete Works of Edith Wharton 102, 269–79, 281–2 “Complicated Romantic Tangle Cleverly Worked Out with Great Cast” (Article in Wid’s Daily) 130 n.5 “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (Rich, A.) 48 n.29 “Confession” (Wharton, E.) 124 “The Confessional” (Wharton, E.) 83 Conflicting Stories (Ammons, E.) 7 Conrad, Joseph 84, 90 The Constable Edith Wharton (Wharton, E.) 270 Constantinople (Turkey) 196 “The Conventional and the Queer: Lily Bart, an Unlivable Ideal” (Wagner, J.) 47 n.18 Coolidge, Archibald 181 The United States as World Power 181 Coony (dog) 11 Cooper, James Fenimore 217–19, 222 n.53 The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 218, 222 n.53 Coppola, Sofia 2, 129 (dir.) The Custom of the Country (TV series) 2, 129 “Copy” (Wharton, E.) 85, 95 Cor Cordium (Swinburne, A. C.) 107 Cordell, Sigrid 85, 87, 96 n.14, 97 n.37 Fictions of Dissent 96 n.14, 97 n.37

Index

“Corporate Thinking: Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” (Kassanoff, J.) 76 n.19 The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–1930 (ed. Towheed, S.) 96 n.6, 247 n.6 Cosmopolitan 84–5 Cosmopolitan Twain (eds Ryan, A.; McCullough, J.) 162 n.49 Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Appiah, K. A.) 191 n.29 “Countess Mary Senni and the Irises at Garland Farm” (Brucia, M.) 284 n.23 The Courtship Novel 1740–1820: A Feminized Genre (Green, K.) 174 n.1 “A Coward” (Wharton, E.) 94, 99 n.100 Crane, Stephen 88–9 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets 88–9 Crete 201 The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton (Killoran, H.) 13 nn.17, 22 Crucial Instances (Wharton, E.) 83, 89, 91 Cruikshank, Margaret 57, 63 n.33 Learning to Be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging 63 n.33 The Cruise of the Vanadis (Wharton, E.) 7, 94, 99 nn.99, 102, 179–80, 182–3, 188, 189 n.1, 194–5, 197–8, 200, 202, 205 nn.11, 21, 274 Cui, Lily 168, 176 n.16 “ ‘So as Not to Arrive’: The Object-Theater of Late Jamesian Consciousness” 176 n.16 The Cultural Return (Hegeman, S.) 220 n.31 Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Brodhead, R.) 222 n.48 “A Cup of Cold Water” (Wharton, E.) 88, 93, 98 nn.89, 91 The Custom of the Country (1913) (Wharton, E.) 2, 5, 8–9, 12 n.10, 37, 127, 155, 157, 196, 209, 219 n.2, 233, 237–8, 240–1, 270, 274, 280, 287–8, 288 n.3 The Custom of the Country (TV series) (dir. Coppola, S.) 2, 129 Cvetkovich, Ann 48 n.29 An Archive of Feelings 48 n.29 “A Cycle of Reviewing” (Article in The Spectator) 275, 282 n.6 “Cynthia” (Wharton, E.) 107 Cyprus 199, 201 D. Appleton & Company 270 “Dactylics” (Wharton, E.) 107, 202

323

The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (Bloom, H.) 149, 160 n.3 Daily News (New York) 275 Daily News (Newport) 275 The Dark Ages 210 Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis (Sikov, E.) 131 n.29 Darwin, Charles 69, 86, 88, 139, 143, 259 Davidson, Cathy N. 46 n.6 (ed.) The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature 46 n.6 Davies, Terence 128 (dir.) The House of Mirth (2000 Film) 128 Davis, Bette 123–4 Dawson, Melanie V. 4, 6, 16 n.55, 49 n.51, 62 nn.5–6, 64 n.58, 131 n.27, 139, 146 nn.19–20, 191 n.31 American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity 62 n.6 Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age 62 n.5, 64 n.58, 131 n.27, 146 n.19–20 “The Limits of Cosmopolitan Experience in Wharton’s The Buccaneers” 16 n.55, 191 n.31 “Wharton, Sex, and the Terrible Honesty of the 1920s” 49 n.51 “The Dead Wife” (Wharton, E.) 107, 110 “Death” (Wharton, E.) 107 Death Comes for the Archbishop (Cather, W.) 159 “Death to Lady Bountiful: Woman and Reform in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” (Marchand, M.) 79 n.85 The Decoration of Houses (Wharton, E.; Codman, O.) 2, 5, 16 n.53, 35, 46 n.4, 85, 255, 264–5, 266 n.8, 273, 275 Deephaven and Other Stories (Jewett, S. O., ed. Cary, R.) 222 n.49 Delicate Pursuit: Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton (Levine, J.) 176 n.28 “Demeter Forgiven: Wharton’s Use of the Persephone Myth in Her Short Stories” (Whitehead, S.) 204 n.10 “The Descent of Man” (Wharton, E.) 85–6 The Descent of Man and Other Stories (Wharton, E.) 83, 89 The Deserted Village (Goldsmith, O.) 215 DeShong, Scott 172, 176 n.26 “Protagonism in The Reef: Wharton’s Novelistic Discourse” 176 n.26 di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi 218 The Leopard 218

324

“The Dialectic of History and Technology in Wharton’s A Motor-Flight through France” (Totten, G.) 190 n.11, 191 nn.19, 21 Dickinson, Emily 6, 101, 111 Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them 114 n.86 Dickinson, G. Lowes 66 “Euthanasia: From the Note-Book of an Alpinist” 66 The Difficult Art of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market (Sawaya, F.) 247 n.4 The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars (Gardiner, E.; Musto, R.) 263, 267 n.26 Digital Wharton 269–70, 279–81 Dijkstra, Bram 247 n.9 Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture 247 n.9 Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge (Katz, S.) 63 n.38 “Disillusionment” (Valéry, P.) 220 n.25 Dits et Ecrits II: 1976–1988 (Foucault, M.) 236 n.63 Divine Comedy (Alighieri, D.) 107 divorce 20, 26, 59, 94, 121, 226, 246 Doan, Laura 48 n.26 Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of Modern English Lesbian Culture 48 n.26 The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Bannet, E.) 174 n.1 Donovan, Josephine 48 n.27, 215, 221 n.42 After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow 48 n.27 European Local-Color Literature: National Tales, Dorfgeschichten, Romans Champetres 221 n.42 Douglas, Lloyd C. Magnificent Obsession 120 Dove, Rita 109, 255 Doves Bindery 255 Drabble, Margaret 288, 289 n.15 “The Beautiful and the Damned” 289 n.15 Drizou, Myrto 4, 8, 205 n.13, 206 n.35 “Edith Wharton’s Odyssey” 205 n.13, 206 n.56 Du Bos, Charles 228, 230, 233, 235 n.54 Dublin (Ohio) 261 Dublin Core protocols 261–3 “The Duchess at Prayer” (Wharton, E.) 91–4, 98 n.80

Index

The Duchess of Palliano (Stendhal) 107 “La Duchesse de Palliano” (Stendhal) 91 Dunne, Irene 120–1 Dupree, Ellen 74, 79 n.84 “The New Woman, Progressivism and the Woman Writer in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” 79 n.84 “A Duty to Kill? A Duty to Die? Rethinking the Euthanasia Controversy of 1906” (Appel, J.) 76 n.17, 78 n.58 Dwan, Alan 118 (dir.) Robin Hood (Film 1922) 118 Dwight, Eleanor 3, 11 n.1, 16 n.57, 190 n.4 Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life 3, 11 n.1, 16 n.57, 190 n.4 Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism (Lewis, C.) 176 n.18 Eadgyth see Edith Jones Eastern culture 95, 182, 184, 198, 201 Eastern Orthodox Christianity 198 Eastern USA 7, 150, 157–9 “ ‘Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me’: The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’ ” (Carpenter, M.) 147 n.47 Edelstein, Sari 62 n.7 Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age 62 n.7 Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (Bishop, E., ed. Quinn, A.) 115 n.88 Edgeworth, Maria 215–18, 221 nn.38, 40, 44, 46 Castle Rackrent and Ennui 215–16, 221 nn.38, 46 Tales and Novels 221 n.40 Edith Wharton (Joslin, K.) 14 n.25 Edith Wharton (Lee, H.) 3, 12 n.11, 30 n.4, 76 n.10, 97 nn.26, 28, 99 n.109, 162 n.41, 191 n.23, 204 n.8, 220 nn.11, 14, 235 n.48, 266 n.5, 282 n.4, 288 n.9 Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888–1920 (Wharton, E., ed. Wright, S. B.) 204 n.11 Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism (eds Goldsmith, M.; Orlando, E.) 4, 15 n.38, 193, 204 n.3 Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction (Rattray, L.) 13 n.19, 15 n.37, 76 n.1, 77 n.22, 102, 112 nn.4, 9, 11, 13–14, 113

Index

nn.30, 44, 52, 57, 60, 114 nn.69, 71, 77, 130 n.2, 162 nn.41, 52, 190 n.6, 191 n.33, 231, 235 n.55, 236 n.62 “Edith Wharton and German Literature” (Lawson, R. H.) 78 n.69 Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of their Friendship (Bell, M.) 76 nn.2, 8, 97 n.58 “Edith Wharton and the ‘Authoresses’: The Critique of Local Color in Wharton’s Early Fiction” (Campbell, D.) 96 n.7, 97 n.24, 148 n.60 Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (Haytock, J.) 176 n.23 “Edith Wharton and the Ethnography of Old New York” (Gibson, M.) 248 n.18 “Edith Wharton and the Issue of Race” (Ammons, E.) 19, 30 n.2 Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age (Dawson, M.) 62 n.5, 64 n.58, 131 n.27, 146 nn.19–20 “Edith Wharton and the ‘New Gomorrahs’ of Paris” (Kaye, R.) 47 n.16, 49 n.46 “Edith Wharton and the New Narcissism” (Orlando, E.) 16 n.49 Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Kassanoff, J.) 4, 19, 30 n.2, 220 n.14, 248 n.18, 249 n.25 Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (Orlando, E.) 62 n.13, 63 nn.14, 22, 131 n.35, 136, 145 n.5, 191 n.26 “Edith Wharton and the Writing of Whiteness” (Haytock, J.) 16 n.43, 30 n.7, 33 n.80 Edith Wharton in Context (ed. Rattray, L.) 14 n.28, 204 n.10, 288 n.5 Edith Wharton in France (Lesage, C.) 12 n.15 “Edith Wharton Invented Kim Kardashian” (Mehta, S.) 16 n.49 Edith Wharton on Film (Boswell, P. A.) 130 n.20 “Edith Wharton on Film and Television” (Marshall, S.) 130 n.1 “Edith Wharton on French Colonial Charities for Women: An Unknown Travel Essay” (Wegener, F.) 283 n.17 “Edith Wharton Reads the Bachelor Type: Her Critique of Modernism’s Representative Man” (Sensibar, J.) 47 n.15 Edith Wharton Review 3, 281–2 Edith Wharton Society 3, 260, 270, 279, 281

325

Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture (Olin-Ammentorp, J.) 161 n.21, 162 n.44 Edith Wharton: A Biography (Lewis, R. W. B.) 76 n.7, 162 n.48, 220 n.10, 221 n.41, 236 n.61 Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. Howe, I.) 14 n.25 Edith Wharton: A Critical Interpretation (Nevius, B.) 76 n.18 Edith Wharton: A Descriptive Bibliography (Garrison, S.) 13 n.17, 282 nn.1, 3 Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction (White, B.) 63 nn.15, 32 Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time (Auchincloss, L.) 13 n.25, 14 n.25 Edith Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (Murray, M.; Lauer, K.) 13 n.17 Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life (Dwight, E.) 3, 11 n.1, 16 n.57, 190 n.4 Edith Wharton: Art and Illusion (Killoran, H.) 204 n.10 Edith Wharton: Back to Compostela/Regreso a Compostela (ed. Fra López, P.) 204 n.5 Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (Singley, C.) 15 n.40, 204 n.10 Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays (eds Bendixen, A.; Zilversmit, A.) 47 n.14 Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings (Wharton, E., ed. Wolff, C.) 48 n.28, 219 nn.1, 3 Edith Wharton: Selected Poems (Wharton, E., ed. Auchincloss, L.) 102, 111, 112 n.7, 115 n.91 Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman (Horner, A.; Beer, J.) 49 n.51, 62 n.3 Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews (eds Tuttleton, J. W.; Murray, M.; Lauer, K.) 13 nn.17, 23, 160 n.7 Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings (Wharton, E., ed. Wegener, F.) 98 n.72, 220 nn.18, 28, 270, 282 nn.4–5 Edith Wharton’s Argument with America (Ammons, E.) 76 n.5 “Edith Wharton’s Art of Ellipsis” (Blackall, J.) 176 n.20 Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics (Bauer, D.) 4, 19, 30 n.1, 31 n.23, 249 n.25 Edith Wharton’s Composed Lives (Goodman, S.) 15 n.32

326

“Edith Wharton’s French Engagement” (Ricard, V.) 204 n.6, 234 n.5, 249 n.19 “Edith Wharton’s Higher Provincialism: French Ways for Americans and the Ends of The Age of Innocence” (Nowlin, M.) 191 n.28 “Edith Wharton’s Hymns to Respectability” (McManis, J.) 145 n.3 Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing (Waid, C.) 48 n.27, 204 n.10 Edith Wharton’s Library (Ramsden, G.) 259, 267 n.20 “Edith Wharton’s ‘New Visions’: An Exploration of the Influence of Catherine Maria Sedgwick on Bunner Sisters and The Old Maid” (Gussman, D.) 147 n.55 “Edith Wharton’s Odyssey” (Drizou, M.) 205 n.13, 206 n.56 “Edith Wharton’s Profession of Authorship” (Kaplan, A.) 96 n.5 “Edith Wharton’s Prose Spectacle in the Age of Cinema” (Toth, M.) 130 n.20 “Edith Wharton’s relationship to German literature: A study in creative affinity” (Mercuri, M.) 77 n.23 Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: A Casebook (ed. Singley, C.) 220 n.27 Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing: The Making of a Connoisseur (Wright, S. B.) 190 nn.5, 14 “Edith Wharton’s Unprivileged Lives” (Rattray, L.) 162 n.52 Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals (Goodman, S.) 48 n.27 Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War (Olin-Ammentorp, J.) 112 n.10, 114 nn.72, 76, 79, 81 EdithWhartonsLibrary.org 8, 253–4, 256–66 Eeckhout, Bart 161 nn.29–30 “Why Would the Spatial Be So Special? A Critical Analysis of the Spatial Turn in American Studies” 161 nn.29–30 Egypt 201 El-Ksar (Morocco) 181 “Elegy” (Wharton, E.) 110 “Elegy Written at a Country Churchyard” (Gray, T.) 215 Eliot, George 1, 151, 216 Eliot, T. S. 101–2 The Letters of T. S. Eliot 112 n.4 Eliot, Valerie 112 n.4 (ed.) The Letters of T. S. Eliot 112 n.4

Index

elitism 4, 158 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 154 Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them (Dickinson, E., ed. Miller, C.) 114 n.86 The End of the Age of Innocence (Price, A.) 14 n.31 Engels, Friedrich 246, 249 n.26 Manifesto of the Communist Party 249 n.26 England & English 2, 84, 95, 103, 125, 127, 158, 163, 186, 188, 194, 203, 223, 229–30, 256, 262, 270, 272, 276–9 English, Daylanne 33 n.73 W.E.B. DuBois’s Family Crisis 33 n.73 The English Novel: A Short Critical History (Allen, W.) 221 nn.42–3 Entertainment Weekly 2 “An Entomologist of Society” (Rascoe, B.) 130 n.9 Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick, E.) 46 n.2, 47 n.24 Erasmus, Desiderius 265 Against War 265 Erben, Michael 131 n.36 “Some Notes on Mrs. Lloyd, Mrs. Lloyd, and Lily Bart” 131 n.36 Erectheum 200 Erlich, Gloria C. 48 n.27 The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton 48 n.27 erotic 6, 22–3, 29, 35–45, 108, 137, 139, 141, 145, 238, 246 Esdale, Logan 115 n.87 (ed.) Ida: A Novel 115 n.87 Eternal Passion in English Poetry (Wharton, E.) 102 “Ethan Brand” (Hawthorne, N.) 125 Ethan Frome (1993 Film) (dir. Madden, J.) 126 Ethan Frome (1911) (Wharton, E.) 1, 6, 19, 66, 73, 123, 135, 217, 257, 270, 272, 274 “Ethan Frome” (1960 TV adaptation) (dir. Segal, A.) 124 Ethan Frome and the “Springs” of Masculinity (Farland, M.) 47 n.23 The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, and Wharton (Bentley, N.) 32 n.48, 220 n.15, 222 n.52, 248 n.18 Europe 8, 19, 53, 95–6, 118, 121, 150, 153–4, 158, 183–4, 189, 193–5, 199–200, 202–3, 212, 215, 224, 226–7, 239, 241, 243, 245, 247, 258, 270, 275

Index

European Local-Color Literature: National Tales, Dorfgeschichten, Romans Champetres (Donovan, J.) 221 n.42 Euryalus (Sicily) 196 euthanasia 6, 66–8, 70–6 “Euthanasia: From the Note-Book of an Alpinist” (Dickinson, G.) 66 Evans, Anne-Marie 120, 131 n.21 “Wharton’s Writings on Screen” 131 n.21 Evans, Brad 167, 175 n.13 “Relating in Henry James (The Artwork of Network)” 175 n.13 Eve of Saint Agnes (Keats, J.) 104 Evolution and Effort (Kelly, E.) 89, 259 Evron, Nir 8 The Blossom Which We Are: The Novel and the Transience of Cultural Worlds 220 n.19 “An Excess of Recompense: The Feminine Economy of The Mother’s Recompense” (Tonkovich, N.) 47 n.7 “Experience” (Wharton, E.) 230 “Expiation” (Wharton, E.) 84–5, 95 “The Exquisite Violence of The Age of Innocence” (Seitz, M.) 12 n.9 “Extinction, Taxidermy, Tableaux Vivants: Staging Race and Class in The House of Mirth” (Kassanoff, J.) 32 n.50, 49 n.62 “The Eyes” (Wharton, E.) 37 Faderman, Lillian 48 n.26 Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America 48 n.26 “Fairy-Tale Love and The Reef” (Ammons, E.) 176 n.25 fairy-tales 141, 144, 171, 184, 239; see also kunstmärchen “The Fall of the House of Marvell: Wharton’s Poesque Romance in The Custom of the Country” (Hume, B.) 248 n.11 “The Fall of the Knowledgeable Woman: The Diminished Female Healer in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” (Jurecic, A.) 79 n.81 “False Dawn” (Wharton, E.) 209, 219 n.3 A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories (Freeman, M.) 222 n.49 Farland, Maria 47 n.23 Ethan Frome and the ‘Springs’ of Masculinity 47 n.23

327

Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of Modern English Lesbian Culture (Doan, L.) 48 n.26 Fast and Loose (Wharton, E.) 274, 281 Fauset, Jessie 28–9, 33 n.74 Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral 28, 33 n.74 Faust 126, 129 A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (Wolff, C.) 3, 11 n.5, 16 n.42, 46 n.6, 47 n.11, 77 n.26 Fedorko, Kathy 45, 49 n.59 Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton 49 n.59 Felicitous Space (Fryer, J.) 48 n.29 Fellowes, Julian 2, 288 The Gilded Age 2 feminism 1, 4, 38, 43, 53, 61, 102, 107, 109, 111, 140, 149, 180, 287 “Feminism, Queer Theory, and the Racial Closet” (Somerville, S.) 49 n.63 Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton (Chambers, D.) 176 n.30 Fern, Fanny 91; see also Sara Willis Fetterley, Judith 4, 215–16, 221 nn.42, 45 Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture 221 nn.42, 45 Fictions of Dissent (Cordell, S.) 96 n.14, 97 n.37 Fielding, Henry 163, 216 Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (Wharton, E.) 275, 281 The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton (Kress, J.) 175 n.11 Film Daily 118, 123, 131 n.28 Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (eds Braudy, L.; Cohen, M.) 62 n.1 “ ‘First Shock of Complete Perception’: The Opening Episode of The Golden Bowl, Volume 2” (Cohn, D.) 176 n.17 First World War 2, 29, 103, 109–10, 155, 209, 211, 213, 224, 275 “The First Year” (Wharton, E.) 110 Fitch, Clyde 117, 272 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 24, 26–7, 32 n.58, 118, 210, 218 The Beautiful and Damned 24, 118 The Great Gatsby 27, 32 n.58 “The Rich Boy” 218

328

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen 131 n.27 “From The Children to The Marriage Playground and Back Again: Filmic Readings of Edith Wharton” 131 n.27 Flaubert, Gustave 151, 216 Fleissner, Jennifer L. 15 n.36, 144, 147 n.57, 171, 176 n.22 The Biological Clock: Edith Wharton, Naturalism, and the Temporality of Womanhood 147 n.57 “Wharton, Marriage, and the New Woman” 15 n.36, 176 n.22 Fleming, Victor (dir.) Gone with the Wind (Film) 121 Florence 88, 153, 189, 287 “La Folle du Logis” (Wharton, E.) 110 “Forms of Disembodiment: The Social Subject in The Age of Innocence” (Knights, P.) 220 n.21 “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (Bakhtin, M.) 154, 161 n.31 La Fornarina (Raphael) 105 “The Forsaken Merman” (Arnold, M.) 146 n.31 A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton (eds Colquitt, C.; Goodman, S.; Waid, C.) 13 n.21 Foucault, Michel 8, 40, 48 n.32, 195–8, 202, 205 nn.14, 25, 231, 236 n.63 Dits et Ecrits II: 1976–1988 236 n.63 “Friendship as a Way of Life” 48 n.32 “Of Other Spaces” 195, 205 nn.14, 25 Four Essays on Liberty (Berlin, I.) 222 n.57 Fra López, Patricia (ed.) Edith Wharton: Back to Compostela/ Regreso a Compostela 204 n.5 France & French 2, 5, 9, 11, 66, 73, 94, 103– 4, 110, 120, 149–51, 154–5, 159–60, 179, 181–2, 187, 194–5, 199, 203, 212, 223–6, 229–33, 239–40, 242, 244, 247, 256–8, 262–5, 269, 272–3, 275–9 France-Maroc 277 Franzen, Jonathan 16 n.52 “A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy” 16 n.52 Freedman, Jonathan 175 n.9 “What Maggie Knew: Game Theory, The Golden Bowl, and the Possibilities of Aesthetic Knowledge” 175 n.9 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins 217, 222 n.49 A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories 222 n.49

Index

“The French Offensive in Champagne (September–October, 1915)” (Recouly, R.) 282 n.8 French Revolution 211 French Ways and Their Meaning (1919) (Wharton, E.) 7–8, 149, 159, 183, 225–6, 229–31, 233, 235 n.50, 236 n.64, 276 Freud, Sigmund 25, 218–19, 222 n.58 “On Transience” 222 n.58 Totem and Taboo 218 “Friends” (Wharton, E.) 86, 90–1 “Friendship as a Way of Life” (Foucault, M.) 48 n.32 Fritzsche, Peter 215, 221 n.36 Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History 221 n.36 “From Agony to Ecstasy: The New Studies of American Sentimentality” (Hoeller, H.) 146 n.29 “From The Children to The Marriage Playground and Back Again: Filmic Readings of Edith Wharton” (Fitzpatrick, K.) 131 n.27 The Fruit of the Tree (1907) (Wharton, E.) 6, 65–8, 74–6, 76 n.4 The Fruit of the Tree e la narrativa di Edith Wharton (Mercuri, M.) 78 n.40 “The Fruit of the Tree: Justine and the Perils of Abstract Idealism” (Tuttleton, J. W.) 78 n.75 Fryer, Judith 4, 48 n.29 Felicitous Space 48 n.29 Fullerton, Morton 3, 35, 101, 103, 108, 181, 229 Problems of Power 181 “The Fulness of Life” (Wharton, E.) 86–8, 91, 97 n.44 Futurists 180 Gandhi, Mahatma 22–3, 25 Garden, Rebecca 74–5, 78 n.76, 79 n.87 “Sympathy, Disability and the Nurse: Female Power in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” 78 n.76, 79 n.87 “Gardening in France” (Wharton, E.) 274, 278 Gardening in Sunny Lands: The Riviera, California, Australia (Martineau, A.) 284 n.27 Gardiner, Eileen 262–3, 267 n.26 The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars 263, 267 n.26 Gargano, James W. 235 n.45

Index

“The Reef: The Genteel Woman’s Quest for Knowledge” 235 n.45 Garrison, Stephen 13 n.17, 274–5, 282 n.1 Edith Wharton: A Descriptive Bibliography 13 n.17, 282 nn.1, 3 Gayley, James 278 Gayley, Julia Gardiner 278 Geertz, Clifford 211–12, 220 nn.20, 23, 30 “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man” 220 nn.20, 23, 30 Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton (Fedorko, K.) 49 n.59 Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (Westphal, B.) 154, 161 n.32 Germany & German 2, 104, 201, 212, 239, 264, 273, 276 “Ghostly Presences: Edith Wharton’s Sanctuary and the Issue of Maternal Sacrifice” (Salas, A.) 145 n.3 Gibson, Mary Ellis 244, 248 n.18 “Edith Wharton and the Ethnography of Old New York” 248 n.18 Gibson, Suzie 175 n.10 “Love’s Negative Dialectic in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl” 175 n.10 The Gilded Age (Fellowes, J.) 2 Gilded Age 1, 3, 7, 11, 158, 288 Giles, Heidi 175 n.1 “Resolving the Institution of Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Courtship Novels” 175 n.1 The Glimpses of the Moon (Wharton, E.) 20, 117–18 Goblin Market (1862) (Rossetti, C.) 7, 136– 7, 139–45 The Gods Arrive (Wharton, E.) 117, 203, 270 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 103–4, 186, 195 Goldberg, Jonathan 43, 49 n.50 Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility 49 n.50 The Golden Bowl (James, H.) 7, 163–4, 166–70, 174, 175 n.7 Goldman-Price, Irene 3, 96 n.2, 97 n.22, 102– 3, 106, 108, 112 nn.7, 15–16, 20–1, 113 nn.40, 50, 59, 114 n.80, 191 n.32, 197, 202, 205 n.28, 206 n.33, 207 n.69, 221 n.40, 235 n.52, 247 n.10, 253, 266 n.1 (ed.) My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann 96 n.2, 97 n.22, 112 nn.16–17, 191 n.32, 221 n.40, 247 n.10, 266 n.1

329

(ed.) Selected Poems of Edith Wharton 102, 106, 112 nn.7, 15, 21, 113 nn.39–40, 43, 45, 50–1, 54, 59, 114 nn.61, 75–6, 78, 80, 82, 84, 205 n.28, 206 n.33, 207 n.69, 235 n.52, 236 n.65 “Young Edith Jones: Sources and Texts of Early Poems by Edith Wharton” 112 n.20 Goldsmith, Meredith 4–7, 15 n.38, 37, 62 n.6, 191 n.31, 193, 204 nn.3–4 American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity 62 n.6 (ed.) Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism 4, 15 n.38, 193, 204 n.3 “Introduction: Edith Wharton: A Citizen of the World” 191 n.31, 204 n.4 Goldsmith, Oliver 163, 215–16 The Deserted Village 215 Gómez Reus, Teresa 204 n.5 “ ‘Remember Spain!’ Edith Wharton and the Book She Never Wrote” 204 n.5 Gone with the Wind (Film) (dir. Fleming, V.) 121 Goodman, Susan 3, 13 n.21, 15 n.32, 48 n.27 Edith Wharton’s Composed Lives 15 n.32 Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals 48 n.27 (ed.) A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton 13 n.21 gothic 20, 37, 45, 91–2, 94, 104, 125, 139, 187, 270 “Gothic Borrowings and Innovations in Edith Wharton’s ‘A Bottle of Perrier” (Singley, C.) 47 n.14 Goulding, Edward (dir.) The Old Maid (1939 Film) 123 Govoni, Paola 284 n.26 “The Making of Italo Calvino: Women and Men in the ‘Two Cultures’ Home Laboratory” 284 n.26 Grand, Sarah 78 n.55, 95 The Heavenly Twins 71, 78 n.55 “The Grand Tour and After (1660–1840)” (Buzard, J.) 190 n.2 “La Grande Bretèche” (de Balzac, H.) 91 “A Granted Prayer: An Unpublished Story by Edith Wharton” (Wharton, E., ed. Whitehead, S.) 12 n.9, 281, 285 n.36 Gray, Thomas 215–16 “Elegy Written at a Country Churchyard” 215 “The Great American Novel” (Wharton, E.) 90, 98 n.72, 220 nn.18, 24

330

“The Great Blue Tent” (Wharton, E.) 109–10 The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Lovejoy, A.) 220 n.22, 221 n.32 The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, F. Scott) 27, 32 n.58 The Great Transformation (Polanyi, K.) 247 n.1 Great War see First World War The Greater Inclination (Wharton, E.) 2, 83, 87, 89–90, 259 Greece & Greek 5, 8, 86, 94, 103, 183, 188, 194–203, 214, 228 Green, Katherine Sobba 174 n.1 The Courtship Novel 1740–1820: A Feminized Genre 174 n.1 Green, Nancy L. 153, 161 n.20 The Other Americans in Paris: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880–1941 161 n.20 Greenwood, Grace 91; see also Lippincott, Sara Jane Gribben, Alan 14 n.30 “ ‘The Heart Is Insatiable’: A Selection from Edith Wharton’s Letters to Morton Fullerton, 1907–1915” 14 n.30 Griffin, Jean C. 49 n.62 “ ‘Lita Is—Jazz’: The Harlem Renaissance, Cabaret Culture, and Racial Amalgamation in Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep” 49 n.62 The Guardian 288 Guizot, François 236 n.76 Mémoires pour servir pour l’histoire de mon temps 236 n.76 Gullette, Margaret Morganroth 53, 57, 62 n.10, 63 n.36 Aged by Culture 62 n.10, 63 n.36 Gussman, Deborah 143–4, 147 n.55 “Edith Wharton’s ‘New Visions’: An Exploration of the Influence of Catherine Maria Sedgwick on Bunner Sisters and The Old Maid” 147 n.55 Haffenden, John 112 n.4 (ed.) The Letters of T. S. Eliot 112 n.4 Hall, Anne 66–7 Hamilakis, Yannis 205 n.19 The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece 205 n.19 Hanink, Johanna 200, 205 n.19, 206 n.57, 207 n.66

Index

The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity 205 n.19, 206 n.57, 207 n.66 Harlem Renaissance 20, 28–9 Harper’s Monthly Magazine 84–5, 102, 108– 9, 270 Harrison-Kahan, Lori 49 n.62 “ ‘Queer myself for good and all’: The House of Mirth and the Fictions of Lily’s Whiteness” 49 n.62 “Haunting Hysteria: Wharton, Freeman, and the Ghosts of Masculinity” (Jirousek, L.) 47 n.23 Haverford 152–3 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 86, 95, 125 “Ethan Brand” 125 The House of the Seven Gables 95 My Kinsman, Major Molinieux 95 Tanglewood Tales 86 The Wonder Book 86 Haytock, Jennifer 2, 4–5, 12 n.12, 15 n.31, 16 n.43, 29, 30 n.7, 33 nn.77, 80, 37, 46, 47 n.17, 49 n.64, 135, 176 n.23, 204 n.3, 249 n.19 Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism 176 n.23 “Edith Wharton and the Writing of Whiteness” 16 n.43, 30 n.7, 33 n.80 “Judith Wheater’s Queer Vision: Edith Wharton’s Alternative Title for The Children” 33 n.77, 47 n.17, 49 n.64 (ed.) The New Edith Wharton Studies 12 n.12, 15 n.31, 204 n.3, 249 n.19 Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan 123, 270 “ ‘The Heart Is Insatiable’: A Selection from Edith Wharton’s Letters to Morton Fullerton, 1907–1915” (Gribben, A.) 14 n.30 Heath, Stephen 232, 236 n.73 (tr.) Image, Music, Text 232, 236 n.73 The Heavenly Twins (Grand, S.) 71, 78 n.55 Heerman, Victor 120, 131 n.22 Hegeman, Susan 214, 220 n.31 The Cultural Return 220 n.31 Helle, Anita 111, 115 nn.89–90 “Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Memory” 115 nn.89–90 Hemingway, Ernest 7, 149 Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900–1915 (James, H.; Wharton, E., ed. Powers, L.) 76 n.3, 79 n.94, 190 n.3, 235 n.42

Index

“Henry James and Neuroscience: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Differences” (Armstrong, P.) 175 n.6 “Henry James’s Heiress: The Importance of Edith Wharton” (Leavis, Q.) 14 n.25 Herder, Johann Gottfried 212–13 The Hermit and the Wild Woman (Wharton, E.) 83 Herzfeld, Michael 205 n.19, 206 n.65 “The Absent Presence: Discourses of Cryptocolonialism” 205 n.19 A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town 206 n.65 heterogeneic 8, 20, 22, 197, 199, 202–3 heterosexuality 35–44, 46 heterotopic 8, 195–200, 202–3, 231 Hinnant, Amanda 96 n.10 “The Magazine Revolution, 1880–1920” 96 n.10 Hirsch, Marianne 48 n.29 The Mother/Daughter Plot 48 n.29 “His Father’s Son” (Wharton, E.) 35, 47 n.16 History of the New York Society Library (Keep, A.) 266 n.4 Hoe, Robert 256–7 Hoeller, Hildegard 4, 19, 30 n.3, 135, 140, 146 n.29 “From Agony to Ecstasy: The New Studies of American Sentimentality” 146 n.29 “Invisible Blackness in Edith Wharton’s Old New York” 30 n.3 “ ‘Hold me, Gerty, hold me’: Lily Bart’s Queer Desire” (Champion, H. J. E.) 47 nn.18–19 Hollingdale, R. J. 78 n.71 (tr.) Beyond Good and Evil 73, 78 n.71 Hollister, Susannah 114 n.87 (ed.) Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition 114 n.87 Hollywood 7, 20, 24, 117, 120 Homer 196, 198 homosexuality 6, 21, 27, 29, 36–43, 45, 145, 246 Horner, Avril 49 n.51, 52, 62 n.3 Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman 49 n.51, 62 n.3 “The House of Mirth” (Baxter, J. M.) 124, 130 n.3 The House of Mirth (2000 Film) (dir. Davies, T.) 128 The House of Mirth (1905) (Wharton, E.) 2–3, 6, 19, 22, 24, 31 n.16, 37, 51–2, 60–1, 65–6, 90, 98 n.62, 117–19, 124, 126,

331

129, 131 n.37, 151, 155–7, 196, 205 n.24, 213, 224, 231, 233, 270, 272, 274, 280, 288 The House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne, N.) 95 “How Can We Read Edith Wharton Today?” (Messud, C.) 12 nn.9–10, 289 n.16 “How Old Are You?”: Age Consciousness in American Culture (Chudacoff, H.) 62 n.2 Howard, June 161 n.29 The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time 161 n.29 Howard, Maureen 97 n.25 “Remarks on Edith Wharton’s Collected Stories” 97 n.25 Howe, Irving 14 n.25 (ed.) Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays 14 n.25 Howells, William Dean 88, 97 n.50, 118, 144 “New York Low Life in Fiction” 88, 97 n.50 Hudson, Berkley 96 n.10 “The Magazine Revolution, 1880–1920” 96 n.10 Hudson River Bracketed (Wharton, E.) 9, 117, 203, 207 n.73, 270 Hume, Beverly 212, 248 n.11 “The Fall of the House of Marvell: Wharton’s Poesque Romance in The Custom of the Country” 248 n.11 Hurst, Fannie 30 n.4 Imitation of Life 120 Hyères 262, 265, 276 Ida: A Novel (Stein, G., ed. Esdale, L.) 115 n.87 The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (Bury, J. B.) 221 n.34 Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Dijkstra, B.) 247 n.9 Il Giardino Fiorito 278 Image, Music, Text (Barthes, R., tr. Heath, S.) 232, 236 n.73 Imitation of Life (Hurst, F.) 120 “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man” (Geertz, C.) 220 nn.20, 23, 30 The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine (Landers, J.) 96 n.12 “In an Artist’s Studio” (Rossetti, C.) 145 n.6 In Morocco (Wharton, E.) 7, 179–81, 183–4, 187, 189 n.1, 190 n.12

332

In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age (Cohen, P.) 63 n.42 In the Day’s Work (Updike, D.) 264–5, 268 n.28 incest 5–6, 20–1, 23, 25–7, 36, 38–40, 42– 3, 231 Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel (Thompson, H.) 174 n.1 The Inter Oceanic 89 “Introduction: Edith Wharton: A Citizen of the World” (Goldsmith, M.; Orlando, E.) 191 n.31, 204 n.4 Invalides 152–3 “Invisible Blackness in Edith Wharton’s Old New York” (Hoeller, H.) 30 n.3 Ionian islands 188, 196, 198 “Iphigénie” (Racine, J.) 228 Ireland 159, 215 Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia (Moorehead, C.) 284 n.25 The Iron Heel (London, J.) 70 “Irreverent Intimacy: Nella Larsen’s Revisions of Edith Wharton” (Orlando, E.) 33 n.70 “Is Lily Gay?” (Joslin, K.) 37, 47 n.21 Islam 95, 184, 199 Islands of History (Sahlins, M.) 220 n.29 “ ‘It Is Either Nothing or Far More Than They Know’: Thirty Years of Wharton Studies” (Olin-Ammentorp, J.) 16 n.44 Italian Backgrounds (Wharton, E.) 7, 179–80, 183–5, 187–8, 191 n.24, 199 Italian Villas and Their Gardens (Wharton, E.) 199, 273, 278 Italy & Italian 2, 5, 20, 22, 88, 91–2, 94, 104–5, 107, 127, 158, 180, 182–8, 194, 196–7, 269, 273, 278–9 “ ‘It’s Painful to See Them Think’: Wharton, Fin de Siècle Science, and the Authentication of Female Intelligence” (Liming, S.) 98 n.60 Izmir (Turkey) 198 Izzo, Donatella 175 n.8 “Nothing Personal: Women Characters, Gender Ideology, and Literary Representation” 175 n.8 James, Henry 2, 4–5, 7, 32 n.68, 35, 38, 65, 75, 84, 96 n.8, 127, 144, 151, 163–70, 174, 175 nn.3, 7, 176 n.15, 179, 190 n.3, 209–10, 228, 243, 288 The Awkward Age 32 n.68

Index

The Golden Bowl 7, 163–4, 166–70, 174, 175 n.7 Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900–1915 76 n.3, 79 n.94, 190 n.3, 235 n.42 The Novels of George Eliot 175 n.3 The Portrait of a Lady 144 Washington Square 167, 176 n.15 The Younger Generation 96 n.8 Jane Eyre (Brontë, C.) 75 Jayne, Thomas 12 n.16 Classical Principles for Modern Design: Lessons from Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman’s The Decoration of Houses 12 n.16 Jessee, Margaret Jay 7 Jewell, Andrew 161 n.23 (ed.) The Selected Letters of Willa Cather 161 nn.23, 25, 162 nn.47, 50 Jewett, Sarah Orne 151, 217, 222 n.49 Deephaven and Other Stories 222 n.49 Jirousek, Lori 47 n.23 “Haunting Hysteria: Wharton, Freeman, and the Ghosts of Masculinity” 47 n.23 Johnson, Samuel (Dr.) 212–13 Jones, Edith (m. Wharton) 2, 103–6, 254 Jones, Frederic Rhinelander 258 Jones, George Frederic 254, 263 Jones, Mary Cadwalader (Minnie) 20, 157, 255, 258, 275, 278 Joslin, Katherine 6, 14 n.25, 37, 47 n.21, 204 n.3 Edith Wharton 14 n.25 “Is Lily Gay?” 37, 47 n.21 (ed.) “Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe” 204 n.3 The Journal of the Ex Libris Society 264 “A Journey” (Wharton, E.) 88, 90, 98 nn.66, 68 Joyce, James 263 Ulysses 203, 263 Judaism 19–21, 24, 89, 95, 120, 183, 197–8 Judeo-Christian 214 “Judith Wheater’s Queer Vision: Edith Wharton’s Alternative Title for The Children” (Haytock, J.) 33 n.77, 47 n.17, 49 n.64 Jung, Daun 140–1, 147 nn.32, 39 “A Subversive or Utopian Fairy Tale? Re-reading Goblin Market as a Quest for Female Self ” 147 nn.32, 39 Jurecic, Ann 74, 79 n.81

Index

“The Fall of the Knowledgeable Woman: The Diminished Female Healer in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” 79 n.81 Justice to Edith Wharton (Wilson, E.) 13 n.25, 99 n.96 Kansas City 154 Kant, Immanuel 212 Kaplan, Amy 4, 84, 96 n.5, 218, 222 n.55 “Edith Wharton’s Profession of Authorship” 96 n.5 “Nation, Region, Empire” 222 n.55 Karn, Jill Kress 7, 175 n.4 “William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism” 175 n.4 Karyes (Turkey) 199 Kassanoff, Jennie 4, 19, 25, 30 n.2, 32 n.50, 49 n.62, 76 n.19, 210, 220 n.14, 248 n.18, 249 nn.20, 25 “Corporate Thinking: Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” 76 n.19 Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race 4, 19, 30 n.2, 220 n.14, 248 n.18, 249 n.25 “Extinction, Taxidermy, Tableaux Vivants: Staging Race and Class in The House of Mirth” 32 n.50, 49 n.62 Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction (Beer, J.) 98 n.73 Katz, Stephen 57, 63 n.38 Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge 63 n.38 Kaye, Richard 37, 43, 47 n.16, 49 n.46 “Edith Wharton and the ‘New Gomorrahs’ of Paris” 47 n.16, 49 n.46 Kazin, Alfred 3, 13 n.24 On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature 13 n.24 Keats, John 104, 107, 230 Eve of Saint Agnes 104 “Ode on Melancholy” 230 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” 107 Keep, Austin Baxter 266 n.4 History of the New York Society Library 266 n.4 Kellogg, Grace 66, 76 n.6 The Two Lives of Edith Wharton: The Woman and Her Work 76 n.6 Kelly, Alice 4, 281, 285 n.36 (ed.) “Coming Home” 281

333

“An Unknown First World War Story by Edith Wharton” 285 n.36 Kelly, Edmond 89, 259 Evolution and Effort 89, 259 Kelly, Hillary 12 n.9 “ ‘The Age of Innocence’ at a Moment of Increased Appetite for Eating the Rich” 12 n.9 “Kerfol” (Wharton, E.) 88, 92 Killoran, Helen 3, 13 nn.17, 22, 204 n.10 The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton 13 nn.17, 22 Edith Wharton: Art and Illusion 204 n.10 Kim, Sharon 96 n.20 “Lamarckism and the Construction of Transcendence in The House of Mirth” 96 n.20 The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893– 1896 (Slote, B.) 161 n.10, 162 n.34 Kingsley, Ben 126 Knights, Pamela 3, 14 n.27, 176 n.21, 211–12, 220 n.21 The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton 14 n.27 “Forms of Disembodiment: The Social Subject in The Age of Innocence” 220 n.21 “The Marriage Market” 176 n.21 Kowaleski-Wallace, Beth 243, 249 n.21 “The Reader as Misogynist in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country” 249 n.21 Kress, Jill M. 175 n.11 The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton 175 n.11 Kuhn, Hartmann (Mrs.) 66 kunstmärchen 239–41; see also fairy-tales Ladies’ Home Journal 270 “A Lady Who Defies Time” (Van Vechten, C.) 32 n.70 “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” (Wharton, E.) 88, 90, 92, 98 n.69, 124–5 Laird, Pamela 237–8, 247 nn.2, 5 Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin 247 nn.2, 5 “Lamarckism and the Construction of Transcendence in The House of Mirth” (Kim, S.) 96 n.20 “The Lamp of Psyche” (Wharton, E.) 85–7, 93, 96 n.18, 98 n.90 Landers, James 96 n.12

334

The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine 96 n.12 Land’s End (Wharton House) 262–5 Language and Gender in American Fiction (Nettels, E.) 7 Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (Yeazell, R. B.) 176 n.14 Lapsley, Gaillard 20, 66, 271 Larsen, Nella 7, 28–9, 33 nn.72, 78 Passing 29, 33 n.78 Quicksand 28, 33 n.72 Lasansky, D. Medina 191 n.34 “Beyond the Guidebook: Edith Wharton’s Rediscovery of San Vivaldo” 191 n.34 Lasky, Julie 13 n.16 “Appreciating Edith Wharton’s Other Career” 13 n.16 “The Last Giustiniani” (Wharton, E.) 83, 109 The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (Cooper, J.) 218, 222 n.53 The Last of the Race (Stafford, F.) 221 nn.33, 35 The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (Santayana, G.) 234 n.2 The Last Token (Wharton, E.) 105 “Latomia dei Cappucini” (Wharton, E.) 197, 202 Lauer, Kristin O. 13 n.17, 160 n.7 Edith Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography 13 n.17 (ed.) Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews 13 nn.17, 23, 160 n.7 Laugel, Auguste 257 Lavaux 255 Lawrence, Harry 201 Lawson, Richard H. 78 n.69 “Edith Wharton and German Literature” 78 n.69 Learning to Be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging (Cruikshank, M.) 63 n.33 Leaves of Grass (Whitman, W.) 83, 110 Leavis, Q. D. 14 n.25 “Henry James’s Heiress: The Importance of Edith Wharton” 14 n.25 Lectures on Literature (Nabokov, V.) 232, 236 n.71 Lee, Hermione 3, 12 n.11, 30 n.4, 66, 76 n.10, 97 nn.26, 28, 99 n.109, 153, 161 n.24, 162 n.41, 182, 191 n.23, 204 n.8, 210, 220 nn.11, 14, 235 n.48, 255, 266 n.5, 281, 282 n.4, 287, 288 n.9 Edith Wharton 3, 12 n.11, 30 n.4, 76 n.10, 97 nn.26, 28, 99 n.109, 162 n.41, 191

Index

n.23, 204 n.8, 220 nn.11, 14, 235 n.48, 266 n.5, 282 n.4, 288 n.9 Willa Cather: Double Lives 161 n.24 Lee, Vernon 88, 262 Louis Norbert 267 n.25 Leighton, John 268 n.27 Book-Plates, Ancient and Modern, with Examples 268 n.27 Lenox 66, 159, 253, 255, 259, 274 Leontis, Artemis 200, 205 n.19, 206 n.52 Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland 205 n.19, 206 n.52 The Leopard (di Lampedusa, G.) 218 Lesage, Claudine 12 n.15 Edith Wharton in France 12 n.15 lesbianism 6, 23, 27, 37, 39, 42–3 “Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Memory” (Helle, A.) 115 n.89–90 “The Letter” (Wharton, E.) 83 The Letters of Edith Wharton (Wharton, E., eds Lewis, N.; Lewis, R. W. B.) 12 n.14, 14 n.29, 16 n.48, 32 n.49, 76 n.9, 96 n.21, 97 nn.23, 30, 59, 98 n.79, 130 n.1, 161 n.27, 162 n.46, 204 n.1, 231, 236 nn.59, 67, 75 The Letters of T. S. Eliot (Eliot, T., eds Eliot, V.; Haffenden, J.) 112 n.4 Levine, Jessica 176 n.28 Delicate Pursuit: Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton 176 n.28 Lewis, Cara 169, 176 n.18 Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism 176 n.18 Lewis, Nancy 3, 12 n.14, 14 n.29, 16 n.48, 32 n.49, 76 n.9, 96 n.21, 97 nn.23, 30, 59, 98 n.79, 130 n.1, 204 n.1, 236 n.59 (ed.) The Letters of Edith Wharton 12 n.14, 14 n.29, 16 n.48, 32 n.49, 76 n.9, 96 n.21, 97 nn.23, 30, 59, 98 n.79, 130 n.1, 161 n.27, 162 n.46, 204 n.1, 231, 236 nn.59, 67, 75 Lewis, R. W. B. 3, 12 n.14, 14 n.29, 16 n.48, 32 n.49, 76 nn.7, 9, 96 n.21, 97 nn.23, 30, 59, 98 n.79, 111, 114 n.83, 130 n.1, 162 n.48, 204 n.1, 220 n.10, 236 nn.59, 61, 270 (ed.) The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton 270 Edith Wharton: A Biography 76 n.7, 162 n.48, 220 n.10, 221 n.41, 236 n.61

Index

(ed.) The Letters of Edith Wharton 12 n.14, 14 n.29, 16 n.48, 32 n.49, 76 n.9, 96 n.21, 97 nn.23, 30, 59, 98 n.79, 130 n.1, 161 n.27, 162 n.46, 204 n.1, 231, 236 nn.59, 67, 75 (ed.) Short Stories of Edith Wharton, 1910–1937 114 n.83 The Library of Robert Hoe: A Contribution to the History of Bibliophilism in America (Bierstadt, O. A.) 256, 259, 266 n.10, 267 n.12 Liebert, Gaston 276 “Life” (Wharton, E.) 107–9, 230 “Life and I” (Wharton, E.) 108, 112 n.22, 113 n.24, 114 n.74, 161 n.22, 274 “ ‘The Life Apart’: Text and Contexts of Edith Wharton’s Love Diary” (Price, K.; McBride, P.) 235 n.51 Liming, Sheila 8–9, 52, 62 n.4, 89, 98 n.60, 267 nn.22, 24, 274 “ ‘It’s Painful to See Them Think’: Wharton, Fin de Siècle Science, and the Authentication of Female Intelligence” 98 n.60 “Suffer the Little Vixens: Sex and Realist Terror in ‘Jazz Age’ America” 62 n.4 What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books 267 nn.22, 24 “The Limits of Cosmopolitan Experience in Wharton’s The Buccaneers” (Dawson, M.) 16 n.55, 191 n.31 Lindos 188, 199, 203 “Lines on Chaucer” (Wharton, E.) 104 Link, Frederick 161 n.14 (ed.) Lucy Gayheart 151–3, 161 nn.14, 16, 19 Linky (dog) 11 Lippincott, Sara Jane 91; see also Greenwood, Grace Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 83, 85 “ ‘Lita Is—Jazz’: The Harlem Renaissance, Cabaret Culture, and Racial Amalgamation in Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep” (Griffin, J.) 49 n.62 Literary Digest 102 “Literary Influences” (Saunders, J.) 204 n.10 “A Little Girl’s New York” (Wharton, E.) 11 n.3, 220 n.28 The Little Minister (Barrie, J. M.) 120 Little Women (Alcott, L.) 120 Locke, John 212

335

London 88, 94, 101, 105, 108, 126, 158, 264 London Blitz 253, 264 London, Jack 70 The Iron Heel 70 “The Looking Glass” (Wharton, E.) 52 Lortic (Lortig) 255–7, 259 Lortic, Marcellin 256–7 “Lost Lands: Metaphors of Sexual Awakening in Edith Wharton’s Poetry, 1908–1909” (Bancroft, C.) 235 n.53 The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature (eds Davidson, C.; Broner, E.) 46 n.6 Louis Norbert (Lee, V.) 267 n.25 Louvre 243 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 212, 220 n.22, 221 n.32 The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea 220 n.22, 221 n.32 “Love’s Negative Dialectic in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl” (Gibson, S.) 175 n.10 Lubbock, Percy 4, 14 n.25, 15 n.35, 16 n.47, 46 n.3, 235 n.42 Portrait of Edith Wharton 14 n.25, 15 n.35, 16 n.47, 46 n.3, 235 n.42 Lucrezia Buonvisi Remembers (Wharton, E.) 107 “Lucrezia Buonvisi’s Lover (Dying at Viareggio)” (Wharton, E.) 107 Lucy Gayheart (Cather, W., eds Porter, D.; Ronning, K.; Link, F.) 151–3, 161 nn.14, 16, 19 Lyautey, Hubert (General) 181 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth, W.; Coleridge, S., ed. Owen, W. J. B.) 232, 236 n.68 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Wilson, A.) 160 McBride, Phyllis 229, 235 n.51 “ ‘The Life Apart’: Text and Contexts of Edith Wharton’s Love Diary” 235 n.51 McCabe, James 97 n.53 New York by Sunlight and Gaslight 97 n.53 McCullough, Joseph 162 n.49 (ed.) Cosmopolitan Twain 162 n.49 McManis, Jo Agnew 145 n.3 “Edith Wharton’s Hymns to Respectability” 145 n.3 Macmillan 83–4, 108, 270 Macpherson, James 215–16 “McTeague and American Naturalism” (Pizer, D.) 146 n.20 Madame de Treymes and Others: Four Short Novels (Wharton, E.) 124

336

Madden, John (dir.) Ethan Frome (1993 Film) 126 “The Magazine Revolution, 1880–1920” (Hinnant, A.; Hudson, B.) 96 n.10 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane, S.) 88–9 Magnificent Obsession (Douglas, L.) 120 “Make It Short: Edith Wharton’s Modernist Practices in Her Short Stories” (Whitehead, S.) 98 nn.63, 65 “The Making of Italo Calvino: Women and Men in the ‘Two Cultures’ Home Laboratory” (Govoni, P.) 284 n.26 “The Making of ‘The Deserted Village” (Miner, E.) 221 n.37 Malcolm, Janet 15 n.37 “The Woman Who Hated Women” 15 n.37 Malta 95, 185, 196 The Manchester Guardian 108 Manifesto of the Communist Party (Engels, F.; Marx, K.) 249 n.26 Manon Lescaut (Prévost, A.) 273 Mansfield Park (Austen, J.) 75 “Mapping Wharton’s World” 279 March, Fredric 122, 129 Marchand, Mary 74, 79 n.85 “Death to Lady Bountiful: Woman and Reform in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” 79 n.85 “Margaret” (Wharton, E.) 109 Margaret of Cortona 109 Mark Twain Project 270, 279 Marketing Marianne: French Propaganda in America, 1900–1940 (Young, R.) 282 n.10 “Marrakech” (Orwell, G.) 191 n.18 “The Marriage Market” (Knights, P.) 176 n.21 The Marriage Playground (Film) (dir. Mendes, L.) 117, 121–2 Marshall, Scott 117, 130 n.1 “Edith Wharton on Film and Television” 130 n.1 “Martin Scorsese Interviewed” (Scorsese, M.) 131 n.38, 132 n.40 Martineau, Alice (Mrs. Philip) 278, 284 n.27 Gardening in Sunny Lands: The Riviera, California, Australia 284 n.27 Marx, Karl 246, 249 n.26 Manifesto of the Communist Party 249 n.26 masochism 7, 135–6, 139–41, 145 The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Noble, M.) 147 n.34 Mason, Sarah Y. 120, 131 n.22

Index

Massachusetts 5, 65, 159, 223, 253, 255, 274 The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage (Thomason, L.) 174 n.1 The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus 199 “May Marian” (Wharton, E.) 105–6 Mayflower (Ship) 225, 229 “Medical Testing: Nursing, Sympathy, and Moral Code in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” (Slatus, K.) 76 n.15, 79 n.93 Medici Society of London 110 Mehta, Sage “Edith Wharton Invented Kim Kardashian” 16 n.49 melodrama 6, 20, 36, 43, 46, 105, 135–6, 139, 143–5, 168 Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility (Goldberg, J.) 49 n.50 Mémoires pour servir pour l’histoire de mon temps (Guizot, F.) 236 n.76 Mendelman, Lisa 210, 220 nn.13, 17 Modern Sentimentalism 220 n.13 Sentimentalism 220 n.17 Mendes, Lothar 121 (dir.) The Marriage Playground (Film) 117, 121–2 Mercier, Vivian 14 n.25 “Whose Edith? A review of Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time, by Louis Auchincloss” 14 n.25 Mercuri, Maria-Novella 6, 77 n.23, 78 n.40 “Edith Wharton’s relationship to German literature: A study in creative affinity” 77 n.23 The Fruit of the Tree e la narrativa di Edith Wharton 78 n.40 mermaids & mermen 8, 239–42, 244–7 Merpeople: A Human History (Scribner, V.) 247 n.8 Messud, Claire 5, 12 nn.9–10, 288, 289 n.16 “How Can We Read Edith Wharton Today?” 12 nn.9–10, 289 n.16 Metropolitan Museum of Art 121, 156, 280–1 Meyer, George 180 Michaud, Régis 228, 235 n.42 “Le Roman aux États-Unis: Mrs Wharton— L’Écueil” 235 n.42 Midwest 150, 155, 157–8, 203, 239 Mignon, Charles 161 n.15 (ed.) My Ántonia 150, 152, 161 n.15

Index

Milan (Italy) 186 Miller, Cristanne 114 n.86 (ed.) Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them 114 n.86 Miner, Earl 221 n.37 “The Making of ‘The Deserted Village” 221 n.37 “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Gazing in Edith Wharton’s ‘Looking Glass,’ ” (Sweeney, S.) 62 n.4 Miskowiec, Jay 205 n.14 (tr.) “Of Other Spaces” 195, 205 nn.14, 25 Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics (Calotychos, V.) 206 n.60 Modern Painters (Ruskin, J.) 88 Modern Sentimentalism (Mendelman, L.) 220 n.13 “Modernist Maneuverings in the Marriage Plot: Breaking Ideologies of Gender and Genre in James’s The Golden Bowl” (Boone, J.) 175 n.3 Moeller, Philip 131 n.22 (dir.) The Age of Innocence (1934 Film) 118, 120, 131 n.22 Moffatt, Elmer 243, 287 Montagu, Mary Wortley (Lady) 186 Monte Carlo 60–1, 128 Montefiascone 180 Montenegro 185, 196 Moore, Marianne 6, 111 Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924 114 n.87 New Collected Poems 114 n.87 Moorehead, Caroline 284 n.25 Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia 284 n.25 Morocco 2, 5, 181, 183–4, 187, 277 Morrison, Toni 21, 30 n.8, 45, 49 n.61 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination 21, 30 n.8, 49 n.61 “The Mortal Lease” (Wharton, E.) 108, 230 Moseley, Ann 162 n.43 (ed.) The Song of the Lark 157, 162 n.43 The Mother/Daughter Plot (Hirsch, M.) 48 n.29 “Mothers, Daughters, and Incest in the Late Novels of Edith Wharton” (Tintner, A.) 46 n.6 The Mother’s Recompense (Wharton, E.) 6, 20, 35–6, 38–9, 43–6, 48 nn.28, 30, 33, 49 nn.52, 60, 62, 65, 52 The Motion Picture Herald 123, 131 n.28

337

A Motor-Flight through France (Wharton, E., ed. Schriber, M.) 7, 179–81, 185, 187, 189 n.1, 190 n.10, 281 de la Motte Fouqué, Friedrich Heinrich Karl 239–41, 248 nn.14, 18 Undine 239–41, 248 nn.14, 18 The Mount 5, 8, 66, 159, 253–4, 258–61, 263–6, 274, 287–8 Mount Athos 188, 196, 198–9, 203 “The Moving Finger” (Wharton, E.) 6, 52, 54, 58–9, 61, 63 nn.16, 23, 35, 40, 43, 83, 94 Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing (Smith, S.) 190 n.7, 191 n.20 “Mrs. Edith Wharton Expresses Her Views on Traveling in France” (Article in Le Voyageur en France) 283 n.16 Mrs. Lloyd (Reynolds, J.) 128 “Mrs. Manstey’s View” (Wharton, E.) 83–7, 89, 97 nn.33, 39, 41 “Mrs. Wharton and Some Others” (Rascoe, B.) 118, 130 n.9 Mulvey, Laura 52, 62 n.1 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” 62 n.1 Murray, Margaret 13 n.17, 160 n.7, 188 Edith Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography 13 n.17 (ed.) Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews 13 nn.17, 23, 160 n.7 “The Muse’s Tragedy” (Wharton, E.) 84, 94, 96 n.9, 145 n.6 Musto, Ronald G. 262–3, 267 n.26 The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars 263, 267 n.26 My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann (Wharton, E., ed. Goldman-Price, I.) 96 n.2, 97 n.22, 112 n.16–17, 191 n.32, 221 n.40, 247 n.10, 266 n.1 My Kinsman, Major Molinieux (Hawthorne, N.) 95 My Ladys Soul: The Poems of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (Siddall, E., ed. Trowbridge, S.) 114 n.86 “My Last Duchess” (Browning, R.) 91–2, 105 My Mortal Enemy (Cather, W.) 155 My Ántonia (Cather, W., eds Mignon, C.; Ronning, K.; Woodress, J.) 150, 152, 161 n.15 “The Myth of Imperiled Whiteness and Ethan Frome” (Ammons, E.) 30 n.3

338

Nabokov, Vladimir 232, 236 n.71 Lectures on Literature 232, 236 n.71 Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Roulston, C.) 174 n.1 Nathaniel P. Willis (Auser, C.) 98 n.78 The Nation 28, 76 The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (Hamilakis, Y.) 205 n.19 “Nation, Region, Empire” (Kaplan, A.) 222 n.55 Native American 120, 217–18 nativism 9, 19 Nazimova, Alla 24 Nebraska 150–3, 155, 158–9 Nettels, Elsa 7 Language and Gender in American Fiction 7 Nevius, Blake 76 n.18, 104, 113 n.25 Edith Wharton: A Critical Interpretation 76 n.18 ‘Pussie’ Jones’s Verses: A Bibliographical Note on Edith Wharton 113 n.25 New Collected Poems (Moore, M., ed. White, H.) 114 n.87 The New Edith Wharton Studies (eds Haytock, J.; Rattray, L.) 12 n.12, 15 n.31, 204 n.3, 249 n.19 New England 1, 90, 125, 217, 224–5, 270 “The New Frenchwoman” (Wharton, E.) 235 n.46 “New Novels: The Fruit of the Tree by Edith Wharton” (Article in The Atheneum) 76 n.16 “The New Woman, Progressivism and the Woman Writer in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” (Dupree, E.) 79 n.84 “New Women, New Men, Or What You Will in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” (Tavares, T.) 77 n.24 “New Year’s Day” (Wharton, E.) 155 New York 1–2, 6, 20–3, 60, 66, 87–9, 108, 120, 124, 129, 142, 150, 152–7, 159–60, 196, 217, 219, 223–4, 226–7, 245, 254, 256, 270, 276, 278 New York by Sunlight and Gaslight (McCabe, J.) 97 n.53 The New York Herald 275 “New York Low Life in Fiction” (Howells, W. D.) 88, 97 n.50 New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals 2, 66 New York Society Library 254–5

Index

The New York Sun 2 The New York Times 2, 5, 110, 275, 288 The New York World 83, 105 The New Yorker 2 The New-York Tribune 118 Newport 103, 150, 254, 262–3, 275, 278 Newton, Charles Thomas 188, 199 Nietzsche, Friedrich 67–9, 73, 77 n.25, 78 n.70–2 Beyond Good and Evil 73, 78 n.71 On the Genealogy of Morals 67, 73, 77 n.25, 78 nn.70, 72 No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (Benstock, S.) 3, 76 n.12, 235 nn.47, 49, 282 n.4 Noble, Marianne 140, 147 n.34 The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature 147 n.34 Norris, Frank 144, 148 n.58 A Plea for Romantic Fiction 148 n.58 North Africa 181, 184, 193, 196–7 “The Northwind” (Wharton, E.) 107 Norton, Charles Eliot 4, 67, 140 “An Appeal to Reason As Well As Compassion” 67 Norton, Robert 201 Norton, Sally 66 Norton, Sara 8, 87, 193 Not in Sisterhood (Williams, D.) 7 “Nothing Personal: Women Characters, Gender Ideology, and Literary Representation” (Izzo, D.) 175 n.8 “The Novel Démeublé” (Cather, W.) 151, 160 n.8, 161 n.12 The Novels of George Eliot (James, H.) 175 n.3 Nowlin, Michael 183, 191 n.28 “Edith Wharton’s Higher Provincialism: French Ways for Americans and the Ends of The Age of Innocence” 191 n.28 O Pioneers! (Cather, W.) 158 Obiter Scripta (Santayana, G.) 266 “ ‘Objects Long Preserved’: Reading and Writing the Shop Window in Edith Wharton’s ‘Bunner Sisters’ ” (Totten, G.) 146 n.20 occultism 170, 240–1, 244 O’Connell, Lisa 174 n.1 The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century 174 n.1

Index

O’Connor, Margaret Anne 160 n.6 Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews 160 n.6 “October in Newport” (Wharton, E.) 107 Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (Faderman, L.) 48 n.26 “Ode on Melancholy” (Keats, J.) 230 Oeuvres (Racine, J.) 258 “Les Oeuvres de Mme Lyautey au Maroc” (Wharton, E., tr. Wills, L.) 277, 283 n.17 “Of Other Spaces” (Foucault, M., tr. Miskowiec, J.) 195, 205 nn.14, 25 Ohler, Paul J. 6, 15 n.31 Olalquiaga, Celeste 239, 241, 247 n.7, 248 n.17 The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience 247 n.7, 248 n.17 “The Old Maid” (Wharton, E.) 124 The Old Maid (1939 Film) (dir. Goulding, E.) 123 “Old Maids” (Sedgwick, C. M.) 143–4 Old New York (1924) (Wharton, E.) 217, 272 Old New York 19, 68, 129, 135, 151–2, 209– 11, 213, 224, 226, 278, 281 “The Older Sister” (Stevens, R.) 124 Olfek, Galia 147 n.48 Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture 147 n.48 Olin-Ammentorp, Julie 7, 15 n.37, 16 n.44, 110, 112 n.10, 114 nn.72, 76, 79, 81 Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture 161 n.21, 162 n.44 Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War 112 n.10, 114 nn.72, 76, 79, 81 “ ‘It Is Either Nothing or Far More Than They Know’: Thirty Years of Wharton Studies” 16 n.44 “On Ethnographic Allegory” (Clifford, J.) 221 n.39 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (Keats, J.) 107 On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (Kazin, A.) 13 n.24 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche, F., tr. Smith, D.) 67, 73, 77 n.25, 78 nn.70, 72 On the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke, E.) 234 n.1 “On Transience” (Freud, S.) 222 n.58 “ ‘One Long Vision of Beauty’: Edith Wharton and Italian Visual Culture,” (Orlando, E.) 191 n.24, 204 n.7

339

“Only a Child” (Wharton, E.) 83, 105–6 “Opportunities” (Wharton, E.) 104 Or San Michele 88 Orientalism 8, 22–3, 40–1, 95, 182–4, 197–8, 203 Les Origines de la France contemporaine (Taine, H.) 233, 236 n.78 The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century (O’Connell, L.) 174 n.1 Origo, Iris 278 Orlando, Emily J. 4, 7, 15 n.38, 16 n.49, 28, 33 n.70, 37, 47 n.12, 54–5, 62 n.13, 63 nn.14, 22, 96 n.15, 128, 131 n.35, 136, 145 n.5, 191 nn.24, 26, 31, 193, 204 nn.3–4, 7 (ed.) Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism 4, 15 n.38, 193, 204 n.3 “Edith Wharton and the New Narcissism” 16 n.49 Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts 62 n.13, 63 nn.14, 22, 131 n.35, 136, 145 n.5, 191 n.26 “Introduction: Edith Wharton: A Citizen of the World” 191 n.31, 204 n.4 “Irreverent Intimacy: Nella Larsen’s Revisions of Edith Wharton” 33 n.70 “ ‘One Long Vision of Beauty’: Edith Wharton and Italian Visual Culture,” 191 n.24, 204 n.7 “ ‘Perilous Coquetry’: Oscar Wilde’s Influence on Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman” 96 n.15 “The ‘Queer Shadow’ of Ogden Codman in Edith Wharton’s Summer” 47 n.12 Orlando: A Biography (Woolf, V.) 206 n.37 Orwell, George 191 n.18 “Marrakech” 191 n.18 Osprey (Ship) 8, 194, 201 “Osprey” Notes 194, 201, 205 n.11 The Other Americans in Paris: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880–1941 (Green, N. L.) 161 n.20 Ottoman Empire 194–5, 198–9, 201 Oubli-sur-Mer 203 Our America: Nativism, Modernism, Pluralism (Benn Michaels, W.) 30 n.5 “Our Literary Aristocrat” (Parrington, V.) 15 n.34, 20, 160 n.4 Owen, W. J. B. 236 n.68 (ed.) Lyrical Ballads 232, 236 n.68

340

Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) 269, 279 Oxford University Press 9, 102, 269, 271–2, 279, 281 Palermo 182 Palmer, Tony (dir.) The Children (1990 Film) 126 Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (Richardson, S.) 163 pandemic 1, 7, 29 Papke, Mary E. 139, 146 n.22 (ed.) Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism 139, 146 n.22 Paris 28, 66, 73, 88, 127, 152–3, 158, 160, 223–4, 226–8, 257, 264, 276–7, 279 Parrington, Vernon 4, 15 n.34, 20, 150, 158, 160 n.4 “Our Literary Aristocrat” 15 n.34, 20, 160 n.4 Parthenon 197, 200, 203 Pascal, Blaise 72, 226 Passing (Larsen, N.) 29, 33 n.78 Passionate Politics: The Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present (Poole, R.) 148 n.61 Passion’s Way (Film) (dir. Ackerman, R.) 126–7 Past Continuous (Shabtai, Y.) 218 Pater, Walter 233, 236 n.74 Studies in the History of the Renaissance 233, 236 n.74 Patterns of Culture (Benedict, R.) 218 Patterson, Martha 249 n.23 Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915 249 n.23 “Paul’s Case” (Cather, W.) 155–6 Pavillon Colombe (Wharton House) 262, 264–5 Payne, E. F. J. 77 n.29 (tr.) The World as Will and Representation 68, 77 n.29 Peel, Robin 4, 176 n.26 “Vulgarity, Bohemia, and Edith Wharton’s The Reef” 176 n.26 Peloponnese 201 Pennsylvania 5, 278 “ ‘Perilous Coquetry’: Oscar Wilde’s Influence on Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman” (Orlando, E.) 96 n.15

Index

Perkins, Michael 288 n.6 “The Age of Elegance” 288 n.6 Phèdre (Racine, J.) 257 The Phenomenology of Henry James (Armstrong, P.) 175 n.5 Philadelphia 28, 106 Phillips, Kevin 249 n.24 Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich 249 n.24 The Pictorial Review 118 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde, O.) 83 Picture-Play Magazine 117 Piketty, Thomas 3, 249 n.27 Capital in the Twenty-First Century 249 n.27 Pizer, Donald 4, 87, 97 n.38, 146 n.21 “McTeague and American Naturalism” 146 n.20 Realism and Naturalism in NineteenthCentury American Fiction 97 n.38 A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town (Herzfeld, M.) 206 n.65 Plath, Sylvia 6, 109, 111, 114 n.86 Ariel 111 Ariel: The Restored Edition 111, 114 n.86 Plato 212, 214 Republic 214 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Morrison, T.) 21, 30 n.8, 49 n.61 A Plea for Romantic Fiction (Norris, F.) 148 n.58 Plots and Proposals: American Women’s Fiction, 1850–90 (Tracey, K.) 174 n.1 Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (Fauset, J.) 28, 33 n.74 Poe, Edgar Allan 125 The Poetry of Edith Wharton (Sencourt, R.) 112 nn.1, 6 Polanyi, Karl 8, 237–8, 247 n.1 The Great Transformation 247 n.1 “Pomegranate Seed” (Wharton, E.) 114 n.83, 124 Poole, Ralph J. 144, 148 n.61 Passionate Politics: The Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present 148 n.61 “Pop Culture of My Life: Roxane Gay on Vanderpump Rules and Edith Wharton” (Biedenharn, I.) 12 n.9 Port, Cynthia 53, 61, 62 n.8, 64 n.59

341

Index

“ ‘Ages Are the Stuff!’: The Traffic in Ages in Interwar Britain” 62 n.8, 64 n.59 The Portable Edith Wharton (Wharton, E.) 16 n.46 Porter, David 161 n.14 (ed.) Lucy Gayheart 151–3, 161 nn.14, 16, 19 “The Portrait” (Wharton, E.) 85 The Portrait of a Lady (James, H.) 144 Portrait of Edith Wharton (Lubbock, P.) 14 n.25, 15 n.35, 16 n.47, 46 n.3, 235 n.42 Powers, Lyall H. 3, 76 n.3, 79 n.94, 190 n.3, 235 n.42 (ed.) Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900–1915 76 n.3, 79 n.94, 190 n.3, 235 n.42 Pre-Raphaelite 104, 128, 136–7 Prévost, Antoine François Manon Lescaut 273 Price, Alan 14 n.31, 204 n.3, 275–6 The End of the Age of Innocence 14 n.31 (ed.) “Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe” 204 n.3 Price, Kenneth M. 229, 235 n.51 “ ‘The Life Apart’: Text and Contexts of Edith Wharton’s Love Diary” 235 n.51 The Princess (Tennyson, A.) 103 Problems of Power (Fullerton, M.) 181 Project Gutenberg 271 “Protagonism in The Reef: Wharton’s Novelistic Discourse” (DeShong, S.) 176 n.26 Proust, Marcel 38, 226, 232–3, 234 n.27, 236 n.77, 260 À la recherche du temps perdu 232, 260 Sodome et Gomorrhe 233, 234 n.27, 236 n.77 Prouty, Olive Higgins Stella Dallas 120 Provence 199 Pryse, Marjorie 215–16, 221 nn.42, 45 Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture 221 nn.42, 45 Pulitzer Prize 1, 123, 217, 270 Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin (Laird, P.) 247 nn.2, 5 Pure Water Move 240–1, 243–5, 247 ‘Pussie’ Jones’s Verses: A Bibliographical Note on Edith Wharton (Nevius, B.) 113 n.25 Pygmalion 55, 107 Pyramids 203

Pythagoreans 214 Quain, Julie 259–60 queer 6, 20, 35–46, 140, 247 “ ‘Queer myself for good and all’: The House of Mirth and the Fictions of Lily’s Whiteness” (Harrison-Kahan, L.) 49 n.62 “The ‘Queer Shadow’ of Ogden Codman in Edith Wharton’s Summer” (Orlando, E.) 47 n.12 “The Quicksand” (Wharton, E.) 85, 96 n.13 Quicksand (Larsen, N.) 28, 33 n.72 Quinn, Alice 115 n.88 (ed.) Edgar Allan Poe & the Jukebox: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments 115 n.88 Rabat 181, 183–4 Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (AbuLughod, J.) 283 n.19 “ ‘Rabid Imperialist’: Edith Wharton and the Obligations of Empire in Modern American Fiction” (Wegener, F.) 190 nn.13, 15 Racine, Jean 228, 256–9 “Iphigénie” 228 Oeuvres 258 Phèdre 257 racism 4–5, 9, 19–29, 45–6, 101, 109, 123, 127, 182, 198, 211 The Radetzky March (Roth, J.) 218 “Raffaelle to the Fornarina” (Wharton, E.) 105, 108 Ramsden, George 259, 267 n.20 Edith Wharton’s Library 259, 267 n.20 Raphael 105 La Fornarina 105 Rascoe, Burton 118, 130 n.9 “An Entomologist of Society” 130 n.9 “Mrs. Wharton and Some Others” 118, 130 n.9 Rattray, Laura 2–4, 12 n.12, 13 n.19, 14 n.28, 15 nn.31, 37, 39, 16 n.54, 67, 76 n.1, 77 nn.20, 22, 95, 102–3, 105, 107–9, 111, 112 nn.4, 9, 11, 13–14, 113 nn.30, 44, 52, 57, 60, 114 nn.69, 71, 77, 130 n.2, 159, 161 n.22, 162 nn.41, 52, 176 n.29, 179, 185, 190 n.6, 191 n.33, 204 nn.3, 10, 230–1, 235 n.55, 236 n.62, 249 n.19, 281, 285 n.35, 287, 288 n.5 Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction 13 n.19, 15 n.37, 76 n.1, 77 n.22, 102, 112

342

nn.4, 9, 11, 13–14, 113 nn.30, 44, 52, 57, 60, 114 nn.69, 71, 77, 130 n.2, 162 nn.41, 52, 190 n.6, 191 n.33, 231, 235 n.55, 236 n.62 (ed.) Edith Wharton in Context 14 n.28, 204 n.10, 288 n.5 “Edith Wharton’s Unprivileged Lives” 162 n.52 (ed.) The New Edith Wharton Studies 12 n.12, 15 n.31, 204 n.3, 249 n.19 (ed.) “The Shadow of a Doubt: A Play in Three Acts, by Edith Wharton” 77 n.21, 285 n.35 “The Shadow of a Doubt: Discovering a New Work by Edith Wharton” 77 n.20 (ed.) The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton 15 n.39, 16 n.54, 281 Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture (ed. Tziovas, D.) 205 nn.18–19 “Re-inventing Colonialism: Race and Gender in Edith Wharton’s In Morocco” (Segalia, S.) 190 n.17 “The Reader as Misogynist in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country” (KowaleskiWallace, B.) 249 n.21 “Reading and Readers in Edith Wharton’s Short Fiction” (Berbinau-Dezalay, A.) 98 n.71 Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Pizer, D.) 97 n.38 “The Reckoning” (Wharton, E.) 83, 85, 88, 90, 92, 94, 98 n.67, 99 n.97 “Reclaiming Sentimentalism in Edith Wharton’s Summer” (Bannett, N.) 146 n.14 “A Reconsideration of Proust” (Wharton, E.) 232, 236 n.69 Recouly, Raymond 275–6, 282 n.8 “The French Offensive in Champagne (September–October, 1915)” 282 n.8 “The Recovery” (Wharton, E.) 96 Red Cloud 153, 159 The Reef (Wharton, E.) 13 n.23, 43, 126–7, 163, 170–4, 227–30, 235 nn.42–3 “The Reef: The Genteel Woman’s Quest for Knowledge” (Gargano, J.) 235 n.45 “Relating in Henry James (The Artwork of Network)” (Evans, B.) 175 n.13 “Remarks on Edith Wharton’s Collected Stories” (Howard, M.) 97 n.25 “The Rembrandt” (Wharton, E.) 84, 89, 95, 97 n.57

Index

“ ‘Remember Spain!’ Edith Wharton and the Book She Never Wrote” (Gómez Reus, T.) 204 n.5 Renaissance 3, 92, 94, 105, 107, 184, 258 Renaissance in Italy (Symonds, J.) 91 “Renunciation” (Wharton, E.) 107 Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (Olfek, G.) 147 n.48 Republic (Plato) 214 “Resolving the Institution of Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Courtship Novels” (Giles, H.) 175 n.1 Reter, Rayna (ed.) Toward an Anthropology of Women 32 n.49 “Review of The Fruit of the Tree” (Article in The Nation) 79 n.95 Revue des deux Mondes 91 Reynolds, Joshua 128 Mrs. Lloyd 128 Rhode Island 150, 254, 262–3 Ricard, Virginia 4, 8, 92, 98 n.87, 194, 204 n.6, 234 n.3, 249 n.19, 281, 285 n.36 (tr.) “America at War: Edith Wharton on the National Character in 1918” 285 n.36 (tr.) “America at War: Explaining the National Character in 1918” 8, 223, 233, 234 nn.3, 6 (tr.) L’Amérique en guerre 281 “Edith Wharton’s French Engagement” 204 n.6, 234 n.5, 249 n.19 (ed.) “The Short Stories of Edith Wharton” 98 n.87 Rich, Adrienne 48 n.29 “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” 48 n.29 “The Rich Boy” (Fitzgerald, F. Scott) 218 Richard Wright: The Life and Times (Rowley, H.) 162 nn.55–6 Richardson, Samuel 163, 216 Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady 163–4 Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded 163 “The Rise of a National Book Trade System in the United States” (Winship, M.) 267 n.14 Robbins, Bruce 183, 191 n.29, 238, 247 n.3 “Comparative Cosmopolitanism” 191 n.29 Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State 247 n.3 Robin Hood (Film 1922) (dir. Dwan, A.) 118 “Le Roman aux États-Unis: Mrs Wharton— L’Écueil” (Michaud, R.) 235 n.42

Index

Roman empire 213 “Roman Fever” (Wharton, E.) 124 romance 36, 60, 104–5, 107, 110, 122–3, 127, 135–6, 139, 142, 144, 152, 158, 170, 184, 197, 200, 212, 227, 229, 239–41 Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction (Schaffer, T.) 174 n.1 Rome (Italy) 158, 180, 184, 278 Ronning, Kari 161 nn.14–15, 162 n.43 (ed.) Lucy Gayheart 151–3, 161 nn.14, 16, 19 (ed.) My Ántonia 150, 152, 161 n.15 (ed.) The Song of the Lark 157, 162 n.43 Roosevelt, Theodore 110, 120, 158, 288 “A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy” (Franzen, J.) 16 n.52 “The Rose” (Wharton, E.) 107 Ross, Marlon 43, 49 nn.48, 63 “Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm” 49 nn.48, 63 Rossetti, Christina 5, 7, 103, 136–45, 145 nn.1, 6, 146 nn.6, 11, 18, 147 nn.42, 49, 51 Goblin Market (1862) 7, 136–7, 139–45 “In an Artist’s Studio” 145 n.6 “Who Shall Deliver Me?” 146 n.6 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 103, 127, 136 Roth, Joseph 218 The Radetzky March 218 Roth, Philip 218 American Pastoral 218 Roulston, Chris 174 n.1 Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France 174 n.1 Rovère, Maxime 231, 235 n.58, 236 n.60 (tr.) Beatrice Palmato: Fragment érotique et autres textes 8, 48 n.29, 235 n.58, 236 n.60 Rowley, Hazel 162 nn.55–6 Richard Wright: The Life and Times 162 nn.55–6 Rubin, Gayle 25, 32 n.49, 48 n.29 “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” 32 n.49, 48 n.29 Ruskin, John 88 Modern Painters 88 The Stones of Venice 88 Russia & Russian 24, 121, 123, 151, 198, 210 Ryan, Ann 162 n.49 (ed.) Cosmopolitan Twain 162 n.49

343

Saal, Ilka 144, 148 n.61 Sahlins, Marshall 213, 220 n.29 Islands of History 220 n.29 St. Louis (America) 138 Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt 262, 265 Sainte-Claire-du-Château (Wharton House) 262, 265, 276, 278 Salas, Angela M. 145 n.3 “Ghostly Presences: Edith Wharton’s Sanctuary and the Issue of Maternal Sacrifice” 145 n.3 Salem 95, 125 “Les Salettes” (Wharton, E.) 110 Salome (Wilde, O.) 24 San Francisco 287 San Vivaldo 188–9 Sanctuary (Wharton, E.) 71, 78 n.56, 135 Santayana, George 101, 223, 234 n.2, 266 The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel 234 n.2 Obiter Scripta 266 “Sapphics” (Wharton, E.) 107 Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Cather, W.) 159 The Saturday Evening Post 118, 270 Saturday Review of Literature 232 Saunders, Judith P. 204 n.10 “Literary Influences” 204 n.10 Sawaya, Francesca 8, 247 n.4 The Difficult Art of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market 247 n.4 Schaffer, Talia 174 n.1 Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction 174 n.1 Schaffner, Franklin J. (dir.) “The Touchstone” (1951 TV Show) 124 Schopenhauer, Arthur 67–70, 77 n.29 The World as Will and Representation 68, 77 n.29 Schriber, Mary Suzanne 189 n.1, 190 n.10 (ed.) A Motor-Flight through France 7, 179–81, 185, 187, 189 n.1, 190 n.10, 281 Schulze, Robin 114 n.87 (ed.) Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924 114 n.87 Schumpeter, Joseph 219, 222 n.57 Schwartz, Tony 287, 288 nn.1, 4 Trump: The Art of the Deal 288 nn.1, 4 scopophilia 39, 41, 52, 59 Scorsese, Martin 129, 131 n.38, 132 nn.40–1

344

(dir.) The Age of Innocence (1993 Film) 126, 129 “Martin Scorsese Interviewed” 131 n.38, 132 n.40 Scotland 232–3 Scott, Walter 215–18 Waverley 215–16 Scribner, Charles 270, 275 Scribner, Vaughn 239, 247 n.8 Merpeople: A Human History 247 n.8 Scribner’s Magazine 83–9, 91, 102, 108, 270, 275, 280 Sedgwick, Catherine Maria 143–4 “Old Maids” 143–4 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 35, 37–8, 44, 46 n.2, 47 n.24 Epistemology of the Closet 46 n.2, 47 n.24 Segal, Alex (dir.) “Ethan Frome” (1960 TV adaptation) 124 Segalia, Spencer D. 190 n.17 “Re-inventing Colonialism: Race and Gender in Edith Wharton’s In Morocco” 190 n.17 Seitz, Matt Zoller 12 n.9 “The Exquisite Violence of The Age of Innocence” 12 n.9 The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (Cather, W., eds Jewell, A.; Stout, J.) 161 nn.23, 25, 162 nn.47, 50 Selected Poems of Edith Wharton (Wharton, E., ed. Goldman-Price, I.) 102, 106, 112 nn.7, 15, 21, 113 nn.39–40, 43, 45, 50–1, 54, 59, 114 nn.61, 75–6, 78, 80, 82, 84, 205 n.28, 206 n.33, 207 n.69, 235 n.52, 236 n.65 self-sacrifice 7, 26, 135–7, 140–2, 144–5, 233 Sencourt, Robert 101–2, 112 nn.1, 4, 6 The Poetry of Edith Wharton 112 nn.1, 6 Senni, Giulio 278 Senni, Mary Gayley (Countess Senni) 277–8 Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (Tompkins, J.) 139, 146 n.28 Sensibar, Judith 37, 47 n.15 “Edith Wharton Reads the Bachelor Type: Her Critique of Modernism’s Representative Man” 47 n.15 sentimentalism 4, 7, 20, 71, 74–5, 85, 90–1, 96, 109, 135–6, 138–45, 173, 187, 232, 246 Sentimentalism (Mendelman, L.) 220 n.17 Setina, Emily 6, 114 n.87

Index

(ed.) Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition 114 n.87 sexism 57, 107, 111 The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton (Erlich, G.) 48 n.27 sexuality 5–6, 10, 22–5, 35–46, 52, 54, 60–1, 70, 90–1, 109, 118, 120, 122–3, 125–8, 130, 136–43, 163, 165–6, 171, 173, 225, 228–31, 240–3 Shabtai, Yaakov 218 Past Continuous 218 The Shadow of a Doubt (1901 Play) (Wharton, E.) 6, 67, 70, 95, 281 “The Shadow of a Doubt: A Play in Three Acts, by Edith Wharton” (eds Rattray, L.; Chinery, M.) 77 n.21, 285 n.35 “The Shadow of a Doubt: Discovering a New Work by Edith Wharton” (Chinery, M.; Rattray, L.) 77 n.20 Shaffer-Koros, Carole 9 “Wharton Studies: A Backward and Forward Glance” 9 Shakespeare and Company Project 279 Shakespeare, William 103, 163, 230 “Shaping Modern Bodies: Edith Wharton on Weight, Dieting, and Visual Media” (Toth, M.) 31 n.36, 62 n.4 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 107, 200, 206 n.51 “Athens” 206 n.51 Shingler, Martin 124, 131 n.30 Bette Davis 131 n.30 “The Short Stories of Edith Wharton” (ed. Ricard, V.) 98 n.87 Short Stories of Edith Wharton, 1910–1937 (Wharton, E., ed. Lewis, R. W. B.) 114 n.83 Showalter, Elaine 4, 9 Sicherman, Barbara 247 n.10 Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women 247 n.10 Sicily 183, 196 Siddall, Elizabeth 6 My Ladys Soul: The Poems of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall 114 n.86 Sikov, Ed 131 n.29 Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis 131 n.29 Singley, Carol J. 9, 15 n.40, 37, 47 n.14, 204 n.10, 220 n.27, 271–2 Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit 15 n.40, 204 n.10 (ed.) Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: A Casebook 220 n.27

Index

“Gothic Borrowings and Innovations in Edith Wharton’s ‘A Bottle of Perrier” 47 n.14 Slatus, Keri 76 n.15, 79 n.93 “Medical Testing: Nursing, Sympathy, and Moral Code in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” 76 n.15, 79 n.93 Slote, Bernice 161 n.10, 162 n.34 The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893– 1896 161 n.10, 162 n.34 Smith, Douglas 77 n.25 (tr.) On the Genealogy of Morals 67, 73, 77 n.25, 78 nn.70, 72 Smith, Logan Pearsall 201 Smith, Sidonie 190 n.7, 191 n.20 Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing 190 n.7, 191 n.20 Smyrna (Agean Ports) 95, 183, 196, 198, 203 “ ‘So as Not to Arrive’: The Object-Theater of Late Jamesian Consciousness” (Cui, L.) 176 n.16 Sodome et Gomorrhe (Proust, M.) 233, 234 n.27, 236 n.77 “Some Notes on Mrs. Lloyd, Mrs. Lloyd, and Lily Bart” (Erben, M.) 131 n.36 “Some Stories of the Month” (Boynton, H.) 13 n.23 “Some Woman to Some Man” (Wharton, E.) 105 Somerville, Siobhan 49 n.63 “Feminism, Queer Theory, and the Racial Closet” 49 n.63 A Son at the Front (Wharton, E.) 154, 162 n.35 “Song [Come, for the leaf is alight]” (Wharton, E.) 107 “Song [Mirth of life’s blooming time]” (Wharton, E.) 107 The Song of the Lark (Cather, W., eds Moseley, A.; Ronning, K.) 157, 162 n.43 “The Sonnet” (Wharton, E.) 83 Sorel, Edward 149–50, 160 n.3 “Souls Belated” (Wharton, E.) 2, 13 n.18, 85, 93–4, 231 “The Southwind” (Wharton, E.) 107 Spain 2, 180 Spalato (Adriatic ports) 188 “The Spark” (Wharton, E.) 2, 47 n.16 The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Warf, B.; Arias, S.) 154, 162 n.33 The Spectator 275 Spinoza, Baruch 212

345

Stafford, Fiona 214, 221 nn.33, 35 The Last of the Race 221 nn.33, 35 “Stage Adaptations of Wharton’s Fiction” (Anderson, J.) 130 n.17 Stahl, John M. (dir.) Back Street (Film) 120 Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition (Stein, G., eds Hollister, S.; Setina, E.) 114 n.87 Stein, Gertrude 6, 111, 114 n.87 Ida: A Novel 115 n.87 Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition 114 n.87 Stella Dallas (Prouty, O.) 120 Stendhal 91; see also Beyle, Marie-Henri Chroniques italiennes 91 The Duchess of Palliano 107 “La Duchesse de Palliano” 91 Stevens, Robert “The Older Sister” 124 The Stones of Venice (Ruskin, J.) 88 Stout, Janis 159–60, 161 n.23, 162 n.54 Cather among the Moderns 159, 162 n.54 (ed.) The Selected Letters of Willa Cather 161 nn.23, 25, 162 nn.47, 50 Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Fritzsche, P.) 221 n.36 Strange Wives (Film) (dir. Thorpe, R.) 123, 131 n.28 Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Pater, W.) 233, 236 n.74 The Study and Criticism of Italian Art (Berenson, B.) 231, 236 n.66 “A Subversive or Utopian Fairy Tale? Re-reading Goblin Market as a Quest for Female Self ” (Jung, D.) 147 nn.32, 39 “Suffer the Little Vixens: Sex and Realist Terror in ‘Jazz Age’ America” (Liming, S.) 62 n.4 Summer (1917) (Wharton, E.) 10, 37, 66, 117, 124, 128, 135, 138, 159, 217, 270 Swann, Thomas Burnett 146 n.31 Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossetti 146 n.31 Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth 52, 62 n.4 “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Gazing in Edith Wharton’s ‘Looking Glass’ ” 62 n.4 Swift, Jonathan 260–1 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 103–4, 107 Cor Cordium 107 The Symbolic Weekly Review 89 Symonds, J. A. 88, 91

346

Renaissance in Italy 91 sympathy 6, 22, 37, 58, 68–70, 74–6, 93, 138, 218 “Sympathy, Disability and the Nurse: Female Power in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” (Garden, R.) 78 n.76, 79 n.87 Taine, Hippolyte 233, 236 n.78 Les Origines de la France contemporaine 233, 236 n.78 Tales and Novels (Edgeworth, M.) 221 n.40 Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910) (Wharton, E.) 257 de Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice 233 Tally, Robert T. 154, 161 n.32 Tanglewood Tales (Hawthorne, N.) 86 Taormina (Sicily) 183 Tavares, Teresa 77 n.24 “New Women, New Men, Or What You Will in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” 77 n.24 “Telling a Short Story” (Wharton, E.) 92 Telling Tales: The Impact of Germany on English Children’s Books, 1780–1918 (Blamires, D.) 247 n.10 Tennyson, Alfred 103 The Princess 103 “Terminus” (Wharton, E.) 101, 109, 112 n.5, 230 “Terza Rima” (Wharton, E.) 107 “That Good May Come” (Wharton, E.) 85–6, 88–9, 97 nn.51, 54 The Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen, T.) 218 Thinking in Henry James (Cameron, S.) 175 n.12 “Thirty Years of Wharton Studies” (Waid, C.) 12 n.13 Thomas, Frances 147 n.33 Christina Rossetti: A Biography 147 n.33 Thomason, Laura 174 n.1 The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage 174 n.1 Thompson, Helen 174 n.1 Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel 174 n.1 Thomson, Ellen Mazur 257, 267 nn.15, 18 “Aesthetic Issues in Book Cover Design 1880–1910” 267 nn.7, 18 Thorpe, Richard (dir.) Strange Wives (Film) 123, 131 n.28 The Times Literary Supplement 281

Index

Tintner, Adeline 46 n.6 “Mothers, Daughters, and Incest in the Late Novels of Edith Wharton” 46 n.6 Tirano 186 “To Form a More Imperfect Union: Gender, Tradition and the Text in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree” (Carlin, D.) 77 n.24 Tóibín, Colm 288 Tollentino, Jia 288 n.7 “What Edith Wharton Knew a Century Ago” 288 n.7 Tolstoy, Leo 151, 216 “The Tomb of Ilaria Giunigi” (Wharton, E.) 104, 108 Tompkins, Jane 139, 146 n.28 Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 139, 146 n.28 Tonkovich, Nicole 36, 47 n.7 “An Excess of Recompense: The Feminine Economy of The Mother’s Recompense” 47 n.7 Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (Leontis, A.) 205 n.19, 206 n.52 Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Tuan, Y.) 154 Totem and Taboo (Freud, S.) 218 Toth, Margaret 31 n.36, 52, 62 n.4, 120, 130 n.20 “Edith Wharton’s Prose Spectacle in the Age of Cinema” 130 n.20 “Shaping Modern Bodies: Edith Wharton on Weight, Dieting, and Visual Media” 31 n.36, 62 n.4 Totten, Gary 4, 7, 146 n.20, 190 n.11, 191 nn.19, 21, 26, 30 “Afterword: Edith Wharton and the Promise of Cosmopolitanism” 191 n.30 “The Dialectic of History and Technology in Wharton’s A Motor-Flight through France” 190 n.11, 191 nn.19, 21 “ ‘Objects Long Preserved’: Reading and Writing the Shop Window in Edith Wharton’s ‘Bunner Sisters’ ” 146 n.20 “Women, Art, and the Natural World in Edith Wharton’s Works” 191 n.26 The Touchstone (Wharton, E.) 16 n.51 “The Touchstone” (1951 TV Show) (dir. Schaffner, F.) 124

Index

Toward an Anthropology of Women (ed. Reter, R.) 32 n.49 Towheed, Shafquat 3, 96 n.6, 247 n.6 (ed.) The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–1930 96 n.6, 247 n.6 Town Topics: The Journal of Society 87 Tracey, Karen 174 n.1 Plots and Proposals: American Women’s Fiction, 1850–90 174 n.1 Trading Up (Bushnell, C.) 287 “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (Rubin, G.) 32 n.49, 48 n.29 Traherne, Thomas 271 “A Vision” 107, 271 “Travelling in France” (Wharton, E.) 276–7 Trowbridge, Serena 114 n.86 (ed.) My Ladys Soul: The Poems of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall 114 n.86 Trump, Donald 9, 287, 288 nn.1, 4 Trump: The Art of the Deal 288 nn.1, 4 Trump: The Art of the Deal (Trump, D.; Schwartz, T.) 288 nn.1, 4 “The Tryst” (Wharton, E.) 109–10 Tuan, Yu-Fu 154 Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values 154 Tunis 95, 182–3, 196 Tuttleton, James W. 13 nn.17, 23, 74, 78 n.75, 160 n.7, 220 n.12 (ed.) Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews 13 nn.17, 23, 160 n.7 “The Fruit of the Tree: Justine and the Perils of Abstract Idealism” 78 n.75 Twelve Poems (Wharton, E.) 102, 110 “The Twilight of the God” (Wharton, E.) 95 Twilight Sleep (1927) (Wharton, E.) 9, 20–1, 24–5, 27–9, 30 n.6, 31 n.33, 117, 209, 280 Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism (ed. Papke, M. E.) 139, 146 n.22 The Two Lives of Edith Wharton: The Woman and Her Work (Kellogg, G.) 76 n.6 Tyler, William Royal 264 Tziovas, Dimitris 205 nn.18–19 (ed.) Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture 205 nn.18–19 Ulysses (Joyce, J.) 203, 263 Undine (de la Motte Fouqué, F.) 239–41, 248 nn.14, 18

347

The United States as World Power (Coolidge, A.) 181 United States of America see America “An Unknown First World War Story by Edith Wharton” (Kelly, A.) 285 n.36 The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton (ed. Rattray, L.) 15 n.39, 16 n.54, 281 Updike, Daniel Berkeley 264–5, 268 n.28 In the Day’s Work 264–5, 268 n.28 Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State (Robbins, B.) 247 n.3 Valéry, Paul 213, 220 n.25 “Disillusionment” 220 n.25 “The Valley of Childish Things, and Other Emblems” (Wharton, E.) 86, 97 n.27 Van Alen, James 94, 182, 188, 196 Van Degen, Peter 242–3 Van Vechten, Carl 28, 32 n.70 “A Lady Who Defies Time” 32 n.70 Vanadis (Ship) 8, 94–5, 182, 189, 196–9, 201–2, 205 nn.20, 26, 206 nn.32, 34, 38, 55, 58, 61, 207 n.67 Vanity Fair 149 Variety 118, 123, 131 n.28 Veblen, Thorstein The Theory of the Leisure Class 218 Vendler, Helen 111, 112 n.15, 115 n.88 “The Art of Losing” 112 n.15, 115 n.88 “A Venetian Night’s Entertainment” (Wharton, E.) 95, 99 n.105 Venice 95 Verses (Wharton, E.) 102–6, 112 n.23, 113 nn.27–8, 31 Vespers (Wharton, E.) 104 Vida, Vendela 287 We Run the Tides 287 “La Viol(e) d’Amour” (Wharton, E.) 104 Virginia 150, 153, 159, 224 The Virginian (Wister, O.) 158 “Visibility in Fiction” (Wharton, E.) 161 n.10 “A Vision” (Traherne, T.) 107, 271 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Mulvey, L.) 62 n.1 Viterbo (Italy) 180 Vogue 287–8 Le Voyageur en France 276, 283 n.16 “Vulgarity, Bohemia, and Edith Wharton’s The Reef” (Peel, R.) 176 n.26

348

W.E.B. DuBois’s Family Crisis (English, D.) 33 n.73 Wagner, Johanna 37, 47 n.18 “The Conventional and the Queer: Lily Bart, an Unlivable Ideal” 47 n.18 Wagner-Martin, Linda 16 n.46, 176 n.29 “Wharton and the Romance Plot” 176 n.29 Waid, Candace 4, 12 n.13, 13 n.21, 48 n.27, 204 n.10, 220 n.4 Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing 48 n.27, 204 n.10 (ed.) A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton 13 n.21 “Thirty Years of Wharton Studies” 12 n.13 Walt Whitman Archive 270, 279 Warf, Barney 154, 162 n.33 The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives 154, 162 n.33 Washington, DC 245, 260 Washington Square (James, H.) 167, 176 n.15 Washington Square 155–6, 160 WASP 210–11 Watteau, Jean-Antoine 128, 183 Ceres 128 Waverley (Scott, W.) 215–16 We Run the Tides (Vida, V.) 287 Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (Phillips, K.) 249 n.24 Wegener, Frederick 9, 181, 190 nn.13, 15, 270–1, 275, 282 n.4, 283 n.17 “Edith Wharton on French Colonial Charities for Women: An Unknown Travel Essay” 283 n.17 (ed.) Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings 98 n.72, 220 nn.18, 28, 270, 282 nn.4–5 “ ‘Rabid Imperialist’: Edith Wharton and the Obligations of Empire in Modern American Fiction” 190 nn.13, 15 Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women (Sicherman, B.) 247 n.10 Wentzel, Rocki 204 n.10 “Classical Reception in Edith Wharton’s Late Fiction” 204 n.10 Western culture 8, 35, 89, 95, 181, 183, 194–7, 200–1, 203, 265 Western USA 7, 120, 150, 155, 157–9 Westphal, Bertrand 154, 161 n.32 Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces 154, 161 n.32

Index

“Wharton and the Age of Film” (Cahir, L. C.) 130 n.20 “Wharton and the Romance Plot” (WagnerMartin, L.) 176 n.29 Wharton, Edith “Afterward” 125 The Age of Innocence (1920) 1, 3–4, 8–9, 11, 19, 29, 52, 87, 117–18, 123, 127, 129, 131 n.6, 132 n.39, 136, 143, 150–2, 155–6, 160, 162 n.39, 183, 196, 209, 211, 217, 219, 224, 226, 229, 231, 233, 234 n.26, 270, 272, 274, 281, 288 “All Saints” 110 “All Souls” 110 “L’Âme close” 229 “America at War: Edith Wharton on the National Character in 1918” 285 n.36 “America at War: Explaining the National Character in 1918” 8, 223, 233, 234 nn.3, 6 L’Amérique en guerre 281 “The Angel at the Grave” 86, 95 “April Showers” 85, 90–1, 98 n.74 “Artemis to Actæon” 109, 230 Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse 102–3, 108–10, 230 A Backward Glance (1934) 3, 8, 11, 180–1, 209, 217, 256, 270, 277 “Battle Sleep” 109–10 “The ‘Beata Beatrix’ of Rossetti” 107 “Beatrice Palmato” 230–1 Beatrice Palmato: Fragment érotique et autres textes 8, 48 n.29, 235 n.58, 236 n.60 “Beaulieu Wood” 107 “Beauty” 107, 271 “Belgium” 109 Bettine to Goethe 104 “Bewitched” 125, 131 n.31 The Book of the Homeless (Le Livre des Sansfoyer) 11, 16 n.59, 110, 264, 276 “Bread Upon the Waters” 123 “Browning in the Abbey” 107 The Buccaneers 126–7, 131 n.33, 183, 274, 281 Bunner Sisters 7, 86, 89, 129, 135–9, 141–5 Bunner Sisters, Madame de Treymes and Three Novels 145 n.2 “Charm Incorporated” 123 “Chartres” 104 Chez les heureux du monde 224 The Children (1928) 6, 10, 20, 29, 37, 46, 51–2, 61–2, 64 n.57, 121, 209, 220 n.5, 270

Index

The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton 270 “Coming Home” 281 “Confession” 124 “The Confessional” 83 The Constable Edith Wharton 270 “Copy” 85, 95 “A Coward” 94, 99 n.100 Crucial Instances 83, 89, 91 The Cruise of the Vanadis 7, 94, 99 nn.99, 102, 179–80, 182–3, 188, 189 n.1, 194–5, 197–8, 200, 202, 205 nn.11, 21, 274 “A Cup of Cold Water” 88, 93, 98 nn.89, 91 The Custom of the Country (1913) 2, 5, 8–9, 12 n.10, 37, 127, 155, 157, 196, 209, 219 n.2, 233, 237–8, 240–1, 270, 274, 280, 287–8, 288 n.3 “Cynthia” 107 “Dactylics” 107, 202 “The Dead Wife” 107, 110 “Death” 107 The Decoration of Houses 2, 5, 16 n.53, 35, 46 n.4, 85, 255, 264–5, 266 n.8, 273, 275 “The Descent of Man” 85–6 The Descent of Man and Other Stories 83, 89 “The Duchess at Prayer” 91–4, 98 n.80 Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888–1920 204 n.11 Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings 48 n.28, 219 nn.1, 3 Edith Wharton: Selected Poems 102, 111, 112 n.7, 115 n.91 Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings 98 n.72, 220 nn.18, 28, 270, 282 nn.4–5 “Elegy” 110 Eternal Passion in English Poetry 102 Ethan Frome (1911) 1, 6, 19, 66, 73, 123, 135, 217, 257, 270, 272, 274 “Experience” 230 “Expiation” 84–5, 95 “The Eyes” 37 “False Dawn” 209, 219 n.3 Fast and Loose 274, 281 Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort 275, 281 “The First Year” 110 “La Folle du Logis” 110 French Ways and Their Meaning (1919) 7–8, 149, 159, 183, 225–6, 229–31, 233, 235 n.50, 236 n.64, 276 “Friends” 86, 90–1

349

The Fruit of the Tree (1907) 6, 65–8, 74–6, 76 n.4 “The Fulness of Life” 86–8, 91, 97 n.44 “Gardening in France” 274, 278 The Glimpses of the Moon 20, 117–18 The Gods Arrive 117, 203, 270 “A Granted Prayer: An Unpublished Story by Edith Wharton” 12 n.9, 281, 285 n.36 “The Great American Novel” 90, 98 n.72, 220 nn.18, 24 “The Great Blue Tent” 109–10 The Greater Inclination 2, 83, 87, 89– 90, 259 Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900–1915 76 n.3, 79 n.94, 190 n.3, 235 n.42 The Hermit and the Wild Woman 83 “His Father’s Son” 35, 47 n.16 The House of Mirth (1905) 2–3, 6, 19, 22, 24, 31 n.16, 37, 51–2, 60–1, 65–6, 90, 98 n.62, 117–19, 124, 126, 129, 131 n.37, 151, 155–7, 196, 205 n.24, 213, 224, 231, 233, 270, 272, 274, 280, 288 Hudson River Bracketed 9, 117, 203, 207 n.73, 270 In Morocco 7, 179–81, 183–4, 187, 189 n.1, 190 n.12 Italian Backgrounds 7, 179–80, 183–5, 187– 8, 191 n.24, 199 Italian Villas and Their Gardens 199, 273, 278 “A Journey” 88, 90, 98 nn.66, 68 “Kerfol” 88, 92 “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” 88, 90, 92, 98 n.69, 124–5 “The Lamp of Psyche” 85–7, 93, 96 n.18, 98 n.90 “The Last Giustiniani” 83, 109 The Last Token 105 “Latomia dei Cappucini” 197, 202 “The Letter” 83 The Letters of Edith Wharton 12 n.14, 14 n.29, 16 n.48, 32 n.49, 76 n.9, 96 n.21, 97 n.23, nn.30, 59, 98 n.79, 130 n.1, 161 n.27, 162 n.46, 204 n.1, 231, 236 nn.59, 67, 75 “Life” 107–9, 230 “Life and I” 108, 112 n.22, 113 n.24, 114 n.74, 161 n.22, 274 “Lines on Chaucer” 104 “A Little Girl’s New York” 11 n.3, 220 n.28 “The Looking Glass” 52

350

Lucrezia Buonvisi Remembers 107 “Lucrezia Buonvisi’s Lover (Dying at Viareggio)” 107 Madame de Treymes and Others: Four Short Novels 124 “Margaret” 109 “May Marian” 105–6 “The Mortal Lease” 108, 230 The Mother’s Recompense 6, 20, 35–6, 38–9, 43–6, 48 nn.28, 30, 33, 49 nn.52, 60, 62, 65, 52 A Motor-Flight through France 7, 179–81, 185, 187, 189 n.1, 190 n.10, 281 “The Moving Finger” 6, 52, 54, 58–9, 61, 63 nn.16, 23, 35, 40, 43, 83, 94 “Mrs. Manstey’s View” 83–7, 89, 97 nn.33, 39, 41 “The Muse’s Tragedy” 84, 94, 96 n.9, 145 n.6 My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann 96 n.2, 97 n.22, 112 nn.16–17, 191 n.32, 221 n.40, 247 n.10, 266 n.1 “The New Frenchwoman” 235 n.46 “New Year’s Day” 155 “The Northwind” 107 “October in Newport” 107 “Les Oeuvres de Mme Lyautey au Maroc” 277, 283 n.17 “The Old Maid” 124 Old New York (1924) 217, 272 “Only a Child” 83, 105–6 “Opportunities” 104 “Pomegranate Seed” 114 n.83, 124 The Portable Edith Wharton 16 n.46 “The Portrait” 85 “The Quicksand” 85, 96 n.13 “Raffaelle to the Fornarina” 105, 108 “The Reckoning” 83, 85, 88, 90, 92, 94, 98 n.67, 99 n.97 “A Reconsideration of Proust” 232, 236 n.69 “The Recovery” 96 The Reef 13 n.23, 43, 126–7, 163, 170–4, 227–30, 235 nn.42–3 “The Rembrandt” 84, 89, 95, 97 n.57 “Renunciation” 107 “Roman Fever” 124 “The Rose” 107 “Les Salettes” 110 Sanctuary 71, 78 n.56, 135 “Sapphics” 107 Selected Poems of Edith Wharton 102, 106, 112 nn.7, 15, 21, 113 nn.39–40, 43, 45,

Index

50–1, 54, 59, 114 nn.61, 75–6, 78, 80, 82, 84, 205 n.28, 206 n.33, 207 n.69, 235 n.52, 236 n.65 The Shadow of a Doubt (1901 Play) 6, 67, 70, 95, 281 Short Stories of Edith Wharton, 1910–1937 114 n.83 “Some Woman to Some Man” 105 A Son at the Front 154, 162 n.35 “Song [Come, for the leaf is alight]” 107 “Song [Mirth of life’s blooming time]” 107 “The Sonnet” 83 “Souls Belated” 2, 13 n.18, 85, 93–4, 231 “The Southwind” 107 “The Spark” 2, 47 n.16 Summer (1917) 10, 37, 66, 117, 124, 128, 135, 138, 159, 217, 270 Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910) 257 “Telling a Short Story” 92 “Terminus” 101, 109, 112 n.5, 230 “Terza Rima” 107 “That Good May Come” 85–6, 88–9, 97 nn.51, 54 “The Tomb of Ilaria Giunigi” 104, 108 The Touchstone 16 n.51 “Travelling in France” 276–7 “The Tryst” 109–10 Twelve Poems 102, 110 “The Twilight of the God” 95 Twilight Sleep (1927) 9, 20–1, 24–5, 27–9, 30 n.6, 31 n.33, 117, 209, 280 “The Valley of Childish Things, and Other Emblems” 86, 97 n.27 “A Venetian Night’s Entertainment” 95, 99 n.105 Verses 102–6, 112 n.23, 113 nn.27–8, 31 Vespers 104 “La Viol(e) d’Amour” 104 “Visibility in Fiction” 161 n.10 “What We Shall Say Fifty Years Hence, of Our Fancy-Dress Quadrille (Danced at Swanhurst, August 8th, 1878)” 104 “With the Tide” 110 “A Woman I Know” 104–5 The Writing of Fiction 35–6, 46 nn.1, 5, 90, 92, 96 n.3, 98 nn.64, 70, 85, 88, 151, 160 n.8, 161 n.9, 175 n.2, 233, 236 n.79, 271–2, 274 “You and You” 110 Wharton, Edward (Teddy) 180, 182, 184, 188, 196, 263

Index

“Wharton, Marriage, and the New Woman” (Fleissner, J. L.) 15 n.36, 176 n.22 “Wharton, Sex, and the Terrible Honesty of the 1920s” (Dawson, M.) 49 n.51 “Wharton Studies: A Backward and Forward Glance” (Shaffer-Koros, C.) 9 “Wharton, Travel, and Modernity” (Bentley, N.) 191 n.27 “Wharton’s Evolving Craft” 279–81 “Wharton’s Writings on Screen” (Evans, A.) 131 n.21 What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books (Liming, S.) 267 nn.22, 24 “What Edith Wharton Knew a Century Ago” (Tollentino, J.) 288 n.7 What Every Woman Knows (Barrie, J. M.) 118 “What Maggie Knew: Game Theory, The Golden Bowl, and the Possibilities of Aesthetic Knowledge” (Freedman, J.) 175 n.9 “What We Shall Say Fifty Years Hence, of Our Fancy-Dress Quadrille (Danced at Swanhurst, August 8th, 1878)” (Wharton, E.) 104 White, Alfred 179, 190 n.4 White, Barbara 54, 56, 63 nn.15, 32 Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction 63 nn.15, 32 White, Heather Cass 114 n.87 (ed.) New Collected Poems 114 n.87 Whitehead, Sarah 12 nn.9, 12, 90, 97 n.43, 98 nn.63, 65, 204 n.10, 281, 285 n.36 “The Business of the Magazine Short Story” 97 n.43 “Demeter Forgiven: Wharton’s Use of the Persephone Myth in Her Short Stories” 204 n.10 (ed.) “A Granted Prayer: An Unpublished Story by Edith Wharton” 12 n.9, 281, 285 n.36 “Make It Short: Edith Wharton’s Modernist Practices in Her Short Stories” 98 nn.63, 65 Whitman, Walt 2, 4, 83, 110, 231 Leaves of Grass 83, 110 “Who Shall Deliver Me?” (Rossetti, C.) 146 n.6 “Whose Edith? A review of Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time, by Louis Auchincloss” (Mercier, V.) 14 n.25 “Why Would the Spatial Be So Special? A Critical Analysis of the Spatial Turn in

351

American Studies” (Eeckhout, B.) 161 nn.29–30 Wid’s Daily 118 Wilde, Oscar 24, 83 The Picture of Dorian Gray 83 Salome 24 Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Woodress, J.) 161 n.11, 162 n.51 Willa Cather: Double Lives (Lee, H.) 161 n.24 Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews (O’Connor, M.) 160 n.6 Willful Subjects (Ahmed, S.) 248 n.15 “William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism” (Karn, J.) 175 n.4 Williams, Deborah Lindsay 7 Not in Sisterhood 7 Willis, Nathaniel P. 91 Willis, Sara 91; see also Fanny Fern Wills, Louise M. 283 n.17 (tr.) “Les Oeuvres de Mme Lyautey au Maroc” 277, 283 n.17 Wilson, August 160 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom 160 Wilson, Edmund 3, 13 n.25, 93, 99 n.96 Justice to Edith Wharton 13 n.25, 99 n.96 Winship, Michael 257, 267 n.14 “The Rise of a National Book Trade System in the United States” 267 n.14 Winthrop, Egerton 85, 209 Wister, Owen 158 The Virginian 158 “With the Tide” (Wharton, E.) 110 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin 3–4, 11 n.5, 16 n.42, 37, 46 n.6, 47 n.11, 68, 77 n.26 (ed.) Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings 48 n.28, 219 nn.1, 3 A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton 3, 11 n.5, 16 n.42, 46 n.6, 47 n.11, 77 n.26 “A Woman I Know” (Wharton, E.) 104–5 “The Woman Who Hated Sex: Undine Spragg and the Trouble with ‘Bother,’ ” (Zibrak, A.) 47 n.20, 176 n.27 “The Woman Who Hated Women” (Malcolm, J.) 15 n.37 “Women, Art, and the Natural World in Edith Wharton’s Works” (Totten, G.) 191 n.26 Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossetti (Swann, T.) 146 n.31 The Wonder Book (Hawthorne, N.) 86 Wood, Bethany 117–18 Woodress, James 161 nn.11, 15, 162 n.51

352

(ed.) My Ántonia 150, 152, 161 n.15 Willa Cather: A Literary Life 161 n.11, 162 n.51 Woodward, Kathleen 57, 63 nn.37, 39 Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions 63 nn.37, 39 Woolf, Virginia 111, 158, 162 n.45, 198, 206 n.37 “American Fiction” 158, 162 n.45 Orlando: A Biography 206 n.37 Wordsworth, William 212, 231, 236 n.68 Lyrical Ballads 232, 236 n.68 The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer, A., tr. Payne, E.) 68, 77 n.29 “Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe” (eds Joslin, K.; Price, A.) 204 n.3 Wright, Richard 160 Black Boy 160 Wright, Sarah Bird 181, 183, 190 nn.5, 14, 194, 204 n.11 (ed.) Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888–1920 204 n.11 Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing: The Making of a Connoisseur 190 nn.5, 14 The Writing of Fiction (Wharton, E.) 35–6, 46 nn.1, 5, 90, 92, 96 n.3, 98 nn.64, 70, 85, 88, 151, 160 n.8, 161 n.9, 175 n.2, 233, 236 n.79, 271–2, 274 Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Fetterley, J.; Pryse, M.) 221 nn.42, 45

Index

The Yale Review 102 Yale University 3, 103 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard 167, 176 n.14 Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James 176 n.14 Yekl: A Tale of New York (Cahan, A.) 88–9 “You and You” (Wharton, E.) 110 “Young Edith Jones: Sources and Texts of Early Poems by Edith Wharton” (GoldmanPrice, I.) 112 n.20 Young, Robert J. 282 n.10 Marketing Marianne: French Propaganda in America, 1900–1940 282 n.10 The Younger Generation (James, H.) 96 n.8 Youth’s Companion 85, 90–1 Yrs. Ever Affly: The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Louis Bromfield (Bratton, D.) 284 n.31 Zantop, Susanne 239, 241, 248 n.12 Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770– 1880 248 n.12 Zibrak, Arielle 47 n.20, 173, 176 n.27 “The Woman Who Hated Sex: Undine Spragg and the Trouble with ‘Bother’ ” 47 n.20, 176 n.27 Zilversmit, Annette 47 n.14 (ed.) Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays 47 n.14 Zipes, Jack 248 n.11 Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy 248 n.11