Abstract
<p>Edith Wharton (1862-1937), a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a distinguished female novelist at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work <em>The Age of Innocence</em> contributes much to the formation of a female literary tradition. Wharton’s subversion of male discourse can be well traced in her novel <em>The Age of Innocence</em>. However, Wharton does not become a destroyer of her age due to the limitation of her time; instead, she shows an open submission and hidden resistance to the patriarchal system.</p><p>This thesis aims to analyze causes of Wharton’s duplicitous voice by the means of <em>The Age of Innocence</em> textual analysis in order to reveal her special strategy of text hidden behind this contradictory attitude.</p>
Highlights
Edith Wharton, one of the most important writers at the turn of the 20th century in America,she was granted an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University in 1923, for being considered elevating “the level of American literature”
Leavis, Alfred Kazin, Percy Lubbock criticized Wharton either “for not offering any positive solution in her novels” or “for excessive concern with her old society while ignoring the poor class or the parvenu” or considered her “essentially a tribute to Henry James”. (Bloom 4216--20) The upper class of old New York society into which Edith Wharton was born provides her with an abundance of material for her writing
Between the end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century, Edith depicted the dark world in the US.The upper class of old New York society into which Edith Wharton was born provides her with an abundance of material for her writing
Summary
Edith Wharton, one of the most important writers at the turn of the 20th century in America,she was granted an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University in 1923, for being considered elevating “the level of American literature”. Just as Louis Auchincloss has commented that “what was to have a much greater influence on Edith Jones as a writer, and to supply her with the subject material for her most important work was her own clear, direct, comprehensive little girl’s vision of the New York Society lives.” (7) Dissatisfied with social life and disillusioned with marriage, Edith illuminates the repressiveness of American upper class and the conflict between the inner self and social convention in most of her works She shows her concern for the status of women and endorses female’s struggle to forge their identities outside accepted social boundaries. Elizabeth Ammons has commented that Edith Wharton’s fiction “is both a record of one brilliant and intellectually independent woman’s thinking about women and a map of feminism’s ferment and failure in America in the decades surrounding the Great War”
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