Edith Wharton and Victorian Visual Culture

Abstract

An engaging and comprehensive study of Whartons representation of women as well as the representation of women by male contemporaries in the visual arts, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts marks a distinguished contribution to Wharton scholarship. Offering meticulous readings of key novels and of short stories that have largely been overlooked, in addition to detailed analysis of nineteenth-century images of women, this study corrects an unfortunate misreading of Wharton that has led some critics to hold suspect her depiction of women as well as her sympathies toward them. Orlando argues convincingly that we must recognize Wharton’s “scathing critique” (4) of the misrepresentations of women sometimes enacted by her male contemporaries and dramatized in the faulty vision of her male narrators. The argument, elegandy supported by the organization of the book, locates the progress of Wharton’s heroines in the voyage “from victims to agents in the visual marketplace” (22). Indeed, what the author shows us is the way Wharton’s women manipulate the culture of display in order to “locate power in their bodies, particularly the art they produce with their bodies” (11). Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts employs its ground­ breaking investigation of Wharton’s engagement with Pre-Raphaelite paintings and poetry to highlight what it convincingly argues is Wharton’s “realist revision of the sexual politics of nineteenth-century literature and visual culture” (22-23). One emerges from the book with a thorough understanding—and a long-overdue critical assessment—of Wharton’s extensive engagement with the art of painting. Orlando displays a delightfully keen art historian’s eye in her at­ tention to the influence of specific paintings on Wharton’s work. The introduction includes one of the most provocative illustrations from the collection of nineteenth-century art pivotal to Orlando’s argument, Alfred Stevens’s The Painter and His Model (1855). Orlando’s detailed discussion