Edith Wharton's Poetics of Telecommunication

Abstract

We learn in autobiographical A Backward Glance that six-year-old Edith Jones spent a good deal of winter of 1868 shouting into her maternal grandmother's ear-trumpet. This prosthesis, supplying emphatic period of a catalogue of objects metonymically invoking Mary Stevens Rhinelander, seems indeed virtually to define her: she is introduced as a kind of assemblage made up of lace cap and lappets, a bunch of gold charms dangling from her massive watch-chain ... a rich black silk dress, and a black japanned ear-trumpet at her ear. As Wharton makes clear, trumpet was not, from perspective of her childhood self, merely one ornament or appendage among others. First, it supplied old woman with a characterizing action: me she exists only as a motionless and gently smiling figure, whose one gesture was to lay aside her stitching for her ear-trumpet at my approach. At same time it would serve for those months, in an experience that clearly stuck in her memory, as a privileged channel, intensely charged with affect, for Wharton's youthful exploration of language and poetry. She would shout Tennyson verses, more enthralled by sound than cognizant of sense, hours ... through trumpet of my long-suffering ancestress, even though unreliable nature of medium linking them, coupled with a shared incomprehension of poet, ensure a highly ambivalent act of communication: the rhythmic raptures tingling through me probably woke no echo in dear old head bent to mine. (1) It is a poignant, even emblematic, image of future writer, for whom a powerful striving for would constitute an abiding motive force. (2) I want to focus here on figure of trumpet itself, as a kind of zero-degree instrument of mediation, a technological copula that both enables communication and renders it problematic, mingling it inextricably with miscommunication. It is a medium that both connects and separates, a source of distortion and frustration but also condition of possibility for any intimacy at all (particularly as Wharton's grandmother was only member of her family who would submit to such sessions). Media have a similarly ambivalent status in Wharton's fiction. Technologies and networks of communication, and other figures of mediation, loom large in her work, from notes and cards whose ritualistic circulation serves as visible index of recondite, hieroglyphic of Wharton's Society to postal, telegraphic, and telephonic networks that sustain or subvert that world (as well as human relays, couriers, and go-betweens to be found there). While she may not have centered an entire work of fiction explicitly and exclusively upon a single such technology, as did her friend Henry James in his novella In Cage, she certainly accorded them a prominent place in her novels and stories, where they frequently serve as occasions for, or indices of, miscommunication and distortion as well as human contact and transfer of information. In part, prominence and treatment of media in Wharton's fiction reflect times in which she lived. She was witness to a series of crucial developments in growth of modern media technologies, as well as penetration and integration of those technologies into social and cultural life of nation. She was born into a telegraphic world, and not yet a globally linked one (there had been a failed transatlantic cable-laying four years before her birth--dismissed by many as a hoax). Her life and career coincided with worldwide expansion and consolidation of telegraphic networks, as well as emergence and evolution of other wired and technologies: telephone beginning in 1870s, and wireless telegraph from early twentieth century (in her old age Wharton listened with horror to Hitler's voice on radio). She died in 1937, one year after BBC established its first television network (and only a few months after Alan Turing laid foundations for modern digital computer in an epoch-making paper). …