Edith Wharton's Proximate Intimacies

Abstract

Abstract As nineteenth-century etiquette books remind their readers, the basic principles of social life meant maintaining a clear and insulating space around corporal forms. Amid such normative expectations, Wharton's characters move through material worlds richly populated with objects, many of which are alluringly textured. This essay argues that a number of these objects were charged with additional associative meanings, based on the persons with whom they are most closely aligned, often their owners. Such material items become what I describe as the “proximate objects” that fascinate Wharton's characters, not only because of their sensual appeal, but also because of their combined physical availability and association with other human forms. For characters in fictions such as The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and The Reef, proximate objects have the capacity to mediate human desires by providing a sense of an appropriately distanced but nevertheless material intimacy with another person as they stand in for human forms that must remain socially distanced from one another. Revealing the dynamic and sensual dimensions of the material world, the haptic encounters experienced by Wharton's characters offer insight into the materiality interwoven with human desire.