Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics Jean Rohloff Dale M. Bauer. Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994. 225 pp. $55.00 (Hardcover); $17.50 (Paperback) Edith Wharton’s later post-World War I novels have long been dismissed as aesthetically flawed, culturally nostalgic, and politically conservative, even reactionary, when compared to her earlier works. In its challenge to this traditional view, Dale M. Bauer’s Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics is very welcome, even “brave” itself. Bauer argues that one of the main reasons critics have viewed Wharton’s later fiction as the product of a writer wilfully disengaged from the cultural trends and political forces that emerged in the twenties and thirties is because Wharton’s “ambivalence makes her difficult, if not impossible, to pin down” (18). Indeed, Bauer sees this ambivalence as revealing the depth, complexity, and introspective nature of Wharton’s dialogue with modern culture. In chapter 1, Bauer places Summer (1917) in the context of the emerging national preoccupation with social engineering that fostered debates about family dynamics, heredity, anthropology, and, ultimately, eugenics. Bauer sees Wharton’s novel as representing not only Wharton’s first “participation in the cultural dialogue on reproductive rights” (34), but as the beginning of her new engagement with the modern political atmosphere. Seeing a form of cultural scapegoating behind the new theories of family heredity and maternal culpability, Wharton blurs the distinctions between “civilized” and “primitive” people and between “good” and “bad” mothering portrayed in Summer. This ambivalence, Bauer contends, is effective in questioning the reductive binary logic of eugenics doctrines and taking a stand against the public interference in private sexuality and morality these doctrines ultimately called for. The second chapter argues that The Mother’s Recompense (1925) represents Wharton’s “sympathies with and her ambivalences about the ‘new America’” (53), specifically her concerns with the emergence of mass culture, the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, and the loss of ethical values she sees resulting from technological progress. Placing the novel against a rich backdrop of 1920s economic abundance theories, psychoanalysis, and popular novels, Bauer counters the retro-critical impulse to see Wharton as merely nostalgic and argues that in this work she “adopts a cultural dialogic, immersing herself in the rhetoric of the day in order to critique it” (55). Bauer ultimately sees the novel as representing Wharton’s progressive rejection of genetic engineering and the sentimentalization of motherhood. [End Page 308] A third chapter treats Wharton’s return to the social and reproductive power of women. In her analysis of Twilight Sleep (1927), Bauer contends that what critics have perceived as the “chaos” of the novel’s plot is actually Wharton’s representation of the chaos of the culture she is critiquing. Wharton leaves oppositions unresolved, such as that between the New Woman and the flapper, to foreground the contradictory nature of women’s position in that culture and to force her readers to analyze themselves. The Children (1928), Bauer asserts, is Wharton’s more explicit treatment of eugenics and her more vehement stand against it. In chapter 4, Bauer turns to Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and its sequel The Gods Arrive (1932) and argues that in these works Wharton explores the intersection between politics and aesthetics. Bauer carefully illustrates that while these works may represent Wharton’s “most critical positions with regard to the new American mass culture”—in the form of advertising, free love, revivalism, and more—these positions also represent her most complex cultural theorizing, not her political conservativism (114). Once again, ambivalence marks Wharton’s representations in part because as a commercial writer she herself must come to terms with modernity in all its forms and because she once again recognizes and underscores the “vexed intricacies of women’s positions” (144) in movements and trends that are ultimately deeply gendered. Chapter 5 presents a compelling reading of “Roman Fever” establishing its often-overlooked context in 1930s Rome during the rise of fascism. Bauer argues that the “myth of origin” the Slades and the Ansleys have clung to concerning legitimacy and respectability is similar to all myths civilizations or individuals use to assert their authority and...