Edith Wharton’s vision of continuity in wartime France

Abstract

Reading Wharton’s two nonfiction texts about France together provides the possibility of comparing a pre-war travelogue to a war report on French culture. Wharton’s precise descriptions and sound method of visual interpretation of moral value in A motor-flight (1908) become problematized in descriptions of war damage in Fighting France (1915). A motor-flight provides several examples of continuity in French material culture offering the chance of a meaningful use of the past. In Fighting France, visits to the war zone show the damage done to civilized landscapes, historical monuments, houses, cathedrals that are destroyed or ruined, offering only chances to think of the scope of the losses in cultural terms, meditations on the lost sense of the past. Images of destruction are linked to this loss of historical continuity. Visits to the trenches show the war as a menace difficult to visualize for the traveller. Here the main effect of the war seems to be the continual threat to secure reflexes and habits of the old reality that is being replaced by war. Also, there are no reports on human wounds but descriptions of the damage to the material environment become humanized. In general, however great the material damage shown and the cultural ruin indicated, Wharton finds traces of continuity in the devastated French countryside of the abandoned war zone: new life begins in the ordered lines of the gardens, in the new uses of the churches, in the reorganization of everyday life among the ruins. From the perspective of the language of war, this means that Wharton’s war reports do not use the disillusioned tone necessary for the language of Anglo-Saxon male combat gnosticism. The standard reason for this can be that she was never in combat. Another likely reason, however, can be her Francophilia. In a gesture that may be identified as a reliance on the outmoded British high rhetoric of war, Wharton adopts the French attitude to historical continuity she describes, which eventually cannot and would not accept the material and cultural devastation the war brings. Although a non-combatant who is rarely close to the lines, Wharton does not report on the home front and her new roles there. She struggles to comprehend and represent her experience of the war zone as an eyewitness, and the method she uses for this is the architectural vision of her former travelogue in order to communicate the extent of the material loss to her noncombatant American audience.