Forms of Ambivalence to “Tabloid Culture” in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

Abstract

LIKE THE PAGES OF A PROGRESSIVE-ERA TABLOID newspaper, which collate society news, sensationalistic stories of finance and politics, and advertisements for corsets and books, Edith Wharton's The Custom of Country (1913) juxtaposes different print messages. The novel, however, thematizes a profusion of print forms beyond tabloids as it arrays for fictional analysis new formats that swamped marketplace (Gillies 16). It isolates what, for Wharton, were influential communication forms, dissecting effects of what she called cinema obviousness [...] and tabloid (Permanent Values in Fiction 179) on her characters and her own situation as a writer of serious popular fiction. Central to novel's consideration of print is an assessment of tabloid culture's impact on Undine Spragg, novel's energetic main figure, and a polity comprised of media consumers. also engages with print media by exploring effect of its transformation on ideas of high and low culture and a causally related undermining of once authoritative forms of poetry, literature, drama, and visual arts. These forms, increasingly obscured by tradition-blackening newsprint, undergird threatened Washington Square reservation (Custom 77) characterized as such by aspiring writer Ralph Marvell, a member of gentry and father to Undine's son Paul. Unlike willingness of Undine to be guided in her social aspirations by ever-new pronouncements of newspapers and their Sunday supplements, gossips sheets, and melodramatic novels, felt deep ambivalence to the increasing speed of cultural production in twentieth century (Bauer quoted in Bentley, Wharton in Her Time 148). This essay suggests that novel registers accelerating changes to print culture, including those affecting Wharton's practice as a novelist. (1) I examine her depiction of a simultaneous democratization of print and undermining of what seemed, to her, a public dialogue inclusive of literature vital to evolution of culture. I demonstrate that in a significant theme that had a decade-old precedent in Wharton's short fiction, novel considers relationship between author, publisher, and reader but also moves beyond trope of print market's disinterest in substantive ideas to register marginalization that stems from media manipulation. Wharton's non-fiction writing frequently mentions leveling effects of a mass print culture of cheap newspapers targeting immigrants and workers, manufacture of public opinion, advertising, and technologies that facilitate what she configures as an unprecedented and numbing cultural loudness, an opinion echoed by her friend Henry James. The Custom of Country reflects on forms, content, and effects of mass print culture, including fiction at odds with Wharton's conservative theory of literary value, as it identifies relays between media and Undine Spragg's subjectivity. Crucially, novel is also a hybrid of sensational news story, popular romance, and highbrow literature, advancing a concern with print in many sections even as it engages in melodrama and hyperbole about excesses of Gilded-Age materialism and trends such as divorce. It exemplifies Amy Kaplan's observation that [t]he power of Wharton's social criticism stems not from external perspective of a writer who resisted an incipient consumer culture, but from one whose identity as an author and whose narrative forms were shaped by her immersion in this very modern (Edith Wharton's Profession of Authorship 453). Its satire regarding pollution of a shared linguistic commons engages breakdown of what Delaney calls stratification that established a stable division between high and low literary (quoted in Gillies 25), and it leverages possibilities for a culturally panoramic fictional chronicle enabled by this shift by making low culture and its readers a subject. …