Medical Testing: Nursing, Sympathy, and Moral Code in Edith Wharton'sThe Fruit of the Tree

Abstract

AbstractThis article interrogates the concepts of morality and sentimentality in Wharton's early novel. Through the use of a nurse, who exists in a liminal position at the turn of the century as representative of women's morality as well as helper to modernizing physicians, Wharton stages a discussion on sympathy and morality in medicine, and whether there is a chance to move progressive ideas forward. As the second half of the novel reveals, this revised sympathy the protagonist espouses is condemned when she carries out the act of euthanasia to end a character's suffering. Rather than physicians and others looking forward to a modernist morality, they often return to a nineteenth-century conception of sentimentality. Wharton's novel experiments with new conceptions of moral code, and expresses disappointment in the failure of its progress.