The New Edith Wharton Studies

Abstract

The New Edith Wharton Studies, edited by Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray, comes at a time of particular plenitude in Wharton scholarship. In the years leading up to the centenary of a major work like The Age of Innocence, the arrival of significant publications would not seem unusual, and some fine work on Wharton's 1920 novel, such as, for example, Arielle Zibrak's edited collection of New Centenary Essays (2019), has emerged. But the scholarship on Wharton of the last few years alone displays an impressive diversity in subject and treatment that Haytock and Rattray's volume further invigorates.As part of Cambridge University Press's Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions series, The New Edith Wharton Studies is meant to identify and explain “the changing critical interpretations” of Wharton and her work “that have emerged since c. 2000,” in all their “rich plurality of twenty-first-century literary critical energies” (ii), calling attention in the process to unexplored or, at any rate, underexplored areas of research. The volume's editors and contributors have responded to this mandate with creativity and rigor. Consistently mindful of the Wharton scholarship that has led to present-day inquiries, the volume pursues suggestive trajectories through a range of perspectives that renew established themes and ideas and locate new ones, all the while highlighting the critical breadth and scope that Wharton's work continues to inspire.Collections of essays offer their own particular challenges, not the least of which is the need for a discerning editorial vision that facilitates selection and ordering to ensure that each contribution receives the best presentation, and that the patterns of thought in the volume offer visible signposts for future scholarship. Haytock and Rattray have shaped their volume well. They state their approach early in the introduction, recognizing “a palimpsest of understanding of the person and her work” (2). The description is apt, for starting with the introduction and traceable in the volume's subsequent fourteen chapters, the connections between Wharton the woman and Wharton the author are kept in subtle interplay, alongside an astute awareness that “one of the fascinations of studying Wharton is the very changes in our understanding of her and her work” (5). Haytock and Rattray see these changes as primarily influenced by three areas: archival discoveries, new critical directions, and the more nebulous area of the “current cultural moment” that draws the text into the societal forces outside itself (5). Their approach affirms that texts are vibrant entities in active engagement with a shifting, evolving world. Wharton's writing, like significant events of her life, offers supple material for such engagements.Haytock and Rattray divide the volume into four parts, the first of which focuses on “self and composition” (13), with the contributors to this section considering Wharton archives, her correspondence, and the publication history of her short stories in magazines. Paul Ohler's opening chapter, “Creative Process and Literary Form in Edith Wharton's Archive,” provides an invaluable summary of the various holdings of Wharton materials. These include “thirty institutions across North America and Europe,” a number likely more than many have realized (15). His observations about this vast array of materials—manuscripts of the many genres in which Wharton worked, typescripts, her extensive correspondence, diaries, notebooks, literary contracts, account books, and more—not only confirm the significance that they hold in understanding Wharton, but suggest the many unexplored avenues remaining in the study of her creative process. Ohler supports this contention further through his assessments of six Wharton biographies, whose engagements with the Wharton archives detail the history of restricted access, new discoveries in the collections, and the acquisition of new archival materials.Wharton's sizable correspondence, of which much remains unpublished, is the subject of the next chapter, “Wharton's Letters: Glimpses of the Whole Edith Wharton.” In looking to the letters to find the “overlooked, even contradictory aspects of the complete Wharton” (33), Julie Olin-Ammentorp addresses directly an issue that haunts Wharton scholarship: how “to reconcile the admirable Wharton … with … her racist, imperialistic, and anti-Semitic attitudes” (36). Judiciously and thoughtfully, she proposes no facile assertions of either condemnation or justification. Acknowledging the extent to which Wharton's letters to friends figure forth an imperfect human being, as, for example, in her correspondence with Gaillard Lapsley to whom Wharton was especially close, Olin-Ammentorp raises ethical questions about how to interpret an author's comments in a personal letter and the violation of privacy that the publication of such letters entails—a subject that Wharton also addressed in some of her fiction. Significantly, Olin-Ammentorp emphasizes the importance of contextualizing the letters, not in terms of normalizing “reprehensible” (33) comments as acceptable for their time and place, but rather in terms of the responses from some of Wharton's correspondents, whose comments directed Wharton to a more balanced and informed vision. Olin-Ammentorp argues persuasively that “the letters reveal her irreducibility” (45), making the correspondence central in understanding the complexities that scholars continue to discover in Wharton's work.Sarah Whitehead directs the focus on “self and composition” to Wharton's magazine publications, where Wharton both resisted and accommodated the demands of a male literary establishment. Whitehead's approach to Wharton's negotiations with the gendered magazine publishing world, and to Wharton's selection and handling of her subject matter, reveals a subversive side to Wharton that privileges her trust in her own writing principles and her astute interpretations of both social realities and the marketplace. Whitehead notes that the “genteel prose and subtle ironies” (53) of Wharton's magazine fiction create “narratives with multiple, often conflicting meanings” (54). She finds that in the shift from the “quality monthlies” (49), like Scribner's, to publishing in the more popular mass magazines, like the Ladies' Home Journal, Wharton had to surrender some of her autonomy over her creative material. Yet this transition, Whitehead notes, highlights Wharton's ability to adapt her aesthetic standards, without compromise, to new publishing conditions. Wharton implemented narrative methods to satisfy an expanded and diverse audience, for instance, and conceived plot lines to meet the physical layout of issues in which advertising figured almost as prominently as content. Whitehead's study reveals that Wharton's sense of art and herself as committed artist did not limit her full participation in the changing field of literary business.An “International Wharton,” the subject of part 2, challenges the privileging of Wharton's American origins over the influences that her many years of European residency, her worldwide travel experiences, and her vast reading exerted on her. Embracing recent critical positionings of Wharton's cosmopolitanism, the chapters in this section suggest that, despite her creative chronicling of Old New York society, the portrayal of Wharton as an ex-patriot American writer seems insufficient, for it fails to acknowledge fully the extent to which the cultures and traditions of other nations formed her inner life.The first chapter in this section focuses on Greece. In “Edith Wharton's Odyssey,” Myrto Drizou maintains that, for Wharton, the importance of Greece lay not only in its significance as “the anchor of Western civilization—but also [as] a topos of strong human bonds that enable social connectedness and cultural continuity” (66). Drawing on Wharton's favorite copy of Homer's Odyssey in the Mount library, with Wharton's usual pencil strokes in the margins, Drizou analyzes The House of Mirth and the later Wharton novel The Children in terms of the Odyssean homeless wanderings through which Wharton articulates the importance of home as “a nexus of social and cultural relations which she saw as increasingly lacking in modern American culture” (68). Drizou's fine analysis shows Lily as a modernist figure of alienation, a state that most modernist writers came to recognize only after the Great War. Although Drizou does not invoke T. S. Eliot, her interpretation of Lily's attempts at survival suggest Prufrock's lonely wanderings and, indeed, a postwar society's ailing attempts to shore up “fragments … against … [societal] ruin” (The Waste Land, Boni & Liveright, 1922, line 431). Drizou, moreover, finds the emphasis on home also in Wharton's accounts of her two trips to Greece, one recorded in the published Vanadis diary, and the other, occurring some forty years later, detailed in the unpublished Osprey notebook. These travel responses confirm for Drizou that Wharton's “tendency to construct the past as a light that guides the present” informs her “entire oeuvre” (74).Virginia Ricard continues the emphasis on the significance of human relations for Wharton, this time under the influence of the country whose claims took up much of her adult life. “It might be argued,” Ricard writes at the opening of “Edith Wharton's French Engagement,” that Wharton's writing is consistently “a meditation … on how communities hold together” (80). In examining Wharton's French life and her extensive readings in French writings across multiple disciplines, Ricard effectively reveals a Wharton “governed by a French perspective” (81) from which she interpreted and critiqued American mores. Ricard's discussion of Wharton's friendship with French writer and critic Paul Bourget includes an analysis of the critical response to The House of Mirth in France, in which the most frequent comparisons were to Bourget's writings rather than to Wharton's Anglo-American contemporaries. Ricard finds in the French reviews a preoccupation with the absence of family solidarity in the novel and a view of womanhood that Wharton herself articulates in French Ways and Their Meaning. Her analysis notes that the French “cooperation between men and women” (88) aligned with Wharton's interest in reconciling societal cohesion with individual autonomy, an area in which Wharton began to diverge from Bourget's privileging of society over the individual. In the works of Jean-Marie Guyau and other French writers, Ricard posits, Wharton found further influences allowing her to consider that “the modern individual, far from being merely a free atom, was, potentially at least, an agent of social cohesion, order, and justice” (91). It was the framework of French society, Ricard concludes, with its valuing of engaged conversation and blending of the sexes, that allowed Wharton herself to evolve into such an individual.The darker side of the international condition emerges in Donna Campbell's “Edith Wharton and Transnationalism.” Campbell adopts the “critical optic” of Jessica Burman, Paul Giles, and others whose theories associate transnationalism with traits such as “rootlessness, involuntary exile, and a sense of loss” (99). In each of Wharton's late novels—Twilight Sleep, The Glimpses of the Moon, The Mother's Recompense, Hudson River Bracketed, and The Gods Arrive—Campbell traces transnationalism's detrimental effects in defining the tragic situations of the heroines. She identifies an economic threat for women that is not so much focused on individual female survival as on the exploitation of women—“on transactions involving bodies,” for instance—embedded in patriarchal social forces. “Women's sexual capital,” Campbell writes, “(or maintaining secrecy about sexual capital) is exchanged for social and economic advantages, often to maintain their nonworking or artistic partners” (101). Campbell, moreover, supports her transnational readings of Wharton's fiction through the real-life example of Gabrielle Landormy who had worked for Wharton during the war. Wharton's unpublished letters reveal details of Landormy's romantic affair that led to a pattern of disorienting wanderings between the United States and France. But even without this interesting insight into Wharton's direct knowledge of a young woman's experience of displacement, Campbell's approach to Wharton's late novels through a transnational lens makes abundantly clear the “submerged history or trauma and loss underlying their satiric Jazz Age trimmings” (102).Campbell's focus on Wharton's disadvantaged transnational women provides a bridge to the subject matter of part 3, “Wharton on the Margins.” Wharton's insistence on her familiarity with the backward enclaves of her own Berkshire Hills in the 1922 introduction to Ethan Frome did not manage to signal, then or in years following, a notable interest in her treatment of the less advantaged. As recently as 2012, the New Yorker's now infamous toast to Wharton on her 150th birthday declared that “privilege like hers isn't easy to like; it puts her at a moral disadvantage” (“A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy,” New Yorker, 5 Feb. 2012). Laura Rattray's introductory chapter to this section puts to rest the future of such careless assessments and provides substantial lines of inquiry for further research on the topic.“Edith Wharton's Unprivileged Lives” focuses on Wharton's “concern for the lives of the poor” in her early work, but also reminds us that Wharton's engagement with social ills stretched across her entire career in both subtle and direct ways as well as across genres. Wharton's interest in the marginalized is evident in her poetry and drama—creative modes that have only recently begun to receive critical attention in Wharton studies, including in Rattray's own Edith Wharton and Genre (2020). Rattray zeroes in on especially significant aspects of Wharton's representations of the underprivileged when she suggests that “Wharton's poor are human and could be any one of us, though they are most often women” (126). Her analysis reveals Wharton's resistance to the common (and enduring) narratives of poverty such as those that categorize “‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor” (119) and adds another layer to the understanding of her nuanced feminist perspective. Rattray rightly foregrounds Wharton's “significant and subversive triumph” in finding ways to recognize “unprivileged lives while achieving huge commercial and critical success as a ‘high-society novelist’” (115). Such achievement is rare in the writing life.Wharton's work acknowledges, moreover, the effects that industrial and commercial corruption holds for societal manipulation. Rattray mentions Wharton's interest in contemporary newspaper accounts, which Jennifer Travis takes up in exploring the influence of an extensively covered insurance scandal on Wharton's recognition “of a growing wound culture intent on regulating and managing pain and suffering, life and death” (129). “Wharton, Insurance Culture and Pain Management” situates its discussion in both the corruption and the strength of the insurance industry in the early twentieth century, when life insurance and annuities had a sizable American market. Through a range of both early and late Wharton works, Travis argues that Wharton represents not “a society of manners,” but rather “a managerial society” in which the human fear of adversity and the desire for stability become targets for exploitation (129). In The Fruit of the Tree, for instance, Travis traces how the valuing of human lives and the concept of a “‘good death’” (137), a marketing term of the insurance companies, play out in terms of monetary compensation. While Wharton's fiction at times seems to follow the insurance industry's story line that equates useless pain with worthless lives, it also resists such notions, Travis ably argues, through the fates of characters that belie such facile equations. The Fruit of the Tree's injured millhand Dillon “does not die and his disability is not his death” (139) as he accommodates and moves on, his outcome showing literature's ability to provide an “antidote to a management society” (140).Rattray's and Travis's chapters foreground Wharton's deep and abiding compassion for human beings and their complex situations. Drawing on the work of William J. T. Mitchell, Shannon Brennan extends this discourse to human-animal relations. “Edith Wharton's Humanimal Pity” interprets selected novels, short stories, nonfiction, and life writings through a paradigm “premised upon the human recognition of animal subjectivity, mutuality and shared vulnerability” (144). Brennan's contention that “pity for animals constitutes a crucial character reference” (146) modifies critical readings of provocative incidents in Wharton's fiction. Brennan argues, for instance, that at the end of Summer, it is not only Royall's turning from the marital bed that revises readings of his marriage to Charity as the exercise of his patriarchal authority, but also his care of his old horse Dan, which allows insight into his generosity toward living things. Brennan acknowledges, moreover, the inherent tensions in the permeability of the human-animal boundary/bond when she turns to Wharton's life writing, where the troubling implications of the loss of language emerge. Whether the result of pain and suffering, or emotional response, the speechless human being draws closer to the inarticulate animal world, challenging humanity's claim to be the “site of morality,” and further disrupting the notion of the “‘human’ as a distinct category” (152). Brennan's tracing of humanimality's implications in Wharton's writings shows Wharton's complex thinking weaving intricately into her imagination and creativity. She makes evident Wharton the writer of both mind and heart.The section's final chapter takes us back to the issues of race, raised earlier in the volume by Olin-Ammentorp, as Jennifer Haytock situates the long-standing history of white privilege in the present moment and in relation to Wharton's work. In “Edith Wharton and the Writing of Whiteness,” Haytock convincingly argues that reading Wharton's works today “offers ways both to make visible the cultural history and influences that have led to current damaging white behaviors and also to formulate strategies for rewriting whiteness” (158). Drawing on the work of philosophers such as Shannon Sullivan and Terrance MacMullan, Haytock links racism and classism to suggest how the tastes and attitudes of the upper classes influenced the formation of a middle-class white identity in which white behaviors came to be normalized as the standard, while at the same time cultural and social practices deemed nonwhite were devalued. Ranging in her discussion from The Decoration of Houses through travel writing and Wharton's novels, early and late, she pays special attention to Wharton's 1928 novel The Children, a work that engages “global blackness and African-American culture” (163). Haytock's analysis advocates approaching the novel through Wharton's own “insistence on the critical eye and the courage for self-evaluation” and argues that in adopting Martin Boyne's perspective to narrate the novel, Wharton includes his biases. Reading the novel through the kind of critical lens that Wharton directs at her subject matter makes readers “work against their own imaginative investment in Boyne to understand his misperceptions … and to uncover the racist and misogynist assumptions that shape his world view” (168).“Sex and Gender” are inevitably worth “Revisit[ing]” (173), and the four essays that comprise the collection's final grouping do so from an informed twenty-first-century perspective that once again affirms how Wharton's writings remain intellectually and creatively responsive to social and cultural shifts. In connecting “Women, Art and the Natural World in Edith Wharton's Work,” as his chapter title indicates, Gary Totten adopts a particularly apt approach in an area of Wharton criticism that tends to address these areas separately. Drawing on ecofeminist theories that problematize women's relationships to nature, Totten posits that Wharton's “deep knowledge of art” as it “coincide[s] with her representation of the natural world” shows “her understanding of women's lives as both enhanced and limited due to their relationship to nature” (176). Totten sees Wharton's writings on architecture and gardens advocating a harmonious continuity between built and natural environments, but her travel writings do not always maintain this culture-nature balance. His analysis points to instances where Wharton privileges her knowledge of art to interpret a foreign culture as a kind of aesthetic object. In her fiction, however, the culture-nature dichotomy becomes a telling marker of the fate of Wharton heroines like Lily and Charity, neither of whom, Totten contends, are successful at negotiating the binary nor are they able to move in any way beyond it, emphasizing the social restrictions under which women operate. Totten productively opens up Wharton's work to examining women's complicated position in the nature-culture divide, recognizing the importance of women's roles as cultural producers through a theoretical framework that acknowledges traditional perceptions of their intimacy with nature.Linda Wagner-Martin looks at another side of cultural affinities through Wharton's interest “in re-scripting the romance novel” as it appears in The House of Mirth, The Reef, and Summer (189). “Wharton and the Romance Plot” suggests how Wharton's knowing “what her readers wanted to read” helped her achieve the popularity and commercial success (at least most of the time) that she desired, while at the same time allowing her to innovate on “stories of romantic love” through variations on and disruptions of the very plot that she was invoking (189). Wagner-Martin's focus on the romantic plot in these novels points to a number of Wharton's effective writerly strategies. For instance, refusing to turn characters like Selden into “spokespeople for didactic moral statements” (191) allows Wharton to display their weakness without labelling them as outright villains. Wagner-Martin notes, too, Wharton's potent use of silence in her descriptions of the physicality, “touch and non-verbal communication” (195) between Anna and Darrow to define the intensity of their romantic relations in The Reef. Comparing Wharton's use of the conventions of the romance novel across these works, Wagner-Martin traces the different understandings that Wharton brings to her handling of innocence, careless exploitations, and passionate human longing. She points out that Wharton's work has been placed in an array of literary streams and trends, but in her own focus on the romance plot, she highlights Wharton's indeterminate endings that align her with modernism, and—significantly, for considerations of Wharton on “sex and gender”—show compromised outcomes to be the particular purview of her female characters.In “Masculine Modernity: Fathers, Sons, and Generational Absolution in Wharton's Fiction,” Melanie Dawson considers Wharton's engagement with “emerging discourses of masculine social development” (204), specifically in terms of a father-son dynamic that has hitherto received only minimal attention in Wharton's work. The “narrative of generational contrast” (2020), which aligns well with Dawson's interest in aging studies as shown in her recent monograph Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age (2020), results, for Dawson, in some of Wharton's more positive male creations. In proposing that Wharton “understood manhood as defined by era and by opportunity” (204), Dawson shows the complexity of this intergenerational dynamic playing out in The Age of Innocence as one that is hopeful but also disturbing, since Dallas's freedom and accomplishments deepen Archer's pride in his son at the same time that they intensify the sense of his own inadequate manhood. In other Wharton fictions, Dawson's analyses locate more devastating results of the father's investment in a son when “the son's lack of distinction” can become “a means of damaging the father's very identity,” as in False Dawn (208). In The Custom of the Country, Ralph's “cross-generational masculine comparisons to his ancestors” (208) only serve to heighten his sense of a diminished fatherhood tied to an inadequate manhood. Nonetheless, despite the limitations placed on the fathers, Dawson identifies in Wharton's younger generation of agential, professional men “a redemptive masculinity [that] is surprisingly hopeful, and for this reason … deviates from common critiques of modern men” (213). Dawson's interesting analyses provide an innovative way to consider Wharton's modernist outlook by having those fixed in the past look favorably forward even if they do so not for themselves but for others.In the volume's final chapter, “Wharton's Wayward Girls,” Meredith Goldsmith turns the interest back to Wharton's female characters through an approach that aligns with the new fields of childhood studies and girlhood studies. Taking two Wharton essays, one from early in her writing life (“The Valley of Childish Things,” 1896) and one from late (“A Little Girl's New York,” 1938)) as contexts for her analyses of The Reef and The Children, Goldsmith shows Wharton, like Freud, rejecting ideas of childhood innocence. Goldsmith invokes twenty-first-century theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton, who in turn builds on Lee Edelman's work, to focus on the figure of “the queer child … who resists a linear (in other words, imposed by adults) narrative of development” (218). Goldsmith effectively places the child, Effie, who is usually overlooked in criticism of The Reef, at the center of the novel's plot, seeing her as pivotal to exposing the limitations of the adult characters whose role includes protecting children. Darrow's view of Effie, moreover, which Goldsmith interprets in terms of the eroticized child, carries over into her reading of Judith in The Children, where she extends the idea of child agency into Judith's “waywardness” (223). She sees “sophistication and immaturity operating in tandem” for Judith as well as for the novel's other children, in a series of narrative moments that take place beyond Boyne's vision. Judith's sexual “behavioural ambiguity,” which “renders childhood an ambiguously liminal state” (225), is further reinforced by the cultural and national ambiguities of the other children. Not only does Goldsmith's reading reveal the possibilities for children when facile categorizations of childhood according to “normative conceptions of gender” (227) are circumvented, it shows the confusions of the adult characters in their struggle to pin them down. In Goldsmith's interpretations, Wharton's representations of her fictional girl children provide a commentary on “the price of attaining a normative adulthood” (219).Early in her chapter, Goldsmith suggests that in resisting normalization, Wharton's “children, mostly girls … subvert the limiting feminine roles Wharton would critique in her best-known fiction” (217). I take Goldsmith's observation as a springboard for some final comments on Haytock and Rattray's collection. The “mostly girls” and “limiting feminine roles” comments are important since many of the volume's chapters point to future critical shapings of Wharton's position on issues of gender. The majority of the chapters, indeed, figure forth a Wharton in marked sympathy with what our contemporary times accept as feminist views that advocate for gender equality. Wharton's writing as well as her attitude places her in a strong tradition of writers, like her much-admired George Eliot, whose fiction resonates with the story of female lives and struggles and yet who resisted gendered labeling and the division of literary traditions along gender lines. Like these women writers, moreover, Wharton recognizes that women's issues are never separate from obstacles and restrictions that gender imbalances impose on men and women alike, as other chapters in the collection suggest. In this context of gender focus, Goldsmith's reference to subversion also reflects a significant thread in the collection. There is a newly recognized Wharton here—one whose subversive tendencies are more starkly evident and accessible to twenty-first-century critical readings than to earlier criticism, whether these involve gender or broader social injustice issues. Finally I take up Goldsmith's implied connection between Wharton's less-known and “best-known fiction” (217). A significant strength of the volume is that it does not stick solely to the fiction, nor to Wharton's major works—even in a period that has expanded what those “major” works are. The chapters consistently draw connections between early and late Wharton, ranging across personal time and global events. Wharton's ideas, interests, approaches, and methods sparkle forth in these pages in new and renewed forms, relevant as much for an understanding of the past as they are for the present and future. The editors begin their introduction with Roxane Gay's high praise that, among other attributes, Wharton's “‘arguments are always compelling’” (1). The editors and contributors of the New Edith Wharton Studies have clearly followed their subject's lead.