“We Are Expected to Be Pretty and Well-Dressed Till We Drop”: Fashion and “Passing” in the Novels of Edith Wharton

Abstract

Focusing on Edith Wharton’s New York trilogy of (1862–1937), the author interprets the function of fashionable dress as a means of constructing social identity. The paper looks at how the concept of “passing” develops through the language of dress and the poetics of behavior. The semiotics of dress reflects the wearer’s strategies of performative “passing”: efforts to become accepted in a certain social group, in this case, New York high society of the Gilded Age. The paper analyses two key conceptual discourses used in the works of Edith Wharton: Veblenian theory of the leisure class and the Darwinian idea of natural selection.