Wharton's Fiction Research Articles

Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age

Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age

A Library of One's Own

A Library of One's Own

Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction

Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction

Editor's Note

Edith Wharton's archive, distributed across more thirty institutions in North America and Europe, is receiving renewed attention from volume editors working on The Complete Works of Edith Wharton. Their examination of holograph manuscripts has produced significant discoveries, as seen in the first article in this issue, Jennifer Haytock's “Judith Wheater's Queer Vision: Edith Wharton's Alternative Title for The Children.” Archival discoveries have long redefined Wharton studies, as when Mary Chinery and Laura Rattray located the lost Wharton play The Shadow of a Doubt in 2017, substantially revising our understanding of her work in the genre. Haytock's discovery of an alternative title for The Children is the basis for her highly original assessment of the ways the novel interrogates “its society's reliance on and reproduction of inherited structures of family, gender, and age categories.”The second article in this issue is Emily Orlando's “‘One long vision of beauty’: Edith Wharton and Italian Visual Culture.” Due to Orlando's prior landmark work on the visual arts in Wharton's fiction and nonfiction, she is well positioned to argue that Wharton's command of Italian art and architecture and “great reverence for Italy … not only made possible her two studies of Italy [Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) and Italian Backgrounds (1905)] but also substantially informs the aesthetic of her early career.” Orlando describes Wharton's establishment of herself as “an accomplished artist and authority on aesthetics,” guiding the reader through the intellectual and travel experiences that formed Wharton's aesthetic outlook and the ways it changed as she matured. The article is particularly useful for its discussion of Wharton's early career in the context of individual works of art that she considered in her nonfiction, for in many cases she repurposed her extensive knowledge of art and architecture to create historical settings in her fiction and depict her characters' aesthetic responses to works of art she found emotionally moving. This essay will serve scholars interested in analyzing continuities between the books on Italy, The Decoration of Houses (1887), and Wharton's fiction to 1905.Lisa Tyler's “The Sins of the Fathers: Mental Illness, Heredity, and Short Fiction by Wharton and Hemingway” is the final article in this issue. Tyler, like Haytock, deals with families, examining Wharton's novella Sanctuary and Ernest Hemingway's “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something,” a story published decades after his death in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987). Tyler proceeds from the observation that “Wharton and Hemingway wrestled with bipolar disorder and its devastating symptoms in their own families and wrote stories in which they expressed their own personal anxieties and cultural anxieties about the illness's devastating impact.” Tyler examines depictions in both works of mental illness and its relation to heredity, eugenics, and degeneration theory. She finds commonalities in the ways Wharton and Hemingway used their knowledge of these subjects, studying how their respective views on eugenics interacted with the ways the “authors grapple with their own familial experience of inherited … mental illness.”For their assistance in preparing this issue, I wish to thank Associate Editor Sharon Kim, Associate Editor Myrto Drizou, Book Review Editor Shannon Brennan, Special Advisory Editor Dale Bauer, and the rest of the Editorial Board. The Edith Wharton Review welcomes articles on all aspects of Wharton, including work on her relation to other writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wharton's archive, Wharton and periodical culture, the author's social networks, and her nonfiction writing.

The New Edith Wharton Studies

The New Edith Wharton Studies

Editor's Note

Editor's Note

Anglo-American Travelers and the Hotel Experience in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nation, Hospitality, Travel Writing

Anglo-American Travelers and the Hotel Experience in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nation, Hospitality, Travel Writing

Dangerous Domesticity: Gossip and Gothic Homes in Edith Wharton's Fiction

AbstractIn the United States of the late nineteenth century, the home was increasingly discussed in terms of privacy and the domestic was viewed as a protected “feminine sphere.” Focusing on the work of an author almost synonymous with the literary depiction of homes, Edith Wharton, this article questions domestic myths of the US home. As a vehicle for its critique, it relies on a mode of communication that is firmly located in the domestic sphere and yet destabilizes its premises of privacy and sanctity: gossip. By analyzing the depiction of homes and the reliance on “idle talk” as both content and narrative technique in “The Lady's Maid's Bell,” The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and Summer, the article shows how Wharton exposes the feminine sphere as a dangerous place. To this end, she combines elements of Gothic fiction that subvert the domestic ideal with depictions of homes that are porous to gossip, which both uncovers abuses and invites them. Concentrating her attention on female protagonists (rather than enfranchised white men), Wharton paints a drastically different picture of the home and the possibility of shielding the private from economic or public concerns than evoked in contemporary legal and journalistic discourses.

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism

The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers

The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers

Edith Wharton in Washington, 2–4 June 2016

Edith Wharton in Washington, 2–4 June 2016

Editor's Note

With volume 32, issues 1–2 (2016) of the Edith Wharton Review, we are now proud to announce that we are part of the Pennsylvania State University Press journals collection. The Press boasts a substantial collection of single-author journals, including the Edgar Allan Poe Review, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, and the Mark Twain Annual; the Edith Wharton Review is Penn State UP's first single-author journal devoted to a woman writer. We are proud to be in such company, and we like to think that Wharton would be, too. Hearty thanks to the staff at the Press for their hard work and expertise; as readers will see, this volume sports a new cover and internal design that they have created. Readers will soon see transitions on the masthead: this volume marks our last issue with Emily Orlando (Fairfield University) as Book Review Editor; from volume 33 onward, Myrto Drizou (Valdosta State University) has graciously agreed to step into that capacity. As Editor of the journal, I am deeply grateful to Associate Editors Sharon Kim (Judson University) and Paul Ohler (Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada) for their help as the journal undergoes this transition.The summer of 2016 marked the Edith Wharton in Washington Conference (2–4 June 2016), codirected by Melanie Dawson (College of William & Mary) and Jennifer Haytock (State University of New York at Brockport). Held in the stunning Larz Anderson House in Dupont Circle, the conference placed Wharton in the context of her time, yet turned our attention toward new directions in Wharton scholarship. Conference abstracts, included in the journal for the first time, will allow readers to see some of the new directions work on Wharton is taking. A few highlights from the conference: keynote speaker Laura Rattray (University of Glasgow) called attention to the underappreciated genres in which Wharton worked; we were encouraged to resee Wharton not only as novelist, literary critic, and travel writer, but as poet, dramatist, and satirist. Wharton's protean versatility was matched by that of our special guest speaker, the prodigious playwright, screenwriter, translator, and director Christopher Hampton. Hampton's fascinating description of the process by which he adapted The Custom of the Country conveyed his sensitivity to the language, characterization, and imagery of Wharton's work. Hampton's talk offered a pivotal example of how adaptations function as interpretations—that is, how they illuminate the texts on which they are based. Simultaneously, it recalled how Wharton, a writer who was ambivalent (to say the least) about the possibilities of film, anticipated filmic techniques in her work.This volume of the journal illuminates some exciting developments in Wharton scholarship. Our cluster of articles on “Wharton and Sex,” based on papers at the Edith Wharton Society panel at MLA 2015, emphasizes how Wharton's fiction cultivated an unexpected frankness on questions of sexuality. General Editor Carol Singley (Rutgers University–Camden) describes the launch of The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, another important moment in Wharton studies. And in one of the many discoveries the archives have yet to afford, Anna Girling illuminates Wharton's relations with British publisher John Murray, showing that her conflicted relations with her publishers began early in her career.We also pay tribute to two Wharton scholars whom, sadly, we lost in 2015. Irene Goldman-Price offers a remembrance of her mentor, Millicent Bell, author of some of the earliest important scholarship on Wharton. And Suzanne Ferris gives a tribute to the critic and biographer Shari Benstock, author of the biography No Gifts from Chance (1994) and the germinal Women of the Left Bank (1986). We remain in the debt of these dedicated scholars, who helped pave the way for the work this volume of EWR contains.

Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman (review)

Reviewed by: Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman Benjamin F. Fisher (bio) Avril Horner and Janet Beer. Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. vi + 207 pp. $75.00 (cloth). Edith Wharton as literary artist and biographical subject has attracted continuing attention since her papers were made available to the public by Yale University, where they had been sealed from the time of her death until the 1960s. In general, critical attention has focused largely on her work up until The Age of Innocence (1920), as if her later work displays a diminished quality. That trend has been subjected to reversals by more recent Wharton scholars. The present book is aimed at justifying the artistry in several late Wharton books. The nature of the book's contents should be attractive to anyone who enjoys Wharton's fiction, and who may not be as familiar with some of the works critiqued as with antecedent Wharton titles. That Horner and Beer command knowledge of Wharton's canon and of the materials relevant to their own project is evident throughout their book, even though the chapter titles may suggest a more selective approach to just a few works. The "Introduction," in which a convincing case is presented for giving attention to late Wharton, is followed by six chapters which respectively focus on these books: The Mother's Recompense, Twilight Sleep, The Children, Hudson River Bracketed, The Gods Arrive, and The Buccaneers, succeeded by a "Conclusion," Notes, Select Bibliography, and Index. Arguing, first, that Wharton's late books are not so far out of the mainstream of 1920s-30s fiction, Horner and Beer situate Wharton among others who are usually ranked as modernists, but whose very modernist features distance them from Wharton's fiction in that same span. Turns out, so they demonstrate, that Wharton may not be so remote from fiction by others, despite her own disclaimers. In 1925, for example, Wharton suggested that in comparison with the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald and that of other younger writers, hers must seem redolent of "tufted furniture and gas chandeliers," that is, Victorian, and consequently lacking the dynamic of state-of-the-art fiction in that era. Wharton was no fan of fiction by writers such as Joyce and others who also worked with stream-of-consciousness techniques, so she created her own forms of realism, without resorting to similar techniques. Horner and Beer point out that each later Wharton work evinces an experimentation that reveals their author's continuing innovation rather than an inexorable decline in her artistic powers. The title of Cynthia Griffin Wolff's biography of Wharton (1995), A Feast of Words, might be said to resonate throughout the present book as the authors convincingly demonstrate how great those feasts continue to be in Wharton's last novels, despite any carping by other critics. How anyone can argue that Wharton's last books lack the brilliant satire and piquant expression that are present in her preceding books, is beyond me. Although, admittedly, mine are seldom [End Page 193] majority opinions, I am happy to find that I concur, without reservations, with Horner and Beer's critiques. Not only do they bring forward the readability of Wharton's later fiction, they do so in what are thoroughly readable viewpoints, a feat that should more often be emulated in many other scholarly books. This one is not jargon-ridden, though the command of Wharton scholarship is deftly blended with ideas found in recent theoretical discourse. That an aging Wharton should repeatedly address issues relevant to older women's concerns about growing older as it affected sexuality and marriage, is wholly plausible. To step momentarily outside the pages of Horner and Beer's book, we may confront circumstances very much like those which occupy these authors. A kindred concern was, for example, also evident in the portrayal of Newland Archer's trajectory from young man to widower. Or, to focus on effects of female aging in that same book, there is the plight of old Catherine, May's grandmother. Catherine's elderly body in no wise keeps pace with her youthful spirits, though the body dictates...

Invisible Blackness in Edith Wharton’s Old New York

Clem Spender's child--growing up on charity in a Negro hovel, or herded in one of the plague-houses they called Asylums. No: the child came first--she felt it in every fibre of her body.--Edith Wharton, Old Maid (1924) I hate to be photographed because results are so trying to my vanity; but I would do anything to obliterate the Creole lady who has been masquerading in the papers under my name for the last year.--Edith Wharton, in a letter to William Crary Brownell (1902) The Children: lives with Tina lives with niggers! A Boy: Shame on you living with Niggers! Another Boy: Nigger! Tina: I'm not!--Edith Wharton, The Old Maid, stage adaptation by Zoe Akins (1935) Old Maid is a novella brimming with racial angst--about being racially misconstrued, revealed, contaminated, diseased, and obliterated. In this tale about illegitimacy, in which the author looks back on the Old New York of the 1850s, Edith Wharton finally explores the racial foundations of the world she had described in her earlier novels, moving from its surface to its anxious roots. What simmered in The House of or The Age of Innocence on the back burner boils on the front flame in Old Maid. Here Wharton not only confronts slavery, America's racial past, and its continuing racial anxieties, but she also secretly destabilizes her own racial identity as white. Perhaps because Wharton invisibly implicates herself in this text, its racial politics, despite being central and unrelenting, are also somewhat hidden and have escaped critical attention. (1) This is all the more surprising as Wharton scholars have become increasingly interested in Wharton's racial politics and the role plays in her writing. This essay will reveal the centrality of in the Old Maid and hopefully contribute to this ongoing critical conversation by destabilizing some of its most fundamental assumptions. In combining racial issues of 1850s New York with those of the 1920s, Wharton creates a sophisticated text that links her writing both to mid-nineteenth-century writing about slavery and to 1920s writing about race. Through this double nature of the text, Wharton is able to reflect upon the various functions of race in New York and in American culture in these eras. These reflections are by no means those of a distanced writer; by linking the novella's plot to her own autobiography, Wharton claims the nonwhite characters of her tale as her possible ancestors and thus invisibly destabilizes her own whiteness. In doing so, she suggests racial politics quite different from the conservative white stance most critics have attributed to her as she depicts the enforced homogeneity of Old New York as stifling and unsustainable. In tracing the slow demise of the ruling class, Wharton ends her plot with a love match--an exceedingly rare event in Wharton's fiction--that depicts racial hybridity as being more fulfilling than an engineered, monitored whiteness. At the same time, Wharton also clearly traces the racial anxieties of the New York of both eras, leaving no doubt about the considerable challenges her mixed couple will face. Edith Wharton as Race Writer Over the last fifteen years or so, Wharton critics have slowly begun to tackle Wharton's view on race, a task met with difficulty from its inception. On the one hand, there was Wharton's rather overt anti-Semitism, visible in her letters and her fiction, which many critics had avoided. (2) On the other, there seemed to be little mention in Wharton's fiction of African Americans and America's slaveholding past. These poles marked the difficult critical territory of determining Wharton's racial politics. Slowly, however, a body of work did emerge. (3) In 1994 Dale Bauer published Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics, which examined the cultural politics of Wharton's later fiction, and particularly her interest in eugenics; in the same year, my article 'The Impossible Rosedale': Race and the Reading of The House of Mirth discussed both the historical context of Wharton's portrayal of Rosedale and the central, functional role anti-Semitism plays in her novel. …

Edith Wharton's Poetics of Telecommunication

We learn in autobiographical A Backward Glance that six-year-old Edith Jones spent a good deal of winter of 1868 shouting into her maternal grandmother's ear-trumpet. This prosthesis, supplying emphatic period of a catalogue of objects metonymically invoking Mary Stevens Rhinelander, seems indeed virtually to define her: she is introduced as a kind of assemblage made up of lace cap and lappets, a bunch of gold charms dangling from her massive watch-chain ... a rich black silk dress, and a black japanned ear-trumpet at her ear. As Wharton makes clear, trumpet was not, from perspective of her childhood self, merely one ornament or appendage among others. First, it supplied old woman with a characterizing action: me she exists only as a motionless and gently smiling figure, whose one gesture was to lay aside her stitching for her ear-trumpet at my approach. At same time it would serve for those months, in an experience that clearly stuck in her memory, as a privileged channel, intensely charged with affect, for Wharton's youthful exploration of language and poetry. She would shout Tennyson verses, more enthralled by sound than cognizant of sense, hours ... through trumpet of my long-suffering ancestress, even though unreliable nature of medium linking them, coupled with a shared incomprehension of poet, ensure a highly ambivalent act of communication: the rhythmic raptures tingling through me probably woke no echo in dear old head bent to mine. (1) It is a poignant, even emblematic, image of future writer, for whom a powerful striving for would constitute an abiding motive force. (2) I want to focus here on figure of trumpet itself, as a kind of zero-degree instrument of mediation, a technological copula that both enables communication and renders it problematic, mingling it inextricably with miscommunication. It is a medium that both connects and separates, a source of distortion and frustration but also condition of possibility for any intimacy at all (particularly as Wharton's grandmother was only member of her family who would submit to such sessions). Media have a similarly ambivalent status in Wharton's fiction. Technologies and networks of communication, and other figures of mediation, loom large in her work, from notes and cards whose ritualistic circulation serves as visible index of recondite, hieroglyphic of Wharton's Society to postal, telegraphic, and telephonic networks that sustain or subvert that world (as well as human relays, couriers, and go-betweens to be found there). While she may not have centered an entire work of fiction explicitly and exclusively upon a single such technology, as did her friend Henry James in his novella In Cage, she certainly accorded them a prominent place in her novels and stories, where they frequently serve as occasions for, or indices of, miscommunication and distortion as well as human contact and transfer of information. In part, prominence and treatment of media in Wharton's fiction reflect times in which she lived. She was witness to a series of crucial developments in growth of modern media technologies, as well as penetration and integration of those technologies into social and cultural life of nation. She was born into a telegraphic world, and not yet a globally linked one (there had been a failed transatlantic cable-laying four years before her birth--dismissed by many as a hoax). Her life and career coincided with worldwide expansion and consolidation of telegraphic networks, as well as emergence and evolution of other wired and technologies: telephone beginning in 1870s, and wireless telegraph from early twentieth century (in her old age Wharton listened with horror to Hitler's voice on radio). She died in 1937, one year after BBC established its first television network (and only a few months after Alan Turing laid foundations for modern digital computer in an epoch-making paper). …

Love and death in Edith Wharton's fiction

Love and Death in Edith Wharton's Fiction examines the struggle between philosophic and scientific notions of love found throughout Wharton's works. The role of death in romantic relationships highlights the central struggle Wharton saw as implicit in the concept of love: the struggle between Darwin's theory of sexual selection and Plato's ideal love of the soul. It was this tension between the romantic notion of soul mates reuniting and the realistic view of sexual selection that became a central focus of romantic relationships in Wharton's works.

Imagining the Jews Together: Shared Figures in Edith Wharton and Henry James

In October of 1904, when Edith Wharton was writingThe House of Mirthand Henry James, having recently arrived in America after a twenty-two-year absence, was collecting the impressions that were to make upThe American Scene, James paid a two-week visit to Wharton at the Mount, her country house in Lenox, Massachusetts. The visit consolidated their friendship and literary relationship. In the mornings, both wrote. In the afternoons, Wharton and James “motored” together, enjoying the beauty of a Western Massachusetts autumn, and they conversed deep into the evenings (Benstock, 144–45; Edel, 598). The claim that Wharton's fiction is heavily influenced by James's, frequently reiterated ever since Wharton began her career, has become a critical commonplace (Lewis, 131). But reading passages side by side from the works both writers were in the process of creating in the fall of 1904,The House of MirthandThe American Scene, yields as much evidence of Wharton's influence on James as of James's influence on Wharton, an influence established probably for the most part through their conversations. In this essay, I contend that the shared imagery in the work of the two writers — involving roses, skyscrapers, and Trinity Church, and centering on the figure of the Jew — makes most sense when the two writers are read in conjunction. Read together, the shared imagery in James and Wharton passages suggests that the two together imagined the Jew as the figure for a commercialized, industrialized, modern America, and for the impossibility of art in such an America — and that they found a mutual consolation in doing so. Wharton's later novels, two of which I consider in this essay (The Glimpses of the Moon[1922] andHudson River Bracketed[1929]) demonstrate that her conversations about these matters with James, and their shared understanding of the Jews, remained important to her for a quarter of a century. Toward the end of her career, she attempted to forge a similar bond of shared aesthetic sensibility and mutual anti-Semitism with the younger writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, but without success.

A Passion for Things: Cicerones, Collectors, and Taste in Edith Wharton's Fiction

ALLAN HEPBURN A Passion for Things: Cicerones, Collectors, and Taste in Edith Wharton's Fiction IN an isthmus of land, at the narrowest and highest point of the Cap Ferrât on the French Riviera, stands a pink Italian palazzo , built between 1905 and 1912 for the Baroness Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild. In 1934, Rothschild donated the palace, stocked with priceless objects and canvases, to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The Blue Guide, indispensable cicerone to the sites of Provence, states that the house has preserved its character as "la résidence d'un riche amateur d'art à l'aube du XXe siècle" (709). This residence, turned museum , contains Louis XV and Louis XVI furniture, Sèvres porcelain, forged iron objects, paintings by Boucher, Fragonard, Moreau, Monet and others. Legend has it that the baroness had items shipped from all over Europe to the train station in nearby Beaulieu. She then sauntered among heaps of goods that sat on the platform and selected and rejected at whim. Her diverse taste manifests itself also in the assemblage of garden styles behind the house. There, Italian fountains, English hedges, Spanish pergolas and French promenades each have a designated place, as if landscape were an esperanto of flowers and greenery. The pink palace incarnates a modern collector's passion and raises two interrelated questions. First, why do so few women collect art or art-objects in the modern period? Second, how is space designed to display the modern collector's possessions and regulate her privacy? The Baroness' collection is the distillation of a female art-lover's taste, the emblem of female purchasing power manifest in teacups, paintings and Arizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 4, Winter 1998 Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 20Allan Hepburn side-chairs all displayed in a joyously pink palazzo. Meditating on material things refines and rationalizes itself into connoisseurship, a discernment of nuance that Edith Wharton understands and uses throughout her fiction. Wharton herself, despite a manifest interest in décor and houses, did not collect art, yet an interest in collectors infuses her fiction between 1902 and 1913. In stories such as "The Moving Finger," "The Dilettante," and "The Pot-Boiler," she exposes the complex relation between those who produce art, those who are the subjects of art, those who appreciate art, and those who collect art. Wharton's knowledge of collectors derived from close contact with a coterie of men who understood art markets: American collector Egerton Winthrop, Harvard professor of art history Charles Eliot Norton, and art expert Bernard Berenson (Dwight 47). Although the imperatives ofappreciation put forward by John Ruskin, Walter Pater and Bernard Berenson for would-be collectors were known to Wharton as the foundation for "good taste," she creates no collectors in her fiction who are women. Male collectors, on the other hand, figure in The Vaüey of Decision (1902), the short story "The Daunt Diana" (^05), The Reef (1912), and The Custom of the Country (1913). Affected by Wharton's understanding of commerce and taste in an American context, collectors in her stories and novels attempt to preserve a private world that gets displaced into or onto objects. The bond between collector and commodity is a dangerous one, particularly for women, for it poses questions of taste and possession. Wharton's literary representations of collectors respond to shifts in the culture of collecting in the first decade of the century. Wharton, by classifying identities according to taste—"dilettante," "connoisseur," "collector"—demonstrates the complex effects that material culture has on women and their relations to identities wholly determined by, or in opposition to, material goods. In The Custom of the Country, Undine's relationship to commodities, as well as Wharton's view of women's place in the world of art and artcollectors , becomes shaded by the understanding that things entrap women and must be kept in circulation in order to avoid the métonymie slide from possessor to possessed. One solution to this quandary is to make women become cicerones who exhibit knowledge or good raste wirhout necessarily becoming collectors. Walter Benjamin argues that the collector, a product ofhigh capitalism , lives a life...

Women and Art in the Fiction of Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton's treatment of the artist has received considerable critical attention, particularly in light of her focus on male artists and the disparity between her early short stories that are dominated by tales about artists and her novels that center on other subjects. Some of these studies have looked at the writer as artist and Wharton's views on the art of writing. While such a focus can be justified by the numerous writers who people Wharton's fiction, it is instructive to examine other dimensions of her reference to art and artists, especially painting, as a way of illuminating the commentary on women's roles that pervades Wharton's work. Like other writers of her era, Wharton constructed many narratives around creative artists or linked her main characters to artistic endeavors in order to interrogate American culture, its materialism, its devaluation of art, and its restrictive sphere for women. It is my contention, however, that Wharton's concern with development of the female artist was subsumed in some of her novels by rhetorical techniques that used art as a sounding board for her social critiques. Specifically, she constructed pivotal scenes around paintings in the narrative and made subtle reference to prominent themes in Victorian artwork as ironic counterpoint to and illumination of the story being told. In this essay, I explore the way in which Wharton drew on artistic representations of women with deep cultural resonance for her audience that served to underscore her critique of Victorian mythology and to garner sympathy for the characters victimized by that mythology.

Edith Wharton , and: Edith Wharton's Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing (review)

Reviewed by: Edith Wharton, and: Edith Wharton's Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing Cheri Louise Ross Katherine Joslin . Edith Wharton. New York: St. Martin's (Women Writers Series), 1991. 156 pp. No price given. Candace Waid . Edith Wharton's Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991. 237 pp. $29.95 cloth; pb. $10.95. Edith Wharton, once marginalized by critics who dismissed her as a pale imitation of Henry James, has received renewed critical attention in the past two decades. Both Katherine Joslin in Edith Wharton and Candace Waid in Edith Wharton's Letters from the Underworld demonstrate familiarity with recent Wharton scholarship, finding it to be helpful in situating their own very different projects. It is, however, unfortunate that neither Joslin nor Waid has read Dale M. Bauer's Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community (1988), which includes a brilliant chapter on Wharton's The House of Mirth, particularly because both authors considered here devote a chapter to that key novel. Katherine Joslin's feminist study begins with a brief biography of Wharton and an overview of her fiction. Four chapters follow, each focusing on one of Wharton's novels, including The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence , and The Mother's Recompense. The last chapter discusses Wharton's critical reception, providing succinct and accurate summaries of the scholarship she treats. Joslin also includes a primary bibliography and a selected list of critical works. Joslin might have subtitled her book "The Closure of Community" because she emphasizes the inability of Wharton's characters in the first three novels to transcend the "customs, manners, and culture of their social group." Linking community to the incest theme in The Mother's Recompense, Joslin argues that "incest represents the powerful pull of the initial community, parents and family, on the individual." She also briefly examines the "Beatrice Palmato" fragment in the context of community. Interestingly, Joslin traces Wharton's feminism to her friendship with Violet Paget, a British scholar who wrote under the name of "Vernon Lee" and who reviewed Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics for The North American Review. Joslin posits that Gilman's work influenced Wharton while she was writing The House of Mirth which, in Joslin's view, centers on the "Woman Question." Katherine Joslin's lucid book should be helpful to readers unfamiliar with Wharton's fiction and with feminist criticism. [End Page 465] Acknowledging her considerable debt to R. W. B. Lewis, Candace Waid offers analyses of selected Wharton texts as she uses the myth of Persephone as a "touchstone" for her readings. In the introduction, Waid asserts that Persephone is for Wharton not only a figure for the woman writer but also a representative of those who leave the pastoral world of Demeter to live in the "underworld" of experience. She describes her study as concentrating on two areas: "a self-conscious attention to writing and the conditions of art and a deeply ambivalent preoccupation with women and the conditions of female identity." Within this framework, Waid examines in depth The House of Mirth, Ethan Frame, Summer, The Custom of the Country, The Touchstone, and Ghosts. The first chapter draws heavily on the Persephone-Demeter myth, with Waid casting Bertha Dorset as Persephone because she is sexually experienced. According to Waid, the plot turns on Lily's burning of Bertha's love letters to Selden. Letters per se, however, are not the only pieces of writing that receive detailed attention. In fact, no reference to, description of, or attempt at writing is overlooked; for instance, thank you notes and the two letters "Ll" in the Reynolds portrait of Mrs. Lloyd take on extreme significance. Waid concludes that Lily's inability to embrace the world of either Persephone or Demeter demonstrates that Wharton could imagine no tenable place for the woman writer. In the next chapter, Waid links Ethan Frame to Wharton's Artemis and Actaeon and Other Verse, particularly those poems dwelling on instances of sexual fulfillment in which physical pain and mutilation are integrally connected. Comparing poems and novel, Waid concludes that...