Over eighty presenters joined us for Edith Wharton in Washington, ably codirected by Melanie Dawson (College of William and Mary) and Jennifer Haytock (The College at Brockport, SUNY). Below please find a sampling of abstracts from the conference. Please contact the authors for more information.Katie Ahearn, University College CorkIn June 1925, Edith Wharton wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald praising The Great Gatsby, stating that “it's enough to make this reader happy to have met your perfect Jew, and the limp Wilson, and assisted at that seedy orgy in the Buchanan flat.” Wharton's comments about Fitzgerald's “perfect Jew” draw comparisons between the characters of Gatsby, Wolfsheim, and Wharton's own Simon Rosedale. But they also inspire comparisons between Wharton and a contemporary Jewish American writer, Anzia Yezierska, who explores concepts of Jewish American masculinity in her 1925 novel Bread Givers in a more nuanced manner. In each of the three novels, the authors explore the concept of perfect Jewish masculinity and the limitations placed on their characters' ambitions by their society. Therefore this paper will investigate the representations of Jewish men and masculinity and the echoes that exist between the three texts.Nina Bannett, The City University of New YorkWhich woman has a worse fate? Which man represents a worse choice? Which woman's choices disappoint students the most? These debates raged as I taught Wharton's Summer alongside Lynn Nottage's contemporary play Intimate Apparel (2005) in an undergraduate course on women writers. Set in 1905 New York, Nottage's play is an ideal text to pair with Wharton's since they share many themes and plot points. Students' critical thinking skills soared as they grappled to compare Charity Royall with Esther Mills, a thirty-five-year-old spinster and African American seamstress who embarks on her first romance with a man she barely knows. Teaching Intimate Apparel alongside Summer deepened our investigation of themes of women's mobility, sexual desire, female respectability, public and private spaces, the use of sympathy, and the role of the seamstress in American life.Rita Bode, Trent UniversityHearsay stories as well as Fitzgerald's own words attest to his appreciation of Wharton's work. His determination, however, to position himself among the literary innovators of the post–World War I years required a distancing from her accomplishments. Tender Is the Night (1934) is more traditional than Fitzgerald's earlier work. Morris Dickstein traces its development back to Wharton's critique of Gatsby's lack of detail. The novel retains many modernist elements, but its expansiveness also reclaims patterns and paradigms that reveal a creative and dynamic dialogue with The House of Mirth as well as with Wharton's own predecessors, such as George Eliot. The continuities and transformations between Wharton and Fitzgerald suggest that if there is a place for Wharton in a historically masculine modernism, perhaps Fitzgerald can be included in a female literary lineage spanning both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Sharon Kehl Califano, Southern New Hampshire UniversityEdith Wharton's initiation into an exclusive group of queer men of letters provided her with a safe intellectual and literal space for exploring complicated paradigms of sublimated desire involving the taboo. Creating complex triangles of desire within imagined familial relationships in her fiction, Wharton explore unnamed, forbidden forms of sexual want, channeled into the unspeakable. Drawing on the paradigmatic, paternalistic relationship between the older mentor / younger student, reminiscent of paiderastia in Hellenic Greece and celebrated by men like Howard Sturgis in her close circle, Wharton examined the sexual attraction of older men for their younger counterparts within the trope of quasi-incestuous relationships, sublimated into seemingly heteronormative affairs with shared women partners. By examining The Reef (1912) and Twilight Sleep (1927), this paper explores how Wharton explored taboo same-sex desire in ways that informed the evolution of her authorial identity in literature.Mary Chinery, Georgian Court UniversityEdith Wharton's “The Twilight of the God” has a long history for so brief a “dialogue,” as she called it. Published as a part of The Greater Inclination in early December 1899, by the end of the month “The Twilight of the God” had become a controversy in the national papers. Former actress and socialite Edith Kingdon Gould performed the play as part of her yearly Christmas theatricals, but did so without the permission of Edith Wharton. The press interpreted the story as an issue of social standing, of the old money Wharton represented versus the nouveaux riches Goulds. In a review of The Greater Inclination on 29 December 1899, the Brooklyn Eagle responded with a suggestion that the uproar was a ploy by Scribner's to sell more books. This paper explores the history of this dialogue, the controversy in the papers, and the context of Edith Gould's performance.Michael J. Collins, University of KentThis paper considers The Custom of the Country within the context of its original, serial publication in Scribner's Magazine (1913). I read Wharton's novel as a response to the changing landscape of American ethnography. I consider how the novel draws on newspaper and journal debates about ethnographic data and sample collection in light of the expansion of museum collections at the Smithsonian, showing how the narrative, which moves from a concern with the exclusive and autonomous culture of a closed New York society toward a discussion of “circulating culture” (Evans) in a transatlantic space, charts significant shifts in turn-of-the-century American anthropology from the Bureau of American Ethnology's Lamarckism toward questions of cultural diffusion and exchange developed by Franz Boas.Megan Dawley, Boston UniversityIf one examines the trajectory of gossip—both whispered and printed—in The House of Mirth (1905) and The Custom of the Country (1913), a pattern of destruction and reconstruction emerges. Lily Bart begins as a society belle, popular in the pages of Town Talk. She learns from the newspaper that the man she loves has lost faith in her and fled New York, and her ultimate ejection from the upper echelons of society takes place in front of a society columnist. Wharton later presented a less ethical version of Lily with Undine Spragg-Moffatt-Marvell-de Chelles-Moffatt, who measures her own social progress, as well as the relative position of others, by counting citations in Town Talk. By comparing Lily with Undine, a different Edith Wharton emerges—one less aligned with the values of old New York and one more dedicated to satirizing the aspirational culture that still dominates American society.Melanie Dawson, College of William and MarySet in the aftermath of the Great War, “Her Son” forms a portrait of grief, featuring a mother who loses an aviator, then a spouse; she also reveals the existence of a firstborn whom she gave up before her marriage. Her quest to locate him reveals her long-term grief for this child, even as the death of her second son prompts a deeply felt mourning. Like other modern works explored through theories of loss, “Her Son” provides examples of both mourning and melancholia. It is the absence of the firstborn that is revealed as irreconcilable. According to Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia,” written in the midst of the war, the species of grief that alters one's sense of self, melancholia, cannot be resolved. Mrs. Glenn's grief for her first son reflects this quality, which Wharton ties to the loss of youth, a powerfully abstract ideal without which the future becomes unimaginable for an older generation.Diana DePardo-Minsky, Bard CollegeEdith Wharton's aesthetic principles, defined in The Decoration of Houses (1897) and Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), delineate characters, critique content, and control structure in The House of Mirth (1905). These treatises emphasize the Vitruvian trinity of suitability, utility, and beauty, then showcase past European styles as matrices for the American present. Simultaneously, Wharton's Italian Backgrounds (1905) proposes that artistic interpretation requires looking back spatially as well as temporally: “foreground and … distances … continually interpret and expound each other … In some cases the background is … amplification … ; in others, its … antithesis.” In The House of Mirth, Wharton's clearly drawn objects, specific locations, and binary composition intertwine past-present, foreground-background, to signal when a character is in or out of sync—unsuitable within the surroundings. Awareness of Wharton's design dictates reveals a covert chorus commenting on society and its citizens throughout her work.Myrto Drizou, Valdosta State UniversityThough scholars have examined Wharton's engagement with the Gothic in short stories and novellas (Summer and Ethan Frome), they have not extended their analysis to The Custom of the Country, a work whose Gothic elements have received little attention. In this novel, I will argue, Wharton revises traditional Gothic patterns to critique the monstrosity of the American nouveau riche culture, the “underworld of affairs” where people move like “shadowy destructive monsters.” Using various Gothic tropes that range from the romantic to the spectral and the grotesque, Wharton probes the realist limits of her novel with fragments of Gothic excess. In doing so, she experiments with generic conventions while proving her continued interest in American mores from the vantage point of the American expatriate and avid cosmopolite.Kristie L. Ellison, The University of North Carolina at GreensboroWritten at a time when women were seeking equality and demonstrating their ability to thrive in a masculine world, Edith Wharton's “Roman Fever” uses sexuality and cunning to portray women at their most competitive. Yet, Wharton creates a world where fierce competition clouds the women's judgment and causes them to destroy one another and themselves. Alida's hubris causes her downfall when Grace gets the last word, and Grace reveals a secret that could destroy her relationship with her own daughter. In giving female characters the agency to enact a masculine model of competition while allowing for unpleasant consequences, Wharton seems to be warning her readers about the potential dangers of the competitive spirit. Still, Wharton's message is not entirely dire, as through the daughters she offers support for women's sexual freedom and hope that future generations of women will not so easily see each other as enemies.Nir Evron, Tel Aviv UniversityMy talk examines a tension in Edith Wharton's social ideal between the conflicting virtues of reverence and curiosity. Wharton, I show, was quite conscious of the potential clash between the centripetal claims of tradition and the centrifugal tendencies of inquisitive individualism, addressing it directly in her laudatory French Ways and Their Meaning. Part of the agenda of that slim primer is to illustrate—on the basis of the French example—that, when properly handled, curiosity and reverence are not antagonistic but mutually animating cultural values. Achieving this ideal state, for Wharton, requires drawing a sharp distinction between the private-intellectual and social-practical realms, or, as one of her characters puts it, between the “things you read about” and the “things you do.” Curiosity, if it is to be sanctioned by Wharton, must be quarantined to the former sphere—to one's private project of self-cultivation. The paper traces the ramifications of this “solution” in Wharton's fiction and nonfiction, and reviews its significance within the broader context of liberal thought from Kant, through Matthew Arnold, to Lionel Trilling.Tricia M. Farwell, Middle Tennessee State UniversityWorld War I saw changes in war reporting as the military sought to control the war narrative. To gain access, reporters had to be credentialed, yet just being sent to war by a newspaper did not guarantee credentials or access. Edith Wharton helped in the war effort through aid efforts including delivering supplies to the front. She focused on delivering supplies as much as finding newsworthy nonfiction topics for Scribner's Magazine. Wharton's war “propaganda” and style in the nonfiction works has been problematic for some. By examining Wharton's war writings in the context of female reporters, it is clear that Wharton contended with problems women reporters faced in navigating between facts and emotion in war writing. This paper explores Wharton's nonfiction war writing in the context of professional female reporters. It argues that she may have helped open doors, albeit maybe unintentionally, for women reporters to expand beyond the women's pages.Anna Girling, University of Edinburgh“That Good May Come” (1894), one of Edith Wharton's early stories, is starkly provocative in its satiric portrayal of (Anglo-)Catholic aesthetics and moral intricacies. Like her other early works, the story hinges on the dubious sale of a text, and the dark implications of this economic exchange are explored through its impact on the text's protagonist. Furthermore, these implications are bound up with accusations of Catholic casuistry (a moral relativism, through which salvation could apparently be purchased), and with the unearned—or unlabored for— rewards offered by such practices. This paper examines the suspicion that Wharton's early fiction, and “That Good May Come” in particular, betrays toward supposedly Catholic (and Anglo-Catholic) “casuistry” and relativism—suspicions that anticipated and rehearsed many of the preoccupations of Wharton's later works.Meredith Goldsmith, Ursinus CollegeThis paper argues for a reading of The Spark, the third novella in Wharton's Old New York collection (1924), in light of fin-de-siècle representations of Walt Whitman. Enjoying a strange relation to the other texts in the Old New York collection, The Spark is ostensibly linked to the 1860s, the period during which the novella's protagonist, Hayley Delane, served in the Civil War. As the novella reveals, Delane was nursed by Walt Whitman during his tenure in the Washington Convalescent Hospitals, an unusual subject matter and historical moment in Wharton's corpus. Despite its retrospective material, the story is set in the 1890s and narrated from a later period, estranging it chronologically from the mostly antebellum material of the Old New York collection. Yet the turn-of-the-century context offers new insight into this underappreciated novella. The story turns on not only a revelation of Whitman's role in Delane's life, but in a scene of homosocial reading in which the bachelor protagonist and Delane bond over the text of Leaves of Grass. I contextualize the story against Wharton's reading of Whitman and in relation to a series of texts that circulated shortly after Whitman's death that attempted to address the poet's sexuality, some of which Wharton owned. Through a reading of Delane's memories of Whitman in wartime, the protagonist's veneration of Whitman in the story's 1890s present, and Wharton's own engagement with Whitman, as evident in her published writing and personal library, I argue that Wharton samples the critical conversation that repositioned Whitman as a gay cultural icon. While the 1890s might be seen as a conventional site for the questioning of male normativity, The Spark points backward from the 1890s to the 1860s, revealing a homoerotic dimension within the homosocial culture of the Civil War.Jennie Hann, Johns Hopkins UniversityCriticism of The House of Mirth has focused on categorizing the novel according to the established triptych of realism, naturalism, and modernism, the aesthetic modes most frequently associated with narrative prose on both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the century. Rather than attempting to locate the novel on such a continuum, however, this paper examines its aesthetic fluidity as a function of its transatlantic structure. By focusing on what I call the novel's “liquid language”—its evocation of the movement of water and the circulation of characters between American and European shores—and illustrating the diverse effects such language achieves—from a realistic social panorama, to a naturalistic exploration of the influences of heredity and environment, to a proto-modernist rendering of alienation—I argue that the coexistence of and friction between these diverse aesthetic modes is vital to understanding the experience of Lily Bart and how we conceptualize the capacious entity known as “transatlanticism.”Andrea L. Harris, Mansfield UniversityThe House of Mirth persistently raises the question of Lily Bart's resistance to categorization and thus her readability. Critics have approached this issue from many angles. I use Paul de Man's method of rhetorical reading to examine the way in which the rhetorical figures of key passages figure Lily's destabilized identity. Lily and the text of the novel disrupt the foundational structure of literature—that of language—and its presumed ability to render the world intelligible and to document what is real. At certain moments in the text, language's indeterminacy challenges the reader's ability to construct a reliable reading. The text uses a series of metaphors that describe the permeability of the barrier between Lily and other people, through repeated use of the words “to thrill,” “to penetrate,” and “to pass.” Ultimately, Lily's death confirms that she is the mark of language's indeterminacy.Jennifer Haytock, The College at Brockport, SUNYEdith Wharton's and Ernest Hemingway's short fiction of the Great War shows both soldiers and medical staff experiencing the medical system as an extension of the “war machine” with its bureaucratic process, its own interests, and the resistances and submissions of the injured soldiers and medical personnel. In Wharton's “Writing a War Story,” the bodilessness of the injured soldiers suggests Ivy's and other volunteers' refusal to see the wounds and by extension the human cost of the war. For injured soldiers in Hemingway's “In Another Country,” the medical system as much as the war undermines their sense of a meaningful and ordered world. Through their representation of injured bodies as invisible, passive, and fragmented, Wharton and Hemingway suggest how the medical system depersonalized the wounded soldier.Dan Hefko, Hanover High SchoolWhile “Roman Fever” is recognized as one of Wharton's most widely anthologized stories, the extent and implications of its adaptation have not been fully recognized. Previous discussions of this subject by Scott Marshall and Hermione Lee directly reference or allude to five adaptations. Drawing on interviews with adaptors, personal correspondence, and archival research, “Adapting ‘Roman Fever’” provides an overview of forty-eight adaptations of Wharton's story (including screenplays, teleplays, radio plays, operas, stage plays, musicals, and short stories). Special attention is given to H. R. Hays's 1952 teleplay for NBC, which is examined in the light of the shooting script, Eva Le Gallienne's production diary, the author's interview with actress Patricia Benoit, and a private collector's claim that the kinescope recording still exists. The paper concludes by analyzing Earl Cordrey's artwork for Liberty magazine and advancing the proposition that his 1934 illustrations constitute the story's first adaptations.Ashley Hemm, University of New OrleansCognitive and evolutionary approaches to literature have become more prevalent in the past few decades. Most evolutionary approaches to mating and parenting strategies stem from Bateman's principle of reproductive success and Trivers's theory of parental investment. While these approaches have been contested within the scientific community, they remain largely unchallenged within literary analysis. Edith Wharton's fiction provides a compelling counter to Bateman-Trivers, particularly her short stories “The Other Two” and “Roman Fever,” both of which suggest that the standard models of male indiscrimination, female choosiness, and parental investment leave something to be desired. Both texts utilize a limited narrative perspective to reveal transgressive female mating strategies, given the cultural constraints of the early twentieth century. “The Other Two” offers a glimpse into divorce and its gradual acceptance in New York society, while “Roman Fever” addresses a much more scandalous subject: premarital sex and illegitimate children among New York's elite.Sally Jones, University of AberdeenBefore Edith Wharton's library became available at the Mount, scholars relied on the well-known notation that her Bible contained “passages marked by Wharton, especially in Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and Isaiah.” This paper makes available a careful investigation of Wharton's annotations in her Bible, revealing not only the specifics of the passages Wharton marked, but also her focus on other sections of the Bible as well, including the Books of Job, Joel, Micah, and the Pauline Epistles in the New Testament. Taken as a whole, Wharton's considerable marginalia illuminates theological issues of interest to her, and one in particular, the contemplation of wisdom, is a recurrent theme. For all of the many enigmas it presents, and future threads to follow, Edith Wharton's Bible is an intriguing artifact of an interrogation into the mystery of divine and human wisdom.Sharon Kim, Judson UniversityDuring World War I, Edith Wharton became friends with John and Alice Garrett in Paris. John Work Garrett was a special State Department agent who later became the U.S. ambassador to Italy. He was also a distinguished collector of rare books, art, and coins. Similarly, his wife, Alice, was a well-connected patron of the arts who worked in wartime charities with Wharton. Together, the Garretts represented a cosmopolitan ideal for Wharton. Their understanding of the history, culture, and languages of other nations was of a high order, enough to enable delicate transnational negotiations in the context of war. Wharton's letters to the Garretts express a rare happiness at being an American citizen, and their friendship continued long past the war, in visits, letters, and gifts. Traces of the Garretts' influence appear in works such as The Age of Innocence (1920) and the short story “Her Son” (1933).Meltem Kiran-Raw, Bas¸kent Üniversitesi, Ankara, TurkeyIf the library represents the unquestioned domain of the male characters in Wharton's fictional domestic interiors, it signifies a dangerous threshold for her female characters. For men, the library is mostly the locus of confidences shared with members of their own sex (“The Bolted Door,” “Full Circle,” “The Eyes”). For women, it becomes a slippery space where they negotiate marital hurdles (“The Other Two,” “Afterward,” “Pomegranate Seed”). The culturally encoded, and hence naturalized, presence of a male character in the library engenders an unadventurous—almost prosaic—narrative, whereas the transgressive appearance of a woman (however naïve or unintellectual she may be) at the threshold of the library elicits a much more charged text. Focusing especially on “Afterward,” this paper argues that Wharton invites a specifically female readership to discover for themselves, to use a biblical analogy, the forbidden fruit of knowledge located within the symbolic space of the library.Jill Kress Karn, Villanova UniversityThough The House of Mirth might appear to have little in common with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, both novels complicate the relationship between solitude and privacy in ways that enhance our readings of each heroine and the development of her consciousness. Lily Bart, a commanding presence in society, systematically eliminates her options for relationship, until eventually, despite her distaste for solitude, she finds herself alone. Elizabeth Bennet, lively and socially adept, must journey away from the social world she knows, in order to discover more about herself. Austen's narrative makes space for solitude, and the narrative voice directs Elizabeth's self-transformation. Consequently, solitude, in Pride and Prejudice, enhances privacy and allows for a deeper awareness of one's inner life. Solitude in House of Mirth is mere isolation and often exclusion: it increases without the enrichment of privacy, without a sense of value in privacy, and allows no refinement for consciousness.Cecilia Macheski, LaGuardia Community CollegeEdith Wharton asserted, “Italy spoils me for everything else.” Hemingway agreed: “Wopland gets in the blood and kind of ruins you for anything else.” Almost forty years apart in age, the two writers nevertheless shared intense involvement in World War I, a love of luxury cars, links to Bernard Berenson, and a passionate disdain for convention guidebooks. Wharton “hyped the ordinary and avoided the celebrated tourist attractions” (Dwight) just as Hemingway's Cantwell advises that “only tourists and lovers take gondolas.” The Glimpses of the Moon and Across the River and into the Trees defy tourist clichés about Venice. Despite their disdain for conventional travel guides, both authors published travel articles and fiction that developed trench tourism and later identified celebrity venues, generating new surges in the number of Americans visiting Europe.Bonnie Shannon McMullen, Independent ScholarDespite the title drawing attention to a servant, most commentators have interpreted this ghost story, first published in 1928, from the point of view of Lady Jane Lynke, who takes possession of an ancestral house, Bells, which earlier owners have declined to live in for several generations. In this paper, I have tried to turn the story inside out, looking at Lady Jane's arrival from the perspective of the long-resident servants, descendants of Mr. Jones. A close examination of seemingly casual allusions, topical in the 1920s, reveals a subtext that suggests important issues regarding family secrets and ownership rights. These questions, in turn, raise a further one—who is really haunting Bells: a long-dead servant, or the representative of a long-departed family?Sheila Liming, University of North DakotaThe “evolutionary sciences,” which in the 1890s and 1900s included nascent forms of psychology, evolutionary theory, and neuroscience, fascinated fin de siècle America. From her library, memoirs, and archived correspondence, we know that Edith Wharton was herself likewise fascinated. In this presentation, I link Wharton's early fiction—in particular, stories from the collection The Greater Inclination—to the scientific work that inspired both its theme and its title, Edmond Kelly's Evolution and Effort (1898). Working from Wharton's annotations in her copy of Kelly's text, I showcase the ways in which Wharton and Kelly alike assume the task of “distinguish[ing] between science that is true and science that is false,” in Kelly's words.John Nichols, Christopher Newport UniversityWhen Edith Wharton published The Writing of Fiction in 1925, she enlivened the genre of advice books about writing. Early twentieth-century advice books on writing had sought to counsel novice writers about characters and setting as well as to answer mundane questions as to the number of hours a day writers should write. But Wharton's advice reimagined the discussion of writing beyond mere compositional tactics. In addition to her practical advice, Wharton elaborated on period debates about the relationships between readers and writers, notions of time and space, and literature in relation to tradition and genre. In raising the advice book about writing to a sophisticated level, she presaged later modernist authors, among them Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, who in their own advice to writers sought to elaborate for themselves and their potential readers (and possible fellow writers) compositional principles and their relation to a history of aesthetics.Paul Ohler, Kwantlen Polytechnic UniversityThe September 1910 issue of Scribner's Magazine offers a previously unexplored locus of works by Edith Wharton, her lifelong friend Theodore Roosevelt, and William Morton Fullerton. Appearing first in the issue is part seven of Roosevelt's African Game Trails, “The Great Rhinoceros of the Lado.” It is followed by Wharton's story “The Blond Beast,” which takes its title from a passage in Friedrich Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals and depicts its protagonist, Hugh Millner, as personifying “superhuman” qualities that are their own justification for action. Appearing last in the issue is Fullerton's essay “Mr. Roosevelt and France.” The paper reports on the interactions between Wharton, Fullerton, and Roosevelt in Paris during the month of April 1910 that led to Fullerton's essay, and it argues that these three texts participate in, and contribute to, a cultural conversation about the relation of personal and political power during a period of widespread interest in the work of Nietzsche. Touching on Roosevelt's “The Strenuous Life” (1899) and his speech “Citizenship in a Republic” (1910), the latter of which Fullerton addresses in his essay, the paper analyzes interconnections between the essays and the story to foreground a historical dialogue about the relevance of U.S. power and politics to western Europe, contextualizing “The Blond Beast” in ways that expand our sense of its subject.Emily Orlando, Fairfield UniversityThe Decoration of Houses (1897), cowritten with the architect Ogden Codman, Jr., put Edith Wharton on the map as an authority on domestic aesthetics at the turn of the twentieth century. What the narrator of “New Year's Day” describes as the “per