‘A Construction in the Void’, Formal Architecture in the Novels of Edith Wharton

<p>Edith Wharton has been persistently framed as an author detached from the ‘modern’ twentieth century literary world she inhabited. Intellectually compromised by critical conceptions of her as the “last Victorian”, and Henry James’s “heiress”, Wharton’s attentiveness to modernism’s fractured worldview and her original employment of literary form to redress this perspective have been largely overlooked. This thesis seeks to re-evaluate Wharton’s ‘old-fashioned’ authorial persona. Instead of reading her commitment to a past perspective as evidence of her literary obsolescence, this thesis argues that her adherence to a bygone worldview serves as a means of managing the disorientation and disorder of the modern, incomprehensible present. Following Wharton’s evolving conception of stylised aesthetic form across pre-war and post-war worlds, I suggest that Wharton’s literature evidences a tension between two opposing literary aspirations. On the one hand, her texts reveal a desire to abandon aesthetic enclosures and realise an unbounded, authentic interior reality. Yet on the other hand, Wharton’s works underscore the poignant sense of fulfillment acquired within a life bound by such aesthetic architecture. Chapter One outlines Wharton’s critical stance in relation to both realism and modernism. It discusses the way in which the outbreak of the Great War motivated Wharton’s implementation of a critical ‘interior architecture’, in which a modernist interiority is held in play alongside an encompassing realist reality. Chapter Two assesses the stunted nature of stylised aesthetic forms in the pre-war world as evinced in The House of Mirth (1905). There, Wharton demonstrates how a lack of grounding in reality renders such aesthetics devoid of an internal anchorage that clarifies their purposeful relation to the world around them. Vacant of real-world relation, such forms abstract, disintegrating into formlessness. In Chapter Three, I reveal how Wharton moves from scorning to celebrating the artificial nature of aesthetic form in the wake of the Great War. In The Age of Innocence (1920), aesthetic forms deemed arbitrary and artificial in The House of Mirth are reevaluated and revealed as possessing an invisible, intrinsic real-world purpose. From denying realism, stylised aesthetics are redeemed in their attempt to frame individuals in relation to a formless world. Though such forms are inherently fictitious, Wharton asserts that their provision of an illusion of structure aids in the preservation of interpersonal and intergenerational connection. These forms thus cultivate an interior architecture within which society can shelter against an intrinsically unstable reality.</p>

‘A Construction in the Void’, Formal Architecture in the Novels of Edith Wharton

<p>Edith Wharton has been persistently framed as an author detached from the ‘modern’ twentieth century literary world she inhabited. Intellectually compromised by critical conceptions of her as the “last Victorian”, and Henry James’s “heiress”, Wharton’s attentiveness to modernism’s fractured worldview and her original employment of literary form to redress this perspective have been largely overlooked. This thesis seeks to re-evaluate Wharton’s ‘old-fashioned’ authorial persona. Instead of reading her commitment to a past perspective as evidence of her literary obsolescence, this thesis argues that her adherence to a bygone worldview serves as a means of managing the disorientation and disorder of the modern, incomprehensible present. Following Wharton’s evolving conception of stylised aesthetic form across pre-war and post-war worlds, I suggest that Wharton’s literature evidences a tension between two opposing literary aspirations. On the one hand, her texts reveal a desire to abandon aesthetic enclosures and realise an unbounded, authentic interior reality. Yet on the other hand, Wharton’s works underscore the poignant sense of fulfillment acquired within a life bound by such aesthetic architecture. Chapter One outlines Wharton’s critical stance in relation to both realism and modernism. It discusses the way in which the outbreak of the Great War motivated Wharton’s implementation of a critical ‘interior architecture’, in which a modernist interiority is held in play alongside an encompassing realist reality. Chapter Two assesses the stunted nature of stylised aesthetic forms in the pre-war world as evinced in The House of Mirth (1905). There, Wharton demonstrates how a lack of grounding in reality renders such aesthetics devoid of an internal anchorage that clarifies their purposeful relation to the world around them. Vacant of real-world relation, such forms abstract, disintegrating into formlessness. In Chapter Three, I reveal how Wharton moves from scorning to celebrating the artificial nature of aesthetic form in the wake of the Great War. In The Age of Innocence (1920), aesthetic forms deemed arbitrary and artificial in The House of Mirth are reevaluated and revealed as possessing an invisible, intrinsic real-world purpose. From denying realism, stylised aesthetics are redeemed in their attempt to frame individuals in relation to a formless world. Though such forms are inherently fictitious, Wharton asserts that their provision of an illusion of structure aids in the preservation of interpersonal and intergenerational connection. These forms thus cultivate an interior architecture within which society can shelter against an intrinsically unstable reality.</p>

“The Taste of Life”

This chapter begins with a comparative analysis of pain’s importance to three prominent nineteenth-century literary modes: sentimentalism, naturalism, and realism. It then turns to the distinctive aesthetic and ethical priorities of the high realism practiced by William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. It concludes with an extended analysis of Howellsian realism as the first of several examples of the high realist aesthetic. From the outset of his career, Howells explored the idea that a more refined literary sensibility hinges on a subtle sensitivity to suffering of various kinds, emphasizing a view of the elevated individual as possessing a heightened ability not just to experience pain but to manage his or her own reactions to it in a sophisticated fashion. Even in his most socially engaged fiction, Howells evinces a preference for a troubled, ruminative, and restrained affective response to others’ suffering over reactions his works portray as rash, boorish, or at best ill-conceived.

RETHINKING POE AND WHARTON: FORESHADOWING IN THE STRUCTURE OF GOTHIC STORIES: SIMILARITIES IN EDGAR ALLAN POE’S AND EDITH WHARTON’S SHORT NARRATIVES

Edgar Alan Poe and Edith Wharton found a way to give their own stories more realistic descriptions and details. The objectives of this research paper are to compare Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado (1846) and Wharton’s Roman Fever (1934) to know how these tales are structured, to describe how their methods works and how similar they can be. To meet these objectives, both stories were read and analysed so that every foreshadowing clue could be detached from the texts and organized in two tables, Group (1), concerning physical elements, such as titles, names of characters, and objects described, and Group (2), concerning events that took important roles in the stories, such as past events and confessions of the hideous crimes. After gathering all this information together, it was possible to compare those two tables and realise that both authors do have a particular way of thinking about the logic behind the plots by leaving clues throughout the stories that may be only recognized when the reader gets to the end. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0771/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Universal White: Discrimination and Selection in James’s American Scene

Chapter 4 reads James’s 1898 essays on American Letters, The American Scene, ‘The Question of Our Speech’, and ‘Charles Eliot Norton’, alongside writing by Charles Eliot Norton and Charles William Eliot, among others. During the early years of the twentieth century, Harvard thinkers address questions about the political responsibilities and powers of the 'college-bred'; this chapter argues that James responds to this discussion about the cultivated elite (or what Matthew Arnold calls 'the remnant') by directing attention to that elite's private pleasures rather than its public responsibilities. Tracing across multiple texts James's articulation of an aesthetic that prizes difference, discrimination, delimitation, and exclusion, the chapter shows that he, like Edith Wharton, associates these desirable qualities with the social hierarchies of the Old World. Although his celebration of intricately shaded heterogeneity has been hailed as anti-nativist or progressive, his critical portrayal of white homogeneity can function to criticise not racism or nativism but rather the egalitarian democracy with which such whiteness was closely associated. In contrasting his own practice of culture against that of Norton's 'Puritan' type, James distances himself from that type's commitments to asceticism and moralizing, and also its lingering associations with radicalism, antislavery sentiment, and democracy.

The Reign of the Genteel

This conclusion examines some episodes in the formation of the narrative about 'the genteel tradition'. Having shown that Henry Adams, Henry James, Edith Wharton and their friend Barrett Wendell all contribute to a realist critique of a liberal idealism, American Snobs notes here that when George Santayana makes his own influential commentary on the 'genteel', he is responding to the same liberal Harvard milieu that provokes that realist critique. Wendell's Harvard students Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Louis Parrington adapt this critique as they develop the narrative about the genteel for their own ends. Brooks, the conclusion shows, contributes to the distortions of that narrative by conflating Charles Eliot Norton's perspective with that of the much more reactionary Wendell. The book closes by considering the unsexy femininity that frequently figures the genteel, linking it to Reconstruction-era evocations of the schoolmarm and later references to sterile Anglo-Saxon womanhood that hastens racial decline. In later iterations of the narrative about the genteel, negative representations of this unsexy white femininity tend to serve progressive ends; in earlier iterations like those surveyed in American Snobs, however, such representations tend to serve a conservatism that is sceptical about democracy and understands itself as realist.

Introduction

This introduction announces American Snobs's argument and indicates how its work draws from and speaks to conversations amongst literary and historical scholars. Pointing to the historical specificity of the liberalism that the book discusses, the introduction describes the social and professional ties that connect the thinkers treated throughout the book, noting the centrality of Harvard University in the elite network that links Henry Adams, Henry James, and Edith Wharton to men like W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles William Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton and Barrett Wendell. The introduction then offers a brief historiography of 'the genteel tradition' before concluding with a rapid summary of the book's subsequent chapters.

American Snobs

Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, American Snobs shows how each of these authors interrogated that liberalism's arguments for education, democracy and the political duties of the cultivated elite. Coit shows that the works of these authors contributed to a realist critique of a liberal New England idealism that fed into the narrative about 'the genteel tradition', which shaped the study of US literature during the twentieth century.