ANALELE

UNIVERSITĂŢII

BUCUREŞTI

LIMBI ŞI LITERATURI STRĂINE

2014 – Nr. 1

SUMAR • SOMMAIRE • CONTENTS

LITERATURĂ ŞI STUDII CULTURALE / LITTÉRATURE ET ÉTUDES CULTURELLES / LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES

A SELECTION OF PAPERS: EDITH WHARTON’ S NEW YORK

DANIEL WALKOWITZ, Elites in Crisis: Edith Wharton’s Old New York Confronts Modernity ...... 5 DANIELA DANIELE, “Refugee Raiders”: Edith Wharton’s Neglected Stories of Urban Philanthropy ...... 19 VERENA LASCHINGER, The Function of Photography in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth ...... 31 BRIGITTE ZAUGG, From Fifth Avenue to Boarding House: Setting in The House of Mirth ...... 47 HRISTO BOEV, Pale Spaces in The House of Mirth – Images of a Disembodied New York ...... 57 2 DANIEL J. WALKOWITZ

OANA ALEXANDRA ALEXA, Social Conflicts and Change in Edith Wharton’s New York ...... 67 NICOLETA PETUHOV, Dinner and Society in Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence ...... 77 RALUCA ANDREESCU, “Traditions That Have Lost Their Meaning Are the Hardest of All to Destroy”: Divorce in Edith Wharton’s New York ...... 87 RALPH POOLE, Having Sex Like a Man: The Postfeminist Single Girl in the Age of Un-innocence ...... 95 * Recenzii • Comptes rendus • Reviews ...... 105 Contributors ...... 109

A Selection of Papers: Edith Wharton’s New York

The following papers were presented at the international conference Edith Wharton's New York, held on September 19-20, 2013 at the Romanian Academy. A report of this event can be read at: The European Study Group of 19th Century American Literature (http://www.eaas.eu/eaas-networks/ european-study-group-of-19th-century-american-literature)

( EAAS European Association of

American Studies - Official Website)

ELITES IN CRISIS: EDITH WHARTON’S OLD NEW YORK CONFRONTS MODERNITY

DANIEL J. WALKOWITZ

Abstract

Edith Wharton writes in the midst of a social crucible -- the profound transformation of work and capitalism in the era between 1890 and World War in which class and race relations were being forged and contested. Her life and corpus raise three questions that complicate and elaborate the differences within the bourgeoisie that emerges in mid-nineteenth century New York. First, how Old New York fits into this putatively “cohesive” bourgeoisie. Second, how the story of elite class formation changes after 1896 during the years Wharton is both struggling with social dictates and is writing her major works. Third, how gendered and familial imperatives of modernity shape bourgeois culture in the early twentieth century as old and new elites confront modernity. Keywords: elites, modernity, gender, bourgeoisie, class.

Two salient features of modern New York help contextualize thinking about Wharton and her corpus: first, in Wall Street and Greenwich Village, New York paradigmatically represents both America and NOT America; New York is both a symbol of American materialist culture and of the anti- materialist counterculture. Second, the symbolic centers of the materialist culture, Wall Street, and the counterculture, Greenwich Village, are only about three miles apart. Political and cultural radicals have made Greenwich Village an American beacon for a bohemian alternative culture since the mid-nineteenth century. And the division between these two cultures reflects the centrality of Manhattan – the county with the greatest inequality in the country – in the national, world and Wharton imagination. Indeed, the radical political and counter-cultural opposition, claiming the mantle of “the 99%” led the march downtown to Occupy Wall Street against the privileged 1%. For social class relations, as E.P Thompson emphasized in his class study of the English working class, are relational and elites define themselves as much against one another as against the working class and poor. Thus, demands by the 99% for a (large) piece of

 New York University, [email protected] 6 DANIEL J. WALKOWITZ the elite’s privilege have animated substantive struggles among elites for both cultural and political capital and over how to deal with the uppity 99%. This story begins in the first half of the nineteenth century, when Edith Wharton’s parents were themselves children. Her parents, Lucretia Rhinelander and George Frederick Jones were an archetypical Old New York family. This Old New York was, of course, the culture of the Dutch and English who followed – the old landholders to whom the Dutch West Indies Company granted much of New York and the Hudson Valley as an inducement to settle and the English merchants who made money on slave trade, rum and sugar. The Rhinelanders were related to the Rensselaers, the wealthy Dutch patrons who settled seventeenth-century New Amsterdam, and with vast inherited wealth, the Jones luxuriated; indeed, some argue the expression “keeping up with the Jones” was based on them. Edith was baptized in the historic Episcopalian Grace Church in the heart of Greenwich Village and spent four early years with her family traveling and living in Europe. When her family returned from Europe in 1872, they settled back into the grand family home at14 W. 23th St., in the area that was fast becoming the fashionable cultural center of the city. In 1879, Edith was appropriately introduced to New York Society. Edith’s birth in 1862, in the midst of the Civil War and a year before the bloody draft riot scarred the city, occurred at a transformative moment for New York elites. The historian Sven Beckert in his classic text, The Monied Metropolis, notes how the City’s economic elite “remade” themselves between 1850 and 1896 as a “self-conscious and inordinately powerful New York upper class.” Indeed, a front-page New York Times story on April 6, 2013 headlined, “In History Departments, Its Up With Capitalism,” highlighted Beckert’s book as the centerpiece of a new history of capitalism that was taking American universities by storm. The New Social History of 1960s and “history from below” had recovered the history of subalterns – notably that of African Americans, the working class women – but had considered elites, if at all, largely as dead white men – and only as a part of political and economic history. In the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, historians like Beckert gave new attention to the 1 percent. The Old New York elite, according to Beckert, prided itself on not having to ‘dirty itself’ with work. It looked with disdain upon ostentatious displays of wealth increasingly associated with the new industrialists and nascent consumer culture. In their studies of Rochester shopkeepers and Utica “middle-class” families respectively, historians Paul Johnson and Mary Ryan have shown how a new market capitalism of the ante-bellum “burnt-over district” challenged older values. However, notes Beckert, older merchant/land holder elites and newer industrial capitalists remain divided as a social class until the Civil War. The end of slavery (though of course not racism and racial inequities) allowed ELITES IN CRISIS: EDITH WHARTON’S OLD NEW YORK 7 CONFRONTS MODERNITY elites to come together in the postwar era as a “bourgeoisie,” in Becket’s words, as a “cohesive group with a shared identity. “This bourgeoisie consolidated as a social class against the backdrop of the organization of the working class in the first half of the century, that is, against the formation of the American industrial proletariat. But Beckert’s story locates bourgeoisie’s class formation in the period after the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction, when as the historian Eric Foner has noted, the federal government brought its troops north where they would be mobilized in 1877 on behalf of capital to defeat the national railroad strike. Beckert focuses on how the class coheres, but he emphasizes as well the diversity of this “entrepreneurial bourgeoisie.” Merchants and new finance capitalists came together in support of possessive individualism and in opposition to the “dangerous classes,” but economic elites, he notes, are “deeply divided and notorious unstable,” divided according to different sources of capital and “sharply diverging… cultural and political imperatives” on the one hand, and by religion and political party affiliations, on the other hand. Unlike the old elites who had made their fortunes from land and trade tied to the slave, sugar and plantation economy (remember, New York merchant ships transported slaves and sugar and plantations were in debt to is banks), the new elites increasingly consisted of manufacturers, retailers and finance capitalists – and the legions of lawyers and politicians who gave the class political leverage. Absentee owners of the new monopolies and oligopolies – such as Armour (meat packing, 1864), Rockefeller (oil, 1884), Carnegie (steel, 1867) and Guggenheim (Colorado mining, 1889) – integrated their operations and relocated their families and fortunes to New York. A survey of the ascendant cadre of investment bankers in the last half of the century is particularly illuminating. Wall Street originated early in the century and centrality of the port and its steamship and clipper lines had established New York as national financial center by midcentury. But the postwar bourgeoisie arose to serve finance that bankrolled industry; investment capitalists such as Lehman Brothers, Drexel, Morgan & Co., Chase National Bank, Seligman Brothers, Loeb & Co., Manufacturers’ Trust make the city the new world financial capital. These elites cohered to create national ruling class based in New York, but ethno-religious prejudices left bourgeoisie’s cohesion riddled, too. For example, many investment bankers were German Jews as finance was one sphere traditionally open to Jews. But while manufactures needed their funding, indebtedness to them fueled anti-Semitism. Most famously, was a paradigmatic incident in Saratoga Springs, New York, Society’s summer venue for high stakes gambling and horse racing. When the Grand Union Hotel barred admittance to financier Joseph Seligman, the resultant scandal made him something of a cause célèbre. Seligman had financed the building of the 8 DANIEL J. WALKOWITZ national railroad and Standard Oil and lent the federal government $200 million in civil war bonds. The main spur to shared class identity – opposition to a class ‘other’ – the working class—was also a source of division. And significantly, this divisiveness was also interethnic and intra-ethnic. For example, Jewish immigrant workers from Eastern Europe – Yiddish speakers from Poland and Russia --labored and organized unions in factories owned and managed by German Jews. Beckert, to reiterate, notes the central concern with the working class animates this new ascendant bourgeoisie, but also emphasizes how it divides over “cultural and political imperatives.” In this case, as we shall see, even as they agree in their opposition to labor, elites divided over how they thought about one another and over strategies on how to contain the ‘danger,’ that is, in whether to deal with the class “other” – New York’s immigrant, working class – with repression and social control or with amelioration and accommodation. Edith Wharton’s life and corpus raises three questions that further complicate and elaborate the difference within the bourgeoisie. First, how does Old New York fit into this “cohesive” bourgeoisie? Second, how does the story of elite class formation change after 1896 during the years Wharton is both struggling with social dictates and is writing her major works? Third, how do gendered and familial imperatives of modernity shape bourgeois culture in the early twentieth century? Key is to remember that while Wharton sets her stories in the last half of the nineteenth century, she writes about that era in the first third of the twentieth century: House of Mirth is 1905; The Custom of the Country is 1913; Age of Innocence is 1920; and Old New York, four novellas she places in succeeding mid-century decades, is published in 1924. Beckert’s bourgeoisie coheres as a social class for him by 1896 – the year of the Populist campaign and the dawn of America’s new imperial adventures. He does not take the story into the twentieth century, yet it was in the following years, conventionally the Progressive Era, that many of the class divisions Beckert sees in the last half of the nineteenth century intensified. And much as the formation of the bourgeoisie took place against the making of the working class, its ‘remaking’ in the last years of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century occurred against the reformation of the working class, both in its composition and in the constrictions of monopoly capitalism and Taylorism under which it struggled in New York. The consolidation of the city’s boroughs paralleled the increased scale and concentration of its industries in fewer hands. Manhattan’s merger with Brooklyn and the largely rural counties of Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx more than doubled the population (from 1.5 million in 1890 to more than 3.4 million in 1900) and increases its geographic spread almost 14-fold. ELITES IN CRISIS: EDITH WHARTON’S OLD NEW YORK 9 CONFRONTS MODERNITY

The ethnic character of the population also changed quite dramatically and the change had racialized imaginings. Twenty-three million Europeans came to the United States between 1880 and 1919 and seventeen million of them landed in New York. Germans continued to arrive in the 1880s, but the majority of immigrants now came from southern and eastern Europe. The New York working class at midcentury was of Irish, German and English background; the working class at the end of the century has legions of Italian and Jewish immigrants. In 1907, for example, only 19% of the 1.2 million immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe, while 81% came form Southern and Eastern Europe. Mostly Italians and Jews, ¾ of the Italians and 9/10 of the Jews settled in urban areas, the greatest number in New York. Religion and culture also distinguished this new wave of immigrants. Irish Catholicism had long been the subject of nativist ire, but Anglo-Saxon elites more generally found intensely devotional Italian Catholicism to be newly strange and alien. Rooted in quasi-feudal societies of Mezzogiorno southern villages, profoundly patriarchal and familial, Italian immigrants formed tight- defensive communities. In contrast to the family immigration that characterized the Irish, Germans and Jews, often only Italian men came to America, and about stayed only to earn money for the family back in Italy. Returning to Italy as “birds of passage,” their allegiance to America was easily questioned, especially when some had Anarchist ties. Jews were also not unfamiliar – Marranos (persecuted Portuguese Jews who outwardly practiced Catholicism) had come as early as 1654 and German Jews had already established themselves in the city. But East European Jews who arrived at the turn of the century spoke Yiddish, were poor and many had formative socialist union experiences in the Polish Bund. The new bourgeoisie – both WASP and German Jewish – had reason to want to control these Jews or at least make them “respectable.” Finally, it is important to remember that the new immigration to the city took place in the context of an equally important migration to the city of African Americans. With the end of Reconstruction, agricultural distress in the 1890s, and the rise of Jim Crow segregation, rural Southern Blacks moved north in great numbers. Between 1890 and 1910, The African American population of New York swelled from 25,000 to over 90,000. The number of African Americans paled next to that of the new immigrants, but symbolically their presence loomed large in the political imaginary, most especially after what were called “race riots” erupted, famously in St. Louis and Chicago, but across urban America in 1919. First, race was spatially reorganized in the city. Facing discrimination downtown, the subway, which opened in 1904, facilitated the development of an African American enclave north in Harlem. Second, as a reserve army of labor, African Americans competed for the lowest paid jobs and gave ethnics cash value to distinguishing themselves from blacks in the labor 10 DANIEL J. WALKOWITZ market. Nativist elements in the dominant white culture considered newer arrivals such as the Jews and Italians from the Mediterranean and East Europe to be “swarthy” and, in the words of one Baptist newspaper, “not quite white folk altogether.” David Roedigger has described how older Irish immigrants could invest in the “wages of whiteness” to claim a place as respectable employees – alas, effectively as ‘good racist Americans.’ Similarly, German Jewish philanthropists worked both to assist their poor east European brethren to Americanize and respect their benefactors – who might well be their bosses in the department stores and garment factories – as their ‘betters.’ Wharton writes in the midst of this social crucible – the profound transformation of work and capitalism in the era between 1890 and World War in which class and race relations were being forged and contested. Monopoly and oligopoly found workers in increasingly larger work settings, especially in garment labor. The 1855 State Census counted 15,969 garment workers and of course, their work was seasonal to suit the fashion and the weather. In 1890, 114,619 New York City garment workers, one of every three City wage workers, produced approximately 70% of the garments worn by Americans, laboring in about sixty factories that employed between 50 and 300 mostly young women. Sweated labor continued, but with increased scale of production and competition, only worsened. The work in the Progressive era New York garment factories was also subject to the new regimes of scientific management. Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced time-motion studies in the 1880s and what he named “scientific management” became the celebrated “modern” business model. Capitalists, constantly faced with increased competition, embraced economizing strategies they saw in taylorization as “efficient”: longer days, piece-work or tasks, the use of the stop watch, speed ups, assembly lines, mechanization. The degradation of conditions is a familiar story, as is the radical labor organizing it spawned, but again, notably in the period following Beckert’s story in which Wharton wrote. As early as 1888, the Socialist Labor Party’s Yiddish Branch 8 and Russian Branch 17 joined with other Jewish trades to form the United Hebrew Trades. By 1910, it had more than one hundred unions with 150,000 workers under its aegis. The majority of the workers in the Hebrew Trades naturally worked in the garment industry, and several thousand of the women organized in the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, the ILGWU, in 1900. Jewish migrants nurtured on the socialist Bund in Eastern Europe labor struggles mobilized the union in 1909 to protest wage cuts and speed-ups. The resulting 14 week strike, the “Uprising of the 20,000,” was followed the next year by an even larger mobilization: The “Great Revolt” in which 60,000 cloak makers went out on strike. While the mass demonstrations and protracted strikes also mobilized business resistance, especially from the owners of large factories, events the next year would highlight for business ELITES IN CRISIS: EDITH WHARTON’S OLD NEW YORK 11 CONFRONTS MODERNITY elites the power of an organized working class. On the afternoon of March 25, 1911, fire engulfed the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory on Green Street, one block east of Washington Square Park in the heart of Greenwich Village; ladders from the fire engines could not reach above the sixth floor and 165 young girls, Italian and Jewish, jumped to their death to avoid flames. Manufacturers, concerned that workers’ bathroom breaks cut into production, had locked the door behind them; the manufacturers on the floor above them walked to safety. Two days later, 150,000 New Yorkers swelled the funeral march of a garment worker community, distressed but more committed than ever to fight back. Labor, united in grief and protest, divided over how to proceed, much as capital divided over how to respond to it. Socialist workers, some in the Hebrew Trades, aligned with the relatively conservative American Federation of Labor, offered one set of opponents with whom business leaders might hope to work; others embraced Marxist principles in new organizations such the Industrial Workers of the World. Bosses had more to fear from the IWW, which saw itself as having nothing in common with the capitalist class. Formed in 1905, the IWW consisted of socialists andanarcho-syndicalists committed to the abolition of the wage system. Many of its more famous supporters and activists, such as Emma Goldman, John Reed, Mabel Dodge, and John Sloan, the Ashcan artist muralist, resided in Greenwich Village and organized the Paterson Pageant in Madison Square (around the corner from house on 23rd Street where young Edith had been raised) in 1913 in support of the Wobblie strike in that industrial city a mere ten miles west of Manhattan. The proximity of Wharton house to Madison Square exemplifies the spatiality of class culture in the city. Residential segregation shaped elite, bohemian, radical and working-class neighborhoods, which overlapped and often abutted one another, making for an anxiety-producing indeterminacy. To the south was Greenwich Village. In post Civil War New York, the Village had become the liminal space, the political and cultural center of what one contemporary critic has termed a bourgeois bohemia. Originally a haven for merchant elites escaping contagion from Yellow Fever and, in their minds, the poor, it was a bohemian space as well for artists, labor radicals and cultural innovators. In the Progressive era, the area was home to what a contemporary cultural critic calls ‘bobos,” bourgeois bohemians, figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keefe, Eugene O’Neill, John Sloan, Margaret Sanger, Isadora Duncan, John Reed, Emma Goldman, Mabel Dodge, Randolph Bourne, Claude McKay, and Max Eastman. The term bobos captures the class dimension of an affluent group that was trying to imagine and create a new culture, an alternative and oppositional culture. By 1870, when the Jones’s returned from Europe, the elite set moved to create new markers of spatial distinction, territorializing a new fashionable 12 DANIEL J. WALKOWITZ neighborhood a mile north on 23rd Street. By the turn of the century, the move would be up Madison, Park and Fifth Avenues into what in the twentieth century would be known as the “silk stocking district. ”The Ladies Mile on Sixth Avenue between 14th and 23rd Streets provided a narrow corridor of respectable consumption between Greenwich Village and Madison Square. Fifth Avenue ran a block east, but Union Square, the home of many trade unions and regular labor protest, was a mere one block further east. Constant elite spatial re-territorialization reflected the class anxieties of a social and economic world in flux, but women, both as reformers and as the shock troops of the garment worker unionization, highlight how contested gender relations in Progressive Era social transformations troubled elite class. While the new cottage industry on capitalism has focused on political economy, Wharton’s story and her characters remind us to look at culture of capitalism and the critically gendered character of the one percent. Wharton writes in an era when the New Woman of the Progressive Era and the Modern Girl of the 1920s heightened gender tensions in the changing social relations of the modern industrial city. As Beckert notes, the bourgeoisie expressed its new class culture in rituals of eating and dining, in clubs, debutante balls, voluntary association, and in interior design preferences. The incident with Seligman, of course, illustrated the importance of such venues even as they could be liminal and contested spaces. The centerpiece of this culture, though, the piece that glued it together, was the patriarchal, traditional bourgeois family with the wife home tending the hearth and children while the husband worked. American bourgeois family ideology has its modern origins in the emergence of the Cult of True Womanhood in the 1840s and 1850s.Against the backdrop of the need for many poor women and young girls to work in factories to order to sustain their families, this ideology insisted virtuous women should stay home, raise children and tend the hearth. The ideology of a “separate sphere” for women deepened as capitalism grew more competitive and contested and as poor immigrants, from the elite perspectives, “flooded” into the city. Women and children were seen both as most vulnerable to urban, immigrant cultural debauchery and as most pliable to reform. Working, protesting and engaged in the public arena– these were working-class women at risk – with whom elite New Women could align, and as we shall see, some did. In the nineteenth century, privileged female reformers, Lady Bountifuls, volunteered for what they saw as women’s mission to mission. These wealthy woman thought to fulfill their nurturing role and sense of noblesse oblige by “visiting” those they thought “less fortunate’ -- rather than exploited -- and giving them moral lessons. In the new century, as Modern Women, some “Ladies” sought work as female professionals in new fields such as social work; others volunteered, ELITES IN CRISIS: EDITH WHARTON’S OLD NEW YORK 13 CONFRONTS MODERNITY much as Wharton would in France in support of war orphans. But elite women entering the public sphere as autonomous individuals, flaunting sexuality and challenging traditional conventions such as prohibitions against divorce, constituted fundamental challenges to elite class culture. The model of the New Women offered bourgeois women freedom, opportunity and a new sense of self, whether simply in riding a bicycle or smoking a cigarette, or in more contested political issues such as suffrage and abortion rights. The figure of the Modern Girl in the 1920s continued this feminist expression of female selfhood. As the international research project on the phenomena, The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity and Globalization (Duke, 2008), has described it, the Modern Girl was a marker of modernity characterized by “the use of trafficking in specific commodities” – bobbed hair, nail polish, cigarettes, high heels, lipstick, etc. – and “disregard [for] roles of dutiful daughter, wife and mother.” “White” and “middle class” (by identity, not class position), they had “the wherewithal and desire to define themselves in excess of conventional female roles and as transgressive of national, imperial, and racial boundaries.” A few anecdotes from my book City Folk(New York University Press, 2010) on Progressive reform and the folk revivals of the early twentieth century in New York illuminates efforts by some women with a resemblance to Wharton to revitalize immigrant workers’ bodies, and especially women’s bodies through folk dance. Historians often characterize these reformers as “middle class” but the term fails to appreciate their generally privileged background and how they were imbricated with and funded by the bourgeoisie. In the winter of 1911-12, New York Society could delight to read in the New York Times of holiday pageant dinners in Swiss Alp resorts attended by rich Americans such as the Duchess of Marlboro (the Brooklyn-born mother of Lord Ivor Spencer Churchill), who had married into English society. The highlight of the event, served by men and women in Tudor dress, was schoolchildren singing folk songs and performing Morris dances. And while Lady Spencer danced in swanky Swiss resorts, her American compatriots danced in hoity-toity New York hotels. “Society Women in Folk Costumes,: headlined the Times, noting in particular the presence of Mrs. T.J. Rhinelander, Mrs. Lorillard Spencer Jr., and Mrs. Frank Phipps dancing the “Fjallnaspolka” at the Waldorf –Astoria gala to benefit the Girls’ Branch of the New York Public Schools Association. The elements in these accounts --educational reform, physical culture for girls, and folk dance – brought together some of key concerns that engendered bourgeois Progressive reform. As early as 1873, the physician and Harvard professor Edward H. Clarke had warned in his book Sex in Education: A Fair Chance for Girls of the emotional and physical dangers that coeducation and exercise regimes held for women’s bodies. By the end of the century, urbanization and the new 14 DANIEL J. WALKOWITZ immigration magnified Clarke’s concerns as reformers worried immigrant culture ill-prepared newcomers to resist urban temptations of the music hall and radicals. Their answer to such deleterious urban conditions was a folk revival – the elixir of pure, unsullied rural (especially American) values and spirit. Luther Halsey Gulick, a prominent New York medical doctor, led efforts to reform endangered bodies. “The modern city,” he complained, produces “ease, mushiness, softness” in the world. Sports like boxing and football could instill manliness for boys, and to build “stiff-backed boys,” Gulick organized the New York Public School Athletic League (PSAL) in 1903, becoming its first director of physical education. In 1905, the American Daniel Carter Beard founded the Boy Pioneers. And after Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts in 1908, Beard organized the American Boy Scouts in 1911. Reformers, however, found the solution for girls, the future mothers of the race, especially vexing. Echoing Clarke, Gulick and his colleague Henry Curtis worried “girls are our great national problem.” One answer, with the support of two wealthy Social benefactors, Grace Dodge and Ellen Speyer, was the1905 organization of the Girls’ Branch of the PSAL. Gulick placed Elizabeth Burchenal, a well-heeled pioneer of the American folk dance movement who had taken several folk collecting tours of Europe, in charge. A second answer, the next year, was the founding by Gulick and Curtis of the Playground Association of America, where children could learn “healthy” play with respectable supervision. A third response was the founding of the Girl Scouts by Juliette Gordon Low in 1912, a female version of what Gail Bederman has characterized as muscular Christianity. Girl Scouts learned female domestic crafts, but folk dance also became an early part of the curriculum. Low was introduced to Helen Storrow, a wealthy Boston philanthropist. Storrow had met her husband James, a banker from a Boston society family, while on holiday skiing in Switzerland. In 1917, the Storrow family summer camp, Pine Tree Camp, on Long Pond just west of Cape Cod, became national training center for Girl Scout leaders. In the inaugural summer Helen Storrow invited the folklorist Cecil Sharp to teach the girls English Country Dance, the forerunner of American square and contra dance. Storrow, who helped found (and fund) the American Branch of the English Folk Dance Society in 1915, the first and now oldest folk dance society in America, had been introduced to ECD at a New York benefit for the Playground Association of New York in 1911. Folk dance, and specifically English Country Dance, comprised a fourth pillar of the bodily reform movement. The convergence of two seemingly different events in 1911 highlighted for reformers the entwined nature of political and cultural bodies at risk: the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and the Tango craze. The Triangle Fire and its attendant protest we have described above; equally concerning to many who represented themselves as “respectable ELITES IN CRISIS: EDITH WHARTON’S OLD NEW YORK 15 CONFRONTS MODERNITY

Society” was the arrival in New York of the tango. Intimate and vertiginous ballroom dance had left many concerned the new social dances led, in the title of a famous book of the era, from the Ballroom to Hell. The tango and the array of animal dances that took over the cabaret and dance hall dance floors heightened Society fears that bodies pasted up against one another and wildly gyrating in unchaperoned spaces where liquor was present jeopardized young women’s bodies – physically and morally. They embraced English Country Dance where couples danced at arms length in what Cecil Sharp famously described as “gay simplicity” as a happy alternative. As important, the dance was choreographed, taught and supervised in chaperoned facilities by instructors and demonstration teams drawn from the middling and elite ranks. Burchenal, as head of the Girl’s Branch of the PSAL, led the successful effort to have folk song and dance incorporated into the public school curriculum, and shetrained teachers to lead the dancing. As early as 1907, there were 253 New York City teachers instructing 8,219 girls in 128 city schools. In the next decade the practice expanded to most American industrial cities and to the settlements and playground programs as well. Jane Addams, the leading woman reformer and founder of Hull House, caught the essentially conservative spirit of these New Women’s urban liberalism in her 1909 volume, Spirit of Youth and City Streets: “These old forms of dancing ... safeguard unwary and dangerous expression and yet afford a vehicle through which the gaiety of youth may flow. Their forms are indeed those which lie at the basis of all good breeding, forms which at once express and restrain, urge forward and set limits.” And Burchenal was more explicit about the social and political mission: “folk dancing,” she writes, “as Recreation for Adults, [offers]… possibilities as a Democratic Socializing Agent, and its value as a form of real Americanization.” A want to close with some reflections on the life of Alva SmithVanderbilt Belmont. Belmont’s life weave together many of the threads of our story: how elites engaged the challenges of modernity amidst troubling social transformations of the era yet often found their values and tactics to be odds, if not internally contradictory. Belmont’s life illustrates the ambiguous and contradictory impulses that animated New Women and suggests similarities and contrast with that of Wharton. Granddaughter of a US congressman and daughter of a commission merchant, Alva Erskine Smith was born in the heart of the antebellum South – Mobile, Alabama – in 1853. Like Wharton, she summered with her parent in Newport, Rhode Island, and accompanied them on European tours. After the war, the family moved to New York where she was introduced to the grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, an iconic American capitalist. William Kissam Vanderbilt and Alva Smith married in 1875 and had three children, one of whom, a daughter Consuela, she 16 DANIEL J. WALKOWITZ maneuvered into a marriage with Charles Spencer Churchill, the 9th Duke of Marlborough, a marriage subsequently annulled. The Vanderbilts had a claim to Old New York as they had 17th-century Dutch settler ancestors. The Commodore, however, was new money: he made his fortune in steamship lines and rail lines, notably owning what became the New York Central Railroad. Alva then had to claim the family’s place in Society, and preferably at the head of it. At one point she designed and owned as many as nine mansions. One, the 1892 neoclassical Marble House in Newport helped transform that sleepy village to a Society destination. Its cost was estimated to be in excess of $11 million. But the first mansion she built, Petit Chateau, a French Renaissance mansion at 660 Fifth Avenue, was her beachhead in New York Society. She opened the house with a masquerade ball for 1000 guests in March 1883 estimated to cost $3 million. The story of how she used the occasion to claim her place in Society may be apocryphal, but is illustrative nonetheless. Alva felt she had been snubbed by Caroline Astor, the putative “queen” of “The 400” elite, and “neglected” to send Caroline’s daughter s invitation, requiring Caroline to make a social call on Alva to claim an invite. As much as she dedicated herself to claiming a seat at the head of New York Society, Alva, a New Woman, then shocked society by divorcing her husband. With a settlement in excess of $10 million and several estates, she then married an old friend of the Vanderbilt’s, Olivier Hazard Perry Belmont, in 1896. They moved into yet another mansion on the corner of Madison Avenue and 51st Street – again, the emerging the Silk Stocking District. Olivier Belmont’s wealth and family position further cemented Alva’s place, but his ancestry complicated it: Olivier’s father, August Belmont, while a successful investment banker for the Rothschild family, had been born a German Jew. He converted to Christianity at the age of 33 when he adopted his wife’s Episcopalian faith, but as we have seen, anti-Semites did not always allow for such distinctions. Olivier died suddenly in 1908 and Alva got absorbed in new interests: women’s suffrage and women’s rights more generally. Indeed, as we have seen, philanthropy had long been a pastime of elite women – a role figured in the image of Lady Bountiful; Alva was, in fact, more of a social activist and politically engaged, albeit with a privileged maternalist subjectivity. In 1909, she founded the Political Equality League to press legislators to pass suffrage laws and she worked tirelessly and gave generously to help establish the National Women’s Party. Moreover, she and her wealthy female allies such as Frances Perkins and Anne Morgan, who critics derisively called “The Mink Brigade,” actively supported the women garment workers, paying to bail out arrested strikers. Alva Belmont, again in an echo of Edith Wharton’s life, retired to France in 1923, where she moved between a Paris townhouse, a villa on the Riviera, ELITES IN CRISIS: EDITH WHARTON’S OLD NEW YORK 17 CONFRONTS MODERNITY and ultimately, a 15th-century chateau in Loiret. She died in 1933. With the world mired in the Great Depression, she widened the river running through the estate and, ever the modern girl, added a bowling alley.

Women like Belmont and Wharton joined alienated elite intellectuals and artists (bo-bos) like Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Abraham Walkowitz as a Lost Generation of Americans abroad. This Lost Generation was a gendered experience, however, in which New Women had to reconcile aspirations of modernity with constrictions of elite patriarchal traditions and passions for leisure and consumption. Thus, the bourgeois obsession with gendered bodies had a central class component. Many bourgeois men worried about uppity wives, but the bourgeoisie, both male and female, worried about working women and men, although they divided on responses. Owners of large garment factory, again often German Jews, had little sympathy for workers they thought careless and lazy and focused on crushing unions. Owners of smaller factories, where relations were more personal, more often pressed for good working relations with unions to avoid strikes. The women reformers such as Belmont fought for “reform, though historians understand Progressive reform such as the factory fire codes that followed the Triangle Fire asa conservative liberal dress rehearsal for New Deal. Protective legislation discriminated on behalf of women and children and did little for male workers. Moreover, the legislation was not well funded, and male workers, happy to have their wives at home and reduce supply of cheap alternative labor, supported it. Reformers, quick to end child labor, never dealt with the loss of wages for the worker family. This account, then, suggests how the contemporary profession’s fascination with the making of an American bourgeois needs to be historicized and Beckert’s story needs to be brought into the 20th century. With the rise of monopoly capitalism, new economic elites emerged that further complicate the consolidated elite Beckert describes. The history of the one percent class is dynamic, divided culturally, economically and politically and overlaps and differences remain to be unraveled. Wharton writes of the 19th century Old New York, but as a 20th century woman. Old New York as a distinct class faction, was largely gone from her world. But if elements of its moral imperatives and social aspirations lived on, what seems evident is that the bourgeoisie as a class was more divided over political strategies than moral and social allegiances. How Edith Wharton reflects each era in her writing – sometimes explicitly, sometimes in silences – and how well the class, racial and gendered transformations of the era in which she lived rather than that about which she writes shaped her work is a project less for the historian than for literary scholars. So Wharton scholars: The ball is now in your court. 18 DANIEL J. WALKOWITZ

REFERENCES

Addams, Jane (1909), Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, Macmillan, New York. Beckert, Sven. (2003), The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1996, Cambridge University Press, NewYork. Braverman, Harry (1975), Labor and Monopoly Capital: the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, New York. Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace, (2000), Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford University Press, New York. Clarke, Edward H. (1873), Sex in Education: A Fair Chance for Girls, Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Cott, Nancy, (1978), The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835, Yale University Press, New Haven. Cott, Nancy (1989), The Grounding of Modern Feminism, Yale University Press, New Haven. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall, (1987), Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Foner, Eric (1988), Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, Harper & Row, New York. Greenwald, Richard A. (2005), The Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York, Temple University Press, Philadelphia. Hammack, David C. (1982), Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century, Russell Sage Foundation, New York. Johnson, Paul E. (1978), A Shopkeepers Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York 1815-1837, Hill and Wang, New York. Osofsky, Gilbert (1964), Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Harper & Row, New York. Peiss, Kathy (1986), Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Temple University Press, Philadelphia. Ryan, Mary P. (1983), Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865, Cambridge University Press, New York.

“REFUGEE RAIDERS”: EDITH WHARTON’S NEGLECTED STORIES OF URBAN PHILANTHROPY”

DANIELA DANIELE

Abstract

The benevolent tales written by Edith Wharton in the aftermath of the Belgian exodus to France and Great Britain in 1914 strike as a literary oddity in the bulk of her sophisticated comedies of manners. Nevertheless, that state of emergency unexpectedly turned the author into a humanitarian crusader, urging her to reformulate the urban theme of the chance encounter in the crowd in ways which still speak to our current experience of mass migrations and war trauma. Keywords: Anglo-American literature, Victorian philanthropy, war trauma, Edith Wharton, Henry James.

1. Benevolence and beauty

We usually celebrate the literary elegance of Edith Wharton and her perfectly designed comedies of manners, apparently resistant to the challenges of the urban scene. In A Backward Glance, the writer recalls “the little prim girl” (viii) who “walked up Fifth Avenue” (1) with her father, and the “ambivalence in her feelings toward New York” (x) before her decision, in the Seventies, to leave that “cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without towers, porticoes, fountains or perspectives” (viii) and retreat in Boston and Europe, “determined to be surrounded with a beautiful world, even if she had to build it herself” (6). Of her “lost brownstone city” (xi) she remembered the “pathetic picturesqueness ” and the indifference of “the immense tribe of my New York cousins” to her literary talent, with the exception of “one eccentric widowed cousin, living a life of lonely invalidism” who “turned to my novels for occasional distraction, and had the courage to tell me so” (144). Countess Olenska in The Age of Innocence (1920) was perhaps her homage to that one sympathetic relative. Although the dramatic ironies of her prose seem impermeable to the fate of the lowly and the outcast, it is a fact, as Balestra points out, that in 1920 a

 University of Udine, Italy, Foreign Languages Department, Anglo-American Literatures, [email protected] 20 DANIELA DANIELE master of social realism like Sinclair Lewis dedicated a modern classic like Main Street to her (1999: 24). The Fruit of the Tree (1907) maintains the muckraking aspects of an industrial novel, revealing the author’s progressive views through her compassionate depiction of millworkers. But it is only during the massive migration of the Belgians caught by surprise by the German invasion in 1914 that Wharton demonstrated an unsuspected, philanthropic commitment. This article discusses her neglected tales of benevolence which initially take the pleading tones of Victorian philanthropy, later to engage the modern writer in a compelling study of the complex relationships involved in the charity business. In The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart already feels “human suffering so near and insistent that the other aspects of life fade into remoteness” (119-20) and, in an act of “prodigal philanthropy”, donates 300 dollars to the Girls’ Club, to “provide comfortable lodging, with a reading-room and other modest distractions, where young women of the class employed in down town offices might find a home” (87). On the occasion, she perceives the empowerment implied in the dynamic of giving and the “self-esteem which she naturally mistook for the fruits of altruism” (88). As she solicits more donations, Lily feels drawn “out of herself” (119) by people’s material needs, as if caught in a Poesque “Maelström” of destitution. Torn between her convinced individualism and the terror of urban masses, Miss Bart meditates: “But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract conception of poverty, another to be brought in contact with its human embodiments. Lily had never conceived of these victims of fate otherwise than in the mass”. And when she becomes a working woman herself, the fellow workers who capture her interest are “young girls, like herself; some perhaps pretty, some not without a trace of her finer sensibilities” (88), being any “mass [...] composed of individual lives, innumerable separate centers of sensation” and “some of these bundles of feeling were clothed in shapes not so unlike her own”. Lily’s brief but intense excursion in philanthropy, and the related “shocks of pity that sometimes decentralize a life” (119) are later echoed in Ethan Frome (1911), and in tales like “Banner Sisters” (1916) and “Summer” (1917) (whose protagonist is significantly named Charity Royall). But it was the exodus of Flemish fugitives to Paris and London after the German bombardments which moved the writer to charity action and originated most of her benevolent tales. As she clarifies in her preface to The Book of the Homeless (1916)—the fund-raising book which she edited to help finance “The Children of Flanders Relief Committee” and shelter the Flemish fugitives in Paris—, the volume was a collective enterprise aimed to create a network of refugee charities and “REFUGEE RAIDERS”: EDITH WHARTON’S 21 NEGLECTED STORIES OF URBAN PHILANTHROPY” custodial institutions.1 Her publication secured for a second year a safe French home to the exiled, and the editor constitutes herself as a hostess who symbolically and practically welcomes the reader/refugee at the threshold of a book which “gradually built itself up, page by page and picture by picture” until “a gallant piece of architecture” is created, with “delightful pictures” hanging on its walls, and “noble music” echoing through them (xxiv-v). In real life, the author took personal charge of “six hundred and fifty children and a number of helpless old men and women from the ruined towns and farms of Flanders [...] drifted into Paris and into other parts of France and across the Channel to England” (ix). Since their initial “flight from Western Flanders” in April 1914 (xxii), her benevolent efforts on the behalf of “this poor burden of humanity” (xxiv), “assisted some 9,300 refugees, given more than 235,000 meals, and distributed 48,333 garments” (xx). The literary master of style apparently alien from any material concerns took care of the refugees’ stream and rationally organized their working life, according to the Tayloristic inspiration of Victorian philanthropy (Bergman-Bernardi, 2005: 11). Her rescuing operation was promptly followed by productive assignments for the refugees, being the aim of the Hostess of the Children of Flanders “not only to feed and clothe and shelter, but also to train and develop them” (Wharton, 1916: xxiii). At the request of the president of the local French Red Cross, Comtesse d’Haussonville, in November 1914 she inaugurated a workroom (ouvroir) for a hundred jobless seamstresses on Rue de l’Université, “just a short walk from her own home on the Rue de Varenne” (Kassanoff, 2004: 115). In that institution, the female workers from the renowned Flemish lace industry destroyed by warfare were profitably employed to the advantage of the French manufacturing industry. Even the “smallest children” partook of this program of “industrial training” (Wharton 1916: xxiii) and “hygienic education”, being “taught gardening and a little carpentry” in a Montessori school, and transformed, along the lines of the sentimental rhetoric of Victorian philanthropy, from “piteous waifs” to “rosy children playing in the gardens of our Houses” (xxiv). In this respect, Wharton’s preface to The Book of the Homeless, which at moments reads as a short story in its own right, surprisingly reflects the conventions of benevolence literature and appeals to the donors’ generosity by

1 This splendid volume, printed and numbered in one hundred and seventy-five copies, was made possible by a yearly American subscription and introduced by the then founder of the Progressive Party, Theodore Roosevelt. Beautifully illustrated by the original paintings and drawings of established artists such as Max Beerbohm, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Rénoir, August Rodin and John Singer Sargent, it featured “articles in Verse and Prose” by Sarah Bernhardt, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Joseph Conrad, Eleonora Duse, John Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy, William Dean Howells, Henry James, George Santayana, Josephine Preston Peabody, Edmond Rostand, Mrs. Humphry Ward, W. B. Yeats, and a music score by Igor Stravinsky. 22 DANIELA DANIELE indulging in the pathetic depiction of “Train-load after train-load of Flemish children poured into Paris” (xxii). From that “great torrent of the flight from the North” (xix), a little Belgian acrobat gets instantly selected and “placed” as page in a big hotel, “given good pay, and put into a good liberty, and told to be a good boy” (xix). However, later on, the little refugee meant to be protected from the predatory forces of society, inhabits the guilty condition of a social deviant, as if crime and exile were the inevitable consequence of his vagrant life. When he gets caught to steal valuables from the rich lodgers of his employer, his benefactress assumes the cleansing tones of a Victorian philanthropist (Eiselein, 1996), whose disciplinary language aimed to contain the social unrest aroused by the circumstances, deriving “much of its impetus in the rhetoric of science, industrial organization, and social organicism” (Radeva, 2007: 153). In this efficient mode, the self-appointed “American Hostess for Refugees” and “social worker among the refugees” lists the nursing care and the “Vacation Colonies” designed for the weariest children (Wharton, 1916: xx), and even advises her Belgian “good Sisters” on “many things they did not know before concerning the physical care of the children” (xxiv).

2. Literary thresholds

The pragmatism of those busy days did not prevent the aloof modern stylist that we all admire from understanding the difference between voluntary migration and the forced expatriation of the traumatized masses she took charge of in Paris. Quite aware that her business was not “preparing for their new life an army of voluntary colonists” but “to console for the ruin of their old life a throng of bewildered fugitives” (xx), she appropriately welcomed the Flemish fugitives with Belgian hymns and symbols like “miniature hay-cocks”, without ignoring how visibly “struck by a senseless and savage bombardment” they kept looking, bearing a “lamentable” and grim expression that the renowned aesthete found “in pitiful contrast with the summer day and the bright flowers” (xxii) which decorated the rescuing scene. At this point of her report, Wharton suspends the pathetic accents initially embraced to move prospective donors to action and lingers on the invariable sadness of the refugees, as if to stress the inadequacy of beauty and of the “bright flowers” in the face of the immense pain of that crowd. The exceeding distress of the scene aroused “an enormity of outrage beyond all thought and all pity” (124) in her friend, Henry James, who perceived the formal perfection that they both had devoted their writing life to quite helpless, if not disturbing. In “The Long Wards”, the essay that he contributed to The Book of the Homeless, the unsurpassed literary master honestly and congruously viewed the “horrors of German powers” from the perspective of the “tended and fostered and cultivated” who “believe in “REFUGEE RAIDERS”: EDITH WHARTON’S 23 NEGLECTED STORIES OF URBAN PHILANTHROPY”

Culture”, and found a “term of comparison” for that crisis in the “abyss” of the American Civil War, noticing how the provisional identity of the refugees severely shook the most cultivated minds from their neutral and judgmental position, being that humanitarian crisis “bound to defy the largest luxury of thought” (118). In deep distress, James did not fail to acknowledge how the “presence of the first aligned rows of lacerated Belgians” (124) and “the eloquence of whose mute expression of their state, and thereby their cause, remain to me a vision unforgettable forever” (118), and satirically explored the deep threat in war emergency brought about by charity to the individualism which sustained any literary creation. As a “witnessing mind” (118) of that “ first wash of the great Flemish tide”, he denounces the “small care and scant provision that have attended such hearty and happy growths”, finally wondering “what a better economy might, or verily might n’t, result” from that diaspora (125). In the face of those masses deracinated from their previous lives and selves, no rescuer was impermeable to the tragedy of their cultural dispossession, aggravated by the “poisoning” measures of the elitist philanthropists whose inadequacy he also castigated: “How can creatures so amiable, you allow yourself vaguely to wonder, have welcomed even for five minutes the stress of carnage? And how the stress of carnage, the murderous impulse at the highest pitch, have left so little distortion of the moral nature?” (122). The tales written by Edith Wharton on the agitation brought about by the Flemish exodus keep James’s compelling questions ringing, as sharp accounts of the dual dynamics implied in her philanthropic commitment which required much more than a sympathetic response. Finally relieved from the material pressure of securing food, clothes and shelter to the exiled, five years after the publication of The Book of the Homeless, Wharton reconsidered her charity action from her friend’s subtler perspective, and abandoned the didactic tones assumed in her efficient management of the “bewildered fugitives” (xx) to delve into the unuttered disturbances involved in the rescuing experience. Hence, she gradually dismisses the homiletic, Victorian rhetoric initially adopted to encourage donations and, in “The Refugees” (1919), she embraces a provocative representation of the rescuers as rescued souls, by reversing the role of the presumed object of pity and of the self-appointed subject of charity. Even in her preface to her charity book, she finally shifts from the vantage point of the benefactress to the poetic voice of the war victims, as if ready to “efface [her]self from the threshold and ask you to walk in” (xxiv-v) and, in the lyric “The Tryst”, which she also contributed to that chapbook (41- 42), she reports the compelling speech of a fugitive widow who escapes the mind-numbing effects of the rescuer’ scrutinizing gaze and laments: “My house is ill to find, she said,/For it has no roof but the sky; /The tongue is torn from the steeple-head”. Her first person account forges a new altruistic personality in benevolent literature, as if to mirror the subjective distress of the rescued, 24 DANIELA DANIELE initially depicted as a mute “throng astray” (41). In a more dialogic fashion, the refugee actively engages in a relationship with her benefactress no less complex than the ones which had previously constituted the main focus of many a Wharton’s fiction. What results is a modern vision of poverty relief, conveyed in a spirit of reform gradually deprived of the power dynamics postulated by the Victorian policy of charity rescue and placement. We can speculate that when, three years later, the writer conceived the character of a Professor of Romance Languages lost in the refugee crowd and pensively wondering on their fate, Wharton had still in mind the slightly obscure but compelling nonfiction which James contributed to The Book of the Homeless (115-125). “The Refugees” replaces the patronizing perspective of the Victorian philanthropist on the nameless “throng of fugitives” (3) with the male perspective of an astounded intellectual “protected by his silent dignity” which, in many respects, reflects James’s own doubts in front of a tragedy which absorbed and “entrapped” even the most informed observers of that crowd (“The Long Wards”:124). It is not a case that in this late benevolent tale, Wharton’s narrator takes the male voice of Charles Durand, a decent Professor traumatized by the “vast needs” (125) of fugitive crowds which James also described in his previous report, “Refugees in England”, published in The New York Times Magazine (1915). If the charity book skillfully built by Wharton on original poetry, fiction and artwork for the benefit of the Flanders Rescue Committee had served as an ideal literary threshold for the “thousands of fugitives wandering through the streets of Paris and sleeping on straw in the railway-stations” (Wharton, 1916: xx), “The Refugees” moves the rescuing scene from Paris to the neighborhood of Chelsea in London that James was familiar with, and posits the Charing Cross station as the actual city threshold and meeting-place where the first glances of mutual recognition between the rescued and the presumed rescuer are first exchanged. Wharton’s story opens on the confusion of the Belgian crowd in which two anonymous passengers are mutually convinced to recognize in each other a needy refugee to be sheltered. In this tale, the narrator is not the “hostess” urged by the power of benevolent womanhood “forced on me by the necessities of the hour” (Wharton, 1933: 356-7) to feed and find a provisional shelter to the fugitives from Western Flanders, but a modern writer in male attire who lucidly explores her uncanny encounter with a group of refugees as a charity lady eager to make herself useful. As she fully recovers the wit of her sophisticated style, in “The Refugees”, Wharton studies the ways in which circumstances of general affliction impinge upon the most exquisite minds and, in doing so, assumes the brooding and Jamesian perspective of a skeptical professor of Romance Languages, initially tempted to “fly the sight” of the massive flood of Flemish refugees and “to slip over the cheap lodgings in London and bury his nose in the “REFUGEE RAIDERS”: EDITH WHARTON’S 25 NEGLECTED STORIES OF URBAN PHILANTHROPY”

British Museum”, but forced by his “lame foot” to follow “the main current” (4) until he gets “caught in the central eddy of fugitives, tossed about among them like one of themselves, pitched on the boat with them”. Thus “entangled” in the multitude “poured out on the platform of Charing Cross” (3),— which, this time, is not depicted as a nameless urban crowd but as a roaring and recalcitrant mob—, the stunned Professor detects an authentic refugee in the “frail and diaphanous” woman whose “insignificance” qualifies for a pauper refugee. As he instinctively gets closer to her, he wonders: “What right had he to be pretending to help a refugee?” (4). He soon has to realize that the benevolent rescue that for a mysterious reason he is so eager to perform matches the woman’s own desire to exercise philanthropy to his advantage. Before surrendering to “the inexorable grasp” of stranger who “steered him through the labyrinth of Charing Cross” (53), the worn-out humanist who apparently stands for James’s alter-ego, abandons his suitcase and reading glasses to another destiny, which seems to promise “a greater freedom of judgement than his neighbors had” (53). As he follows “the frightened creature who was so determined not to let him go”, the incognito traveler ends up sitting in a packed compartment with the mysterious stranger, being both transfixed, “silent, absorbed in their emotions” (3) in a moment of mutual distraction. As the stunned Professor from a Catholic University in Belgium gets “compassionately but firmly” (3) led out of the crowd by little fingers later defined as “thin claws” (53), he becomes an easy prey for the genteel “refugee raider” (57), and her crew of “ministering angels with high heels and powdered noses” (3), who later exhibit him as a trophy of compassion at tea parties. This time, Wharton’s philanthropic experience becomes the pretext to investigate the essential ambivalence of the simplest gesture of human solidarity, gradually revealing the states of mind of two charitable souls whose mutual rescuing act respectively reveals the loneliness of a dignified professor and the social ambitions of the lady who singles him out of the crowd. The “torrent of broken phrases” in her “harrowing” confession reveals the vulnerability of the leisure class in times of scarcity, and strikes as “the uncontrollable outburst of a shy woman grown inarticulate through want of listeners” in the eyes of her misplaced object of charity, who also “stammered whenever it was all- important to speak fluently”. Their hesitation ultimately unmasks the romantic nature of their mutual rescue, since “in moments of extreme social peril [...] at the hour when civilization was shaken to its base, he, Charles Durand, might not at last permit himself forty-eight hours of romance” (53). One of the many ironies of this modern tale of benevolence is the way in which the material act of sheltering an afflicted soul reveals the want of care and affection of the would-be rescuer, in a tragic comedy of errors produced by the untenable position of the two philanthropists deprived of their cherished object of charity. The subtle study of their human permeability strikes as a 26 DANIELA DANIELE warning in our age of terror dominated by manufactured trauma and massive migrations provoked by warfare. Wharton’s depiction of a turbulent transition in history and of the chaotic management of urban crowds that it brings out assumes the features of a modern tale of urban displacement in which neither the professor engaged in a tentative exercise of charity nor his rich rescuer exorcise the personal fragility which “contracts his faculties” in front of human wretchedness. The fund-raising activity which urged Wharton to shelter thousands of Belgian fugitives from their nation spoiled by the German advance places the reader himself in a position of amnesia, “in an ecstasy of assimilation” (4) which, in the story, makes Durand’s romantic and philanthropic response coexist in that state of humanitarian emergency. If the Victorian ethos traditionally viewed compassion as a feminine instinct able to balance the profit-making manifestations of the middle-class, Wharton resists that spirit of condescension and social determinism and, in a Jamesian attempt to reduce the disproportion between “watch and ward”, exposes the arrogance of the improvised guardians who expected only humiliation and self-denial from their “wards.” By inverting the roles of victims and benefactors, “The Refugees” deconstructs the naturalistic accents of genteel pauperism which turned the “herded” poor into animalistic and subdued creatures selected out of the “stagnant mass, through which, over which, almost, there squeezed, darted, skimmed and criss-crossed the light battalions of the benevolent”. Compared to the silent mass depicted in her preface to The Book of the Homeless, in this late tale of benevolence, the swarming mass of fugitives conveys all their restlessness through Wharton’s skillful use of an uneven syntax and of war metaphors, which captures the recalcitrant turbulence of a refugee crowd confronted with armies of benevolent ladies wearing “badges” comparable to war insignia. The writer’s critique of the sentimental rhetoric of these philanthropic soldiers casts light on the disciplining function of their untiring “sorting, directing, exhorting, contradicting, saying, “Wee, wee,” and “Oh, no,” and “This way, please. Oh, dear, what is ‘this way’ in French?” and “I beg your pardon, but that bed warmer belongs to my old woman,” in a rapping which “industriously” adds “to the stress and bewilderment of their victims” (53).

3. At the court of Lady Bountiful

As the narrator releases his identity along with his luggage, the tale turns into the satiric portrait of organized philanthropy as an elitist social game which casts a patronizing gaze on the educated expatriates that warfare bring in town. In this respect, the genteel spectacles of generosity portrayed by Wharton are a “REFUGEE RAIDERS”: EDITH WHARTON’S 27 NEGLECTED STORIES OF URBAN PHILANTHROPY” mixture of altruism and self-indulgence2 perfectly attuned with the “jolly fatalism” that James castigates (Wharton 1916: 121) in the context of the same Flemish crisis. In “The Long Wards”, he stigmatizes the contented ladies feasting on “those unfortunates, the very poor, the victims of a fire or shipwreck, to whom you have to lend something to wear before they can come to thank you for helping them” (121-122). Their fund-raising parties for “the inmates of the long wards” (122) provide little profit to the rescued and more relief to the pious souls eager to restore a “state of moral hospitality to the practices of fortune, however outrageous, that may at times fairly be felt as providing amusement, providing a new and thereby a refreshing turn of the personal situation, for the most interested party” (121). In “The Refugees”, Wharton explores the darkest side of this refugee hunting activity: caught in the Poesque whirlpool of the urban masses whose dangers threaten his “silent dignity”, the selfless narrator hardly holds the intoxicating power of compassion and “benevolence at bay”, going through the humiliating process of being rescued by a wealthy patroness whose “gentle egotism” is gratified by fighting over “a refugee to take care of, in triumph against all competitors” (4), being too “humiliating for her to go back to the hall without a single refugee!” (53). In this respect, the lady’s practice of waiting ”at the station and seize one of the poor things before any of those unscrupulous women had got him” is less a charity act than a decadent variation on urban shopping for the lady who runs “about all alone, looking as wild as she does on sale days at Harrod’s” (5). And additionally requires the audacious act of “towning” and of “making show” of herself which, at the time, was a form of licentious advance for the lady involved. The chance encounter of the speechless intellectual and of the lady Bountiful who triumphantly leaves the crowd “with a victim on his arm” (4) in the congested British capital becomes representative of a critical moment in history which reverses the traditional class and gender roles implied in charity negotiations3, and disrupts social positions in a dramatic twist of fate also represented by Wharton in the “Banner Sisters”: the story of two gifted milliners driven to bankruptcy by the charms of a rascal. In the same way, in “The Refugees”, the identity of both the improvised humanitarian in the story and of the zealous lady that he mistakes for a refugee is at stake, being equally convinced to rescue each other from pain, while being more needy of care than the Belgians expatriates who seek material assistance around them. In “The Refugees”, Wharton finally turns the simplest exercise of benevolence that she sacrificed so much of her writing time to into an upper

2 ”They’d promised us a large family, with a prima donna from the Brussels Opera — so useful for Agatha’s music; and two orphans besides” (57). 3 As Charles Durand sums up at a Charity reunion: “I took her for a refugee too. We rescued each other!” (60). 28 DANIELA DANIELE class instrument of surveillance which makes of human rescue a new profession for women. Like James, Wharton is interested in the power relations implied in the charity business of a leisure class who masquerades its privileges with human sympathy. Her story explores the “poisonous gift” of benevolence which leads a decent Professor of Romance Languages to “pass” for a refugee (3), adding to James’s sarcasm a Shakespearian touch when she locates the setting of their charitable amusement in a gentry mansion “on the edge of the park” where moral codes and gender roles are questioned like in the Forest of Arden4. In her remarkable narrative version of As You Like It, Wharton features “the Duchess of Bolchester and Lady Ivy Trantham, the most successful refugee raider of the district” who distractedly run a charity show in which the well-read refugee is invited to “lecture on Atrocities”, offering a gruesome account of the “central inattention” of these Ladies Bountiful greedy with sensation, since “there are lots of people coming just for the Atrocities” (57). Even in this case, the passage overtly echoes James’s image of the festive “English entertainers” who literally consume the refugee’ testimony as a new commodity, exposing “the privilege of this placid and sturdy people to show the world a new shade and measure of the tragic and the horrific” (James 1916: 124). From his skeptical American perspective, this unsurpassed modern master had previously castigated fund-raising parties as a benevolent activity that times demanded and helped escape the “sore human stuff” (125) and the “vast need” (124) caused by the German advance. James compares them as a decadent entertaiment for of wealthy ladies who keep their nose buried in the “mystical” aroma of the scratched “rose” of philanthropy which he corrosively defines: “the flower of amiability from the bramble of an individualism so bristling with accents [...] that permits to detach the rose with the fewest scratches. The rose of active good nature, irreducible, incurable, or in other words irreflective, that is the variety which the individualistic tradition happens, up and down these islands, to ear upon its ample breast — even it may be with a considerable effect of monotony” (123). The “Atrocities Exhibitions” sponsored by the “Refugee Relief Party” organized by Wharton express her friend’s preoccupations with the volunteers who make of trauma and affliction a form of cynical entertainment, anticipating the voyeuristic pleasures which nowadays saturate our audiovisual sphere. In a modern critique of the bureaucratic management of disempowered masses, the charity business of the benevolent lady in the tale finally reaches such a Tayloristic peak that she finally fails to recognize the

4 “All his scruples vanished in the enchantment of his first encounter with the English country [...] The next moment they were in the spacious shade of a sort of Forest of Arden, with great groups of bossy trees standing apart, and deer flashing by at the end of ferny glade” (Ibidem). “REFUGEE RAIDERS”: EDITH WHARTON’S 29 NEGLECTED STORIES OF URBAN PHILANTHROPY” refugee whom she dedicated all her care and support in the man who later calls at her placement office. One of the most exquisite ironies in this story is that the Lady Bountiful who mistakes a forlorn humanist for one of the fugitives gathered on the pier on their way to Boulogne later becomes the ruthless, charity manager who dismisses him “without a sign of recognition”, in her mechanic scrutiny of needy crowds: “‘Not another refugee, Clio” — she shouts — ‘not one! I absolutely refuse. We have not a hole left to put them in.’” As “her glance strayed carelessly over Durand’s congested countenance” she leaves the traumatized Professor with the sad realization that ”There’s no danger of her being forgotten — it’s she who does the forgetting now” (61).

REFERENCES

Balestra, Gianfranca “L’altra Wharton” (1999), in Acoma, vol. 17 Autunno, pp. 23-31. Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi (Eds.) (2005), Our Sisters’ Keepers. Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women, Alabama U. P., Tuscaloosa. Eiselein, Gregory (1996), Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era, Indiana U. P., Bloomington. James, Henry (1915), “Refugees in England”, The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 1915, sec. 4, 1-2. Kassanoff, Jennie A. (2004), Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge U. P., Cambridge. Radeva, Milena Todorova (2007), Philanthropy, the Welfare State, and Early Twentieth Century Literature, Pennsylvania State U. P., Philadelphia. Wharton, Edith (1905), The House of Mirth, Norton, New York, 1990. ---, A Backward Glance, An Autobiography (1933), Ed. Louis Auchincloss, Scribner’s, New York-London, 1964. ---, “The Refugees” (1919). Saturday Evening Post, 18 January 1919, pp. 3-5, 53, 57, 61 illustrated by F. R. Gruger. ---, (Ed. and preface) (1916), The Book of the Homeless (Le Livre des Sans-Foyer), Scribner’s, New York-London.

THE FUNCTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN EDITH WHARTON’S THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

VERENA LASCHINGER

Abstract

This paper argues that The House of Mirth is an early textual example of female self- empowerment. By interrogating several scenes, I will show how Wharton’s metaphorical deployment of photographic vision and practice introduces photography as a source of liberation for women and implicitly anticipates the future aesthetic appreciation of the new medium. Keywords: House of Mirth, Edith Wharton, photography, vision and gender, New Woman, Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space.

1. Introduction

The following paper examines the function of photography in Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth.1 Interrogating several scenes, in which Wharton employs the photograph as a visual metaphor and which have been neglected in the prolific scholarship on the novel, I am concerned with the larger question of how photographic vision is set apart from other visual modes, and which specific metaphorical function photography has in the novel. I contend that photography is in fact crucial for the fictional model of the so- called new woman in The House of Mirth. Exploring significant passages in the text, in which Wharton employs the modes of nineteenth century visual technologies, such as the kaleidoscope, the stereopticon, the diorama as well as the panorama to metaphorically describe her character’s cognitive, emotional and imaginative depths, otherwise called her “vision-building faculty” (118), Laura Saltz in her 2011 article thoroughly investigates how developments in the scientific discourse about vision at the

 Erfurt University, Germany; [email protected] 1 This essay is an extended version of a talk presented at the annual meeting of the European Study Group of Nineteenth Century American Women’s Literature in Bucharest, Romania in September 2013. My gratitude goes to the members of this group, namely Daniela Daniele, Mariana Net, Marie-Claude Perrin-Chenour, Ralph J. Poole, and Brigitte Zaugg for their valuable comments on my presentation on The House of Mirth. 32 VERENA LASCHINGER time factored into the composition of The House of Mirth.2 According to Saltz, aligning the novel “with contemporaneous aesthetic and philosophical theories of vision” (19), allowed Wharton firstly to present “Lily’s visual education as a story of evolutionary advancement” (19); Secondly, to show that all human vision in the novel, including Lily’s, is compromised insofar as it “is always a negotiation between individual subjectivity and material reality” (19); And lastly, to dismiss the model of the impartial observer as narrator in The House of Mirth and let “varying perspectives actively shape the contours of the narrative” (21) instead:

In acknowledging the instability and temporality of the body, nineteenth-century theories of vision deny the assumptions of transcendence and neutrality later ascribed to naturalist and realist texts by twentieth-century literary criticism. (Saltz 21)

By contextualizing The House of Mirth with Peter Henry Emerson’s photographic theory, which puts the greatest emphasis on the artist’s individual vision as endorsed by American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Saltz makes a convincing case for Lily’s visual agency and adds an important aspect to state- of-the-art scholarship on The House of Mirth. Exploring the analogies between Wharton’s concept of the “vision building faculty” (118) in The House of Mirth and the set of naturalistic principles characteristic of Emerson’s “faculty of artistic vision” (cit. in Saltz 31), Saltz concludes that “like Emerson’s artists, Lily and Selden are highly evolved” (32). In contrast to earlier feminist scholarship, which along the lines of Laura Mulvey’s work on the gaze exposed Selden’s flawed perception of Lily as an intricate mode of control, dominance and commodification that turns Lily into the female object of Selden’s scopophiliac male gaze, Saltz seems uncomfortable with relegating Lily’s artistic agency to the sidelines. Conceding that differences in class and gender privilege lead to the asymmetry of Lily and Selden’s positions in life, Saltz argues nonetheless that Selden and Lily share the same vision-building faculty, that they are equals in terms of their imaginative capacities “to invest perceptions with meaning” (33), which ultimately puts both characters regardless of their gender “on the same rung on the evolutionary ladder” (32), while setting them apart from all the rest of the novel’s lesser characters. My own investigation of the function of photography in The House of Mirth takes its cue from Laura Saltz’s groundwork. While it is not invested in digging deeper into the influence of Emerson’s photographic theory on Wharton,or in elaborating on the more problematic racial implications of the

2 Over the decades the tableau vivant scene has received by far the most scholarly attention, mostly with regard to Lily Bart’s act of self-fashioning as a work of art (e.g. Wolff 1974, Fetterley 1977, Lidoff 1980, Steiner 1989, Kassanoff 2000, Orlando 2007). Other than Saltz, only Gary Totten has been equally attentive to the roles of visual technologies in other passages in the text. THE FUNCTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY 33 IN EDITH WHARTON’S THE HOUSE OF MIRTH naturalist principles endorsed in the novel, I am interested in exploring in more detail, how photography features in the text as a metaphor for female empowerment. Providing close readings of several scenes, in which Wharton employs either photographic vision or photographs as material objects in the text, I am going to show how Wharton lets photography work to the benefits of the younger generation of women, specifically Gerty Farish and Norma Hatch. This ultimately goes to show that Wharton offers models of female self- assertion way before she let Undine Spragg in her 1913 novel The Custom of the Country “carve out a space for her own agency” (Orlando 29). By arguing that The House of Mirthis an early textual example of female self-empowerment, I counter Emily J. Orlando’s assessment that Wharton allowed only the women in her later fiction “to make the system work for them by overseeing and directing their body art” (29). To make my case, this paper will provide a fresh reading of what I consider the unacknowledged key scene in the novel. Here Wharton portrays the moment, in which Gerty Farish gains complete emotional independence and hence a clear vision, within the visual paradigm of the photographic snapshot. Juxtaposing Lily’s famous tableau vivant performance with Gerty’s photographic rendition of the new woman, Wharton includes the structural level of the novel to not only compare two artistic modes (one old-fashioned, one modern) but also to set two models of womanhood against each other, the second of which clearly supports the novel’s progressive gender politics.

2. Activating Visions of the New Woman

2.1. Lily Bart’s Familial Views

Not only does Wharton reveal “much about her characters through precise description of the houses they inhabit or build” (Macheski 192), but as biographer Hermione Lee suggests she more specifically “characterizes families and societies through the decoration of houses” (18). If details matter, the few incidents, in which photographs are explicitly mentioned in the The House of Mirthare significant. Chapter nine of The House of Mirth is a valid case in point, since here the narrative develops from views at the grander house to smaller decorative elements in Lily’s room, which are given symbolical weight. Upon her return to aunt Peniston’s Fifth Avenue residence from the Van Osburgh wedding Lily just learned to have been disbanded for a plainer girl by yet another suitor. Typically, Lily, who has a history of both rejecting marriageable candidates and being rejected, can only express this new pang of pain in metaphors of style: “Her moral repulsion found a physical outlet in a quickened distaste for her surroundings” (87). Lily, who has both attachment 34 VERENA LASCHINGER and abandonment issues, is revolted by the house, which to her feels “as dreary as a tomb” (88). She projects her freshly ignited “self-disgust” (87) onto the foster home at Mrs. Peniston’s and the “complacent ugliness” (87) of its interior design. Lily’s dislike of the house is an understandable result of the circumstances, which brought her there. Mrs. Peniston “had taken the girl because no one else would have her” (32), making the house the only available place of refuge for the orphan, whose relatives had not “manifested a lively desire for her company” (32). For Lily, “who had no heart to lean on” (131), Aunt Julia’s upper class residence becomes the material symbol of such paradoxical experiences as loss, grief, burdening others, while being materially and physically protected. In terms established by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, one could claim that Aunt Pensiston’s house is an image to reveal Lily’s “psychic state” (72). When the reader observes Lily go upstairs, which according to Bachelard’s psychological mapping of space “bears the mark of ascension to a more tranquil solitude” (26), she is offered more intimate insights into the protagonist’s soul as soon as Lily enters her private room at the Peniston residence. Despite being “large and comfortably furnished” (Wharton 97), the room feels “as dreary as a prison” (97). And we learn that Lily does not only feel inhibited by the room, but that she also has little sense of ownership of the space she inhabits. The room is hers and not hers, since most of its furniture used to belong to the deceased Mr. Peniston. The old man’s “monumental wardrobe and bedstead of black walnut” (97) creates an inhospitable atmosphere. Lacking intimacy, this room cannot provide a home for Lily. Everything from the imposing furniture to the outdated “magenta ‘flock’ wallpaper”, which “was hung with large steel engravings” (97), is alien to her, intimidating even. The materials, colors, proportions identify the cold, dark and uninviting room as a male space. Never clearing it, the widow Peniston has made it into a memorial site for its previous owner, her dead husband. Leaving the room literally possessed by the old man, whose furniture is the mark of his lingering spirit, it resists Lily’s presence. Hanging on to the past, Aunt Peniston had refused to make room for the young woman, from the very day of her coming to live there, she did not allow her to claim the space she needed to live, to mourn the death of her parents and then move on to firmly grasp her life from a solid spatial and psychological base. Instead, time has been brought to a halt in this room, forcing Lily to live in a death chamber, which leaves her desolate: “To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any other … is expatriate everywhere” (131). As the novel proceeds, Lily will feel homeless in each new habitation along her geographical trajectory through New York City. As Annette Benert states, Lily’s familial “circumstances deprive her not only of space but of place” THE FUNCTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY 35 IN EDITH WHARTON’S THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

(123), and ultimately make it impossible for her to get settled. And while The House of Mirth narrates the story of Lily Bart as an involuntary wanderer, it is remarkable to me that Wharton puts photographs into the first room, in which Lily defies her spiritual homelessness:

Lily had tried to mitigate this charmless background by a few frivolous touches, in the shape of a lace-decked toilet-table and a little painted desk surmounted by photographs; but the futility of the attempt struck her as she looked about the room. (Wharton 97)

Photographs are among the few objects, which Lily assumes potent enough to help her beautify and hopefully seize the space allotted to her at the Peniston residence. The reader does not get to know whom or what the photographs in Lily’s room represent. Beyond the fact of their material existence, they are Leerstellen in the text, which points to late nineteenth century’s conceptions of photographs as facilitators of “surogate ownership” as Miles Orvell states in The Real Thing (73). They are empty both in the sense of not being powerful enough to help Lily claim a room of her own3, and in the sense of being nondescript objects. As empty frames they do, however, invite the reader to speculate about whom or what Lily would most likely display. And how? Which genre would she like? Landscape depictions, stereographic views of the city, or reproductions of famous paintings? Would she memorialize her parents? Or put up portraits of herself, or of a friend? While all of this remains unanswerable, the effect, for which the photographs account, is indisputable. As framing devices they “state”, as Mary Ann Caws comprehensively argues in Reading Frames in Modern Fiction, “the importance of what they enclose” (9), and hence attest to Lily’s personal views. Expressive of Lily’s hopes to create an intimate nook in Mr. Peniston’s former room the elegant ensemble of very few objects, “photographs”, “lace- decked toilet-table” and “little painted desk”, carve out, if only haphazardly, the contours of a private, feminine space within the brutish male realm. This miniature room of her own symbolizes simultaneously Lily’s wish to make a home, her frail sense of security and the extent of alienation from the world, which surrounds and dominates her. Assuming that the photographs show her parents, herself as a child with both her mum and dad, or some friends who function as a family substitute, they would indicate Lily’s loneliness. After all family photographs, as Marianne Hirsch states in Family Frames, “show us what we wish our family to be, and therefore what, most frequently, it is not” (8). But

3 In “The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton’s House of Mirth“ Elaine Showalter interprets Lily Bart’s inability to make a home for herself along the lines of Virginia Woolf’s famous claim that a woman needs a room of her own to be creative. According to Showalter, Lily’s “inability to speak for herself“ (142), resonates with Edith Wharton’s own plight to raise her voice and turn herself into a respected woman artist. 36 VERENA LASCHINGER gesturing to Roland Barthes, according to whom the “important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time” (88-89), I think that Lily’s photographs could in fact be both an “emanation of past reality” (88) and of a future, which the protagonist envisions for herself, even if her ability to bring this vision to full fruition still needs considerable training and tending, since it “has been stunted by her upbringing” (Saltz 19). Regardless, or rather because the subjects of the photographs in Lily’s enclave are undisclosed to the reader, they gain symbolical weight. Indicative of Lily’s personal views, her affection for certain places and people, the images could for all the reader knows simultaneously fulfill memorial, narcissistic, or affirmative functions. While the empty frames refuse to make Lily’s visions concrete, by denying any photographic reference, they also speak of her desire to create visions of her own (which also distinguishes her from her aunt). Denying any sense of closure by leaving the frames blank, Wharton affirms Lily’s realness (as opposed to ‘the real Lily’) not in the way a detailed, and ultimately asphyxiating account of the photographs’ idiosyncratic subjects would do, but by making the notion of time proceeding, of development its crucial factor. If anything, Lily is in the making. Triggering the reader’s imagination of Lily’s views with empty frames, Wharton adds another level of perception, and one that is constantly in flux with each new reader of the novel. Convinced that “no subject exists apart from the consciousness that perceives it”, Wharton defies “rendering objective reality” (Saltz 20) in favor of a more subjective and embodied model, which is as we can see in this scene, inclusive of the reader. Wharton disavows notions of photography as a mere reproductive craft, highlighting instead the liberating and creative potential photography might hold for Lily, and other young women for that matter. Symbolically the photographs are meant to cast away the aggressive thrust “of the offending furniture” and the male relative’s old-fashioned value system, which they represent (97). As decorative elements they clearly stand in opposition to the “seven-by-five painting of Niagara” (89) in Mrs. Peniston’s drawing-room, whose artistic quality the narrating voice ironically summarizes as “the one artistic excess of Mr. Peniston’s temperate career” (89). According to Emily J. Orlando, Edith Wharton had a strong “distaste for the art of her native country, and for much of the art displayed in the homes of wealthy Americans” – be it “copies of European masterpieces” (“Visual Arts”, 183), or, I would like to add with reference to chapter nine of The House of Mirth, amateurish American landscape paintings. While the Niagara painting works as a cipher for both the Penistons’ artistic philistinism and their nationalistic sentiments, which landscape paintings especially of Niagara Falls held for nineteenth century Americans, the amateurish work is also an apt visual metaphor to suggest the Penistons’ lasting marital bond, more specifically Mrs. THE FUNCTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY 37 IN EDITH WHARTON’S THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

Peniston’s passive devotion for or dependence on her husband, which makes her naïvely display even the results of his most pitiful attempts to excel as an artist. The bitter irony of Mrs. Peniston’s faithfulness, which is mostly an inability to move on after her husband’s death and to redefine her life or at least to make over the house according to her own taste, is certainly not lost on Lily, who gave up trying “to bring her into active relation with life” (33). If the landscape painting at the Peniston residence is a symbol of the pitfalls of traditional marriage and conventional lifestyle, Lily’s photographs signify the modern young woman, the new woman, who is potentially free to choose, express and even change her views as she pleases. And this is not just with regards to suitable husbands, but the empty frames may be filled with any subject be it art or politics even. The expanse of Lily’s possibilities is as wide as she is able to envisage. And while Aunt Peniston’s artistic appreciation is limited to decorating her home with her dead husband’s badly executed imitation of an unimaginative landscape motif, Lily has it in herself to be an artist, both to imagine and produce new and out-of-the ordinary views, which are to be expressed in the modern genre of photography. But, as is also indicated by the empty frames, she also bears the burden of having to first creatively develop her views against all odds, if she does not want to get fixed by mere nostalgic dread. This leaves Lily in a state of transience and insecurity while searching for her very own house of mirth, which at this point in the novel still needs to get sketched out both in Lily’s and this reader’s imagination. All we know is that it is going to be different from Aunt Peniston’s unimaginative, yet materially secure residential tomb.

2.2. The Photograph of Miss Bart

In the following I will interrogate some of the events on the day after the party at the Wellington Brys in chapter twelve. While chapter thirteen relays the encounter at Trenor’s house, where Lily barely escapes an attempted rape by Gus Trenor, chapter fourteen gives an account of Gerty Farish’s and Lawrence Selden’s téte a téte on this very day. Beginning with the sentence “Lily woke from happy dreams …” (132), chapter thirteen evidently is to be read in close conjunction with chapter fourteen, which starts with “Gerty Farish … woke from dreams as happy as Lily’s” (132). Implying a comparison between concurrent events and parties involved, the two chapters work together in “cumulative and progressively more significant superpositioning, one scene easily pictured as placed directly above the preceding one”, which according to Mary Ann Caws results “in a retrospective reframing” of earlier events (28). As I will go to show, the superpositioning lets Lily’s “culminating moment of her triumph” (123) during the tableau vivant of Mrs. Lloyd appear in a different 38 VERENA LASCHINGER light, eclipsed by the flashlight, which is shed by Gerty’s radiant self- realization. Freed from the artificiality of seduction and the superimposed heteronormative notions of how a woman should behave, Lily and Gerty are able to meet eye to eye and truly connect.4 While the scene as Katherine Joslin has shown, does insinuate that Lily, and Gerty for that matter, might be “gay, a lesbian character of Wharton’s conjuring” (105), sexual preference is ultimately not the question. Self-realization, as I will go on to show, is what the novel relays by way of the photographic metaphor. When Lawrence Selden invites himself over to his cousin Gerty’s flat, both are agitated by the impression Lily made on them at last night’s party. In this chapter several crucial shifts are effected, which are typical for nineteenth century American realism. The text transitions from spectacular to moderate, from grand imagination and fantasy to realization and clarity. Switching from tableau vivant to photography, and thus juxtaposing two different visual metaphors in successive chapters, the novel compares not only two modes of perception, but also how they might affect men and women in different ways. The location changes from the boisterous setting of the Wellington’s to Gerty Farish’s modest apartment. In terms of milieu the novel moves from the upper social stratum to a middle-class environment, from old to new New York. The craze of the party has simmered down and Selden’s visit at Gerty’s is conducted in a quiet tone. Zooming in on the two figures in the room, Wharton sharpens the focus; and seen close-up both the spatial arrangement and the characters appear differently, both intra- and extradiegetically. The change in perception is, however, explained by the characters’ exalted moods: “It is surprising how little narrow walls and a low ceiling matter, when the roof of the soul has suddenly been raised” (136), states the narrating voice, who also remarks that Selden “had never before noticed that she Gerty had ‘points’” (136). Clearly, the characters’ visions are embodied and directed by the complex network of sensory sensations and feelings, which yet again speaks to Saltz’s argument about Wharton’s intricate knowledge of contemporary theories on vision. The setting, in which Selden and Gerty meet, resembles a dollhouse, its heightened intimacy commensurate to its shrunk geometrical proportions. Positioning the characters in a neat and blissful scenario of smallness, Wharton activates, if Gaston Bachelard is to be believed, “the dynamic virtues of

4 All numbering of chapters and pages in this essay refers to the Wordsworth Classics edition of Wharton’s The House of Mirth, which follows the first edition of the text of October 14, 1905 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. The Penguin Classics edition of 1986 differs insofar as all events of the day after the party, from Trenor’s attack on Lily to Selden’s visit at Gerty’s, are subsumed in chapter 13. Given that chapter 14 is indicated in the appendix, not however in the novel proper, I assume that there has been a mistake. Either way, I claim that Gerty’s tête à tête with Selden has to be read in direct relation, or rather opposition to the tableau scene. THE FUNCTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY 39 IN EDITH WHARTON’S THE HOUSE OF MIRTH miniature thinking” (150). Those allow representation be “dominated by Imagination. Representation becomes nothing but a body of expressions with which to communicate our own images to others” (150). In other words, introducing a spatial setting, which is equivalent to the miniatures depicted in photographic representations, is a narratological strategy to endow both the literary text in chapter thirteen and photographic representations with increased imaginative qualities:

When they were in the sitting-room again, where they fitted as snugly as bits in a puzzle, and she had brewed the coffee, and poured it into her grandmother's egg-shell cups, his eye, as he leaned back, basking in the warm fragrance, lighted on a recent photograph of Miss Bart, and the desired transition was effected without an effort. (Wharton 137)

Selden who is enamored of Lily uses the photograph to let his imagination run wild. Shifting the conversation allows him to talk about Lily, to wallow in his excitement for her. Of course one could also say that he practices a form of conversational masturbation, in the process of which unsuspecting Gerty – in a manner of speaking - lends a helping hand to the man, she is infatuated with. Selden is engaged in his imaginative musings about Lily,“and again and again he returned, questioning, conjecturing, leading Gerty on, draining her inmost thoughts of their stored tenderness for her friend” (137). His insisting to bring the topic back to Lily makes Gerty, who at first was “happy in this perfect communion of their sympathies“ (137), eventually realize that Selden was not interested in her, but that he “had come to talk to her of Lily – that was all“ (138). The question for me about Selden’s reaction to the photograph of Miss Bart is not, if or to what extent he might be visually constructing, controlling and consuming Lily like he has done before, but what to make of the fact that this time there is no clear picture of Lily offered. If Selden misreads the photograph of Miss Bart, the reader is not in a position to notice, nor is she intended to, because the text deviates from the strategy of freezing Lily and have her observed through the eyes of Selden. This time, Selden and Gerty only talk about Lily, conjuring a story instead of a picture. For all the reader knows the narrative they construct has no discernable relation to the photographic image. Because again the photograph in question is left blank in the text, which is especially striking if compared to the elaborately described tableau earlier. In contrast to the living picture the photograph remains nondescript beyond the mentioning of its material existence and its subject matter. Denying information about photographic composition, style, format, artistic qualities, framing or how it has been arranged among other images, Wharton leaves many questions unanswered. Why does Gerty own a photograph of Lily in the first place, who took it, and on which occasion? Instead of disclosing any facts, the text relays to the reader the impressions, which the image makes on Gerty and 40 VERENA LASCHINGER

Selden. It thus characterizes the photograph of Lily Bart ex negativo, a textual strategy reminiscent of Henry Fox Talbot’s 1841 invention of the photographic negative-positive process. Selden’s initial response to the image is lukewarm. He deems it “well enough“, and one could assume he means in terms of verisimilitude. Critically assessing the quality of the image, Selden lets his mind’s eye wander to the tableau performance and next declares that Lily impersonating Mrs. Lloyd had had a “new look on her face“, which – this is implied - the photograph apparently fails to represent:

The photograph was well enough--but to catch her as she had looked last night! Gerty agreed with him--never had she been so radiant. But could photography capture that light? There had been a new look in her face--something different; yes, Selden agreed there had been something different (Wharton 137).

Unlike with the tableau, which revealed “the real Lily Bart“ to him (119), Selden cannot kindle a “corresponding adjustment of the mental vision“ by looking at the photograph (118). Supported by a grammatical transitioning from specific to general - note how the quotation documents the shift from the photograph of Miss Bart to photography - Selden blames the medium for the weak impact it has on him. He finds it fails to capture the light, which Lily radiated during her living picture performance. Or to phrase it with Walter Benjamin, being a mechanically reproduced image the photograph of Miss Bart lacks aura, the “unique manifestation of a remoteness, however close it may be” (9). At least it does for Selden and all the readers, who have adopted his point of view. Selden’s sniffy assessment puts in a nutshell, the disdain man upper class Americans held against photography, especially if they considered themselves art connoisseurs. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century complaints were common about multiple shortcomings of the technical sort, which made photography less an art than a craft. While the technology was accepted for commercial, scientific or private purposes, people complained that photographers notoriously missed the right moment due to cumbersome equipment, long exposure time5, or the equalizing effects of the medium both in aesthetic and social terms (which would make Lily appear more ordinary, and photographs available for common people like Gerty). Way into the twentieth century and on both sides of the Atlantic, the catalogue of common grievances would then be extended by more insidious arguments about photography’s presumed artistic limitations, which were based on the technology’s high level

5 Later in the text Wharton, who herself was “averse to being photographed“, (Wharton cit. in Orlando, 27) compares Dorset’s growing awkwardness around Lily with the “queer contortions”, which result from a “photographer’s behest to ‘look natural’” (Mirth, 184). THE FUNCTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY 41 IN EDITH WHARTON’S THE HOUSE OF MIRTH of facticity6. As late as 1965, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu condescends in Photography as a Middle-Brow Art that because it is a technologically advanced, mechanized, and socially less exclusive entertainment practice, photography provides less an “opportunity for aesthetic experience” (71). As an “art that imitates art“ (73), whose “values and rhythms, its reasons and its raison d’être are borrowed from elsewhere” (71), Bourdieu finds photography fulfilling only “social functions” (71). At the risk of seeming ahistorical in my argumentation, I want to frame Selden’s response with such twentieth century photographic theorizing, insofar as Selden cannot consider the social function, which the photograph of Miss Bart performs, an adequate compensation for its lack of aura. His musings and communications with Gerty, with whom he produces a story about Lily on account of the photograph, do not satisfy his needs (which are sexual yet dressed up and sublimated as artistic). Selden’s response needs to be completed by Gerty’s, who complicates and finally overrules Selden’s patriarchal views on the aesthetic potential of the photographic medium. While it has not been given any scholarly attention, Gerty’s view represents the “subtle and definite change” in the way, in which photography was viewed first inside the circle of theorists, to which Wharton was privy, and later by the general public: “from a passive medium to an active medium” (Orvell 99). Relegated to the role of neglected lover in most critical interpretations of the novel, or “social worker” at best (Joslin 103), Gerty has been put on the passive, receiving end in the interaction with Selden, and Lily for that matter7. And while on the plot level this might be true, the level of form allows a different interpretation both of Gerty’s role and of the implied values of photography.

2.3. The Photograph of Miss Farish

When Gerty realizes that her feelings are unreciprocated by Selden, she extricates herself from the unsavory situation of assisting his masturbatory musings, or to phrase it differently, she herself stops fantasizing about Lily, and shifts her gaze away from Lily’s photograph. Realizing that she was mistaken about what she had hoped was their common vision (to use a term central to American Realism) of a future as husband and wife, Gerty, who is now “facing Selden” (138), experiences a moment of enlightenment.

6 For accounts on the role of photography in the nineteenth century see Alan Trachtenberg (1989), Reading American Photographs and Miles Orvell (1989), The Real Thing. 7 In this regard Gerty Farish suffered the fate, which Henry James apparently had had in mind for Henrietta Stackpole, too, this “reporter in petticoats” (102), who “does smell of the Future - it almost knocks one down” (113), and whom he had established in his 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady as a “light ficelle“ rather than a “true agent“ (15). 42 VERENA LASCHINGER

Letting Gerty sit “in the center of a great glare of comprehension“, Wharton captures the climactic moment, in which the character gains “a new vision of the future“, in a verbal snapshot (138). Momentarily arrested into a freeze-frame, Gerty all of a sudden dominates the scene – at least from the reader’s perspective. Selden, who still obsesses over Lily, cannot see the woman, who is right in front of him. While Selden misses the moment, the reader perceives Gerty’s awakening from illusion from the novel’s paradoxical incongruence of content and form. Gerty’s actions and speech are arrested, which, according to Caws’ interrogation of literary frames, “provides the static quality essential to the great framed scenes within the ongoing flux of the narrative” (24) - and indeed, Selden just keeps rambling on - which heightens the “psychological import” (23). Simultaneously, Gerty’s own perception of space is described as changing from cozy and cramped to vast. Now that she is feeling wrecked, the miniature has stopped to work its imaginative magic on her. The miniature dissolves due to a shift in focus, which pulls Gerty into the foreground, and presents her as the illuminated center of the scene. Illuminating Gerty at the solitary moment, in which she realizes that her romantic feelings for Selden are unreciprocated, highlights that Gerty’s vision has been effectively cleared from mind-blurring sentimentalist illusions.8 By encompassing Gerty in a glare, it is my understanding that the text establishes an alternative notion of aura to the one Selden found missing in Lily’s photograph. Aura, which is entrenched in the patriarchal tradition of scopic control over woman as object, is substituted with the radiating flare of the independent female subject who actively engages her intellect. If in Benjamin’s definition distance is needed to produce aura, Gerty’s glaring insight is on the contrary effected by the intimate proximity with Selden, as if getting thus close actually makes her see better. Despite the fact that realizing the truth about Selden’s feelings is bitter for Gerty, the ekphrastic procedure suggests a positive outcome of the scene, especially with regards to its reality effect, which does not spare any illusion or misperception about anyone. If one assumes that Gerty, who is both infatuated with Lily and jealous of her, had initially put up the photograph in her sitting room to exercise some form of star cult, or like Lily herself had at Julia Peniston’s, to make her private space more beautiful, she suddenly finds it “looking out imperially on the cheap gimracks, the cramped furniture of the little room” (143), not only because she is disillusioned by the “effect“ the photograph had had on Selden (136), but because she has gained clear insight in her own pitiful idolatry. Whatever postpubescent function the photograph of Lily originally had for Gerty, it doesn’t any longer. With her mind cleared of misperceptions and projections, Gerty “saw that she had dressed her idol with attributes of her own making”

8 On the connection of ekphrastic writing and effect in The House of Mirth read Wendy Steiner. THE FUNCTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY 43 IN EDITH WHARTON’S THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

(143). After a brief period of intense emotional uproar, in which she despises Lily out of jealousy and shame, Gerty is eventually altered by the realizations she had about Selden, herself and Lily. Ultimately, it is her clear vision that enables her to commit an act of genuine kindness to Lily, who shortly after comes knocking at her door (the sort of support, Selden fails to offer to Lily until the end of the novel). Paralleling the intimate arrangement she had had with Selden in her sitting-room, Gerty at the end of chapter fourteen finds herself in bed and cuddled up with Lily Bart, to whom she provides both shelter and comfort at a moment of despair:

‘Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things,’ she moaned; and Gerty silently slipped an arm under her, pillowing her head in its hollow as a mother makes a nest for a tossing child. In the warm hollow Lily lay still and her breathing grew low and regular. (Wharton 147-48)

Substituting the miniature with the bed as nest, which according to Bachelard is “a primal image” (91), evokes “the urge toward cosmic confidence” (105), with which Lily Bart and Gerty Farish engage in their communion. Resulting in a still scene of intense intimacy between the two women characters, chapter fourteen of The House of Mirth negotiates two spatial and relational models, of which only the second is truly comforting/-able and thus visionary of how a better future might be created and sustained by women. Clarity is needed as much as mutual faith and kindness, all of which comes into effect in chapter fourteen through the extended visual metaphor of photography.

3. Sunday Supplements

The House of Mirth mentions photography again in Book Two / chapter nine. By then Lily has been ousted from her social group and her vision quest is thus far proceeded that she earns her living as private secretary of Mrs. Norma Hatch. Having moved to New York only recently, this rich Western woman took up lodgings in a fashionable city hotel, in order to make her way up into the glitzy world of celebrity life. Unlike Lily, whose reputation was ruined by rumors, Norma builds hers by turning gossip into gold, and working the machinations of the yellow press in her favor. Her photographic portraits “formed the recurring ornament of ‘Sunday Supplements’” (240). The novel suggests that photography not only serves the economic and self-fashioning needs of the growing middle-class, but that it has in fact become the operative force in the urban environment and marketplace, of which women increasingly claim their share. Norma Hatch precedes Undine Spragg in how 44 VERENA LASCHINGER she markets herself and controls the ways in which her portraits are represented in visual culture. Thus it isn’t only the privilege of “Lily’s younger literary sisters – the women of the new century – to thrive in the later narratives by feeding and rewarding their desire to display themselves as objects d’art” (Orlando 79). Gerty and Norma count as early models of the new woman. They both succeed, if in different ways, to successfully repudiate the restrictive and spellbinding effects of male art connoisseurship, and establish a clear vision for their own future. While Gerty shakes off the shackles of sentimentalism, in which the notion of true womanhood was enwrapped in the nineteenth century, and gains her independence due to "a great glare of comprehension” (138), Norma Hatch builds her financial and emotional independence on living her "life in the glare (a much-used word) of publicity” (Lee 156). While Lily fails to reach this point of independence before she dies, Wharton lets these other female characters in The House of Mirth venture towards a radical claim of control and agency, which is, as I have tried to show, encapsulated by her use of the photographic metaphor. Offering a fresh perspective on the notion of aura, which was deeply embedded in the established patriarchal concepts of vision and aesthetics, and whose demise twentieth century readers learned to miss and mourn as a result of Walter Benjamin’s incisive interrogation of the aesthetic and political pitfalls of mechanical reproduction, The House of Mirth employs the new medium’s egalitarianism as a source of liberation for women. Furthermore, the metaphorical deployment of photography in The House of Mirth anticipates implicitly a future aesthetic appreciation of the medium in its own right, as it was in fact spearheaded by the Pictorialists under the lead of Alfred Stieglitz, who as an enthusiastic supporter of Emerson’s theory deemed photography capable of expressing individual views and subjective sensibilities. His own photographs of American painter Georgia O’Keefe represent the powerful synthesis of female artistic agency and photography.

REFERENCES

Bachelard, Gaston (1958, 1994), The Poetics of Space, Translated by Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, Boston. Barthes, Roland (1980, 2000), Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, Translated by Richard Howard, Vintage Books, London. Beer, Janet, Pamela Knights and Elizabeth Nolan, eds. (2007), Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Routledge, Penguin, London and New York. Benert, Annette (2006), The Architectural Imagination of Edith Wharton: Gender, Classand Power in the Progressive Era, Fairleigh Dickinsion UP,Madison, NJ. Benjamin, Walter (1936, 2008), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by J.A. Underwood, Penguin ,London, New York. THE FUNCTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY 45 IN EDITH WHARTON’S THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

Bloom, Harold, ed. (1986), Modern Critical Views: Edith Wharton, Chelsea House Publishers, Philadelphia. Bourdieu, Pierre (1965, 1990), Photography. A Middle-brow Art, Translated by Shaun Whiteside, Stanford UP, Stanford, California. Caws, Mary Ann (1985), Reading Frames in Modern Fiction. Princeton UP, Princeton, New Jersey. Fetterley, Judith (1977), “’The Temptation to be A Beautiful Object’: Double Standard and Double Bind in The House of Mirth“, Studies in American Fiction 5, pp. 199-212. Hirsch, Marianne (1997, 2012), Family Frames. Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Harvard UP, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London. Joslin, Katherine (2007), “Is Lily Gay?”, in Janet Beer, Pamela Knights and Elizabeth Nolan (Eds.), Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 96 105. Kaplan, Amy (1988), The Social Construction of American Realism, U of Chicago P, Chicago, London. Kasanoff, Jennie A.(2000), “Extinction, Taxidermy, Tableaux Vivants: Staging Race and Classin The House of Mirth“, PMLA Special Topic Rereading Class 115.1, pp. 60-74. Lee, Hermione (2007, 2008), Edith Wharton, Vintage Books, London. Lidoff, Joan (1980), “Another Sleeping Beauty: Narcissism in The House of Mirth“, American Quarterly 32, pp. 519-39. Macheski, Cecilia (2012), “Architecture”, in Laura Rattray (Ed.), Edith Wharton in Context, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, New York, pp. 189-98. Orlando, Emily J. (2007), Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Orlando, Emily J. (2012),“Visual Arts”, in Laura Rattray (Ed.),Edith Wharton in Context, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, New York, pp. 177-188. Orvell, Miles (1989), The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880- 1940, U of North Carolina P, North Carolina. Rattray, Laura, ed. (2012), Edith Wharton in Context, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, New York. Saltz, Laura (2011), “’The Vision-Building Faculty’: Naturalistic Vision in The House of Mirth”, Modern Fiction Studies 57.1, pp. 17-46. Showalter, Elaine (1986), “The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton’s House of Mirth“, in Harold Bloom (Ed.), Modern Critical Views: Edith Wharton. Chelsea House Publishers, Philadelphia, pp. 139-54. Steiner, Wendy (1989), “The Causes of Effect: Edith Wharton and the Economics of Ekphrasis”, Poetics Today 10.2, pp. 279-97. Totten, Gary (2000), “The Art and Architecture of the Self: Designing the ‘I’-Witness in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth”, College Literature 27.3, pp. 71-87. Trachtenberg, Alan (1989), Reading American Photographs. Hill and Wang, New York. Wharton, Edith (1905, 2002), The House of Mirth, Wordsworth Classics, Ware, Hertfordshire. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin (1974), “Lily Bart and the Beautiful Death“, American Literature 46, pp. 16-40 Wharton, Edith (1905, 1986), The House of Mirth, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Wharton, Edith (1905), The House of Mirth, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin (1974), “Lily Bart and the Beautiful Death“,American Literature 46, pp. 16-40. Woolf, Virgina (1929), A Room of One’s Own. Harcourt, San Diego, New York, London.

FROM FIFTH AVENUE RESIDENCE TO BOARDING-HOUSE: SETTING IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

BRIGITTE ZAUGG

Abstract

Although the action of The House of Mirth begins in the upper-middle-class world and the heart of Manhattan, around Washington Square, that Edith Wharton knew so well, the reader is soon taken into successive parallel worlds that always go one notch down. All along the book, and particularly in the last pages, Wharton regularly draws on her intimate knowledge of the lay- out of the city, giving such specific geographical references that one might locate the characters on a map. These street scenes are pitted against indoor scenes which provide her with an opportunity to display what an eye she had for interior decoration. I shall therefore look at what specific places Wharton mentions and depicts and try to establish their function. However, since quite a number of scenes and episodes do not take place in New York (Book 1, for instance, depicts the Trenors’ country residence, while Book 2 opens in Monte Carlo), one may perhaps question the actual usefulness of such a precise setting. Indeed, Wharton seems to indicate that the location does not matter much as long as it is a place favoured by the very rich, into which they displace the way of life they are used to pursuing in New York; in other words, New York is not just a city, it is a society. What is also interesting, in this novel, is that Wharton is not content with describing the world of the very rich and the replica that the nouveaux riches and upstarts strive to create (cheap, vulgar, garish, uncouth). She is also quite incisive in her depiction of the living conditions of the lower and working classes (and one may wonder whether she had first-hand knowledge of them): Nettie Struthers’ place, the milliner’s, Lily’s room at the boarding-house, for example. A close look at the depictions of these places will lead me to try and assert their realism. Keywords: Edith Wharton, House of Mirth, New York, setting, geographical references

Memory may play strange tricks on the reader, even one who claims to be well acquainted with a given work. That is what I was forced to acknowledge as I started working on “setting” in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905), a novel set mostly in New York City – though some scenes occur in one of those summer residences along the Hudson River that the wealthy could afford, and several others abroad, in Monte Carlo and Nice. I was convinced that Wharton, more often than not, gave the precise whereabouts of her characters, was actually so precise that any reader could locate them and/or their itineraries on a

 Université de Lorraine, Metz, France, [email protected] 48 BRIGITTE ZAUGG map. But it turns out she is rather vague, and I had to hunt through the pages for hints and clues in order to try and establish (without any certainty) where the Trenors’ town house is located, where exactly Lawrence Selden lives, how far out in the country Bellomont might be, and in which part of Manhattan Madam Regina’s millinery, Lily’s boarding house, and Nettie Struthers’ apartment are situated. I did not always succeed in pinpointing these places on the map. This led me to reconsider my original idea that Wharton’s evocation of New York was based on an almost photographic rendering of the city’s lay-out, and to attempt to ascertain what such an impression was due to. In fact, Wharton does not linger much on the description of streets or buildings; she only drops a few evocative names here and there, famous landmarks that enable the reader to have a general idea of the character’s geographical whereabouts (for instance, Grand Central Station, 5th Avenue, the Park), and then invites him inside a flat or a house. She is at her best there, in the depiction of drawing rooms, dining rooms and bedrooms, re-using in her fiction the ideas on interior decoration that she and architect Ogden Codman put forward in their pioneering book published in 1897, The Decoration of Houses. Wharton only needs a few brushstrokes to create an atmosphere, an ambiance, using the setting to reinforce the characterization, either through contrasts or parallels. This is what contributes to the materiality of the picture that emerges in the reader’s mind’s eye and remains there, as clear and detailed as a photograph. The opening sequence of the novel illustrates this zooming effect very well: it takes the reader from a precise geographical location to one that remains vague, from the outside to the inside. The first chapter opens with the unexpected meeting of the two main characters, Lawrence Selden and Lily Bart, at Grand Central Station, on Park Avenue and East 42nd Street. Instead of going for a cup of tea to the nearby Sherry’s, on 44th Street and 5th Avenue, they “turn[] into Madison Avenue and beg[i]n to stroll northward” (HM 7), until Lily spots a side street lined with trees and suggests they “go into the shade.” The unnamed street is where Selden lives; he is a bachelor whose means are rather scant by Fifth Avenue standards but who is nevertheless part of the picture of New York’s well-to-do society in the early 1900s. All the reader has to go by is a description of the houses, “new brick and limestone house-fronts, fantastically varied in obedience to the American craving for novelty, but fresh and inviting with their awnings and flower-boxes” (HM 7). Selden’s building is a “flat-house with [a] marble porch and pseudo-Georgian façade” (HM 7). The street must be within walking distance of the station, but no clue is given as to how far up Madison Selden and Lily go. It is only at the end of chapter 11 in Book 2 that the reader can work out what street Selden lives on. Lily, walking up 5th Avenue, has reached 50th Street when it begins to rain and she decides to walk across to Madison Avenue to take the electric car. The text reads: FROM FIFTH AVENUE RESIDENCE TO BOARDING-HOUSE: 49 SETTING IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

As she turned into the side street, a vague memory stirred in her. The row of budding trees, the new brick and limestone house-fronts, the Georgian flat-house with flower- boxes on its balconies, were merged together into the setting of a familiar scene. It was down this street that she had walked with Selden, that September day two years ago; a few yards ahead was the doorway they had entered together. (HM 236-37)

Trying to establish exactly what street Selden lives on is actually of no import, for Wharton’s interest in the setting lies elsewhere than in geographical precision; had Selden’s street been 51st or 49th Street, nothing would have changed in the plot. What matters for Wharton (among other things) is to imprint on her reader’s mind the fact that Selden lives in a bachelor-only building, as indicated by its name, “The Benedick” (a fact Simon Rosedale – an up-and-coming Jewish outsider striving to enter fashionable society, and the owner of the Benedick – points out to Lily to show her he has seen through her lie that she’d been visiting her dressmaker, HM 15). This detail informs the reader on Selden’s social status and way of life (implying that he is not the marrying kind but a confirmed bachelor, like the character in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing). It also suggests the possibility of illicit encounters, which is confirmed by the stare of the charwoman Lily meets on the stairs:

Lily felt herself flushing under the look. What did the creature suppose? Could one never do the simplest, the most harmless thing, without subjecting one’s self to some odious conjecture? […] Miss Bart was not familiar with the moral code of bachelors’ flat- houses, and her colour rose again as it occurred to her that the woman’s persistent gaze implied a groping among past associations. (HM 13)

The Benedick is an actual place in New York and still standing, although its address is not 50th Street but 80 Washington Square East. It was built in 1879 by Lucius Tuckerman, a wealthy iron manufacturer living at 22 Washington Place, who was aware that bachelors had a hard time finding acceptable lodgings and therefore had a team of architects design an apartment building exclusively for them. In this red brick structure with stone trim and cast iron bay windows on the three middle floors, there were 33 apartments in all (with, on the 6th floor, four artist’s lofts, presumably because of Tuckerman’s interest in the arts). To make life easier for a womanless male, the building offered maid service, a bootblack and, if the tenant desired, the janitor would provide breakfast from the basement. Before long, The Tuckerman was dubbed The Benedick. It remained a bachelor’s apartment building until 1925, when it was purchased by New York University and turned into a dormitory. It is more than likely that Wharton knew about the place: after all, her family home was only a couple of blocks north of Washington Square, on West 23rd Street, and several of her Rhinelander cousins lived on the Square. The other thing that matters for Wharton is the inside of Selden’s flat, which the reader discovers at the same time as Lily. The description is rather 50 BRIGITTE ZAUGG cursory, but a lot is revealed about the man, as well as, given her exclamation, Lily – in particular her dissatisfaction with her own situation:

He ushered her into a slip of a hall hung with old prints. She noticed the letters and notes heaped on the table among his gloves and sticks; then she found herself in a small library, dark but cheerful, with its walls of books, a pleasantly faded Turkey rug, a littered desk, and, as he had foretold, a tea-tray on a low table near the window. A breeze had sprung up, swaying inward the muslin curtains, and bringing a fresh scent of mignonette and petunias from the flower-box on the balcony. Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs. “How delicious to have a place like this all to one’s self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman.” (HM 8)

The flat is rather small (“a slip of a hall”, “a small library”), not particularly tidy (“letters and notes heaped on the table among his gloves and sticks,” “a littered desk”) and everything (the walls and the furniture, cf. HM 11) is rather worn and shabby, but the whole place has a lived-in, homey quality (“dark but cheerful,” “pleasantly faded Turkey rug”). Moreover, at a time when well-to-do people (especially those of Mrs. Peniston’s generation and social class) still cut off the light and the air with closed windows and two layers of curtains (lace draperies and damask hangings, cf. R.W.B. Lewis’s description of the Joneses’ home as well as Wharton and Codman’s denunciation of Victorian-style interiors, which favoured heavy window curtains, a superabundance of trinkets, and overstuffed furniture), the fact that the window is open, letting in the fragrance of fresh flowers and a breeze, indicates that Selden is something of a non-conformist, a man who cannot stand stuffiness and unnecessary clutter. As for the books that line his walls, they testify to his good taste and his interests, while the mention of his first edition of La Bruyère (HM 11) confirms his position as an observer, a student of character, which has been emphasized from the very first lines of the novel. Selden’s characterization through the description of his bachelor flat remains quite subtle compared to that of two women who could not be more different, Mrs. Peniston and Mrs. Norma Hatch. Mrs. Peniston, Lily’s aunt, who accepted to take her in when Lily lost both her parents and was still unmarried, is representative of the conventional rearguard, so set in her ways and respectful of traditions that nothing could possibly induce her to change her habits. This is rendered in her characterization through epigrammatic sentences and comparisons that are both unexpected and eloquent, as for example the comparison of her mind to “one of those little mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix to their upper windows, so that from the depths of an impenetrable domesticity they might see what was happening in the street” (HM 32). As for Mrs. Norma Hatch, the prototype for Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country, she is the emblem of everything Wharton hated and despised, the loud and uncouth “Invaders,” as she called them: without any FROM FIFTH AVENUE RESIDENCE TO BOARDING-HOUSE: 51 SETTING IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH manners, breeding or pedigree but generally – especially the women – with a past, i.e. with at least one divorce in their wake; people who suddenly turn up from nowhere (“hatch”) and try to wheedle their way into established society. While Mrs. Peniston spends most of the year in her 5th-Avenue house, Mrs. Norma Hatch is still in limbo, her dwelling place being the Emporium, a hotel whose name Wharton must have chosen for its implications: it both pompously claims ties to the Antiquity by referring to Rome’s river port and blatantly advertises the place as a large, ostentatious retail shop offering for sale a wide variety of merchandise, thus linking it to the world of commerce so abhorrent to New York’s “good old families” (as an editor of Harper’s Weekly once put it, in reference to New York’s “aristocracy”). The exact location of the Emporium is not given; what matters is that it is emblematic of “the world of the fashionable New York hotel” (HM 213), a world described as follows:

a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert- hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from “art exhibit” to dress-maker’s opening. (HM 213)

As the prefix “over” shows, this world is one of superlatives and hyperboles (a fact emphasized by the anaphoric ternary rhythm). Accordingly, the people who dwell there are also characterized by exaggeration, which appears not only in the accumulation of places and events (restaurant, concert- hall, palm-garden, music-room, art exhibit, dress-maker’s opening) but also in the syntactic organization of these items: they work by pairs built with the same structure and grouped so as to repeat the ternary rhythm of the opening sentence. It is also a world of contradictions and paradoxes: there is too much of everything yet it is a “desert”; any “fantastic requirement” can be obtained, but none of the “comforts of civilized life”; each day seems packed with activity, yet there is no sense of busyness, or rush, or interest: the maritime metaphor, carried in the verb “drift” and the noun “tide,” emphasizes passivity, while the adjective “languid” directly contradicts the noun “curiosity” (the metaphor is continued on the next pages with terms like “float” [HM 214] and “swim” [HM 215]). Similarly, one of the meanings of the adjective “wan” (pallid, lacking colour) is at odds with the phrase “as richly upholstered as the furniture”; “wan” in this sense also stands in contrast with “torrid splendor.” Through this rather short description, Wharton manages to convey an impression of total confusion, an absence of values and a lack of purpose, and the predominance of superficiality. What is also striking is that Wharton seems unable to depict the place without 52 BRIGITTE ZAUGG describing its occupants, which confirms the idea that places and people are meant to be matching entities, the one enhancing the other. At the other – higher – end of the spectrum stand Mrs. Peniston’s 5th- Avenue house and Mrs. Peniston herself. Compared to the Emporium, the house is cavernous, dark and silent, as if to say that it dates back to prehistoric times and to imply that Mrs. Peniston is not just outdated but some kind of fossil or dinosaur. The black walnut furniture and the gloss of the vestibule tiles (HM 78) are echoed in the perpetual black clothes and glittering jet jewels she wears (she is said to be “cuirassed in shining black” and to be “the kind of woman who wore jet at breakfast” [HM 84]). The decoration of the drawing-room reveals her extremely conventional Victorian tastes, featuring “glossy purple arm- chairs” (HM 85), a “Dying Gladiator in bronze” on the drawing-room window sill (HM 77), an “ormolu clock surmounted by a helmeted Minerva, which throned on the chimney-piece between two malachite vases” (HM 85), and an Axminster carpet adorned with “monstrous roses” (HM 142) – “monstrous” suggesting both “gigantic” and “horrible.” The “glacial neatness” (HM 32) of the room is brought out by the “blaze” of the chandelier and the “icy […] grate” of the highly polished fireplace, and the indication that “the fire, like the lamps, was never lit except when there was company” (HM 84). Lily’s room is decorated in the same vein: dark, old-fashioned and cheerless. Though it is “large and comfortably-furnished,” it cannot compare to “the light tints and luxurious appointments of the guest-rooms where so many weeks of Lily’s existence were spent” (HM 86). Lily’s attempts at making it less impersonal only bring out its ugliness more:

The monumental wardrobe and bedstead of black walnut had migrated from Mr. Peniston’s bedroom, and the magenta ‘flock’ wall-paper, of a pattern dear to the early ‘sixties, was hung with large steel engravings of an anecdotic character. Lily had tried to mitigate this charmless background by a few frivolous touches, in the shape of a lace- decked toilet table and a little painted desk surmounted by photographs; but the futility of the attempt struck her as she looked about the room. (HM 86)

With such a description of Mrs. Peniston’s place, one realizes that the statement Lily makes jokingly while in Selden’s flat – that “If [she] could only do over [her] aunt’s drawing-room” she would be “a better woman” (HM 8) – is actually based on a very real abhorrence of the place where she lives. Wharton does not say how high up on 5th Avenue Mrs. Peniston’s house is located, but people familiar with old New York and its history know that the old guard is centered around Washington Square and its vicinity, while the latest arrivals have palaces along the Park. In her short story “New Year’s Day,” Wharton has the narrator sum up changes in New York as follows:

My mother’s mother, Grandmamma Parrett, still lived in the house in West Twenty- third Street which Grandpapa had built in his pioneering youth, in days when people shuddered at the perils of living north of Union Square – days that Grandmamma and FROM FIFTH AVENUE RESIDENCE TO BOARDING-HOUSE: 53 SETTING IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

my parents looked back to with a joking incredulity as the years passed and the new houses advanced steadily Park-ward, outstripping the Thirtieth Streets, taking the Reservoir at a bound, and leaving us in what, in my school-days, was already a dullish back-water between Aristocracy to the south and Money to the north.(http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301191.txt)

Fifth Avenue works as a vantage point, and Wharton renders this in the novel by using it as a point of reference, a geographical landmark in relation to which the action unfolds. Thus, just before the reader follows Selden and Van Alstyne walking down the avenue on leaving Mrs. Fisher’s, he is told that “Mrs. Fisher lived in an East side street near the Park” (HM 126). Similarly, the Dorsets’ house on 5th Avenue can be more or less precisely located when we are told that Lily, having reached 50th Street, still has “half a mile” (HM 236) to go, which puts their house at about the level of 64th Street. Fifth Avenue also functions as a kind of scale according to which a person’s social position and arrival on the social scene are measured. For the newly rich, it is the perfect spot on which to display their newly acquired wealth – having a house on 5th Avenue, besides having a box at the opera and being received by people whose ancestry can be traced to Dutch or English families, is the thing. Yet even if they succeed in acquiring a house there, or in having one built, there will always be a demarcation line between them and the old families: the higher up on the Avenue, the more recently arrived on the scene – and therefore the most ostentatious the house. Selden’s conversation with Van Alstyne makes this particularly clear:

[…] as the two men walked down Fifth Avenue the new architectural developments of that versatile thorough-fare invited Van Alstyne’s comment. “That Greiner house, now – a typical rung in the social ladder! The man who built it came from a milieu where all the dishes are put on the table at once. His façade is a complete architectural meal; if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money had given out. Not a bad purchase for Rosedale, though: attracts attention, and awes the Western sight-seer. […]” (HM 126)

In front of the Brys’ “wide white façade, with its rich restraint of line, which suggested the clever corseting of a redundant figure,” Van Alstyne comments:

“That’s the next stage: the desire to imply that one has been to Europe, and has a standard. I’m sure Mrs. Brys thinks her house a copy of the Trianon; in America every marble house with gilt furniture is thought to be a copy of the Trianon. What a clever chap that architect is, though – how he takes his client’s measure! He has put the whole of Mrs. Bry in his use of the composite order. Now for the Trenors, you remember, he chose the Corinthian: exuberant, but based on the best precedent. The Trenor house is one of his best things – doesn’t look like a banqueting-hall turned inside out.” (HM 126-27)

54 BRIGITTE ZAUGG

If living on 5th Avenue is one of the signs indicating one’s social position, then the total lack of geographical information concerning a character (Mrs. Hatch, for example, or Nettie Struthers, the working girl who invites Lily to her kitchen) is a way of signifying that this character is off the social map, on the margins. However, Wharton seems to hint, nothing is set forever: this is exemplified in Lily’s downfall as well as in the shifting border separating one set from the next in this hierarchical organization. Between the ostentatious display of riches and modernity at the Emporium and the stolid, inherited wealth of Mrs. Peniston’s town house, there are all kinds of gradations – the established leaders of fashionable society, like the Dorsets and the Trenors, the Stepneys, the Van Osburghs and the Van Alstynes, and the people who are slowly working their way up, like the Brys and Simon Rosedale. Virtual nobodies at the beginning of the novel, looked down upon as vulgar and uncouth, and therefore shunned by old New York, the Brys and Rosedale immensely profit by the advice of Carry Fisher, who has made a regular business out of tutoring upstarts into the maze of New York’s do’s and don’t’s. The other factor in their social climb is the money they make in Wall Street “at a time when most people’s investments are shrinking” (HM 95). While their insolent wealth was precisely what prevented them from getting into society, after a while society’s desire to be amused takes over and prejudice is cast to the winds. Welly Bry and Rosedale come to be looked upon as “magician[s] powerful enough to turn the shrunken pumpkin back again into the golden coach,” as men who have “found the secret of performing [a] miracle” (HM 95). This demonstrates, if needs be, society’s fickleness and its capacity to close its eyes on what it does not want to see – though there are limits to what it condones, as the story with Mrs. Hatch proves. Even Rosedale has understood that some associations are better left alone: “Mrs. Hatch’s milieu was one which he had once assiduously frequented, and now as devoutly shunned” (HM 226). Wharton repeatedly shows how the process works, not only with the Brys and Rosedale, but also with the Gormers. Lily’s perception of their set while they are still on the margins, still in the making, adumbrates the outcome of their social career:

The Gormer milieu represented a social out-skirt that Lily had always fastidiously avoided; but it struck her, now that she was in it, as only a flamboyant copy of her own world, a caricature approaching the real thing as the “society play” approaches the manners of the drawing-room. The people about her were doing the same things as the Trenors, the Van Osburghs and the Dorsets: the difference lay in a hundred shades of aspect and manner, from the pattern of the men’s waistcoats to the inflexions of the women’s voices. Everything was pitched in a higher key, and there was more of each thing: more noise, more colour, more champagne, more familiarity – but also greater good-nature, less rivalry, and a fresher capacity for enjoyment. (HM 182)

A cursory reading of this passage could lead to a comparison with the paragraph depicting Mrs. Hatch and her superlative world and to the conclusion FROM FIFTH AVENUE RESIDENCE TO BOARDING-HOUSE: 55 SETTING IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH that Wharton uses the same narrative device. In fact it is not quite so, for even if Wharton highlights the overwhelming quantities of everything through the comparatives (“higher,” “more” repeated five times, “greater,” “fresher”) and, through Lily’s point of view, passes a negative judgment on this set (as indicated by the adjective “flamboyant” and the noun “caricature”), she also underlines the similarities: it is “only a […] copy,” it “approach[es] the real thing,” they are “doing the same things as the Trenors…”. At the end of the paragraph, she even hints that the Gormer milieu is actually more pleasant than Lily’s (“greater good-nature, less rivalry, and a fresher capacity for enjoyment”) thanks to the absence of the snobbishness that is disguised as sophistication or refinement. However, she also shows that Mattie Gormer’s desire for a higher place on the social ladder makes her lose that freshness: her regard for Lily vanishes as she strikes up an acquaintance with Bertha Dorset. Lily’s drifting from the top to the bottom (the “rubbish heap” as she calls it, HM 240) of the social hierarchy takes the reader into successive parallel worlds whose standards and morals always go one notch down. While in Book 1 Lily enjoys a certain geographical stability, spending her time between New York and country estates on the Hudson, in Book 2 she is attached to no fixed place: on returning from Europe, she first lives in “a small private hotel” “on the edge of a fashionable neighbourhood” (HM 193), but she avoids it as much a she can, accepting the Gormers’ invitation to go to Alaska, then to Newport, then to Long Island, joining Carry Fisher at Tuxedo. Finding herself in “rooms with [a] cramped outlook down a sallow vista of brick walls and fire escapes” (HM 193) and depressing decoration (“surcharged ceiling,” “plush exuberance” of the narrow sitting-room) only makes her crave more “the luxury of lying once more in a soft-pillowed bed, and looking across a spacious sunlit room at a breakfast-table set invitingly before the fire” (HM 212). After leaving the comfort of her room at the Emporium she finds herself in a boarding-house, the precise location of which remains unknown. All the reader gets to understand is that it is not far from 5th Avenue and its alluring display of carriages and wealth, which of course only brings out the contrast with the boarding-house more. It seems that just on the other side of 5th Avenue lies a whole different world – though not quite that of slums –, noisy (due to the “shrieks of the ‘elevated’ and the tumult of trams and wagons” [HM 226]) and dirty (she and Rosedale walk “westward past a long line of areas which, through the distortion of their paintless rails, revealed with increasing candour the disjecta membra of bygone dinners” [HM 229]). As in other descriptions of places, here Wharton only needs a few touches to give a sense of the decrepitude of Lily’s surroundings, mentioning “the blistered brown stone front, the windows drapes with discoloured lace, and the Pompeian decoration of the muddy vestibule” (HM 229), as well as, inside, “the peacock-blue parlour, with its bunches of dried pampas grass, and discoloured steel engravings of sentimental episodes,” 56 BRIGITTE ZAUGG

“a console adorned with a Rodgers statuette,” “plush and rosewood sofas” and “a rocking-chair draped with a starched antimacassar” (HM 232). One of the reasons why Wharton did not give too precise a description of the boarding-house where Lily spends her last days is probably that she did not have a very thorough knowledge or experience of that kind of place; it simply was not her world, and she was not the kind of writer who would go and check things she meant to use in her novels. However, her choice of eloquent details makes up for the absence of specific geographical information and suffices to draw a full and realistic picture of the New York of the turn of the century.

All references in the article are to the Norton Critical Edition of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth edited by Elizabeth Ammons in 1990.

PALE SPACES IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH – IMAGES OF A DISEMBODIED NEW YORK

HRISTO BOEV*

Abstract

Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth presents closed spaces of forced nonchalance, exaggerated Oscar Wilde-like witticisms as well as spatial and spiritual emptiness. The spaces of the brown houses where the novel is set, if subjected to topoanalysis, reveal a paleness that has a profound effect on the main protagonist, Lily Bart, as well as on the representatives of high society with whom she interacts. This pervasive sickly image of the interior, where most of the action takes place, is projected on to the world without, thus producing equally pale images of New York, which is but a reflection of the inside of the houses. Represented in such a manner, the city loses its clear contours and becomes another shade of the paleness of its inhabitants inside the houses, a salient presence of a disembodied super entity. Keywords: house, pale, city, disembodied, emptiness.

1. The Urban Novel in Interdisciplinary Criticism

1.1. A Spatial Approach to the Social Novel

The House of Mirth has been said to contain the big city as a salient feature, the action taking place mostly in the closed spaces of a provincial New York, whose superficial leisure class in attire and manner is definitely Victorian, if compared to its exuberant representation in Fitzgerald’s novels of the Roaring Twenties. A precursor to his works set in New York (The Beautiful and the Damned and The Great Gatsby), the representatives of this class in Wharton’s fictional New York of the 1890s are also revealed as hollow whose glamor is nothing but a façade. The analysis of this class in Veblen’s highly popular The Theory of the Leisure Class (1895) has been shown to be a useful tool of outlining the social structure of novels of the Jazz Age and would certainly do Edith Wharton’s novel justice. For instance, it could do so by disclosing the dimensions and the poignancy of “vicarious consumption” in

* Ph.D. in Philology, Ovidius University Constanta, Romania, [email protected] 58 HRISTO BOEV women (2007:49, 58, 119, 122) from the previous epoch – the actual description of pecuniary relationships in Veblen’s work. Aiming to reveal the habitation of closed spaces in the novel and its projection on to the open spaces of the city without, in this paper, I shall go beyond the mere economic dependency between the wealthy men and the escorting women. Thus, I shall examine the underlying foundations of the sumptuous scenes of fancy balls and the squalid interior of boarding houses. On this premise, I make a point that in Wharton’s novel, regardless of the fact whether ravishing women adorn the tables of rich men, imparting a sense of ostentatious exquisiteness to the surroundings, or overworked and degraded women share men’s tables and misery in shabby pubs, it is the same profound hollowness that is exuded from both, which affects men and women equally. I shall, therefore, establish the intimate relationship between setting and actors in determining, the choices that these actors make, which are mainly reflected in the novel’s main protagonist, Lily Bart.

1.2. Topoanalysis Applied to the House

Part of the spatial turn arising from the 60s in works by French scholars such as Foucault, Lefebvre and Bachelard, in his Poetique de la ville (1973) Pierre Sansot speaks of “un langage urbanistique dont nous refusons la scission qu’il introduit entre l’homme et la ville” (11) [an urban language where we refuse to allow a split between a person and a city]. Given the enormous significance of the house and its spaces in Wharton’s novel, I propose an approach, based on Bachelard’s idea of topoanalysis (The Poetics of Space), which explores the relationship between the city and the city resident by examining the pale spaces inhabited by the main characters. In so doing, I shall prove that the city dwellers receive their paleness from these spaces, infusing it into the shades of the big city without, imagined through the prism of the sickly devitalized class of the wealthy.

2. The Effect of the House

2.1. Container and Contained

The very word house is present in the title of the book itself, referring to Ecclesiastes: “the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth” (7:4). Stilgoe explains Bachelard’s preoccupation with the house in the following manner: “on whatever theoretical horizon we PALE SPACES IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH – IMAGES 59 OF A DISEMBODIED NEW YORK examine it, the house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being” (1994: xxxvi). And indeed, the effect of the house with its appertaining spaces on its inhabitants is much too strong for the latter to resist; it encapsulates them just like a shell – a form that presupposes their insular existence characterized by very limited interactions with the modified periphery of the world without – the big city. Wharton’s novel perfectly illustrates Augoyard’s insistence on the omnipotence of the relation between container and contained in the city (2007: 8). In a much more literal sense than Stilgoe’s synthesis of Bachelard’s achievement in The Poetics of Space where “the house serves Bachelard as the portal to metaphors of imagination” (1994: viii), The House of Mirth naturalistically insists on the container (the house, the room) giving shape to the contained (the inhabitant), just like a shell forms the creature inside it. In this oppressive space, the main protagonist, Lily Bart, is portrayed as a sylvan animal captured in the trap of the somber drawing room: “as though she was a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing room” (19).

2.2. Wearing Different Shades of Pale

The conventions of the container determining the traits of the contained pervade the entire novel and are certainly not confined to Lily Bart only, but are extended to all inhabitants, perhaps, with the sole exception of Lawrence Selden – her unsuccessful savior, who suggests a source of self-reliance, and hence freedom, outside the gross materialism of the world around him. For example, on her way out from Selden’s house, Lily Bart bumps into the curious housekeeper, whose paleness and sickly looks are imparted alliteratively by the pail that she uses in her work. She has “a broad sallow face, slightly pitted with small pox” (20). The men occupying themselves with the estate of Percy Gryce, the latter an enduring marital interest for Lily due to his social awkwardness and wealth, are portrayed as “a batch of pale men on small salaries” (35), who have “grown gray” (35) in the process. An acquaintance of Lily Bart’s and her rival for men’s attention, Mrs George Dorset, into whom she runs on a train to Bellomont has taken a severe blow from her marriage with effects much stronger than Lily Bart’s identification with the drawing room. She, a typical representative of her class, is portrayed as a pale cheerless inhabitant of New York, a disembodied spirit, whose strident voice in an amorphous body fills the space around her with emptiness (36). The sense of New Yorkers’ mechanized meaningless existence, turning its inhabitants into pale spirits also exudes from Lily Bart’s father and mother long before he hits bankruptcy and she succumbs to the strains of chronic pecuniary problems. They lead a pale colorless existence. He is invariably portrayed as a tired man who is almost never home, 60 HRISTO BOEV whose “fagged step” (45) Lily occasionally overhears in winter after night falls. He is even more “effaced and silent” (45) in summer when even resting becomes a tiring experience for him: he spends his free time staring in stupor at the sea-line from the verandah of his house while the clatter of his wife’s existence goes on “unheeded a few feet off” (46).

3. The Chronotope of the House

3.1. Dinginess in Riches and Rags

Lily Bart’s aspirations after the world of the rich and its appertaining residential spaces can be considered her downfall since she excludes what she terms a life of “obscurity” (61) and her mother “dinginess”, the latter being quoted as the cause of her mother’s death (55). Brought up by her mother to hate dinginess, she relishes an atmosphere of luxury: “it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in” (40). After her parents’ deaths, which Lily interprets as a signal for her to keep away from poverty, the quality of the spaces she inhabits generally deteriorates. She stays the longest at her aunt’s – Mrs Peniston, thus recreating a chronotope of the house, which, as Bachelard claims, allows examining the house as the “abode of the soul” (1994: 25, 27, 42). In a similarly unlocked chronotope in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865), Bella Wilfer discovers spirituality after going through a number of houses (2012: 20-30), some of which rich while others poor. Unlike Dickens’s novel, however, The House of Mirth is not set in London, where the city can be redeemed by its extant organicity, and which, according to Mumford, was preserved until the first skyscrapers made a change to the cityscape in the 1960s (1963: 111). The organic (human) essence of Dickensian London is expressed in the tangible presence of the household gods (Welsh, 1999: 160; Spengler, 1922: 2:90-100), which can provide the road to salvation and hence spirituality. By contrast, Wharton’s New York is far too advanced in modernity for the mere presence of the containers of these gods – hearth, door, floor and chamber, to be of any real significance, effectively registering them as the gods’ dispirited sarcophaguses. As a result, Lily Bart, while inhabiting them, is to find out that “dinginess is a quality which assumes all manner of disguises… as latent in the expensive routine of her aunt’s life as in the makeshift existence of a continental pension” (57).

3.2. The House as a Prison

Having examined some of the disheartened New Yorkers in the novel and their symptomatic paleness, I now turn to the source of this paleness – the houses inhabited by Lily Bart, a representative New Yorker. In the novel, they PALE SPACES IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH – IMAGES 61 OF A DISEMBODIED NEW YORK often create the prism, through which we look at the city without: “the free undulations of the park” are seen through the “yellow boughs” (62) of the trees from the window. The window in winter presents an outlook to an indistinguishable exterior: “the outer air, penned between high buildings, brought no freshness through the window” (271). Thus, the house becomes a vantage point reshaping our perceptions of outer reality: with Lily Bart having moved to her aunt’s, the house turns into a “watch-tower” through which Fifth Avenue is perceived:

And Mrs. Peniston, from the secluded watch-tower of her upper window, could tell to a nicety just when the chronic volume of sound was increased by the sudden influx setting toward a Van Osburgh ball, or when the multiplication of wheels meant merely that the opera was over, or that there was a big supper at Sherry’s (193).

The introduction to the first house, where Lily Bart moves after her mother’s death, marks a huge difference in the honed powers of observation of Lily’s aunt if compared to the severely limited perceptions of the bedridden inhabitants in another novel by Dickens, set for its most part in London – The Old Curiosity Shop. The residents of these houses are capable of discerning only the “incessant tread of feet” (3) while Mrs. Peniston easily reconstructs the culture life of the avenue with precision, which attests to a fully adapted way of life. This difference is accounted for by the fact that the ones who perceive London thus in Dickens’s novel do so out of an impossibility; otherwise they would be walking the streets just like the omniscient narrator of the novel. By contrast, Mrs. Peniston, like most of the inhabitants in Edith Wharton’s novel, prefers to stay indoors, confined to her house, looking on the city, thus turning her house not just into an observational lens, but a veritable trap whose visiting inhabitants may crave for the outside, but feel incapacitated to make the step towards it, risking exposure to the public gaze with the consequences of being judged for it. An example of Bachelard’s established intimacy between the house of one’s birth and its inhabitant (1994: 21), as well as the sensation of estrangement subsequent houses may generate, is the guest of the house in Wharton’s novel, who may be treated like an intruder contaminating the furniture (205). Even though her aunt’s house has all the prerequisites of what may constitute a happy “oneiric” (1994: 13-21) experience – being large and having many rooms, its spaces create a living nightmare for Lily. The sense of foreignness of the Victorian somber house to underprivileged younger members of New York society with an artistic taste who do not have their own houses, is highlighted in Lily’s plight; she is obliged to inhabit a room that has a depressing effect on her:

She had a vision of herself lying on the black walnut bed – and the darkness would frighten her, and if she left the light burning the dreary details of the room would brand themselves forever on her brain. She had always hated her room at Mrs. Peniston’s – its ugliness, its impersonality, the fact that nothing in it was really hers (239).

62 HRISTO BOEV

The sense of estrangement that Lily feels for her room is intensified into a sense of aggression that the room exercises on its unfortunate inhabitant, the room effectively becoming a torture chamber of Victorianism for the early modernist soul in a scene also suggesting Edith Wharton’s own preoccupations with interior design (176-7). Wharton provides numerous examples of the sense of utter discomfort that Lily feels in her aunt’s house, which gradually turns the latter into a gilt cage, contributing to Lily’s waning away and her pale looks becoming sallow. Its “immaculateness and order” make her feel as if she were living in “a tomb” (160); and her aunt’s drawing room, a room with which she initially identifies, creates in her a sensation as if “she were buried alive in the stifling limits of Mrs. Peniston’s existence” (160). The same room is illuminated by the “cheerless blaze of the drawing room chandelier” (162) whose effects are immediate on Lily, and who suffers from prolonged irradiation, leading to premature aging: “Lily seemed to watch her own figure retreating down vistas of neutral-tinted dullness to a middle age” (162) If we return to Dickens’s Victorian prison-houses, a number of examples readily come to mind. We can think of Mrs Clennam’s decrepit house (Little Dorrit). Then it is not dissimilar to Miss Havisham’s ice-cold house (Great Expectations), which, like Mrs Peniston’s house, has entrapped a young woman – the beautiful, but cold Estella. However, it bears more likeness to yet another Dickensian house – the richly furnished house of Mr Dombey (Dombey & Son), both affecting their inhabitants on a psychological level. Their dead costly furniture is reflected in the dispiritedness of their soulless proprietors – Mr Dombey and Mrs Peniston, with mortifying effects on Edith Granger and Lily Bart respectively, both female big city inhabitants yearning to break free. As a result, Lily finds herself waiting anxiously for a visit from the outer world – Selden’s, which has all the signs of an utter disappointment, as he does not come (163). The feeling of being trapped haunts Lily in all the other houses, even if she only stays in them for brief moments, as in Gus Trenor’s house where the full signification of his monetary assistance for her is made. Unlike Edith Granger, who is reclaimed by the street, which, in Dickens’s novel may often offer a respite from the oppressive atmosphere of the Victorian house, in Lily Bart’s case, this feeling is only illusory. The street in Wharton’s novel, as a rule, reflects the grim interior of the house, engulfing the terrified inhabitant in a world of indistinct forms and fleeting shadows (238).

4. The House and the City: Reflections of Bleakness and Desolation

4.1. From Stifling to Sallow – the Rich House and the Boarding House

Mrs Peniston’s drawing room, just as Lily’s subsequent habitation in other rooms in the big city will show, offers further evidence of the lugubrious interior projecting itself on to the relentlessly bleak exterior, usually Fifth PALE SPACES IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH – IMAGES 63 OF A DISEMBODIED NEW YORK

Avenue, which, in turn, reflects this bleakness with an amplified effect back on to the interior. Such is the case of Mrs Peniston’s death: “the blinds of Mrs. Peniston’s drawing room were drawn down against the oppressive June sun, and in the sultry twilight the faces of the assembled relatives took on a fitting shadow of bereavement” (355). A casual reflection of Lily’s face in another window may accentuate its frail and sickly traits: “the glare from the jeweler’s window, deepening the pallor of her face, gave to its delicate lines the sharpness of a tragic mask” (345). Further evidence of identification between city inhabitants and their interior surroundings can be found in the revealing portrayal of the pallid world of the rich New York hotel where wan moth-like creatures move about its mechanized and stifling interior (442). The sense of upholstered artificiality is imparted to the wan beings who find themselves in this suggestively typical nonheterotopic environment. Other literary representations of urban topoi on both sides of the Atlantic can be alive with the dynamics of fin-de-siècle modernity. An example is the bridge in Dickens and Dos Passos (2012: 21-37), offering functional or aesthetic markers of changing modernity. By contrast, the stifling inertia of the city hotel in this novel only seems to reflect that of the street outside – the paintless rails of Sixth Avenue (474) Eventually, determined to pay back her debt to Gus Trenor, Lily Bart moves to live in a boarding house. Her new room there and the boarding house itself are equally depressing, assuming the sallowness (455) of their often hard- toiling inhabitants: her room is cramped, marked by “blotched wallpaper and shabby paint” (464). It offers an outlook of “sallow vista of brick walls and fire- escapes” (398; emphasis added).

4.2. Blurred and Bleak, the City Streets Offer No Relief

The city exterior, the most frequent case being the portrayal of Fifth Avenue remains desolate and indistinct, panoramically viewed from a distance – one may imagine the watch-tower of Mrs Peniston’s house unlike the close- ups of interactions between walkers and this avenue in Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), some of which feature the earlier epoch of Wharton’s novel. Seasons hardly affect it and it remains uneventful and only very rarely it does not portend ill for its most frequent ambling onlooker – Lily Bart. It is in spring that it has a mitigating effect on “the ugliness of the long crowded thoroughfare,” blurring “the gaunt rooflines,” throwing “a veil over the discouraging perspective of the side streets” (479). However, in winter Fifth Avenue is “still deserted at the weekend … from Monday to Friday a broadening stream of carriages between house-fronts gradually restored to consciousness” (420); it may be brilliant in “hard winter sunlight” (420). In 64 HRISTO BOEV general, all the details dissolve in the blinding light, or get blurred. Reflecting the gloomy atmosphere of the Victorian house, however, it usually conspires against Lily Bart, foreboding the set frame of interminable bleakness: “the future stretched before her dull and bare as the deserted length of Fifth Avenue, and the opportunities showed as meagerly as the few cabs trailing the quest of fares that did not come” (372). The conspiracy against her includes all urban realia, breaching the supposedly invincible beyond: “but the terrible silence and emptiness seemed to symbolize her future – she felt as though the house, the street, the world were all empty, and she alone left sentient in a lifeless universe” (519). New York itself as an urban entity is rendered in generalized forbidding terms month by month or season by season: spring is “inclement” (301), August is “barren” (381), October is marked by “desolate dullness” (161), etc.

5. No Way Out

5.1. Realism and Utopia Equally Fail

In these spaces of utter desolation and bleakness of urban interior and exterior, Wharton seems to offer two ways out, one of which is false – Selden’s stance of nonfeasance and his escape into a world of his own and a poor girl’s recreation of a nest on the top of a cliff. The latter offers a straw at which she can clutch in her continuous battle with the hardships of urban life and thus retain its connection with it. As the novel unfolds, it turns out that Lily was right in questioning the feasibility of the proposed by Selden alternative existence in New York. Selden is capable only of dreaming about saving her and taking her with him: “ah, he would take her beyond – beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of the soul“(249). A brilliant conversationalist, out of all occasions when he could have offered her more than moral support, Selden makes sure he profits from none and thus abandons her to her fate, proving that his “republic” is built on nothing but words. The second solution proposed by the poor girl is a more realistic outcome, which invokes Bachelard’s discussion of the bird’s nest and phenomenology of roundness (1994: 232-241):

The poor little working girl who had found strength to gather up the fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them, seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It was a meager enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a cliff – a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss (517)

PALE SPACES IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH – IMAGES 65 OF A DISEMBODIED NEW YORK

5.2. The Household Gods Are Dead: Sallowness Reigns Supreme

As we can see from the passage, the solution proposed is a stubborn kind of existence despite all odds, the key word here, as well as elsewhere in the analyzed passages, being the conspicuous absence of “life” as a possibility. This solution presupposes not only existing in the city, but resisting the circumstances, fighting the obstacles and overcoming them in a stability arising from an inner strength and peace of mind, thus establishing a more palpable “personal freedom” than Selden’s. In Lily’s case it does not work, either, as she is incapable of resurrecting the household gods in Gerty’s humble rooms while she is staying with her. The hearth proves ineffectual and the coziness in the room has very short-lived effects on Lily, who is losing fast her will to live, stepping into the beyond, which excludes everything material:

Lily sat quiet, leaning to the fire: the clatter of cups behind her soothed her as familiar noises hush a child whom silence has kept wakeful. But when Gerty stood at her side with the tea she pushed it away, and turned an estranged eye on the familiar room (264).

Unable to offer its characters a mainstream way to building their own nest and cling over the urban abyss or alternative ways of forgoing gross materialism, the novel ends on a note of pervasive scenes of sallowness and apathy in which Lily sees her own sickly reflection, for example, at a restaurant:

She had lost the sense of time, and it seemed to her as though she had not spoken to any one for days. Her eyes sought the faces about her, craving a responsive glance, some sign of an intuition of her trouble. But the sallow preoccupied women, with their bags with notebooks and rolls of music, were all engrossed in their own affairs. (489; emphasis added)

As this analysis suggests, The House of Mirth can be reviewed beyond the empty laughter of the rich and foolish implied by Ecclesiastes. It underscores Edith Wharton’s naturalism in the portrayal of New York as an entity whose urban contours are not clear and we are not allowed to see the details. Its inhabitants are presented as just as pale and sallow as the exterior of the city, even though they are usually confined to its interior – the Victorian house. They are part of this interior and an extension of it, reproducing a society just as frayed at the edges as the sumptuous furniture in the rich house – the hotel as social tapestry (445). With topoanalysis applied to Wharton’s novel, we have established that the Victorian house as a container of the entrapped modern city inhabitant is incapable of providing a dreamscape, which could compensate for its spiritual unsustainability. The city dwellers, who have taken after the interior of the house, are portrayed as lifeless as the interior itself. Unable to truly exit the pale and sallow spaces of the house interior, the characters in the novel cannot even see the exterior and thus New York for them 66 HRISTO BOEV remains blurred, lurid, inert, uneventful, an extension to the dead house. Thus, the house in this novel becomes the embodiment of a decadent epoch, a greenhouse whose detrimental influence over its inhabitants is universal, most notably reflected in its protagonist – Lily Bart, who just like a delicate rare flower in this scathing environment, wilts away. Going through increasingly depressive house spaces, regardless of their luxury or lack of it, Lily Bart’s radiance, which even at the beginning of the novel is tainted by her exhausting routine of using house interiors, goes through paleness to finally turn to the sallowness marking her spiritual sickness and ghastliness, when in the end, she blends with the depressing interior in death.

REFERENCES

Augoyard, Jean-François [1979] (2007), Step by Step, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Boev, Hristo (2012), “The Chronotope of the Beginnings in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend: Two Houses” in Analele stiintifice ale universitatii Ovidius din Constanta, vol. XXIV, nr2, pp. 20-30. Boev, Hristo (2012), “The Modern City Experienced through Its Bridges: the Bridge in London and New York in the Works of Dickens and Dos Passos” in International Journal of Cross-Cultural Studies and Environmental Communication, vol. 1, nr. 2, pp. 21-37. Bachelard, Gaston [1958] (1994), The Poetics of Space, Orion Press, New York. Dickens, Charles [1848] (2009), Dombey and Son, The Econarch Institute, Jakarta. Dickens, Charles [1860] (1993), Great Expectations, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Dickens, Charles [1857] (1868), Little Dorrit, Books, New York. Dickens, Charles [1865] (2009), Our Mutual Friend, The Econarch Institute, Jakarta. Dickens, Charles [1841] (1907), The Old Curiosity Shop, J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, London. Dos Passos, John [1925] (2000), Manhattan Transfer, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York. Mumford, Lewis (1963), The Highway and the City, Harcourt Brace & World, New York. Sansot, Pierre (1973), Poetique de la ville, Klincksieck, Paris. Spengler, Oswald (1922), The Decline of the West, Alfred A. Knopf, New York. Stilgoe, John R (1994) “Forward to the 1994 Edition.” in The Poetics of Space [1958], Orion Press, New York, pp. vii-xv. Veblen, Thornstein [1899] (2007), The Theory of the Leisure Class, Oxford University Press, New York. Welsh, Alexander. [1970] (1999), The City of Dickens, Harvard University Press, London. Wharton, Edith (1905), The House of Mirth, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.

SOCIAL CONFLICTS AND CHANGE IN EDITH WHARTON’S NEW YORK

OANA ALEXANDRA ALEXA

Abstract

As a novelist of manners, Edith Wharton had a long literary career, which enabled her to depict in her works both the New York of her youth and the subsequent changes America faced through the first part of the 20th century. The aim of this paper is to analyze the social interactions and conflicts which characterized New York’s upper-class as they are presented in her Pulitzer-winning novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), and the respective film adaptation by Martin Scorsese (The Age Of Innocence, 1993), while emphasizing their evolution in time and the changes they brought in the world of the elite. Wharton’s New York is mostly what Veblen called the ‘leisure class,’ which is essentially at the heart of the social conflict between this closed circle and the newly-risen bourgeoisie. ‘Old New York’ is about keeping up the upper-class standards and rejecting everything that ‘new money’ stands for. But both the last chapter of the novel and its cinematic equivalent, later offer us a glimpse of the “newer” New York, where the leisure class comes to need the ‘new money’ and mixes with the bourgeoisie in order to survive. Keywords: social conflict, change, leisure class, outcasts, film adaptation.

1. Changes in Turn-of-the-Century America

Conflict is directly related to change. Whenever the state of affairs is modified (either by one from inside a community, or by an outsider, or even by evolution itself), it is inevitable that conflict should arise between the old and the new orders. The industrial revolution brought such a profound change that the American society (just as anywhere else) suffered tremendous mutations. One half of the American population suddenly moved to the city and the society subsequently divided. While for those people remaining in the country-side life continued with its almost unchanged pace, most of those who chose the city had

 Ph.D candidate at “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Iaşi; [email protected]. This work was supported by the strategic grant POSDRU/159/1.5/S/133652, cofinanced by the European Social Fund within the Sectorial Operational Program – Human Resources Development, 2007-2013. 68 OANA ALEXANDRA ALEXA done so in order to become labourers in the newly built factories all over the country. As for the upper-class, the place to see and be seen was also the city, where living was becoming increasingly comfortable with the new inventions. This shift from farm to city occupies a central place in the developmental theories of economists and the histories of nations. It was also a significant source for social inequality, which in turn was accentuated by the birth of consumerism. While the lower-class workers formed a compact group of overly- exploited and poorly-paid city newcomers, their bosses, as the new factory owners, increased their wealth rapidly and turned their ‘new money’ into an infusion of capital which changed the appearance of the cities. However, they did not represent the upper-class, and the latter made a big statement out of their rejecting the nouveau-riche. Thus, while there was a constant conflict between the labourers and their exploiters on grounds of working conditions and poor payment, there was also a conflict between the newly-risen middle class and the closest thing to European aristocracy America could pride on. Class conflict was associated with the new economic status, and the upper-class struggled to remain aloof. ‘Old New York’ was about keeping up the upper-class standards, but however rigid they might have been in terms of who was or was not to be invited to their gatherings, certain characters, with a more or less “blurred” background, infiltrated through marriage or even forced their way into the privileged group. In the “newer” New York, however, people did not care much about ancestry and social differences. The leisure class comes to need the new money and mixes with the bourgeoisie in order to survive. Some of Wharton’s later novels, like Twilight Sleep, give us a picture of the profound social, moral and cultural changes which transformed the 20th century.

2. Social Conflicts in Wharton’s World

In Edith Wharton’s rarefied upper-class New York, social groups were clearly delineated. The few who could pride on their Anglo-Saxon early settlers’ origin made a statement of rejecting anything less aristocratic: from the food they ate to the colours they chose for their walls and drapes, to the people they visited and the marriages they made. This was a closed, inner circle of conservatism and excessive boundary demarcation. In choosing her topic, upper-class New York, Wharton describes a world at the very top of the social pyramid, which was so focused on its superiority that it ignored the very foundations which made it superior by contrast. It was so high up on the social scale that the lowest of the classes would read about its members in the newspaper columns, like they would read a story about lost civilizations and their mystical gods. SOCIAL CONFLICTS AND CHANGE IN EDITH WHARTON’S NEW YORK 69

Consequently, there is little conflict between the upper and the lower classes in the sense of the communist revolution in Wharton’s novels, because the two social groups did not come into close contact. The social conflict in her world lies within the leisure class, between the inner-circle and different types of outcasts threatening its borders. The essence of this conflict is the delineation between ‘the x’ and the ‘not-x,’ between what and who is accepted and what and who is not. But what were the criteria in distinguishing these tribes? In analysing Edith Wharton’s social register, Claire Preston identifies the essence of this segregation in the author’s own childhood experience: “From an early age, it seems, Wharton was aware of a contention between the impulses of her imaginative gifts and the dictates of her tribe.” Preston (2000:1) The unpleasant or the forbidden always took the shape of “’not-niceness,’ an old litotes which seems to summarize an essential linguistic and behavioural demarcation in Wharton’s fiction.” Preston (2000:1) By prescribing what is ‘done’ and ‘not done’ to the faintest detail, the elite was able to keep at bay any intruder not matching the required standards. So, there is, on the one hand, the inner circle, the tribe – a well-defined group of respectable families of Anglo-Saxon origin, having the means to live a life of leisure and a well-established code of behaviour and, on the other hand, outcasts – anyone not displaying the proper wealth, social behaviour and aristocratic origin.

2.1. The Age of Innocence: The Magnificent Scene for a Silent Battle

The social conflict in Wharton’s world is one of infinite nuances and details, carried out silently behind a screen of studied respectability and serenity. The Age of Innocence, in particular, constantly reminds the reader what was or was not the thing to do in the world of the privileged tribe. From the opening scene, “we are introduced to this dialectical code through a range of details, all proposed as unyielding, unexplained, communally and tacitly subscribed to as if they were natural laws.” Preston (2000:6) Indeed, “what was or was not ‘the thing’ played a part as important in Newland Archer’s New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago.” Wharton (2010:4) There was no secret regarding those who formed this inner circle, and The Age of Innocence states the precise families which could claim this honour:

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The New York of Newland Archer’s day was a small and slippery pyramid, in which, as yet, hardly a fissure had been made or a foothold gained. At its base was a firm foundation of what Mrs. Archer called ‘plain people;’ an honorable but obscure majority of respectable families who (as in the case of the Spicers or the Leffertses or the Jacksons) had been raised above their level by marriage with one of the ruling clans. Wharton (2010:40)

The term “plain people” in Wharton’s world has obviously nothing to do with their clothing, manners or intellect (since we can see that both Lefferts and Jackson are keen observers of the social world, understanding its subtleties) but it is only used to describe a different social level, where those not entirely blue- blooded could be found.

Firmly narrowing upward from this wealthy but inconspicuous substratum was the compact and dominant group which the Mingotts, Newlands, Chiverses and Mansons so actively represented. Most people imagined them to be the very apex of the pyramid; but they themselves (at least those of Mrs. Archer’s generation) were aware that, in the eyes of the professional genealogist, only a still smaller number of families could lay claim to that eminence.[…] Mrs. Archer and her son and daughter, like everyone else in New York, knew who these privileged beings were: the Dragonets […], the Lannings […] and the van der Luydens. Wharton (2010:40)

Edith Wharton herself uses the term “tribe” to refer to this carefully delineated group of the elite, referring to a society largely based on actual or perceived kinship and descent. They were as genetically “pure” as they could be, but they are also defined by attitudes and actions. Social conventions dictated every thought and step, and “this seemed as natural to Newland Archer” (as to everyone else from the top of the pyramid) as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded […]. Wharton (2010:4) Wealth was required, not to be talked about, but rather to fund conspicuous consumption. Anything below the standards is living “like a pig.” Wharton (2011:34) That anyone should say this out loud is uncommon, because the New York of that time, Wharton observes, existed in a “kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.” Wharton (2010:37) For those inside the inner circle, there seemed to be no free will, no imagination and few options. Life was not a matter of too many choices, but rather a long array of prescribed automatisms, performed with the required attitude and form .When anything escapes the pattern, immediate and drastic measures need to be implemented, with the help of those at the very top of the social pyramid, who are considered the ultimate preservers of tradition. The vehemence in their reactions is disguised in exclusion rituals carried out with the same mask of smiles and flawless etiquette. The opening scene of The Age of Innocence sets the stage for all the drama unfolding within this (intentionally) small circle gathering every winter SOCIAL CONFLICTS AND CHANGE IN EDITH WHARTON’S NEW YORK 71

in the crowded space of the old Academy of Music in New York. “In opera, James and Wharton discovered a social institution that illustrated both the customs of the old guard and the consumption of the new wealth.” Skaggs (2010:98) Within the small number of opera boxes, “elaborate rituals of social privilege and rejection occurred. Box seats allowed their owners to display their wealth while simultaneously offering themselves to the public as a spectacle.” Skaggs (2010:98) The number and position of the sitting arrangements clearly state who is part of the inner circle. The few unusual exceptions, namely Ellen Olenska (a foreigner) and Julius Beaufort (a representative of the ‘new money’ social group), were tolerated because of their kinship with prominent families like the Mingotts and the Dallases. It is here that the reader gets acquainted with the conflicting social groups, because it allows them to “display publicly the evidences of this status.” Skaggs (2010:116) Being present at the opera and hanging famous paintings in one’s drawing-room is a sure sign of wealth, and wealth takes one half way to the inner circle. Claire Preston categorises those characters ouside the tribe as ‘outcasts.’ She sees this organisation into tribes and outcasts as a result of the Darwinist influences on Wharton’s works:

The themes suggested to her by the evolutionists and by the anthropologists and nascent sociologists were not only the metaphors of social organisation such as species, clans, hereditary behaviour patterns, and so on; they also suggested to her principles of boundary and exclusion. Preston (2000:56)

Ellen Olenska was part of the inner circle through birth. Ellen’s relatives may have been a little too adventurous for Old New York’s standards, but as long as her repectable family (in the form of her rich aunt, Mrs. Mingott) is willing to overlook these minor offenses, she could still enjoy its privileges. That is because, by Old New York standards, “as long as a member of a well- known family is backed-up by that family it should be considered – final,” Wharton (2010:46) declares Mr. van der Luyden. Other characters had never been part of the inner circle. As we can also see in her social reform novel, The Fruit of the Tree (1907), Wharton was not quite a complete supporter of the working class and she is not sympathetic enough to their causes. She focuses more on those outcasts who were banished from the tribe rather than on the large mass of ousiders forming the working- class. Like Lily Bart, the author was aware that her well-being was based on the poverty of the many, but felt that it was unavoidable:

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She had always accepted with philosophic calm the fact that such existences as hers were pedestalled on foundations of obscure humanity. The dreary limbo of dinginess lay all around and beneath that little illuminated circle in which life reached its finest efflorescence […]. Wharton (2011:175)

There is always a great distance between Wharton’s main characters and the lower class. Poor people fade somewhere in the background and only come up in conversations about how to avoid ending up like them. And, most of the times, they are not individualised. In terms of Wharton’s attitude towards this social group and also the one represented by Julius Beaufort, we have to take into account her personal views concerning a “class-based strategy of social control.” Kassanoff (2008:69) In her book, Edith Wharton’s Politics of Race, Jennie Kassanoff starts from the premise that Wharton feared that the “ill-bred,” “foreign” and poor would overwhelm the upper-class elite and destroy the country’s well-established, tradition-based moral and social codes. A friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s, she shared his belief that a strong hand was needed to steer the American economy. Both the workers and monopolies were not fit to serve the nation and his criticism mainly turned against the middle-class industrialist, characterised by the greed for profit. Wharton saw in Roosevelt a great leader and she shared his distaste for the corporate nouveau riche. The irony is that Old New York scorns people like Beaufort while, at the same time, uses his money. We infer that the social conflict between the businessmen and the leisure-class lies only at the surface, since money flows from one group to the other and it soon dictates social conventions.

2.1.1. The Result of Social Conflicts: Rituals of Social Exclusion

In Wharton’s works, much like in those of Henry James’, foreigners are presented like a different “species.” The fact that Ellen had married abroad and lived there for a number of years, surrounded by artists, was considered at best eccentric on her part. When May and Newland go to Europe after their marriage, they avoid visiting any acquaintances, “in conformity with the old New York tradition that it was not ‘dignified’ to force one’s self on the notice of one’s acquaintances in foreign countries.” Wharton (2010:157) We suspect that the real reason is not politeness, but rather a desire to avoid anything foreign, which is almost similar to irreputable. It is a world the Americans do not want to be associated with because they reject it as a disease. But this rejection is only due to their fear of change, the fear of the leisure class of losing hold on their social position. In the end, Ellen would have been tolerated with her foreign eccentricity if she hadn’t threatened May and Newland’s union. SOCIAL CONFLICTS AND CHANGE IN EDITH WHARTON’S NEW YORK 73

In The Age of Innocence, foreigness is also associated with artists. This category of people was not even part of the social pyramid:

beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed Mrs. Archer’s world lay the most unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians and ‘people who wrote.’ These scattered fragments of humanity had never shown any desire to be amalgamated with the social structure. In spite of odd ways they were said to be, for the most part, quite respectable; but they preferred to keep to themselves. Wharton (2010:82-83)

In other words, they were respectable, but unfashionable, which was almost equally offensive. The fact that Countess Olenska had rented a house in an unfashionable quarter inhabited by artists and, moreover, she liked their company, makes her different and on the verge of the scandalous. It adds to her unpopularity, but this is not the breaking point. Threatening the tribe’s alliances, on the other hand, is. The ritual of exclusion in Ellen’s case takes the shape of a formal farewell dinner:

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the Old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. Wharton (2010:272-273)

She had been privately excluded long before that, but this was the final statement for everyone to acknowledge it.

2.1.2. No More Social Conflicts? The Dynamics of the New Social Order

The leisure class had always been known for its conservatism. Indeed, it could not have survived for so long if it hadn’t kept its standards high, so that lower classes would always aim higher and keeping thus its prestige intact. But it is interesting to notice that, willingly or not, Wharton’s upper class changed dramatically in a matter of thirty years. Beaufort’s bankruptcy had shocked everyone in Old New York, as it “tolerated hypocrisy in private relations; but in business matters it exacted a limpid and impeccable honesty.” Wharton (2010:211) But, still in Archer’s lifetime, “only the older people remembered so obscure an incident in the business life of New york as Beaufort’s failure” since now “nobody was narrow-minded enough” Wharton (2010:286) to do so. Indeed, the last chapter of The Age of Innocence describes a very different dynamic between the two social groups previously identified as old and new money. The changes are so profound that Lefferts’ surreal predictions in the previous chapter entirely come true. Newland’s children marry precisely the descendants of Fanny Ring and Reggie Chivers because 74 OANA ALEXANDRA ALEXA

people nowadays were too busy – busy with reforms and ‘movements,’ with fads and fetishes and frivolities – to bother much about their neighbours. And of what account was anybody’s past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane? Wharton (2010:287)

It seems that social conflicts had suddenly died out on account of everybody feeling the freedom to do as one wished. Or, at least, the old conflicts disappeared. But Wharton’s later novels show that new ideas on what was or was not ‘the thing’ or ‘acceptable’ would emerge. In fact, conflicts are recurrent, only in a different shape. There will always be richer and more prestigious classes, discrimination and social movement. The difference is now that changes occur at a faster pace and the new order is more dynamic than ever.

3. Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence: Responsibility as the Key to Social and Moral Conflicts

In directing The Age of Innocence (1993), Martin Scorsese departed from his usual style and interests. At that time, he was known for movies like Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980) and Goodfellas (1990), as he addressed such themes as crime, violence, Italian American identity and Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption.

The Age of Innocence was seemingly Scorsese’s most anti-Scorsesean film: an elegant yet large-scaled adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel about a blighted romance in nineteenth-century New York high society. The director […] saw analogies between the social controls exerted by his muscular mobsters and these more subtle guardians of the status quo in another insular society. Schickel (2011:111)

Richard Schickel argues that, in fact, Scorsese’s films about the Mafia resemble the image of the upper-class New York in its rally to protect their representative couple against the influence of the Polish countess. The Age of Innocence was an expensive film, with an estimated budget of 30 million dollars. Money shows in the lavish background and costumes, in the choice of actors and promotion. It enabled Scorsese to visually enrich our image of Wharton’s world and to surprise us with numerous details which we might not have noticed when reading the novel. When explaining why he chose to screen Wharton’s 1920 novel, Scorsese said it was interesting “because it has to do with responsibility.” Schickel (2011:111) In the end, this is the reason why Archer chooses to stay with his wife. His sense of responsibility, ingrained in him as he grew up, is the key to solving both the social and the moral conflicts in the novel and in the film. “In the long run it’s better for him” Schickel (2011:111) because this is what he is: SOCIAL CONFLICTS AND CHANGE IN EDITH WHARTON’S NEW YORK 75

a part of the social system that is so excessively unyielding that it resembles a surgeon’s knife removing the cancerous tumor (Ellen Olenska) from the patient’s body (Archer, and, by extrapolation, his social group). “It’s the slow and agonizing and brutal way in which they undo him—and it’s all done extremely politely. It’s pretty brutal, I think.” Schickel (2011:111) To Scorsese, Archer’s sense of responsibility, which is further underlined in the last chapter (when his son recalls what his mother told him, that they were safe with their father since he had once given up what he loved most), brings back memories of his own father’s commitment to his family. Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence is about responsibility because, at that time, the tribe’s conventions came first, even before feelings and personal choices. The movie’s complexity is overwhelming. The director uses every occasion to remind us what was or was not the thing to do, say and even think back then, and the narrator’s comments (the voice-over belongs to Joanne Woodward) merge beautifully with the visual details that are so rich in significance that every scene is like a painting one discovers all over again each time he looks at it. He introduces us to an age of opulence, and from the first sequences of the film, “Scorsese exposes us to all of the details that suggest the excesses – and the potential conflicts – of this tribe of New Yorkers.” Boswell (2007:124) The film was shot in New York and France (for the last scenes showing Newland Archer in Paris with his son). It uses a variety of period locations around New York State to re-create the atmosphere of pre-high-rise Manhattan of the 1870’s, including the Enid Haupt Conservatory and the National Arts Club but also the Philadelphia Academy of Music. The set decoration and the costumes complete the picture of the upper-class’ conspicuous display of wealth. Gabriella Pescucci won an Oscar for the category of Best Costume Design and the film was also nominated for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration. In an opulent setting like this, one wouldn’t guess that battles are as fierce as anywhere else. And Scorsese brings social conflicts forth as the very essence of the action. All the characters are like puppets playing their role in the big social tragedy. Scorsese had to render Countess Olenska’s foreignness as opposed to May’s tribute to convention, Beaufort’s unconventional audacity as opposed to Archer’s moral struggle when faced with breaking the rules. He did so by choosing the blonde Michelle Pfeiffer and dressing her into reds and blacks, as opposed to Winona Ryder’s white dresses, by making Stuart Wilson loud and in-your-face while showing Daniel-Day Lewis’ teary eyes when confronted with his clan’s conspiracy. Michele Pfeiffer as Countess Olenska is supposed to represent everything that May is not: passion, intelligence and spontaneity. Twenty-seven years older than Winona Ryder, Pfeiffer is obviously more experienced and sends the right message. Her character is an exception because, even though she does leave 76 OANA ALEXANDRA ALEXA

New York and Newland, she realises early on that he cannot fight who he is: a pillar of compliance for the inner circle as he is one for his family. Scorsese’s film is a work of art, from beginning to end, from the overlapping images of writing, lace and roses in the title credit sequence, to our last image of old Newland Archer turning a corner and Paris and leaving his memories of Ellen behind. The exquisite attention to all of Wharton’s details proves that he understood her unique combination of the social with the personal and her interest for what becomes of a character if faced with the loss of its social self. The film’s reviews confirm that the film, with its fine cast and visual complexity, is “like a window on a world” Scorsese “had just discovered, and about which he can't wait to spread the news.” Canby (1993)

REFERENCES

Allen, Frederick Lewis (1997), Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s, New York, John Wiley & Sons Inc. Bell, Millicent, (Ed.), (1995), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Boswell, Parley Ann (2007), Edith Wharton on Film, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press. Calhoun, Charles W. (Ed.), (2007), The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America. 2nd ed., Lanham, Roman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. Canby, Vincent “Review/Film: The Age of Innocence; Grand Passions and Good Manners” in The New York Times 17 September 1993. Conard, Mark T. (Ed.), (2007), The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese, Lexington, Kentucky, The University Press of Kentucky. Kassanoff, Jennie A. (2008), Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Leitch, Thomas (2007), Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ, Baltimore, Maryland, The Johns Hopkins University Press. Nevius, Blake (1976), Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction, Berkeley, University of California Press. Preston, Claire (2000), Edith Wharton’s Social Register, London, Palgrave Macmillan. Peuckner, Brigitte “Rival Arts? Filming The Age of Innocence” in Edith Wharton Review, No. 1, Volume XIII, Fall 1996. Schickel, Richard (2011), Conversations with Scorsese, New York, Alfred A. Knopf. Singley, Carol J. (1998), Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Stam, Robert, Raengo, Alessandra (Eds.), (2004), A Companion to Literature and Film, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing. Trammell Skaggs, Carmen (2010), Overtones of Opera in American Literature from Whitman to Wharton, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press. Veblen, Thornstein (2007), The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York, Oxford University Press. Wharton, Edith (1998), A Backward Glance: An Autobiography, New York, Touchstone Simon and Schuster. Wharton, Edith (2010), The Age of Innocence, London, HarperCollins. Wharton, Edith (2011), The House of Mirth, London, Penguin. SOCIAL CONFLICTS AND CHANGE IN EDITH WHARTON’S NEW YORK 77

The Age of Innocence, Dir. Martin Scorsese, Screenplay Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese, Prod. Barbara De Fina, Perfs. Daniel-Day Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder, Stuart Wilson, Miriam Margolyes, Alec McCowen, Joanne Woodward (voice). 1993. DVD. Columbia Pictures. The Edith Wharton Society, http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/ http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/a/ageof.html#.UiR9wWXfq00

DINNER AND SOCIETY IN EDITH WHARTON’S AGE OF INNOCENCE

NICOLETA PETUHOV*

Abstract

The Age of Innocence is a mirror of a society and of a city living in the present, but equally, in the past. The novel is built around the outer life and inner feelings of young and refined Newland Archer, and achieves a magnificent picture of New York City from its origins (all the “important” families in the novel are among the city founders) to 1870. The true life, manners and values of old New York society are an outcome of the interplay between appearance (a gracious, polite and moral society) and reality (cruel, hypocritical, and manipulative). This paper aims to present a particular technique of Edith Wharton’s aiming to introduce the reader in the atmosphere of New York society: i.e. dinner. There are three moments: dinner time, before dinner and after dinner. All these definite periods of time represent ingenious and generous subterfuges to describe people, family bonds, interiors, pieces of furniture, clothes. Even more relevant for the unwritten codes governing social life is the presentation of dishes, table companions and conversations. Keywords: New York Society, dinner, relationships, family allegiance, tradition and conceptions

1. Preamble

Published in 1920, the novel Age of Innocence represents a mirror of the old and new New York society in which values such as tradition, duty and faith are above sentiments. The novel is built around the life and feelings of the young man called Newland Archer, an opportunity for the author to offer an image of a society contemporary to his, but also to make a foray into the world and society of old New York. The novel, structured in two parts that consist of twenty four chapters, opens with the moment of the musical, which allows the author to introduce the reader to a universe close to the main character of the novel. At the same time we learn that an important event is about to happen in Newland Archer’s life – his engagement to young and innocent May. At first sight things would seem

* “Iorgu Iordan - Al. Rosetti” Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest, [email protected] DINNER AND SOCIETY IN EDITH WHARTON’S AGE OF INNOCENCE 79

commonplace, since to what extent would one be safe that an engagement could become the subject of a novel? But also in the first chapter, the reader finds out that this decision of getting engaged is apparently hastened to a certain extent by the arrival in the city of the ‘black sheep’ of the fiancée’s family, countess Olenska. Once the plot sets in motion, once the main characters are introduced to us, a dance is triggered among them, and this dance entails meetings, conversations, narrations of stories that are more or less elegant about things that are more or less common knowledge to the participants. In this manner present characters are built, characters that have disappeared are evoked, sentiments are unraveled, habits from the present but also from the past are depicted. As a matter of fact, the author achieves, with perfect skill and ingeniousness, a permanent balance between the present and the past. What attracted our attention is a leitmotif, a subtle recurrent theme chosen by the author in order to mirror together the two temporal axes – the present and the past, a past that seems to dominate almost subconsciously the present world and society. What comes into play is the leitmotiv of the dinner: it appears three times in the course of the novel and in our opinion is an integral part of the succession of symmetries that the author resorts to in order to accomplish her work: organizing the structure in two parts, the secret meetings between Archer and Ellen Olenska, etc.

2. A subtle technique: the dinner

The motif of the dinner is an opportunity for the author to carry on the narrative thread, but also to inform the reader about certain details. The dinner is one of the events that dwell upon the subject and give it substance. Among these events we also include the night of the musical, the ball, courteous visit or in the case of the engagement in this volume, the visit of giving the information to the family and acquaintances. We are in front of an omniscient and omnipresent narrator, who with lucidity and at times even sternness, analyses and elucidates the relationships between characters, their inner feelings, as well as their reactions regarding events or characters from past and present.

2.1/ The first dinner

The first dinner we witness is the dinner Mrs. Archer, the mother of young Newland, offers in the fifth chapter of the first part. It is preceded by the musical night that takes place at the Music Academy (in New York) and by the ball that Mrs. Julius Beaufort offers, which become opportunities for the author to describe some of the main characters and the plot – the presence or absence 80 NICOLETA PETUHOV of the controversial countess Ellen Olenska at the ball offered by Queen Beaufort, after she had shown up a few hours before in the family box at the musical night, sparking a huge scandal among the wealthy people. Thus, the first dinner takes place in the modest home of the Archers. The dinner itself is not a mere courteous occasion, but is held because Mrs. Archer, “shy woman who was withdrawn from society” wanted to learn news about a recent event invites her old friend, Mr. Sillerton Jackson, to dinner. This is the moment when the omniscient narrator delimits the contemporary New York society according to the manner he correlates with the material:

(1) But then New York, as far back as the mind of man could travel, had been divided into the tow great fundamental groups of the Mingotts and Mansons and all their clan, who cared about eating and clothes and money, and the Archer-Newland-van-der-Luyden tribe, who were devoted to travel, horticulture and the best fiction, and looked down on the grosser forms of pleasure.’ And if in the Lovell Mingot house you got canvas-back and terrapin and vintage wines; at Adeline Archer’s […] luckily the Archer Madeira had gone round the Cape.

In this situation, it is quite a surprise that Mr. Jackson, who considered that

(2) if perfection had been attainable on earth, would also have asked that Mrs. Archer’s food should be a little better

and who would have liked the dinner to take place when Newland was not at home

(3) not because the young man was uncongenial to him (the two got on capitally at their club) but because the old anecdotist sometimes felt, on Newland’s part, a tendency to weigh his evidence that the ladies of the family never showed.

Thus it is quite surprising that Mr. Jackson accepts in spite of all this Mrs. Archer’s invitation. At least as far as appearances go. We now discover another side of this high New York society, overwhelmed by pretensions of refinement and elitism: the inclination towards slander, at times even gossip, whenever a situation arises that disturbs the unwritten rules that have governed the world for several generations. The moment proper of the dinner is preceded by a preamble, in which the narrator introduces to us the protagonists of the dinner with exquisite narrative art, depicting their present state, not forgetting to make short yet edifying incursions in the family’s past. As a matter of fact, the past is constantly present throughout the novel – on the one hand due to the author’s explanations, on the other in a more direct manner, through the stories and histories told by the characters. DINNER AND SOCIETY IN EDITH WHARTON’S AGE OF INNOCENCE 81

The main actors of this first dinner are Mrs. Archer, her daughter, Newland and obviously, the guest. Mr. Jackson. Despite the kin relationship to the distinguished van der Luyden family, the Archer ladies show rather modest qualities as regards mental or feeling capacities, and paradoxically seem to be content with their state: they cultivated ferns in Wardian cases, made macramé lace and wool embroidery on linen, collected American revolutionary glazed ware, subscribed to ‘’Good Words,” and read Ouida’s novels for the sake of the Italian atmosphere. They preferred those about peasant life, because of the descriptions of scenery and the pleasanter sentiments, though in general they liked novels about people in society, whose motives and habits were more comprehensible. However, their physical aspect seems to remind us of their noble origins, more so than their habits and tastes:

(4) tall, pale, and slightly round-shouldered, with long noses, sweet smiles and a kind of drooping distinction like that in certain faded Reynolds portraits.

They are good and have a loving nature, with their love aimed at the only man in the family, young Newland Archer. The dinner proper is a balance between subtle culinary observations and the characters’ dialogues. The dialogues swing from approaching the present state to evoking the past, a standard of a good and just behavior. It is clear that the Archer ladies invite Mr. Jackson and expect him to keep them posted about the impressions created within their elitist society by countess Olenska’s unexpected appearance. We remind that it is not the latter’s return to the family that represents the amazing thing, but the fact that she returns home after having left her conjugal home, an inconceivable attitude in the New York society at the beginning of the 20th century. The reasons she left her husband are mere presuppositions. But whatever the reasons, in the eyes of the New York society’s ‘morals’ they are deemed to be reprehensible. The situation is of utmost interest to the Archer ladies because the son and their brother respectively is about to become a kin by marriage to the family of the controversial countess. As expected, the conversation is about topics of general interest: the Beaufort spouses’ recent ball and their gaffe of inviting Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, as well as a short history of the latter’s adventurous life. In not too long a time, a sign of the impatience typical of feminine characters, the conversation approaches the crucial character of the dinner, countess Olenska. One notices the disapproving position of Mrs. Archer towards that ‘esprit de corps’ of the Mingot family, who do not understand why Newland’s engagement should be mixed up with that Olenska’s woman’s comings and goings. The repeated attacks against countess Olenska seem to provoke young Archer, who – maybe due to a spirit of gallantry, maybe due to his future kinship relationship to her – takes her side. The climax of the conversation is attained by Archer’s outburst when they discuss about the 82 NICOLETA PETUHOV divorce of the countess: the young man is so wholeheartedly convinced of his statute of defendant of Ellen Olenska that he forgets the codes of behavior that forbid his talking about delicate or intimate matters in front of the butler. On the whole, the conversation held during the dinner is a stinging and acrimonious one, despite the characters’ attempt to keep an air of distinguished detachment towards this topic. The tone of the discussion given by the guest coincides with the impressions he has about the culinary products they eat. Mr. Jackson already has an impression about the meals offered by Mrs. Archer, an impression confirmed yet again. Thus,

(5) He looked baffled and hungry, and Archer reflected that he would finish his meal on Ellen Olenska. since neither the cucumber slices, nor the warm fillet and the mushroom sauce even less so, satisfied the gentleman gormandizer. And his dissatisfaction channels the discussion, just like young Archer had foreseen, towards the denigration of countess Olenska, which entails the attraction of sympathy or compassion of Newland Archer. It is a first sign that the sentiments of aversion he has for this controversial character – whose arrival overwhelms the safe and secure world of well-to-do New York families – start to undergo a metamorphosis. In this first description of the dinner we grasp the true face of this society, which declares itself a supporter of a code of impeccable values. Initially presented as a lover of reading and travelling, Mrs. Archer turns out to be interested by the rumors circulating through the city. Even young and innocent Janey has fits of wickedness against the rebellious countess, an undeniable result of an education that is not really irreproachable. The motif of the dinner itself brings to the foreground characters, mores and relationships that dominate contemporary New York society, but these appear as a reflex of a previous society, considered to be better and more refined. In this first picture of dinner the hint is directed by Mr. Jackson against Newland Archer’s grandfather, a refined gormandizer and a man seemingly endowed with a lofty moral code, as the guest makes him the silent witness of his astonishments regarding the marriages between the contemporary American girls and foreigners. The depiction of the dinner in this fifth chapter ends suddenly, as expected, with a reply referring to the same Olenska countess, who had been the main topic of conversation the whole evening.

2.2. The second dinner

The motif of the dinner is resumed before long, in the eighth chapter. The scenery changes – we are now in the sumptuous and refined residence of the van der Luyden family, while countess Olenska, not too long ago a favorite DINNER AND SOCIETY IN EDITH WHARTON’S AGE OF INNOCENCE 83 topic of conversation, becomes a real-life character. Seen through the eyes of Newland Archer, the countess shows a remarkable beauty:

(6) It was true that her early radiance was gone. The red cheeks had paled; she was thin, worn, a little older-looking than her age, which must have been nearly thirty. But there was about her the mysterious authority of beauty, a sureness in the carriage of the head, the movement of the eyes, which, without being in the least theatrical, struck him as highly trained and full of a conscious power.

As opposed to the modest and unassuming dinner in Mrs. Archer’s house, the dinner at the van der Luyden family

(7) was almost a religious solemnity.

This impression is instilled by the whole range of china dishes – all inherited by the family, as well as by the silverware exhibited on the table, by the aspect of lady van der Luyden ‘like a Cabanel,’ but also by the great number of jewels worn by the ladies who are present. As a matter of fact, the moment of the dinner is reduced to the presentation of the select society and of the attire of its members, making us think that the presentation of the meal sittings, however refined these might have been, would have lessened the noble quality of the depicted picture. Like in the preceding picture, the dinner is a good pretext for the author to make forays into the world of her characters. The habits of the society are reviewed: after dinner there is a moment when the gentlemen join the group of ladies; the etiquette required that the gentlemen should first pay their respects to older ladies; the etiquette also says that

(8) it was not the custom in New York drawing-rooms for a lady to get up and walk away from one gentleman in order to seek the company of another, a rule which countess Olenska seems to ignore; we also learn from the conversation between Archer and the countess that in the New York society of the time the prearranged marriages are no longer the fashion, which proves a certain relaxation of the relationships between opposite sexes. Secondly, social relationships are surveyed with a keen eye: the ‘good society’ in New York, which to an exterior observer would seem equal, has a certain hierarchy. A proof of this is the dinner the van der Luyden family offer in honor of countess Olenska or for her ‘social rehabilitation’:

(9) behind her, waiting their turn to name themselves to the Countess, Archer noticed a number of the recalcitrant couples who had declined to meet her at Mrs. Lovell Mingott’s.

We thus have a picture of the customs, social relationships, but also of the most intimate sentiments of the characters and these sentiments vary according 84 NICOLETA PETUHOV to events that happen. Let’s take the case of Mrs. Archer: irritated by the kinship relationship that is being established between her son and the countess’ family, as we have previously seen in the picture of the dinner in her house, Mrs. Archer does not linger too long and arranges dinner in the van der Luyden house in order to accept the reneged countess within society. This apparently occurs at the request of her son. The pressure of the hierarchy may also be sensed in the attitude of certain characters that treat Ellen Olenska with a noble indifference all until the moment when these characters are invited to the van der Luyden house, when they even come with the precise aim of paying their respects:

(10) Behind her, waiting their turn to name themselves to the Countess, Archer noticed a number of the recalcitrant couples who had declined to meet her at Mrs. Lovell Mingott’s. As Mrs. Archer remarked, when the van der Luydens chose, they knew how to give a lesson. The wonder was that they chose so seldom.

However, the character that is emphasized in these scenes is obviously Ellen Olenska. Absent in the first picture of dinner and nevertheless present, as she is the topic of discussions during the evening, Ellen Olenska is a real presence in the second picture of the dinner, the one depicted in the house of the van der Luyden family. Ellen Olenska is, in our opinion, the sober and critical eye. She belongs to New York by origin, but her frequent escapes from the New York space ever since her childhood make her a rebellious and detached member, lacking any tenderness towards the world she comes from. Her innate rebellious spirit is fuelled by the influence exerted by old Mrs. Mingot, who is herself a nonconformist. This explains her courageous act of separating from an inconvenient relationship and also the even more courageous act of returning to a New York full of prejudices. In these circumstances, her relationships with singers, Beaufort or other satellite-characters who inhabit this ‘good’ world that her family belongs to which for Olenska the nonconformist are quite natural and continue to shock and to be a constant subject of conversation. Ellen Olenska is perhaps the only character – if we leave aside Newland Archer, who undergoes a complete metamorphosis until the end of the novel – who has the courage to deal with things at their face value and to live her life without meanness, the way she feels or believes despite the fact that she has to face the disapproval of everybody around her.

2.3. The third dinner

The last picture containing the dinner motif is in chapter 33. It is justified by the good habits of the bourgeoisie:

(11) It was expected that well-off young couples in New York should do a good deal of informal entertaining, and a Welland married to an Archer was doubly pledged to the tradition. DINNER AND SOCIETY IN EDITH WHARTON’S AGE OF INNOCENCE 85

As opposed to the previous dinners, meant to probe and introduce the subject, this chapter’s dinner is a dinner of departure given in the honor of countess Olenska. It is also the most magnificent and richest of all depicted in the novel: we remember the dinner with the four persons living around Mrs. Archer and the sophisticated dinner given by the van der Luyden family, which despite of having a slightly more numerous attendance, is more selective. The dinner of the young family of Newland Archer is sumptuous and prepared with great attention to detail:

(12) mound of Jacqueminot roses and maidenhair in the centre of the long table, (13) Maillard bonbons in openwork silver baskets between the candelabra, (14) On the piano stood a large basket of orchids which Mr. van der Luyden had had sent from Skuytercliff.

In a few words,

(15) everything was, in short, as it should be on the approach of so considerable an event.

The places occupied at the table confirm the hierarchies existing in society: ‘It was only at an entertainment ostensibly offered to a "foreign visitor" that Mrs. van der Luyden could suffer the diminution of being placed on her host's left’ The social relationships are very clear highlighted and we can notice how the family constitutes a strong pillar. May leans against it tacitly in her attempt to chase off her rival, without thinking that her life is based on the absence of truth. May leans against it in order to give her life a sense – she needs a husband and children. It is to her that Lefferts toasts a rather vehement discourse after dinner (however we should not forget that Lefferts was far from being a role model for a husband and father):

(16) Never had Lefferts so abounded in the sentiments that adorn Christian manhood and exalt the sanctity of the home. Indignation lent him a scathing eloquence, and it was clear that if others had followed his example

Very many sentiments are pinpointed in this picture: May’s pride about being married and having a house of her own; Mrs. van der Luyden’s superior goodwill towards the countess, who had lost the game with the New York society; the fear that the members of this society feel towards scandal:

(17) It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood". It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes, except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.

86 NICOLETA PETUHOV

We can also remark their talent to disguise:

(18) All these amiable and inexorable persons were resolutely engaged in pretending to each other that they had never heard of, suspected, or even conceived possible, the least hint to the contrary; and from this tissue of elaborate mutual dissimulation Archer once more disengaged the fact that New York believed him to be Madame Olenska's lover. He caught the glitter of victory in his wife's eyes, and for the first time understood that she shared the belief.

Ellen Olenska remains to the last minute a foreigner to this environment.

(19) The fact of Madame Olenska's “foreignness” could hardly have been more adroitly emphasized than by this farewell tribute.

It is true that she did not try to conform, but the families did not try to help her either. In fact, all the attempts to integrate her within the environment are, as a matter of fact, false, sham, artificial because she is different from them and because she has the courage to defy their traditions and “values”. The dinner must be perfect due to this very reason, to make them ignore the fact that they failed in their attempt to accept her, as well as the fact that what they are doing is cheap and dirty, namely making her leave:

(20) There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.

2. As a conclusion…

Social relationships, traditions, sentiments – these are the core directions on which Edith Warton’s novel develops by way of this special and sagacious technique which is the dinner scene. Beyond all this come the characters themselves, well defined, well outlined, among whom we have chosen to analyze in passing the feminine character – Newland Archer is also a character that has an interesting evolution. But Ellen Olenska represents defiance directed against rigid traditions (not in the negative sense of the word), freedom of spirit and the desire to live an honest life regardless of the cost.

REFERENCES

Lewis, R. W. B. (1975), Edith Wharton: a biography, Harper & Row, New York. Postle, Martin (2005), "The Age of Innocence" Child Portraiture in Georgian Art and Society", in Pictures of Innocence: Portraits of Children from Hogarth to Lawrence. Bath: Holburne Museum of Art, pp. 7-8. DINNER AND SOCIETY IN EDITH WHARTON’S AGE OF INNOCENCE 87

Wagner-Martin, Linda (1996), The Age of Innocence: A Novel of Ironic Nostalgia. Prentice Hall International, London. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin (1977), Feast of Words: Triumph of Edith Wharton, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Wharton, Edith (2014), The Age of Innocence, http://www.gradesaver.com/the-age-of- innocence/e-text/

“TRADITIONS THAT HAVE LOST THEIR MEANING ARE THE HARDEST OF ALL TO DESTROY”: DIVORCE IN EDITH WHARTON’S NEW YORK

RALUCA ANDREESCU

Abstract

The paper discusses the manner in which Edith Wharton’s short story “Autres Temps...” (1916) addresses the issue of divorce and its consequences on the lives of women in the New York society at the turn of the century and during the first decades of the 20th century. I explore the clash between the old New York society, which tended to ostracize and marginalize divorced women, and the New York society of the new century, which fostered a more modern and pragmatic view on the subject. In my analysis of Wharton’s story about the constraints rather than the liberations of divorce, imprisonment rather than freedom, and the power of the haunting past rather than the promise of the future, I argue that despite the changing times, for certain generations and certain sins there is no exemption from punishment. Keywords: divorce, double standards, Old New York, Victorian society, modern marriage / divorce.

First published under the title “Other Times, Other Manners” less than two years before the conclusion of Edith Wharton’s own controversial divorce from Teddy Wharton in 1913, the short story “Autres Temps...” (1916) explores the consequences of what W.D. Howells deemed the “enormous fact” of American life on the lives of women in the New York society at the turn of the 20th century. It reveals the double standards operating in a social environment at once stepping into a new era and clinging to antiquated habits and traditions. The issue of failed marriages and disastrous family relations, as well as the conflict between the old and the new rule are constants in Wharton’s fiction and, at the same time, representative for the crisis at the turn of the century. It has been argued that there was no shrewder chronicler and critic of divorce early in the century than Edith Wharton (Dafoe Whitehead 1997: 24). Affected with “deep and painfully contradictory feelings” (Griffin Wolff 1995: 226) as a consequence of her own divorce from a disappointing husband, the female writer would, on the one hand, expose its debilitating effects on the protagonists (social ostracism, isolation, stigmatization, loneliness, self-doubt)

 University of Bucharest, e-mail: [email protected] “TRADITIONS THAT HAVE LOST THEIR MEANING ARE THE HARDEST 89 OF ALL TO DESTROY”:DIVORCE IN EDITH WHARTON’S NEW YORK and paint an unflattering portrait of the arrivistes who would use it as a vehicle of social ambition and upward mobility, on the other. In this last respect, Wharton’s novel of divorce suggestively entitled The Custom of the Country (1913), but also her later work The Glimpses of the Moon (1922) reveal the ruthless calculations and business-like approach to both marriage and its legal dissolution. As one of the characters in the latter novel advises its female protagonist, “[a] man can get out of a business partnership when he wants to . . . why not get out of marriage the same way?” And even though in her earlier writings at the turn of the century, divorce was regarded as “the thing”, “symbolically suspended over her head and his”, “an impassable barrier” between the two spouses – as in the short story of 1898 “Souls Belated” (206), by the time The Fruit of the Tree came out in 1907, divorce “has grown almost as painless as modern dentistry”, so much so that Carry Fisher in The House of Mirth observes that “there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.” (42) “Autres Temps...” tells the story of a woman who divorced her husband to elope with another man and was consequently condemned to an European exile by the tribal society of old New York for what would be perceived as an unforgivable violation of the rules of propriety. After nearly twenty years of living safely far off from the society that rejected her, Mrs. Lidcote returns to New York to offer comfort to her daughter who just went through a divorce in her turn and is getting ready to marry again. Foreseeing the consequences of her daughter’s gesture on the latter’s social and family life, Mrs. Lidcote appears terrified not only by having to face New York again after all those years, but also by having her daughter repeat the same transgression and the ordeal accompanying it as a result of what she believes to be “the dark inheritance she had bestowed upon her daughter”: “Mrs. Lidcote could hear the whole of New York saying with one voice: ‘Yes, Leila’s done just what her mother did. With such an example what could you expect?” (5). Little is the mother aware of the changes in American society with respect to the consequences of divorce on female divorcees – the daughter is not ostracized, on the contrary, she seems on the road to social advancement with the new marriage. However, as Mrs. Lidcote will learn by the end of the story, the relaxation of standards regarding female divorcees does not apply in retrospect and, despite the apparent new promises of the American land for women in her situation, she will leave it once again disillusioned but reconciled with her fate. “Autres Temps...” reveals to contemporary readers an era when divorce was a shameful act, which triggered the immediate social expunction of the (female) divorcees. In her biography of Edith Wharton, Shari Benstock notes that “[d]ivorce was unacceptable in old society, and a divorced woman – however much the victim of her husband’s deceit – often found the doors of familiar drawing rooms closed against her.” (Benstock 2004: 82) Along the 90 RALUCA ANDREESCU same lines, Cynthia Griffin Wolff maintains that Wharton’s own hereditary background, the world of Old New York, was a “complex and profoundly imperfect social system” characterized by a “heavy Victorian morality” which rendered divorce reprehensible in general, although while “a divorced man was a curiosity, perhaps”, “a divorced woman was a pariah.” (Griffin Wolff 1990: xxiv) From the Victorian point of view, a woman’s transgression “is like a mortal sin” and that woman “bears an indelible stain which can almost never be washed away; and even the unsubstantiated rumor of impropriety can blacken her reputation” (Preston 2000: 77). After all, “evil” was the word most frequently associated with “divorce” both in the popular press of the day and in the religious circles (Celello 2009: 21) Moreover, Wharton’s sexual transgressors “belong to a culture which acknowledges theoretically the possibility of unhappy marriage, but does not, in the case of women, admit of escape.” (Preston 2000: 77) In 1905, for instance, one sympathetic magazine editor expressed his regret that “[a]lthough divorce is so common, there is still so wide and deep a feeling against divorce that some of those who suffer most from marriage are reluctant to take that cure for the pain.” (Celello 2009: 21-22) Arguably like Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s celebrated novella, Mrs. Lidcote appears throughout the short story as a woman “stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow.” (Hawthorne 1913: 318) Cast beyond the pale of “respectable” society, Mrs. Lidcote seems crushed under the heavy burden of her past, which makes the city of her transgression and subsequent banishment seem like a “huge menacing mass” causing a “kind of unreasoning terror” that renders her “still so unprepared to face what New York had in store for her” (6). For Mrs. Lidcote, the past presents itself as something “huge, obstructing, encumbering, bigger and more dominant than anything the future could ever conjure up”, and is assimilated to an afflicted relative one tries to keep hidden from the rest of world, but who nonetheless, to everyone’s horror, manages to “suddenly break[] away from nurses and keepers and publicly parad[e] the horror and misery she had, all the long years, so patiently screened and secluded.” (5) With the heavy load of the past pressing down upon her, Mrs. Lidcote soon finds herself puzzled by the apparent changes in the New York society, with respect to fashion, rules of propriety and behavior, manner of speaking and addressing one another (she observes with particular interest a discussion among a group of lively young women with “the latest Paris hats on their heads and the latest New York ideas in them”) and understands that the “old- fashioned categories” or “any one or other of the definite things which young women, in her youth and her society, were conveniently assumed to be” are no longer operational. Noting not without surprise “the present fluid state of manners”, Mrs. Lidcote seems befuddled by the fact that although she is unable to assign the young women to any of the categories familiar to her (“married or “TRADITIONS THAT HAVE LOST THEIR MEANING ARE THE HARDEST 91 OF ALL TO DESTROY”:DIVORCE IN EDITH WHARTON’S NEW YORK unmarried, ‘nice’ or ‘horrid’”) and to place them in the context of New York as she knew it, the girls nevertheless appear conversant with the present state of affairs in the high society of that particular environment: “their talk leaped elliptically from allusion to allusion, their unfinished sentences dangled over bottomless pits of conjecture, and they gave their bewildered hearer the impression not so much of talking only of their intimates, as of being intimate with every one alive.” (2) Moreover, she is shocked by the fluidity of marital relationships which appears to have taken over the American society: “All their friends seem to be divorced; some of them seem to announce their engagements before they get their decree. One of them – her name was Mabel – as far as I could make out, her husband found out that she meant to divorce him by noticing that she wore a new engagement-ring.” All the perceived transformations in a society Mrs. Lidcote used to know all too well make her approach “the huge threat of New York” as she would a “sphinx whose riddle she must read or perish.” (2) And although she will be constantly reassured by friends, relatives and even her daughter that “things are different now – altogether easier” and that “[i]t would take an arbitration commission a good many sittings to define the boundaries of society nowadays” (12), Mrs. Lidcote will be confronted with bitter disappointment once more, but not before hope of being reinstated as a respectable woman would settle in. Historian Roderick Philips noted that the flood of divorces following the Great War “increased the exposure of ordinary people to divorce on a scale unthinkable ten years earlier” (quoted in Dafoe Whitehead 1997: 20), as a consequence of the disruptions in marital and family lives, of the increased mobility of people and especially due to the rapid expansion of consumer economy (Dafoe Whitehead 1997: 20). A Harper’s Magazine’s edition at the time, for instance, featured an article entitled “The Chaos of Modern Marriage” stating that “a complete change in attitude, often in the form of a violent revolt against the former ideals and customs affecting the marriage relation, is in full swing.” (Celello 2009: 22) Both men and women would embark on a quest for novelty and change and, as Ellen Pifer notes, “[w]ith dazzling rapidity, social and sexual relationships dissolve and reconjoin in a kaleidoscope of changing patterns of attachment sanctioned by the sudden popularity of divorce.” (Pifer 1999: 223) In Wharton’s story, Mrs. Lidcote learns from cousin Susy Suffern, who herself used to “represent the old New York” that “[e]verything’s changed. ... There’s no old New York left ...” (6). What seems, however, most promising is that the new society ostensibly no longer fosters conventional points of view and proposes that “every woman had a right to happiness and that self- expression was the highest duty.” (16) To Mrs. Lidcote, the perspective of her social reinstatement is akin to coming alive after having been (socially) dead for many years: “It’s as if an angel had gone about lifting gravestones, and the 92 RALUCA ANDREESCU buried people walked again, and the living didn’t shrink from them.” (16) At first, she is shaken by a vision of maladjustment to the new conditions and opportunities of “this crowded, topsy-turvy world, with its headlong changes and helter-skelter readjustments, its new tolerances and indifferences and accommodations” (24) and fears that the new world offers no room and no corner “for a character fashioned by slower sterner processes and a life broken under their inexorable pressure” (23). As if released from prison after scores of years, she would find herself in a position to make her way again into the society that rejected and put her there, without being able to anticipate the transformations and new codes of behavior deemed acceptable. In his critical study on Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners, Gary H. Lindberg elaborates on Wharton’s symbolic use of the prison cell, claiming that “[s]ociety functions as a prison in her fiction, not because the individual, ‘trailing clouds of glory,’ has accidentally fallen into it, nor because he is being tested by exposure to its confines, but because he has been born and reared in it; he learns to perceive reality through the bars of a cage.’” (quoted in Fracasso 1994: 2) (The image of the prison cell is recurrent throughout the short story and I will return to it presently.) But upon seeing “the chaos from a new angle”, Mrs. Lidcote realizes that besides the potential unadaptability to the new social standards, her liberation from the constraints of the horrid past may similarly ensue. She dares to imagine that “[i]f the old processes were changed, her case was changed with them” and that “she, too, was a part of the general readjustment, a tiny fragment of the new pattern worked out in bolder freer harmonies.” (23) Moreover, “[s]ince her daughter had no penalty to pay, was not she herself released by the same stroke?” (23) And since she “had paid with the best years of her life for the theft of the happiness that her daughter’s contemporaries were taking as their due”, was she not entitled to “accumulate new stores of happiness”? (23) Her male friend, her relatives, her own daughter certainly told her so. However, the American myth of starting anew proves to be but an illusion for Mrs. Lidcote, and her hope of creating a new self just a “painted gauze” which comes off when she is literally incarcerated in her room over one weekend for fear that her presence among her daughter’s prospective in-laws would “contaminate the atmosphere and endanger the new couple’s desire to wed” (Preston 2000: 81). In addition, the very man courting her and apparently trying to do away with her “preconceived theories” by maintaining that New York has changed indeed and that women are freer and less subjected to social scrutiny and censure is eventually proven to be prejudiced himself: he wants to live with Mrs. Lidcote in Florence, but is ashamed to be seen with her in New York. It is at this moment that Mrs. Lidcote realizes that ironically “the success or failure of the deepest human experiences may hang on a matter of chronology” (27) and, pondering on the difference twenty years make in New York attitudes toward divorce and remarriage, disappointingly notes that her “TRADITIONS THAT HAVE LOST THEIR MEANING ARE THE HARDEST 93 OF ALL TO DESTROY”:DIVORCE IN EDITH WHARTON’S NEW YORK second chance at happiness is ruined because “society is much too busy to revise its own judgments.” (49) In an emotional outburst at the end of the story, Mrs. Lidcote breaks her respect for the taboo, addresses for the first time the similarity between her own divorce and Leila’s and openly condemns the society which shunned her. While everyone accepts Leila’s behavior as the younger generation is allowed its freedoms, the mother still is and will forever remain an “immoral” woman whose rejection has become part of tradition:

Probably no one in the house with me stopped to consider that my case and Leila’s were identical. They only remembered that I’d done something which, at the time I did it, was condemned by society. My case has been passed on and classified: I’m the woman who has been cut for nearly twenty years. The older people have half forgotten why, and the younger ones have never really known: it’s simply become a tradition to cut me. And traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy. (50)

Marius Bewley notes that Wharton’s protagonists are “hopelessly trapped by the demands or the refusal of their society, or by the vacuity of their social aspirations, or by the various deprivations imposed on them by life” (Fracasso 1994: 2). While on the outside “the immense black prospect of New York, strung with its myriad lines of light, stretched away into the smoky edges of the night”, Mrs. Lidcote grimly and sorrowfully reflects along the same lines that “[w]e’re all imprisoned, of course – all of us middling people, who don’t carry our freedom in our brains” and since “we’ve accommodated ourselves to our different cells”, when suddenly confined to new ones, “we’re likely to find a stone wall where we thought there was thin air, and to knock ourselves senseless against it.”(52) In Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s opinion, Mrs. Lidcote’s preparation to return to her European exile indicates that eventually “Wharton accepted the necessity of her own divorce” and that in this respect the female author “remained, forever, an old-fashioned woman.” (1995: 454) Wharton’s ambivalence toward divorce in general is well known and critics unanimously note that she was deeply conflicted about her own – so much so that, besides her commitment to a career as a writer, her divorce from Teddy Wharton emerges as arguably the most conflicting experience and choice of her life. This is so especially since it “raised again the haunting problems associated with ‘niceness’” (Griffin Wolff 1995: 219) and it gnawed at the foundations of her identity as a woman at the beginning of the century – cousin Thomas Newbold, arguably acting as the voice of society, wrote to Wharton in April of 1913: “have you decided what you are going to call yourself?” (Griffin Wolff 219) Contemporary interest in Wharton’s short story led to the presentation of a stage version two years ago at the Mount – the female author’s “autobiographical house” in Lenox, Massachusetts. What is particular about this staging is that instead of being set in Wharton’s turn-of-the-century New York, it was relocated to the Mad Men era, specifically to 1962. The show’s director, 94 RALUCA ANDREESCU

Catherine Taylor-Williams explained that it had been her idea to set the play halfway between 1911 and the present day, but also to focus on an era characterized by similar pressures for women: the cult of femininity that women in the 1960s were forced to observe places them in the same prison cell with Mrs. Lidcote, both parties being driven by an inner desire to break out and in no way capable to do that. As the play’s director observes, very few changes were required to move the play half a century forward – mainly the costumes and a few cultural references in the story – as people’s sensibilities indeed seem to have remained the same (quoted in Brown 2011). Herself trapped in an unhappy marriage, as well as in a society which fostered forced unions between men and women, Wharton sees marriage not as the ultimate defense against male forces seeking to control the existence of women, but as the very source of domestic terror, through its regulation of a woman’s sexuality and life (Fedorko17). However, in her stories about Old New York, marriage, satisfactory or not, is treated by characters as a permanent condition; despite adultery, financial impropriety, or boredom, one (had to) remain(ed) married to one’s spouse. Although she was never comfortable with the notion of divorce, or with her own divorce for that matter, in Wharton’s writings about the 1920s divorce no longer appears scandalous but rather has an established place in society (see for instance A Mother’s Recompense, announced by “Autres Temps...”). That is not to say that behind its glittering, “vertiginous” surface and beneath “all the new ardors and the new attitudes”, much had really changed: for Edith Wharton, New York still appeared at the beginning of the new century “ugly, patchy, scrappy.” (Benstock 2004: 291)

REFERENCES

Benstock, Shari (2004), No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton, University of Texas Press, Austin. Brown, Joel (2011), “Where Wharton and ‘Mad Men’ Meet”, in Boston Globe. Celello, Kristin (2009), Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. Dafoe Whitehead, Barbara (1997), The Divorce Culture, Alfred A. Knopf, New York. Fedorko, Kathy, (1995), Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa and London. Fracasso, Evelyn E. (1994), Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Consciousness: A Study of Theme and Technique in the Tales, Greenwood Press, Westport. Griffin Wolff, Cynthia (1990), “Introduction”, in Four Stories by American Women: Rebecca Harding Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Penguin Classics. Griffin Wolff, Cynthia (1995), A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, Addison- Wesley, Reading . Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1913), The Scarlet Letter, J. M. Dent & Sons, London. “TRADITIONS THAT HAVE LOST THEIR MEANING ARE THE HARDEST 95 OF ALL TO DESTROY”:DIVORCE IN EDITH WHARTON’S NEW YORK

Pifer, Ellen (1999), “The Children: Wharton’s Creative Ambivalence to Self, Society and the ‘New World’”, in Clare Colquitt, Susan Goodman and Candace Waid (Eds), A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton, University of Delaware Press, Newark 1999, pp. 221-232. Preston, Claire (2000), Edith Wharton’s Social Register, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Wharton, Edith (1905; 1999), The House of Mirth, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Wharton, Edith (1907), The Fruit of the Tree, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. Wharton, Edith (1916), “Autre Temps”, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.

HAVING SEX LIKE A MAN: THE POSTFEMINIST SINGLE GIRL IN THE AGE OF UN-INNOCENCE

RALPH J. POOLE*

Abstract

The HBO signature series Sex and the City starts out by claiming that New York has entered the “Age of Un-Innocence”. This obvious reference to Edith Wharton’s novel calls for a comparison, and yet it marks a difference. The paper explores whether Carrie Bradshaw & Co., on their search for available Mr. Bigs, are so very different from Wharton’s Mary Welland, Ellen Olenska, and Lily Bart. While unattached women are prone to make a freakish public spectacle by their sheer single appearance in Wharton’s “age of innocence” that revolves around the institution of marriage and its possible pitfalls, the postfeminist, testosteronized single girl-cosmos of Carrie and her friends seemingly offers an urban haven that allows women to sexually conquer the city every which way they desire. And yet, just as Wharton has shown for her ‘girls,’ even today very much depends on the market value of these New York women who are looking for men while pretending not to. The dilemma of simultaneously fitting in and standing out, essential for drawing the attention of a lucrative bachelor while not frightening him away, may have shifted fetishized dress-codes from Ellen’s black fur trim to Carrie’s Manolo Blahniks, but the question addressed in this paper is whether HBO’s comedy of manner ultimately departs as radically from Wharton’s formula as it proclaims. Keywords: American Single Girl, Post-Feminism, marriage market, adaptation, Sex and the City, Gossip Girl.

“I want to be free,” Countess Olenska declares in Edith Wharton’s legendary novel about New York’s upper-class society, The Age of Innocence (1920: 107). What she here particularly means is to be free of her marriage with European Count Olenska, but what she more generally refers to is her wish to be free of obligations that tie her to social responsibility and representative tasks as a countess, and to be an “American girl” again instead. This, of course, is not possible for so many reasons. Above all, her family – or tribe, as Wharton fiercely calls them – gathers, summoning their unified strength and summoning their delegate Newland Archer to prevent a social scandal that a divorce would entail for all. Secondly, even though everyone agrees that it is bad to be

* Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Dep. of English and American Studies, [email protected] HAVING SEX LIKE A MAN: THE POSTFEMINIST SINGLE GIRL 97 IN THE AGE OF UN-INNOCENCE maltreated by a husband, it is worse to have been a ‘bad girl’ as well, as the rumors around Ellen Olenska’s affair with her secretary suggest. Accordingly, if her husband wants her back, as is the case, and even on considerably tolerant grounds (she only would have to socially perform as hostess once in a while), she had better comply and save her and everybody else’s reputation. And finally, and most fatally, after being in Europe for so long, she has become too un-American to return to her former home turf. Against his better judgment, Newland advises her that “[o]ur legislation favours divorce – our social customs don’t” (Wharton 1920: 109). This is in stark contradiction to his earlier assessment, where he took her side, even defending her possible affair: “Living together? Well, why not? Who had the right to make her life over if she hadn’t? I’m sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots. […] Women ought to be free – as free as we are” (Wharton 1920: 39). Archer serves as the reader’s guide to this society, but he also is this world’s bad conscience being trapped in its surface appearances and hidden realities. His very own troubled hypocrisy reflects the double standard at large. We can only surmise Ellen’s own motivations, some of which are expressed in the recorded dialogues with Newland. While we learn that Newland fails to be a promised ‘new land’ for himself as well as for Ellen, he fatefully mistakes his world as impersonated by his future wife May Welland to be as pure and innocent as he thought May would be. It turns out, he is the one royally fooled by a world that is as un- innocent as the false golden glitter that gave the era its name: the Gilded Age that Newland’s son in the end calls a “deaf-and-dumb asylum” (Wharton 1920: 359). The question that troubles me therefore is: While fetishized dress-codes may have shifted from Ellen’s black fur trim to Carrie’s Manolo Blahniks in Sex and the City, the principle dilemma for the single girl of simultaneously fitting in and standing out, so essential for drawing the attention of a lucrative bachelor while not frightening him away, may ultimately have not altered as radically from Wharton’s formula as Carrie and her cohort of single girls proclaim. If Wharton’s New York novel already is a satiric novel of manners that acerbically ridicules a period for its appearance of innocence, what then has really changed for women in contemporary metropolitan times, which Candace Bushnell in Sex and the City has famously epitomized as “The Age of Un-Innocence”?

1. Candace Bushnell’s Testosterone Single Girl: Between Norm and Freakishness

In her book, Candace Bushnell makes several references to Edith Wharton right at the start in chapter one. Bushnell’s claim basically is that her girls are as far removed from Wharton’s world as possible: 98 RALPH J. POOLE

Welcome to the Age of Un-Innocence. The glittering lights of Manhattan that served as backdrops for Edith Wharton’s bodice-heaving trysts are still glowing – but the stage is empty. No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has affairs to remember – instead, we have breakfast at seven A.M. and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. How did we get into this mess? (Bushnell 2013: 2)

Lorraine DiCicco, focusing on Lily Bart, the heroine of Wharton’s The House of Mirth, however thinks that Bushnell misread Wharton in her assumption that today’s age is the more difficult for single women due to “our nineties dilemma – the dilemma of Love vs. the Deal” (1996: 2). Contrary, DiCicco offers a reading of Lily as an “uncannily ordinary […] representation of the American single girl” (2010: 81). Lily’s not-so-young unmarried status on the “marriage market” (see Knights 2012: 224) in particular calls for a comparison with Bushnell’s single girls. Even though they often pretend to circumvent the traditional marriage market of former times, by the series’ finale all of them end up in long-term monogamous heterosexual relationships. But at the same time, Lily is also depicted as a “freakish” spectacle much in the same way that we perceive the four “sexy, jungle-prowling” girls of Sex and the City: “Lily Bart and Carrie Bradshaw are both monstrously freakish single girls whose stories, like those of other singles, are conveyed in terms curiously reminiscent of those used for the exhibition of the traditional carnie freak” (DiCicco 2010: 81). This comparison may seem farfetched, but then maybe not. Like Wharton’s Lily, Bushnell’s ‘girls’ seem to adhere to the norm: they are beautiful, carefree girls with the world – and especially the bachelor’s world – open to them. And yet, just like Lily, they are very much aware that their market value is tied to their bodies, or rather to their making a spectacle of their bodies. In that, they need to be exceptional, because only then does the seemingly normal girl get the better ‘deal’. And just like Lily, who in the very first pages of the novel is repeatedly stared down like merchandise, her contemporary sisters must carry the burden of balancing between representing the norm and standing out, which is precisely the dilemma Bushnell is speaking of. The girls’ display of autonomy, self-control, independence and economic self-reliance brings them close to what society then and now considers predominantly male privileges. Such a girl therefore lingers precariously on the brink between masculinity and femininity. DiCicco remarks that “[s]he is what we today call an intersexed being, but what the carnies of Wharton’s day called a ‘half and half’ and the medical profession of the nineteenth century back to the Greeks called the hermaphrodite” (DiCicco 2010: 84). Bushnell labels them “testosterone women” who “just go out and have sex like a man” (2013: 40-41). This is why critic Mandy Merck calls Bushnell’s Manhattan a “heterodystopia” that in ironic contrast to Michel Foucault’s heterotopia signifies “a heterosexual hell in which men and women continually pursue and repel each other until they HAVING SEX LIKE A MAN: THE POSTFEMINIST SINGLE GIRL 99 IN THE AGE OF UN-INNOCENCE settle into equally hellish marriages, bachelor indifference (for men) or, worst of all female fates, move back to Iowa to live with their mothers” (2004: 50). Since my point of reference is Wharton’s Age of Innocence rather than The House of Mirth – especially for its eponymous title that is referenced so often in current representations of the single girl –, what is noteworthy is the fact that contrary to the television series, which although based on Bushnell’s book largely focalizes Carrie and her voice-over, the preceding book chose the male perspective instead. So, interestingly and despite her disclaimer to the contrary, in terms of narration and presentation Bushnell’s mode comes ever so close to Wharton’s novel, where we perceive New York’s society through the eyes of Newland Archer – and they are distinctly male eyes, no matter how troubled in his desires, impotent in his actions, and sympathetic towards Ellen’s fate Newland’s character is drawn.

2. HBO’s Sex and the City: The Age of Un-Innocence

The HBO television series Sex and the City (1998-2004) adopts Bushnell’s setting and theme, but not the narrative perspective and character focus. Whereas Carrie Bradshaw was but a minor character in Bushnell’s ensemble that features four straight men, a gay male couple and only at the conclusion of chapter one, “my friend Carrie” (2013: 8), she advances to become the main narrator of the TV series and one of four major female characters. From the outset, the trailer features Carrie both as a flâneuse and as a tabloid cover-girl, and it is a distinctly female perspective and gaze that marks the show’s gender politics. Each episode highlights Carrie, the sex columnist, who introduces a specific topic mostly relating to the interaction of women with men, albeit sometimes focusing on women’s issues only, which then is being acted out and – even more importantly – being discussed by the four female protagonists. The very first example of the girls’ gossip is striking for our context. We can see how women ‘talking sex’ breaks taboos and rewrites patriarchal narratives much in the sense that Michel Foucault attests to a person talking about “intimate sexual matters [as placing that person] to a certain extent outside the reach of power […] upset[ing] established law; [and] somehow anticipat[ing] the coming freedom” (1998: 6, quoted in Akass/McCabe 2004: 183):

Samantha: “Look, if you’re a successful saleswoman in this city, you have two choices: you can bang your head against the wall and try and find a relationship or you can say ‘screw it’ and just go out and have sex like a man.” Charlotte: “You mean with dildos?” Samantha: “Noooo, I mean . . . without feeling.” Carrie [voice-over]: “Samantha Jones was a New York inspiration. A public relations executive, she routinely slept with good-looking guys in their twenties.” 100 RALPH J. POOLE

[…] Samantha: “This is the first time in the history of Manhattan that women have had as much money and power as men, plus the equal luxury of treating men like sex objects” […] Carrie: “Oh, come on ladies, are we really that cynical? What about romance?” (“Sex and the City” 1998)

Thus, the pilot picks up the question, already prominent in Bushnell’s book, “Can women have sex like a man?”, discussing it on the backdrop of literary and cinematic predecessors, amongst which Wharton features prominently, but also referring to a set of iconic examples ranging from Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Capote’s Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Bridget Jones[‘s Diary] and Ally McBeal. From the very start, therefore, the series sets the single girl into a historical, literary and visual perspective, bringing it up to postfeminist date and asking questions exemplified by the following quote, slightly altered from Bushnell’s original:

Carrie [voice-over]: Welcome to the age of un-innocence. No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s and no one has affairs to remember. Instead we have breakfast at 7am and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. Self-protection and closing the deal are paramount. Cupid has flown the co-op. How the hell did we get into this mess? (“Sex and the City” 1998)

In a sense, the American single girl has always been in a “mess”. Discussing the notion of success in life, Lily Bart in Wharton’s The House of Mirth claims that for her success means “to get as much as one can out of life”, whereas Lawrence Selden – much like Newland Archer – asserts that for him success is “personal freedom. […] To keep a kind of republic of the spirit” (1905: 108), to which Lily agrees in theory, but not in practice. As a single woman, Lily has to rely on others or otherwise she will be taken as a freak or – closely related, but even worse – a prostitute. Considering the history of the single girl as a progress, certainly Carrie Bradshaw and her round of single girl-friends can keep “a kind of republic of the spirit”, they are free from worries about money, poverty, anxiety, “material accidents” as Selden defines it (68). And yet, even Carrie is repeatedly taken as a ‘streetwalker’. Already in the pilot episode, her first chance encounter with Mr. Big humorously has Carrie spilling the contents of her purse on the street displaying an ample amount of condoms: for her confirming her sexual independence, for him suggesting her ‘profession’. This ambiguous moment is repeated in their second meeting, where Mr. Big voices his earlier belief:

Mr. Big: “What have you been doing lately?” Carrie: “You mean besides going out every night?” Mr. Big: “Yeah. I mean what do you do for work?” Carrie: “This is my work. I’m sort of a sexual anthropologist.” Mr. Big: “You mean . . . like a hooker?” (“Sex and the City” 1998) HAVING SEX LIKE A MAN: THE POSTFEMINIST SINGLE GIRL 101 IN THE AGE OF UN-INNOCENCE

As many public reactions alongside the airing of the show prove, there are plenty of fears still around when it comes to the growing independence of the single girl. Cosmopolitan, for instance, warned the middle-aged single girl a year after the series started that “in the United States, the 20s are the picture- perfect decade for saying I do. The farther you stray from that magic era, the more freakish you start to feel” (quoted in Nelson 2004: 84-85). Time magazine in the same year proclaimed the demise of feminism under the header “Is Feminism Dead?” and asks two years later “Who Needs a Husband?” chronicling the growing number of single women in the US (see Henry 2004: 65, 82). The article is titled “Flying Solo” and asserts: “The single woman has come into her own. Not too long ago, she would live a temporary existence […] adult life […] only came with a husband. Well, gone are the days” (quoted in Nelson 2004: 87). Accordingly, Sex and the City has been linked to third-wave feminism and its paradoxical claim of both to a shared ideology (i.e. the lasting legacy of second-wave feminism) and to individualism (and thus to the postmodernist / postfeminist notion of moving beyond and indeed against the perceived dogmatism of the second wavers). As Astrid Henry remarks, one of the central dilemmas addressed in Sex and the City pertaining to the third- wavers’ assertion to the freedom of choice is whether or not to marry (2004: 73). While Adriaens and Bauwel acknowledge the “dangerous, slippery slope between the third wave and postfeminism,” arguing that the latter is “an essential fundamental” of the former (2014: 177), and while Snyder highlights the “fun, feminine, and sex-positive” outlook of the third-wavers (2008: 179), Maglin and Perry in their assessment of third-wave feminism state: “Sexuality, in all its guises, has become a kind of lightning rod for this generation’s hopes and discontents (and democratic vision) in the same way that civil rights and Vietnam galvanised [a previous] generation in the 1960s” (1996: xvi). The focus on pleasure (rather than politics) is not only the “principle ethic” (Henry 2004: 75) of Sex and the City, all in all the four ‘girls’ are also neither punished for being sexually active nor treated as ‘fallen women’ like former single girls in similar circumstances. In contrast, Wharton’s Ellen or Lily hardly had any pleasure in their agency, but all the more dangers of falling. This is in accordance with Angela McRobbie’s notion of postfeminism’s “new sexual contract” by which young women can enjoy the sexual freedoms advertized by popular culture, the leisure and fashion industries and the ‘porn-chic’ market with impunity. Indeed, McRobbie asserts, the postfeminist single girl can “now get drunk and even behave badly, within certain limits.” For example, as long as she does not become “a single mother reliant on welfare,” she has access to pleasures which in the past were “the privilege of men” only (2011: 182). And yet, after re-reading The House of Mirth with Carrie & Co. in mind, it struck me even more how massively Lily screwed up in securing a wealthy husband, but also how horrid her choices in potential spouses were. We indeed 102 RALPH J. POOLE could ask much as Carrie does right at the start of the HBO show: “Why are there so many great unmarried women and no great unmarried men?” And just like Mr. Big counters Carrie’s self-assertive claim that she is out to have sex just like a man with his remark: “I get it . . . you’ve never been in love”, the critics Akass and McCabe ruminate: “[D]oes modern romantic fiction within a post-feminist age imbibe women in a new language of feminist empowerment and limitless choice to reveal the same old impossible fantasies?” (2004: 198).

3. Gossip Girl: “The Age of Dissonance”

In yet another explicit allusion to Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, the postfeminist single girl is cast as teenage jeune fille fatale. The CW series Gossip Girl (2007-2012) may be called an updated version of the 1980s Californian teen cult soap Beverly Hills, 90210, now set in Manhattan’s urban upper crust instead. The series revolves around a group of exceedingly rich and exceedingly conniving teenagers, their amorous affairs and societal games of inclusion and exclusion, the latter entailing a Brooklyn-based intellectual and artsy, but only middle-class family consisting of a father and his two children.† For our purposes, Gossip Girl has at least one explicitly intertextual Wharton-moment. Towards the end of the second season, the decision for the annual school play falls on The Age of Innocence. The door thus is open for all kinds of comparisons between Wharton’s novel and the world of Gossip Girl surpassing this specific episode. For example, one of the adolescents’ mothers is the properly named Lily, who not only shares her beauty with Wharton’s Lily Bart, but also her status as pure commodity and “consumer item” (Wolff 1986: xxii), the embodiment of woman as a passive creature. In contrast to Lily Bart, however, Lily van der Woodsen in Gossip Girl uses her social skills to serially marry increasingly rich men thus moving further upwards on the social ladder, but also succeeding in securing her position where her predecessor has so fatally failed. She is a typical single girl in the sense that she still has to rely on the riches of husbands, but she also follows a pattern of pleasure that eventually allows her to marry her old flame, the Brooklyn father Rufus, without risking her social status. Problematic, of course, is that her daughter, the premature blond bombshell Serena, and Rufus’ artsy son Dan fall in love as well, thus doubling

† Another comparison of the series came up with the launching of Girls, a new HBO series focusing on a group of 20-something single women that can be considered a missing link between Gossip Girl’s teenage girls and Sex and the City’s 30-ish women. This belated comparison puts Gossip Girl in closer proximity to Sex and the City than usually considered before and offers new possibilities of linking the teenage soap opera to the comedy of manner narrative. HAVING SEX LIKE A MAN: THE POSTFEMINIST SINGLE GIRL 103 IN THE AGE OF UN-INNOCENCE the class conflict of their parents. All this is further amplified through the staging of Wharton’s novel as historical drama. The script focuses on the quartet May played by Serena, Ellen played by Serena’s counterpart Blair, and Beaufort played by Nate who has been a boy-friend to both Serena and Blair. The role of Newland predictably falls to Dan with Newland’s amorous infatuation with the wrong single girl Ellen being mirrored by Dan’s current illicit affair with his teacher. From the beginning of the episode, the comparison between Wharton’s and Gossip Girl’s New York is made explicit. Gossip Girl, the omnipresent, yet anonymous voice-over announces:

On the Upper East Side, all the world’s a stage and the men and women merely players […]. Before Gossip Girl there was Edith Wharton. And how little has changed. The same society snobs still reigned, only in corsets and horse-strung carriages. (“The Age of Dissonance” 2009)

All that happens on stage is in some way a reflection of the world of the play’s actors. As Blair playing Ellen says of her recent experience of being ousted from her claim to Yale: “I’m humiliated and shunned. They made me a flesh-and-blood Countess Olenska” (“The Age of Dissonance” 2009).‡ And yet, while the staging as such points towards obvious interfaces between Wharton’s social world and the contemporary Manhattan elite, it also marks a sharp contrast exemplified by the rupture of the performance. It is Nate, the actor playing Beaufort, who feels most uncomfortable impersonating a pompous guy in what he thinks to be a silly, outdated drama. He complains: “It’s like the most boring book ever. Nothing happens. Guy and girl want to be together. They can’t. End of story” (“The Age of Dissonance” 2009). He not only fails to learn his lines, in the end he also articulates his displeasure on stage, which brings the play to an improvised and early comic ending. Straightforwardly addressing the director whom he believes has shown an inappropriate interest in his girl-friend Vanessa, he cries: “You want feelings? I hate these clothes, I hate this play, and I hate pretentious assheads who try and steal other people’s girl-friends” (“The Age of Dissonance 2009). What is even more significant besides the rupture in an illusionist drama and the reference to real-life drama is the fact that it is Beaufort’s character who lends Nate this chance of adolescent rebellion, since Beaufort is the most important character in Wharton’s novel signifying social change and new moral codes. Newland’s and Beaufort’s symbolic rivalry over Ellen is far from being

‡ Although casting May here with the blonde bombshell character of Serena provides this seemingly innocent Wharton character with more overt eroticism than in the novel, in terms of physical appearance this version nevertheless stays closer to Wharton’s original than, for example, Martin Scorsese’s famed film adaptation of 1993 with May being cast by dark-haired Winona Ryder and Ellen by blonde Michelle Pfeiffer. For Wharton screen adaptations see Evans (2012), for female stereotypes in Gossip Girl see Damme (2010). 104 RALPH J. POOLE about a fight over the ‘girl’ alone, it is much more about ways of staking one’s position in a highly stratified society. While Wharton leaves the conflict between the men and what they stand for unresolved, at least in terms of ‘who gets the girl’, Gossip Girl here takes a stand insofar as Nate refuses to play Beaufort. What starts out as a problem of character identification and an inability to learn the script, turns into a dismantling of Wharton’s social claustrophobia. By breaking out of his role on stage during the performance – forcing the others to follow suit – Nate breaks lose the antagonism between the symbolic positions of Newland and Beaufort as well as May and Ellen. Instead of strict moral codes and old-fashioned tribalism (personified by May) versus modernization and commodity-driven structure of desire (with Beaufort as stand-in), the play’s rupture overhauls this dichotomy and releases the anarchic forces of postfeminist free-play. The episode is aptly called “The Age of Dissonance” and a critic present at the performance praises the “radical deconstruction” of Wharton’s world on the contemporary stage, which is in sync with recent, non-realistic Wharton stage adaptations such as the 2011 version of Ethan Frome by Laura Eason at Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre that, according to John Dennis Anderson “highlights by contrast the theatrical conventions that provided the context of the Broadway productions during Wharton’s life-time” (2012: 165). What the critic in Gossip Girl takes to be a carefully planned adaptation, is of course an impromptu accident which adds to the overall method of doubling and dissonancing that this episode propagates leading to what Nate’s outspoken girl-friend Vanessa succinctly calls “a whole new level of fake” (“The Age of Dissonance” 2009). And thus it comes as no surprise that the dismantling of Wharton’s Age of Innocence is voiced by the character of Nate who amongst many other things has slept with older women for money earning him the label of being the school class’ “whore” and whose boy-toyish metrosexual stylishness and behavioral sleekness renders him an amorphous, ‘freakish’ male model, pretty much on the same generic level as his female counterparts Serena and Blair. In this sense, he not only is a postfeminist ‘it-boy’ just like Dan, who turns out to be the female narrator aka “Gossip Girl”. Even more, Nate and Dan and the likes of them may actually have become the prototype of the new American girl, but that would be a different paper altogether.

REFERENCES

“Sex and the City” (1998), Sex and the City, Season 1, Episode 1, HBO, June 6, 1998, dir. Susan Seidelman. “The Age of Dissonance” (2009), Gossip Girl, Season 2, Episode 18, The CW, March 16, 2009, dir. Norman Buckley. HAVING SEX LIKE A MAN: THE POSTFEMINIST SINGLE GIRL 105 IN THE AGE OF UN-INNOCENCE

Adriaens, Fien and Sofie Van Bauwel (2014), “Sex and the City: A Postfeminist Point of View? Or How Popular Culture Functions as a Channel for Feminist Discourse”, in The Journal of Popular Culture 47.1, pp. 174-195. Akass, Kim and Janet McCabe (2004), “Ms Parker and the Vicious Circle: Female Narrative and Humour in Sex and the City”, in Reading ‘Sex and the City’, eds. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, I.B. Tauris, London and New York, pp. 177-198. Anderson, John Dennis (2012), “Stage Adaptations of Wharton’s Fiction”, in Edith Wharton in Context, ed. Laura Rattray, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 157-166. Bushnell, Candace (2013), Sex and the City, Abacus, London. Damme, Elke Van (2010), “Gender and Sexual Scripts in Popular US Teen Series: A Study on the Gendered Discourses in One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl”, in Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies 2.1, pp. 77-92. DiCicco, Lorraine (2010), “The Enfreakment of America’s Jeune Fille à Marier: Lily Bart to Carrie Bradshaw”, in Journal of Modern Literature 33.3, pp. 78-98. Evans, Anne-Marie (2012), “Wharton’s Writings on Screen”, in Edith Wharton in Context, ed. Laura Rattray, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 167-176. Foucault, Michel (1998), The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley, Penguin, London. Henry, Astrid (2004), “Orgasm and Empowerment: Sex and the City and the Third Wave Feminism”, in Reading ‘Sex and the City’, eds. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, I.B. Tauris, London and New York, pp. 65-82. Knights, Pamela (2012), “The Marriage Market”, in Edith Wharton in Context, ed. Laura Rattray, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 223-233. Maglin, Nan Bauer and Donna Perry, eds. (1996), ‘Bad Girls’/’Good Girls’: Women, Sex, and Power in the Nineties, Rutgers UP, New Brunswick. McRobbie, Angela (2011), “Beyond Post-Feminism”, in Public Policy Research, September/November, pp. 179-184. Merck, Mandy (2004), “Sexuality in the City”, in Reading ‘Sex and the City’, eds. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, I.B. Tauris, London and New York, pp. 48-62.. Nelson, Ashley (2004), “Sister Carrie Meets Carrie Bradshaw: Exploring Progress, Politics and the Single Woman in Sex and the City and Beyond”, in Reading ‘Sex and the City’, eds. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, I.B. Tauris, London and New York, 83-95. Snyder, R. Claire (2008), “What Is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay”, in Signs 34.1, pp. 175-196. Wharton, Edith (1905), The House of Mirth, Scribner, New York. Wharton, Edith (1920), The Age of Innocence, Grosset & Dunlap, New York. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin (1986), “Introduction” to Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, Penguin, New York et al., pp. vii-xxvi. Recenzii • Comptes rendus • Reviews

Petr VURM (editor), Réévaluations. Canons littéraires et culturels / Reassessments. Literary and Cultural Canons. Proceedings of the Conference Organized by Masaryk University in Brno, University of Szeged and Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg / Actes du colloque organisé par l’Université Masaryk de Brno, l’Université de Szeged et l’Université Martin Luther de Halle-Wittenberg. Brno-Šlapanice, 15-18.09.2011, MASARYKOVA UNIVERZITA, Brno, 2013, 147 p.

El volumen de publicaciones Réévaluations. Canons littéraires et culturels / Reassessments. Literary and Cultural Canons tiene una estructura binaria, con un doble prólogo firmado por Thomas Bremen y Petr Kyloušek y dos partes en su contenido. Mientras que la primera parte, “Theoretical Issues / Enjeux Théorique”, consiste de seis estudios teóricos, la segunda, “Case Studies / Études de cas”, consta de siete casos prácticos. Los estudios teóricos de la primera parte son los siguientes: Katalin Kürtösi, Modernism Revisited: The Case of Canada; Petr Kyloušek, La France et nous; Dominique Rougé, Le récit de folie comme genre littéraire; Petr Vurm, Faut-il réévaluer la littérature? Quelques enjeux de la litterature numérique; Jiří Holub, Bourdieuan critique of Bürger´s Theory of Avant-Garde; Teresa Kwaśna, L’école contemporaine a-t-elle besoin d’un nouveau canon littéraire? La segunda parte incluye los siguientes casos prácticos: Dénes Mátyás, Changing Traditions, Changing Canons – Pier Vittorio Tondelli´s Other Libertines; Miroslav Kulifaj, Il positivismo di Giovanni Verga; Norbert Buchholcz, Collective Identity and Its Literary Representation in Jurek Becker´s Bronstein´s Children; Gudrun Lörincz, “Die Erinnerung ist ein abstrakter Spiegel im Kopf” – transkulturelle Indentitätsschreibungen im autofiktionalen Schreiben Herta Müllers; Martina Urioste–Buschmann, El topos de la Ceremonia afrocaribeña en la novelae franco y hispanoantillana: ¿un relé de terceros espacios?; Anna Maziarczyk, Jean Echenoz et la poétique des contraríes; Zoltan Gyulai, Chasing the Invisible Man, Chasing the Visible (on H.G. Wells´ The Invisible Man). Según los datos proporcionados por Thomas Bremen, el libro colecciona los estudios del séptimo de los encuentros internacionales de los estudiantes de doctorado y profesores coordinadores organizados desde el año 2000 por los Programas Doctorales de Estudios Literarios y Culturales de las Universidades de Brno, Halle y Szeged. El presente volumen atestigua los intereses de los participantes en las cuestiones de la teoría literaria de la literatura y cultura francesa, italiana, alemana, canadiense y latinoamericana contemporánea. Las conferencias anteriores fueron las siguientes: Szeged 2000 (Borders, Nations, Contacts; Thomas Bremen y Katalin Kürtösi, editores); Brno 2002 (Codifications et symbols des cultures nationales, Petr Kyloušek, editor); Novi Sad 2003 (Littératures et médias, Pavle Sekeruš, editor); Szeged 2004 (Serta Musarum. Essays in Honor of István Fried, Thomas Bremen y Katalin Kürtösi, editores); Wittenberg 2007 (Literature in Cultural Contacts Rethinking the Canon in Comparative Perspectives, Thomas Bremen y Susanne Schutz, editores); y Roma 2009 (Contacts and Contracts: North-South, East-West in Literature, Culture, History, Flóra Kovács, Dénes Mátyás y Katalin Kürtösi, editores). Tambien anuncia la siguiente reunión organizada por la Universidad de Halle durante el mes de abril de 2013 en Wittenberg, con el tema Space – Time – Circulation of Cultures. A su turno Petr Kyloušek explica en su parte del prólogo la estructuración del libro articulado en dos partes y la contribución de cada autor al conjunto. Como ya mencionado anteriormente, la primera parte aporta reflexiones teóricas generales. 107

La intervención de Katalin Kürtösi examina la implicación de la pintura, sobre todo la de Emile Carr, en la definición de la modernidad, a la vez pictórica y literaria, y la contribución del arte plástico a la “decolonización” de la cultura canadiense, por lo tanto, a la redefinición del canon cultural. El antiguo tópico de la relación entre la pictura y la poesis recibe especial atención en su estudio, puesto que más que uno de los análisis del Modernismo evidencia el estrecho vínculo entre las dos formas de expresiones artísticas, como partes integrantes de un mundo- trabajo, en el que el mero hecho de construir puentes entre emociones y palabras viene muy a menudo condicionado por el nivel de enseñanza conseguido por uno, dentro de un género híbrido entre el bildungsroman (la transformación de un joven) y el künstlerroman (la maduración de un artista). El mismo proceso de la deperiferización y autonomización cultural de la literatura canadiense–francesa viene igualmente ilustrado por el estudio de Petr Kyloušek. La comparación con la situación de la literatura de Québec permite evidenciar las analogías entre los dos elementos complementarios, el anglófono y el francófono, de la cultura canadiense. La negación del centro hace posible la promoción de los propios valores autóctonos, pero a diferencia del centro, al que normalmente se le considera como generador de lo natural y de lo universal, la periferia oscila entre dos imperativos, el de lo particular y el de lo universal, desde el cierre enfermizo hasta la apertura total. Se puede considerar este desnivel como un fenómeno inherente a la situación de cualquier separación. La periferia que sigue compartiendo con el centro los bienes literarios, rechaza la aplicación de los valores que el centro siente el derecho de legitimar, pero a los cuales la periferia, en su deseo de convertirse autónoma, ya no los acepta. La problemática testimonia un cambio paradigmático y la transformación de la situación periférica en una situación central. A la redefinición del canon literario se le considera como una necesidad sobre todo para conseguir un contrapeso para la presencia inglesa que estimuló una tendencia inversa de acentuar la idea de la francité y la relación con la cultura francesa. Otro tipo de reevaluación es el propuesto por Dominique Rougé, quien trata la problemática general de los marcos de la tipología de los escritos sobre la locura, siguiendo el esquema típico de Monique Plaza, según el cual los textos sobre la locura se constituyen a través de tres movimientos: la expiación, el pacto con el mundo y la reconciliación, que a su turno siguen las pautas de la psiquiatría clásica para la que un enfermo se cura solamente cuando es capaz de criticar su delirio, de considerarlo un error o de reintegrarse en la sociedad. Y también sigue el trascurso de la mitología cristiana: el loco pasará del Inferno al Purgatorio para poder esperar al Paraíso. A base de estas ideas, y también manteniendo que la locura y la escritura sobre los locos solamente aparecen en el molde de una sociedad, no habiendo locos fuera de una sociedad particular, Dominique Rougé propone cuatro tipologías de textos: los en los que el autor se exhibe, los textos pedagógicos, los de contestación y por último los en los que el autor de desdobla, siendo testigo y actor de su locura simultáneamente dentro de un síntoma esquizofrénico. Mientras tanto, Petr Vurm expone la problemática relacionada con la literatura numérica que, más allá de ofrecer un campo importante de investigación, parece cuestionar a la vez el concepto tradicional de literatura. La revolución electrónica contribuye al encuentro de analogías en el pasado en lo que concierne las primeras experiencias con los otros medios justo después de su creación: la fotografía, el fonógrafo o el cinema. A pesar de su aspecto electrónico, esta literatura interactiva, híbrida, combinatoria o generativa no es de ninguna forma nueva. Su debut se puede observar al mismo tiempo con las grandes retoricas de finales del siglo XV, puesto que hay poetas que afirman su virtuositas mecanicista y exploran las potencialidades del lenguaje y de la poesía en poemas complejos, llenos de juegos poéticos y de formalismo. El internet proporciona la intertextualidad de las obras celebres, como por ejemplo pasa con el corpus electrónico de Frantext. Por consiguiente, el significado del texto cambia profundamente, al mismo tiempo que los nuevos medios imponen nuevos métodos. La simultaneidad referencial requiere una mundo espacial y virtual muy particular de la configuración narrativa que juega con los planos escénicos como si todo fuera dentro de un teatro de imágenes. La ausencia de un centro 108 es el principio fundador del internet y del hipertexto, un principio posmoderno que define la igualdad de la pluralidad de las partes. La parte teórica del volumen se completa con el estudio de Jiří Holub, quien analiza la crítica del sociólogo Pierre Bourdieu y la hermenéutica de Gadamer y Bürger, partiendo de la idea de que tanto Bürger como Bourdieu entienden el arte como una institución establecida por la emancipación y diferenciación de los otros subsistemas sociales, como por ejemplo el derecho, la economía o la ciencia. También ambos ven el crecimiento del Esteticismo y de la vanguardia histórica como el momento cuando la institución del arte gano su más alto nivel de autonomía, por lo tanto podría convertirse en un instrumento político para cambiar la sociedad. Por último el artículo de Teresa Kwanza examina la necesidad y la posibilidad de la redefinición del canon literario en la enseñanza, analizando los varios problemas entre los cuales el más grave sería la cuestión de la tradición y de su trasmisión, en un tiempo cuando la mundialización funciona como un sistema de valores y de activos simbólicos importantes para cada individuo en su vida social y privada, y todo ello al nivel profundo de la conciencia de su identidad. La crisis del canon la ve la autora como la crisis de los valores no solamente al nivel del gusto literario o al más amplio de la estética, sino al campo de los valores éticos, como una crisis de la autoridad. Este canon existe como un conjunto de mitos y símbolos antiguos que nos remiten al mundo inmenso del sueño y de la actividad humana universal, a los arquetipos existenciales de la humanidad. Aunque el canon debe cambiarse en función de las necesidades del hombre contemporáneo, en función de la evolución del arte y de la literatura, en función de las circunstancias políticas y sociales particulares, en la enseñanza de la literatura la cuestión de la interculturalidad se pone inmediatamente cada vez que se elige un texto para trabajar. Por consiguiente el canon de las lecturas nacionales podría constituirse en base de aquellos libros que constituyen el patrimonio común de cada europeo, importando muy poco sus orígenes. La segunda parte se abre con dos contribuciones consagradas a la literatura italiana: si las reflexiones de Dénes Mátyás tratan del cambio del canon perceptibles en la obra de Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Miroslav Kulifaj escribe sobre la inspiración positivista de verismo de Giovanni Verga. Siguen dos estudios relacionados con la problemática identitaria y la escritura memorialistica, a la vez colectiva e individual: mientras que el aspecto, el colectivo, viene examinado por Norbert Buchholcz en su estudio cuyo sujeto es la obra de Jurek Becker, el aspecto individual, sobre todo el que concierne la relación entre la identidad y la autoficción es analizado por Gudrun Lörinz. La cultura de los Caribes, la transculturalidad y la implicación de los aportes culturales que trascienden las barreras lingüísticas son los propósitos del artículo escrito por Martina Urioste-Buschmann. Esta superación de los límites se refiere no solamente a los espacios culturales, sino que se inscribe dentro de un juego genérico de un autor como Jean Echenoz, así como lo muestra la intervención de Anna Maziarczyk, y en general invierte en la relación entre la ficción y la non-ficción y la entre lo literario y lo extra-literario, un problema en el que se centra a conclusión de actos el estudio de Zoltan Gyulai. Petr Kyloušek advierte como cabal ventaja la variedad de idiomas que caracteriza los convenios organizados por las tres universidades de Halle-Wittenberg, Szeged y Brno. Ello no excluye, como ya lo demuestra los actos de coloquios ya publicados, la coherencia de propósitos dentro de la problemática ofrecida, dado que permite la superación de los obstáculos que muy a menudo separan a los especialistas de varios campos literarios y culturales. Se puede concluir que esto es el caso también del presente volumen consagrado al canon literario y cultural.

SILVIA ŞTEFAN

 Universidad de Bucarest, Facultad de Lenguas y Literaturas Extranjeras, Departamento de Lingüística Románica, Lenguas y Literaturas Ibero-románicas e Italiano, [email protected]

CONTRIBUTORS

Oana Alexandra ALEXA Oana Alexandra Alexa teaches Business English to first and second year students at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași. She is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Letters in the the same university.

Raluca ANDREESCU Raluca Andreescu is assistant professor at the University of Bucharest. She holds an M.A. in American Studies and a Ph.D. in Philology from the Doctoral School of Literary and Cultural Studies, both with the University of Bucharest. Her main research interests are in the area of American Cultural Studies, Gothic literature and culture, comparative literature, contemporary women’s studies and gender studies. She published a book and articles in journals and collective volumes about the Female Gothic in the American Century, the American authors Edith Wharton, Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates, but also on the work of Doina Ruşti.

Hristo BOEV Hristo Boev was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria in 1973. He graduated from Plovdiv University, Bulgaria in 1997 obtaining an MA in English Philology. He defended successfully his Ph.D. thesis at Ovidius University, Constanta, Romania in April, 2013. His interests are in the field of Modern British and American Literature, Romanian Literature between the Wars, Translation and Cultural Studies. He is a teacher of English Language and Literature, translator and editor in Bulgarian, English and Romanian. Apart from his academic interests, he is also an avid reader and short story writer in English. He actively participates in conferences on Literature and Cultural Studies. His main publications are on Dickens and Dos Passos in a number of scientific journals category B and BDI.

Daniela DANIELE Daniela Daniele holds a doctoral degree in Anglistics from the University of Genoa and a PhD in Comparative Literature at the City University of New York. She currently teaches Anglo-American Literature at the University of Udine. Her research on Victorian America mostly focused on Louisa May Alcott's writings, and led to the Italian editions of Moods (Bollati Boringhieri, 1995) and of the four-volume Marches’ saga (Einaudi, 2006). She has written 111

several essays on this writer and on her contemporaries, and recently translated a selection of her suffragist articles and poems appeared in the Woman’s Journal. She is also a specialist in contemporary American literature, having edited a literary anthology in the aftermath of September 11th, Undici settembre. Contro-narrazioni americane (Einaudi, 2003); a special issue of Nuova Corrente (Tilgher, 2005) on Don DeLillo and the American section of the Garzantina della letteratura (Garzanti, 2007). She also translated into Italian a selection of poems by Grace Paley (Empiria, 1993) and by Jerome Rothenberg (Porto dei santi, 2001), and the collection of short stories by Mary Caponegro Materia prima (Leconte, 2004).

Verena LASCHINGER Verena Laschinger holds a Ph.D. in American literature and culture from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. From 2005-2010 she was Assistant Professor of American Literature at Fatih University Istanbul, Turkey, and presently teaches at Erfurt University, Germany. Her research interests include urban studies and popular culture with a strong focus on the overlaps of photography and literature.

Nicoleta PETUHOV Dr. Nicoleta Petuhov is a researcher at the Institute of Linguistics of Bucharest. Her areas of specialisation are lexicology and lexicography, terminology, semantics and sociolinguistics. She has written a number of articles and essays on terminology and phraseology in Romanian and also on the effect of language contact in African French. She is additionally affiliated with the Department for Foreign Students of the Faculty of Letters of the Bucharest University.

Ralph J. POOLE Ralph J. Poole is Professor of American Studies at Salzburg University. He taught at the University of Munich, Germany, and at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey. He was also visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies in Theater Arts at the CUNY. His publications include a study on the Avant-Garde tradition in American theater focussing among others on Gertrude Stein and Robert Wilson, a book on satirical and autoethnographical ‘cannibal’ texts from Herman Melville to Marianne Wiggins, and most recently a collection of essays on “dangerous masculinities” as well as several essays on Caribbean writers (e.g. Aimé Césaire, Shani Mootoo) and transatlantic cross- currents (e.g. French surrealism and the Caribbean). Together with Ilka Saal, he co-edited Passionate Politics: The Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present (2008), and with Annette Keck a double issue of Gender Forum on “Gender and Humour: Re-Inventing the Genres of 112

Laughter” (2011). His research interests include film, television, drama, gender/queer/masculinity studies, popular culture, and transatlantic negotiations.

Brigitte ZAUGG Brigitte Zaugg is Associate Professor (Maître de Conférences) at the Université de Lorraine (Metz, France), where she teaches American literature and translation. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on Ellen Glasgow and has published several articles on the Virginian writer, as well as on Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Margaret Mitchell, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Edith Wharton. Her latest article, “The Art of Irresolution in Edith Wharton’s ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell’,” was published in Les Cahiers de la nouvelle / Journal of the Short Story in English 58 (Spring 2012). Among the most recent books she has co-edited are L’Espace du Sud au féminin (2011) and Dislocation culturelle et construction identitaire (2012). She is a member of IDEA research group.

Daniel WALKOWITZ Daniel Walkowitz is a social and cultural historian who in nearly a dozen books, many articles and four films for public television has worked to bring America’s past to both academic and broad public audiences. Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and Professor of History at New York University, from 1989 to 2004, he directed the Metropolitan Studies Program, from 2004- 07 served as the Colleges’ inaugural Director of College Honors., and from 2007-10 served as the College’s inaugural Director of Experiential Education.