The New Edith Wharton Studies Edited by Jennifer Haytock , Laura Rattray Frontmatter More Information

Home , Edith Wharton, Emily Dickinson

Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-42269-7 — The New Edith Wharton Studies Edited by Jennifer Haytock , Laura Rattray Frontmatter More Information

THE NEW EDITH WHARTON STUDIES

The New Edith Wharton Studies uncovers new evidence and presents new ideas that invite us to reconsider our understanding of one of America’s most highly acclaimed, versatile, and proliﬁc writers. The volume addresses themes that have previously been missed or underdeveloped and examines areas where previous scholarship does nottakeaccountofkey,contemporaryissues:Whartonandecocriticism, Wharton and queer studies, Wharton and animal studies, Wharton and whiteness, and Wharton and contemporary psychology. Essays explore Wharton’s treatment of the poor in her emerging career, the ways in which French thinkers helped her envision community, the importance of Greece to Wharton, her transnationalism, the ongoing revelations of the author’s archives, and new perspectives on her agency in the literary marketplace. It addresses key themes and examines contemporary issues, while reassessing Edith Wharton’slifeandcareer.

jennifer haytock is the author of At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature (2003), Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (2008), The Middle Class in the Great Depression: Popular Women’s Novels of the 1930s (2013), and The Routledge Introduction to American War Literature (2018). laura rattray is Reader in American Literature and Director of the Centre of American Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her work on Wharton includes Edith Wharton in Context (2012), The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton (2009), and the Oxford World Classics edition of Summer (2015).

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-42269-7 — The New Edith Wharton Studies Edited by Jennifer Haytock , Laura Rattray Frontmatter More Information

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CRITICAL REVISIONS

This series addresses two main themes across a range of key authors, genres, and literary traditions. The first is the changing critical interpretations that have emerged since c. 2000. Radically new interpretations of writers, genres, and literary periods have emerged from the application of new critical approaches. Substantial scholarly shifts have occurred too, through the emergence of new editions, editions of letters, and competing biographical accounts. Books in this series collate and reflect this rich plurality of twenty-first-century literary critical energies, and wide varieties of revisionary scholarship, to summarize, analyze, and assess the impact of contemporary critical strategies. Designed to offer critical pathways and evaluations, and to establish new critical routes for research, this series collates and explains a dizzying array of criticism and scholarship in key areas of twenty-first-century literary studies. Recent Titles in This Series matt cohen The New Walt Whitman Studies mark byron The Ezra Pound Studies michelle kohler The New Emily Dickinson Studies jean-michel rabate´ The New Samuel Beckett Studies joanna freer The New Pynchon Studies

THE NEW EDITH WHARTON STUDIES

edited by JENNIFER HAYTOCK The College at Brockport, SUNY

LAURA RATTRAY University of Glasgow

University Printing House, Cambridge cb28bs,UnitedKingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006,USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207,Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025,India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108422697 doi: 10.1017/9781108525275 © Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwal A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-108-42269-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Notes on Contributors page vii Acknowledgments xi List of Editions and Abbreviations xii

Introduction 1 Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray

part i self and composition 13 1 Creative Process and Literary Form in Edith Wharton’s Archive 15 Paul Ohler 2 Wharton’s Letters: Glimpses of the Whole Edith Wharton 32 Julie Olin-Ammentorp 3 Edith Wharton and the Business of the Magazine Short Story 48 Sarah Whitehead

part ii international wharton 63 4 Edith Wharton’s Odyssey 65 Myrto Drizou 5 Edith Wharton’s French Engagement 80 Virginia Ricard 6 Edith Wharton and Transnationalism 96 Donna Campbell

vi Contents part iii wharton on the margins 111 7 Edith Wharton’s Unprivileged Lives 113 Laura Rattray 8 Wharton, Insurance Culture, and Pain Management 129 Jennifer Travis 9 Edith Wharton’s Humanimal Pity 143 Shannon Brennan 10 Edith Wharton and the Writing of Whiteness 158 Jennifer Haytock

part iv sex and gender revisited 173 11 Women, Art, and the Natural World in Edith Wharton’s Works 175 Gary Totten 12 Wharton and the Romance Plot 189 Linda Wagner-Martin 13 Masculine Modernity: Fathers, Sons, and Generational Absolution in Wharton’s Fiction 202 Melanie Dawson 14 Wharton’s Wayward Girls 217 Meredith Goldsmith

Bibliography 231 Index 247

Notes on Contributors

shannon brennan is Assistant Professor of English at Carthage College, where she teaches courses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her writing on Edith Wharton has appeared in Legacy: A Journal of Women Writers, and she is book review editor of the Edith Wharton Review. donna campbell is Professor of English at Washington State University. Her most recent book is Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing (2016). Recent work includes “Yours for the (Marriage) Revolution: Jack London and Mary Austin” in American Literary History and the Turn Toward Modernity, edited by Melanie V. Dawson and Meredith L. Goldsmith (2018), and “Little House in Albania: Rose Wilder Lane and the Transnational Home” in Western American Literature. Her current projects include a critical edition of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth in the thirty- volume Oxford University Press edition of the Complete Works of Edith Wharton, a series for which she is associate editor. melanie dawson is Professor of English at The College of William and Mary, where she teaches late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century American literature. She is the author, most recently, of Emotional Reinventions: Realist-Era Representations Beyond Sympathy (2015)andco-editorofAmerican Literary History and the Turn Toward Modernity with Meredith Goldsmith (2018). She has authored articles on Henry James, W. D. Howells, companio- nate marriage, and realist temporalities and is currently at work on a book-length project about Edith Wharton’s ﬁctioninrelationtoa modern sense of aging.

vii

viii Notes on Contributors myrto drizou is Assistant Professor of English at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey, where she teaches American and transatlantic literature. She is associate editor of the Edith Wharton Review and editor of the volume Edith Wharton for the Critical Insights series (2017). Her work on Wharton has also appeared in Gothic Landscapes, edited by Sharon Yang and Kathy Healey (2016), Critical Insights: American Writers in Exile (2015), and 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies. Other work includes essays on Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Henry Adams, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and a special issue on American naturalism (forthcoming in The New Centennial Review). Her current projects involve Edith Wharton’s Hellenism and a comparative study of ﬁn-de-siècle American and Greek naturalist literatures. meredith goldsmith is Professor of English and Associate Dean at Ursinus College. She has published numerous articles on authors including Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, and Anzia Yezierska, among others, in such venues as Modern Fiction Studies, Legacy: A Journal of American Women’s Writing, and American Literary Realism. She served as editor of the Edith Wharton Review (2012–17). She has also co-edited three scholarly collections: Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s (2003); Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism (2016); and American Literary History and the Turn Toward Modernity (2018). jennifer haytock is Professor of English at The College at Brockport, SUNY. She has published The Routledge Introduction to American War Literature (2018), The Middle Class in the Great Depression: Popular Women’s Novels of the 1930s (2013), Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (2008), and At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature (2003). She is also the author of articles on Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, literature of the Iraq War, and more. paul ohler teaches nineteenth and early twentieth-century American literature at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia. He is the editor of the Edith Wharton Review and a past president of the Edith Wharton Society. His publications include Edith Wharton’s Evolutionary Conception: Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels (2006), essays in English Studies in Canada and the Edith Wharton Review, and in America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary

Notes on Contributors ix Culture, edited by Tina Gianquitto and Lydia Fisher (2014). His current projects include editing Short Stories I: 1891–1903, volume two of the Complete Works of Edith Wharton, which is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant. julie olin-ammentorp is Professor of English at Le Moyne College. She is the author of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture (2019) and Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War (2004). In addition, she has published over twenty-ﬁve articles, including essays in Edith Wharton in Context (2012) and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country: A Reassessment (2010), both edited by Laura Rattray; in Willa Cather and Modern Cultures (2011); and in journals as varied as Letterature d’America: Rivista Trimestrale and The Henry James Review. She is a member of the Board of Governors of the Willa Cather Foundation and a past president of the Edith Wharton Society. laura rattray is Reader in American Literature at the University of Glasgow in the UK. Her publications on Edith Wharton include, as editor, Cambridge University Press’ Edith Wharton in Context (2012), the two-volume Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton (2009), Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country: A Reassessment (2010), and Summer (2015). Other publications include work on F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Hollywood novel, Horace McCoy, and Josephine Johnson. virginia ricard is Associate Professor at Bordeaux Montaigne University where she teaches American Literature and translation. She was a recipient of the Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship at the Lilly Library and has done research in Wharton archives on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2012 she edited a volume of essays devoted to Wharton’s short stories. Other publications include work on Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Ludwig Lewisohn, Eva Hoffman, and Vladimir Nabokov. gary totten is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and editor of the journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. He is the author of African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (2015), co-editor of Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing (2015), and editor of Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture (2007). He is a former president of the Edith Wharton Society, and his articles have appeared in African American Review, American Indian Quarterly, American

x Notes on Contributors Literary Realism, MELUS, Studies in Travel Writing, and Twentieth- Century Literature, among other journals and essay collections. jennifer travis is Professor and Chair of the English department at St. John’s University, New York, where she teaches American literature and digital humanities. Her books include Boys Don’t Cry? Rethinking Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S., co-edited with Milette Shamir (2002), Wounded Hearts: Masculinity, Law, and Literature in American Culture (2005), Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Crash and Burn (2018), and Teaching with Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2018), co-edited with Jessica DeSpain. Her current projects include a volume on gender and American literature for a new Cambridge University Press series (co-edited with Jean Lutes), and a book and online exhibit based on her research and collaboration with art historian Susan Rosenberg in the Davis Library, a New York City insurance archive. linda wagner-martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English & Comparative Literature emerita, The University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. The recipient of the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature, she sponsors book series for both Palgrave and University of South Carolina Press. The biographer of Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Zelda Fitzgerald, Barbara Kingsolver, Ellen Glasgow, and others, she has recently published Hemingway’s Wars: Public and Private Battles (2017), John Steinbeck: A Literary Life (2017), and Maya Angelou: Adventurous Spirit (2015). sarah whitehead teaches English Language and Literature at Alleyn’s School and Kingston University, London. She has a particular interest in the short story and print culture. She has published articles on the magazine short story in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the comic gothic, and Edith Wharton’s short ﬁction. She is currently work- ing on two projects, one a study of Edith Wharton’s magazine stories and another on the early publication of James Joyce’s short stories in The Smart Set magazine.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Ray Ryan at Cambridge University Press for commissioning this volume, Edgar Mendez at the press for his support, and the anonymous readers for their enthusiastic, thoughtful responses to our submission. Heartfelt thanks to Linda Wagner-Martin, who ﬁrst suggested we team up for a Wharton project of this nature. We would like to thank Julia Masnik at the Watkins/Loomis Agency, the Biblioteca Berenson at Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and the President and Fellows of Harvard College, and the Institut Catholique de Paris, Bibliothèque de Fels for facilitating permissions. Excerpts from unpublished writing by Edith Wharton are included by permission of the estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/ Loomis Agency. Finally, we wish to express our deep gratitude to the contributors to this volume.

Editions and Abbreviations

Edith Wharton Primary Source Abbreviations AI The Age of Innocence (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1920). BG A Backward Glance (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934). Buccaneers The Buccaneers (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1938). CC The Custom of the Country (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913). Children The Children (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1928). CSI Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, 1891–1910, M. Howard (ed.) (New York: Library of America, 2001). CSII Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, 1911–1937, M. Howard (ed.) (New York: Library of America, 2001). CV The Cruise of the Vanadis (New York: Rizzoli, 2004). DH The Decoration of Houses (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897). EF Ethan Frome (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911). FD Old New York: False Dawn (The ’Forties) (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1924). FF Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915). FT The Fruit of the Tree (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1907). FWM French Ways and Their Meaning (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1919). GA The Gods Arrive (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1932).

xii

List of Editions and Abbreviations xiii GM The Glimpses of the Moon (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1922). HM The House of Mirth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905). IB Italian Backgrounds (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905). IM In Morocco (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920). IVG Italian Villas and Their Gardens (New York: The Century Co., 1904). Letters The Letters of Edith Wharton, R. W. B. Lewis and N. Lewis (eds.) (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988). LGNY “A Little Girl’s New York,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine (March 1938), 356–64. LI “Life and I,” The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton, Vol. 2: Novels and Life Writing, L. Rattray (ed.) (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). MF A Motor-Flight Through France (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908). MR The Mother’s Recompense (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1925). Poems Edith Wharton: Selected Poems, L. Auchincloss (ed.) (New York: Library of America, 2005). Reef The Reef (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1912). Summer Summer (NewYork:D.AppletonandCompany, 1917). TS Twilight Sleep (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1927).

Secondary Source Abbreviations Benstock S. Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994). CR Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, J. W. Tuttleton, K. O. Lauer, and M. P. Murray (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 1992). Lee H. Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). Lewis R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

xiv List of Editions and Abbreviations MDG My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann, I. Goldman-Price (ed.) (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2012). Wolff C. G. Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, 2nd ed. (Reading, ma: Addison-Wesley, 1995).