Dialogic Thought and Male Intruders in Edith Wharton

The Imperceptible Flow: Dialogic Thought and Male Intruders in Edith Wharton by Daniel Hjerkinn Westby A Thesis Presented to the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the M.A. Degree UNIVERSITY OF OSLO NOVEMBER 2016 II The Imperceptible Flow: Dialogic Thought and Male Intruders in Edith Wharton by Daniel Hjerkinn Westby III © Daniel Hjerkinn Westby 2016 The Imperceptible Flow: Male Intruders and Dialogic Thought in Edith Wharton http://www.duo.uio.no/ Trykk: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo IV Abstract The aim of this thesis is to discuss implications of applying a postclassical perspective on the fictional mind to readings of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence and “New Year’s Day”. The author’s emphasis on depicting social aspects of thinking is discussed in relation to characterization, by understanding narrative as a rhetorical act, and by reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic inner utterance. Two supplementary frameworks are provided to discuss the moral implications of Wharton’s strategy: firstly, the thesis argues that Wharton’s renderings of dialogic thought enable individualization and a sense of independent agency in settings which otherwise threaten to reduce characters to abstractions of their culture. Secondly, the thesis connects central male characters’ idolizing visions of the heroine to her self-concept and subsequent development. The visions are discussed in light of their function as embedded narratives and in the context of discursive authority. The visions form a recurring pattern, which shows how Wharton adapts her mind designs to each specific rhetorical purpose, as well as the development of her strategy over time. The failure of each of these visions to capture its subject illustrates Wharton’s tendency to assume male voices of authority with the intention of criticizing them. V VI Acknowledgments I would first like to thank Professor Nils Axel Nissen for his invaluable advice and support as supervisor throughout the writing process. In particular, I would like to thank him for always being generous with his time, and for making the students feel appreciated. I would also like to thank Hanne Cecilie Geirbo for her helpful comments. Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Inger-Johanne Molven for making it all possible, and for being my partner in life. The thesis is dedicated to Inger-Johanne, Georg and Vera. VII VIII Contents 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 An Ethical Approach to Edith Wharton ...................................................................... 2 1.2 Dialogic Thought and Possible Selves ........................................................................ 6 1.3 Naturalism and Vision-Building ................................................................................ 10 1.4 Structural Layout ....................................................................................................... 12 2 Vision-Building and Dialogic Thought in The House of Mirth ....................................... 15 2.1 Beginning: Establishing Lily’s Mind ........................................................................ 19 2.2 Middle: Crisis and Changing Self-Concept ............................................................... 29 2.3 Late Middle and End: Three Male Encounters .......................................................... 36 3 Discovering Dependence: Voice and Embedded Narratives in The Age of Innocence ... 42 3.1 Beginning: Establishing Newland’s Mind ................................................................. 45 3.2 Middle: The Male Intruder ........................................................................................ 55 3.3 Late Middle and End: Newland’s Lesson .................................................................. 65 4 The Narrator’s Vision in “New Year’s Day: The ‘Seventies’” ........................................ 69 4.1 Social and Discursive Authority ................................................................................ 70 4.2 The Narrator’s “Anxious Moving” Vision ................................................................ 76 4.3 The Reader Judges the Narrator ................................................................................ 83 5 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 89 Works Cited .............................................................................................................................. 95 IX 1 Introduction In her essay “Forms of Disembodiment: The Social Subject in The Age of Innocence”, Pamela Knights discusses the function of “social details” and “cultural furnishings” such as clothes, manners and interior design in The Age of Innocence. According to Knights, these details function not primarily as picturesque or oppressive background for a characterization, but as “social inscriptions” that the characters need to exist. To Knights, the dramatic effects on the individual when the social setting changes suggest that “without . the social mold, there may be no self at all” (21). Wharton felt that the novel had found its form when authors became aware that “the bounds of personality are not reproducible by a sharp black line, but that each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things” (The Writing 10). For the sake of practicality, I refer to this phenomena as the “imperceptible flow”, or simply “flow”. For Knights, the flow is an expression of Wharton’s critical attitude to modern fiction that “took its bearings entirely within the flux of the subconscious” and that she wanted to integrate the social aspect of consciousness in fictional discourse (21). Knights’ observation is meant to describe The Age of Innocence, but I will argue that it is useful to consider its implications for some of Wharton’s other New York stories as well. I will argue that the tendency of “disembodiment”, understood as the disappearance or fragmentation of the self as it is disengaged from its native culture, is balanced against a variety of narrative strategies providing significant psychological individualization. One of these forms of characterization, I will suggest here, is the depiction of the fictional mind engaged in “dialogic thought”, understood as the narrative depiction of social influence blending with and reacting to individual character minds. If Wharton’s New York novels question “where and how far [the social entanglement] extends” (Knights 21), this mental arena illustrates that it stops short of complete permeation. In other words, social inscriptions are shown to exert a powerful influence, but they never completely overturn individual values, identity and agency in the narratives discussed here. The reader’s experience of Wharton’s central characters as no more nor less than semi-independent agents – heavily influenced by social inscriptions but still in possession of agency – is an essential aspect of a characterization strategy that produces a peculiar fluctuation in the reader’s response to character and the narratives as a whole. This thesis will discuss Wharton’s engagement with the debate about the social basis of consciousness in the novels The House of Mirth (1905), The Age of Innocence (1920) and the novella “New Year’s Day” (1924). I will approach this task by attempting to show how 1 characterization is defined by various representations of mental processes in which social influence interacts with individual traits. Despite the dominating presence of location in Wharton’s New York stories, it is possible to over-emphasize the influence of “cultural furnishings”. In the narratives discussed here, I hope to demonstrate, the characters themselves are as important transmitters of social inscriptions as the cultural artifacts they are surrounded by. Wharton’s tendency to introduce male focalizers as a screen between the implied author and the heroine is an example of social inscription reflected in narrative form. In the narratives examined here, one important function of the male focalizer is to be a transmitter of social inscriptions. The male focalizers have been interpreted as distancing device or as a way to lend authority to the act of telling (Nettles 249), but they also highlight problematic ideas and actions of men who somehow fail the women who rely on them. This thesis will examine some of the causes and effects associated with these failures. The three texts discussed here all feature leading male characters who are attracted to the heroine, because she shows what they perceive as an unrealized potential in themselves or the woman in question. These notions lead the men to form visions of who the women “really” are; visions they want the heroine to live up to. The visions influence the heroines by interacting with their future ‘possible selves’, understood as hypothetical narratives that coexist and potentially compete with the heroines’ own hopes and fears about their future. The vision is also a contributing factor in the males’ failure, because it pacifies them in their role as helpers. Ultimately, Wharton’s depiction of thought as inherently social calls our attention to the moral responsibility to be aware of other people’s self-concepts and how we influence them – both when we speak directly to people and when we

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