Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) 5-24-2012 Edith Wharton: Vision and Perception in Her Short Stories Jill Sneider Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Sneider, Jill, "Edith Wharton: Vision and Perception in Her Short Stories" (2012). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 728. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/728 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of English Dissertation Examination Committee: Wayne Fields, Chair Naomi Lebowitz Robert Milder George Pepe Richard Ruland Lynne Tatlock Edith Wharton: Vision and Perception in Her Short Stories By Jill Frank Sneider A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2012 St. Louis, Missouri Copyright by Jill Frank Sneider 2012 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Washington University and the Department of English and American Literature for their flexibility during my graduate education. Their approval of my part-time program made it possible for me to earn a master’s degree and a doctorate. I appreciate the time, advice, and encouragement given to me by Wayne Fields, the Director of my dissertation. He helped me discover new facets to explore every time we met and challenged me to analyze and write far beyond my own expectations. This work would be much less than it is without his help, and I will always be grateful for his enthusiasm and astute suggestions. I am also thankful for the interest and support of my committee. I value the help of Kathy Schneider, who serves as Advising and Student Records Coordinator. Kathy answered endless questions and facilitated the logistical and administrative details with a ready smile and friendly encouragement. Edith Wharton was not as fortunate as I am to have a loving family that supports my ambitions. My son, Mark Sneider, my daughter, Julie Peller, and her husband, Brian, have always encouraged me to pursue my academic goals and complete the requirements for my degree. I hope that my four granddaughters, Sally and Bonnie Sneider, and Josie and Lila Peller, will always share the excitement I find in literature and the exhilaration I feel in accomplishing a difficult but rewarding undertaking. My sister, Nancy Schenkel, and Aunt Penny Speckter have never failed to ask interested, probing questions and to praise my progress. I also appreciate the encouragement of my friends, particularly the positive reassurance I always received from Sheri Sherman. Finally, I will be forever grateful to my husband, Martin, who convinced me that I could and should return to school to get a master’s degree and eventually a Ph.D. He has been perpetually interested in my work and particularly in Edith Wharton because I am so intrigued by her. Martin read many of her short stories and novels, and our dinner table conversations often revolved around Wharton’s themes and characters. His insights and suggestions proved invaluable. I would never have written this dissertation or received a doctorate without Martin’s loving insistence, patient prodding, and unwavering belief in me and my ability to be my best self. I will never be able to fully express my love and my appreciation. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction 1 Chapter One: Marriage and Divorce 20 Chapter Two: Artists and Writers 73 Chapter Three: Social and Persona Values 143 Conclusion 209 Appendix A: Edith Wharton’s Short Stories 221 Appendix B: Edith Wharton’s Major Novels and Novellas 223 Bibliography 224 iii Edith Wharton: Vision and Perception in Her Short Stories Introduction I have been intrigued by Edith Wharton ever since I read several of her novels while studying for the American Literature Major Field Examination, and I knew then that if I wrote a dissertation, it would pertain to her work. Her subject matter enchanted me as I read about a conflicted lawyer bound by the traditions of New York society in the late nineteenth century, the downfall of a single woman trying to climb the social ladder to security, a lonely man trapped in both the frozen landscape of New England and a cold and emotionless marriage, and a ruthless social-climbing American woman and her marriages in America and France in the first decade of the twentieth century. I had found a new favorite author to savor. Wharton’s accessible style and choice of just the right word, her incisive wit and fascinating characters, and her sense of situation and narrative enveloped me, and I have been perpetually captivated. One might think that her writing would be dated by now, old-fashioned and unappealing to the modern reader, but in my view, Edith Wharton’s work stands the test of time and has considerable relevance in today’s world as it did in her own. Although Wharton is best known for her many novels, her short stories also provide a rich and meaningful addition to our understanding of this brilliant American writer. During her seventy-five year lifespan, Wharton wrote non-fiction, novellas, poetry, and even a few plays as well. Her eighty-six short stories, written throughout her 1 life, have received much less critical attention than her novels, and even the best tales are usually less well-known than her novels. Some of these stories, though they may be of interest to understanding the full range of her work, are not worthy of serious discussion. Others, however, represent Wharton’s broad interests, remarkable talents, and exceptional insights, and they deserve exploration. A brief summary of her life will be helpful here. Born in 1862 to Lucretia and George Jones, moderately affluent, upper-class New Yorkers, Wharton began making up stories as a child, but her first short story was not published until she was twenty-nine, and her first volume of short stories appeared in 1899 when she was thirty-seven. In Wharton’s family, as in others of her class and time, a young woman was expected to make her debut, find a suitable husband, and take her place in society. Educated at home, Wharton was encouraged to read the classics, history, plays and poetry, and she learned languages from extensive foreign travel, but she never received parental encouragement in her impulse to write stories or longer fiction; nevertheless, she wrote stories, poems, and plays throughout her childhood and even completed a novella, Fast and Loose, at age fifteen. When she married Edward “Teddy” Wharton at age twenty-three, after a broken engagement and later, an ambiguous, possibly romantic relationship with Walter Berry that did not lead to a commitment, Edith Wharton continued the pattern of life set by her mother, late father and others of her class. Settling into a home, traveling, socializing and establishing a cordial but passionless marriage, Wharton continued her writing, but it represented a fraction of her time, competing with her other obligations and a series of health issues that surfaced after her marriage. Anita Brookner, in an introduction to a 2 collection of Wharton’s short stories, explains the context in which she wrote: “Indeed the world in which she grew up saw her literary activity as a sort of aberration or solecism, and only one of her numerous relations ever read her books” (vii). In A Backward Glance, Wharton’s 1934 autobiography, she describes her joy when Edward Burlingame at Charles Scribner’s Sons agreed to publish a collection of her stories, a few of which had previously appeared in magazines. With Ogden Codman she had published a book on American design, The Decoration of Houses, in 1897, but her volume for Scribner’s would be her first book of fiction. R. W. B. Lewis, in his seminal biography of Edith Wharton, explains her tentative awareness that her life might be changing when Scribner’s first suggested the project: “It marked the beginning of a precarious sense of herself, less as a social matron who experimented cautiously with short stories from time to time than as, just possibly, a developing writer of fiction” (70- 71). Lewis contends that this opportunity presented exciting possibilities for Wharton but also brought anxiety: “Burlingame’s invitation had the effect upon Edith of asking her to commit herself at last to a career of writing . What, at the age of thirty-two, was her fundamental role in life: wife, social hostess, observer of foreign parts—or, drawing on all of these, a writer of fiction?” (75-76). It took five years before The Greater Inclination was published in 1899, years when Wharton suffered anxieties and periods of depression, when her confidence in her work waned, and when the stories she submitted were not good enough for inclusion. During this time she was also distracted by travel, family obligations and improving her 3 newly-purchased summer estate in Newport. In A Backward Glance, Wharton recalls her response when the book was finally released: But I must return to The Greater Inclination and to my discovery of that soul of mine which the publication of my first volume called to life. At last I had groped my way through to my vocation, and thereafter I never questioned that story-telling was my job, although I doubted whether I should be able to cross the chasm which separated the nouvelle [short fiction] from the novel.