Chapter Wharton and Feminist Criticism 1. Freudian Psychology

Notes

Chapter  Wharton and Feminist Criticism 1. Freudian psychology, Marxism, and postmodernism have challenged easy understandings of the self and gender. Arguing that psychological, cultural, and economic forces constrain independent freedom of action to such a degree that a stable identity is perhaps no longer possible, such theorists understand the self as, at best, a temporary if useful story about one’s identity. If the self is unstable, claims about gender identity are even less fixed. Deconstructing traditional categories of male and female, post-structuralist gender critics assert that such binary thinking is too simplistic in assigning innate traits to men and women. Even more problematic, for feminist post-structuralists, is the potential for such binary categories to keep in place the very hier- archical thinking that has been used to exclude women and to devalue female roles and their stories. Separating out the study of women writers in women’s courses and searching for markers of gender in narrative style and content, so the argument goes, implicitly retain cultural beliefs that women’s narratives can never be seen as normative and universal. Other feminists respond that social and material conditions construct gender differences that clearly impact the experience of being a woman and her writing. Although it is certainly possible and sometimes useful to deconstruct the notion of a stable self and essential gender traits, most of the time, these theorists argue, we continue to treat each other as men and women. Our gendered bodies have obvious consequences for how we live and think about ourselves and how we tell our stories. 2. For a brief and highly readable summary of feminist criticism from Kate Millet to Kristeva see “Introduction: The Story So Far” by Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore in The Feminist Reader. Toril Moi’s Sexual/Texual Politics, although more polemic in tone, provides a more detailed discussion. Moi is much more sympathetic to French feminism than Anglo-American theories. For a good overview of feminist analyses of gender that undergird this literary criticism, see Chapter 5, “Feminism, Stories of Gender,” in Thinking Fragments by Jane Flax. Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” in Coming to Terms edited by Elizabeth Weed offers a histo- rian’s perspective on the postmodernist debate. 158 NOTES

3. Rich talks about the woman writer’s need to heal the split between a sense of herself as a writer and a woman defined by her gender in cultural and material ways. Like T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Rich advocates an understanding of the literary past but, unlike Eliot, she believes this history can be turned to rev- olutionary purposes centered on altered ways of seeing gender and writing: “We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (2046). For Rich, “the work of Western male poets reveals a deep, fatalistic pessimism as to the possibilities of change” and only women’s creative energy will generate change (2056). Rich’s implicit assumption that aesthetic change must be related to social change reflects the early Anglo-American emphasis on pragmatic action, ethics, and the transformation of the conditions under which women live and write. 4. Although Showalter’s gynocriticism establishes a rationale and method for examining the gender of writing, her paradigm also risks defining gender differences as innate rather than as social constructions by cultures organized around believed differences between genders. Even more problematically, Showalter must sacrifice individual differences between women in order to establish the importance of a universal woman writer. In an effort to locate common ground for women writers founded on the historical and cultural experiences of living and writing as a woman, Showalter separates the woman writer from the very specifics of the historical and cultural conditions that she has argued shaped her as unique and wor- thy of specialized tools of analysis in the first place. The challenge of articulating difference based on the gendered experience of living and writing as a woman is complicated by the seeming paradox of recognizing the common material and cultural conditions of all women’s lives while, at the same time, ignoring the historical and cultural differences. 5. In her early essays, Kolodny, like Rich and Showalter, works to under- score essential differences based on gender in order to rescue women writers who have been devalued and silenced by masculine standards of literary value. Kolodny’s “A Map for Rereading” (1980) argues that feminist critics should look at how women’s writing comes from a nondominant literary tradition and, therefore, may require a different kind of reading. Her “Dancing Through the Minefield” (1980) calls for new critical methods of reading that take into account unequal power relationships and the differing literary histories that have shaped male and female writers. By the end of the decade, however, she has begun to confront those critics who see gender in more fluid ways and to point out the consequences of blurring the gender line. In “Dancing Between Left and Right” (1988), she directly responds to post-structuralist feminists who use the work of Lacan and Derrida NOTES 159

to theorize and complicate the idea of “difference.” Kolodny expresses concern about male appropriation of feminist work and the construction of feminist studies within masculinist paradigms such as Lacan’s psychoanalytic structures or Derridean deconstruction. 6. Cixous, a post-structuralist sympathetic to Jacques Derrida, defined two kinds of writing: the masculine that preserves binary oppositions and the feminine that disrupts the normative structures of male-centered language. Her essays “Sorties” and “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975)—reading more like poetry than prose in their use of puns, paradox, and metaphor—enact her theories and demonstrate a use of feminine language that can never be entirely controlled by author or reader. 7. All page references to Irigaray’s essays refer to the collection of essays translated by Catherine Porter and published as This Sex Which Is Not One in 1985 by Cornell University Press. Reworking Lacan’s concept of desire and language, Irigaray finds “multiplicity” rather than “phallic oneness” (30) in the language of women. In “The ‘Mechanics’ of Fluids” (1974), Irigaray argues that “woman” exists outside the current language system that is based on properties of the solid, while the “woman-thing . . . speaks fluid” (111). Irigaray’s essays demonstrate her interest in a theoretical discourse that is allusive, witty, metaphorical, and female. 8. More recent American feminists are struggling to bridge the gap between American criticism and French theoretical discourse. See Essentially Speaking by Diana Fuss, “Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism” by Nancy Fraser, and Linda Nicholson and Linda Alcoff’s “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism.” For a more specific literary analysis, see Alice Jardine’s Gynesis. In her effort to link an American interest in ethics and social practice and French concerns with discourses and structures of language that undergird social practice, Jardine argues for the “rethinking of both male and female subjects’ relationship to the real, imaginary, and symbolic” (44). 9. Kamuf asks, “If feminist theory can be content to propose cosmetic modifications on the face of humanism and its institutions, will it have done anything more than reproduce the structure of women’s exclusion in the same code which has been extended to include her?” (45) Kamuf’s important attack on humanism highlights a system of thought that has defined masculine as universal and true, and feminine as the Other. 10. Miller extends her argument in another essay, “Changing the Subject” in Subject to Change. She notes the postmodernist claim for the death of the author “does not necessarily hold for women” who have “been excluded from the polis” and whose “relation to integrity and textuality, desire and authority, displays structurally important differences from that universal position” (106). 160 NOTES

11. Consider, for instance, Anne Bradstreet’s “farewell” to her unborn child in “Before the Birth of One of her Children” written in 1678. Although the story of America in the seventeenth century is usually about taming the wilderness and its native peoples and struggling to create the “city on the hill,” Bradstreet’s poem expressing her fear about giving birth (in a new country and under primitive conditions) suggests a very different, but equally viable story of courage. 12. The Kristeva Reader edited by Toril Moi provides both an overview of Kristeva’s work up to the mid-1980s and ready access to a number of her essays. In “The System and the Speaking Subject,” found in this volume, and Revolution in Poetic Language, translated from La revolution du langage poetique published in 1974, Kristeva sets forth her concept of the split subject and the dialectical relation between the symbolic (associated with patriarchal law and linguistic system) and the semiotic chora (associated with the maternal, pre-oedipal, and pre-linguistic). For further discussion of Kristeva’s view on semiotics and literatures see Desire in Language. 13. Riley argues that “female persons can be very differently positioned” over time in relation to concepts of the self, soul and body, sexuality, and Nature (2). She believes that admitting the “instability” of women as a “historical foundation” is a way of escaping the current threats of “deconstruction and transcendence” to feminist analyses (5). “It’s not that our identity is to be dissipated into airy indeterminacy, extinction; instead it is to be referred to the substantial realms of discursive historical formation” (5). Riley asks, “But if being woman is more accurately conceived as a state which fluctuates for the individual, depending on what she and/or others consider to characterize it, then there are always different densities of sexed being in operation, and the historical aspects are in play here”(6). 14. Riley believes that recognizing that ideas of gender change over time interrupts the simple opposition of male and female. Riley believes that history shows how the “female speaker” whose “rejections of, adoptions of, or hesitations as to the rightness of the self description at that moment” can shift. For Riley, examining how “ ‘men’ and ‘women’ are enmeshed with histories of other concepts” of the self undermines the simple “binary opposition of sexual antagonism” without ignoring the historical presence of the gender opposition (7). Riley’s position is strategically useful for a feminist politics and aesthetics. 15. “The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S. and Britain” (1989). 16. Finding the polarity between post-structuralism and essentialism in contemporary feminist debates fruitless, De Lauretis advocates shifting the terms of the discussion away from theoretical differences within the feminist movement to “the historical specif icity, the essential difference of feminist theory itself” (6). This rhetorical maneuver NOTES 161

enables her to break down what she sees as a “pernicious opposition of low versus high theory” that is “reductive” and creates an unnec- essary division between individuals supposedly working toward the same goal—defining a feminist perspective (12). More specifically, De Lauretis’s emphasis on multiple perspectives and dialogue between feminists—in a footnote she refers to her own article as a dialogue— recovers texts from earlier moments in the woman’s movement, texts that De Lauretis notes contemporary post-structuralist feminists wrongly dismiss. Like Denise Riley, De Lauretis highlights the historical perspective. For De Lauretis, it is important to recognize the “socialhistorical location” of the feminine subject, the consequences of this historical positioning of women, and the history of the woman’s movement that chronicles past efforts by women to grapple with this locating of the gendered self within the culture (11). Thus De Lauretis would seek to recoup such earlier feminist texts as Adrienne Rich’s 1971 “When We Dead Awaken” without rejecting the more recent contributions of French post-structuralists such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. De Lauretis finds the analysis of sexual difference “less an essentialist biological or metaphysical view of woman’s difference (from man) than a historical materialist analysis of ‘the state of emergency’ in which we live as feminists” (27). 17. De Lauretis records how “autocoscinza,” a sort of consciousness- raising practiced by small groups of Italian women in the 1970s, led directly to a recognition by the women of Milan of “their own different subjecthood” and consequent need “to gain self-representation in the established symbolic order” (21). De Lauretis sees this recov- ery of women’s writings as “a frame of reference for one’s analyses, understanding, and self-definition” and as a way to “mediate a woman’s relation to the symbolic” (15). 18. Female-authored poetry, prose, and drama have historically revealed a subject position excluded from the discursive realm. These women’s texts reveal struggles to claim their place in literary history. In seventeenth-century America, Anne Bradstreet’s poetry was first published by her brother-in-law in 1650 without her knowledge of its final edit- ing. In “The Prologue,” “ her poetic persona seems to allay men’s fears about writing women by assuring her readers that “men can do best and women know it well.” Arguing that her meager and inept offerings will only make their “glistening gold but more to shine,” Bradstreet asserts her right to tell her story. The ironic tone of the poem, nevertheless, actually mocks male narratives and privileges female stories. In the nineteenth century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” recounts the case of a woman driven to write in isolation and secrecy. The protagonist achieves a kind of victory after finding the story of a trapped woman written in the wallpaper by stripping the wall and freeing the woman. Her madness frees her to construct her story. Claiming narrative authority by defining writing as a physical 162 NOTES

and psychological imperative, the protagonist tells a story about the necessity of storytelling. In 1957, Isak Dinesen’s community of female storytellers in “The Blank Page” uphold a long tradition of storytelling. But again Dinesen’s tale is more about the process of storytelling and the struggle to achieve narrative authority than the story itself. Ironically, the narrative is never completed. Like a hallway of infinitely receding mirrors, the multiple narrators appear to lead the reader to the heart of the story only to fall silent leaving the reader to the mute contemplation of the one canvas of “pure white linen” unstained by virginal blood . Already excluded from the patriarchal printed page, Dinesen’s storytellers try to enter the discursive realm through an oral narrative emerging out of the female body as they invite their audience to consider the meaning of the absence of bloodstains on a bridal bed- sheet—but even so the narrators are ultimately forced to “draw their veils over their faces and [become] . . . dumb” (1422).

Chapter  Wharton, Women, and Authorship at the Turn of the Century 1. For Kristeva, “the conception . . . of meaning as the act of a transcen- dental ego cut off from its body, its unconscious and also its history” is “outdated” (Kristeva Reader 28). She instead advocates the practice of “semanalysis” that “conceives of meaning . . . as a signifying process” (28) located within the speaking subject who is a “divided subject” (28). The “person” making meaning, then, is subjected “to bio-physiological processes ( . . . what Freud labeled ‘drives’)” and “to social constraints (family structures, modes of production, etc.)” (28). Kristeva’s speaking subject is always constructed by internal and external forces that are “social, political and historical” (33). 2. Kristeva’s theory restores the importance of history and cultural context to the study of the woman writer. Cultural debates about the nature and role of women, changing publishing practices, and increasingly negative views of the “woman writer” shape Wharton as an author. Analysis of textual meaning within her novels—what Kristeva might consider a study of semiotics—has to take account of these external conditions. 3. This study focuses on the ways in which Wharton critiqued the conservative gender ideology of her time. Nevertheless, Wharton remains true to her conservative roots in terms of class, race, and political ideologies. Jennie Kassanoff’s Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race argues that too much of Wharton criticism has ignored her conservative views on class and race—topics of considerable public debate in Wharton’s time. Kassanoff offers a useful corrective to this absence. Integrating social documents and close readings of selected novels, she explores Wharton’s anxieties about the democratic racial and class incursions into larger parts of American culture and the effects NOTES 163

of these social and demographic changes on the community of social elites to whom she remained loyal. 4. For a compelling historical account of women’s participation in the controversy over sex differences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Rosalind Rosenberg’s Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism. 5. It should be noted at the outset that my comments in this chapter focus almost exclusively on middle and upper class white women. The experiences of women of color and working-class women were far different. I concentrate on one layer of a complex and varied structure of female experience not because it is universal but because it most closely describes Edith Wharton’s cultural context. Complaints and Disorders by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English details some of the major differences between the lives of women of the “leisure” class and working-class women in terms of their treatment by the medical profession at the turn of the century. 6. The apparent proliferation of this disease gave doctors (mostly male) a ready group of patients (mostly female) to treat at a time when medicine was attempting to gain currency as a scientific enterprise and a recognized profession. For a discussion of the connection between the development and treatment of hysteria, cultural roles prescribed for women, and the professionalization of medicine, see “The Hysterical Woman” in Carole Smith-Rosenberg’s Disorderly Conduct and “The Sexual Politics of Sickness” by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in Peter Conrad’s The Sociology of Health and Illness. 7. Newman argues that the real debate centered not on sexual difference, “but the social and political implications of that difference” (xiii). Her collection of essays from The Popular Science Monthly from 1870 to 1915 provides a fascinating account of the controversy. For another version of the debate, see Clarke’s Sex in Education (1874), in which he outlines his proposals for the separate education of women so as not to endanger their reproductive capacities, and for a reasoned response in Sex and Education, edited by Julia Ward Howe (1874). 8. Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s A Feast of Words explores at some length the pattern of sexual repression handed down by Lucretia Jones to her daughter. In general, Wolff’s study is a valuable discussion of the conflict Wharton experienced between her desire for adulthood and the model of female behavior represented by her mother. 9. The roles of homemaker, nurse, and moral guardian, identified by Welter as central to True Womanhood, continued to shape expectations of female behavior in Wharton’s time. Admittedly, as Welter acknowledges, even during the height of True Womanhood, the ideal often deviated sharply from the reality. Class status and economic conditions for individual women dictated whether or not one could 164 NOTES

participate fully in True Womanhood; nevertheless this cultural ideal modeled by higher-status women shaped the aspirations of women from all classes. 10. Chief Scout Thompson Seton expressed his concern over boys who were becoming “a lot of flat-chested cigarette smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality” (qtd. in Susan Faludi’s Backlash 63). At the Modern Language Association convention in 1909, a speaker worried about the effect of increasing numbers of women in literature classes and advocated the need to preserve within literary study the “ideal of masculine culture” (qtd. in Conflicting Stories 16). 11. James R. McGovern claims that this period was responsible for “the emergence of a ‘virility impulse’ . . . [that] may be described as an exaggerated concern with manliness and its conventional concomi- tants—power and activity” (335). He points out that the heroes in Phillips’ novels “are rigidly defined and highly conventionalized super-males” who display their virility in action and a “masterful handling of women” (346, 347). He shows how the popular Phillips’ work ethic and fiction consistently reveal anxiety about the need to preserve manly vigor. Phillips, who wrote in a standing position and scheduled writing time from eleven at night until four, five, or six in the morning seven days of the week, commented, “I could not trust myself to luxurious surroundings for fear they would soon eat all of the manhood out of me” (McGovern 340). At the same time it should be noted that Phillips was a strong supporter of women’s rights who “praised the independent woman who behaved like a man” (349). His final novel Susan Lenox traces the life of a young woman born illegitimate, who is driven to flee her arranged marriage at seventeen and is forced into prostitution to survive, but who is eventually taught the value of work and independence and helped toward a successful career in theater. Wharton said in a letter that the novel was one of “the only things out of America that have made me cease to despair of the republic—of letters” (Lewis Letters 445). McGovern links Phillips’ masculine activist stance to changing work patterns and increasing participation by women in the larger society. He notes that the “decline of self-employment opportunities . . . after 1900,” the increase of leisure time for men, and the entrance of more and more women into the job market between 1880 and 1920 exac- erbated cultural tensions about gender roles (352–354). McGovern goes on to say, “This enlarged sphere of women’s activity, the more disturbing because it was disrupting traditional roles, may have contributed a situational base for the psychological element of Progressivism. One needs hardly speculate that the allusions in fiction and non-fiction of the period to women refusing to bear children describes a fact which contributed to the sex roles of the period. The instances in popular literature of near and actual role reversals with women consciously wishing to be like men or becoming like NOTES 165

them in personality are also suggestive of basic tensions” (354). For an analysis of Susan Lenox in terms of Wharton’s ideas about naturalism and ways in which the Phillips novel can be seen as “vindicate[ing] Wharton’s vision in The House of Mirth” see “The Bitter Taste of Naturalism: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and David Graham Phillips’s Susan Lenox.” 12. In Doing Literary Business, Susan Coultrap-McQuin notes, “Attitudes toward women writers often mirrored attitudes toward women” (15). She also observes, “Although men’s character also was presumed to be reflected in their texts, the connections expected in women’s works were strongly influenced by the cultural prescriptions for women” (15–16). 13. For a useful discussion about Wharton’s efforts to separate herself from other women writers, her desire to be successful in the marketplace and the literary world, and the increasing antagonism of men toward women writers, see Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Politics of Female Authorship by Deborah Lindsay Williams. Williams’ introduction, “Strangled with a Petticoat,” offers an overview of challenges facing Wharton, Cather, and Gale at the beginning of the twentieth century. Chapter One, “Threats of Correspondence: The Letters of Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and Edith Wharton,” closely examines letters between Gale and Wharton. Williams shows that, for Wharton, “an artist must remain unaffili- ated, at least publicly” (36). Nevertheless, Wharton’s letters to Gale argues that “Wharton’s interest in the other woman’s work and ideas seems far from perfunctory: the community of spirit is attractive” (36). In Chapter Three, “Sisterhood and Literary Authority in The House of Mirth, My Antonia, and Miss Lulu Bett,” Williams suggests that The House of Mirth helps Wharton to establish her literary voice and gives her confidence in the profession of writing although Wharton maintains her “apparent hostility to sisterhood and to feminism” (122). 14. In her essay “Women in Literature,” Cone claims that the opening of women’s colleges and supposed increased accessibility of the profession should have increased women’s “advance in literature” (126). She attributes the comparative scarcity of women writers to “unavoid- able self-consciousness” felt by those “released from the burden of a retarding tradition” and the “new social responsibilities” of the college-educated woman (126). But her argument raises questions. Why is it that men such as Frank Norris, Jack London, and Stephen Crane managed to combine literature and social reform? And how quickly could women leave behind the tradition of denial and suppression of voice that Cone traces in her own essay? 15. Gilman notes, “It is difficult for men, heretofore the sole producers and consumers of literature, and for women, new to the field, and following masculine canons because all the canons were masculine, 166 NOTES

to stretch their minds to a recognition of the change which is even now upon us” (105). The familiar case of Kate Chopin is an example of cultural resistance to women’s stories that critique prevailing assumptions about gender. The negative public reaction to Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) has been well documented. Publishing almost nothing after the novel, Chopin virtually retired from writing. The amount and severity of critical response to Chopin’s narrative suggest that women had made little headway in literary parity by the close of the century. Having discovered a new identity as an artist and having experienced sexual freedom, Chopin’s protagonist chooses suicide rather than returning to her Victorian role as wife and mother. Sustained negative public reaction to the novel suggests that the reading audience of the time was not ready to accept narratives—by women—that threatened prevailing cultural attitudes toward gender roles in any way. While it might be argued that any novel published at this time about a woman who deliberately flouts social and sexual conditions would offend American readers, public response to immoral books differed on the basis of gender. One case in point is Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie published in 1900. Dreiser’s book was condemned by his own publisher and some readers, but it was taken seriously by reviewers and championed by another important writer of the time, Frank Norris. By 1905, Dreiser was a successful magazine publisher who bought the rights to Sister Carrie in 1907 and had it reissued. By 1915, having completed four additional novels, he was seen as a major American author. Chopin was largely ignored for the next thirty years. 16. Sharon O’Brien constructs her biography Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice within this paradigm—the conflict between being female and an author. O’Brien argues that Cather’s authentic voice emerges only after she has reconciled this division. Volume I of the biography carefully details how Cather’s writing “apprenticeship was distinguished by her struggle to resolve the culturally imposed contradictions between femininity and creativity” (5). 17. An interesting parallel can be drawn here. In her autobiography, Edith Wharton pays particular attention to her great-grandfather, Major-General Ebenezer Stevens, who took part in the Boston tea party, commanded artillery units in the Revolution, and became a highly successful East-India merchant after the war. Confessing “a secret partiality for him,” Wharton admires his energy and ambition (14). That she too wished to signal some linguistic connection to an admired male forbearer is suggested when she named her home in Massachusetts “The Mount,” the title given by her great-grandfather to his country home on Long Island. 18. Elizabeth Ammons’ sketches of the careers of women in the closing pages of Conflicting Stories are compelling evidence of the tension between being female and an author within Wharton’s culture. These NOTES 167

writers faced material conditions and internal and external cultural forces actively hostile to writing such as the responsibilities of wife- hood and motherhood; religious, class, or regional traditions opposed to female writing; the intensification of gendered alienation through racism or poverty; and charges of plagiarism and expectations that women “produce nothing but pretty . . . stuff” (198). It is within this cultural context that Wharton had to define herself as an author. 19. In her introduction to The Portable Edith Wharton, Linda Wagner- Martin examines ways in which some of her selections of Wharton’s work can be linked to elements of Wharton’s biography and her development as a writer. (xvii). She notes, “Her hegira through her existence is itself a kind of metaphor for the life of the writer—that such an artist does live in her imagination, does find comfort in her aesthetic and in her product” (xxi). 20. Shari Benstock in No Gifts from Chance disagrees with Lewis. She argues that Wharton’s claim of illness in an 1895 letter to her publisher “was in some measure disingenuous.” According to Benstock, although Wharton “did not invent illness . . . she did dramatize her situation to editors who were far away” (80). 21. In The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, Gloria C. Erlich explores in great detail connections between psychological family dynamics in the Wharton family, Wharton’s changing relationships to her own sexuality, and Wharton’s writing and view of herself as an author. Erlich makes a compelling argument in favor of a “psychic nexus that embraced Wharton’s creative as well as her erotic life” (42). She asserts that “books and even words become libidinized” (42). Erlich suggests that Wharton constructs “an authorial self’ firmly established within “the realm of the father” (45). While I am unwilling to place as much emphasis on the theme of incest in Wharton’s own life, I agree that Wharton seems to articulate writing in sexualized terms. Hermione Lee notes that Wharton’s unpublished memoir Life and I is even more explicit “about the physical account of her passion for story-telling” as a little girl (14). She finds Wharton’s descriptions of the making up to be “extremely erotic” (14). 22. She recalls, in her autobiography, living the “old life, for my husband was as fond of society as ever, and I knew of no other existence, except in our annual escapes to Italy.” She adds, “I had as yet no real personality of my own, and was not to acquire one till my first volume of short stories was published” (Backward 112). In an early letter to her publisher, she apologizes for the extended correspondence, the insistent questions about title page, format, and publication date by noting her eagerness to finally see these “people” in print. 23. Again although Wharton’s autobiography is not entirely trustworthy as a recollection of events, the careful construction of a writing self at the end of her career testifies to the centrality of this self-image throughout her life. Hermione Lee calls Wharton’s autobiography “a 168 NOTES

beautifully produced and illustrated book . . . an impressively evasive exercise in good manners and self-screening” (715). 24. In A Backward Glance, Wharton describes her mother as witnessing the fall of the French monarchy in Paris in 1848 but says she “suspect[s] that the study of the Paris fashions made a more vivid impression on her than the fall of the monarchies” (20). Wharton describes the “tradition of elegance” her mother preserved throughout her life and “the excitement caused by the annual arrival of the ‘trunk from Paris’ ” full of the most recent fashion in dresses (Backward 20). Lucretia had few intellectual interests although she insisted on overseeing her daughter’s reading. Wharton maintains that she was “an indolent woman” who made things easy on herself by requiring Wharton to show her any piece of fiction the daughter wanted to read and then refusing her permission (Backward 65). Wharton points out the irony in her mother’s action by making note of “the stacks of novels” that Lucretia and the other older women “devoured” (68). 25. In Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Elizabeth Ammons explores at some length Wharton’s apparent conservatism in later life, attributing much of it to the effect of the war. 26. Janet Malcolm in “The Woman Who Hated Women” makes the same assertion in an article published in 1986. 27. Hermione Lee also takes note of the significant contradictions within Wharton’s image. She says, “Wharton’s self-creation through the 1890s and 1900s as a woman writer who could not be categorized under ‘feminine’ or ‘sentimental,’ and a highly cultured author who could also appeal to a big audience, was a remarkable one” (171). 28. In a 1904 letter to William Crary Brownell, Wharton writes, “The continued cry that I am an echo of Mr. James (whose books of the last ten years I can’t read, much as I delight in the man) . . . makes me feel rather hopeless” (Lewis, Letters 91). In 1923, she writes Bernard Berenson that she found Joyce’s Ulysses “a turgid welter of pornogra- phy . . . & uninformed & unimportant drivel; & until the raw ingredi- ents of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation & thought can make a work of art without the cook’s intervening. The same applies to Eliot” (Lewis, Letters 461). Nevertheless, critics have begun to explore Wharton’s complicated connection to modernism in recent years. Frederick Wegener in “Form, ‘Selection,’ and Ideology in Edith Wharton’s Antimodernist Aesthetic,” was “concerned about her own lack of enthusiasm about the work of her younger contemporaries” (119). But for Wegener “Wharton’s regressive social and political views”—especially in her later essays on writing—“are closely intertwined with her convictions about the writing of fiction and the making of art” (134). Carol J. Singley argues that Wharton’s use of irony in the service of realism constructs “an ironic detachment we associate with modernism” in NOTES 169

“Edith Wharton’s Ironic Realism” (226). Singley notes that although critics have attempted to read Wharton within the modes of realism, naturalism, and sentimentalism, Wharton escapes any easy categori- zation. Katherine Joslin points out in “ ‘Embattled tendencies’: Wharton, Woolf and the nature of Modernism,” that feminist scholars over the last twenty years have read Wharton as a “transitional figure” (203). Joslin traces what she sees as a dialogue about art and representation that emerges from a comparison between the writings of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton. Joslin defines modernism as “a sharp dialogue, . . . a transatlantic dialogue, over literary possibilities” and places Wharton firmly within this debate (204). 29. In A Backward Glance, she says, “My literary success puzzled and embarrassed my old friends far more than it impressed them, and in my own family it created a kind of constraint which increased with the years. None of my relations ever spoke to me of my books . . . the subject was avoided as though it were a kind of family disgrace” (144). 30. According to Ammons in Conflicting Stories, Wharton’s identification with male authors, scholars, and intellectuals was not uncom- mon for many women at the turn of the century. She argues that among “turn-of-the-century women committed to art as their goal” the “aspiration to be taken seriously as an artist” meant “a strong and frequently outspoken—indeed often belligerent—identification with the acknowledged great writers of western tradition, who were almost always male” (123). In addition, Ammons notes that many of these same women writers also separated themselves from an American tradition of literature. She says, “As if to emphasize their independence . . . they distanced themselves from U.S. literary tradition, connecting themselves instead to an international artistic community” (123). Although Wharton greatly admired Emerson and saw herself working toward some of the same ends as Hawthorne, she clearly allied herself with European artists. Moving to France, reading extensively in contemporary European literature, forming friendships with Europeans and Americans who saw themselves as Europeans, Wharton found the international milieu more conducive to her writing. In general, she believed that “America . . . [wasn’t] exactly a propitious ‘ambiance’ for the arts,” and in particular, she found that European culture at least in some ways gave women a wider scope. In French Ways and Their Meaning, she argues, “Compared with the women of France the average American woman is still in kindergarten” (100–1). Wharton believed that the exclusion of American women from the economic and intellectual realms and their relegation to the home and the company of other women pre- vented her countrywomen from ever being genuinely “grown up.” 31. In “No Innocence in this Age” included in the collection Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors, Jamie Barlowe argues that “Wharton 170 NOTES

was indebted to a number of professional women” who worked “in early mass-market industries, particularly commercial theatre and film, but also interior design, advertising, and magazine production” (44). She suggests that critical discussion should move beyond “Wharton’s intentions and attitudes about . . . collaborations with women” to ways in which “their work advanced her commercial success” (44, 45). 32. Amy Kaplan’s The Social Construction of American Realism offers a useful analysis of Wharton’s rejection of the sentimental and domestic tradition, her embrace of realism, and her efforts to become a professional (65–87). 33. In his study of four male writers of the period, Wilson observes, “each of these writers became a symbol of the highly ‘masculine ideal’ of authorship which infused the public rhetoric of the Progressive era. It was as if each writer personally experienced the dismantling of ‘feminized’ Victorianism and the making of Progressive-era culture in his own literary psyche. The new cult of masculine writing momentarily overshadowed differences of region, social stratification, or politics” (xiv). 34. Wharton displayed this same insistence on facing things in her personal life as well. In 1909, she wrote to Morton Fullerton, “Don’t think me sentimental or ‘petite fille’ . . . .. It’s just this—the situation is changed, & I, who like to walk up to things, recognize it, & am ready to accept it—only it must be nettement!” (Lewis, Letters 179). 35. In “Edith Wharton and the ‘authoresses,’ ” Donna Campbell explores Wharton’s rejection of local color in two of her early short stories. Arguing that Wharton was writing within a period of change in which cultural tastes as defined by critics associated local color with inferior and feminine writing and naturalism as masculine and superior, Campbell examines Wharton’s attempts to create a realistic style that escaped the constraints of either tradition. Mary Marchand in “Cross Talk: Edith Wharton and the New England Women Regionalists,” explores the connections between local writing and contemporary concerns about perceived threats that such writing posed to high culture. Marchand argues that Wharton’s rejection of regionalism in Edith Frome was also a rejection of the threat to high art posed by “a politicized women’s culture” (388). Marchand concludes that Wharton’s novel reveals Wharton “asserting her class culture against the rising factions of the middle class . . . while, on the other hand, offering an alternative feminism that that seeks to sub- vert, not simply revaluate, conventional female identity” (390). Thus, Wharton’s efforts to support her class ideology and to define herself as a serious author can be seen as parts of a single agenda. 36. Coultrap-McQuin notes that such male artists as Hawthorne and Irving were seen as “feminine” in their artistic temperament (15). She also argues that, in the nineteenth century, authors were generally placed in a female position by the paternalism of the publishers (38). NOTES 171

37. Scribner’s investment in this ideology may help explain his extreme and almost personal disappointment when Wharton decided to leave Scribner’s for Appleton. Lewis argues that the trouble began when Scribner refused the serialization of Summer for Scribner’s Magazine in 1916. On the other hand, the publisher knew that Wharton’s books were generally lucrative. Wharton had often expressed disappointment about the advertising of her books in her correspondence with Brownell, the editor at Scribner’s. And although she claimed early in her career that she did not have to “live by the pen,” she began to rely on her writing income to support her large homes and beautiful gardens, her automobiles and extensive travels, and her charities. Appleton was able to offer her considerably larger amounts for her novels. Although Coultrap-McQuin and Wilson note that Wharton remained with the conservative publishing house for twenty years, it is apparent that Wharton was a woman of her times in her decision to obtain the best deal for her work that she could get. 38. Lewis reads much of Wharton’s correspondence with her publishers unsympathetically. For example, he suggests that her series of complaints bordered “on paranoia” (88). In his discussion of Wharton’s move from Scribner’s to Appleton, he notes that her concern about advertising for Ethan Frome was “reminiscent of the earlier days”— behavior already dismissed by Lewis as evidence of her ill health (311). He suggests that Wharton’s decision to have Appleton publish The Reef was motivated by a desire for more money, quoting from her letter to Scribner’s in which she claims they had made a “very high offer for it” (Lewis, Wharton 312). It also seems possible to view Wharton’s concern over the marketing of her books and her effort to take the best offer as evidence of her business acumen. In her biography of Edith Wharton, Hermione Lee suggests that there were three major problems—“each with arguments to be made on both sides” (422). Lee reports that Wharton was unhappy with the marketing of her books and her publishers were worried that she was working on three books at the time. But Lee believes that the biggest problem had to do with the serialization and publication of her books. If Wharton chose to serialize a novel in another magazine besides the one owned by the publisher, the publisher still insisted on the book. Lee says, “It was as much on the tension between serialization and book publication, as on sales, that the Wharton-Scribner relationship foundered” (423). 39. Louis Auchincloss in Edith Wharton cites the serialization of The Glimpses of the Moon in Pictorial Review as “the clue to the author’s lapse of style and taste” (169). He finds further evidence of Wharton’s loss of aesthetic standards in the “mawkish jacket” of the book edition published by Appleton (169). The implicit and unexamined cor- relation between a rise in public popularity and good business strategies and the decline in artistic value is commonly applied to women’s writing. See Jane Tompkin’s Sensational Designs. 172 NOTES

40. In a letter to Bernard Berenson in 1917, she says, “And, oh, how it does agreeably titillate the author’s vanity to have his pet phrases quoted to him!” She footnotes the masculine pronoun as follows: “You see I’m getting a little confused about my sex! A form of meg- alomania” (Lewis, Letters 398–99). 41. Elsa Nettels in “Language and Convention in Wharton’s Hieroglyphic World” located in her work Language and Gender in American Fiction explores Wharton’s interest in language, class, social codes, and gender. Nettels argues that language is powerful “in protecting the social order,” class divisions, and even generations (99). Even more importantly, however, language most often gives men power. She notes, “Female characters rarely objectify men in similes or metaphors but male characters habitually perceive women in the centuries-old figures” (116). For Nettels, though, both men and women are defined by social roles and “concepts of gender too powerful for individual characters of either sex to escape” (118). 42. Barbara Hochman in “The Rewards of Representation: Edith Wharton, Lily Bart and the Writer/Reader Interchange” explores the contrasting relationships to narrative between author and protagonist in The Awakening and The House of Mirth. Defining both texts as naturalistic, Hochman claims that naturalism enables Chopin and Wharton to seek “authorial status beyond the confines of ‘women’s’ writing” (212). As I do, Hochman believes that Wharton’s very success as a writer distinguishes her narrative authority from her protagonist’s failure to control narrative. 43. Wharton’s letters and autobiography reveal her appreciation of an ironic perspective on self and world. In 1921, she wrote to Gaillard Lapsley about a review by Edmund Wilson on The Age of Innocence: “He speaks words that are as balm to me, for it has dawned upon him that perhaps satire is my weapon” (Lewis, Letters 444). In A Backward Glance she writes “that it is . . . the ironic sense of the pity and mystery of things which have always created the closest tie between myself and my friends” (158).

Chapter  Competing Discourses and the Word in THE HOUSE OF MIRTH 1. Both Cynthia Griffin Wolff in A Feast of Words and Candace Waid in Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld discuss Wharton’s treatment of women, art, and writing in her earliest short stories and novella, The Touchstone but as Waid notes The House of Mirth “represents Wharton’s first sustained interrogation of the relation between women and writing” (17). 2. For a complex analysis of Wharton’s critique of her society, see Travis Foster’s “Ascendant Obtuseness and Aesthetic Perception in The House of Mirth.” He argues that Percy Gryce (a character rarely discussed by NOTES 173

critics) reveals a “doubled yet uncritical consciousness” that allows him to fantasize being seen by others as his own version of the “ideal self” (1). His lack of insight—a deliberate obtuseness—is set alongside Lily’s “permanent double consciousness” that “prevents her from seeing any version of herself that is not mediated through another” (2). (Later in this chapter I make the same point about Lily.) Foster concludes that Wharton’s novel “doubles the object of its inquiry” to interrogate Old New York Society as Wharton represents it and as it “(mis)represents itself” in a kind of willful obtuseness (6). 3. The House of Mirth has received a great deal of critical attention. James Tuttleton argues that the novel “is fundamentally the story of a failure of connections, of Lily Bart’s failure to get into relation with an order of cultural values superior to the goal of worldly pleasure pursued by fashionable haute monde” (124–25). Gary Lindberg demonstrates how “agents of social power” work to “hasten the errant individual back into his communal place” (46). He argues that Lily is unable to escape the constraints of her community and class because these forces have so shaped her perceptions that “Lily, for all her dissatisfied dreaming, had never really conceived the possibility of revolving around a different center” (54). Cynthia Griffin Wolff sees the novel as an “attack . . . [on] all those vanities of a society whose moral failures are captured in its devastating impact the lives of women” (Feast 110). She argues that Wharton’s decision to have Lily die “implies a judgment upon the elements of femininity that Lily embodies: they are not viable, not worth preserving” (Feast 136). Wolff returns to The House of Mirth twenty years later in “Lily Bart and the Drama of Femininity.” In the second essay, Wolff traces connections between Edwardian drama, the narrative structure of the novel, and Lily’s “performance” of the ideal woman. Wolff claims that Wharton’s goal is to critique the “gendered propaganda” of theater and life. I am convinced by Wolff’s argument and, in this study, explore the roles of stagecraft and female performance in The Glimpses of the Moon. Finally, there are a number of excellent critical texts that provide a good starting point for a study of the novel. One particularly useful work is “The House of Mirth”: A Novel of Admonition by Linda Wagner-Martin. This Twayne Reader’s Companion locates the novel within its historical context, surveys its reception, and offers some of the earliest discussion on Selden as a problematic narrator, the multilayered narrative structure, and the connections between Lily’s artistic desires and Wharton’s efforts to establish a writing career. See also a critical edition of The House of Mirth edited by Shari Benstock. The five critical essays cover many of the most central arguments about the novel including Wharton’s deconstruction of Selden as the traditional sentimental hero; themes of capitalism, consumption, and gender; female subjectivity; and the challenges of authorship by Wharton. Finally, Carol J. Singley’s Edith Wharton’s 174 NOTES

‘The House of Mirth’: A Casebook collects eleven of the most important essays published on the novel as well as two short excerpts from Wharton on writing and The House of Mirth. 4. Waid’s treatment of The House of Mirth in her 1991 study is one of the first works to focus on Wharton’s use of Lily Bart as a representation of “the predicament of the woman artist” (17). But Waid explores in some detail Lily’s position as a double to Bertha Dorset—a dangerous “scripter of scenes in which Lily Bart is cast as a character” (23). While my analysis reaches some of the same conclusions about Lily’s place outside writing, I am also interested in exploring consequences within the text of Wharton’s effort to author a narrative about a woman’s ultimate failure to tell her story. 5. David Holbrook in Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man sees Selden as failing Lily, although he suggests, “Each lets the other down, at moments of crisis—out of emotional impotence” (36). In his careful study of a series of Wharton novels, Holbrook sees a pattern of male figures who fail. He links these failed males to Wharton’s attachment to her father. He argues that the relationship may or may not have been incestuous but that certainly the closeness (even if largely in Wharton’s fantasies) convinced her that no man (who was not a father figure) would satisfy; the female protagonists are doomed to seek out men who let them down. In general, Holbrook reads the male protagonists more sympathetically and the female protagonists less sympathetically than I do. 6. Mary Louise Pratt in Toward a Speech Act Theory defines literary works as “display texts” in which the speaker is “understood to be displaying an experience” in which speaker and reader “contemplate, explore, interpret, and evaluate, seeking pleasure and interpretive consensus” (143, 140). Claiming that literary works can be treated as “discourse acts” whose purpose is to represent the world, Pratt suggests that literary “utterances” can be analyzed similarly to natural narratives (143). Furthermore, she notes that certain kinds of literature distinguish between a “fictional speaker” and “its real-world speaker, the author” (173). According to Pratt, readers of such texts must “atten[d] to at least two utterances at once—the author’s display text and the fictional speaker’s discourse” (174). I am arguing that The House of Mirth should be examined at two discursive levels: Lawrence Selden’s narrative construction of Lily (and Lily’s response to his story of her) and Wharton’s discourse on Selden as author. 7. Wharton writes to Dr. Morgan Dix, rector of Trinity Church in New York, in 1905, “I could not do anything if I did not think seriously of my trade; & the more I have considered it, the more it has seemed to me valuable and interesting only in so far as it is ‘a criticism of life’ . . . . No novel worth anything can be anything but a novel ‘with a purpose,’ & if anyone who cared for the moral issue did not see in my work that I care for it, I should have no one to blame but NOTES 175

myself—or at least my inadequate means of rendering my effects” (Lewis, Letters 99). 8. In Criticism and Ideology, Terry Eagleton outlines a relationship between realism, history, ideology, and aesthetic form that provides a theoretical foundation for my analysis of Wharton’s text. Arguing that realism in a text is already governed by ideological representations of the real, Eagleton locates history in the production of a text. He says, “The ‘textual real’ is related to the historical real, not as an imaginary transposition of it, but as the product of certain signifying practices whose source and referent is, in the last instance history itself” (75). The “incoherence of the text” is meaningful in that it reveals “ideological categories . . . by the significant disarray into which it is thrown in its efforts to operate its materials in the interests of a ‘solution’ ” (86). For Eagleton, “the process of the text is the process of problem-solving” (87) and “it is therefore important to read the text, as it were, backwards—to examine the nature of its ‘problems’ in the light of its ‘solutions,’ ” even those solutions termed “acceptably unresolvable” (88). The relationship between the ideological and the aesthetic can best be figured as a kind of endless circuit “of an ‘aesthetic’ solution to ideological conflict producing in its turn an aesthetic problem which demands ideological resolution, and so on” (88). I am arguing that the structural disjunction in Wharton’s text reveals a formal “solution” to the “problem” of female narrative authority at the same time it represents the ideological conflict figured in a woman’s assertion that she writes serious literature. 9. The question of authorial agency remains a difficult issue for the contemporary critic. To state definitively either that Wharton deliberately devised a narrative structure full of gaps or that Wharton’s conflicted narrative structure unwittingly reveals competing ideologies regarding women’s writing is neither possible nor desirable. The most accurate assertion is probably that Wharton is doing both. Writers do make decisions about point of view, choice of language, development of character, and narrative structure at the same time they remain caught within their own cultural ideologies and personal interior drama. That Wharton herself was aware of the tensions within her narrative is indicated by a letter to her editor, William Crary Brownell, in 1905 shortly before the book was published. She says, “I was pleased with bits myself; but as I go over the proofs the whole thing strikes me as so loosely built; with so many dangling threads, & cul-de-sacs, & long dusty stretches, that I had reached the point of wondering how I had ever dared to try my hand at a long thing—So your seeing a certain amount of architecture in it rejoices me above everything—my theory of what the novel ought to be is so exorbitant, that I am always reminded of Daudet’s ‘Je reve d’un aigle, j’accouche d’un colibri’ ” (Letters 94–95). 176 NOTES

10. Wolfgang Iser in examining the relationship between text and reader notes that the “act of reading is . . . the transformation of the author’s signals” (3). Because the literary text is a response to, rather than a representation of, the world, Iser says that this lack of identification creates “a certain amount of indeterminacy” which must be “coun- terbalanced . . . in terms of the individual experience of the reader” (8,9). For Iser, multiple viewpoints in a text create further gaps that must be “bridged” by the reader (11). Since the author “outlines . . . the possible alternatives for the reader . . . [the] structure . . . involves the reader . . . and yet, at the same time, it controls the reader’s evalua- tion” (20). I am arguing that Wharton’s novel invites such reader participation. 11. Wharton’s interest in the process of reading and the role of the reader has interested a number of critics. Barbara Hochman in “The Awakening and The House of Mirth: Plotting Experience and Experiencing the Plot” notes the motif of reading in Wharton’s novel and concludes that Wharton’s belief in the fruitful interchange between her own readers and her text enables her to tell the full story. For a fascinating analysis of reading practices, Wharton’s mass audience of middle-class readers, and The House of Mirth, see Amy Blair’s “Misreading The House of Mirth.” 12. Maureen Howard in “The Bachelor and the Baby: The House of Mirth” also argues that Wharton uses the genres of the novel of manners and melodrama to disrupt reader expectations. Howard claims that Wharton’s evocation of contemporary notions of Darwinism reveals Lily’s subjection to a heritage and tradition that dooms her. Wharton’s refusal to apply the comforting ending associated with the novel of manners and melodrama underscores Lily’s lack of will. For Howard, Wharton, on the other hand, “willed” herself into “the role of professional writer” (146). 13. Linda Wagner-Martin’s, ‘The House of Mirth’: A Novel of Admonition reaches some of the same conclusions I do in this chapter. I am especially indebted to her reading of Selden as a problematic “hero,” her understanding of Wharton’s creation of a subtext that critiques the “fictions” of a happy marriage (54), and the role of the reader in the construction of alternative meaning. 14. In “Point of View and Narrative Technique in the Fiction of Edith Wharton,” Michael J. O’Neal makes a similar argument about the use of Selden as a “reflecting mind” (277). Offering a linguistic analysis of Selden’s voice, he demonstrates the way Wharton “underlines the extent to which a woman in her social position exists in the semantic position taken by an observer” (274). Although O’Neil recognizes an “amused” spectator role played by Selden and Wharton’s ironic view of Selden, he determines that Selden’s perspective is equated with the “author-narrator’s ideological perspective” (276). I argue that Selden does not speak for Wharton in any sense. Lori NOTES 177

Merish in “Engendering Naturalism: Narrative Form and Commodity Spectacle in U.S. Naturalist Fiction” is more critical of Selden’s seeing of Lily. For Merish, Lily as both consumer and commodity draws Selden’s “controlling gaze” (250). She concludes that Wharton finally “foregrounds and ironizes his will-to-possession” (260). 15. In “The Conspicuous Wasting of Lily Bart,” Ruth Bernard Yeazell discusses Selden’s spectator status and Lily’s display of self throughout the novel. Applying Thorstein Veblen’s sociological study of the leisure class to the novel, Yeazell shows how “conspicuous waste” lies at the heart of Old New York society. She concludes that Wharton both satirizes this society and chronicles “the faltering pulse of resistance . . . to the bitter end” of her heroine (37). 16. Carolyn L. Karcher in “Male Vision and Female Revision in James’ The Wings of the Dove and Wharton’s The House of Mirth” also recognizes the problems of Selden’s authorship in the opening and closing scenes in the novel: “The gap between his perceptions and those Wharton allows us through a direct view of Lily makes for a devastating indictment of the male observer-author’s myopia and sanctimo- niousness” (237). 17. In “The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton’s House of Mirth,” Elaine Showalter traces certain of these “male myths and fantasies” (139–40). 18. Wolff has noted Lily’s function as a visual art object. Examining portrait and mural art of the period that for Wolff picture the woman “as an essentially ‘artistic’ creation” which idealizes the feminine, she suggests that “women like Lily . . . might be lured by the seductive confu- sion between representation and reality and come to view themselves as objects—to be admired, to be sustained in their beauty” (115). She also points to Selden’s dual role as “connoisseur” and critic. Nancy Von Rosk in “Spectacular Homes and Pastoral Theaters” argues that Lily’s display of the self is a kind of performance of gender using pastoral nature as stage. Von Rosk believes that Lily’s final decline should be set against the public urban spaces of the nineteenth century. 19. Judith Fetterley has explored the economic implications of the objec- tification of Lily’s beauty in terms of her society and her relationship to Selden, noting that “the beautiful object, presumably so valuable, is in fact peculiarly valueless” (202). According to Fetterley, the paradox for Lily is that she cannot exist as “ornamental without a solid economic base; yet all of Lily’s attempts to acquire such a base are blocked . . . precisely because of her nature as beautiful object” (202). Emily Orlando in “Picturing Lily” in Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors believes that Lily does find “power in art” even though the art is constructed via her body as in the tableau vivant of the Reynolds portrait (85). Orlando concedes that Lily’s ultimate refusal to sell herself or her values leads to a powerless “final presentation as a still life” (105). 178 NOTES

20. Recent critics have extended the scope of Ammons’ argument. Wai- Chee Dimock in “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth” examines how “the power of the marketplace” invades all social interchange (783). She suggests that men and women suffer from this “commodification of social intercourse” (784). Dale Bauer in Feminist Dialogics argues that Lily has to “market herself as a piece of art in an acquisitive culture” (93). Wendy M. DuBow in “The Businesswoman in Edith Wharton” argues that Lily Bart and Undine Spragg in Custom of the Country are both aware that the business of a lady is the acquisition of a husband. Unlike Undine, however, Lily finally rejects this role and fails to achieve her goal. DuBow points out that eight years later, Wharton will create a protagonist who is a consummate businesswoman. Although Undine is seen as unlike- able by most readers, she emerges as an “admirable protagonist” in terms of her business acumen and success in looking after herself (17). Lois Tyson says in “Beyond Morality” that Lily’s participation in commodity culture through the marketing of herself as an oject d’art reveals her desire to transcend the “existential inwardness.” See also “Divided Selves and the Market Society: Politics and Psychology in The House of Mirth” by Robert Shulman. For a very recent perspective on commodity culture and consumerism, see “Shopping for Survival: Conspicuous Consumerism in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Ellen Glasgow’s The Wheel of Life” by Anne-Marie Evans. Arguing that Glasgow’s novel can be read as a direct response to Wharton’s text, Evans traces the ways in which Lily’s necessary shopping further traps her in her social role. On the other hand, Glasgow’s protagonist, “despite [her] blatant embrace of cathartic consumer practice” comes to a significantly more positive ending (14). Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors, edited by Gary Totten, contains a number of essays focusing on The House of Mirth in terms of material culture and turn-of- the-century changing practices of commercialization, commodification, and consumption. 21. Increasingly, critics are turning to the figure of Rosedale. In “The ‘Perfect Jew’ and The House of Mirth,” Irene C. Goldman-Price places Rosedale within the growing overt anti-Semitism of New York society at the end of the nineteenth century. She sees Rosedale as more fully developed than a stereotype but a character used by Wharton who can raise taboo topics such as the economic structures that undergird Lily’s society. David Herman in “Economies of Essence in The House of Mirth,” shows how Rosedale’s identity as Other is a culturally and socially constructed “essence” that reveals the “already- commodified character” of Old New York society (7). He, too, takes note that Lily and Rosedale share an understanding of the economic elements that support society even if Lily and her community refuse to discuss it. Meredith’s Goldsmith’s essay “The Year of the Rose” NOTES 179

asserts that Rosedale is a “far more complex and contradictory representation” of the Jewish male than previously recognized by critics. Goldsmith notes that just as Lily is both drawn to and repelled by Rosedale, Wharton is deeply ambivalent about the encroaching presence of the Jewish community. 22. Jennifer Shepherd in “Fashioning an Aesthetics of Consumption” in Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors shows how Wharton and Lily make use of commodity aesthetics to distinguish high class status; Rosedale is suspect, then, in terms of his race and class. Nevertheless, according to Shepherd, “His patient attempts at sartorial camouflage and assimilation” may “pay off” over time (154). She concludes that Rosedale’s potential for success might be seen as “Wharton . . . script- ing the possibility of success for herself in the increasingly commer- cialized and competitive sphere of turn-of-the-century American letters” (157). 23. Dimock says that Lily is “the only one who pays routinely and scru- pulously” in her society. She argues that Lily’s protection of Bertha out of love for Selden represents “an act of wanton expenditure” (789). 24. Showalter sees Rosedale as offering the “hope of continuity, rooted- ness, and relatedness that Lily finally comes to see as the central meaning of life” (“Death of a Lady” 142). 25. See “Disowning ‘Personality’: Privacy and Subjectivity in The House of Mirth” by William E. Moddelmog for an analysis of the consequences of Lily’s inability to see herself apart from Selden’s perspective. According to Moddelmog, Lily’s failure to control her own story and the stories about her make her “true” self unknowable to Selden, Lily herself, and the readers of Wharton’s novel. 26. Roslyn Dixon in “Reflecting Vision in The House of Mirth” makes the same criticism. She points out that while Selden represents “an ethical perspective on Lily’s expedient decision” (213), he does not “follow his own philosophy” (214). 27. Carol Sapora Baker in “Female doubling: The other Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth” closely examines the doubled self of Wharton—art object vs. real woman, the outer self constructed by Wharton vs. the inner self called forth by Selden. As I do, Sapora extends the specific discussion about Lily’s inability to define an independent self to the wider context of Wharton and women writers at the end of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Benjamin D. Carson in “ ‘That Doubled Vision’ ” sees the doubled vision of Lily and Wharton as Wharton’s reflection of “the power” and the “failure” of gender ideology within Wharton’s culture. 28. Diverse and contradictory critical responses to Lawrence Selden are nearly as prevalent as analyses of Lily Bart. In “ ‘Natural Magic’: Irony as a Unifying Strategy in The House of Mirth,” Carolyn Miller similarly sees the danger Selden’s perspective holds for Lily and Wharton’s 180 NOTES

ironic treatment of his “pose of superiority” but believes he is essentially a “decent man” (85). Joseph Coulombe in “Man or Mannequin” argues for an even more positive reading of this character. Noting that early reviewers of the novel debated whether Selden was admirable or culpably unsympathetic to Lily, Coulombe points out that critics in the first part of the last century found him “intriguingly complicated” but a “positive alternative” for Lily (3). But he finds most recent criticism to be nearly entirely negative. Within this context, Coulombe, argues that Selden, although not perfect, represents a new kind of man who does offer Lily a way out. He concludes that Wharton in Selden “redefines what it means to be a man in a competitive money- driven society” (8). I think Wharton’s critique of Selden is pervasive and unambiguous. 29. Hermione Lee also notes that “Lily liked to think of herself as a reader, and one of the things that attracts her to Selden is that he makes her a better one” (194). 30. Dale Bauer notes, “The point of view Lily shares with Selden does not allow her freedom to speak” (122). 31. In “The House of Mirth and Edith Wharton’s ‘Beyond!’ ” Janet Gabler-Hover and Kathleen Plate use theoretical perspectives drawn from Nietzsche and Julia Kristeva to demonstrate Lily’s subjection to Selden’s authority in terms of language. 32. Shari Benstock in her essay “ ‘The word which made all clear’: The Silent Close of The House of Mirth” (located in Famous Last Words edited by Alison Booth) argues that Lily’s death and Wharton’s decision to remain silent about the “word” enabled her to “represent the tensions between personal desires and public codes of behavior” (245). Making a larger argument about Wharton’s belief in “the ethical referentiality of art,” Benstock says that Wharton structures her ending to demonstrate that there is “no moment for the word that Selden and Lily might whisper to each other . . . separate from the social customs” of their world (249, 245). Benstock claims that Wharton maintains her insistent critique of her society to the end of her career despite the pressure of readers and the need to sell her work to support herself. Mirth was one of a number of novels that was seri- alized before publication as a book. 33. Showalter points out that Lily, the object of “male discourse” throughout the novel, “dies with the word of self-definition on her lips” (“Death of a Lady” 136, 137). Bauer in Female Dialogics suggests “there is no word . . . that could center her life” (126). For a radically differing reading of the “word,” see Donald Pizer’s “The Naturalism of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.” Pizer believes that Lily is fully aware of her subjection to the forces of capitalism and the patriarchy. Nevertheless, Pizer argues that Selden’s belief in the “word” signals a faith that transcends the destructive forces of naturalism. NOTES 181

34. Dale Bauer argues that Selden finds Lily’s suicide “unreadable, because he cannot—or will not—interpret this gesture as his own failure” (Female Dialogics 127). I agree that Selden does not find himself guilty but would argue that Selden, nevertheless, makes an interpretation. 35. Tricia M. Farwell in Love and Death in Edith Wharton’s Fiction argues that Selden can attain ideal “love as a spiritual union” only after Lily has died (24). Farwell traces Wharton’s shifting views about love through a set of novels that bridge Wharton’s career. She believes that at the point of writing The House of Mirth, Wharton had conceived of ideal love “as a spiritual union beyond the physical” (10). By the time Wharton was working on The Reef, Farwell sees Wharton moving toward embracing the notion of physical love although the conflict between the physical and the spiritual, between life and death in love, remains. Farwell sees this tentative acceptance of the physical extended in Summer as “Wharton presents a picture of an uneasy acceptance of the physical love she found as an inferior love in earlier works” (106). Although Farwell ends her analysis with The Buccaneers, her analysis of The Glimpses of the Moon is more central to my study. Farwell concludes that Wharton creates a final balance between the physical and the spiritual forms of love—a love of equals—between the two protagonists. Farwell is clearly not reading any irony in The Glimpses of the Moon and seems less interested in Wharton’s critique of relationships between men and women in general.

Chapter  The Unravelling of Story in THE REEF 1. I do not accept here an inherent binary opposition between masculine voice and female silence. Post-structuralist feminist theory use- fully argues that the very terms “man” and “woman”—like male and female voice—are discursive constructions. But it is important that Wharton, writing at the turn of century within a culture where notions of gender difference were under intense discussion, represents the struggle for control over discourse in oppositional gendered terms. Wharton’s choice reflects ideological tensions over gender roles and her continuing interest in women’s efforts to take up authorship. 2. Cynthia Griffin Wolff finds The Reef to be one of Wharton’s less successful novels because of its treatment of sexual passion. She believes that although the story introduces “the immensely convoluted, many-sided problem of sexuality,” it fails to resolve these “compo- nents” into a “coherently focused image” (Feast 219). In Wolff’s view, Wharton achieves this coherent vision only in The Age of Innocence. This chapter attempts to show how the “incoherence” of the narrative enables Wharton to critique more fully sexual inequal- ity of gender roles and narrative power. 182 NOTES

3. Kathy Hadley’s In the Interstices of the Tale: Edith Wharton’s Narrative Strategies also signals the importance of Wharton’s structuring of her novels to create a layered text. In her discussion of The Reef, Hadley takes note of George Darrow’s attempts to reduce Anna and Sophy to stereotypes, Sophy’s love for Darrow despite his ill treatment of her, and the dilemma facing Anna at the end as she struggles with her doubts about Darrow and Sophy and her desires to act on the passion she feels for Darrow. Although The Reef is the only novel we both treat, I share Hadley’s interest in Wharton’s narrative structures, Wharton’s use of irony, and the presence of underlying narratives that undermine the surface tale. Hadley’s book is one of the first works of criticism to call for a re-reading of Wharton’s novels in terms of the gaps or “interstices” through which an alternative story emerges. 4. R.W.B. Lewis calls it “possibly the most autobiographical work of fiction she ever wrote” (Lewis, Wharton 326). In one of the few essays published on this novel, Jean Gooder also claims “The Reef is charged with personal memories” (44). In “Unlocking Edith Wharton: An Introduction to The Reef,” Gooder traces connections between Wharton’s relationship to Fullerton and her protagonist’s dilemma in the narrative. See also James Tuttleton’s “Mocking Fate: Romantic Idealism in Edith Wharton’s The Reef.” Gloria Erlich in Edith Wharton’s Sexual Education finds traces of Edith Wharton’s experiences with Fullerton throughout the novel. She argues that Wharton visits her earlier sexual ignorance in The Reef in Anna Leath while defining Sophy as the “erotic principle” (111). She argues that in spite of “humiliation and anguish” over Fullerton, Wharton “took away the valuable prize of the passion experience” (115). Hermione Lee offers a particularly detailed account of Wharton’s relationship with Fullerton in her biography; she agrees with Lewis that The Reef is autobiographical. Lee argues, “The Reef was an extraordinarily candid expression of private feelings about her desires and sexual knowledge, immaculately disguised by the novel’s formal control and careful dramatic design” (354). 5. James W. Gargano also comments on Wharton’s “technical skill” in mediating the reader’s perception of Anna through Darrow in “Edith Wharton’s The Reef: The Genteel Woman’s Quest for Knowledge” (42). 6. For a reading that claims “to offer a . . . nuanced description of . . . [Darrow’s] motivations” see Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Shame by Lev Raphael. Raphael suggests that Darrow is motivated by humiliation (by Anna) rather than being insensitive in his treatment of Sophy. 7. Later the text will contrast this essentially narcissistic paradigm to Anna’s alienation from self. Anna also gains an identity through the other but the source and effect of what is seen are very different. NOTES 183

Anna finds herself reflected in Darrow but her awareness is filtered through her sense of Darrow’s understanding of who she is. Anna sees herself as a woman viewed and thus the movement is triangular. The potential for narratively constructing the self with any measure of independence is clearly limited in this situation. 8. One of the major arguments Wolff makes throughout A Feast of Words is the repressive effect of family and culture on Wharton as she grew up and assumed the role of lady. In her discussion of The Reef, Wolff calls attention to Wharton’s cultural and class ideology that said it “was not ‘nice’ for girls to have feelings” of either a sexual or “assertive” nature (207). 9. The irony is that throughout the narrative, Darrow refuses to hear Anna as she struggles to define herself, to express her desire, to engage him in talk. 10. See Jean Gooder in “Unlocking Edith Wharton.” Tuttleton also discusses the “geometric” precision of the novel that he believes is Wharton’s attempt at “harnessing . . . volatile sexual feelings” (“Mocking Fate” 460). Tuttleton takes the allusion to Greek tragedy further, noting that Darrow and Sophy see Oedipe in Paris. It seems clear that Wharton’s text is designed to echo Greek drama in important ways. Fraser Leath, for example, is described as a Sphinx. But more importantly, Anna’s drive to search out the “truth” and the tragic consequences of her discovery that nearly destroy her hint at a subtle allusion to the Oedipus tale. In a letter to Wharton, Henry James calls the novel a “Drama” and repeatedly compares it to the work of Racine— that most classical and Greek of French playwrights (239). 11. Gooder also recognizes the heightened tensions in the narrative arguing that the “close organization of the novel compels attention to the emotional discrepancies at its heart—discrepancies between what seems and what is, between speech and silence, truth and lies, courage and fear” (48). 12. Blake Nevius complains in Edith Wharton that limiting the point of view to these characters makes it difficult to discern Wharton’s specific attitude toward Darrow and her general moral perspective on the narrative. I find his reading of Darrow too sympathetic given the novel’s careful portrayal of Darrow’s self-absorption from the very beginning. The counterpoint between Darrow’s easy appropriation of people and things around him and Anna’s intense struggle to make sense of the world emerges as a useful strategy for critiquing Darrow and garnering sympathy for Anna. 13. Thus Anna conceives of herself as something to be seen. Her identity is not constructed through language but through her imagined perception of Darrow’s seeing her “as she was” (124). 14. The characterization of Sophy Viner has evoked contradictory critical responses. Wolff recognizes the narrative effectiveness of not show- ing Sophy’s character “directly” but later complains that Wharton 184 NOTES

never reveals “the essence” of this character (Feast 210, 218). Carol Wershoven in The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton sees Sophy as a courageous and generous “free spirit” whose silent presence in the text is a “catalyst for Anna and Darrow to examine their stereotypical ways of thought” about women (98). Moira Maynard in “Moral Integrity in The Reef: Justice to Anna Leath” offers a more tempered view—noting that although this character represents the impulse to face life unflinchingly, she maintains a curi- ous blindness toward Darrow’s shortcomings. 15. Wershoven sees Sophy’s escape from the “artificial and simplistic categories” employed by Darrow and Anna as evidence of her emerging “unscathed” from her experience (107). I read Wharton’s text as much less positive about Sophy’s fate in the hands of Mrs. Murrett. 16. For an intriguing discussion of Wharton’s use of the fairytale motif in the novel, see Elizabeth Ammons’s “Fairy-Tale Love and The Reef.” 17. Critics read the final scene as both evidence for Anna’s probable rejection of Darrow in an effort to preserve her ideal of romantic love and her enforced acceptance of the harsh reality that love rarely saves one. Compare Tuttleton’s contention in “Mocking Fate” that Anna “holds to a romantic ideal of love and emotional and sexual fulfill- ment . . . unsullied by desecrating compromises” (471) to Ammons’ conclusion in “Fairy-Tale Love” that the conclusion reveals as “fantasy” the female dream of “deliverance” for both Anna and Sophy (628). The existence of so much critical debate underscores the effectiveness of Wharton’s strategic authorial silence. As James Gargano suggests, the narrative ends “as vision, not as explicit moral” (48). 18. Gooder also believes that Anna will never free herself: “She cannot accept Darrow and she cannot bring herself to reject him” (51). 19. The painful representation of Anna’s indecisiveness has been noted by Wharton’s readers from the outset as Gooder points out. Henry James wrote, “I am not sure her oscillations are not beyond our nota- tion” (qtd in Millicent Bell, Edith Wharton and Henry James). Critics continue to draw attention to A nna’s frenzied state of mind. Maynard, for example, argues that although such indecision “exasperates readers,” it reveals Anna’s desperate efforts to find a “communal” justice that recognizes her needs as well as her responsibilities toward Effie and Owen (290). Margaret McDowell in Edith Wharton argues that the “psychic interplay between Darrow and Anna and Anna’s anguished introspection . . . in Book 5 account . . . for the richness of the novel” (40).

Chapter  Seduction and Language in SUMMER 1. Cynthia Griffin Wolff calls it “the most erotic fiction that Wharton ever published” in A Feast of Words (267). In the introduction of the NOTES 185

Harper and Row edition of Summer, Wolff describes the novel as a Bildungsroman in which “sexual passion” is seen as “an essential component of that process” of growth into adulthood (x). Kathy Grafton in “Degradation and Forbidden Love in Edith Wharton’s Summer” also reads the novel as the story of Charity’s sexual matu- ration. Using Freudian theory, Grafton examines the ways in which Lucius Harney’s and Charity Royall’s sexual relationship both represents and finally moves beyond masculine degradation of the object of desire and female fascination with the forbidden. Grafton says that Charity’s marriage to lawyer Royall is evidence of “own[ing] her power” and the development of “ease with her sexuality” (366). Wharton was aware that she had written a novel about sex that challenged the prudishness of her public, complaining in a letter to Rutger Jewett about the rejection of The Old Maid by two mass market magazines. First recalling The Scarlet Letter and Adam Bede as “classics” that deal with such material, she goes on to ask, “And how about my own Summer?” (Lewis, Letters 443). 2. In Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics, Dale Bauer places Wharton’s novel within contemporary cultural debates about eugenics, family studies, and reproductive policies (28). Noting Charity Royall’s Mountain heritage, she suggests that Charity’s decision to have her baby points to Wharton’s resistance to simplistic assumptions about degeneracy and racial purity being made in the early part of the twentieth century. “Charity’s deliberation in exercising her own sexuality” sets her apart from the “bad mothering” as defined by North Dormer (37). Charity chooses the person with whom she has sex, the man she will marry, and where she will live as a mother and, thus, defines herself. 3. Jean Frantz Blackall in “Charity at the Window: Narrative Technique in Edith Wharton’s Summer” considers the challenge Wharton faces in giving narrative voice to the uneducated and wordless Charity. Backall concludes that Charity’s highly visual appreciation of the physical world and Wharton’s references to windows and mirrors provide a kind of frame for the novel that allows Wharton to speak through her protagonist. 4. In “The Desolation of Charity Royall,” Linda Morante explores the “wasteland imagery” of “the culturally destitute New England hill town” (247). She sees it as a “central key to character analysis” (247). 5. Wharton’s treatment of the rural New Englanders on the Mountain is complicated. She considered both Ethan Frome and Summer to be realistic portrayals of “life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England” (Backward 293). In her discussion of Summer in Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, Candace Waid also takes note of Wharton’s insistence on the “harsh and biting 186 NOTES

realism” of the Berkshire novels (97). But the loaded imagery suggests less an accurate representation of poverty and barren lives and more a symbolic picturing of anarchy. The early references to an animal-like existence and the later vivid scenes of a thoroughly degraded life portray a nightmare world in which social bonds simply do not exist. In defining the Mountain people as primitive and animalistic, Wharton draws on an evolutionary model. In a letter to Sara Norton, Wharton declares that Darwin “was one of the formative influences of my youth” (Lewis, Letters 136). But the narrative also hints that civilized life in the town could become equally barbaric. Later in the novel, Charity will flee to the Mountain hoping to escape “the harsh code of the village” that makes scapegoats of those individuals who fail to conform (238). The feral quality of the doctor/abortionist in Nettleton with the false teeth and “murderous smile” suggests a primitive lawlessness at the heart of civilization. Furthermore, two years later, Wharton will describe her own society as a community of savages. The Age of Innocence is an anthropological study of New York society in which civilized conventions are imaged as primitive ritual. The Darwinian sociological analysis of her own community in the subsequent novel thus becomes a kind of extension of Summer. Clearly, for Wharton, the darkly primitive, which both fascinates and horrifies, functions most effectively as a metaphor for powerful emo- tions and drives that exist inside and outside the human community. Given Wharton’s nuanced treatment of lawlessness and social bonds, it is not surprising that she and Joseph Conrad admired each other’s work. Conrad especially liked Summer (Lewis, Wharton 398). Stuart Hutchinson in “Unpacking Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome and Summer,” dismisses Wharton’s treatment of Charity, lawyer Royall, and the mountain community as written in a “spirit of reductiveness” in Wharton (232). Although I agree that Wharton’s insistence on the realism of characters is not entirely valid, I remain convinced that the metaphoric power of the mountain people is deliberate and significant. In “Ethan Frome and Charity Royall: Edith Wharton’s Noble Savages,” Pascha Anrece Stevenson argues that Charity is Wharton’s representation of Rousseau’s noble savage. Although Stevenson sees Wharton “as a literary anthropologist” with an elitist perspective, she acknowledges the complicated and sympathetic portrayal of Charity in the light of her subjection to Lucius Harney and the “civilized” world he represents. She concludes that “civilization is no more redeemed” than the “primitive” New Englanders (427). 6. In “The Unmastered Streak: Feminist Themes in Wharton’s Summer,” John W. Crowley argues that Charity’s sexuality as “defined by men” makes her a kind of “trophy to be captured” (90) by Harney and a “form of property” to be “defend[ed] . . . from other men” by Royall (89). I find Crowley’s pessimistic reading of Charity’s entrap- ment by men more convincing than Wolff’s efforts to read the narrative NOTES 187

as a positive example of Charity’s growth into adult experiences and roles. Abby Werlock in “Whitman, Wharton, and the Sexuality in Summer” also claims that Wharton treats sexual activity as something only men can control. Tracing connections between the language in Wharton’s novel and Walt Whitman’s poetry, Werlock sees Summer as “a brilliant prose response to the masculine confidence and sexuality found in Leaves of Grass” (261). In the end, Charity is “aligned with all the powerless women in the novel” (250). 7. While Anna thinks a great deal about passion and real life, Wharton’s portrayal of Anna’s desire and sexual encounters with Darrow figure largely within the gaps of the narrative. Like romantic films of the 1930s and the 1940s, the text “fades out” on the first kiss, ensuring that the scene of romantic rapture is only imagined. 8. Waid also calls attention to the metaphoric association between the library and death. She sees Charity’s flight as a rejection of the “underworld” (123). I agree with Waid that Charity’s “inability to express . . . feelings in spoken or written words . . . is perhaps the most poignant aspect of the novel” (124). 9. In Edith Wharton, Margaret McDowell explores the negative consequences of Charity’s connection to nature that comes to represent “a fatality far stronger than she as a limited individual can cope with” (78). 10. Some critics have also constructed arguments based on Charity’s inability to use language to define herself. Rhonda Skillern in “Becoming a ‘Good’ Girl: Law, Language, and Ritual in Edith Wharton’s Summer” argues that Charity’s “resistance to the symbolic order” throughout the novel reveals her desire to inscribe female experience outside the patriarchy (119). Ultimately, she fails because “she has found no way to adequately represent it” (132). Susan L. Hall in “The Death of Love: Sexuality, Secrets, and Settings in Wharton’s Summer” also points out that Wharton’s representation of the failed love affair rests, at least in part, on “the difficulty of com- munication in language” (16). 11. Here Wharton’s use of the animal metaphor is positive. It should also be noted that Charity finds this place on the mountainside. The vitality and fecundity of Charity’s refuge contrasts with the scene of death and sterility that takes place later in the novel on the mountain- top. The text seems to establish a middle ground (literally on the side of the mountain) where the physical can be given space without run- ning amok, but no one lives here. 12. Charity is treated as a sort of book by Harney. He believes both she and the volumes need proper ventilation and sunlight. Indeed, Harney spends much of the novel “reading” Charity. 13. The detailed description sets up a kind of physical depth of field in which multiple layers of narrative intersect. The triangular mediation of the female self through masculine narrative is enacted in Wharton’s 188 NOTES

staging of the scene. Through language, the text achieves an almost cinematic style that spotlights a particular scene and gives it a physical dimension in order to “talk” about discourse. By calling attention to what is happening not through direct authorial comment but by the details of staging, Wharton’s narrative reveals a potentially sub- versive strategy that enables the author to critique her own representation. As author, Wharton trains her sight on the masculine gaze and the mediation of the female (self) identity through the male gaze. However, the multiple looks are finally controlled by the author who is, in fact, female. Wharton will exploit this “cinematic” style even more directly in The Glimpses of the Moon. 14. Lacan defines the origin of language in terms of desire, the endlessly regressive effort to articulate one’s desire, to substitute the word for the absence of what the heart most desires. In an inversion of Lacan’s psychic system, the object of this character’s desire is not material but linguistic. 15. Critical readings of Royall are divided about whether Royall should be seen as a complete villain or as an individual whose failings are somewhat mitigated in the novel. The difficulty is not lessened by Wharton’s ambiguous comment in a letter to Bernard Berenson: “I’m so particularly glad you like old man Royall. Of course, he’s the book” (Lewis, Letters 398). For two discussions of Royall’s central but dual position in the novel, see “Summer: The Double Sense of Wharton’s Title” by Christine Rose and “The Divided Conflict of Edith Wharton’s Summer” by Carol Wershoven. 16. While Waid also recognizes Charity’s “inability to compose writing: to turn flesh, feeling and experience into words or letters,” she suggests that Charity’s motherhood is not entirely tragic (124). Waid argues, “Unlike Wharton, Charity does not compose the mother by writing about her; she overcomes the threats of the murderous mother, the animal mother, and the predatory father by embodying the mother” (125). But as Waid herself goes on to say, although Wharton’s writing may be a way of psychologically containing her own mother’s power, she denies this avenue to Charity. Although Wharton provides her protagonist “with a place on earth as a mother; . . . she does not make a place for her as a poet” (125). Although Waid finds some sal- vation in Charity’s marriage, I argue that Charity’s powerlessness as a “poet” and her consequent assumption of motherhood and marriage to a man she does not love make her a thoroughly tragic figure. 17. For an intriguing analysis of Summer as a reenactment of the Demeter- Persephone myth that records “the demise of the nineteenth century woman’s community” (75) as a failed mother-daughter connection, see Josephine Donovan’s After the Fall. 18. The conflict between Harney’s story and Charity’s actual experience points to an apparent contradiction in Wharton’s text as well. Early in NOTES 189

the narrative, Wharton appears to accord Charity a kind of unvoiced poetic nobility in her responsiveness to her nature retreat on the mountainside. In many ways, the narrative works to make the reader unsympathetic to the narrowness and meagerness of life in North Dormer. But even if the text reveals Wharton’s own desire for a place that escapes the civilized and deadening constraints of community, it also represents Wharton’s inability to figure such a space. If social institutions and codes of behavior represent a sort of barbarism in their treatment of those individuals who do not conform, they also limit the anarchy and primitiveness of life. It is difficult not to read the contradictory impulses within the narrative as Wharton’s working through her own dilemma regarding lawlessness, the desire of the individual, impatience with the constrictions of society, and a valuing of responsibility to the community. Although Wharton’s affair with Fullerton by her own account liberated a self she had never known existed, her narrative rendering of the experience in Summer suggests that escape from social convention can be only temporary. For an analysis of the novel in the light of Wharton’s “real world problems,” see “Cold Ethan and ‘Hot Ethan’ ” by Cynthia Griffin Wolff (231). 19. Wharton reinforces Charity’s position as childlike—“she followed Mr. Royall passively as a tired child” (274). Later he feeds her like a child—pouring her coffee and putting the bread on her plate (269). In Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Ammons also points to the child imagery, arguing that marriage to Royall “dooms Charity Royall to perpetual daughterhood—a fate that Wharton surrounds with images of spiritual paralysis and death” (141). See also Crowley’s essay that finds “childish dependency” at the core of Charity’s relationships with both Harney and Royall (92). 20. Perhaps more than any other Wharton novel, Summer has elicited radically differing readings. Ammons and Wolff stake out the extremes in terms of reading Charity’s marriage to lawyer Royall. Wolff argues that the conclusion is “perhaps, the beginning of love” (219) and that the “novel . . . is a hymn to generativity and marriage” (Feast 293). Ammons believes the narrative provides “Wharton’s bluntest criticism of the patriarchal sexual economy” (133). She argues, “The final union between Charity and Royall is not merely depressing; it is sick” (Argument 133). See also “Life’s Empty Pack: Notes toward a Literary Daughteronomy” by Sandra Gilbert, “ ‘Seduced and Abandoned’: Convention and Reality in Edith Wharton’s Summer” by Nancy Walker, “Edith Wharton’s Summer and ‘Woman’s Fiction’ ” by Barbara White, and Verging on the Abyss by Mary Papke (131–34). Barbara Comins in “ ‘Pecking at the Host’: Transgressive Wharton” moves beyond the issue of incest to trace Wharton’s use of allegorical references to biblical stories and religion—allegory that undermines rather than points to a clear moral 190 NOTES

stance. She believes that Wharton’s transgressions reveal “Wharton’s problematic relationship to religion” (20). Erlich in Edith Wharton’s Sexual Education believes that the marriage represents Charity’s “final defeat in her struggle for autonomy” (126). She attributes agency to Charity even at the end when she chooses the “bizarre solution” of marriage over other options such as “moving out of North Dormer” (130, 129–130). Hermione Lee argues “that the ending can be read as . . . a sinister immolation of youth,” or a “realist adjustment on both sides, where Royall becomes grave and kindly . . . and Charity feels reassured and secure” (512). She concludes, “Wharton’s readers cannot agree upon the ending, because the book pulls against itself” (513) 21. Ammons points out that the connection in Charity’s mind “has its depressing logic” since “her spirit, in effect, dies” (138). 22. Again critical response is divided. Waid sees Royall as “the protective ‘father’ who insists on sheltering the ‘fatherless’ children” (114). In “Cold Ethan and ‘Hot Ethan,’ ” Wolff notes “a disquieting element of sublimated incestuous affection” but believes that the “ambiguities” point to a “final insight” in which “love must have a social component to be viable—must contain both dependency and desire” (243, 244). Ammons argues that “the incestuous nature of patriarchal marriage is the . . . subject of Summer” (Argument 133). William E. Hummel in “My ‘Dull-witted Enemy’: Symbolic Violence and Abject Maleness in Edith Wharton’s Summer” claims that Royall exerts symbolic violence over Charity while “present[ing] himself as a crumbling icon of American manhood” (224 ). Veronica Makowsky and Lynn Z. Bloom see Royall much more positively in “Edith Wharton’s Tentative Embrace of Charity.” Noting Wharton’s “defense against her discom- fort at class and artistic exploitation” through her critique of Harney, they claim that Royall emerges as the one character truly capable of charity in the novel (224). Julie Olin-Ammentorp in Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War reads Royall, Charity’s final predicament, and the novel’s ending in a largely positive way. Placing the writing of the novel in the middle of World War I, Olin-Ammentorp suggests that writing Summer provided an escape for Wharton and a possible respite for the reader from the grim horrors of the war. She finds much evidence of the effects of the war on Wharton as she was writing her novel. She points out the refugee-like status of the Mountain folk and the astonishingly gruesome description of Charity’s mother’s death. Nevertheless, Olin-Ammentorp argues that “the menaces threatening Charity are relatively minor” and at least “man- ageable” compared to the horrors of war (63, 64). She concludes that Charity’s marriage reveals the presence of love, however “bittersweet [its] tone” (65). Although I read the novel and its ending in a radically differing way, Olin-Ammentorp’s argument is persuasive within the context of Wharton’s wartime writings. NOTES 191

23. Waid reads the pin “as a talisman, as a text, as a sign that points to an author” (118). She suggests that the pin “is a symbol that tells its own story” (116) and ultimately becomes a “sign of protected motherhood” (117).

Chapter  Gender and Performance in THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON

1. Appleton paid Wharton $45,000 that year in serialization fees and royalties (Lewis, Wharton 444). The story also attracted the interest of the developing film industry; Paramount purchased the film rights for $15,000 (Benstock 370). The silent film, starring Bebe Daniels, John Powell, Charles Gerrard, and Nita Naldi and directed by Allan Dwan, was released in 1923. 2. For a summary of reviews of Wharton’s novels by her contemporaries, see Edith Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography by Kristin O. Lauer and Margaret P. Murray. 3. Critics have routinely categorized The Glimpses of the Moon as an inferior novel. Cynthia Griffin Wolff argues in A Feast of Words that “Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are almost caricatures of Selden and Lily Bart” and that Wharton had apparently “begun . . . to borrow from her own earlier work” (346). Although Gary Lindberg in Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners notes that it was written at the same time as The Age of Innocence, he believes it “bears surprisingly little stylistic resemblance” (142) and represents one of the “later novels of manners” that “are simply not good books” (11). Noting a similarly unsatisfying parallel to The House of Mirth, Geoffrey Walton too calls it “a careless and ill-written first study of the socially anarchic twenties” (147). Elizabeth Ammons, who provides the most extensive discussion, finds it “stale” and an indication of Wharton’s “treading water on the old issues of economics and social pressure” (Argument 158). While I recognize that The Glimpses of the Moon is a very different sort of novel from The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence, difference does not necessarily imply inferiority. I am suggesting that the text of the 1922 novel calls attention to itself in ways that demand another set of reading conventions to address parody of a genre rather than a “straight- forward” satire of a society. Peter Rabbinowitz argues in Before Reading that an interpretation should yield the “best” book possible. Paying closer attention to the parodic elements and taking into account Wharton’s well-documented contempt for the sentimental will yield an entirely different reading of the narrative as I have suggested. 4. In The Age of Innocence, published just two years earlier, Edith Wharton investigated masculine narratives about women not so much in terms of their oppressive and constraining effects but more in terms of how such narratives fail to contain women. Here she represented men’s efforts to “story” women as impotent fantasies. Her 192 NOTES

successive reworkings of the “problem” of female narrative achieved partial resolution in The Age of Innocence; her narrative constructed a fiction that in some ways appeared to free its author by positing the failure of masculine story. Although Newland Archer wants to escape the “realities” of language that would define Ellen Olenska as “mis- tress” if she is not “wife” (289), Ellen insists that such thinking is only fantasy. Archer tells her, “I want—I want somehow to get away with you into world where words like that—categories like that— won’t exist” (290). But Ellen replies, “Oh, my dear—where is that country?” (290). Later in the novel, having married May, raised his children, and devoted his life to civic duties, Archer has transformed Ellen into story: “When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed” (347). At the end of the novel, Archer again chooses his story over “real life” (361). Deciding that his imagined view of the woman he has not seen in nearly thirty years “is more real to me than if I went up” to her apartment and fearing that the actual person would disrupt that gentle dream, “Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel” (361). The shift in The Glimpses of the Moon is one of emphasis. Lawrence Selden constructs stories about Lily Bart that constrain and destroy her. Part of Royall’s power over discourse stems from his role as a speaker for the town’s conventional morality about young women, marriage, and motherhood. Conversely, Nick Lansing continues to construct his own narratives about Susy— which Susy accepts as Lily Bart did—but The Glimpses of the Moon explores more fully how these narratives derive from broader cultural stories to which both genders are subject. 5. A radically alternative reading to my argument can be found in “Marriage in The Glimpses of the Moon” by Harriet Gold. Gold sees Nick as a “positive hero” and argues that the novel celebrates marriage and motherhood (13). I find Wharton’s novel to be much more ironic in its treatment of women and men. 6. Although the epistolary novel and the feminized sentimental novel represent disparate traditions, the history of the novel’s development suggests a link going back at least to the eighteenth century in British literature. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa Harlowe (1748), often cited as paradigms of the epistolary narrative, both track the sentimentalized amatory adventures of a female protagonist. In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt notes “that Richardson was using an essentially feminine, and from a literary point of view, ama- teur tradition of letter-writing” (193–94). Suzanne Clark in Sentimental Modernism: Woman Writers and the Revolution of the Word discusses at some length women’s “privileged (or fatal) relationship with the sentimental” (2). She argues that modernism worked to construct the sentimental tradition as the source of bad NOTES 193

writing that lacked the objectivity, rationality, complexity, and fresh- ness of what we now call high modernism. She also shows how sentimental literature has come to be linked with mass culture and the gendered writing of women. For women writers in the twentieth century, this literary tradition “exists as an unwanted discourse” (37). Clark’s helpful delineation of the powerful sentimental tradition provides a useful discussion of the conventions with which Wharton and her readers were familiar. Extending Clark’s ideas to the writing and reception of Wharton’s novel would suggest that Wharton’s mass culture readers would have found the genre entertaining and validating. Wharton’s critics would be likely to dismiss the novel because of its sentimentalism. Wharton herself consistently rejected the conventions of sentimentality in American culture and writing. 7. I n A Backward Glance, Wharton asserts, “It is always a necessity to me that the note of inevitableness should be sounded at the very opening of my tale and that my characters should go forward to their ineluctable doom like the ‘murdered man’ in ‘The Pot of Basil’ ” (204). Although Wharton is speaking here of the development of her characters, her assertion might apply equally well to her attitude toward these characters. Certainly as an author who carefully designed her narratives, Wharton valued a consistent tone. 8. Laura K. Johnson in “Edith Wharton and the Fiction of Marital Unity” notes the economic conditions that underpin marriage in both The House of Mirth and The Glimpses of the Moon. Developing an argument around the legal issues of marital unity and the marital contract, Johnson asserts that Wharton “expose[s] the legal fictions of contract and unity as fictions” (967). Neither Lily nor Susy suc- ceed in creating a marital union that escapes the financial and con- tractual aspects of marriage. 9. Again the focus on female virtue connects the epistolary and the sentimental narrative. Both Clarissa and Pamela centered on the efforts of a female protagonist to sustain her virtue under relentless attack by a male adversary. Of course, Wharton’s narrative complicates and ironizes elements of the gendered battle over moral virtue, since it is Susy who, at least in Nick’s eyes, threatens the moral order and Nick who upholds the higher standard. Furthermore the struggle is over not only sexual behavior but the management of money. 10. Wharton’s language underscores the finances of romance in this scene. Strefford describes his marriage proposal as an “offer . . . from an elderly peer of independent means” (162). Susy cannot help thinking of how much she would “enjoy paying . . . back” her crowd for their “condescending kindnesses . . . their Christmas cheques” (163). 11. Many critics have dismissed most of the novels after The Age of Innocence as not up to her earlier standard of writing. R.W.B. Lewis, among others, argues that one reason for the artistic decline of her later novels was her increased writing for high-paying mass market 194 NOTES

magazines that demanded not “the best fiction . . . of which she was capable, but only the best fiction acceptable to popular magazine editors and tolerable to magazine readers.” Lewis suggests that Wharton “never consciously ‘wrote down,’ but she drove herself to write too fast and too much, because of financial need” (Lewis, Wharton 447). But as Jane Tompkins notes in Sensational Designs, academic readers have been too ready to denigrate a work precisely because it was popular. I would argue that this predisposition to see the popular as less artistic has led readers to ignore the merit of a novel such as The Glimpses of the Moon. 12. Very early in her career, Wharton recognized the usefulness of the dramatic in fiction. In 1906, she wrote Robert Grant about the col- laborative adaptation of The House of Mirth she was doing with Clyde Fitch: “The play is great fun, & I am learning so much that is useful in my own trade that, even if it fails, I shall not regret the work” (Lewis, Letters 103). Even later, Wharton considered her work especially appropriate for adaptation to the stage, writing in 1921 to Minnie Jones that she was “particularly pleased” about a proposed dramatization of The Age of Innocence (Lewis, Letters 439). In the same letter, she muses, “How odd that no one should know there is a play in ‘The Reef’ all ready to be pulled out!” (440) Hermione Lee notes that “Wharton was experimenting as a dramatist as well as a novelist in the early 1900s” (181). She believes that Wharton’s “fascination with the theatre would stay with her, and profoundly affected the way she would write her fiction” (181). 13. Note that Nick can escape the public gaze if he marries Coral, but Susy must embrace her role as object on view to marry Strefford. 14. For an analysis of the continuing limitations on young women’s roles even in the modern age, see “ ‘Too Young for the Part’: Narrative Closure and Feminine Evolution in Wharton’s ‘20s Fiction” by Melanie V. Dawson. Dawson sees a pattern in Wharton’s later novels that signals Wharton’s concern over the failure of young men and women to break free of the traditional cultural roles assigned to women. She argues that these novels are not evidence of Wharton writing past her prime but Wharton exploring “a generation locked in a troubling developmental inertia” (113). She argues that “young women reproduce the race ideologically as well as biologically” (113). Thus the young female protagonists of Wharton’s later novels are forced to sacrifice themselves “by adopting retrograde social roles, which appear startling out of sync with their otherwise modern lives” (91). My argument focuses on the ways Susy Lansing is forced to accept these roles. 15. The portrait of Susy as ideal mother recalls the earlier scene with Strefford at the exhibition of eighteenth-century paintings in Paris. Susy’s rejection of Strefford means she will never again stand beneath the portrait of Strefford’s great-grandmother in “its great carved NOTES 195

golden frame” sitting “like a throne above the other pictures.” Susy is quite aware that Strefford had been demonstrating that Susy “could wear the same name as his pictured ancestress” (227). For Strefford and Nick, Susy is a work of art; the transformation from an eighteenth-century wealthy dowager to a medieval Madonna visually represents Susy’s moral achievement but neither representation is controlled by Susy. For an interesting essay linking the theme of home—what Nick and Susy truly need—to the novel’s imaging of the Virgin and Child in this scene and the motif of the moon throughout the narrative, see “The Glimpses of the Moon and Tiepolo’s Fresco, The Transportation of the Holy House” by Adeline Tinter. She notes that a ceiling fresco at the Vaderlyn Palazzo seen by Nick early in the novel is actually the Tiepolo fresco. Tintner argues the fresco imagery of the Virgin with her Child sitting on the top of her house being transported by angels against the moonlight ties together some of the most important themes in the novel. The explanation of the reference is extremely useful although I see Wharton’s allusion as essentially ironic. 16. Carol Wershoven in The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton, although no more enamored of The Glimpses of the Moon than most critics, at least admits that “it is dangerous to group all the postwar novels together and to attribute any inferiority in them to one general cause” (110). Candace Waid says that The Children (1924) is one of her best works. A Mother’s Recompense (1925) has also been given more attention in recent scholarship. Nevius Blake admits that the unfinished Buccaneers, published posthumously in 1938, “indicates” that Wharton could “regain control of her style” even in her last work (237). I believe taking a fresh look at The Glimpses of the Moon, as a text with its own style and purpose, may demonstrate that Wharton is fully in control of this text as well. 17. The story clearly “worked” for Wharton’s audience. Although Margaret McDowell calls it “disappointing and dull,” Wharton’s readers did not find it so (17). McDowell admits it became a best- seller in both America and England. 18. In her intriguing analysis “Mothers and Flappers,” Elizabeth Ammons examines Wharton’s postwar perspective on motherhood. Ammons finds a major shift—moving “from a liberal to a conservative position”—in Wharton’s attitude about mothers and female freedom after the war (Argument 160). Ammons says that this group of novels “for the first time” advocates “marriage, the home, and motherhood” as a solution to the dilemma of the “untrained leisure-class young woman” (Argument 162, 161). While it is certainly true that Wharton must have been shaken by the cataclysmic events and horrors of World War I, I am not sure this is reason enough to read all of the subsequent novels as testaments to Wharton’s reactionary response toward all women. Furthermore it is impossible to know 196 NOTES

exactly how Wharton felt about not being a mother as she grew older. As Wolff notes, her close relationship with Elsinia Tyler and her family during the war gave her a chance to get to know “the vagaries and delights of little children,” especially the two-year-old William Tyler (348). And yet Percy Lubbock quotes Daisy Chandler as writing that Wharton was “really frightened in the presence of children” and “knew nothing of the natural pleasure our children give us” (148). Although Ammons also notes the ambivalence, she imagines “it . . . very probable that there were times she wished she had a child” (168). Nevertheless, we simply cannot know and, in constructing a view of Wharton as aging and childless, we run the risk of imposing our own version of the ideology about the saving virtues of motherhood on our reading of the text. 19. In Verging on the Abyss, Mary E. Papke examines the novel as an “entrepreneur tale” that combines the business motif of The Custom of the Country with the “pathos” of The House of Mirth (143). She reads the novel as finally about “Susy and woman’s lot”—“necessary compromises and dulled sensibilities, a life made harder precisely because she is a poor woman, and thus dependent on the ‘tribe,’ . . . for her sustenance” (145). Papke too finds the final scene an implicit critique of gender differences that have been essentialized by Wharton’s culture. Focusing on Nick’s view of “the two ways of loving,” she finds that “the fundamental differences between true women and true men are maintained” (146). Bibliography

Alcoff, Linda. “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory.” Signs 13 (1988): 405–37. Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. ———. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1980. ———. “Fair-Tale Love and The Reef.” American Literature 98 (1976): 615–28. Auchincloss, Louis. Edith Wharton. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1961. ———. Edith Wharton: A Woman of Her Time. New York: Viking P, 1971. Bauer, Dale M. Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994. ———. Female Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community. Albany: State U of New York P, 1988. Beatty, Robin. “ ‘Lilies That Fester’: Sentimentality in The House of Mirth.” College Literature 14 (1987): 263–74. Bell, Millicent, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. ———. Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship. New York: George Braziller, 1965. Benstock, Shari, ed. The House of Mirth. By Edith Wharton. 1905. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994. ———. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994. ———. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. ———. “ ‘The word which made all clear’: The Silent Close of The House of Mirth.” Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure. Ed. Alison Booth. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993. 230–58. Blackall, Jean Frantz. “Charity at the Window: Narrative Technique in Edith Wharton’s Summer.” Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Ed. Alfred Bendixon and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992. Blair, Amy L. “Misreading The House of Mirth.” American Literature 76.1 (2004): 149–75. Blum, Virginia L. “Edith Wharton’s Erotic Other World.” Literature and Psychology 33 (1987): 263–74. 198 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boydston, Jeanne. “ ‘Grave Enduring Traditions’: Edith Wharton and the Domestic Novel.” Faith of a (Woman) Writer. Ed. Alice Kessler-Harris and William McBrien. Westport: Greenwood, 1988. Campbell, Donna M. “The ‘Bitter Taste’ of Naturalism: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and David Graham Phillips’s Susan Lenox.” Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism. Ed. Mary E. Papke. Tennessee Studies in Literature. 40. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2003. ———. “Edith Wharton and the ‘Authoresses’: The Critique of Local Color in Wharton’s Early Fiction.” Studies in American Fiction 22.2 (1994): 169–83. Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro- American Woman Novelist. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Carson, Benjamin. “ ‘That Doubled Vision’: Edith Wharton and The House of Mirth.” Women’s Studies 32 (2003): 695–717. Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken Books, 1981. 243–64. ———. “Sorties.” Trans. Claudia Reeder. New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken Books, 1981. 90–106. Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Clarke, Edward H., M.D. Sex in Education. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1874. Comins, Barbara. “ ‘Pecking at the Host’: Transgressive Wharton.” Edith Wharton Review 14.1 (Spring 1997): 18–21. Cone, Helen Grey. “Women in Literature.” Woman’s Work in America. Ed. Annie Nathan Meyer. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1891. Coulombe, Joseph. “Man or Mannequin?: Lawrence Selden in The House of Mirth.” Edith Wharton Review 13.2 (Spring 1996): 3–8. Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. Doing Literary Business: American Writers in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990. Crowley, John W. “The Unmastered Streak: Feminist Themes in Wharton’s Summer.” American Literary Realism 1870–1910 15 (1982): 86–96. Cuddy, Lois A. “Triangles of Defeat and Liberation: The Quest for Power in Edith Wharton’s Fiction.” Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 8 (1982): 18–26. Dawson, Melanie V. “ ‘Too Young for the Part’: Narrative Closure and Feminine Evolution in Wharton’s ‘20s Fiction.” The Arizona Quarterly 57.4 (2001): 89–119. De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. ———. “The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S. and Britain.” Differences 1 (1989): 3037. BIBLIOGRAPHY 199

DeShong, Scott. “Protagonism in The Reef.” Edith Wharton Review 8.2 (Fall 1991): 19–23; 32. Dimock, Wai-Chee. “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.” PMLA 100 (1985): 783–92. Dixon, Roslyn. “Reflecting Vision in The House of Mirth.” Twentieth Century Literature 33 (1987): 211–22. Donovan, Josephine. After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989. Dubow, Wendy M. “The Businesswoman in Edith Wharton.” Edith Wharton Review 8.2 (Fall 1991): 11–18. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Writers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso, 1978. Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness. New York: Feminist P, 1973. ———. “The Sexual Politics of Sickness.” The Sociology of Health and Illness. Ed. Peter Conrad and Rochelle Kern. New York: St. Martin’s, 1986. Emsley, Sarah. “Sexual Purity and Relentless Indecision in Wharton’s The Reef.” The New Compass: A Critical Review 3 (June 2004). 23 June 2005 . Erlich, Goria C. The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Evans, Anne-Marie. “Shopping for Survival: Conspicuous Consumption in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Ellen Glasgow’s The Wheel of Life.” Edith Wharton Review 22.2 (Fall 2006): 9–15. Faery, Rebecca Blevins. “Wharton’s Reef: The Inscription of Female Sexuality.” Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Ed. Alfred Bendixon and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992: 79–98. Farwell, Tricia M. Love and Death in Edith Wharton’s Fiction. Modern American Literature: New Approaches. 48. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Fetterley, Judith. “ ‘The Temptation to Be a Beautiful Object’: Double Standard and Double Bind in The House of Mirth.” Studies in American Fiction 5 (1977): 199–211. Flax, Jane. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Foster, Travis. “Ascendant Obtuseness and Aesthetic Perception in The House of Mirth.” Edith Wharton Review 23.1 (Spring 2007): 1–8. Fraser, Nancy and Linda Nicholson. “Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism.” Universal Abandon. Ed. Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. 83–104. Fryer, Judith. Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986. Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking. New York: Routledge, 1989. ———. “Reading Like a Feminist.” Differences 1 (1989): 77–92. 200 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gabler-Hover, Janet and Kathleen Plate. “The House of Mirth and Edith Wharton’s ‘Beyond!’ ” Philological Quarterly 72.3 (1993): 357–78. Gargano, James W. “Edith Wharton’s The Reef: The Genteel Woman’s Quest for Knowledge.” Novel 10 (1976): 40–48. Gilbert, Sandra M. “Life’s Empty Pack: Notes toward a Literary Daughteronomy.” Critical Inquiry 11 (1985): 355–84. ———. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984. Gilman, Charolotte Perkins. The Man-Made World or Our Androcentric Culture. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911. Gimpel, Wendy. Edith Wharton: Orphancy and Survival. New York: Praeger, 1984. Gold, Harriet. “Marriage in The Glimpses of the Moon” Edith Wharton Review 16.1 (Spring 2000): 13–17. Goldman-Price, Irene C. “The Perfect Jew and The House of Mirth.” Modern Language Studies 23.2 (1993): 25–36. Rpt. in Edith Wharton Review 16.1 (2000): 1, 3–9. Goldsmith, Meredith. “The year of the Rose: Jewish Masculinity in The House of Mirth.” Modern Fiction Studies 51.2 (2005): 374–92. Gooder, Jean. “Unlocking Edith Wharton: An Introduction to The Reef.” The Cambridge Quarterly 15 (1986): 33–52. Goodman, Susan. Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals. Hanover: UP of New England, 1990. Grafton, Kathy. “Degradation and Forbidden Love in Edith Wharton’s Summer.” Twentieth Century Literature 41.4 (1995): 356–66. Hadley, Kathy Miller. In the Interstices of the Tale: Edith Wharton’s Narrative Strategies. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Hale, E.E., Jr. “Mrs. Wharton’s The House of Mirth.” Bookman Dec. 1905: 364–66. Hall, Susan L. “The Death of Love: Sexuality, Secrets, and Settings in Wharton’s Summer.” Edith Wharton Review 21.2 (Fall 2005): 10–17. Hays, Peter L. “Signs in Summer: Words and Metaphors.” Papers on Language and Literature 25 (1989): 114–19. Haytock, Jennifer. Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Herman, David. “Economies of Essence in The House of Mirth.” Edith Wharton Review 16.1 (Spring 1990): 6–10. Hochman, Barbara. “The Awakening and The House of Mirth: Plotting Experience and Experiencing Plot.” The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism. Ed. Donald Pizer. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. 211–35. ———. “The Rewards of Representation: Edith Wharton, Lily Bart and the Writer/Reader Interchange.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 24.2 (1991): 147–61. Holbrook, David. Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. BIBLIOGRAPHY 201

“The House of Mirth.” Spectator 28 Oct. 1905: 657. Howard, Maureen. “The Bachelor and the Baby: The House of Mirth.” The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Ed. Millicent Bell. 1995. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999: 137–56. Howe, Irving, ed. Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1962. Howe, Julia Ward. Sex and Education. 1874. New York: Arno P, 1972. Hummel, William E. “My ‘Dull-Witted Enemy’: Symbolic Violence and Abject Maleness in Edith Wharton’s Summer.” Studies American Fiction 24.2 (1996): 215–36. Hutchinson, Stuart. “Unpackaging Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome and Summer.” The Cambridge Quarterly 27.3 (1998): 219–32. Inness, Sherrie A. “Nature, Culture, and Sexual Economics in Edith Wharton’s The Reef.” American Literary Realism 26.1 (1993): 76–90. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Iser, Wolfgang. “Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fiction.” Aspects of Narrative. Ed. J. Hillis Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1971: 1–45. Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Johnson, Laura K. “Edith Wharton and the Fiction of Marital Unity.” Modern Fiction Studies 47.4 (2001): 947–76. Joslin, Katherine. “ ‘Embattled Tendencies’: Wharton, Woolf and the Nature of Modernism” Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms 1854–1936. Ed. Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett. New York: Manchester UP, 2002. Kamuf, Peggy. “Replacing Feminist Criticism.” Diacritics 12 (1982): 42–47. Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Karcher, Carolyn L. “Male Vision and Female Revision in James’ The Wings of the Dove and Wharton’s The House of Mirth.” Women’s Studies 10 (1984): 227–44. Kassanoff, Jennie A. Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Kolodny, Annette. “Dancing between Left and Right: Feminism and the Academic Minefield in the 1980s.” Feminist Studies 14 (1988). 453–66. ———. “Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism.” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. 144–67. ———. “A Map for Misreading: Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts.” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. 144–67. Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 202 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in the Poetic Language. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Lauer, Kristin O. and Margaret P. Murray, eds. Edith Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990. Lawson, Richard H. Edith Wharton. New York: Ungar, 1976. Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Lewis R.W.B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Lewis R.W.B. and Nancy Lewis, eds. The Letters of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988. Lindberg, Gary H. Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1975. Lipking, Lawrence. “Aristotle’s Sister: A Poetics of Abandonment.” Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 61–81. Lubbock, Percy. Portrait of Edith Wharton. New York: Appleton-Century- Crofts, 1947. Lyde, Marilyn. Edith Wharton: Convention and Morality in the Work of a Novelist. Norman: Oklahoma UP, 1985. Macmaster, Anne. “Rescripting the Romance: Edith Wharton’s Paired Heroines.” Furman Studies 37 (1995): 29–44. MacNaughton, William R. “Edith Wharton’s ‘bad heroine’: Sophy Viner in The Reef.” Studies in the Novel 25.2 (1993): 214–25. ———. “Edith Wharton’s The Reef.” The Explicator 51.4 (1993): 227–30. ———. “Edith Wharton, The Reef and Henry James.” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 26.2 (1994): 43–59. Makowski, Veronica, and Lynn Bloom. “Edith Wharton’s Tentative Embrace of Charity: Class and Character in Summer.” American Literary Realism 32.3 (2000): 220–33. Malcolm, Janet. “The Woman Who Hated Women.” New York Times Book Review 16 Nov. 1986: 11–12. Marchand, Mary V. “Cross Talk: Edith Wharton and the New England Women Regionalists.” Women’s Studies 30 (2001): 369–95. Maynard, Moira. “Moral Integrity in The Reef: Justice to Anna Leath.” College Literature 14 (1987): 285–95. McDowell, Margaret. Edith Wharton rev. ed. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991. McGovern, James R. “David Graham Phillips and the Virility Impulse of Progressives.” New England Quarterly 39 (1966): 334–55. Menon, Pat. “Beings of a Different Language: Pragmatist Meets Idealist in Edith Wharton’s The Reef.” The New Compass: A Critical Review 2 (December 2003). 23 June 2005 . Merish, Lori. “Engendering Naturalism: Narrative Form and Commodity Spectacle in U.S. Naturalist Fiction.” Edith Wharton’s the House of Mirth: A Casebook. Ed. Carol J. Singley. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. BIBLIOGRAPHY 203

Meynell, Alice. “The House of Mirth.” Bookman (London). Dec. 1905: 130–31. Miller. Carol. “ ‘Natural Magic’: Irony as Unifying Strategy in The House of Mirth.” South Central Review 4.1 (1987): 82–91. Miller, Nancy K. Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. ———. “The Text’s Heroine: A Feminist and her Fictions.” Diacritics 12 (1982): 48–53. Moddelmog, William E. “Disowning ‘Personality’: Privacy and Subjectivity in The House of Mirth.” American Literature 70.2 (1998): 337–63. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Methuen, 1985. Morante, Linda. “The Desolation of Charity Royall: Imagery in Edith Wharton’s Summer.” Colby Library Quarterly 48 (1982): 241–48. Nettels, Elsa. Language and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton and Cather. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1997. Nevius, Blake. Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1961. Newman, Louise Michele. Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities. New York: Pergamon P, 1985. Nicholson, Linda J., ed. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1990. O’Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Olin-Ammentorp, Julie. “Edith Wharton’s Challenge to Feminist Criticism.” Studies in American Fiction 16 (1988): 237–44. ———. Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2004. ———. “Wharton’s Negative Hero Revisited.” Edith Wharton’s Newsletter 6 (1989): 6, 8. O’Neal, Michael J. “Point of View and Narrative Technique in the Fiction of Edith Wharton.” Style 17.2 (1985): 270–89. Overton, Grant. The Women Who Make Our Novels. rev. ed. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1928. Papke, Mary E. Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton. New York: Greenwood P, 1990. Pearce, Richard. The Politics of Narration. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991. Peel, Robin. “Vulgarity, Bohemia, and Edith Wharton’s The Reef.” American Literary Realism 37.3 (2005): 187–201. Pfeiffer, Kathleen. “Summer and Its Critics’ Discontent.” Women’s Studies 20 (1991): 141–52. Pizer, Donald. “The Naturalism of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.” Twentieth Century Literature 41.2 (1995): 241–48. Powers, Lyall H., ed. Henry James and Edith Wharton. Letters: 1900–1915. New York, Scribner’s, 1900. 204 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pratt, Mary Louise. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1977. Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987. Raphael, Lev. Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Shame. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Restuccia, Francis L. “The Name of the Lily: Edith Wharton’s Feminism(s).” Contemporary Literature 28 (1987): 223–38. “A Review of the Important Books of the Year.” Independent 16 Nov. 1905: 1151–63. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Ed. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. New York: Norton, 1985: 2044–56. Riley, Denise. “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Rose, Christine. “Summer: The Double Sense of Wharton’s Title.” ANQ 3 (1990): 16–19. Rosenberg, Rosalind. Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism: New Haven: Yale UP, 1982. Sapora, Carol Baker. “Female Doubling: The Other Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.” Papers on Language and Literature 29.4 (1993): 371–94. Saunders, Catherine E. Writing the Margins: Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow and the Literary Tradition of Ruined Women. (English Honors Essay, 1987) Cambridge: English Department, Harvard University, 1987. Scott, Joan. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” Coming to Terms: Feminism Theory, Politics. Ed. Elizabeth Weed. New York: Routledge, 1989. 81–100. Scribner, Mary Suzanne. Gender and the Writer’s Imagination: From Cooper to Wharton. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1987. Showalter, Elaine. “The Death of a Lady (Novelist): Wharton’s House of Mirth.” Representations 9 (1985): 133–49. ———. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Random House, 1985. 243–70. Shulman, Robert. “Divided Selves and the Market society: Politics and Psychology in The House of Mirth.” Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 11 (1985): 10–19. Singley, Carol J., ed. “Edith Wharton’s Ironic Realism.” Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization. Ed. Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2000. ———. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: A Casebook. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. BIBLIOGRAPHY 205

Springer, Marlene. Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1976. Stein, Allen F. After the Vows Were Spoken: Marriage in American Literary Realism. Columbus: Ohio State P, 1984. Stevenson, Pascha Antrece. “Ethan Frome and Charity Royall: Edith Wharton’s Noble Savages.” Women’s Studies 32 (2003): 411–29. Tinter, Adeline R. “The Glimpses of the Moon and Tiepolo’s Fresco, The Transportation of the Holy House.” Edith Wharton Review 14.1 (Spring1997): 22–27. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Totten, Gary. Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2007. Tuttleton, James W. “Mocking Fate: Romantic Idealism in Edith Wharton’s The Reef.” Studies in the Novel 19 (1987): 459–74. ———. The Novel of Manners. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1972. Tyson, Lois. “Beyond Morality: Lily Bart, Lawrence Selden and the Aesthetic Commodity in The House of Mirth.” Edith Wharton Review 9.2 (Fall 1992): 3–10. Vita-Finzi. Penelope. Edith Wharton and the Art of Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990. Von Rosk, Nancy. “Spectacular Homes and Pastoral Theaters: Gender, Urbanity and Domesticity in The House of Mirth.” Studies in the Novel 33.3 (2001): 322–50. Wagner-Martin. The House of Mirth: A Novel of Admonition. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990. ———. ed. The Portable Edith Wharton New York: Penguin, 2003. Waid, Candace. Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991. Walker, Nancy A. “ ‘Seduced and Abandoned’: Convention and Reality in Edith Wharton’s Summer.” Studies in American Fiction 11(1983): 107–14. Walton, Geoffrey. Edith Wharton: A Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1982. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957. Weed, Elizabeth, ed. Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge, 1989. Wegner, Frederick. “Form, ‘Selection,’ and Ideology in Edith Wharton’s Antimodernist Aesthetic.” A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton. Ed. Clare Colquitt, Susan Goodman, and Candace Waid. Newark: University of Delaware P, 1999. Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: Ohio UP, 1976. Werlock, Abby H. “Whitman, Wharton, and the Sexuality in Summer.” Speaking the Other Self. Ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1997. 206 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wershoven, Carol. “The Divided Conflict of Edith Wharton’s Summer.” Colby Library Quarterly 21 (1985): 5–10. ———. The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1982. Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. 1920. New York: Scribner’s, 1970. ———. A Backward Glance. 1934. Scribner’s, 1985. ———. French Ways and Their Meanings. New York: Appleton, 1922. ———. The Glimpses of the Moon. New York: Appleton, 1922. ———. The House of Mirth. 1905. New York: Penguin, 1985. ———. The Reef. 1912. New York: Scribner’s, 1965. ———. Summer. 1917. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. ———. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Scribner’s, 1925. White, Barbara A. “Edith Wharton’s Summer and ‘Women’s Fiction.’ ” Essays in Literature 11 (1984): 223–35. Williams, Deborah Lindsay. Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the Politics of Female Authorship. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Wilson, Christopher. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. “Cold Ethan and ‘Hot Ethan.’ ” College Literature 14 (1987): 230–45. ———. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. ———. “Lily Bart and the Drama of Femininity.” American Literary History 6.1 (1994): 71–87. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, 1929. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. “The Conspicuous Wasting of Lily Bart.” New Essays on The House of Mirth. Ed. Deborah Esch. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001. Index

Age of Innocence, 1, 2, 5, 8, 36, 45, Erlich, Gloria, 63, 167 (n. 20) 125, 146, 166–7 (n.18) Ethan Frome, 2, 8 Ammons, Elizabeth, 2, 27, 28, 57, 63, 168 (n. 25), 169 (n. 30), Feminist theory, 10, 15–24, 157 195–6 (n. 18) (n.1, 2) Anglo-American, 17–18, 19, 159 Backward Glance, 3, 6, 8, 9, 25, 31, (n. 8) 33, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42, 47 Essentialism, 19, 20, 22 Benstock, Shari, 2, 167 (n. 20), French, 17,18–19 180 (n. 32) Post-structuralist, 10, 16, 18, 19, Berenson, Bernard, 40, 71, 172 20, 21 (n. 40) Fetterley, Judith, 63, 177 (n. 19) Berry, Walter, 37,40 films based on Wharton novels, 2 Blake, Nevius, 125 French Ways and Their Meaning, Bourget, Paul, 40 7–8, 26, 27, 67, 169 (n. 30) Fullerton, Morton, 6, 12, 38, 40, Cather, Willa, 31, 39 69–71, 170 (n. 34) Chandler, Daisy, 38, 47 Children, The, 7 Gender differences Chopin, Kate, 166 (n. 15) anxiety over changing roles, 28–9 Cixous, Helene, 18–19, 159 (n. 6) and higher education, 27 Clark, Suzanne, 41, 192–3 (n. 6) and history, 16–17, 20–2, 25 class, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 26, 49, and language, 18–19, 55, 84, 97 51, 52, 67, 87, 98–9, 100–1, scientific debate, 27, 163 (n. 7) 102–3, 104, 105, 108–9, and writing, 1, 21, 30, 31, 41, 117–18, 140, 170 (n.35) 43–4, 45–6, 53, 65, 67, Cone, Helen Gray, 30, 165 (n. 14) 68, 69, 93 Coultrap, McQuin, 29–30, 44, Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 30–1, 165 (n. 12), 170 (n. 36) 39, 165–6 (n. 15) Custom of the Country, The, 70 Glimpses of the Moon, The, 2, 7, 9, 11, 12, 23, 45, 46, 125–49, Decoration of Houses, 4, 44 152, 154 De Lauretis, Teresa, 22, 160 (n. 16) Goodman, Susan, 38 Dreiser, Theodore, 166 (n. 15) Grant, Robert, 45 Du Plessis, Rachel Blau, 61 Greater Inclination, The, 33, 42, 45 208 INDEX

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 40, 43 patriarchal power, 24, 27, 56, 78 House of Mirth, The, 2, 8, 9, 11, spectator role, 9–10, 55, 73–4, 23, 46, 49–65, 67, 68, 69, 139–42, 143–6, 148 70, 71, 73, 97, 98, 99, 105, Miller, Nancy, 19–20, 159 (n. 10) 125, 126, 142, 146, 148, Mother’s Recompense, A, 7, 47 151, 152, 154, 173–4 (n. 3) Hugh-Smith, John, 40 New York Society, 1, 3, 4, 5, 10, 25, 26, 33, 49, 50, 51, 53–4, Irigaray, Luce, 18–19, 159 (n. 7) 56, 57, 58, 60, 153 Norton, Sara, 4, 5, 25, 36, 38, James, Henry, 1, 37, 40, 43 39, 42 Wharton compared, 2, 3, 16, 39 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 31, 152 Old Maid, The, 7 Jones, George, Frederic, 3, 34 Jones, Lucretia Stevens Phillips, David Graham, 29, 164–5 Rhinelander, 3, 6, 9, 34–5, (n. 11) 168 (n. 24) Progressive Era, 28–9 Jones, Minnie, 38 publishing industry paternalism, 11, 170 (n. 36) Kamuf, Peggy, 19, 159 (n. 9) professionalization, 11, 26, Kolodny, Annette, 15, 19, 22, 158 43–4, 153 (n. 5) and Wharton, 9, 44, 45 Kristeva, Julia, 20–1, 22, 25, 160 (n. 12), 162 (n. 1,2) reader, role of, 54, 61–2, 65, 69, 93–4, 174 (n. 6), 176 (n. 10) Lapsley, Gaillard, 40, 71, 172 realism, 42–3, 49, 54, 152 (n. 43) Reef, The, 9, 11, 23, 45, 46, Lee, Hermione, 2, 32, 167 (n. 21), 67–96, 97, 98, 99, 105, 123, 167–8 (n. 23), 168 (n. 27), 126, 129, 152, 154 171 (n. 38), 180 (n. 29), 182 Rich, Adrienne, 17, 18, 19, 22, (n. 4) 158 (n. 3) Lee, Vernon, 38–9 Riley, Denise, 21, 160 (n. 13, 14) Lewis, R.W.B. 2, 32, 171 (n. 38) Lewis, Sinclair, 7, 42 sentimentalism, 10, 12, 26, 40, Lodge, Bessy, 7, 37 41–3, 51, 52, 53, 54, 61, Lubbock, Percy, 36, 38, 40 97, 127, 129–31, 132, 142–3, 149, 152, 192–3 McGovern, James R., 29, 164 (n. 6) (n. 11) sexuality, 12, 68–9, 71, 75, 77, Men 79–80, 89, 91–2, 95, 97–8, male gender anxiety, 28–9, 164 101–2, 110 (n. 10) Showalter, Elaine, 17–18, 19, 22, masculine writing style, 43–4, 63, 158 (n. 4), 177 (n. 17) 45, 152, 170 (n. 33) Stevens, Ebenezer, 3–4, 166 (n. 17) narrative filters, 23, 52, 53, Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 29, 35, 55, 71 40, 41 INDEX 209

Sturgis, Howard, 40 with men, 38, 40 Summer, 8, 9, 11, 12, 23, 43, 45, homes, 3–4, 32 46, 97–124, 125, 152, 154 marriage, 6, 152 modern writers, view of, 40, Valley of Decision, The, 42 168–9 (n. 28) Victorianism motherhood, view of, 6–7, 147, True Womanhood, 28 195–6 (n. 18) values, 29 national identity, 1, 7, 8, 40 women’s roles, 10–11 rejection of women writers, 8, 41–2, 43, 152, 165 (n. 13), Wagner-Martin, 2, 167 (n. 19), 170 (n. 35) 176 (n. 13) relationship with mother, 5–6, Waid, Candace, 2, 172 (n.1), 174 8–9, 34–5, 168 (n. 24) (n.4), 187 (n. 8), 188 (n. 16) sexuality, 6, 12, 98, 167 (n. 21), Welter, Barbara, 28, 163–4 (n. 9) 183 (n. 8) Wharton, Edith writing schedule, 4, 5, 27, 36 America, view of, 1, 4–5, 7–8, writing, view of, 8–9, 32, 25–6, 42, 169 (n. 30) 38, 45 American women, view of, 5, 8 Wharton, Edward, 6, 37–8, 39 anxiety of authorship, 31–3, 35, Wilson, Christopher, 42, 43 45–6, 47, 49, 50, 71, 126, Winthrop, Egerton, 40 151, 152 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 2, 6, 63, as businesswoman, 1, 9, 39, 125, 163 (n. 8), 172 (n. 1), 44–5, 49, 171 (n. 37, 38) 177 (n. 18), 181 (n. 2), conservatism, 35, 162–3 (n. 3), 183 (n. 8) 168 (n. 25) Women development as a writer, 8–9, constraints on writing, 1, 10–11, 10–11, 12, 24–5, 33, 37–8, 16–17, 19, 23, 30–1, 44, 40, 53, 65, 96, 126, 138, 50–1, 53, 152–3, 166–7 149, 153–4, 156 (n. 18) divorce, 6, 37–8, 39, 152 constructed term, 22 French women, view of, 7–8, dismissal of writing, 10, 30–1 26, 27, 67 New Womanhood. 11, 28, 35 friendships True Womanhood, 28 with women, 38–9 Woolf, Virginia, 31