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ZEEB ROAD, ANN ARBOR, Ml 48106 18 BEDFORD ROW, LONDON WC1 R 4EJ, ENGLAND 8107964 M il l e r, C a r o l An n NATURAL MAGIC: IRONY AS A UNIFYING STRATEGY IN THE FICTION OF EDITH WHARTON The University of Oklahoma Ph.D. 1980 University Microfilms I nter n ât 0i n a! 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor. MI 48106 Copyright 1980 by Miller, Carol Ann All Rights Reserved THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE NATURAL MAGIC: IRONY AS A UNIFYING STRATEGY IN THE FICTION OF EDITH WHARTON A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Carol Miller Memphis, Tennessee 1980 NATURAL MAGIC': IRONY AS A UNIFYING STRATEGY IN THE FICTION OF EDITH WHARTON APPROVED BY DISSERTATION COMMITTEE Abstract of NATURAL MAGIC: IRONY AS A UNIFYING STRATEGY IN THE FICTION OF EDITH WHARTON by Carol Miller University of Oklahoma December, 1980 The recurring consensus of several generations of critics ranging from Edmund Wilson to R. W. B. Lewis has been that the fiction of Edith Wharton has not received a just evaluation. Wharton's reputation in American literature remains uncertain and her achievement elusive, traditionally because of historical and cultural biases which deprecate her aristocratic background, her expatriation to France, and even her gender. More recently, an attitude of critical resistance has arisen from assumptions made by current theorists who view the irony elemental to Wharton's fiction as being at odds with neo-oral, anti-ironic preferences of structuralist analysis. Though these theorists perceive irony as a dis­ tancing strategy which increases the alienation of writer and audience, a contention of this study is that irony— the basis of Wharton's art— may be an integrating strategy instead, a bonding mechanism bringing together writer and audience by establishing affinities of understanding and complicity between writer and reader and requiring them to become co­ creators of meaning. Wharton's ironic method demands that her readers become sensitive receivers of nuance, ambiguity, and multiple meaning— literally, readers upon whom nothing is lost--and her writing assumes its greatest coherence only when her ironic technique is accurately understood. Her most con­ sistent ironic device, and perhaps the one which demands the most sensitivity on the part of her audience, is ironic characterization, varying in degree but almost always involving the protagonist, whose view of himself and his circumstances is at variance with that of the author and reader. Ironies of situation and imagery are also crucial to Wharton's technique, usually fulfilling the general function of contributing to narrative unity by emphasizing theme. And extremely important is Wharton's ironic juxta­ position of elements of romanticism, realism, and naturalism, employed to produce complications of characterization and value. Though integration rather than alienation is the aim of Wharton's ironic method, alienation i£ a crucial unifying theme threaded throughout her best work, a motif so insist­ ently explored that it, rather than manners or social 3 commentary, or any other consideration, is the author's central concern. The problem of alienated consciousness has been an almost obsessive theme of American literature for over two centuries, and Edith Wharton's career-long attention to this theme places her work where it belongs— in the main­ stream of American fiction, and gives it relevance which transcends its receding time and place. In Wharton's view, alienation is a pervasive force influencing human behavior. Her characters are not merely fossils of a by-gone social milieu; they are representative beings confronting a de­ structive reality— the complex loneliness of the human spirit— and they are linked by their shared consciousness of spiritual, emotional, and physical isolation and their often bewildered, often thwarted, attempts to overcome it. In Wharton's most effective novels, then, which span her long career, the elemental thematic tension is between alienation and integration, a tension exactly reproduced by the form of its expression. They deserve to be viewed as a body of work unified by technique and theme, achieving a fusion of form and purpose which results in that quality of inevitable rightness Wharton called "natural magic." Acknowledgments My thanks to Professor Robert Murray Davis for his unfailingly helpful advice and guidance as my director; and to Professors Barbara Davis, Roy R. Male, Alan Velie, and David Levy for consenting to read my dissertation and for suggestions that improved its quality. My thanks also to my parents and my friends for their material and moral support and, most of all, for their affectionate encouragement. i n TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapter 1.......................................... 1 II..................................... 24 III...................................... 50 IV................'..................... 91 V .................................... 128 VI................................... 176 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................... 216 IV NATURAL MAGIC: IRONY AS A UNIFYING STRATEGY IN THE FICTION OF EDITH WHARTON CHAPTER I It is now over forty years since the death of Edith Wharton in 1937, eighty since the publication of her first collection of short stories;^ yet her reputation in American literature remains uncertain, the precise nature and merit of her achievement elusive, and most of her novels and stories unread by a contemporary audience. During forty years of effort, she produced a substantial body of work— twenty-one novels and novellas, eleven collections of stories, nine works of non-fiction, including an autobiography, three collections of verse, and numerous articles and reviews. For a period, after the turn of the century, she was perhaps the most pop­ ular American novelist, and yet at the time of her death, there were only two book-length studies of her work, one of 2 these in French. "Since that time, Wharton has received a more propor­ tionate share of critical attention, but it has always been 1 2 particularly divergent in its pronouncements. In one judg­ ment only has there been recurring consensus, and that is in the echoed declaration first spoken by Edmund Wilson four years after her death that justice has ultimately not been 3 done the work of Edith Wharton. Eleven years later, he repeated this conviction in a review of Percy Lubbock's reminiscence of Wharton; "Her work, I believe, has never been--and was not, even at the time of her greatest success-- appreciated or interpreted as it should be . and he speculated that such appreciation might have to wait for the details of her personal history to be made accessible by the opening of her private papers in 1968. Both Irving Howe, in his collection of critical essays about Wharton,^ and R. W. B. Lewis, in the definitive biography that has at last given us those surprising details,^ echo the opinion that justice to Wharton has yet to come. The reasons why Wharton's fiction has been under­ valued are diverse; some of them are subtle and elusively intangible. They are the result, first, of certain his­ torical and cultural biases and, more recently, of an atti­ tude of resistance which arises out of assumptions made by current critical theorists. In the broadest sense, analysts have tended to view it from perspectives that diminish its actual weight and coherence. By many critics, for example, Wharton has traditionally been seen almost entirely in the shadow of Henry James as 3 little more than a kind of literary apprentice. Credit for Wharton's successes is often divided between herself and "the master," or her fiction is measured against his and found to be inferior,^ The friendship between James and Wharton became deep and complex, but he himself implied a master-student relationship when, after seeing a collection of her early stories, he wrote, "I take to her very kindly as regards her diabolical little cleverness, the quantity of her intention and intelligence in her style, and her sharp eye for an interesting kind of subject.