Joy L. Davis (essay date Summer 1993)
SOURCE: “The Rituals of Dining in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence,” in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 4, Summer, 1993, pp. 465-80.
[In the following essay, Davis theorizes that Wharton's dining scenes are metaphorical representations of the social and personal relationships among her characters.]
The act of dining fascinated Edith Wharton as a social ritual exposing aspects of human behavior that people in her world preferred to conceal. Beneath the complex etiquette of their formal...
Source: Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, ©2006 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full copyright.
(The entire page is 4752 words.)
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