Wharton, Edith (1862 - 1937) | Kathy A. Fedorko (Essay Date 1995)
KATHY A. FEDORKO (ESSAY DATE 1995)
SOURCE: Fedorko, Kathy A. "The Gothic Text: Life and Art." In Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton, pp. 1-21. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.
In the following essay, Fedorko maintains that "the Gothic in her fiction allows Wharton both to mirror and to revise issues that inform her life as well as the genre."
Wharton's conflicting and conflicted views of women and men and feminine and masculine reflect a complicated interweaving of family and social environment, historical time, and individual psychology. These conditions and the gender tension they foster in turn provide the impetus for Wharton to use and recast Gothic conventions and narratives in her fiction as a way to dramatize psychic conflict. Indeed, as a dreamlike interaction among parts of the self, the Gothic in her fiction allows Wharton both to mirror and to revise issues that...
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