Wharton's life spanned three-quarters of a century of momentous change, an era of modernization when a Victorian America governed by strict moral codes gave way to the modern era with its increasingly liberal attitudes towards divorce, birth control, and women's paid employment. The period was one of massive change in technology and culture that transformed the way people thought and experienced time and space, particularly with the invention of the telephone, instantaneous photography and the Kodak camera, the motion picture, the automobile and the airplane.

During Wharton's lifetime, the number of states in the union expanded from 36 to 48 and the population grew from approximately 32 million to 130 million, becoming increasingly diverse in terms of the national origins of immigrants. Ethnic and religious diversity was not altogether welcomed, however, by the older Anglo protestant group and during this period there were several ethnic conflicts as well as race riots. Chinese and Japanese immigration was banned, restrictive quotas were placed on immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and, while racial segregation was rigidly policed in the southern states, it was widely practiced throughout the rest of the country. On the international front, the United States became a world power. In the late 1890s, it emerged from a long period of relative isolation, engaging militarily in the Spanish American War of 1898 by which the United States acquired colonies in Asia and the Pacific, and committing combat troops in 1917 to support the European Allied Powers in their long protracted war against Germany.

THE GILDED AGE: 1870-1914

In the period from the end of the Civil War until World War One, the way of doing business in the United States became corporatized. That is to say, the United States witnessed “the emergence of a changed, more tightly structured society with new hierarchies of control.”¹ By the late 19th-century business corporations came to dominate the economic landscape and were characterized by the way in which they were profit-driven, engaged in full-capacity production, and dominated mass markets. Many appeared at the time of recession in the late 1890s, buying up smaller businesses cheaply and aiming to manipulate the market through controlling both the prices of commodities and of labor. Corporations consisted of either a grouping of companies in the same industry or an integration of related industries ranging from the extraction of raw materials all the way through to the point of sale. Either way, corporations were all about concentrating power, capital and control, and reducing the effects of economic recessions on profit margins. When Wharton was just 20 years old, John D. Rockefeller established the first great trust in the United States: the Standard Oil Company. Another prominent figure from this period was the financier, J. P. Morgan, head of the famous House of Morgan. Morgan supplied the capital necessary for mergers in all key areas of industry: railroads, coal, steel, shipping and electricity. In 1901 he bought out Andrew Carnegie, the multi-millionaire owner of steel mills, whose steel built the Brooklyn Bridge and the Washington Monument. Morgan went on to create the U. S. Steel Corporation, the largest industrial corporation in the world in 1901 with a turnover of a billion dollars per year.

The New York in which Wharton grew up was the financial capital of the United States, the headquarters of dozens of multi-million-dollar corporations and finance houses, and, of course, the U.S. stock market. As a result, New York City attracted newly-minted millionaires from all over the country. The old New York elite, of which her parents were members, experienced the influx of these wealthy newcomers as a series of invasions, as being “assailed from every side by persons who sought to climb boldly over the walls of social exclusiveness.”² Social competition became fierce and, in order to survive, the old elite sought “controlled mergers” with the new rich, that is to say marital alliances combining money with lineage. In 1872 Ward McAllister, a former Georgia lawyer, came to the fore by orchestrating social events which controlled the entrance of the new arrivals into the upper circles of high society. He gathered together twenty-five men of solid social standing in New York City, known as the Patriarchs, who arranged a series of winter balls and distributed the invitations. The idea, according to McAllister, was to make the Patriarch Balls as select as possible, so that invitations would be deeply coveted and bestow social acceptance.³ Closely associated with Ward McAllister was Mrs. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, whose own marriage to the grandson of John Jacob Astor in 1853 symbolized the merger of wealth and lineage. For twenty-five years she held sway over New York society as a social arbiter and setter of fashions. Her regime was a formal one, based on the adoption of European manners and conventions. Calling and card-leaving, balls, dinners, receptions, and attendance at the opera during the New York winter season constituted the framework for the formal sociability of Mrs. Astor's social set, widely known as “The Four Hundred.” Businessmen utilized these social entertainments in order to further their interests—tips on the stock market might be gratefully acknowledged by an invitation to use one's opera box; business connections might be enhanced by an invitation to dinner. The formality of Mrs. Astor's regime began, however, to pall by the mid-1890s and wealthy New Yorkers began to seek a more informal social life based around country-house weekends, restaurants, gaiety shows and vaudeville theatre, and various forms of recreation such as golf and tennis.

The fierce competition for high social status manifested itself architecturally on Fifth Avenue in New York and in Newport, Rhode Island, where many of New York's upper circle spent their summer. The move towards social consolidation, modeled on European aristocratic society, determined an architectural style just as imposing as the more functional commercial buildings of Wall Street. Henry James, when he revisited New York in 1904-05, perceived a shallowness to the new prosperity and found the “elegant domiciliary” and “exorbitant structures” of Fifth Avenue equally insincere and insecure.⁴ The nouveau riche quite literally bought history through purchasing European art treasures and antiques and using European marbles for their Italianate palazzi or French châteaux. Wharton herself was scathing about this “new class of world-compellers” who bound “themselves to slavish imitation of the superseded” and who displayed a “prompt and reverent faith in the reality of the sham they had created.”⁵

It was Thorstein Veblen, an economic historian and author of The Theory of the Leisure Class, who, in the 1890s, coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption.” Veblen had in mind the very kind of architectural extravaganza that appeared both on Fifth Avenue and in Newport. Through their ostentatious houses, the wealthy sought to overawe the rest of society with their monied power. This kind of display did not stop at houses, of course. It extended to all areas of their lifestyle: clothes, entertainments, international travel, automobiles and private railroad cars, and so on. Daily newspapers and society magazines obliged them by reporting in minute detail their comings and goings, listing passengers sailing for Europe, attendees at the Patriarchs and other balls, guests at society weddings, and patrons at the opening night of the opera. The designer dresses of women received particular attention in the society columns.Town Topics, a notorious gossipy society magazine, made no bones about the game of self-advertisement that was played by members of New York's social elite:

The 400 are in the social business … they do not spare pains, expense or advertising for the sake of maintaining a brilliant and refined series of continuous social performances.

They are the actors, the rest of us are the spectators; but there is this difference between their show and all other shows, that they not only give the performance, but they do not charge anything for the privilege of looking at it.⁶

Wharton herself captured the culture of display in her New York novels and hinted at the complex relationship between class, gender, self-advertisement, fashion, publicity, consumption, and leisure. Two key sites for this in her fiction were the opera and restaurants. In the New York of Wharton's youth, the Academy of Music on 14th Street was the premier venue for opera. It was soon surpassed, however, in 1883, by the Metropolitan Opera House on 39th Street and Broadway, built to accommodate the burgeoning elite and its voracious demand for opera boxes. A box at the opera provided an almost unparalleled opportunity for the wealthy to see and be seen. The performance of class and heterosexual desire conducted in the boxes rivaled that of the performance on stage. The same principle of display and spectatorship was evident in the new fashionable restaurants in uptown Manhattan as well as in some of the older establishments favored by the Four Hundred, such as Sherry's and Delmonico's. At the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, which opened in 1897, was the famous Palm Garden restaurant, a favorite haunt of the fashionable and the wealthy. A table at the Palm Garden was coveted almost as much as an opera box at the Met. Leading up to the restaurant was a three-hundred foot corridor lined with “luxurious chairs and sofas,” aptly known as Peacock Alley, where the public could survey in comfort the promenade of the rich and famous on their way to dine. But the display and spectatorship did not just end there. Once seated, diners remained on public view because the walls of the restaurant were made of glass, and so the diners constituted a huge, live window display for gawping onlookers. The patrons could also engage in spectatorship thanks to the floor-to-ceiling mirrors which enabled them to see diners at other tables without having to look round.

The newspaper publicity about the lifestyle and expenditure of the wealthy helped to advertise a wide range of new consumer items which came on to the market at this time. Ordinary Americans were encouraged to emulate the wealthy but on a less an cheaper scale as commodities, such as the bicycle or the box camera, became mass produced. The world of material goods was transformed in terms of the number and variety of artifacts that became commonplace in the home and the workplace—artifacts that changed the way that people performed their work or the way they engaged with the world around them. Wharton herself was ambivalent about the usefulness or aesthetic advantages of some of the new inventions that came onto the market and wildly enthusiastic about others. She took considerable interest in those things that made certain aspects of her life easier such as the typewriter or the telephone and, above all, the automobile. She attended the Paris Exposition in 1900 with her husband and her friends the Bourgets.

Expositions were enormously popular venues for the display of new inventions and material goods. Between the year of Wharton's birth and the First World war there were more than a dozen expositions in the United States alone attracting tens of millions of visitors. With reference to these fairs, historian Warren Susman described them as “rites of passage for American society which made possible the full acceptance of a new way of life, new values, and a new social organization.” At the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, for example, two of the most important exhibits on display that were about to transform the world of communications were Christopher Scholes's Remington typewriter and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. The early mass-produced typewriter was a cumbersome machine, more like a sewing machine with a foot treadle to operate the carriage return. But after 1900, the typewriter became a more portable object and was popular amongst writers and editors before being taken up by the business world. As for the telephone, it was not until 1878 that the first telephone exchange was opened in the United States, in New Haven, Connecticut. By 1900 the Bell Company alone had more than 800,000 telephones in service, but by 1930 there were more than 20 million telephones in use in the United States.⁷ Apart from the speed with which communications could be conducted, the telephone had an impact on the way people conversed with each other and broke down barriers between the private and public world. While traveling in the United States, Arnold Bennett, the English writer, was intimidated by the mass of telephone wires “threaded under pavements and over roofs and between floors and ceilings and between walls” both uniting “all the privacies of the organism” and destroying them “in order to make one immense publicity.”⁸ The telephone facilitated a greater informality in social relations in ways, perhaps, not dissimilar to the introduction of electronic mail of our own era.

To some extent the telephone denoted the intrusion of the public into the private space of the home in ways that people in the late-nineteenth century were not familiar with. Even electric street lighting was seen as intrusive if not vulgar in the way it penetrated into people's houses and encouraged the use of thick window curtains.⁹ There was a general prejudice against intense light, whatever its source. The famous mid-nineteenth-century American writer, Edgar Allen Poe, whose fiction Wharton admired, had written that, in his day, even gaslight was regarded as “totally inadmissible within doors” because “its harsh and unsteady light offends.”¹⁰ When Wharton and Codman came to write their manual on interior decoration in 1897, they firmly advised that the appropriate light to use in the company drawing-room was that of wax candles. With derision, they objected to the use of electric lighting:

Nothing has done more to vulgarize interior decoration than the general use of gas and of electricity in the living-rooms of modern houses. Electric light especially, with its harsh white glare, which no expedients have as yet overcome, has taken from our drawing-rooms all air of privacy and distinction. In passageways and office, electricity is of great service; but were it not that all “modern improvements” are thought equally applicable to every condition of life, it would be difficult to account for the adoption of a mode of lighting which makes the salon look like a railway-station, the dining-room like a restaurant.¹¹

For all their disapproval of electric light, electricity was nevertheless central to the new culture of the display of commodities, especially in department stores on both sides of the Atlantic. Dry-goods stores had been dark, uninviting buildings in which purchases were made only on the ground floor. They were more like warehouses because goods requested by customers had to be fetched by clerks. First the introduction of plate glass, allowing much more daylight into the store, and then electricity transformed the way in which retailers could display their commodities. Shopping became a leisure activity and, by 1915, a predominantly female activity. Storeowners targeted women shoppers by trying to make stores more comfortable and welcoming with “powder rooms,” writing tables, lounges and ladies' restaurants. The rise of the department stores dates from the mid-nineteenth century. In 1862 A. T. Stewart paved the way with his Venetian cast-iron palace on 9th Street, bringing to New York Parisian methods of retailing that had been hugely successful for pioneers like Aristide Boucicaut, owner of Le Bon Marché. Haggling over price was replaced with the fixed price; sales were held to ensure a constant turnover of merchandise; and, most popular of all with women shoppers, customers could return unwanted goods. According to Thomas Schlereth, women “accounted for close to 90 percent of all consumer spending in the United States.”¹²

Capturing the new age of consumer capitalism was a new periodical which appeared on the newsstands in 1913, Vanity Fair whose motto was: “a record of current achievements in all the arts and a mirror of the progress and promise of American life.”¹³ It sold fashion and style and encouraged its readers to identify with the products it advertised and featured in articles. Like most magazines of its kind, its pages were illustrated with commodities, commodities associated with stories about people who featured in its articles. In the 1910s and 1920s the commodity item was the automobile. Even the early car advertisements implied that ownership of a particular make of vehicle conferred a certain kind of personality and lifestyle.

WORLD WAR I: 1914-1918

Soon after expatriating herself to France in 1913, Wharton found herself at the center of world events. Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife by a Serb nationalist in June 1914, Germany and Austria-Hungary marched on France, Russia and Serbia. The day after Germany declared war on France, Britain declared war on Germany. Leading statesmen of the day blithely predicted a short war, but Europe was soon embroiled in massive military conflict on a scale never before experienced. The numbers of civilians disrupted by bombardment and trench warfare was unprecedented and Paris was inundated by refugees from Belgium and the North of France where most of the major battles of the war took place.

Wharton was keen for the United States to enter the war on the side of the Allied Powers of Britain, Franc and Russia, but President Woodrow Wilson wanted to maintain the neutrality of the United States and had campaigned for re-election in 1916 on the promise of keeping America out of the war. Wilson's stance reflected a long tradition in U. S. foreign policy going back as far as the 1790s of avoiding entanglements in European wars. Like his revolutionary forbears, Wilson envisioned the United States playing a different role in international affairs and believed in the United States' potential to act as an arbitrator of international disputes. To protect that role, Wilson had declared U. S. neutrality in 1914. The United States, however, did not observe strict rules of neutrality and supplied the Allied Powers with arms, munitions and food. In the first two years of the war, U. S. trade with the Allied Powers tripled, reaching $3 billion by 1916. In addition, U. S. banks extended more than $2 billion in credit to Britain and France thus giving the United States a strong vested interest in an Allied victory. American shipping and U. S. citizens were at risk once Germany began, in February 1915, enforcing a blockade around Britain with U-boats to disrupt this trade. These submarines torpedoed Allied shipping without warning and, in May 1915, the British passenger liner, the Lusitania, was sunk with the loss of nearly 1200 lives, including 128 Americans. This and other attacks severely tested Wilson's resolve to maintain neutrality, but his hand was not forced until nearly two years later when 12 U-boats attacked the U. S. merchant vessel, the Algonquin, in March 1917. On 2 April Congress passed a declaration of war on Germany.

From September 1914 onwards, when the Allies had halted the German advance on France at the Battle of the Marne, just north of Paris, the military confrontation had been reduced to protracted trench warfare. The front line stretched from Flanders to the French border with Switzerland, consisting of two rows of narrow trenches manned by millions of troops. In the no-man's land in between, soldiers were cut down by machine guns and in the trenches they were shelled and gassed. Casualties reached horrific proportions when either side launched an offensive: 680,000 at Verdun in 1915 and 16,1,375,000 at the Somme in 1916.

In all, 9 million died on the battlefield. The arrival of two million troops from the United States were a key factor in halting Germany's 1918 spring offensive, and, by the fall of that year, with starvation widespread in Germany, the German government sought an armistice.

U. S. military involvement earned President Wilson a seat at the peace table in Versailles in 1919, and he was keen to establish a new world order to minimize the likelihood of future conflagrations and, in his words, “to make the world safe for democracy.” He proposed the establishment of a League of Nations, which included a proposal for an international court of justice that would arbitrate on disputes between nations. Ironically, he was unable to convince his own citizens of the League's merits and a staunch Republican opposition in Congress, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, threw out the Treaty of Versailles in March 1920. In the 1920 presidential election, Wilson was soundly defeated by Warren G. Harding.

THE ROARING TWENTIES: 1920-29

A war-torn and war-weary Europe took longer to recover from the four years of conflagration than the United States, whose economy boomed, if somewhat precariously, in the 1920s. The post-war economy was consumer-led and one of the most successful industries of the decade was the automobile industry. The car manufacturer, Henry Ford, had perfected the mechanics of mass production by 1908 and, by May 1927, Ford Motor Company had produced more than 15 million Model T. Fords.¹⁴ By 1929 five million cars a year rolled off the assembly lines.

If the world of prohibition, speakeasies and Al Capone was somewhat remote to an aging Wharton, who lived a quiet life at her Parisian and Mediterranean homes, she was not unaware of the more liberal mores that characterized the decade and the claims made about the newfound freedoms of women. In 1920 American women had finally won the right to vote after a campaign that dated back to 1869 with the founding of the National Women's Suffrage Association and the American Women's Suffrage Association. The first call for women's suffrage was heard back in 1848 at the famous Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention, but it was not until after the Civil War that the predominantly white women's movement focused its attention on the vote. Alongside of the women's movement, significant changes began to take place with regard to access to tertiary education and the professions, women's paid employment, married women's property rights, and the decline of the national birth rate. White middle-class women benefited most from these changes and became increasingly active in the pubic sphere—in local politics, reform societies, settlement houses, and social work. While on the one hand women were gaining greater access to education and employment, the consumer culture of the era continued to objectify women—and perhaps did so even more powerfully with the development of the mass media.

One of the enduring images of women in the 1920s was that of the flapper. The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described her as “lovely and expensive and about 19.” There was the “flapper look”: flat-chested and waistless with bobbed hair. The flapper was associated with the hedonistic lifestyle of large cities and usually depicted engaging in one of the new, energetic dances, such as the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear, the Chicken Scratch, the Kangaroo Dip, the Monkey Glide or the Lame Duck. Many of these dances had been appropriated from black nightclubs in Harlem and were regarded as risqué because dancers moved with less inhibition and engaged in more physical contact than had been conventional.

Changes in manners and dress were not a strong indicator that women in the United States had achieved greater equality or independence. If anything, they seem to suggest that women were merely conforming to a new, fashionable image, one exploited by the ever-growing fashion and beauty industry. The historian Mary Ryan notes that in New York city alone, beauty parlors quintupled between 1922 and 1927 and that, by the end of the decade, American women spent more money on manicures, face lifts, hair dyes and cosmetics than the federal government spent on the navy.¹⁵ It was also an image which pandered to male domination: The flapper look infantilised women, confirming what Wharton had been critiquing in her fiction since 1905, namely that American culture preferred women to be childlike rather than full human beings. Despite the efforts of the women's movement to bring about the emancipation of women and the construction of the “New Woman” as an exemplar of a woman who exercised a greater degree of control over her life, Wharton maintained a sceptical stance from the 1890s onwards.¹⁶ The conclusion that historian Alice Kessler-Harris comes to about women's status in the 1920s endorses Wharton's position:

A careful look at what was happening to women in that decade provides no grounds for assuming that they were on the way to equality.¹⁷

A new source of income for Wharton in the 1920s and 1930s was the sale of the film rights to her fiction. Before the First World War, silent moving pictures that ran from two to ten minutes each were shown throughout the United States in “nickelodeons,” movie theatres in predominantly working-class and immigrant neighborhoods which charged a nickel entrance fee. Thomas Edison had first exhibited his kinetoscope, the first commercially viable motion picture machine, at the 1893 World Fair in Chicago. By 1910 there were some 20,000 movie theatres playing to a daily audience of a quarter of a million people.¹⁸ The quality of the projection was not that good, the flickering effect giving rise to the colloquial term for movies: the “flicks.”¹⁹ Things had begun to change significantly on the eve of the War. The predominantly immigrant European theatre-owners were displaced by a powerful conglomerate of film producers of white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant background who sought to control both the distribution and showing of movies and to appeal to a more middle-class audience by providing plush movie palaces. More artistic movies and feature films of greater length were produced, such as D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which premiered in Los Angeles in 1915. The film industry expanded exponentially in the 1920s. Between 1926 and 1930, when silent movies were replaced with “the talkies,” weekly movie audiences doubled from 50 to 100 million. The movie exemplified modern consumer culture, both as a product that was consumed by moviegoers and as a vehicle for the advertisement of other commodities. In many ways, the movies replaced high society as the predominant way in which lifestyle was sold, consumer products endorsed, and fashions created.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION: 1930-39

The prosperity of the 1920s was based on more efficient management techniques of production, distribution and capitalization, the introduction of new forms of mechanization in the manufacture of goods, such as the conveyor belt, the replacement of steam power by electricity, and the expansion of advertising, facilitated by the radio which was developed for commercial use at this time.²⁰ The leading industries had been the automobile and construction industries, the latter being stimulated by the need for roads and suburban expansion. But there was a limit to growth and both businesses and individuals over-extended themselves speculating on future expansion. In the spring of 1928 the stock market was in a speculating frenzy but, eighteen months later, the market broke and prices began to tumble. Investors were in a panic to offload stock and, on 24 October, known as Black Thursday, nearly 13 million shares changed hands. Investors held onto their money cutting off the supply of capital that was crucial to the day-to-day operation of U. S. businesses. Things spiralled out of control as people withdrew their savings from banks, as production sagged and millions of workers were laid off, and as business confidence vanished.

The impact of the crash of the New York stock market reverberated throughout the world, plunging national economies into recession. One of the worst affected European countries was Germany, which was still struggling to recover from the First World War and the heavy debts of reparation imposed on it by the Allied Powers. During times of runaway inflation German citizens had used wheelbarrows to transport their worthless currency. Deep economic disarray and high unemployment paved the way for the rise of the Nazi party and, in 1933, the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Within two years, Hitler repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, ceded from the League of Nations, and announced that Germany would rearm. When Wharton died in 1937 the signs of another conflagration about to engulf Europe were more than evident.

Notes

1. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982): 3-4.

2. Mrs. May King Van Rensselaer, The Social Ladder (London: Nash & Grayson, 1925).

3. Ward McAllister, Society As I have Found It (New York: Cassell, 1890).

4. Henry James, The American Scene (London: Horizon, 1967): 159.

5. Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (New York: Library of America, 1985): 803.

6. Town Topics, 2 April 1896, 6.

7. See, for example, Thomas Schlereth, 188-9.

8. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1919 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983): 188-9.

9. Schivelbusch, 187.

10. Edgar Allen Poe, “The Philosophy of Furniture.”

11. Wharton & Codman, The Decoration of Houses, 126.

12. Schlereth, 141.

13. Ronald Berman, The Great Gatsby and Modern Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996): 17.

14. Virginia Scharf, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York: Free Press, 1991): 53.

15. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975): 186.

16. Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton's Argument With America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980): 11, 159-60.

17. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983): 236.

18. Schlereth.

19. Ibid.

20. Harvey Green, pp. 188-89.