Edith Wharton

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How did the life Edith Wharton lived up to the age of eighteen prepare her for her writing career?

Do Wharton’s novels give the lie to those who see a preoccupation with manners as a superficial interest?

What are the significant differences between Wharton’s presentation of character and that of her admired friend Henry James?

In The House of Mirth, what traits in Lily Bart make it possible to view her sympathetically despite her many faults?

Discuss Wharton’s attitude toward social conformity.

Do the socially elite characters in Wharton’s novels deserve the downfall that many of them experience?

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Edith Wharton’s prolific career includes the publication of novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, travel books, criticism, works on landscaping and interior decoration, a translation, an autobiography, and wartime pamphlets and journalism. Her novel The Age of Innocence (1920) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. Several of her works have been adapted for the stage, including The Age of Innocence and the novels Ethan Frome (1911), The House of Mirth (1905), and The Old Maid (1924). The dramatization of The Old Maid was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1935. Films based on Edith Wharton’s works include The House of Mirth, The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), and The Old Maid.

Achievements

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Edith Wharton’s talent in affording her reader an elegant, well-constructed glance at upper-class New York and European society won for her high esteem from the earliest years of her career. The novel The House of Mirth was her first best-seller and, along with Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence, is considered to be one of her finest works. During World War I, Wharton served the Allied cause in Europe by organizing relief efforts and caring for Belgian orphans, work for which she was inducted into the French Legion of Honor in 1916 and the Order of Leopold (Belgium) in 1919. In the United States, the 1920’s would see Wharton’s literary career flower. In 1921, she became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize, awarded to her for The Age of Innocence; in 1923, she also became the first female recipient of an honorary degree of doctor of letters from Yale University; in 1927, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature; in 1928, her novel The Children was the Book-of-the-Month Club selection for September. By 1930, Wharton was one of the most highly regarded American authors of the time and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. After Wharton’s death in 1937, her fiction was not as widely read by the general public as it was during her lifetime. Feminist literary scholars, however, have reexamined Wharton’s works for their unmistakable portrayal of women’s lives in the early 1900’s.

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In addition to her novels, of which several had appeared serially in Scribners, The Delineator, and The Pictorial Review, Edith Wharton (HWAWRT-uhn) published eleven collections of short stories and three volumes of poetry as well as a variety of nonfiction works. She wrote an early and influential book on interior decorating and design, The Decoration of Houses (1897; in collaboration with architect Ogden Codman, Jr.); a short book on the art of narrative, The Writing of Fiction (1925), published originally in Scribner’s magazine; and a delightful if highly selective autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), which includes, among other things, an amusing account of Henry James’s circumlocutory manner of speech.

Wharton, an indefatigable traveler, recorded accounts of her travels in Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), Italian Backgrounds (1905), A Motor-Flight Through France (1908), and In Morocco (1920). During World War I, she wrote numerous pamphlets and letters...

(This entire section contains 246 words.)

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to inform Americans about French and Belgian suffering and to enlist sympathy and support. Articles she wrote to explain the French people to American soldiers were later collected in the volumeFrench Ways and Their Meaning (1919), and accounts of her five tours of the front lines were published under the title Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort (1915). Wharton also published a great many short stories, articles, and reviews that have never been collected. A number of her stories and novels have been adapted for the stage, motion pictures, and television, and have also been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Danish, Finnish, and Japanese.

Achievements

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Unlike Henry James, whose readership was small and intensely discriminating, Edith Wharton managed to attract a large audience of general readers and at the same time command the interest of critics and fellow writers as well. Among her admirers were Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald; Bernard Berenson, the art critic; and Percy Lubbock. Wharton’s popularity remained high almost to the end of her career in the 1930’s, but critical enthusiasm began to diminish after 1920, when the quality of her fiction declined.

Even in the early years, 1905 to 1920, when Wharton’s best fiction was being published, there were reservations expressed or implied by those who thought her a follower of and to some extent a lesser James, a charge easier to disprove than to eradicate. The truth is, though Wharton learned from James—and a few of her novels, particularly Madame de Treymes, reflect Jamesian themes as well as techniques—Wharton had her own manner as well as her own subject, and as she grew older, she continued to discover differences between her fiction and James’s. It should also be pointed out (whether in praise or blame will depend on the critic) that James was a more dedicated artist than Wharton; his fiction had a finish and a coherence to be found in only a half dozen of her novels; moreover, Wharton sometimes skated on the thin ice of superficiality, and in one novel, The Glimpses of the Moon, plunged through. Toward the end of her career, she also grew increasingly out of touch with life in the postwar world, much of which offended her. Her long residence in France, moreover, not only cut her off from the life of her fellow countryfolk but also—since she spoke French or Italian almost exclusively—loosened her grasp of English, so much so that a critic such as the young Edmund Wilson could complain that there were awkward phrases even in her masterpiece The Age of Innocence.

Wharton’s major talent was for social observation. Unlike James, whose interest was ultimately metaphysical and whose novels were often invented from the slightest hints and employed few details, Wharton filled her novels with precise accounts of the decoration of houses, of dress and of dinner parties, describing them often down to the cut of a waistcoat and the contents of the soup tureen. This is not to say that such details were signs of superficiality, but rather that Wharton’s fictions depended heavily on the notation of manners and were the result of direct observation. Wharton tended to write—again, unlike James—out of her own direct experience. Even novels such as Ethan Frome and Summer—both set in provincial New England and so different from the world she inhabited in New York and Paris—were created with remarkable attention to surface details, of which the famous cut-glass, red pickle dish in Ethan Frome is a familiar example.

Wharton’s fiction was (again, unlike James’s) significantly autobiographical. Even the novels of provincial life, so different on the surface, treated issues that came out of the tensions of her own restricted upbringing and her unhappy marriage. Marriage was one of Wharton’s principal subjects and provided her with a way of exploring and dramatizing her two main themes: the entrapment of an individual, as R. W. B. Lewis puts it in his Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975), and the attempt by an outsider, often a vulgar lower-class individual, to break into an old, aristocratic society. There is a sense in which these two themes are contradictory: The first one implies a point of view that identifies with the individual rather than with society; the second one judges from the point of view of society. The apparent contradiction, however, merely points up the range and boundaries of the author’s sensibility. In some novels—Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth, for example—Wharton writes with sympathy of the trapped individual; in others, The Custom of the Country and The Children, she writes from the standpoint of a traditional society. In her best novels, there is both sympathy for the trapped individual and the invocation of an outside claim—marriage vows, moral code, traditional manners—with the balance of sympathy tipped to the individual.

Wharton’s major work was written between 1905, the year The House of Mirth was published, and 1920, when The Age of Innocence appeared. Interesting novels were still to come: The Mother’s Recompense, The Children, and The Buccaneers, which has the best qualities of her earlier fiction; but the major works of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive, betray a serious falling off of energy and of talent. In these novels, Wharton was attempting to judge the contemporary world by the values of the past, but was so out of sympathy with the life around her and so out of touch with its manners that her representation of it in these later books can hardly be taken seriously.

Despite this later decline, however, and despite the undeniable influence of James on some of her early work, Wharton produced a considerable body of original fiction, high in quality and superior to most of what was being published at the time. Her fiction also influenced other, younger American writers, notably Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald. After a long decline in readership and a period of critical indifference, there now appears to be a renewal of interest in her writing, both by critics and scholars of the American novel and by feminist scholars interested in extraliterary issues.

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