Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters PDF
Preview Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters
EDITH WHARTON: TRAVELLER IN THE LAND OF LETTERS Edith Wharton Traveller in the Land of Letters Janet Beer Goodwyn Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-0-333-62327-5 ISBN 978-1-349-24006-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24006-7 EDITH WHARTON Copyright© 1990 by Janet Patricia Beer Goodwyn Ali rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critica! articles or reviews. For information, address: St. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1990 Reprint of the original edition 1995 ISBN 978-0-312-03200-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-312-12146-4 (pbk.) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beer Goodwyn, Janet, 1956- Edith Wharton : traveller in the land of letters 1 Janet Beer Goodwyn. -New York : St. Martin's Press, 1990. xii, 184 p. ; 23 cm. Further Reading: p. 166-168. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-03200-5 (cloth)- ISBN 978-0-312-12146-4 (pbk.) 1. Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937-Criticism and interpretation. 1. Title. PS3545.H16Z655 1990 813'.52-dc19 89-6050 AACR 2 MARC For my parents, with love Contents Acknowledgements ix Preface to the 1995 Reprint X Introduction 1 1 The Valley of Decision 8 2 The Customs of the Country: France 25 3 Fighting France 44 4 Inside the House of Mirth 56 5 The Writing of American Fiction 81 6 'Literature' or the Various Forms of Autobiography 103 7 The Age of Innocence 131 Conclusion 154 Notes and References 155 Further Reading 166 Index 169 vii Acknowledgements The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permis sion to quote from the work of Edith Wharton: The Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Watkins/Loomis Agency Inc., New York, for excerpts from A Backward Glance (New York: 1934; reprinted by Constable & Co., 1972). I would also like to thank everyone who has helped me with my work on Edith Wharton, both in England and the United States, and particularly the staff of the Yale Beinecke Library, 1980-1981. My special thanks are due to John Stokes, who saw my work through its academic process; to my husband, Andrew Goodwyn, who has shared his home with Edith Wharton for a decade and can still express enthusiasm for her; to Marion Maidment, for her love and support; and, finally, to my son, Thomas Goodwyn, for being a sound sleeper. Janet Beer Goodwyn ix Preface to the 1995 Reprint Edith Wharton's literary reputation has soared in the last two decades. The publication of R. W. B. Lewis's biography in 1975 marked a revitalisation of critical interest in Wharton's writing which has brought her back to her proper place in the forefront of any consideration of early twentieth-century American litera ture. As I write the BBC is filming a lavish British-American co production of Wharton's last, unfinished novel, The Buccaneers, films of The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome are in the cinemas and the books are on the bestseller lists, just as they were in her lifetime. These indications of a general as well as a specialist academic interest in her work is testimony to the breadth and accessibility of her writing as well as to the enduring relevance of her themes and concerns. Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters looks at Wharton's novels, autobiographies and travel writing in terms of her inspir ational use of particular landscapes and different cultures. The book is concerned with all Wharton's novels, giving serious con sideration to texts such as Twilight Sleep and The Glimpses of the Moon, still underrated in 1994, as well as to the much discussed The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country. I began my research for this study of Wharton in 1980 and although I find that today I have more and different things to say about Whar ton's work, and, in particular, about the short stories which are excluded from the discussion here, I feel most satisfied with the sections of the book which treat the texts unfamiliar to the gen eral reader and with my work on her various autobiographical writings. It is here that I hoped, and still hope, to extend the range, and indeed the canon, of the Wharton texts which are given attention by both an academic and a general audience. I first conceived of this book as one which would examine Wharton's writing through the medium of her autobiographies, looking at how her own accounts of her life related to and in formed her fictions. As I plunged deeper into her non-fiction what I found was that Wharton's art was interdependent, the travel as well as the autobiographical writing sustaining an intimate X Preface to the 1995 Reprint xi relationship with her creative work and providing the sort of multi-cultural context which could support and indeed illuminate a reading of her novels which was topographically based. My enabling principle was, and continues to be, Wharton's own description of a self-willed and self-fulfilling residence in the 'Land of Letters', the place where her work and her life could finally conjoin. Her metaphoric construction of a literary terrain gave me a number of points of access to the range and depth of her writing. I am aware that it is but one among many modes of access to the infinite variety that is Edith Wharton's work. Many outstanding books on Wharton have been published in the last decade and I have taken the opportunity of this reprint to up date the Further Reading section of this book to reflect the exhilar ating critical revolution in the field of Wharton studies that has taken place. Janet Beer Goodwyn 1995 Introduction Edith Wharton's first novel, The Valley of Decision, was published in 1902, a month after her fortieth birthday. For the child who used to cover the brown wrapping paper from her mother's Paris dresses with closely written stories and pace about her bedroom, upside down text in hand, declaiming her own fictions to the walls, this belated publication marked a definitive change of life. Wharton had been in print before 1902: a small volume of poetry, two collections of short stories, a treatise on interior design co-written with the architect, Ogden Codman, and a novella. All these preceded The Valley of Decision, but it was the novel which truly marked her entry into the world of the professional writer. This 'romantic chronicle'1 as Wharton called her first novel, was an experiment which she never repeated; never again did she venture so far into the past nor so deep into another country without an American cast of characters. However, the processes of composition of the book, the background reading and organisation of historical material, proved to be an invaluable exercise for the aspiring novelist, especially when looked at in conjunction with the writing of her two Italian travel books, Italian Villas and Their Gardens, published in 1904, and Italian Backgrounds, 1905. Her successful apprenticeship in the short story combined with her skills as observer and recorder in the guidebooks provided an inspirational beginning for an artist whose work would always be distinguished by its innovative use of specific landscapes and its topographical coherence. Wharton thought of her fiction as possessing a particular geogra phy and from the time of publication of The Valley of Decision onwards she was to regard the plying of the written word as much more than her profession; in fact, her art became her place of residence; as she says in her published autobiography, A Backward Glance: I felt like some homeless waif who, after trying for years to take out naturalization papers, and being rejected by every country, has finally acquired a nationality. The Land of Letters was henceforth to be my country and I gloried in my new citizenship? 1
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