Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech

213 Pages·2009·2.13 MB·English

by  Dianne L. Chambers (auth.)

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin
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Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison
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American Political Poetry in the 21st Century
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Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James:
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Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism
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Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech
By Dianne L. Chambers
Feminist Readings of
Edith Wharton
From Silence to Speech
Dianne L. Chambers
FEMINIST READINGS OF EDITH WHARTON
Copyright © Dianne L. Chambers, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61765-0
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
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the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-38059-6 ISBN 978-0-230-10154-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230101548
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chambers, Dianne L.
Feminist readings of Edith Wharton : from silence to speech /
Dianne L. Chambers.
p. cm.—(American literature readings in the 21st century)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-349-38059-6 (alk. paper)
1. Wharton, Edith, 1862–1937—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Feminism and literature—United States—History—20th century.
3. Women in literature. 4. Sex role in literature. I. Title.
PS3545.H16Z638 2009
813(cid:2).52—dc22 2009011850
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: December 2009
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Wharton and Feminist Criticism 15
2 Wharton, Women, and Authorship at the
Turn of the Century 25
3 Competing Discourses and the Word in
The House of Mirth 49
4 The Unravelling of Story in The Reef 67
5 Seduction and Language in Summer 97
6 Gender and Performance in The Glimpses
of the Moon 125
Conclusion 151
Notes 157
Bibliography 197
Index 207
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Linda Wagner-Martin who introduced me to Edith
Wharton and has supported me in my work for all these years. I also
want to thank Cindy Gilmore for her enthusiasm and support for this
book for nearly as many years. I owe thanks to family, friends, and col-
leagues in the Department of English at Elmhurst College who have
never stopped asking about Edith Wharton. Special thanks to Shirley
Roemer. I owe much gratitude to the librarians at the A.C. Buehler
Library who always found what I needed. And finally, thanks to Mom
and Dad who taught me persistence along with their love.
Introduction
Edith Wharton has proven to be a fascinating and compelling subject
who eludes any easy categorization as a woman and writer. The study
of her life and her novels, short stories, and nonfiction reveal her to be
a figure rich in contradictions. She was an American patriot who was
appalled when Henry James gave up his American citizenship in World
War I; nevertheless, she lived most of her adult life in England and
France. Born into the elite class of New York society that was defined
by old money and rigid social rituals in the nineteenth century, she
relentlessly satirized the hide-bound traditions and foibles of these
same upper classes. Fearing that being classified as a woman writer
would define her work as less significant than writing produced by
men, Wharton rejected any connections to the many women writers
during her time. Refusing to believe that the writing of serious litera-
ture was limited to men, she complained in a letter to a friend that she
would never be able to write like a man. Consistently worried about the
critical acceptance of her work throughout her career, she worked hard
to earn the attention of intellectuals and artists; yet, at the same time,
she was also a shrewd businesswoman who carefully oversaw the details
of marketing her work and celebrated both the making of money and
her status as a best-selling writer. These contradictions testify to her
complex personality and make the exploration of her writing within the
context of her culture and personal history an absorbing journey.
During her lifetime, Wharton was recognized as a serious and
critically appreciated writer. In 1921, she won a Pulitzer for The Age
of Innocence—an award made annually “for the American novel which
shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the
highest standard of American manners and manhood” (qtd. in Lewis,
Wharton 433). In 1924, she became the first woman to be given an
honorary degree of Doctorate of Letters by Yale University in recog-
nition of “her place in the front ranks of the world’s living novelists”
and as a person who had “elevated the level of American literature”
2 FEMINIST READINGS OF EDITH WHARTON
(qtd. in Lewis, Wharton 453). She was nominated for a Nobel Prize
in literature in 1927 as “the foremost living creative literary artist of
America” (qtd. in Lewis, Wharton 481).
Wharton was also extraordinarily well received by the reading pub-
lic. With the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905, her success as a
best-selling writer was clear. Over 140,000 copies were in print by the
end of the year and, for the first two months in 1906, her novel remained
the highest-selling book in the country (Lewis, Wharton 151). In 1918,
she was offered $18,000 by Pictorial Review for the serialization of her
next novel (Lewis, Wharton 423). Within two years after the publica-
tion of The Age of Innocence, she had earned nearly $70,000 on the
novel. In 1922, Wharton sold over 100,000 copies of her new novel,
The Glimpses of the Moon, earning almost $60,000. By any barometer
used to measure success, Wharton clearly had achieved it.
However, despite critical and popular success in her lifetime,
Wharton’s entry into the canon of writers who are regularly taught in
American literature classes and whose work is the routine subject of
scholarly attention is relatively recent. Often relegated to the status of
Henry James’s protégé after her death in 1937, Wharton’s work largely
disappeared from critical and public attention. Thirty years ago, most
of her texts could be found only in used bookstores. Her work was
rarely anthologized. The teaching of her novels was confined to Ethan
Frome by high school teachers who, in large part, appreciated the
work for its brevity.
All of this has changed, of course. Initiated in part by the publica-
tion of R.W.B. Lewis’ biography in 1975, an edited collection of her
letters by R.W.B and Nancy Lewis in 1988, and a second major biog-
raphy by Shari Benstock in 1994, Wharton has become a significant
figure in American literary history. A detailed, extensively researched,
and lengthy biography by Hermione Lee was published in 2007.
Critical analyses and biographies by such feminist scholars as Cynthia
Griffin Wolff, Elizabeth Ammons, Candace Waid, and Linda Wagner-
Martin have renewed critical interest in this American writer.
Nor is the current renewal of interest in Wharton confined to
scholars and critics. Bookstores carry new editions of her popular
novels and she is the subject of undergraduate seminars at colleges
and universities. Wharton would very likely have been especially
pleased by her increasing presence in American popular culture with
the release of film adaptations of Ethan Frome (1993), The Age of
Innocence (1993), and The House of Mirth (2000). This resurgence of
interest in her work certainly supports an ongoing feminist agenda
among American critics to rediscover and reposition women writers
INTRODUCTION 3
within the tradition of American literature; however, continuing con-
temporary interest in Wharton also testifies to the depth of Wharton’s
understanding of American culture and the acute insight of her nar-
rative voice.
The current return of popular and critical attention to Edith
Wharton invites further study of this complex and contradictory
woman. Wharton’s life and her career represent, in significant ways,
the challenges of being a women writer at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century. No longer easily dismissed as a second rate-Henry
James, Wharton elicits continuing debates over her role as an American
writer, as a woman writer, and as a feminist. Contemporary critics
argue about whether she is best read as a realist, romanticist, or natu-
ralist, as a writer of novels of manners or melodrama, as a sharp sati-
rist or a producer of sentimental potboilers. The connecting threads
of Edith Wharton’s gender, class, and cultural context make for an
intriguing story that highlights turn-of-the-century concerns about
changing gender roles and authorship. Wharton emerges as a writer
who both embodies and delineates the cultural conflicts over male
and female roles in America at the beginning of the twentieth
century.
Born in 1862, the daughter of Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones
and George Frederic Jones, Wharton entered into the world as a child
of considerable and long-standing wealth and secure family name, a
descendent of an old and respected family with impeccable social cre-
dentials and a member of Old New York society. While she was
expected to be well-mannered, speak faultless English, and be well-
dressed, she was neither encouraged nor expected to become an
author. Noting in her autobiography that “in the eyes of our provin-
cial society,” writing was considered to be an activity positioned
somewhere in “between a black art and a form of manual labor,”
Wharton came to embrace a distinctly European model of intellectual
life and to author critically successful novels that revealed the vanities
and morally corrupt values of her native American eastern, upper class
culture (Backward 69). Her satiric voice is at its keenest when point-
ing out the outworn rituals, empty values, and limited worldview of
the denizens of Old New York American society.
And yet, Wharton remained loyal to many of the traditions and
views of Old New York society. Wharton took pride in her prestigious
ancestry. In her autobiography, she traces her ancestry through a
legacy of socially prominent relatives. Upon the completion of her
first great mansion in 1902, in Lenox, Massachusetts, she named this
home the Mount, after the summer home of her great great grandfather