Orientalism, Modernism, and Gender in Edith Wharton’s Late Novels

Given the excellent scholarship on Edith Wharton and race appearing in the last two decades, surprisingly little critical attention has been given to a racial discourse that pervades much of Wharton’s writing: Orientalism. This essay demonstrates that Orientalism informs several of Wharton’s novels and, in the case of late works like Twilight Sleep, The Glimpses of the Moon, Hudson River Bracketed, and The Gods Arrive, shapes them in fundamental and complex—if sometimes inconsistent—ways. Specifically, Wharton uses references to Orientalism as a vehicle through which to identify and critique various ills she perceives in modernist social and aesthetic trends. Attending to Wharton’s engagement with Orientalism, then, opens up new interpretations of her late works, particularly with respect to race, gender, and modernism. Moreover, understanding Wharton’s Orientalism allows us to situate her as a global citizen and grapple with the imperialist views subtending her fiction.

“Eyes Filled with Splendor”

During a sunset in Italy, Ralph Marvell’s aesthetic pleasure in the landscape crosses into a visionary experience, one distinguished by the unusual perceptual means by which he sees it. His vision resembles the “saturated phenomenon” theorized by Jean-Luc Marion, in which the presence of being becomes so concentrated in a physical manifestation that it results in a bedazzlement of vision. Because such perception does not operate in Cartesian or Subject-centered terms, it does not reduce or objectify what is seen. The saturated gaze thus presents a rare alternative to the predatory modes of vision seen in The Custom of the Country (1913) and criticized in contemporary theory. It also forms the basis of an equally rare form of cosmopolitanism, one that is not a disguised version of narcissism, provincialism, or imperialism. Ralph’s vision, however, is short-lived, disintegrating in the destructive ways of seeing that empower his wife Undine.

Wharton’s Italian Women

Chapter 4 examines Wharton’s first novel, the historical fiction The Valley of Decision, in the context of Wharton’s knowledge of and appreciation for Italy that began with her family’s European stays during Wharton’s childhood. In The Valley of Decision, Wharton engages Italian womanhood as a way of exploring womankind’s relationship to learning and culture. The chapter traces Wharton’s admiration for and literary indebtedness to her Victorian predecessor, George Eliot—a writer Wharton read from early on as her letters to Anna Bahlman indicate—and discusses how Wharton’s own female intellectual, Fulvia, is not a replication of but rather a response to Eliot’s Romola.

The Cosmopolitan at War

Edith Wharton’s war literature reflects her attentiveness to the material culture of France and its powerful embodiment of intercultural exchange across centuries and cultures. In Wharton’s two major World War I texts, her earliest essays in Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort (1915) and her final war novel, A Son at the Front (1923), material phenomena push the narrative toward a more nuanced view of warfare, one in which violence happens against a backdrop of transcultural objects created by “imagined communities” reaching back centuries. As an example of women’s warw literature, Wharton’s work illuminates the tragic consequences of mechanized violence of international warfare while also providing a heightened expression of the interrelatedness of cultures.

Here/There, Now/Then, Both/And

Reading Edith Wharton’s Old New York through the genre of regionalism reveals the complexity of her cosmopolitanism, and strengthens the case for reading the volume as a unified work. The chapter discusses relevant aspects of the cultural history of the decades in which the four stories are set (such as the associations of tuberculosis in “False Dawn” and the ormolu clock in “The Old Maid”) and reviews the early publication history of each story and the collection. Close readings trace how Wharton connects and contrasts the United States and Europe (especially New York City and Italy) and puts their correspondences with historical eras into play—challenging received notions of progress and the assumption that cultivated taste correlates with integrity. The chapter argues that the way Old New York maps time onto place enables the projection of alternative values within a work that remains publishable and legible in its own moment.

Motifs of Anarchism in Edith Wharton’s The Children

This chapter explores Edith Wharton’s enactment of the removal of her childhood repressions in The Children—a novel of expatriate children banding together in anarchist solidarity against their ineffectual parents—by implementing a unique theory of transatlantic anarchism that allows the coexistence of the two irreconcilable veins of anarchism, the collectivist Darwinian-Kropotkinian and the individualist Nietzschean-Stirneresque, and Ernst Bloch’s definition of utopia based on his notion of Not-Yet-Conscious, derived from Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious and dreams.

Afterword Edith Wharton and the Promise of Cosmopolitanism

Edith Wharton’s travel writing is important to our understanding of the promise of cosmopolitan experience in her work. In these travel narratives, she represents herself in terms of what Melanie Dawson describes as Wharton’s “ideal cultural interlocutor”: “an appreciative viewer who witnesses and endeavors to understand history and artifacts, exploring a culture on its own terms and through its particular traces” (262). In ...

Beyond the Guidebook

In chapter 6, D. Medina Lasansky discusses Wharton’s role in rediscovering the sixteenth-century Franciscan sacro monte of San Vivaldo, located outside San Gimignano. Wharton wrote about the New Jerusalem site for Scribner’s as well in Italian Backgrounds. She commissioned the Florentine firm Fratelli Alinari to photograph sculptures on site, which she attributed to the Della Robbia workshop. Although not formally trained as an art historian, Wharton’s discussion of San Vivaldo shows that she was writing art history more inventive than most contemporary art historians. Of equal importance is that Wharton, like many of her female colleagues, collapsed genres (fiction, history, translation, travel writing) to write about her subjects, including San Vivaldo.

Possessing Italy

Chapter 5 places Edith Wharton as an aesthetic cosmopolitan, someone who, in John Urry’s terms, had a curiosity about other places and cultures, had the ability to “map” them historically, ventured beyond “the tourist environmental bubble”—epitomized in the Baedeker guides that Wharton wrote against--and who had the extensive knowledge of European literature, art, and languages necessary for comparative aesthetic judgments. Wharton’s first work of travel writing, Italian Backgrounds, was aimed at fellow cosmopolitans who had the time and means to immerse themselves in Italian culture. She had no time either for Italians or Americans who were ignorant of the cultural treasures of Italy. Her visual consumption of everyday scenes, which leaned toward mythologizing, stands in contrast to the debasement of the Italian poor commonly found in the travelogues of her contemporary compatriots, revealing both a lack of openness to difference and the national and racialized sentiments at the heart of anti-immigration discourse at the turn of the twentieth century.

“The Very Beginning of Things”

Edith Wharton benefited in her early career from the intellectual cosmopolitanism and encouraging support of the Harvard art professor Charles Eliot Norton. His emphasis on the imagination as a powerful force for social change drew from his close association with the aesthetic principles of John Ruskin and the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, and it found expression in a key art-historical publication, Historical Studies of Church Building in the Middle Ages. The moral and spiritual concepts underpinning this text, along with Norton’s writings about Italy, including Notes of Study and Travel in Italy, and his life itself, are read in this chapter alongside Wharton’s short stories and her first novel, set in late-eighteenth-century Italy, The Valley of Decision. Wharton’s fiction owes much in its focus on the artistic imagination, moral choices, and community transformation to Norton’s lessons in virtuous service, sympathy, and aesthetic sensibility.