47- ] American Literature - Edith Wharton

47- ] American Literature 

Edith Wharton

1862–1937 

Edith Wharton, née Edith Newbold Jones, (born January 24, 1862, New York, New York, U.S.—died August 11, 1937, Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, near Paris, France), American author best known for her stories and novels about the upper-class society into which she was born. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.

Edith Jones came of a distinguished and long-established New York family. She was educated by private tutors and governesses at home and in Europe, where the family resided for six years after the American Civil War, and she read voraciously. She made her debut in society in 1879 and married Edward Wharton, a wealthy Boston banker, in 1885.

Although she had had a book of her own poems privately printed when she was 16, it was not until after several years of married life that Wharton began to write in earnest. Her major literary model was Henry James, whom she knew, and her work reveals James’s concern for artistic form and ethical issues. She contributed a few poems and stories to Harper’s, Scribner’s, and other magazines in the 1890s, and in 1897, after overseeing the remodeling of a house in Newport, Rhode Island, she collaborated with the architect Ogden Codman, Jr., on The Decoration of Houses. Her next books, The Greater Inclination (1899) and Crucial Instances (1901), were collections of stories.

Wharton’s first novel, The Valley of Decision, was published in 1902. The House of Mirth (1905) was a novel of manners that analyzed the stratified society in which she had been reared and its reaction to social change. The book won her critical acclaim and a wide audience. In the next two decades—before the quality of her work began to decline under the demands of writing for women’s magazines—she wrote such novels as The Reef (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), and The Age of Innocence (1920), which won a Pulitzer Prize.

The Age of Innocence presents a picture of upper-class New York society in the 1870s. In the story, Newland Archer is engaged to May Welland, a beautiful but proper fellow member of elite society, but he falls deeply in love with Ellen Olenska, a former member of their circle who has returned to New York to escape her disastrous marriage to a Polish nobleman. Both lovers prove too obedient to conventional taboos to break with their upper-class social surroundings, however, and Newland feels compelled to renounce Ellen and marry May.

Wharton’s best-known work is the long tale Ethan Frome (1911), which exploits the grimmer possibilities of the New England farm life she observed from her home in Lenox, Massachusetts. The protagonist, the farmer Ethan Frome, is married to a whining hypochondriac but falls in love with her cousin, Mattie. As she is forced to leave his household, Frome tries to end their dilemma by steering their bobsled into a tree, but he ends up only crippling Mattie for life. They spend the rest of their miserable lives together with his wife on the farm.

Wharton’s short stories, which appeared in numerous collections, among them Xingu and Other Stories (1916), demonstrate her gifts for social satire and comedy, as do the four novelettes collected in Old New York (1924). Her 1915 reporting for Scribner’s Magazine on the Western Front in World War I was collected as Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (1918). In her manual The Writing of Fiction (1925) she acknowledged her debt to Henry James. Among her later novels are Twilight Sleep (1927), Hudson River Bracketed (1929), and its sequel, The Gods Arrive (1932). Her autobiography, A Backward Glance, appeared in 1934. In all Wharton published more than 50 books, including fiction, short stories, travel books, historical novels, and criticism.

She lived in France after 1907, visiting the United States only at rare intervals. She was divorced from her husband in 1913 and was a close friend of novelist James in his later years.

Career

Despite not publishing her first novel until she was forty, Wharton became an extraordinarily productive writer. In addition to her 15 novels, seven novellas, and eighty-five short stories, she published poetry, books on design, travel, literary and cultural criticism, and a memoir.

In 1873, Wharton wrote a short story and gave it to her mother to read. Stinging from her mother's critique, Wharton decided to write only poetry. While she constantly sought her mother's approval and love, she rarely received either, and their relationship was a troubled one.[65] Before she was 15, Wharton wrote Fast and Loose (1877). In her youth, she wrote about society. Her central themes came from her experiences with her parents. She was very critical of her work and wrote public reviews criticizing it. She also wrote about her own experiences with life. "Intense Love's Utterance" is a poem written about Henry Stevens.

In 1889, she sent out three poems for publication, to Scribner's, Harper's and Century. Edward L. Burlingame published "The Last Giustiniani" for Scribner's. It was not until Wharton was 29 that her first short story was published: "Mrs. Manstey's View" had very little success, and it took her more than a year to publish another story. She completed "The Fullness of Life" following her annual European trip with Teddy. Burlingame was critical of this story but Wharton did not want to make edits to it. This story, along with many others, speaks about her marriage. She sent Bunner Sisters to Scribner's in 1892. Burlingame wrote back that it was too long for Scribner's to publish. This story is believed to be based on an experience she had as a child. It did not see publication until 1916 and is included in the collection called Xingu. After a visit with her friend, Paul Bourget, she wrote "The Good May Come" and "The Lamp of Psyche". "The Lamp of Psyche" was a comical story with verbal wit and sorrow. After "Something Exquisite" was rejected by Burlingame, she lost confidence in herself. She started travel writing in 1894.

In 1901, Wharton wrote a two-act play called Man of Genius. This play was about an English man who was having an affair with his secretary. The play was rehearsed but was never produced. Another 1901 play, The Shadow of a Doubt, which also came close to being staged but fell through, was thought to be lost, until it was discovered in 2017. Its world premiere was a radio adaptation broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2018.[66] She collaborated with Marie Tempest to write another play, but the two only completed four acts before Marie decided she was no longer interested in costume plays. One of her earliest literary endeavors (1902) was the translation of the play Es Lebe das Leben ("The Joy of Living"), by Hermann Sudermann. The Joy of Living was criticized for its title because the heroine swallows poison at the end, and was a short-lived Broadway production. It was, however, a successful book.[37]

Many of Wharton's novels are characterized by subtle use of dramatic irony. Having grown up in upper-class, late-19th-century society, Wharton became one of its most astute critics, in such works as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.

Themes

Versions of her mother, Lucretia Jones, often appeared in Wharton's fiction. Biographer Hermione Lee described it as "one of the most lethal acts of revenge ever taken by a writing daughter."[25] In her memoir, A Backward Glance, Wharton describes her mother as indolent, spendthrift, censorious, disapproving, superficial, icy, dry and ironic.[25]

Wharton's writings often dealt with themes such as "social and individual fulfillment, repressed sexuality, and the manners of old families and the new elite."[67] Maureen Howard, editor of Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, notes several recurring themes in Wharton's short stories, including confinement and attempts at freedom, the morality of the author, critiques of intellectual pretension, and the "unmasking" of the truth.[68] Wharton's writing also explored themes of "social mores and social reform" as they relate to the "extremes and anxieties of the Gilded Age".[67] These themes were expressed in her ghost stories, in which supernatural specters function as richly costumed variations on a theme of all-too-human cruelty.[69]

A key recurring theme in Wharton's writing is the relationship between the house as a physical space and its relationship to its inhabitant's characteristics and emotions. Maureen Howard argues "Edith Wharton conceived of houses, dwelling places, in extended imagery of shelter and dispossession. Houses – their confinement and their theatrical possibilities…they are never mere settings."

Influences

American children's stories containing slang were forbidden in Wharton's childhood home.[70] This included such popular authors as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Joel Chandler Harris. She was allowed to read Louisa May Alcott but Wharton preferred Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby.[70] Wharton's mother forbade her from reading many novels and Wharton said she "read everything else but novels until the day of my marriage." [70] Instead Wharton read the classics, philosophy, history, and poetry in her father's library including Daniel Defoe, John Milton, Thomas Carlyle, Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Jean Racine, Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, John Ruskin, and Washington Irving.[71] Biographer Hermione Lee describes Wharton as having read herself "out of Old New York" and her influences included Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, T. H. Huxley, George Romanes, James Frazer, and Thorstein Veblen.[72] These influenced her ethnographic style of novelization.[72] Wharton developed a passion for Walt Whitman.[73]

Works

Novels

The Valley of Decision, 1902 , The House of Mirth, 1905 , The Fruit of the Tree, 1907 , The Reef, 1912 , The Custom of the Country, 1913 , Summer, 1917 , The Marne, 1918 , The Age of Innocence, 1920 (Pulitzer Prize winner)

The Spinster, 1921 , The Glimpses of the Moon, 1922 , A Son at the Front, 1923 , The Old Maid, 1924 , The Mother's Recompense, 1925 , Twilight Sleep, 1927 , The Children, 1928 , Hudson River Bracketed, 1929 , The Gods Arrive, 1932 , The Buccaneers, 1938 (unfinished) , Novellas and novelette , The Touchstone, 1900 , Sanctuary, 1903 , Madame de Treymes, 1907 , Ethan Frome, 1911 , Bunner Sisters, 1916 , Old New York, 1924 , 1. False Dawn; 2. The Old Maid; 3. The Spark; 4. New Year's Day , Fast and Loose: A Novelette, 1938 (written in 1876–1877)

Poetry

Verses, 1878 , Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse, 1909 , Twelve Poems, 1926

Short story collections

The Greater Inclination, 1899, includes Souls Belated. , Crucial Instances, 1901 , The Descent of Man and Other Stories, 1904 , The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories, 1908 , Tales of Men and Ghosts, 1910 , Xingu and Other Stories, 1916 , "Xingu"; "Coming Home"; "Autres Temps ..."; "Kerfol"; "The Long Run"; "The Triumph of Night"; "The Choice"; "The Bunner Sisters" , Here and Beyond, 1926 , Certain People, 1930 , Human Nature, 1933 , The World Over, 1936 , Ghosts, 1937 , Roman Fever and Other Stories, 1964 , Madame de Treymes and Others: Four Novelettes, 1970 , The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, 1973 , "The Lady's Maid's Bell"; "The Eyes"; "Afterward"; "Kerfol"; "The Triumph of Night"; "Miss Mary Pask"; "Bewitched"; "Mr Jones"; "Pomegranate Seed"; "The Looking Glass"; "All Souls" , The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton, 1998 (Carroll & Graf Publishers; paperback, 640 pages) , "The Pelican"; "The Other Two"; "The Mission of Jane"; "The Reckoning"; "The Last Asset"; "The Letters"; "Autres Temps ..."; "The Long Run"; "After Holbein"; "Atrophy"; "Pomegranate Seed"; "Her Son"; "Charm Incorporated"; "All Souls"; "The Lamp of Psyche"; "A Journey"; "The Line of Least Resistance"; "The Moving Finger"; "Expiation"; "Les Metteurs en Scene"; "Full Circle"; "The Daunt Diana"; "Afterward"; "The Bolted Door"; "The Temperate Zone"; "Diagnosis"; "The Day of the Funeral"; "Confession"

The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, 2007 paperback 452 pages, NYREV publishers

1. Mrs. Manstey's view; 2. That good may come; 3. The portrait; 4. A cup of cold water; 5. A journey; 6. The Rembrandt; 7. The other two; 8. The quicksand; 9. The dilettante; 10. The reckoning; 11. Expiation; 12. The pot-boiler; 13. His father's son; 14. Full circle; 15. Autres temps; 16. The long run; 17. After Holbein; 18. Diagnosis; 19. Pomegranate seed; 20. Roman fever

Non-fiction

The Decoration of Houses, 1897 , Italian Villas and Their Gardens, 1904 , Italian Backgrounds, 1905 , A Motor-Flight Through France, 1908 , The Cruise of the Vanadis, 1910 , Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort, 1915 , French Ways and Their Meaning, 1919 , In Morocco, 1920 (travel) , The Writing of Fiction, 1925 , A Backward Glance, 1934 (autobiography) , Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings, Edited by Frederick Wegener, 1996 , Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888–1920, 1995, Edited by Sarah Bird Wright

As editor , The Book of the Homeless, 1916