The Post-World War I Civilization as a “House on fire”. Modernity, Womanhood and Incest in Edith Wharton’s The Mother’s Recompense
From Firenze University Press Journal: LEA
Simona Porro, Università di Firenze
- Edith Wharton and Modernism
Edith Wharton has long been the object of a critical controversy regarding her position within the tradition of American letters. As Michele S. Ware duly asserts, she “simply doesn’t fit into any category in a satisfactory way, and the broad range of her writing in a number of genres makes classification a perilous activity” (2004, 17). The crux of the matter is that, as Franca Balestra notes — partially quoting the title of Wharton’s 1934 autobiography — “although she published most of her work in the twentieth century, she is often perceived as oriented towards the nine-teenth century, as ‘looking backward’ ” (2012, 10). Accordingly, while some scholars see her as a “resolutely traditional” (Lewis 1975, ix) nineteenth-century figure (Delbanco 1993, 31) who, in Alfred Kazin’s harsh terms, “could do no other” (1982, 77), more recent contributions have taken a completely different direction, by discussing “not if,but to what degree, her work exhibits the characteristics ofModernism” (Ware 2004, 18). Feminist criticism has, in fact, properly captured the modernity of Wharton’s oeuvre by calling attention, among other aspects, to her portrayal of “issues of gender, desire and creativity” (Beer and Horner 2009, 69), above all to “her critique of the commodification and exploitation of women at the turn of the century” (Balestra 2012, 10) — what Elizabeth Ammons calls, in stronger terms, the “immoral and wasteful oppression of women” (1980, 184). It should, therefore, come as no surprise that, for instance, Carol Singley views Wharton as “a modernist innovator in her own right” (1998, 7), with other critics con-firming this opinion (Miller Hadley 1993, 4; Ware 2004, 18; Toth 2016, 227) by emphasizing what they believe to be the “subversive” (Whitehead 2012, 25) tendencies of her narrative style.As for Wharton herself, it is worth noting that she did not conceptualize her literary pro-duction as modernist. On the contrary, she seemed to have a rather negative opinion on the phenomenon, especially on the formal experimentation that characterized high Modernism. First of all, she viewed the movement as a disruptive force, the result of a “distrust of technique and the fear of being unoriginal […]”, which, in her opinion, led to “pure anarchy in fiction” (Wharton 1925b, 14). Secondly, she had particularly strong reservations on some of the most representative achievements of the era, especially Ulysses and The Waste Land, as she made clear in a letter to Bernard Berenson, in which she famously defined Joyce’s masterpiece “a turgid welter of pornography (the rudest schoolboy kind) & unformed and unimportant drivel” and concluded that “the same applies toEliot” (Wolff 1977, 372). Some scholars astutely saw her diffidence (Wegener 1999, 128) as a “defensive posture” dictated by the “awareness of her own waning popularity and power in the literary marketplace” (Ware 2004, 18) as opposed to other writers’ growing recognition on the international cultural panorama. As Richard W.B. Lewis, in fact, states in his biography of Edith Wharton, in the 1920s the artist reflected on
her own relations, as a woman in her sixties who had come to literary fruition twenty years before, with the younger writers who were appearing on the postwar scene to varying acclaim. Writing to the twenty-six-year-old William Gherardie, the twenty-nine-year-old Scott Fitzgerald, the thirty-five-year-old Sinclair Lewis, what she stressed in each case washerassumption of an unbridgeable gap between herself and them and her joy at discovering that the distance could be overcome. (1975, 465)
With all this in mind, it is plausible to affirm that, although Wharton did not openly and fully embrace Modernism, her work — especially in the late years of her career — does show an attempt to “establish some sort of contact with theAmerican authors of the new generation and their new ways of doing things” (Lewis 1975, 465). In so doing, it addresses some of the themes most commonly associated to the movement, one of which is, I argue, the shocking impact of World War I on the individual and society.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13128/lea-1824-484x-13459
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-lea/article/view/13459
