Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism

Edith Wharton's cosmopolitanism has long been a truth universally acknowledged within the confines of Wharton scholarship, even if it has made little dent on her popular reputation as nativist chronicler and supreme representative of the elites of Gilded Age America; she may have spent almost half of her life (and most of her career) in Europe, but it is New York, Newport, and the Berkshires that claim her as their own. Nevertheless, for Wharton scholars, the contours of this cosmopolitanism (which we might simply call “internationalism,” were it not for that term's left-wing associations) are well trodden: formative European travels as a child, a sustained and serious engagement with European literature and culture (fostered at least in part by Wharton's governess and longtime companion, Anna Bahlmann), lengthy travels to Europe and North Africa as an adult, and a final move to France in 1911, after which she would return to the United States only three times before her death in 1937. And yet Wharton scholarship has often tended to take these international contexts for granted, seeing them as backgrounds for the stories Wharton tells about America and Americans. Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando's Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism compellingly shifts this emphasis, foregrounding the author's international interests and influences, and using them to view her work within the context of both what it meant to be “cosmopolitan” in the early twentieth century and the more recent theorizing of “cosmopolitanism” as ideal and project.The collection is divided into three thematic sections: “Cosmopolitan Ideas and Ideals”; “Cosmopolitan Places: From Italy to New York and Back”; and “Cosmopolitan Aesthetics.” To these we could add the theme of “Cosmopolitan Ethics,” which Donna Campbell's foreword, Gary Totten's afterword, and Goldsmith and Orlando's introduction all address. Campbell explores in fascinating detail the meaning of “cosmopolitanism”—in Wharton's day and our own—addressing the tension between Wharton's self-representation as “a citizen of the world” and her understanding of “the deep and essential ties of memory, place and history … from which the cosmopolitan perspective rooted in difference emerges” (ix). In addition to thinkers contemporary to Wharton (such as O. Henry, Hamilton Wright Mabie, and Theodore Roosevelt), Campbell, like many of the other contributors, draws heavily on Kwame Anthony Appiah's work on cosmopolitanism, using his idea of “rooted cosmopolitanism” (x) to encompass both Wharton's outward-looking perspective and local allegiances to the United States and France.1 As Goldsmith and Orlando explain in their excellent introduction, thinking about Wharton in conjunction with Appiah's “rooted cosmopolitanism” (5)—which they also reconfigure as an “enlightened statelessness” (3)—and Bruce Robbins's notion of cosmopolitanism as “a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a distance” (5) allows us to “contemplate the power and limitations of the ideal of cosmopolitan citizenship” (5) more generally, as well as to consider what this might mean for the “cosmopolitan potential not only of Edith Wharton herself, but of American literature of the early twentieth century” (14). In inviting such a reconsideration, Goldsmith and Orlando do not shy away from Wharton's “challenging attitudes regarding questions of affiliation and otherness” (5); they recognize the “ambiguity of Wharton's cosmopolitanism” (6) as well as the challenges that her “wartime politics, her support of colonialism, and her ethnocentrism pose … to the cosmopolitan ideal” (7–8). This collection, however, is not an appeal for Wharton's individual designation as “cosmopolitan” or otherwise. Rather, it is a complex consideration of the ways in which the writer and her work engage with theories of cosmopolitanism, both those that were current when she was writing and those that are contemporary to us now.Conversation is central to the idea of cosmopolitanism, and—as well as bringing Wharton into fruitful conversation with works that theorize the cosmopolitan—a central achievement of this collection is the illuminating juxtaposition of Wharton's lesser-known writing with her more famous texts. Wharton's little-read first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), is the subject of essays by William Blazek (“‘The Very Beginning of Things’: Reading Wharton through Charles Eliot Norton's Life and Writings on Italy”) and Rita Bode (“Wharton's Italian Women: ‘My Beloved Romola’”). Blazek provides what now seems like essential historical context to the novel through the writings of Wharton's friend and mentor, the Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton. Bode similarly demonstrates the necessity of viewing the novel (and its female characters' negotiations of the private and public spheres) alongside Wharton's own reading, and George Eliot's Romola (1863) in particular. Those of us with an interest in The Valley of Decision have reason to be grateful to this collection for these two essays alone.Italy is, inevitably—given Wharton's own writing and travels in the country—the subject of a number of essays in the collection (which in many ways builds on Katherine Joslin and Alan Price's 1993 collection Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe). Sharon Kim also touches briefly on The Valley of Decision in her rigorous and engaging essay on aesthetics and ethics, “‘Eyes Filled with Splendor’: On Italy and the Saturated Gaze in The Custom of the Country.” Kim invites us to consider cosmopolitan “ways of seeing” (222) that avoid the “rapacity” (217), acquisitiveness, and imperialism that are so often implicit in the tourist's gaze. Wharton's own “anti-tourism” (12) is addressed by Maureen E. Montgomery (“Possessing Italy: Wharton and American Tourists”) and D. Medina Lasnasky (“Beyond the Guidebook: Edith Wharton's Discovery of San Vivaldo”). Montgomery reads Wharton's Italian travel writing alongside contemporaneous “American travelers' representation of Italians and Italy” (111), inviting us to compare the versions of cosmopolitanism presented by each. Lasansky's essay explores, in detail for the first time, Wharton's remarkable (and correct) attribution—despite disagreement from Bernard Berenson, among others—of the sacro monte of San Vivaldo to the school of della Robbia. June Howard, meanwhile, in “Here/There, Now/Then, Both/And: Regionalism and Cosmopolitanism in Edith Wharton's Old New York,” outlines the extent to which Wharton's 1924 novellas rely on Italian art and French artifacts for their construction of place and period, and demonstrates the ways in which this complicates our understanding of the “narrative shape” (181) of Wharton's cosmopolitanism.Material culture of another kind is the starting point for Mary Carney's essay, “The Cosmopolitan at War: Edith Wharton and Material Culture,” which discusses Wharton's use of French cathedrals in her wartime writing to invoke a cosmopolitan “imagined community” in the face of “German bombardment” (198). Wharton's postwar politics are the subject of essays by Clare Virginia Eby (“The Glimpses of the Moon and the Transatlantic Debate over Marital Reform”) and Ferdâ Asya (“Motifs of Anarchism in Edith Wharton's The Children”). Eby reads Wharton's 1922 novel in the context of the “heretofore unremarked historical context” (20) of the transatlantic “1920s companionate marriage movement” (21), presenting a convincing (and richly detailed) case for reading Nick and Susy Lansing's marriage in the light of this progressive reform movement. Similarly, Asya places one of Wharton's lesser-known novels in the context of another early twentieth-century intellectual movement: anarchism. Asya suggests that we see Wharton's 1928 novel “about expatriate children banding together in anarchist solidarity against their ineffectual parents” (44) as representing the “struggle of the individual or community with oppressive familial, social, or political power” (43).While Appiah's work on cosmopolitanism emphasizes both our responsibility to “strangers” and the importance of not overlaboring the need for empathy, he frequently cautions against an overemphasis (or fetishizing) of difference. This fetishizing of difference leads to the “orientalizing” perspective that has underwritten Western imperialism, and both Margaret A. Toth's essay (“Orientalism, Modernism, and Gender in Edith Wharton's Late Novels”) and Totten's afterword (“Edith Wharton and the Promise of Cosmopolitanism”) approach Wharton alongside theories of orientalism and imperialism. Toth's fascinating essay, like Eby's and Asya's, focuses on a number of Wharton's lesser-read novels from the 1920s and 1930s. Reading these in the context of performative “consumer Orientalism” (230) and “Orientalist author[ship]” (236), Toth suggests that Wharton's use of Orientalism is temporal rather than spatial, signifying the ways in which her characters “experience time” (242). Totten's afterword provides a necessary supplement to the collection as a whole, in that it explicitly addresses the imperialist discourse (and language of conquest) that underpins much of Wharton's travel writing. Through a close reading of In Morocco (1920) in particular, Totten demonstrates the limits and caveats of Wharton's own cosmopolitanism.As with any stimulating and provocative work, Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism inevitably poses questions and suggests lines of inquiry for future scholarship. Among these is the question of Wharton and world literature—or Weltliteratur, to use the phrase and concept that Goethe, so important to Wharton, inaugurated.2 Goethe is not mentioned in this collection and one is left wondering how Wharton's work and her transnational allegiances may have been complicated by her engagement with what Pascale Casanova calls—in terms that echo Wharton's own “paysage choisi of the spirit” and “Land of Letters” (and Lawrence Selden's “republic of the spirit”)—“the world republic of letters.” The “Cluster on Global Wharton” in the prior issue of the Edith Wharton Review is an excellent example of how we might begin to think about Wharton on a global (and not just Western) stage; it is to be hoped that Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism will provide both foundation and provocation for future work along the same lines.3 As acknowledged by a number of the essays in this volume, Wharton is in many ways an observer and theorist of globalization—to consider her in a truly global context, however, we might also need to expand our idea of what (and where) a Wharton scholar is. This collection emerged from the 2012 “Wharton in Florence” conference (which Goldsmith and Orlando codirected), the program for which reflects its cosmopolitan nature and international appeal.1 It is a shame, therefore, that the twelve contributors to this collection should be mostly based at U.S. institutions (with one apiece from Canada, the UK, and New Zealand). No doubt this reflects the extent to which Wharton scholarship is still largely a U.S. enterprise; however, it is to be hoped that this excellent volume will make it increasingly untenable to consider Wharton in a predominantly U.S. context. Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism is an important and timely work that insists on new connections not only within Wharton's oeuvre but also with a range of international texts and contexts. The collection demands that we view Wharton as seriously engaged with the theorization of national and international identity (and responsibility) in the period during which she was writing—questions that we are still grappling with today.

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