The New Edith Wharton Studies

The New Edith Wharton Studies, edited by Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray, comes at a time of particular plenitude in Wharton scholarship. In the years leading up to the centenary of a major work like The Age of Innocence, the arrival of significant publications would not seem unusual, and some fine work on Wharton's 1920 novel, such as, for example, Arielle Zibrak's edited collection of New Centenary Essays (2019), has emerged. But the scholarship on Wharton of the last few years alone displays an impressive diversity in subject and treatment that Haytock and Rattray's volume further invigorates.As part of Cambridge University Press's Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions series, The New Edith Wharton Studies is meant to identify and explain “the changing critical interpretations” of Wharton and her work “that have emerged since c. 2000,” in all their “rich plurality of twenty-first-century literary critical energies” (ii), calling attention in the process to unexplored or, at any rate, underexplored areas of research. The volume's editors and contributors have responded to this mandate with creativity and rigor. Consistently mindful of the Wharton scholarship that has led to present-day inquiries, the volume pursues suggestive trajectories through a range of perspectives that renew established themes and ideas and locate new ones, all the while highlighting the critical breadth and scope that Wharton's work continues to inspire.Collections of essays offer their own particular challenges, not the least of which is the need for a discerning editorial vision that facilitates selection and ordering to ensure that each contribution receives the best presentation, and that the patterns of thought in the volume offer visible signposts for future scholarship. Haytock and Rattray have shaped their volume well. They state their approach early in the introduction, recognizing “a palimpsest of understanding of the person and her work” (2). The description is apt, for starting with the introduction and traceable in the volume's subsequent fourteen chapters, the connections between Wharton the woman and Wharton the author are kept in subtle interplay, alongside an astute awareness that “one of the fascinations of studying Wharton is the very changes in our understanding of her and her work” (5). Haytock and Rattray see these changes as primarily influenced by three areas: archival discoveries, new critical directions, and the more nebulous area of the “current cultural moment” that draws the text into the societal forces outside itself (5). Their approach affirms that texts are vibrant entities in active engagement with a shifting, evolving world. Wharton's writing, like significant events of her life, offers supple material for such engagements.Haytock and Rattray divide the volume into four parts, the first of which focuses on “self and composition” (13), with the contributors to this section considering Wharton archives, her correspondence, and the publication history of her short stories in magazines. Paul Ohler's opening chapter, “Creative Process and Literary Form in Edith Wharton's Archive,” provides an invaluable summary of the various holdings of Wharton materials. These include “thirty institutions across North America and Europe,” a number likely more than many have realized (15). His observations about this vast array of materials—manuscripts of the many genres in which Wharton worked, typescripts, her extensive correspondence, diaries, notebooks, literary contracts, account books, and more—not only confirm the significance that they hold in understanding Wharton, but suggest the many unexplored avenues remaining in the study of her creative process. Ohler supports this contention further through his assessments of six Wharton biographies, whose engagements with the Wharton archives detail the history of restricted access, new discoveries in the collections, and the acquisition of new archival materials.Wharton's sizable correspondence, of which much remains unpublished, is the subject of the next chapter, “Wharton's Letters: Glimpses of the Whole Edith Wharton.” In looking to the letters to find the “overlooked, even contradictory aspects of the complete Wharton” (33), Julie Olin-Ammentorp addresses directly an issue that haunts Wharton scholarship: how “to reconcile the admirable Wharton … with … her racist, imperialistic, and anti-Semitic attitudes” (36). Judiciously and thoughtfully, she proposes no facile assertions of either condemnation or justification. Acknowledging the extent to which Wharton's letters to friends figure forth an imperfect human being, as, for example, in her correspondence with Gaillard Lapsley to whom Wharton was especially close, Olin-Ammentorp raises ethical questions about how to interpret an author's comments in a personal letter and the violation of privacy that the publication of such letters entails—a subject that Wharton also addressed in some of her fiction. Significantly, Olin-Ammentorp emphasizes the importance of contextualizing the letters, not in terms of normalizing “reprehensible” (33) comments as acceptable for their time and place, but rather in terms of the responses from some of Wharton's correspondents, whose comments directed Wharton to a more balanced and informed vision. Olin-Ammentorp argues persuasively that “the letters reveal her irreducibility” (45), making the correspondence central in understanding the complexities that scholars continue to discover in Wharton's work.Sarah Whitehead directs the focus on “self and composition” to Wharton's magazine publications, where Wharton both resisted and accommodated the demands of a male literary establishment. Whitehead's approach to Wharton's negotiations with the gendered magazine publishing world, and to Wharton's selection and handling of her subject matter, reveals a subversive side to Wharton that privileges her trust in her own writing principles and her astute interpretations of both social realities and the marketplace. Whitehead notes that the “genteel prose and subtle ironies” (53) of Wharton's magazine fiction create “narratives with multiple, often conflicting meanings” (54). She finds that in the shift from the “quality monthlies” (49), like Scribner's, to publishing in the more popular mass magazines, like the Ladies' Home Journal, Wharton had to surrender some of her autonomy over her creative material. Yet this transition, Whitehead notes, highlights Wharton's ability to adapt her aesthetic standards, without compromise, to new publishing conditions. Wharton implemented narrative methods to satisfy an expanded and diverse audience, for instance, and conceived plot lines to meet the physical layout of issues in which advertising figured almost as prominently as content. Whitehead's study reveals that Wharton's sense of art and herself as committed artist did not limit her full participation in the changing field of literary business.An “International Wharton,” the subject of part 2, challenges the privileging of Wharton's American origins over the influences that her many years of European residency, her worldwide travel experiences, and her vast reading exerted on her. Embracing recent critical positionings of Wharton's cosmopolitanism, the chapters in this section suggest that, despite her creative chronicling of Old New York society, the portrayal of Wharton as an ex-patriot American writer seems insufficient, for it fails to acknowledge fully the extent to which the cultures and traditions of other nations formed her inner life.The first chapter in this section focuses on Greece. In “Edith Wharton's Odyssey,” Myrto Drizou maintains that, for Wharton, the importance of Greece lay not only in its significance as “the anchor of Western civilization—but also [as] a topos of strong human bonds that enable social connectedness and cultural continuity” (66). Drawing on Wharton's favorite copy of Homer's Odyssey in the Mount library, with Wharton's usual pencil strokes in the margins, Drizou analyzes The House of Mirth and the later Wharton novel The Children in terms of the Odyssean homeless wanderings through which Wharton articulates the importance of home as “a nexus of social and cultural relations which she saw as increasingly lacking in modern American culture” (68). Drizou's fine analysis shows Lily as a modernist figure of alienation, a state that most modernist writers came to recognize only after the Great War. Although Drizou does not invoke T. S. Eliot, her interpretation of Lily's attempts at survival suggest Prufrock's lonely wanderings and, indeed, a postwar society's ailing attempts to shore up “fragments … against … [societal] ruin” (The Waste Land, Boni & Liveright, 1922, line 431). Drizou, moreover, finds the emphasis on home also in Wharton's accounts of her two trips to Greece, one recorded in the published Vanadis diary, and the other, occurring some forty years later, detailed in the unpublished Osprey notebook. These travel responses confirm for Drizou that Wharton's “tendency to construct the past as a light that guides the present” informs her “entire oeuvre” (74).Virginia Ricard continues the emphasis on the significance of human relations for Wharton, this time under the influence of the country whose claims took up much of her adult life. “It might be argued,” Ricard writes at the opening of “Edith Wharton's French Engagement,” that Wharton's writing is consistently “a meditation … on how communities hold together” (80). In examining Wharton's French life and her extensive readings in French writings across multiple disciplines, Ricard effectively reveals a Wharton “governed by a French perspective” (81) from which she interpreted and critiqued American mores. Ricard's discussion of Wharton's friendship with French writer and critic Paul Bourget includes an analysis of the critical response to The House of Mirth in France, in which the most frequent comparisons were to Bourget's writings rather than to Wharton's Anglo-American contemporaries. Ricard finds in the French reviews a preoccupation with the absence of family solidarity in the novel and a view of womanhood that Wharton herself articulates in French Ways and Their Meaning. Her analysis notes that the French “cooperation between men and women” (88) aligned with Wharton's interest in reconciling societal cohesion with individual autonomy, an area in which Wharton began to diverge from Bourget's privileging of society over the individual. In the works of Jean-Marie Guyau and other French writers, Ricard posits, Wharton found further influences allowing her to consider that “the modern individual, far from being merely a free atom, was, potentially at least, an agent of social cohesion, order, and justice” (91). It was the framework of French society, Ricard concludes, with its valuing of engaged conversation and blending of the sexes, that allowed Wharton herself to evolve into such an individual.The darker side of the international condition emerges in Donna Campbell's “Edith Wharton and Transnationalism.” Campbell adopts the “critical optic” of Jessica Burman, Paul Giles, and others whose theories associate transnationalism with traits such as “rootlessness, involuntary exile, and a sense of loss” (99). In each of Wharton's late novels—Twilight Sleep, The Glimpses of the Moon, The Mother's Recompense, Hudson River Bracketed, and The Gods Arrive—Campbell traces transnationalism's detrimental effects in defining the tragic situations of the heroines. She identifies an economic threat for women that is not so much focused on individual female survival as on the exploitation of women—“on transactions involving bodies,” for instance—embedded in patriarchal social forces. “Women's sexual capital,” Campbell writes, “(or maintaining secrecy about sexual capital) is exchanged for social and economic advantages, often to maintain their nonworking or artistic partners” (101). Campbell, moreover, supports her transnational readings of Wharton's fiction through the real-life example of Gabrielle Landormy who had worked for Wharton during the war. Wharton's unpublished letters reveal details of Landormy's romantic affair that led to a pattern of disorienting wanderings between the United States and France. But even without this interesting insight into Wharton's direct knowledge of a young woman's experience of displacement, Campbell's approach to Wharton's late novels through a transnational lens makes abundantly clear the “submerged history or trauma and loss underlying their satiric Jazz Age trimmings” (102).Campbell's focus on Wharton's disadvantaged transnational women provides a bridge to the subject matter of part 3, “Wharton on the Margins.” Wharton's insistence on her familiarity with the backward enclaves of her own Berkshire Hills in the 1922 introduction to Ethan Frome did not manage to signal, then or in years following, a notable interest in her treatment of the less advantaged. As recently as 2012, the New Yorker's now infamous toast to Wharton on her 150th birthday declared that “privilege like hers isn't easy to like; it puts her at a moral disadvantage” (“A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy,” New Yorker, 5 Feb. 2012). Laura Rattray's introductory chapter to this section puts to rest the future of such careless assessments and provides substantial lines of inquiry for further research on the topic.“Edith Wharton's Unprivileged Lives” focuses on Wharton's “concern for the lives of the poor” in her early work, but also reminds us that Wharton's engagement with social ills stretched across her entire in both subtle and direct as as across Wharton's interest in the is in her and that have only recently to critical attention in Wharton in Rattray's own Edith Wharton and Rattray in on especially significant aspects of Wharton's of the she that “Wharton's are human and be any one of they are most often women” Her analysis reveals Wharton's to the of such as that and poor” and to the understanding of her Rattray Wharton's and subversive in to recognize lives while and critical as a is in the writing work moreover, the effects that and for societal Rattray Wharton's interest in which Jennifer up in the 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