Edith Wharton and Genre

Beyond Fiction

Laura Rattray

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780230361669
• eBook ISBN:
  9781349595570
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Based on extensive new archival research, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond

Fiction offers the first study of Wharton's full engagement with original writing in

genres outside those with which she has been most closely identified. So much

more than an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, Wharton is reconsidered

in this book as a controversial playwright, a gifted poet, a trailblazing travel

writer, an innovative and subversive critic, a hugely influential design writer, and

an author who overturned the conventions of autobiographical form. Her

versatility across genres did not represent brief sidesteps, temporary diversions

from what has long been read as her primary role as novelist. Each was pursued

fully and whole-heartedly, speaking to Wharton's very sense of herself as an

artist and her connected vision of artistry and art. The stories of these other Edith

Whartons, born through her extraordinary dexterity across a wide range of

genres, and their impact on our understanding of her career, are the focus of this

new study, revealing a bolder, more diverse, subversive and radical writer than

has long been supposed.

© The Author(s) 2020

L. RattrayEdith Wharton and GenreAmerican Literature Readings in the 21st Centuryhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59557-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Laura Rattray¹

(1)

University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

Laura Rattray

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

I have always known what I wanted & done it!¹

Edith Wharton was one of the most versatile writers of her time. Her career comprised so much more than the novels, novellas, and short stories for which she is deservedly acclaimed. Indeed Wharton worked—and worked hugely successfully throughout her career—across a variety of other genres, most notably poetry, drama, criticism and literary theory, travel, and autobiography, as well as writing on architecture and design. This diverse narrative has been obscured over the years, however, primarily by the fascination with Wharton as a novelist, and at times by the imposition of a series of restrictive, and often contradictory, scripts: the society novelist, the anti-modernist, the author who captured society in transition, the writer of New York, the chronicler of the elite, the grande dame, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the writer who lost touch. On her death in August 1937, the literary world paid tribute to a novelist—its scale of acclaim ranging from ‘noted’, ‘great’, to ‘one of the greatest’.² Many of Wharton’s obituaries recorded very precisely the volume, but not the range of her output, observing that she had written thirty-eight books, with another collection of stories proof read and in the final publication stages at the time of her death, along with the unfinished, final novel, The Buccaneers . Of that total, however (in fact forty-three books published in her lifetime), a third fall outside the categories of novels, novellas, or short stories. Include the numerous other texts that were uncollected or unpublished—not least a series of plays, scores of individual poems, and various unfinished memoirs, essays, and travel writings—and it equates to an even more substantial and significant body of work. The stories of these other Edith Whartons, born through her extraordinary dexterity across a wide range of genres, and their impact on our understanding of her career, have not been fully told, and they are the focus of this study.

Wharton’s work was often radical, subversive, and transgressive—the full extent of which becomes clear only when viewing her oeuvre across its span of less familiar genres. The author who wrote about child prostitution, drug addiction, child suicide, blasphemy, vivisection, domestic abuse, illegitimacy, euthanasia, and incest would still come to be associated by the public with an antique image of ‘violets and old lace’.³ Wharton’s diversity of output was part of her radicalism. She could so easily have stuck to the success achieved in any one of a variety of genres—but instead refused to allow her talent and creative vision to be curtailed. Her prowess across a range of genres spoke to this author’s confidence and sense of authority on the one hand, and to her vision of artistic cohesion and connectedness on the other. (As will be seen repeatedly in this study, here was a writer who loathed any kind of short-cut.) It is often in the genres for which she is least well-known that Wharton is shown at her boldest, most adventurous, and most radical—which in part explains why a full recognition of those characteristics of her work has been obscured. The author who penned the powerful critical volume The Writing of Fiction (1925) had indeed more than the writing of fiction to her name.

Wharton rebelled early. In many ways, the very act of writing as a young girl in the privileged, leisured society into which she was born was itself an act of rebellion. And that rebellion was advertised early. Of her first published poem, ‘Only a Child’ (1879), which appeared in the New York World when she was seventeen, Wharton recalled sending a note to the editor in which she carefully explained that she ‘knew the rules of English versification’ and ‘had put in the extra syllables on purpose!’⁴ At seventeen, Edith Jones knew the form—and was prepared to transgress it. Before that obscuring gauze of ‘violets and old lace’ was lowered, Wharton’s work caused fierce controversy. In November 1901, for example, Harper’s Monthly Magazine published her now little-read dramatic monologue, ‘Margaret of Cortona’, in which Margaret on her death bed makes a blasphemous confession to the priest that she would not have entered the convent had her lover lived: ‘I, who have known both loves, divine and human, / Think you I would not leave this Christ for that?’ ‘He was my Christ.’⁵ The Catholic Church’s Margaret was fully repentant and duly canonised; Wharton’s dissatisfied Margaret was still teeming with physical desire and passion thwarted in a second-rate substitute life of the church. The poem caused outrage, with the Catholic press denouncing ‘a subtle love of evil in the literary world’, Wharton’s ‘shameful misrepresentation’ and her flagrant offence against ‘good taste, historical accuracy, Catholic tradition, and Divine teaching’: ‘Miss Wharton has erred.’⁶ The furore was such that by January 1902 the editor felt obliged to issue a fulsome apology for the ‘injury to the religious sensibilities’ of readers, claiming historical ignorance on the part of both poet and editor, who ‘rather than have knowingly done the wrong, would have given up writing and editing altogether’.⁷ The idea that the cultured Wharton, who often spent months of every year in Italy, would be ignorant of an Italian saint about whom she was writing was almost as unconvincing as the notion she would lay down her pen. Wharton, like her Margaret, was evidently unrepentant, not only republishing the poem in her volume, Artemis to Actaeon (1909), but doing so without any amendments to appease ‘religious sensibilities’ and atone for the ‘offence’.

Only months before ‘Margaret of Cortona’ was first published, The Shadow of a Doubt—a play Wharton scholars were unaware existed until 2016—appeared set for the Broadway stage, having been taken on by Charles Frohman, the leading producer of his age. The play’s startling theme was euthanasia, with its revelation that the character of Kate Derwent, formerly a professional nurse, had helped her husband’s first wife to die, after she had begged for an end to her pain. By making Kate a figure of quiet integrity and honour who elects to give up her newly acquired life of luxury because her husband doubts that she acted out of compassion, Wharton refuses her audience an easy, unquestioning condemnatory stance, inviting instead recognition of euthanasia as a complex moral issue. To write a play pivoting on a theme of euthanasia for the commercial stage was brave and controversial—and the theme may offer one explanation for Frohman’s production being abruptly shelved. Wharton would later include euthanasia as one of several plotlines in her novel, The Fruit of the Tree (1907), but its impact was partially blunted by a multiplicity of themes. It was Wharton as playwright who made the bolder artistic decision, one which professionally may have cost her a Broadway debut.

In her notebook, ‘Quaderno dello Studente’, begun in 1924, Wharton claimed as her motto a phrase from ‘The Vision’ by seventeenth-century poet, Thomas Traherne: ‘Order the beauty even of Beauty is.’⁸ Her novels, poems, and plays often illuminate the allure, but also the dangers, especially for women, of disorder, of crossing the threshold, of going ‘beyond’. Kate Derwent’s choice takes her from London’s affluent Park Lane to a drab lodging-house in the East End, as she struggles to find employment without a reference to attest to her character or professional skills. In the poem, ‘May Marian’, written when Wharton was only fourteen, a young woman’s naïve choice to follow a man to London proves fatal. In the unfinished early novel Disintegration , the divorced Mrs Clephane is ‘banned to a desert place outside the geography of the visiting-list’,⁹ while ‘beyondness’ ultimately brings The House of Mirth’s Lily Bart to the shabby and dingy existence she most feared, on the ‘rubbish heap’ from which only chloral provides an effective release.¹⁰ ‘In the established order of things as she knew them’, reflects the narrator of Charity Royall in the closing stages of Summer (1917), ‘she saw no place for her individual adventure….’¹¹

In her non-fiction, however, Wharton is able to find space for and reward the individual adventure, to suggest guiding rules, but encourage flexibility within them. In The Writing of Fiction , the author deploys ‘Order the beauty even of Beauty is’ as the volume’s epigraph, yet directly warns against excessive prescription: ‘General rules in art are useful chiefly as a lamp in a mine, or a hand-rail down a black stairway; they are necessary for the sake of the guidance th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Edith Wharton as Poet
• 3. Playwriting
• 4. Travel Writings
• 5. Architecture and Design
• 6. Critical Writings and Literary Theory
• 7. Life Writings
• 8. Afterword
• Back Matter