This study is neither exhaustive nor comprehensive. As with
any travel itinerary, certain destinations have been omitted, some hurried past,
while others will be explored at length. Selection, as Wharton never hesitates to
remind us, is necessary. I have chosen to treat those critical writings by Wharton
that explicitly address questions of literary criticism (how should a critic
approach a text? what did Wharton believe a reviewer's guiding principles ought
to be? and so on). I have made these articles my primary focus for several
reasons. First, aside from The Writing ofFiction, such articles (for instance, 'The
Criticism ofFiction,' 'The Great American Novel' and so on) are the most
explicitly theoretical pieces she wrote, and insofar as my project involves gaining
insight into Wharton's theories on interpretation, such articles provide crucial
insights. Secondly, her critical articles that explicitly address the question of
literary interpretation (particularly 'The Criticism of Fiction') are rarely treated as
primary subjects in their own right. They are most often subordinated to a
supplementary position in scholarly arguments about her fiction. In treating
Wharton's articles that explicitly address abstract questions of literary criticism
(such as, what is a novel? or what constitutes an 'American' novel?), I aim to
allow a portrait of Wharton-the-critic to emerge from her own dogged attempts to
wrestle with these vexing questions, as opposed to patching one together out of
statements taken from various sources. This is my first aim: to allow a portrait of
Wharton-the-critic to emerge from a holistic approach to each critical article in
which she explicitly addresses questions of criticism.
The second aim of this study is to illustrate the degree to which Wharton's
ideas about how to interpret shade and color nearly every aspect of her life and
work. For this reason, I have chosen a range of material—critical essays, travel
writings, a novel, and The Writing of Fiction. Insofar as breadth and scope are
crucial to my claim, I have felt it necessary to range widely over as many different
forms of her writing as I can, as opposed to focusing solely on fiction or solely on
those works that can be discretely classified as 'critical'. It is because I want to
demonstrate the wide ranging ways in which Wharton employed the interpretive
approach she advocated that I do not treat all the material contained in The
Uncollected Critical Writings, that I only discuss one of her novels, and that I
have attempts to trace her interpretive efforts through a diverse range of subjects
and contexts. That is to say, insofar as my claim is that this interpretive
procedure is not limited to those texts that are explicitly critical, my own selection
of material had to range beyond that which is explicitly critical as well.
An unfortunate effect of this choice is that her novels receive much less
attention than I would have liked. However, I also felt that this thesis would do
greater service to Wharton studies by turning my attention to those pieces which
have received scant treatment over the years. As a result, I have foregrounded
works such as her 1914 article 'The Criticism of Fiction,' her 1934 article on
Proust, and The Writing ofFiction, while allowing her fiction a slightly lesser
role. As a tremendous lover of her novels, such a course of action was not my
first choice, but, in the end, my own preferences are secondary to the demands of
my subject, which, in this instance, required scope and breadth of treatment.
Additionally, in the nine years since Wharton's critical articles first
appeared together in a single volume, a detailed, book-length study devoted solely
to Wharton-the-critic has yet to emerge. That is not to say her criticism has been
ignored. Rather, it has most often been quoted piecemeal by scholars making
arguments about other aspects of her work, as in Nancy Bentley's 'Wharton,
Travel, and Modernity' (2003) and Frederick Wegener's "Form "Selection," and
Ideology in Edith Wharton's Antimodernist Aesthetic' (1999), both of which put
Wharton's 'The Great American Novel' to interesting, and very different, uses.
But despite such occasional treatment in articles, scholars have been largely silent
on the subject of Wharton-the-critic. The only book-length survey of Wharton's
critical prose remains Penelope Vita-Finzi's Edith Wharton and the Art of Fiction
(1990), even though the subsequent publication of Wharton's critical writings in a
single volume calls some of Vita-Finzi's conclusions into question.
In his 1996 introduction to The Uncollected Critical Writings, Frederick
Wegener remarks that what emerges from her critical writings viewed together is
'an Edith Wharton even more complex and mercurial than the figure with whom
we have become so familiar in the past generation of scholarship' (45). That is,
indeed, what I have found, although the ways this complexity manifests itself
proved quite surprising. Wharton, even in her later years, was far more quixotic
in her reactions, less consistently reactionary and narrow, than we have come to
assume. Thus, in a sense, this study picks up where Wegener's overview leaves
off, as I attempt to add shade and light to this 'complex and mercurial' figure,
providing precise details about how these complexities manifest themselves by
tracing the various paths her mercurial tendencies followed.
Finally, despite the incisive and plentiful scholarship that has emerged on
Wharton over the past two decades, no one has yet addressed the sophisticated
and insightful theorist that I found hard at work in the pages of The Writing of
Fiction} Over the years, scholars have sought Wharton in the drawing room and
in the library (Singley); they have followed her motor-flights across France and
Italy (Schriber, Wright); they have documented and analyzed her war-time
activities and sympathies (Price, Olin-Ammentorp); they have drawn connections
between her ideas about interior design and her fiction (Vita-Finzi); they have
debated her attitude towards race, class, politics, and gender (Ammons, Bauer,
Wegener, Sensibar). But nowhere has the idea been put forth that Edith Wharton
was a prescient theorist, one grappling with many ofthe same vexed questions
those of us involved in literary studies wrangle over today. It is this Edith
Wharton, the one who took me so utterly by surprise when reading The Writing of
Fiction, whom I wish to introduce to my readers. And because Wharton-thetheorist is inseparable from Wharton-the-gardener, the interior designer, the
author, the critic, the friend, the 'life-wonderer' and even the lover—one glance at
the Fullerton letters shows how doggedly she mustered all her interpretive powers
in order to try and comprehend his infuriatingly enigmatic behavior—this study
could be three, four, five times its present length.
Indeed, wherever Wharton encountered an enigma, she responded by
trying to interpret it as best she could. At their finest, these interpretations took
the form of novels. But Wharton's responses to life's mysteries also took the
form of letters to her friends, ruminations on works of art she encountered in her
travels, instructive books on gardening and a rereading of her own life through
memoir. And, correspondingly, when her friends were at their finest, in
Wharton's own eyes, they became interpretations: an 'expansion' of her own
self—not quite separate, yet still, like that other self that dwells within the breast,
at the core, other.
