Edith Wharton and queer history at the fin de siècle

Abstract

What does it mean to think of Edith Wharton (1862-1937) as a decadent writer? In this thesis I suggest that, from the very beginning of her career, Wharton was a writer far more engaged with European literary decadence than has previously been recognised. In turn, I argue, this under-acknowledged engagement with literary decadence has - combined with the way that certain biographical details have shaped readings of her work - resulted in a tendency to overlook the extent to which Wharton's fiction was in dialogue with a male homosexual literary tradition that goes beyond her well-documented friendship with Henry James. Alongside Wharton's interest in fin-de-siecle Literature, and in writers such as Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Oscar Wilde, I look at the ways in which she draws on and uses various 'queer' histories, including those of: the alchemist Nicolas Flamel; Napoleon and Josephine; the Oxford Movement; Margaret Fuller; the Italian Risorgimento; and Wilde's trials, and death. Approaching Wharton as an author significantly influenced by literary decadence, and these queer histories, reveals a writer concerned with many of the same questions, anxieties, and concerns more usually linked (as in recent scholarship on decadent literature) to queer, decadent, and European fin-de-siecle writers - such as contemporary understandings of sexuality and gender identity (and the impact on both men and women of the homophobia associated with emerging sexual identities), the establishment and survival of non-heteronormative relationships (including friendships), and the place of friendship in theorisations of both literary production and early-twentieth-century supranational and non-familial community building. Recognising these contexts for Wharton's writing both demonstrates the striking fin-de-siecle and 'queer' resonances of a number of her lesser-known early works and allows for new readings of some of her best-known texts. I focus in particular· on a series of Wharton's less familiar short texts, before going on to consider The Age of Innocence (1920), demonstrating the ways that an in-depth attention to her early engagement with decadence can transform how we approach her major novels. Furthermore, where Wharton's politics have either been dismissed as fundamentally conservative or sometimes awkwardly figured as progressively proto-feminist, the picture which emerges from a reading of her fiction in the context of both literary decadence and late-nineteenth-century theorisations of male homosexuality is that of a writer who, like James, Pater, Symonds, and Wilde, was engaged in a serious consideration of sexual identity and gender roles, and the relation between these, citizenship, and community.