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fairfieldthinkspace · 1 year

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“The future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous”: Why the 21st Century Loves Edith Wharton

Emily J. Orlando

E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in the Humanities & Social Sciences and Professor of English

Fairfield University

Photo: John Singer Sargent, Sybil Frances Grey, later Lady Eden 1905.

If ever there were a good time to read the American writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937), who published over forty books across four decades, it’s now. Since the Wharton revival of the late 20th century, when directors were adapting (the Pulitzer-Prize winning) The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, The Buccaneers, and The House of Mirth, her star has continued to rise. As I yesterday prepared to teach The Custom of the Country, which many have called Wharton’s greatest novel, a friend texted me Sofia Coppola’s article on the surprising appeal of its social-climbing heroine. Coppola is developing Undine Spragg’s story for Apple TV. A kind of Gilded Age Material Girl, Undine has been ready for her close-up for years.

Coppola joins an impressive roster of contemporary admirers of Wharton that includes Roxane Gay, Laura Bush, Lisa Lucas, Peggy Noonan, Jennifer Egan, Stephin Merritt, Claire Messud, Meg Wolitzer, Mindy Kaling, Doug Hughes, Brandon Taylor, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ali Benjamin, Vendela Vida, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Kristin Hannah. At a time when publishing houses are compelled to scale back, new editions of Wharton’s books are appearing in print with introductions by Coppola, Egan, and Taylor.

Photo: Sofia Coppola.

Those who think they don’t know Wharton might be surprised to learn they do. A reverence for Wharton’s writings informs Sex and the City (whose pilot welcomes us to “the Age of Un-Innocence”), Gossip Girl, Downtown Abbey (whose “Lady Edith” suggests a nod to Wharton), and HBO’s The Gilded Age which, like Downton, is created by the Wharton-appreciating Julian Fellowes. His Bertha and George, after all, are named for the power couple from The House of Mirth.

But why Wharton? Why now? Perhaps it’s because for all its new technologies, conveniences, and modes of travel and communication, our own “Gilded Age” is a lot like hers. For the post-war and post-flu-epidemic climate that engendered The Age of Innocence is not far removed from our post-COVID-19 reality. In both historical moments, citizens of the world have witnessed a retreat into conservativism and a rise of white supremacy. Fringe groups like the “Proud Boys” and “QAnon” and deniers of everything from the coronavirus to climate change and Sandy Hook are invited to the table in the name of free speech, and here Wharton’s distrust of false narratives resonates particularly well. Post-9/11 calls for patriotism and the alignment of the American flag with one political party harken back to Wharton’s poignant questioning, in a 1919 letter, of the compulsion to profess national allegiance:

how much longer are we going to think it necessary to be “American” before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?[i]

Her cosmopolitan critique of nationalist fervor remains instructive to us today.

Edith Wharton seems to have foreseen the excesses, obsessions, and spectacles of our current moment. The scandals documented in Wharton’s narratives serve as harbingers of the sensations that flash across our hand-held screens. Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking touches on the same nerve as the sexual exploitation of minors in Wharton’s Summer (1917) and The Children (1928). The quid pro quo run-in between Wharton’s Lily Bart and Gus Trenor looks uncomfortably forward to Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo. The rise to power of Donald Trump would not surprise Edith Wharton.

Photo: “Vanity,” by Auguste Toulmouche, circa 1870.

Wharton’s tenacious Undine Spragg—as horrifying to progressive era readers as she is admired by Generation Z—can be conceived of as the original social media influencer conscious of her brand. For Undine and her creator know that “the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous”[ii] and that the turn-of-the-century “world where conspicuousness passed for distinction”[iii] foreshadows our own. Wharton would describe Undine in terms we might use for a “Real Housewife of Park Avenue”: “If only everyone would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable” (162). Undine’s world encourages her to aspire to the rank of trophy wife and the sexual double standard dictating that “genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair”[iv] would apply to Wharton herself who, on the 150th anniversary of her birth, would be assessed by a male novelist in terms of how she sizes up to Grace Kelly or Jackie Kennedy.[v] The writer who would declare, in her wildly popular interior design manual The Decoration of Houses, privacy “one of the first requisites of civilized life”[vi] would be appalled by what is broadcast across social media. Wharton also would’ve anticipated the racism directed at Meghan Markle and why granting Oprah an interview would not help relations with her spouse’s family. Children forcibly separated from families due to morally dubious immigration policies echo the plight of war refugees for whose welfare Edith Wharton labored, while the distrust of the cultural other echoes the writer’s own complicated nationalist allegiances.[vii]

Ten years ago, Lev Raphael took the temperature of Wharton studies declaring in the Huffington Post: “Edith Wharton is hot.” She is now positively on fire. I offer below a short excerpt from the introduction to The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton, which appears in print today.

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The image gracing the cover of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton, capturing a scene on the terrace of Edith Wharton’s French home, reflects the cultural work that this book takes as its task. The writer is in her element: she cradles in her lap her beloved dogs, she sits outdoors at a well-appointed property she lovingly transformed, she surrounds herself with fashionably dressed cosmopolitans, and she smiles. The moment validates an idea expressed in The Age of Innocence: that “the air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.” As host, Wharton, by this point an internationally acclaimed artist, has brought together representatives of an admiring generation from diverse backgrounds that would outlive and perhaps learn from her. That sunlit terrace is doing something we hope this book will do: provide a foundation for future conversations with Edith Wharton at the center.

Photo: Edith Wharton publicity shot.

Around the time this photograph was taken, Wharton would reflect in A Backward Glance that “[t]he world is a welter and has always been one; but though all the cranks and the theorists cannot master the old floundering monster, . . . here and there a saint or a genius suddenly sends a little ray through the fog, and helps humanity to stumble on, and perhaps up” (379). Wharton’s writings arguably send a ray and help humanity stumble on and up in our own Gilded Age. It is the aim of this collection of essays, produced by leaders in the field at a time of global crisis, to make a meaningful contribution to the scholarship on and dialogue about the work of Edith Wharton and to open up new possibilities for understanding and embracing a writer whose corpus is as enormous as it is resonant. To borrow from Wharton’s preface to her anthology The Book of the Homeless (1916), in which she conceives of her volume, as she so often does, as a house: “You will see from the names of the builders what a gallant piece of architecture it is. . . . So I efface myself from the threshold and ask you to walk in.”[viii]

Emily J. Orlando is the E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in the Humanities & Social Sciences and Professor of English at Fairfield University. She is the author of Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts and editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton. She is currently preparing for publication a new edition of Edith Wharton’s first book, The Decoration of Houses.

[i]Lewis, Letters, 424.

[ii]Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country, New York, Penguin, 2006, 117.

[iii]Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, ed. Elizabeth Ammons, 2nd Norton Critical ed. (New York: Norton, 2018), 186.

[iv]Edith Wharton, The Touchstone, in Wharton, Edith, Collected Stories, 1891-1910, ed. Maureen Howard (New York: Library of America, 2001), 170.

[v]Jonathan Franzen, “A rooting interest: Edith Wharton and the problem of sympathy,” The New Yorker, February 5, 2012.

[vi] Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., The Decoration of Houses (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 22.

[vii]See Melanie Dawson, “The Limits of Cosmopolitan Experience in Wharton’s The Buccaneers.” Legacy 31.2 (2014): 258-80. Print.

[viii]Edith Wharton, Preface to The Book of the Homeless (Le Livre des Sans-foyer) (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), xxiv-xxv.

#Emily J. Orlando #Fairfield University #Edith Wharton #Gossip Girl #The Custom of the Country #Sofia Coppola #The Age of Innocence #Undine Spragg #Summer #The Book of the Homeless

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jdragsky · 4 months

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i'm gonna go one step further and say it's actively good to engage with media you have fundamental ideological disagreements with, especially when you use that as a testing ground to conceptualize your own worldview and help you crystalize your perspective on things

#i read book of the new sun over the summer and it really helped me understand my politics better #also my favorite video game is cities skylines which is just horrifically anti-homeless

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twst-mer · 9 months

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#hirasaka yuuka #mito yuuta #twst #twisted wonderland #book 2 manga #book 3 manga #i love the way yuuka is a judoka #how yuuka specializes in judo throws--and how that might even be a reference to the way simba throws scar #how part of the philosophy is about overcoming even significantly bigger opponents #how concept art literally says yuuka can lift jack with ease #speaking of jack--i love the way yuuta interacts with jack #laughs and gentle arm touches #how yuuta likely had to deal with a lot of different types in a restaurant and probably reads people like a book #tsundere expert #i wish yuuta wasnt treated so much as a gag character #if my read is right--jack & leona never criticize based on body at least #but a lot of things are gonna happen and could change in book 3 with savanaclaw so im both afraid and hyped #skipping school with jack #giving jack pointers while they work together in mostro lounge #JACK BRINGING YUUTA & GRIM TO SAVANACLAW AFTER THEY GO HOMELESS...SLEEPOVER WITH LEONa...#screaming all night with grim for leona to help them because its all or nothing on their last day in savanaclaw #leona eventually helping out and saying Sorry Azul. You're just not quite as dastardly a villain as Yuuta is.#pls #they bring out the essence of the dorms and foil the overblotters so well!! fave official yuu designs hands down

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charliejaneanders · 5 months

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Bluestockings Cooperative is an indispensible feminist bookstore in NYC. It's been a fantastic community space for as long as I can remember. Now it's facing eviction because the store is providing Narcan — and they've actually saved lives!. Please do what you can to help. Details at the link.

#books #bookstores #bookshops #narcan #homelessness #this is so infuriating i want to scream #Instagram

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keykidpilipili · 29 days

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Blaine light corruption arc this, emblem heartless lore retcon that, what truly would surprise me is to see humanoid nobodies outside the org and their impact on keyblade society.

You definitely saw your keyblade guardian get done by a heartless but they came back wrong the next month. You grieved them, you learnt to wield their keyblade over your own and now they're back.

Also hilarious scenario of murdering sby in a heartless ambush for power only for them to come back as a nobody possibly stronger.

#kingdom hearts #khml #kh missing link #kh lore #kingdom hearts missing link #kh nobody #Also my brain keeps referring to Remus based on the tv show Nobody's boy remi #the japanese title of the series is just homeless child so the pun wouldn't work and the title of the source book is just No family #and of course now I got the french opening stuck in my head #NOBODY'S BOY REMUS

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tharkflark1 · 9 months

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Ruin provides a sort of timeline that has me hella confused.

Like, if GGY is canonical, (and with patient 46 it most likely is) that means Gregory was under the mimic’s control for a while.

But when/how did he get under that control and when/how did he break out of it?

1. GGY has knowledge of computers and the pizzaplex. Gregory does not (he actively questions certain things within and his little “I dunno it looks complicated…” when upgrading Freddy is just hmmmm)

2. GGY is a nice kid but he has his weird moments (I think staring blankly at someone after they called you your real name is sus behavior). Gregory is either sassy or scared out of his mind throughout SB. Not to mention, Ruin has him being like “I have no idea what that thing down there in the basement is” with possibly Vanessa having to give him the run down

NOT TO MENTION his relationship with Cassie. Gregory has been to the pizzaplex. There’s cut dialogue where Freddy says he remembers Gregory from “that place”. And the thing that isn’t cut is Freddy’s little “hmph” when he learns Gregory’s name (like Deja vu but Freddy doesn’t dwell too long on it). And the fact that Gregory doesn’t have ANY existing database??? None?????? Like what did he do that as GGY/Dr. Rabbit???

There’s still all those little areas where someone has camped out. Was that Gregory or previous kids that got lured in????

Also, when did Cassie and Gregory become friends? Being freed from the Mimic’s control clearly messed with his memories (I think it’s implied Vanessa has little to no memories of when she’s Vanny???) does that mean Gregory and Cassie became friends before he got possessed?? And why did Gregory go missing?????

With Vanessa you had to play some hidden arcade games to free her so what did Gregory do??? Did Freddy’s malfunction have to do with it somehow??????

What is the timeline here???? I’m so confused

#fnaf #fnaf sb #fnaf ruin #gregory fazbear #Cassie fnaf #if anyone more knowledgeable than me on the books could help that’d be great #also the implication that he’s homeless cuz he killed his parents but doesn’t remember doing that???#Gregory who are you come over here imma hug u #GGY

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fatehbaz · 17 days

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#thinking of dinosaurs and troodontids were my favorite dinosaurs as a child #when younger i had a real full troodontid tooth fossil that meant a lot to me #for a time we lived within a few kilometers of hadrosaur sites and troodontid sites #while wider general area had many sites of recovery for the big celebrities like tyrannosaur and multiple dromaeosaurs #at that time troodontids were kinda infamous for i think the depiction in some childrens field guides and dino books #which depicted like a fantasy speculative humanoid troodontid based on 1980s model at Canadian Museum of Nature in ottawa #anyway would visit a small local paleo center a lot and woman in her 70s or 80s ran the counter of their center and rock shop #one day she asked me what my fave dino was and i said troodon so she pulled out the tooth and just gifted it to me #in little black case size of ring box with padding and transparent plastic viewing cover kinda like laminate for displaying a trading card #tooth got stolen from out my vehicle while giving some people a ride while at university before i got too poor for tuition #later during first year of pandemic owner of my storage unit died and new property owners threw away everything i ever owned #i was homeless anyway lost job due to early pandemic closures and had to allocate any money to insulin and other prescrip meds #but wouldve found a way to save my things if the new owners had contacted me #they threw out photoalbums y backpacking gear y books y musical instruments y clothes y artwork y camera y all family keepsakes #and all childhood treasures like souvenirs and gifts and school awards and writing portfolios and all the little memories #which i was always sentimental about as child #from earliest age my room looked like a natural history museum with plants and maps and library of field guides #and rocks and field trip keepsakes and all kinds of little animal figurines and mother had painted room in forest greens and browns #to feel like a forest and among the succulent plants and a globe sat the troodon tooth #parents passed when i was a child #never near any family and were always moving never got to settle into proper stable place then father passed after long sad illness #and mother put in so much effort but she passed few years later and i could not take care of myself or my remaining material possessions #and so im still quite hurt having nothing whatsoever remaining of my childhood or school friends or mother or life generally #and when trying to process grief my thoughts often come back to the troodontid tooth as a focal point a distillation of what was lost #even when young i knew it was advised not to become too connected to material physical possessions #but still there are some small little trinkets in our lives that seem to hold so much meaning and i tortured myself for losing that tooth #thinking about troodon reminds me of childhood

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hussyknee · 10 months

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Idk how people go into social science research knowing that you're anyway going to spend your entire life arguing with wilfully ignorant fuckwits over stuff like "keeping one-tenth of the world's GDP locked up in a handful of people's accounts is bad for a functional economy'', "you shouldn't have to pay money to stay alive", "letting people mind their own business won't hurt you", "knowledge is good actually", "people have the right to do whatever they want with their own bodies", "children are people too", "germs are real", "spreading disease is bad for society", "genocide is bad actually", "letting the government kill people puts everyone in danger because everyone is people", "access to long-distance murder weapons increases the chances of getting murdered", "you can't give a clump of cells the same rights as a human being" ad fucking nauseaum until you die.

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gasolineclown · 4 months

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Damn it’s the homeless boys hour

#disney twst #twst #twst wonderland #twisted wonderland #black butler #black butler joker #black butler book of circus #gild tesoro #one piece #op gild Tesoro #one piece gild Tesoro #homlessness #homeless boy hours #fellow honest #twisted wonderland fellow honest #twst fellow #twst fellow honest

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artbyblastweave · 2 years

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Getting a T Shirt made that says “RORSCHACH WAS RIGHT*

(small print)

*ABOUT NOT LETTING OZYMANDIAS OFF THE HOOK FOR THE SQUID THING WHEN IT WAS SUCH AN OBVIOUSLY FLIMSY, CONCIETED AND DIFFICULT-TO-SUSTAIN-OVER-THE-LONG-HALL PLAN COOKED UP BY A SINGLE EGOMANIAC WITH ABSOLUTELY NO OVERSIGHT OR PEER REVIEW, NOT ABOUT THE WEIRD TRAD STUFF*

(and then on the back)

*ALTHOUGH ITS TEXTUALLY UNCLEAR IF RORSCHACH HIMSELF IS OR WAS EVEN PSYCHOLOGICALLY CAPABLE OF NOTICING THE LOGISTICAL OR LOGICAL HOLES IN THE PLAN THAT WOULD CONVENIENTLY OBVIATE THE UTILITARIAN ARGUMENT TOWARDS SILENCE; HE APPROACHES IT AS THOUGH THE GIVEN DICHOTOMY WITH WHICH HE IS PRESENTED, UTILITARIAN-DRIVEN SILENCE OR DEONTOLOGICALLY-MOTIVATED APOCALYPSE, IS IN FACT AIRTIGHT, AND HIS SUICIDE IS MOTIVATED BY THIS; IT IS CONCIEVABLE THAT WITH A MOMENT TO THINK, HE MIGHT NOTICE THE HOLES IN THE UTILITARIAN ARGUMENT AS PRESENTED, BUT FEEL THAT ARGUING ON THE BASIS OF THOSE HOLES, RATHER THAN FROM PURE UNCOMPROMISING RETRIBUTIVE DEONTOLOGY, IMPLICITLY LENDS UNDUE CREDENCE TO THE UTILITARIAN LOGIC OF HIS ENEMY, AND INDEED IMPLICITLY CEDES THE ARGUMENT ALTHOGETHER SHOULD OZYMANDIAS PLAUSIBLY ADDRESS ISSUES OF SUSTAINABILITY AND PERSONAL BIAS: HE MIGHT PLAUSIBLY FIND THIS AN EVEN WORSE COMPROMISE OF HIS PRINCIPLES AND BEHAVE EXACTLY AS HE DID IN CANON.

The shirt is gonna have a weird cut but so did the movie

#watchmen #rorshach #anyway I do basically sympathize with him a lot more than I think Alan Moore wanted me to vis a vis the squid issue specifically #and fall in lock step with the conventional Volley of Rorshach Criticisms otherwise #Guys #you have absolutely no insurance against whatever fuckery Adrian tries next #he's proven at a baseline that there's no amount of violence he won't do if he unilaterally decides that it's ethical to do it #granted the rest of you also prove that every single day #but you're a bunch of homeless fugitives and he's a genocidal billionaire #do not let him walk away from Antartica with his decision making faculties intact #thoughts #meta #comic books

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