Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture (review)

Gary Totten's edited collection, Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors, presents a set of narratives and contexts clustered around the subjects of material culture and interiority as they affected Wharton's career and fiction. Arranged in five sections, the volume sets out to explore how materiality influenced Wharton's literary style, including representations of corporeality, consumerism, interior spaces, and technology. While some of these topics are familiar to Wharton scholars, together the volume's essays suggest a broad scope of material concerns affecting women of Wharton's era.

The first essays describe Wharton's literary authority in relationship to perceptions of her material status. Lyn Bennett's essay, "Presence and Professionalism: The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton," one of the best in the volume, presents a fascinating account of Wharton's early reception. Bennett argues that Wharton's "first critics were willing to grant her an identifiable and unifying voice, yet, because the coolly mirroring author was also seen as material culture's most famous champion" (22), she was also read as unoriginal and marginally professional. Hence, Wharton's work was praised for its form more than for its originality or depth (28). Jamie Barlowe explores the commercialization of Wharton's work, particularly "her connections to and collaborations with other professional women," through such "mass-market industries" as stage and screen adaptations (45), "interior design . . . advertising, and magazine production" (44). Such connections, Barlowe argues, were essential to Wharton's full success as a professional author linked to the developing industries of marketing and adaptation. With a narrower focus, Jacqueline Wilson Jordan explores the figure of the woman writer in "Mr. Jones," a text that associates women with interior spaces through the idiom of the ghost story.

In the section on corporeality, Emily J. Orlando's "Picturing Lily: Body Art in The House of Mirth" explores the well-traversed terrain of the novel's tableaux vivants episode in relation to a new context, "the sort of melancholy maiden memorialized by the Pre-Raphaelites" (91). Addressing relations between "art and necrophilia" (105), as well as a long pictorial tradition that limits the power of the female subject, Orlando "recognizes The House of Mirth as a site where a Wharton heroine manages to find power in art—to let it work for, rather than against, her" (84). Deborah J. Zak's contribution addresses the modern body as it appears in Twilight Sleep, reading the novel as a modernist text that allows us to see the way it "explores American culture's coming-to-terms with new ideas about the human body" (112). Yet the modern body appears curiously disconnected from the inner self, raising continuing questions about its meaning in relation to both characters' idealities and, Zak suggests, Wharton's sense of modernity.

In the consumerism section, the essays address, in compelling new ways, interests often brought to bear on Wharton's work. In "Fashioning an Aesthetics of Consumption in The House of Mirth," Jennifer Shepherd employs the work of "social historians [who] have linked the aesthetics of consumption with turnof the-century developments in the ideology of heterosexual romance" (136). This framework provides a new context for interesting connections between the novel and the works of Thorstein Veblen through examples of periodical advertising practices. Shepherd claims that Lily Bart "exercises her agency in passive-aggressive fashion, refusing to close the sale of herself in marriage until she receives an offer of her own choosing" (149). J. Michael Duvall's fine essay, "The Futile and the Dingy: Wasting and Being Wasted in The House of Mirth," focuses on utility and waste as well as "[a]n ethic of disposability" as defining tendencies in a society struggling to reconcile production and consumption-based activities (160). Encompassing such concepts as Lily's reification and objectification, the essay explores the ruthless material displays staged by the novel's upper class, solidified in relation to "important ethical and aesthetic" questions surrounding "[t]he...