Selling Edith Wharton: Illustration, Advertising, and Pictorial Review, 1924-1925

EDIE THORNTON Selling Edith Wharton: Illustration, Advertising, and Pictorial Review, 1924-1925 ICANNOT consent t? have my work treated as prose by the yard," wrote Edith Wharton to her editor and advisor, Rutger Bleeker Jewett , in 1920. Wharton was infuriated that Pictorial Review, the popular women's magazine serializing The Age of Innocence, meant to cut some of her installments to make room for illustrations and advertisements (Lewis 429). As all of her 1920s novels appeared first as serializations in Pictorial Review, this was but one of many encounters Wharton would have with the limitations and demands ofpopular magazine publishing. While critics have long debated the degree to which Wharton considered —some suggest "wrote down to"—her mass audience in the 1920s, some compelling questions remain unanswered: how did Pictorial Review package and sell Wharton's work to its perceived readership? How did the cultural authority of magazine illustration interact with Wharton 's often critical position toward magazine preoccupations, particularly female youth, narcissism, and sexual desire? Most important, how did these combined factors affect possible interpretations of narratives such as the 1924-25 serialization of The Mother's Recompense? Illustration, advertising, and promotion copy invited readers of The Mother's Recompense to focus on certain narrative coordinates over others . The conventions and expectations of Pictorial Review's visual environment pointed readers toward a consumer-driven bias in their reading , emphasizing particularly the tie between youth, fashion, and female heterosexuality. Wharton, however, was impatient, both in and out of Arizona Quarterly Volume 57, Number 3, Autumn 2001 Copyright © 2001 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 610 30 Edie Thornton her fictions, with the era of consumption and its preoccupation with the individual. As Dale Bauer argues in Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics , Wharton saw the 1920s as a time of "false liberation" and "unchecked narcissism" in which a mature heroine like Kate Clephane "must choose between desexualized and erotic roles" (56, 77). Kate, however, refuses to choose and Wharton's 1925 serialization emerges as a critique of the very context in which it appears. Into this contradictory mix of reading priorities entered a factor discounted by current readers: the profound visual authority of illustration and the celebrity status of illustrators. This article asserts that Wharton 's textual descriptions of her heroine struggle for authority with ads, illustrations, and promotion not only over what Kate will look like, but also over how a sexual, middle-aged woman can—or cannot—be represented in 1920s popular print culture. By examining the novel through questions of consumerism, fashion, and visual cues, I suggest that Pictorial Review attempted to solve the "problem" of Kate's mature age and sexual desires by rendering Kate as progressively younger than her forty-five years. Far from erasing a critique of consumer culture, however , these visual alterations presented readers with an image of youthful sexuality that was disengaged from its magazine counterparts, standardization and narcissism. The Mother's Recompense provides a heroine that maintains a certain age and status within the text and can be visually manipulated to suit the magazine's criteria. Through these apparent contradicions, the serialization affords an expanded vision of age, sexuality, and self definition to women readers who were increasingly confined by age-specific, youth-worshipping ads and representations. WHARTON, ILLUSTRATION, AND CULTURAL AUTHORITY Before still photography, film, and television trained viewers to expect photo-realism, illustrators like The Mother's Recompense's Arthur Fuller created the visual images reproduced for mass consumption. Increasingly in the early century, publishers vied for the best illustrators, paying them yearly salaries of up to $100,000 and establishing them as media stars. Magazine historians concur that "in the days before television and radio . . . illustrations had an enormous impact on American society and culture. . . . [They] provided most Americans with their Selling Edith Wharton 31 most important ideas about the world outside their experience" (Best 3, 10). While silent film and still photography began to offer their own images of reality in the 1920s, magazine illustration was the most frequently consulted source for visual representation until approximately 1930 (Elzea 7). Women's magazines like Pictorial Review were dominated by the illustrations of a group including Charles...