Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman (review)

Edith Wharton as literary artist and biographical subject has attracted continuing attention since her papers were made available to the public by Yale University, where they had been sealed from the time of her death until the 1960s. In general, critical attention has focused largely on her work up until The Age of Innocence (1920), as if her later work displays a diminished quality. That trend has been subjected to reversals by more recent Wharton scholars. The present book is aimed at justifying the artistry in several late Wharton books. The nature of the book's contents should be attractive to anyone who enjoys Wharton's fiction, and who may not be as familiar with some of the works critiqued as with antecedent Wharton titles. That Horner and Beer command knowledge of Wharton's canon and of the materials relevant to their own project is evident throughout their book, even though the chapter titles may suggest a more selective approach to just a few works. The "Introduction," in which a convincing case is presented for giving attention to late Wharton, is followed by six chapters which respectively focus on these books: The Mother's Recompense, Twilight Sleep, The Children, Hudson River Bracketed, The Gods Arrive, and The Buccaneers, succeeded by a "Conclusion," Notes, Select Bibliography, and Index.

Arguing, first, that Wharton's late books are not so far out of the mainstream of 1920s-30s fiction, Horner and Beer situate Wharton among others who are usually ranked as modernists, but whose very modernist features distance them from Wharton's fiction in that same span. Turns out, so they demonstrate, that Wharton may not be so remote from fiction by others, despite her own disclaimers. In 1925, for example, Wharton suggested that in comparison with the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald and that of other younger writers, hers must seem redolent of "tufted furniture and gas chandeliers," that is, Victorian, and consequently lacking the dynamic of state-of-the-art fiction in that era.

Wharton was no fan of fiction by writers such as Joyce and others who also worked with stream-of-consciousness techniques, so she created her own forms of realism, without resorting to similar techniques. Horner and Beer point out that each later Wharton work evinces an experimentation that reveals their author's continuing innovation rather than an inexorable decline in her artistic powers. The title of Cynthia Griffin Wolff's biography of Wharton (1995), A Feast of Words, might be said to resonate throughout the present book as the authors convincingly demonstrate how great those feasts continue to be in Wharton's last novels, despite any carping by other critics. How anyone can argue that Wharton's last books lack the brilliant satire and piquant expression that are present in her preceding books, is beyond me. Although, admittedly, mine are seldom majority opinions, I am happy to find that I concur, without reservations, with Horner and Beer's critiques. Not only do they bring forward the readability of Wharton's later fiction, they do so in what are thoroughly readable viewpoints, a feat that should more often be emulated in many other scholarly books. This one is not jargon-ridden, though the command of Wharton scholarship is deftly blended with ideas found in recent theoretical discourse.

That an aging Wharton should repeatedly address issues relevant to older women's concerns about growing older as it affected sexuality and marriage, is wholly plausible. To step momentarily outside the pages of Horner and Beer's book, we may confront circumstances very much like those which occupy these authors. A kindred concern was, for example, also evident in the portrayal of Newland Archer's trajectory from young man to widower. Or, to focus on effects of female aging in that same book, there is the plight of old Catherine, May's grandmother. Catherine's elderly body in no wise keeps pace with her youthful spirits, though the body dictates...