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6 Wenzell andWharton marketing The House of Mirth’s designs While my chapters on twain, crane, and dunbar examine visual and verbal artists who are comfortable or uncomfortable thanks to differences of “race,” this final chapter considers inequalities of sex and gender, as they are rendered visually for comfortable purchasers of books. edith Wharton’s lily Bart stands to lose her comfortable place among Old new york gentility, as Wharton and the artist assigned to the novel, albert Beck Wenzell, market the story for readers who hope in turn to achieve, or to retain, their own relatively comfortable social statuses. in Wharton’s The House of Mirth’s serialized run in Scribner’s Magazine in 1905, as well as its first book editions, in november of that year, Wenzell’s illustrations met the eyes of the story’s readers. Visual and verbal art were housed, as it were, in the same editions. lily met the original audience, not only in Wharton’s prose but also in Wenzell’s accompanying illustrations, but critiques of the novel, even ones that emphasize visual art, seldom reproduce those illustrations. Footnotes mentioning Wenzell, critical editions reproducing the pictures, discussions accounting for the novel’s original packaging and design, all remain exceptions to the rule.1 readers almost universally forget that this work, which chronicled a woman’s ambivalent career on the marriage market, first appeared with visual art that displayed a male artist’s attempt to help the heroine and the author succeed on the publishing market. illustrating the novel for readers meant comfortingly depicting the heroine’s progressively less comfortable place in new york social life. Wharton was too careful a writer not to manage the visual and verbal appeal of her work. Gifted with “an architect’s eye for proportion and detail,” she possessed such a “heightened sensitivity to visual impressions” she would “suffer intensely from ugliness” (Benstock 164, 23). The Decoration of Houses (1897), coauthored with Ogden codman, contained more than fifty half-tone 160 chapter 6 plates depicting sparsely but elegantly furnished interiors and arguing visually and verbally against the Gilded age’s tendency toward bric-a-brac. Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) enlisted maxfield Parrish illustrations to extend architectural principles to cultivated lawns. Women writers of her generation felt “two lines of inheritance,” elaine showalter suggests, lines “generally represented in the literary history of american women writers by the spatial images of the father’s library and the mother’s garden” (153). in The Decoration of Houses, Wharton told fathers how to design and stock their libraries, and in Italian Villas and Their Gardens showed mothers how to achieve a mediterranean flair. even before The House of Mirth, she contributed volumes to buyers’ libraries, while influencing ideas of library design. designs in complementary—or encroaching—visual media often accompany her fictions. By 1885, “it was believed essential to the printing of fiction to illustrate it,” writes roger Burlingame of his father’s long-running editorship of scribner’s (Burlingame 226). He continues: “The epoch in which the public grew up to the point of no longer needing this [visual] aid to the understanding of the more serious fiction may be spotted roughly by running through the volumes of edith Wharton’s novels. The Fruit of the Tree in 1907 had a dramatic frontispiece; but opposite the title page of The Custom of the Country in 1913, there is a dignified blank and the modern reader arriving at this point gives a deep sigh of relief” (Burlingame 226). Though he omits The House of Mirth, this vogue for “essential” illustration and Wharton’s early career coincide. authorship seldom meant working with one medium in isolation , but it included the consideration of visual accompaniment, or commercial competition, for Wharton’s novelistic art. The graphic artist for The House of Mirth, a. B. Wenzell, made a name for himself rendering aristocrats in ballroom finery. He provided drawings for novels and collections by many 1890s authors, illustrated an edition of stories by Guy de maupassant, and produced two books comprised entirely of captioned illustrations, In Vanity Fair (1896) and The Passing Show (1903).2 He worked for Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, Century , and Cosmopolitan. He rendered a portrait of Theodore roosevelt and his daughter and completed a cycle of murals for new york’s new amsterdam Theater. He painted “colossal” women or allegorical figures for murals, which, cynthia Griffin Wolff reminds us, were “used as symbols, mere visual embodiments...

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