"Rabid Imperialist": Edith Wharton and the Obligations of Empire in Modern American Fiction

Late in April 1898, near the end of his illustrious career at Harvard, the eruption of war against Spain impelled Charles Eliot Norton to perform what one biographer has called “one of his last acts of moral courage as a citizen and idealist.” ¹ Norton urged his students not to serve in what he described to a friend as “this wretched, needless and, consequently, iniquitous war,” which he then lamented in a widely reviled address as “a bitter disappointment to the lover of his country” and “a turning-back from the path of civilization to that of barbarism.” ² Vehemently attacked by politicians and an inflammatory press, and inundated by “a vast amount of, mainly anonymous, abuse and denunciation” in the mail, Norton went on to assail “this bastard ‘imperialism’” and “our detestable policy and proceedings in the Philippines,” as even more remote interventions by the United States led him to “mourn her desertion of ideals . . . of universal worth and validity.” ³ Such remarks placed Norton in the vanguard of a small but vociferous group of anti-imperialist Americans that had formed in opposition to the war with Spain and that remained influential until 1905, after Theodore Roosevelt’s reelection consolidated the nation’s appetite for empire. A personification of genteel conservatism, nearly seventy years of age and on the verge of retirement, Norton did not hesitate nonetheless to risk his reputation in courting public opprobrium on what he considered an urgent matter of principle. ⁴

It was during this turbulent period that Edith Wharton became one of the last of Norton’s protègès, later remembering his friendship and the loyalty with which “[h]e never ceased to interest himself in my work, or to encourage me to go forward.” ⁵ On a visit to Washington, D.C., in March 1898, a few weeks after the sinking of the Maine , Wharton apparently shared Norton’s anguished response to the crisis, declaring to Ogden Codman Jr., as Shari Benstock reports, that “America had ‘entered upon a period of national disgrace’ in taking arms against Spain.” ⁶ Yet it seems that Wharton objected more to the belligerence toward an esteemed European power than to an incipient colonialism on the part of the United States in Cuba. By March 1901, in fact, after the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, and Puerto Rico had joined Cuba as sites of U.S. strategic engagement, she announced in a letter to Norton’s daughter Sara, agreeing to entertain J. B. Harrison, an Indiana clergyman and newspaper editor with whom Norton had frequently collaborated on various political and social matters: “We are awaiting Mr. Harrison with open arms, & perhaps when he discovers that I am a rabid Imperialist the shock may strike a few sparks out of him.” ⁷

Aware that such an admission would probably kindle sparks in Norton himself, Wharton must have been motivated by more than an urge to shock the squeamish and fastidious New Englander, who would write “in alarm” after the publication of The House of Mirth (1905), the novelist later recalled, “imploring me to remember that ‘no great work of the imagination has ever been based on illicit passion’!” ( BG , 127). For her deliberately provocative description of herself as a “rabid Imperialist” is merely the most overt pledge that Wharton made on behalf not only of a nascent American empire but of imperial Britain and France as well. Ultimately, Wharton’s reply to Sara Norton discloses an imperial sensibility that fundamentally shaped her social and political views, some of the defining themes of her prose, her aesthetic creed, and her vision of American fiction in the twentieth century.

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Certainly there was much in Wharton’s background and environment to make her keenly receptive to American expansionism. Her characterization of the “indifference” and “inertia” of the old New York of her childhood suggests that she would have recognized the extension of national boundaries as...