Edith Wharton and Epiphany

Although not typically associated with literary epiphany, Wharton was one of the first to recognize its significance to modernist fiction. In The Writing of Fiction, Wharton made epiphany central to her theory of fiction and used it to enter into a dialogue with the modernism she viewed from a critical distance. Wharton distinguishes between two different epiphanies: the moral epiphany and the modern epiphany, which stresses the materiality of aesthetic perception. Wharton links the discontinuity of modernist fiction with the ahistorical thrust of modern epiphany. She argues instead for continuity with the narrative patterns inherited from literary history, patterns that interpolated moral epiphanies. In Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive, Wharton develops a third form of epiphany, one that combines the aesthetics of modern epiphany with a subjective and historical continuity that has its roots in an older, perhaps more female, source of creative production.