The Architectural Imagination of Edith Wharton: Gender, Class, and Power in the Progressive Era (review)

Architecture, interior decoration, and landscape gardening were more than dilettantish hobbies for Edith Wharton. Her first book, The Decoration of Houses, was a serious, scholarly work as well as a manifesto of principles that aligned her with the classical revival of the period (as opposed to the romanticism of Gothic revival, or to the emerging modernism of Louis Sullivan). Wharton's neoclassicism aligned her with Charles McKim, the most successful architect of his time, and with landscape designer Frederick Law Olmstead, as well as her own niece Beatrix Jones, one of the most important designers of parks and gardens after Olmstead. The work of these designers was part of the aesthetic vision of the Progressive movement, which aimed at creating dignified public spaces and buildings—parks, public gardens, libraries, museums—in keeping with their vision of the appropriate ideals for a democratic society. These ideals had reached their fullest expression in the White City of the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893.

Annette Benert's goal is to show that Wharton's architectural imagination unites all of her interests as a kind of touchstone, at least until the shattering impact of the First World War. Her book about Italian Gardens, as well as her travel books, shows a continuous scholarly interest in the European classical traditions of structures and designed landscapes. In her private life she devoted herself to her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Mount, and later to her two estates in France. The imaginative work of her mornings was given to writing, her afternoons to her gardens. She had equivalent success in each.

Benert's demonstration of Wharton's serious interest in architecture and design is impeccable and convincing. As she acknowledges, it is more difficult to demonstrate that Wharton's "architectural imagination" illuminates all aspects of her fiction. There is a disconnection, for example, between Wharton's nominal affiliation with the Progressive movement in matters architectural and the social vision she presents in her novels and stories. Nonetheless, Benert offers convincing readings of several works in terms of Wharton's use of structures and space. The rise of Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country and the decline of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth can be measured by the successive buildings and rooms they inhabit. Confining structures and the open spaces of gardens and country walks are obvious ways to reify the social and psychological situation of her characters.

It is a measure of Benert's success that the reader finds other examples of this theme and wishes further exploration. Thus her mention of Newland Archer's library recalls that libraries function in significant ways in the ghost story "The Eyes," as well as in Summer. That novella also would provide an opportunity for exploring Wharton's use of vernacular architecture, since the narrative can be described in terms of a series of houses: red house, brown house, tumbledown house, the shanties on The Mountain.

After witnessing the destruction of the First World War, a destruction not only of human life but of the material patrimony of France, Wharton wrote no more about architecture, and her fiction was increasingly less grounded in material reality. The spaces she had constructed in her country estates were her refuge.