Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (review)

Edith Wharton possessed a keen sense of the visual. This gift, accompanied by a penetrating intellect and impressive knowledge of art and architecture, produced a body of fiction that is both startlingly fresh and allusive. Noting these connections, Emily J. Orlando has written a thoughtful, informed analysis of Wharton’s engagement with the visual arts, especially with the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her book is a welcome interdisciplinary study that enriches our understanding of Wharton specifically and the connections between visual art and American literature generally.

Orlando’s argument begins with the claim that Wharton’s writing voices dissatisfaction with the objectification and sexualization of women as represented in popular art and culture. The art of the Pre-Raphaelites forms the backdrop for her close readings of Wharton’s novels and short fiction. In particular, Orlando traces the process by which Wharton moves from “misrepresentations” of women as enshrined, enslaved, or killed to gradually more proactive representations of women enthroned and finally empowered (p. 4). Orlando shows Wharton to be a writer conversant with and deeply affected by the art of her day. She establishes that Wharton was neither a passive nor casual observer of the world around her. Rather, she was a penetrating critic and accomplished artist whose fiction challenges and revises accepted views of femininity. Wharton emerges in Orlando’s fine book as “one of American literature’s most gifted intertextual realists” (p. 4).

Orlando first explains a late nineteenth-century cultural and aesthetic obsession inspired by a misogyny that sought to enshrine women’s bodies by literally or figuratively killing them in art. Male artists imagined women as passive, languid, sexualized, infantilized, sickly, or dead. That Wharton also portrays powerless or dead women in her fiction is less a function of her “male identification”—as some critics have claimed—than a demonstration of her critique of such representation (p. 9). Orlando then finds evidence of female subjectivity and explores possibilities of the female artist in Wharton’s canon.

Among the book’s virtues are its intriguing pairings of Wharton’s texts. In the first chapter, Orlando considers major novels alongside relatively unknown short stories, drawing comparisons that increase the reader’s appreciation of specific works as well as of Wharton’s work as a whole. Chapter one examines early stories, “The Moving Finger,” “The Duchess at Prayer,” and “The Muse’s Tragedy,” in order to show the limitations on women’s agency as male artists attempt to seduce women into art and thereby penetrate or kill them. With references to Poe-like necrophilia, she discusses the imagery of women and flowers in fresh ways. Chapter two, about Wharton’s best-selling novel, The House of Mirth, and her tale, “The Potboiler,” suggests that some female characters commission their own objectification and manage to find life rather than death in art, albeit in limited ways. Among several notable points are Orlando’s comparison of Madame Warton and Mrs. Wharton as producers of the tableau vivant, references to Sleeping Beauty myths, and similarities between Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s The House of Life.

The third chapter continues this argument with textual evidence drawn from Wharton’s novels, The Custom of the Country, Hudson River Bracketed, and The Gods Arrive, and the short story, “The Temperate Zone.” This chapter includes the book’s most controversial claim: women in these fictions manage to channel their objectification to their advantage. Feminism from the 1970s might protest any form of objectification of women, but Orlando’s project participates in a newer feminism that emphasizes the positive value of women’s choices, situated in shifting social and political contexts.

Strikingly original analyses of women, museums, and curatorial caretaking appear in chapter four. Focusing on the tales, “The House of the Dead Hand,” “The Rembrandt,” “The Angel at the Grave,” and “Mr. Jones,” and the novella, Summer, Orlando persuasively argues that women compromise not by becoming objects or muses...