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

In The Architectural Imagination of Edith Wharton, Annette Benert examines Wharton’s fiction in the context of the author’s interest in architecture and design and, more generally, within the social and political functions the built environment served during the decades in which Wharton wrote. With chapters that follow her career chronologically, the book charts a trajectory for Wharton’s interest in architecture that “begins and ends in fierce attachment to traditional values, moves from delight in Italy to despair for France, and centers in the brilliantly crafted structures and spaces of the early New York novels” (7). Although Benert may overstate the fact that the author’s “architectural imagination” has been ignored by other critics, she has nonetheless contributed a more thorough examination of a crucial interest of Wharton’s than previous scholars have.

Chapter one provides a useful, if overly detailed, summary of Wharton’s upbringing and early writings, placing both alongside the ways turn-of-the-century architects utilized built structures to shape social identity. Benert rightly asserts that “the capitals of Europe,” to which Wharton was early exposed, “represented a visual and spatial standard, an aesthetic imprint, against which the American scene could never measure up” (21). Both in writing The Decoration of Houses and in building The Mount, her home in western Massachusetts, Wharton aligned herself with the City Beautiful movement and with the architectural work of Charles McKim. Just as Wharton and Codman’s book constitutes an “attempt to create an environment that united the best of Europe and America,” and just as The Mount was built, under Wharton’s direction, so as to harmonize nature and structure, McKim and other promoters of the American Renaissance believed that “neoclassical urban buildings and planning would bring order and harmony to American cities” as well as to “help to acculturate and assimilate the foreign-born, the poor, and the new rich alike” (35, 38). Yet Benert goes on to argue that “physical structures that in her architectural and autobiographical works serve to maintain her own culture and class and to reify their ideals become in her fiction agents of social domination” (58).

Benert establishes the presence of this dichotomy in chapter two’s discussion of Wharton’s books on Italian design and the two-volume novel The Valley of Decision more convincingly than she does in the first chapter’s analysis of “Mrs. Mainstay’s View” and The Bunner Sisters. Set in late-eighteenth-century Italy, The Valley of Decision both critiques the “moral validity” of the aristocratic order and mourns the underclass mob’s destruction of the cultural artifacts created by class inequity (93). Benert’s third chapter traces Wharton’s “almost superstitious horror” of spaces that enclose, from convents in stories like “The Hermit and the Wild Woman” and the homes of the upper class in her ghost stories to In Morocco’s dramatically-rendered harem. All ostensibly united by the fact that they enclose women, these spaces also horrify Wharton in part because they are associated with the other: with Catholics, with Celts (as in the case of a story like “All Souls’”), and with Moroccans, a point that Benert could have considered more carefully, especially in light of her attribution of Wharton’s attitudes to a supposedly quintessential American “horror of tyranny, of oppression, of confinement” (94, 93).

The two chapters that follow are the most coherent in focus and, in the case of chapter five, the most persuasive in argument. Chapter four explores how The House of Mirth and The Custom of the County “oddly mirror each other” in the ways that they protest women’s places in the domestic sphere, places that work to reify class status so that “home” becomes a place that precludes human interaction and hinders personal development (112). In chapter five, Benert examines The House of Mirth’s as well as The Reef’s deployments of the...