Edith Wharton's Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction (review)

A traditional bias that persists within scholarship on Edith Wharton's canon praises her as a realist, citing works from the first half of her career to support that categorization while dismissing many of her later works as regrettable "lapses" into sentimentality. Hildegard Hoeller's innovative study, Edith Wharton's Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction, addresses that persistent bias by considering evidence of the sentimental mode in her work, while simultaneously exploring how Wharton employs that sentimental voice to engage in self-referential dialogue and critique of the realist voice. Hoeller's study thoughtfully and effectively compels us to re-examine Wharton's oeuvre in light of this neglected area, and it raises useful questions about continuing critical resistance to the sentimental in literary scholarship as a whole.

Hoeller begins by lucidly setting forth the tensions between realism and sentimental fiction, while acknowledging the "vexing critical issues" of aesthetics and politics that have complicated the reclamation of women's sentimental writing (10). This initial chapter also delineates Wharton's scholarly context, particularly the traditional critical narrative of Wharton's career. Hoeller's discussion of realism and sentimentalism thoughtfully explores a long-standing bias against the sentimental as an uncontrolled, inferior, and excessive feminine mode of expression.

The ensuing chapters explore several of Wharton's works in a progression that clearly indicates how these works revisit and build upon her engagements with both sentimentalism and realism in earlier texts. Chapter two concerns Wharton's juvenile novella Fast and Loose, noting its provenance in Wharton's revision of a verse novel by Victorian author Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton. Hoeller concludes that with this early text, "Wharton both employs and renders ironic the language of the sentimental tradition" (44). Chapters three and four closely read several short stories, as well as Wharton's love letters to Morton Fullerton, to argue that these texts constitute either a critique of the "dangers" of a "male literary taste" that venerates economy or an expression of Wharton's own "double nature" as both realist and sentimental writer (53, 81). A chapter on The House of Mirth illuminates that novel's original appeal as both a realist and a sentimental text, a phenomenon obscured in its canonization as a work of realism. In perhaps the most surprising and provocative reconsideration of this study, Hoeller argues that Wharton's 1922 novel The Glimpses of the Moon, often dismissed for its sentimentalism, in fact exposes sentimental notions as "fictions" and thus is a triumph of Wharton's realist, ironic voice. Remaining chapters consider later short stories, including "Roman Fever," and Wharton's 1925 novel The Mother's Recompense. Such works build upon Wharton's earlier negotiations between realism and sentimental fiction, particularly as focused through the idea of motherhood. The conclusion speculates on the role of Wharton's unfinished final novel, The Buccaneers, in her continued interest in the sentimental tradition. Carefully developed throughout these readings is the idea that the sentimental mode allows the expression of female desire and experience, while the focus on restraint of "masculine" realism silences such expressions.

The strengths of this well-researched and persuasive study are many. Hoeller importantly continues the work of reclaiming the latter part of Wharton's career, often still slighted by scholars. Hoeller is not afraid to question the older generation of Wharton scholars, but she also questions more recent critics, including some feminist scholars whom she considers "uneasy" with acknowledging the sentimental elements in texts such as The House of Mirth (103). Her study also thoughtfully and lucidly draws together Wharton's canonical and non-canonical works. Most significant, this examination of the role of the sentimental in Wharton's work leads us to ponder the author's entire canon in new ways, while Hoeller's premises encourage further scrutiny of the persistent resistance to sentimentalism in the American literary tradition.