Edith Wharton and the "Authoresses": The Critique of Local Color in Wharton's Early Fiction
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Notes
1. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), p. 293.
2. Josephine Donovan's Local Color: A Woman's Tradition (New York: Felix Ungar, 1983) and After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1988) take this approach, which here provides a way of conceptualizing Wharton's antipathy for the movement. For other feminist approaches, see Millicent Bell's "Female Regional Writing: An American Tradition," Revue Française d'Etudes Americaines, 1 (1986), 469-80 for the local colorists' use of dialect as the language of marginality; Elizabeth Ammons' Introduction to Rose Terry Cooke's How Celia Changed Her Mind and Other Stories (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986) for the use of the sketch as a local color form; and Alice Hall Perry's "Universal and Particular: The Local-Color Phenomenon Reconsidered," ALR, 12 (1979), 111-26, for the use of the quotidian; and Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse's Introduction to American Women Regionalists 1850-1910 (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. xi-xx.
3. Candace Waid provides a thorough and convincing analysis of Wharton's debt in Summer to Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's story "Old Woman Magoun" in Edith Wharton's Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 87-125.
4. Charles Miner Thompson, "New Figures in Literature and Art: Hamlin Garland," Atlantic, 76 (December 1895), 840.
5. Paul Shorey, "Present Conditions of Literary Production," Atlantic, 78 (1896), 170.
6. For an excellent discussion of regional fiction that goes far beyond the severely limited version presented here, see Richard H. Brodhead's chapters "The Reading of Regions" and "Jewett, Regionalism, and Writing as Women's Work," in Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993).
7. Ann Douglas (Wood), "The Literature of Impoverishment: The Women Local Colorists in America 1865-1914," Women's Studies, 1 (1972), 3-45.
8. Charles Dudley Warner, "Editor's Study," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 92 (May 1896), 961.
9. James Lane Allen, "Two Principles in Recent American Fiction," Atlantic, 80 (October 1897), 439.
10. Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 6.
11. Quoted by Millicent Bell in Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship (New York: George Braziller, 1965), p. 293. June Howard's model of spectatorship and the threat of proletarianization in Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985) informs my argument here.
12. Sarah Orne Jewett's "A Little Captive Maid," Octave Thanet's "A Recognition," and two stories by Thomas Nelson Page appeared in the same volume. The same approximate period of the summer and fall of 1891 reveals the similar content of other major literary journals: Harper's New Monthly Magazine, for example, featured Sarah Orne Jewett's "The Failure of David Berry," travel writing by Constance Fenimore Woolson, and novels by William Dean Howells and "Charles Egbert Craddock" (Mary N. Murfree); and The Century contained a novel by Edward Eggleston, a story by Hamlin Garland, and poetry by Mary E. Wilkins (Freeman).
13. Edith Wharton, "Mrs. Manstey's View," Scribner's Magazine, 10 (1891), 117. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
14. In A Feast of Words (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), Cynthia Griffin Wolff observes that "Mrs. Manstey is revealed to us in a series of reductions" (p. 65), a term that recalls Ann Douglas's characterization of local color as a "literature of impoverishment." Most recent critics, however, would disagree with Douglas's generally negative view of local color fiction.
15. R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 61.
16. Barbara A. White, Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1991), p. 33.
17. Gwen Nagel, "'This prim corner of land where she was...
