"Too Young for the Part": Narrative Closure and Feminine Evolution in Wharton's '20s Fiction

MELANIE V. DAWSON "Too Young for the Part": Narrative Closure and Feminine Evolution in Wharton's '20s Fiction Tidely characterized as self-assured, irreverent, and passionate about new experiences, modern youth reaped the criticism of popular journalists as well as authors of fiction.1 Along with this criticism was a pronounced interest in the young generation, combined with a concern about the cultural life that modern youth valued. Prominent authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald attributed energizing possibilities to the young, specifically to young men. Writing that "Some generations are close to those that succeed them; between others the gap is infinite and unbridgeable," Fitzgerald located in his male characters such as Basil Lee the energies of a dynamic future (47). Continuing in this vein, Fitzgerald describes the play ofyoung adolescent boys, noting that "they were making the first tentative combinations of the ideas and materials they found ready at their hand—ideas destined to become, in future years, first articulate, then startling and finally commonplace " (47-8). In the youth, or the "still unhatched eggs of the mid-twentieth century," Fitzgerald situates the dynamic possibilities of spurning an older generation's values, with youth creating a pronounced generational chasm, even as they instigated profound change (47). Edith Wharton's twenties novels, however, do not share Fitzgerald's optimism in youthful energy, for they instead highlight the impossibility ofyoung women engaging in any type ofprogress. Far from energized or promising, Wharton's youth emerge as hybrid, complicated young women who, despite sincere beliefs and personal integrity, cannot meet Arizona Quarterly Volume 57, Number 4, Winter 2001 Copyright © 2001 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 QOhielanie V. Dawson modernity's ideals; instead, they are disappointments—collapsing, choosing safety, and embodying stasis. Wharton's rendering of youth reminds us that portraits of dynamic modern youth tend to be characterizations of young men, for whom professional, artistic, and even militaristic opportunities had long been and continued to be available. The stagnation and stasis facing modern female youth, however, attest to the limited possibilities and crushed desires of American "girls" of the twenties. Wharton's youthful figures from novels such as Glimpses of the Moon (1922), The Mother's Recompense (1925), Twilight Sleep (1927), and The Children (1928) struggle to develop into fulfilled women, as do the following young women in a range of modern novels: Cather's Antonia, who appears fated (at least in Jim Burden's eyes) to witness the more respectable successes ofher childhood friends; Olsen's Mazie Holbrook, who drops out of a narrative ostensibly about her as the family plunges ever deeper into poverty and disintegration; Lewis's Carol Kennicott, who, rather than achieve personal fulfillment, at last succumbs to the pressure to become an ordinary wife, mother, and townswoman; Faulkner's Caddie Compson, Judith Sutpen, and Rosa Coldfield—who, whether unrepentant, stoic, or outwardly compliant, are shaped by parents , brothers, and lovers; and Hurston's Janie Crawford, stifled by a caring grandmother and, by turns, controlled by admiring and abusive older husbands. Clearly, from such a list, the difficulties of feminine development were concerns of authors other than Wharton, a fact relating to the peculiar cultural status of women during the decade of attaining suffrage, the long-time goal of the women's movement. Writing of the women authors in Greenwich Village, Nina Miller describes the tensions of the twenties, when the political impetus behind women's suffrage waned, or the moment when the "women of the twenties were left to negotiate their experience of gender oppression within the arena of the personal" (47). Miller notes that the women's movement seemed to have lost its unity and force, with the effect of limiting young women's "feminist pursuits" (47). At this time, moreover, an interest in "the ostensibly neutral scientific authority of sexology" promised women's liberation, but in essence, functioned as "a widely popularized science that effectively promoted traditional gender relations in quintessentially 'modern ' terms," upholding monogamy and motherhood as the fulfillment of liberated women (47). In this belief, Miller argues, "advertising and "Too Young for the Part"9 1 sexology pushed hard to redomesticate women," with sexology "tak[ing] up the consumerist rhetoric...