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Reviewed by:
  • Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture, and: Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion
  • Jean C. Griffith
Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture. Ed. Gary Totten. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2007. 408 pp. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $38.50.
Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion. By Katherine Joslin. Durham: Univ. of New Hampshire Press, 2009. 248 pp. Cloth, $30.00; paper, $40.00.

Gary Totten’s Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture and Katherine Joslin’s Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion aim to provide new readings of Wharton’s life and work by focusing on specific aspects of turn-of-the-twentieth-century material culture. Both editor and author acknowledge that associating a woman with clothing or objects of decorative art risks trivializing her works, but they prove the usefulness of such approaches, especially to a writer dedicated, as Wharton was, to the accurate and penetrating portrayal of the material world.

Of the two works under review, Totten’s collection illustrates this promise more successfully. The essays are divided among five sections on professionalism, the body, consumerism, interiors, and technology, and if none of these constitutes entirely new territory in Wharton scholarship, it is novel to have them scrutinized side-by-side. The essays in the opening section on professionalism revisit the question of how canonical Wharton’s works were in her own time and remain in ours and, interestingly, they come to no consensus. While Jamie Barlowe and Jacqueline Wilson-Jordan explore the ramifications of Wharton’s success, Lyn Bennett uses Timothy Morris’ notion of a “poetics of presence,” a conflation of text and authorial voice, to examine the criticisms made in early reviews of The Decoration of Houses, The Age of Innocence, and The Writing of Fiction. Concluding that reviewers found something lacking in Wharton’s works even when they praised them, Bennett argues that the demand they evinced for authorial “presence” proves the shortcomings of contemporary approaches to Wharton’s works, particularly feminist ones. Bennett’s readings of the early reviews are excellent, but I wish that the important work she does in identifying patterns in Wharton’s reception had not been accompanied by critique of feminist work, one that is contradicted by a number of other essays in the collection. [End Page 177]

Essays by Barlowe, Emily Orlando, and Deborah Zak, for example, bring fresh contexts to bear on readings of gender in Wharton’s works. Barlowe surveys drama and film adaptations of Wharton’s works and the women screenwriters and other entertainment-industry professionals who worked on them. In the section on the body, Orlando places the much-discussed tableau vivant scene in The House of Mirth in the context of art nouveau. While this scene is often read as a dramatic illustration of Lily’s status as a commodity, Orlando uses a comparison between Mrs. Lloyd in the Reynolds painting Lily imitates and the female figures in works by Rossetti to make a compelling case that this scene represents a moment of agency for Lily. Zak’s contribution situates Twilight Sleep within modernism rather than, as the novel has previously been read, a rejection or parody of it, claiming its place there based upon its indictment of new “efficiency”-based approaches to the female body. While Zak underestimates the extent to which Wharton satirizes her characters, especially Pauline and Lita, her placement of the novel alongside cultural trends such as the eurythmic dance movement associated with Isadora Duncan proves that Twilight Sleep is worthy of more consideration than it has hitherto received. Other essays provide new readings of gender and culture in Wharton’s works themselves. Wilson-Jordan’s “Materializing the Word” examines how the gothic conventions of “Mr. Jones” reveal Wharton’s attitudes concerning her status as a woman writer, while Karin Roffman’s essay explores Wharton’s evolving attitudes toward museums in a range of works.

The three essays that most fully consider Wharton’s class and racial politics alongside her gender politics and her attitudes about American culture more generally are the finest in the collection. Jennifer Shepherd applies a burgeoning “commodity aesthetic...

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