Wharton and Cather

This year’s Wharton scholarship, in one full-length study and nearly 50 articles and book chapters, addresses a wide range of Wharton’s writing from myriad critical perspectives, engaging philosophy, aesthetics, reader-response, feminism, material culture, film, and technology. Interior design and gardens, the automobile, the efficiency craze, and the New Woman all receive attention. The House of Mirth continues to draw interest, with Lily’s moral and marital dilemmas considered through themes of consumerism, individualism, and the American dream. Essays also discuss Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence. Wharton’s international writing and late novels are subject to increasingly sophisticated analysis, with critics noting Wharton’s modernism and challenging the notion that she lost touch with America during the 1930s. Comparative articles discuss Wharton and writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Willa Cather, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Diane Johnson, and Virginia Woolf. A special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English is devoted to Wharton; a special issue of the Edith Wharton Review describes teaching strategies.

This year also witnesses a tectonic shift in Cather scholarship with the publication of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, a volume Cather tried to forestall in her will by forbidding any publication of her letters. Following those terms, until now scholars could read the letters held throughout the country in over 75 different archives but only paraphrase them in print or refer to factual matters they include. Owing to the passage of time and also the passing of those relatives who knew Cather, the will’s stricture no longer holds and now allows the publication of this most needed collection. It promises to transform Cather scholarship. This year also welcomes the inclusion of an expanded edition of Cather’s April Twilights and Other Poems in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series and a special issue of Studies in the Novel that treats the personal and professional contexts surrounding the creation of Cather’s works. These volumes are accompanied by book chapters and articles covering a range of novels and stories but do not reveal especial emphasis in her work. Of particular note among these pieces is Sharon Hamilton’s study of “Coming, Aphrodite!” as sexual manifesto.

The Wharton section of this chapter is contributed by Carol J. Singley and the Cather by Robert Thacker.

i Edith Wharton

a. Books

Sarah Way Sherman’s detailed and carefully argued Sacramental Shopping: Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (New Hampshire) explores an encroaching late-19th-century consumerism in competition with secular idealism and religious faith. Tracing consumerism to Alcott’s Little Women, Sherman analyzes the struggle between moral and material values in American culture, showing how Wharton and Alcott rework Protestant discourse such that “Protestant anxiety over the interpretation of the sacraments becomes modern anxiety over the use of consumer goods”; and the Catholic belief in the power of bread and wine to grant grace is “re-imagined” as consumers’ faith in the power of commodities. Both writers, she persuasively argues, describe the failure of consumer goods to deliver the happiness they promise. Interpretations of Little Women, The House of Mirth, and ancillary texts by other American writers establish a literary lineage based in religious discourse, consumer culture, and identity formation. In Sherman’s hands, Little Women becomes a protomodernist text and The House of Mirth a modernist jeremiad with contemporary relevance and importance.

b. Book Chapters and Articles

Two essays discuss material culture. Ben de Bruyn’s “Where to Do Things with Words” (OL 68: 457–72) explores the material circumstances of reading in The Decoration of Houses. Vilifying Victorian clutter, Decoration adopts a strategy of “un-decoration” to argue that rooms should be furnished to shape activities that take place in them. Wharton’s principles of proportion, de Bruyn asserts, still apply today. In “Edith Wharton Society Mount Research Award” (EWhR 29, i: 35–37) Kaye Wierzbicki draws on a clipping in Wharton’s copy of William Robinson’s The English Flower Garden and Home Grounds to explain Wharton...