Debility and Disability in Edith Wharton’s Novels

This essay examines how Edith Wharton represented disability as US industrialization was accelerating and changing class relations. However, my essay seeks to complicate how disability is often discussed to show that Wharton’s writing was already anticipating the critique of disability-as-identity by representing a distinction between disability and what several scholars are now defining as debility. I draw on these scholars’ theorizations to argue that even as disability was emerging as a category, it was a category that privileged some lives over others, an observation which Wharton’s novels illustrate so profoundly. Through an analysis of four of Wharton’s novels, I demonstrate how they represent another classification of bodies: those that have become debilitated because of their economic and political conditions.