Wharton and Cather

The impressive volume of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather scholarship this year signals that both novelists have achieved full acknowledgment as major literary figures of the American 20th century. Their work offers readers and scholars both scope and complexity enough to continue to raise fresh questions and to generate innovative readings. Continuing a recent trend, historical and archival projects dramatically expand the data and the contexts with which we approach the pair. Other work usefully imports concepts and methods from other disciplines, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, and psychology among them, and most approaches are anchored in close analysis of Wharton's and Cather's texts. What follows are brief commentaries on those books, book chapters, and articles we consider most potentially useful for readers and scholars.

The Wharton section of the chapter is contributed by Kim Vanderlaan and the Cather section by John Swift.

i Edith Wharton

The year's Wharton scholarship is incisive, diverse, and provocative. Ranging from new archival research and arguments based on its findings to historical recontextualizing of her work to fresh theoretical perspectives on well-examined texts and issues, the essays discussed here, appearing in two issues of the Edith Wharton Review and a collection from Cambridge University Press, demonstrate compellingly that Wharton scholars continued to forge ahead in a year of pandemic disruption.

a. Edith Wharton Review

In "Judith Wheater's Queer Vision: Edith Wharton's Alternative Title for The Children" (Edith Wharton Review [EWhR] 36, i: 1–24), the first of three articles in this issue of the journal, Jennifer Haytock explores the myriad implications of the discovery of a holograph manuscript. Wharton's initial title, "The Family," draws attention to particular dimensions of the narrative, most notably "the effects of easily available divorce on children, the relationship between age and youth, and the nature of heteronormative sexual desire." Drawing in part on various theorists, Haytock suggests that the fictional children seen collectively offer alternative versions of the "heteronormative definition of family" and represent the destructive and unstable nature that plagues the traditional family unit, especially in a period when aspects of self-consciousness and egoism (e.g., the divorce culture) were altering American values. Haytock offers unique cultural insights and deftly integrates the significant findings of other scholars. For instance, her analysis of the character of Judith includes a discussion of how Wharton may have used the terrain of homes and domestic spaces in both her nonfiction and fiction to navigate personal disappointment in her own life.

In the same issue Emily J. Orlando's "'One Long Vision of Beauty': Edith Wharton and Italian Culture" (EWhR 36, i: 25–47) suggests that Wharton's great admiration for Italy and her early nonfiction works on Italy, interior design, and Italian gardens inform the entire aesthetic of her early career. It is not a thesis that any reader would likely dispute, though there are some delightfully refreshing detours, as when Orlando writes about Wharton's early cultural education, especially her acknowledgment of John Ruskin's influence and her eventual departure from his artistic judgments. Tracing Wharton's artistic tastes and commentary from architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini to painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Orlando is most resonant when she applies her research to analyses of Wharton's fiction, pointing out for example the references to Tiepolo's art in novels such as The House of Mirth and The Glimpses of the Moon. Orlando's assertion that Wharton's disdain for "the American leisure-class habit of acquiring works of the Old Masters merely as signifiers of status" is also on the mark and can be seen in Wharton's satirical treatment of myriad fictional characters (Sim Rosedale, Undine Spragg, and Elmer Moffatt, to name a few). Finally, I agree with Orlando that Wharton was able to "repackage the 'household arts'" in ways that not only legitimized her study of them but also—however subconsciously Wharton may have done so—created a place for women as experts in fields such as architecture, art criticism, interior design, and landscape architecture that had long been dominated by men.

Lastly, in "The Sins of the Fathers...