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Edith
( Newbold Jones) Wharton
1862-1937
American
novelist, poet, short-story writer
Evelyn
Sung/宋怡緻
 Family Background
Marriage
Life in Wartime
Later Life
Writing Style
Motifs
Decline
Family Background
Edith
Wharton was born to a wealthy and conservative family, on January 24,
1862 (some sources say 1861), in New York City, She was the youngest of
three children and the only daughter of George Frederic Jones, a
descendent of a notable family of merchant-ship owners, and Lucretia
Stevens (Rhinelander) Jones, a beautiful, fashionable woman descended
from a Boston tea party participant, Young Edith was educated privately
by tutors and governesses, and traveled about Europe throughout her
childhood, When she was not traveling, she spent most of her time in
her father's library, and only entered the social milieu when her
parents insisted, In her teens, she started to write some verse and
short stories; however, because of the influence of Dutch Reformed and
Episcopalian beliefs, her parents did not have a high regard for art,
They did not appreciate her talent, and later seldom mentioned her
literary success.
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Marriage
In
1855, Edith, at the age of 23, married Edward Wharton, a Boston banker
from her mother's social circle, who was 11 years older, It is said
that before she knew Edward Wharton, she had already fallen in love
with Walter Berry, a friend of the family, who was one of the few that
knew her early attempts at writing fiction, and helped her to make the
necessary improvements, Berry later became her life-long confidant,
sharing with her the intellectual pursuits that few were able to share.
Edith
was not happy in her marriage life half because Edward suffered from
mental illness, and half because she disliked playing the role of
society matron and hostess, A few years into her marriage, in 1894, she
had a nervous breakdown, She was advised by her doctor to write to
improve her conditions, She and her husband had never had much in
common, either in terms of interests or worldview, While working on Ethan
Frome (1911), she fell in love with an American journalist
living in Paris, Morton Fullerton, She felt terribly guilty for
breaking her marriage vows, which she took seriously, The affair
between Wharton and Fullerton was intense and brief, but one of the
happiest times of her life, She and her husband divorced in 1912 (some
sources say 1913), She traveled in Italy and Germany, and then moved to
France, settling down near Paris, where she consorted with American
expatriate writers as well as English and French artists.
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Life in Wartime
When
the World War I broke out in 1914, she devoted herself into charity
works, organizing a workroom for female garment workers, and a
sanatorium for women and children with tuberculosis, and finding food
and lodging for Belgium refugees, France recognized her charitable
deeds by awarding her the Cross of the Legion of Honor; she also was
made Chevalier of the Order of Leopold in Belgium, Also, she retold her
wartime experiences in Fighting France (1915), The
Book of the Homeless (1915), The Marne (1918),
French Ways and Their Meanings (1919) and A
Son at the Front (1923).
However,
books informed by her wartime experiences were not considered her best.
The critic, Louis Auchincloss explained that she saw the war "from a
simple but consistent point of view: France, virtually singlehanded ,
was fighting the battle of civilization against the powers of darkness,
It was the spirit that made men fight and die, but it has never,
unfortunately, been the spirit of fiction, Reading The Marne
... and A Son at the Front ...
today gives one the feeling of taking an old enlistment poster out of
an attic trunk.... Mrs. Wharton knew that the war was terrible; she had
visited hospitals and even the front itself, But the exhilaration of
the noncombatant, no matter how dedicated and useful her services, has
a shrill sound to postwar ears."
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Later Life
Wharton
briefly returned to United States in 1923—the first time since she
became a resident of France—to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale
University, It was the first such degree at Yale given to woman, James
W. Tuttleton pointed out that the New York City Wharton went back in
1923, was no longer the pre-war city she left almost two decades ago,
Many of her friends were long dead and unrecognizable, Her parents'
world, old New York, was gone without a trace, Old New York,
a work comprised of four short novels set in the New
York that Wharton remembered, was not celebrated when it appeared in
1924, Edmund Wilson commented in New Republic that
the stories "do not . . . follow life quite faithfully enough to be
impressive as social studies and . . . are not quite dramatically
enough developed to be satisfactory as conventional short stories."
The
year of 1927 was a difficult period in her life, Her companion (some
say lover), Walter Berry, died and it was at the same year that she was
nominated for a Nobel Prize, but she did not receive it, Wharton died
in 1937 of a heart attack at the age of seventy-five, and was buried
next to her beloved Walter Berry in Versailles, France.
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Writing Style
Jamesian influence
Best
known for her novels The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan
Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920),
she also published poetry, criticism, nonfiction about the First World
War, travel writing, and several collections of short stories, Her
books suffered a period of critical neglect because of their similarity
to the works of James, Wharton met James in her travel to France, where
James became her friend and her mentor, The Writing of
Fiction (1925) explained that "their similarities lie in
the common interest in social conventions, which encroach upon the
freedom of individuals from every social stratum, in particular the
wealthy and the American abroad." Most of the characters in their
stories had problem getting into others' minds, coming to a full
understand to others, and escaping from the environment.
However,
Wharton's works were still significantly different form the works of
James, In Edith Wharton, Auchincloss observed,
"in contrast to the gradual accumulation of subtle effects for which
James is known, Wharton's vivid depictions of people and objects led
readers through a series of impacts, It is those half-elusive but
exquisitely effective strokes that reveal in an instant a whole mental
attitude or the hidden meaning of a profound emotion." The ability to
affect impacts upon characters' inner psyches in a moment is Wharton's
talent, which makes her distinct from James.
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Motifs
1. social convention
In
the turn of the 20 th century, while American writers wrote adventure
story in which the heroine rebelled successfully against the past,
Wharton tended to portray her heroines in defeat and disillusion, Her
works centered on the motifs such as an ill-starred romance, the evils
of divorce, the aftermaths of deception, the individual versus society,
the need and the danger of joy, the gulf between ambition and ability,
and the importance of living with a sense of duty to others, As Wharton
indicated in her book, The Writing of Fiction (1925),
her major focus was "the conflict between the desire of the individual
and the authority of social convention." Wharton was a woman trapped by
convention, and her own social status; she had to learn, throughout her
life, how to balance her own desires and interests with the morals she
internalized as a child.
2. supernatural
Since
her childhood, Wharton had terrified herself with the feeling that she
was being followed by something, She later became entranced by the idea
of the supernatural and tried to seek safety in the society, However,
instead of warmth and a sense of security, she sought alienation and
isolation from the high society, It is this sense of alienation and
foreboding that enabled Wharton to create some of the best ghost
stories of her age, She wrote some 16 or so stories of the
supernatural, the best being collected in her omnibus volume, Ghosts
(1937), Later she moved her genre into macabre,
exploring the idea of death and afterlife, It was not until she moved
to France that Wharton could view her life and her inner fears more
objectively so as to produce a series of rounded, cleverly observed
supernatural stories, In all her supernatural stories, Wharton was able
to use the supernatural to project aspects of the human psyche ranging
from fear and guilt to joy and longing, Once she tried to write stories
of witchcraft or black magic, as in "Bewitched" ( Pictorial
Review , 1925) and "All Souls'" (first published in Ghosts
), where the atmosphere is strong but the plot lacks
conviction, In short, Wharton was always at her best when dealing with
the projection of human and spiritual emotions.
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Decline
Wharton's
writings generally fall into two periods, Most critics have agreed that
her best work was done during the years before 1914 and that her later
work is but an echo of it, namely, rather static and without new things
to tell, Three explanations have been offered for this decline.
Those
close to Wharton say that she did her best to produce "potboilers", by
which she was able to make a large sum of money to support the charity
works during the wartime, However, Edmund Wilson has suggested that she
was "a brilliant example of the writer who relieves an emotional strain
by denouncing his generation, When such a strain had been relieved, her
writing was no longer a personal necessity and thus blandness and
nostalgia replaced the acerbity of her earlier social criticism."As for
her biographer, Percy Lubbock, believed that Walter Berry, "a man of
'dry and narrow and supercilious temper', had the effect of shutting
Mrs. Wharton's mind 'in a box' and contributed to the 'doom of an
imagination that alights on sterile ground.'"
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