Technologies of Uplift: Race and Beauty in Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep

Recent criticism on Edith Wharton as a race writer emphasizes the ways in which discourses of race permeate her work. Additionally, scholars have become increasingly concerned with Wharton's attitude toward technology, particularly as it relates to the relationships between social life, human bodies, and machines. Race and technology become paired concerns in Wharton's Jazz Age novel Twilight Sleep , where the ideologies that inform the technologies through which Pauline Manford approaches the issue of bodily uplift also inform the way she thinks about and acts on the issue of uplifting the race.