Edith Wharton Society Panels: Edith Wharton and Beauty at the American Literature Association Conference, Boston, 25–27 May 2023

Both of the Edith Wharton Society panels at the American Literature Association Conference this year were centered on beauty. Beauty is a subject Wharton has written about extensively through her long career as an author, critic, designer, and traveler; consequently, the presenters took into consideration Wharton’s writings in a variety of genres. The first session was composed of four presentations: Cynthia J. Davis and Sophie Yuwen Su focused on Wharton’s novels while also touching on the author’s life, whereas Allyson Stack and Gary Totten dealt with Wharton’s travel writings as well as her criticism of art and architecture. The second session featured papers by Alp Eren Pirli and Tara Foley on Wharton’s early short stories; the former discussed “The Quicksand” (1902) alongside Wharton’s theory of fiction, and the latter put “Mrs. Manstey’s View” (1891) in conversation with contemporary periodical pieces and legislation.This diversity of approaches worked well: the papers conversed with one another through the lens of beauty as a common point of reference. Interiority indeed emerges as one point of convergence. Davis reminds us that beauty, in Wharton’s memoirs, brings the author to a “sensuous rapture” (Unpublished Writings 188), the experience of which Wharton counts among her prized possessions “locked away in [her] in a safe place” (Backward Glance 335). This affective experience of the beautiful resonates with Stack’s paper. In A Motor-Flight Through France (1908), Wharton relegates her mind to the position of “a blank page” for Amiens Cathedral to leave its imprint on (7). Stack finds such instances to anticipate the “postcritical turn” associated with such names as Rita Felski, Denis Donaghue, and Elaine Scarry, which throws the affective and the emotional into relief rather than forsaking them in favor of more theoretical approaches. Totten also highlights Wharton’s praise of the “confused atavistic enjoyment” of art and architecture, which—albeit “lesser” than more learned modes of appreciation—“enrich[es] the aesthetic consciousness” (178–80). Su locates an emotional intensity similar to that of Wharton’s reception of art in her portrayal of unconsummated adultery. In The Age of Innocence (1920), Ellen Olenska becomes Newland Archer’s ideal of beauty, which resides painfully in his mind as “the composite vision of all that he had missed” precisely because she remains “unattainable” to him (243). Marriage, in all its factuality, can never be so beautiful; Archer can describe his relationship with his wife, May, only as “a dull duty” (243). The presenters in the second panel also addressed representations of the ideal in harmony or in conflict with external circumstances. Pirli notes that in “The Quicksand,” Hope Fenno’s outward beauty proceeds from her moral excellence, evoking the sort of Platonic beauty that emerges from the body’s concordance with a virtuous soul (Plato 402c). Wharton contrasts Hope’s beauty with an aesthetics that seeks to produce appealing surfaces without moral substance. Foley, in turn, reads “Mrs. Manstey’s View” as Wharton’s response to the rapidly expanding turn-of-the-century American city, which supersedes an older urban space arranged according to middle-class ideals. Such change induces acute mental stress, leading to the titular character’s tragic death.Privacy, another concept which Wharton evaluates through an aesthetic framework, is central to the papers of the second session. In his influential study The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (1964), sociologist E. Digby Baltzell frames privacy as an upper-middle-class emblem at risk of erosion in turn-of-the-century United States (122–23). As mentioned, the unregulated construction of extensions eats away at a specifically middle-class image of the city in “Mrs. Manstey’s View.” This image is characterized by its accentuation of private space: as the elderly Mrs. Manstey gazes out of her window, the view completes her “as the sea does a lonely island” (Wharton, Collected Stories 3). When she receives guests to her room, what constitutes this sight “full of interest and beauty” figures as her “real friends” (1, 3). Foley compares this story’s exaltation of urban space unoccupied by an overabundance of buildings to a paragraph in the final report of the City of New York’s 1916 Zoning Resolution—the first comprehensive zoning ordinance in the United States—which poses an “apartment house with a fine garden and court space around it” as the more socially beneficial alternative to “buildings with their walls abutting or with little alleyways between” (141). Such legislation comes some twenty-five years too late for Mrs. Manstey. In his paper, Pirli considers the Platonic virtues of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice not only to engender a timeless beauty in young Hope but also to negate the gradual deterioration of privacy effected by mass media. In her internalization of the four cardinal virtues, Hope is juxtaposed with her suitor Alan’s newspaper business, which profits by exposing “family scandal[s]” (Descent 132). Aside from being defined in terms of “ugliness,” the newspaper is also aptly named the Radiator, fashioning itself as a housing fixture that intrudes upon private spaces and matters (134).Secrecy carries an important presence in both sessions. Su contends that The Age of Innocence opens a daring discussion about adultery. In the Pulitzer-winning novel, Archer’s monogamous relationships with May and Ellen can coexist without the need for secrecy so long as the extramarital does not enter its counterpart’s domain of legal, material, and social reality. Thus, even as Ellen is constructed as an unobtainable image of beauty, the continued stability of Archer and May’s marriage is ensured; indeed, for Archer the one signifies the other. Through this process of signification, Wharton invites her contemporaries to be more candid about how adultery operates in society despite its commonplace association with secrecy. Totten points to passages in the travelogue In Morocco (1920) where Wharton is invited to harems or ceremonies in which outsiders—especially women—are not allowed. Although at times horrified by the spectacles presented to her, Wharton writes with the desire to demystify what is veiled in secrecy and to describe what she sees in her scope. This drive, Totten asserts, evinces Wharton’s yearning for the role of the guide—her wish for others to take pleasure in whatever beauty lies in the sights she has enjoyed firsthand. Davis underlines that Wharton construes the secrecy of emotions and feelings as a determinant of the depth of one’s subjectivity. This comes with certain class-based implications: whereas the containment of responses to stimuli within oneself signals a high-caliber beauty, the externalization thereof indicates one’s belonging with the “agglutinated humanity” of hoi polloi (Reef 24). Stack sustains this political import, calling attention to how Wharton’s positioning of the hidden background as more beautiful than the immediate foreground creates a binary along the lines of taste, a corollary of class division. Secrecy was not the fetish of Wharton alone; as Stack points out, Thomas Dixon Jr.’s romance about the secretive Ku Klux Klan, The Clansman, was published in the same year as The House of Mirth (1905). Stack argues that while the critical sphere is rightly suspicious of secrecy—and its potentially classist or fascist politics—it cannot evade this enchanting faculty. In Stack’s view, critics and scholars must strive to engage with the seductively beautiful in affective terms in order to understand what enchants people on a more fundamental basis.All in all, the EWS ALA panels for this year presented a range of arguments that showed a marked and exciting diversity. This is without a doubt owing to Wharton’s multifaceted encounter with beauty. Reflecting on Wharton’s nuanced approach to beauty, the six papers pave new avenues to examine Wharton’s aesthetics in her life and writings. At the same time, the range of these papers suggests that beauty is a particularly fruitful subject for Wharton studies. This year’s EWS panels at ALA invite Wharton critics to center questions of beauty in future Wharton scholarship.In the 2008 monograph Uses of Literature, Rita Felski speaks of a “phenomenology of enchantment,” which accords with the postcritical “return to beauty” as something that “bespeaks a positive value, a presence, an enrichment . . . [that] often eludes our analytical grasp” (65). Stack traces a precursor to this phenomenology in Wharton’s recommendation in A Motor-Flight Through France to “[surrender] one’s self uncritically to the total impression produced” by Amiens Cathedral so as to witness “one of the most splendid spectacles that Gothic art can show” (9). In foregoing a more analytical gaze, this mode of appreciation incorporates “the fortunate accidents of time and weather” like the patina the cathedral’s stones have acquired in the beauty of the object beheld (9). Such a mode of appreciation thus allows for the recognition that a work of art is both a historical “symbol” and a “work of nature” (9). Here, Wharton again anticipates Felski, who proposes that “history is not a box”—that a work is a product of time and not merely its own time (“Context” 574). In sum, Wharton’s uncritical surrender, far from being equivalent to unthinking gratification, demands a more inclusive “enfranchisement of thought” and “atavism of feeling” (Motor-Flight 10).In Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism (2022), Davis notes Wharton’s belief that pain carries with it a refining power. In this paper, Davis makes a similar observation about beauty, noting that for Wharton the way in which one responds to aesthetic stimuli is generative of beauty in one’s person. Davis shines a light on the class dimensions of this aspect of beauty by reading Wharton’s memoirs alongside The Reef (1912). As Anna Leath, a dignified and wealthy widow, looks out across a scenic view, bliss surges through her “every nerve and vein,” giving rise to a vivid interiority (Reef 89). Wharton, who occupies the same class position as Anna, similarly recounts that even at a very young age, the beauty of natural life “had stirred in [her]” (Backward Glance 54). In contrast, the young aspirant Sophy Viner’s inner self is never explored in the novel; her being “all awake and alive” is instantly noticeable in her features, creating a skin-deep beauty (Reef 42). Wharton establishes this class distinction to resist a cultural shift that calls for the embodied performance of identity, which turns the concept of selfhood into spectacle. In reaction to this, one defining characteristic of Wharton’s upper-class beauty is that it does not allow itself to be seen by outside eyes.Wharton is often disparaging of tourists; in Italian Backgrounds (1905), she deems “the mechanical sight-seer” to be the “product” of guidebooks (177). Nevertheless, her travel writings have an informative quality reminiscent of guidebooks. The primary difference, Totten argues, is that Wharton writes with a high emotional register, imbuing her technical descriptions with her feelings. For instance, she relays that Milan’s “picturesqueness [is] gay rather than sinister in its suggestions, made up of lights rather than of shadows” (158). Such passages are mainly designed to inform, but they are also affective—rather than purely objective—in tone. From this, it becomes evident that Wharton’s aim is to foreground the experience of the tourist. Indeed, she considers resisting the guidebook to be one of the “most delicate pleasures of the continental tourist” (85). And yet, there is also something captivating about the amount of knowledge offered by the guidebook; Wharton recounts an incident where she and her travel group, deeply engrossed in their study of a guidebook, go past their destination, the Bergamasque Alps. In this clash lies the key to Wharton’s travel writing: she desires simultaneously to demonstrate the beauty of the tourist experience and to supply her readers with valuable information.Su argues that The Age of Innocence joins adultery and beauty. Borrowing from Peter Gay’s psychoanalytic history of the Victorian era, Su asserts that the adultery novel is founded on an idea of romantic love, which professes an emotional tension in conflict with marital stability. In her acclaimed 1920 novel, Wharton takes advantage of this generic feature to navigate the pull of adultery in her milieu. The relationship between Archer and Ellen is like a rush of “danger” for the former, who has drifted away from his wife for the same reason he had pursued her—that is, her symbolizing the “unescapable duty” of perpetuating the family line (Age 172, 145). Adultery, hence, is accompanied by a transgressive freedom that threatens class preservation. Wharton, however, does not allow this threat to materialize, thereby letting Archer and Ellen’s love retain its depth and intensity. Wharton, then, concedes that infidelity is not without its allure (which is unsurprising, considering her infamous affair with Morton Fullerton), while stressing the social function of matrimony. Ultimately, Wharton agrees with the maxim commonly attributed to Goethe: “Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing” (qtd. in Perel 36).Pirli draws a line of descent between Plato’s aesthetic philosophy and Wharton’s writings. In her theory of fiction, propounded in texts like the 1925 The Writing of Fiction and the undated “Fiction and Criticism,” Wharton cautions against creating beautiful surfaces without ethical substance and suggests that true beauty proceeds from and gives shape to moral excellence, echoing Phaedo and the Symposium. Wharton models the short story “The Quicksand” on such aesthetics. So as to distract herself from the “ugliness” of her husband and son’s exploitative newspaper business, Mrs. Quentin turns to the beauty of art (Descent 134). In doing so, however, she only replicates her son Alan’s blind worship of the “hideous idol” that is the newspaper (137). Hope, who is reluctant to marry Alan due to the unconscionable nature of the business, provides a contrast to the older woman. Where Mrs. Quentin’s decorative choices belie her distress, Hope’s virtuousness is in perfect harmony with the elegance of her external features. By way of this incongruity, Wharton makes the case that beauty, kept separate from morality, is like quicksand, pulling the beholder down into falsity. True beauty, as exemplified by Hope, is a part of the soul as much as the body.Foley’s paper connects “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” a short story from Wharton’s early career, to turn-of-the-century debates on urban space in America. The view from the window of Mrs. Manstey’s room evokes in the aging woman “vague memories of a trip to Europe, made years ago” (Collected Stories 3). This is a vision of the beauty the upper-middle-class City Beautiful movement wishes to instill in the American city. It is this beauty that is under threat of disintegration by the forces of unregulated development, represented in the story by Mrs. Black. Neither Mrs. Manstey nor her landlady Mrs. Sampson have any legal means to stop Mrs. Black’s planned extension, which is set to block the view of the former. The bewilderment of the two women mirrors the words of the critic Montgomery Schuyler, who writes in 1903 about the rapid construction of skyscrapers: “Like Frankenstein, we stand appalled before the monster of our own creation” (254). Mrs. Black’s desire to build extensions is an addiction “like drink” that mentally affects all urban residents; Mrs. Manstey’s dismay at losing her view pushes her to commit arson, not long after which she dies of pneumonia (Collected Stories 4). By attributing such effects to uncontrolled change in the urban landscape, Wharton makes the claim that the issue is not solely aesthetic and that it is indeed a negative influence on the social fabric.