Twilight Sleep: Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics
01 Jan 1989-Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory (Johns Hopkins University Press)-Vol. 45, Iss: 1, pp 49-71
TL;DR: The authors show how writing literature and writing culture, for Wharton, draws on a cultural unconscious, one associated for her with fascism, and how Wharton manipulates the conventions of the realist novel to reconcile popular fiction with cultural criticism.
Abstract: ENERATiONS of critics have claimed that Edith Wharton liked both her gardens and her society well-pruned. In her late fictions, however, Wharton addresses the politics of intimate experience in the context of social debates. To that end, her characters often echo social policy, transformed as it is by Wharton's own bias against legislation of private morality. Although her late fictions have been read conservatively, they are not written in isolation from larger political issues. Instead, they insist on the relation between private and public rather than on a divorce between the two. In challenging her class's (as well as her culture's) gender ideology, Wharton manipulates the conventions of the realist novel to reconcile popular fiction with cultural criticism. My aim is not to reduce the ambivalence with which Wharton writes about anti-Semitism, nor her hatred of black culture, especially as Carl van Vechten describes it in his 1926 Nigger Heaven. I do, however, want to show how writing literature and writing culture, for Wharton, draws on a cultural unconscious, one associated for her with fascism. In Nancy Armstrong's terms, \"individual works and kinds of writing gather force, not as they exemplify [an] individual imagination, genre, or tradition of ideas, but as they enter into an unwitting conspiracy that extends throughout the figurative operations of cultural production to shape the lives of real people\" (357). I do not so much want to place Wharton's Twilight Sleep in the \"context\" of history, thereby writing a new historicism, as
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TL;DR: For instance, the authors pointed out that the relationships among characters in Summer are unrealistically close, all spawned by the same central imagination, which seems to have been an incestuous one.
Abstract: "Where in New England did Mrs. Wharton unearth the scene and people for her latest novel?" the Boston Transcript cried in 1917 of Summer--a novel that, despite the querulous reviews it received, Edith Wharton ranked as one of her five favorites.(1) Unable to offer a satisfying answer to this question, many reviewers expressed their dislike for a novel that Wharton considered an extension of Ethan Frome (1911), which had enjoyed great popular success.(2) But if reviewers were puzzled and exasperated, Wharton's creation of what Shari Benstock calls "a novel that indicts American provincialism while invoking rural beauty" did not escape the eyes of the expatriate intellectual of Wharton's lifetime;(3) writing anonymously for The Egoist, T.S. Eliot praised Wharton as a "satirist's satirist" and valorized the novel for dealing a "deathblow" to the New England novel of "stunted firs...granate [sic] boulders..[and] white farmhouses where pale gaunt women sew rag carpets."(4) Eliot's praise of Summer is undoubtedly connected to the novel's harsh critique of romantic love, which inflects Prufrock's own "restless nights in one-night cheap hotels." Still, many critics of Wharton's day remained unconvinced of the novel's literary merits; some, as Eliot himself predicted, found the novel "disgusting."(5) While few scholars today would challenge Wharton's esteem for Summer, the question of just where Wharton "unearth[ed]" Charity, Lawyer Royall, and Lucius Harney has elicited provocative and divergent responses. Recent criticism has taught us that instead of surveying a New England landscape for the donnee of Summer, Wharton dove deep into a psychobiography that allowed her to write over the scar tissues of her virtually celibate marriage with Teddy Wharton, her passionate but abbreviated love affair with Morton Fullerton, and perhaps her veiled, taboo desire for her own father, George Frederic Jones. The surfacing of the "Beatrice Palmato" fragment in 1974 was the key piece of information critics needed to respond to the Boston Transcript's flustered question: "The relationships among characters in Summer are unrealistically close," Gloria C. Erlich notes, "all spawned by the same central imagination, which seems to have been an incestuous one."(6) Wharton knew that her fascination with incest would be deeply subversive of the cultural imperatives of America as it grudgingly let go of its Victorian sensibilities; in a letter to Bernard Berenson, eighteen years after the publication of Summer, Wharton wrote, "I've got an incest donnee up my sleeve that wd make them all [Faulkner and Celine] look like nursery-rhymes."(7) She would have had an appreciably more difficult time predicting the dissension among recent feminist scholars faced with her incest donnee.(8) Candace Waid, for example, boldly claims that in Summer Wharton "domesticates the horror of incest by marrying Charity Royall to Lawyer Royall, the only father she has ever known," and thereby restores "stable hierarchies and the benevolence of paternal authority."(9) More cautiously, Cynthia Griffin Wolff contends that "Royall is willing to assist Charity in the transition from a love that is extrasocial...to a love that contains both passion and affection--both some element of freedom and some appropriate component of mutual dependency."(10) On the other side of this particular feminist divide is Erlich, who cautions that "the father-derived figures in Wharton's work act as forces inhibiting sexual consummation with more appropriate men"; thus Julius Beaufort interrupts "almost every one of Newland Archer's visits to Countess Olenska, breaks into their incipient tryst in the patroon's house and thus short-circuits the fulfillment of their passion."(11) Amplifying Erlich's circumspection, Sandra M. Gilbert, in her much-anthologized essay, "Life's Empty Pack: Towards a Literary Daughteronomy," denounces Lawyer Royall as "ultimately, no more than the role his professional title and allegorical surname together denote: a regal law-giver, a mythologized superego whose occupation links him with the library and with culture, that is, with the complex realm of patriarchal history that both puzzles and imprisons the wild child he is trying to make into a desirable daughter/bride. …
17 citations
01 Jan 2004
6 citations
TL;DR: The authors traces the gendered contradictions of this psychosocial history, highlighting the essential ambivalence of modern subjectivity, denaturalizing contemporaneous scientific attitudes, and unsettle enduring critical assumptions about the interwar period's literary forms.
Abstract: When the term “ambivalence” first appeared in 1910, it referred to a psychotic symptom of schizophrenia. Migrating into popular psychology, the condition soon became a neurosis associated with young women and homosexuals. By the late 1920s, “ambivalence” also described an aesthetic value associated with masculine intelligence. Extending recent work in new modernist studies, cognitive disability studies, and the social history of medicine, this essay traces the gendered contradictions of this psychosocial history. Historicizing ambivalence illuminates two distinct but interrelated concepts: ambivalence proper as condition of modern femininity and modernist irony as a masculinized expression of the same set of feelings and conflicts. Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep (1927) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) reflect this interplay of psychic and aesthetic patterns, highlight the essential ambivalence of modern subjectivity, denaturalize contemporaneous scientific attitudes, and unsettle enduring critical assumptions about the interwar period’s literary forms.
3 citations
TL;DR: In this paper , Treadwell's depiction of maternity and hospital-based childbirth in Machinal (1928) is viewed as a crucial though underexplored dimension of the expressionistic play's feminist social critique.
Abstract: This article positions Sophie Treadwell’s depiction of maternity and hospital-based childbirth in Machinal (1928) as a crucial though underexplored dimension of the expressionistic play’s feminist social critique. Our argument focuses on the fourth of nine episodes, “Maternal,” and reads the protagonist’s traumatic postpartum experience alongside and in the context of contemporary media, medical, and literary publications that articulate emerging concerns about childbirth, maternity, and obstetric care. We illustrate how characters’ responses to the Young Woman’s intense distress resonate with a prevalent medical trend to either dismiss women’s anxieties about the risks and pain associated with childbirth or diagnose them as symptoms of modern women’s “weakness” or “nervous exhaustion.” Treadwell stages an argument that at once affirms the legitimacy of women’s potential fears and challenges the notion of mental-uplift as a panacea for maternal anxiety. Furthermore, through the scene’s medical figures and sonic backdrop, she presents a scathing portrait of institutionalized obstetric care. This scene reinforces the broader critique of modern, patriarchal hierarchies and their embeddedness in technological discourses that runs throughout Machinal. The postpartum scenario offers a unique vantage point to expose how intimate and institutional structures combine in ways both physically and psychologically damaging to women.
01 Jan 2021
TL;DR: In this paper, a method of teaching Twilight Sleep using the comparison and contrast teaching approach is described. But the authors focus on the formation of identity, the collapses in communication, and the temptations of evasion and escape.
Abstract: Although it is one of Edith Wharton’s later and often neglected novels, Twilight Sleep is arguably more relevant than ever. Brisk, mysterious, and satirically critical of fads and celebrity culture, the novel invites college students to consider their own processes of development at a time when they face financial pressures combined with unprecedented access to personalized technologies that exhibit a ubiquitous ensemble of celebrities, artists, or influencers whom many of them aspire to emulate. This chapter details a method of teaching Twilight Sleep using the comparison and contrast teaching approach. With a focus on the formation of identity, the collapses in communication, and the temptations of evasion and escape, it shows ways to encourage students to analyze their generation’s circumstances in comparison to those of Wharton’s main character Pauline Manford and her family in Twilight Sleep. Suggesting that the development of technology has rendered Twilight Sleep more applicable in the 2020s than in the past decades, the chapter offers a current approach for teaching Wharton’s late-career novel.
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305 citations
01 Jan 1975
TL;DR: The psychology of women is acquiring the character of an academic entity as witnessed by the proliferation of research on sex differences, the appearance of textbooks devoted to the psychology of the women, and the formation of a separate APA division, Psychology of Women.
Abstract: The psychology of women is acquiring the character of an academic entity as witnessed by the proliferation of research on sex differences, the appearance of textbooks devoted to the psychology of women, and the formation of a separate APA division, Psychology of Women. Nevertheless, there is almost universal ignorance of the psychology of women as it existed prior to its incorporation into psychoanalytic theory. If the maxim "A nation without a history is like a man without a memory" can be applied, then it would behoove the amnesiacs interested in female psychology to investigate its pre-Freudian past. This article focuses on one period of that past (from the latter half of the 19th century to the first third of the 20th) in order to clarify the important issues of the time and trace their development to the position they occupy in current psychological theory. Even a limited overview leads the reader to appreciate Helen Thompson Woolley's (1910) early appraisal of the quality of the research on sex differences:
140 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1976
TL;DR: The Horrors of the Half-known Life as discussed by the authors is an important foundational text in the construction of masculinity, female identity, and the history of midwivery, and is a classic in the field.
Abstract: Now a classic in the field, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life is an important foundational text in the construction of masculinity, female identity, and the history of midwivery.
92 citations
84 citations