Edith Newbold Jones also known as Edith Wharton was born on January 24, 1862, in America. She was the leading novelist, screenwriter, and designer of the twentieth century. She used her insider’s knowledge to portray the real living standards and morality of the Gilded Age. She targeted American aristocratic society in her works ranging from The House of Mirth to The Buccaneers. She was the first of the women writers awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Literature.
Best known for fabricating psychological complex fiction, she also touched crucial subjects of the status of women in society and moral wickedness in the genteel class. Literary critics and scholars are of the view that her style, themes, and tone resemble Henry James. But she received fame for her inbuilt knowledge through observation of social conventions.
A Short Biography of Edith Wharton
The kind of society Edith Wharton was born in, was a very conservative one. Women were not free. They were only allowed to get married. All these restrictions could not stop Wharton from becoming the greatest writer in America. Her most prominent books include The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and The House of Mirth. Other than these books, she wrote more than 40 books in a short time span of 40 years. Isn’t it unbelievable?
These books are on various subjects including, gardening, designing, architecture, and travelogue. In her life, she earned many awards and honors like the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The membership in The American Academy of Arts and Letters was also given to her. Apart from this, she was bestowed with the nominal Doctorate of Letters from Yule University.
The family in which she grew up was a wealthy family in New York. She was the only daughter of her parents, George Fredric and Lucretia Jones. Most of the time she spent away from her home city. She has been to France, Germany, and Italy. In these years she developed a great interest in arts, design, architecture, and literature.
In 1872, she returned to her home city New York and started her literary career. She has got great support from her parents. She has got Anna Catherine Bahlmann as her governess. She also has permission to use her father’s library. She was only 16 when a volume of her poems got published.
Through rounds of dances and parties, she revealed herself in her home city, New York. She was involved in two romantic affairs and both ended up on break up. In 1882, her father died and her childhood period was over then. At the age of 23, She was unmarried. In 1885, she met a man, named Edward Robbins. She married him. They were an unmatched couple. In the early years of their marriage, they spent traveling.
When she was residing in Newport, she refined her design expertise. During this time she got her non-fiction work published with the title of The Decoration of Houses and it was a successful attempt.
The Mount
She was very much eager to leave Newport. She wanted to build her own home. In the year 1901, she bought 113 acres of land in Lenox, where she designed her own home by herself. She named it The Mount. Everything of her interest was in that home including gardening, designing, and writing. She spent almost ten years in that house.
She wrote a letter to her lover, Morton Fullerton, and expressed her love for her home. She felt amazed by her efforts. She thought herself a better landscape gardener than a novelist. Each and every line belongs to her and she feels immensely blessed to have such a home.
While residing in The Mount, she earned much fame and gained numerous professional achievements. During this time she composed her most famous works including, The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome. She also faced emotional upheaval in the form of her husband’s mental inabilities. Her marriage was not a successful one. It was a disputed marriage and the couple separated in 1913 for good. She sold out The Mount and went to France and her husband, Teddy went to his sister’s house in Lorax.
Wharton was living in Paris when WWI started and at that time, she was a well-famed artist. Paris was her favorite city and she did not decide to leave for England or the United States. She preferred living in Paris. She established a network of charitable institutions and helped the victims of the war.
These institutions include; homes for T.B sufferers, camps for refugees, and schools for the children of war-torn Belgium. She witnessed the harsh realities of war and served as a front-line author. For her great services, she was given the award of the French Legion of Honor.
When the war was over, Wharton left Paris and settled herself down in a suburban villa, Pavillon Colombe in St. Brice-sous-Foret. For her old work, The Age of Innocence, she was given the Pulitzer award in 1921. The remaining time of her life, she spent among, dogs, writings, friends, home, traveling, and gardening. In 1937, a couple of years before WWII, she died at her house and was buried in the Cimetiere des Gonrads in Versailles.
Edith Wharton’s Writing Style
Language
Edith Wharton’s literary style is distinguished in terms of simplicity, control, subtle choice of words, and sentence building. Her grammatical, thematic, and stylistic style is often considered derivative from James Joyce but later it was defined as deceptive. Her novels are an embodiment of constraints of imagery, behavior, and sparked words that fulfill stylistic functions.
One of the powerful examples of this kind of controlled and deceptive style is seen in her novel Ethan Forme. Descriptions of events in this book, from beginning to end seem carefully controlled. Mattie and Ethan, the main characters of the story, ride down the slope of a hill.
Wharton starts the event with thrill and Ethen, in a state of frenzy, decides to drive straight into the elm tree. Then she suddenly swoops into a slow pace by making Ethan come to his senses. This restrained style is overwhelmed in all her works. This is how words convey meaning regardless of the effort of grouping them together.
Imagery
One of the outstanding features of her style is the use of intense imagery to define the setting and develop the characters. Her use of figurative language appeals to the aesthetics and senses of the reader that he feels immersed in the story.
For example, the character of Ethan Forme is portrayed by Wharton in these words, “A bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was no more than fifty-two”. Use of image words like ‘bleak’, ‘grizzled’ and ‘stiffened’ sketch the picture of a bored, weary and exhausted man. She gives vivid details rather than providing mere information to bring characters to life.
In Ethan Forme, when the couple; Mattie and Ethan, spend the evening together, Wharton employs the elemental natural imagery of warmth and cold, stars, seasons, animals, light, and vegetations to soothe the passions of characters. She uses words describing the emotions of warmth and cold.
Point of view
Wharton’s pronouncement can be captured through her narrative methods of fiction. She usually writes in first-person narration with respect to the point of view. This disposition occurs in her short story ‘Roman Fever’ (1934). The story is depicted from the viewpoint of the antagonist; Mrs. Slade.
The tone, rhythm, and distinctiveness of Mrs. Slade’s narration are asserted through experimentation with sentence structures. The complex blend of choice, temporal frame projection, and the second sentence of oral speech patterns create Wharton’s narratives.
Minute Detailing
Wharton gives minute attention to little details. Her sentence structuring enables the readers to feel the tragic history of the character as a victim. She depicts the real events and pictures from Old New York; the houses, fashion, and social rituals. As an anthropologist, studying these ordinary details reflects that she digs underlying shades of society.
The Age of Innocence is abundant with anthropological terminology. Newland Archer, the protagonist of the novel reveals the customs and traditions of his tribe and its worldwide popularity. He also mentions his wedding as “a rite that seemed to belong to the dawn of history.”
Similarly, The House of Mirth is structured on scenes and frames of the social status of its protagonist, Lily Bart. Wharton closely marks the clear dividing line between classes “the difference [between them] lay in a hundred shades of aspect and manner, from the pattern of the men’s waistcoats to the inflection of the women’s voices.”
Despite the fact that Wharton pays attention to minute details, no such subtlety is found in her work Ethan Frome. However, a static and still tone offers the novel a social structure.
Short Fiction Writing Style
Edith Wharton’s short fiction writing style is often deemed as derivative from that of Henry James in terms of themes and characters. Both writers have written a variety of stories dealing with themes of fate, American commercialization, modernism and its impact on humanity, and confrontation of public conventions with an individual’s inner self.
Moreover, the characters of each of them present the internal world experiences in a gothic manner which is hard to dramatize in a feasible manner. Wharton’s early writings _ The Greater Inclination and Crucial Instances do greatly resemble James’ work.
Later, she developed a style of her own resulting in directness in themes, sweeping action stories, and omission of multiple detailing of characters. It is no surprise that they also share sameness in socialization. Both had a limited circle of friends having the same tastes. But Wharton’s experiences were limited as a woman. She, therefore, was sympathetic towards womenfolk_ victimization and narrowness they suffer an inappropriate division of social responsibilities. The House of Mirth and The Rembrandt were written under these themes.
Themes in Edith Wharton’s Writings
In Wharton’s work, upper-class offenses and their moral violations, American advancements in contrast to the European world, women confinement to marriage, and economic complexities are some of the dominating themes
Capitalism
During the Gilded Age, capitalism was uncontrolled which helped motivate themes in Wharton’s fictional world. She took this social wave critically and criticized corrosively the upper stratum of New York. But their social conventions and lavished etiquettes were rarely highlighted in her novels rather she touched them in a gothic manner. In her story The Eyes, Ghosts haunt mansions and wealthy people. The appearance of spirits is tied to the excesses of capitalism.
Isolation
Isolation is another dominating theme in Wharton’s world. In her novel Ethan Forme, Mattie and Ethan fall prey to self-imposed seclusion caused by external circumstances. Ethan tries to cope with the loneliness felt in Starkfield and his father’s farm by joining a technological college.
He enlarges his social circle but soon after the death of his father, he has to withdraw from college and join the farm again. After marrying Zeena, he is totally imprisoned to farm and house. He starts living a life of aloofness and imprisonment that a society conventionally offers.
Hypocrisy
Wharton criticizes the Gilded Age in her novels. She points out the deficiencies of her society that are still tolerated despite the fact of being despised. The character of Lawrence Lefferts (from The Age of Innocence) is the exact example of hypocrisy. He was in relation to multiple women including Ellen who was married. As a Christian, he extolled religious virtues and sabotaged Ellen for leaving her husband. Confessions, conspiracies, and planned sympathies cover the whole story that depicts in the age of innocence, hypocrisy prevails.
Appearances and Reality
In Wharton’s literary world, appearance matters a lot for the Gilded Society. They are actually hypocrites from inside. Ellen of The Age of Innocence points out on many occasions the duality of New Yorker. They were reluctant, to tell the truth. One of the characters May gives a huge buffet to show off his wealth and success which proves to be scandalous.
Men and Women
Women in Wharton’s world are chaste, innocent, and do not involve in extramarital affairs as the men of that society do. They were not even allowed to get a divorce. The only right they were supposed to have were loyalty and pregnancy. When single, they were treated as embellishing objects like May and when got married, they become the trophies to put aside in the corner of home-like Ellen. Men, on the contrary, were restricted to do jobs outside the home.