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Edith Wharton, Futurist 8/26/2014 11:03:07 AM
[A version of this post originally appeared on thunderalleybcp.com on August 5, 2014.]
I know that the mere mention of Edith Wharton is enough to make some of you want to run screaming from the internet. You probably have flashbacks to high school English classes and books you were supposed to read but never quite did.
There’s an impression of Edith Wharton as having produced stuffy, period-choked books that were all about “manners” and have little to offer modern readers. In reality, Wharton’s work demonstrates an uncanny prescience about the direction of popular culture.
It’s true that Edith Wharton’s work most often focuses on the habits, prejudices, and yes, manners, of New York “high society.” But her stories don’t celebrate those traits or wallow in them; it takes a blowtorch to them. Wharton was a pioneer in a genre that could be dubbed “bitch lit.” She sets her characters up and finds a variety of ways to explode them. It’s a modernist approach that a contemporary reader should be able to recognize and appreciate.
Of course, Wharton was herself a member of the social group she so often excoriated. Her wealth (both inherited and married) and career as a writer gave her cover to be as brutal as she wanted to be about her peers and their milieu. When things got too uncomfortable, she could always retreat to her house in the Berkshires. Later, she self-selected exile in France. It gave her the freedom to tear down her social set from the inside.
Does that sound familiar? Wharton wrote fiction, but that insider’s perspective on a particular social group, used to dissect and condemn it, is the bedrock of the modern memoir. Who better to bring down the house from the inside than someone who already lives there? Look at something like The Age of Innocence or her New York-based short stories and you see a woman determined to expose the hypocrisies and inanities of her peers. It’s the logical forerunner to writers who step out of their own environments to expose and damn them in memoirs.
In the characters that Edith Wharton crafted for her fiction, you can see templates for some of our modern types. The central figure of The Custom of the Country is the prototype of a Kardashian-style modern media creation. A young woman, precariously new money, pursues what she deems she deserves. She wants not so much to be respected, but to be the center of things, to be seen, admired and envied. She always looks on to the next conquest, whatever it is she’s decided she wants now that she no longer wants what she’s already won. She’ll leave any number of innocent bystanders in the dust, swapping out husbands, friends and even religions as is necessary to take that “next step.”
That description could apply to any number of people showcased in the surfeit of reality shows documenting the “fabulous” lives of any number of groups, from Beverly Hills trust fund brats to New York City realtors. Ironically, while Edith Wharton intended to condemn her subjects and their environment, the stars of modern reality TV do so almost by accident. By exposing the details of their lives, they invite critique and, often, condemnation. Wharton would be amazed that while she battled to expose her peers, the people of the modern day offer themselves up willingly.
Wharton’s foresight can be seen in other characters, as well. Take the Jazz Age society types that populate Twilight Sleep. All are looking for something to take them out of themselves: the newest guru, treatment, medication, spiritual exercise, artistic movement, philosophy, cause… The characters could barely stand to be alone with their own thoughts. That sort of striving for distraction and embrace of “the new” would become major trends in the decades after Sleep’s publication in the late ‘20s.
Ethan Frome is probably the book that you avoided in high school. It’s different than a lot of Wharton’s other work, in that it’s set in a small town populated by “normal” people. Frome shows people striving to be more than their circumstances provided them, some successfully, some not. It’s a theme that resonates decades later and Wharton’s refusal to allow a happy ending or even a glimmer of hope puts her squarely in the camp of modern cynical stylists.
The work of Edith Wharton may not be to everyone’s taste, but looking at it a century later, it’s amazing how ahead of the pop culture curve she was.
