Making It New: 1900–1945 327and how to write about it, from Sarah Orne Jewett. Glasgow belonged to a loose
group of fellow women writers that included, at different times, Mary Johnson,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
(1896–1953), who wrote about what she called “the firmly entrenched outpost of
the vanishing frontier” in such novels as The Yearling (1938). Wharton was different
to the extent that she drew example and encouragement from her longtime friend
Henry James rather than other women authors. All three, however, dedicated them-
selves to the imaginative exploration of one or two particular regions or areas of the
United States. For Wharton, this was New York, for Glasgow the South, and for
Cather it was the West and Southwest. And all three were preoccupied with the
social and moral transformations they saw occurring in their particular corner of
the nation, and the clash between past and present, the old habits and customs and
the new, that those transformations engendered. In their hands this concentration
on a particular place was not an act of provincialism but of pressure and focus: they
treated the societies they examined, their practices and myths, as a paradigm of
what was happening in the nation at large, and perhaps beyond. They were
profoundly interested in change, and the tension between change and ingrained
habits of belief and behavior – all that is gathered under the categories of tradition,
convention, and memory – and the imaginative sites they chose were their way of
exploring that subject.
Wharton was born Edith Jones into a wealthy New York family. In 1885 she
married Edward Wharton, a man considerably older than her from her family’s
circle of acquaintances. The marriage, never a happy one, ended in divorce. She was
in love for some time with another man, Walter Berry, an expatriate. Berry, however,
made it clear that he did not want marriage, and she never married again. The
themes of frustrated love and unhappy marriage became common ones in her
fiction. Her first book, however, was a nonfictional work, The Decoration of Houses
(1897). It anticipated at least some of the interests and strategies of her later novels
to the extent that it explored status and snobbery in old New York, furnishings in
particular and taste in general as an index to character. Her first full-length novel,
The Valley of Decision (1902), was set in eighteenth-century Italy. But then followed
subjects closer to home. As a wife and hostess at this time, Wharton belonged to
New York society. As a novelist, however, she analyzed its customs with irony.
Her New York novels, which are her best work, present a changing society and an
internecine conflict between an old, patrician upper-middle class rather like her
own and a newly rich upper-middle class for whom traditional ideas of culture
were hlosing their sanctity. They also consider, in particular, the position of women
in New York society, torn as Lily Bart, the heroine of her first major novel, The House
of Mirth (1905), is between personal desire and social law – the need to fulfill the
requirements of the imagination and the need to make a good marriage. The House
of Mirth was a popular success, but it shocked many contemporary readers because
of its inwardness, realism, and inclination toward tragedy: in the end, Lily Bart dies
from an overdose of a sedative. In 1911 Wharton turned from a New York setting to
explore the themes of thwarted love and failed marriage in a rural New EnglandGGray_c04.indd 327ray_c 04 .indd 327 8 8/1/2011 7:53:47 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 47 AM