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Race, culture, nation: Edith Wharton and Ernest Renan - Critical Essay
Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2003 by Carol J. Singley
Although it is true, as Frederick Wegener notes in his introduction to Wharton's Uncollected Critical Writings, that her work "stubbornly defies classification, refusing to accommodate or to bind itself to any of the various reigning critical orthodoxies of her day" (31), we can see how Renan's views prefigure Wharton's own. In describing nationhood not as nationalism but as "common glories in the past, and a common will in the present" (174), Renan lays a foundation for Wharton's argument in her nonfictional study French Ways and Their Meaning, in which she celebrates France not just as a political entity but as a "continuity" (76) of traditions, tastes, and values that tie a people together. The idea of a nation as a spiritual family, as something one comes to as a result of affirmation and reaffirmation rather than as an innate or eternal principle, had great appeal for Wharton, an expatriate who adopted France as her nation. Indeed, Wharton's own life demonstrates that although born into a particular culture or nation--in Wharton's case, rarified, upper-class New York--one may cease to identify with it and even discard it in favor something else. Certainly Wharton's success as a woman and a writer depended on her ability to transgress boundaries that family and society believed were indisputable and inviolable, and to form, as Susan Goodman notes, "a small circle of confreres ... who held the same convictions" as she (ix).
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French Ways and Their Meaning was published "with the idea of making France and things French more intelligible to the American soldier" (Wharton, Backward 357). The book opens with cautionary remarks about the need to resist easy and misleading generalizations about a nation and its character. The French people, Wharton notes, are currently not themselves because they have been subjected to prolonged attack from Germany: "Four years of desperate resistance to a foe in possession of almost a tenth of the national territory ... represent a strain so severe that one wonders to see ... life in general going on as before" (7). Appealing to her American audience, Wharton asks her reader to "picture our situation if Germany had invaded the United States, and had held a tenth part of our most important territory for four years" Her description of France under duress echoes Renan's view, expressed in "What Is a Nation?" that it is the shared experiences, especially the sufferings and sacrifices that people make in the name of their country, that constitute nation and nationhood.
The remainder of Wharton's project in French Ways looks Janus-faced on Franco-American relations. On the one hand, Wharton wishes to generate sympathy for the French cause by appealing to a fundamental similarity between France and the United States: "the differences between ourselves and the French are mostly on the surface, and our feeling about the most important things is always the same" (15-16). Such an approach is fundamental to her goal of continued American support for the French. Despite the temptation among some Americans to identify with Germany rather than France because of the large number of German immigrants in the US, Wharton asserts that "the Germans, who seem less strange to many of us because we have been used to them at home, differ from us totally in all of the important things" (16). On the other hand, Wharton positions France as a high ideal toward which the younger, cruder American nation should aspire. Although one hears a great deal about "'What America can teach France,'" she writes, it is more worthwhile to "apply ourselves to finding out what they have to teach us" (8-9). Americans are materialistic and crave security; in contrast, the French exhibit qualities of "taste, reverence, continuity, and intellectual honesty." These are traits that a new pioneer people, "destined by fate to break up new continents and experiment in new social conditions, ... have had the least time to acquire" (18-19; original emphasis). (7)
