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Race, culture, nation: Edith Wharton and Ernest Renan - Critical Essay
Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2003 by Carol J. Singley
Believing in nation but not necessarily in nationalism, Renan wrote that true patriotism is the courage to declare one's nation mistaken when one believes that it is (Chadbourne 101). On this view Wharton was patriotic when, contrary to public opinion, she urged the US to resist isolationism and become involved in the European conflict (Benstock 298), and when, in French Ways and other works, she criticized American customs in favor of French ones. Abandoning the US for France allowed Wharton a critical perspective that would not have been possible had she remained in her own country. As she wrote in a tribute to literary critic and Scribner's editor William C. Brownell, "America produces numerous critics of life who have found out there is something wrong with Main Street, but do not know the remedy because they never really studied the alternatives" (205). She credits Brownell with having "the intellectual range and detachment needful for the survey of culture." Multicultural well before the term gained currency, Wharton used her knowledge of other nations as the means to lament the inward-turning instincts of early twentieth-century Americans. The US was not only impeding its own cultural growth, it was missing an important global opportunity. It was a "curious" and "suggestive" fact, for example, that "America's acute literary nationalism has developed in inverse ratio to the growth of modern travelling facilities" ("Great American Novel" 156). A renowned lover of technology, Wharton saw tremendous but unfulfilled potential in transatlantic crossings--practical and cultural--that modern travel and communication made possible.
If in some respects Wharton adopted a more global perspective than some of her contemporaries, in other respects she exhibited a resistance to modernity. In Renan's cautionary statements in "What Is a Nation?" we may read a caveat for Wharton. It is a grave error, Renan maintained, to confuse race with nation, because "race makes and remakes itself" (171); history and human conditions constantly break down the strict meaning of race as blood relations. It is sometimes the case that Wharton's terms blur the distinctions Renan carefully delineates. For example, in French Ways, Wharton follows Renan in describing the quality of French reverence as "the sense of the preciousness of long accumulations of experience" (31) and "the instinct to preserve that which has been slow and difficult in the making, and into which the long associations of the past are woven" But she also relates this quality to "some deep racial need, moral or aesthetic." Elsewhere, when discussing transatlantic influences on literature made possible by accelerating technology, she also conflates the terms race and nation. In "The Great American Novel" she writes that although
it is doubtful if a novelist of one race can ever really penetrate into the soul of another, this perpetual interchange of ideas and influences is resulting, on both sides of the globe, in the creation of a new world, ephemeral, shifting, but infinitely curious to study and interesting to note. (157; my emphasis)
