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Race, culture, nation: Edith Wharton and Ernest Renan - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2003 by Carol J. Singley

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It is well known that Wharton frequently railed against what she considered a decline in contemporary American literary standards and that she criticized modernist writers in particular. Like Renan, who worried in Essais de morale that industrialization and increasing bureaucracy threaten the individual spirit upon which all poetry depends (Chadbourne 86), Wharton lamented the fact that "there is no Whitman singing in this generation" (Letters 466). This antimodernist stance, as both Nancy Bentley and Frederick Wegener have noted, although moralistic in tone, actually connotes a social "concern" (Wegener, "Form" 117) or fear that the privileged classes whose Eurocentric values she applauded were losing "social power" as a result of mass cultural change (Bentley, Ethnography 112).Wharton may have theorized that all subject matter is fit for literary expression and protested the notion that "certain categories of human beings are of less intrinsic interest than others" ("Cycle of Reviewing" 162), but she simultaneously declared that "the common mean of American life ... stands for everything which does not rise above a very low average in culture, situation, or intrinsic human interest" ("Great American Novel" 153). In French Ways she understands the individual, culture, and the nation as products of accumulated experience. The acquisition of taste, she asserts, "is the long slow old-fashioned one of education" (53). Yet she holds fast to a notion of national identity as innate, declaring that "The French are naturally endowed with taste" (53; my emphasis). She asks, "Are not some races--the artistically non-creative born as irremediably blind as Kentucky cave-fishes?" and in response offers the truism that "the French are a race of artists" (52). The same metaphor--blind Kentucky cave fish--is enlisted a year later in The Age of Innocence (1920) to suggest cultural and aesthetic myopia in the breed of American upper-class women typified by May Welland.

Wharton held a persistently elitist view that some categories of people were in fact superior to others. This belief, as Jennie Kassanoff points out, operates in The House of Mirth. We see Wharton wrestling in this novel with the same terms of identity that constituted the debate over nationhood at this time. That cultural value is innately embodied in the white elite class is emphasized by her use of organic imagery and descriptions of violations of that natural order. For example, the depiction of Lily as rootless in the final chapter of the novel is, as many have noted, a Darwinian image, but first and foremost it signifies that Lily has lost the threads of tradition and connection that were inherently hers:

   [Lily] had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer
   to her than another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave
   endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from
   which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.
   In whatever form a slowly accumulated past lives in the
   blood--whether in the concrete image of the old house stored with
   visual memories, or in the conception of the house not built
   with hands, but made up of inherited passions and loyalties--it
   has the same power of broadening and deepening the individual
   existence, of attaching it by mysterious links of kinship to all the
   might sum of human striving. Such a vision of the solidarity of
   life had never before come to Lily. (296-97)

Race, culture, nation: Edith Wharton and Ernest Renan - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2003 by Carol J. Singley

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