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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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The phrase "whatever form a slowly accumulated past lives in the blood" can imply that not just a class structure but an entire nation is under siege. A similar conflation of interests is apparent in her manuscript "Disintegration," also discussed by Kassanoff. In this unfinished novel, Henry Clephane muses about the influx of new people and money that has displaced and largely rendered useless the dominant class:

   the place to study [the results] is here and now--here in this
   huge breeding-place of inequalities that we call a republic, where
   class-distinctions, instead of growing out of the inherent needs of
   the social organism, are arbitrarily established by a force that
   works against it! (qtd. in Kassanoff 69, my emphasis)

If Wharton fluctuates in French Ways between conceptions of nation as inherent and as learned, she leans overall toward the latter--that is, toward an understanding in alignment with Renan's. The United States is impoverished in part because it is young. It has not had time to acquire the "patience, deliberateness, reverence" that are "the fundamental elements of taste" (55). Wharton, it follows, staunchly believed in the edifying effects of learning and in the slow process that true education entails. "As long as America believes in short-cuts to knowledge," she asserts, "she will never come into her real inheritance of English culture"

That Wharton described herself as a "rabid imperialist" had friends who advocated a strong US military and economic presence in the world, and focused on the ameliorative rather than the destructive aspects of colonialism is well documented (see Wegener, "Rabid"; Sensibar; and Bauer). Wharton's imperialism was not economically or politically motivated, however, at least not explicitly so. It was, rather, based on an aesthetic and cultural ideal. (8) Wharton spurned the aggressive, entrepreneurial development that motivated American expansionism. She deplored the loss of what "the new order of things has wiped out" and "shudder[ed] at what it was creating" ("Great American Novel" 157). Dale Bauer notes confusion in discussions of Wharton's politics and concludes that divided views reside as much in Wharton herself as in her critics (11). Similarly, Bentley writes that Wharton "exhibited neither blind nostalgia nor a consistent progressivism" ("Wharton" 148). Instead, she wrote with profound ambivalence about the accelerating speed of cultural change in the twentieth century, fascinated by what technology could accomplish, alarmed at what it might destroy. Bentley notes that Wharton's cultural imperialism had as its goal discernment and preservation rather than expansion per se. Although in the case of Morocco, culture was to be inculcated through French colonial rule, at the same time, Wharton lamented the "harm" that the "modern European colonist" would do to "the beauty and privacy of the old Arab towns" (In Morocco 22). There is to Wharton's imperialism, then, a paradoxical quality, a gesturing outward that is aimed not so much at dominance as at retention.

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

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

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