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

In Wharton's idealism we see links to Renan, who, in a strict sense, is not a nationalist at all. The highest "ideal reality" for him is ultimately not the nation but humanity. Although in "What Is a Nation?" he acknowledges "the principle of nationhood [as] just and legitimate" (172), he imagines that one day a larger family of loyalties will supersede those presently equated with the nation. "Do not let us abandon this fundamental principle," he writes, "that man is a reasonable and moral being, before being allotted to such and such a language, before being a member of such and such a race, an adherent of such and such a culture." Wharton's scope too was broad, despite its Eurocentric, aristocratic blind spots, which she also shared with Renan. She envisioned human connections that might transcend national borders. She acted on these beliefs as she traveled incessantly, conversed in various languages, crossed geopolitical boundaries with little regard to their meaning except as dictated by her own standards of aesthetic beauty and form. She also espoused these ideas as she theorized the writing and criticism of fiction. The critic's "office," she writes in "The Criticism of Fiction," is to dwell on the novelist's "highest gift, on that divining and life-evoking faculty which ... is the very foundation of the novelist's art and the result, not of this or that rule or theory, but of the intense and patient pondering on the depths of life itself" (128). Although not exempt from the cultural biases of her time, Wharton's idealism was international, her sense of nationhood more fluid than fixed. She and Renan believed in a moral consciousness based ultimately on a sense of shared humanity. Such an outlook was, for its time, far from conservative.

Notes

(1.) I analyze philosophical and religious structures and themes in Wharton's fiction in Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. See also Helen Killoran's Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion, which describes Wharton's prodigious knowledge of Western classical and religious traditions.

(2.) Wharton writes in "The Criticism of Fiction":

   France is given to lamenting the extinction of the great literary
   critic ... but France should know more about the average of
   so-called literary criticism in other countries before she
   depreciates her own. The generation of Sainte-Beuve is gone, that of
   M. M. Anatole France, Jules Lemaitre and Emile Faguet is going; but
   two such generations leave in the minds succeeding them so rich a
   deposit and so high a standard that French literary criticism, at
   one of its least original moments, is still a valuable contribution
   to literature. (120)

See also Wegener, Uncollected Critical Writings 39.

(3.) Wharton wrote that Sainte-Beuve's "Lundis" was "bracing fare for a young mind" (Backward 66-67), and she enjoined her lover Morton Fullerton to "read Arnold" (Letters 281). She may have been familiar with Arnold's essay "Renan."

(4.) According to Ramsden, the books by Ernest Renan that Wharton owned include annotated copies of Averroes et l'averoisme (1852), 3rd ed. (Paris: Levy, 1866) and La Vie de Jesus (1863), 19th ed. (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1893); a copy of Saint Paul (1869), 13th ed. (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1893), unopened; Les evangiles et la seconde generation chretienne (1877), 2nd ed. (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1877); Nouvelles etudes d'Histoire Religieuse (1884), 2nd ed. (n. pub.), with a marked preface; and Le Livre de Job; avec une etude sur l'age et le caractere due poem (1859), 5th ed. (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1894).Also in her library was William Barry's Ernest Renan (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1905), inscribed "For Edith Wharton from M. P. [Countess Maria Pasalini?] London 1905"