Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics

Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics. Dale M. Bauer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. 225 pages. $55.00 cloth; $17.50 paper.

Like her friend Henry James, Edith Wharton left a vast and complex oeuvre that continues to challenge her readers while lending itself to a diverse variety of critical approaches. Until recently, Wharton's work was most often read through the formalist or feminist lenses traditionally favored by James scholars, which led to its classification into two major stages, with the latter fiction dismissed as inferior and/or reactionary. Sighting the limitations of these critical approaches, rather than the fiction itself, as the cause of these questionable judgements, Dale Bauer's Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics introduces a new critical methodology, which Bauer calls Cultural Dialogics, into Wharton criticism. With a nod to Aldous Huxley, Bauer's title links the mature Wharton to the emerging generation of modern novelists whose fiction actively addressed the future of both politics and art. It thus foregrounds her aim to rescue Wharton from the dismissive practice of reading her as an icon of a bygone era rather than as a politically aware writer who remained deeply committed to the social problems facing the American public in the 1920s and 1930s, especially the debates on eugenics and the politics of family relationships. To accomplish this goal, Bauer first rehistoricizes and then re-evaluates Wharton's late fiction, specifically the works written from 1917 to 1937, in order to overturn the prevailing critical assessment of the late fiction as inferior to her earlier--and generally less ambiguous--formal successes such as The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome.

Through her invention of Cultural Dialogics, which is as much a subject of the book as the fiction it examines, Bauer delivers a thorough consideration of Wharton's relationship to the cultural trends that much of her later fiction simultaneously resisted and redefined. Perhaps best explained as a dynamic new historicism, cultural dialogics studies the varying intensity of a writers engagement with the material history as revealed through the layers of cultural references with which a writer deepens her work; moreover, cultural dialogics reveals how internalized the cultural voices are even as the writer interprets and evaluates their directives in orchestrating among cultures a `dialogic encounter.'" In simplified terms, this approach uses intensive historical documentation to trace an author's constantly shifting relationship to a myriad of cultural discourses as they are interpreted and critiqued, yet also internalized, by the writer. In this study, Bauer moves away from the Bakhtinian terminology she employed in her earlier book, Feminist Dialogics (1988)--which included readings of Wharton's early works--due to her sense that the complexity of the later fiction warrants, and indeed demands, a new way of situating and evaluating the author's relationship to the controversial public issues of the day. This methodology integrates feminist concerns with aspects of new historicsm and Bakhtin's theories of dialogism but will, I think, quickly achieve its own identity due to its potential as a useful critical tool for reading other post-Victorian authors. As we can imagine, synthesizing so many cultural, theoretical, and literary threads in a dialogic argument makes for an organizational challenge as the structure must necessarily be one of movement back and forth between points, but Bauer's powerful critical voice provides coherence and allows her to illuminate Wharton's growing engagement of politics and mass culture in her fiction.

The introduction refutes the oft-rendered opinion that Wharton (like James) grew increasingly out of touch with her audience by sighting letters and historical accounts that reveal her clear concern about both America and her readership. Particularly persuasive is the well documented section showing Wharton's interest in the eugenics/science debate, which Bauer goes on to trace in later chapters, especially those on Summer, Twilight Sleep and The Children. In fact, it is Wharton's contemplation of such complex public and political issues as social engineering and the mass influence of cultural icons reproduced in new technologies such as film, and their effects upon and interrelation with the private lives of her American characters, that Bauer sees as the primary difference between Wharton's early and late work. According to Bauer, in the late fiction we find characters who face the challenge of redirecting their identification from dangerous cultural icons (e.g., the narcissistic, promiscuous, fetishized flapper) to alternative cultural values, as does the adaptable Pauline Manford in Twilight Sleep. Although Bauer locates the early/late division with Summer (1917), her introductory chapter includes an extended analysis of The Reef (published in 1912 and often hailed as Wharton's most "Jamesian" novel), because Bauer finds that this prewar novel anticipates Wharton's later politics. In fact, she makes such a strong case for reading the "free love" sexual politics of The Reef's George Darrow as a critical commentary of the potential consequences of U.S. international expansionist policies, particularly the Monroe Doctrine, that I wondered why she didn't cite 1912 as the beginning of Wharton's "brave new politics." I suspect her reason may stem from the critical acclaim The Reef has received over the years; it does not share the same need for revaluation as the works to which Bauer does devote full chapters.