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

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

"Triste a mourir" to part with Fullerton and wistful about the passing of time--"I wish I had known you when I was twenty-five. We might have had some good days together" (Letters 238)--Wharton was at this time particularly receptive to the consolations of philosophy, whether romantic (Flaubert or Wagner) or rational (Renan). She would have found appealing Renan's combination of the Hegelian world of reason with the Nietzschean world of revolt and nihilism, leading to a positive morality without God. She was perhaps looking for heroes, which could explain her interest in the subject of Renan's doctoral dissertation, Averroes, the twelfth-century Arab-born Spanish philosopher. Renan employs a historical method in this biography and prefigures the treatment he gives to his subject in his controversial Life of Jesus (1863).

Wharton turned to Renan again during another crisis. In 1917, with World War I raging and no end to it in sight, Wharton had to acknowledge that it signaled, as David Jones notes, "the Break" with all that had gone before (qtd. in Benstock 332). The war challenged her personal faith, already precarious, and threatened the concept of civilization that she held dear. Her distress was exacerbated by the death of her good friends Henry James and Howard Sturgis. In the fall of 1917 Wharton read Renan's Life of Jesus, perhaps for comfort and certainly for enlightenment and a sense of history. This book, which provides a historical rather than theological account of Jesus and Christianity, and which refers to Jesus as "an incomparable man," (5) had incurred the wrath of the clergy. Despite the outcry, however, such an imaginative as well as historically based portrayal fit well with modernist times, now more disposed toward solutions that were mythical than those that were doctrinal in origin. Renan's Life of Jesus not only presented a secular image, it joined in the refusal to acknowledge Jesus as a Jew and thus participated in the anti-Semitism expressed by many prominent thinkers of the day and manifested as well in Wharton's writings.

Renan's book also helped to address the pressing problem of culture. The Life of Jesus and the two volumes that followed it describe how Christianity spread among the rootless proletariat of the cities of Asia Minor and illustrate the question that preoccupied Renan and others: would the intellectuals of the nineteenth century lead the masses toward a new enlightenment? Wharton's desire for an affirmative answer is evident in her 1920 travel book In Morocco and in other statements that may be characterized as conservative or even colonialist. On the issue of nation and nationhood, Renan's ideas are relevant to Wharton's. He propounded these ideas in "What Is a Nation?" (Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?), a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne on March 11, 1882, and published in his book Discours et conferences in 1887.

This essay, widely credited with laying the foundation of modernist notions of nationhood, enters into a "central historical and philosophical debate" dating from the nineteenth century and continuing in contemporary scholarship. The debate asks whether the nation is an "inherent, natural, eternal, and necessary part of human development" or "a contingent event, a function of historical vicissitudes of power, will, desire, and institutions" (Pecora 22). Work at one end of the spectrum in this debate is represented by Johann Gottfried von Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Hegel, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte; work at the other end is represented by Renan and modernists such as Elie Kedourie and Ernest Gellner. The former view assumes that nations are eternal in spirit and organic in nature. As German philosopher Fichte argues in Foundations of Natural Law (1796), the state is "not something which is primary and which exists for its own sake, but is merely the means for the higher purpose of the ... continuous development of what is purely human in this nation" (qtd. in Pecora 22). The state is finally subordinate to the nation. Or as Lord Acton writes in "Nationality" in 1909, the nation is "a soul, as it were, wandering in search of a body in which to begin life over again" (qtd. in Pecora 23).The latter view, which Renan advocates in "What Is a Nation?" is that race, language, religion, and geography, while useful descriptors, do not determine nationhood. Renan rejects the notion, circulating in Germany under Bismarck and later exploited by Hitler, that a nation requires expansion into territories thought to be racially or anthropologically related to it. "The truth is that there is no pure race.... Is Germany an exception to this rule?" (169), asks Renan, protesting the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. He answers the question with a clear no. (6)