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

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

Renan called into question an organic view of nation and state. There were no nations in antiquity, he argued, only loosely held aggregates. For him, nations are historically circumscribed political forms dating from the Teutonic invasions of the fifth through tenth centuries, born out of bloody violence and conquest rather than peaceful evolution. Nations, he argued, must not be confounded with either biological or linguistic races, and one should not attribute to linguistic groups the status of nation-states. In questioning the romantic model that sees race, language, religion, economy, and geography as grounds for national identity, Renan resembles to some extent John Stuart Mill, who held a similarly liberal view of nationhood (Pecora 21). Nations derive from and depend on the collective memory of past glories and past sacrifices made on the nation's behalf; they thrive on the strength of a present will, desire, and need to continue together. The nation is still "a spiritual principle" (Renan, "What Is a Nation" 174) as well as the actual land that comprises it, but nations are not eternal. Renan defines nation not as a group's genealogy but as its common legacy of memories and a commitment to go on together. His view prefigures that of many contemporary scholars who insist that the meaning of nation be restricted to the achieved nation-state; it presages, in particular, Benedict Anderson's argument that nations are "imagined communities," discursively created.

Although it is true, as Frederick Wegener notes in his introduction to Wharton's Uncollected Critical Writings, that her work "stubbornly defies classification, refusing to accommodate or to bind itself to any of the various reigning critical orthodoxies of her day" (31), we can see how Renan's views prefigure Wharton's own. In describing nationhood not as nationalism but as "common glories in the past, and a common will in the present" (174), Renan lays a foundation for Wharton's argument in her nonfictional study French Ways and Their Meaning, in which she celebrates France not just as a political entity but as a "continuity" (76) of traditions, tastes, and values that tie a people together. The idea of a nation as a spiritual family, as something one comes to as a result of affirmation and reaffirmation rather than as an innate or eternal principle, had great appeal for Wharton, an expatriate who adopted France as her nation. Indeed, Wharton's own life demonstrates that although born into a particular culture or nation--in Wharton's case, rarified, upper-class New York--one may cease to identify with it and even discard it in favor something else. Certainly Wharton's success as a woman and a writer depended on her ability to transgress boundaries that family and society believed were indisputable and inviolable, and to form, as Susan Goodman notes, "a small circle of confreres ... who held the same convictions" as she (ix).

French Ways and Their Meaning was published "with the idea of making France and things French more intelligible to the American soldier" (Wharton, Backward 357). The book opens with cautionary remarks about the need to resist easy and misleading generalizations about a nation and its character. The French people, Wharton notes, are currently not themselves because they have been subjected to prolonged attack from Germany: "Four years of desperate resistance to a foe in possession of almost a tenth of the national territory ... represent a strain so severe that one wonders to see ... life in general going on as before" (7). Appealing to her American audience, Wharton asks her reader to "picture our situation if Germany had invaded the United States, and had held a tenth part of our most important territory for four years" Her description of France under duress echoes Renan's view, expressed in "What Is a Nation?" that it is the shared experiences, especially the sufferings and sacrifices that people make in the name of their country, that constitute nation and nationhood.