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

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

The remainder of Wharton's project in French Ways looks Janus-faced on Franco-American relations. On the one hand, Wharton wishes to generate sympathy for the French cause by appealing to a fundamental similarity between France and the United States: "the differences between ourselves and the French are mostly on the surface, and our feeling about the most important things is always the same" (15-16). Such an approach is fundamental to her goal of continued American support for the French. Despite the temptation among some Americans to identify with Germany rather than France because of the large number of German immigrants in the US, Wharton asserts that "the Germans, who seem less strange to many of us because we have been used to them at home, differ from us totally in all of the important things" (16). On the other hand, Wharton positions France as a high ideal toward which the younger, cruder American nation should aspire. Although one hears a great deal about "'What America can teach France,'" she writes, it is more worthwhile to "apply ourselves to finding out what they have to teach us" (8-9). Americans are materialistic and crave security; in contrast, the French exhibit qualities of "taste, reverence, continuity, and intellectual honesty." These are traits that a new pioneer people, "destined by fate to break up new continents and experiment in new social conditions, ... have had the least time to acquire" (18-19; original emphasis). (7)

Believing in nation but not necessarily in nationalism, Renan wrote that true patriotism is the courage to declare one's nation mistaken when one believes that it is (Chadbourne 101). On this view Wharton was patriotic when, contrary to public opinion, she urged the US to resist isolationism and become involved in the European conflict (Benstock 298), and when, in French Ways and other works, she criticized American customs in favor of French ones. Abandoning the US for France allowed Wharton a critical perspective that would not have been possible had she remained in her own country. As she wrote in a tribute to literary critic and Scribner's editor William C. Brownell, "America produces numerous critics of life who have found out there is something wrong with Main Street, but do not know the remedy because they never really studied the alternatives" (205). She credits Brownell with having "the intellectual range and detachment needful for the survey of culture." Multicultural well before the term gained currency, Wharton used her knowledge of other nations as the means to lament the inward-turning instincts of early twentieth-century Americans. The US was not only impeding its own cultural growth, it was missing an important global opportunity. It was a "curious" and "suggestive" fact, for example, that "America's acute literary nationalism has developed in inverse ratio to the growth of modern travelling facilities" ("Great American Novel" 156). A renowned lover of technology, Wharton saw tremendous but unfulfilled potential in transatlantic crossings--practical and cultural--that modern travel and communication made possible.