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

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

Wharton held a persistently elitist view that some categories of people were in fact superior to others. This belief, as Jennie Kassanoff points out, operates in The House of Mirth. We see Wharton wrestling in this novel with the same terms of identity that constituted the debate over nationhood at this time. That cultural value is innately embodied in the white elite class is emphasized by her use of organic imagery and descriptions of violations of that natural order. For example, the depiction of Lily as rootless in the final chapter of the novel is, as many have noted, a Darwinian image, but first and foremost it signifies that Lily has lost the threads of tradition and connection that were inherently hers:

   [Lily] had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer
   to her than another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave
   endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from
   which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.
   In whatever form a slowly accumulated past lives in the
   blood--whether in the concrete image of the old house stored with
   visual memories, or in the conception of the house not built
   with hands, but made up of inherited passions and loyalties--it
   has the same power of broadening and deepening the individual
   existence, of attaching it by mysterious links of kinship to all the
   might sum of human striving. Such a vision of the solidarity of
   life had never before come to Lily. (296-97)

The phrase "whatever form a slowly accumulated past lives in the blood" can imply that not just a class structure but an entire nation is under siege. A similar conflation of interests is apparent in her manuscript "Disintegration," also discussed by Kassanoff. In this unfinished novel, Henry Clephane muses about the influx of new people and money that has displaced and largely rendered useless the dominant class:

   the place to study [the results] is here and now--here in this
   huge breeding-place of inequalities that we call a republic, where
   class-distinctions, instead of growing out of the inherent needs of
   the social organism, are arbitrarily established by a force that
   works against it! (qtd. in Kassanoff 69, my emphasis)

If Wharton fluctuates in French Ways between conceptions of nation as inherent and as learned, she leans overall toward the latter--that is, toward an understanding in alignment with Renan's. The United States is impoverished in part because it is young. It has not had time to acquire the "patience, deliberateness, reverence" that are "the fundamental elements of taste" (55). Wharton, it follows, staunchly believed in the edifying effects of learning and in the slow process that true education entails. "As long as America believes in short-cuts to knowledge," she asserts, "she will never come into her real inheritance of English culture"

That Wharton described herself as a "rabid imperialist" had friends who advocated a strong US military and economic presence in the world, and focused on the ameliorative rather than the destructive aspects of colonialism is well documented (see Wegener, "Rabid"; Sensibar; and Bauer). Wharton's imperialism was not economically or politically motivated, however, at least not explicitly so. It was, rather, based on an aesthetic and cultural ideal. (8) Wharton spurned the aggressive, entrepreneurial development that motivated American expansionism. She deplored the loss of what "the new order of things has wiped out" and "shudder[ed] at what it was creating" ("Great American Novel" 157). Dale Bauer notes confusion in discussions of Wharton's politics and concludes that divided views reside as much in Wharton herself as in her critics (11). Similarly, Bentley writes that Wharton "exhibited neither blind nostalgia nor a consistent progressivism" ("Wharton" 148). Instead, she wrote with profound ambivalence about the accelerating speed of cultural change in the twentieth century, fascinated by what technology could accomplish, alarmed at what it might destroy. Bentley notes that Wharton's cultural imperialism had as its goal discernment and preservation rather than expansion per se. Although in the case of Morocco, culture was to be inculcated through French colonial rule, at the same time, Wharton lamented the "harm" that the "modern European colonist" would do to "the beauty and privacy of the old Arab towns" (In Morocco 22). There is to Wharton's imperialism, then, a paradoxical quality, a gesturing outward that is aimed not so much at dominance as at retention.