Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings - Review

Style, Spring, 1998 by Mary Suzanne Schriber

Frederick Wegener, ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xvii 331 pp. $29.95 cloth.

This thoroughly researched, annotated, and illuminating collection brings together for the first time the miscellaneous, little-known, uncollected, and heretofore dispersed critical writings of Edith Wharton. As editor Frederick Wegener observes, Wharton studies have been characterized by psychologically- and biographically-oriented scholarship, from the landmark biography of R. W. B. Lewis in 1975 to Shari Benstock's No Gifts From Chance in 1994; from Cynthia Griffin Wolff's A Feast of Words:The Triumph of Edith Wharton in 1977 to Susan Goodman's Edith Wharton's Inner Circle in 1994; from Alan Price's The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War in 1996 to Sarah Bird Wright's Edith Wharton's Travel Writing: The Making of a Connoisseur in 1997. Seemingly every nook and cranny of Wharton's mansion of letters has been approached, entered, and more or less occupied. Yet the attention of critics and scholars to that wing of Wharton's work closest to their own and very important to Wharton, her criticism, has been meagre. Frederick Wegener's impressive collection conducts us into this neglected and psychologically revealing outpost.

The collection opens with a fifty-two page essay by Wegener's hand, "'Enthusiasm Guided by Acumen': Edith Wharton as a Critical Writer." The essay is so intelligent and insightful that Wharton scholars may find themselves as appreciative of Wegener's analysis of the criticism and its context as of his work as collector and editor of the Wharton materials themselves. The essay abounds with information about Wharton's critical activities and assessments of their revelations. Wegener draws the figure of a woman yearning to write critical articles but lacking the confidence to do so; a woman startlingly different from the seemingly self-assured novelist; a woman unable to take women, and hence herself, seriously as writers of criticism; a woman who gendered the critic and scholar as male. Yet he shows us, as well, the female critic who wrote one of the most sizable bodies of criticism in the history of American letters; addressed a variety of subjects in her criticism; and undertook to reform and renovate common critical practice in her own culture. To establish this figure, Wegener examines material from Wharton's critical writings, of course, but also from her letters and from her fiction. He provides us with one of the most telling bodies of material on the subject of Edith Wharton's complexity, of her conflicts and insecurities as an intellectual woman, and of what he perceives to be the difficulties of locating a genuinely feminist sensibility in her work.

The collection that follows is divided into five sections: reviews, essays, and other writings, 1896-1914; reviews and essays, 1920-1934; tributes and eulogies; prefaces, introductions, forewords; and self-considerations. The collection includes an unreprinted parody, an unpublished essay, a collaborative essay by W. Morton Fullerton and Wharton on the art of Henry James, and a bibliography. The collection offers, as well, deeply researched and wonderfully useful endnotes that supply cross-references, relevant quotations from works and writers to whom Wharton refers, family and social connections, and historical and cultural context, all serving to plant Wharton's criticism deeply in the milieu from which it emerged.

This assemblage of Wharton's work, enabling the scholar to read Wharton's criticism and reviews and eulogies in succession, foregrounds principles and themes that recur through time: Wharton's organic view of art; her insistence on character as the crucial element in fiction; her conviction that genius is rooted in tradition; her diminished opinion of herself as a critic; her attitudes toward women. Read as a unit, this material serves to underscore certain of Wharton's habits: her unvarying annoyance with specific faults of craft (accusing Dickens and Balzac, for example, of using catchwords as a device of characterization, making characters sneeze and squint each time they appear) and her consistently brilliant marshalling of metaphor (declaring, for example, that new growths of art require "the accumulated leaf-mould of tradition"). Wegener observes about these repetitions and recurrences that Wharton, an even more complex and mercurial figure than we previously knew, held firm but relatively static aesthetic principles. Yet perhaps Wharton's development as a critic was discouraged if not prohibited by her lack of confidence. The tenacity of her hold on certain principles may reflect her insecurities as a critic, speaking from an unwavering platform and preempting, in this way, charges of inconsistency and capriciousness laying in wait for the work of a female critic.

The opportunity that Wharton most frequently postponed and, it would seem, approached with the greatest fear and trembling was criticism of the work of Henry James. Wharton's assessment of The Letters of Henry James, entitled "Henry James in His Letters," is perhaps the most arresting of Wharton's reviews. Here Wharton's affection for James, the nature of their relationship, the quality of their banter, and her sense of loss and loneliness following his death are clear and deeply affecting. Her assessment of his fiction and of the excesses of his technique is also clear. As Wegener sees it, she writes as "a grateful but not uncritical successor and beneficiary." This review, as much as any of Wharton's other critical prose, attests to her critical acumen even as it is reveals the depth of her feeling for James.