| Feminist literary criticism has created a galvanizing and transformative moment in critical discourse, offering a way of reading otherwise. The question, what does it mean to write, and to read, as a woman? conveys the interpretive possibilities of transformation and translation, while it foregrounds female identity in the production of meaning. This approach brought new attention to the writer Edith Wharton in the late twentieth-century, but it also produced another, more conservative, narrative about identity and meaning, by focusing on the writer's sexual biography as a key to textual interpretation. The psycho-biographical methodology may yield intriguing details about the historical subject, but it also results in a critical discourse that relies on curing the text and fixing the writer within.;Far from assigning a signature, Wharton's use of letters in her stories directs her reader to the discursive circuit and to the exchanged meanings that remain in play, ambiguous and open to new readings. My project here provides only a glimpse into the interpretive possibilities this perspective offers the feminist critic.;This project addresses the ways in which Wharton resists the biographical--and therapeutic--interpretation, specifically through her use of ambiguity and textuality, to explore meaning, desire, and writing itself. I find this engagement in her short fiction, in particular, in stories that use letters to disrupt and critique narrativity, and interrogate the writer-reader exchange. Six stories, "The Muse's Tragedy," "The Touchstone," "His Father's Son," "Mr. Jones," "Pomegranate Seed," and "The Letters," engage letters as embedded texts to convey multiple readings and destabilize textual identification. My reading relies on French feminist theory, particularly that of Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, feminist psychoanalysis, and theories of textuality and the epistolary to address the ways in which Wharton's writing achieves a complex and nuanced treatment of female subjectivity, at once flexible and resistant, through exploring the relationships between gender and genre. This reading attests to the writer's intellectual and aesthetic purposes, while allowing the text a life of its own. |
