The fetishized family: The modernism of Edith Wharton

This study locates Edith Wharton in the genealogy of early modernism by examining her career-long enquiry into the ideology of kinship and the discursive construction of the American family. Wharton, I argue, defamiliarized kinship to such an extent that the Family became, in her words, "a huge voracious Fetish"--at once an icon of reverence and a mark of absence. Operating within a theoretical framework informed by anthropology, psychoanalysis and social history, this study traces the developing implications of the "fetishized family" in Wharton's major fictions and argues that Wharton's critique formed a ground-breaking modernist analysis of American kinship. Her inquiry into the roles of politics, gender, class, and the body within the fragmenting matrix of the American family influenced a generation of younger modernists who, in turn, exploited and experimented with the formal connotations of Wharton's genealogical critique.; Chapters 1 and 2 situate Wharton both biographically and theoretically within the context of early twentieth-century modernism. Chapter 3 pursues Wharton's anthropological and psychoanalytic theory of the "fetishized family" in her late fictions, The Age of Innocence (1920) and Old New York (1924). In Chapter 4, the dissertation returns to Wharton's early career, and begins tracing her theoretical development by briefly sketching the social history of the turn-of-the-century American family in conjunction with Wharton's early modernist achievement, The House of Mirth (1905). Chapter 5 explores the impact of Wharton's kinship theories on the larger turn-of-the-century American population by deconstructing her elaborately encoded critique of reproduction, class, mechanization and individual agency in her little-known 1907 work, The Fruit of the Tree. Wharton's fascination with the dialectical human impulses to venerate and transgress familial law occupies the consideration of The Reef (1912) in Chapter 6, while Chapter 7 attends to the linguistic foundation of kinship in The Custom of the Country (1913). Finally, Chapters 8 and 9 consider the family in extremis, concentrating on Wharton's overlapping themes of incest, familial and narrative fragmentation and the post-war erotics of home in Summer (1917) and The Mother's Recompense (1926).