COMPOSING THE SELF: EDITH WHARTON AND THE ECONOMY OF DESIRE

Edith Wharton's fiction is centrally concerned with the individual's struggle to accommodate the opposing demands of the personal and social order. The place of passion in the individual's life was of particular importance to the writer, whose work typically dramatizes the complex economy of sexual exchange. Her protagonists' varying efforts to master this economy are modeled in part upon Wharton's own experience of life "in the round" during her pivotal midlife affair with Morton Fullerton. Significantly, Wharton's belated sexual awakening not only allowed the writer her first opportunity to "speak out her heart": it also furthered her efforts to locate that necessary fictional space where she could both "hoard" and "spend" her passional treasures.; Although in their respective accounts of this romance, R. W. B. Lewis and Cynthia Griffin Wolff carefully sketch the contours of the novelists' many-sided relationship with Fullerton, they do so without the benefit of Wharton's considerable love correspondence, the existence of which has only recently come to light. The emotional and literary concerns which emerge from this correspondence pertain not only to the affair itself and to a highly autobiographical short story published during this romance, "The Letters," but also to those novels which focus upon her protagonists' struggles to "author" their lives, among them, The House of Mirth, Summer, The Age of Innocence, and The Mother's Recompense.; Wharton's fictional representation of the economy of desire is suggested by the term "passionate containment," for like their creator, her characters typically seek to "compose" the self, first by overcoming their reluctance to articulate their passion and then by learning to contain their emotional needs within suitable literary and non-literary forms. In seeking to resolve the dilemma of passionate containment, Wharton's protagonists must customarily confront the "fictive" quality of their assumptions about romance and acknowledge as well the inherent inequality of sexual exchange. Once having freed themselves from naive "fictions" of love that commonly derive from sentimental literary sources, her protagonists may realize the limits of their passional and fiction-making power in a manner akin to Wharton's own authorial construction of character.