| The heroines in Edith Wharton's novels have long been viewed as sensitive individuals crushed by forces outside themselves. Most critics have seen these women as victims of a narrow American upper class, ineffectual men, or the tragic condition of man. This study proposes that what defeats these heroines and prevents them from finding sustaining intimacy with a man are their own internal fears and anxieties. Long viewed as novels of manners, Wharton's fiction emerges as the fables and fantasies of lonely and repressed women, beset by the same guilts and conflicts that drive the isolated and tormented heroes of fellow American male writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Hemingway and Faulkner from the pleasures of adult sexuality and independence.; Most of Wharton's heroines disclose emotionally impoverished childhoods. They are usually orphaned, a condition, like that of many an American hero, that symbolizes their earlier emotional abandonment. When facts of their parents are given, we find rejecting and demanding mothers, weak and long absent fathers. Their subsequent insecurity erupts into highly competitive and ambivalent relationships with other women. The men they desire are married or involved with their unacknowledged rivals. Winning that man but subverting the victory and asserting the claims of the other woman becomes the internal narrative pattern in Wharton's novels. This recurrent motif re-enacts the deeply impoverished self-images of Wharton's frequently well-born and socially established heroines.; In Wharton's most successful works, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, this narrative metaphor of renouncing success is more subtly enmeshed and emerges only after careful tracing and the exposure of more ostensible explanations. Significantly, those novels set outside New York society, such as Ethan Frome and Fruit of the Tree, present more clearly a heroine embattled with another woman for a mutually desired man. Wharton's novels of the 1920s, her least controlled works, such as Twilight Sleep and The Mother's Recompense, finally cast mothers and daughters themselves as competitors in love, confirming the unacknowledged roots of the familial rivalry in all Wharton's heroines. In her final fictions, Wharton desperately tries to arrange the union of her heroine and hero. But the evident failure of these last fictional relationships confirms that Wharton's vision remains, to the very last scene, the charting of the desolation of lost and lonely daughters. |
