Affect,Repetition,and Exile:Transcendence In Edith Wharton's Late Works

Edith Wharton(1862-1937)is a major American writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,the first woman writer to have earned a Putlizer prize for literature in American literary history,and a three-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in literature.Being a writer that was favored by many readers and critics of her time,Wharton is nevertheless relegated as outdated when compared with other modernists by a number of contemporary literary critics.This in turn caused controversy in the recognition of her literary achievements,as there are perpetual doubts to the artistic originality in her works,especially to those written in her late years.With new tendencies in the field of modernist studies,the turn to affect in the aesthetic revival,and the rise of cosmopolitan studies,Wharton's works are again brought back to the critical arena,especially her embodiment of experience and transcendence in the late works.The present dissertation,based on affect theory and its affective and discursive approaches,endeavors to examine the embodiment of modernist experience in Edith Wharton's late works against the background of modern social transformation,and to explicate Wharton's modernist literary art based on affective modulation.It chooses four novels The Age of Innocence,The Mother's Recompense,Hudson River Bracketed,and The Gods Arrive from those written by Wharton since the 1920 s to analyze the characters' affective responses to loss,shame and anxiety that are the results from conflicts between the traditional and the modern,public identity and personal appeal,and cultural heritage and personal talent.It examines how in Wharton's novels the characters think and act,following their emotional flow and flux,in aesthetic judgment,experiential recognition and cultural crossing.Edith Wharton's late works reflect on the fever of “making it new” in the modernist movement and the high modernists' technical experiementation in literary form and expression.Different from her modern counterparts' discourses on ruptures and severance,Edith Wharton's conception of the modernist drive to make anew is based on a relation with the cultural past and its traditional values.Genuine creation for Wharton must come as a natural continuation of tradition;it comes from a tradition but is different from it in its critical take of both tradition and new situations.Transcendence,an existentially philosophical term which refers to a subject's breaking through of selfcontainment into the state of autonomous agency,is conceived to be a main characteristic in Wharton's literary creation in the late years.There is consistent plotting of stasis and transcendence in the late novels which embodies the individual's selftranscendence through existential practice in rigid social structures.In those novels,the self is not pre-existent or fixed but vulnerable and open to social contingency.It is produced and restricted by the cultural background,but it can be restructured with assessment and judgment of values in the on-going social practice.Edith Wharton's late works embody a type of transcendence that is immanent in the traditional culture and accords with its natural evolution,constantly challenging over inherent constraints and impinging bondages.Three thematic terms—affect,repetition and exile—are adopted to draw out the affective trajectory supporting Edith Wharton's agenda of modernist transcendence.Affect theory,targeted at the pre-conscious emotions and feelings,are adopted to analyze the affects which are products of circumstances and inexorable life decisions in a time of change.In The Age of Innocence,affects are not only carriers of social sensations reflective of the social and cultural conflicts,but also function as analytical tools to conceptualize relations between individual decisions and social dynamics.Loss and frustration felt generally by people after World War I showcase disorder and disorientation in the value system in the process of social transformation,and the characters living through the intensities of the conflicts readjust themselves in accordance with orders from both the old and the new world.They do not make easy decisions but take historical tradition and modern contingencies critically,trying to make connections between historical and modern societies in a time of major social change.The transcendence generated by experience of modernist changes are embodied in the characters' struggles to break through confinements and to achieve freedom in their aesthetic response.Repetition is another way for the individual to gain new learning from experience.Platonic repetition and Nietzschean repetition provide basic tools for recognition of the relationship between the self and its social relations,and with the introduction by J.Hillis Miller into literary criticism,repetitive forms become clues for textual interpretation.The Mother's Recompense is a rewriting of Wharton's earlier work Disintegration,and its intertextual relationship with Victorian novels and contemporaneous works,as well as the plot of return and re-exile,are embodiment of experiential repetition and cognitive transcendence.Under the textual surface,the psychoanalysts see repetition of experiences,especially those of unhappy events,as a precondition for mastery and transcendence.According to affect theorists,repetitions of experiences point to a certain affect,and Gilles Deleuze's theory on immanence and transcendence regards repetition as a trodden path toward genuine change.The mother in the novel leaves Old New York and returns after eighteen years to seek recognition of her new identity,and the shame she feels is not the result of her personal wrongdoing,but should be attributed to historical injustice in the social establishment and marital institution.It is found that the stereotyped definition of the mother's role impinges oppression on her individual development and overlooks her spiritual discontents,and it is by repeatedly walking out of the confining social register and living between two cultures that the mother gets herself empowered to subvert the traditional role and obtain an independent modern identity.A typical character type,that of the returning self-exiled woman,is crucial in bringing the themes together in the four novels that are chosen for examination in the present study.She is the anxious cultural agent who repeatedly crosses the Atlantic to experience the orderliness of European civilization,the heritage of cultural tradition and its continuity in the modern time,and to exert influence back at the home country with her artistic affectivity.Halo Spears in Hundson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive belongs to this category of women.Instead of showing contempt and self-conceit as her American compatriots going abroad often do,she casts an othering gaze upon home culture,and integrates the other's horizon with it to enter into the symbolic order of a greater cultural tradition.Exilic experience endows on her a sense of liberation,and her anxiety is gradually released in the constant crossings over territories and borders.The late novels often work on a double structure of the personal and the collective,with the stories happening between individuals who are also representatives of social dynamics,and intensities are created among them by cultural conflicts in practical life experience,reflecting the author's configuration of the ideal spiritual formation of the modern American society.Edith Wharton's late works synchronistically represented the 1870 s of Old New York society to contrast with the historical reality in the 1920 s and 1930 s.The analysis endeavors to reveal how Wharton's Old New York characters insist on the traditional values while strive to face the challenges of the modernized society.It also shows how they conduct a slow but decisively subversive battle against social conventions,hierarchical oppression and narrow cultural vision.Wharton's characters adhere to the virtues of the old society on one hand,but try hard to transcend over constraints and bondages on the other.They embody her own ambition to inherit and break through tradition,to strive for the recognition of a new identity,and to create genuinely great American literature.These are the unique contributions that Wharton as a major American writer living in a transitory historical period can make to the American modernist movement.