| Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edith Wharton foreground the aesthetic capacities of the novelist's art by resisting the underlying conceit of popular moralizing criticism: that the meaning of a literary work is reducible to a single moral truth. Remarkably, each writer imagines and mediates his or her most aesthetically modern writing practices through the figures of assimilative Jews. As consistent symbols of malleability and instability, the Jewish and ambiguously Jewish characters of these authors signal---and indeed help to define---their cultivation of literary fiction as itself a realm of unstable, proliferating, and ambiguous meanings. To each, these multiplications of meaning make the mode of representation focal, and in so doing, erode the critical propensity to make the content paramount by showing it as subject to the uncertainties of its depiction. |
