Woman as writing subject: Recasting the narrative in Edith Wharton

Many of Edith Wharton's novels published between 1905 and 1922 can be seen as accounts of her efforts to resolve her own ambivalence about writing and to address cultural constraints faced by a female author in the beginning of the twentieth century. In these novels, Wharton calls attention to the problem of writing, narrative discourse, and the use of metaphor as masuline-coded activities.; Chapter one examines the way specific ideological, economic, and historical forces governing ideas about sexual difference, gender roles, and authorship at the turn of the century shaped Wharton's understanding of what it was to be a woman and an author.; Chapters two through five consider the ways Edith Wharton's texts reveal narrative strategies that indicate the divided position of the female author and illustrate her efforts to take on the authority of writing, to assume the role of artist and literary professional, and to claim a critical readership.; In The House of Mirth, Wharton examines Lawrence Selden not only as Lily's possible savior, but also as the inaccurate chronicler of her life. Disjunctions within the text call into question Selden's final "word" on Lily. In The Reef Wharton explores more directly the controlling power of masculine narrative and metaphor as she examines how one who controls the way events are talked about also wields a power over those events. In Summer Wharton establishes a metaphorical link between sexual passion and the seductiveness of language and narrative so that she transforms a story apparently about awakening sexuality into a tale about women and the alluring but dangerous and alienating power of masculine narratives. In The Glimpses of the Moon, Wharton employs parody and conflicting discourses to turn the sentimental novel on itself and to use this conventional genre to question the very assumptions on which it rests, taking issue with the "feminine" way of looking at life advocated by such genres.; While Wharton fails to grant any of her female protagonists control over narrative, she develops strategies within this sequence of novels which enable her as writer to escape a similar fate.