Edith Wharton's Theoretic Enquiry And Practice

Edith Wharton had been considered as one of the greatest authors of the early twentieth century in her lifetime, but her being ranked among the classic writers in the U.S. only happened in the 21st century. For a long time people debated on her status in American literature though she obtained numerous honorable titles in her life. She was accused of being too rich and too aristocratic to develop social conscience. People ignored her deep insight into the nature of human life while regarding her as a prominent novelist of manners for her accurate depiction of the New York society. Her New York high society was often considered too narrow a subject to extend depth to the work. Her fiction was considered as lacking moral dimension due to her extramarital affair and divorce. Her first biographer Percy Lubbock described her as a "scribbler" who dreaded theoretic enquiry, which directly influenced people's evaluation of Wharton and her works before more objective biographies appeared. Actually she wrote a monograph, The Writing of Fiction, and many essays and reviews to express her reflection on the art of fiction such as subject and theme, tradition and originality, permanent values in fiction, the status and function of criticism and so on.After a study of the first-hand materials such as her theoretic monograph The Writing of Fiction, her autobiography A Backward Glance, her letters, and a critical anthology collected by Frederic Wegner, Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings, and a consultation of the biographies by Lewis and others, this thesis summarizes Wharton's theory of fiction as three general rules, namely, Selection and Intention, Transmutation and Objectivity, Tradition and Originality.Wharton held that every work of art has to make a selection of subject and illuminating incidents. The subject should be responsive to some judgment of life, which is a mysterious need for normal persons. The illuminating incidents should be closely related to the subject. In her eyes, any great work has to be based on philosophy of life, which accounts for the author's choosing one particular slice of life rather than another.While acknowledging a close relationship between a work and the author's personal life, Wharton took transmutation as the first principle of art. That is, mere copying can never substitute creative vision, and an imaginary world is even more living than a real world. Meanwhile Wharton emphasized the importance of objectivity and held that too much of theauthor's interference in the work will ruin its value.Wharton considered tradition as the greatest work of the mankind and complained about the experimental novels. She held that originality is not a negation of tradition but a new vision of things.Wharton's theory of criticism involves four aspects: The Indispensability of Criticism, The Function of Criticism, Desirable Reading, and Permanent Values in Fiction. She suggested three points in judging aesthetic values of a work: What is the author trying to represent? How Far has he succeeded? Is the subject chosen worth representing?Embracing Mathew Arnold's credo that literature should be "a criticism of life", she kept observing and summing up human life and conveyed her view of life to readers. Wharton's subject of high society did not ignore such a theme: when God was declared dead, there emerged other invisible dark forces that hampered individual freedom and aspirations. Invisible power, similar to a divine plan, still exists in the form of traditions, conventions, and community interests. Anyone who ventures to deviate from it will inevitably get punished ruthlessly. In her fiction, more desirable characters wage, often unsuccessfully, intense moral battles with society, the equivalent of the inscrutable, arbitrary God, which is manifested as the moaning of the wise in The House of Mirth.After a presentation of Wharton's theory of fiction and criticism this thesis makes an analysis of its application in The House of Mirth to correct Lubbock's myopic observation of Wharton that she ignored...