| Edith Wharton's reputation rests upon her achievements in fiction. In comparison, her nonfiction writing remains relatively unknown. During her forty years as a writer, Wharton published nine nonfiction books on topics ranging from architecture, trench warfare, and travel. The image of Wharton as a literary grande dame, who wrote society novels and adhered to traditional ideals, falls apart in light of her nonfiction. Less mediated and closer to personal experience, Wharton's nonfiction offers a map to her thinking about culture, civilization, and self.; Wharton's nonfiction falls into five distinct phases, each representing a stage in her development as a writer. The Decoration of Houses (1897) marks her exploration of domestic space and its links to identity. The aesthetic principles of this text form a guide through which we read the interior spaces and characters in The House of Mirth (1905) and beyond. Wharton then moves from the domestic sphere to the external world. Her travels to Italy lead to the formation of an aesthetic which foregrounds and backgrounds the objects and people she describes. Italian Backgrounds (1905) plays with notions of visual spectacle as it subverts the traditional travel text. Its principles inform Wharton's first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902).; Wharton next turns to France during World War I. Her nonfiction reveals a consciousness of the social and cultural changes the war would bring to civilization. Thus The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front (1923), when read in light of Fighting France (1915) and French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), present a Modernist view of art and life after the Great War. Wharton's nonfiction ultimately turns inward. The Writing of Fiction (1925) situates her place among other writers as it reframes her overlooked novels of the 1920s and 1930s. Her 1920 travel book, In Morocco, details a wartime trip to that country, providing readers with a Modernist autobiography in contrast to Wharton's official autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934). The selves she presents, whether Western, female, or free, transform our readings of novels like Summer and The Age of Innocence. Reading Wharton's nonfiction as an avenue toward understanding her better known novels secures her stature as a major intellectual force at the beginning of the twentieth century. |
