The economics of marriage in the novels of Edith Wharton: Class and gender conflicts in early twentieth-century America

Generic conflicts among the various literary forms Wharton uses in her novels reveal more general contradictions in the economic conditions of United States' society at the time. Wharton's effort to illustrate their irreconcilable differences as they relate to marriage offers a dramatic critique of the place of women and the mechanisms of their social subordination. Her attention to the physical bodies of her characters is especially important since disciplining those bodies is the most specific objective of those mechanisms, and their physical disintegration in the novels often registers ideological conflicts that are otherwise hidden by social and literary conventions. Using Frederic Jameson's premise that all genres are ideologies, this study examines both the ideology contained in the form of Wharton's texts and in the bodies of her characters in four novels, The House of Mirth (1905), The Fruit of the Tree (1907), Ethan Frome (1911), and Summer (1917). The worn out and broken bodies of the characters in all four novels of this study are both the result of rent social fabric and the collapsing of genres that accompanies this social phenomenon.; The old mandate of formalism to find unity in works has discouraged critics from examining the radical message contained in the tension between competing genres and forms in Wharton's texts. Her texts, read as metacommentaries on the historical or dialectical reevaluation of conflicting interpretive codes, expose the assumptions of the older genres, such as the romance. They help to prepare the way for a more egalitarian society by destabilizing the distinctions between male and female, between alien "other" and privileged society and between organized society and its outlaw fringe. Wharton's texts argue that conventional paradigms of thought must be replaced as older genres fall and as we remake social relationships.