Family and social class in selected novels of Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser

The American period from 1900 to 1925 is one of great social transformation. Those writers who offered macro-systemic analysis of late Gilded Age family models and class structuring were situated uniquely within their era. Writers of late Gilded Age texts such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Thorstein Veblen and Jane Addams prompted their readers to question the effects of urbanization, immigration, capitalism and the impact of a growing labor force upon the individual, the market, the family and marriage, and provide a clarifying socio-critical lens for the reading of American realist novelists.; Of particular interest for this period are the literary texts of Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser, realist writers who portrayed contemporary family structures of differing social classes even as those classes were in flux. I focus on the way by which characters in selected novels of Dreiser and Wharton negotiate, perceive and interpret gender relationships in order to reveal the function of family in limiting or prescribing the social class mobility of the individual. Additionally, I include an exploration of the narrative method Wharton and Dreiser used, realism, in order to expand an understanding of their critique of the modern age. In addition to reference to the late Gilded Age social texts mentioned above, and reference to other realist novels, specific novels by Wharton and Dreiser which I examine are: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, An American Tragedy, and Sister Carrie.; The exegetical reading and comparative analyzation of the above mentioned texts with reference to recent socio-historical discourse on family and social class, from a feminist/neo-Marxist perspective, provide the theoretical basis for this project.