| More than one-fourth of Edith Wharton's fictional and even many of her nonfictional works develop the theme of the supernatural. Utilizing the supernatural allowed Wharton to extend the possibilities of language and to examine issues of sexuality, class, and gender. This dissertation builds a poetics for Wharton's supernatural fiction.; The search for this supernatural aesthetic begins in the Introduction (Chapter I), where I review the lacks in criticism of Wharton's works in this vein. I pose this question in Chapter II: when composing supernatural fictions, did she still write within the context of Realism? I answer this question in the negative, proposing that Wharton, along with other writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, constituted what I call the school of Dialectical Realism. The texts that enroll their author in this school achieve a dynamic contradiction between their real and supernatural elements by employing either Doubles--supernatural figures who defy the laws of space--or Revenants--supernatural figures who defy the laws of time.; Analogously, I examine Wharton's fifteen aesthetically successful supernatural stories through perspectives of space or time. And like her supernatural stories themselves, I utilize the dialectic to order the chapters of my dissertation. In Chapters III-V, I analyze, or suggest the reader analyze, each of the stories several times using heuristics (critical tools) deriving from synchronic (space-based), diachronic (time-based), and dialectical models. The heuristics are governed by hermeneutics (interpretive strategies) themselves dialectically ordered: in Chapters III and IV, I employ the synchronically based hermeneutics of structuralism and psychoanalysis. Chapter V utilizes Marxism, a diachronically based hermeneutic. The Conclusion (Chapter VI) asserts that feminism can synthesize this interpretive dialectic. Throughout these chapters, I eschew critical closure and show the reader not what, but how, to interpret. In the Conclusion as throughout the dissertation, I maintain that these texts, permitting us freedom of interpretation all the while, demonstrate Wharton's mastery of the short story. |
