A Study Of Male Characters In Edith Wharton's Novels

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was one of the leading American writers of her day. She was sometimes regarded as a novelist of manners as Jane Austin. Whereas Austin precisely discloses her contemporary English country life with light irony and underlying serious qualities, Wharton presents a true picture of the high society of Old New York at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, its custom and conventions, the superficial luxury of the four hundred powerful families and the inner struggle of the people constricted by the conventions of this society. As an outlet for her mental depression, she was recommended to write in a society where women are believed to be ornamental and not encouraged to be intellectual. The publishing of The House of Mirth brought her both professional and commercial success and she began to take writing as her profession. She was awarded Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for The Age of Innocence and has been the first woman honored by Yale University with the degree of Doctor of letters. Her work is distinguished by her brilliance as a stylist, the clarity and urban intelligence with which she manipulated the English language, and her acuity as a social observer and critic, particularly of the leisure class.With the development of women right movement, Wharton's works have attracted great attention from the feminist critics since 1970s. She was considered as one of the pioneering feminist writers. In the 1990s, research on Wharton continued to expand in various directions as Wharton's novels were read in relation to other writers, to literary traditions, gender, race, class, religion, ethnology, and language. From these new perspectives critics even attached importance to many of her late works that had suffered from poor review.In a sense, the feminist critics are justified in viewing Wharton as a feminist writer. It is true that Edith Wharton cares about the problems faced by women in her novels. However, the feminists' views are challenged by the fact that Wharton also shows great concern and sympathy for the life of the male in her novels. In fact, Wharton has been deeply influenced by the naturalist thoughts of her time. In her works both the female and male characters are subjected to their living environment.This thesis, based on the textual analysis of three of Wharton's most important novels-The House of Mirth, Ethan Frame, and The Age of Innocence, is to study the oppressive environment exposed in the novels and the struggle against it by the male characters.This thesis consists of three parts along with an introduction and a conclusion. Part One gives an introduction of naturalism in America and its influence on Edith Wharton. Part Two studies the common features of Wharton's male characters. All of the male characters in the selected novels live in a destructive environment, whether it is social, natural, or cultural. These men all try to struggle against their environment. However, they all end in failure. Part Three analyzes the causes of the failure of the struggle. Apart from the uncontrollable external factors, the weakness and limitation of the men themselves are the main factors which lead to the inevitable failure of their struggle.In conclusion, the thesis points out that: 1) as a female writer, Wharton amazingly shows great concern about men and their devastating living environment; 2) the male characters' living environment in her novels is no better than that of the female characters; 3) Edith Wharton is a naturalist writer who shows us how the environment affects the individual man as well as woman though she is different from her contemporary rigid naturalists in that she is not completely committed to prescriptive notion of environmental determinism but believes that man and woman can gain strength and derive meaning from their desires, hopes, and faiths so as to attain an ideal existence by overcoming the hurdles of the oppressive social expectations.