Alienation As A Theme: A Study Of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, The House Of Mirth, And The Age Of Innocence

Edith Wharton is usually considered a novelist of manners and the theme in her fiction is comparatively less analyzed than the characters and other elements of the fiction. Besides recording the social convention in the part of human history that she is an insider, she has a much bigger concern-to reveal the human fate behind the convention, namely, alienation that happened to the human kind. However, such an important theme as alienation is seldom discussed in Wharton criticism; therefore it is necessary to research on this theme in her works.As a complicated conception, alienation has been a heated topic in both academic and daily life. This thesis is an attempt to prove that alienation is an important theme in Edith Wharton's fiction by textual analysis of Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and The Age of Innocence.The fictions mentioned above were written in different phases of Wharton's writing career. Consisting of explicit signs of alienation, they represent all her works to some extent; so, they are selected to be analyzed. This thesis begins with one of the definitions of alienation-alienation is a situation that man is in, where man is controlled by something that is created by himself. In Ethan Frome, Ethan Frome was alienated by his labor-the more he produced, the less belonged to him. In The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer was alienated by the social convention, and his sense of alienation was aroused and halted by Countess Olenska. Finally, Lily Bart ended her struggle with the alienation of convention and the alienation of money when she died.