The Customs of the Country: France

Abstract

As discussed in the Introduction to this study the novels and travel guides in which Wharton concerns herself with the civilisation of France mark a period of transition in her writing. These works chart a movement from the Europe which she sought to illuminate for her American audience in The Valley of Decision to a Europe made familiar to her compatriots through the experiences of both war and tourism; the European scene no longer needed to be explicated in the same way. From the Napoleonic War which ends The Valley of Decision to the publication of her novel, A Son at the Front,five years after the end of the first world war, the progress of Wharton’s work reflects a larger cultural passage from the Europe which had been, in the words of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a locus for ‘romance’, towards a world where American ‘actualities’¹ would now dominate. As Wharton expressed it in an essay ‘The Great American Novel’, published in the Yale Review in 1927. ‘We [Americans] have, in fact, internationalized the earth, to the deep detriment of its picturesqueness’.²