Edith Wharton’s Fiction

Abstract

Edith Wharton once quarreled with William Dean Howells over the relationship of the self to society. Henry James, so the story goes, complained to Howells about the scarcity of materials for the novelist in America’s rudimentary social order, an argument that stretches back to James Fenimore Cooper who likewise argued that it would “baffle the strength of a giant” to find social material for a novel of manners about American culture. Howells responded to James that beyond the social order, “There is the whole of human nature!” That is to say, Howells separated the “self” from “society” and argued that the essence of selfhood lay outside social boundaries. Responding to Howells, Wharton asked in her essay “The Great American Novel”:

But what does “human nature” thus denuded consist in, and how much of it is left when it is separated from the web of customs, manners, culture it has elaborately spun about itself? Only that hollow unreality, “Man,” an evocation of the eighteenth-century demagogues who were the first inventors of “standardization.” As to real men, unequal, unmanageable, and unlike each other, they are all bound up with the effects of climate, soil, laws, religion, wealth — and, above all, leisure.¹

But what does “human nature” ... consist in, and how much of it is left when it is separated from the web of customs, manners, culture it has elaborately spun about itself?

— Edith Wharton, “The Great American Novel”

To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.

— Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth