Antimodernism and Looking Pretty: Wharton’s Artistic Practice

Abstract

In James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Stephen Dedalus declares that “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning” (247). A few years later, in This Side of Paradise (1920), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s alter ego Amory Blaine finds “no God in his heart…yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams” (282). He states, “I know myself…, but that is all.” With the rise of the modernists came the figure of the isolated artist, young, tormented, and disillusioned but blessed with a mystical insight into life and a superhuman ability to create. He was undoubtedly male. By definition, a writer such as Edith Wharton was excluded from the elite club of artists. She herself did not define an artist in this way, however, and her stridency against modernism no doubt comes in part from her anger at what she saw as an idealistic, misogynist, misanthropic, and extremely narrow definition of “the artist.”