the life and times of edith wharton

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The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

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The Life and Times of Edith Wharton. SOCIAL CLASS & WEALTH SOCIAL FORMS & CONVENTIONS Freedom of the Individual Role of Women Bildungsroman. wealth, privilege, multiple marriages, society snobs, exclusion and elitism, scandals and affairs, of fads and fashions, and above all, ‘looking pretty’. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Page 1: The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

Page 2: The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

SOCIAL CLASS & WEALTH

SOCIAL FORMS & CONVENTIONS

Freedom of the Individual

Role of Women

Bildungsroman

Page 3: The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

wealth, privilege

, multiple marriag

es, society snobs,

exclusion and

elitism, scandals

and affairs, of fads

and fashions,

and above

all, ‘looking pretty’.

Page 4: The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

“There is a tyranny in large cities of what is known as

the ‘fashionable set’, formed of people willing to spend money; who make a

sort of alliance, offensive and defensive; who have

give balls and parties and keep certain people out,”

Mrs John Sherwood, Manners and Social Usages (1903)

Page 5: The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

Julius Beaufort & Mrs Lemuel

Struthers infiltrate the

social circles of the Mingotts and van der Luydens.

‘Old Money’ vs.‘Nouveaux Riches’

Page 6: The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

society of ‘precise and inflexible rituals’

principles of ‘social amenity’ &‘financial incorruptibility’

SocialForm

Page 7: The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

“Every one (including Mr. Sillerton Jackson) was agreed that old Catherine had never had beauty—a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified

every success, and excused a certain number of failings.”

(Ch 2, 11)

Page 8: The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

The subject was avoided as though it were a kind of family disgrace, which might be condoned but not forgotten.

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

Page 9: The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

Her ‘intellectually unimaginative husband and

their predictable, possibly sexless married life began to

drain her spirits’ (Penguin).

‘The affair dazzled and tormented her, as the elusive Fullerton drifted off, between

his other complicated liaisons.’ (Knights)

Page 10: The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

Her fiction would later reflect a concern with the

survival of an entire community (Wolff). Wharton

saw writing Age as a ‘retreat to childish

memories of a long-vanished America’.

Page 11: The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

Wharton’s title implies a lost pre-war world. It also suggests a

connection between the America of fifty years ago and the America of [1920], which

she so often complains about for its infantilism, naive

optimism, and parochialism.Hermione Lee, ‘The Age of Innocence’, Edith Wharton

Page 12: The Life and Times of Edith Wharton

The novel’s protagonist, Newland Archer, embodies Wharton’s origins: he is an

isolated misfit.

The object of Newland’s grand passion, Ellen

Olenska, is the person Wharton became: the self-

sufficient exile, the survivor of a disastrous

and disillusioning marriage, the New York-

born European free spirit.