Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts

Studies in American Realism and Naturalism

by Emily J. Orlando

An insightful look at representations of women’s bodies and female authority. This work explores Edith Wharton's career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts--especially painting—as a medium for revealing the ways that women's bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantalized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed. Emily Orlando contends that while Wharton's early work presents women enshrined by men through art, the middle and later fiction shifts the seat of power to women. From Lily Bart in The House of Mirth to Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence , women evolve from victims to vital agents, securing for themselves a more empowering and satisfying relationship to art and to their own identities. Orlando also studies the lesser-known short stories and novels, revealing Wharton’s re-workings of texts by Browning, Poe, Balzac, George Eliot, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, most significantly, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts is the first extended study to examine the presence in Wharton's fiction of the Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting of Rossetti and his muses, notably Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Morris. Wharton emerges as one of American literature's most gifted inter-textual realists, providing a vivid lens through which to view issues of power, resistance, and social change as they surface in American literature and culture.

Genres: Literary Criticism

280 pages, Hardcover

First published January 14, 2007

Reviews

[thestarsailor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This work brings together a lot more context to the Gilded Age Wharton was pulling from with writing her works, specifically the ideas and obsession with paintings and their representation of women as the basis for this upper class culture, which restricted women even though they would appear more free than women in lower classes. Edith Wharton is known for being this independent female artist at a time when that was never allowed in Anglo-American high society, and writing books about women who were never as successful in obtaining this freedom as she was. She maintains such a focus throughout her work, but there is never "a happy ending", always some catch or compromise that keeps a woman subservient of some desire to men in some manner. These paintings are always referenced in Wharton's books in some way and refer to the condition of the protagonists, generally anti-Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and pro-French naturalism as the means of progressing women's liberation.