Shanghai International Studies University
A Naturalistic Study of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth
And Ethan Frome
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate School
In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for
Degree of Master of Arts
By
Liu Menghua
Under Supervision of Professor Wu Qiyao
May 2010
Acknowledgement
I gratefully acknowledge all those persons who have assisted me in the process
of completing my graduate thesis. But for their help, this thesis would have been
hardly possible.
First and foremost, my primary indebtedness goes to professor Wu Qiyao, my
supervisor, who has given me invaluable advice and help in my thesis writing. I
would like to extend my gratitude for his immense patience, professional suggestions
and constant encouragement, which enable me to complete this thesis.
My thankfulness also goes to my friends and fellow students, especially Hu
Mengying and Ye Ling, who have supported me and inspired me with their boundless
knowledge and enthusiasm in research during my journey of thesis writing.
Finally, I am obliged to my parents, who have in the past two years given me
consistent support that makes the paper possible.
Abstract
Edith Wharton is one of the towering figures in the American literary world at
the beginning of the 20th century. In her long career, which stretched about sixty years,
Wharton had published seventeen novels, seven novelettes, eleven volumes of short
stories, and numerous miscellaneous works in which she portrayed a fascinating
picture of the American life. As the author of numerous best-selling award-winning
works, Wharton has inspired many other authors in terms of novels, short stories,
poems, bibliography and traveling and nonfiction essays. Her creation is still of
importance for what it reveals about a particular time and place in American culture.
Though not generally regarded as a naturalistic novelist, Wharton frequently
explores the collision between love and authority, the confrontation between
forbidden conventions and personal fulfillment, as well as the doomed struggles under
a restrictive and isolated environment in her works. In fact, the central motif of
entrapped and isolated individuals and emotions is so remarkably intermingled with
the course of Wharton’s literary career that she often devotes her own life experience
into her novels.
This thesis tries to make a rudimentary study on the naturalism reflected in the
protagonists of The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome, two of Wharton’s highly
acclaimed masterpieces. Neither Lily in The House of Mirth nor Ethan in Ethan
Frome could pull themselves out of the realm of the ruthless natural and social
environment, hereditary and uncontrolled force of fate and chance. This thesis
analyzes the factors of naturalism in the two representing novels and by doing so, it
means to get a better knowledge of Wharton’s understanding of the relationship
between the universe and the individual, thus making some contribution to the study
of Wharton in China.
Key words: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, Naturalism
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摘要
伊迪丝·华顿是 20 世纪初美国文坛上最杰出的作家之一。在长达 60 年的文
学生涯中，她创作发表了 17 部长篇小说，7 部中篇小说，11 本短篇小说集，以
及数量众多的杂文集。在她的作品中，华顿生动地描绘了 20 世纪初期纽约上流
社会的生活以及该生活圈的塌陷过程。作为一个畅销作家，她的小说、诗歌、自
传、散文等常常成为他人文学创作的灵感源泉。她在作品中为我们展示的 20 世
纪初的美国社会文化，至今仍有深刻的研究意义。
虽然评论界不把华顿归为自然主义作家之列，但读者在她的作品中却不难发
现她的自然主义倾向。华顿在其作品中不遗余力地探索个人情感与权力之间的对
立、个人追求与社会契约之间的矛盾、以及个人在压抑的环境中注定失败的斗争。
事实上，华顿常常将个人的生活情感经历注入她的作品中。
“人性与情感的压抑”
这一主题始终贯穿于华顿的创作生涯当中。
本文从华顿的生平出发，试图通过研究华顿的两部最受推崇的作品——《欢
乐之家》和《伊坦·弗洛美》，来探讨华顿的自然主义倾向。无论是《欢乐之家》
中的莉莉，还是《伊坦·弗洛美》中的伊坦，都逃脱不了无情的环境与命运的制
约。通过对这两部小说的分析，本文旨在揭示华顿这位杰出作家对环境与个人关
系的关注与思考，从而为华顿研究在中国的发展起到一点填补作用。
关键字： 伊迪丝·华顿、《欢乐之家》、《伊坦·弗洛美》、自然主义
ii
Contents
Acknowledgement
Abstract ............................................................................................................................ i
摘要................................................................................................................................. ii
Introduction......................................................................................................................1
Chapter I Literary Naturalism and Its Influence on Edith Wharton ................................7
1.1 General Introduction to Naturalism ...........................................................................7
1.2 Influence of Naturalism on Edith Wharton..............................................................10
Chapter II The Wilting of Lily in The House of Mirth...................................................12
2.1 Lily: A “Highly Specialized Object” in a Marketplace of “Fair-play” ....................13
2.2 Lily: A Martyr for the “Republic of Spirit” .............................................................18
Chapter III A Beautiful Nightmare in Ethan Frome ......................................................24
3.1 The Collapse of Ethan under Deterministic Environment .......................................25
3.2 Doomed Failure of Ethan’s Struggle for Escape......................................................30
Conclusion .....................................................................................................................34
Works Cited....................................................................................................................38
Introduction
Edith Wharton is one of the most distinguished American writers at the turn of
the 20th century. Her literary career begins with the publication of The House of Mirth
(1905) and culminates with the award of Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence
(1920). During her literary years, she published more than forty works, including
short stories, novellas, novels, poems, essays, autobiography and travel books, among
which, The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome (1911) are
regarded by most critics as her highest achievements. She is the first woman who was
awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University and won the gold
medal from the national art academy.
Edith Wharton was born during the Civil War – in 1862 – into a distinguished
New York family. Her parents, George Frederic and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, were
members of the society that had dominated New York from the Dutch and English
colonial era. She was privately educated by a series of governess on both sides of the
Atlantic and self-taught in her father’s library. At an early age, young Wharton
showed an outstanding intellect and an ardent love for books, which was thought to be
unsuitable for a woman of her social status because at that time, the ultimate goal for
women’s education was to secure a wealthy husband and “to marry well was viewed
as the highest aspiration of the woman of the idle rich” (Mirth 3). Her dominating and
unsympathetic mother tried to prevent her from writing and pushed her out on to the
marriage market for a rich husband. After two abortive romances, in 1885, when she
was twenty-three, Edith married Edward Wharton, of proper family and twelve years
her senior. The couple shared an interest in travel but were otherwise incompatible.
For a while, Wharton seemed to have been content in her role as wife. Within a few
years, however, the marriage became unhappy. Then in 1894, Wharton suffered a
physic breakdown and was confined to a hospital. Partly to relax her nervous
condition and partly to relieve the unhappiness of her marriage, Wharton turned to
writing, though sporadically at first. In 1897 she co-authored a book titled The
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Decoration of Houses with architect Ogden Codman, Jr. Her next publication was a
collection of short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899). She published The Valley
of Decision (1902) when she met her life-long friend and instructor Henry James.
Three years later, the publication of The House of Mirth established Wharton’s
reputation as a skilled novelist. During her lifetime, she published over forty books,
the most well known of which include The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and the
Pulitzer-winning The Age of Innocence.
Wharton and her husband got divorced in 1913. After divorce, Wharton settled
permanently in France, where she found intellectual companionship in circles where
artists and writers mingled with the rich and the well-born, and where women played
a major role. At her Paris apartment and her garden home, she played host to a
modernist group. Among her friends were Henry James, Percy Lubbock (who became
her first biographer), Walter Berry and Bernard Berenson. When the First World War
broke out in 1914, Wharton dedicated herself to the charitable work and created
hostels, schools, workrooms, and various supporting services for women and children
refugees from northeastern France and Belgium. Her first war book, Fighting France
(1915), was drawn from her visit to the western front to deliver food and hospital
supplies. Her late works were intended to raise the consciousness of Americans to the
devastating effects of the war on the civilian populations. Edith Wharton died in 1937
in France after suffering a stroke. 1
Edith Wharton is one of the towering figures in the literary world of America at
the beginning of the twentieth century. “A consummate stylist and astute critic of late
nineteenth- and early twentieth- century American social life” 2 , Wharton often
plunged herself into the depiction of the upper class New York society she belonged
to. But she was also able to observe the farmers of New England, whose ways and
world she described in her best-known novella Ethan Frome. Her protagonists, such
1
The basic information about Edith Wharton’s life experiences and achievements is mainly from the following
sources:
Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Wharton “Edith Wharton”
2
Cf. Singley, Carol J., “Introduction.” A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Ed. Carol J. Singley. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003. 3
2
as Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and the charming but
ineffectual Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, are some of the most memorable in
American literature. Often portrayed as tragic victims of cruel social conventions,
they are trapped in bad relationships or confining circumstances. Her works are often
centered on the motifs of ill-fated love, individual’s desire versus society’s convention,
the discrepancy between ability and personal fulfillment, and the tension between
preservation and reform, between tradition and innovation. Wharton often wrote from
her personal experience. She constantly sought new experiences through reading,
writing, travel, and friendships.
Because of the focus on women in most of her major fiction and her affinity with
Henry James, for years, Wharton’s writings have been scrutinized from the
perspective of feminism or her connection to Henry James. The first attempt to free
Wharton from the conventional criticism was made by Blake Nevius. He argued in
Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction that Lily Bart, in The House of Mirth, was “as
completely and typically the product of her heredity, environment, and the historical
moment … as the protagonist of any recognized naturalistic novel” (57). Though he
failed to further his research in this aspect, he was the first to observe the naturalistic
inclination in Wharton’s works. Indeed, Wharton was a staunch follower of naturalism
and its particular way of expressing and interpreting the world was an enduring
influence on Wharton’s literary creation. In the short stories, as well as in novels like
The House of Mirth, Ethan From and The Age of Innocence, the major motif of
naturalism that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in
shaping human character can be clearly traced in the storyline and the personalities of
the characters, and the influence of the naturalistic writers on Wharton is plain in her
choice of words, use of language and narration method.
The works to be researched in this paper include The House of Mirth and Ethan
Frome, both tragic novels, dealing with the appalling sufferings of the protagonists.
The protagonists in the two novels are both helpless and insignificant in the face of
the indifferent natural and social environment. In both of the two works, naturalism is
indicated by the combination of natural and social environment, heredity and
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uncontrollable maneuver of chance.
As the book The House of Mirth unveils itself, we come to know the story of a
girl – Lily Bart, who struggles for her ideal life in the ruthless, mercenary and morally
bankrupted New York leisure-class society. As a young woman from an old New York
family ruined by financial bankruptcy, she is caught between her love of beauty and
luxury and her moral fastidiousness. If she marries the man she loves she would live
in what to her would be physical squalor; but if she marries a man she does not love in
order to get the material things essential to her sense of well being, she would violate
her deepest nature. She manages to salvage her moral integrity but slides into poverty
and, then, death. Edith Wharton’s effort in The House of Mirth to “excoriate the nexus
between sex and money in turn-of-the-century upper-class New York life and to reveal
the tragic effects of a society of this kind upon a sensitive young woman 1 ” is clearly
mirrored through her treatment of the subject matter.
The old New York Lily lives in is a place bent on money-making and
pleasure-seeking, where things have replaced ideas and money has replaced the soul.
Trapped in such a circumstance, our heroine Lily, beautiful, provocative and fragile,
realizes that a secure future only depends on her acquiring a wealthy husband. But
such endeavor is doomed to fail partly due to her inadaptability and partly because of
her scrape of moral consciousness. More a tale of social exclusion than of failed love,
The House of Mirth reveals Wharton’s compelling gifts as a storyteller and her
clear-eyed observations of the savagery beneath the well-bred surface of high society.
Published in 1911, Ethan Frome was wildly regarded as the most popular of
Wharton’s novels. She wrote it in a time of despair over her husband and her marriage,
over her relationship to Walter Berry and her love affair with Morton Fullerton. And
the novel is permeated with such pessimism of “doomed love and frozen emotions” 2 .
It is also quite a departure for Edith Wharton, who always devoted her works into the
depiction of the New York upper-class society, in that the main characters of this
1
Cf. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_n2_v41/ai_17861988/?tag=content;col1 “The naturalism of
Edith Wharton’s ‘House of Mirth’” by Donal Pizer.
2
Cf. Benstock, Shari. “Edith Wharton: A Brief Biography.” A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Ed. Carol J.
Singley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 39
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story are poor and simple people in the Massachusetts back country, instead of her
usual New York socialites. Set against a bleak background, the novel tells the story of
Frome, his ailing wife Zeena and her companion Mattie Silver and the tragic
imprisonment of the characters.
Unlike The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome is very short,
and the plot is not complicated. Yet within such a minimal number of strokes,
Wharton shows her great talent as a meticulous observer of human nature. There is
one thing that signals this novel for special attention. She wrote an introduction to it,
which was something she had refused to do for any of her novels, wherein she
explained her authorial choices. Instead of enumerating of the “sweet-fern, asters and
mountain-laurel”, she chose to depict the “outcropping granite” that had often been
“overlooked” (Frome viii). Although as a member of the upper class society, Wharton
never had any chance to get a thorough look at the life of the poor farmers, her
sensitivity to natural beauty and her perception of human psychology make the novel
a convincing and powerful portrait of rural life.
With a focus on Edith Wharton’s naturalistic inclination and her talent in
manipulating tragic art, this thesis intends to examine two of her major works: The
House of Mirth and Ethan Frome, and to study the naturalistic thoughts expressed in
her novels by textual analysis and the exterior and interior causes of her naturalistic
views by historical study. This thesis is divided into tree main parts besides an
introduction and a conclusion. Chapter One is a brief introduction of literary
naturalism and its influence on Edith Wharton. It explores the socioeconomic
background of literary naturalism and its impact on Edith Wharton. Chapter Two is
the text-oriented analysis of one of Wharton’s most acclaimed works, The House of
Mirth. Arranged by one topic, “The Wilting of Lily”, this part tracks the downfall of
the ravishing heroine. Chapter Three is dedicated to the analysis of Wharton’s another
masterpiece Ethan Frome. It aims to explore the root causes of Ethan’s collapse: the
devastating natural elements, the suffocating social settings, and the protagonist’s
characteristics of passiveness, conformity, inarticulateness and self-isolation.
With textual analysis and historical study, this thesis tries to explore the
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naturalistic characteristics of Edith Wharton’s fictions and her understandings of
naturalism mirrored through her stories of touching and shocking love tragedies. By
reading biographic and other materials of the author, I try to give a reasonable
explanation the naturalistic significance of her works so as to make some contribution
to the study of Edith Wharton in China.
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Chapter I Literary Naturalism and Its Influence
On Edith Wharton
Naturalism, as a creative current of thought and a prominent literary movement
emerged in the late 19th century, has been a contentious term ever since its
introduction into literature, for there are various opinions and consistent debates over
its definition and impact on literary development. An established definition of
naturalism is “the idea that art and literature should present the world and people just
as science shows they really are” (High 87). In other words, naturalism reflects the
attempt to apply the scientific principles of Darwinism and social Darwinism to the
study of human beings. Naturalism is an extension of Realism. “Realism involved the
literary attempt to write an objective narrative, to depict the outside world as honestly
and truthfully as possible. Naturalism carried realism one step further, added a
biological and philosophical component to the writing of fiction, and stressed the
connection between literature and science” (Lehan 3). Naturalism may be better
understood by studying the basic precepts of that literary movement. The term
naturalism itself came from the French writer Emile Zola. Naturalists believe that
one’s heredity and social environment determine one’s character. In the United States,
the genre is associated principally with writers such as Abraham Cahan, Ellen
Glasgow, David Graham Phillips, John Steinbeck, and most prominently Stephen
Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser.
1.1 General Introduction to Naturalism
One of the most astonishing developments witnessed in the 19th century in the
fields of natural and social sciences is the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of
Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). Based on the achievements made by
his predecessors, Darwin extended the application of “natural philosophy” into the
field of biology and put forward the theory of evolution, setting off another upsurge in
scientific revolution and bringing forth heated debates in the areas of biology,
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philosophy, mythology and sociology. Citing evidences from numerous sources that
humans are animals, Darwin applied evolutionary theory to human evolution, and
detailed his theory of sexual selection, covering humankind’s descent from earlier
animals including evolution of society and of human mental abilities. Like other
living creatures, man was restricted by the same order of nature, and even the
intelligence and morality which differentiated man from other animals, were the result
of biological evolution.
This theory of evolution exerts a tremendous influence on the spirit and ideology
of the late 19th century and early 20th century. As a result of the exposure to
Darwinism, naturalism as a literary movement came into being in the late 19th century.
Literary naturalism first took root in France where it gained enormous momentum for
development. Emile Zola, an influential French writer and the first exponent of
naturalism (for this he is regared as the father of naturalism), brought forward the
well-defined and coherent theory of naturalism. He voiced his understanding on
naturalism in The Experimental Novel (1880) which is often cited by critics as the
manifesto of literary naturalism. He emphasized the naturalist novel being a kind of
experimental novel, in the sense that it was the product of the scientific revolution and
the naturalistic writer should dedicate himself to the documentary and scientific
exposition of human behavior, the dark harshness of life.
Following his tenet that novelist must function like a scientist, naturalists closely
observed scientifically the underlying forces – the environment or heredity –
influencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic works often include sordid subject
matter; for example, Emile Zola’s works had a frankness about sexuality along with a
pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including
poverty, racism, sex, prejudice, disease, prostitution, and filth. They looked at the
world around them and concluded that individuals have little or no agency, and the
environment destroys or nurtures as it sees fit. A person is either born to adapt or
made to fail. The free will, actions initiated by the self, the personal accomplishments
of goals, have been overwhelmed by the forces of economics, unconscious desires and
natural selection. In the United States, literary naturalism is often associated with the
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names of Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser. 1
To better understand naturalism in American literature, we need to put it into a
historical context. The second half of the 19th century, along with the termination of
the American Civil War, witnessed the unprecedented flourish of the American
capitalism, as exemplified by the gigantic development in industry and commerce.
With the expansion of the territory, the whole nation seemed to come to a period of
great success. A national transportation and communication network was created, the
corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial
revolution transformed business operations. By the beginning of the 20th century, per
capita income and industrial production in America exceeded that of any other
country except Britain. Behind the momentous economic advancement and the
seemingly ever-increased accumulation of wealth, however, lay the deep-rooted
chronic social illness. It was a “gilded age”, as remarked by Mark Twain, a period
glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. Alongside with the pursuit of wealth
and fame was the ever-fierce competition between individuals. The whole country
was just like a juggle full of fighting and struggling, where everybody wrestled
desperately and hysterically with each other, where traditional idealism was
abandoned, social instinct and morality were degraded and disintegrated. It was an era
of corruption, conspicuous consumption, and unfettered exploitation. The whole
nation presented a picture of human society illustrating Darwinists’s theory of
“struggle for living” and “survival of the fittest”.
This social reality provided a seedbed for the blossom of American naturalism.
Pessimistic about human capabilities, naturalistic writers abandoned the romantic
idealism of the Transcendentalism, and began to pick up a deterministic view toward
life. They applied the biological determinism to literary writing, believing that the
development of human being was also a process of biological evolution, so that man,
as an object existing in the nature, can be studied by objective scientific law. They
1
The basic information about naturalism is mainly from the following sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(literature) “Naturalism (literature)”
Lehan, Richard. Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2005.
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were frank and direct in the portrayal of human beings as animals driven by
fundamental urges – fear, hunger, sex, etc., believing that these were indispensable for
survival in a world of cruelty and bloodiness. They were usually honest and objective,
even documentary, in the presentation of the material. They often concentrated on the
non-Anglo, ethnically marked inhabitants of the growing American cities, many of
them immigrants and most belonging to a class-spectrum ranging from the destitute to
the lower middle-class.
1.2 Influence of Naturalism on Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton is not included in the list of naturalistic novelists by conventional
literary critics. And the critics’ long negligence of Wharton’s naturalistic inclination is
excusable. While naturalist fiction is often concentrated on the non-Anglo, the
destitute lower-class people, Wharton mainly focuses on the description of the upper
class New York society of which she herself was a member. Because of her affinity
with Henry James, throughout most of the twentieth century her reputation suffered
from excessive comparison to Henry James. And as she was preoccupied with women
and their problems, the feminist critics often tend to twist her work to fit their own –
perceptions.
It was not until 1953, the year when Blake Nevius published Edith Wharton: A
Study of Her Fiction did researchers began to notice the naturalistic elements in
Wharton’s novels. Nevius was the first one to observe that Lily Bart, in The House of
Mirth, is “as completely and typically the product of her heredity, environment, and
the historical moment … as the protagonist of any recognized naturalistic novel” (57),
though he failed to penetrate his study on Wharton’s naturalistic inclination. Indeed
Wharton was an ardent follower and admirer of Darwin. And her naturalistic tendency
has a historic basis. Wharton lived and wrote in a time of unprecedented social,
economic and political transformations. While Wharton was fascinated by the rapid
changes taking place in customs, family life, and material culture, she also possessed
a skeptical and largely disapproving perspective on the changing mores of her time. In
Wharton’s eyes, the erosion of traditional social orders and the rise of mass culture
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