Edith Wharton's 1913 novel The Custom of the Country reveals a national concern with defining and preserving authenticity in social and cultural life. A study of the novel through the lens of scholarship concerning the modernist obsession with "the real thing," including such seminal texts as Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity, opens up a broad discussion of authenticity and imitation as defined by Wharton's characters. This paper challenges the traditional interpretations of the much-abused term. First, I outline a brief history of the study of authenticity in art and literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing how realist writers like Wharton were influenced by the ideal of cultural and literary reality. Then I discuss the obsession with "the real thing" by all the characters in The Custom of the Country, both low- and high-born, and how the term influences the development of the plot. Finally, I reveal the vexed nature of the term "authenticity" in the novel, showing how the nouveau riche wrest aura from the old aristocratic class, and how they appropriate the power necessary to define "the real thing" on their own terms.

Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather are often mentioned together as traditionalists, the supposition being that their common interest was inspired by similar forces; all women, all of the same era, all greatly appreciative of many of the same values, and all doing most of their outstanding work during their middle and late years. It has become a convenience of criticism and scholarship to consider authors as belonging to certain schools. It has also been a convenience to study the origins of these schools as social phenomena having more to do with a direction of society as a whole than with individual psychological forces within each author. Such an approach may be adequate for a movement that rises to its apex and dwindles to a shadow all within one generation--as did the extreme Naturalism of Norris--, but it is not sufficient for traditionalism which has repeated itself several times throughout literary history. It is, therefore, the purpose of this study to investigate the lives and works of Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather in order to demonstrate the different forces tending each towards vastly different tradition-influenced work, specifically novels. In such treatment, each author can be presented individually in a brief biographical study, and then her novels can be discussed with her own psychological framework and the whole field of traditionalism kept in mind as a balance. The emphasis here will be upon the diverse influences in their lives and the extremely varied work these differences motivated. Traditionalism will not be exactly defined because this paper has been undertaken with the hope of broadening rather than limiting the concept of "traditionalism." It is the intention here to investigate and evaluate both the intent and extent of the various degrees and elements of traditionalism as they appear in the bulk of these authors' novels.

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The Age of Innocence is an opera based on the 1920 novel by Edith Wharton. Set in New York high society of the 1870's, it tells the story of Newland Archer, a young lawyer, his fiancée May Welland, and her cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, who has returned to her native New York in an aura of scandal, having left her husband, the dissolute Polish Count Olenski, in Europe. Although Archer and Ellen fall in love, he nevertheless follows the expectations of his family and marries the lovely but conventional May. For her part, while she sees a life with Archer as an escape from her loneliness, Ellen cannot allow herself to betray her cousin, insisting that she and Archer can love each other only if they remain apart. This love triangle is unique because of the social pressures placed upon Archer: he is a product of New York society, which has taught him to believe in the factitious idea of female innocence, as personified by May. Though he questions this and other conventions of his society, he is unable to bring himself to abandon the safety of these social norms that govern every aspect of proper behavior in New York. It is Archer's love for Ellen that prompts him to challenge these standards, pointing out New York's hypocrisy in welcoming May's cousin back to America while at the same time treating her as a pariah for abandoning her husband in Europe. None of their objections to Ellen is explicitly stated, however, for this is a world which has a morbid fear of "the unpleasant"--that is, anything that would disturb the calm surface of society's politesse and social grace. It comes as no surprise, then, that Archer's desire for Ellen (especially after he marries May), becomes a potential social nightmare for his family and all of New York, as they ruthlessly plot to drive the two apart, and send Ellen back to Europe. The main challenge in creating an opera out of this story, in addition to streamlining a lengthy and complex plot, was to delineate both in the libretto and the music the realms of the said and unsaid--that is, what the characters say in public, and what they say to themselves or to others that represents their innermost feelings. In the libretto, this was achieved by drawing upon Wharton's dialogue and narration in the novel in order to create these private and public utterances, in the form of recitatives, arias, duets, or ensemble pieces. The language of the libretto has been fashioned to serve these different musical forms, with dialogue from the novel employed in moments of recitative; and freely-metered verse, with a modest use of rhyme, for the "numbers" of the opera. The music, meanwhile, employs a system of codes to define the realms of the said and unsaid--motives, sonorities and key relationships that bring into focus the interactions of the characters, especially Archer, Ellen and May as their drama plays out under the ever-watchful eyes of New York society. The music has also been rendered to bring out the stresses and meter of the text, and heighten the import of the words as sung by a particular character. I have attempted in my opera to bring to life the timeless themes of Wharton's novel: unfulfilled love, the individual versus society, the potential corrupting influence of desire, and the moral choices that human beings face as they wrestle with these common issues. Opera, through the language of music, is one of the few art forms capable of fully realizing these themes in a dramatic context--in this sense, it is just as relevant to our time as it was to Wharton's, and therefore remains a viable medium for the twenty-first-century composer. / Music Composition / Accompanied by one .pdf file.

The language of flowers was a popular phenomenon in the United States in the nineteenth century. This dissertation on American literature looks at several American women authors’ use of the language of flowers in their novels. I examine the use of the language of flowers in Margaret Fuller’s “Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” “Yuca Filamentosa,” and poetry such as “To Sarah,” Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons, Edith Wharton’s Summer, Mary Austin’s Santa Lucia: A Common Story and Cactus Thorn, and Susan Glaspell’s The Verge. Through analysis of language of flowers dictionaries, historical studies of the language of flowers, feminist history and theory, and close readings of the sketches, poems, novels, and plays themselves, I will show that American women continued to use and be influenced by the language of f lowers for close to a decade. I will also show that these women writers’ use of the language of flowers shows evolving social attitudes toward women and standards of femininity in American society during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century.

In this essay I plan to show how Wharton, through Lily, criticised society, and more specifically its expectations of women. My thesis is that Wharton and her character Lily exposed the upper class society of New York, and its ruthlessness, by voicing a woman’s point of view. Therefore, the main purpose here is to reveal the complexity of the lives women led in order to fulfil society’s expectations and I thereby plan to explore what it was like living in a world governed by strict rules of conduct.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (January 13, 2010) Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-57)

The House of Mirth's main character, Lily Bart, is charaterized a fated character, incapable of exerting free will. With the help of Lawrence Selden and Gerty Farish, she realizes that, for the most part, she has lived and acted according to what others expect of her.

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