Critics of Edith Wharton frequently discuss the material culture that pervades her work, but the trend in doing so has been to rush past the things themselves and engage in abstracted conversations of theory. I would like to suggest that a closer scrutiny of the individual objects being presented in Wharton’s novels can highlight Wharton’s own theoretical approaches to material culture. Working from Bill Brown's distinction between objects and things, I want to argue that Wharton firmly situates the material culture in The Age of Innocence in the background of her characters' lives as objects which they utilize as extensions of the self; but she brings the thingness of material culture to the forefront in Twilight Sleep, where the material culture in the novel alternately stands out and malfunctions, as characters attempt—and fail—to construct coherent and livable identities for themselves in the face of a 1920s New York that Wharton depicts as a paradoxically over-furnished wasteland. I will ultimately argue that things, problematic as they are, become a matter of survival strategy for her characters in Twilight Sleep when they utilize them to reconstruct the social relations that have become increasingly threatened from the world of The Age of Innocence. / text

This thesis argues that Edith Wharton’s assessment of American ways and their meaning in her post-war fiction has been widely misread. Its title derives from French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), which she wrote to educate her countrymen about French culture and society. Making sense of America was as great a challenge to Wharton. Much of her later fiction was for a long time dismissed by critics on the grounds that she had failed to ‘make sense’ of America. Wharton was troubled by American materialism and optimism, yet she believed in a culturally significant future for her nation. She advocated – and wrote – an American fiction that looked critically at society and acknowledged the nation’s ties to Europe. Sometimes her assessment of American ways is reductive, and presented in a tone that her critics, then and since, found off- putting and snobbish. But her skepticism about American modernity was penetrating and prophetic, and has not been given its due. In criticism over the last two decades, a case for the place of Wharton’s post-war fiction in canons of feminism and modernism has been persuasively made. The thesis responds to these positions, but makes its own argument that the post-war writing reflects broader shift in American identity and ideology. The thesis is broadly historicist in its strategy, opening with a discussionofthereputationofthesetextsandthatoftheauthormoregenerally. Afterthat entry-point, it is organized thematically, with four chapters covering topics that are seen as key components of American ideology in Wharton’s post-war writing. These include modernity, gender equality, the American Dream of social mobility, and American exceptionalism. The thesis concludes with an assessment of Wharton’s prognostications in the context of twenty-first century America.