Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts

An insightful look at representations of womens bodies and female authority.This work explores Edith Whartons careerlong concern with a 19thcenturyvisual cultur... » 

An insightful look at representations of womens bodies and female authority.This work explores Edith Whartons careerlong concern with a 19thcenturyvisual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Whartonrepeatedly invoked the visual artsespecially paintingas a medium forrevealing the ways that womens bodies have been represented as passivesexualized infantalized sickly dead. Wellversed in the Italian mastersWharton made special use of the art of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhoodparticularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women butinstead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed.Emily Orlando contends that while Whartons early work presents women enshrinedby men through art the middle and later fiction shifts the seat of power towomen. From Lily Bart in The House of Mirth to Undine Spragg in The Customof the Country and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence women evolve fromvictims to vital agents securing for themselves a more empowering andsatisfying relationship to art and to their own identities.Orlando also studies the lesserknown short stories and novels revealingWhartons reworkings of texts by Browning Poe Balzac George Eliot SirJoshua Reynolds and most significantly Dante Gabriel Rossetti. EdithWharton and the Visual Arts is the first extended study to examine thepresence in Whartons fiction of the PreRaphaelite poetry and painting ofRossetti and his muses notably Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Morris. Whartonemerges as one of American literatures most gifted intertextual realistsproviding a vivid lens through which to view issues of power resistance andsocial change as they surface in American literature and culture.Emily J. Orlando is Assistant Professor of American Literature at TennesseeState University. «