Women and Art in the Fiction of Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton's treatment of the artist has received considerable critical attention, particularly in light of her focus on male artists and the disparity between her early short stories that are dominated by tales about artists and her novels that center on other subjects. Some of these studies have looked at the writer as artist and Wharton's views on the art of writing. While such a focus can be justified by the numerous writers who people Wharton's fiction, it is instructive to examine other dimensions of her reference to art and artists, especially painting, as a way of illuminating the commentary on women's roles that pervades Wharton's work. Like other writers of her era, Wharton constructed many narratives around creative artists or linked her main characters to artistic endeavors in order to interrogate American culture, its materialism, its devaluation of art, and its restrictive sphere for women. It is my contention, however, that Wharton's concern with development of the female artist was subsumed in some of her novels by rhetorical techniques that used art as a sounding board for her social critiques. Specifically, she constructed pivotal scenes around paintings in the narrative and made subtle reference to prominent themes in Victorian artwork as ironic counterpoint to and illumination of the story being told. In this essay, I explore the way in which Wharton drew on artistic representations of women with deep cultural resonance for her audience that served to underscore her critique of Victorian mythology and to garner sympathy for the characters victimized by that mythology.

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