Edith Wharton Panels at the American Literature Association in Boston

Thursday, May 26, 2011 4:30 – 5:50 pm

 Session 6-B Edith Wharton and the Aesthetic (Marriott Arlington)

Organized by the Edith Wharton Society

Chair: Gary Totten, North Dakota State University

1. “’Our Literary Aristocrat‘: Edith Wharton, Social Class, and The Writing of Fiction,” Julie Olin-Ammentorp, Le Moyne College

2. “Wharton, Atherton, and the Aesthetics of Age,” Melanie Dawson, College of William and Mary

3. “Wharton‘s Guide to Novel-writing: Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive,” Ann L. Patten, Trinity College Dublin

4. “Edith Wharton and the Problem of Progress,” Rafael Walker, University of Pennsylvania

Friday, May 27, 2011 9:40 – 11:00 am

Session 8-B Realism, Naturalism, and the Powers of Horror in Edith Wharton's Writing (Essex Center) Organized by the Edith Wharton Society

Chair: Meredith Goldsmith, Ursinus College

1. “Mountain Iconography: Charity's Uphill Descent in Edith Wharton's Summer,” Bill Hardwig, University of Tennessee

2. “Queering the Uncanny: The Psychic Vampire in Viereck's The House of the Vampire and Wharton's ‘The Eyes,’” Sharon Kehl Califano, Hesser College

3. “The "Habit(u)s and Tastes" of Edith Wharton's Gothic: Class, Ghosts, and Architecture in ‘Afterward‘ and ‘The Lady's Maid's Bell,‘“ Gillian Nelson Bauer, Loyola University Chicago

Friday, May 27, 2011

11:10 am – 12:30 pm

Session 9-N Business Meeting: Wharton Society (Parliament 7 th Floor)

Edith Wharton Sessions at MLA 2011, Los Angeles

Thursday, 06 January

101. Edith Wharton and Travel

3:30–4:45 p.m., Platinum Salon G, J. W. Marriott

Program arranged by the Edith Wharton Society and the Discussion Group on Travel Literature

Presiding: Gary Totten, North Dakota State Univ.

1. “The ‘Guide-Book Tourist’ versus ‘The Cultivated Minority of Travellers’ in Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing,” Frederick Wegener, California State Univ., Long Beach

2. “‘The Banalities and Promiscuities of Modern Travel’: Female Cosmopolitanism and Transnational Capital in Edith Wharton’s In Morocco,” Andrea Bebell, West Virginia Univ., Morgantown

3. “The Frenchwoman Dépaysée: Edith Wharton’s French Ways and Their Meaning, Gabrielle Landormy, and the Transnational Body,” Donna M. Campbell, Washington State Univ., Pullman

Respondent: Gary Totten

For abstracts, write to gary.totten@ndsu.edu.

Friday, 07 January

294. Edith Wharton on Rodeo Drive

1:45–3:00 p.m., Diamond Salon 7, J. W. Marriott

Program arranged by the Edith Wharton Society

Presiding: Margaret P. Murray, Western Connecticut State Univ.

1. “Intersections of Consumer Culture: ‘Twilight Sleep’ and ‘The Children’ in Pictorial Review,” Noreen O’Connor, King’s Coll.

2. “Jewelry and Women’s ‘Big Bribe’ in Wharton’s Twenties Novels,” Jenny Glennon, Univ. of Oxford

3. “From Wharton’s Lilies to Bushnell’s Lolas: Edith Wharton and the New Narcissism,” Emily J. Orlando, Fairfield Univ.

4. “The ‘Wanamaker Touch’ in Fiction,” Ann L. Patten, Univ. of Dublin, Trinity Coll.

Session 5-L Business Meeting: Edith Wharton Society

Session 12-I After Innocence: Late Edith Wharton

Organized by the Edith Wharton Society

Chair: Laura Rattray, University of Hull, UK

1.  “Edith Wharton’s ‘Book of the Grotesque’: Sherwood Anderson, Modernism, and the Late Stories,” Donna Campbell,  Washington State University

2. “Edith Wharton's Boom and Bust,” Jenny Glennon, University of Oxford

3.  “ Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive: Edith Wharton's American Odyssey,” Cecilia Macheski, LaGuardia  Community College, The City University of New York

4.  “‘ Land of Contrasts,’ Land of Art: Morocco and the Imagination of Edith Wharton,” Adam N. Jabbur,   University of Delaware

Audio-Visual Equipment Required: Projector for Powerpoint Presentation

Organized by the Edith Wharton Society

Chair: Gary Totten, North Dakota State University

1. “Shorthand for Style: Edith Wharton and Popular Women’s Magazines,” Jessica Schubert McCarthy, Washington State University

2. “Constructing Edith Wharton: Why the Popular Press Loves Wharton’s Houses,” Elif Armbruster, Suffolk University

3. “Edith Wharton Meets Aquaman: The Glimpses of the Moon and Imperiled Male Culture in Entourage,” Donna Campbell, Washington State University

Friday, May 23, 8:00-9:20 a.m. Session 7-M

Business Meeting: Edith Wharton Society (Pacific H)

Saturday, May 24, 2:00-3:20 p.m. Session 19-D Edith Wharton and Celebrity (Pacific F)

Organized by the Edith Wharton Society

Chair: Meredith Goldsmith, Ursinus College

1. “‘She only does it for the baby’: Intersections of Celebrity and Maternity in Edith Wharton’s Early Short Stories,” Alison Betts, University of Arizona

2. “‘Open to the public’: Secrets, Celebrity, and the Epistolary Afterlife in The Touchstone,” Cynthia Port, Coastal Carolina University

3. "Benevolent Fame: Edith Wharton's Celebrity and The Book of the Homeless," Kristina Huff, University of Delaware

Edith Wharton Sessions at MLA
Philadelphia, PA, December 27-30, 2006

Thursday, 28 December

163. Narcissism in Edith Wharton’s Works

10:15–11:30 a.m., Liberty Ballroom Salon B, Philadelphia Marriott

Program arranged by the Edith Wharton Society
Presiding: Margaret P. Murray, Western Connecticut State Univ.

1. “Narcissism and the Banality of Evil,” Linda Costanzo Cahir, Kean Univ.
2. “Denying Himself No Thing: Major Chris Fenno as the Cultural Psychoanalyst’s Aggressive Narcissist,” Kristin Lauer, Fordham Univ., Lincoln Center
3. “Looking into the Haunted Verge: Narcissism and Self-Recognition in Wharton’s Ghostly Tales,” Elsa Nettels, Coll. of William and Mary
4. “Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall: Self-Fixation and Inauthenticity in The Custom of the Country,” Frederick Wegener, California State Univ., Long Beach
5. “Narcissism for the Nation: Undine Spragg and Patriotism in The Custom of the Country,” Donna M. Campbell, Washington State Univ., Pullman

Edith Wharton Society Dinner

Saturday, 30 December

771. Nation, Race, and Citizenship in Edith Wharton’s Works

1:45–3:00 p.m., 303, Philadelphia Marriott

Program arranged by the Edith Wharton Society
Presiding: Donna M. Campbell, Washington State Univ., Pullman

1. “Domesticating the Europeanist Presence in The Age of Innocence,” Teresa Tavares, Univ. of Coimbra
2. “Edith Wharton’s Reading Nation(s) and the First World War,” Shafquat Towheed, Univ. of London
3. “American Orientalism, the Decoration of Houses, and Edith Wharton’s Late Novel of Manners,” Junehee Chung, DePaul Univ.

A short EWS business meeting will be held during this session at the end of the paper presentations.

Agenda items:

1. . Announcement of election results.
2. Announcement of the Edith Wharton Essay Prize winner.
3. Announcement of the Wharton Conference in June 2008 at the Mount.
4. Announcement of Edith Wharton Beinecke Research Awards program.
5. Vote on changes to the process of selecting the panel topic from the floor at MLA and ALA.
6. Selecting a topic from the floor for next year's MLA.
7. Other business, if any.

Edith Wharton Session at the ALA Symposium on American Fiction
Bahia Hotel and Resort, San Diego, CA
September 28-30, 2006

Chair: Margaret Murray, Western Connecticut State University

1. Mary Ruth Marotte- U of Central Arkansas- "The Birthing Body as Captive Body in Wharton's Twilight Sleep."
2. Kevin Grauke-La Salle U- "'The Whole World Has Become a Vast Escalator': Ethan Frome, Connoisseurship and the Fading of the Picturesque."
3. Meg Gillette-Augustana C-"The Coat Hanger in the Closet: Gossip, Secrets and Abortion in Wharton's Summer."
4. Meredith Goldsmith-Ursinus C- "'What's All This About Wanting?': Consumer Desire in Summer."

Edith Wharton Sessions at ALA 2006

Thursday, May 25, 2006
11:30am – 12:40pm

Session 3-E Terror and Evil in Edith Wharton’s Works (Pacific Concourse E)
Organized by the Edith Wharton Society

Chair: Carole Shaffer-Koros, Kean University

1. “The Fall of the House of Marvell: Ralph’s Suicide in Wharton’s The Custom of the Country,” Beverly Hume, Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne

2. “Justice from Edith Wharton: The Silent Revenge of ‘Kerfol’,” Margaret Murray, Western Connecticut State University

3. “The Terror of Loneliness in ‘Miss Mary Pask’,” Helen Killoran, Ohio State University

4. “Haunted Crime: Terror and Evil in Edith Wharton’s ‘All Souls’,” Jacqueline Wilson-Jordan, Western Illinois University

Thursday, May 25, 2006
1:00pm – 2:20pm

Session 4-K Business Meeting: Edith Wharton Society (Pacific Concourse H)

All (even non-EWS members) are invited to attend. One panel for next year's ALA session will be chosen from topics presented from the floor; the proposer will chair the panel. Chairs are expected to join the EWS before the next ALA convention if they are not already members. Those proposing topics are encouraged to check the list of topics from previous sessions so that their suggestions will not repeat the subjects of previous panels.

Friday, May 26, 2006
5:00pm – 6:20pm

Session 15-D Physicality in Edith Wharton’s Fiction (Pacific Concourse D)
Organized by the Edith Wharton Society

Chair: Hildegard Hoeller, College of Staten Island, City University of New York

1. “‘Jails, Institutions, or Death’: Lily Bart as Addict,” Edie Thornton, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater

2. “The Silent Speech of Cross-Class Desire in The House of Mirth,” Melissa Strong, University of California, Davis

3. “No Limits: An Analysis of Undine Spragg’s Source of Energy in The Custom of the Country,” Min-Jung Lee, Florida State University

MLA 2005

502. Wharton, Science, and Technology

3:30–4:45 p.m., Park Tower Suite 8219, Marriott

Program arranged by the Edith Wharton Society

Presiding: Laura Ruth Saltz, Colby Coll.

1. “Trains, Pains, and Scenes of Emotional Harm: Edith Wharton on the Railroad,” Jennifer Travis, Saint John's Univ., NY

Wharton’s Ethan Frome foregrounds the underlying tensions between agrarian and industrial America, from the failing farm that Ethan struggles to keep afloat, a failure which is presented in and against the success of merchants like Dennis Eady and Ned Hale, to Ethan's own missed chance at becoming a professional engineer. So too is the railroad that passes in and out of town a barometer of technological advance, and importantly, of psychological decline in the novel. Ethan notes that with the coming of the railroad when he was a young man the local traffic of friends and neighbors ceased. Townspeople no longer passed by his house, paying visit to his mother immobilized with rheumatism. It is the isolation ironically inflicted by the mechanism meant to collapse the distance between people that causes Mrs. Frome to turn "queer": "after the trains began running nobody ever come by here to speak of, and mother never could get it through her head what happened, and it preyed on her right along till she died" (8). Ethan's cousin Zeena, called in to care for his mother, traveled to the Fromes by that same railroad from a village larger and "nearer to the railway" than Starkfield (29). Soon after his mother's death, when Ethan and Zeena decide to marry, he thinks she will be eager to move to a larger town; yet, purchasers for the farm are "slow in coming," and Ethan learns that "in the greater cities which attracted Ethan," Zeena "would have suffered a complete loss of identity" (30). Within a year, the reader is told, Zeena "developed [her] 'sickliness'" (30). In a gesture against anonymity, Ethan and Zeena do not leave Starkfield with the rest of those who boarded the railroad out. Indeed, the railroad and the transforming technological world that once offered Ethan passage from his dreary circumstances come to plague Ethan, as his mother, and, subsequently, Zeena, are estranged in this world, while Ethan himself loses the skills he needs to participate in it. The novel enters this alienation and explores the repercussions and manifestations of its transforming technologies: injuries to the psyche.

The discourse about injury that sprung up in relation to the railroad gave writers such as Wharton, as well as lawyers, medical professionals, and industry men new analytic terrain upon which the injured body and, crucially, the injured psyche, would become a valid subject for recognition, protection, and quite often, recompense. This paper examines the role of the railroad reconceptualizing the meaning of suffering and injury in the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that Wharton used the railroad and the language of injury that it inspired as a vehicle through which to rethink and rewrite woundedness in Ethan Frome. Wharton’s novel asks readers to extend their capacity for acknowledging pain and injury in an increasingly anonymous and impersonal world. Judging and quantifying pain were fundamental to the development of an industrial nation. Not only readers and critics, but beyond the novel, psychologists, lawyers, and judges, among others, were asked to accommodate and account for the seeming proliferation of pain. Wai Chee Dimock calls this “quantify[ing] sentience”; there was great cultural need, beginning in the nineteenth century, “to come up with something like a calculus of pain.” Edith Wharton writes Ethan Frome precisely within this calculus, at a time when not only literary critics, but also law courts and corporations alike questioned whether lay persons could expand their capacity to understand suffering and to compensate injuries to body and mind. Wharton’s response to debates about industry, technology, and injury are at the heart of Ethan Frome.

2. “Measuring ‘The Distance the World Has Travelled': The Science of Technology and Time in The Age of Innocence ,” Betsy Klimasmith, Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston

3. “Technologies of Uplift: Race and Beauty in Twilight Sleep ,” Gary Totten, North Dakota State Univ.

Recent criticism on Wharton as a race writer, most notably by Elizabeth Ammons, Dale Bauer, Jennie Kassanoff, and Augusta Rohrbach, has emphasized the ways in which discourses of race permeate her work. As Kassanoff has noted, “race is the missing but historically crucial component complicating progressive interpretations of Wharton’s project” (61). Additionally, scholars have become increasingly concerned with Wharton’s attitude toward technology, particularly as it relates to the relationships between social life, human bodies, and machines, the “relays between the natural and the technological” that Mark Seltzer has termed the “American body-machine complex” (3). Race and technology become paired concerns in Wharton’s Jazz Age novel, Twilight Sleep (1927), where the ideologies which inform the technologies through which Pauline Manford approaches the issue of bodily uplift also inform the way she thinks about and acts upon the issue of uplifting the race.

We might term Pauline’s interest in the technologies of body and race as “technologies of the self,” Foucault’s term for the specific ways in which subjects are constructed within and through a society’s power structures. Through such technologies, subjectivity is both consumed and regulated, illustrated in the novel by Pauline’s engagement with technology as it relates to her public appearance, specifically, and, more generally to women’s creation of a public face and body through which they acquire and exert power in a modern world where “loveliness” takes on the “attributes of an advanced industrialism, and babies [become] something to be turned out in series like Fords” (18). Pauline’s engagement with what we might call the “racial/facial politics” of the modern age allows Wharton to interrogate the ways in which ideologies of race and beauty coincide with newly imagined relationships between human beings and technology, and the attendant metaphors and paradigm shifts (epistemic facts, as Foucault would say) that accompany technological progress. Ultimately, I argue, Wharton’s treatment of uplift in terms of both race and beauty in Twilight Sleep belies her own struggle with technological progress as it relates to the upper class white woman.

Friday, 30 December

708. French Ways and Their Meaning: Consuming, Collecting, and French Identity in Edith Wharton

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Kennedy, Marriott

Program arranged by the Edith Wharton Society

Presiding: Donna M. Campbell, Washington State Univ., Pullman

Business Meeting. A brief business meeting for the Wharton Society will be held at the end of this session.

Agenda:

1. Vote on changes to the constitution.
2. Announcement of the winner of the Edith Wharton essay prize.
3. Announcement of the results of the election for the new EWS board members.
4. Select a topic from the audience for one of next year's MLA sessions.

Papers

1. “Comparative Atavisms,” Francesca Josephine Sawaya, Univ. of Oklahoma

In Diane Johnson’s flat new introduction to Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country (Modern Library, 2001), Johnson argues that Wharton contrasts American and European marriages in order to show the superiority of the latter. She writes:

The European woman is “the very middle of the picture,” interested in the man’s world and included in it. And if the European woman is in the very center of the picture, it is because, with her superior cultivation, she is more interesting than her intellectually limited American counterpart. (xiii)

While it is certainly true that Wharton proposes this as a reading of the difference between American and European marriages, it is only one reading she proposes. Wharton’s depiction of Undine’s marriage into French nobility indeed provides a critique of American marriage, but it also provides a scathing critique of French marriage.

At the estate of Raymond de Chelles, aptly named Saint Desert, the “idle hands” of Undine are contrasted to “the rise and fall of industrious fingers above embroidery-frames” (314) of de Chelles’ mother and sisters. But this contrast underlines a startling similarity. Through Undine’s eyes we come to think quite desperately of the “innumerable rooms of Saint Desert [as] furnished with the embroidered hangings and tapestry chairs produced by generations of diligent chatelaines” (314). If American wives’ main role is to consume conspicuously to advertise their husbands’ pecuniary worth, French wives’ main role is to embroider pointlessly. A chatelaine, according to the OED is the mistress of a castle or an “ornamental appendage…supposed to represent the bunch of keys, etc. of a mediaeval chatelaine.” This notion of a French wife--as a decorative appendage, who anachronistically represents a practical ornament worn during feudalism-- suggests that Wharton’s analysis of French marriage partakes of comparable characteristics to those of her analysis of American marriage.

In this paper, therefore, I want to compare and contrast Wharton’s analysis of marriage as atavistic—whether American or French. One of the most compelling features of Custom of the Country is the way in which Wharton revises turn-of-the-century feminist analysis of woman’s domestic role in society as atavistic. Thinkers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Olive Schreiner, and Thorstein Veblen argued that the wife’s domestic role in modern society was a reversion to barbaric practices of the past. By contrast, Wharton tends to parody this analysis, by describing Undine’s husbands as atavistic reversions to the past. Most obviously, this is the case for Ralph Marvell. Wharton writes of him in a famous line, “He seemed to be stumbling about in his inherited prejudices like a modern man in medieval armor” [287]. But I will show that atavism characterizes all of Undine’s husbands—whether French or American.

Finally, however, it is important to note that Undine herself reverts to the past at one moment in the text. During her marriage to Raymond de Chelles, Undine “wakes” up to “[o]dd atavisms” (319). I conclude my paper by analyzing Undine’s reversions to the past, why French marriage incites this reversion, and what Wharton is telling us here about the comparative atavisms of French and American marriage.

2. “Wharton and La Bruyère: French Admonitions on American Collecting Practices,” Coby Dowdell, Univ. of Toronto

Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) is framed by the placement of French author Jean de La Bruyère’s The Characters, or, The Manners of the Age (1699). As Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden discuss Percy Gryce’s collection of Americana in the opening chapter, Lily returns a first edition La Bruyère to the shelves of Selden’s library. During Lily’s final visit to Selden’s apartment, Selden is seen reading La Bruyère. The prominence of La Bruyère’s text during the discussion of Americana makes sense since the French text contains an extended passage on the vagaries of book collecting. However, the return of La Bruyère’s text at the end of the text insists upon understanding the entire trajectory of the narrative in terms of French attitudes towards American collecting practices. This paper argues that the framing of Wharton’s novel with La Bruyère’s text, not only signals the cultural importance of book collecting during what Robert A. Shaddy considers the “Golden Age” of American book collecting, but highlights the relevance of collecting practices to a critique of leisure class society, a critique that understands resistance to the leisure class society of Wharton’s novel in terms of a foreign “French” withdrawal from American culture.

During her first visit to Selden’s library, Lily asks, “Don’t you ever mind not being rich enough to buy all the books?”(11). To this query, he “followed her glance about the room, with its worn furniture and shabby walls,” responding: “Don’t I just? Do you take me for a saint on a pillar?”(11). Wharton’s reference to the ascetic pillar saint is ironic in that Selden’s apparent denial of his own asceticism points towards Lily’s adoption of such methods by the close of the narrative, progressing from a life of conspicuous consumption to a life (in death) of complete resignation and withdrawal from leisure society. Wharton’s conflation of collecting practices with ascetic practices presents a strange combination, made all the more obscure by a general understanding of collecting as a product of excess and leisure. This paper considers collecting practices, not only as symptomatic of the consumptive practices of leisure society, but also, counter-intuitively, as ascetic practices that resist the exclusionary social politics of the leisure class. This paper first addresses the more straightforward collecting practices of Percy Gryce and Simon Rosedale, suggesting the ways in which collecting functions as a mode of social mobility from the margins to the centre of leisure class society. Secondly, it considers Lily’s role in collecting, addressing the way in which she functions as both collector and collectible in relation to Lawrence Selden. Thirdly, it evaluates the tragic consequences for Lily of operating as both collectible and collector, understanding her physical decline into chloral addiction, fasting, and death as an ascetic practice akin to that of the pillar saint. By considering the way in which Lily functions as both collector and collectible, this paper seeks to understand how collecting as social practice functions both in opposition to, and in complicity with, leisure class society, representing both the pinnacle of excessive consumption and the apex of social austerity.

3. “Edith Wharton's ‘Happy Ending': Living and Dying in France,” Celeste Wiggins, Ursuline Coll.

Throughout her childhood and as a married woman, Edith Wharton had limited opportunities to escape the intellectual and social prisons imposed on her by Old New York society. Upon taking up permanent residence in France in 1912, organizing wartime relief efforts, and immersing herself in French art and culture, she experienced a new-found freedom. Wharton has left us a record of her life in France in numerous letters, articles, and books. Using photographs taken in Paris in 2005 and Wharton’s own words, I will address the question of mutual influence, asking not only how France shaped Wharton, but also what influence she had on her adopted home.

Information about
Celebrating the Centenary of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth
June 23-25, 2005

Edith Wharton Sessions and Business Meeting at ALA , May 2005

Session 16-G Edith Wharton and Money
Saturday, May 28, 2005
8:00 - 9:20 am
Essex Center

Chair: Hildegard Hoeller, College of Staten Island — City University of New York

1. “'It Cost Him a Visible Effort to Take  a Few Steps…': Wharton's Use of Money as a Signifer of Disability in Ethan Frome,” Christopher Bell, University of Illinois at Chicago.

2. “Edith Wharton and Money: The Financial Factor on the Axis of Heterosexual and Homosocial Relationships,” Stephanie Taitano, University of Texas , Arlington .

3. “The Jewish Economy of Risk in The House of Mirth,” Naomi Reed, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Session 17J: Business Meeting of the Edith Wharton Society
Saturday, May 28, 2005 9:30-10:50 am
Parliament Room, 7th floor

Tentative Agenda:

1.  Old business and announcements (minutes, etc.).
2.  Informal vote on changes to the constitution for nonprofit status.
3. Extended deadline for nominations to the Executive Board; three positions available .
4. Announcement of the Edith Wharton Essay Prize.
5. Choosing the topics for next year's ALA sessions (suggestions are taken from the floor and voted on immediately; the winning suggestion becomes the topic for next year, and the proposer becomes the chair).
  6. Any other new business.

Session 18-G Edith Wharton: Critical Perspectives
Saturday, May 28, 2005 11:00 am - 12:20 pm
St. George B

Chair: Carol Sapora, Villa Julie College

1.      "A Critical Rivalry: The Competing Methods of Mrs. Wharton and Mrs. Woolf," Sharon Kehl Califano, University of New Hampshire .
2.      "The Critics, The Canon, and Cultural Capital: Edith Wharton as a Short Story Writer," Gary Totten, North Dakota State University .
3.      "'Wherever You Seize It, It's Interesting': Subject, Class, and Aesthetic Value in Edith Wharton's Critical Prose," Frederick Wegener, California State University , Long Beach .