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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
The essay focuses on Edith Wharton's critically neglected novel Twilight Sleep as demonstrating the complexity of the social vision that is articulated in the mature fiction of the late 1gzos and early 1930s. In this hybrid text the generic boundaries between satire and the Gothic are dissolved as Wharton provides a cultural critique of social and aesthetic modernity that draws on contemporary thinking but also demonstrates her proficiency as a literary renovator. The novel is placed in both its European and American cultural contexts; its transatlantic Gothic antecedents are discussed, as are its affinities with the work of modernist writers.
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Reviewing Edith Wharton's 1927 novel Twilight Sleep, the critic Edmund Wilson invoked the received hierarchy of genre to position the novel in relation to her earlier works: 'The House of Mirth was a tragedy; The Custom of the Country a ferocious satire. Twilight Sleep [...] remains a comedy'. Despite this rather disparaging remark, Wilson acknowledged that there was a freshness in the text: 'It is a striking proof of Mrs. Wharton's insight that Twilight Sleep should be something other than [...] a mere paler repetition of the author's earlier characters and situations. She has really, to a surprising extent, renewed herself with the new age'. (1) This phase of renewal, which began with The Mother's Recompense (1925), has been substantially misjudged and, consequently, neglected by critics of Wharton's work. It is our contention that Wharton, in her later works of fiction, deliberately experiments with blurring genre boundaries, producing a new hybrid mode through which to critique the modern age. It is apposite, therefore, to examine her work using recent scholarship that makes the connection between satire and the Gothic, (2) a connection that Wharton herself was making in her work in the 1920s.
We intend here to approach Wharton's engagement with the modern world in her fiction by examining Twilight Sleep as a hybrid text in which she combines the effects of realism with elements of the Gothic mode in order to make distinct her satiric vision. We shall suggest that, far from evidencing a decline from the three most valorized of her novels--The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), The Age of Innocence (1920)--Twilight Sleep shows Wharton deliberately dissolving generic boundaries in order to produce a new form of writing. The palimpsestic Gothic plot in this comic novel offers, we wish to claim, a profound critique of modern life, whilst its surface uses satire and parody in order to entertain. (3) And whilst the novel's satiric portraits amuse, divert, and perhaps educate, the Gothic elements within the text subtly evoke feelings of unease and emotional anxiety. The result is a complex and layered novel, the narrative drive conjuring the frenetic whirl of New York in the 1920s, and the Gothic palimpsest raising broad and disturbing questions about the nature of modernity. We shall thus argue that Twilight Sleep is not a mere comedy of manners manque, but a sophisticated example of Gothic satire that presents us with a sharp and sometimes melancholy assessment of modern American society as seen through the wry eyes of a mature woman writer.
Whereas the Gothic element of Twilight Sleep has been neglected, its humorous element seems to have divided readers. Even those critics who have written perceptively and at length on Twilight Sleep tend resolutely to ignore its comic dimension. Phillip Barrish, for example, in an illuminating essay on the novel, treats it almost as if it were a tragedy. (4) However, Naomi Royde-Smith, reviewing the novel in the New Statesman (2 July 1927), applauded its satiric elements and foregrounded their international relevance:
For Mrs. Manford, inexhaustibly rich, indiscriminately charitable, visiting her divorced husband once a week and completely failing to understand how horrid a mess she is making of her second marriage, is a thoroughly American type. And Mrs. Wharton has exposed her with a thoroughness that only just stops short of caricature [...] The book, it will be seen, is full of good, acid reading. And its satire will not be lost on London or Paris, where Mrs. Manford and her Inspirational Healers and Initiates have their counterparts. Mrs. Wharton is not telling that uncomfortable thing the Truth exclusively about American millionaires. (5)
The sharp and sometimes bitter humour in Wharton's late work is never just a consoling retreat into the whimsical or simply amusing. Throughout her writing career her humour always derives from the same source--satire; however, the focus of her later work is often the fraudulent language of cults and causes and the new languages of leisure and entertainment. Pauline Manford's quest is to join any organization that will recognize her prominence and fill her day with activity that distracts her from a potential hiatus. She sees, after all, no contradiction in subscribing enthusiastically to the Mothers' Day as well as the Birth Control lobbies; her high profile in both organizations is supposed to fulfil the injunction of the Mahatma--one of Pauline's gurus--to strive for a pitch where 'all discords were resolved into a higher harmony'. (6) However, her near-catastrophic error beginning her Birth Control Speech at the Mothers' Day meeting does at least bring a moment's pause to her blithe assumption that she is able to reconcile all such contradictions. Wharton wants to remind us of the comedic potential of the episode as she tells us that Pauline 'did not need her daughter's derisive chuckle to give her the measure of her inconsequence' (p. 115). We see here an intense and driven woman, fending off the knowledge of an empty and meaningless life by the application of high seriousness to often spurious moral, intellectual, or spiritual causes. The comedy--bitter though it is--derives from the expense of spirit in the pursuit of aims and ideals that could be attained so much more simply; as Dexter says, Pauline 'never walked upstairs, and then had to do gymnastics, and have osteopathy, and call in Hindu sages, to prevent her muscles getting atrophied' (p. 79). But the atrophy experienced by these New Yorkers, which is moral as well as physical, is expressed by a twist to Wharton's comic strategy in the later work.
As we have argued elsewhere, Wharton's ghost stories use humour, irony, and pathos rather than fear and anxiety to unsettle the reader, in a skilful appropriation of the Gothic mode. (7) Similarly, in Twilight Sleep, satire jostles with hints of the uncanny--a word used several times in the novel--in order to challenge the reader's complacency about the nature of progress and the place of women in the modern world. Humour and the Gothic are offered to the reader as the scalpel and forceps with which to dissect the nature of modernity, as represented by American metropolitan society in the 1920s. Family life is anatomized in the novel, especially the substitutions and displacements of authentic relationships in favour of the ephemeral pursuit of cults, causes, and celebrity.
The novel opens with a bleakly comic description of Pauline Manford's daily regime:
"7.30 Mental Uplift. 7.45 Breakfast. 8. Psychoanalysis. 8.15 See Cook. 8.30 Silent Meditation. 8.45 Facial massage. 9. Man with...
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