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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | The Architectural Imagination of Edith Wharton: Gender, Class, and Power in the Progressive Era
ISBN# 0838641067
Reviewed by: Charles Crowe
American Literary Realism |
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Benert's demonstration of Wharton's serious interest in architecture and design is impeccable and convincing. As she acknowledges, it is more difficult to demonstrate that Wharton's "architectural imagination" illuminates all aspects of her fiction. There is a disconnection, for example, between Wharton's nominal affiliation with the Progressive movement in matters architectural and the social vision she presents in her novels and stories. Nonetheless, Benert offers convincing readings of several works in terms of Wharton's use of structures and space. The rise of Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country and the decline of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth can be measured by the successive buildings and rooms they inhabit. Confining structures and the open spaces of gardens and countries walks are obvious ways to reify the social and psychological situation of her characters.
It is a measure of Benert's success that the reader finds other examples of this theme and wishes further exploration. Thus her mention of Newland Archer's library recalls that libraries function in significant ways in the ghost story "The Eyes," as well as in Summer. That novella also would provide an opportunity for exploring Wharton's use of vernacular architecture, since the narrative can be described in terms of a series of houses: red house, brown house, trumbledown house, the shanties on The Mountain.
After witnessing the destruction of the First World War, a destruction not only of human life but of the material patrimony of France, Wharton wrote no more about architecture, and her fiction was increasingly less grounded in material reality. The spaces she had constructed in her country estates were her refuge.
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