Overview

An investigation into Wharton's extensive use and adaptation of the Gothic in her fiction. Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton is an innovative study that provides fresh insights into Wharton's male characters while at the same time showing how Wharton's imagining of a fe/male self evolves throughout her career. Using feminist archetypal theory and theory of the female Gothic, Kathy A. Fedorko shows how Wharton, in sixteen short stories and six major novels written during four distinct periods of her life, adopts and adapts Gothic elements as a way to explore the nature of feminine and masculine ways of knowing and being and to dramatize the tension between them. Edith Wharton's contradictory views of women and men–her attitudes toward the feminine and the masculine–reflect a complicated interweaving of family and social environment, historical time, and individual psychology. Studies of Wharton have exhibited this same kind of contradiction, with some seeing her as disparaging men and the masculine and others depicting her as disparaging women and the feminine. The use of Gothic elements in her fiction provided Wharton, who was often considered the consummate realist, with a way to dramatize the conflict between feminine and masculine selves as she experienced them and to evolve and alternative to the dualism. Fedorko's work is unique in its careful consideration of Whartons's sixteen Gothic works which are seldom discussed. Further, the revelation of how these Gothic stories are reflected in her major realistic novels. In the novels with Gothic texts, Wharton draws multiple parallels between male and female protagonists, indicating the commonalities between women and men and the potential for a female self. Eventually, in her last completed novel and her last short story, Wharton imagines human beings who are comfortable with both gender selves.

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9780817359133

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Reviews

Innovative but persuasive. This is a very impressive book, polished, seasoned through careful consideration of new criticism on Wharton's work (the bibliography is excellent), and very much a new way of reading this oeuvre. Not only is Fedorko's approach new, but her inclusion of a number of short stories with the key novels makes the study unusually comprehensive. --Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Fedorko's analysis of gender in the Gothic stories is superb, but the most intriguing aspect of her work is her recovery of the Gothic subtext of the novels and nonfiction....Her [Fedorko's] provocative work both spells out some strands in the complex relation between Wharton's Gothic and Wharton's realism and invites further consideration of this relation. --American Literature Framing Wharton's gender dilemma in the process of individuation and drawing on Wharton's travel writing, autobiography, letters, and essays as well as on her novels and short fiction, Fedorko persuasively shows how Wharton used the dispensations of the Gothic, across her career, to probe the possibility of gender integration or fe/maleness. --Mary Suzanne Schriber, author of Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830-1920, and Gender and the Writer's Imagination: From Cooper to Wharton

Fedorko's analysis of gender in the Gothic stories is superb, but the most intriguing aspect of her work is her recovery of the Gothic subtext of the novels and nonfiction....Her [Fedorko's] provocative work both spells out some strands in the complex relation between Wharton's Gothic and Wharton's realism and invites further consideration of this relation. - American Literature Framing Wharton's gender dilemma in the process of individuation and drawing on Wharton's travel writing, autobiography, letters, and essays as well as on her novels and short fiction, Fedorko persuasively shows how Wharton used the dispensations of the Gothic, across her career, to probe the possibility of gender integration or fe/maleness. - Mary Suzanne Schriber, author of Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830-1920, and Gender and the Writer's Imagination: From Cooper to Wharton Innovative but persuasive. This is a very impressive book, polished, seasoned through careful consideration of new criticism on Wharton's work (the bibliography is excellent), and very much a new way of reading this oeuvre. Not only is Fedorko's approach new, but her inclusion of a number of short stories with the key novels makes the study unusually comprehensive. - Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Author Information

Kathy A. Fedorko is Professor of English at Middlesex County College.

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