Natural magic :

Abstract

Though integration rather than alienation is the aim of Wharton's ironic method, alienation is a crucial unifying theme threaded throughout her best work, a motif so insistently explored that it, rather than manners or social commentary, or any other consideration, is the author's central concern. The problem of alienated consciousness has been an almost obsessive theme of American literature for over two centuries, and Edith Wharton's career-long attention to this theme places her work where it belongs--in the mainstream of American fiction--and gives it relevance which transcends its receding time and place. In Wharton's view, alienation is a pervasive force influencing human behavior. Her characters are not merely fossils of a by-gone social milieu; they are representative beings confronting a destructive reality--the complex loneliness of the human spirit--and they are linked by their shared consciousness of spiritual, emotional, and physical isolation and their often bewildered, often thwarted, attempts to overcome it.

Wharton's ironic method demands that her readers become sensitive receivers of nuance, ambiguity, and multiple meaning--literally, readers upon whom nothing is lost--and her writing assumes its greatest coherence only when her ironic technique is accurately understood. Her most consistent ironic device, and perhaps the one which demands the most sensitivity on the part of her audience, is ironic characterization, varying in degree but almost always involving the protagonist, whose view of himself and his circumstances is at variance with that of the author and reader. Ironies of situation and imagery are also crucial to Wharton's technique, usually fulfilling the general function of contributing to narrative unity by emphasizing theme. And extremely important is Wharton's ironic juxtaposition of elements of romanticism, realism, and naturalism, employed to produce complications of characterization and value.

In Wharton's most effective novels, then, which span her long career, the elemental thematic tension is between alienation and integration, a tension exactly reproduced by the form of its expression. They deserve to be viewed as a body of work unified by technique and theme, achieving a fusion of form and purpose which results in that quality of inevitable rightness Wharton called "natural magic."

The recurring consensus of several generations of critics ranging from Edmund Wilson to R. W. B. Lewis has been that the fiction of Edith Wharton has not received a just evaluation. Wharton's reputation in American literature remains uncertain and her achievement elusive, traditionally because of historical and cultural biases which deprecate her aristocratic background, her expatriation to France, and even her gender. More recently, an attitude of critical resistance has arisen from assumptions made by current theorists who view the irony elemental to Wharton's fiction as being at odds with neo-oral, anti-ironic preferences of structuralist analysis. Though these theorists perceive irony as a distancing strategy which increases the alienation of writer and audience, a contention of this study is that irony--the basis of Wharton's art--may be an integrating strategy instead, a bonding mechanism bringing together writer and audience by establishing affinities of understanding and complicity between writer and reader and requiring them to become co-creators of meaning.