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from a vital young social science support Wharton’s thematic concerns and provide a vehicle for her social satire. She portrays a bygone ‘‘age’’ with such thoroughgoing accuracy that her novel may at first strike readers as a piece of nostalgia, as if her chief purpose were to preserve the outlines of an extinct social community. Such a first impression dissipates, however, in the urgency of her attack on that community’s complacent parochialism. Despite plentiful opportunities for education and travel, old New York refuses to see value in any social order but its own. It is guilty of a collective ethnocentrism that Wharton targets for ridicule and contempt.

Her protagonist’s understanding of cultural plurality allows him to evaluate his society in startlingly modern terms, and in this respect he is a man ahead of his times. His romantic crisis derives much of its interest and meaning, moreover, from the social conflicts it embodies: outsider vs. insider, tradition vs. innovation, compliance vs. rebellion. Although he does not escape the constraints imposed on his destiny by his community, Archer gains a rich measure of philosophical equanimity from his perception of that community’s limitations and absurdities. His relatively passive acquiescence in the fate society shapes for him, an acquiescence that readers may be inclined to judge unsympathetically, underscores his kinship with other twentieth-century antiheroes. Like Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock or Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, the indecisive and temporizing Newland Archer is an articulate commentator, better able to describe his predicament than to confront it. His very inadequacies make him a recognizably modern figure. ‘‘Bent and bound’’ though he is, he achieves precious psychological breathing space by stretching his attention beyond the boundaries of the ‘‘little world’’ that frustrates his desires, quietly opening the windows of his imagination to ‘‘bigger places’’ and ‘‘a wider world.’’

—Judith P. Saunders

Selected Bibliography

Auchincloss, Louis. Edith Wharton: A Woman of Her Time. New York: Viking, 1971.

Bell, Millicent. The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribners, 1994.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Edith Wharton. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.

Dwight, Eleanor. Edith Wharton, An Extraordinary Life. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994.

Killoran, Helen. Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998.

Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. New York: Knopf, 2007.

Levine, Jessica. Delicate Pursuit: Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

Lubbock, Percy. Portrait of Edith Wharton. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1947.

McDowell, Margaret B. Edith Wharton. Rev. ed. Twayne Series. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991.

Nevius, Blake. Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953.

Singley, Carol J. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Vitz-Finzi, Penelope. Edith Wharton and the Art of Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.

Wershoven, Carol. The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton. Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982.

Williams, Deborah Lindsay. Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the Politics of Female Authorship. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Wright, Sarah B. Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Guide to the Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 1998.

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Readers interested in more detailed information about Wharton’s background in anthropology and its implications for her fiction may consult Saunders, ‘‘Portrait of the Artist as Anthopologist: Edith Wharton and The Age of Innocence’’ in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 4.1 (2002): 86-101.

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