What's Wrong With a Literary Escape?

 I like Edith Wharton – both for herself and because Henry James frustrates me. What I have read about her work generally finds her later work less interesting. 

I think The Pleasures of a Pessimistic Literary Escape: Jessie Gaynor on Edith Wharton’s The Glimpses of the Moon provides a reason to read Wharton and does not denigrate a later novel. 

That Edith Wharton’s oeuvre reveals an essential pessimism about humanity is undeniable. The Glimpses of the Moon’s will-they-won’t-they frame belies the fact that it’s still a Wharton novel. The novel was published in 1922, the year regarded as the birth of Modernism. Where the tide of literature was turning toward experimentation and disillusionment, Wharton wrote a novel of escape.

For her, perhaps, this was the experiment—and there’s great pleasure to be found in reading a beloved author’s experiment. Even when writing an escapist romance, Wharton is inescapably herself: A brilliantly funny cynic; a razor sharp observer of the mores of the very rich; a chronicler of bad behavior. In the Wharton Universe, Susy isn’t as iconic as Lily Bart or Undine Spragg—instead of literary immortality, Wharton grants her a quietly happy ending. She gives Susy a Nick who is flawed but not irredeemably so. If the reader is left with the impression that Susy is settling, just a bit, we know that she doesn’t feel the same way. And like the friend who settles for that guy, we just have to force a smile and hope it works out for the best.

sch 10/14