Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T21:16:50.720Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Behind the Lines” in Edith Wharton's A Son at the Front: Rewriting a Masculinist Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Judith L. Sensibar
Judith L. Sensibar
Affiliation:
Associate Professor in the Department of English and a member of the Core Faculty of the Women's Studies Program at Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-0302, USA.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A Son at the Front is the story of a war fought, as Edith Wharton said, “from the rear,” a war in which the art of portrait painting becomes a deadly weapon. In John Campton's World War I Paris, where the fashionable portrait painter wields his paintings in a behind the lines battle to gain, as he says, “possession” of his grown son, Wharton probes the sexual politics underlying the development of modernist aesthetics by writing a new kind of war novel. The novel invokes and then questions a central trope of the fiction and poetry that, until recently, has been identified as The Literature of the Great War.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , August 1990 , pp. 187 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 In her memoir, A Backward Glance (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933)Google Scholar Wharton makes clear that her title is consciously ironic. Further emphasizing her ironic perception of the meaning of the Great War, she then uses antithesis to characterize “the new intensity of vision” given her by her front and rear experiences and the personal losses she had sustained during 1914–18. Looking back, she sees those years “in all their fantastic heights and depths of self-devotion and ardour, of pessimism, triviality and selfishness. A study of the world at the rear during a long war seemed to me worth doing.” A few paragraphs later she describes the imaginative intensity in which she conceived this novel which was “written in the white heat of emotion … a picture of that strange war world of the rear,” 368–69. See also 355–68.

2 The best known book on the canonical writing of WWI is Fussell's, PaulThe Great War and Modern Memory (New York & London: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar. In their introduction, the editors of Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, an excellent collection of feminist essays on the politics of gender in both World Wars, point out that while much war literature questioned hegemonic definitions of masculinity and.femininity and popular sexual myths, such questioning “had little (contemporary) political impact.” The reasons are that men's war literature “passed directly into the canon of twentieth century war literature, where the prevailing critical categories, resting on traditional definitions of gender, read sexual ambivalence as irony and cynicism.” Women's writings simply “passed into obscurity” (13). The sexual ambivalence in A Son at the Front (New York: Chas Scribner's Sons, 1925)Google Scholar cannot be read as irony and cynicism although much of the novel's strength derives, as does men's war literature, from “the tensions between patriotism and criticism”(15). Son has been faulted for its naive patriotism only because readers have ignored its criticism of that patriotism. As Edith Wharton knew, and as the editors of Behind the Lines point out, all wars are events of gender politics.

3 For the best interpretation of this theme in The House of Mirth see Dimock, Wai-chee, “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth,” PMLA, 100 (10 1985), 783–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Some of the most interesting articles on this subject appear in Higonnet, Margaret Randolph, Jenson, Jane, Michel, Sonya and Collins, Margaret (eds.), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar and in Women's Studies International Forum, 2 (3), 1988Google Scholar. See also Cooper, Helen M., Munich, Adrienne A. and Squier, Susan M. (eds.), Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan, Sexchanges, vol. 2 of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, Chs. 4 and 7; and Marcus's, Jane Afterwords in two recently re-issued women's war novels, Not So Quiet …: Stepdaughters of War (1930, rpt. New York: The Feminist Press, 1989)Google Scholar by Smith, Helen Z. and We That Were Young (1932, rpt. New York: The Feminist Press, 1989)Google Scholar by Rathbone, Irene. Blankley's, Elyse, and Michel's, Sonya review essays in The Women's Review of Books (09 and 07 1989, respectively) on recent feminist readings of WWI literature are also valuable.Google Scholar

5 Fussell has taught us that sexual confusions and disruptions in mainstream (read male) war poetry and fiction signal “a crisis in masculinity” brought on by their writers' emasculating experiences in the Great War. Wharton's imaginative revision of this crisis suggests its perennial presence in a homophobic world.

6 Hoffman, Frederick J., The Twenties: American Writing in the Post War Decade (rev. ed., New York: Collier Books, 1962), 74 and 68Google Scholar; Lewis, R. W. B., Edith Wharton: A Biography (p.b. Fromm Intl. Pub, 1985), 446Google Scholar; and Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 348 and 351.Google Scholar

7 Benstock, , Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1040 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 86 and 60.Google Scholar

8 Gilbert, and Gubar, , 152.Google Scholar

9 Gilbert and Gubar write that for Wharton “illicit sexuality” remains “unsayable” and seldom “erupts” in the works published in her lifetime. The only eruption they cite is Olenska, Ellen in The Age of InnocenceGoogle Scholar. Gilbert, and Gubar, , 164–168.Google Scholar

10 For the first and second interpretations, respectively, see Buitenhuis, , “Edith Wharton and the First World War,” American Quarterly, 18 (1966), 502CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gilbert, , “Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” Signs, 8 (Spring 1983), 502.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 In the most complimentary reading to date, Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan read A Son at the Front as an example of “women's inspiration inspired by male desperation,” (307), arguing and rightly so, that her art was “subtly strengthened” and re-invigorated by the author's wartime experiences. But when they go on to say that in this “admiring tale of an artist-father whose art is mysteriously revitalized by the death of his soldier son, [she] offered an encoded description of a … transformation of a dead man into an enlivening muse,” (307) and claim that for Wharton the “living master” muse of the nineteenth century “metamorphosed into a literal or figurative dead good soldier,” they misread the novel in service of their thesis and so bypass Son's infinitely more subversive commentary on the gender politics of the war to end all wars. While they delincate some aspects of Edith Wharton's “unorthodox feminism” and go much further than other feminist critics in claiming that “her major fictions … constitute perhaps the most searching – and searing – feminist analysis of the construction of ‘femininity’ produced by any novelist in this century,” (128) their insistence that her critiques of men were inspired by “her secretly hostile feelings towards them” (152) tends to dilute their reading. I am uncomfortable with the unrelenting binarism in many of their generalizations about gender. Nonetheless their chapter on Edith Wharton is, on the whole, superb and whatever small quibbles one has with Sexchanges, it offers a comprehensive, well researched and wittily written challenge to all previous interpretations of the period beginning at the fin de siécle and ending in the high modernism of the twenties and thirties.Google Scholar

12 Fussell, , 276.Google Scholar

13 Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory, 288 and 296–97Google Scholar; Hoffman, Frederick, The Twenties: American Writing in the Post-War DecadeGoogle Scholar; Reade, Brian (ed.), Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900, An Anthology (New York: 1981)Google Scholar; and Smith, Timothy d'Arch, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English “Uranian” Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970).Google Scholar

14 Fussell, , 293.Google Scholar

15 A Son at the Front, 161, 333–34, 347, 368, 371, 416Google Scholar. I will discuss these aspects of the social and gender criticism in her novel in a longer project.

16 The one exception is Campion's realistic portrait of the spinster, Adele Anthony, who is also the only nurturing grown-up in the novel. Done early in his career, this uncompromisingly realistic portrait was, in large part, responsible for the decades of Campton's obscurity.

17 Benstock, , 33–34.Google Scholar

18 See other examples of Campton reducing people to line, colour, and pattern (226, 228–29, 325, 328).

19 Told that Brant has permission to visit George near the front, he is furious: “and this other man, who was nothing to George, absolutely nothing, who had no right whatever to ask for leave to visit him, had somehow obtained the priceless favor, and … had sneaked off secretly to feast on the other's lawful privilege!” (238). Here, as throughout the novel, Campion's jealous phrases: “this other man,” “sneaked off secretly,” mime those of heterosexual melodramas.

20 For example, even when he learns that George and the vapid Mrs. Talkett are lovers, he finds it “intolerable” that she has bought his portrait (337).

21 Wharton's interest is what the editors of Behind the Lines call the war's behind-the-lines battles of the “deconstruction and reconstruction of gender,” Higonnet, , et al., Behind the Lines (17).Google Scholar

22 This scene, like the relationship at the novel's core, anticipates a much more ambiguously and complexly drawn scenario in The Children (New York, 1928)Google Scholar. See Sensibar, Judith L., “Edith Wharton Reads the Bachelor Type: Her Critique of Modernism's Representative Man,” American Literature, 60 (12 1988), 575–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Fussell, , The Great War, 285, 288Google Scholar. For a good discussion of these poets' use of such motifs in their war poetry see his chapter, “Soldier Boys,” 270–309.Google Scholar

24 Fussell, , 281.Google Scholar

25 Specimen Days, in Cowley, Malcolm (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, Vol. 2 (New York: Pellegrini and Gudahy, 1948), 43–4.Google Scholar

26 Like Smith's, Helen ZennaNot So Quiet…Google Scholar, this novel is “a textual deconstruction of sexual stereotypes” (Marcus, Jane, Afterword to the novel, 245)Google Scholar. But rather than “the possessive sexualization of women in time of war,” Wharton writes about the possessive sexualization of boys (Higonnet, and Higonnet, , “The Double Helix,” Behind the Lines, 37)Google Scholar. Rather than “soldiers' private fantasies and pin-ups” (ibid.) Wharton explores those of a middle-aged male portrait painter. This novel does not duplicate, re-enact, or re-inscribe the pastoral homoeroticism Paul Fussell finds in much masculinist World War I poetry and fiction (276–78). Rather, it questions its meaning by exploring the sources of the rage and sexual anaesthesia that characterize the sufferer of male homosexual panic. In this war novel, the warrior is not feminized in any of the traditional ways we associate with war literature. He is not a passive victim of the trenches or the pawn of an older generation who has made the war he's fighting (à la Eric Maria Remarque).

27 I suspect that George's role in his father's erotic fantasies is to serve as a screen to mask, what must be, for him, a more possible and thus more dangerous attraction for Anderson Brant. That this might be so is suggested by Campton's continuing his relationship with Brant in the way that he does. Campton's creative power, his image of George, which is a metaphor for the phallus, will be paid for by Brant, but Campton will model the image first in clay and later in marble. That is, he'll handle it and make it come erect. Furthermore, Brant will never have possession (be able to enjoy George “quietly, confidentially, uninterruptedly”) as this image will be a public monument. But beside it, Campton and Brant can continue to meet. Like John Marcher and the stranger at May Bartram's grave and Henri and the Marquise over the slain Paquita, in Balzac's “The Girl with the Golden Eyes,” Campton connects with the real object of his erotic desire for the forbidden other over the body of the person who has served as a screen. See Sedgwick, , “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,” in Yeazell, Ruth Bernard (ed.), Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth Century Novel, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1983–84 (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 148–86Google Scholar, and Felman, Shoshana, “Rereading Femininity,” Yale French Studies, 62 (1981), 19–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar