This chapter traces the emergence of a prosthetic modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It suggests that the literature of the fin de siècle, from Bellamy and Wells to Gilman and Wilde, registers a shifted relation between the interior and the exterior of being and between the figurations of surface and depth in the artwork, produced by the development of a new period in the history of modernity. This shifted relation is discernible in the late-century realism, but it is in the first stirrings of the modernist form that it comes to a new kind of expression. The chapter reads this new modernist relation between inside and outside, between surface and depth, as it is given expression in the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James, particularly in The House of Mirth, and in What Maisie Knew. These works depict a duplication of consciousness, a sense that the novel imagination encounters itself always at remove from itself, but they also produce a new formal means of giving this duplicated consciousness a unity, of bringing depths onto the modernist surface of the artwork.

This essay re-examines Wharton’s early career to suggest an emerging writer much more focused on and concerned with lives of hardship and lack of privilege than we have acknowledged. Archival research and attention to less familiar, at times unpublished early writing and genres, including her poetry and plays, illuminate anew a bold, compassionate and at times subversive writer. Wharton’s attacks on social inequality, injustice, and the complicity of her own class, are strong, powerful, and pervasive, her writing often in conflict with conventional ideologies of poverty and pauperism of the time. Deeply engaged in contemporary issues and inspired as much by newspaper reporting than by the more familiar classical allusions with which she is credited, what emerges, this essay suggests, is a radical creative vision running counter to ongoing popular images of Wharton and her work.