Essays on Edith Wharton

Question 1. “The Lost Generation". The Lost Generation is a group of writers who came in during World War I to express their disappointment with the World War I era. The Lost Generation comprised of writers like Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis and John Dos Passos. The Lost Generation felt that they were being alienated from the society; therefore, they decided to escape and criticize the alienation. Some of the members of the Lost Generation literally escaped. The Lost Generation writers lived an immigrant life in Paris and others went to Berlin or Rome. The Lost ...

Edith Wharton is an American novelist, short story writer, and designer of the end of nineteenth – beginning of the twentieth centuries. She is known as a three-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the first female owner of the Pulitzer Prize. Stories of Edith Wharton brilliantly show psychological and social insight of America’s privileged classes; they are written with humor and incisiveness. One of the late short stories written by Edith Wharton is Roman Fever (1934). The plot of the story concentrates around the meeting of two old friends, Grace Ansley and Alida Slade, their relationship ...

THE SECRET OR HIDDEN STORY WITHIN KATHERINE ANNE PORTER’S “THE JILTING OF GRANNY WEATHERALL”

According to Dictionary.com’s definition of the word ‘jilt’, it means “to reject or cast aside (a lover or sweetheart), especially abruptly or unfeelingly.” The website explained that the word ‘jilt’ originated from a word used in during the period of 1650-1660, which was another word for harlot. It adds that it is a “syncopated variant of jillet.” The Online Merriam-Webster Dictionary notes that the Scottish word ‘jillet’ means a “vexatiously flirtatious girl” or a wench. It is inferred from the meanings of the words ‘jillet’ and ‘jilt’ and the hidden narrative present within Porter’s ...

English Literature

Introduction Charlotte Brontë, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather created heroines who deal with issues of love and marriage. For the most part, men play a central part in all of their lives. The narratives are told from a variety of perspectives in the three novels. The endings differ substantively as well. Jane Eyre was first published in 1847 as a kind of autobiography. Jane is plain looking but filled with good sense and bravery. She triumphs over her cruel guardian and an inflexible social class order. When Jane becomes the governess in Edward Rochester’s house, she falls in love with ...

Introduction/Thesis Statement

Edith Wharton’s ‘The House of Mirth’ closely examines relationships, desire for personal autonomy and material success outside the boundaries or rules of the social world. In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart, the protagonist, seeking a luxurious life in the high society is torn between wealth and marriage and is willing to go the mile to achieve her goal. In The Great Gatsby, Daisy is also after money and luxury, and uses Gatsby to achieve her ambitious pursuit. On closer observation, one cannot but think that the novel, ‘The Great Gatsby,’ and ‘The House of Mirth,’ was written ...

The short story, ‘Ethan Frome’ written by Edith Wharton in the early 1900’s, tells the story of Ethan who grew up on a farm where his descendants lived and worked and died. Ethan’s story is told from the first person point of view and details the story of a sad and unfortunate young man who lives in a New England village. The choices that he has made have him trapped hopelessly in situations that befall him one by one. Ethan had left home to study technology at a college in Worcester. He had big dreams of living in the city where ...

I have chosen to examine four short stories whose characters are people with physical markings or mental disorders. People who have these traits are unusual and regarded as odd by "normal" people. Usually, they develop some mental powers and become able to achieve much more than people who have neither physical nor mental problems. Maybe these "marked" people achieve success because they believe in themselves, whereas, "normal", healthy people tend to be paradoxically more self-conscious which hold them back. However, they are always there to judge the challenged ones. The stories that were particularly interesting to me are: Roman ...

During the time when the careers of writers like Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were flourishing, unemployment had also been growing and the working-class was getting larger and larger. Thus, the works of both Wharton and Charlotte often featured working-class characters. However, the question is: To what extent was their depiction of the working-class American society in their respective works and how were they different? In her works, Edith Wharton tends to purposely make the lifestyles of the American working classes seem like a fixation so that social inequality is seen as natural and normal. Apparently, she has ...

Language is a fundamental tool for communication of ideas. Thus, both the short stories “Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton and “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane portray a writing technique that goes hand in hand with realism movement. This is a period that existed around 1910 to 1920, during post civil war. It was supposed to be an intense form of pragmatism, one that moved away from the middle class center of the realists and pertained more to the remains of society. The view of naturalism that classifies it as so different unit from naturalism is its ability and difference in looking ...

Edith Wharton’s two short stories “Roman Fever” and “The Fullness of Life” are two very different types of stories. Roman Fever is a realist, but fictional account of two women who have known each other from the days of the youth. “The Fullness of Life” is a transcendent, story of mythical proportions which lends itself to tracing it’s influence back to Greek and Roman mythical stories. Despite the diverging nature of the stories, both of them have similar characters in one sense. This essay analyzes the similarities of character and difference in setting, and the similarity of theme running ...

The age of innocence refers to a novel by Edith Warton and got published in 1920. The novel gets set in upper class New York during the 1870s (Wharton 2). In the novel, the author gets to depict the themes of social class, social rigidity and hierarchy that evidenced itself in the elite families of upper New York. Society as portrayed in the novel, forces people to convent to its forms (Pennel 18). The author paints the issue of social classes through the novels main characters of Newland Archer, May Welland and Ellen Olenska. This paper will aim at analyzing ...

Introduction

Unattainable love is something that all of us have experienced at some point in our life. It is both a painful and learning experience, and a subject that has inspired numerous artists both in literature and in the visual arts. It has also urged many to become better persons, although there are also others who choose to just give up in despair.

One of the most beautiful ways of expressing the sorrow, despair, and frustrations that come with unattainable love is through the art of literature. In this regard, this paper reviews three prose and three poems that dwell on the ...

Weaknesses and Strengths of Women in the Story Souls Belated By Edith Wharton

In the short story Souls Belated by Edith Wharton there various traits arising from the women can be seen as either weaknesses or strengths of the women. The women in the novel strengths can be viewed through the relationships they have (Wharton, 2004). At the start of Souls Belated they all seemed different relationship wise. Lydia, a main character in the short story has a notable strength. That is, the determination of not living by the conventions set by the society to women and through that she refuses to marry Gannett. Through relationships their strength such as explaining themselves and standing ...