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In recent years, the critical understanding of literary modernism has undergone much revision. We no longer perceive modernism simply as a reaction to the devastation of the First World War and the constraining morality of the nineteenth century but, also, as a response to changing economics and gender relationships. This expanded definition of modernism allows us to look for and acknowledge other factors that influenced modernist writers. Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep (1927) suggests that the increasing rate of divorce and a more tolerant attitude to it add to the pervasive feelings of fractured identity and emptiness in human relationships present in modernist writing. In novels by Wharton and many other writers, marriage offers the illusion that the individual has become complete, part of a unified whole. This is particularly true for women; as feminist critics have aptly demonstrated that marriage tends to be offered to women as the ultimate goal of life and self-hood.1 This illusion is easily shattered when individual desire and the difficulties of language reveal the vast differences between husband and wife. As the private and public acknowledgement that the unified whole does not exist, divorce signifies those differences and gaps between individuals. Within the context of the modernist project, it also represents the lack of unity within the individual herself. Twilight Sleep shows that the disintegration of marriage both reflects and causes this breakdown; that is, in the novel divorce decenters individuals and symbolizes this decentering. With this dual move, Wharton not only addresses such modernist topics as identity and communication but does so, as I will show, in a distinctly modernist way.
Over the past twenty years, critics have altered their definition of modernism and the modernist canon to recognize the innovative work of authors other than Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, and Faulkner. Shari Benstock's Women of the Left Bank (1986), for example, changed the perception that modernism was dominated by male writers and by issues primarily crucial to men. Benstock opens up the literary definition of modernism to include "gender as an important (and all too often disregarded) element in defining the aesthetics and politics, the theory and practice, of what we now call Modernism" (4). Building on Benstock's work, Linda Wagner-Martin argues that, until recently, critical understanding of...