Content area
Full Text
By Claire Preston. London: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. 225 pp. $65.00.
In a fine study, Edith Wharton's Social Register, Claire Preston situates Edith Wharton's writing within the cultural and literary contexts of modernism. In this respect, her book expands points raised by Shari Benstock in her 1994 biography, Edith Wharton: No Gifts from Chance, and enters into critical dialogue with recent studies of Wharton and culture, such as those by Nancy Bentley, Barbara Hochman, and Phillip Barrish, who investigate Wharton's realism and modernism in relation to contemporary debates in the sciences and social sciences. Preston convincingly argues that Wharton's engagement with these issues places her "indubitably within the early Modernist tradition" (xiii). As the phrase "social register" suggests, Preston offers a taxonomy of Wharton's characters, whom she organizes into four groups: tribes, outcasts, buccaneers, and expatriates. Her useful framework illuminates the motives, actions, and outcomes of characters, and charts the development of Wharton's writing over time.
Preston enlists the term "tribes" to describe the social apparatus that structures and confines individuals. Wharton, she explains, explores boundaries of kinship, aesthetics, taste, space, and behavior through a binary system in which characters are "categorised as either `in' or `not in"' (5). This scheme also illuminates Wharton's modernist narrative method, which...