Despite apparent similarities, Edith Wharton's hyper-moral female characters differ in important ways from the domestic angels of sentimental fiction. That tradition, basically religious in origin, exalted woman as the finer sensibility and moral conscience of her family, an idealization that persisted well into the era of literary realism. It was still alive by the early twentieth century, when Edith Wharton was emerging as a novelist of manners - manners, that is, as indices of moral codes. Although Wharton retained the guardian role for wives, she did so for other than sentimental reasons. Indeed, the fanatically moral female characters that we examine here (primarily in Sanctuary, The Touchstone, “Bewitched,” and “Afterward”) seem more demonic than angelic. Wharton's representation of women as moral arbiters was doubtless supported by literary convention, but her tyrannical female consciences stem from a personal psychological source - the internalized voice of her own mother.