1. Examples include Raphael, Lev, “Writers and Artists,” in Edith Wharton's Prisoners of Shame: A New Perspective on Her Neglected Fiction (New York: St. Martin's, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vita-Finzi, Penelope, Edith Wharton and the Art of Fiction (New York: St. Martin's, 1990)Google Scholar; and Tuttleton, James W., “Edith Wharton: Form and the Epistemology of Artistic Creation,” Criticism 10 (Fall 1968): 334–51.Google Scholar See also Nevius, Blake, Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953)Google Scholar; and McDowell, Margaret, Edith Wharton (Boston: Twayne, 1976).Google Scholar

2. Information on literature about the woman artist during Wharton's time can be found in Ammon, Elizabeth's Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Plessis, Rachel Blau Du, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Huf, Linda, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983)Google Scholar; Gubar, Susan, “The Birth of the Artist as Heroine: (Re)production, the Künstlerroman Tradition, and the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield,” in The Representation of Women in Fiction, ed. Heilbrun, Carolyn and Higonnet, Margaret (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Smith, Carl S., Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Jones, Suzanne W., ed. Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. I am using the term Victorian to refer to an ideology that took root in America during the 19th Century and ended early in the 20th. Although Queen Victoria ruled from 1837 through 1901, the code of conduct that bears her name has complex sources predating her reign. Nevertheless, the late 19th Century witnessed the flowering of Victorianism in American culture, and it is this era of art that furnished Wharton with her primary images.

4. That Victorian art was familiar to a wide audience and accessible to the general public is documented in Gillet, Paula, Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 12–13Google Scholar; Roberts, Helene E., “Marriage, Redundancy or Sin: The Painter's View of Women in the First Twenty-five Years of Victoria's Reign,” in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Vicinus, Martha (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; and Howe, Daniel Walker, “American Victorianism as a Culture,” American Quarterly 27 (12 1975): 507–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Gillett, , Worlds of Art, pp. 192–93.Google Scholar

6. Gillett, , Worlds of Art, p. 218.Google Scholar

7. Howe, , “American Victorianism,” pp. 517–18.Google ScholarTrachtenberg, Alan discusses the democratic approach to art and culture in late-19th-Century America in The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Guilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), pp. 140–61.Google Scholar

8. Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 150.Google Scholar For an example of this cross-pollination, see Meixner, Laura, “‘The Best of Democracy’: Walt Whitman, Jean-Francois Millet and Popular Culture in Post-Civil War America,” in Walt Whitman and the Visual Arts, ed. Sill, Geoffrey M. and Tarbell, Roberta K. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).Google Scholar Philip Sevick calls our attention to the awareness among early-20th-Century writers like Wharton of the painting world as well as the art of film and camera in The American Short Story, 1900–1945 (Boston: Twayne, 1984), p. 19.Google Scholar

9. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford University, Press, 1977), pp. 111–15Google Scholar; and Fryer, Judith, Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 55–60.Google Scholar For a more extended discussion, see Abbott, Reginald, “‘A Moment's Ornament’: Wharton's Lily Bart and Art Nouveau,” Mosaic 24 (Spring 1991): 73–91.Google Scholar

10. This painting can be found in Spencer, Robin, Whistler (New York: Portland House, 1990), p. 57.Google Scholar

11. Dijkstra, , Idols of Perversity, p. 12.Google Scholar Dijkstra contends that the ideal female figure itself came to resemble a lily and that, by the late 19th Century, the pure woman in art was “up to her neck in flowers” (pp. 9, 17).Google Scholar A good example of the lilylike body to which Dijkstra refers is a drawing of Sarah Bernhardt depicting her 1880 arrival in New York (Gold, Arthur and Fizdale, Robert, The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt [New York: Knopf, 1991], illustration 37).Google Scholar Another illustration of how popular the lily was as a symbol of femininity is the public success of American dancer Loie Fuller, who performed “The Lily Dance” at the turn of the century, a dance memorialized in an 1898 sculpture of the same name by Theodore Rivière. Judith Fryer discusses Fuller and includes a photo of Rivière, 's sculpture in Felicitous Space (p. 60).Google Scholar

12. Dijkstra, , Idols of Perversity, pp. 39–41.Google Scholar Tennyson's centrality to Victorian culture is indicated in Buckley, Jerome Hamilton, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture (New York: Vintage, 1951), pp. 66–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Dijkstra, , Idols of Perversity, pp. 37–38, and 42–47.Google Scholar A painting of the Lady of Shalott (by Mrs. Odenheimer Fowler) graced the cover of a portfolio collection of some of the most popular artworks in the 1880s (Sheldon, George William, Recent Ideals of American Art [New York: Appleton, 1888; rept. New York: Garland, 1977)].Google Scholar

14. Dijkstra, , Idols of Perversity, p. 61Google Scholar; see chapter 2, “The Cult of Invalidism; Ophelia and Folly; Dead Ladies and the Fetish of Sleep.” Examples of paintings that represent dead, dying, or ill women can also be found in Strahan, Edward, The Art Treasures of America (Philadelphia: Barrie, 1879–1882; rept. New York: Garland, 1977), vol. 3Google Scholar: The Convalescent by Palmaroli, V., p. 32bGoogle Scholar; Suicide by Charcoal by Benner, E., p. 48Google Scholar; and Virginia, by Bertrand, James, p. 64b.Google Scholar Also see Mystery by Marr, Carl, p. 40aGoogle Scholar; and Borne Away by Angels by Gutherz, Carl, p. 132bGoogle Scholar, in Sheldon, , Recent Ideals.Google Scholar A critical study of eroticism and female death is Bronfen, Elisabeth's Over Her Dead Body: Configurations of Femininity, Death and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992).Google Scholar See also Diane Price Herndl's discussion of how Wharton handles this subject in Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 134–140.Google Scholar

15. Wharton, Edith, A Backward Glance (1933)Google Scholar, rept. Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings, ed. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin (New York: Library of America, 1990), p. 813.Google Scholar

16. The House of Mirth was serialized in Scribner's Magazine as were many of Wharton's early novels. The beautiful illustrations in American magazines of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries are discussed in a collection of representative art by the Brooklyn Museum, entitled A Century of American Illustration (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1972).Google Scholar

17. Showalter, Elaine, “The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton's House of Mirth,” Representations 9 (Winter 1985): 133–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wolff, , Feast of Worlds, p. 132.Google Scholar

18. Wharton, , The House of Mirth (1905; rept. New York: Macmillan, 1987).Google Scholar

19. Wharton, , House of Mirth, p. 391.Google Scholar

20. Dijkstra discusses the popularity of Albine in Idols of Perversity (pp. 56–63).Google Scholar

21. Waid, Candace, Edith Wharton's Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 48.Google Scholar

22. Wharton, , House of Mirth, p. 429.Google Scholar

23. The painters listed are Botticelli, Goya, Titian, Van Dyck, Kauffmann, Veronese, Watteau, and Tiepolo.

24. Cynthia Griffin Wolff reads Lily's impersonation of a painting as Wharton's metaphor for female self-display as art object in a culture that forbids production of art to women; it is a moment of artifice and self-betrayal (Feast of Words, pp. 125–26).Google Scholar Judith Fryer agrees with this assessment in that she sees Lily making herself into a work of art much like the women in civic murals or art nouveau (Felicitous Space, pp. 75–77).Google Scholar Candace Waid interprets this scene more positively, seeing in the image of Mrs. Lloyd an emblem of the woman as writer (Edith Wharton's Letters, pp. 27–30).Google Scholar

25. Another painter, this one a contemporary of Wharton's, who focused on women in classical dress and settings was Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. His lush, sensual portraits of women in diaphanous simple gowns might also have furnished a tableau for Lily but for their sumptuous settings, which contradicted Wharton's desire to strip her heroine of ostentation.

26. Wharton's preference for classical lines, proportion, harmony, and reason was announced in her first book with Codman, Ogden Jr. The Decoration of Houses (New York: Scribner's, 1897).Google Scholar She also described herself as “high priestess of the life of reason” (letter cited in Vita-Finzi, , Edith Wharton, p. 24).Google Scholar Judith Fryer describes Wharton as “a true Renaissance woman” who believed in harmony and proportion in both artistic expression and relationships (Felicitous Space, pp. 65, 71).Google Scholar

27. Wolff, , Feast of Words, pp. 111–15.Google Scholar Similarly, Elizabeth Ammons believes the portrait appeals to Selden's vanity, his desire to play Pygmalion and bring an art object to life (Edith Wharton's Argument with America [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980] p. 36).Google Scholar

28. Wharton, , House of Mirth, p. 86.Google Scholar

29. Wharton articulates her belief that art and tradition are inextricably linked in her essay “The Great American Novel,” Yale Review 16 (1927): 646–56.Google Scholar

30. Wharton, , House of Mirth, p. 9.Google Scholar

31. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, in a contrasting interpretation, believes Wharton is satirizing Selden's republic of the spirit as an ethereal fantasy unrealistically divorced from the material realm that sustains him (Feast of Words, p. 123).Google Scholar

32. Wharton, , House of Mirth, p. 179.Google Scholar

33. Wharton, , House of Mirth, p. 182.Google Scholar

34. The connection of women with sexual purity and domesticity in the Victorian era is described by many historians, including Conway, Jill, “Stereotypes of Femininity in a Theory of Sexual Evolution,”Google Scholar in Vicinus, , Suffer and Be Still, pp. 140–154.Google Scholar See also Houghton, Walter, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 341–93Google Scholar; Rosenberg, Rosalind, Beyond Separate Spheres (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Welter, Barabara, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” in Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Welter, Barbara (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Cogan, Frances B., All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Baym, Nina, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America 1820–1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

35. Critics who discuss the strong influence of Selden's fastidious parents on his traditional expectations of women are Wolff, (Feast of Words, p. 120)Google Scholar and Ammons, (Edith Wharton's Argument, p. 36).Google Scholar

36. Beaty, Robin, “Lilies That Fester: Sentimentality in The House of Mirth,” College Literature 14 (1987): 263–75.Google Scholar

37. Wolff, , Feast of Words, pp. 131–33.Google Scholar

38. Wharton, , House of Mirth, p. 440.Google Scholar

39. Wharton, , House of Mirth, p. 445.Google Scholar

40. Wharton, , House of Mirth, p. 438.Google Scholar

41. Wolff discusses the representation of civic virtue as female in American statuary and architecture in Feast of Words (pp. 112–15).Google Scholar

42. According to Carol Wershoven, Justine Brent is a character type who appears in much of Wharton's fiction, a “female intruder,” whose values Wharton endorsed such as compassion, authenticity, courage, and independence (The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton [Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1982], pp. 14–25).Google Scholar

43. Wharton, Edith, The Fruit of the Tree (New York: Scribner's, 1907; rept. London: Virago, 1984), p. 12.Google Scholar

44. Wharton, , Fruit of the Tree, p. 161.Google Scholar

45. Wharton, , Fruit of the Tree, p. 473.Google Scholar

46. Janet Goodwyn asserts that Justine eats the forbidden fruit of masculine knowledge by usurping the powers of men when she kills Bessey, (Traveller in the Land of Letters [New York: St. Martin's, 1990], p. 73).Google Scholar

47. Bram Dijkstra provides an extended description of paintings that depict women in postures that appear to represent a broken back (Idols of Perversity, pp. 104–9).Google Scholar

48. Wharton, , Fruit of the Tree, pp. 196, 198, 247.Google Scholar

49. One of Candace Waid's central points is that Ralph's destruction is a metaphor of the defeat of artistic cultivation in America (Edith Wharton's Letters, pp. 130–35).Google Scholar

50. Ammons, , Edith Wharton's Argument, p. 115.Google Scholar

51. Waid, , Edith Wharton's Letters, p. 148.Google Scholar

52. Wharton, Edith, The Custom of the Country (New York: Scribner's, 1913; rept. New York: Penguin, 1987), p. 50.Google Scholar

53. Dijkstra, , Idols of Perversity, p. 87.Google Scholar

54. Other paintings of women floating in water or air are Bouguereau, William Adolphe, The Oreads (1902)Google Scholar; Legrand, Paul, The Snow (ca. 1902)Google Scholar; Shirlaw, Walter, Dawn (1886)Google Scholar; Ball Dodson, Sarah Paxton, The Morning Stars (ca. 1890)Google Scholar; Hiremy-Hirsch, Adolf, Aphrodite (ca. 1898)Google Scholar; Cabanel, Alexander, The Birth of Venus (ca. 1863)Google Scholar; Previati, Gaetano, The Dance of the Hours (1899)Google Scholar; and Draper, Herbert, The Mountain Mists (ca. 1912).Google Scholar

55. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, p. 82.Google Scholar

56. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, p. 82.Google Scholar

57. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, p. 84.Google Scholar

58. Candace Waid reads Ralph's attraction to Undine as susceptibility to surface aesthetics; he is seduced by her feminine artifice (Edith Wharton's Letters, pp. 143–47).Google Scholar

59. Elizabeth Ammons focuses her interpretation of The Custom of the Country on the novel's critique of marriage as a business construct, one in which women can advance only through marrying wealthy men (Edith Wharton's Argument, pp. 108–18).Google Scholar For a discussion of Wharton's focus on female manipulation as a survival tool, see Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan, “Angel of Devastation: Edith Wharton on the Arts of the Enslaved,” in No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), vol. 2.Google Scholar

60. For further discussion of images of drowning women, see Nochlin, Linda, “Lost and Found: Once More the Fallen Woman,” in Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).Google Scholar

61. Dijkstra, , Idols of Perversity, pp. 129–46.Google Scholar See also Millet, F. D., “The Toilet,” p. 109Google Scholar; Freer, Frederick W., In a Looking-Glass, p. 117Google Scholar; Dannot, W. T., A Blonde Profile, p. 136aGoogle Scholar; and Hovenden, Thomas, The Pride of the Family, p. 148Google Scholar, in Sheldon, , Recent Ideals.Google Scholar For a discussion of the ways in which women artists transformed this image, see Higonnet, Anne, Berthe Morisot's Images of Women (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 159–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62. Margaret McDowell discusses the mirror as a central image in the novel in Edith Wharton (pp. 79–83).Google Scholar Candace Waid also sees Undine as a reflective surface in Edith Wharton's Letters (pp. 138–40).Google Scholar

63. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, p. 128.Google Scholar

64. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, p. 129.Google Scholar

65. Wolff, , Feast of Words, p. 113Google Scholar; and Fryer, , Felicitous Space, p. 77.Google Scholar

66. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, p. 108.Google Scholar

67. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, pp. 112–13.Google Scholar

68. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, p. 108.Google Scholar

69. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, p. 114.Google Scholar

70. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, p. 330.Google Scholar

71. Candace Waid discusses Wharton's attack on decontextualizing art at some length in Edith Wharton's Letters (pp. 165–71).Google Scholar

72. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, pp. 308, 325.Google Scholar

73. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, p. 326.Google Scholar

74. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, p. 326.Google Scholar

75. Wharton, , “Great American Novel,” p. 647.Google Scholar

76. Wharton, Edith, French Ways and Their Meaning (New York: Appleton, 1919), p. 39.Google Scholar

77. Ammons, , Edith Wharton's Argument.Google Scholar

78. Janet Goodwyn asserts that Undine is separated from the real business of life in America, like most women (Traveller in the Land, pp. 27–28).Google Scholar

79. Wharton, , Custom of the Country, p. 329.Google Scholar

80. Judith Fryer suggests that the theater motif is related to a theme of posing in The Age of Innocence. She contends that the novel is not so much about Newland Archer as it is the world of women by which he is ensnared, a world she characterizes as one of frozen rituals. Raised in such a setting, Archer cannot distinguish between the artificial and the real in Fryer's view, and consistently misreads Ellen Olenska as “some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture.” Ironically, it is Archer's life with May Welland that is copied from the conventional poses of Victoran literature and painting where female purity and innocence are seductively enshrined (Fryer, , Felicitous Space, p. 141).Google Scholar

81. Fryer maintains that Newland Archer unconsciously falls into poses he has seen enacted on the stage (Felicitous Space, p. 137).Google Scholar

82. Wharton, , The Age of Innocence (1920; rept. New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 180.Google Scholar

83. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 362.Google Scholar

84. Carol Wershoven places Ellen among the subversive women who represent unrepressed emotion in Female Intruder (p. 21).Google Scholar

85. Elizabeth Ammons describes Ellen as an artist whose medium is life (Edith Wharton's Argument, pp. 143–56).Google Scholar

86. Good examples are Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, La Loge (1874)Google Scholar and The First Evening Out (1876)Google Scholar; and Cassatt, Mary, At the Theater (1879)Google Scholar, At the Opera (1880)Google Scholar, Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge (1879)Google Scholar, The Loge (1882)Google Scholar, and In the Loge (1879).Google Scholar

87. Fryer makes this observation in Felicitous Space (p. 136).Google Scholar

88. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 137.Google Scholar

89. The same motif is found in The Custom of the Country when we see Undine in opera boxes very conscious of being on display for the audience.

90. This painting is reproduced in Craze, Sophia, Mary Cassatt (New York: Crescent, 1990).Google Scholar

91. Donovan, Josephine, After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), pp. 76–77Google Scholar; Ammons, Elizabeth, “Cool Diana and the Blood-Red Muse: Edith Wharton on Innocence and Art,” in American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Fleischmann, Fritz (Boston: Hall, 1982).Google Scholar

92. See, for example, Whistler, James McNeill, Symphony in White, No. 2 (1864)Google Scholar, Symphony in White, No. 3 (1865–1867)Google Scholar, The White Symphony (1868)Google Scholar, Harmony in Grey and Green (1872–1873)Google Scholar, and Arrangement in Black and White (1876)Google Scholar; and Sargent, John Singer, The Wyndham Sisters (1899)Google Scholar, Mrs. Henry White (1883)Google Scholar, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885–1886)Google Scholar, Repose (1911)Google Scholar, Madame Paul Poirson (1885)Google Scholar, and Ada Rehan (1894–1895).Google Scholar

93. This and other paintings by Sargent are reproduced in Jennings, Kate F., John Singer Sargent (New York: Crescent, 1991).Google Scholar

94. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 211.Google Scholar

95. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 212.Google Scholar

96. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 225.Google Scholar

97. Fryer mentions that a “commanding figure” of Diana graced the dome of the Agricultural Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Felicitous Space, p. 55).Google Scholar A statue of Diana also sat atop the dome of Madison Square Garden during the early 20th Century; it is now the centerpiece of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing Courtyard.

98. Ammons, , “Cool Diana,” p. 212.Google Scholar

99. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 52.Google Scholar

100. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 52.Google Scholar

101. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 348.Google Scholar

102. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 44.Google Scholar

103. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 347.Google Scholar

104. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 164.Google Scholar

105. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 354.Google Scholar

106. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 354.Google Scholar

107. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 358.Google Scholar

108. Wharton, , Age of Innocence, p. 359.Google Scholar

109. The best description of Wharton's struggles with the female Künstlerroman tradition is provided by Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, Introduction to The Touchstone (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991).Google Scholar

110. Kaplan, Amy, “Edith Wharton's Profession of Authorship,” English Literary History (Summer 1986): 433–57Google Scholar; and Showalter, , “Death of the Lady.”Google Scholar

111. Marilyn French suggests this may be the case in Wharton's portrayals of defeated women characters in “Muzzled Women,” College Literature 14 (1987): 219–229.Google Scholar

112. Viola Hopkins alludes to this quality of Wharton's when she says, “Like the fabrics and household objects in Dutch paintings, the interiors and details of dress of Mrs. Wharton's New Yorkers are richly suggestive of the inner life of their owners” (“The Ordering Style of The Age of Innocence,” American Literature 30 [1958]: 345–57).Google Scholar