Twilight Sleep: Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics
ENERATiONS of critics have claimed that Edith Wharton liked both her gardens and her society well-pruned. In her late fictions, however, Wharton addresses the politics of intimate experience in the context of social debates. To that end, her characters often echo social policy, transformed as it is by Wharton's own bias against legislation of private morality. Although her late fictions have been read conservatively, they are not written in isolation from larger political issues. Instead, they insist on the relation between private and public rather than on a divorce between the two. In challenging her class's (as well as her culture's) gender ideology, Wharton manipulates the conventions of the realist novel to reconcile popular fiction with cultural criticism. My aim is not to reduce the ambivalence with which Wharton writes about anti-Semitism, nor her hatred of black culture, especially as Carl van Vechten describes it in his 1926 Nigger Heaven. I do, however, want to show how writing literature and writing culture, for Wharton, draws on a cultural unconscious, one associated for her with fascism. In Nancy Armstrong's terms, "individual works and kinds of writing gather force, not as they exemplify [an] individual imagination, genre, or tradition of ideas, but as they enter into an unwitting conspiracy that extends throughout the figurative operations of cultural production to shape the lives of real people" (357). I do not so much want to place Wharton's Twilight Sleep in the "context" of history, thereby writing a new historicism, as
Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women A Study in Social Myth
The psychology of women is acquiring the character of an academic entity as witnessed by the proliferation of research on sex differences, the appearance of textbooks devoted to the psychology of women, and the formation of a separate APA division, Psychology of Women. Nevertheless, there is almost universal ignorance of the psychology of women as it existed prior to its incorporation into psychoanalytic theory. If the maxim "A nation without a history is like a man without a memory" can be applied, then it would behoove the amnesiacs interested in female psychology to investigate its pre-Freudian past. This article focuses on one period of that past (from the latter half of the 19th century to the first third of the 20th) in order to clarify the important issues of the time and trace their development to the position they occupy in current psychological theory. Even a limited overview leads the reader to appreciate Helen Thompson Woolley's (1910) early appraisal of the quality of the research on sex differences:
Variability as Related to Sex Differences in Achievement: A Critique
This paper is the outcome of prolonged reflection on the doctrine of greater male variability. It comprises an attempt to assemble and review briefly data at present accessible as to the comparative variability of the sexes in mental traits, and to discuss critically the hypothesis that the great difference b tween the sexes in intellectual achievement and eminence is due to the inherently greater variability of the males. This hypothesis is stated clearly and concisely by Thorndike' thus: The trivial difference between the central tendency of men and that of women which is the common finding of psychological tests and school experience may seem at variance with the patent fact that in the great achievements of the world in science, art, invention, and management, women have been far excelled by men. One who accepts the equality of typical (i.e., modal) representatives of the two sexes, must assume the burden of explaining this great difference in the high ranges of achievement. The probably true explanation is to be sought in the greater variability within the male sex..... In particular, if men differ in intelligence and energy by wider extremes than do women, eminence in and leadership of the world's affairs of whatever sort will inevitably belong oftener to men. They will oftener deserve it.