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
Ambivalence and Irony: Gendered Forms in Interwar America
When the term “ambivalence” first appeared in 1910, it referred to a psychotic symptom of schizophrenia. Migrating into popular psychology, the condition soon became a neurosis associated with young women and homosexuals. By the late 1920s, “ambivalence” also described an aesthetic value associated with masculine intelligence. Extending recent work in new modernist studies, cognitive disability studies, and the social history of medicine, this essay traces the gendered contradictions of this psychosocial history. Historicizing ambivalence illuminates two distinct but interrelated concepts: ambivalence proper as condition of modern femininity and modernist irony as a masculinized expression of the same set of feelings and conflicts. Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep (1927) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) reflect this interplay of psychic and aesthetic patterns, highlight the essential ambivalence of modern subjectivity, denaturalize contemporaneous scientific attitudes, and unsettle enduring critical assumptions about the interwar period’s literary forms.
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
words, need of Accessory and fundamental movement Accuracy of memory overdone Activity of children, motor Adolescence biography and literature of characterized Agriculture Alternations of physical and psychic states Altruism of country children of woman, cutlet for Amphimixis, psychic, basis of Anger Anthropometry and ideal of gymnastics Arboreal life and the hand Art study Arts and crafts movement Associations devised or guided by adults Astronomy Athletic festivals in Greece Athletics as a conversation topic dangers and defects of records in Attention fostered by commando exercises rhythm in spontaneous Authority and adolescence Autobiographies of boyhood Automatisms motor, causes and kinds of control and serialization of danger of premature control of desirable Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene CHAPTER XII. MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 156 Bachelor women Basal muscles, development of Basal powers, development of Bathing Beauty, age of feminine Belief, habit and muscle determining Bible, the influence of, in adolescence methods of teaching study of, for girls study of, in German method of will training study of, order in study of, postponed study of, preparation for Biography and adolescence Blood vessels, expansion at puberty Blushing, characteristic of puberty Body training, Greek Botany Boxing Boys age of little affection in dangers of coeducation for differences between, and girls latitude in conduct and studies of, before puberty puberty in, characteristics of Brain action, unity in Bullying Bushido Cakewalk Castration, functional in women Catharsis, Aristotle's theory of Character and muscles Children faults and crimes of motor activity of motor defects of selfishness of Chivalry, medieval Chorea Christianity, muscular Chums and cronies Church, feminity in the City children vs. country children Civilized men, savages physically superior to Climbing hill muscles, age for exercise of Coeducation, dangers in College coeducation in English requirements of woman's ideal school and Combat, personal, as exercise Commando exercises restricted for girls Concentration Concreteness in modern language study, criticized Conduct mechanized of Italian schoolboys tabulated weather and Confessionalism of young women passional inducement to Conflict, see Combat Control nervous, through dancing of anger of brute instincts of children's movements Conversation, athletics in degeneration in, causes of Conversion Cooerdination loosened at adolescence inherited tendencies of muscular Corporal punishment Country children vs. city children Crime, juvenile causes of education and reading and Cruelty, a juvenile fault Culture heroes Dancing Deadly sins, the seven, vs. modern juvenile faults Debate and will−training Doll curve Domesticity Dramatic instinct of puberty Drawing, curve of stages of Dueling Education art in crime and industrial intellectual Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene CHAPTER XII. MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 157 manual moral and religious of boys of girls physical Effort, as a developing force Emotions dancing completest language of the religion directed to Endurance Energy and laziness English language and literature, pedagogy of pedagogic degeneration in, causes of requirements of college sense language, dangers of Ennui Erect position and true life Ethics, study of, criticized Ethical judgments of children Euphoria and exercise Evolution, movement as a measure of Exercise health and measurements and music and nascent periods and rhythm and Farm work Fatigue at puberty chores and not a cause for punishment play and restlessness expressive of result of labor with defective psychic impulsion rhythm of activity and will−culture and Faults of children Favorite sounds and words Fecundity of college women Femininity in the church in the school and college Feminists Fighting Flogging Foreign languages, dangers of France, religious training in Friendships of adolescence Fundamental and accessory Future life, as a school teaching Games groups Panhellenic Gangs, organized juvenile Genius, early development of Germany, will−training in Girl graduates aversion to marriage of fecundity of sterility of Girls and boys, differences between coeducation for, dangers of education of education of, humanistic education of, manners in education of, more difficult than of boys education of, nature in education of, regularity in education of, religion in ideal school and curriculum for overdrawing their energy Grammar, place of Greece, athletic festivals in Greek body training Group games Growth at puberty Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene CHAPTER XII. MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 158 gymnastics and its effect on of muscle structure and function, measure of periods rhythmic Gymnastics effect on growth, its ideal of, and anthropometry ideals, its four unharmonized, and military ideals and nascent periods and patriotism and proportion and measurement for, criticized Swedish Habits and muscle Hand and arboreal life Health, exercise and of girls Heredity, a factor in development High School, the coeducation in language study and Hill−climbing Historic interest, growth of Home, restraint of, detrimental Honor, among hoodlums in sports Hoodlums Hysteria Imagination, at puberty of children play and Individuality, growth of, at puberty Industrial education Industry and movement Inhibition Intellect, adolescence in Intemperance Knightly ideas of youth Knowing and doing Language, concreteness in, degeneration through dangers of, through eye and hand precision curve of vs. literature Latin, danger of Laughter Laziness and energy Lies Literary men, youth of women, youth of Literature and adolescence language vs. Machinery and movement Mammae, loss of function of Manners in girls' education Manual training defects and criticisms of difficulties of Marriage, dangers in delay of influenced by coeducation influenced by college training Mastery in art−craft, equipment for Maternity, dangers of deferred Measurements and exercise Memory, accuracy, age, and kinds of sex curve of types of Military drill ideals and gymnastics Mind and motility Money sense Monthly period and Sabbath Motherhood, training for Motor, activity, primitive automatisms defects of children defects, general economies powers, general growth of precocity psychoses, muscles and recaptulation Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene CHAPTER XII. MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 159 regularity Movement and industry Movements, passive precocity of Muscle tension and thought Muscles, per cent by weight of body character and motor psychoses and small, and thought will and Muscular Christianity Music and exercise Myths, study of Nascent periods and exercises Nature in girls' education