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
Birthing and Anesthesia: The Debate over Twilight Sleep
"At midnight I was awakened by a very sharp pain," wrote Mrs. Cecil Stewart, describing the birth of her child in 1914. "The head nurse ... gave me an injection of scopolamin-morphin. ... I woke up the next morning about half-past seven ... the door opened, and the head nurse brought in my baby. ... I was so happy."1 Mrs. Stewart had delivered her baby under the influence of scopolamine, a narcotic and amnesiac that, together with morphine, produced a state popularly known as "twilight sleep." She did not remember anything of the experience when she woke up after giving birth. This 1914 ideal contrasts with today's feminist stress on being awake, aware, and in control during the birthing experience. In 1914 and 1915, thousands of American women testified to the marvels of having babies without the trauma of childbirth. As one of them gratefully put it, "The night of my confinement will always be a night dropped out of my life."2
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.