Chastity on the Western Front: Sexual Politics in Wharton's A Son at the Front and Rinehart's Dangerous Days
Abstract:Edith Wharton and popular romance novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, though not often studied together, are connected by striking plot similarities in their post-World War I novels, each of which draws on its author's journalistic expeditions to the front lines and highlights her fierce support for the Allies. Wharton's and Rinehart's shared pro-war politics fit uneasily into the canon of postwar literature, but these works merit further study because their complex treatment of soldier characters' sexuality challenges presumed narratives about female ignorance and male sexual libertinism during war and anticipates a modernist focus on the body as a locus of political meaning.