Gender and the Gothic in the fiction of Edith Wharton

Kathy A. Fedorko

Using feminist archetypal theory and theory of the female Gothic, Fedorko shows how, in sixteen short stories and six major novels written during four distinct periods of her life, Wharton adopts and adapts Gothic elements as a way to explore the nature of feminine and masculine ways of knowing and being and to dramatize the tension between them. A distinction in her use of the form is that she has both women and men engage in a process of individuation during which they confront the abyss, the threatening and disorienting feminine/maternal. Wharton deconstructs traditional Gothic villains and victims by encouraging the reader to identify with those characters who are willing to assimilate this confrontation with the feminine/maternal into their sense of themselves as women and men. In the novels with Gothic texts Wharton draws multiple parallels between male and female protagonists, indicating the commonalities between women and men and the potential for a fe/male self. Eventually, in her last completed novel and her last short story, Wharton imagines human beings who are comfortable with both gender selves. Fedorko's study challenges existing views of the nature of Wharton's realism as well as the nature and importance of her fiction that defies that categorization. It provides a provocative approach to Wharton's handling of and response to gender and complicates current assumptions about her response to the feminine and the maternal.