ABSTRACT
As viewed by the realist school, social change was a portentous affair of left or right wing revolution springing from the sensational inequalities of wealth depicted in their novels. The wilderness of the mountains is both contemporary and timeless, a realistically observed backwash of the twentieth century and the primordial haunt of barbarism. Twain and Edith Wharton observed the same period in different perspectives: his conclusion is cynical and pessimistic; hers, in the series of New York novels, gradually less censorious of the rising elite of wealth. By Mrs. Wharton's life and by her autobiographical record, A Backward Glance, we are left in no doubt that she found in Europe, and especially in France, an aesthetic sensibility transubstantiated into the innumerable particulars of daily living, a culture, in short, having a 'real presence', instinctively accepted, in which America was deficient.
