ABSTRACT

Edith Wharton’s writing after World War I reflects an uneasy combination of perspectives: a backward glance to Old New York and a forward outlook to America’s future. All the while, the author casts a sidelong eye to an idealized vision of European social traditions. In this chapter I take a historicist approach to Wharton’s concerns regarding postwar American family life through her nonfiction writing and her fictional children in The Glimpses of the Moon (1922) and The Children (1928), linking the childlike behavior of Jazz Age adults to what she sees as a nationwide moral decline, as well as noting the spread of American habits and values abroad. In her autobiographical works—A Backward Glance (1934), “A Little Girl’s New York” (1938), and “Life and I” (a more candid, early draft version of A Backward Glance, first published in 1990)—Wharton reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of her strict nineteenth-century upbringing. In French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), Wharton seeks to educate her wayward countrymen on the cultural virtues of France. Even in the face of her misgivings about family life in Old New York, Wharton characterizes stable, traditional families as critical to the enduring strength of a nation. Through her fictional critiques of frivolous Americans in European settings in The Glimpses of the Moon and The Children, Wharton presents an image of cultural and moral regression that refutes contemporary mainstream American notions of social progress, particularly with regard to relations between the sexes and women’s social roles.