ABSTRACT
Focusing on Edith Wharton’s fiction and career in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the second chapter closely examines the new ideals of professionalism and professional authorship that arose partly in response to the feminization of clerical work. These changes had a strong effect on Wharton as she viewed herself as a professional author at the beginning of her career. Responding to Amy Kaplan, I distinguish Wharton’s early Jamesian professionalism from the professional models that became dominant in the mid-1920s. Unlike Henry James’s ideal, modernist authorship required an “esoteric body of knowledge” and the sanctioning of elite institutions. Wharton’s sense of exclusion partly led to the deeper conservatism of Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and The Gods Arrive (1932) even as these novels include a critique of women’s marginalization. In Wharton’s two popular novels, Twilight Sleep (1927) and The Children (1928), she develops a stronger critique of the power imbalance between the male professional and the modern girl figure. In contrast to Sigmund Freud’s case studies or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction, the male protagonist of The Children has no access to the psyche of the adolescent Judith Wheater, whom he alternately perceives as child in the “nursery” and a mature woman.
