Chapter 1 is a case study of realist writer Edith Wharton. “Edith Wharton: Fashioning White Privilege as Commodification, Consumption and Corruption” argues Wharton’s use of fashion exemplifies and often interrogates realism itself, a genre Henry James sought to define as “the real” despite its emphasis on only a selected, elite class. The novels The House of Mirth and The Custom of The Country, published eight years apart, show Wharton’s exploration of realist principles and her manipulation of fashion in her fiction. It provides to readers original social critiques, as Clair Hughes and Martha Banta, among others, have suggested (99).