Edith Wharton as Spatial Activist and Analyst

Reneé Somers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135922962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Biografías literarias

Because she devoted much of her life to exploring the relationships that exist between people and their built environment, Edith Wharton developed a set of philosophies that she expressed in many arenas, including interior design, architecture, and landscaping. Her theories of space were practiced and materially executed, in addition to being expressed in her writing. This book explores Wharton's theories of space in Newport, Rhode Island during the Gilded Age when the town was transformed from a rustic seaport to a playground for the fabulously wealthy. The built environment played a pivotal role as social, economic and personal conflicts were enacted among private and public spaces. As a cultural worker and as an author, Wharton stood squarely in the middle of these conflicts and directly participated in them. Accordingly, the book shows Wharton in a new light by exploring texts such as The Decoration of Houses and The House of Mirth as well as by examining the architecture and aesthetics of three of Wharton's primary homes.

Chapter One

The Politics of Space: Newport's Built Environment in the Gilded Age

Not long after her marriage, Edith Wharton was riding in her carriage along what she called “the fashionable Ocean Drive at Newport” when her new coachman inadvertently passed her mother's carriage and gave her “the dust.” Edith hastily apologized to her mother the next morning and explained that the coachman did not recognize Lucretia Jones's carriage by sight and therefore was ignorant of the “offence” he was committing. Her mother's chilly reply was “you might have told him” (A Backward Glance 15). This incident clearly illustrates two points that must be addressed if we are to see Wharton as a theorist of space.

First, it establishes that space in Newport—in this particular case, a public avenue—had become semiotically charged. The social hierarchy exemplified in the carriage incident was one of many ways in which competing groups of summer sojourners attempted to manage their social stations and to preserve the privilege that accompanied those stations. Wharton was among those groups and found herself so frustrated by the increasingly elaborate, yet staid, social practices that she set out to counter them in her own way. Secondly, this anecdote reveals that Wharton initially embraced her role as a theorist of space with a certain degree of ambivalence. She attempted to rail against the conventions she found so severely limiting, yet she couldn't completely free herself of an Old New York ethos that had been instilled upon her for years. This ethos maintained that public transgressions were as unacceptable as private ones. Thus, when Wharton personally apologized to her mother—a woman “obsessed with etiquette”—she was also showing remorse for having broken Old New York's rules. Eventually, Edith Wharton shed this skin of ambivalence and ardently promoted her theories of space that grew bolder as her confidence developed.

In this chapter, I would like to establish the complexity of the cultural milieu that largely contributed to the formulation of Edith Wharton's theories of space. More specifically I will examine some of the primary elements that came together to make turn-of-the-century Newport a site in which space became especially loaded with semiotics. For many years, the built environment had played a substantial role in establishing Newport as a popular seaside resort. But during the Gilded Age, when the small town morphed into a watering-place for New York fashionables, its public and private spaces became semiotically charged to a previously unknown extent as “new” and “old” money jostled with each other for social power.

Edith Wharton's theories of space had direct ties to this hotbed of cultural contestation because they were responses to the ideas and the practices—most of which linked the built environment to money, manners and social clout—that formed Newport's culture as the nineteenth century drew to a close. These responses were put forth in Wharton's verbal expressions and her architectural practices, both of which were intended to counter the practices of two distinct groups: the old guard who were shakily clutching to their diminishing socio-economic power and the arrivistes who anxiously sought to manage and maintain their growing power. This chapter anticipates Edith Wharton's cultural and authorial roles by first surveying the forces that converged to imbue Newport with a knotty constellation of spatial semiotics.

Public and private spaces in turn-of-the-century Newport became infused with complex networks of social customs, beliefs and practices that stemmed mostly from a small group of newly-moneyed New Yorkers. They were seeking not only to exhibit their fabulous wealth, but also to sustain and even bolster their newly-acquired socio-economic positions of extreme privilege. As a blossoming resort with a lovely climate and relatively cheap real estate values, Newport was an ideal site for a seasonal ingathering of these New Yorkers, many of whom had benefited tremendously from the economic boom that followed the Civil War. Some had become multimillionaires nearly overnight.

This abundance of new millionaires meant that New York society of the 1870s and 1880s was now crowded and competitive. Old New Yorkers who had enjoyed generations of social and economic dominance were now forced to compete with nouveau riche social climbers who were anxious to initiate themselves into the upper-echelons of society. Members of Lucretia and George Frederic Jones's set found themselves displaced by the thrusters, elbowed aside at the opera and confronted by vulgarians, ablaze with diamonds, whenever they ventured on the social scene (O'Connor 32). The newcomers battered at the gates of New York society, while the old guard tried to stave them off. Restless, and avid for association that would certify their claim to “belonging,” the nouveau riche began looking for new places where they could sustain their stations far from the immediate opposition from the old guard. The Ogden Goelets and the August Belmonts, newly-wealthy New York families, “discovered” Newport and others of their set soon followed their lead, transplanting themselves there for an average of six weeks during the summer season.

Collectively, a number of vying coteries produced social practices, etiquettes and rituals as part of their ongoing attempt to mold Newport's culture to serve their own interests. And these interests almost always revolved around an uneasy obsession with position based on acquired or inherited money. The social hierarchies and codes of manners that the Old Knickerbockers had created were safeguards to sustain themselves amidst an increasingly combative high society. Their hold upon this rank became fractured, however, when some of their own members such as Edith Wharton railed against them as well as when social climbers seized the Old New York structures and exaggerated them through elaborate social practices. The built environment at Newport was both the battleground on which these struggles took place and the product of these struggles.

Space in Gilded Age Newport was politically charged in radically new ways. For instance, the main throughways, Bellevue Avenue and Ocean Drive, went from being routes of transportation to public stages upon which carriage parades allowed the wealthy to showcase their assets and good taste. A similar space was the Newport ballroom. Once used for frivolous dances and galas, the ballroom was now where the wealthy assembled to exhibit their superiority in taste and to intimidate social rivals. At the forefront of this ferocious competition and collective exhibitionism were the highly-contested notions of social class and gender. Moreover, exclusivity supplanted community within the confines of the Newport ballroom, thereby contributing to a narrative of decline that was felt mostly by the surviving members of the old guard. Lastly, the Newport “cottages” themselves—the palatial mansions along Bellevue Avenue—contributed to the cultural contestation over the built environment. They unabashedly broadcasted nouveau riche power and sparked debates over the “appropriate” relationship between money, taste and manners.

Edith Wharton's theories of space were influenced by the politics that surrounded Newport's built environment. As social, economic, political and personal tensions escalated, Wharton found herself among many groups and individuals who were actively engaged in trying to define the terms by which Newport's culture functioned. They tried to shape what was fashionable and what was not; they attempted to dictate who was worthy of social inclusion and who was not; they tried to maintain what good taste was and how it should be exhibited; they attempted to define the proper association between money and good manners. The new breed of wealthy “cottagers” represented one of the many coteries involved in this battle for cultural definition. With the “cottagers” (quite literally) came members of the serving-class. Another coterie was Newport's “old guard” who were divided into many factions: the old summer colony of wealthy bluebloods, the local, year-round residents who were mostly working or middle class and, finally, the intellectuals.

It is important to recognize that these coteries and their cultural, economic and intellectual boundaries were not always clearly demarcated. Newport's milieu was not one that could be reduced to a simple binary of “us vs. them” or “old vs. new” or “rich vs. poor.” Richard O'Connor maintains that the Newport townspeople and the summer residents engaged in “continual guerrilla warfare” and that “the territorial imperative asserted itself in only slightly more dignified terms than the conflict between street gangs over their turf” (23). But this is a reductive assertion that does not take into consideration the complex cultural web that was created when people of many ethnicities, social stations and cultural affiliations transgressed, shattered, diminished, conflated, amalgamated and sometimes walked the slippery paths between these boundaries.

For instance, some local Newport residents did not see the newly wealthy summer residents as “interlopers” and came to their defense against accusations of wasteful extravagance and vapidity. Some serving-class members of the community constructed false stories about other serving-class members who had risen on the social ladders and were therefore seen as traitors. Some of the members of the so-called intelligentsia were lured into participating in the social competition and lavish entertaining that took place among the upper echelons of Newport society. Some of the nouveau riche poked fun at themselves and their compulsion for conspicuous consumption. Thus, these individuals and coteries did not create stagnant, self-preserving boundaries that existed within cultural vacuums. Conversely, the cultural assemblage that was taking place in turn-of-the-century Newport involved a blurred process of negotiation and slippage among the competing groups as well as among the boundaries they established.

To better grasp how absurdly elaborate the social practices of Gilded Age Newport had become—during the reign of the arriviste—we can juxtapose it with the summer spot that Edith Jones and her family had once known. Socially, the Newport of 1860 prided itself on a sense of community and intellectual pursuits. Picnics, beach excursions, dances and the always-popular clam bakes brought members of the summer colony and local residents together on a regular basis. Prior to the Civil War, wealthy plantation owners summered in Newport to escape the stifling heat and the social turmoil that was escalating in the South. The Civil War ended their patronage and they were replaced by those Richard O'Connor calls “nice millionaires” who were unobtrusive and felt no need to advertise their wealth (24). Newport ranked as one of the wealthiest counties in the United States according to the 1860 census, but the Newport of fabulously wealthy families and conspicuous consumption did not yet exist. No estates exceeded a valuation of $500,000 and the socioeconomic “elite” consisted of fewer than 300 families. The households of the fifteen richest men in Newport County in 1860 averaged five servants apiece, and the two millionaires employed only nine servants between them (Sterngass 188).

The cultural atmosphere of tolerance combined with the sheer beauty of the island and its bay drew the social and intellectual elites of Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Every summer there was an ingathering of artists, authors, scientists, actors, philanthropists and statesmen. Collectively, John La Farge, William Morris Hunt, John Singer Sargent, the James family, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Helen Choate Bell, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, Thomas Appleton, Charlotte Cushman, Helen Hunt (Jackson), Katherine Wormeley and others created a Newport of high culture and elevated thought.

Generally speaking, there was a consensus among the intellectuals that, while they summered in Newport to think and to be inspired by the island's beauty for art's sake, the rich New Yorkers who began to sojourn from July to early September simply came to play. The seeds of the “purposeful” versus “purposeless” debate that continued for many years were planted at this time. Local Newporters and members of the intelligentsia eyed the nouveau riche families with an admixture of suspicion, uneasiness and awe. “How many of the swellest of the swell were anything at all twenty years ago—fifteen years ago even?” asked an editorial in the gossipy Town Topics in 1877. “Where were the Vanderbilts, socially, even five years ago? The Astors had just fifteen years the social start” (Lewis 41).

An exact date on which Newport was transformed into a playground for the fabulously wealthy cannot be determined. Richard O'Connor maintains that it all seemed to happen overnight as, “a stampede to the seaside that swept away the modest hotels, boarding houses and farms in which summer people had indulged in their quiet pleasures and replaced them with castles and chateaux of the most depressing magnificence” (29). Traditional entertainments such as picnics, beach excursions, small dinner parties and cotillions were eclipsed by lavish entertainments that were sponsored by many of the New York grande dames that were fiercely competing for social dominance. Dinner parties and balls were occasions to compete; hostesses vied to dazzle guests more brilliantly than ever before. As Mary Murphy-Schlichting has noted, restraint and moderation, keystones of the old order, were abandoned (223). It must not go unnoticed that much of this dramatic metamorphosis hinged upon Newport's built environment. Rather than attempting to survey all of the contributing factors and consequences of this alteration, however, I think it best to examine a select group of individuals who were key players in molding public and private spaces to manage and sustain their social status.

The Belmonts of New York carefully constructed a mandarin image that relied heavily upon public spaces. August Belmont was an international banker, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and the American agent for the European Rothchilds. He married Caroline Perry, daughter of the Newport naval hero, Matthew Perry, who had opened up the ports of Japan to western trade. In 1860, August Belmont rented a villa on Bellevue Avenue and liked it so much that he later bought the fourteen-acre plot next door for $47,000 and built his villa, Bythesea (a misnomer since it is not located on the oceanfront). Described as “glamorous” and “gilded” and sporting a “florid style,” the Belmonts represented the lavishness and the epitome of high-class living that pervaded Newport as it entered the Gilded Age. They served as a bellwether for a whole flock of New Yorkers in their summer migrations. After the Belmonts came a task force composed of various Kips, Tiffanys, Rhinelanders, Van Rensselaers, Lorillards, Schermerhorns and Stuyvesants, followed by the Astor and Vanderbilt clans (O'Connor 37).

But what the Belmonts accomplished was even more important than what they represented. They initiated what would later become a staple of Newport social life: parading one's carriage down a main avenue to be seen and envied by all. In other words, the Belmonts were among the first to recognize that Bellevue Avenue and Ocean Drive—spaces that had not long before been overgrown landscapes and farmlands—could be used to bolster their social station. Essentially, they transformed these roads into stages, thereby creating what Jon Sterngass has called the spirit of see-and-be-seen ennui (199). Glittering carriages ambled down the avenue without a specific destination.

Caroline Belmont would parade down Bellevue Avenue in her demi-daumont, a carriage imported from Paris, drawn by four horses and driven by two postillions outfitted as jockeys. The afternoon carriage-parade along the avenue became something that anyone who was anyone did without fail. Eleanor Dwight acknowledges that this drive was “important” (37), while Richard O'Connor calls it an “afternoon drive-cum-exhibition” (138). The wealthy exhibitionists piled into vehicles such as demi-daumonts, dogcarts, victorias, landaus, phaetons, barouches and four-in-hands. Thus, parading up Bellevue Avenue or along Ocean Drive in a stunning variety of horse-drawn vehicles and equipages was another way to advertise one's wealth and good taste. Edith Wharton describes what she calls the “regular afternoon diversion” of carriage-parading:

Every day all the elderly ladies, leaning back in Victoria and barouche, or the new-fangled vis-à-vis, a four-seated carriage with a rumble for a footman, drove down the whole length of Bellevue Avenue, where the most fashionable villas then stood, and around the newly laid-out ‘Ocean Drive,’ which skirted for several miles the wild rocky region between Narragansett Bay and the Atlantic. (A Backward Glance 845)

Caroline Belmont did more than create a “diversion” that took place every afternoon; she actually shaped the criteria for this ritual. She set forth the standards of these public spaces by maintaining that, to properly partake in the parading, one must exude an aura of extravagance and to behave with increased formality. One way to project this extravagance was to display markers of wealth that were associated with prestige and were entrenched within Old World customs.

For instance, Newport millionaires began to have liveried footmen accompany their carriages. The Vanderbilt footmen wore maroon coats while Mrs. Astor's crew wore blue. The Newport Daily News insisted that having “two stately footmen ride behind you a [sic] moderate pace” (3) was a crucial element to arranging the right ensemble for the carriage-parade. In short, carriage-parading was not a new social activity among the wealthy; it had already been instituted among the aristocracies of Europe. In this sense, the Belmonts did not actually create something new in Newport. However, as with many others of their set, they took the social practices that were already in place and tremendously amplified them as part of their ongoing effort to sustain their newly-gained social station. The Newport carriage-parade was unlike any other in the world because it had at its core a nouveau riche anxiety rather than an aristocratic prestige. The components deemed necessary for parading along Bellevue Avenue and Ocean Drive reflected this anxiety: they were wildly disproportioned and grossly exaggerated as compared to their European predecessors.

Fashion was greatly exaggerated in Newport because it was believed to be another critical component of “avenue extravagance.” The carriage-parade along the avenues was conducted at a conspicuously slow pace so that onlookers could gaze at and scrutinize each costume. What better forum for Madame to flaunt her new Parisian hat or her delicately embroidered dress? Mrs. Belmont was known for wearing the most expensively tasteful imported frocks and jewelry and for her “aristocratic manner.” Maud Howe Elliott wistfully recalls, “I can see Mrs. Belmont now, as she smiled and bowed— gracious, charming woman, always spoken of as tres elegante” (133). Likewise, Edith Wharton remembers that, for the parade down Bellevue Avenue, “one dressed as elegantly as if attending the races at Ascot or Auteuil”:

A brocaded or satin-striped dress, powerfully whale-boned, a small flower-trimmed bonnet tied with a large tulle bow under the chin, a dotted tulle veil and a fringed silk or velvet sunshade, sometimes with a jointed handle of elaborately carved ivory, composed what was thought a suitable toilet for this daily circuit between wilderness and waves. (A Backward Glance 845)

The politics of fashion that accompanied the main focal point of the afternoon were to be taken seriously. For instance, the Newport Daily News instructed naive newcomers who were new to the Bellevue Avenue or Ocean Drive parade scene to dress “in your best attire” (44). To ignore this advice was to risk public humiliation and censure—imperfections were detected immediately and seized upon by social enemies.

Aspiring social climbers drastically elevated the existing standards that had always been associated with carriage-parading to new heights by insisting upon an orchestrated perfection. As such, simple elegance and modest exhibitionism were replaced with pristine splendor. This was one way to exclude soc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter One The Politics of Space: Newport’s Built Environment in the Gilded Age
• Chapter Two Edith Wharton as a Theorist of Space: A Study of Her Earliest Homes and Influences
• Chapter Three The Literary Spaces of Class and Gender: Edith Wharton’s Early Short Fiction
• Chapter Four Spaces and Sites Without Limits: The Decoration of Houses and The Mount
• Chapter Five Full Circle: The House of Mirth and Three
• Afterword Who Would Be Satisfied With Being Satisfied
• Bibliography
• Index