Imagining the Jews Together: Shared Figures in Edith Wharton and Henry James

Abstract

In October of 1904, when Edith Wharton was writing The House of Mirth and Henry James, having recently arrived in America after a twenty-two-year absence, was collecting the impressions that were to make up The American Scene, James paid a two-week visit to Wharton at the Mount, her country house in Lenox, Massachusetts. The visit consolidated their friendship and literary relationship. In the mornings, both wrote. In the afternoons, Wharton and James “motored” together, enjoying the beauty of a Western Massachusetts autumn, and they conversed deep into the evenings (Benstock, 144–45; Edel, 598). The claim that Wharton's fiction is heavily influenced by James's, frequently reiterated ever since Wharton began her career, has become a critical commonplace (Lewis, 131). But reading passages side by side from the works both writers were in the process of creating in the fall of 1904, The House of Mirth and The American Scene, yields as much evidence of Wharton's influence on James as of James's influence on Wharton, an influence established probably for the most part through their conversations. In this essay, I contend that the shared imagery in the work of the two writers — involving roses, skyscrapers, and Trinity Church, and centering on the figure of the Jew — makes most sense when the two writers are read in conjunction. Read together, the shared imagery in James and Wharton passages suggests that the two together imagined the Jew as the figure for a commercialized, industrialized, modern America, and for the impossibility of art in such an America — and that they found a mutual consolation in doing so. Wharton's later novels, two of which I consider in this essay (The Glimpses of the Moon [1922] and Hudson River Bracketed [1929]) demonstrate that her conversations about these matters with James, and their shared understanding of the Jews, remained important to her for a quarter of a century. Toward the end of her career, she attempted to forge a similar bond of shared aesthetic sensibility and mutual anti-Semitism with the younger writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, but without success.