1. Mrs. Wharton's friendship with Henry James and the derivation of her
methods from his suggest an interesting comparison of the work of these
two writers. For this comparison, books treating of similar material
should be chosen; for example, Mrs. Wharton's _The Custom of the Country_
or _Madame de Treymes_ with Mr. James's _Portrait of a Lady_ or _The
Ambassadors_. The result will show that Mrs. Wharton, having an
essentially different type of mind, has worked out an interesting set of
variations of Mr. James's method.
2. Mrs. Wharton's novels of American social life should be studied and
judged separately from her Italian historical novel (_The Valley of
Decision_) and from her New England stories, _Ethan Frome_ and _Summer_.
3. Two special phases of Mrs. Wharton's work which call for study are her
management of supernatural effects in some of her short stories and her
use of satire.
4. Her short stories offer a basis of comparison with those of Mrs.
Gerould (q.v.), another disciple of Mr. James.
5. Has Mrs. Wharton enough originality and enough distinction to hold a
permanent high place as a novelist of American manners?
6. Use the following criticisms by Mr. Carl Van Doren as the basis of a
critical judgment of your own. Decide whether he is in all respects
right:
From the first Mrs. Wharton's power has lain in the ability to
reproduce in fiction the circumstances of a compact community in a
way that illustrates the various oppressions which such communities
put upon individual vagaries, whether viewed as sin, or ignorance,
or folly, or merely as social impossibility.
She has always been singularly unpartisan, as if she recognized it
as no duty of hers to do more for the herd or its members than to
play over the spectacle of their clashes the long, cold light of her
magnificent irony.
It is only in these moments of satire that Mrs. Wharton reveals much
about her disposition: her impatience of stupidity and affectation
and muddy confusion of mind and purpose; her dislike of dinginess;
her toleration of arrogance when it is high-bred. Such qualities do
not help her, for all her spare, clean movement, to achieve the
march or rush of narrative; such qualities, for all her satiric
pungency, do not bring her into sympathy with the sturdy or burly or
homely, or with the broader aspects of comedy.... So great is her
self-possession that she holds criticism at arm's length, somewhat
as her chosen circles hold the barbarians. If she had a little less
of this pride of dignity she might perhaps avoid her tendency to
assign to decorum a larger power than it actually exercises, even in
the societies about which she writes.... The illusion of reality in
her work, however, almost never fails her, so alertly is her mind on
the lookout to avoid vulgar or shoddy romantic elements.