Edith Wharton and Romanticism: A Study of the [Bracketed] Artistic Self

Buchanan-King, Mindy Leigh

Edith Wharton and Romanticism: A Study of the [Bracketed] Artistic Self

Authors

Buchanan-King, Mindy Leigh

Abstract

Edith Wharton’s 1929 novel, Hudson River Bracketed, is often disregarded in her canon of work as a narrative outmoded in the era of modernist writing. However, this paper seeks to build upon contemporary scholars, such as Judith P. Saunders, who are endeavoring to shed critical light upon the significance of Hudson River Bracketed. By examining this novel and researching its predecessor, the unpublished “Literature” housed in the Edith Wharton Collection at the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut, this thesis seeks to undertake one of the first close examinations of the import of Wharton’s use of the term “bracketed” in relation to architecture and the artistic self, a word that suggests conflicting experiences of security, imprisonment, secrecy, and enclosure. Within the confined, finite spaces of the Hudson River Bracketed mode of architecture, as represented by the Willows in Hudson, Wharton’s struggles with artistic creativity, gender, and nature are explored through her use of Romantic-era concepts, particularly in her allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “Kubla Khan.” Ultimately, this thesis argues that, far from writing in the mode of a didactic, traditionalist, realist author, Wharton was using Romanticism and the bracketed spaces to express her own artistic struggles, providing readers a rare glimpse into the artistic self of Edith Wharton.