Twilight Sleep:

Color-Blindness, Racism, and the Production of Progress

 

            Of all the questions one might immediately ask of Twilight Sleep and its long dead authoress Edith Wharton, perhaps the last thought on the mind of a reader is the question of race and its role in the construction of this story. For most readers, particularly for people that are white, the blips within Twilight Sleep that mention race seem trivial in the grand scheme of a story which unravels to its somewhat-tragic conclusion. Through the narrative skills of Edith Wharton, the purpose of the work seems to be to criticize (as was often the habit of Mrs. Wharton) the trajectory of American society, particularly the white nouveau riche of the 1920’s which so contrasted with her own understandings of elite American culture that she was born and bred into. With the ascent of the rising upper middle and upper class of the roaring 1920’s came a host of intercultural appropriations and exchanges. For that era, race, ethnicity, and culture had just as great a salience as they do today, if not more so.

 

           The styles of the young, rich, and fashionable urbanites were not created or dominated solely by established fashion houses of Europe: nor were their hairstyles, their dances, or any other cultural affectation. It was at this point, long past the days of the Civil War, that cultural others entered into the urban consciousness as arbiters of new-found fads. So why do the narratives or the realities of people of color lack in this work of Edith Wharton? Their distance based on class is a respectable answer, but their impacts on the trajectory of history thereby must be read in tandem with the story. In order to understand Edith Wharton the pedigreed elitist critic, we must understand Edith Wharton the innocuous and speechless racist.

 

           For over a hundred years American culture has been one of consumption, predicated strongly on the appropriation and reinterpretation of the histories, artifacts, and objects of “othered” cultures. This model of American cultural appropriation, consumption, and mass production has until recently been one undefined or unexamined by the majority of American citizens. It has only been through the advent and growing popularity of intersectional feminist philosophy, discourse, and empowerment that intersecting structures of oppression have begun to be understood as working in conjunction, particularly by understanding the impacts of white, heterosexual, and male hierarchies on the lives of women of color which cumulatively buckle under their weight and bear an intersecting form of oppression.

 

           The contributions of people of color to American society have long been derided, ignored, or actively silenced, with the last two far more frequent presently than common sense would suggest they ought to be. In this paper, I argue that the contributions of people of color directly inform and shape an otherwise color-blind narrative crafted by Edith Wharton and that in order to fully understand her anti nouveau-riche sentiments and seeming progressivism, we must first root it understandings of not only gender or class, but also race.

 

           Under the apparent visage of boredom and discontent, intergenerational and interclass conflict, struggles of gender-based power and class-based right; contouring the motion of each of these is the influence of those considered “other” by their white counterparts. Through the exploitation of people of color, elite white youth and culture of the United States posed a novel threat to established hierarchies which praised age, an old family line, maleness, and whiteness. However, it is this influence of people of color that ultimately engendered much of the social transformation of the early 20th century concurrently with the rise of industrial capitalism. Tempered by readings of the work’s progressivism in depicting novel constructions of elite families and gender-dynamics, Twilight Sleep can be said with certain authority to represent all that was best and worst about American dynamism, erasure, and the cultural construct of American collective supremacy.

 

            According to Jean Griffith, the setting of Twilight Sleep is one tempered by the onsetting realities of the Jazz Age which signals the ushered end of family and profit-based American elitism. In place of long geographically-centered and well-monied American elites has come a mish-mash of up-and-coming elites. The traditions of the past are now relegated for the first time to a status lesser than that of a consumptive American culture which erases racial significances in the pursuit of a singular American culture. This erasure takes place in multiple forms, with the appropriation of the musical and dance styles of different groups of people of color by young whites figuring most prominently in Griffith’s narrative (2006). By examining the reorientation of elite nexes of power, Griffith hearkens back to contributions of the Harlem-based Jazz Age in substantially informing the habits of young elites.

 

           Within the novel, two incarnations of such American elites are manifest in Wharton’s novel through the presence of Nona Manford and Lita Wyant; the one born into a family of pedigreed privilege, the other an orphan whose marriage into the Wyant’s is one of nearly happy circumstance due to the reputation of her aunt among the new New York elite. While the lives of these two women intersect openly, with Lita’s affair ultimately causing Nona to be shot , the ways in which they themselves are propelled forward are more thoroughly deconstructed and engaged in Griffith’s article as benefactresses of cultural appropriation which was long-derided and despised among established elites such as Wharton (Griffith 2006). Indeed, Wharton herself harbored ill-feelings about the disintegration of the elite culture of her birth and felt betrayed not only by the rise of consumer-based cultural habits which outpaced any kind of well-intended tradition, but perhaps especially by the ways in which cultural others – particularly African American people of color – were unduly influencing American culture and gaining prominence (Griffith 2006). That this rhetoric did not enter in the dialogue of the book itself save in few descriptions apart from the dance club scene is itself surprising, but the innocuous nature of racism in literature is seldom one of many words.

 

          In fact, erasure is a far more prominent aspect and one woven throughout Twilight Sleep, a novel which condemns the transgressions of American society at every turn – from the rise of women like Pauline Manford, the attitudes, fashions, and amorality of women like Lita Wyant, and the grasping immorality of men like Dexter Wyant (Wharton 16; 33; 37; 54; 60; 194). It is this kind of erasure of black bodies, their subsumption to a sub-human and non-dialogic existence, that allows for the prevailing narrative of Edith Wharton as a critic of nouveau-riche capitalist Americans to prevail (Wharton 147). Among proponents of this novel, some point to the new conventions of family as being indicative of Wharton’s support for the coming of the modern family. The relationship between mother’s and daughter’s is praised when good, and familial breakups in the form of divorce are shown as evidence of the “modernist project” which would revolutionize American life in the coming decades. Though this would for many years remain an option only for the elite, it signals a significant alteration in power dynamics that suggest a newfound flexibility for white women of elite status and the understanding of women based on their subordinance to heteropatriarchy (Haytock 225-229).

 

          Other proponents of the text point to Wharton’s obvious satirism in order to justify what much of literary America apparently felt was a flop compared to her earlier successes (Beer & Horner 179-182). Citing numerous literary ancestors that contributed to her sense of satire, certain academics have posited that the worth of the piece lies in that Wharton may be misrepresenting herself as desirous of the old world, of old ways: ultimately, that she falsifies her personhood as a conservative when in reality she is not (191). To Beer and Horner, the novel merely reaffirms her place as a writer who wrote beyond the scope of what critics could or would understand, arguably presenting a scathing review of American elitism. Whatever the case of Wharton’s intentions however, the documentation of her letters remains real, viable, and legitimate – as found in the recent arguments of Griffith.

         

         While critiques which praise Wharton for her gender-egalitarianism in fact have a certain truth to them, the mind which engendered Twilight Sleep was not free from the social norm of systemic racism. This informed the understandings of Edith Wharton in how elite culture evolved – it did not stand apart, silent and fetishized, as presented in the novel. Though people diverge in their conceptions of Wharton’s ultimate treatments regarding the agency of women and their place within tradition, it is known that she herself was something of a rebel in her youth and in her writing. But this cannot be taken as being tantamount to not being racist or not perpetuating any kind of sexism, racism, or classism. Rather, her critique of the new American elite was rooted in their difference from her: in upbringing, in action, in consumption, in lack of innate cultivation. Furthermore, their difference was at least partly informed by a social pattern in which the fashions, dances, and music of people of color first became popular.

 

          While ideally this might have on one level signaled a new age for America, it is one foretold in her novel: one of long-decades lacking authenticity, denying the credit of people of color in agentially enacting their own cultural forms and modes of expression. If we miss this warning inherent in Edith Wharton’s piece, one which can easily be overlooked for the seeming romantic plotline, or the broken gender norms and family relations, or the purported classist satire of the piece, we miss a critical aspect of American culture that shaped each of these facets without words and with an undercurrent too strong to be ignored. We risk ignoring racism, we risk perpetuating erasure: ultimately, we risk staying in the very vacuum of white culture which preys on cultural others and gives nothing in return except for silence.