The Naturalism of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth

Abstract

between sex and money in turn-of-the-century upper-class New York life and to reveal the tragic effects of a society of this kind upon a sensitive young woman has been recognized from the publication of the novel in 1905. Criticism of the day, however, and indeed for the next half-century, shied away from an identification of these themes with literary naturalism. The fictional worlds of Norris, Crane, and Dreiser, the naturalists of Wharton's generation, appeared so distant from those of Wharton that the almost inevitable tendency of the literary historian, as revealed most notably in a well-known section of Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds, was to consider Wharton and Dreiser as antithetical tendencies in early twentieth-century American expression. A notable attempt, however, to free Wharton criticism from this

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