Death to Lady Bountiful: Women and Reform in Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree

Abstract

The consensus among several generations of critics is that Wharton's 1907 novel The Fruit of the Tree lacks a stable core of concerns. 1 "There was stuff here for a dozen novels," Millicent Bell concludes (253-54). Henry James's judgment was no less decisive for his characteristic indirection. After praising the novel to Wharton as a thing "of a great deal of (though not perhaps of a completely superior) art," he adds, "Where my qualifications would come in would be as to the terrible question of the composition & conduct of the thing" (Powers 78). He would later complain to Mary Cadwalader Jones of the novel's "strangely infirm composition and construction--as if she hadn't taken thought for that" (Powers 79, n3). 2 Frequently underlying criticism of its construction is the assumption that Wharton conceived of her novel in the muckraking tradition. Thus Elizabeth Ammons, who characterizes both The House of Mirth (1905) and The Fruit of the Tree (1907) as "economic novels," assigns them places alongside Norris's The Pit (1903), Glasgow's The Deliverance (1904), and Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). If we hold Wharton to these muckraking intentions, then the novel's cursory attention to the details of mill life and its focus instead on the private lives of the three principal characters are bound to disappoint.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.