Family and Social Change

Edith Wharton contrived in her novels to sacrifice the portrait of ¿life in time¿ to ¿life by value¿. But even granting this, one can observe that the profound skill employed by Edith Wharton in moving specially her female characters through large areas and epochs is used not primarily in order to guarantee their ¿reality¿, but to suggest the essential rootlessness and restlessness that characterise woman¿s, nay man¿s existence in modern world. Her novels are not peripheral to the central facts of American experience. They are an integral part of the social world. Her fiction is nothing short of an ¿all over¿ picture, where every inch is charged with line and colour and the total metamorphosis of the surface presents textual and material canvass that depicts symbols of a larger reality. The considerable value of her novels as social documents cannot be denied. Like a great artist, Edith Wharton integrates her sense of the amoral individual into a carefully controlled moral context and her fiction can be viewed as ¿a telescope upon a tower¿ which seems to correct false social history and to provide meaning to social life.