| Popis: |
During her life as a transatlantic writer, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) witnessed unprecedented social, economic and political transformations both in America and in the world at large: post-Civil War Reconstruction, the Gilded Age (the time between the Civil War and World War I), the Progressive Era and World War I. Deeply concerned with the issues of her day, she produced fiction about the effects of change at all levels of society - not only concerning the upper-class New York society of which she herself was a member but also in smaller communities such as New England villages. To this end, she consistently created tragic female figures who call attention to the lack of viable alternatives and choices for women in nineteenth-century American society. Also depicted are the following themes which have clear contemporary relevance: the inner complexities of women’s lives derived from their subservient position as objects of desire for men; their emotional distress and physical pain in their entrapment in traditional gender roles as dictated by societal norms and codes; the vulgarity of the nouveaux riches; the repression of the established upper class; the inequality and repression of women in patriarchal culture; the hostility and rivalry between women; the confining nature of marriage, especially for women; the preference of powerful, white, usually upper-class men for childish dependent women; the repression of women’s sexual desire, the structure of patriarchal power; the financial insecurity and economic dependence of women for survival; a sense of homelessness- rootlessness in a country void of a cultural heritage. This paper thus aims to demonstrate how all the female characters in Ethan Frome, Summer and The House of Mirth are variously represented as the hopeless victims of social entrapment, with special focus on marriage from three different perspectives: married life itself (e.g.: Zeena Frome in Ethan Frome), hope for marriage (as in Mattie Silver in Ethan Frome and Charity Royall in Summer) or failure in exerting oneself to achieve marriage, the embodiment of the false values of wealthy Gilded Age New York (as in Lily Bart in The House of Mirth) |
