Content area
Full Text
In Edith Wharton's first war novel, The Marne (1918), France becomes, for young Troy Belknap, "his holiday world, the world of his fancy and imagination, a great traceried window opening on the universe" (9). For young Edith, the whole of Europe became just such a window, a vision of beauty and order that Colored her whole life. Charmed as a child by the visual world and fascinated by art and architecture, Wharton as a young adult became an apologist for the buildings and beliefs of the American Renaissance, allying herself in particular with the work of its leading architect, Charles Folien McKim. This first public role placed her in a context of wide-ranging cultural and political importance.
Her very early years were dominated by the family's 1866 migration to Europe "to economize," "a happy misfortune which gave me, for the rest of my life, that background of beauty and old-established order!" (Backward Glance 44). These early aesthetic memories "positioned" the novelist, as Shari Benstock observes, in "relation to traditions that privilege visual harmony and order" (29), traditions to which her individual subjectivity was deeply linked. The capitols of Europe came to represent a visual and spatial standard to which the American scene never measured up. She would have seen not only historic European architectural monuments but the results of recent development of major capitols. The most important was the opening and ordering of space in the center of Paris under Baron von Haussmann in the mid-nineteenth century. By the late eighteenth century, Berlin had laid out the grand Under den Linden and throughout the nineteenth century built a series of monumental museums, theaters, churches, and other public buildings, many designed by the neoclassical heavyweight, Carl Friedrich Schinkel. These two cities in particular became the ideal toward which the City Beautiful movement aspired at the turn of the twentieth century in the U. S.
Wharton reflects both these architectural movements, the European and the American, in the repugnance in A Backward Glance at the "little lowstudded rectangular New York" of the 1870s, a "cramped horizontal gridiron of town, . . . hide-bound in its deadly uniformity of mean ugliness" (55). Even as an adult, she hated "the wild, dishevelled backwoods look of everything."' Early in her...