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In a letter written in eariy summer 1908, Edith Wharton mentioned that she had been reading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil: after praising his "wonderful flashes of insight" and "power of breaking through conventions," she encouraged her friend Sara Norton to "read him if you haven't" (Letters 159).' R.W.B. Lewis maintains that, during this period, Wharton read not only Beyond Good and Evil but also On the Genealogy of Morals and The Will to Power, the philosopher's lengthy, posthumously published collection of notes. More recently, Shari Benstock asserts that, in 1907 and 1908, Wharton "read all of his works, as part of her reading program in philosophy" ( 1 72) .2 Despite this evidence the few scholarly references to Nietzsche's influence on Wharton have centered almost exclusively on how he helped justify her clandestine affair with Morton Fullerton. Lewis writes, for example: "It was of course the affair with Fullerton that had aroused Edith to these considerations of naked instinct and the status of the body" [Biography 230). As well, Carol Singley asserts: "Although Wharton does not mention Nietzsche in her fiction, her letters reveal how important he was in helping her solve a spiritual crisis brought on by a passionate extramarital love affair" (17).3 Although I have no doubt that Nietzsche attracted Wharton in part because his ideas helped rationalize her affair, I also believe there was more to the Nietzsche-Wharton connection than this. Several Nietzschean ideas interested and challenged her; they also influenced some fiction4 she wrote between approximately 1909 and the outbreak of war in 1914. The most obvious example is the short story, "The Blond Beast." which I will discuss here. At the essay's conclusion, however, I will point briefly to Ethan Frome and The Custom of the Country as further evidence of the ways in which Wharton's reading of Nietzsche affected her writing.
"The Blond Beast" was published in Scribner's Magazine in September, 1910,5 and also in the 1910 collection. Tales of Men and Ghosts.6 The beginning of the fivesection story depicts the joyous and confident response of a young man, Hugh Millner, as he leaves the New York home of a wealthy philanthropist, Orlando G. Spence, to whom he has just become private secretary. Millner has also met Spence's...