"A Great House Full of Rooms": Explorations of Literary Tradition and Gender Norms in Three Novels by Edith Wharton

Abstract

This thesis explores gender and narrative technique in three Edith Wharton novels: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and Summer. Women writers before Wharton were often not taken seriously, and this thesis examines the writing techniques that simultaneously placed Wharton within the male literary tradition and questioned its premises. Many of Wharton's female protagonists made waves with readers and deviated from expectations for female characters; thus, this thesis explores them as "difficult women", a reflection of their deviancy from gender norms and expectations. In creating female protagonists which were based in literary convention, Wharton challenged those norms with subtle changes to the predominantly male literary tradition, specifically through her use of narrator's voice, focalization and chronology. Based on the concepts of masculine authority and fiction as disguise, this thesis examines Wharton's fiction as an implicit criticism of women's position in American society in the early twentieth century.