Jennie A. Kassanoff,
Edith Wharton and the Politics
of Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004, $70.00, 226 pages, ISBN 0-521-83089-3)—Chris Bell, Nottingham
Trent University
Readers familiar with Edith Wharton’s
oeuvre will immediately be attracted to or perplexed
by the title of this critical text. Known and revered
primarily for her works examining the trials and travails
of American, particularly New England, upper-crust
societies at the turn of the twentieth century, one
might be inclined to wonder how Kassanoff could effectively identify and explicate issues
of race in Wharton’s works, especially given the fact
that Wharton is not often viewed as a writer concerned
with or even mildly interested in issues of race.
Indeed, within the first few pages of
this text, it becomes clear that Kassanoff
does not really produce a successful critique, due
notably to the fact that Wharton’s forays into race
were so few and far between. Moreover, Kassanoff
barely attempts to conceal the fact that her critique
is not grounded in race so much as it is instantiations
of class—that is the kind of examination of Wharton’s
works that occurs on a quotidian basis. By that light,
there is very little new information presented in
this text, which, given its misleading title, isn’t
that hard to understand.
One of the key questions this text raises,
perhaps unintentionally, is what does the individual
choose to take and tout as “history,” with the secondary
concern of who is left out of that history and why?
With specific regard to Edith
Wharton and the Politics of Race, Kassanoff’s
version of history is tellingly entrenched in whiteness.
If she intended to discuss how white is a race, then
perhaps there might be a point to emphasizing so much
white history. Since she does not, her critique’s
limited focus becomes all the more distressing. A
case in point: In a discussion of French culture,
Kassanoff notes how Wharton appreciated the French for their
“unprecedented level of artistic and racial continuity”
[22]. She goes on to observe that the French can “trace
their culture back to the cave painters of prehistoric
Europe” [ibid]. Such
a statement should alert careful readers, causing
them alarm, in that it presupposes that all French
subjects have some sort of biological connection and/or
allegiance with the European continent. Kassanoff’s
conjecture, as it does more often that not, raises
troubling questions, in this case: What do you do
with the always already present subaltern in your
midst? How do you opt not to see this person? More
specifically, is Kassanoff actually unaware of the fact that the transatlantic
slave trade imported individuals to France
from a region outside of Europe
and that the descendants of those individuals are
themselves seen as “French”? Indeed, does she not
realize that at the time Wharton wrote, slavery was
outlawed in France, meaning
that those individuals who had been imported were
(on their way to becoming) “French” even then? Additionally,
at the time Wharton wrote, wasn’t France one of the chief proponents of colonization,
“owning” lands in Africa?
Weren’t the people populating those lands conceived
of as “French,” albeit at a lower rung on the nationalist
hierarchy?
Such “structuralist”
gaffes are not limited to the notion of so-called
“French” individuals. Consider this excerpt, wherein
Kassanoff reveals her all-encompassing
idea of an “American”: “As Charles Bowen tells Laura
Fairford in The Custom
of the Country, Americans are epitomized by their
women” [35]. Immediately, the reader wonders, who
is an American in Kassanoff’s
conception? Who, specifically, is being discussed
and how does the focus on that singular conception
of an American necessarily relegate “other” Americans
to the margins? These questions become all the more
significant given the fact that the work under examination
here, Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, was published in 1913, a mere ten years following
W.E.B. Du Bois’s
landmark treatise The
Souls of Black Folk. If we agree that blacks were
“Americans” at the turn of the twentieth century just
as the former African slaves were “French” at the
same time, then it is worth recognizing that Du
Bois was not speaking about black women in his text
so much as he was discussing certain black men (point
of clarification: he writes of double consciousness,
not triple consciousness). To that end, the statement
that “Americans are epitomized by their women” takes
on a new (racialized) complexity
that Kassanoff does not even begin to consider, let alone address.
One of the more distressing aspects of
the text is that Kassanoff
misses even the most obvious opportunities to discuss
titular issues of race. For example, she inserts this
statement in the midst of a textual analysis: “These
so-called ‘down-and-outers […] ‘passed’ among America’s poor” [94]. What is the
purpose of placing the term “passed” in quotation
marks, of emphasizing it as a trope, if you’re going
to do nothing to discuss how the term is generally
conceived, its racial implications? Stated differently,
why deploy that particular term which was invoked
during the time Wharton wrote, to bring to mind racial
masquerading in this, a text that purports to connect
Wharton to a politics of race, and leave it unexamined?
As with many instances in the text, Kassanoff’s
critique leaves much to be desired.
This brings me to one of the central problems
of Edith Wharton
and the Politics of Race. If you’re going to write
a text that alleges a discussion of race in the works
of an author who, for all intents and purposes, did
not discuss race, you might find yourself padding
the text. This explains the frequent inclusion of
rather irrelevant material throughout the bulk of
the work. In the middle of the volume, for instance,
there is a discussion of euthanasia that is somewhat
out of place and decontextualized
[73]. Later, Kassanoff includes
an anecdote about, as she describes him, “a comparatively
minor American journalist, W. Morton Fullerton” [72]
and his meeting in France with Theodore Roosevelt. Peppering
one’s critical text with examinations of minor figures
is not altogether disingenuous, although it might
have helped if Kassanoff
had informed her reader of this particular one’s relevance
and bearing on the issue at hand. Consider as well
these sentences at the beginning of one of her latter
chapters:
Immediately, the reader cannot help but
notice that the chapter’s stated focus has little
to do with the text’s titular aims.
In those rare moments when Kassanoff does manage to stay on topic, the critique is sadly
underdeveloped. For example, in a discussion of the
aforementioned Wharton text Summer,
Kassanoff begins to address issues of agency, race mixing
and “race suicide” [145], concepts that warrant a
sustained treatment, then quickly veers away from
the topic in favor of a completely unrelated subject.
Another example is this statement placed at the end
of one of her earlier chapters: “To study Wharton’s
politics is to understand at once the inventiveness
of her fiction and the complex ways that she interacted
with the issues of her day. Doubtful of her nation’s beginnings, Wharton nonetheless mined America’s
ambiguity for all of its protean promise” [36].
The reader would like to know how this process of
mining occurred instead of being left with an unanalyzed
over-generalization. The occasional substitution of
sweeping generalizations in lieu of concrete critical
analysis is one of this text’s frustrating aspects.
To her credit, Kassanoff
doesn’t reinstantiate turn-of-the-century
racial strife and discord. She veers away from the
caustic sentiments characterizing much of the contemporaneous
discourse of the day. Of course this isn’t saying
much, in that so little of Edith
Wharton and the Politics of Race actually focuses
on race that she hardly has an opportunity to come
across as racially insensitive. Nonetheless, it is
strange (revealing?) that in a text that claims to
be about race, Kassanoff
has no qualms with the inclusion of this assertion:
