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1 results

  • Chapter 4 - Edith Wharton’s Odyssey

  • from Part II - International Wharton
  • Edited by Jennifer Haytock, Laura Rattray, University of Glasgow
  • Book:
    The New Edith Wharton Studies
    Published online:
    28 November 2019
    Print publication:
    19 December 2019, pp 65-79

  • Summary

    This essay addresses the role of Greece in Edith Wharton’s representation of home as a topos of strong human and cultural bonds. While Wharton saw France as the epitome of this ideal, she found in Greece its most symbolic expression, one that she identified in The Odyssey and later developed into a narrative of cultural wandering and triumphant return. The essay examines Homeric-inspired tropes of wandering and return in The House of Mirth (1905) and The Children (1928), as well as non-fictional works, such as Wharton’s diary of the 1888 Vanadis cruise. Using archival resources, including Wharton’s undated poem “Penelope” and her impressions from the 1926 visit to Greece on the steam yacht Osprey, I argue that Wharton conceptualized Greece not only as the ancient cradle of Western civilization but also as a paradigm of cultural recovery and the antidote to modern forms of alienation and drift.