The meaning of place is always flexible and is subject to the interpretations of its dwellers. For a woman, the feeling of place attachment occurs when she can wield power over her living environment and have it relate to the every aspect of her life.
A place becomes “home” because she can identify with it and thus defines it as one.
In Place and Placelessness (1976), E. Relph explores place as “a phenomenon of the geography of the lived-world of our everyday experiences” (6) whose meanings are characterized by the beliefs of man (3). Its value, as Yi-Fu Tuan indicates in Space
and Place (1977), lies in “the intimacy of a particular human relationship” without
which it would have nothing much to offer (140). In Psychology of Place (1977), David Canter talks about place as “the result of relationship between actions, conceptions and physical attributes,” and we could not identify with it until we know what behavior is associated with it (158-9). Later in The Sense of Place (1981), Fritz Steetle argues that sense of place is an experiential process “created by the setting combined with what a person brings to it” (9). Thus, to some degree, we create our own place and it does not exist independent of us. Our personal identity is bound up with this place identity which is crucial for one to create and maintain one’s “self.”This notion of identity is fundamental in defining one’s relation with others. In his discussion of ego identity in “Identity and the Life-Cycle” (1959), Erik Erikson
1 The Mount is, as Wharton calls it in A Backward Glance (1934), “my first real home” (125).
writes that “the term identity…connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself…and a persistent sharing of some kind of characteristic with others” (102).
While identity makes its claim upon beings of every kind, it is founded not only in an object or an individual person, but also in a place to which they belong. This place identity however, is not a simple address which makes the place identifiable; instead, it is a basic feature of our experience of place (Relph 45).
In “Place Identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self” (1983), Proshansky, Fabian and Kaminoff claim that place identity is a substructure of one’s self in that it is a “potpourri” of one’s memories, conceptions, interpretations, ideas and related feelings about specific physical settings (60). Meanwhile, Kalevi Mikael Korpela, in
“Place-identity as a product of environmental self-regulation” (1989), regards place identity as a psychological structure arising out of the individual’s attempt to regulate their environments. He points out that “place-belongingness” is the basis of place identity and the practice of environmental usage will enable one to create and sustain a coherent sense of self (246). In other words, place identity is not static and unchangeable, but varies with human intentions and attitude, and place attachment is integral in the self-definitional process and the formation of one’s self-identity. When a woman is able to view the place as an essential part of her self, the place will turn into her “home.”
For many people, the childhood home is such an intimate place. In The Poetics of
Space (1969), Gaston Bachelard states that the childhood home is one’s ideal in that it
is a place where one’s life is enclosed and protected. It is one’s “original shell” one will always want to go back later in life whether physically or mentally (4). InTopophilia (1974), Yi-fu Tuan also points out that one’s awareness of the past is an
important element for one to love a place (99). However, for Wharton, who always holds an ambivalent feeling to her birthplace, is not to return to her childhoodbrownstone house. As Louis Auchincloss writes in his introduction to Wharton’s autobiography,
On one hand, she〔Wharton〕loved it 〔the Old New York〕for the very completeness of her understanding of it and for the richness of the material with which it supplied her. It was, after all, her cradle and family. On the other hand she resented the smallness of its imagination, the dryness of its appreciations and its ever turned back towards everything that made life worth while to her (xi; parenthesis mine).
Therefore, instead of living merely in her memory, she will go beyond her nostalgia to establish a personal bond with her current living space; and during her lifetime, she will produce more than one place of attachment for herself.
Having a place with which one can identify and to which one can feel attached is important to the self-perception of an individual. Anne Buttimer, in “Home, Reach, and the Sense of Place” (1980), points out an identity crisis posed by the loss of one’s home or the losing of one’s place (167); and Simone Weil, in The Need for Roots (1955), presumes that to have roots in one place is a necessary precondition for other needs of the soul, and it is vital for one to have multiple roots so that one can “draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a part” (53). Hence, while both Bachelard and Tuan regard the childhood home as the “psychic anchor” associating one with family love and security, they also believe that one’s emotion and feeling for a place should not derive solely from one’s longing for the “first home.” Tuan suggests that it can take many forms and vary greatly in emotional range and intensity (Topophilia 27) and Bachelard also argues that in addition to the past, both present and future give a place
different dynamism that could stimulate one another (6). And among them, the present that can relate to one’s living experience is foremost important. When a person can find in her current environment a repository for emotions and relationships that give meaning and purpose to life, the place will become part of one’s self-identity and increase a woman’s self-esteem and her feeling of belonging to the society.
However, for women in the Gilded Age, the society was a site filled with obstacles. There were problems brought by the influx of the new wealth and a consumer culture based on the male production of wealth. A look into the historical background of the second half of the nineteenth century will illuminate the difficult social circumstance of that time. When Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined the term “Gilded Age” in their 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, they portrayed the postbellum America as an era of excess and parvenus. When Paul Bourget (1852-1935), the French novelist and critic, was instructed by Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald to do his “fashionable-watering place” article on Newport, he was captivated by the energy of the showy resort and was amazed at its grandest mansions2
Indeed, it was an important turning point of the country. It just transformed itself from an isolated, rural, agricultural nation into an urban, industrial, and multicultural . He got the feeling that “you half fancy that you have been visiting some isle consecrated to the god Plutus, whose modern incarnation is the god Dollar” (19-20). Meanwhile, Henry James was equally stunned by this extravagant
“American scene” after almost twenty-five years abroad. As he showed it in the Ivory
Tower (1917), everyone out there was so “hideously rich” (207) and one could even
hear “something like the chink of money itself in the murmur of the breezy little waves” (23).
2 Some of the grandest mansions of that time: William K. Vanderbilt’s Marble House, Ogden Goelet’s Ochre Court and James Van Alen’s Wakehurst on Bellevue Avenue
world power. However, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Leon Fink, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and several others have also pointed out the major problems hidden behind this prosperity. The discontent caused by its capitalism was satirized by Twain in his short story “Poor Little Stephen Girard” (1879) and documented by Carnegie in
Problems of Today: Wealth, Labour, Socialism (1908).
3 Meanwhile, the Jim Crow Laws deepened the racial discrimination against the black people, erecting a virtual caste system of institutional segregation.4The society ladies, whose presence in the public entertainment had become more visible than ever before, were objectified to gratify the desire of men and were commodified to be bought and possessed. The fierce competitions between the haute bourgeoisie and the Old New York elites required these ladies to demonstrate the wealth of their fathers and their husbands and to compete for the title of the “dowager empress” (O’ Connor 44). Therefore, while their men were busily engaged in the financial business, the women were attending operas, going to the theaters and hosting social events. Lavish balls would take place one after another in Mrs. Astor’s summer And later its “trap” of consumption would be noted by Gillman in Women and Economics (1898) while its rampant materialism was to be attacked by Henry James in The American Scene (1907). These were factors which not only made the Gilded Age society a space of conflicts but also subjected women to an inferior position.
3 .
In this story, Mark Twain aims to shatter the poor-boy-done-good theme, an ideology of success which was widely promoted in the Gilded Age America. The notion showed that with enough of hard work, everyone would be able to succeed. Meanwhile, it was also believed that poor boys might make good more often simply because of fortunate accidents. (“Gimme A Break! Mark Twain Lampoons the Horatio Alger Myth.” History Matters:The U.S. Survey Course on the Web. American Social History Production Inc. 2006. 15 October 2011. < http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4935>
4 The Jim Crow Laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965.
They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly “separate but equal”
status for black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. Wikipedia. 15 October 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws>
palace Beechwood, the Berwinds’ The Elm and Alva Vanderbilt’s Golden Ballroom at Marble House, and Alva had to trump them all with the fancy Chinese costume ball at her newly-built Chinese-styled teahouse (Sommer 7-23). They made frequent appearance in the public to display their fine gowns, expensive jewelry, and most important of all, to maintain the status of their family. As a consequence, although their participation in these leisure activities seemed to emancipate them and lead them out of the domestic sphere, it also provided their men with further domination and control. The world was in fact constructed within the context of gender inequalities, and a woman’s identity was a mere social construct.
Wharton detected these problems and reflected them in her novels as well.
Though embracing the glamour and extravagance of her time and obsessing herself with the leisure activities of collecting and display, Wharton confessed in her autobiography A Backward Glance (1934) that she always hated the “general society”
(213). She was acutely conscious of the restraint placed on her by her society, which thwarted her early interest in writing and was the cause of her unhappy marriage.
Thus, whether in her writings or in her real life, she was looking for a place of attachment where she was able to live with a real self and not to feel deprived.
To discuss Wharton and her protagonists’ quest, I will center my thesis on the social climate of Gilded Age and its influence on its people. I will argue that only when a woman is connected affectionately and positively with her place can she feel a sense of attachment. In chapter one, I will focus on Edith Wharton and her production of homes. By looking into her life and works and her design of the Mount, I will point out Wharton’s belief in the mutual influence between people and their environment and the need to produce a home from which one’s “real self” can be empowered.
In chapter two, I will talk about Lily Bart’s quest for home and her final enlightenment in The House of Mirth. Here I will consider the Gilded Age society a
marketplace in which every “marriageable girl” has to commodify themselves to hunt for a wealthy husband. Refusing to be treated as a commodity and ignorant of the business rules of her time, Lily is going through a process of decommodification that will not only reverse her subordinate position in the economic relation but also lead her to discover a place of attachment in the real human connection.
In chapter three, I will examine the idea of “hotels” in the Gilded Age and look at Undine Spragg’s homes in mobility in The Custom of the Country. As a social climber, Undine is shifting from one place to another, always looking for opportunities. Knowing how to utilize the “liminality” or “the freedom of movement”
provided both by the hotel space and the public space, she is empowered to establish homes everywhere on her traveling route.
In chapter four, I will turn to discuss Ellen Olenska’s futile search for a place of attachment in The Age of Innocence. I will investigate the tribal concept and the imperial mindset in the Gilded Age. I will look at how these two elements contribute to a binary system dividing the world into the insiders and the outsiders and epitomizing the unequal relation between the Orient and the Occident. And Ellen, the European countess who returns to Old New York to divorce her husband, is regarded as a threatening Other who is going to disrupt the order of her society. The society people’s fear of her presence will give her a sense of placelessness and render her an outcast. Finally, I will conclude that space of various types can be turned into place of attachment as long as one can find in it a balanced power relation. Ellen’s inferior position makes her unable to feel at home while Lily’s and Undine’s capability to reconstruct and identify enables them to find a home in the boisterous Gilded Age.
Chapter One
Edith Wharton and Her Production of Homes
In The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre suggests that each space is
“actively produced” by its dwellers, and the one associated with one’s lived everyday experience is the most alive and dynamic. For Wharton, creating such a place that will be the locus of action and passion becomes a way for her to live a life in accord with her inner self. In the short story “The Fullness of Life” (1893), Wharton compares a woman’s nature to a great house full of rooms, and “in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes” (CS 14). This inner self, often elusive and unrestrained, is a source of one’s personal longings; and its interaction with its surroundings plays a great part in one’s existence.
In The Age of Innocence, the “soul” can be seen in Ellen’s unconventional bid for freedom; in The House of Mirth, it is realized in Lily’s instinct for love and humanity and in The Custom of the Country, it is manifested in Undine’s “monstrous” ambition to advance her marriage career.5
Spending most of her childhood in Europe and growing up indulging herself in the historical sites of Rome and the townscapes of Paris and Florence, Wharton developed a lifelong standard of beauty that would prompt her to free herself from the
As for Wharton, it is reflected in her desire to produce a place of her own. Always describing in her novels an individual modified or distorted by the mores, rituals or expectations of their society, Wharton believes that the influence between the environment and its people is mutual; and she emphasizes the need for one to build an emotional tie with the environment in order to live a life with energy and mobility.
5 For the earlier reviewers, The Custom of the Country lacks a sympathetic heroine from whom the reader might learn a moral lesson. In the novel, Undine is glittery, greedy and soulless without any moral feature. For example, The New York Sun (1913) writes that Wharton has created “an ideal monster” with no human feeling, who is “absolutely unmoral” (qtd. in Killoran 66).
dreary landscape of Old New York and its suffocating way of life. To Wharton, the period from 1840 to 1890 was “the nadir of American taste” (Wilson 156), and she felt dismayed to find that most people felt it easier to arrange their room like some one else’s than to analyze and express their own needs. She could never wipe out from her memory the overcrowded rooms in her parents’ three-story brownstone house on West Twenty-third Street because
like those of most other New York town houses of the period, 〔they〕were so designed as to lack any clear identity and to make privacy impossible.
Each seemed somehow to be part of the room next to it—the drawing room was part of the hall, the library part of the drawing room…. The house was expensively but unharmoniously furnished…. (Lewis 22)
Therefore, in her first published book The Decoration of Houses (1897), she was redressing the ostentation and “indescribability” of Richard Morris Hunt’s designs with her architectural philosophies;6
6 Richard Morris Hunt (1827-95). An eminent and prolific American society architect. He is known for a series of increasingly opulent mansions for which he adopted a variety of styles, as seen in the Stick Style Griswold House, (1863); the Neo-classical Marble House (1982); the Italian Renaissance Revival The Breakers, (1895); and the French château style Biltmore House (1895), all for the Vanderbilt family. The most important of his commercial buildings in New York was the New York Tribune Building (1876). Hunt helped to establish professional building standards and a proper fee basis for architects; he also helped found the American Institute of Architects in 1857 (Callowy 531).
and when she built The Mount, her “first real home” in Lenox (1902), she admitted in her autobiography that finally she was able to enjoy “the freedom from trivial obligations” and to write contentedly (BG 125). Later, it was at The Mount that she was to finish her first important work, The House of
Mirth. For Wharton, one’s living environment impacts significantly on the well-being
of the individual; hence, it is important to create a place that will cater to the needs of its dwellers.In Edith Wharton as Spatial Activist and Analyst (2005), Reneé Somers points out Wharton’s belief in the mutual influence between people and their living space.
Discussing Wharton’s several literary texts, “Mrs. Manstey’s View” (1891), “The Lamp Psyche” (1895) and The House of Mirth, Somers believes that Wharton was always exploring how space created meaning and how people were made into
“creatures of their environment” (3). Her first novel The Valley of Decision (1902) is full of overwhelming details of settings and lifestyle in which the “background” just upstaged the characters (WA 189).Vanessa Chase also argues that “〔F〕or Wharton, architecture and its decoration both define and are defined by the inhabitants; the house one builds or the room one decorates is an expression of one’s character, and the house or room in which one is obliged to live creates that character” (138).
In The Writing of Fiction (1925), Wharton herself praised Balzac as a pioneer in investigating the physical surroundings of his characters and their psychological make-up:
Balzac was the first not only to see his people, physically and morally, in their habit as they lived, with all their personal hobbies, and make the reader
Balzac was the first not only to see his people, physically and morally, in their habit as they lived, with all their personal hobbies, and make the reader