Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Home and the War Travels of Edith Wharton"
Mary Suzanne Schriber
Distinguished Professor of English
Department of English, Northern Illinois University
mschriber@niu.edu
In Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (1915), Edith Wharton asserts that "War is the greatest of paradoxes: the most senseless and disheartening of human retrogressions, and the stimulant of qualities of soul which, in every race, can seemingly find no other means of renewal" (53). War, that is, is a borderland where the human slouches not forward toward Bethlehem but back toward the bestial, the threat of which reactivates dormant possibilities that distinguish human beings from brutes. Whereas war frequently raises the fear of physical death, hunger, cold, pain, and loss of freedom, it raises as well what is perhaps a more visceral specter: the abject, or that which "disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules" (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982).
Despite, paradoxically, the rules of war that would protect women, children, and the home, homes are in fact prey to attacks that would bring about the collapse of a nation and a culture. Understanding this, Edith Wharton seizes on the home and its destruction, in both her travel writing and in her fiction, as a metaphor for the disturbance of identity, system, and order that drags human beings toward the abject. In Fighting France (1915) Edith Wharton's writing of her travels to the front in WWI, and in "Coming Home" (1915), a short story developed from a segment of those travels, the home so central to "the homeland" that war would protect and save or conquer is destroyed and decentered. War demolishes the houses -- the homes -- in which identity is shaped and sustained; and it scatters the inhabitants of home, and with them the spirit of families. I propose to explore the concept of home in Fighting France and in its revision as the fiction of "Coming Home" for three purposes. First, the juxtaposition of the travel writing and the fiction shows us the co-author of The Decoration of Houses and the architect of The Mount (Wharton's home in Lenox, Mass.) making use of the physical and spiritual fate of French homes during The Great War to voice the spiritual dimension of her interest in architecture and homebuilding. Second, the juxtaposition shows Wharton's imagination of the gothic underside of home; it reveals the paradoxical connection between the survival of the home and the sexual abjection of women, the cost civilization abstracts from women to sustain itself. Finally, the juxtaposition of Fighting France and its revision as "Coming Home" shows Wharton's sense of genre and its connection to cultural work as she wrote first fact and then fiction in the service of her adopted homeland, France.
Mary Suzanne Schriber
Department of English
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
(815) 753-6602
mschriber@niu.edu
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