Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts

This work explores Edith Wharton’s career–long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts—especially painting—as a medium for revealing the ways that women’s bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantilized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed.