The Role Of The Revolution In Edith Wharton's Society

To Edith Wharton this society which was laid out delicately like a museum, gave a culture which was an amalgamation of purity and snobbery. If no one soared above the conventions of this extravagant society, only the exceptional ones attempted to degrade them. There was neither any performance of heroic deeds nor the regret of its absence. The young Edith Wharton Jones unquestioningly accepted it from the first and admired its chivalry to the end. Its kindliness, its precision of taste, its organized and controlled structure had a strong impact on her. She was educated to be part of a world where leisure ruled and good conversation was expected to be fundamental. Even in New York, a city already committed to a commercial destiny, ladies and gentlemen of the ancient regime gathered for elaborate luncheon parties they were taught not to talk about money. Conversations related to acquisition of wealth had been of no interest to her class. The frontiersmen who encroached into this smug and sophisticated society were looked down upon as objects of amusement. The men who were busy building railroads, laying water pipe lines and bellowing down the stock exchange were treated repulsively touched.
The revolution in Edith Wharton's world, characteristically a revolution of manners, came when the infiltration of these merchant class leading to the …show more content…
She is the critic of that subtler American materialism which consists in having ideas only to let then tyrannize over due and drive one to preposterous lengths. Became American civilizations is young, it is difficult for ideas to circulate freely and naturally. Either Americans have them not, or else have a few of them madly, ungovernably to the pitch of obsession. Mrs. Wharton is the satirist both of American materialism and their freakish and faddish emancipation from