Edith Wharton

how Ethan ended up the way he did. He meets a man, Harmon Grow, and he tries to get more information about Ethan from him. One thing he said stuck with him forever, “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away.” (Wharton, 9). At first, he doesn’t understand what this meant. However, as he spent more time in Starkfield, he realized that Ethan had spent too many winters there; this ultimately shaped the…

Oscar Wilde implements a heavy focusses significant attention on class in The Importance of Being Earnest. People with and without money behave very differently, though strive for the same response and impressions from their peers. The characters in this novel are exaggerated to the point of absurdity when it comes to their obsession with class. Victorian upper class demands its members to keep up an important image in society and value money and appearance above all else, including people.…

retreats from life into a vision. He escapes his reality to enjoy a few blissful moments in his dream, but never acts to make that dream come true. Harmon Gow says, “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away.”(Wharton 6) While having every reason to leave Starkfield and his querulous wife, Ethan doesn’t. Ethan’s moral and social values combined with his indecisiveness causes Ethan to retreat from life into a vision. Ethan retreats into his vision to escape…

The Pelican Analysis In 1899, Edith Wharton published “The Pelican”. She published this short story, like many of her other works, to express the failure that she felt towards herself and her disappointment she felt when her husbands abandoned her. During Wharton’s life she has experienced nervous breakdowns, paralyzing depressions, broken engagements, multiple divorces, and mistreatment by society. Since she has undergone such trauma throughout her life, Wharton thinks of herself poorly and…

The changing of the weather, the once joyful elements of a winter now gone. As the season comes to an end, a family’s relationship begins to wither away and die as they fight for a reason that is all too real in families today. This sets the scene for Raymond Carver’s short story, “Popular Mechanics.” “Popular Mechanics” opens with the husband of the family packing his suitcase in what appears to be the aftermath of a divorce. It then spirals into a domestic dispute between the wife and…

Innocence. Does it really exist in America? The book written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, was not only written for his son, but for innocence itself. The book’s main idea revolves around the innocence of people who are often convicted of crimes and actions based upon their race, belief or ethnicity, someone who could have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, or even a person who could have just been suspected based on racial profiling and prejudice. In this essay, there…

Innocence by Edith Wharton captures the high society of New York in the late nineteenth century. Wharton experienced an unhappy marriage during this time frame, and many of her novels detailed similar unhappy marriages, including The Age of Innocence. Newland…

a story can make us change the way we perceived the story. “Roman Fever” is an American short story written by Edith Wharton in 1934. It is the story of “two middle-age”(Wharton, 1934, p.1) women: Mrs.Ansley and Mrs. Slade that are on a trip to…

would expect to live such a lifestyle. Taking place in upper class New York, the socialites “all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs” (Wharton 145). The story focuses on Newland Archer, a restrained young attorney who is forced to live the conventional life that is expected of him, but dreams breaking free and living his life for himself. By conforming to “old society” but internally…

would expect to live such a lifestyle. Taking place in upper class New York, the socialites “all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs” (Wharton 145). Wharton’s novel tells the story of personal freedom, and how it is stifled by the rigid social conventions of the time (McWilliams 268). She tells this theme through the life story of Newland Archer, a restrained young attorney who is…