Wharton the 'Renovator': 'Twilight Sleep' as Gothic Satire

The essay focuses on Edith Wharton's critically neglected novel "Twilight Sleep" as demonstrating the complexity of the social vision that is articulated in the mature fiction of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In this hybrid text the generic boundaries between satire and the Gothic are dissolved as Wharton provides a cultural critique of social and aesthetic modernity that draws on contemporary thinking but also demonstrates her proficiency as a literary renovator. The novel is placed in both its European and American cultural contexts; its transatlantic Gothic antecedents are discussed, as are its affinities with the work of modernist writers.