{"id":25,"date":"2013-12-12T06:31:01","date_gmt":"2013-12-12T06:31:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emilyorlando.com\/?page_id=25"},"modified":"2025-03-06T23:22:15","modified_gmt":"2025-03-06T23:22:15","slug":"reviews","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/emilyorlando.com\/?page_id=25","title":{"rendered":"Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Praise for Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts<\/em> by Emily J. Orlando:<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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\u201cIn this meticulously researched study of Wharton\u2019s novels and short stories, Orlando (Fairfield University) makes a convincing argument for the ways in which Wharton enacted, through her work, a \u2018cultural critique that transcends the literary arts.\u2019 Interweaving illustrations of 19th- and early-20th-century art and detailed close readings of Wharton\u2019s fiction, the author guides the reader through Wharton\u2019s critique of the pre-Raphaelite artists and their vexed representations of women. Thanks to Orlando\u2019s impressive knowledge of art history and of Wharton scholarship, this volume secures an understanding of Wharton\u2019s place as one of \u2018American literature\u2019s most gifted inter-textual realists.\u2019 Nor does Orlando sacrifice depth for breadth. So smart and commanding a reader is she that the study\u2019s multidisciplinary approach (art history, cultural history, women\u2019s studies, US literature, Victorian literature) only enhances its appeal. One leaves this book with a more thorough understanding of Wharton\u2019s engagement with the visual arts as well as deeper insight into her complex, often-misunderstood relationship to the representation of women and the emerging feminism of her day. A distinguished contribution to Wharton scholarship. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.\u201d\u2014 Choice<\/em> (Outstanding Academic Title Award<\/strong>, 2008)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn her autobiography, A Backward Glance<\/em>, Edith Wharton has much to say about her love of books, such as her intellectual \u2018Awakeners\u2019 Goethe, Walt Whitman, Charles Darwin, and Robert Browning, but she reveals little about her taste in painting and the visual arts. As Emily J. Orlando contends in her excellent study Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts<\/em>, however, Wharton had an extensive knowledge of the visual arts, one she used in her fiction to reveal her culture\u2019s limited\u2013and limiting\u2013vision of women. Through allusions to art familiar to her audience, Wharton critiqued her culture\u2019s stifling idealization of women and created characters whose very existence served as a means of arguing against its limitations\u2026..Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts<\/em> is an important book for reading Wharton\u2019s female characters as figures resisting disempowerment not only by their social milieu but also by the very forms of representation that male characters choose as a means to honor them. Through in-depth readings, especially of the lesser-known stories, and reproductions of the paintings being discussed, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts<\/em> provides a rich new context for understanding Wharton\u2019s fiction.\u201d \u2014 Donna Campbell, The Journal of American Studies<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEdith Wharton possessed a keen sense of the visual. This gift, accompanied by a penetrating intellect and impressive knowledge of art and architecture, produced a body of fiction that is both startlingly fresh and allusive. Noting these connections, Emily J. Orlando has written a thoughtful, informed analysis of Wharton\u2019s engagement with the visual arts, especially with the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her book is a welcome interdisciplinary study that enriches our understanding of Wharton specifically and the connections between visual art and American literature generally\u2026.Critics have noted Wharton\u2019s reliance on the visual arts but seldom with this study\u2019s depth or specificity. Orlando convincingly makes the case that Wharton\u2019s work invites and deserves such focused attention. She traces Wharton\u2019s engagement with important artistic movements of her day and places her analysis of Wharton\u2019s fiction in the context of psychological and biographical scholarship. Well-researched and persuasively argued, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts<\/em> stands out among the growing number of interdisciplinary studies of Wharton.\u201d \u2014 Carol J. Singley, Tulsa Studies in Women\u2019s Literature<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEmily J. Orlando\u2019s Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts<\/em> makes an important contribution to our understanding of Wharton\u2019s engagement with the visual arts and offers new ways to think about her relationship to gender ideologies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries\u2026. Orlando\u2019s analysis of Lily\u2019s tableau performance [in The House of Mirth<\/em>] in the context of the art portrayed by her peers is a seminal reading of the novel\u2019s most famous scene. Throughout the study, Orlando\u2019s close textual analysis is impressive, as is her ability to infuse this analysis with historical context and theoretical inquiry without sacrificing her focus on the literary texts themselves. Orlando\u2019s stated emphasis is on literary and visual intertextuality in Wharton\u2019s work, and she displays a firm command of the visual arts context informing the fiction and also provides a compelling discussion of Wharton\u2019s literary allusions, including George Eliot and Dante Gabriel Rossetti\u2026. Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts<\/em> will likely become essential reading for those hoping to further investigate Wharton\u2019s art in historical context. It is a smart, engaging, and eminently readable work of scholarship.\u201d \u2014 Gary Totten, Edith Wharton Review<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[Orlando] reads Wharton as a hard-eyed realist who could see that women in the early twentieth century were little better off than their mothers and grandmothers had been a century before. As the female remained the object of art, she might discover ways to control if and how her image would be used. Thus Lily Bart in The House of Mirth<\/em> is a primary example of the heroine who revises convention by commissioning her own objectification in the tableau vivant scene when she robes herself as Sir Joshua Reynolds\u2019s painting, \u2018Portrait of Joanna Lloyd of Maryland\u2019 (1775\u201376). We learn from Orlando that Wharton may have selected that particular painting for the very reason that Reynolds was an anathema to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Reynolds\u2019s eighteenth-century painting depicts an agile female body in the act of writing; and, therefore, Lily Bart\u2019s act of becoming Mrs. Lloyd signals female control. The book traces an increasing sense of female agency in later Wharton heroines who imagine and direct themselves into what Orlando calls body art. Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country<\/em> understands exactly how to work the system by altering conventional images of the female body. Undine slips easily from gown to gown and scene to scene, bending the gaze to her will\u2026. Contributing significantly to Wharton scholarship, [Orlando and Parley Anne Boswell, author of Edith Wharton on Film<\/em>] also look beyond familiar texts to later novels and short stories that Wharton wrote as she competed with fashionable magazines and movies for an audience. Looking closely at visual images surrounding and informing Wharton\u2019s fiction, Boswell and Orlando point the way toward future scholarship in material culture.\u201d \u2014 Katherine Joslin, Modern Fiction Studies<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMore fully than anyone else, Professor Orlando demonstrates the importance in Wharton\u2019s fiction of the Pre-Raphaelite artists, especially the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; the paintings by Rossetti, Waterhouse, and others, of women\u2019s bodies in states of trance or death; and the artists\u2019 models (notably Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Morris), whom certain of Wharton\u2019s characters are shown to resemble\u2026.In her treatment of the Pre-Raphaelites, the author makes a major contribution to Wharton scholarship.\u201d \u2014 Elsa Nettels, author of Language and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOrlando argues that Wharton used realism to struggle against the sexualization and objectification of women in art, identifying a progression in her heroines from victims to agents in the visual marketplace over the course of her literary career\u2026. In The House of Mirth<\/em>, The Custom of the Country<\/em>, and a host of short stories, Orlando highlights moments when characters realize that they either \u2018can be circulated as works of art\u2019 or take hold of the reins and \u2018elect to circulate themselves.\u2019 When Wharton\u2019s women \u2018learn, as a survival tactic, to barter their bodies for their benefit,\u2019 they become capable of \u2018direct[ing] and produc[ing] a kind of \u201cbody art\u201d\u2019 (28). While Orlando emphasizes that Wharton herself did not celebrate or promote such a strategy and even lamented it, her later writings communicate the notion that women\u2019s decisions to become \u2018architects of their own construction as marketable works of art\u2019 are the only definite ways \u2018to secure power in a culture of display\u2019 (90). \u2026In their efforts to fashion narratives that embrace the breadth and depth of this writer\u2019s intelligence and sensibilities, both books [Orlando\u2019s Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts<\/em> and Annette Benert\u2019s The Architectural Imagination of Edith Wharton<\/em>] illustrate the potential of interdisciplinary inquiry to reshape Wharton studies while speaking to concerns of today\u2019s readers\u2014students, scholars, and teachers alike.\u201d \u2014 Maura D\u2019Amore, Legacy<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Praise for Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts by Emily J. Orlando: \u201cIn this meticulously researched study of Wharton\u2019s novels and short …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilyorlando.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilyorlando.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilyorlando.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilyorlando.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilyorlando.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/emilyorlando.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":323,"href":"https:\/\/emilyorlando.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25\/revisions\/323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilyorlando.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}