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Section Two (1890-1920) —...
Case Study

"The Business of America is Business": Edith Wharton and the Culture of American Consumption

Edith Wharton and Henry James are often classified as novelists of American manners, focusing on the wealthy, established classes in the United States, without accounting for the new economic realities of their age. While while James is generally known for his concern for the internal conflicts and the psychology of his characters, critics and historians have noted that Wharton's novels and stories serve as a snap-shot of privileged American social spaces after the turn of the twentieth century. When they were first published, Whatron's stories addressed all there was to aspire to, to be ashamed of, and to consume. Today, they give readers a glimpse of the owner-class of the "Progressive Era."

Section Two (1890-1920) spans the literature of "the Gilded Age" (from Reconstruction to the mid-1890s) and "the Progressive Era" (from the mid-1890s to the stock-market collapse in 1929) of American history. The "Gilded Age" was an era marked by governmental corruption and the unfettered growth of American industry. In the 1880s, the development of the limited liability corporation began to change the way the United States did business. Huge, vertically integrated corporations soon dominated American commerce. Major industries, each previously associated with their respective tycoons (Rockefeller with oil, Carnegie and Frick with iron and steel, Mellon and Morgan with finance) were suddenly controlled by groups of financiers, none of whom were individually liable. It was an era in which colossal fortunes were made.

In 1879, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust becomes the first cooperative business trust. Trusts and monopolies in other industries soon followed. American commerce in the 1880s becomes an oligopoly regulated by few laws.

The Republican party dominated national politics in the "Gilded Age" with a coalition of support from the Eastern upper class (represented in the stories of writers like Wharton and James) and the rising middle class in the Midwest. The Democrats were supported by Southerners, the working class in large Eastern cities, and populist Midwesterners from agricultural regions. The tremendous regionalism that determined American politics during the "Gilded Age," and typified the writing of earlier eras, was still evident in turn-of-the-century magazine fiction stories, like Kate Chopin's "The Storm."

The "Progressive Era" became known for its reforms. During this time, the federal government ratified new legislation limiting the power of large conglomerates and passed strong new anti-trust measures. The roots of American liberalism were planted during the "Progressive Era;" the trade union movement, which had been steadily building in the United States since the 1850s, came to a head in the early 1890s, as a series of strikes and work stoppages threatened to shut down several industries. Strikes were militant. Even during the "Progressive" years both state and federal governments tended to side with business, and guardsmen were often called in to quell striking workers. The very real differences between the owner class, the professional-managerial class, and the working class became increasingly divisive.

Protesting the conditions in factories and the wages paid to unskilled works, there are a series of trade union strikes throughout the industrial North, from Pittsburgh's "Black Diamond" strike in 1877 to the 1892 work stoppage at Andrew Carnegie's Homestead Ironworks and the 1894 Pullman Strike in Chicago. In 1886, the American Federation of Labor is founded. It is a period characterized by a shift in the control of work: prior to the "Progressive Era," craftspeople and laborers controlled production within the factory, but automation and "scientific management" made specialized knowledge obsolete and managers began to direct the work of unskilled laborers.
It is also an era of mass consumerism, focused on catering to the desires of the new middle class. Burgeoning industries boom with the help of national product brand names, nationwide advertising and public relations campaigns, all delivered to the public through the new channels of mass media. Magazines became very popular in middle class households, which, for the first time, had disposable incomes. These magazines brought with them advertisements for leisure activities and ready-to-wear clothing, and stories directed at this new reading audience (like "The Cabellero's Way," by William Sydney Porter the writing of "O. Henry"). The new media helped satiate middle class's desires for consumption: for products, for for leisure, and for some version of social ascension in the new society. Such are the tensions that typified the writing of Edith Wharton.

Rigid class distinctions, even amid the age of American social climbing, are the hallmark of Edith Wharton's novels and stories. In perhaps Wharton's most famous novel, The House of Mirth, she charts the social space of her world: the fashionable quarters of New York City, Connecticut, and Long Island are depicted in meticulous detail. Moreover, the servants in the "house" of Mirth have been conspicuously excised: when the fashionable set is away, New York is "a dusty deserted city" or simply "deserted." The millions of lower-classed inhabitants are no longer people; they are in fact "creatures," or at best "figures," neatly expunged from Wharton's depiction of the city. . Even the middle class relations of the main character, described as "pigs," have maids to answer the door. When such lower class characters are represented, they transgress clearly defined social divides, or are described as going from "bad to worse" within their own social spaces, "slums." In "The Other Two," a story of negotiating what Wharton calls "the newest social problem:" the social space of divorce in polite society (Waythorn is pressed into contact with Varick and Haskett on the train, at the club, in his own home). This story, like her others, reflects the reality of the new American social economy.

In 1880, less than 1% of marriages ended in divorce; by 1920, the rate had climbed to almost 10%. Public debate about divorce rages during this period, as women's groups and American liberals point to the freedom divorce allows women (legal reform throughout the nineteenth century gave women progressively more control of their financial affairs in the event of divorce. Custody of the children was also increasingly granted to women in such situations); conservatives fear for the deterioration of American society.

The story begins on Mr.Waythorn's sharing the "first night under his own roof" with his wife, and ends with the collision of Waythorn, Varick, Haskett, and the woman whom they had each married, in Waythorn's space once more. The "faint undercurrent of detraction" with which society had marked Mrs. Waythorn is a result of her having been "unearthed somewhere," a place later described as "the outer darkness."

Waythorn's upper-class revulsion for the working class is displayed in the character's commute home on the "congested trains," where he is "crushed between layers of pendulous humanity."

Horse-car train services (public transport pulled on tracks by teams of horses) were common in American cities by 1880. The 1880s and 1890s mark the rise of the cable car in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Chicago. Ridership by 1890 reaches nearly 400 million per year. The explosion of American public transportation in the late nineteenth century is credited with the spatial reorganization of American cities. In Boston and Chicago, where the first suburbs sprouted at the end of the nineteenth century, railways quickly buy parcels of land for development, then lay tracks and provide service convenient to the city center. Railroads make tremendous profits bringing country living to the middle class. The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, which was completed in 1883, brings Manhattan and Brooklyn together, making New York City by far the largest in the country.

Varick, the reader should be relieved to know, is at least "a gentleman," but Haskett, whom Waythorn is compelled to allow into his home once each week to visit his daughter (the very prospect of which repulses him), is a creature of "over-the-counter politeness." In fact, at their first encounter, Haskett's "thick" voice gives Waythorn the impression he is a piano-tuner or domestic laborer. His language is coarse and unstudied; he mistrusts the governess who overseas his daughter, determined to give her a "stylish education." Mrs. Waythorn's life with Waythorn is described as "a studied negation" of her marriage to Haskett.

Ultimately, after assessing his middle class lifestyle, the provincial businessman whom he must allow into his home and the upper-class gentleman-speculator for whom he is compelled to work, Waythorn "compare[s] himself to a member of a syndicate." "He held so many shares in his wife's personality," Wharton writes, "and his predecessors were his partners in the business." The incorporation of American businesses is transformed into the incorporation of American social interactions. Without focusing on the details of the variety of new experiences Americans encountered each day--reflected in various ways in the stories of Section Two--Wharton manages to articulate the earthquakes that shook American society, revolutions which would fundamentally change the character of American families, cities and life.