Responses to Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker article, part II

From The Center for Fiction, via Twitter:

Roxana Robinson responds to Jon Franzen's New Yorker piece on Edith Wharton.


Jonathan Franzen (in his essay in The New Yorker, “A Critic at Large”) addresses “the problem of sympathy” for Edith Wharton. It’s a serious matter, by his account: He finds Wharton hard to like. His reasons are personal and class-related: He castigates Wharton for her privileged family, her looks, her too few women friends, her too many famous male friends, her money, her sexual ignorance, her charmlessness, and her methods of travel.

Wharton’s social standing “puts her at a moral disadvantage,” declares Franzen. “No major American novelist has led a more privileged life than Wharton did… pouring her inherited income into houses in rich-person precincts, indulging her passion for gardens and interior decoration, touring Europe endlessly in hired yachts or chauffeured cars, hobnobbing with the powerful and the famous...”



To start with, many of his sweeping claims are inaccurate. Though Wharton was born into a privileged circle, she didn’t lead a life of undiluted privilege. Her family was financially on the outer rim, and they suffered economic setbacks. Wharton had many close women friends, and was known for her talent at friendship. When she did finally become rich, it was due to her best-selling novels. Wharton’s marriage was known to be increasingly unhappy, but Franzen’s jeering description makes it sound like a soap opera. He suggests that Teddy’s mental instability was partly the fault of Edith’s success as a writer, overlooking the fact that Teddy’s father had been institutionalized for insanity. After Teddy’s embezzlement and adultery were discovered, Edith finally asked him for a divorce. Franzen characterizes this as her forcing Teddy “to pay up.” The fact that her 28-year-long marriage was largely sexless, Franzen surmises, was not to be blamed on her looks (as we might otherwise assume), but on her sexual ignorance. This remarkable statement suggests a nearly bottomless ignorance of marriage, or indeed all human relationships. In fact, it is more than likely that Edith’s husband, too, played a part in the failure of their marriage: Any man who waits 28 years for his wife to learn the facts of life is a man not eager to undertake her education.


Accuracy aside, Franzen’s tone is extravagant, contemptuous and condescending. It’s a strange way to describe someone whom he purports to admire. Even when Franzen finally declares his respect for Wharton’s great novel The Age of Innocence, he doesn’t relent in his judgment of Wharton herself. He never describes her sympathetically, but calls her an “isolate and misfit” —not terms of admiration.

From Girls Like Giants

When Franzen discusses Wharton’s books, he’s insightful and curious. I particularly like his exploration of why he wants Wharton’s characters–and literary characters in general–to get what they want, even if they want things about which he has ethical and moral qualms: more money, social status, a loveless but secure marriage. The vehemence of their desires is contagious. Eventually, they become the sympathetic reader’s own. This also explains, he says, why he wants Thackeray’s selfish, superficial Becky Sharp to climb right up that social ladder. But Franzen’s own likability and popularity, or lack thereof, is the subtext of half his personal essays as well as the blatant text (top-text?) of about a zillion pieces of Franzen-related criticism, so I think he’s more invested in the subject of ascending and descending social ladders than he’s willing to admit.

When Franzen is talking about Wharton herself, however, he gets myopic and weirdly mean-spirited. For one thing, he’s really stuck on the idea that Wharton was not a looker, which:

a) says you, J Franz!

b) relevance?

Ostensibly he’s talking about Wharton’s appearance because it’s her “one potentially redeeming disadvantage.” But he doesn’t sound sympathetic when he talks about her looks; he sounds like he’s just observing the patriarchal dictate that before we can talk about any woman artist or intellectual or politician or activist, we must first rank her on Hot or Not. He indicates that Wharton had a tough time finding a husband because of her looks, and tips his hat at the possibility that her marriage to Teddy Wharton was largely sexless because she wasn’t pretty enough (!) before concluding no, it was probably because of her sexual ignorance (I’m thinking Teddy probably had a hand in or out of their sex life too).

Responses to Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker article, part I

Franzen's article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/13/120213fa_fact_franzen

From The Daily Beast:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/01/why-jonathan-franzen-can-t-appreciate-edith-wharton.html

Why Jonathan Franzen Can’t Appreciate Edith Wharton

For a certain group of successful male authors, dismissing women writers is so much more pleasant than taking them seriously.

There were many travesties committed in Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker piece on Edith Wharton, which has caused so much outcry and sizzle in recent days for its disdainful tone, its relentless focus on the author’s looks, and its odd assertion that sympathy is hard to come by for this grand dame of letters.

Among his assertions: that she was ugly, which didn’t cause her marriage to be sexless, but probably didn’t help; that Lily Bart is the opposite—beautiful—but a “party girl” whom Wharton punishes for her looks; that the central problem in reading Wharton is how to grudgingly “get over” her cosseted, wealthy existence as she swans around European hotels. But his worst sin is one of omission—what Franzen did not write about.

Specifically, how Wharton was just like Franzen—an ambitious American author who strove to balance literary reach with public taste.

This was pointed out the other night by novelist Pamela Redmond, at a book group of fellow women authors, all of us incensed by the essay. “It would have been far more interesting to find out what he identified with in Wharton,” she remarked. “That’s an essay I would have liked to read.” [more at the link above]

From Flavorwire:

Franzen argues that we don’t feel sympathetic towards Wharton for several reasons: because of her privilege, which he says “put her at a moral disadvantage,” her conservatism, her ultimate rejection of America, and the fact that “she was the kind of lady who fired off a high-toned letter of complaint to the owner of a shop where a clerk had refused to lend her an umbrella.” Her sole “potentially redeeming disadvantage,” Franzen says, is the fact that (according to him) she wasn’t very pretty, but he goes on to decide that no, that doesn’t help, because the “odd thing about beauty… is that its absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do,” and he thinks “Wharton might well be more congenial to us now if, alongside her other advantages, she’d look like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy.” So, he suggests, her work is neglected (is it?) or less appreciated because the author herself is not likeable.

For this author, Franzen is pretty much a walking argument against his point here. Everyone I talk to seems to express at least a little bit of distaste for the guy, and sometimes more than a little (no one crosses Oprah, even if they take it back later), but those same people will leap to tell you that well yes, they loved Freedom, and of course they count him among the great American novelists of our time, if not the greatest. Personally, he has not ingratiated himself to me by making all of those dismissive and coarse comments about David Foster Wallace, who was supposed to be his friend.

He’s also a touchstone in the ongoing discussion about how male authors get an inordinate amount of attention as compared to their female contemporaries, with many critics complaining that Freedom won Franzen way too much acclaim, to the detriment of deserving women.

From the L.A. Review of Books:

Not Pretty

Edith Wharton was born 150 years ago. Jonathan Franzen’s piece
on the occasion in the New Yorker got VICTORIA PATTERSON mad.

Victoria Patterson’s work has often been compared, for good reason, to Edith Wharton’s. This Vacant Paradise, Patterson’s first novel, is a contemporary retelling, quite consciously and intelligently, of The House of Mirth, transferred 100-plus years and 3000 miles from Wharton’s Old New York to Patterson’s Newport Beach. For all the cultural and historical distance, the two write of emotionally identical, muscular family struggles involving inheritance and strategic marriage; they chart matching dramas of cash-nexus beauty, analyze the power of sex and their characters’ debilitating combination of over-consciousness and under-consciousness of that power; and they pay the same attention to the way people find themselves, no matter their intentions or ethics, divided almost randomly into the blithe, oblivious, cruel winners and the flotsam- and jetsam-like losers strewn about as wealth patrols its waters. When Jonathan Franzen wrote about Wharton’s 150th birthday in The New Yorker (“A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy,” February 13, 2012), he harped on her looks and read the biographical record in ways that prompted Patterson to respond.

— Tom Lutz

VICTORIA PATTERSON
Not Pretty

After reading Jonathan Franzen’s essay in the New Yorker about Edith Wharton, I couldn’t sleep. I admire Franzen’s work and usually appreciate his commentary about social media, eBooks, etc., but his depiction of Edith Wharton was so mean-spirited and off-key that I tossed and turned. Why would he link her husband’s mental illness with her success? Why claim that she was only interested in male friendships? And worst of all: Why would he focus on her physical appearance, claiming that she was unattractive? He’d taken a literary hero and written about her as if ranking a Maxim photo spread.

I reread the piece the following morning. Franzen’s essay is a tribute to Wharton and her work. Yet there’s a strange negative slanting of Wharton’s biography and a peculiarly misplaced concentration on her physical appearance. There are other problems with his essay as well: It is either disingenuous, or uninformed, for instance, for Franzen to reflect on Wharton’s disagreeable politics without also noting that throughout the war, she worked tirelessly in charitable efforts for refugees (mainly women and children) and, in 1916, that she received the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur in recognition of her commitment to the displaced. But it is her facial features that structure Franzen’s response, and it is his constant return to them that bothers me the most. [...]

From the New York Daily News

February 27, 2012 7:27 AM 0 comments

Jonathan Franzen's female 'problem'

BY Alexander Nazaryan

It started, as it is so often does, with Edith Wharton.

To be more precise, it started with a New Yorker essay on the “Age of Innocence” author, written for the Feb. 13 issue by Jonathan Frazen. Called “Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy,” the essay was, by many accounts, a snide and mean-spirited appraisal of Wharton’s career.

Anyone forced to read Wharton’s “Ethan Frome” in high school may question her talents as a writer, but Franzen went much further than that, speculating on aspects of her life that are far beyond the ken of an essayist:

“That [Edith and Teddy Wharton’s] ensuing twenty-eight years of marriage were almost entirely sexless was perhaps less a function of her looks than of her sexual ignorance.” (Franzen and Oprah Winfrey / AP)

“[Wharton] did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn't pretty.”

“Wharton might well be more congenial to us now, if alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy.”

“[The House of Mirth] can be read … as a sadistically slow and thorough punishment of the pretty girl she couldn’t be.”

This is, plainly put, nonsense. Critics pounced at once. The Kenyon Review blasted him, as did the blog Girls Like Giants.

But the definitive response to Franzen’s article did not come until last Saturday, when novelist Victoria Patterson shredded him in a fine, pithy essay in the LA Review of Books (which, by the way, is quickly establishing itself as the Left Coast’s most serious literary outlet).

“He’d taken a literary hero and written about her as if ranking a Maxim photo spread,” Patterson says in the opening paragraph of the piece, "Not Pretty," pointing out that Franzen seems far less concerned with Wharton’s art than her appearance. (Edith Wharton / Photofest)

Defending Franzen

The Awl--an article by Emily Gould defending Franzen that concludes with this insight: he's just calling "attention to the fact that we all have prejudices that influence our reading."

EWS Vice President Meredith Goldsmith discusses Ethan Frome on the Diane Rehm show

EWS Vice President Meredith Goldsmith on the Diane Rehm show
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-02-22/readers-review-ethan-frome-edith-wharton

Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - 11:06 a.m.

For our February Readers’ Review: A tragic love story about a poor farmer who falls for his ailing wife’s cousin. We hope you’ll join us for the discussion of Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton on Wednesday, February 22.
Guests
Meredith Goldsmith

professor of English, Ursinus College; vice president, The Edith Wharton Society
Lisa Page

president, PEN/Faulkner Foundation
John Pfordrescher

professor of English, Georgetown University

Wharton's 150th from the BBC

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9025633/Edith-Wharton-150th-anniversary-BBC-Radio-4-Extra-preview.html
It’s the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton’s birth, and the digital network Radio 4 Extra is marking it with vintage adaptations of her work from the BBC’s vast archive.

First up Anna Massey stars in Madame de Treymes (Sunday, 1.30pm), a powerful tale of romance, intrigue and power struggles.

Then at 2.30pm, it’s Female Ghost starring Buffy Davis and John Guerrasio as an American couple in England who find their past catching up with them.

Edith Wharton Review (Fall 2011) Table of Contents

http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org/ewr.htm

Volume 27.2, Fall 2011

Faulstick, Dustin H. "'He that Loveth Silver Shall Not Be Satisfied with Silver'" Reconsidering the Connection between The House of Mirth and Ecclesiastes."Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 1-12.

Patten, Ann L. "'The Wanamaker Touch in Fiction' and Edith Wharton's Guide to Novel-writing in Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive." Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 12-22.

Raphael, Lev. "Writing Wharton's Wrong." Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 22-2.


Shaffer-Koros, Carol. "Wharton in New York." Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 23-24.

Goldman-Price, Irene. "Edith Wharton Collection Research Report." Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 24-25.

Olin-Ammentorp, Julie. Rev. of Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race by Jennie A. Kassanoff. Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 25-26.

Campbell, Donna. Rev. of The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton, ed. Laura Rattray. Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 26-27.

New Independent Production of Summer

An independent feature adaptation of Edith Wharton's 1917 classic Summer is planned for 2012. In development since 2010, Summer has been adapted for the screen by Carl J.Sprague - carlsprague.com - film designer and verteran of several projects based on Wharton's work - notably The Age of Innocence (1990) and The Buccaneers (1995). Principal locations have been identified in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where Wharton made her home and took inspiration for the overlooked masterpiece she called "the hot Ethan Frome". Further information is avaiable at Summerthemovie.com and on the Facebook page Summer. Wharton enthusiasts are encouraged to visit - opinions, suggestions and support are most welcome.


The Edith Wharton Restoration at The Mount has generously hosted readings of the screenplay, and another very successful reading took place in April 2011 at the Players Club in New York. Financing is still in progress, but over $100,000 has been raised toward an approximately million dollar budget. Casting sessions are scheduled for January. Principal photography will begin in March 2012 and continue into the early summer. A summer 2013 release is anticipated.

Edith Wharton's Childhood Home

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/37dd500a-fbdf-11e0-989c-00144feab49a.html#axzz1cDWrN4Tp

In the shadow of New York’s Flatiron Building, sandwiched between a burrito shop and a deli, sits the five-storey building where a young Edith Wharton spent much of her childhood reading in her father’s library.

The American author, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, was born and spent her childhood years at 14 West 23rd Street. However, the droves of people who walked by on their way to Madison Square Park every day had no idea. Nor did local historians or even the owners of the building until a walking tour leader recently discovered the fact.

Now, thanks to preservationist Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, a red plaque next to the modern glass entrance alerts passersby and visitors that the building housed, among other rooms, an extensive library that inspired Wharton’s initial curiosity about books during an era when a woman’s name was only to appear in print three times in her life – at birth, marriage and death.

Diamonstein-Spielvogel has devoted the past 15 years to commemorating more than 100 locations throughout New York’s five boroughs – the childhood homes, studios and workspaces of famous residents – through the Historic Landmarks Preservation Center’s cultural medallion programme. The programme was the latest in her four-decade-long commitment to preserving the city’s history.

Edith Wharton and Leonardo da Vinci

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/oct/21/leonardo-da-vinci-painter-milan?newsfeed=true

Edith Wharton first saw Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper during a trip to Milan when she was 17. It was to be almost four decades before she finally gave vent to the passion it had aroused. During that long interval, she said, she had "wanted to bash that picture's face". It wasn't the most edifying contribution to art history and she was careful not to broadcast it. Rather, she confessed her loathing privately in a letter to the art historian Bernard Berenson, who, as "the most authorised fist in the world", had just done her pugilistic business for her.

Berenson had published The Study and Criticism of Italian Art (Third Series, 1916) in which he revealed that, as a boy, he had "felt a repulsion" for The Last Supper. "The faces were uncanny, their expressions forced, their agitation alarmed me," he recalled feverishly. "They were the faces of people whose existence made the world less pleasant and certainly less safe." This description of the most famous narrative painting in the world as resembling a Neapolitan marketplace drew great opprobrium. One American newspaper compared it to an act of war, claiming Berenson had "torpedoed" Leonardo's reputation (this at a time when German U-boats were sinking allied ships). Another review argued that he had shown "such want of sympathy with Leonardo's work as is generally considered to place a critic's estimate out of court".

Ben Stiller Teaming with ‘Reality Bites’ Writer for Edith Wharton-Inspired Horror ‘The Mountain’

http://www.slashfilm.com/ben-stiller-direct-the-mountain/
Ben Stiller is set to reunite with Reality Bites writer Helen Childress for a new picture that couldn’t be more different from their last collaboration. The new project, titled The Mountain, will be a period horror story based on characters from Edith Wharton‘s novel Summer. The movie marks a sharp change of pace for Stiller, whose past projects have been mostly comedies. In addition, it represents a return to writing for Childress, whose Reality Bites was her first and last feature screenplay. More details after the jump.