“A Woman's Nature is Like a Great House Full of Rooms”: Edith Wharton's Personal and Fictional Representation of Homes

ABSTRACT

All of her life, the turn-of-the-century American novelist Edith Wharton was extremely sensitive to her environment. This preoccupation resulted in a professional interest in houses and their interior decoration. She created homes for herself, both in America and in France, in which she ensured the conditions for the development of her authorship. She moreover published books in which she expressed her opinions on how a home should be constructed and decorated, which contributed to her reputation as a professional author, but also as an intellectual, a connoisseur, and a cosmopolitan. The average American bourgeois home, which she abhorred, formed a source of inspiration for her literary imagery in the depiction of characters who find themselves entrapped in patriarchal society.

KEYWORDS:

• Edith Wharton
• author
• America
• Europe
• interior architecture
• literary imagery
• bourgeois home
• marriage
• patriarchal society