Vested Reading: Writing the Self through Ethan Frome

ABSTRACT

This essay builds on the work of Wolfgang Iser, Janice Radway, E. H. Gombrich, and other theorists of reading to argue for a new approach to the reading encounter, which I call vested reading. Vested reading is a means of engaging with the literary text in a way that reads the self into the book one holds in one's hands while also attending to issues of literary form. I turn to Edith Wharton's novella Ethan Frome and its popular reception in order to flesh out my understanding of vested reading as a practice that realigns life-worlds, while reconstructing the world of the text in ways relevant to readers’ lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropology of literature
• reader-response theory
• Edith Wharton
• women's studies
• marriage
• divorce
• Wolfgang Iser
• Janice Radway
• E. H. Gombrich

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rebecca Gould is the author of Writers and Rebels: The Literatures of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale UP, 2016), After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern UP, 2016), and The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus (Central European UP, 2015). Broadly specialising in the literatures of the Caucasus, she is a Reader in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol. Her work has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Van Leer Institute for Advanced Studies (Jerusalem).

ORCID

Rebecca Gould http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2198-5406

Notes

1. Although Trilling's critique is arguably less than central to a contemporary discussion of Wharton's literary legacy, the currency of this particular essay is evidenced by its inclusion in the recent Norton Critical Edition of Ethan Frome.

2. See John Updike, “The Changeling: A New Biography of Edith Wharton” and Jonathan Franzen, “A Rooting Interest”. Updike points to the recurrence of the term ‘ruthless’ in Hermione Lee's biography of Wharton.

3. For Wharton and popular culture, see Nancy Bentley, Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920, and Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race. For Wharton and visual culture, see Emily J. Orlando, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts. For Wharton and material culture, see Emily J. Orlando, Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture.

4. For a study of the film versions of Wharton's novels, see Parley Ann Boswell, Edith Wharton on Film.

5. For the problem of the will in American naturalism generally, and in Wharton's oeuvre specifically, see Jennifer Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (see 161–200 for a detailed discussion of Wharton).

6. For a classic parsing of these two terms, see Jonathan Culler, “Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative: Some American Discussions”.

7. See Wolfgang Iser's The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology and Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, especially 262–284 for two classic statements.

8. For feminist reader-response theory that usefully combines historicism with a phenomenology of the reading process is the work of Jane P. Tompkins’, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860, and West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, and Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. In the context of these works, I would define the present investigation as being less interested in historicism and more in the phenomenology of the reading process.

9. For an edition of the full French text, currently held by Yale University's Beinecke Library, see W. D. MacCallan, “The French Draft of Ethan Frome”.