This book sets forth how the "greening" of Wharton's private and public
writings contributes to exciting strands in cultural geography and
recent postcolonial theory: for example, biological and political
constructions of citizenship, mobility, race, and nation; hospitality
and hostility toward the "Other"; fraught experiences of exile and
competing conceptions of home/land; trans/national selfhood; the figure
of the nomad, the outcast, or the wanderer. Ultimately, it will address
this question: What are the issues, broadly speaking what motivates an
ecocriticism, how does that address the challenges of cultural
geography, why can we uncover meaning by turning to Wharton? The
argument made is that a reading of Wharton's fiction can help reveal how
to understand those issues. This book situates Wharton as an author who
is acutely responsive to pastoral tropes and terrain, among other
species of spaces. She addresses the affective and geographical
resonances of such sites, especially sparsely populated localities and
landforms--voguish mountain resorts, private ornamental gardens, lush
public parks, monumental and "sham" ruins--which offered pampered
American socialites a brief escape from the "welter." I wish to
complicate popular perceptions of "Wharton's world"--reinforced by
numerous handsomely produced cinematic and television adaptations of her
novels--as one rooted in often-opulent domestic interiors with their
waspish social cliques, strict rules of politesse, and elaborate
hierarchies.
Indeed, one of the central aims of this book is to treat pastoral as a
kind of palimpsest--a "parchment" upon which successive generations of
artist-pilgrims have etched their impressions, constantly revising its
imagery, formal procedures, and lyrical effects. This notion of the
palimpsest also reinforces how my research seeks to extend the range of
Wharton studies. First of all, my close reading of selected texts adds
another "layer" of sophistication to the ever-evolving field of
ecocriticism, whose core ideas and critical standpoints have assumed
both an urgency and galvanizing potency given the seismic upheaval to
our material localities around the globe--some of the most damaging
tornadoes in US history; flooding in the American Midwest; devastating
earthquakes in Haiti, China, and Japan; stronger and more extensive
wildfires in the American Southwest.
