The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton

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University of California Press, 2023 M12 22 - 223 páginas
Starting with the tensions in the early family constellation, Gloria C. Erlich traces Edith Wharton's erotic evolution—from her early repression of sexuality and her celibate marriage to her discovery of passion in a rapturous midlife love affair with the bisexual Morton Fullerton. Analyzing the novelist's life, letters, and fiction, Erlich reveals several interrelated identity systems—the filial, the sexual, and the creative—that evolved together over the course of Wharton's lifetime.

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On Double Mothering
1
Family Ties
16
On the Threshold
50
The Passion Experience
75
Parental Inscriptions
116
Final Adjustments
148
Beatrice Palmato
171
Notes
177
Bibliography
191
Acknowledgments
197
Index
199
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Página 68 - ... any deeper bearing than the people composing such a society could guess ? The answer was that a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.
Página 63 - Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things," she moaned; and Gerty silently slipped an arm under her, pillowing her head in its hollow as a mother makes a nest for a tossing child. In the warm hollow Lily lay still and her breathing grew low and regular. Her hand still clung to...
Página 65 - It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper impoverishment — of an inner destitution compared to which outward conditions dwindled into insignificance.
Página 66 - Nettie Struther's child was lying on her arm : she felt the pressure of its little head against her shoulder. She did not know how it had come there, but she felt no great surprise at the fact, only a gentle penetrating thrill of warmth and pleasure.
Página 20 - Lily, if it's any comfort, that for twelve years I seldom knew what it was to be, for more than an hour or two of the twenty four, without an intense feeling of nausea, & such unutterable fatigue that when I got up I was always more tired than when I lay down.
Página 56 - That's Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.
Página 197 - Staley, director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas...
Página 121 - I cannot picture what the life of the spirit would have been to me without him. He found me when my mind and soul were hungry and thirsty, and he fed them till our last hour together.
Página 66 - And as she looked back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any real relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless, blown hither and thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts. She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself...
Página 75 - I have drunk of the wine of life at last, I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through, never to grow quite cold again till the end.

Acerca del autor (2023)

Gloria C. Erlich is the author of Family Themes and Hawthorne's Fiction (Rutgers, 1984), which won the House of Seven Gables Hawthorne Award and the Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars. She lives and writes in Princeton, New Jersey.

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