Wharton’s Revision of Guardian-Ward Romance Fiction in Summer

Abstract

Abstract:This article analyzes the way that Wharton’s Summer both engages with and revises a relatively common trope of popular nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American fiction centered on romance, the romance between a male guardian and his female ward. To do so, it also analyzes the trope in a range of those other novels, including William J. Locke’s 1905 The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (so popular that it became a play and then a motion picture), Jean Webster’s 1912 Daddy Long-Legs, and Ethel M. Kelley’s 1917 Turn About Eleanor. Each of these other novels generally obscures or indeed celebrates the uneven power dynamics and age relationships of such couplings, sometimes to quite remarkable degrees, and in ways that foreground the “romantic” elements of the romance fiction genre. In Summer, Wharton, by partially but not entirely revising them, instead recasts the conventions of a guardian-ward romance to force the logical and emotional contradictions of the hierarchies of power coercively inherent in the limited female autonomy of such wards to the surface.