Edith Wharton's Island Ecologies and The Cruise of the Vanadis

Abstract

Abstract:This article examines what readers learn about Wharton's view of island ecosystems in her 1888 diary of her Aegean cruise, The Cruise of the Vanadis, when readers approach the diary in relation to recent island studies frameworks. The author expands previous discussion of Wharton's imperialist, nationalist, and racial ideologies to consider how these ideas are impacted by her notion of the relationship between humans and their environments, especially in island contexts. Wharton's 1888 cruise is a formative moment in which her notions of island geography and related ideas about otherness—racial, cultural, and geopolitical—emerge. This burgeoning attention to the connections between people and place, what might even be called the bioregional identity of place, carries into the rich connections between characters and settings/landscapes in her later work.