Wharton, Sex, and the Terrible Honesty of the 1920s

Reading Wharton's novels The Mother's Recompense and Twilight Sleep in relation to a broader cultural conversation about the supposedly new nature of honesty, “Wharton Sex, and the Terrible Honesty of the 1920s” interrogates one central tenet of this concept: that youth were understood to be more profoundly invested in honesty and its shocking provocations than were their elders. Warner Fabian's 1923 best seller, Flaming Youth, for example, proposes that part of the shock of the modern was youth's tendency to voice disconcerting, uncomfortable truths of the type Ann Douglas has explored and which early twentieth-century commentators such Fabian, Ben Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, and Frederick Lewis Allen presented as characteristics of a generation. Yet Wharton's vision disrupts this generational narrative by highlighting the younger generation's provocative postures of honesty, even while they engage in surreptitious affairs, display a willful blindness to troubling events, and exhibit self-denial in regard to their deepest desires. In all, youth of Wharton's 1920s fictions appear less than forthright about the most significant aspects of their lives, thereby complicating a central narrative that would divide generations via the matter of truth.