PAC Postscript Pluta Parker: A Realist Perspective 1

A Realist Perspective in the Modern Age: Nona in Wharton’s Twilight Sleep

Melissa Pluta Parker

Charleston Southern University

Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep is a novel that, by its very title, suggests a modern

sensibility and a focus on gender issues. The term “twilight sleep” refers to a method of

alleviating pain during childbirth, popular in the early part of the 1900s. There is no

doubt that Wharton, in this 1927 novel, addresses issues relating to domesticity, marriage,

and motherhood amidst the shifting landscape of the modern period. Divorce, by this

point, had become more commonly accepted, and as Wharton demonstrates in this novel,

it was often initiated by women. Such shifts raise questions about a woman’s role in both

the home and society, and more largely about a woman’s responsibilities. While much

has been made of the novel’s modern characteristics, there has not been as much

discussion regarding Wharton’s realist tendencies, evident here in her depiction of Nona

(Mrs. Manford’s daughter). Wharton presents Nona as a transitional figure who straddles

two worlds – the old (sentimental) world inhabited by her mother, the twice married

matriarch of the family, and the modern world inhabited by Lita, the fashionable young

wife of Jim, Mrs. Manford’s son. Nona’s position as a transitional figure in many ways

parallels Wharton’s own, for as an author she bridged the gap between sentimental

writers and modernists. Wharton’s realist impulse, then, seen most clearly here in her
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depiction of Nona, can be viewed as an effort to alleviate anxieties regarding her role as a

writer and to establish herself more firmly as a professional author on the literary scene.

As Amy Kaplan explains in The Social Construction of American Realism,

Wharton “viewed writing as work rather than leisure and treated realism as a tenuous

balancing act negating the idealism of genteel culture while resisting the sentimentalism

of mass culture” (66). This balance became harder to achieve in the modern period as the

foundations of both genteel culture and sentimentalism started to give way. Wharton,

however, in the years following her divorce and the decline of the old New York

aristocracy, with which she was associated, continued to write. She sought to establish

herself as a professional writer, to distinguish herself on one hand from “the ‘d_____d

mob of scribbling women’ that Nathaniel Hawthorne so violently resented (qtd. In

Myerson xiv)” (Martin 583) and on the other to position herself as something more than

“a novelist of manners or an aloof aristocrat clinging to outmoded values” (Kaplan 65).

This, for Wharton, meant fulfilling certain responsibilities as a writer. As Barbara

Hochman notes, “professional authorship meant redefining [her] position as wom[a]n

within turn-of-century American society” (211). Wharton’s desire to define herself is

evident in her depiction of Nona, who contemplates the role she is expected to play and

the obligations that she, as a woman, is expected to fulfill.

Nona, as we see, finds herself feeling the pull of two traditions – that of nineteenth

century womanhood, as evinced by her mother, Mrs. Manford, and that of the new

woman, as represented by Lita. Mrs. Manford, who fills her days with volunteer work
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and social events, “envied women who had no sense of responsibility – like Jim’s little

Lita” (Wharton 28). Lita, meanwhile, simply wants “a new deal” (Wharton 195). Bored

with her life, she seeks a divorce. Lita’s flippant attitude toward marriage, and her quick

disregard for her responsibilities as both wife and mother, is denounced by Mrs. Manford,

yet Wharton points out that Mrs. Manford, like Lita, is seeking to fill a void commonly

associated with the modern period. Nona “[d]id admire her mother’s altruistic energy; but

she knew well enough that neither she nor her brother’s wife Lita would ever follow such

an example – she no more than Lita. They belonged to another generation: to the

bewildered disenchanted young people who had grown up since the Great War [. . .]”

(Wharton 12). In this passage, Nona acknowledges a distinct difference between her own

generation and that of her mother’s and is well aware that she will never possess that

“altruistic energy” that defined nineteenth century womanhood. Notably, however, she

also distances herself from Lita, who is of her generation, by stressing that “she no more

than Lita” would follow suit. Nona, “with her incorrigible honesty,” adopts an outlook

that is more akin to Wharton’s (Wharton 12). It is an outlook that helps us understand

Wharton’s realist aesthetic and the responsibilities she associated with her role as a

female writer.

Realism, by the time of this novel’s publication, had become something of an

outmoded movement; however, Wharton presents it as her preferred aesthetic, as a means

of establishing a foundation on which to stand amidst the cultural and social upheavals of

the 1920s. Nona, at several times throughout the novel, is referred to as “old-fashioned”
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(Wharton 46). This is a charge with which Wharton, often marginalized as being nothing

more than “‘the lady novelist,’” was familiar (Kaplan 65). While Wharton, with this

description, alludes to the fact that realism’s heyday had passed, she simultaneously

affirms realism as a valid mode of writing. As Kaplan acknowledges, “Wharton

conceived of writing as productive work as a protest against the wastefulness of upper-

class idleness” (68). Her stance on this is evident in her depiction of Nona, who works

hard to combat the wasteful effects of idleness among her set. Just as “Life was a

confusing business to Nona Manford,” so it was for Wharton the realist who regarded

“life” as her subject matter and a “business” (Wharton 47). It was not a matter to be

treated lightly, and the fact that she finds it “confusing” speaks to its complexities and the

difficulties that attended to her role as a writer.

As some have noted, Twilight Sleep does adopt characteristic features of other

genres, including sentimentalism and the gothic. Janet Beer and Avril Horner call it “a

hybrid text” that “combines the effects of realism with elements of the Gothic mode in

order to make distinct [Wharton’s] satiric vision” (177). While there is no doubt that

Wharton “blur[s] genre boundaries” in this novel, which could certainly be considered an

experimental technique akin to the modern period, she does more than simply present us

with what Beer and Horner call “the effects of realism” (177). In appropriating the

conventions of sentimental, gothic, and modern fiction, Wharton presents us with a

glimpse of the confusion that characterized the modern world, while simultaneously

seeking to bridge the fragmented gaps on which it stood. Kaplan questions whether
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“realism [is] part of a broader cultural effort to fix and control a coherent representation

of a social reality that seems increasingly inaccessible, fragmented, and beyond control”

(8). For Wharton, in many ways, it is. A close look at the way in which she portrays

Nona in this novel makes this longing for coherence evident. As Regina Martin observes,

“realism does not denote a stable set of conventions; instead, ‘realism’ is [. . .] a term that

is continually reconstituted as a source of authority and prestige according to a complex

network of inclusions and exclusions as it encounters other literary genres” (584).

Realism, then, presented Wharton with a means of exploring these “encounters” and

connections, connections that are noticeably absent in the modern world of this novel

where the characters seemingly glide past one another day in and day out without any

meaningful interactions. By satirizing these characters who inhabit “a world which

believed in panaceas,” Wharton rejects the idea that the novel merely functions as a form

of escape and suggests instead that it fulfills a solid purpose (Wharton 51).

She, like other authors writing in the realist tradition, sought to establish her work

as meaningful. In The Problem of American Realism, Michael Davitt Bell discusses the

idea of realism and suggests that it functioned “as a means for neutralizing anxieties

about the writer’s status in a culture still intensely suspicious or contemptuous of ‘art’

and the ‘artistic’” (Bell 8). Such “anxieties” are ever present in the novel. Lita’s desire to

pursue a Hollywood career, for example, is frowned upon by the old New York set.

Meanwhile, the teachings of the “much-slandered Mahatma” are questionable, so much

so that Mrs. Manford seemingly has to convince herself that “Yes; certainly she believed
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in the ‘Mahatma’” (Wharton 22). These doubts and uncertainties raise questions about

what constitutes reality. As Lilian R. Furst asserts in All is True: The Claims and

Strategies of Realist Fiction, “The claim ‘All is true’ is a good starting point for a

reconsideration of realist fiction, because it implicitly raises the essential critical issues.

Are readers still willing to accept the postulate that the realist novel gives a true and

faithful account of a preexistent, stable, knowable reality?” (3). Doubts that such “a

preexistent, stable, knowable reality” exists permeate the novel and help us understand

Wharton’s attempts to alleviate such concerns while simultaneously validating her

position in society as a female author.

This is a lonely, and empty, world that these characters inhabit, and this troubled

Wharton, as we see in her portrayal of Nona, whom Wharton presents as a “source of

authority,” which mimics the role that she, as a realist, took on despite it being fraught

with hardships. Throughout this novel, we meet characters like Mr. and Mrs. Manford

who face a constant barrage of obligations and duties, but none, however, carry a weight

like the responsibilities held by Nona. The narrator describes how “There were moments

when Nona felt oppressed by responsibilities and anxieties not of her age, apprehensions

that she could not shake off and yet had not enough experience of life to know how to

meet” (45). She seemingly accepts this, though, recognizing that “After all, somebody in

every family had to remember now and then that such things as wickedness, suffering

and death had not yet been banished from the earth; and with all those bright-

complexioned white-haired mothers mailed in massage and optimism, and behaving as if

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they had never heard of anything but the Good and the Beautiful, perhaps their children

had to serve as vicarious sacrifices” (Wharton 45). Nona, Wharton stresses, is tasked with

monumental “responsibilities” that reflect Wharton’s own as an author. In suggesting that

Nona is “perhaps” a sacrifice, Wharton acknowledges the sentimental tradition, but she

raises that notion only to reject it. Wharton, writing in the modern age, “remember[s]”

like Nona, and reminds us, with her satirical indictment of a society intent on eradicating

the unpleasantries of life no matter the cost, that “wickedness, suffering, and death” still

exist. Notably, Nona feels “oppressed by responsibilities and anxieties not of her age,”

which speaks to how Wharton, as a realist writing in the modern period, is taking up

issues “not of her age.” The fact that Nona feels underscores the importance of these

“responsibilities,” which Wharton presents as meaningful. It is Nona, for example, who

worries about Jim’s happiness and takes on the job of “running after Lita all night from

one cabaret to another” when Jim cannot, and it is Nona who is charged with attending to

Arthur Wyant’s concerns and with aiding Mr. and Mrs. Manford, who find themselves at

odds and in conflict when it comes to quelling a scandal that could potentially ruin the

family’s name (Wharton 81). Further, it is Nona, who is tasked by Aggie Heuston with

saving Stanley, the man that Nona loves but cannot have. Nona is cognizant of how

all those others needed her: Jim and his silly Lita, her father, yes, even her

proud self-confident father, and poor old Exhibit A and her mother who

was so sure that nothing would ever go wrong again, now she had found a

new Healer! Yes; they all needed help, though they didn’t know it, and Fate
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seemed to have put her, Nona, at the very point where all their lives

intersected . . . . (Wharton 143)

Nona thus not only bridges the gap between their lives but functions as a solid “point” at

which all converge.

In short, we see, enacted through her depiction of Nona, Wharton presenting us

with what William Dean Howells called a “‘vision of solidarity’” (Kaplan 11). Kaplan

describes this as a strategy that “construct[s] a vision of a social whole, not just as a

nostalgia for lost unity or as a report of new social diversity, but as an attempt to mediate

and negotiate competing claims to social reality by making alternative realities visible

while managing their explosive qualities” (11). It is from Nona’s perspective – and

through her encounters with other characters – that these “alternative realities” become

“visible,” and it is through her depiction of Nona, the mediator, that Wharton at large

“attempt[s] to mediate and negotiate competing claims to social reality.” Beer and Horner

describe how “Family life is anatomized in the novel, especially the substitutions and

displacements of authentic relationships in favour of the ephemeral pursuit of cults,

causes, and celebrity” (179). It is the “authentic,” however, that Nona desires, and the

novel offers us a glimpse into the frustration and pain Nona feels in its absence. Beer and

Horner go on to assert that “the novel offers us no viable point of reference for

authenticity,” but this is not so (191). In this text, Nona functions as a “point of

reference” as she reflects not only on her own experiences, but on those of the other

characters as well. As Furst explains, the realist novel “stakes its claim to special
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authenticity by accenting its primary allegiance to experience over art, thus purporting to

capture truth. In keeping with this view, the role played by observation in the realist

novel is proportionately greater than that of artistic convention” (6).

In Twilight Sleep, Wharton grounds the authentic in Nona and in doing so

underscores the importance of her work as a novelist. We see this, for instance, when

Nona, despite suffering in love, refuses to compromise her sense of self. When Aggie

finally offers to divorce Stan, the man that Nona loves, on the condition that Nona marry

him and save him from the woman he has run off with, Nona refuses, poignantly

explaining, “‘Because even if I’ve been a coward that’s no reason why I should be a

cad’” (Wharton 206). This opportunity to be with Stan is what Nona says she has wanted

“more than anything in life!” (Wharton 206). Yet she gives it up and continues to feel the

pain for that which she longs. Jennifer Haytock suggests that “For Nona, divorce

represents superficiality; she believes that no relationship founded on the unhappiness of

someone else could be lasting or satisfying” (224). While Wharton’s view of divorce is

certainly more complicated than presented here, we do see a longing on Nona’s part for a

“lasting” and “satisfying” relationship. She refuses to sacrifice herself and acquiesce to

Aggie who insists that Nona “must save him” (Wharton 205). Nona refuses, and in this

refusal, we see Wharton again rejecting the sentimental tradition in favor of realism and

demonstrating a longing for substance in this vacuous world.

We see this desire for substance even more firmly as Wharton links Nona and

realism with physical pain and acute feeling, which is something that the other characters,
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as the title suggests, try to alleviate through any means possible. When Mrs. Manford

tells Nona, “‘We ought to refuse ourselves to pain. All the great healers have taught us

that,’” Nona pointedly asks her mother, “‘Did Christ?’” (Wharton 275). Here, Nona

exposes her mother’s hypocrisy and in doing so alludes to a moral foundation largely

absent in the modern world. Wharton, in depicting this exchange, demonstrates that the

proclamations of the “great healers” to which Mrs. Manford refers are meaningless. Just

before this exchange with Nona, Mrs. Manford recalls the words of one such healer by

the name of Gobine: “‘If only you Americans would persuade yourselves of the utter

importance of the Actual – of the total non-existence of the Real’” (Wharton 274). With

this reference to “the Actual” or to “the Real,” Wharton reveals an anxiety about what

constitutes reality, a direct reflection of her role as a writer dedicated to presenting life as

it actually is. She suggests that “non-existance” is an absence, which brings not relief, but

an emptiness. We see this most clearly at the end of the novel when Nona suffers from a

misdirected gunshot wound, “which had fractured her arm near the shoulder” and “also

grazed her lung” (Wharton 302). The shot, fired by Mrs. Manford’s first husband, Arthur

Wyant, was meant for Lita, who was having a romantic exchange with Mr. Manford, but

these are all facts that Mrs. Manford never becomes privy to. Just as Nona saves Lita

from feeling the physical pain of the gunshot, Mrs. Manford is spared details of the truth.

In the days that follow, Nona wonders whether

that dreadful night at Cedarledge [had] ever been a reality to [her mother]?

If it had, Nona was sure, it had already faded into the realms of fable, since
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its one visible result had been her daughter’s injury, and that was on the

way to healing. Everything else connected with it had happened out of sight

and under ground, and for that reason was now as if it had never existed for

Pauline, who was more than ever resolutely two-dimensional. (Wharton

307)

In this passage, Wharton draws a distinct difference between the injured Nona, who is

starkly aware of the painful truth, and Mrs. Manford, for whom it barely exists save for

the “visible result” of the wound. Wharton’s realist tendencies are evident in how she

presents Nona, who confronts and manages the pain of reality in a way that the other

characters do not, much in the same way that Wharton as a realist both acknowledges and

addresses problems of the modern world, thereby affirming a sense of purpose in her

work.

Wharton thus presents us with a critical image of “a rich, efficient, and busy

society. [. . .] that hides a great deal of turmoil and discontent” (Beer and Horner 186).

Nona is one of the only characters in this novel who does not hide from this “turmoil and

discontent.” In fact, by the novel’s end, Nona admits as she is laid up in bed recovering

from her wound, that she is “envious of the others who could escape by flight – by

perpetual evasion” (Wharton 306). After the incident at Cedarledge, Lita and Jim set sail

for Paris, and Arthur Wyant “had gone also – to Canada” (Wharton 305). Meanwhile, Mr.

and Mrs. Manford are preparing for a trip to Cairo. It is only Nona who physically

remains. She feels little, if any, respite, and when in the closing scene with her mother
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she exclaims that she would “a thousand times rather go into a convent” than marry, she

stresses, “I mean a convent where nobody believes in anything” (Wharton 315). In this

final scene, Nona’s eyes (and body) are wide open to the problems that stand before her,

the problems of her age and society, just as Wharton’s, the realist, are. Haytock asserts

that “The absence of redemption at the end of Twilight Sleep places the novel in the

frustrated modernist position of a loss of faith, summed up by Nona’s desire to join ‘a

convent where nobody believes in anything’” (226). This view, however, is too limiting.

In this novel inhabited by characters like Mrs. Manford who so readily believe the

preaching of these so-called great healers, Nona adopts a realist perspective. She would

rather be where people are true to themselves than exist in a world proliferated and filled

by empty promises.

In Twilight Sleep, we see Wharton employing the strategies of realism and thereby

demonstrating her own longing to forge connections and foreground meaning in the

fragmented modern world. Her portrayal of Nona reflects a sense of unease and

determination regarding the role she set for herself as a professional author. More

specifically, a careful look at Nona reveals Wharton’s desire for solidarity, presented here

as realism, amidst the threatening emptiness of the modern world. As Kaplan asserts,

“Realists do more than passively record the world outside; they actively create and

criticize the meanings, representations, and ideologies of their own changing culture” (7).

Wharton, then, through her depiction of Nona, presents us with a vision of solidarity in

this “slippery sliding modern world” (Wharton 48). That vision is realism.
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Works Cited

Beer, Janet, and Avril Horner. “Wharton the ‘Renovator’: Twilight Sleep as Gothic

Satire.” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 2007, pp. 177-192.

Bell, Michael Davitt. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History

of a Literary Idea. U of Chicago P, 1993.

Furst, Lilian R. All is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction. Duke UP, 1995.

Haytock, Jennifer. “Marriage and Modernism in Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep.”

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 19, no. 2, 2002, pp. 216-229.

Literature Resource Center. Accessed 21 February 2018.

Hochman, Barbara. “The Awakening and The House of Mirth: Plotting Experience and

Experiencing Plot.” The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and

Naturalism: Howells to London, edited by Donald Pizer, Cambridge UP, 1995, pp.

211-235.

Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. U of Chicago P, 1997.

Martin, Regina. “The Drama of Gender and Genre in Edith Wharton’s Realism.”

Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 58, no. 4, 2012, pp. 582-605.

Wharton, Edith. Twilight Sleep. Scribner, 1997.