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Death to Lady Bountiful: Women and Reform in Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree
The consensus among several generations of critics is that Wharton's 1907 novel The Fruit of the Tree lacks a stable core of concerns.(1) "There was stuff here for a dozen novels," Millicent Bell concludes (253-54). Henry James's judgment was no less decisive for his characteristic indirection. After praising the novel to Wharton as a thing "of a great deal of (though not perhaps of a completely superior) art," he adds, "Where my qualifications would come in would be as to the terrible question of the composition & conduct of the thing" (Powers 78). He would later complain to Mary Cadwalader Jones of the novel's "strangely infirm composition and construction -- as if she hadn't taken thought for that" (Powers 79, n3).(2) Frequently underlying criticism of its construction is the assumption that Wharton conceived of her novel in the muckraking tradition. Thus Elizabeth Ammons, who characterizes both The House of Mirth (1905) and The Fruit of the Tree (1907) as "economic novels," assigns them places alongside Norris's The Pit (1903), Glasgow's The Deliverance (1904), and Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). If we hold Wharton to these muckraking intentions, then the novel's cursory attention to the details of mill life and its focus instead on the private lives of the three principal characters are bound to disappoint.
But what if Wharton conceived of Fruit as belonging to an altogether different class of reform novels, as remarks by her contemporaries suggest? The Nation's reviewer apparently had little trouble recognizing in it "a familiar type of current American fiction: the industrial novel" ("Current Fiction" 352). This reviewer affords us a glimpse of this subgenre's essential features when he observes of Amherst and Bessy's engagement at the end of Book 1, "At this point the ordinary industrial novel might have been content to end, with a sound of wedding bells and popular plaudits" (353). These comments suggest that readers in the early 1900s would have had little difficulty in placing Wharton's novel not among journalistic exposés of industrial corruption but together with a class of reform novels that did not entirely eschew the romantic subplot.
Just such a tradition was the class of American women's fiction...