Edith Wharton and the phenomenology of enchantment

Recent attempts to reorient the critical conversation to accommodate aesthetics suggest a need to reconsider the question of beauty. In Uses of Literature critic Rita Felski writes ‘beauty bespeaks a positive value, a presence, an enrichment, even if the precise nature of that enrichment often eludes our analytical grasp. The new writing on beauty thus overlaps at key points with the phenomenology of enchantment’ (65). This paper contends that Edith Wharton’s writings on visual art constitute an example of criticism that engages with this ‘phenomenology of enchantment’. Specifically, when Wharton encounters beauty in a work of art, she responds not only analytically but also affectively, refusing to banish ‘the eddies and flows of affective engagement’ (Felski 19). This paper will examine Wharton’s responses to French cathedrals in A Motor-Flight Through France, treating her travel writings as works of cultural criticism that adopt just the sort of interpretive stance Felski advocates—one that embraces the distinctive visual qualities of each cathedral (its beauties), while also offering up sophisticated critical responses. In short, this paper will argue that Wharton’s writing on Amiens, Beauvais, and Rheims cathedrals constitutes the very approach to critical inquiry that contemporary critics such as Rita Felski, Dennis Donoghue, Elaine Scarry, and D. A. Miller (among others) have recently advocated. The paper will conclude by proposing that neglect of Wharton’s critical writing, to some extent, might stem from how we have tended to define criticism, privileging certain rhetorical stances over others. It will also suggest that Wharton’s writings on visual art offer an important precursor to what critics now call a ‘postcritical’ stance—one where analysis sits comfortably alongside emotion and moments of enchantment.