This talk draws on Edith Wharton’s writings to flesh out more widely resonant value-laden distinctions between externally expressive and quietly internalized responses to pain and pleasure. Wharton reliably denigrates the publicly embodied hedonic experiences she associates not only with people marginalized by ascriptive identities of race and class but also with her fellow affluent Americans. The realm of affect, then, serves as the arena where Wharton’s so-called “argument with America” is waged and where she grounds her preference for Old World over New World sensibilities. The expat author’s high cultural investment in a non-normative, nonreproducible affective interiority only deepened amid a growing concern over privacy rights in her country of origin, an ascendant American cultural preference for performative self-presentations, and ongoing statistical and sociological efforts to standardize the U.S. population into types. Within this context Wharton’s writings emerge as indispensable texts for understanding how an inwardly contained enlivenment could function as a vital, imperceptible, and volitionally unattainable sign of truly elite status.  

Cynthia J. Davis earned her doctorate from Duke University and is a Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. She is currently serving as a Fulbright U.S. Research Scholar in Germany. Stanford University Press published her first two single-authored books; her most recent monograph, Pain and the Aesthetics of U.S. Literary Realism, was published by Oxford University Press in January 2022. Her talk draws on the Edith Wharton chapter from that book as well as from a forthcoming 2024 article, “‘Alive in Every Fibre’: Chopin and Wharton on Pain, Pleasure, and Private Feeling,” featured in the journal American Literature in a special issue on “Pain.”