The Professor and the Mob in Wharton’s The Valley of Decision

Abstract

Chapter 3 reads Edith Wharton's Valley of Decision, 'The Vice of Reading' and 'The Descent of Man'. Considering these texts alongside Charles Eliot Norton's writing about reading and education, the chapter argues that Wharton articulates her political thought in conversation with the elderly professor. In these early texts, as in her later commentary on modernism, Wharton expresses a realist conservatism that opposes a liberal idealism committed to democracy. In its reliance on abstraction and theory, Wharton contends, such idealism fails to see clearly the people whom expansions of democracy would enfranchise. Norton imagines a democracy enhanced by broader access to culture and a richly literate electorate; Wharton derides the capacities of the actual reading public, locates the the diffusion of culture in the marketplace rather than the school, and points to the degradation of literature amongst vapid consumers. Her texts satirize and exterminate professorial types, portraying a public that misunderstands or murders the scholars who would teach them. The scholar who gives voice to Norton's liberal idealism in Valley of Decision is a woman who herself embodies an ideal; Wharton's portrayal of her sad fate uses incisive feminist analysis to bolster a conservative case against idealisms of all sorts.