Agents without Agency: A Study of Archetypes and Society in Works of Edith Wharton

• Thesis title in Czech: Aktéři bez možnosti konat: studie archetypů a společnosti v dílech Edith Wharton
• Thesis title in English: Agents without Agency: A Study of Archetypes and Society in Works of Edith Wharton
• Key words: Edith Wharton|americká společnost|společnost|archetyp|konzum|kapitalismus
• English key words: Edith Wharton|American society|society|archetype|consumerism|capitalism
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2020/2021
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: doc. Erik Sherman Roraback, D.Phil.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 30.11.2020
• Date of assignment: 30.11.2020
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 04.12.2020
• Date and time of defence: 03.06.2021 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 09.05.2021
• Date of proceeded defence: 03.06.2021
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: PhDr. Hana Ulmanová, Ph.D.

Guidelines

The thesis will analyze the role of society in Edith Wharton’s major New York works, including her three New York novels, The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, as well as the four short stories written as novella Old New York, alongside with some other shorter stories, in order to encompass and analyze as much of her texts as possible. The thesis will be based on the assumption that society is the essential character of the book, and that the characters themselves have only secondary roles, and have no level of determinism. There is no novelty in the characters; they are recycled meticulously throughout Wharton’s texts, which is why archetypes of these characters will be formed in order to explain the society’s role better.
The first chapter will concentrate on the historical as well as theoretical basis of the thesis, focusing mainly the study of the society as introduced by Jean Baudrillard in The Consumer Society, as well as by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, since the capitalist society and to that connected consumerism was on the rise during Wharton’s era, and remnants of it can be found throughout her work. The next chapter will include a study of Claude Levi-Strauss’ theory of myth and archetypes, which will be applied on the Wharton’s characters, creating a scheme that will be used as the practical basis for the thesis’ analysis. Furthermore, a chapter will be devoted to each archetype to better explain their relations to the New York society. The archetypes would be based on notions such as: the “Determined Woman” for Lily Bart, Ellen Olenska, and Undine Spragg, the “Faithful Boy” for Newland Archer, Lawrence Selden, and possibly Ralph Marvell, then the “Nouveau Riches” which would include all the characters of this type of people, and lastly the “Old Generation” where would most of the traditional characters be.
The main goal of this thesis will be to apply Levi-Strauss’ theory on Edith Wharton’s work, as well as to prove that the society was indeed the most crucial part and one which should not be omitted from the discussion about her work. While some critics believe that Wharton wrote solely better versions of the novel of manners, this thesis will try and prove that her works went into greater depth, primarily when portraying the society of which Wharton had been a part of most of her life.

References

Preliminary Bibliography:
Primary Sources:
Wharton, Edith. Three Novels of New York: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence. London: Penguin Classics, 2012.
–. Old New York. New York: Scribner, 1995.
–. The New York Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2007.

Secondary Sources:
Allatson, Wendy. Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes. London: Routledge, 1992.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil, 1957.
Baudrillard, Jean. Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage, 1998.
Bell, Millicent. The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Daunton, Martin; Hilton, Matthew. The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles; Guatari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998.
Dimock, Wai-Chee. “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.” Modern Language Association 100.5 (1985): 783-792. JSTOR 15 April 2020.
Domosh, Mona. “Those ‘Gorgeous Incongruities’: Polite Politics and Public Space on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century New York City.” Annals of Association of American Geographers 88.2 (1998): 209-226.
Eliade, Mircea. Mýtus o věčném návratu: archetypy a opakování. Translated by Eva Streinbingerová. Praha: ISE, 1993.
Foulkes, Nick. High Society: The History of America’s Upper Class. New York: Assouline, 2008.
Goldschmidt, Walter. “Social Class and the Dynamics of Status is America.” American Anthropologist 57 (1955): 1209-1216.
Furnas, Joseph Chamberlain. The Americans: A Social History of the United States 1587-1914. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1969
Levi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” The Journal of American Folklore 68.270 (1955): 428-444. JSTOR 25 May 2020.
Lubbock, Percy. Portrait of Edith Wharton. London: Alden Press, 1947.
Luedtke, Luther S. Making America- the Society and Culture of the United States. Washington: United States Information Agency, 1988.
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin Press, 1967.
Nevius, Blake. Edith Wharton: A Study of her Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961.
Pizer, Donald. “The Naturalism of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.” Twentieth Century Literature 41.2 (1995): 241-248. JSTOR 13 April 2020.
Roraback, Erik S. The Dialectics of Late Capital and Power: James, Balzac and Critical Theory. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.
Ruti, Mari. A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912.
Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.