—in short, of modulated cleverness. Speed, vulgarity, vastness, unconventionality even, if it be excessive, find no place except the ironic in her pages.
The art of fiction would seem by now almost a traditional field for the assertion of feminine emancipation; but if Mrs. Wharton can be said to assert any emancipation at all, it is only that of the individual woman who frees herself by the force of her own character and talent. The emancipation of her sex is a note she does not sound, doubtless because she believes in equality. For evidence of her belief that civilized women are on a practical equality with civilized men is to be found in the irony with which she handles the heroines of the divorce court. That she regards them as both shirkers and imperialists might reasonably be inferred from the fact that she makes Charles Bowen describe Undine Spragg as the product of the "custom of the country,"—the custom, that is, of allowing wives to shirk the responsibility of an intelligent share in their husbands' interests, and further, of allowing them to lay violent hands on fundamental social conventions for the sake of their own convenience, to make their first appeal to what should be the court of last resort. The sharpness of her satire of the vulgar and insensible, the fashionable, the divorced, is significant of the essential conservatism of her regard for the civilized status quo and the conventions of educated sensibility. Perhaps her eminence as an artist, joined to the fact that she is a woman, will lead to her being-called a New Woman—we are vague about such words. But if she is to be called a New Woman truly, it will be because she is doing a relatively new thing for a New Woman to do: namely, defending some of the oldest things in our civilization.
