To the Editors:
Regretfully, James W. Tuttleton’s “The Feminist Takeover of Edith Wharton” (March 1989) was brought to my attention and part of me would like not to dignify this “mean-spirited and condescending attack” (as Tuttleton calls that of one of the women in this article) with a reply. However, since Tuttleton’s animosity was fueled to essay-writing force in large part by his attendance at a conference I co-directed as president of the Edith Wharton Society and editor of the Edith Wharton Newsletter, I feel obligated to counter his allegations. Moreover, by publishing his assertions in a non-academic journal, he knows general readers cannot assess his scholarship.
It would take another article to contest all his charges and readings, but I address what I see as two of his greatest sources of ire, the purported rescue by feminist scholars of Edith Wharton from the “neglect of the male literary establishment” and their appropriation of her life and fiction “to buttress the ideology of . . . feminism.”
The first charge frankly surprises me since Tuttleton, long a commentator on Wharton, should welcome all attention paid, and had he joined the Wharton Society when he was so invited he would know that it is not a “sorority of feminists” in the frivolous or exclusionary sense, although all the women critics he mentions by name (except the two researchers) are active members. But other long and active members from the pre-Seventies world of critics are R. W. B. Lewis,
