Eerie Edith

Society was an old beast in a new skin.

Pulitzer Prize winner Edith Wharton is celebrated for her incisive portrayals of New York high society, but a darker current runs beneath her champagne-soaked ballrooms. In this groundbreaking study, Fred C. Adams, Jr. reveals that the Gothic was never far from her mind, arguing that Wharton mastered the elements of traditional horror to expose the anxieties of the early twentieth century.

Adams demonstrates how Wharton transformed the boring stage properties of medieval fiction into modern American nightmares. Through her lens, crumbling European castles become imposing Park Avenue mansions, while the magicians and wizards of old are reborn as Wall Street tycoons spinning gold from thin air. The traditional Gothic heroine, once trapped in dungeons, becomes the woman suffocated by the oppressive forces of social class and economic privilege.

Exploring Wharton’s innovative triple voice technique, Adams shows how she wove together realism and fantasy to create closet Gothics within mainstream masterpieces like The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth. Beyond her society fiction, this book examines Wharton’s celebrated ghost stories and uncovers the shocking subtext of Ethan Frome—presented here as a literary trompe l’oeil that can be read as a vampire novel.

From psychic vampires to haunted American psyches, Edith Wharton’s American Gothic offers a radical reinterpretation of one of America’s finest novelists.