Edith Wharton's American Gothic

Discover the shadows lurking behind Edith Wharton’s gilded society. Fred C. Adams, Jr. challenges the view of Wharton as merely a footnote to Henry James, demonstrating how she employed Gothic conventions as a subversive vehicle for social criticism. From psychic vampires draining victims in snowbound Ethan Frome to a persecuted heroine destroyed by Old New York’s tribal code in The House of Mirth, Adams uncovers the covert terror in Wharton’s fiction.