Abstract
In her 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton admonished critics of her 1917 novel Summer who viewed the novel as a “pleasing romance of summer life.” Wharton saw her novel as part of the same Dark Romantic literary traditions of New England established by authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne. This project moves beyond Wharton’s connections of genre and geography to explore how both Hawthorne’s and Wharton’s literary works were intimately situated within their respective era’s popular culture and how popular entertainments of each era shaped the form, style, and worldview of each author’s literary works. I begin by analyzing how Hawthorne’s 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance is narrated as though it were a series of tableaux vivant or “living pictures,” antebellum entertainments with a moral message, though they were also often an excuse to skirt censorship laws. I then explore how, in much the same way, Wharton’s Summer uses the circus freakshow, a form descended from the tableaux vivant that displayed Otherness as a medical and scientific entertainment. In Summer the freakshow is used with disturbing effect as a way to deliver an otherwise simple “seduced and abandoned” plot. Together these novels suggest that literary fiction is shaped by the popular culture that surrounds it. As that popular culture evolves, so too does the form of literary fiction. Large changes in popular culture, like those between tableaux vivant and the freakshow, are mirrored by minor differences in the narratives of literary fiction like those between The Blithedale Romance and Summer.