Between 1905 and 1911, Edith Wharton published three novels, each of which circulated with fascinated horror around the prone body of an immobilized woman. At the conclusion of The House of Mirth (1905), Lawrence Selden discovers “on a bed, with motionless hands and calm, unrecognizing face, the semblance of Lily Bart” (325). Six years later, in the culminating moments of her bleak New England tale, Ethan Frome (1911), Wharton's narrator discovers the dreadful source of Ethan's grief: the incapacitated body of a “much smaller and slighter” Mattie Silver:

While Wharton would return to this image six years later in Summer's harrowing description of Mary Hyatt, whose body lies atop the Mountain “like a dead dog in a ditch” (Summer 163), The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome form an oddly compact trilogy with the less well-known novel that links them, The Fruit of the Tree (1907), Wharton's peculiar foray into the worlds of industrial reform, bodily paralysis and euthanasia.