In this chapter I will be discussing texts that are concerned with life in early twentieth century America – the first published in 1907 and the rest in the 1920s – and that are controversial in some way or other, in their engagement either with taboo or with contemporary public discussions about subjects as various as euthanasia, factory reform, and religion. From The Fruit of the Tree, published in 1907, through The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), The Mother's Recompense (1925), Twilight Sleep (1927), to The Children (1928), Wharton is concerned with morality in the modern world and, in particular, how variation and change in the moral climate affect the role of women in society. As novels they are part-reactionary, part-revolutionary, venturing into territory that is controversial and shocking but also demonstrating allegiance to a clearly visible set of traditional moral standards.

For many years critical opinion has placed all of these novels firmly in the second rank of Wharton's achievement, a judgement that is, in many ways predicated on the assumption that the texts are written by someone alienated or estranged from the subject of her fiction – that is, the society of her native land. I would like to argue that the central difference between these novels and those judged to be of greater artistic worth is chiefly the transparency of their morality: they all clearly and unflinchingly promote a well-defined aesthetic and ideological position. In articulation of their particular concerns a fairly histrionic mode of delivery is common to all these texts and they offer, in many ways, very straightforward accounts of conflict between clearly delineated contesting forces. The dramas are played out in a variety of different settings – from the seedy Riviera lodging house to the avant-garde New York salon, from the Nouveau Luxe hotel in Paris to the industrial town of Hanaford – and are all structured around social discordance and personal confusion. The novel, Twilight Sleep, for instance, is essentially predicated on the gross disjunction between the surface – the world in which Pauline Manford is preoccupied by the organization of a prestigious dinner party or the best way to reduce the size of her hips – and the underside, where her family are plunging ever more fearfully into a chaos of infidelity, incest, and murderous intent.