SOURCE: Ammentorp, Julie Olin. “Edith Wharton's Challenge to Feminist Criticism.” Studies in American Fiction 16, no. 2 (autumn 1988): 237-44.

In the following essay, Ammentorp finds that Wharton's male characters in The House of Mirth suffer nearly as much as the women because of their society's expectations.

In the past decade, feminist critics have done much to restore Edith Wharton to her proper rank among American novelists and to shed light on many aspects of her work previous critics had overlooked. Scholars such as Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Elizabeth Ammons, Judith Fetterley, and recently Wai-Chee Dimock have changed the understanding of Wharton's work through their perceptive analyses, focusing particularly on Wharton's insights into the social structures of the early part of this century and the ways in which these structures influenced and limited women's lives.

Yet the work of these feminist critics also raises issues of the limitations, or perhaps blind-spots, of...