Chapter 9 - Edith Wharton’s Humanimal Pity

Summary

This essay analyzes the way that Edith Wharton’s writing frames the ethical and ontological relationship between human and nonhuman animals. Disputing a philosophical tradition that defines the difference between humans and animals on the basis of a capacity for language, Wharton – a committed animal lover – ambivalently suggests a less stark species boundary. The “humanimality” rendered in her work depicts human characters who are rendered animal through pain, through extreme experience, and through speechlessness. These representations are most manifest in Wharton’s wartime texts, Summer, Ethan Frome, and Fighting France. Wharton proposes that the appropriate posture toward both human and nonhuman animals is a pity based on the recognition of shared vulnerability to suffering. Yet her writing also frequently frames human–animal boundary-crossing as a mode of gothic excess, suggesting a pervasive anxiety about the very humanimaity that forms the basis of her compassionate ethics.