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Sources: stock images plus, clockwise from top left, Image title TK Book cover art © Suzanne Fox 2021 |
The novels of Edith Wharton offer many pleasures and some perfectly executed pain. Exquisite place descriptions, nuanced characterizations, absorbing narratives and a unique insight into American class divisions mark her best work. So too, at least for me, does a sense of sometimes unbearable constriction. Wharton is tremendously astute about the cruelties as well as niceties of society, its imbalances of privilege and power, and the steep price it charges people, particularly women, for whatever (always conditional) protection and comfort it provides. Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, my personal favorite among Wharton's novels, is a woman who reveres the very systems that paralyze her, who can sometimes perceive the bars of her prison but can never imagine another world sufficiently to chart a route there. It's oversimple yet not entirely incorrect to say that her tragedy stems not so much from others' refusal to see her as more than a polished manner and a pretty face as from her own inability to do so. The social construct in which she lives dismembers her, in some deep psychic sense, and she colludes with it as it does so. Like many if not most of Wharton's protagonists, she is surrenders to something less than wholeness.
In thinking about "covering" Edith Wharton's books, my mind kept returning to that tension between beauty and a sort of brutality. This cover series uses some of the glorious portraits of women from the periods of which Wharton wrote, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cropping them so that most of each woman's face is missing and most of what is seen of her is covered by her garments. Each woman becomes both presence and absence, and a mouth that seems ready to speak but of course never actually does so. The title and author type extend into the space around her, echoing the shape of her jaw and neck. The faint grid of circles overlaid on these covers was originally an overlay of an actual grille or gate, suggesting the way Wharton's women are locked within their gender, class and roles. I could never make that work, but I like this less literal version.