Edith Wharton's Revolution in Taste
Edith Wharton wrote in "The Writing of Fiction" that "the impression produced by a landscape, a street, or a house should always, to the novelist, be an event in the history of a soul." Her novels resonate with sensitive renderings of surroundings and décor. We do indeed peer into Newland Archer's soul in "The Age of Innocence" when we see him in his "Gothic library" reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The House of Life." Wharton traveled a great deal when she was young and acutely sensed the stark contrast between the architectural grandeur of Europe and the bleak brown streets of her native New York. In Venice, her father put Ruskin in her hands — and she never truly let go of him. But between her girlhood and her recollections from the tranquility of her 60s, Wharton had less use for Ruskin than for 18th-century France.
She wrote a great deal about architecture and its allied arts. Her first book was an architectural treatise, "The Decoration of Houses" (Rizzoli, 198 pages, $35), which she co-authored with the American architect Ogden Codman Jr. The year was 1897, and America was ready for a new defining aesthetic sensibility. As the architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson writes in his foreword to the new, handsome facsimile edition of "The Decoration of Houses," "It is among the most influential books about decoration and architecture ever published in the United States."
By 1897, the brownstone era that Wharton had railed against had ended. The dark house fronts, cramped interiors, layers of damask blotting out any hint of daylight, and the visored knights upholding the mantel — all this was swept away by Indiana limestone and open floor plans. Wharton and Codman promoted 18th-century France as the locus of taste. "The essence of taste," Wharton wrote, "is suitability." And none competed with the French for suitability, which "expresses the mysterious demand of the eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order." Wharton was a French classicist who disdained Gilded Age excess as much as the Victorian taste with which she grew up on West 23rd Street. She loathed clutter above all else.
Wharton believed in the trickle-down theory of taste: If the rich got it right, the middle class and the working class would too. "The Decoration of Houses" wasn't merely a manual of decoration, but a manifesto of post-Victorian values. The book influenced Elsie de Wolfe, the most popular interior decorator of the early 20th century, and the doctrine of suitability did trickle down, until it was absorbed by modernism. But before that, we had a glorious period of architecture in the 1910s and early 1920s that championed light, airy, graceful, and suitable spaces — "a breeze of beauty," as the historian John Lukacs put it.
This new edition of "The Decoration of Houses," which reproduces the original typeface and illustrations, arrives by way of Rizzoli and the Mount Press. The conception of the book grew out of Wharton's and Codman's collaboration on the decoration of her house, Land's End, in Newport, R.I. Both Wharton and Codman later moved to France, the fount of suitability, where in 1937 she suffered a stroke at his château, having come to visit him to discuss a revised edition of "The Decoration of Houses," as fresh 40 years after it first came out as it is 110 years later.
