“The delights of intellectual vagrancy, of the improvised chase after a fleeting allusion”: Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front

Abstract

A Son at the Front was an underrated novel at the time of publication and consigned to the margins of World War I literature for many years. A number of contemporary reviewers failed to appreciate the depth of the novel, particularly with regard to Wharton’s complex use of allusions, and faulted it for being out of touch with modern fiction and being published at the wrong time. The years covered by the narrative had been consigned to history and events that had overtaken the period of American neutrality for those who sought retreat into isolationism. Memorialization of those who had fought and died in the war was, however, very much an ongoing process, particularly in the public erection of monuments among participant countries, and they have remained to this day the sites for public ceremonies of commemoration. This article focuses on Wharton’s reference to a knight’s effigy, Luca Signorelli, and a painting of the Inquisition attributed to Juan de Borgoña, to the Christian iconography of medieval and early Renaissance art, as a way of understanding how her novel probed the contestation over how to memorialize the death of soldiers in World War I amid a polarized response to American involvement.