A backward glancetheorizing edith Wharton's autobiographical subjectivity

Abstract

This article will claim that beneath the restraint and detachment that characterize Edith Wharton's autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), lies a self-imposed and consciously adopted subjectivity. Drawing on Michel Foucault's paradigm of self-formation that he defined as "technologies of the self" and on Toril Moi's more recent reworking of the critical category "woman," 1 will try to work out the theory of subjectivity that underlies Wharton's autobiography. Her text further shows to what extent her self-portrait derives from a voluntary subjection to self and social surveillance, while the self-censorship evident in the text does paradoxically intimate a number of private concerns of crucial importance to the author.