Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton Contributions in Women's Studies

While neither Kate Chopin nor Edith Wharton can be called feminist writers, each did produce "female moral art," writings that focus relentlessly on the dialectics of social relations and the position of women therein. Mary Papke analyzes their disintegrative visions through detailed readings of virtually all of their novels and several of their shorter works.

Unlike comparable writers of their time, she argues, theirs was a nonpolemical but nonetheless political art in which disruption of the rules of masculine/feminine discourse and the hegemonic world view is deeply but obviously embedded within character, plot, and theme.