“Behind the Lines” in Edith Wharton's A Son at the Front: Rewriting a Masculinist Tradition

Abstract

A Son at the Front is the story of a war fought, as Edith Wharton said, “from the rear,” a war in which the art of portrait painting becomes a deadly weapon. In John Campton's World War I Paris, where the fashionable portrait painter wields his paintings in a behind the lines battle to gain, as he says, “possession” of his grown son, Wharton probes the sexual politics underlying the development of modernist aesthetics by writing a new kind of war novel. The novel invokes and then questions a central trope of the fiction and poetry that, until recently, has been identified as The Literature of the Great War.