Even this small room soon will be too expensive for her unless she can sell the one art treasure she still possesses: an unsigned Rembrandt. This widowed lady, who has suffered a number of financial misfortunes, has been reduced from living in palatial homes to now living in a dingy room. As “The Rembrandt” opens, Eleanor persuades her cousin to accompany her to a rented room occupied by an elderly lady, the once-wealthy Mrs. These acts of charity, however, often take the form of persuading someone else to bear the brunt of the inconvenience and expense. The narrator of “The Rembrandt” is a museum curator whose cousin, Eleanor Copt, frequently undertakes acts of charity toward the unfortunate. This theme, which underlies some of her best novels-The House of Mirth is a good example-also appears in a number of her short stories, such as “The Rembrandt.” The Rembrandt She was therefore especially sensitive to such subtle forms of victimization as the narrowness of a woman’s horizons in her society, which not only denied women the opportunity to develop their full potential but also burdened men with disproportionate responsibilities. Not all their perceptions, however, were identical since Wharton’s viewpoint was influenced by the limitations she experienced as a woman. Both writers moved in the same rather limited social circle and were exposed to the same values and to the same types of people. It is not surprising that Wharton and James developed a number of parallel interests. Her approach to the themes which she shared with James was much more direct than his: She took a more sweeping view of the action of a story and omitted the myriad details, qualifications, and explanations which characterize James’s work. As she matured, however, Wharton developed an artistic viewpoint and a style which were distinctly her own. Wharton knew James and admired him as a friend and as a writer, and some of her early short stories-those in The Greater Inclination and Crucial Instances, for example-do resemble James’s work. Further, both James and Wharton used ghost stories to present, in allegorical terms, internal experiences which would be difficult to dramatize in a purely realistic way. Each of these authors wrote a number of stories regarding such themes as the fate of the individual who challenges the standards of society, the effect of commercial success on an artist, the impact of European civilization on an American mentality, and the confrontation of a public personality with his own private self. Because many of Edith Wharton’s ( Janu– August 11, 1937) characters and themes resemble those of Henry James, her work has sometimes been regarded as derivative of his.

In morocco by edith wharton