Edith Wharton’s <i>A Motor-Flight through France</i> and the Aesthetics of Wonder

Abstract Toward the end of her life, Edith Wharton described herself as “an incorrigible life-lover &amp; life-wonderer.” This article contends that wonder is a crucial mechanism in how Wharton responds to aesthetic artifacts. Through a detailed analysis of her response to Amiens Cathedral in A Motor-Flight through France, this article illustrates how Wharton adopts and advocates what Philip Fisher calls an “aesthetics of wonder”—an interpretive stance wherein the intellect’s drive to know a work of visual art is inaugurated and sustained by Cartesian wonder. Such a stance allows analysis to unfold, nourished by specialist knowledge, without banishing emotion and sensation. Taking her response to Amiens as paradigmatic, I also address how similar dynamics mark her responses to Bourges, Beauvais, and Rheims in Motor-Flight, while noting important parallels between Wharton’s approach to aesthetics and the ideas of John Addington Symonds.