Squandered Art: Edith Wharton and the Erotics of Collecting

Abstract: This article explores the intersections among art, gender, and sexuality as depicted in three texts by Edith Wharton: “The Moving Finger” (1901), “The Daunt Diana” (1909), and False Dawn (1923). Treating the male art collector as a key (if understudied) figure in the literary history of sexuality, it argues that Wharton’s fictional connoisseurs partake in what the economist Thorstein Veblen terms “conspicuous consumption,” albeit with a crucial difference. By collecting reified works of art only to abandon or resell them, collectors pursue decidedly queer attachments with other men mediated via the visual arts which circumvent women altogether. In contrast to the female consumer who abounds in Wharton’s fiction, the male collector pursues the thrill of the chase and hence blurs the distinction between aesthetic and erotic desire.