Tintner, Adeline. “Edith Wharton and Grace Aguilar” Edith Wharton in Context : Essays on Intertextuality. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999: 124-133

The strained relationship between mothers and daughters is one of Edith Wharton’s persistent themes in her late novels. Concealed within is the struggle for the father, a struggle that wounds their relationship. R.B.W. Lewis1 and Cynthia Griffin Wolff2 have pointed out in their studies of the life and work of Edith Wharton how the relations between parents and children contain the theme of incest that obsessed the American novelist in her later years. The existence of the pornographic fragment, “Beatrice Palmato,” highlights Wharton’s interest in introducing into her fiction an explicit account of the sexual act between father and daughter. This motif emerges in the fiction written in her sixties in a concentrated form in mother and daughter relations.

By this time Wharton had rejected the role of wife, had finished, as far as we know, her role as lover, and her yearning for biological children could now never be satisfied. Her progeny were her books; in letters to her friends she called her literary productions her “children.” Her own deprivation encouraged her fantasies in this direction. During the war years her maternal feelings were directed to the orphans of the war and to a few young men, especially to one who lost his life early in the war and whom she memorialized in A Son at the Front. ( P 124)