#fairfield university

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Fairfield Swimming

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"Welcome to the fire - now it is your turn to hold the hose."

Billy Joel - Musician at Fairfield University (1991)

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“The future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous”: Why the 21st Century Loves Edith Wharton

Emily J. Orlando

E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in the Humanities & Social Sciences and Professor of English

Fairfield University

Photo: John Singer Sargent, Sybil Frances Grey, later Lady Eden 1905.

If ever there were a good time to read the American writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937), who published over forty books across four decades, it’s now. Since the Wharton revival of the late 20th century, when directors were adapting (the Pulitzer-Prize winning) The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, The Buccaneers, and The House of Mirth, her star has continued to rise. As I yesterday prepared to teach The Custom of the Country, which many have called Wharton’s greatest novel, a friend texted me Sofia Coppola’s article on the surprising appeal of its social-climbing heroine. Coppola is developing Undine Spragg’s story for Apple TV. A kind of Gilded Age Material Girl, Undine has been ready for her close-up for years.

Coppola joins an impressive roster of contemporary admirers of Wharton that includes Roxane Gay, Laura Bush, Lisa Lucas, Peggy Noonan, Jennifer Egan, Stephin Merritt, Claire Messud, Meg Wolitzer, Mindy Kaling, Doug Hughes, Brandon Taylor, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ali Benjamin, Vendela Vida, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Kristin Hannah. At a time when publishing houses are compelled to scale back, new editions of Wharton’s books are appearing in print with introductions by Coppola, Egan, and Taylor.

Photo: Sofia Coppola.

Those who think they don’t know Wharton might be surprised to learn they do. A reverence for Wharton’s writings informs Sex and the City (whose pilot welcomes us to “the Age of Un-Innocence”), Gossip Girl, Downtown Abbey (whose “Lady Edith” suggests a nod to Wharton), and HBO’s The Gilded Age which, like Downton, is created by the Wharton-appreciating Julian Fellowes. His Bertha and George, after all, are named for the power couple from The House of Mirth.  

But why Wharton? Why now? Perhaps it’s because for all its new technologies, conveniences, and modes of travel and communication, our own “Gilded Age” is a lot like hers. For the post-war and post-flu-epidemic climate that engendered The Age of Innocence is not far removed from our post-COVID-19 reality. In both historical moments, citizens of the world have witnessed a retreat into conservativism and a rise of white supremacy. Fringe groups like the “Proud Boys” and “QAnon” and deniers of everything from the coronavirus to climate change and Sandy Hook are invited to the table in the name of free speech, and here Wharton’s distrust of false narratives resonates particularly well. Post-9/11 calls for patriotism and the alignment of the American flag with one political party harken back to Wharton’s poignant questioning, in a 1919 letter, of the compulsion to profess national allegiance:

how much longer are we going to think it necessary to be “American” before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?[i]

Her cosmopolitan critique of nationalist fervor remains instructive to us today.

Edith Wharton seems to have foreseen the excesses, obsessions, and spectacles of our current moment. The scandals documented in Wharton’s narratives serve as harbingers of the sensations that flash across our hand-held screens. Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking touches on the same nerve as the sexual exploitation of minors in Wharton’s Summer (1917) and The Children (1928). The quid pro quo run-in between Wharton’s Lily Bart and Gus Trenor looks uncomfortably forward to Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo. The rise to power of Donald Trump would not surprise Edith Wharton.

Photo: “Vanity,” by Auguste Toulmouche, circa 1870.

Wharton’s tenacious Undine Spragg—as horrifying to progressive era readers as she is admired by Generation Z—can be conceived of as the original social media influencer conscious of her brand. For Undine and her creator know that “the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous”[ii] and that the turn-of-the-century “world where conspicuousness passed for distinction”[iii] foreshadows our own. Wharton would describe Undine in terms we might use for a “Real Housewife of Park Avenue”: “If only everyone would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable” (162). Undine’s world encourages her to aspire to the rank of trophy wife and the sexual double standard dictating that “genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair”[iv] would apply to Wharton herself who, on the 150th anniversary of her birth, would be assessed by a male novelist in terms of how she sizes up to Grace Kelly or Jackie Kennedy.[v]  The writer who would declare, in her wildly popular interior design manual The Decoration of Houses, privacy “one of the first requisites of civilized life”[vi] would be appalled by what is broadcast across social media. Wharton also would’ve anticipated the racism directed at Meghan Markle and why granting Oprah an interview would not help relations with her spouse’s family. Children forcibly separated from families due to morally dubious immigration policies echo the plight of war refugees for whose welfare Edith Wharton labored, while the distrust of the cultural other echoes the writer’s own complicated nationalist allegiances.[vii]  

Ten years ago, Lev Raphael took the temperature of Wharton studies declaring in the Huffington Post: “Edith Wharton is hot.” She is now positively on fire. I offer below a short excerpt from the introduction to The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton, which appears in print today.

                                                           *********************

The image gracing the cover of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton, capturing a scene on the terrace of Edith Wharton’s French home, reflects the cultural work that this book takes as its task. The writer is in her element: she cradles in her lap her beloved dogs, she sits outdoors at a well-appointed property she lovingly transformed, she surrounds herself with fashionably dressed cosmopolitans, and she smiles. The moment validates an idea expressed in The Age of Innocence: that “the air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.” As host, Wharton, by this point an internationally acclaimed artist, has brought together representatives of an admiring generation from diverse backgrounds that would outlive and perhaps learn from her. That sunlit terrace is doing something we hope this book will do: provide a foundation for future conversations with Edith Wharton at the center.

Photo: Edith Wharton publicity shot.

Around the time this photograph was taken, Wharton would reflect in A Backward Glance that “[t]he world is a welter and has always been one; but though all the cranks and the theorists cannot master the old floundering monster, . . . here and there a saint or a genius suddenly sends a little ray through the fog, and helps humanity to stumble on, and perhaps up” (379). Wharton’s writings arguably send a ray and help humanity stumble on and up in our own Gilded Age. It is the aim of this collection of essays, produced by leaders in the field at a time of global crisis, to make a meaningful contribution to the scholarship on and dialogue about the work of Edith Wharton and to open up new possibilities for understanding and embracing a writer whose corpus is as enormous as it is resonant. To borrow from Wharton’s preface to her anthology The Book of the Homeless (1916), in which she conceives of her volume, as she so often does, as a house: “You will see from the names of the builders what a gallant piece of architecture it is. . . . So I efface myself from the threshold and ask you to walk in.”[viii]

Emily J. Orlando is the E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in the Humanities & Social Sciences and Professor of English at Fairfield University. She is the author of Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts and editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton. She is currently preparing for publication a new edition of Edith Wharton’s first book, The Decoration of Houses.

[i]Lewis, Letters, 424.

[ii]Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country, New York, Penguin, 2006, 117.

[iii]Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, ed. Elizabeth Ammons, 2nd Norton Critical ed. (New York: Norton, 2018), 186.

[iv]Edith Wharton, The Touchstone, in Wharton, Edith, Collected Stories, 1891-1910, ed. Maureen Howard (New York: Library of America, 2001), 170.

[v]Jonathan Franzen, “A rooting interest: Edith Wharton and the problem of sympathy,” The New Yorker, February 5, 2012.

[vi] Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., The Decoration of Houses (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 22.

[vii]See Melanie Dawson, “The Limits of Cosmopolitan Experience in Wharton’s The Buccaneers.” Legacy 31.2 (2014): 258-80. Print.

[viii]Edith Wharton, Preface to The Book of the Homeless (Le Livre des Sans-foyer) (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), xxiv-xxv.

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Fairfield University. Jan 30, 2023

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Plot Against Human-Rights Activist Masih Alinejad Uncovered

A Disturbing Plot Against a Human-Rights Activist In February, during a scheduled speaking engagement at Fairfield University in Connecticut, Brooklyn-based human-rights activist Masih Alinejad became the target of a sinister plot. Two men from New York were dispatched to the campus with the intent to assassinate her, according to federal prosecutors who revealed this shocking information last…

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Direct from the Director Late Summer 2024

We’ve had a very exciting summer at the museum! As a result of our recent AAM Museum Accreditation, this was the first summer that we had professional guards and were thus able to be open through July. Our first two summer exhibitions proved very popular with our visitors, especially Peter Anton: Just Desserts!

We welcomed 5,732 visitors to our Peter Anton and Suzanne Chamlin exhibitions in the 10 weeks between graduation and the close of the exhibitions.

We broke our one-day attendance record with over 850 visitors (serving free frozen treats at an ice cream social that day probably didn’t hurt)!

Recently we've been busy repainting the walls, planning new programs, preparing our two fall exhibitions, and installing a new group of outdoor sculpture. We can't wait to welcome you all back to campus.

The Museum is all about works on paper this fall! A pair of exhibitions will introduce you and our other visitors to a broad range of works on paper, from Old Master prints in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries to prints by contemporary BIPOC artists in the Walsh Gallery. We hope you will check out both exhibitions and all of the programs on offer.

The first exhibition, opening in the Museum’s Bellarmine Hall Galleries on September 12 and on view through December 21st, is Ink and Time: European Prints from the Wetmore Collection. Curated by Michelle DiMarzo, PhD (Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Culture), the exhibition presents a group of woodcuts, engravings, and etchings from the late 15th through late 18th centuries, including Albrecht Dürer, Raphael, Rembrandt, and Canaletto. From familiar favorites like Dürer’s Adam and Eve and Rembrandt’s Three Trees to hidden gems like the gold-sprinkled surface of Maria Katharina Prestel’s Virtue Overcoming Vice, the show explores more than three centuries of artistic innovation on paper.

The works are part of a collection formed by Fanny S. Wetmore in the first decades of the 20th century and bequeathed to Connecticut College in 1930. This exhibition is the second in the Museum’s history to have been co-curated with Fairfield University students and has been supported by generous funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

The second exhibition, on view in the Museum’s Walsh Gallery in the Quick Center for the Arts, is Sacred Space: A Brandywine Workshop and Archives Print Exhibition. This exhibition opens on September 20th and also runs through December 21st. Sacred Space, organized by guest curator Juanita Sunday, draws on the rich history of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives, founded in Philadelphia in 1972 by artist Allan Edmunds. As of 2022, the Museum is home to a Brandywine “satellite collection” – the only such collection in Connecticut. This exhibition features works from the Museum’s own collection as well as loans from Brandywine itself.

Sacred Space encourages a deep exploration of spiritual connection, inviting viewers to reflect on the ancestral wisdom and memory passed down through generations. The exhibition serves as a portal into the interconnected realms of spirituality, time, space, memory, and culture. The artists pay homage to their forebears, drawing upon cultural traditions, rituals, and sacred practices to honor and preserve, as well as question, the invaluable heritage that shapes our identities.

In addition to the works from the Brandywine Collection, the exhibition will also feature local artists whose works are responding to the themes in Sacred Space. Artists invited by curator Juanita Sunday include Aisha Nailah, Iyaba Ibo Mandingo, Arvia Walker, and Rebecca Fowke. This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of corporate sponsor M & T Bank/Wilmington Trust.

A broad slate of programming complements both of these exhibitions, from hands-on workshops to rich public lectures, and can be explored on the museum’s website calendar at www.fairfield.edu/museum.

When you come to visit, or if you can join us for the Ink & Time festivities on September 26th, please make sure to seek out and enjoy Lauren Booth's fantastic bronze Tulip Family which has been installed on the Bellarmine Hall lawn, just below the building, on the slope heading down towards the Dolan School of Business.

Artfully yours, Carey

Captions:

Rembrandt van Rijn, Three Trees, 1643, etching, drypoint, and burin. Lent by Connecticut College.

Maria Katharina Prestel after Jacopo Ligozzi, The Triumph of Truth over Envy, 1780, etching and aquatint in brown and ochre ink, touched with gold leaf. Lent by Connecticut College.

Mikel Elam, Veil, 2019, offset lithograph, screenprint. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022 (2022.17.13) © Mikel Elam

James Phillips, Untitled II, 1994, offset lithograph. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022 (2022.17.33) © James Phillip

Ibrahim Miranda, El Túnel, 1999, offset lithograph. Lent by the Brandywine Workshop & Archives © Ibrahim Miranda

Lauren Booth, The Tulip Family: Mama Tulip, Papa Tulip and Child Tulip, 2017-2023, Bronze. On loan from the artist. © Lauren Booth

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Patrick James Miller Fairfield University

Patrick James Miller photographed Dr. Emily Orlando for Fairfield University Magazine. Patrick captured portraits of Dr. Orlando to accompany an interview on her forthcoming book The Decoration of Houses, coming out this October with Syracuse University Press. Dr. Orlando employs her renowned expertise on the 20th-century writer Edith Wharton, focusing on her ever-expanding reputation as she seems “to have foreseen the excesses, obsessions, and spectacles of our current climate.” 

See more of Patrick James Miller’s portrait portfolio here.

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hehe Twitter meme

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Terror Radius

Beat beat beat beat beat beat

Nothing major in Swapped lore here. Its just like a moment from a trial or something. I wanted to draw the two again :3

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Happy 2nd Bday to the boys! 🎉

@ask-the-dweets turned two today!!! And since I have been in AU hell lately I thought I'd draw the boys in their most prominent AUs!!! This was so much work, but I did it!

OG, killer, cowboy (Red dead), Angel/Demon (GTA), post apocalypse (fallout), furry, merfolk, pirate (Sea of Thieves?), Soul Eater

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I need to post more lmao. Anyway I drew my killer au version of Dwight a bit ago, and have decided to share him here. I'm absolutely obsessed with Dwight. silly guy

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William Wyler: A Master Filmmaker Revisited

By Jay Rozgonyi

Associate Vice Provost for Pedagogical Innovation & Effectiveness

Director, Center for Academic Excellence

Instructor of both Educational Technology and Film Studies

How about this for a great Final Jeopardy question under the category The Oscars: “He’s the Hollywood director with the most Best Director nominations (12), the most Best Picture nominations (13), and the most acting nominations in his films (36).” Pretty good, I’d say. But chances are that the question will never be used—not because I’m not a staff writer for the show, but also because the answer would likely be considered too hard for most contestants, even serious film fans.

That they wouldn’t be able to name William Wyler is unfortunate, as he was one of the truly great filmmakers of the 20th century. A lot of his movies are well known: Wuthering Heights, Ben-Hur, Roman Holiday, Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives, Funny Girl… I could go on and on. But unlike Alfred Hitchcock and suspense, or John Ford and Westerns, Wyler didn’t focus on a particular genre; instead—as the list of films I just mentioned demonstrates—he moved from comedy to drama to romance to historical epic. Because of that, he was brushed aside by the critics of the 1960s and 1970s, who considered him a gifted Hollywood studio director but thought that he lacked a coherent artistic vision. In fact, Wyler’s highly diverse output was the result of a quest for innovation and a desire to challenge himself by always trying something new throughout a career that lasted nearly 50 years.

If you Google William Wyler filmmaking style, you’ll learn about the way he carefully composed his shots, staggered his actors from deep in the frame to extremely close up, and staged dialogue scenes with few cuts so all the characters are visible at the same time—all directorial techniques that demonstrate his meticulous craftsmanship. I see another element to his films, however, which hasn’t received much attention at all: a steadfast attention to social justice and basic human morality. Once you look for these themes, it’s as easy to spot as his striking camera setups and his precise use of light and shadow. Wyler’s firm sense of conscience comes out in the nuances of his stories and the characters who inhabit them, and in the subtle ways they speak to the issues of their respective days. We see it in 1937’s Dead End, where the Depression has left families broken and juveniles with little sense of hope for their future. We see it in 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives, where GIs returning from World War II confront a home front that seems to have moved beyond them and their sacrifices, and toward a future focused on making money and assailing anyone who might be a “Commie.” And we see it in 1970’s The Liberation of L.B. Jones, Wyler’s last film and in many ways his most courageous—a brutally honest look at racism in America and the dehumanization it brings upon us all. 

Over the course of 2024, Fairfield University is celebrating the career of William Wyler with an undergraduate course devoted to his work, a series of film screenings at the Fairfield Bookstore on the Post Road, and an exhibition of materials from his private collection titled William Wyler: Master Filmmaker, Man of Conscience, which will be on display at the DiMenna-Nyselius Library from September through December. We’re just a few years away from the 125th anniversary of Wyler’s birth in 1902, so this seems like a good time for a lot more people to get acquainted with the man and his films. Then, perhaps, by 2027, the Final Jeopardyanswer might even be too easy for contestants to ponder. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Fairfield University’s celebration of the life and work of William Wyler would not be possible without the generous support of his daughters, Catherine and Melanie Wyler. We thank them for all that they’ve done to enable us to share their father’s work with our community.

The following movie screenings will be open to the public at 6:30 p.m. on these dates at the Fairfield University Downtown Bookstore, located at 1499 Post Road, Fairfield, Conn.:

April 9: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); guests: Melanie Wyler (in person) and Catherine Wyler (via Zoom).

October 1: The Desperate Hours (1955); guests: Melanie Wyler (in person) and Catherine Wyler (via Zoom); other Wyler family members may attend via Zoom.

November 19: The Liberation of L.B. Jones(1970); guests: Melanie Wyler (in person) and Catherine Wyler (via Zoom); other Wyler family members may attend via Zoom.

[wutbju]

The Sword of the Lord included this tiny little ad from African American pastor Thomas Thornes from Fairfield, Alabama. “Tithing: The Sure Way of Receiving Abundant Blessing” is clearly a health-and-wealth message. 

Thornes pastored Galilee Baptist that split so severely they went to court!

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Spring 2024 Direct from the Director

Woohoo! I am very excited to share the fantastic news that we are an accredited Museum!

The Fairfield University Art Museum has been awarded Accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums, the highest national recognition afforded to American museums. Receiving accreditation signifies excellence to the entire museum community, to government agencies and institutional funders, to collectors, partners, and visitors. This prestigious distinction will bring national recognition to our Museum for its commitment to excellence, accountability, high professional standards, and continued institutional improvement.

About the Accreditation process: Accreditation is a rigorous but highly rewarding process that examines all aspects of a museum’s operations. To earn accreditation, a museum first must conduct a year of self-study and then undergo a site visit by a team of peer reviewers. Our small-but-mighty team at the Fairfield University Art Museum worked on the self-study from May 2022 through May 2023. As part of the process, we hosted two peer reviewers on campus for a two-day site visit in November 2023. The Alliance’s Accreditation Commission, an independent and autonomous body of museum professionals, considered the self-study and visiting committee report to determine whether we should receive accreditation. We were just notified of this happy result!

Our accreditation distinguishes the Fairfield University Art Museum on the national stage:

Of the nation’s estimated 33,000 museums, just over 1,080 are currently accredited.

Fairfield University Art Museum is one of only 21 accredited museums in Connecticut and one of only 12 accredited art museums in the state. 

Only 11% of museums in New England and only 16% of the academic art museums in the country are accredited.

Only 15% of the museums with staffs the size of Fairfield’s Art Museum have achieved this honor, and only one other Jesuit University has an accredited museum (the De Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University).

We are incredibly proud to be an accredited Museum and to have been recognized for all that we have accomplished since the Museum’s inception in 2010. Among the achievements we are most proud of are: having grown and diversified the permanent collection, which now numbers almost 2,700 objects; making our programs accessible to the broadest possible audiences through livestreaming, recording and archiving; keeping our exhibitions and events always completely free and open to all year after year; and making all of our exhibition materials available bilingually in Spanish. Our accreditation is a testament to the incredible generosity of our wonderful donors and supporters, who make our work possible and enable us to present programs of the highest quality for the benefit of our students, faculty, and the broader community.

We have recently acquired a number of new works, some by donation and several via the Black Art Fund, in our continued quest to diversify our collection by purchasing works by Contemporary Black artists. This stunning photograph, entitled Sun and Trees, by Adger Cowans was included in our 2022 solo exhibition of the artist's work. We are thrilled to now be able to add it to our permanent collection, and it is making a reappearance in our Landscape in Focus exhibition opening next week.

This work by Martina Johnson-Allen was acquired, along with two others, from Brandywine Workshop and Archives to augment our Satellite Collection of works created there. It will be included in an exhibition this coming fall focusing on Brandywine prints entitled Sacred Spaces, guest curated by Juanita Sunday.

We are absolutely delighted and extremely grateful that the Quetzal that is included in Streaming: Sculpture by Christy Rupp, the current exhibition in the Museum's Walsh Gallery, has been donated by the artist to the Museum's permanent collection. You have just one month left to see this fantastic exhibition - do not miss it!

I look forward to seeing you in the galleries this spring for Christy Rupp (followed by Peter Anton: Just Desserts), Suzanne Chamlin: Studies in Color, and our Focus on Landscape photography exhibition.

Artfully yours, Carey Carey Mack Weber Frank and Clara Meditz Executive Director

Captions: Adger Cowans, Sun and Trees, 1959, archival pigment print. Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2024 Martina Johnson-Allen, Another Realm, 2006, offset lithograph. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2024 Christy Rupp, Quetzal, 2020, credit cards, wood, steel, mixed media. Gift of the artist. Christy Rupp, Streaming: Sculpture by Christy Rupp, Gallery Installation shot, Walsh Gallery, February 2024

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Annie & I Take Altamont!

The first time I saw the small town of Altamont, Illinois was this past June at the John Deere G reunion. I was taken with the lovely mansion I saw there. We also loved the fun antique shop the hubby and I stopped at. I saw that they were having a music and wine fair at the Charles Wright House Museum. I thought perfect! A trip for Annie! About once a month or so, my friend Annie Jansen and I…

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