Edith Wharton tells us to brood. Should we?

Claire Dederer's 'Monsters' contends with antisemitism and racism amid literary genius

Edith Wharton’s ‘The Writing of Fiction’ and Claire Dederer’s ‘Monsters’

I just finished reading Edith Wharton’s book The Writing of Fiction and noticed that she praised brooding many times as part of her process.

“As to experience, intellectual and moral, the creative imagination can make a little go a long way, provided it remains long enough in the mind and is sufficiently brooded upon,” Wharton wrote.

Being encouraged to brood – and to see the merits of brooding – felt good. I was reminded of the novel draft I finished last summer and set away. Sometimes I have a flash of an idea for what to do with it. Often, I sense that my brain is still working on the story on some low setting, chewing it over. The longer I'm not actively working on it, the more I want to return. 

The noun “brood” means “the young of an animal or a family of young, especially the young (as of a bird or insect) hatched or cared for at one time” and “a group having a common nature or origin.” As in children. People have told me when I’m out with my kids, “That’s quite a brood you have there,” — usually with an eyebrow raised or tone that indicates nothing positive. I don’t love hearing it that way.

The transitive verb “brood” means “to sit on or incubate (eggs), to produce by incubation, or to think anxiously or gloomily about.” The intransitive means “of a bird: to brood eggs, to sit quietly and thoughtfully, to dwell gloomily on a subject, or to be in a state of depression.”

“Brooding,” the adjective, means “moodily or sullenly thoughtful or serious, and darkly somber.”

As to experience, intellectual and moral, the creative imagination can make a little go a long way, provided it remains long enough in the mind and is sufficiently brooded upon. —Edith Wharton

It’s a mode I’m inclined toward but wary of – thoughts can be scary, and I want to avoid that type of isolation in my mind. 

But if Edith Wharton tells me to brood over my art, I’ll listen. 

Then I started reading Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, and she reminded me of Wharton’s antisemitism. I came late to Wharton’s novels, reading The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country in the last two years, and I remember the tenacious hatefulness of her descriptions of Jewish characters. In The House of Mirth, the character Simon Rosedale is a stand-in for people who are (in the eyes of her characters, also in her eyes?) messing up the very social order Wharton is satirizing. 

Anne Roiphe wrote about Wharton in 2018 for Tablet Magazine’s questionably-named series ‘My Favorite Anti-Semite’ – an on-again-off-again series whose subjects includes Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ty Cobb, among others. Her essay argues that “Wharton’s antisemitism serves in this book as another way of exposing the actual moral poverty in the class of people she is mocking so bitterly.” She also writes that “Rosedale survives Wharton’s pages with his heart intact” and that “when we read in fine books about Jewish veniality, or Jewish coarseness we can read those words as a stumbling attempt to protect against the knowledge of the sins of the Christian world in all its dominant glory.” 

In Monsters, Dederer writes about the mental calculus one does to continue watching a Woody Allen movie or reading an Ernest Hemingway book. Roiphe’s essay reads to me like she’s sharing her mental calculations that keep her reading Wharton.

Tablet Magazine was new to me as the Catholic I am, so I read a series of articles about it – its rise and subsequent showing-of-itself in the last five years as a venue “focused on decrying liberal “wokeness,”” as Jewish Currents put it. Last October, the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) stopped advertising with Tablet in response to members’ complaints about a sponsored email. Sasha Senderovich’s tweet in reply to AJS’ sponsored email supporting a Tablet-produced podcast started things off: “plz don’t take [Tablet’s] money. It is in its party line . . . a fascist publication.”  

There, that was my mental calculus for quoting a Tablet essay from 2018 in 2023.

While washing dishes and cooking, I finally finished listening to Christina Sharpe on Between the Covers with David Naimon. Sharpe talks about how her books are formed out of obsession and – she doesn’t use this word, but I think it’s in line with her sentiment – brooding.

“I just think that staying with something can open up a different kind of aperture by which we don’t collapse everything into it but by which we can make an argument or see the world,” Sharpe says. On this one point, it seems Wharton and Sharpe are in agreement. Obsession and brooding can be a forge, shaping art.

One of the last questions in the episode is about something Sharpe said a while ago about how Kazuo Ishiguro’s (and other non-Black writers’) “vast imagination utterly falters when it encounters blackness.” The question also describes Sharpe sitting in the audience as a famous “...theorist, who has written books that upended and changed fields, loses words on whiteness; and in relation to blackness, they transport wonder to the conversation, but not depth.” What would the conversation have been like if the theorist had read more widely, especially Black writers? 

“When all of these writers, thinkers, and philosophers of Black life have given us such detailed careful understandings that shift across time but that we can certainly build on, think with, and remain deeply important to our contemporary living, that we are left with something like wonder instead of real encounter and real engagement, becomes, well, at the very least, deeply troubling,” Sharpe says.

Staying with something can open up a different kind of aperture by which we don’t collapse everything into it but by which we can make an argument or see the world. —Christina Sharpe

Wharton wrote about the benefits of brooding on our art: thinking slowly over and around and through something. And yet her imagination falters when it encounters Jewishness. 

Like I wrote about last week, observation and care shape the world. In our own work and life, yes. And it’s also worth paying attention to what and who receives our favorite artists’ attention — and what happens during/because of that attention. Wharton cares most about taking down her fellow wealthy Christians, leaving her Jewish characters and readers in the wake.

In Monsters, Dederer writes about how looking back at artists and seeing their racism, abuse, and blind spots in the light of the current day is tricky. How enlightened are we if, as Sharpe says, the abundance of Black writers’ and thinkers’ work isn’t enough for all non-Black writers to read, learn and change?

Dederer writes, “We think it's ignorance, on the part of these people in the past. We imagine these poor deluded souls simply waiting for scales to fall from their eyes, but in fact what is really happening is that antisemitism and racism were often tied to a larger project of domination.” There are still scales to be pulled off.

The genius, as we understand it, is not the person who spends most of her time, and I mean that quite literally, thinking about child-care. —Claire Dederer

Two example usages of “brooding” were “A brooding genius, A brooding, embittered man.” If you’re reading Monsters, these two examples are head-shakingly apt. Dederer writes about how, really, it’s only men who are allowed to be brooding art monsters – “The genius, as we understand it, is not the person who spends most of her time, and I mean that quite literally, thinking about child-care.”

This essay is a circle, and I’m back to the part where I’m wary of brooding. Maybe that’s important–being endlessly alone in thought is probably something to be kept in check. Reading and thinking more widely and questioning easy answers might safeguard us against staying stagnant, might push us out of a well-worn loop in the mind. But it also seems to be no guarantee—as the great thinkers who are also monsters show.

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Sonhab Chocolate’s wildly good honeycomb

Reading — Everything I wrote about above, plus a book in the Sparkleton series (lol) my 5yo loves.

Writing — This newsletter, which ballooned from initial thoughts on brooding to much, much more.

Cooking — Pickled red onions, roasted eggplant and zucchini, and eating lots of frozen fruit. Plus, the bite I’m still dreaming of: Sonhab Chocolate’s honeycomb toffee made with 24k gold and rose wildcrafted honey with a layer of reishi mushroom infused bean-to-bar single origin chocolate from Tanzania, topped with Maldon sea salt and rose petals from Yarrow’s pop-up at Monsoon Market last Sunday.