"The nearest we have to a Henry James or an Edith Wharton of the East Coast's Wasp upper classes"
About this Quote
A neat little act of cultural triangulation: by reaching for Henry James and Edith Wharton, Charlotte Curtis isn’t just offering a compliment, she’s handing the reader a set of class-coded instruments and saying, Use these. James and Wharton are shorthand for a particular kind of American elite life - money old enough to feel like destiny, manners deployed as strategy, feelings expressed through furniture choices and conversational feints. To call someone “the nearest we have” to that tradition is to place them in a lineage while admitting the lineage is fading, or at least changing costumes.
The phrase “East Coast’s Wasp upper classes” does crucial work. Curtis isn’t describing “high society” in a neutral way; she’s naming the ethnic-religious and regional machinery behind the glamour. “Wasp” signals not only privilege but a style of privilege: restrained, inherited, self-justifying, allergic to melodrama yet built on exclusions. In that world, the sharpest conflicts are fought with understatement, and the harshest judgments arrive wrapped in tasteful prose.
“Nearest” also carries a journalist’s edge. It implies approximation, a modern substitute for a vanished species. Curtis is likely reviewing or profiling a writer or social observer who anatomizes that class with an insider’s fluency and an outsider’s coolness - capable of rendering the small humiliations and silent hierarchies that keep the whole system humming. The line flatters the subject’s literary acuity while quietly noting that the social order being chronicled has become, by Curtis’s era, less a ruling class than a cultural artifact worth documenting before it disappears.
The phrase “East Coast’s Wasp upper classes” does crucial work. Curtis isn’t describing “high society” in a neutral way; she’s naming the ethnic-religious and regional machinery behind the glamour. “Wasp” signals not only privilege but a style of privilege: restrained, inherited, self-justifying, allergic to melodrama yet built on exclusions. In that world, the sharpest conflicts are fought with understatement, and the harshest judgments arrive wrapped in tasteful prose.
“Nearest” also carries a journalist’s edge. It implies approximation, a modern substitute for a vanished species. Curtis is likely reviewing or profiling a writer or social observer who anatomizes that class with an insider’s fluency and an outsider’s coolness - capable of rendering the small humiliations and silent hierarchies that keep the whole system humming. The line flatters the subject’s literary acuity while quietly noting that the social order being chronicled has become, by Curtis’s era, less a ruling class than a cultural artifact worth documenting before it disappears.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Charlotte
Add to List
