This is hardly the "warm and jolly and inconsequent" scene described in
Twilight Sleep. Larsen has transplanted the players and altered the narrative point of view such that a biracial female protagonist can gaze critically, from the inside, at how her own black countrymen cop minstrel-like poses in order to ingratiate their white Anglo Saxon audience, and can indict, too, the "pale pink and white people" entranced by the Jim Crows-tyle performance.
We intend here to approach Wharton's engagement with the modern world in her fiction by examining
Twilight Sleep as a hybrid text in which she combines the effects of realism with elements of the Gothic mode in order to make distinct her satiric vision.
Family problems are treated in The Mother's Recompense (1925),
Twilight Sleep (1927), and The Children (1928).
Thanks to her method of "
twilight sleep"--a conscious sedation produced by sedatives and a local anesthesia --Dr.
For your husband's colonoscopy, he'll probably be given moderate sedation, which will send him into a "
twilight sleep," in which he'll drift in and out of consciousness, but be easily aroused.
Zak's contribution addresses the modern body as it appears in
Twilight Sleep, reading the novel as a modernist text that allows us to see the way it "explores American culture's coming-to-terms with new ideas about the human body" (112).
Troubling and admittedly imperfect, The Mother's Recompense (1925),
Twilight Sleep (1927), and The Children (1928) are novels with interesting critical receptions, and challenge some received notions about Wharton derived from her better-known work; with equal claim to sit above the salt with Ethan Frome and Summer are the four brilliant novellas of Old New York (1924).
Some to the articles clearly disturbed--such as the historic account of "
Twilight Sleep" and the biographical sketch of "Joseph Bolivar Delee." I thought Rahima Baldwin's entry on "TORCH Syndrome" was informative, but think she could have also done some of the other subjects as well.