The society that Wharton criticizes in her major works is a representation of what Thorstein Veblen called "pecuniary culture," a culture in which money is the supreme good and thus the source of power. In these worlds, men become subjects who produce wealth, and women, who can achieve wealth only through association with a male (either a father, a husband, or a lover), function as men`s ornaments or possessions. In this male-dominated capitalist economy, bourgeois and upper-class wives are constructed to function as apparently autonomous but really servile creatures whose "conspicuous consumption" signifies their husbands` wealth and power. In Summer, however, Wharton explores the fact that this dependence of women is not only the problem of bourgeois and upper-class women but also of the women of the rural poor. By the time Wharton published Summer (1917), her argument on the woman question--economic dependence, sexual repression, proprietary marriage--had fully matured. The problem of economically dependent women in male-dominated pecuniary culture that she traces in her earlier works is extended in Summer to include the level of the sexual dependence of women. Charity Royall, the most rebellious heroine of Wharton, initially revolts against her perternal guardian, who tries to dominate her economically and sexually, but she is ultimately bound in marriage to him in the end. As in her other novels, Wharton attacks the feminist optimism of the Progressive Era in America--which held that education and jobs were freeing women--this time by presenting a heroine who comes to be possessed by her `father-husband,` a man from whom she has always longed for freedom. Summer is thus a radically critical book.