To say that Royall constitutes “the book” suggests that Summer would end very differently without his last-minute Louboutin Very Prive Peep-Toe Pumps Ivory SatinPatent into Charity’s negotiations of class, gender, and sexuality. Before Royall’s arrival at the base of the Mountain, Charity has envisioned her only possibilities for the future as those of an unwed mother or an urban prostitute (235). In identifying Royall as “the book,” Wharton hints at the ways in which his marriage to Charity serves as a vehicle of closure, bringing Charity’s negotiation of homosocial and heterosexual relations to a forced conclusion. The marriage plot, then, offers women like Charity a place Louboutin Suede Fringe Pump what she calls “the established order of things” (235). Summer offers a provocative entry point into several new readings of Wharton’s fiction. First, it demonstrates the extension of Wharton’s concerns with fashion and consumer culture into her New England fiction, traversing boundaries of class and region.18 Through its depiction of how consumer culture generates homosocial conflicts and compromises, it complicates our understanding of women’s partnerships in Wharton’s fiction – here, mediated by the exchange of and competition over louboutin Pumps NIB Red patent goods, elsewhere forged through the exchange of lovers, husbands, and children. Even Wharton’s more canonical work is fraught with homosocial conflict, whose role as a plot motivator is rarely acknowledged: For example, it is arguable that Lily Bart dies, not because of her rejection by Seiden, but because of her refusal to live with Gerty Farish, who offers her economic support when no one else will (House of Mirth Louboutin Suede Fringe Pump). Summer, with its broad range of homosocial negotiations, provides a bridge between Wharton’s early and later works, many of which probe the nature of relations between women, particularly “Bunner Sisters,” “The Old Maid,” The Mother’s Recompense, “Her Son,” and “Roman Fever.”19 Highlighting the queerness of homosocial relations in Summer also illuminates Wharton’s efforts to distance herself from her female regionalist precursors.