[1] Even as a best selling novel Twilight Sleep was not well received by critics at the time, who, while appreciating Wharton as a writer, struggled with the scenarios and characters she had created in the novel.

There is Pauline's self-inflicted busy schedule, Nona's love interest in a married man, Arthur's infirmity, Lita's partying, dancing, and movie star aspirations, and Dexter's affairs.

The novel ends with Nona recovering and the rest of the family all taking trips out of the country as a way to physically and emotionally escape what had happened.

[8] In the 1920s, American Literature the motif of escape is ever present, and in Wharton's Twilight Sleep this theme drives a melodramatic plot.

Twilight sleep was a medical procedure in which pregnant women would be given a mixture of the drugs scopolamine and morphine as a way to simultaneously reduce the pain of childbirth and allow the mother to forget the experience altogether.

Twilight Sleep is one of the ways that Wharton expressed her objections to modern science and its goal of relieving humans from suffering.

Nona is a flapper of the jazz age (though she identifies herself in this way more out of societal expectation then of a true want for that lifestyle)[10] and stands as the novel's protagonist as she begins and ends the narrative.

However, some critics speak on Wharton's use of Harlem in Twilight Sleep as nothing more than a metaphor for the oft reviled sexual liberation of white flapper women,[10] which can also be seen being represented through Lita's character.

[10] During the 1920s, media platforms such as advertisements and film began to surface with the goal of popularizing this new idea of the perfect female body.

From the very beginning of the novel we see how Pauline Manford has an extremely busy schedule, full of techniques that she believes will alter her body and mind.

As a female character set in the 1920s, Pauline spends a huge amount of time working and improving on her body and image.

Twilight Sleep shows the shift in the cultural perception of marriage from a symbol of wholeness and personal completion to that of a burden on one's self-identity.

[2] When the Pictorial Review published Twilight Sleep as a serialized story, the headline proclaimed it "the finest novel of New York society",[4] and the sales seem to agree.

Twilight Sleep appears on many lists, such as Publishers Weekly, in the top ten bestsellers of 1927, but upon its release, the critics were largely underwhelmed.

Percy Hutchison wrote in The New York Times that he did not believe Wharton could live up to Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth, but he mostly begins his review praising her and her past works.

He uses these works to excuse certain shortcomings of Twilight Sleep: "But she maintains herself at so consistently high a level that any occasional faltering of the imagination may be charitably set down as nothing more serious than a change of pace, any lapse in artistry as a mere peccadillo of the pen".

[14] Edmund Wilson of The New Republic is less critical of the novel, as well, and finds Wharton's loss "of her old harshness" to be an acceptable turn and uses it to excuse her novel being "proportionately less vivid".

America voiced a concern "that her latest novel "Twilight Sleep" is an inartistic abandonment of her former office of telling what ought to be known about well-bred people in order to describe the vagaries of the new war-made rich".