Edith Wharton's sense of beauty found a visual definition through her sense of ugliness and, in general, through an ambivalent view of reality, composed of an alternation, at times a mingling, of both the beautiful and the ugly. The aim of this study is to show how Edith Wharton's strong sense of beauty was a constant force imposing order and intellectual discipline throughout her life and to argue how it was closely connected to her sense of ugliness both in her fictional and factual world,