The Reef is regarded as a turning point of Edith Wharton’s career as a writer. Wharton had been regarded as an aloof and aristocratic writer until her letters to Morton Fullerton were published in 1980. The letters to Fullerton reveal her passionate affair with him in which she experienced the ecstasy of sexual love for the first time in her life. Wharton was able to write about the new volatile psycho-sexual feelings and women’s sexuality more openly since then. The Reef can be said the first novel which shows Wharton’s changed attitudes toward women’s passion and sexuality after the affair. My goal in the article is to examine the ways Wharton represents the power of sexuality through the bodies of her female characters in the Reef. Sophy is the embodiment of the dark terrain of female sexuality, the presence of the female body. Darrow and Anna try to decipher Sophy, but Sophy is a submerged text, as well as the ‘reef,’ on which the ship of Darrow and Anna’s lives founders. Wharton criticizes the cultural construction which contains the female sexuality in this work. The author invites her readers to look what is a real “reef,” which she thinks is the patriarchal myths about women. (Duksung Women’s University)