Lily's Choice in The House of Mirth

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Recommended: Edith Wharton and the upper class

Lily's Choice in The House of Mirth

Near the beginning of The House of Mirth, Wharton establishes that Lily would not indeed have cared to marry a man who was merely rich: "she was secretly ashamed of her mothers crude passion for money" (38). Lily, like the affluent world she loves, has a strange relationship with money. She needs money to buy the type of life she has been raised to live, and her relative poverty makes her situation precarious. Unfortunately, Lily has not been trained to obtain money through a wide variety of methods. Wharton's wealthy socialites do not all procure money in the same way: money can be inherited, earned working in a hat shop, won at cards, traded scandalously between married men and unmarried women, or speculated for in the stock market. For Lily, the world of monetary transactions presents formidable difficulties; she was born, in a sense, to marry into money, and she cannot seem to come to it any other way. She is incapable of mastering the world of economic transactions, to the point that a direct exchange is repulsive to her highly specialized nature. Finally, these exchanges and the obstacles they present prove to be the end of her, and Wharton's text joins naturalism's Darwinian rules to an economic world. Whether Lily's death is accidental or a suicide does not really matter in Wharton's vision, because the choice facing Lily at the end of the novel--to make a transaction or to make a transaction--necessitates her death. Near the end of the novel, Wharton's protagonist must make a choice--but both options are part of the environment in which Lily has not evolved to survive. In Lily's attempt at wage-earning and her moral dilemma regarding Rosedale's marria...

... middle of paper ...

...1975.

Lyde, Marilyn Jones. Edith Wharton, Convention and Morality in the Work of a Novelist. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959.

Miller, Mandy. Edith Wharton Page. 19 Nov. 2002 <http://www.Kutztown.edu/faculty/Reagan.Wharton.html>.

Pizer, Donald. "The Naturalism of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth." Twentieth Century Literature 41.2 (1995): 241-8.

Rehak, Melanie. Rev. of The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton. Amazon.com 28 Oct. 2002 <http://www.amazon.com/execs/obidos/ASIN/055321320/hallbook/>.

Ruschmann, Paul. "Climbing the Social Ladder...In the Wrong Direction." Rev. of The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton. Epinions.com 28 Oct. 2002

<http://www.epinions.com/./book-review-6AF6-7A25B6D-39DA>.

Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. (1905) New York: Signet,. 1998.

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