Edith Wharton once stated that she “ . . . [doesn’t] know if [she] should care for a man who made life easy; [she] should want someone who made it interesting,” showing how Edith reflects Lily Bart, an unwed woman living in the midst of the elite society of New York, who struggles to find a suitable husband and live in the elite society that leads to her inevitable demise, in Edith's novel The House of Mirth (CITATION). Although many of the characters in the novel were in an elite and prominent society, they were possibly the most morally corrupt people since women married men for their wealth, and men expected women to constantly act proper and sophisticated. Edith Wharton’s modern novel The House of Mirth demonstrates why people in the …show more content…
This time period marked the ending of the Victorian Age, when women were usually considered the caretakers of the family and stayed at home to do tasks like raising their children, entertaining guests, and decorating the house, but the home gradually became the concern of both women and men. For example, male doctors and educators published manuals that gave advice on childbirth and parenting, subjects that before were exclusively studied by women. Also, both single and married women were also beginning to work at jobs that tended to reflect the domestic roles that women traditionally adopted; in The House of Mirth, Lily Bart is given a job in a hat-making shop with the help of her friends. The number of American women working almost doubled from about fifteen percent to almost thirty percent of the workforce between 1880 and 1910 (Moss and …show more content…
When later visiting Laurence Selden, Lily tells him, “I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person . . . I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else” (296; ch. 12). Lily now realizes how difficult it is to live unwed and without money, having to work without ever being taught the important skills needed to be self-sufficient. She recognizes that she had been just a small part of the elite society of New York, and when this society shunned her, Lily could not fit in elsewhere. The irony in The House of Mirth is that Lily dies believing that she has no marriage suitors and no possible way to rejoin the elite society of New York, but the day after her death, Laurence, a member of the elite society, visits Lily with the intention of professing his love for
“For the first time in his life he sees her in a new light: he sees her as no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding…” (Wharton 117) Edith Wharton is best known for her books Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth. Wharton was often compared to another writer in her time, Henry James. Even though this occurred, she considered her books one of a kind. She was pleased with her work, but the critics were not. Often, she received poor reviews, but this did not stop her; in fact, she then went on to be the first woman to win The Legion of Honor Medal. Wharton also won the Pulitzer Prize and a gold
Edith Wharton grew up with a wealthy family who lived in a controlling society which prohibited women to achieve anything a man could. This book, published by Wharton in 1911, is one of the few pieces in her fiction novels
The tableaux vivants scene in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth is pivotal to the understanding of Lily Bart as a character. The passage not only highlights her precarious state in high-society, but it also contains one of the only instances where Lily feels truly comfortable and confident. Over the course of the description of Lily’s staging of her own tableaux, she goes from being a piece of art on display, to an artist carefully working to exhibit her own beauty. However, the contradictory reception from the audience to her intentions when her tableaux is presented, conveys her hubris in both her beauty and her ability to create visual representations of art. The scene concludes with, Gerty Farish, in response to seeing Lily’s tableaux, saying,
In the novel The House of Mirth, Lily Bart is introduced to us as a rich, single lady in the 1900's. She is brought up into an upper class society, where the society is based on people that have "old money". In her society, people who want to climb the social scale, must have money, and must have power. If ever Lily were to talk to David from Call it Sleep, her views on climbing the social scale would completely be different than David's. Since Lily is in a totally different environment than that of David, and since she is an adult, her views are about how to survive in her upper class world. In order to survive in Lily's world one must have money, not simply be rich but one must have a certain kind of money. They have to have inherited money, called "old money", this is the first step to survive in Lily's community. In the book, we see that although Mr. Rosedale is a very wealthy man, he is outside the social circle because he does not have old money. He has new money, which shows that he is not part of a great, rich family. The second step to climb up in the social scale is to use other people for one's benefit. For a woman to climb up in this society, Lily says one must marry not for love but for money. If one marries into a wealthy family, than her status is automatically heightened to that level. A lady should marry a wealthy man, and a man must marry a beautiful lady to survive in the society.
... lavishness now seemed to beckon her with open arms to a life a where she could live expensively. Despite she sadness she was facing Lily knew she could not return to the realm of elites, “it was happiness she still wanted and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account” (449). At this stage of the novel, the demise of the Lily whose most ardent desire was money, power and prestige was complete. Lily’s loneliness and lack in what Lawrence show Lily that there is a fate that will cause greater pain than lack of wealth. Near her tragic end, Lily finds herself without both of her competing desires. It is then she finally understand that a life without love, happiness and freedom causes greater misfortune that a life without wealth.
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...
In the first chapter of The House of Mirth, while drinking tea with Selden in his apartment, Lily says to him, “you can’t possibly think I want to marry you” (Wharton 10). This comment is stated and accepted without further explanation, because both Lily and Selden know that Selden is not wealthy enough to meet Lily’s expectations, even though it is apparent throughout The House of Mirth that Lily has feelings for Selden, and he for her. Linda Wagner Martin’s remark, “The poignant but all-too-real narrative of the beautiful Lily Bart, fast aging beyond marriageability” points to the fact that Lily Bart was in her late 20’s and was expected to have found a husband by that age (Wagner-Martin 6). Wagner Martin also claims that, “Wharton creates in The House of Mirth the impressionable character of Lily Bart, flowerlike in fragility as well as name, who has accepted the social decree that she become a beautiful marriageable object” (Wagner-Martin 4). The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper points out that her husband is a respected doctor, and that he provides for her. Despite his controlling and dismissive treatment of her, she consoles herself with the thought that, “He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well” (Perkins Gillman). In exchange for perceived comfort, she is his
“The Pastoralization of Housework” by Jeanne Boydston is a publication that demonstrates women’s roles during the antebellum period. Women during this period began to embrace housework and believed their responsibilities were to maintain the home, and produce contented and healthy families. As things progressed, housework no longer held monetary value, and as a result, womanhood slowly shifted from worker to nurturer. The roles that women once held in the household were slowly diminishing as the economy became more industrialized. Despite the discomfort of men, when women realized they could find decent employment, still maintain their household and have extra income, women began exploring their option.
Like Alice, who divorced was twice. Another example of how Edith and this particular story is compares to her life is Alice’s daughter is sick with typhoid and when Edith was 10 she suffered from typhoid fever and almost died. Also like Lily and most children her age Edith Wharton also had a governess. Wharton’s main concept in the story was the theme of divorce and survival of the fittest. By having the other two men being around the current marriage and dealing with some of struggles of divorced and being able to survive New York’s
Restuccia, F. L. "The Name of the Lily: Edith Wharton's Feminism(s)." The House of Mirth: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Benstock, S. (ed.). New York, Bedford Books, 1994, 404-418.
Wharton’s noble social background was very influential on her writing. It allowed Wharton to give an insider’s perspective on the wealthy people of New York during this time. Due to her first hand view of society during the Gilded Age, Wharton was able to satirize this society and also reference the tragedies that go on through out it. In a letter to Dr. Morgan Dix, a rector of Trinity Church in New York, Wharton wrote: "Social conditions as they are just now in our new world, where the sudden possession of money has come without inherited obligations, or any traditional sense of solidarity between the classes, is a vast and absorbing field for the novelist” (Wharton “To Dr. Morgan” 98). In the novel, The House of Mirth, Wharton displays this opinion of society through the main character of the novel, Lily Bart. Lily is an unmarried woman without wealthy parents and no significant income of her own. In order to achieve financial and social stability, she must marry...
Edith Wharton created The House of Mirth to mock the society that she lived in and gave Lily the negative traits associated with it. With these negative traits and Lily’s upbringing, Wharton creates a character that is trapped by her upbringing desire to have a permanent place in society but also yearns for love, expressed through Wharton’s characterization of Lily Bart, imagery associated with Lily, and the motif of Lily’s fatal flaw. The end result is Wharton’s fated demise of her heroine with neither love nor a position in society.
The House of Mirth is a novel written by Edith Wharton, who earned her fame essentially through her two books, Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence. She was born to a distinguished New York family and married wealthy banker Edward Wharton in 1885. After her marriage, she started to write stories among turn-of-the-century New York society, and by 1905, she finished writing The House of Mirth.
Edith Wharton wrote the House of Mirth during the Realist Movement. Realism in Wharton's writing is influenced by Darwinism. When rumors spread of Lily and George’s conquests, Lily’s reputation is smashed. Even though she survived through being broke, gossip stops her existence. The past will always haunt her. When Lily decides to keep her morals intact and not smash George’s wife Bertha back by exposing Bertha’s escapades with the man Lily fancies, the readers know she is doomed to unhappiness.
Throughout the book House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, the main character, Lily Bart, rejects both Simon Rosedale, a rich social outcast, and Lawrence Selden, a less profitable but well liked lawyer. Lily realises, through her rejections, that she does not have the potential she thought to have had and that because of her inflated views of herself, she is now doomed to be a part of the working class. Her choice to reject both men has been understood as selfish but might also have a small sense of molarity contributing to the aspects of her upbringing. Lily’s choices to reject have left a lasting impact on the plot of this novel and have shaped Lily’s character including her status to society as well as her self worth.