Review: "The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton was born on January 24, 1862--150 years ago. Dovegreyreader has an excellent write up on Wharton's whole career. The following is our own review of The House of Mirth which, along with several other of Wharton's works, may be downloaded for free from our ebook catalog.
This review is meant as a tribute to Edith Wharton's writing skill, because she can take a topic about which this reader has little knowledge and less interest and weave it into a page-turner. An inspiring story with a happy ending it is not, but The House of Mirth has many qualities to recommend it. Its heroine, Lily Bart, is not noble. She is snobbish and indecisive, qualities only somewhat mitigated by her intelligence, generosity and integrity (at least in comparison with the other characters caught up in the social whirl of New York's Fifth Avenue at the dawn of the Twentieth Century.)
Lily Bart is a beautiful, sought-after socialite who turns down more marriage proposals than Scarlett O'Hara accepts. Pushing 30, she is still hedging on commitment, possibly because her heart belongs to Lawrence Selden. Lily has made it clear to Lawrence that they can only be friends because she must marry a rich man, as both of her parents died and left her in a upper crust social milieu with no inheritance of her own. Lily lives with her aunt who is kind to her and pays most of her expenses except the debts Lily has incurred playing cards for money. The aunt's attitude might have been reasonable had Lily not incurred the debt fulfilling a social obligation to join her aunt's bridge parties. Thus Lily's life goes on, her obligations leave her damned if she does, damned if she doesn't, and she lacks the wherewithal to ignore social obligations and strike out on a path of her own. The issue of her debt drives the downward trajectory of Lily's social status, since Lily possesses neither the money sense nor the professional skill to manage her finances or shore up her dwindling bank balance.
In spite of the fact that The House of Mirth was published in 1905, the truths that Wharton illustrates with Lily's story feel strangely contemporary. Wharton pictures a new class of self-made millionaires created by Wall Street, casts a shadow over the tenuous position of those in the "leisure class" and offers a peek at the ascendancy of the self-supporting career woman. What a working woman can take away from this story is a gladness that she can marry or not; that she can keep her friends or not; that she can join the social whirl or thumb her nose at it because she possesses an independence that Lily Bart was denied.
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I couldn't help thinking about "The House of Mirth" when I watched "Coco Chanel" September 13 on the Lifetime Channel. Coco Chanel was a real-life contemporary of Lily Bart's who went on to found a multi-billion dollar design company. Although not reared by the European upper class, Ms. Chanel for a while was dependent upon one member whom she believed would marry her. Later, when she declared her independence, she found herself in a situation similar to Lily Bart's, even to her work in the same profession (millinery.) It was enjoyable to compare how these two women handled their situations. It was also comforting to realize that it was the real-life woman who triumphed.
I adored this book when I read it in college (always a sucker for tragedy), and your review reminds me that it is well over do for a reread. Lily's downfall is inevitable from the very beginning, a trap that the reader sees her falling into, and while her fate is frustrating, we just cannot abandon her until it's all over. This is my favorite of Wharton's books. I must go dig up my copy. Thanks!
Thanks for your kind words, Alexa. I have to admit that I cringed when I got this assignment, because Wharton always feeds us a dose of tragedy; something I don't really care for. But her writing style is so captivating, one just can't quit when you start reading her writing. Reading her has given me the courage to venture into Virginia Woolf. If you liked Wharton, you'll like Woolf. We'll be offering that soon, and more Wharton also.
Thanks for reviewing this - it's the Wharton that I read first, as a schoolgirl, and it's always remained my favourite, I think because it's so well structured - to my mind it has the inevitability, and indeed the stature, of Greek tragedy. I don't think it's a coincidence that it was dramatised (by Wharton herself) just a year after its publication - and of course it's been filmed more than once since then, the most recent version with Gillian Anderson I thought was actually rather good.
Like many a tragic hero (or indeed post-classical ones - The Mayor of Casterbridge and Billy Budd are two who have just come to mind...) Lily Bart is a fine creature, but with that 'fatal flaw' that you can see from the outset is going to be her undoing. I like very much a passage near the beginning, where Selden mentally compares Lily to a fine bit of porcelain: 'he had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must in some way have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to common clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape?'
Of course, the narrative drive depends on Selden being a bit of a drip, as well as Lily being a flawed vessel ;-). Their final encounters n his study, and on her deathbed, still had me sniffing into my handkerchief every time I read them though!
Now the girl on that cover looks exactly as I imagine Lily to look! Wharton is was ahead of her time when she wrote of debt and conspicuous consumption. I love the way she describes the air around Lily as glittering with gold dust.
Nicola, I'm glad to hear you say that. I picked out the picture from a collection of John Singer Sargent paintings, but Laura wasn't certain she was right for the cover. Somehow, she just jumped off the page to me, however, as our Lily Bart. Must have worked.