To ask other readers questions about The House of Mirth , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. John Viano added it Dec 09, There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Edith Newbold Jones was born into such wealth and privilege that her family inspired the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses. Edith's creativity and talent soon became obvious: By the a Edith Newbold Jones was born into such wealth and privilege that her family inspired the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses.
By the age of eighteen she had written a novella, as well as witty reviews of it and published poetry in the Atlantic Monthly. After a failed engagement, Edith married a wealthy sportsman, Edward Wharton. Despite similar backgrounds and a shared taste for travel, the marriage was not a success. Many of Wharton's novels chronicle unhappy marriages, in which the demands of love and vocation often conflict with the expectations of society.
Wharton's first major novel, The House of Mirth, published in , enjoyed considerable literary success. Ethan Frome appeared six years later, solidifying Wharton's reputation as an important novelist. Often in the company of her close friend, Henry James, Wharton mingled with some of the most famous writers and artists of the day, including F. In Edith divorced Edward.
She lived mostly in France for the remainder of her life. When World War I broke out, she organized hostels for refugees, worked as a fund-raiser, and wrote for American publications from battlefield frontlines. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor for her courage and distinguished work. The Age of Innocence, a novel about New York in the s, earned Wharton the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in -- the first time the award had been bestowed upon a woman.
Wharton traveled throughout Europe to encourage young authors. She also continued to write, lying in her bed every morning, as she had always done, dropping each newly penned page on the floor to be collected and arranged when she was finished. Wharton suffered a stroke and died on August 11, She is buried in the American Cemetery in Versailles, France. However, her visitor turns out to be Simon Rosedale who, so smitten by her appearance in the tableau vivant, proposes a marriage that would be loveless but mutually beneficial. Considering what Rosedale knows about her, she skillfully pleads for time to consider his offer.
Selden never does show up and doesn't provide any reason why. To escape the rumors arising from the gossip caused by her financial dealings with Gus Trenor, and also disappointed by what she interprets as Selden's emotional withdrawal, Lily accepts Bertha Dorset's spur-of-the-moment invitation to join her and George on a Mediterranean cruise aboard their yacht, The Sabrina. Bertha intends for Lily to keep George distracted while Bertha carries on an affair with young Ned Silverton. Lily's decision to join the Dorsets on this cruise proves to be her social undoing. In order to divert the attention and suspicion of their social circle away from herself, Bertha insinuates that Lily is carrying on a sexual liaison with George.
In front of their friends at the close of a dinner the Brys hold for the Duchess in Monte Carlo , Bertha commands that Lily not return to the yacht, stigmatizing her. Selden helps Lily by arranging a night's lodging with her cousin, Jack Stepney, under the promise that she leave promptly in the morning. The ensuing scandal ruins Lily's reputation - her friends abandon her virtually immediately, and her Aunt Julia disinherits her. Only two friends remain for Lily: Despite the efforts and advice of Gerty and Carry to help her overcome notoriety, Lily descends through the social strata of New York City's high society.
She obtains a job as personal secretary of Mrs. Hatch, a disreputable woman who very nearly succeeds in marrying a wealthy young man in Lily's former social circle. She resigns her position after Lawrence Selden returns to warn her of the danger, but not in time to avoid being blamed for the crisis.
It is during this occupation that she is introduced to the use of chloral hydrate, sold in drugstores as a remedy for various ailments. Lily then finds a job in a milliner's shop. Unaccustomed to the rigors of working class manual labor, her rate of production is low and the quality of her workmanship poor, exacerbated by her increased use of the drug. She is fired at the end of the New York social season, when the demand for fashionable hats has diminished.
Meanwhile, Simon Rosedale , the Jewish suitor who previously had proposed marriage to Lily when she was higher on the social scale, reappears and tries to rescue her, but Lily is unwilling to meet his terms. Simon wants Lily to use the love letters that she bought from Selden's servant to expose the affair between Lawrence Selden and Bertha Dorset. For the sake of Selden's reputation, Lily does not act upon Rosedale's request and secretly burns the letters when she visits Selden one last time. Distraught by her misfortunes, Lily has been regularly using a sleeping draught of chloral hydrate to escape the pain of poverty and social ostracism.
Her debts repaid, and desperate for sleep, Lily takes an overdose of the sleeping draught and dies - perhaps it is suicide, perhaps an accident. That very morning, Lawrence Selden arrives to finally propose marriage, but Lily Bart is dead. Among her belongings are receipts for her payments of the investment debt owed Gus Trenor, proving that her financial dealings with Trenor were honorable and not evidence of an improper relationship. Wharton considered several titles for the novel about Lily Bart; [d] two were germane to her purpose:.
A Moment's Ornament appears in the first stanza of William Wordsworth 's — poem, "She was a Phantom of Delight" that describes an ideal of feminine beauty:. She was a Phantom of delight When first she gleam'd upon my sight; A lovely Apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament: Her eyes as stars of twilight fair; Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn; A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay.
Her value lasts only as long as her beauty and good-standing with the group is maintained. By centering the story around a portrait of Lily, Wharton was able to address directly the social limitations imposed upon her. These included the mores of the upper crust social class to which Lily belonged by birth, education, and breeding.
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. The House of Mirth spotlights social context as equally important to the development of the story's purpose, as the heroine. At the time the novel takes place, Old New York high society was peopled by the extraordinarily wealthy who were conditioned by the economic and social changes the Gilded Age — wrought.
Wharton's birth around the time of the Civil War predates that period by a little less than a decade. As a member of the privileged Old New York society, [g] she was eminently qualified to describe it authentically. She also had license to criticize the ways New York high society of the s had changed without being vulnerable to accusations of envy motivated by coming from a lower social caste. Wharton revealed in her introduction to the reprint of The House of Mirth her choice of subject and her major theme:.
When I wrote House of Mirth I held, without knowing it, two trumps in my hand. One was the fact that New York society in the nineties was a field as yet unexploited by a novelist who had grown up in that little hot-house of tradition and conventions; and the other, that as yet these traditions and conventions were unassailed, and tacitly regarded as unassailable.
Wharton figured that no one had written about New York society because it offered nothing worth writing about. But that did not deter her as she thought something of value could be mined there. If only the writer could dig deeply enough below the surface, some " 'stuff o' the conscience' " could be found. She went on to declare unabashedly that:. Such people always rest on an underpinning of wasted human possibilities and it seemed to me the fate of the persons embodying these possibilities ought to redeem my subject from insignificance.
The central theme of The House of Mirth is essentially the struggle between who we are and what society tells us we should be. Thus, it is considered by many to be as relevant today as it was in The House of Mirth continues to attract readers over a century after its first publication, possibly due to its timeless theme. That the life and death of Lily Bart matters to modern readers suggests that Wharton succeeded in her purpose: The Victorian Era was a time of great invention and discovery, but not all such accomplishments would prove beneficial to society.
At the time, it was believed to have positive medicinal properties, and its addictive nature was yet unknown.
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Introduced as medicine, opium led to the discovery of morphine and, subsequently, heroin. In addition, drugs such as opium were typically used by members of the lower and working classes. In her steady downward spiral, Lily becomes dependent on chloral hydrate to calm her mind and sleep. Much like morphine, chloral hydrate was a semi-synthetic drug used as a sedative and sleep aid it sometimes still is administered to calm patients before surgery. When taken sparingly, it provides relief, but consistent use leads to tolerance and greater abuse.
Wharton writes in her novel: I mean, how would she feel and look toward the end? Biographer Hermione Lee says, "Does the letter prove that Lily all along intended to kill herself? It's actually a much greater book if we don't know for sure. Uncertainty is a common theme in the endings of Wharton novels.
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Biographer Roxana Robinson l eans in a different direction: Wharton contemporary Louis Auchincloss wrote, "I don't see what the fuss is about. It's perfectly clear what happens. Lily doesn't mean to kill herself but risks death in a desperate bid for rest. Edith Wharton wrote to Kinnicutt because she needed to find a drug that wouldn't disfigure Lily's beautiful body. She didn't want that dreadful Madame Bovary thing, with the arsenic. I mean, how can you have Lily Bart die a messy death? The more sleep deprived she becomes, the greater she feels the need to seek help from this drug.
Sleep deprivation results in lapses of judgment, irritability, and paranoia. Wharton's view was more traditional, that electric light was harsh and unnecessary. She believed artificial light - as well as having a detrimental effect on natural sleep patterns - had disrupted daily life.
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Wharton writes of Lily: It was as though a great blaze of electric light had been turned on in her head, and her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered in it, without knowing where to take refuge. The chemist warns Lily an increase in dosage could potentially be fatal, but she takes her chances, as craving sleep overshadows all else.
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On the Best Seller list for nearly six months, The House of Mirth was met with mixed reactions and likely gained popularity from its controversial content. A stigma, suicide in some countries is still actually illegal, a law developed from the religious idea that suicide is a grave sin.
In addition, anyone who attempted suicide, along with anyone who assisted, could be prosecuted as well. Because the book was a commercial success, some critics classified it as a genre novel. However, Wharton's pastor rector of Trinity Church in Manhattan wrote to tell her that her novel was "a terrible but just arraignment of the social misconduct which begins in folly and ends in moral and spiritual death.
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A Case Book states, "[ The House of Mirth ] is a unique blend of romance, realism, and naturalism,[and thus] transcends the narrow classification of a novel of manners. The Saturday Review saw Lily's portrait as a "masterly study of the modern American woman with her coldly corrupt nature and unhealthy charm. Not all objections were from a moral standpoint. There were many negative commentaries on Wharton's narrative style in a book critics felt lacked a logical plot. Another critic for the same paper stated his belief that "there is something almost vindictive in this hailstorm of epigrams.
Providing a more positive perspective, the contemporary book review "New York Society Held up to Scorn in Three New Books" 15 October , The New York Times critic said that The House of Mirth is "a novel of remarkable power" and that "its varied elements are harmoniously blended, and [that] the discriminating reader who has completed the whole story … must rise from it with the conviction that there are no parts of it which do not … belong to the whole.
Its descriptive passages have verity and charm, it has the saving grace of humor, its multitude of personages … all have the semblance of life. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the various adaptations of the novel, see The House of Mirth disambiguation. She was a Phantom of Delight, first stanza [6].
In reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: It was Selden's distinction that he had never forgotten the way out. She further posits that in this "speech act drama" the only language that exists is for social discourse dominated by the linguistic strategies of men, yielding no language for personal discourse. Thus, the "word that would have saved both Lily and Selden. Members of her society socialized with one another and shunned the ostentation of the nouveau riche , who after the Civil War were making their way into the ranks of Old New York.
They reasoned that "such a woman could not understand the average working person. The House of Mirth. Works by Edith Wharton. The Greater Inclination Crucial Instances From Dunkerque to Belfort The named reference The House of Mirth was invoked but never defined see the help page. Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. The named reference WorldEdithWhartonnotes was invoked but never defined see the help page. The decline of Lily Bart". University of Tennessee, Knoxville Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange.
The House of Mirth - Wikipedia
Retrieved May 24, The name of the Lily: Edith Wharton's feminism s in Ross C. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: Bedford Books of St. The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton, pp. The House of Mirth pp. The Penguin Group Signet Classics.
Yale French Studies History of the Opium problem: The New York Times. Studies in American Naturalism. The House of mirth: Check date values in: The Decatur Daily Review. Retrieved from " https: