The House of Mirth: (Annotated) by Edith Wharton
She is a very beautiful and clever young lady, and no matter how impromptu any action of hers appears, Selden knows that she never makes an unplanned move. Lily has almost no money of her own; her beauty and her good family background are her only assets. Her father died soon after a reversal of his f Lawrence Selden enjoys watching Lily Bart put a new plan into operation. Her father died soon after a reversal of his financial affairs, and her mother drilled into her the idea that a wealthy marriage is her only salvation.
Peniston, who supplies her with a good home. However, Lily needs jewels, gowns, and cash to play bridge if she is to move in a social circle of wealthy and eligible men. Simon Rosedale, a Jewish financier, would gladly have married Lily and provided her with a huge fortune, for he wants to be accepted into the society in which Lily moves.
The House of Mirth
Lily, however, thinks that she still has better prospects, the most likely one being Percy Gryce, who lives with his watchful widowed mother. Kindle Edition , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. 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.
She invites Selden to Bellomont on anonymous advice to keep Mrs. Gus Trenor —Judy Trenor's husband—a massive man with a heavy carnivorous head and a very red complexion. He is a successful stock market speculator and an advocate of Sim Rosedale's acceptance in high society circles although he considers him a bounder. He is also a notorious flirt and looks for attention in relationships with women outside of his marriage.
Gus becomes enamored with Lily, a frequent guest at his wife's weekend social events. He uses his financial investment skills and a large sum of his own money in a risky investment for Lily which she agrees to. The proceeds from this speculation will help her pay her gambling debts and other expenses necessary to keep up appearances. The investment turns sour and Lily commits to repaying her debt to Gus rather than to bestow him with the sexual favors he desires. She is perceived as carrying "a general air of embodying a 'spicy paragraph';" 70 [1] and according to Mrs.
Although Gus accepts romantic favors from Mrs. Fisher in exchange for paying her bills and investing her money in the stock market, he considers her a "battered wire-puller" 94 [1] in comparison to the fresh and unsullied Miss Bart. Carry is also known for bringing newcomers into high society such as Rosedale and the Welly Brys who had managed the miracle of making money in a falling market.
After Lily has been expelled from the upper class by Bertha, Carry is one of the few people who still shows compassion toward her, offering Lily support and money. Ned Silverton —A young man, whose first intention was to live on proofreading and write an epic, but ended up living off his friends. Ned's romantic relationship at the Bellomont house party is with Carry Fisher. Six months later Ned accompanies Lily and the Dorsets on their Mediterranean cruise. He has an affair with Mrs Dorset, who manages to keep it concealed from most of society.
Evie Van Osburgh —A young, innocent, dull, and conservative, stay-at-home kind of a girl, heiress to a substantial fortune. Evie ends up getting engaged within six weeks of their stay at Bellomont to Percy Gryce due to Bertha Dorset's match-making skills. Gerty Farish —Selden's cousin. She is a kind, generous woman who occupies herself with charity work. In Book Two, she becomes one of Lily's only friends, giving her a place to stay and taking care of her when everyone else abandons her.
They belong to Old New York's high society. Jack is Lily's cousin so he agrees to shelter her for the night after Bertha kicks her off her yacht for ostensibly carrying on romantically with Bertha's husband. Grace Stepney —Lily's competitive middle-aged cousin who lives in a boarding house and who attracts and remembers all manner of gossip related to high society in general and to Lily in particular. Unbeknownst to Lily, Grace dislikes her because she felt "mortally offended" at being excluded from her Aunt Peniston's dinner party for Jack and Gwen on their return from their honeymoon.
She surmised, not unjustly, that it was Lily's counsel to her Aunt Peniston that kept her from being included.
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To get even Grace relays to Aunt Julia the talk about Lily's attention to Gus Trenor in exchange for money that Lily used to pay gambling debts. Grace refuses to give Lily financial assistance when she is down and out. A beautiful and intelligent, but impoverished socialite, Lily Bart attends a house party at Bellomont, the country home of her best friend, Judy Trenor. Her mission is to find a husband with great wealth and status to maintain her place in New York society.
It is here that Judy introduces her to potential suitor, Percy Gryce. Lily's week at Bellomont ends in a series of failures - she loses a large sum at bridge as well as her ploy to marry Percy Gryce. Her failure with Percy occurs when tall, handsome and engaging Lawrence Selden unexpectedly shows up at Bellomont.
The House of Mirth (Annotated)
Lily chooses to spend Sunday with him instead of meeting Percy for morning church services and an afternoon walk. Succumbing to her agreeable femininity, Selden begins to fall in love with Lily. Seldon quickly realizes that she cannot happily marry a man of his modest means.
Realizing Selden came to Bellomont to see Lily, Bertha retaliates by making sure Percy finds out about Lily's gambling, smoking, and borrowing money from men to pay off her gambling debts. Percy is scared off and soon thereafter marries Evie Van Osburgh. Lily attempts to neutralize the detrimental effects of the gossip surrounding her by renewing her association with her nemesis, Bertha Dorset, and cooperating with Carry Fisher's mission to bring the newcomers, the Wellington Brys, into high society. Fisher's advice, the Wellington Brys throw a large "general entertainment" featuring a series of tableaux vivants portrayed by a dozen fashionable women in their set, including Miss Bart.
Lloyd in Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous 18th-century painting. The portrait is of an attractive woman suggestively clad. Lloyd as it is for the loveliness of Lily Bart herself - marking the pinnacle of her social success. The next day, Lily receives two notes - one from Judy Trenor inviting her to dine that evening at her townhouse and the other from Selden, asking to meet with her the following day. Though she has a dinner engagement, she agrees to a visit with Judy at ten o'clock. However, her late-evening encounter turns out to be alone with Gus, Judy's husband.
Gus vehemently demands the kind of attention he thought he had paid for. Shaken and feeling very much alone, she calls on her friend Gerty Farish for shelter for the rest of the evening. The following day, Lily pleads with her aunt to help with her debts and confesses that she has lost money gambling at bridge, even on Sundays. Feeling trapped and disgraced, Lily turns to thoughts of Selden as her savior and has a change of heart towards him as she looks forward to his visit at four o'clock.
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.
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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.
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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. 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. 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.