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The House of Mirth (Modern Library 100 Best Novels) Paperback – August 10, 1999
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Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton depicts the glittering salons of Gilded Age New York with precision and wit, even as she movingly portrays the obstacles that impeded women's choices at the turn of the century.The beautiful, much-desired Lily Bart has been raised to be one of the perfect wives of the wealthy upper class, but her spark of character and independent drive prevents her from becoming one of the many women who will succeed in those circles. Though her desire for a comfortable life means that she cannot marry for love without money, her resistance to the rules of the social elite endangers her many marriage proposals. As Lily spirals down into debt and dishonor, her story takes on the resonance of classic tragedy. One of Wharton's most bracing and nuanced portraits of the life of women in a hostile, highly ordered world, The House of Mirth exposes the truths about American high society that its denizens most wished to deny. With an introduction by Pamela Knights.
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
- Publication dateAugust 10, 1999
- Dimensions5.19 x 0.83 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100375753753
- ISBN-13978-0375753756
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One of Wharton's earliest descriptions of her heroine, in the library of her bachelor friend and sometime suitor Lawrence Selden, indicates that she appears "as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing room." Indeed, herein lies Lily's problem. She has, we're told, "been brought up to be ornamental," and yet her spirit is larger than what this ancillary role requires. By today's standards she would be nothing more than a mild rebel, but in the era into which Wharton drops her unmercifully, this tiny spark of character, combined with numerous assaults by vicious society women and bad luck, ultimately renders Lily persona non grata. Her own ambivalence about her position serves to open the door to disaster: several times she is on the verge of "good" marriage and squanders it at the last moment, unwilling to play by the rules of a society that produces, as she calls them, "poor, miserable, marriageable girls.
Lily's rather violent tumble down the social ladder provides a thumbnail sketch of the general injustices of the upper classes (which, incidentally, Wharton never quite manages to condemn entirely, clearly believing that such life is cruel but without alternative). From her start as a beautiful woman at the height of her powers to her sad finale as a recently fired milliner's assistant addicted to sleeping drugs, Lily Bart is heroic, not least for her final admission of her own role in her downfall. "Once--twice--you gave me the chance to escape from my life and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward," she tells Selden as the book draws to a close. All manner of hideous socialite beasts--some of whose treatment by Wharton, such as the token social-climbing Jew, Simon Rosedale, date the book unfortunately--wander through the novel while Lily plummets. As her tale winds down to nothing more than the remnants of social grace and cold hard cash, it's hard not to agree with Lily's own assessment of herself: "I have tried hard--but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. 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." Nevertheless, it's even harder not to believe that she deserved better, which is why The House of Mirth remains so timely and so vital in spite of its crushing end and its unflattering portrait of what life offers up. --Melanie Rehak
Review
Contemporary Reviews, and Letters
Between Edith Wharton and Her Publisher
" A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys."--Edith Wharton
Lily Bart knows that she must marry--her expensive tastes and mounting debts demand it--and, at twenty-nine, she has every artful wile at her disposal to secure that end. But attached as she is to the social world of her wealthy suitors, something in her rebels against the insipid men whom circumstances compel her to charm.
"Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape," Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, "on the bare chance that he might ulti-
mately do her the honor of boring her for life?" Lily is distracted from her prey by the arrival of Lawrence Selden, handsome, quick-witted, and penniless. A runaway bestseller on publication in 1905, The House of Mirth is a brilliant romantic novel of manners, the book that established Edith Wharton as one of America's greatest novelists.
" A tragedy of our modern life, in which the relentlessness of what men used to call Fate and esteem, in their ignorance, a power beyond their control, is as vividly set forth as ever it was by Aeschylus or Shakespeare." --The New York Times
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in
1920 for The Age of Innocence. But it was the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905 that marked Wharton's coming-of-age as a writer.
From the Back Cover
With an introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick,
Contemporary Reviews, and Letters
Between Edith Wharton and Her Publisher
" A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys."--Edith Wharton
Lily Bart knows that she must marry--her expensive tastes and mounting debts demand it--and, at twenty-nine, she has every artful wile at her disposal to secure that end. But attached as she is to the social world of her wealthy suitors, something in her rebels against the insipid men whom circumstances compel her to charm.
"Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape," Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, "on the bare chance that he might ulti-
mately do her the honor of boring her for life?" Lily is distracted from her prey by the arrival of Lawrence Selden, handsome, quick-witted, and penniless. A runaway bestseller on publication in 1905, The House of Mirth is a brilliant romantic novel of manners, the book that established Edith Wharton as one of America's greatest novelists.
" A tragedy of our modern life, in which the relentlessness of what men used to call Fate and esteem, in their ignorance, a power beyond their control, is as vividly set forth as ever it was by Aeschylus or Shakespeare." --The New York Times
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in
1920 for The Age of Innocence. But it was the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905 that marked Wharton's coming-of-age as a writer.
About the Author
Her first published book was a guide to interior decorating, but this was followed by several novels and story collections. They were written while the Whartons lived in Newport and New York, traveled in Europe, and built their grand home, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts. In Europe, she met Henry James, who became her good friend, traveling companion, and the sternest but most careful critic of her fiction. The House of Mirth (1905) was both a resounding critical success and a bestseller, as was Ethan Frome (1911). In 1913 the Whartons were divorced, and Edith took up permanent residence in France. Her subject, however, remained America, especially the moneyed New York of her youth. Her great satiric novel, The Custom of the Country was published in 1913 and The Age of Innocence won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.
In her later years, she enjoyed the admiration of a new generation of writers, including Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In all, she wrote some thirty books, including an autobiography. A Backwards Glance (1934). She died at her villa near Paris in 1937.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
SELDEN PAUSED in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.
It was a Monday in early September, and he was returning to his work from a hurried dip into the country; but what was Miss Bart doing in town at that season? If she had appeared to be catching a train, he might have inferred that he had come on her in the act of transition between one and another of the country-houses which disputed her presence after the close of the Newport season; but her desultory air perplexed him. She stood apart from the crowd, letting it drift by her to the platform or the street, and wearing an air of irresolution which might, as he surmised, be the mask of a very definite purpose. It struck him at once that she was waiting for some one, but he hardly knew why the idea arrested him. There was nothing new about Lily Bart, yet he could never see her without a faint movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions.
An impulse of curiosity made him turn out of his direct line to the door, and stroll past her. He knew that if she did not wish to be seen she would contrive to elude him; and it amused him to think of putting her skill to the test.
"Mr. Selden–what good luck!"
She came forward smiling, eager almost, in her resolve to intercept him. One or two persons, in brushing past them, lingered to look; for Miss Bart was a figure to arrest even the suburban traveller rushing to his last train.
Selden had never seen her more radiant. Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a ball-room, and under her dark hat and veil she regained the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing. Was it really eleven years, Selden found himself wondering, and had she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her?
"What luck!" she repeated. "How nice of you to come to my rescue!"
He responded joyfully that to do so was his mission in life, and asked what form the rescue was to take.
"Oh, almost any–even to sitting on a bench and talking to me. One sits out a cotillion–why not sit out a train? It isn't a bit hotter here than in Mrs. Van Osburgh's conservatory–and some of the women are not a bit uglier."
She broke off, laughing, to explain that she had come up to town from Tuxedo, on her way to the Gus Trenors' at Bellomont, and had missed the three-fifteen train to Rhinebeck.
"And there isn't another till half-past five." She consulted the little jeweled watch among her laces. "
Just two hours to wait. And I don't know what to do with myself. My maid came up this morning to do some shopping for me, and was to go on to Bellomont at one o'clock, and my aunt's house is closed, and I don't know a soul in town." She glanced plaintively about the station. "It is hotter than Mrs. Van Osburgh's, after all. If you can spare the time, do take me somewhere for a breath of air."
He declared himself entirely at her disposal: the adventure struck him as diverting. As a spectator, he had always enjoyed Lily Bart; and his course lay so far out of her orbit that it amused him to be drawn for a moment into the sudden intimacy which her proposal implied.
"Shall we go over to Sherry's for a cup of tea?"
She smiled assentingly, and then made a slight grimace.
"So many people come up to town on a Monday–one is sure to meet a lot of bores. I'm as old as the hills, of course, and it ought not to make any difference; but if I'm old enough, you're not," she objected gaily. "I'm dying for tea–but isn't there a quieter place?"
He answered her smile, which rested on him vividly. Her discretions interested him almost as much as her imprudences: he was so sure that both were part of the same carefully-elaborated plan. Inj udging Miss Bart, he had always made use of the "argument from design."
"The resources of New York are rather meagre," he said; "but I'll find a hansom first, and then we'll invent something."
He led her through the throng of returning holiday-makers, past shallow-faced girls in preposterous hats, and flat-chested women struggling with paper bundles and palm-leaf fans. Was it possible that she belonged to the same race? The dinginess, the crudity of this average section of womanhood made him feel how highly specialized she was.
A rapid shower had cooled the air, and clouds still hung refreshingly over the moist street.
"How delicious! Let us walk a little," she said as they emerged from the station.
They turned into Madison Avenue and began to stroll northward. As she moved beside him, with her long light step, Selden was conscious of taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness: in the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair–was it ever so slightly brightened by art?–and the thick planting of her straight black lashes. Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. 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 mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the 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 vulgar 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?
As he reached this point in his speculations the sun came out, and her lifted parasol cut off his enjoyment. A moment or two later she paused with a sigh.
"Oh, dear, I'm so hot and thirsty–and what a hideous place New York is!" She looked despairingly up and down the dreary thoroughfare. "Other cities put on their best clothes in summer, but New York seems to sit in its shirt-sleeves." Her eyes wandered down one of the side-streets. "Some one has had the humanity to plant a few trees over there. Let us go into the shade."
"I am glad my street meets with your approval," said Selden as they turned the corner.
"Your street? Do you live here?"
She glanced with interest along the new brick and limestone house-fronts, fantastically varied in obedience to the American craving for novelty, but fresh and inviting with their awnings and flower-boxes.
"Ah, yes–to be sure: The Benedick. What a nice-looking building! I don't think I've ever seen it before." She looked across at the flat-house with its marble porch and pseudo-Georgian facade. "
Which are your windows? Those with the awnings down?"
"On the top floor–yes."
"And that nice little balcony is yours? How cool it looks up there!"
He paused a moment. "Come up and see," he suggested. "I can give you a cup of tea in no time–and you won't meet any bores."
Her colour deepened–she still had the art of blushing at the right time–but she took the suggestion as lightly as it was made.
"Why not? It's too tempting–I'll take the risk," she declared.
"Oh, I'm not dangerous," he said in the same key. In truth, he had never liked her as well as at that moment. He knew she had accepted without afterthought: he could never be a factor in her calculations, and there was a surprise, a refreshment almost, in the spontaneity of her consent.
On the threshold he paused a moment, feeling for his latch-key.
"There's no one here; but I have a servant who is supposed to come in the mornings, and it's just possible he may have put out the tea-things and provided some cake."
He ushered her into a slip of a hall hung with old prints. She noticed the letters and notes heaped on
the table among his gloves and sticks; then she found herself in a small library, dark but cheerful, with its walls of books, a pleasantly faded Turkey rug, a littered desk, and, as he had foretold, a tea-tray on a low table near the window. A breeze had sprung up, swaying inward the muslin curtains, and bringing a fresh scent of mignonette and petunias from the flower-box on the balcony.
Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs.
"How delicious to have a place like this all to one's self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman."
She leaned back in a luxury of discontent.
Selden was rummaging in a cupboard for the cake.
"Even women," he said, "have been known to enjoy the privileges of a flat."
"Oh, governesses–or widows. But not girls–not poor, miserable, marriageable girls!"
"I even know a girl who lives in a flat."
She sat up in surprise. "You do?"
"I do," he assured her, emerging from the cupboard with the sought-for cake.
"Oh, I know–you mean Gerty Farish." She smiled a little unkindly. "But I said marriageable–and besides, she has a horrid little place, and no maid, and such queer things to eat. Her cook does the washing and the food tastes of soap. I should hate that, you know."
"You shouldn't dine with her on wash-days," said Selden, cutting the cake.
They both laughed, and he knelt by the table to light the lamp under the kettle, while she measured out the tea into a little tea-pot of green glaze. As he watched her hand, polished as a bit of old ivory, with its slender pink nails, and the sapphire bracelet slipping over her wrist, he was struck with the irony of suggesting to her such a life as his cousin Gertrude Farish had chosen. She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.
She seemed to read his thought. "It was horrid of me to say that of Gerty," she said with charming compunction. "I forgot she was your cousin. But we're so different, you know: she likes being good, and I like being happy. And besides, she is free and I am not. If I were, I daresay I could manage to be happy even in her flat. It must be pure bliss to arrange the furniture just as one likes, and give all the horrors to the ash-man. If I could only do over my aunt's drawing-room I know I should be a better woman."
"Is it so very bad?" he asked sympathetically.
She smiled at him across the tea-pot which she was holding up to be filled.
"That shows how seldom you come there. Why don't you come oftener?"
"When I do come, it's not to look at Mrs. Peniston's furniture."
"Nonsense," she said. "You don't come at all–and yet we get on so well when we meet."
"Perhaps that's the reason," he answered promptly. "I'm afraid I haven't any cream, you know–shall you mind a slice of lemon instead?"
"I shall like it better." She waited while he cut the lemon and dropped a thin disk into her cup. "But that is not the reason," she insisted.
"The reason for what?"
"For your never coming." She leaned forward with a shade of perplexity in her charming eyes. "I wish I knew–I wish I could make you out. Of course I know there are men who don't like me–one can tell that at a glance. And there are others who are afraid of me: they think I want to marry them."
She smiled up at him frankly. "But I don't think you dislike me–and you can't possibly think I want to marry you."
"No–I absolve you of that," he agreed.
"Well, then––?"
He had carried his cup to the fireplace, and stood leaning against the chimney-piece and looking down on her with an air of indolent amusement. The provocation in her eyes increased his amusement–he had not supposed she would waste her powder on such small game; but perhaps she was only keeping her hand in; or perhaps a girl of her type had no conversation but of the personal kind. At any rate, she was amazingly pretty, and he had asked her to tea and must live up to his obligations.
"Well, then," he said with a plunge, "perhaps that's the reason."
"What?"
"The fact that you don't want to marry me. Perhaps I don't regard it as such a strong inducement to go and see you." He felt a slight shiver down his spine as he ventured this, but her laugh reassured him.
"Dear Mr. Selden, that wasn't worthy of you. It's stupid of you to make love to me, and it isn't like you to be stupid." She leaned back, sipping her tea with an air so enchantingly judicial that, if they had been in her aunt's drawing-room, he might almost have tried to disprove her deduction.
"Don't you see," she continued, "that there are men enough to say pleasant things to me, and that what I want is a friend who won't be afraid to say disagreeable ones when I need them? Sometimes I have fancied you might be that friend–I don't know why, except that you are neither a prig nor a bounder, and that I shouldn't have to pretend with you or be on my guard against you." Her voice had dropped to a note of seriousness, and she sat gazing up at him with the troubled gravity of a child.
"You don't know how much I need such a friend," she said. "My aunt is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to conduct in the early fifties. I always feel that to live up to them would include wearing book-muslin with gigot sleeves. And the other women–my best friends–well, they use me or abuse me; but they don't care a straw what happens to me. I've been about too long–people are getting tired of me; they are beginning to say I ought to marry."
There was a moment's pause, during which Selden meditated one or two replies calculated to add a momentary zest to the situation; but he rejected them in favour of the simple question: "Well, why don't you?"
She coloured and laughed. "Ah, I see you are a friend after all, and that is one of the disagreeable things I was asking for."
"It wasn't meant to be disagreeable," he returned amicably. "Isn't marriage your vocation? Isn't it what you're all brought up for?"
She sighed. "I suppose so. What else is there?"
Product details
- Publisher : Random House Publishing Group (August 10, 1999)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0375753753
- ISBN-13 : 978-0375753756
- Item Weight : 10.3 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.19 x 0.83 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,891,692 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #56,109 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #110,235 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #144,721 in Historical Fiction (Books)
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HOUSE OF MIRTH
This classic novel revolves around Lily Bart. She is the only person in the novel with dimension. The others are tools for her demonstration and destruction. Lily is presented as a lesson in conditioning. Her character is fixed and permanent. She does not learn from life, only is diminished by it, though she has some distant understanding that, at the end, there was little she could have done to alter the inevitable. The novel would be grim and foreboding if the style were not so distinguished and the analysis of the heroine and the society in which she lives so compelling and repulsive.
Before returning to Lily Bart, something must be said of the fin de siecle New York moneyed class on the edge of which she lives. The people presented in the novel are mostly shallow, talentless, in fact meaningless. Selden, Gerty Farish and Rosedale are the exceptions. The others have appetites but no taste, copying one another as sharks do in a feeding frenzy, but maintaining their position by violent defense of their privileges. Each is classed by money and the length of time it is possessed. The mind, in their view, is an organ of little value unless it is an engine that permits more money to be acquired and promotes further ascent on the social ladder. Nothing has value unless it is confirmed by someone else. Everything is acquired but temporary. They are as vulgar as the British upper classes but without the structure and fittings of royalty and title. Perhaps, in Ms Wharton's view, the villain of the story is democracy in America that lifts people who are in truth so low so high. And then envies and applauds the miracle performed.
Lily is part of the decoration, a tool for entertainment and use which when it loses its purpose is cast aside, dismissed and forgotten. Were she a horse her destiny would be glue. If she had not certain definitions of conduct, she would inexorably have become a prostitute. But even for that role, she does not have aptitude. She must marry wealth. It is her mantra. Money is the buoy that will save her from drowning but there is a fatal indecision in her conduct and a taste for decency which defeats her impulse to survive. After exploring a few brief years of existence from twenty-nine to the low thirties, there is no role in the end for which she is fit other than corpse. Which she plays very well though unremarked by the society she esteems and despises.
The society that Ms Wharton presents is peopled by wealthy vauriens who have no purpose but status. Their prized activity is consuming and elbows. They are bicyclists bowing down in servility before those above them and pounding down as hard as they can on those beneath. They make no mark on time or place, only engulfing everything of value to their peers. They hold in contempt all under them and are devoured by fear of all above. They are predators who never are replete and visitors like Lily have no role but as prey. Of course were she to acquire a wealthy husband, she would instantly alter status and be classified after a short apprenticeship as ONE OF US. Though Wharton shows a few British upper class characters for contrast, they are done with so little emphasis that we readers don't understand the vital difference between the American rich and the British aristocrats. Both groups worship money but the Americans breath it and without it, they lose purpose. The British aristos are convinced of their actual worth which is independent of possessions, founded on history and a system of place which is permanent unless some truly catastrophic conduct intervenes. Wharton's Americans are vulgarians and not the least of the tragedy in this book is the energy and drive Lily employs to attain a place among these unremarkable plutocrats.
To sum up, Ms Wharton wants to demonstrate in a brief and heavily selected form the society of New York at the turn of the century. She shows perhaps ten or fifteen specimens and a limited number of scenes in which they interact, feeding on whatever is esteemed by a peer, and despising in unison whatever at the moment is considered unsuitable. Anything that threatens money is the most unsuitable of all, of course. Ms. Wharton succeeds in her task, presenting a loathsome but convincing pack of wealthy jackals, chewing up every comestible before them. They are thoughtless and reflect a collective rascality which goes for purposeful conduct and earns them esteem from anyone who fears or hopes to gain from them. The interchange of fear and greed motivates everything they do. Just as in the stock market, the players go from greed descending the Slopes of Hope and fear ascending the Walls of Worry. The social game has rules which are known and obeyed. They can be broken only by those few with the most, but the rules are created to maintain just those few so they have little incentive to diminish their advantages. So I have suggested Wharton's purpose and agreed that she has achieved it classically.
Lily is shown always as the suppliant, someone of little stature. Her dreams are few and modest. She is presented as severely conditioned, unable to develope. She is fulfilled by the clothes she wears, the society she frequents, and the latest attitude she presents. She takes little space and it grows less as the book develops, ending finally in the contemptible boarding house room with its narrow single bed and sparse light. As an inept milliner-seamstress, she excites little pity from others and only a measured sympathy from herself. A classical tragedy causes a heightened awareness of the cruelty of life and focuses on an ill-chosen action, but this tragedy is a domestic misfortune that is sad and of brief duration.
The remaining question then is a literary one of where this work stands. The main character, Lily Bart, is memorable but in silhouette. She is a tragic figure, but since her major dream is contemptible, it discolors everything else including the sweetness and true gentleness of her person. All the other characters are flat and forgettable, necessary only for Lily's ruin, so the book stands and falls entirely on Lily whose shoulders are not constructed for such heavy-lifting. So The House of Mirth takes its place in the high upper ranges of the second rank. The writing is faultless and the style estimable, but the contents are soon overcast by haze and, if not forgotten, not remembered with great acuity.
[...]
Mirth is an excellent novel, finely crafted, beautifully written and alive with Wharton's darkly humorous outlook. Wharton writes of the world she lived in, among the wealthy elite of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York City, and her characters are frighteningly real: flawed and damaged, the best of them sometimes unsure how to act or whom to trust, and the worst... Oh God, the worst of them are as unspeakably horrible as the idle rich of any time and place.
So why the lower rating? Mirth is, for me, the lesser work because of its extremes. Where Innocence relied on a more nuanced look at its characters and central situation, Mirth follows the formula of many writers' early works, with too much "goodness" on the side of its protagonist, and too much unrelieved wickedness on the other side.
Lily Bart, the unmarried, beautiful, twenty-nine-year-old woman at the center of the story, who has been brought up to be merely an "ornament" in her world, not a worker or contributor, is emotionally incapable of marrying without love or, as the story progresses, unwilling to sink to the level of her abusers, to use blackmail to regain her lost position in the world. The degree to which she grows in self-knowledge is remarkable, and her ethical restraint, while suffering the worst reversals of poverty and ostracism, is not always believable.
Part of what made Innocence such an enjoyable story was its "historical" aspect, the way Wharton contrasted the limited, blinkered world of the 1870s with the freer, more sophisticated world of 1900, when that story ends. In Mirth, we see the other side of that "modern" freedom, and what it means for women who are alone in the world, without family or close friends to protect or guide them. For Lily, it's an unrelenting downward spiral, and it's a heartbreaking read.
I've noticed, as often with stories like this, some readers' contempt for Lily as someone who makes "stupid" choices. And I've often wondered what makes these readers think they would have done any better, assuming they were products of that same time and place, and did not have their hundred-years' worth of twenty-twenty hindsight. For me, my sympathy for Lily makes reading about her downfall too painful to be enjoyable, despite Wharton's engaging writing style. Lily sabotages all her near successes, precisely because she has too much intelligence and "sensibility," in the Jane Austen meaning, to marry without love, to spend the next forty years tied to a man she can't respect.
The comparison with Austen is apt, because Wharton's writing is Austen without the gloss of two centuries of cultural change, the separation of the Atlantic Ocean, or a "quaint" country setting. It's New York City, not Netherfield, and it has this city's unabashed brutality. I was astonished at how similar the NYC of 1900 was to the city I grew up in and still inhabit. Austen's world is every bit as tough, but we don't always see it, because we're too easily lulled by her elegant, eighteenth-century manner to feel the stiletto blade until it pierces our heart. Wharton carries her cavalry saber unconcealed, and we (at least I do) sometimes shrink from its slashing force, dreading the inevitable bloody end.
As Lily destroys one chance after another for herself, I found myself wishing that she would use the means at hand to defeat or at least control her female enemy, and not worry about hurting the man she loves in the process. In Wharton's world, as in Austen's, it's the women who pay the price for sexual indiscretions, gambling losses and other misbehavior, no matter who commits the actual sins. When one minor character, a silly young man, gambles away his fortune, it's his two unmarried sisters who are reduced to shabby spinsterhood, trying to earn a living, a mode of existence for which they are woefully unprepared. "Miss Jane reads aloud very nicely--but it's so hard to find anyone who is willing to be read to."
Wharton writes with the kind of magical style that draws a reader in no matter what. Even if we know the story from having seen the movie version(s); even if we aren't happy about how it ends; even if we find some of the extreme duality of good and bad characters a little tedious--still, we want to spend time with this narrator. Like Jonathan Franzen, another author with this specific talent, Wharton can tell us any story she chooses, about any characters, and most readers will only say, "More, please."
On that level alone, Wharton's work deserves five stars, but what I'm doing here is ranking her against herself, not everybody else.
At the end of The Age of Innocence, I felt that it was a perfect work of art, the final scenes just right; a somewhat ambiguous, sad but not tragic ending that was the only acceptable resolution for the main characters. Mirth, by contrast, leaves most readers dissatisfied. "No," we think, "that can't be right." It's an argument in Wharton's favor that her ending is in many ways more realistic than the happier one most of us wish for. People do kill themselves, not literally by suicide, but by making one misstep after another, until they reach a place where death is the only possibility.
Wharton's only "mistake" is in allowing us to see each of her heroine's missteps all too clearly, and with no way of turning her in a different direction. Perhaps this book deserves five stars after all.
Top reviews from other countries
La protagonista Lily Bart è una giovane di buona famiglia che diviene all’improvviso orfana di padre dopo la rovina finanziaria di questi, e resta così priva di mezzi. Il suo unico scopo diviene allora quello di riuscire ad ogni costo a liberarsi dalla sua povertà, ritenuta vergognosa, per entrare a far parte della cerchia ristretta dei ricchi. Ma quel mondo dorato ed esclusivo in cui lei cerca ostinatamente di entrare ha regole ferree pronte a travolgerla e schiacciarla.
Narrazione di stile impeccabile, lucida e amara.
The ending was sad but beautiful in a certain way .
The language was very flowery, and the sentences exquisite. A lot was said in many words signifying the strength of Wharton's writing. A must read book for lovers of Classic literature.