This will end up being a review of The House of Mirth, sort of.“Wasn’t she too beautiful, Lawrence? Don’t you like her best in that simple dress? It makes her look like the real Lily – the Lily I know.” p.142Let’s begin with rich, beautiful people. I am neither, and I come from a long line of neithers. I come from hardy, working-class stock – Scots-English, mostly. Lots of ‘em orphaned or abandoned and left to fend for themselves as a result of various kinds of neglect, addictions or just plain bad luck. The women were tough mama bears who put their heads down and did what they had to do to put food on the table. On my dad’s side, his mother - Grandma Flora - left Dundee, Scotland sometime in the late teens/early 20s when she was the same age; roughly the time Wharton was writing. From what I can piece together, Grandma Flora had been working as a domestic, with few prospects for anything but a life of slavery and grinding poverty. “Dingy” is the word Lily would use – but probably for a lifestyle about six rungs up the ladder that Grandma Flora was barely clinging to.It was the strangest part of Lily’s strange experience, the hearing of these names, the seeing the fragmentary and distorted image of the world she had lived in reflected in the mirror of the working-girls’ minds. She had never before suspected the mixture of insatiable curiosity and contemptuous freedom with which she and her kind were discussed in this underworld of toilers who lived on their vanity and self-indulgence. p.302Young Flora’s choices were to stay and toil for the rest of her life or take her chances on a new life in Canada. I think she may have had some distant relatives here, but really, she was on her own. She somehow ended up in Timmins, in the deep woods of northern Ontario near the Quebec border, and married a man from Leeds – a Bernardo orphan, we believe - who subsequently drank the money they were making from the fledgling bakery they had established together. When it went under, he moved her to Toronto on the likely assumption that he could find work there, then in 1932 in the depths of the Depression, he left her (never to be seen or heard from again) with children aged five, two and six months with no income and no prospects for a life other than one of, again, ongoing grinding poverty.There are stories about how Grandma Flora, my two uncles and my father (the middle child) survived in a time when there was no welfare, no social programs to speak of, that would rip your heart out. She worked for many years capping bottles on an assembly line at Crown Cork & Seal. The children somehow must have fended for themselves. At the age of two, the youngest came down with tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitorium in the west end of the city. He was there for more than a year – longer than his recovery likely took, but the hospital (founded as The Toronto Free Hospital for the Consumptive Poor, but known as the Weston Sanitorium) served as a quasi-orphanage for children whose parents were so impoverished they simply couldn’t look after them. Grandma Flora. I now picture her gripping the hands of her other two, barely past toddlers themselves, and tugging them along Queen Street. They walked (on rare days, they could probably afford the streetcar for part of the trip) a round-trip of 40 km each Saturday to visit him. He was her baby, her bonnie lad. They all were. She held on tight.Uncle Stan, the oldest–who never married while she was alive and lived with her until she died–left school at grade 6. The family needed the income. My father did a little better, making it to grade 10 and finding a spot in a coveted mechanical apprenticeship program and later into a permanent job on the railway. On my mother’s side, it’s a similar story. Her father lasted with them a while longer, until one day he came home from work, lay down on the sofa, and his heart exploded. Mom was 12; her younger brother 10. This was a little later – 1948 – so times were not so desperate, and there was some kind of insurance that kept them going, at least for a little while. Still, mom had to leave school at age 16 with a high school equivalency diploma, and get herself an office job downtown.“Why, what on earth are you doing?”“Learning to be a milliner—at least, trying to learn,” she hastily qualified the statement.Rosedale suppressed a low whistle of surprise. “Come off; you ain’t serious, are you?”“Perfectly serious. I’m obliged to work for my living.” p.307You worked. As soon as you could and at whatever you could. You didn’t choose a 'career.' You didn’t 'marry up.' It was, literally, unthinkable. “Out of work-out of work! What a way for you to talk! The idea of your having to work; it’s preposterous.”… “I don’t know why I should regard myself as an exception—” she began.“Because you are; that’s why; and your being in a place like this is a damnable outrage. I can’t talk of it calmly.” p.316----------------I remember visiting Grandma Flora in her one-bedroom apartment in Scarborough, in a – yes – dingy white brick building, surrounded by others just like it. It had horrible smelling hallways and a terrifying elevator, which you took – even though you only needed to get to the second floor – because the stairwell was not an option.Even then at the age of about 10 (and thanks to what I now recognize was my parents’ incredible luck, hard work, steadfast determination to rise out of the poverty they were raised in), I was condescending toward and frightened of the poverty Grandma Flora still lived in. Although, in her mind, she was in the Taj Mahal compared to where she had been. But once inside, Grandma Flora would serve tea (always in pretty china cups – that was the ‘proper’ thing to do and probably the single luxury she had or had ever had) and empire biscuits that she had baked herself; the aroma enveloped you and provided relief and dramatic contrast to what was outside. I would often bring her drawings that I had done and she would exclaim and marvel over them in a most uncharacteristic way (she was a taciturn Scot, after all). The next visit, they would be in cheap, black plastic frames from Woolworth’s, hung prominently in the one room that was kitchen-living room-bedroom. It was warm in the kitchen, which, when Nettie Struther’s match had made a flame leap from the gas-jet above the table, revealed itself to Lily as extraordinarily small and almost miraculously clean.“We’ve got a parlour too,” she explained with pardonable pride …” p.333Grandma Flora taught me how to cook Scotch eggs and, on crossed broomsticks there in that kitchen nook, the rudiments of highland dance. Don’t mistake me: she was not the apron-wearing, rosy-cheeked Grandma, all smiles, hugs, love and gingerbread. She was a tough, practical, judgmental, tee-totalling survivor of god knows what for god knows how long.Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to Lily. She had had a premonition of it in the blind motions of her mating instinct, but they had been checked by the disintegrating influences of the life about her. All the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance; her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening in Nettie Struther’s kitchen. p.339----------------I became the family’s historian at about age 12, the result of a school assignment. Grandma Flora helped me sketch out the family tree, as much as we could anyway. It ended up looking like a maple after a particularly gusty October day, denuded by bad memory and so much unknown history. So many bare branches, disappearing into the foggy newsprint of my sketchbook. I was more interested in names and places – quantity, clarity – as I thought that was where the marks were. And still a little young to be asking what I wish I had asked her: what were you thinking, what were you feeling, from where did you draw your courage? Did you, when you trudged along Queen Street or over the Bloor Street bridge, ever think of throwing yourself over? By the time those questions became of interest to me, it was too late to ask them. Grandma Flora hardened into a silent, angry knot and I was insolent and arrogant, clutching my B.A. (the first in my family to get one; the diploma professionally matted and framed, and hung proudly in my parents’ den next to my graduation picture). I had been raised to aspire to more. My parents had already climbed all the way up to what I suppose would be called lower middle-class; and my brother and I were to put as many more rungs as possible between ourselves and our family’s impoverished past. In my parents’ eyes, those rungs were made of education and hard work. Work, as long as you can work, you can survive. Talent was good – but secondary. It gave you something to build on, but mine were seen more as options for recreation and, at best, avocation; not tangible enough to provide a living. I could write and draw and play a little piano (my inherent lack of grace and athleticism made highland or any other kind of dance pretty much a dead-end), but none of these looked promising as a route to providing social and financial security – which, to them, meant having a nice house and a car and some savings in the bank, maybe a good pension plan. That was about as far ‘up’ as Mom and Dad could see – and in fact as far as they would get.Since she had been brought up to be ornamental, she could hardly blame herself for failing to serve any practical purpose; but the discovery put an end to her consoling sense of universal efficiency. p.315I know they spent many a sleepless night as I weighed my choices for university: was it to be art school or the more traditional route studying English lit? In the end, art school didn’t offer me a scholarship, so I went with the money (it would have been profligate not to), and English lit it was. They would have supported me either way, but their pride was couched in obvious relief knowing that the route I chose could lead to teaching (it didn’t, but it could have). Nursing, typing and teaching: these were the skills that, in my parents’ still-constrained minds (the feminist revolution hadn’t reached them), and for a young woman in my position, paid. They were worthwhile, acceptable and attainable goals. Dreams like Lily’s were not only out-of-reach, they weren’t even dreams. That kind of money – real money; the one percent in today's handy vernacular – you were born or married into. And it dirtied you. It called into question your moral fibre (the consoling rationalization of the poor).She had learned by experience that she had neither the aptitude nor the moral constancy to remake her life on new lines, to become a worker among workers and let the world of luxury and pleasure sweep by her unregarded. … Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose leaf and paint the humming-bird’s breast? And was it her fault that the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to be hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral scruples? p.319 ----------------So, we are more alike than we seem, you and me, Lily Bart. Across time and place and class, we are more alike than we might seem. And there, my sympathy and empathy were engaged. There, Wharton spoke to me through Lily and touched my heart with her tragedy, which is Grandma Flora’s and mine and ours.“What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole? One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—and you don’t know what it’s like in the rubbish heap!” p.327Yes, it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities, and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation. … She felt an intense longing to prolong, to perpetuate, the momentary exaltation of her spirit. If only life could end now—end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost possibilities, which gave her a sense of kinship with all the loving and foregoing in the world. p.340 __________________Aug 8/12: Maybe, just maybe, the best book I've read all year. Who are you Edith Wharton, and where have you been all my life? Why has it taken me so long to find you?Can't remember the last time I've been so engaged with characters and the world they inhabit.Or been provoked, moved, stirred to pity, disgust, anger, sadness to the point where my only recourse was to scrawl margin notes in capital letters followed by much punctuation: what a BITCH!!!!! FINALLY - she realizes that????!! OMG - what a simpering fop!!! IT'S A TRAP, IT'S A TRAP!noooooo LILY - too late, too late!!! :-(and finally, :-( :-( :-( :-(more of a review later, once I compose it - and myself.
I read the House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence almost at the same time, and while The Age of Innocence is the better book -the title is less euphonic, mind- House of Mirth has meant something to me. I've declared in another review my undying love for fools, whatever their size or shape. Lily is one of gigantic proportions. That, given the title, is hardly a surprise, 'cause:"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth"7:4 EcclesiastiusMy opinion is that the guy who wrote that part of the Bible put his foot (or at the very least his goose quill) in his mouth because that sentence is a bit of euphonic nonsense, but I guess he liked to put hearts in places:"The heart of fools is in their mouth: but the mouth of the wise is in their heart." 21:26 EcclesiastiusIf Lily's heart is in her mouth, it's not because of too much talking, but man does she chew through her fall from the highs of money and beauty to the slums of respiratory depression. I'm going with that as a causa mortis because it's prettier than "choking in her own vomit". She dies because benzodiazepines were yet to be invented. They used to get hung on chloral... She should just have smoked weed.But I don't see her as either as a tragic figure or as a selfish one.I can tell tragic when I see it: it’s Gerty. Tragedy = unavoidable misery, it’s the greek sense of inescapable fate, whatever you do, you’re fucked - their gods were such bitches. Gerty can never get a choice; nothing much will happen to her at all, ever. See Pascal: hell lies in boredom. Bad luck and bad choices are interesting, hence, not tragic.Of course, there’s a case to be made in favour of Lily’s destiny being set in stone, but it requires, in order to be interesting, that we disregard parts of the novel to see it only as a mildly feminist critique of the upper New York society. And it is; Wharton is angry at a class that only offer parasitic lifestyles to women. But the feminist critique is the only way to have her doomed from the start; if not, what would be the point of the book? An ode to Bad Luck? Instead of that, we get a very clever portrayal not only of a social class, but also of the psychology of a woman who has to stand alone and fight, mainly against her own nature.Yes, Lily is a purely decorative object, yes, she is wholly dependant on others to survive... but it’s ultimately not what makes her doom. She dies the way she does because she is a short-distance athlete. The same way she says to Selden “ perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down”, this woman can’t play chess: it takes too long. That’s why she fails with the Americana-guy; that’s why she can’t climb back, that’s why it means so much that she doesn’t use the letters- that would have been right up her alley; she could have pulled it off.Even her death... she could have been a Nana. She would have lost herself. She dies and saves the last her self-respect; that’s a pretty heroic failure, and a very human one. Of course, it’s bad luck that Selden comes to his realisation the moment she’s dead, but, you know, shit happens. The thing is, she’s never been as worthy of love as in the moment when she dies. He can't be blamed for not having loved her before.The question begs the answer: if Selden had come the night before, would they have had a happier ending? Or would she have ruined him, sickened him? As a mather of fact, Wharton goes out of her way to say that they would have been happy. In the last scene of the book, when she visits Nettie, it is said: “it is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be!” I think that the moment Wharton believes in that transformation, she would have given it to Lily and Selden too. It wasn't hopeless from the start.Lily’s selfishness and entitlement, and the snobbism of the privileged, seem to make a deep impression on readers. Is she really so very selfish? It’s the only life she knows. She has nobody to stand up for; there’s noone in the world she loves, or owes anything to, and certainly not her friends except for Gerty. And Gerties are certainly worthy of love, sound of mind, admirable in every respect, but god are they boring to hang out with.So she can’t make friends with low-class people, has a physical repulsion to shabbiness, and sees no attraction in the life of a manual worker. A review I've seen on this site (while very interesting) suggests that the reader feels personaly insulted by all three. I think she’s missing the point, because she’s essentially talking about being strong and therefore worthy of more respect that the one Lily shows, but she focuses on strength for the family, and that’s precisely what Lily can't have. Does she want me to feel sorry for Lily? I will. Will I think her weak? No.Regarding shabbiness and manual work, I can never blame her for that. I don’t want to be a workshop worker either. Please believe it’s not particularly a dislike for effort. Of course, her taste for luxury doesn’t call for sympathy; but this is a woman alone. She needs to love something, and what she loves is beauty. It’s her only asset and the base of her self-esteem. The only qualitiy she knows she has is taste.The bad: Wharton repeats the same concepts with different formulae over and over again. She does, in fact, write the words “poured out the wretchedness of his soul”. She dwells in melodrama. She tortures me with Gerty (could she have at least a fault, so I don’t feel so bad about her?). Some characters -Trenor- are utterly unappealing.In the end, I know what I love in House of Mirth: Lily goes through her day, she’s planning ahead, she’s trying hard, she’s laughing at unfunny quips and smoothing rough situations and she’s bored. But sometimes, an impulse breaks through all that and wrecks her routine; she knows who she is and who she could be, she gets a glimpse of a life that is not stopped, in which the clock ticks evenly, and suddenly her intentions mean something else or nothing. And then she goes on a picnic. It’s the effect Selden has; he’s distracting.I’m fascinated by this concept of rays of light that break through routine. I think that’s why all her impulses bring her lower: it’s to prove Selden wrong when he’s unable to separate her intentions from her impulses. Even when she’s telling him she loves him, he thinks she’s planning. She’s not.There’s a tremendous beauty in impulses, specially when they’re doomed and therefore are pure. That last plunge, when she goes up to see him just because she’s in his street. What she doesn’t do through courage, she’ll do through the power of a rush. It quickened my pulse too.
What do You think about The House Of Mirth (2006)?
Okay, I didn't finish it, I'm on page 41, I'm just not sure I can or want to continue reading. Wharton feels such contempt for all of her characters. A sort-of friend describes Lily as...a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing-room; and Selden reflected that it was the same streak of sylvan freedom in her nature that lent such savour to her artificiality.Ouch. Of one potential victim slash husband:She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce...and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.Poor bastard. Of Lily's character:...she had never been able to understand the laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations.Of Lily's father:...a neutral-tinted father filled an intermediate space between the butler and the man who came to wind the clocks.Jesus. Her mother thought...there was something heroic in living as though one were much richer than one's bankbook denoted.Yeah, it's funny, but it's awfully nasty, too. I feel like Wharton's not just writing a novel, she's out for revenge. She's a good writer, I'll give her that, she makes me despise them, too, but do I really want to live through 300 more pages of this? I understand that this is a portrait of a specific place and time, but were the members of New York's turn-of-the-century upper crust really so uniformly selfish and self-absorbed and snobbish? I can't have just one character I don't loathe? Even The Great Gatsby had Nick.Of course I know how this ends, Lily is disgraced because she went to tea in a gentleman's rooms and gets caught in a lie about it and is cast off and probably dies of disgrace, like a goat sacrificed to New York society gods. I understand that Wharton is vilifying a society she despises (at least I think she is, otherwise what's the point of all this downright meanness), outing a silly, pretentious bunch of rich people who care for nothing but having money and marrying more. It just feels so heavy-handed. Talk about using a sledgehammer. She should have read more Austen to learn how to use a scalpel.
—Dana Stabenow
I completely soured on this by the end of Book I and start of Book II. I really don't want to finish it, but I might when in a better mood. The melodrama of Gus Trenor's attempt on Lily's virtue and of Lily's flight to Gerty really disgusted me; that's not the Wharton I like, the lofty and relentless social anatomist of The Age of Innocence. It was horrible to see Wharton's cool, classic prose break down into the exclamation marks and fervid dashes of a Gothic romance. In addition to the mawkish melodrama, I was put off by the clumsiness of her handling of the characters other than Lily (always exquisite), a clumsiness that became impossible to ignore during the maladroit muddle of the Monte Carlo scenes: Wharton sets us in a nest of intrigue and drama populated by badly drawn, barely formed subsidiary characters. After George Dorset broke down in front of Lily ("poured forth his wretchedness," as Wharton puts it, ridiculously) I just didn't care anymore. Strengths of The Age of Innocence include the solidity and definition of its secondary characters, and the subtle weave of subplots--think of Jules Beaufort, or Stillerton Jackson, or the van der Luydens, people whose appearance and situation are swiftly and economically evoked into convincing life on the margins of the Newland-Ellen-May triangle. With a few exceptions (Percy Gryce, Mrs. Penniston) Wharton in The House of Mirth shows no such power. Lily is a vividly colored central figure, but the rest of the picture is just sketched-in.
—Eric
Edith Wharton. She gets me every time. I know I should expect it and she shouldn't be able to surprise me, but she does. People do not write like this anymore. If they did, publishers would reject it or send it back saying, "Remove flowery language and cut some details." But that is what makes the story so moving. Wharton's lyrical language is entrancing enough and into it she weaves a story that pierces your heart.The House of Mirth follows the life of Lily Bart, a young woman with dreams of escalating the rungs of the New York society ladder around the year 1900. Throughout the book I was torn between adoring her, pitying her, and feeling that she was getting what she deserved. Lily is no two-dimensional character. She is vain, but she is kind. She is ambitious but self-controlled. She is willing to learn from her mistakes, a loyal friend, and refuses to speak against others even if it would be true. Unfortunately, she also makes some horrible decisions, is naïve, and does not open her heart up to the right people.Lily spends a very long time searching for Mr. Right - someone who is rich and she could tolerate living with. A decision made for love is not one that she has been trained to make. The intolerance of society and shallowness of her friendships is made clear to her, but she hesitates to rely on those who truly love her.The end was shocking, heart-wrenching, and so very Wharton-like. This book reminded me of another favorite of mine, Villette by Charlotte Bronte. It is one that will stay with you, floating around in your head as though you might be able to dash in and make something happen differently.
—Samantha
