Dying to Survive : An Analysis of Edith Wharton’s the House of Mirth

Dying to Survive

Edith Wharton, a novelist from the early 1900's, wrote several stories and novels about old New York. She was raised in old New York and observed this society in transition as new money was being infused into the old society. She was interested in the morals of this group of people. She touches on this in her novel The House of Mirth. She shows the extremes the rich can go to maintain their social position. Lily Bart, the main character, is sacrificed to this society. In Wharton’s autobiography A Backward Glance, she comments on her novel The House of Mirth, “The answer was that a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals. The answer, in short, was my heroine, Lily Bart”(940). Lily does not have a chance. She violates the mores of New York’s elite. In reality, she is no more than an object to be admired and bartered for. BECAUSE SOCIETY HAS DETERMINED THAT LILY IN EDITH WHARTON’S NOVEL THE HOUSE OF MIRTH IS NO MORE THAN A COMMODITY ON THE MARRIAGE MARKET FOR A WEALTHY HUSBAND, HER DESIRE FOR MORAL INTEGRITY AND EMOTIONAL CONNECTION WITH OTHERS ULTIMATELY LEADS TO HER DEATH.

Edith Wharton understood from personal experience Lily’s plight. She was from a society that prized beauty, “In that simple society there was an almost pagan worship of physical beauty, and the first question asked about any youthful newcomer on the social scene was invariably: ‘Is she pretty?’ or: ‘Is he handsome?’”(A Backward Glance 818). She also experienced at the age of three that feeling of being an ornament, “because she had on her new bonnet, which was so beautiful (and so becoming) that for the first time she woke to importance of dress, and of her self as a subject for adornment...” (A Backward Glance 777 - 778). Her goal early in life was to be “the best-dressed woman in New York” like her mother (A Backward Glance 796). Likewise, Lily knows the need for a women to adorn herself, “If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like; they don’t make success,