Teaching Philosophy and Materials
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
In our first discussion of Wharton's 1905 novel, I asked you all to produce one image that came to mind when you thought of the action in the novel "so far." Overwhelmingly, you all offered the image of a "dollar sign." Symbolically, the dollar sign represented to you so much of the action of the novel. It indicated Lily's motivations, problems, history, and desired future. It also defines her marginality. Within her milieu, Lily was the one who struggled to maintain a status, one delimited by wealth, and Lily made efforts that put her in a precarious financial situation. Her playing bridge for money with other wealthy women of the "leisure class" prominently demonstrates this. Another dimension of the bridge-playing, though, is its moral dimension. This comes into view most clearly in the moral tug-of-war we see emerge within Lily as she makes maneuvers to marry Percy Gryce. While Gryce's wealth is hereditary and he invests in the persistence of this wealth through the procurement of valuable pieces of "Americana," he still believes, we conclude, that there should be a moral order (culturally and within a person) impervious to the contaminating forces of wealth and social status-seeking. Lily knows she will have "won" him (echoing her taste for gambling, in a card game or in life) if he sees her devoutly established in a church pew. What causes her to lose him is not only her inner distaste for the dull life marriage to him would promise; he turns away from her because he concludes that she must be, after he hears of her gambling, immoral. Her absence from church reinforces this. So, in a novel that has as a prominent symbol the dollar sign, we also see that much more ineffable idea of "morality" as a significant concern as well. We've discussed Lily's moral struggles, as the novel particularly reveals then in Book Two. We'll get to that in a later post.
So, money can buy status -- or can it? Lily seems to have throughout Book One a good degree of status in her circle, but she wishes for this to be solidified through an advantageous -- or "securing," we might say -- marriage. We learn that she has missed, or turned down, several opportunities in the past and, now, at twenty-nine years of age, she feels the pressure to marry intensify. As she worries about lines appearing on her beautiful face, she recognizes that "now" is the time to complete her greatest job (and "job" is a word that is most appropriate to use here). We know that marriage to a wealthy man is what she has been trained throughout her entire life to achieve. It is for this reason that another ineffable phenomenon of life -- true love -- has eluded her and when, in Book One, we see the love blossom between Lily and Selden, we know it is incongruous with her training.
We spoke also of technologies in Book One of the novel. At the outset, we see Lily arriving by train and then, out in the streets of New York City, she is faced with a city that is decidedly a "male" place, a place of finance, industrial advancement, of rapid movement (or, as we called it, peripatesis). Throughout the novel, we see New York City as a place where many of the wealthy only pass through (particularly women). Two characters spend considerably more time in the city, not traveling quite as much from place to place (examples are Selden and Gertie), but when Lily spends "too much time," whether hours or months, in the city, troubles emerge for her (such as in Book One, when she visits Selden's apartment, and later when she is tricked into going to Gus Trenor's house). If the city is a "male" zone (one defined by technology, employment, investment, manipulation of money), what, then, is the "female" zone or space in the novel? Are there instances where women have power in the site of the city? And what does the text tell us about the geography of class, as I might call it? We don't see any working women (or men, really) out in the country, at the country estates of Lily's friends, or during their international jaunts. But in the city, we meet working women, and in Book One, we meet one kind of, or one in particular, working woman: the char woman of Selden's apartment building. What is Lily's attitude about the woman when she passes her on the stairs very early in the novel? Do we see Lily interact with other "servants"? We do see women of what we might call three classes over the course of the novel (about which I will write in a later post). But, what we can ask at this time concerns what kind of roles in turn-of-the-century American urban society Wharton presents as available options for women. And, these options, how strictly are they delimited by socio-economic class?
I asked you as you were reading Book One to tell me what kind of story The House of Mirth is. Some of you offered that it is a "love story." If that's true, then what kind of love story is it? Love of what? When we pursued this topic, we had not yet discussed naturalism and realism, but we can look at this question now through those lenses, particularly the naturalist lens. If this is a kind of "realistic" story that also functions as a moralistic parable about "modern" life, about women perhaps, about what our nature (or our training, or our genealogy) prepares us for, against which we cannot fight, how do such ideas of "naturalism" ideas effect or change our understanding of the The House of Mirth as a love story? In this kind of naturalistic love story, what are the possible fates for women, as the novel shows them to us? What is the result of a conflict between financial expediency and moral "rightness"?
1905 was a time when America was the landing-ground of many immigrants, from many countries; how does Wharton show this to us? Which characters are "old" Americans (in the language of nativism, these would be "natives," and we used the acronym, for simplicity's sake more than for accuracy,"W.A.S.P." to describe this group in class). So, think about immigrants and the "world" of The House of Mirth. Think also of "new" and "old" money. Think in particular about Rosedale and the intertwining of Lily's life with his and Wharton's treatment of him and their interactions.
Click here to return to the "Other Writers" Lecture Notes page.