Teaching Philosophy and Materials
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, Summary of Ideas
Here are some more ideas that we discussed in class regarding The House of Mirth: Who or what is to blame for Lily's fate? What is the relationship of women to "power" in the novel? What does the novel present as indexes of morality or immorality? What options do women have for the expression of their creativity or business acumen? What is "beauty"?
All of these ideas are significant and weighty in this work. If you look at our Tumblr whiteboard images, you'll see that we sort of orbited around these ideas in our discussions. Looking at the notes might help you to come up with some answers to these questions.
We spoke also about realism and naturalism in respect to this novel. If this is a piece of naturalistic fiction, what does Wharton offer as her social and individual (i.e., of Lily) indictment? Who or what, again, is to blame for Lily's fate? Which of her problems are attributable to her "nature"? And what does that mean, at this period of time? In our last discussion of the novel, we spoke about all of the critical "isms" that might be applied to this text as tools for reading it. We also revisited some of the ideas we have focussed on in our studies of other works this term: race, class, gender, technology, training, heredity. Do you remember which of these ideas your group discussed? What was its significance to the novel as a whole, as a text with probably a moralistic, didactic message?
Finally, many of you criticized this novel for the style in which it was written. Even as Lily feared dullness, you found the novel about her to be very dull. You attributed this dullness to excesses in Wharton's style. You thought it was too much of a soap-opera (some said) and there were too many character with too many details. This embellished style, one that allowed Wharton to delve into psychological reasons for a character's problems as well as the movements of many characters in Lily's sphere, was not to your liking . . . for most of you. But, as I've asked with other novels, what can we gain from reading this novel today?
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