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angelayoung 's review for:
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
This book is about cruelty, but such subtle cruelty that - at least at first - you don't notice it. The particular brand of cruelty is exclusion, exclusion from a society whose rules are made by those with much money and reputations they protect at all costs. Lily Bart, the protagonist, doesn't have enough money to join them without borrowing (and so putting herself at risk of blackmail) nor quite enough courage to confront them (which would mean expulsion from the fringes of the society to which she clings). It is an object lesson in finding the courage to be yourself at a time when, especially for a woman, that was a very difficult thing to do. It defeated Lily Bart ... and I wish it hadn't.
I wanted to grab Lily back from the brink of disaster ... I first read 'The House of Mirth' almost twenty years ago and all the way through I willed Lily to find a way to survive in a society that seemed to me to take pleasure in her struggle to live among them, and in her failure to do so. When, on page 12 of my edition (from the Penguin American Library), Lily Bart says to Lawrence Selden, ‘A girl must [marry]; a man may if he chooses … We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop – and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership,’ my heart sank just as it did when I first read those lines. And when, on page 15, Wharton writes, ‘Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? … She had yielded to a passing impulse in going to Lawrence Selden’s rooms … [but] this one … was going to cost her rather more than she could afford,’ In a society where hypocritical standards and fantastic wealth rule, there is no room for intelligence, independence or impulse, if it is female.
I love 'The House of Mirth', but the love is bittersweet because it is an uncomfortable read. As Wharton herself said of the book (and she spoke from real knowledge because she was born, in 1862, into a family whose members were counted among the ‘Four Hundred’): ‘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.’
A while ago I also read this with the Cornflower Bookgroup: http://cornflower.typepad.com/domestic_arts_blog/2008/03/the-house-of-mi.html
I wanted to grab Lily back from the brink of disaster ... I first read 'The House of Mirth' almost twenty years ago and all the way through I willed Lily to find a way to survive in a society that seemed to me to take pleasure in her struggle to live among them, and in her failure to do so. When, on page 12 of my edition (from the Penguin American Library), Lily Bart says to Lawrence Selden, ‘A girl must [marry]; a man may if he chooses … We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop – and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership,’ my heart sank just as it did when I first read those lines. And when, on page 15, Wharton writes, ‘Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? … She had yielded to a passing impulse in going to Lawrence Selden’s rooms … [but] this one … was going to cost her rather more than she could afford,’ In a society where hypocritical standards and fantastic wealth rule, there is no room for intelligence, independence or impulse, if it is female.
I love 'The House of Mirth', but the love is bittersweet because it is an uncomfortable read. As Wharton herself said of the book (and she spoke from real knowledge because she was born, in 1862, into a family whose members were counted among the ‘Four Hundred’): ‘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.’
A while ago I also read this with the Cornflower Bookgroup: http://cornflower.typepad.com/domestic_arts_blog/2008/03/the-house-of-mi.html