The Hypocrisy Of The Upper Class By Edith Wharton

The upper class characters are constantly trying to uphold their reputation, because they fear losing their power and status. Mr. Utterson throughout the novella strives to preserve his reputation and Dr. Jekyll's. Mr.

Today donating to charitable causes is a widespread among the world’s wealthy people. Some are contributing the majority of their vast fortunes, “Warren Buffett, who has committed 99 percent of his fortune to charity upon his death, along with Bill and Melinda Gates, who have given more than $28 billion to their foundation and say they plan to give a significant portion of their remaining wealth to good causes.” (Yen). In The Great Gatsby a large amount of Gatsby’s wealth is wasted on lavish parties for people who are indifferent about him. The Buchanan’s are even more selfish. Tom frequently sees the poor when he visits his mistress Myrtle, yet he never feels an obligation to help them. It appears as though the affluent people of today feel that helping the less fortunate is more of their responsibility than the rich of the Roaring 20s did. While the wealthy still don’t support the destitute to their full abilities, noblesse oblige is much more present today in America than it ever has been.

In the book “The Great Gatsby” wealth affects the lives of many characters in the book, examples of these characters are; Daisy,Tom, and Gatsby. All these characters either had a dream to become wealthy, bribed people, or just cared about money, not love.Because of their obsession with wealth this led to many problems with other characters, showing the bad traits of others, and overall showing how wealth can almost always have a negative effect on a person.

The upper class doesn’t have real ambition and they try to use money in its place. Tom and Daisy’s palace is the most apparent example

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn all explore the effects of wealth and class on society. On closer inspection, a common strand seems to form between these three classic novels. The idea that wealth (and the social class that comes with it) determines a person is refuted via the use of deep characterization. In the end, it seems, wealth and class don’t determine a person’s moral integrity and value, but rather how they interact those two things. Ultimately, Twain makes a case for the lower-classes, that even the poor (and enslaved) can be truly good, setting a better example than the wealthy. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, shows that rich aren’t entirely superficial, rather, that they can be great men. Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a bit more of an oddball than the other two novels, focusing instead on a protagonist that leaps from riches (under the supervision of a cruel aunt), to rags, then back to riches once again. Still, this common strand holds true between the three books: no class, poor or rich, is entirely exempt from moral bankruptcy. A poor person like Pap Finn can be morally corrupt, while a rich man like Jay Gatsby can be good. All character-based judgments in these books lay solely on the person they are judging, blind of the class and wealth that surrounds them.

Jane Austen’s Persuasion challenges the notion that one’s social class determines one’s happiness. In the novel there is the upper class, which includes Sir Walter Elliot and his family; the nouveau rich, such as Admiral Croft and Captain Wentworth; and the poor

Selden, who is not rich, but is self-sufficient and comfortable. Lily's incredible outer beauty cannot mask the internal suffering which she endures. This is Wharton's way of revealing the emptiness and greed behind the glittering exterior of elite society. The Dorsets, despite their fabulous wealth, are the most unhappy characters in the novel. Bertha is a cruel and bitter antagonist, and her husband is a lonely, pathetic old man. Edith Wharton spent her entire life rubbing elbows with the upper-crust, yet still believed that money cannot buy happiness. The House of Mirth may be categorized as a "novel of manners," a literary genre which explores the struggle of the individual in society, and most commonly, the way in which that struggle effects women and

Looking at the article “Class Matters” by Peter Sacks, Social classes are divisions in society, which are based on social and economic status. People from a similar social class have a distinct level of power and wealth within a given community or country. The most common social groupings, based on status, are the upper, the middle, and the lower social classes. The precise considerations of determining these hierarchical social categories vary from time to time. Many researchers have come up with different perspectives as far as social stratification is concerned. According to Karl Marx, social stratification is a result of one's position in the hierarchy of factors of production. Therefore, social stratification is a manifestation of financial muscle within society further creating the divide within social groupings as seen through educational divides and inequalities that lie in many aspects of life.

Class, gender, and race are just a few of the classifications that have directly impacted one’s financial, legal, and personal freedoms throughout history. There are several examples in Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth that will shed light to the many situations in which the characters find themselves that display the sort of inequality that was quite common in the 20th century.

Chapter six discusses the upper class, what it consists of, and how it shapes society. Many of the people who originally made great fortunes were not accepted to the United States upper class. Only the future generations of these wealthy families could make it into the upper class. The upper class today is no longer as powerful as it was in the early 20th century. Wealth, power, education, or fame alone, will not place someone into the upper class. The kind of wealth, how old it is, and the source of power is most important within the upper class. Being involved with the social institutions of the upper class,

Take everything you know about racism, sexism, and religionism and toss it out the window, because there’s an impediment to prosperity that is often underlooked: Classism. Classism is a suppression which always has and always will continue to affect our everyday lives. The disparities that presently exist between the lower and higher classes form a condition where it is unlikely to allow for equality for anyone. The short stories “A Rose of Emily,” written by William Faulkner, and “Desiree’s Baby,” written by Kate Chopin, offered several depictions of classism within a society. “A Rose for Emily” recounts the life of an isolated, aristocratic woman named Emily Grierson who symbolically represents the demise of the old Southern society. Similarly, “Désirée’s Baby” portrays classism present in mid-nineteenth century Southern society in conjunction with the inequalities that exist between race. Class prejudice plays an important role as it was behind the emergence of the characters’ unspeakable actions. In “A Rose for Emily” and “Desiree’s Baby,” classism is emphasized and provokes arrogance, denial, and the demise of others.

      Near the beginning of The House of Mirth, Wharton establishes that Lily would not indeed have cared to marry a man who was merely rich: "she was secretly ashamed of her mothers crude passion for money" (38). Lily, like the affluent world she loves, has a strange relationship with money. She needs money to buy the type of life she has been raised to live, and her relative poverty makes her situation precarious. Unfortunately, Lily has not been trained to obtain money through a wide variety of methods. Wharton's wealthy socialites do not all procure money in the same way: money can be inherited, earned working in a hat shop, won at cards, traded scandalously between married men and

This passage demonstrates how deeply rooted wealth and marriage are to Lily’s character. Lily cannot survive without money and she can never find a perfect marriage. At the time of this passage Lily is

Other characters in The House of Mirth are not affected by gambling and risk-taking as severely as Lily is because they have the financial means and power to gamble or recover from their mistakes. In the nineteenth-century and more specifically the Gilded Age of New York City, marriage and money were what measured power, so since Lily had neither of those, her position in that society was very fragile. In Victoria Shinbrot’s article “Risk and Subversion in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth”, she ponders the question of Lily’s peers being “ever [so] conscious of the looming perception of her public decline and moral failure”(42). Lily defends her playing by saying that Mrs. Trenor had expected it in exchange for her “prolonged hospitality,”

In the early 19th century, social class or status was everything to individuals back then. Social status was everything to people, just by saying they were better than others. Also, by saying they were “higher statuses” than one another was such a huge deal back then, which higher statues and ranks were about how had money and who didn’t. As people say history repeats itself, I believe that, for instance, nowadays people are always trying to outdo one another. Edith Wharton expressed a variety of different dimensions throughout House of Mirth, which included social, cultural, political, economic. Edith Wharton elaborates a story about Lily Barton, a young lady in her mid 20’s, who is continuously trying to achieve social statuses while dealing with other life struggles. She struggles trying to find someone rich to marry and ends up not being able to become wealthy either. When she struggles to try and find who she wants to marry she tends to get discourage and ends up putting herself in a serious amount of debt that she is unable to pay back. While in debt, she has trouble sleeping, and starts taking medicine to help with this problem. When she had enough money to pay off this debt she uses it to her advantage and pays off all her debt, however why paying off her debts Lily was still taking her sleeping pills and ends up over dosing, which causes her to die. After, this short summary of House of Mirth, did Lily social status affect her life? Did her social status actually