House of mirth

The House of Mirth explores the place of women (particularly Lily Bart) in society and the social effect that marriage had on them. The book showcases the problems that came with being a single woman during the late 1800s and the need and struggle to conform to society's expectations, and, therefore, falls under the title of a novel of manners. Women had little chance to play any role other that a wife or a mother, and could acquire respect and power only through marriage. Edith Wharton explores

Women in society sometimes are subject to objectification, meaning they are treated as a mere object; unequal to men. In the novel, The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton, this holds true, except, women are said to be equal to men, but are not treated in this exact manner. Lily is apart of the upper class society of New York and attends parties, gambles all her money, and throughout the whole book tries to marry a rich man. Wharton’s feminism is apparent in the way she treats Lily; Lily gets through

usually tragic but tell readers the fate of the characters. Realist novels have plausible events, with cause and effect in their stories — what the characters desire and the consequences they receive because of that. Realism in the novel, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, was clearly shown through Lily Bart's character with its ironic ending that had both her fall and rise as a character. She was known for her beauty in the novel; she made various mistakes in the process of entering the high social

Claudia Feher American Studies 1st year The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton The House of Mirth is a novel that condemns the elitist world of women and promotes the idea that money can't buy happiness. Wharton wanted to present American aristocracy when that aristocracy was doing so well. The novel highlights each aspect of a person's social behavior because each detail can have implications. Wharton wanted to mock the society, but also to show the tragedies in it. Wharton considered New

Lily's Choice in The House of Mirth         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

Naturalism in The House of Mirth             Challenging the strict deterministic confines of literary naturalism, which hold that "the human being is merely one phenomenon in a universe of material phenomena" (Gerard 418), Edith Wharton creates in The House of Mirth a novel which irrefutably presents the human creature as being subject to a naturalistic fate but which conveys a looming sense of hope that one may triumph over environment and circumstance if one possesses a certain strength

Assignment one – Discuss the significance of Lily Bart’s death at the end of The House of Mirth. You should consider the implications both for the protagonist’s social milieu and for women in general at this point in American history. The significance of Lily Bart’s death. As a writer looking towards the twentieth century Wharton faced the challenge of telling the history of women past the age of thirty. The age of thirty was established as the threshold by nineteenth-century

Shattering the Glass House "where ignorance is bliss, / 'Tis folly to be wise." - Thomas Gray The title of Edith Wharton's novel The House of Mirth waxes poetic irony in the case of the old money society of turn-of-the-century New York. The individual as part of the collective of society which seeks to oppress individuality is representative of the "house" in the novel's title. To remain ignorant and play by the "rules," therein lies the "mirth." Clearly, the victimization of the story's

Objectification of Women in The House of Mirth        Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth is an affront to the false social values of fashionable New York society.  The heroine is Lily Bart, a woman who is destroyed by the very society that produces her.  Lily is well-born but poor.  The story traces the decline of Lily as she moves through a series of living residences, from houses to hotel lodgings.  Lily lives in a New York society where appearances are all.  Women have a decorative function

From Gender Roles to Gender Goals Edith Wharton’s novel, House of Mirth, written in 1905 centers around Lily Bart, a single woman in her late twenties, who is constantly struggling to maintain her status in high society. Lily navigates herself through the upper class with a “double consciousness”. This double consciousness enables her to recognize “...that [she] is at the same time inside and outside the ideology of gender; and conscious of being so, conscious of that twofold pull, of that division