The House of Mirth

steady the cups; then she sank back into her seat. “I’d forgotten there was no room to dash about in— how beautifully one does have to behave in a small flat! Oh, Gerty, I wasn’t meant to be good,” she sighed out incoherently.”(Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, p. 259-260, Book 2 Chapter 8) 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

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

York City during the early 20th century and scrutinizing some of the most affluent people the city has to offer. Edith Wharton was able to witness all of the arrogance in New York during this time and put those observations into her novel, The House of Mirth. Edith Wharton was born on January 24th, 1862 into a prosperous New York family. She lived in an expensive area of New York and was primarily educated by governesses and personal tutors (Olin 72). Her family inspired the phrase “Keeping up with

In life, there are several things that cannot be bought in a store, such as friendship. There are several views on the purpose of friendship. The House of Mirth is a novel by Wharton that revolves on Lily Bart attempting to find a husband as a way to have a successful life and provides insight on upper class society in the late 1800s and early 1900s. O Pioneers! is a novel by Cather about how Alexandra Bergson connects to the land and others and how Emil Bergeson’s “romance” with Marie Shabata evolves

novels from Wharton and Cather such as Lucy Gayheart and The House of Mirth and got a glimpse of who were Cather and Wharton. Overall, by reading and writing about the novels, there four learning outcomes I was supposed to accomplish. The first learning outcome was to comprehend and analyze some of Wharton’s and Cather’s novels. The first writing assignment was the analytical paper. I chose to analyze two passages from The House of Mirth. Through a close reading of both passages and focusing on diction

Edith Wharton, an American author, born on January 24, 1862, was the daughter of American aristocrats, Lucretia Rhinelander and George Frederic Jones. She is known for documenting the lives of wealthy Americans during the Civil War and World War I time period. She herself was born into the aristocratic New York society. Her novels depicted the New York aristocratic life which she witnessed in her life and challenged the social conventions of that time period. When she was around the age of 18,

This essay examines a passage from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth to show how it fits within the broader context of the novel. It considers whether the excerpt deals with similar themes from which it has been drawn, for example, money and class, or whether it introduces new ideas. It does this by cross-examining the passage with other parts of the novel. Moreover, the passage presents two key characters: the protagonist, Lily Bart, and the detached lawyer, Lawrence Selden. Both characters will

fate that are subject only to their environments. An example of a Naturalistic novel is The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton; a novel set in late 19th century New York that follows Lily Bart: a young woman who was born rich but is slowly losing both her societal status and her money whilst she repeatedly avoids marriage, her only option to escape her fate: a life of poverty. With this in mind, The House of Mirth is an exemplary example of a Naturalistic novel because of its portrayal of characters as

humanity and depicts the lesson that life is never fair. Lily makes her own choices, however, they are not entirely made of her own volition. The heavy influence and expectations of Lily's environment captures her in a deterministic system, therefore House of Mirth is a naturalist novel. Lily Bart resembles that of a scholarship student in a clique

with the pursuit of marriage and end with a happily married woman. Within her novels, Edith Wharton works to demonstrate the flaws of this understanding and present a question on the possibility of female happiness. By specifically looking at The House of Mirth, Summer, and The Custom of the Country, exposing Wharton’s stark critique of the nature of women’s involvement within a patriarchal social structure allows us to understand the damaging effects of female gender expectations. Marriage and motherhood