4.75 or 5?
Similar to Madame Bovary which I did prefer but what an unexpected surprise! Definitely interested in more by Wharton x

Set in New York society during the first years of the 20th century, it records the disastrous social career of Lily Bart, a penniless orphan who is related to some of the city's prominent families.

Il cuore del saggio è nella casa del pianto, ma il cuore degli stolti è nella casa della gioia.
Ecclesiaste

Lily Bart è bellissima. Ce ne accorgiamo subito quando la vediamo per la prima volta, all’inizio del romanzo, alla stazione di New York.

Era talmente bella da fermare persino i pendolari che correvano a prendere l’ultimo treno.

Invitata a feste, balli e ricevimenti, frequenta gli antichi e i nuovi ricchi dell’alta società americana di inizio Novecento. Ma ormai è passata l’età dell’innocenza: Lily ha ventinove anni, nota già qualche piccola ruga sul viso quando si guarda allo specchio prima di coricarsi. E non si è ancora sposata. Detentrice solo di una piccola rendita e allevata fin da bambina a destreggiarsi in un mondo finto e luminoso, come potrà permettersi il suo dispendioso stile di vita se non si troverà un buon partito? Tra trionfi e umiliazioni, esaltazioni e maldicenze, oscilla tra la tentazione di cedere al compromesso e l’orgoglio della rinuncia.
Una persona prova a capirla nel profondo: il suo caro amico Lawrence Selden. Ma lui è un giovane avvocato squattrinato. Tutti gli altri percepiscono solo la sua bellezza esteriore e rimangono estasiati quando, in una sequenza di tableaux vivants organizzata per una festa, lei decide di imitare la “Mrs. Lloyd” del quadro di Reynolds.

Lily non era stata incerta nemmeno per un attimo sul significato del mormorio che aveva accolto la sua comparsa. Nessun altro tableau era stato salutato con quella precisa nota di approvazione: naturalmente il merito era suo, e non dell’immagine che impersonava. All’ultimo momento aveva temuto di rischiare troppo rifiutando i vantaggi di una cornice più sontuosa, ma la portata del suo trionfo le diede l’euforica sensazione di aver riconquistato il suo potere.

La bellezza è potere ma anche una fonte potenziale di corruzione. La fragile Lily lentamente ne diventa cosciente: vede quello che gli altri non vedono (a parte il così vicino così lontano Lawrence Selden), vede il degrado attorno a sé e percepisce il rischio che questo degrado entri dentro di sé.

Era il successo ad abbagliarla; ma nel crepuscolo del fallimento riusciva sempre a distinguere i fatti con sufficiente chiarezza.

Edith Wharton si è chiesta nella sua autobiografia: “In che modo si poteva dire che una società di irresponsabili alla ricerca del piacere avesse molto di più a che vedere con il vecchio dolore del mondo di quanto la gente che formava quella società stessa potesse immaginare? La risposta fu che una società frivola può acquistare significato solo attraverso ciò che la sua frivolezza distrugge. Essa raggiunge una dimensione tragica nel potere di degradare persone e ideali. La risposta, in breve, fu la mia eroina, Lily Bart.”
E la risposta è questo bellissimo romanzo, che con il suo stile preciso e partecipe raggiunge quasi la perfezione de “L’età dell’innocenza”.

If you have read anything by Wharton, you will know that mirth is rarely to be found in her work;-) That being said, her style of storytelling, for me at least, is so compelling and really draws you in. I liked this even more than The Age of Innocence, which was a surprisingly engaging novel, once you get past the fact that it's rather depressing.
The House of Mirth is the story of Lily Bart, a beautiful young woman, who gets into money-related trouble, which haunts her for many years to come. What I found so fascinating about this book was not so much the story, but the character of Lily Bart, who stays with you long after you close the book. I am the kind of reader who can love a mediocre book if its characters are memorable, and Wharton just does really intriguing characters. Lily was not always likable; arrogant or proud at times, but those flaws were balanced with kindness and self-awareness, that made her multi-dimensional.
In years to come, I will probably forget many of the story's details, but I think I will still remember Lily Bart. Now I have to find some of Wharton's other books, fortunately for me, she was quite prolific.

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Poor, lovely Lily Bart
Her tragic story
will break your heart

She runs in the best circles
Wears the right clothes
And flirts with rich men

But everyone knows
That she needs to marry
Someone – and fast!

At 29 her looks won’t last
She’s ringing up debts
Borrowing from men

And displeasing their wives
Not to mention her friend
Lawrence Selden, a lawyer (but not very rich)

It’s Gilded Age New York
And life’s a bitch
If you’re not old money

Like the Trenors, Dorsets
And that odd Percy Gryce
The most you can do is play very nice

Like Sam Rosedale, the Brys
The Gormers and such,
Who buy their way in (i.e., never go "dutch”)

Just remember: this clique
Who summer in Newport and vacate in France
Can shut you out of the social dance

Which brings me back to Lily Bart
Who’s clearly not as smart as she seems
Stepping right into a terrible scheme

And refusing to clear her name
Or go along with the game
Even though, in the end, it causes her shame

Does she have a choice?
A tragic flaw?
Or is her inaction the point of it all?

Is her refusal to play her hand
A critique of women’s roles
In a world ruled by Man?

And what of that ending
That seems out of place?
I won't give a spoiler (that’d be a disgrace)

But melodrama and tears crop up near the end
When Lily appears
To want for a friend

Her author, Ms. Wharton, knew this world well
It looked like heaven
But was nasty as hell

It’s a fine portrait of Old New York
But please don’t forget another great work
An even better one, written

Some 16 years hence
Full of wisdom, passion, sensibility and sense
The title? You guessed it: The Age Of Innocence

Lily Bart, born poor but from a blue blood family, grew up privileged, well her mother pretended they had wealth, always telling her hard working husband, she will not live like a pig! He succumbs to an early grave, broke, at the turn of the century (20th), that is, the mother spends money, they haven't got, going to Europe, buying expensive clothes, jewelry, furniture, all for the sake of appearances, their friends, in High Society are very well - to- do. Since childhood, Lily is told one thing, never trained for anything else, her object in life, marry a rich man, restore the family honor, love doesn't matter, the only important concern, Gold... When her mother dies too, in poverty, discouraged, Lily is alone at the age of 19. Aunt Peniston, affluent, widowed sister, of Lily's father, surprisingly takes her in, she keeps mostly to herself, aloof, will not help Miss Bart, pay bills, ( Lily has a meager income), and her niece continues in New York society, with her friends, buying extravagant dresses, gambling at cards, bridge, a maid employed, visiting the houses of people, who live lavishly, in their own little world. Mrs.Trenor, her best friend is always inviting her to stay and enjoy the good life, with the snobs, at her mansion. Lily is glad to get out of her Aunt Julia's, boring, dowdy home. Her bills go unpaid, Lily must marry soon, but is too fastidious, for her own good, meeting the very shy millionaire Percy Gryce, dull, tongue tied, his only interest in life , collecting old books! That is when his pulse beats faster... But Lily loves Lawrence Selden, a fascinating man, they have interesting conversations together, she feels good being able to speak honestly, but he is just another struggling lawyer, a working man, who travels in high places and lives in a modest apartment. His cousin Gerty Farish, is one of the few real friends, Lily has, and she also loves Lawrence, helping the poor, becomes her life's work. And Gerty even takes, Miss Bart to see them and she gives some precious money, to their welfare, Lily feels happy, doing so. The skittish, straight- laced Mr. Gryce, gets cold feet, hearing about Miss Bart's gambling debts, what would mother think? Selden is also uncomfortable with Lily's reputation, undeserved, the crowd likes to gossip. She has another even less desirable candidate, Simon Rosedale, on the way to becoming the richest man in town, trying to enter the exclusive group, rather uncouth but is improving. He wants to marry the gorgeous woman, what a prize to show off to his new friends...Lily Bart, doesn't like him and needs to find someone quickly, at 29, her days of floating around the honeycomb are rapidly ending, she has to taste the honey and become the Queen... But Lily is asked to go on a Mediterranean yacht cruise, by Mrs. Dorset, months of pleasure, no worries, everything free, forget all her troubles, what will she do ?

Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) is one of my all-time favorite books, so to say I approach her other works with high expectations is something of an understatement. It’s not fair, I know, to hold one person’s greatest work as the benchmark for everything else they’ve done: we can’t expect Bob Dylan to write “Blonde on Blonde” every time he puts an album out, after all. But we kinda do it anyway, don’t we? “The House of Mirth” is an earlier novel of Wharton’s, and while you can see glimpses of what will make “The Age of Innocence” truly brilliant, her prose here is still sharpening its claws: beautiful and biting, but not as surgically insightful as it will one day be – while still being better than what most people manage in a lifetime.

Lily Bart was raised to expect luxury and impeccable taste to surround her at all times. But her mother’s lack of good sense quickly leads to her father’s ruin, which means she only has her radiant beauty as a bargaining chip with which to find a rich husband who can support her unrealistic expectations. But after years of holding out for the perfect party (i.e. she wants to marry for love AND money, the sap!) to come along, she is running out of time, and out of cash… This puts her in an uncomfortable position, and the wealthy “friends” who can support her lifestyle will take full advantage of her vulnerability.

Wharton grew up in that world, the overly privileged New York of the Gilded Age, and she knew it inside and out: its strange standards of conduct, its hypocrisies, its rituals. She also clearly thought a lot of it was silly, or she wouldn’t have written the realistic – even unromantic – novels she did. There never are happy endings in her novels, and Lily’s fall from grace is both cautionary tale and sad statement on the uncomfortable and precarious situations a certain class of women lived in. Just like Undine in “The Custom of the Country” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) , there is a sense of inevitability to Lily’s fate: the world she lives in has such a rigid code of conduct that it seems impossible that a woman in her situation could extricate herself from her circumstances and transcend them. It always upsets me to read about women stuck in those situations, where earning one’s independence is unthinkable, where every decision is governed by the (not so subtle) intention of finding a “sponsor”. It also upsets me to think of the fickleness and capriciousness of the people Lily is surrounded with, which effectively isolate her: she can’t actually trust that anyone has her back, because it all hangs on her reputation, doesn’t it? How little things change…

Lawrence Selden sees Lily Bart for exactly who she is, smart and charming, but a bit mercenary; he loves her despite her flaws, but he also can’t be the kind of man she wants to marry. The allure of material comfort is a stronger draw for Lily than the genuine mutual affection between herself and Selden, in a push-pull similar to Archer’s in “The Age of Innocence”: the demands of social expectations clash with her true desires – and she is even more helpless than Archer to reconcile them because as a woman, she simply has less options.

Lily is unfortunately no Countess Olenska (she has the charm and charisma, but too many illusions and not enough character), and I didn’t really root for her: all I could do was watch as she painted herself into a tighter and tighter corner, as she found herself with fewer and fewer options. The social strata she feels she belongs in is a cold and unforgiving place; it mystifies me that people could yearn to belong to such a crowd that badly. An interesting albeit embryonic version of a much better novel.

Lily Bart è un personaggio femminile che non si dimentica facilmente. Lei si definisce come un anemone di mare strappato alla sua roccia. L’anemone di mare è più colorato dei fiori della superficie terrestre, ha colori sgargianti o tinte pastello, in ogni caso spicca tra tutti per la sua bellezza e la meraviglia che ispira a chi guarda. Ma l’anemone di mare vive attaccato ad una roccia, la sua esistenza dipende esclusivamente dalle radici che penetrano a fondo nella roccia. Così è Lily, una bellissima donna nata in una ricca famiglia newyorkese, educata da sua madre ad essere una bella pianta o animale da ammirare nella buona società fino a quando non troverà un marito ricchissimo che continuerà a tenerla come un ornamento della sua casa. Ma in seguito ad un tracollo economico la famiglia Bart perde tutto. Come può il meraviglioso anemone di mare sopravvivere? Se lo si strappa al suo ambiente soffre e muore. Così è Lily, che non riesce a strapparsi dalla comoda roccia della ricchezza e degli agi della buona società, pur consapevole che non è altro che roccia, non è una terra fertile in cui le piante fioriscono rigogliose. Per questo motivo Lily mi ha conquistato, perché è dilaniata nel suo intimo dalla consapevolezza che lei quella ricchezza e quegli agi li detesta ma non può farne a meno, si dibatte a lungo per uscirne, trova a un certo punto l’aiuto dell’avvocato Selden, uno squattrinato ed intelligente uomo con il quale, unico, Lily si sente per un momento libera dalla roccia che le dà vita ma anche la opprime. La sua storia è magistralmente raccontata da Edith Warthon, con uno stile unico, elegante, raffinato e con uno scavo psicologico eccelso.
Un romanzo di cui si potrebbe scrivere a lungo, per me il primo di Edith Warthon. Bellissimo.

This book is very thought-provoking, as most great literature is. It's the tragic story of a beautiful young woman who is trapped by her upbringing and the society in which she is born, doomed to chase the American Dream as it is defined for her position, but to ultimately fail. But is it an actual failure on her part, or her unconscious rejection of the role society demands that she play? Lily's story raises questions about honesty and morality. At what price do these principles come? Is there a point at which it becomes prudent to abandon them, and if so, when? When a person is accused of crimes she has not committed, should she be constrained to keep to the moral high-ground when her enemy does not feel that constraint and is able to triumph over her because of it?

Lily is a difficult character to like or root for. She so often makes poor choices and does foolish things that you get all out of patience with her. A good part of this can be attributed to her upbringing and the expectations of society, but not all. She acts when you want her to do nothing, and does nothing when you want her to act. A good deal of it is simply because she doesn't know what she wants. She keeps making the same mistake time and again, without ever learning from it. Her self-knowledge comes at the end, of course, when it is too late to save her.

At the beginning, Lily seems pretty indistinguishable, aside from her beauty, from the frivolous, shallow ladies that are her friends, but by the end, she has proven that she is cut from finer cloth than those who reign as the queens of society. She clings to the honorable principles that she regards as part of the life she was raised to lead--one of refinement and sophistication, surrounded by luxury and beautiful things. She believes that certain types of behavior go along with that luxury, but she learns that most of her friends do not share her dedication to those ideals. Whether she should have adhered so stubbornly to these principles when all other aspects of that luxurious lifestyle had disappeared is one of the questions raised by the book.

This book is a scathing indictment of the people who ruled society in that day, but again, like most good literature, is an indictment of certain types of human behavior and is just as relevant today as it was then. There are and will always be power-hungry people, ruthless people who will do and say anything to get their way, and likewise there will always be those who will follow those ruthless, power-hungry people blindly; too cowardly, ignorant, or apathetic to resist their leadership. This book definitely merits a second reading!

This will end up being a review of The House of Mirth, sort of.

“Wasn’t she too beautiful, Lawrence? Don’t you like her best in that simple dress? It makes her look like the real Lily – the Lily I know.” p.142

Let’s begin with rich, beautiful people. I am neither, and I come from a long line of neithers. I come from hardy, working-class stock – Scots-English, mostly. Lots of ‘em orphaned or abandoned and left to fend for themselves as a result of various kinds of neglect, addictions or just plain bad luck. The women were tough mama bears who put their heads down and did what they had to do to put food on the table. On my dad’s side, his mother - Grandma Flora - left Dundee, Scotland sometime in the late teens/early 20s when she was the same age; roughly the time Wharton was writing.

From what I can piece together, Grandma Flora had been working as a domestic, with few prospects for anything but a life of slavery and grinding poverty. “Dingy” is the word Lily would use – but probably for a lifestyle about six rungs up the ladder that Grandma Flora was barely clinging to.

It was the strangest part of Lily’s strange experience, the hearing of these names, the seeing the fragmentary and distorted image of the world she had lived in reflected in the mirror of the working-girls’ minds. She had never before suspected the mixture of insatiable curiosity and contemptuous freedom with which she and her kind were discussed in this underworld of toilers who lived on their vanity and self-indulgence. p.302

Young Flora’s choices were to stay and toil for the rest of her life or take her chances on a new life in Canada. I think she may have had some distant relatives here, but really, she was on her own. She somehow ended up in Timmins, in the deep woods of northern Ontario near the Quebec border, and married a man from Leeds – a Bernardo orphan, we believe - who subsequently drank the money they were making from the fledgling bakery they had established together. When it went under, he moved her to Toronto on the likely assumption that he could find work there, then in 1932 in the depths of the Depression, he left her (never to be seen or heard from again) with children aged five, two and six months with no income and no prospects for a life other than one of, again, ongoing grinding poverty.

There are stories about how Grandma Flora, my two uncles and my father (the middle child) survived in a time when there was no welfare, no social programs to speak of, that would rip your heart out.

She worked for many years capping bottles on an assembly line at Crown Cork & Seal. The children somehow must have fended for themselves. At the age of two, the youngest came down with tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitorium in the west end of the city. He was there for more than a year – longer than his recovery likely took, but the hospital (founded as The Toronto Free Hospital for the Consumptive Poor, but known as the Weston Sanitorium) served as a quasi-orphanage for children whose parents were so impoverished they simply couldn’t look after them.

Grandma Flora. I now picture her gripping the hands of her other two, barely past toddlers themselves, and tugging them along Queen Street. They walked (on rare days, they could probably afford the streetcar for part of the trip) a round-trip of 40 km each Saturday to visit him. He was her baby, her bonnie lad. They all were. She held on tight.

Uncle Stan, the oldest–who never married while she was alive and lived with her until she died–left school at grade 6. The family needed the income. My father did a little better, making it to grade 10 and finding a spot in a coveted mechanical apprenticeship program and later into a permanent job on the railway.

On my mother’s side, it’s a similar story. Her father lasted with them a while longer, until one day he came home from work, lay down on the sofa, and his heart exploded. Mom was 12; her younger brother 10. This was a little later – 1948 – so times were not so desperate, and there was some kind of insurance that kept them going, at least for a little while. Still, mom had to leave school at age 16 with a high school equivalency diploma, and get herself an office job downtown.

“Why, what on earth are you doing?”
“Learning to be a milliner—at least, trying to learn,” she hastily qualified the statement.
Rosedale suppressed a low whistle of surprise. “Come off; you ain’t serious, are you?”
“Perfectly serious. I’m obliged to work for my living.” p.307

You worked. As soon as you could and at whatever you could. You didn’t choose a 'career.' You didn’t 'marry up.' It was, literally, unthinkable.

“Out of work-out of work! What a way for you to talk! The idea of your having to work; it’s preposterous.”
… “I don’t know why I should regard myself as an exception—” she began.
“Because you are; that’s why; and your being in a place like this is a damnable outrage. I can’t talk of it calmly.” p.316

----------------

I remember visiting Grandma Flora in her one-bedroom apartment in Scarborough, in a – yes – dingy white brick building, surrounded by others just like it. It had horrible smelling hallways and a terrifying elevator, which you took – even though you only needed to get to the second floor – because the stairwell was not an option.

Even then at the age of about 10 (and thanks to what I now recognize was my parents’ incredible luck, hard work, steadfast determination to rise out of the poverty they were raised in), I was condescending toward and frightened of the poverty Grandma Flora still lived in. Although, in her mind, she was in the Taj Mahal compared to where she had been.

But once inside, Grandma Flora would serve tea (always in pretty china cups – that was the ‘proper’ thing to do and probably the single luxury she had or had ever had) and empire biscuits that she had baked herself; the aroma enveloped you and provided relief and dramatic contrast to what was outside. I would often bring her drawings that I had done and she would exclaim and marvel over them in a most uncharacteristic way (she was a taciturn Scot, after all). The next visit, they would be in cheap, black plastic frames from Woolworth’s, hung prominently in the one room that was kitchen-living room-bedroom.

It was warm in the kitchen, which, when Nettie Struther’s match had made a flame leap from the gas-jet above the table, revealed itself to Lily as extraordinarily small and almost miraculously clean.

“We’ve got a parlour too,” she explained with pardonable pride …” p.333

Grandma Flora taught me how to cook Scotch eggs and, on crossed broomsticks there in that kitchen nook, the rudiments of highland dance. Don’t mistake me: she was not the apron-wearing, rosy-cheeked Grandma, all smiles, hugs, love and gingerbread. She was a tough, practical, judgmental, tee-totalling survivor of god knows what for god knows how long.

Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to Lily. She had had a premonition of it in the blind motions of her mating instinct, but they had been checked by the disintegrating influences of the life about her. All the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance; her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening in Nettie Struther’s kitchen. p.339

----------------

I became the family’s historian at about age 12, the result of a school assignment. Grandma Flora helped me sketch out the family tree, as much as we could anyway. It ended up looking like a maple after a particularly gusty October day, denuded by bad memory and so much unknown history. So many bare branches, disappearing into the foggy newsprint of my sketchbook. I was more interested in names and places – quantity, clarity – as I thought that was where the marks were. And still a little young to be asking what I wish I had asked her: what were you thinking, what were you feeling, from where did you draw your courage? Did you, when you trudged along Queen Street or over the Bloor Street bridge, ever think of throwing yourself over?

By the time those questions became of interest to me, it was too late to ask them. Grandma Flora hardened into a silent, angry knot and I was insolent and arrogant, clutching my B.A. (the first in my family to get one; the diploma professionally matted and framed, and hung proudly in my parents’ den next to my graduation picture). I had been raised to aspire to more. My parents had already climbed all the way up to what I suppose would be called lower middle-class; and my brother and I were to put as many more rungs as possible between ourselves and our family’s impoverished past.

In my parents’ eyes, those rungs were made of education and hard work. Work, as long as you can work, you can survive.

Talent was good – but secondary. It gave you something to build on, but mine were seen more as options for recreation and, at best, avocation; not tangible enough to provide a living. I could write and draw and play a little piano (my inherent lack of grace and athleticism made highland or any other kind of dance pretty much a dead-end), but none of these looked promising as a route to providing social and financial security – which, to them, meant having a nice house and a car and some savings in the bank, maybe a good pension plan. That was about as far ‘up’ as Mom and Dad could see – and in fact as far as they would get.

Since she had been brought up to be ornamental, she could hardly blame herself for failing to serve any practical purpose; but the discovery put an end to her consoling sense of universal efficiency. p.315

I know they spent many a sleepless night as I weighed my choices for university: was it to be art school or the more traditional route studying English lit? In the end, art school didn’t offer me a scholarship, so I went with the money (it would have been profligate not to), and English lit it was. They would have supported me either way, but their pride was couched in obvious relief knowing that the route I chose could lead to teaching (it didn’t, but it could have). Nursing, typing and teaching: these were the skills that, in my parents’ still-constrained minds (the feminist revolution hadn’t reached them), and for a young woman in my position, paid. They were worthwhile, acceptable and attainable goals. Dreams like Lily’s were not only out-of-reach, they weren’t even dreams. That kind of money – real money; the one percent in today's handy vernacular – you were born or married into. And it dirtied you. It called into question your moral fibre (the consoling rationalization of the poor).

She had learned by experience that she had neither the aptitude nor the moral constancy to remake her life on new lines, to become a worker among workers and let the world of luxury and pleasure sweep by her unregarded. … Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose leaf and paint the humming-bird’s breast? And was it her fault that the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to be hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral scruples? p.319

----------------

So, we are more alike than we seem, you and me, Lily Bart. Across time and place and class, we are more alike than we might seem. And there, my sympathy and empathy were engaged. There, Wharton spoke to me through Lily and touched my heart with her tragedy, which is Grandma Flora’s and mine and ours.

“What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole? One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—and you don’t know what it’s like in the rubbish heap!” p.327

Yes, it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities, and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation. …
She felt an intense longing to prolong, to perpetuate, the momentary exaltation of her spirit. If only life could end now—end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost possibilities, which gave her a sense of kinship with all the loving and foregoing in the world. p.340

__________________

Aug 8/12: Maybe, just maybe, the best book I've read all year. Who are you Edith Wharton, and where have you been all my life? Why has it taken me so long to find you?

Can't remember the last time I've been so engaged with characters and the world they inhabit.

Or been provoked, moved, stirred to pity, disgust, anger, sadness to the point where my only recourse was to scrawl margin notes in capital letters followed by much punctuation:

what a BITCH!!!!!
FINALLY - she realizes that????!!
OMG - what a simpering fop!!!
IT'S A TRAP, IT'S A TRAP!
noooooo LILY - too late, too late!!! :-(

and finally, :-( :-( :-( :-(

more of a review later, once I compose it - and myself.

The first time I was acquainted with Edith Wharton was a movie version of The Age of Innocence but not knowing anything about the author or that this movie was from a book. It is interesting how many movies (my watching a movie or TV was more my activity than reading a book now & then) I have seen that were based on books. I read The Age of Innocence fairly recently & of course the book is better by far & even though I enjoyed that novel -The House of Mirth was what I classify as a love rating! It was a slow getting my groove into reading this but maybe being tired had something to my reading pace was the case because I finished 1/2 of this book in 2 days. It took 8 days to read this novel. I am finished early this morning & I will be thinking of this book for quite sometime, another sign of a great book. The House of Mirth was published in 1905 but the setting is New York City in the 1890's. Wharton depicts the wealthy society of this era through Lily Barton, the main character of the story. Lily is 29 years old unmarried woman looking to increase her financial standing in society with a match with a wealthy society man without the help of her parents who died while Lily was a teen. Her parents left her penniless but with the help of an older aunt who takes Lily into her home. Lily's lifestyle are at odds with her aunt who tries to keep her eyes closed to anything she finds distasteful. Lily lives the high society life with the help of her friends who help fund her with clothes & other necessities except money. She is a servant to her friends wants & whims which Lily tries to accommodate & be helpful. A wealthy husband is the means to the end for Lily no matter how distasteful the marriage might be to her, the loss of all she desires would be the worst result so she looks for a marriage with benefits not of love. Many chances escape her & even though she is desirable she has been out in society for over 10 years & no match is where the story begins. Lily's life takes a turn when she has a chance meeting with Lawrence Selden on the way to a weekend visit with friends. Refreshments are taken at Selden's apartment with the notice of up comer Simon Rosedale. What is Lily to do but marry a rich society man or is there something else for her? Is this the life she really wants to live, it seems to be the life she was brought up to aspire to live. Here are some of the issues brought to play in the story. How one person is the scapegoat & singled out where others have done fair worse the the fall person is baffling especially when the indiscretions are obviously of the charger. It is interesting how the upcoming want to be part of the elite society & will do all the can to be one of them, yet the society will always make a distinction. Looking at life through the eyes of both sides of the social order of the classes, and seeing what is important foremost.

OTR NBC University Theater October 9, 1949

https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com...

n  “Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury. It was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.” n  
n

Veblen in his 'Theory of Leisure Class' (written six years before this book) argues that one of the way leisure class show their wealth is by maintaining people who will sit idly for them. The chief example is of wives, where richest men do not want their wives to be doing paid jobs - do and own charities - yes, art exhibitions -yes, partying - yes, just not doing any sort of job. The tendency becomes less visible as we go down the ladder of social class, In India, one can still observe the trend. If they are rich enough, many men would rather have housewives and many women would prefer to be housewives. And if they are wealthier still, they would have servants so that their wives won't have to work. Among such people, a woman earning her living is scorned at and is liable to be cast away by society. Besides wives, the super rich might also maintain a class of 'friends' to keep company.

Lily Bart is such a 'friend' and has been raised to be such a wife of a rich man. The only thing she knows well and is good at is 'manners' of leisure class - and these manners won't earn her any money. Higher standards of living are addictive and she is addicted, but she doesn't have any wealth of her own. And since she can't earn, marrying a rich man is her only option - which seems difficult as she is aging (it is a society where an unmarried women nearing thirties is likely to attract suspicions and prejudice attached to the phrase 'old maiden', another thing still visible in India) and, moreover, she also wants to marry for love. To her misfortune, she happened to be a character in Wharton's realistic novel, instead of being a character in one of Austen's happily-ever-after tales.

n  
“She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.” n  
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One must bow low in respect to Wharton's craft. I mean there are lots of writers who have better stories or things to tell and writers who have awesome literary techniques at their disposal but, very few can beat her,IMO, when it comes to perfection of telling a realistic story in traditional manner (you know no stream-of-consciousness, no magical realism, no Gothic castles etc) And her cynicism (cynics are always sexy), and the way she brings out the helplessness of her character whether it is Lily Bart, Newland Archer or Ethan Frome. She also kept a dog in her lap when she wrote, if her new Goodreads avatar is to be believed.