House of Mirth Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth presents an interesting study of the social construction of subjectivity. The Victorian society which Wharton's characters inhabit is defined by a rigid structure of morals and manners in which one's identity is...

One of the tragedies in The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is that Lily Bart is unable to marry Laurence Selden and thereby secure a safe position in society. Their relationship fluctuates from casual intimacy to outright love depending on how...

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...

Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth creates a subtle, ironic, and superbly crafted picture of the social operation of turn-of-the-century New York. In her harsh expression of community, she succeeds in portraying a world of calculation operating...

The society in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth is immersed in an economy of risk. The men work as businessmen, trading on the fluctuating stock market; the women spend their time at the bridge table wagering their family savings. Wharton makes a...

Nature, whether in the form of the arctic tundra of the North Pole or the busy street-life of Manhattan, was viewed by Naturalist writers as a phenomena which necessarily challenged individual survival; a phenomena, moreover, which operated on...

Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, is understood from chapter 1 to be a female of remarkable beauty. Throughout the novel she is classified as uniquely attractive, a woman to be desired by men and subtly threatening to...

You are Ibsen. Review House of Mirth.

Which of the domestic palaces in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth claims itself as the titular source of the tragic novel? Each offers strong evidence in its own favor. There is the bucolic decadence of the...

In Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, the cold and unforgiving world of New York's high society never favors the perspective of the outsider, or the looker-on. But the author seems to award a great deal of credit to those characters who adapt to...

He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her...

In Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth, money is the most evident and most basic value held by the characters who populate the author's turn-of-the-century New York. Essentially, money is valued for only one reason - it provides the means by which...

The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton, chronicles the tragic life of Lily Bart in New York's fashionable high society. Exquisitely beautiful, Lily was trained to think of herself not as a woman capable of defining her own goals and making emotional...

Edith Wharton's IThe House of Mirth] tells the story of Lily Bart's fall from the upper reaches of the social spectrum to the lowly depths of the working class. The characters in the novel represent all levels of society, from the urban poor to...

According to the Marxist theoretician Louis Althusser, society's class structure and gender roles depend primarily not on economics, but on the power of attitudes and ideas. In Edith Wharton's classic work, The House of Mirth, characters show...

In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, protagonist Lily Bart is on a quest for happiness. In her case, happiness embodied in the image of marriage to a rich and indulgent husband and, subsequently, the ability to behave as a proper woman of...

The relationship between the ideal and the reality is many times pictured in black and white. The ideal can be defined as a conception of something in its perfection, whereas reality is defined as something that exists independently of ideas...

In Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth, the beautiful but helpless Lily Bart is never able to escape from the follies and superficialities of the society that she is born into. According to a verse in Ecclesiastics which the novel was titled...

The Gilded Age of the late 19th century saw the rise of extravagant hats, hairstyles, and high society. Subsequently, the Gilded Age was also host to an increasingly treacherous gap between the rich and the poor and stifling social restrictions...

Commonly called “a novel of manners” because of the way characters are shown thinking and speaking about how people in society ought to conduct themselves, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton focuses chiefly on Lily Bart, a woman whose social...

In The House of Mirth, Percy Gryce is a rich young eligible bachelor upon whom Lily, one of Wharton's central characters, sets eyes on. Gryce is used by Wharton as a vehicle to convey the shallowness and brutality of the New York high society,...

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton offers a multidimensional and fluid analysis of social class. Initially, Lily attempts to belong to the upper class. However, through a series of unfortunate decisions, we witness Lily’s inevitable descent into...

In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton uses weather in a variety of ways that provide symbolic significance along with a vivid setting. Wharton uses weather, climate, and the change of seasons to foreshadow events in the immediate future and to...

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) is a novel of society and manners, following two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, in their bids for love and marriage. Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905) focuses on New York’s high society and...

In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton introduces us to the opulent society of New York during the Gilded Age. The entire novel unravels a tedious model of social etiquette in which every person’s action is either criticized or judged by their...