The House of Mirth

Author: Edith Wharton

Outdoor reading (which is nice to do before it gets too hot!)

Category: I first read The House of Mirth about 12 years ago—because I thought it was a classy thing to read. And I don’t remember what my impression was. I read it for the second time about three years ago, while unemployed, and I got a whole lot more out of it then. This is the third time I’ve read it (yes, I really have a tendency to reread things).

 My thoughts: Have I mentioned that I think Edith Wharton was a genius and insanely talented? I really really love her! The House of Mirth is a tragic tale of Lily Bart, a woman who, at the beginning of the novel, is at the top of New York society at the turn of the 20^th century. She is groomed to be married, and seems to fight an internal battle over this—she makes efforts to attract wealthy suitors, but then loses interest (is it self-sabotage?) and her chances wither away. Two potential suitors circle her throughout the novel—Lawrence Selden, a sort of middle-class lawyer, and Simon Rosedale, an upstart businessman who is in the process of elbowing his way into society.  I once heard this book described as a Cinderella story in reverse (by whom, I don’t remember). That pretty much sums it up, as Lily experiences a gradual but definite (and heartbreaking) fall from grace.

It’s frustrating that Lily did not have more survival skills. She lacked cunning and the ability to look a reality in the face and deal with it. Other people do wrong by her, but part of Lily’s downfall is her own fault. To me, she needed more toughness and to make better decisions. I think also she does not have the ability to read people, and is a bit naïve. Bertha Dorset, a society maven (and resident mean girl) commits a casual strike against Lily at the beginning of the story. Lily could have learned not to trust her—but instead she puts herself in a situation where she is basically at Bertha’s mercy, and then becomes the victim of a mean betrayal by Mrs. Dorset. I wish that Lily had just married Selden. Or if she didn’t want to be middle class (because Selden was not quite poor), she should have just sucked it up and married one of the dull men whom she had been groomed to marry. Lily kind of wants to have her cake and eat it too, and she is a frustrating heroine. But despite all this, I really feel sorry for her. She is not a villain, and she is not a cruel person. She doesn’t strike back when attacked—which is frustrating, but admirable. I tell you, it’s a great book that can elicit such emotions about a fictional main character!

 It’s also interesting to read this book with Undine Spragg from The Custom of the Country in mind. Undine had the toughness and cunning (too much so, to be sure) that Lily lacked.  Undine Spragg knew how to play the society game. Lily couldn’t and didn’t. At one point, Lily tells her friend, Carry Fisher, “The world is too vile.” “It’s not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it is to fight it on its own terms,” says Carrie. That’s what our dear Ms. Spragg did. In the end, I think The House of Mirth is a cautionary tale.

 I was reading this book when I travelled to New York recently. There, my mother and I visited the Morgan Library and the Frick Collection—the latter is on Fifth Avenue, which was well trod by Lily Bart in the novel. It was quite nice being in the midst of reading this amazing book (I really do love it) and being in the world that Lily Bart—and Edith Wharton—knew so well.

 Great passage: But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract conception of poverty, another to be brought in contact with its human embodiments. Lily had never conceived of these victims of fate otherwise than in the mass. That the mass was composed of individual lives, innumerable separate centres of sensation, with her own eager reachings for pleasure, her own fierce revulsions from pain—that some of these bundles of feeling were clothed in shapes not so unlike her own, with eyes meant to look on gladness, and young lips shaped for love—this discovery gave Lily one of those sudden shocks of pity that sometimes decentralize a life.

 P.S. At a society party that Lily attends, female guests dress up as subjects of famous works of art in a tableaux vivant. Lily dresses up as Mrs. Lloyd by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Mrs. Lloyd by Sir Joshua Reynolds

When I read this book before, I had no idea who most of the artists were—like Watteau, Kauffman, and Sir Joshua Reynolds himself. But now, after taking an art history class last year, I know about these people! Yay!

 Up next, Snobs by Julian Fellowes