The House of Mirth

The House of Mirth follows Lily Bart, a young(ish?) woman in New York's high society in the early 20th century, in the days of wild Wall Street speculation, over-the-top opulence, and aristocratic ennui. Lily, however, does not actually have the money of the society she keeps with, as her parents died and left her broke and living with her aunt. Her only aspiration, it seems, is to continue to live life the only way she's known it: with egregious, superfluous expense, more or less doing nothing but gossiping and wearing Parisian dresses and playing bridge. To continue to do this, she must marry into wealth – but each time she's on the precipice of snagging some nice (read: terribly boring, sometimes boorish) rich man, she does something to sabotage it. She lives with the imp of freedom and independence whispering into her ear, though that is totally at odds with the live she wants to live; thus she is constantly at odds with herself. There's also something of an underplayed romance with her and Lawrence Selden, but, meh. To me this felt ill-developed so as to cause no flutterings in my heart.

Anyways, blah blah, she continues to ruin herself via self-sabotage and having really shitty friends, but they keep her around, it seems only because she is very pretty.

Suffice to say that I didn't like this one much. The flourish of the writing, typical of the era, captivated me at first with delightfully overwrought phrases, but eventually after a few chapters that wears, and it seems like the book just drags on and on well after the point is made pretty clear. Also, as a self-respecting, independent woman reading this, I just wanted her to make up her mind already and sell her soul to an unhappy relationship and bountiful wealth or independence and poverty. I get that it's not so simple (there were 200 pages expounding upon the inner turmoil) but it's frustrating as a reader.

The farther back in time you go, the more a woman's looks were central to her prospects in life. When we meet Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, she's 29 and worried that her celebrated loveliness is beginning to fade before she's managed to marry herself off to someone who can support her. Lily was raised in wealth, taught to abhor anything “dingy”...and then her father lost their fortune and died and her mother followed him shortly thereafter, leaving Lily poor and alone. She was begrudgingly picked up by her aunt Julia, who gives her the right address and some pocket money, but not nearly enough to keep herself afloat on the glittering social circuit, where she needs this season's stylish hats and gloves and dresses and is expected to gamble regularly at cards. It seems hopeful, though: she's on her way to her friend Judy's house, where she expects to meet and charm and become engaged to Percy, a very eligible bachelor.

Instead, she feels no chemistry with Percy and earns the ire of married socialite Bertha when Bertha's ex-paramour Lawrence Selden turns up to see Lily. Bertha splits up the budding romance between Lily and Percy, leaving Lily in a position to have to ask Judy's husband, Gus, to make some investments for her to help keep her afloat. Gus views this as an investment in earning Lily's...favors, and though she manages to keep her head above water and even rise briefly, it all comes crashing down when Bertha invites Lily on a trip to keep her husband George distracted while Bertha carries on with her latest conquest. When George discovers the truth, though, Bertha spreads lies painting Lily as a temptress instead, which begins Lily's descent through the social classes.

This book plays with the same kind of themes Wharton would return to in her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence, which I read a few years before I read this: the artificiality of the upper-class New York “society” in which Wharton herself was born and raised and the way it constrains and even punishes real feeling primary among them. Lily herself is a great heroine: it's so easy to identify with her simultaneous longing to do the “right” thing and make it easy on herself by just finding someone rich to marry her and keep her in comfort and to be true to herself and wait for the kind of real connection she feels with Lawrence. Even though women are by and large much less dependent on men for material support today, I think there still exists the temptation, especially as one approaches 30, to just settle for someone good enough and check “marriage” off the list of things you constantly get asked about as a woman. And the power of the rumor mill, and its ability to ruin reputations, remains potent.

It's thematically similar enough to The Age of Innocence that comparison is inevitable, and for my money, Innocence is the better-developed and more rewarding work. But Mirth was also written 15 years beforehand, so it's not surprising that it's less mature. It does bring the added context of a female perspective, and it's partly refreshing to see how far we've come and at the same time how many things are still largely the same in terms of the constraints that society as a whole places on women. I will say one of the things that didn't quite work for me was the novel's central romance: it's never really developed, we're just meant to sort of assume that they've fallen for each other. It's necessary to have established for a late character moment to work, but it's done so superfluously that it doesn't quite have the power it could have. All in all, if you like a sharp social critique and old-society novels, or just like Wharton, it's definitely worth reading. Otherwise, pick up The Age of Innocence instead.