“And, what is most evident, she has no inner desire to be wed. When the novel opens Lily is an orphant and at the age of twenty-nine, and she has failed in the business of getting married. Therefore, Maureen Howard describes her mother as “a devil’s chaplain of Darwins note on the cruelty of nature“ (Bell 1995: 144). She trained Lily to become a decorative object. After her father’s financial ruin, Lily’s mother selected her daughters beauty as the dominant strain for survival. From a young age, Lily was taught that her only goal in life was to find a wealthy man to marry. Lily Bart was born into the upper class of the New York society. “Wharton’s use of this biblical text emphazises the tragedy of the novel: the human failure to distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic.“ (Singley 1995: 70). Ecclesiastes is a skeptical and pessimistic text that had, at the turn of the century, a special relevance for a society engaged in material and spiritual debate. She selected the title for her book from the bible, from Ecclesiastes 7.4 – “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth“ (Singley 1995: 70). The tension between the real and the ideal is expressed throughout the novel, and also from Wharton’s choice of title to her imagery and characterization.

Edith Wharton reflects in her fiction issues and arguments, such as criticism on conspicuous consumption in the leisure class, the economics of marriage for women and “the physical rigors and deprivations of working-class life for many Americans“ (Ammons 1990: ix), broadly current in her culture. The book is one of the few novels which can claim to rank as literature“ (Ammons 1990: 313). In Lily Bart she has created a character that will haunt the imagination of the reader and live in his memory. She can evoke the emotions of pity, horror and love. The Saturday Review (a contemporary London paper) wrote in 1906 “It is the striking art of Miss Wharton as a writer that keeps the reader’s sympathy from first to last. That is the exact description of a mental state that many will probably experience on reading The House of Mirth“ (Ammons 1990: 309). E.E.Hale, JR., a contemporary critic, wrote in his review: “we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the bussiest kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. In The House of Mirth Lily’s struggle with the New York society and her fall from this circle of people is traced.Ĭritics loved this book. This society is hypocritical and unkind to those who do not completely conform to their rules and expectations.

The novel is the story of Lily Bart who is a product of the society of New York. The House of Mirth is one of Edith Wharton’s most famous and most discussed novels.

The house of mirth review