Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: A Study of Societal Pressure, Moral Choices, and Women’s Struggles Essay

Introduction

Writers observing what is occurring in their countries are concerned about the moral evolution of a moneyed society, expressed in a pragmatic rejection of ethics. Edith Wharton is no exception; trying to draw the reader’s attention to her concerns, she created novels that ridiculed morality. She criticized a society where the primary measure is money, and concepts such as conscience, honor, and dignity have been relegated to the background.

However, of particular interest is the novel The House of Mirth, which tells the story of a young, beautiful Lily Bart. Despite the inherent genre, reality is the novel’s central theme rather than criticism. Wharton’s creation is a sad drama about vocation, love, and, most significantly, the dependence of women in the aristocratic and bourgeois society of the early 20th century. The main character, Lily Barton, embodies Wharton’s suffering. At a certain point in life, Lily and Edith have faced the choice of love or money, and their fates represent that a woman cannot be happy unless she can reclaim her rightful place in the community.

Lack of Freedom in Life Choices of Both the Author and the Protagonist

The major problem of Wharton’s work is the lack of freedom to choose one’s life path, which is characteristic of both the author and her heroine. The House of Mirth is a world of fashionable mansions in New York City, which is, in fact, a world of social and moral disasters. One can agree with Ellie Ragland Sullivan that the inspiration for this idea is the author’s fate (4).

Wharton is not a girl from a low-income family, and her parents immediately reject her decision to fall in love with a man from another circle. On the forced advice of her parents, the writer made another choice, leading to the life of two different people who kept secular habits but never were mentally together. Lily Barton faces the problem of love, which she has instantly relegated to the level of that very ordinariness in which moments of ghostly luxury and freedom have been replaced by long hours of captivity (Wharton 108). Like the author, the protagonist faces a tough choice between true love and a rich life.

Unfulfilled Love and Emotional Sadness

Undoubtedly, the novel reflects Wharton’s sadness over unfulfilled love. Particular realism creates the impression of unintentional plot development in the novel and the spontaneity of events. Still, for the most part, the main character’s introspection is portrayed through her internal monologues and unspoken direct speech.

Lily Bart gives the impression of a frivolous, short-sighted, calculating girl urgently needing marriage (Wharton 17). In her dreams, she envisions a lovely, cozy home furnished exclusively to her exacting taste and dinner parties, the duties of a socialite. Ellie Ragland Sullivan rightly points out that by presenting her heroine to readers in such an unfavorable light, the author gradually introduces her to her real life rather than this outer shell (3). In this way, the author portrays what is behind the luxury and prejudice she has faced.

The Pursuit of Self-Realization

Equally important in a novel is the theme of self-realization that the writer and her heroine strive for. Wharton herself believes her career has been affected by her ex-husband’s constant cheating. However, in The House of Mirth, she has, perhaps for the first time, literally described the algorithm of how a quite cultured man can civilize the life of a secular, educated, and even to a certain extent, independent woman. The vague promises, the sticky nets of chatter and rationalizations, paralyze the will, shake the ground beneath her feet, and derail Lily Barton’s entire independent destiny (McGrath). The House of Mirth is considered an autobiographical novel because only a person who has experienced it can portray male hypocrisy with clarity and a stubborn unwillingness to see the objective difference in potential vulnerability.

Social Constraints and Wharton’s Personal Insight

Wharton’s own experience enabled her to portray in such detail the core values of the society to which her heroine, Lily, was bound. A society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers may have a deeper meaning than its members may realize. Wharton anticipates a theme concerning many twentieth-century American writers, especially in the twenties: F.S. Fitzgerald and E. Hemingway would write about the very rich.

The writer found an angle in this novel that gave this theme a special twist. Her frustration with society facilitated the realization of the idea. According to Sullivan, Wharton believed that such a mindless and empty community could only gain dramatic meaning through what its emptiness and thoughtlessness destroy (Sullivan 4). This novel is thus one of the most eloquent indictments of a social system based on wealth and privilege.

Gender Discrimination in Literary Expression

What is remarkable is how the author depicts the discrimination against men she faced in portraying the love story. The author notes that Selden is not rich, but his situation is fundamentally different (Wharton 12). He can live alone in his apartment and still be appreciated in society.

Without losing respect, Selden even has an affair with a married woman (Wharton 12). At the same time, Lily is thrown out of society quite innocently, her reputation undermined by the mere suspicion of having an affair with a married man. Wharton makes the reader feel the alienating power of such a situation from the beginning.

Understanding Social Laws Through Experience

Wharton’s main creative task is not to materially recreate everyday life but to comprehend the underlying laws of social existence using experience. Ellie Ragland Sullivan notes that adherence to the realist tradition manifested in the desire to create typical characters in specific historical circumstances to raise the problem of human moral choice and inner dignity (3). It is valid, as the novel covers the theme of human significance.

Wharton’s realistic treatment of the material enables her to recreate and analyze not just the experience of a person of a particular socio-economic position in a particular historical period. It enabled us to show that it is precisely a woman’s experience. She explains perfectly to Selden the difference in their position concerning marriage and the material side of life: “… A girl must marry, and a man can if he wants to” (Wharton 12). The critical pathos of her work is expressed here: in a world where only material values are worshipped, man is alienated and humiliated to the point of being a prisoner of civilization.

Lily Bart’s Struggle Against a Hostile Society

The novel’s protagonist, Lily Bart, a fragile, charming girl, confronts the pleasure-seeking society. Like Wharton’s, her story is a human struggle with a hostile environment where complete human existence is impossible. Lily cannot endure her ordeal: exhausted physically and mentally, she carelessly takes an overdose of sleeping pills and dies (McGrath). Her mission is decorative; she is precious not as a human being but as a jewel, and in marriage, her role is to be a beautiful showcase for her husband’s wealth.

The portrayal of Lily’s fate demonstrates the importance of making the right choice and raises the theme of a woman’s place in society (Sullivan 4). This statement is true because Wharton’s decision to devote herself to literary work is evidence of her disapproval of her surroundings. After all, it violated one of the generally accepted rules: the high society of New York was born to consume, not to create art (McGrath). However, despite the difficulties, the author could walk the difficult path to the heights and, unlike her heroine, live a happy life.

Conclusion

Thus, the fates of Lily Barton and Wharton are closely intertwined. At a certain point, under the pressure of society, they both make a decisive choice affecting their fate. In the novel The House of Mirth, the female theme with autobiographical notes becomes central in Wharton’s work. The critical attitude of the writer to modern reality, her belief in human dignity, and her resistance to hostile circumstances manifested in the treatment of this theme are particularly acute.

Existing societies and cultures impose false ideas about themselves and their place in the world. It deprives them of the possibility of personal development and dooms them to an inferior and immoral existence within rigid rules and regulations. At the same time, a proper moral choice under such conditions inevitably requires a woman to confront her environment heroically. This path of struggle was chosen bythe writer herself, who has passed the internal path of its development and has found her way as an artist through a conscious moral choice.

Works Cited

McGrath, Charles. “Wharton Letter Reopens a Mystery.” New York Times, 21 Nov 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/books/21wharton.html

Ragland, Sullivan. “The Daughter’s Dilemma: Psychoanalytic Interpretation and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.” Psychoanalytic Criticism and HM, vol. 2, no. 4, 1994, pp. 1-12.

Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. Broadview Press, 2005.