Edith Wharton`s The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton`s The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton`s The House of Mirth

The novel The House of Mirth ' was published in 1905 . In this work Wharton vividly portrays personal relations depicting that the new rich separate out the spheres of men and women more radically than ever before . Edith Wharton is s feminist writer who gathered together a vast stock of miscellaneous information and ideas , and that the use she made of them gave her novel sometimes an air of greater understanding and comprehensiveness than her own experience of life could supply

. Thesis Female characters depicted in the novel are feminists who fight for freedom and personal identity but they suffer greatly because of extreme sense of dignity and desire to oppose men

The main character , Lily Bart , is a feminist looking for a prosperous wealthy man to marry . It is clear from `The House of Mirth ' that the young woman 's task in life is to get herself as 'well ' married as she can , in the financial and the social sense . Lily is a feminist who takes heart in the hope that it may take much time and effort to achieve her dream . She tries to unit her supreme capacity of love with the sacred individuality of her life . Lily wants to have the same rights as men have , to be equal with them , and that is why she invents for herself a new role . Wharton describes Lily 's hopes : Lily 's preference would have been for an English nobleman with political ambitions and vast estates or , for second choice , an Italian prince with a castle in the Apennines and an hereditary office in the Vatican (Wharton 2005 . From the psychological point of view , these hopes and ideals were caused by lack of money and low social status Lily wants to forget . Put all of these together the author creates a complicated emotional mix of feminist ideas and desperation . Ned Van Alstyne , connoisseur of the "female outline " sees Lily as the epitome of physical perfection (Sapora 1993 , 371

As Lily 's self splits inwardly , reader see it fragmenting into the multiple images of the different sections . The beginning chapters mark a turning-point : the change of pace which plunges both Lily and readers into a broken course through worlds built on different assumptions After this , the narrative divides and reassembles its characters more speedily consigning them to the Caribbean , London or Alaska , and bringing them back almost within a sentence (Rosk 2003 . It takes Lily rapidly through repetitions of previous events , in distorted forms and different settings . New York is reconvened in Monte Carlo the country-house drawing-room has its 'flamboyant copy . a caricature approximating the real thing (Wharton 2005 ) in the loud milieu of the Gormers Fifth Avenue finds its ghostly shadow in the social void of the hotel world . Lily , like Alice , seems to have passed into a grotesque wonderland where she begins to lose her sense of herself . Wharton describes this change as : [Lily] had an odd sense...