Wives have begun to divorce their husbands. Where The House of Mirth is decidedly 20th century is in its frank depiction of the changing sexual mores around the behaviour of married women. In The House of Mirth, sexual deception is rewarded, while virginity remains a volatile property, inciting suspicion And there is, too, a lingering 19th-century feel to Wharton’s disembodied approach to human physicality – especially striking in a novel whose central conundrum is sexual: Lily, a pedigreed virgin without fortune, craves the sensual pleasures of life among the very rich but cannot bring herself to marry a wealthy man, her only means of securing those pleasures for life.
Cars were exotic playthings telephones hadn’t supplanted visiting cards electric light was a harsher alternative to candles. Although the 20th century’s defining technologies had all been invented by the time it was published in 1905, they had yet to substantially alter even the affluent world of the novel’s protagonist, Lily Bart. On its surface, The House of Mirth reads like a 19th-century novel. All of which moves me to assert that Edith Wharton’s second novel is a masterpiece that remains electrifying and relevant in our 21st century. But each time, I find the novel’s tragic power intact, even as the nature of the tragedy seems to shift – from the perils of living by one’s looks (teenage reading) to the cruelty of the world towards women (early adult reading) to the struggle for personal freedom in a money-obsessed culture (adult reading) to my most recent (middle-aged, I’ll reluctantly call it) appreciation of the novel as an artefact of the Gilded Age that lays bare that era’s pathologies. After all, the world and I have both changed quite a bit since I was a teenager. I recall the experience as my coming of age as a reader – when I learned, years before discovering that I wanted to write, what transformative power a work of fiction can have.īecause my attachment to the book is so personal, I tend to reread it with slight trepidation that the magic may have fled. I read it as a teenager, during a stifling summer visit to my grandparents, when my literary tastes were unsophisticated (Archie comics were high on my list). T he House of Mirth was the first literary classic that I picked up entirely on my own, without prodding from a teacher or a parent, and adored.
0 kommentar(er)
