Girls just want to have fun

A review of The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (New York: Scribner, 1905). Ebook.

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Lily Bart is a beautiful young New York socialite. Although she grew up in wealthy surroundings, her father lost the family fortune, and then both parents died when she was 20, leaving her without money. She lives with her aunt, which at least lets her live surrounded by wealth (even if the house's décor is outdated) and move in the social circles she's accustomed to. Lily receives a small allowance from her aunt, which she spends on clothing, but that doesn't leave her enough to cover the thousands of dollars of gambling debts she has incurred playing bridge.

And so Lily seeks a husband. Her options are limited at her advanced age of 29. Her friend Lawrence Seldon is a lawyer with good social connections, but he's not rich enough. Simon Rosedale, a Jewish businessman and Seldon's landlord, is wealthy and climbing the social ladder, but unrefined in his manners. And Percy Gryce is wealthy enough, but he's a rather boring collector of Americana. Nonetheless, Lily sets her sights on Percy.

Lily learns that her acquaintance Bertha Dorset is bored with her husband, the wealthy George Dorset, and has been in an affair with Selden. Lily keeps her knowledge of the relationship secret. Nonetheless, the vindictive Bertha spreads rumours about Lily's love life and gambling habits. This scares Percy away from her. Lily's reputation suffers greatly and begins to decline.

I preceded this novel with Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage, so I went from a novel in which the female protagonist worries about being forcibly married into a Mormon harem so her husband can steal her land, to one in which the female protagonist worries about having tea with a male friend on his balcony in case his landlord gets suspicious and her reputation suffers.

The title of this 1905 novel, Edith Wharton's second, comes 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." Wharton describes the decadent upper crust of New York society: extremely wealthy, frivolous, decadent, and concerned only with leisure, money, and status. Wharton herself was raised in this pseudo-aristocracy, and thus she was in a good position to observe and criticize (satirize?) the foolishness of the upper class. Lily herself is amongst the biggest of the fools. She wants the benefits of high society, but not to be bound by its strictures. It's the conflict between what she wants to be and what she is expected to be that ultimately causes her downfall.

The House of Mirth's biggest weakness may be its ending. Wharton tells us, about halfway through, that Lily has a particular habit. Upon reading that, I knew exactly how the novel was going to finish. Lo and behold, I was right. Like the other tragic, early-20th-century novels I've read in recent years, such as Yates' Revolutionary Road and O'Hara's Appointment at Samarra, Lily Bart's story has a particular … inevitability to its end.

I studied Wharton's 1920 novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence, in my American literature course in university. I think it was my favourite novel on the syllabus. I suppose I was hoping for something similar from The House of Mirth. Both books at least deal with the societal expectations of New York City's upper class. But while The Age of Innocence was by no means a romantic comedy, it was not the harsh tragicomedy that is The House of Mirth. I enjoyed her later novel a lot more.