House of Mirth

From Jeffrey Meyers's Introduction toThe House of Mirthby Edith Wharton The House of Mirth, conventional in form but still very readable and perceptive about the social roles of modern women, appeared almost a century ago, in 1905. That year, Japan's defeat of Russia led to the first Russian Revolution, the formation of workers' Soviets, and the mutiny on the battleshipPotemkin. In 1905 Einstein proposed his First Theory of Relativity and Freud published hisThree Contributions to the Theory of Sex. There were also new currents of modernism in art, music, and literature. John Singer Sargent paintedThe Marlborough Family, Henri RousseauThe Hungry Lion, and Henri MatisseLa Joie de vivre. Franz Lehar composedThe Merry Widow, Claude DebussyLa Mer, and Richard StraussSalome. G. B. Shaw brought outMajor Barbara, H. G. WellsKipps, and E. M. ForsterWhere Angels Fear to Tread. There was considerable unrest in the United States as well as in Russia, and as the historian John Higham noted, "It was a time of mass strikes, widening social chasms, unstable prices, and a degree of economic hardship unfamiliar in earlier American history. Edith Wharton was intimately acquainted with the ruling class, with people who had money and property, wealth and power. As Louis Auchincloss observed: "She knew their history and their origins, their prejudices and ideals, the source of their money and how they spent their summers." She seemed to hate the society she belonged to, and described it with pervasive irony and sharp wit. Her philistine and hypocritical characters are spoiled and selfish, idle and self-indulgent, hedonistic and materialistic; their social hierarchy, through which Lily Bart makes her tragic descent, is as rigid as the Army or the Church. In a society rife with financial scandal and sexual intrigue, anything is allowed as long as the transgressors are wealthy and maintain a respectable facade. The "vulture" Carry Fisher, who's twice been divorced and receives money from Gus Trenor, has powerful protectors and is invited everywhere. The fierce and vindictive Bertha Dorset has flagrantly indiscreet affairs with Selden and Silverton but, ironically protected by her victim Lily Bart, manages to maintain both her reputation and her marriage. In her revealing introduction to the 1936 reprint ofThe House of Mirth, Wharton explained her choice of subject and suggested her major theme: "When I wroteThe House of MirthI held, without knowing it, two trumps in my hand. One was the fact that New York society in the nineties was a field as yet unexploited by an novelist who had grown up in that little hot-house of traditions and conventions; and the other, that as yet these traditions and conventions were unassailed, and tacitly regarded as unassailable." She admitted that she "wrote about totally insignificant people, and 'dated' them by an elaborate stage-setting of manners, furniture and costume." Such people, she said, "always rest on an underpinning of wasted human possibilities," and their sadly vulnerable victim was "the tame and blameless Lily Bart." Ironically listing Lily's misdemeanors, Wharton described her as "a young girl of their world who rouged, smoked, ran into debt, borrowed money, gambled andcrowning horror!went home with a bachelor friend to take tea in his flat!" Wharton's caustic novel, piercing the secure stockade of convention, alarmed and disturbed the rulers of New York. In a letter of November 11, 1905, a month after the book appeared, Wharton defended her work. She said that the American uppWharton, Edith is the author of 'House of Mirth', published 0000 under ISBN 9781593081041 and ISBN 1593081049.