Description

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth, warns Ecclesiastes 7:4, and so does the novel by Edith Wharton that takes its title from this call to heed. New York at the turn of the century was a time of opulence and frivolity for those who could afford it. But for those who couldnt and yet wanted desperately to keep The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth, warns Ecclesiastes 7:4, and so does the novel by Edith Wharton that takes its title from this call to heed. New York at the turn of the century was a time of opulence and frivolity for those who could afford it. But for those who couldnt and yet wanted desperately to keep up with the whirlwind, like Whartons charming Lily Bart, it was something else altogether: a gilded cage rather than the Gilded Age. One of Whartons earliest descriptions of her heroine, in the library of her bachelor friend and sometime suitor Lawrence Selden, indicates that she appears as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing room. Indeed, herein lies Lilys problem. She has, were told, been brought up to be ornamental, and yet her spirit is larger than what this ancillary role requires. By todays standards she would be nothing more than a mild rebel, but in the era into which Wharton drops her unmercifully, this tiny spark of character, combined with numerous assaults by vicious society women and bad luck, ultimately renders Lily persona non grata. Her own ambivalence about her position serves to open the door to disaster: several times she is on the verge of good marriage and squanders it at the last moment, unwilling to play by the rules of a society that produces, as she calls them, poor, miserable, marriageable girls. Lilys rather violent tumble down the social ladder provides a thumbnail sketch of the general injustices of the upper classes which, incidentally, Wharton never quite manages to condemn entirely, clearly believing that such life is cruel but without alternative. From her start as a beautiful woman at the height of her powers to her sad finale as a recently fired milliners assistant addicted to ing drugs, Lily Bart is heroic, not least for her final admission of her own role in her downfall. Oncetwiceyou gave me the chance to escape from my life and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward, she tells Selden as the book draws to a close. All manner of hideous socialite beastssome of whose treatment by Wharton, such as the token social-climbing Jew, Simon Rosedale, date the book unfortunatelywander through the novel while Lily plummets. As her tale winds down to nothing more than the remnants of social grace and cold hard cash, its hard not to agree with Lilys own assessment of herself: I have tried hardbut life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. Nevertheless, its even harder not to believe that she deserved better, which is why The House of Mirth remains so timely and so vital in spite of its crushing end and its unflattering portrait of what life offers up. Melanie Rehak