The House of Mirth (Oxford World's Classics)
"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 couldn't and yet wanted  desperately to keep up with the whirlwind, like Wharton's charming Lily  Bart, it was something else altogether: a gilded cage rather than the  Gilded Age.One of Wharton's 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 Lily's problem. She has, we're told, "been brought up to be ornamental," and yet her spirit is larger than what this ancillary role requires. By today's 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.Lily's 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 milliner's assistant addicted to sleeping drugs, Lily  Bart is heroic, not least for her final admission of her own role in her  downfall. "Once--twice--you 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 beasts--some of  whose treatment by Wharton, such as the token social-climbing Jew, Simon Rosedale, date the book unfortunately--wander through the novel while Lily plummets. As her tale winds down to  nothing more than the remnants of social grace and cold hard cash, it's hard not to agree with Lily's own assessment of herself: "I have tried hard--but 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, it's even harder not to believe that she deserved better, which is whyThe House of Mirthremains  so timely and so vital in spite of its crushing end and its unflattering  portrait of what life offers up.--Melanie Rehak--This text refers to an alternatePaperbackedition.