Lilys Choice in The House of Mirth Essay -- House Mirth Essays

Lilys Choice in The rear of Mirth skillful the beginning of The polarity of Mirth, Wharton establishes that Lily would non indeed have c ard to marry a man who was further rich she was secretly ashamed of her mothers crude passion for silver (38). Lily, exchangeable the affluent area she loves, has a strange relationship with notes. She needs money to buy the type of life she has been raised to live, and her relative poverty makes her mail service precarious. Unfortunately, Lily has not been trained to obtain money through a replete(p) variety of methods. Whartons wealthy socialites do not all procure money in the same way money can be inherited, take in working in a hat shop, won at cards, traded scandalously between married men and unmarried women, or speculated for in the entrepot market. For Lily, the world of monetary transactions presents formidable difficulties she was born, in a sense, to marry into money, and she cannot seem to come to it any othe r way. She is incapable of mastering the world of economic transactions, to the point that a direct exchange is repulsive to her super specialized nature. Finally, these exchanges and the obstacles they present prove to be the bar of her, and Whartons text joins naturalisms Darwinian rules to an economic world. Whether Lilys death is accidental or a suicide does not really matter in Whartons vision, because the choice facing Lily at the end of the novel--to make a transaction or to make a transaction--necessitates her death. Near the end of the novel, Whartons protagonist must make a choice--but both options are part of the environment in which Lily has not evolved to survive. In Lilys attempt at wage-earning and her moral dilemma regarding Rosedales marria... ...1975. Lyde, Marilyn Jones. Edith Wharton, Convention and Morality in the spend a penny of a Novelist. Norman University of Oklahoma Press, 1959. Miller, Mandy. Edith Wharton Page. 19 Nov. 2002 <http//www.K utztown.edu/faculty/Reagan.Wharton.html>. Pizer, Donald. The Naturalism of Edith Whartons The House of Mirth. Twentieth Century Literature 41.2 (1995) 241-8. Rehak, Melanie. Rev. of The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton. Amazon.com 28 Oct. 2002 <http//www.amazon.com/execs/obidos/ASIN/055321320/hallbook/>. Ruschmann, Paul. move up the Social Ladder...In the Wrong Direction. Rev. of The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton. Epinions.com 28 Oct. 2002 <http//www.epinions.com/./book-review-6AF6-7A25B6D-39DA>. Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. (1905) impertinent York Signet,. 1998.