two little lines about the mouth

Narrative threads of anxiety, luck, and age in Edith Wharton's 1905 The House of Mirth

Today’s scene comes from Edith Wharton.

In Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth, the 29-year-old socialite Lily Bart frets with diverse but relatable anxieties: she longs for a different, better existence, but also feels elegantly trapped in her life:

“She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate, when she longed to drop out of the race and make an independent life for herself. But what manner of life would it be? She had barely enough money to pay her dress-makers’ bills and her gambling debts….Ah no—she was too intelligent not to be honest with herself.”

The precarity of her situation is clear: she is unwed at 29 years old, has virtually no suitors that interest her, and she’s entirely dependent on a small, but livable allowance from a cold, mean-spirited aunt with whom she lives. And the question I puzzle over, every time I read it, is why does Lily handle this situation the way that she chooses to?

Her situation aptly recalls Charlotte’s, in Jane Austen’s Pr…