Wow. We’ve made it!
I’m so eager to learn what you all thought of the conclusion of the novel. Today, we’re working through the end of The House of Mirth.
It’s an extra-long newsletter today, to celebrate the end of our amazing ten-week read-a-long together, and I have included so many questions and points to explore and moments to closely read. I hope you enjoy working your way through our final chapter guide as much as (I hope) you enjoyed the conclusion of this fantastic, strange, and beautiful novel.
A content warning: today’s post mentions suicide.
For today’s finale post, we’re covering many things:
Where the novel began
How it all ended
How scholars and writers read the ending
An “additional reading” list — now that you know the ending, I’m not afraid to share all the articles that include spoilers
A very brief academic bibliography, should you be inclined to conduct any secondary research yourself
…And surprise! An invitation to another, upcoming Wharton read-a-long!
But before you scroll down and dive in,
I invite you to take four very deep breaths and think about your experience of reading The House of Mirth over the last few months.
What has stuck with you? What still feels heavy? What feels less, or more, important now than it did as you read?
Take a moment to think about the wonderful accomplishment of committing to a classic novel and making it all the way through. If you haven’t, this is also a good moment to open your copy of the novel to a mostly-blank page and write down a few thoughts. (You could also do this in a notebook or in your phone’s Notes app!) I also like to write the month and year I read the book in the top right-hand corner of the title page.
Should you feel wistful and nostalgic at any time during today’s conclusive post, you can easily revisit where our reading experience together began and browse all of our chapter guides:
View all previous chapter summaries.
What happens in the final chapters
A lot happens this week. Here’s a basic plot summary. The characters we meet this week are in bold.
In B2.Chapter 11:
Lily is finally the spectator, rather than the spectacle herself: “Lily, lingering for a moment on the corner, looked out on the afternoon spectacle of Fifth Avenue”
Lily sees Mrs. Gryce (her once potential mother-in-law) with her new grandson (the family lines of Old New York continue to perpetuate themselves…)
Rosedale pays Lily another unexpected visit and offers her a business deal, which she refuses
Lily finally resolves to take the letters to Bertha and pursue the marriage plot with Rosedale, but surprises even herself by stopping at Selden’s on the way
In B2.Chapter 12:
Lily visits Selden and she wants to be clear and open, but he insists on their usual wordplay and banter
Lily feels awkward and starts to cry; she thanks Selden for “the things you said to me at Bellomont,” and how his words have “kept me from really becoming what many people have thought me”
Selden is deeply confused and very worried about her, but not enough to drop the act and try to understand her
Lily cries about falling into society’s “rubbish heap” and Selden’s response is to ask her if she’s getting married (BFFR, Lawrence)
Lily tells Selden she’d like to leave “the Lily Bart you knew” with him, so she can go on living as the socially acceptable version of herself — but then she seems to change her mind
Lily drops the packet of letters into Selden’s fire and leaves; Selden doesn’t notice the letters
In B2.Chapter 13:
Lily sinks onto a bench in Bryant Park in the freezing cold rain
Nettie Struthers — a woman Lily helped get the treatment she needed for lung disease (like pneumonia) — comes across her and offers to help her get home
Lily goes home with Nettie to warm up and meet her baby girl
Nettie tells Lily a story that is achingly similar to Lily’s, but for one key difference: she never thought she’d marry, almost got engaged to a man who left her, then ended up with the one man who loves her for who she is; that Lily’s help was what made her second-wind possible and helped her restart her life with her husband George (it’s clear Lily is thinking wistfully of Selden at this moment)
Lily makes it home and goes through her trunk, reminiscing about her past
The inheritance cheque arrives and Lily balances her finances, realizing she has almost nothing left after paying her debt to Gus Trenor
Lily struggles inside the tension of whether or not she’ll pay Trenor, despite having made out the cheque
Panicked and exhausted, she drinks the entire bottle of chloral at her bed side and climbs into bed as the drug finally takes effect
In B2.Chapter 14:
Selden all but skips to Lily’s apartment in the morning because he has found “the word” to say to her that will make things right between them
Gerty is already there, and so are the doctor and landlord — Lily has died
Gerty tells Selden that the doctor has given them a half hour to privately go through Lily’s things
Selden reviews her financial records and recoils at the sight of Trenor’s name; then tries to understand what the truth may have been between Lily, Trenor, and the $9,000 cheque she left in his name
Selden kneels beside her body and utters “the word which made all clear.”
"A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys."
— Edith Wharton
The end of Lily Bart
We finally find out, this week, that for Wharton, the richest, most “frivolous,” and most powerful societies act destructively. But they don’t just ruin customs, like marriage. Modern societies —riddled with the kinds of corrupt and vacuous energies we see in Wharton’s depiction of Old New York—also destroy individual human beings. It’s all rather Foucauldian.
For Wharton, New York society at the turn of the century “acquire[s] dramatic significance” precisely via its power to destroy Lily Bart. In other words: in Wharton’s mind, there’d be no reason to write a story about a society like Old New York, unless you wrote the story of Lily Bart — a story that invites you to see a society’s power to ruin individuality.
The “dramatic significance” of the society, then, rests within the lived realities of the individuals within that system. And this, as we’ve discussed earlier in our read-a-long, is the fertile ground of Naturalist literature: the tension between individual people and the powerful throes of fate or, perhaps, of Social Darwinism.
Now that we’ve reached the end of the novel, I find myself returning to earlier discussions of literary Naturalism — and these evolutionary ideas, such as “survival of the fittest” and arguments about the importance of adaptation to survival — and how it all relates to Lily Bart. In the end, Lily seems unable to adapt to the changes her situation increasingly requires (from adapting her expectations for marriage to adapting her physical body to perform manual labor), and this requires her exit, or extinction, from the social sphere.
Or does it?
What do you think?
Is the novel staging a larger argument about Lily’s “fitness” for surviving in this social system? Is it Lily’s fault that she dies?
Is the novel, as a whole, rather an indictment against the kind of society that imposes such rigid rules for survival?
Is it somehow both? (Wharton is pretty damn good at letting two seemingly opposed truths coexist.)
What do you make of Selden’s belief, at the novel’s end, that “It was this moment of love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which had kept them from atrophy and extinction; which, in her, had reached out to him…”? Was Lily’s love a form of anti-extinction?
Where it all began
Now, before we talk too much about the ending, let’s recall the first two sentences of the novel:
“Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.”
All those weeks ago, we met Lily as Lawrence Selden — a confirmed bachelor fresh off of his affair with Bertha Dorset — gazed on her in the bustling afternoon traffic.
Together, they take the risky move of being seen sneaking off to his apartment at mid-day, and Lily clearly states she’s willing to take the risk. She smokes his cigarettes, admires his library, wonders at how different his life is — and his freedom is — from hers. Later, discussing their ideals for freedom, Selden will tell Lily about his “republic of spirit,” the Stoic’s paradise, or detached method through which he relates to society and keeps himself safely distanced from its “frivolities” and the consequences of those frivolities.
Why does recalling all of this matter? Because it is Lily and Selden from the outset: two fundamentally different lives and ways of being in the world, drawn together for brief and exhilarating moments of tension, attraction, and unspoken desire. And then, horribly, kept apart forever at the bitter, heartbreaking end.
But who is it truly a heartbreak for?
In one of my favorite essays about the novel, Lynn Tillman writes:
“It is Selden whom Lily encounters by chance in Grand Central Station, and it’s Selden who finds Lily dead at the novel’s end. His presence frames Lily’s life, ghosts and subverts it, as the rooms, scenes, and encounters Wharton sets Lily in structure it.
What the reader knows of Lily’s thoughts about her impossible position are gleaned primarily in her discussions with Selden, her foil and confidante. Selden is a fitting comrade, a modern flawed hero or antihero…No one underwrites Lily’s essential placelessness, or lovelessness, more than Selden.”
The novel starts with such a classic, teasing, romantic promise: will they or won’t they?
Will these two mismatched social outcasts — her, the buzzing center of hot gossip and him, the philosophical outsider — somehow wind up together? Will Lily put aside her ambitions for money and status, and settle for love alone? Will Selden put aside his prideful disdain for society and love a girl who so desperately longs to control its whims?
What we make of the ending
In the end, Lily and Selden do end up together — at least, they’re in the same room in the final scene. But Selden is too late and Lily is already gone.
“He knelt by her bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.”
—The House of Mirth
Why does Wharton choose to end the novel this way?
The final sentence contains two independent clauses, linked by a semi-colon. Why is this important? Because it insists that part of the final thrust of the novel is Selden’s bending and draining of the moment, as much as it is about that mysterious “word which made all clear” that seems to hang in the air between them.
The first-half of the final sentence — “He knelt by her bed and bend over her, draining their last moment to its lees” — brings us back to “tea” again. Lees are the dregs or leftover leaves in the bottom of the cup. The imagery recalls all those other scenes in the novel, in which Lily drinks tea with a kind of desperate need for its energy to lift and sustain her:
on the train to Bellomont, when she wields an operator-like command over a jittering tea hour on the train with Gryce
all those moments she asks Gerty for a stronger brew as she starts to confront the reality of her impending poverty
that desperate moment she asks Rosedale for another cup, when he takes her for tea near Mrs. Hatch’s hotel
The tea reference also recalls Lily’s “refreshing” nature, as Selden “drain[s] their last moment to its lees.” It is as if he is taking refreshing drinks from a final cup of tea, or a final draw from the “refreshing” sight of Miss Bart. (It never seems more clear to me that Selden is a kind of energy vampire: a man who comes to a beautiful woman only to be aroused and inspired by her, rather than to engage in genuine discourse or make her a lasting commitment.)
Notice also the body language and composition of the scene. Lily is draped in her bed — a beautiful corpse, not unlike Sleeping Beauty. Gerty weeps in the hallway; Selden kneels like a prince at Lily’s side, as if to kiss her dead lips.
In many ways, the novel ends on another tableau vivant, though this time it is a tableau mort. Rather than Lily stepping into the frame to embody a work of art, Lily’s dead body becomes the final scene from which Selden can “drain” aesthetic power, or perhaps attempt to understand in her death what he could never quite understand in her life — he can once again attempt to understand “the real Lily Bart.”
And then there’s that curious second-half of the sentence: “and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.”
What needed to be made clear?
What was Selden still “unclear” about?
What was Lily “unclear” about? What did she want Selden to understand during her final visit to him?
What might the word be? Is it a real word?
What other scenes have we encountered, in the novel, where silence and clarity seem to coincide?
When a book ends on profound ambiguities, like Mirth does, close reading is our path to sense-making.
But I’d caution you before you leap to answering the bulleted questions above. Rather than engaging a close reading process to discover the “true” ending or find the “one” ending to the novel, we can use close reading to help us unpack the many, layered mysteries Wharton leaves open. We can use close reading, in other words, to compound the mysteries of a text — rather than to “solve” it.
It’s up to you, as Wharton’s reader, to generate an understanding of the ending, based on everything your close reading experience has lent to you over the past ten weeks.
To do this, you might ask yourself: What combinations of themes and character traits and moments have I noticed as I read? Which ones can help me contextualize what happens in this final scene? Which ones help me understand Selden’s final act, or Lily’s final moments? Which ones confuse me? What do I make of the end of it all?
You might also wonder about the wider literary themes, traditions, or tropes Wharton may be leveraging here. (One of thinks of Sleeping Beauty or Snow White — those fairy tale endings of beauty and horror, albeit without the magical resurrections. What about Anna Karenina? Or perhaps you thought of Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, adrift in the water, floating or drowning, we’re never quite sure.)
Personally, I’m drawn back to thinking of key scenes that leverage the same language as our final sentence:
Gerty and Selden’s moment in Book 2, Chapter 8 when Selden holds Gerty’s hand and “there passed between them, on the current of the rare contact, one of those exchanges of meaning which fill the hidden reservoirs of affection.”
Lily’s moment with Rosedale when, in Book 2, Chapter 11, “in the silence Lily had a clear perception of what was passing through his mind.” I’m noticing here the repeating phrases of “passed between them” and “in the silence,” where meaning seems transferred between individuals in a non-linguistic manner.
At the end of Chapter 13, Lily thinks of “some word she had found that should make life clear between them,” but she can’t articulate the word, doesn’t know what it is.
To formalize my close reading, I would take each of these moments onto a sheet of paper and diagram them out — highlighting their key language and drawing out their most salient connections to the other moments. Then, like fitting a puzzle together, I would try to envision the new image this combination of scenes can help me see, or understand, about the novel as a whole.
Making your final reading
To take your reading to a truly close and deep place, should that be your desire here at the end, we can start with the facts of what has taken place. Things the text clearly lays out for us. These include:
That Lily makes a final visit to Selden
That Lily burns the packet of letters and never goes to confront Bertha
That Lily pays off her final, largest debt via a final check to Trenor
That Lily endures a panic attack or existential crisis and has the sensation of holding Nettie’s baby girl in her bed
That Lily dies after “swallow[ing the contents of the glass” of chloral at her bedside
That Selden came to see her the next morning full of hope and optimism
That Gerty was already at Lily’s place and found her dead
That Gerty believes Selden should review Lily’s documents before the police and other society members arrive
That Selden sees the check to Trenor and wonders what it means
That Selden kisses Lily’s cold lips and utters “the word which made all clear”
We’re left with questions about what these facts mean:
Did Lily know she was going to die when she visited Selden?
Did she want him to recognize the letters?
Did Lily plan to mail the check? Selden finds the envelope unsealed; did she mean to seal and send it the next day?
Did Lily overdose accidentally?
Or did Lily overdose on purpose?
Why did Selden come to see her the next day? What were his intentions?
Why was Gerty there already?
What mysterious word did Selden utter? (Does it matter?)
Lily’s death brings back all the questions we’ve been dancing with since Week 1. Is fate or chance more powerful? What will Lily choose? What will Selden do? What manner of life is, or was, possible for Lily?
The way that you answer these questions will be different than the way I answer them. This is one of the most frustrating and most wonderful magics of close reading. This is why there is an entire field of literary criticism — why I could write a dissertation chapter on the novel 115 years after it was written, because no one had read it the same way that I read it (yet).
Importantly: This is not to say that you can’t incorrectly read a book, or that you can use “close reading” to make a book mean anything you want it to mean! The practice of close reading, rather, invites you to make sense of the total import of the moments you noticed in a story, and to fit those moments together, creating your own “reading” of what matters most in the novel and why it matters so much.
Readings of the ending
I’ve collected a few quotes from scholarship and writing on the novel to illustrate examples of how you might take your own observations — what you’ve noticed — about the novel and turn those observations into your own close reading of the text.
I’ve bolded the parts where you can feel the writer’s reading or keen observations come through in how they position their take on the novel’s ending. In other words, I’m hoping to showcase where these writers take the facts of what has happened in the novel and offer insight into how they would answer the question of what those facts mean.
A close reading of why the novel is so particularly tragic:
“The novel is a tragedy, yes, of course, but that the tragedy is particularly keen because we’ve just watched Lily realize the truth of life and of the world, we’ve just seen her come through everything and find a real moral vision for how she wants her life to be lived. That’s what’s so brutal. She’s just gotten it right, and if only she had tomorrow, if only that one little thing, tomorrow, if only.”
A close reading of Lily’s overdose as an accident:
“What moves us about her death is that it is not a suicide. She has so fully departed from the world that produced her that she has come to recognize her ‘deeper impoverishment.’ ….She dies of a last, miscalculated dose of chloral, yet another mistake in the long list of bad risks, misunderstandings, and irresolutions that make her story.”
—Maureen Howard in “The Bachelor and the Baby”
A close reading of Lily’s death as a curious redemption:
“As she drifts into her final sleep, having overdosed – accidentally or intentionally, it’s not clear – she cradles an imaginary infant in her arms with a tender joy that implies redemption.
What form that redemption will take is ambiguous, but I have a theory: Lawrence, arriving the next morning at Lily’s boarding house, finds Gerty calmly and expertly managing the scene of Lily’s self-destruction. In these dire circumstances, Lawrence sees his plain cousin anew. “He stood up, and as their eyes met, he was struck by the extraordinary light in his cousin’s face.” Gerty has always loved Lawrence, and there is the hint that with her, he might at last break free of the arid parlour games that kept him from Lily, and partake, in Lily’s aftermath, of her revelation.
That’s one interpretation, but there are infinite others – of those scenes, and of the novel as a whole.”
—Jennifer Eagan for The Guardian
A close reading of the references to electric light in Lily’s death scene:
“In Lily’s electric death — ‘it was as though a great blaze of electric light had been turned on in her head,’ — Wharton shows a cascading view of systems within systems. She suggests that social systems were not the only revelation to the modern mind.
The individual self was also far more complex, was itself not a perfectly networked and closed system on which energies circulated, but a network within a network, a chaotic energetic field where electricity might run simultaneously diffuse and distinct, where wakefulness might be experienced not as a sum total experience, but inside each and every nerve. Where, for poor Lily Bart, the mind might become a space that could be illuminated with modern epiphany.
Indeed, Lily’s psychological crisis begins after she “had an odd sense of being behind the social tapestry, on the side where the threads were knotted and the loose ends hung” (276). Lily’s lightbulb in the mind, like our popular metaphor today, suggests an epiphanic moment: for Lily, this is the realization of the deep, interconnected webs of power that make up her painful social position. Overwhelmed by the gravity of her social precarity, and with a new awareness of the intricate system that has placed her in such a state, Lily’s final act is a desperate attempt to numb the power of that realization with prescription chloral. How long that numbing takes seems to be further proof of her own complicated system, of how she — like the her surprisingly complex social system — contains multitudes.”
—Haley Larsen (yours truly!) in my doctoral dissertation
What is your “interpretation” of the novel?
Having read it closely these last ten weeks, do you have any theories, insights, or even hot takes? If so, I hope you’ll gift yourself a few hours to work it out on paper and see where your close reading takes you.
An invitation:
If you’d like to write a formal close reading of The House of Mirth, and you’d like someone to read and respond to that close reading, or help you outline and draft it, or even just hold you to a deadline to get it done, send me a DM here on Substack or leave a comment. I’d love to read your ideas and help you compose a close reading for your own Substack or other writing space (even if it’s just your own reading journal).
Reader questions
We have a few to address this week!
First: two readers wrote in with the same question:
Why is the title of the novel ‘The House of Mirth’? There isn’t much mirth in the novel, but for it to be just irony seems a bit simplistic. What am I missing?
//
What is the meaning of the title of the book?
A perfect question for us to explore at the end of it all! Let me go into Professor Mode for a minute, won’t you?
Back in Week 1, I told you a bit about the novel’s original title: A Moment’s Ornament, which comes from a Wordsworth poem:
The original title of the novel, as Wharton worked on her first drafts, was A Moment’s Ornament. The phrase comes from a William Wordsworth poem about his beloved wife, entitled “She Was a Phantom of Delight” which begins:
She was a Phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely Apparition, sent
To be a moment's ornament
This poem may develop more meaning for you as we get further into the novel, but don’t those first four lines feel so darn connected to the first scene?
In Book 2, Chapter 11, Lily reflects on her status as a decoration:
“Since she had been brought up to be ornamental, she could hardly blame herself for failing to serve any practical purpose; but the discovery put an end to her consoling sense of universal efficiency.”
The writer Lynn Tillman argues that Selden is also an ornamental feature of the novel:
“Lily Bart could have been [the novel’s] temporary decoration. Though, from Lily’s point of view, the occasional ornament could have been Selden. But then Wharton enjoyed symmetries. Her house, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts, which she designed and had built, has three front doors, one of them fake; Wharton wanted the facade to be symmetrical. Selden is symmetrical to Lily and does balance her, even as he unbalances her. (Symmetry, to Wharton, “the answer of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.”)
The uncoupled couple form a double-faced statue that articulates Wharton’s comprehension of how women’s changed, conflictual desires are met by changed, conflicted men. Both are, in a way, misfits, though Selden’s eccentricity and inappropriateness, including his bachelorhood, have value, while Lily’s spinsterhood and virginity daily lose theirs.”
Though Wharton did eventually change the title, we know — from Tillman’s close reading there, as well as from Wharton’s own history and publications — that Edith Wharton loved architecture. She meticulously designed The Mount, the home she built and decorated herself.1
But I digress. Let’s get to the actual title.
The phrase “the house of mirth” comes from the Bible. It can be found in Ecclesiastes 7:4:
“The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”
The verse perfectly captures this idea of two competing worlds: a foolish world of fleeting pleasures (that Old New York society, so corrupt with money and politics and consumerism) and that wiser world of mourning, depth, and true feeling.
One scholar explains the allusion thusly: “Wharton’s allusion to Ecclesiastes in the title and content of her novel highlights the limits of our comprehension of experience, including the communicative action between characters and their immediate physical settings.” (Source)
Think of the “bright morning” (mourning) which draws Selden to Lily at the book’s end — finally, having had a change of heart to become more wise than to believe the foolish judgements of society, Selden can come to Lily in the hopes of creating space for themselves in some other house — perhaps taking up residence together in that mysterious “republic of spirit” where Selden and Lily both long to be free.
(It also seems relevant to the title that Lily is rootless and house-less, living in a rented boarding-room, at the end of the novel. There’s definitely something there about Lily’s “house” and the warm “homes” she experiences with Selden and Nettie before returning to her own cold, sterile rental.)
Oh! And there’s one more reference worth your knowing that might give you thoughts about the title:
The most famous haute couturier in Lily’s time was a fashion house in Paris called The House of Worth. It was precisely the kind of upscale fashion house through which Lily’s most expensive and custom gowns would have been ordered. Wharton is so damn clever.
We had one other reader question:
Do you have any recommendations on which book to read next and any accompanying resources for more Wharton?
Yes I absolutely do! Below, you’ll find a list of additional readings and resources, as well as a recommendation of which Wharton novel to read next!
Please note that the links below take you to Bookshop.org listings for these titles, and if you purchase via the link, I receive up to 10% of the sale!
Additional readings
By Wharton:
The Age of Innocence — Wharton’s 1920 novel that made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction (and the one I most recommend reading next!)
The Custom of the Country — Wharton’s 1913 novel about the ambitious, devious Undine Spragg who uses divorce(s) to her financial advantage
Old New York — Wharton’s collection of short stories about the same New York society we read about in Mirth, though most are not-so-dark a treatment but are more comedic or sarcastic
The Writing of Fiction — Wharton’s essays about the art of writing and her approach to developing fictional stories, novels, and poems
The Decoration of Houses — The first book Wharton ever wrote and published, which is a nonfiction theory of interior design and home decoration
A Backward Glance — Wharton’s autobiography. It’s a stunning work of self-reflection and remembrance toward the end of her life.
On the novel:
Jennifer Egan on The House of Mirth // Lawrence Selden: A cad among men // Justice for Lily Bart! a truly fantastic essay by a stellar Substack essayist // A list of recommended novels about New York society that are for those who loved Mirth // 7 more books about sad girls in New York //
On Edith Wharton:
A fantastic 50-minute speech about Wharton by biographer Hermione Lee // Lee’s exceptional biography of Wharton // What Virginia Woolf had to say about Wharton’s legacy // The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, should you want to read academic insights and close readings of her fiction // How Edith Wharton foresaw the 21st century by the brilliant Emily J. Orlando // How Edith Wharton changed one writer’s perspective on what to expect from marriage // Edith Wharton on the “deeper processes” underlying her fictional work //
On Wharton’s home, The Mount
Take a video tour of Wharton’s home, The Mount // Explore Edith Wharton’s vision for the symmetrical entrance of her Lenox home //
A (brief) list of academic sources on The House of Mirth and Wharton’s fiction more broadly:
Ammons, Elizabeth. “Gender and Fiction.” The Columbia History of the American Novel. Ed. Emory Elliot. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: A Cultural Reader. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.
--. Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Benstock, Shari. “Edith Wharton, 1862-1937: A Brief Biography.” A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Carol J. Singley, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Bentley, Nancy. “Wharton, Travel, and Modernity.” A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Carol J. Singley, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Chambers, Dianne L. Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Clarke, Michael Tavel. "Between Wall Street and Fifth Avenue: Class and Status in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth." College Literature, vol. 43 no. 2, 2016, p. 342-374. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2016.0019.
Goldsmith, Meredith. "Cigarettes, Tea, Cards, and Chloral: Addictive Habits and Consumer Culture in The House of Mirth." American Literary Realism, vol. 43 no. 3, 2011, p. 242-258. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/426126.
Harrison-Kahan, Lori. ""Queer myself for good and all": The House of Mirth and the Fictions of Lily's Whiteness." Legacy, vol. 21 no. 1, 2004, p. 34-49. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/leg.2004.0010.
Hochman, Barbara. “The Awakening and The House of Mirth: Plotting Experience and Experiencing Plot.” The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London. Ed. Donald Pizer. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Huber, Hannah. "Illuminating Sleeplessness in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth." Studies in American Naturalism, vol. 11 no. 2, 2016, p. 1-22. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/san.2016.0022.
Liming, Sheila. Edith Wharton’s Library. http://sheilaliming.com/ewl/items
--. What A Library Means to a Woman. University of Minnesota, 2020.
Marchand, Mary Vital. "Every Contact Leaves a Trace: Wharton's Critique of the Forensic Imagination in The House of Mirth." Edith Wharton Review, vol. 34 no. 2, 2018, p. 167-188. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/732738.
Martin, Michele. "The Culture of the Telephone." Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture. Gender, and Technology. Patrick D. Hopkins, ed. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.
Mayne, Michael. "“Place and Agency in The House of Mirth”." Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 42 no. 1, 2012, p. 1-20. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2012.0002.
Orlando, Emily J. “Picturing Lily: Body Art in The House of Mirth.” Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture. Gary Totten, ed. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 2007.
Saltz, Laura. ""The Vision-Building Faculty": Naturalistic Vision in The House of Mirth." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 57 no. 1, 2011, p. 17-46. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2011.0029.
Singley, Carol J. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Solan, Yair. “‘Striking Stereopticon Views’: Edith Wharton’s ‘Bunner Sisters’ and Nineteenth-Century Magic Lantern Entertainment.” Studies in American Naturalism vol. 7, no. 2, 2012.
Totten, Gary, editor. Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture. University of Alabama, 2007.
My favorite sentences + final thoughts
I have a few favorite sentences this week:
“One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters; but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.”
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“She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty.”
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“All the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance: her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening in Nettie Struther’s kitchen.”
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“It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be!”
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“It was as though a great blaze of electric light had been turned on in her head, and her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered in it, without knowing where to take refuge.”
My re-reading experience
I thought I knew this novel, yet I learned so much on this re-read. And it proved to me once again that re-reading is a truly special brand of magic: the words on the page don’t change, but we do change. And what a miraculous thing that is.
This is my first time closely reading the novel since I finished my dissertation chapter on it in 2021. It was a pure pleasure.
It feels brand new to me, all over again, as if it was my first time reading it. This time around, I was wary of Selden and not charmed by him at all; I was less impatient with Lily; I actually thought George Dorset was kind of sweet (constant references to dyspepsia notwithstanding). I was really fucking mad at Grace Stepney the entire time (you can’t tell me she wasn’t angling for the inheritance the whole book!!!!). And then, I still can’t believe how Rosedale almost fixes everything at the end — and Lily almost lets him — and the way they spark in these lovely, empathetic moments of chemistry even though it’s far too late to do anything about them.
I ached and cried during Lily’s final scene, as I always do. But the ache was different this time. I knew it was coming, but I wasn’t analyzing it. I wasn’t looking for ways to connect it to some larger, academic argument. I was entrenched in the plain, boring sadness of it — the tragic fate Lily arrives at after trying so hard, for so long, to become someone she genuinely wished she could be.
On this read, for perhaps the first time, I felt that the someone she wanted to be was someone I could see so clearly, and I saw her trying, so often, to give her room to breathe. I felt that “the real Lily Bart” was so much more than an ideal or a concept on this read; that Lily had a crushing proximity to her in key moments, and I wished so badly for anyone to understand her.
In the end, I found myself so bothered by how slow Selden is to grasp the severity of what has happened to Lily; how his own privilege and isolation from upper-class dramatics and politics have insulated him from experiencing the emotional and psychological pain that Lily so tragically feels until her very end.
I really, really, really didn’t like Selden this time around. (And a few scholars feel the same way!)
I also found myself drawn to those sweet women, Gerty and Nettie, who are desperate for Lily to see that another life is possible for her, and wish so badly for Lily to take care of herself the way she takes care of her dresses. Their tender care for Lily broke my heart over and over again.
Thank you for reading with me
This was the most fun I’ve had reading a book in a really long time — and I have you all to thank for it!! About two weeks in, I thought, “are we really doing this? Is it working?” About four weeks in, I thought “Oh, we’ve got to do this again.”
And now, ten weeks in and all done with Mirth, I think: We simply must read The Age of Innocence together!
(And perhaps someday after that, we’ll embark on Wharton’s shockingly cynical novel about marriage: The Custom of the Country.)
The start date for our Wharton Wednesday reading group: The Age of Innocence will be announced soon, and in the meantime, I’ll be working on some goodies and additional Wharton Wednesdays to keep the good times rolling. (And I think, very soon, all of us who’ve just finished the novel should hop on Zoom to talk about it. Right? Let me know in the comments if that sounds fun to you!)
For now, meet me in the comments
I want to hear *all of your thoughts* — the frustrations, the disappointments, the surprises, the tears! (Did you cry? I cried so hard.)
Tell me your favorite sentences, scenes, and anything else you resonated with, either in the closing chapters or the novel as a whole.
How do you read the ending?
What was your favorite scene or sentence?
Now that you’ve read the whole novel, what’s your favorite part? Lease favorite part?
If you were going to write about the novel, what would you write about?
Fun fact: the first book Wharton ever published was a non-fiction book about home decoration. It’s called The Decoration of Houses and it’s full of the most opinionated takes on home design you’ve ever read. It’s a classic and so much fun to read.
I’m going into my PhD Special Fields exam in a few weeks and this was on my reading list, but it’s been 9 months and 90 books ago, so following along with this series was such a great way to jog my memory (and in such depth, wow!). I’ll also add that if you’re interested, my supervisor Dana Seitler has published on The House of Mirth as well! :)
I will eventually distill my final comments, but for now I just want to say. "Wow!" and "Thank you". I've not been so spectacularly challenged on so many levels for ages. House of Mirth is a great novel, but I would have missed so much if I had just read it. The concept of close reading seems like a more intimate way to connect with an author. I can't wait to go apply it to some of my all time favorite books. Building a community to take the journey together and asking us to share our perceptions has exponentially strengthened the process for me. I'm not sure exactly how I found my way here, but thank you.