Oh, thank you for such a fabulous rounding up of all that has happened to Lily! I am fearing the worst for her...
Hochman quoted the standout sentence for me, spoken by Lily: "The whole truth? Miss Bart laughed. "What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe." That line. It broke me! I find it such an honest statement that Wharton expressed through Lily. As we've mentioned before, the resemblance to Edna Pontellier and the idea, as Hochman mentions, of the fallen woman in literature is a trope I have long found both fascinating and tragic. I only wish I had read Mirth earlier when studying The Awakening. Looking forward to next week :)
So I must be missing something in the subtext. Just what is going on with Mrs. Hatch that elicits such strong repugnance that Lily is deemed and even feels tainted just by being there?
So much in these chapters, but the character I'm most glad to see back on stage is Gerty who astutely appraises Lily's situation. "Gerty could smile now at her own early dream of her friend's renovation through adversity: she understood clearly enough that Lily was not one of those to whom privation teaches the unimportance of what they have lost." She also tries to help in the only way she knows by encouraging Selden to take action. Lily on the other hand "had an odd sense of being behind the social tapestry, on the side where the threads were knotted and the loose ends hung.” What a great descriptive indictment of the artificiality of the society and relationships Lily has been pursuing. I am traveling and without my fat library copy of the book, so though I can't wait to get to the end I'm also glad for a break as I know that the walls are closing in on Lily. Despite everything, she has retained a hard line against expedient, but questionable things she will not do because she understands the slippery slope of the consequences. Whether she learned this from her failure with Trenor, or from watching Bertha and others like her, or always had enough sense of her own worth, she has chosen ( so far) not to take any of those actions. I don't foresee a happy ending, but I hope that Lily's story can at least end without her finally betraying this sense of herself.
After an exuberant amount of work, I am so happy to be back on track with Wharton Wednesday for the last two weeks!
I was thrilled when you mentioned Emma Bovary. Did you mention it before, because I think of Flaubert's Madame Bovary for at least half of the House of Mirth. But rather than comparing the two women per se, I would compare the way they are written about. I had to check, they were published about 50 years apart, and the literary style has changed, and we also have to take into account the geographical difference. But still. I always found Flaubert's Emma superficially written and very preachy. A woman brought up on (inappropriate, though by today's standards innocent) romance novels falls from grace when she gives in to lust. And of course her very ethical (and rather older) husband takes it stoically and tries to "help" her.
And although we are still reading about the fall of a woman, Lily, in The House of Mirth, I find Wharton's female characters much more complex. I still haven't decided whether the book is preachy, to be honest. I felt there was a hint of cold detachment about Lily from the narrator's point of view. What we learn of Lily's actions and thoughts is not enough for me to fully understand Lily. Or maybe I just need more time and the final pages...
Oh, and Seldon. There is so much to say about him. I started to dislike him after the Tableau vivant scene. On the other hand, I feel he is a male counterpart to Lily. He is part of the society although always on its edges. Would Lily fall in such disgrace if she was a man?
And although I have many more comments and thoughts that I have accumulated while binging on the pages, this read along and the spectacular comment section, I will end with a thought about the Emporium Hotel. I think the modern comparison might be the Jezebels in The Handmaid's Tale. It is a place known to the men and hidden from the women. The place has to remain unknown to "gentle" part of society so that they can preserve their innocence and thus be good wives and mothers (which might open up a new debate, as it has already started with the question of the children's whereabouts in one of the previous sections).
I can't wait for the finale! Thank you again Haley, for taking us on this ride!
I guess I'll take my time this week to say that, perhaps in a personal failure, I cannot read Selden as anything but a hypocrite. And I think this is particularly jarring when we compare it to Rosendale's line in chapter 7 where he sates "I don't believe the stories about you--I don't want to believe them. But they 're there, and my not believing them ain't going to alter the situation." I don't think Rosendale is being particularly romantic in his interactions with Lily, but to me this highlights how Selden has basically bought wholesale everything that was being sold about Lily but never took the time to actually talk to her (again, I am very aware that this is heavily tinged by my dislike for the miscommunication trope). Or, as I scribbled after chapter 8, Selden seems to be only willing to meet Lily under his own terms, and only with a certain picture of Lily, not the real woman and her flaws.
But I wanted to highlight two passages, the first from chapter 10, because I think it really circles back to our previous discussions of Lily as a commodity. This is about her working at the millinery. It stays that Mme. Regina "had been willing from the first to employ Lily in the show-room: as a displayer of hats, a fashionable beauty might be a valuable asset. But to this suggestion Miss Bart opposed a negative..." I found this very interesting because it made me wonder where the objection comes from, considering she had no trouble displaying herself in other settings. And while this could be just because Lily would rather keep her "working" private, I think there could be more to it. I was left with the feeling that the problem is not the "displaying" it self, but the fact that for once Lily was asked to sell something other than her own presence. And I don't mean this in a mean way--Lily has been "trained" to sell *herself* in the social and marital market, and to use that to sell something else might feel inappropriate to her.
Besides, and this takes me to the other passage I wanted to bring up, it doesn't seem like fear of publicity (that is, of others knowing of her situation) plays a role here. Or, as in chapter 7: "Society did not turn away from her, it simply drifted by, preoccupied and inattentive, letting her feel, to the full measure of her humbled pride, how completely she had been the creature of its favour."
First off, thanks Haley for your tip about the ruler! I started annotating my book this week — I was just seeing so many connections and callbacks this week — and the ruler makes the annotations look neat and orderly, ha!
But the one that got me really excited: Electric light!!!! > "Lily found [Mrs Hatch] seated in a blaze of electric light, impartially projected from various ornamental excrescences" (excrescences - great word! somehow extremely difficult for me to spell.) Back in chapter 3, Lily sees hateful lines around her mouth, a sign of her aging, and first attributes them to the electric light... but even in the candlelight, the lines are still there. Now in these chapters, Lily says to Gerty she has more lines on her face than ever AND she's delivered into a space that only has electric light.
Another callback: Mrs. Hatch's space is also described as a totally transient place, out of the social geography that Lily knows, where the main female inhabitants (Mrs. Hatch's friends?) are women with "no real existence," who probably had a "real past" at some point but are now floating through life totally untethered. I'm thinking about Percy Gryce and his Americana, also back in the early chapters. Collecting antiques is the ultimate sign of having a "real past," of being tied to history, to society and lineages and all the rest. Mrs. Hatch's modern, electrified world offers no sense of the past and (in the strange, ambiguous comings-and-goings of people within it) no associated code of conduct to govern how people should and should not act. Which makes it all the more threatening and disreputable.
(Question for you, Haley: Who are these ladies, exactly? Assuming this is all part of the red light sub-subtext of Mrs. Hatch that you mentioned in your reply to Maryann's question — her friends who are just sort of "easily" enjoying life and/or providing easy companionship to the various men, some of whom Lily knows, who come through?)
One last thought. The millinery reminds me of one of my favorite contemporary novels, Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee. In that novel, the main character, Casey, is totally enthralled by an expensive New York lifestyle that she cannot afford. (Sound familiar?) She goes into ruinous debt—and she also makes hats. Now I'm itching to give Free Food for Millionaires a reread and see if there is a deeper conversation happening there!
I love this so much, thank you so much for answering my question so thoroughly!
My favorite literature professor in college had us take a blank notebook and fill it with “connections” we found to our reading. Connections to anything- reading for other classes, our life, current societal issues, movies, news. That’s really what you’re doing here and what I think reading closely is all about. Making connections and following threads! And what I love so much is that there are SO. MANY. THREADS. that could be followed. You mentioned Anna Karenina which happens to be my next read (because it’s mentioned so much in The Gentleman in Moscow which I recently loved) so I’ll be watching for the fallen woman trope. But reading the House of Mirth could just as quickly lead me to The Great Gatsby, The Awakening, or to a gilded age movie marathon or thousands of other directions! Reading is magic and these connections are everything. It’s also interesting to analyze which threads I am most compelled to follow, because they inevitably speak to something going on in my head and heart.
I’m not quite finished with the novel, but I hope the final post includes your thoughts on movie adaptations because I’ll definitely be watching one or more!
“Lily renounces the project of being believed or even heard, progressively isolating herself.” OUCH. This is so heartbreaking, infuriating, and relatable.
One of my favorite sentences: “Lily smiled faintly at the injunction to take her tea strong. It was the temptation she was always struggling to resist. Her craving for the keen stimulant was forever conflicting with that other craving for sleep—the midnight craving which only the little phial in her hand could still.” I feel like this mirrors the pull of Lily’s opposing social desires. She desires “rest,” —perhaps the ease that would be afforded to her by doing what is expected of her, marrying for money and easing her financial stresses. Yet she continuously stimulates conflict by refusing that path, resenting its pressures, falling into scandal & disfavor and evading marriage at every proposal.
And one more: “so suffused and immersed in the light of her full gaze that he found himself being drawn into strange depths of intimacy. He who had had to subsist on mere fugitive glances, looks winged in flight and swiftly lost under covert, now found her eyes settling on him with a brooding intensity that fairly dazzled him.”
Oh, thank you for such a fabulous rounding up of all that has happened to Lily! I am fearing the worst for her...
Hochman quoted the standout sentence for me, spoken by Lily: "The whole truth? Miss Bart laughed. "What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe." That line. It broke me! I find it such an honest statement that Wharton expressed through Lily. As we've mentioned before, the resemblance to Edna Pontellier and the idea, as Hochman mentions, of the fallen woman in literature is a trope I have long found both fascinating and tragic. I only wish I had read Mirth earlier when studying The Awakening. Looking forward to next week :)
So I must be missing something in the subtext. Just what is going on with Mrs. Hatch that elicits such strong repugnance that Lily is deemed and even feels tainted just by being there?
So much in these chapters, but the character I'm most glad to see back on stage is Gerty who astutely appraises Lily's situation. "Gerty could smile now at her own early dream of her friend's renovation through adversity: she understood clearly enough that Lily was not one of those to whom privation teaches the unimportance of what they have lost." She also tries to help in the only way she knows by encouraging Selden to take action. Lily on the other hand "had an odd sense of being behind the social tapestry, on the side where the threads were knotted and the loose ends hung.” What a great descriptive indictment of the artificiality of the society and relationships Lily has been pursuing. I am traveling and without my fat library copy of the book, so though I can't wait to get to the end I'm also glad for a break as I know that the walls are closing in on Lily. Despite everything, she has retained a hard line against expedient, but questionable things she will not do because she understands the slippery slope of the consequences. Whether she learned this from her failure with Trenor, or from watching Bertha and others like her, or always had enough sense of her own worth, she has chosen ( so far) not to take any of those actions. I don't foresee a happy ending, but I hope that Lily's story can at least end without her finally betraying this sense of herself.
After an exuberant amount of work, I am so happy to be back on track with Wharton Wednesday for the last two weeks!
I was thrilled when you mentioned Emma Bovary. Did you mention it before, because I think of Flaubert's Madame Bovary for at least half of the House of Mirth. But rather than comparing the two women per se, I would compare the way they are written about. I had to check, they were published about 50 years apart, and the literary style has changed, and we also have to take into account the geographical difference. But still. I always found Flaubert's Emma superficially written and very preachy. A woman brought up on (inappropriate, though by today's standards innocent) romance novels falls from grace when she gives in to lust. And of course her very ethical (and rather older) husband takes it stoically and tries to "help" her.
And although we are still reading about the fall of a woman, Lily, in The House of Mirth, I find Wharton's female characters much more complex. I still haven't decided whether the book is preachy, to be honest. I felt there was a hint of cold detachment about Lily from the narrator's point of view. What we learn of Lily's actions and thoughts is not enough for me to fully understand Lily. Or maybe I just need more time and the final pages...
Oh, and Seldon. There is so much to say about him. I started to dislike him after the Tableau vivant scene. On the other hand, I feel he is a male counterpart to Lily. He is part of the society although always on its edges. Would Lily fall in such disgrace if she was a man?
And although I have many more comments and thoughts that I have accumulated while binging on the pages, this read along and the spectacular comment section, I will end with a thought about the Emporium Hotel. I think the modern comparison might be the Jezebels in The Handmaid's Tale. It is a place known to the men and hidden from the women. The place has to remain unknown to "gentle" part of society so that they can preserve their innocence and thus be good wives and mothers (which might open up a new debate, as it has already started with the question of the children's whereabouts in one of the previous sections).
I can't wait for the finale! Thank you again Haley, for taking us on this ride!
I guess I'll take my time this week to say that, perhaps in a personal failure, I cannot read Selden as anything but a hypocrite. And I think this is particularly jarring when we compare it to Rosendale's line in chapter 7 where he sates "I don't believe the stories about you--I don't want to believe them. But they 're there, and my not believing them ain't going to alter the situation." I don't think Rosendale is being particularly romantic in his interactions with Lily, but to me this highlights how Selden has basically bought wholesale everything that was being sold about Lily but never took the time to actually talk to her (again, I am very aware that this is heavily tinged by my dislike for the miscommunication trope). Or, as I scribbled after chapter 8, Selden seems to be only willing to meet Lily under his own terms, and only with a certain picture of Lily, not the real woman and her flaws.
But I wanted to highlight two passages, the first from chapter 10, because I think it really circles back to our previous discussions of Lily as a commodity. This is about her working at the millinery. It stays that Mme. Regina "had been willing from the first to employ Lily in the show-room: as a displayer of hats, a fashionable beauty might be a valuable asset. But to this suggestion Miss Bart opposed a negative..." I found this very interesting because it made me wonder where the objection comes from, considering she had no trouble displaying herself in other settings. And while this could be just because Lily would rather keep her "working" private, I think there could be more to it. I was left with the feeling that the problem is not the "displaying" it self, but the fact that for once Lily was asked to sell something other than her own presence. And I don't mean this in a mean way--Lily has been "trained" to sell *herself* in the social and marital market, and to use that to sell something else might feel inappropriate to her.
Besides, and this takes me to the other passage I wanted to bring up, it doesn't seem like fear of publicity (that is, of others knowing of her situation) plays a role here. Or, as in chapter 7: "Society did not turn away from her, it simply drifted by, preoccupied and inattentive, letting her feel, to the full measure of her humbled pride, how completely she had been the creature of its favour."
First off, thanks Haley for your tip about the ruler! I started annotating my book this week — I was just seeing so many connections and callbacks this week — and the ruler makes the annotations look neat and orderly, ha!
But the one that got me really excited: Electric light!!!! > "Lily found [Mrs Hatch] seated in a blaze of electric light, impartially projected from various ornamental excrescences" (excrescences - great word! somehow extremely difficult for me to spell.) Back in chapter 3, Lily sees hateful lines around her mouth, a sign of her aging, and first attributes them to the electric light... but even in the candlelight, the lines are still there. Now in these chapters, Lily says to Gerty she has more lines on her face than ever AND she's delivered into a space that only has electric light.
Another callback: Mrs. Hatch's space is also described as a totally transient place, out of the social geography that Lily knows, where the main female inhabitants (Mrs. Hatch's friends?) are women with "no real existence," who probably had a "real past" at some point but are now floating through life totally untethered. I'm thinking about Percy Gryce and his Americana, also back in the early chapters. Collecting antiques is the ultimate sign of having a "real past," of being tied to history, to society and lineages and all the rest. Mrs. Hatch's modern, electrified world offers no sense of the past and (in the strange, ambiguous comings-and-goings of people within it) no associated code of conduct to govern how people should and should not act. Which makes it all the more threatening and disreputable.
(Question for you, Haley: Who are these ladies, exactly? Assuming this is all part of the red light sub-subtext of Mrs. Hatch that you mentioned in your reply to Maryann's question — her friends who are just sort of "easily" enjoying life and/or providing easy companionship to the various men, some of whom Lily knows, who come through?)
One last thought. The millinery reminds me of one of my favorite contemporary novels, Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee. In that novel, the main character, Casey, is totally enthralled by an expensive New York lifestyle that she cannot afford. (Sound familiar?) She goes into ruinous debt—and she also makes hats. Now I'm itching to give Free Food for Millionaires a reread and see if there is a deeper conversation happening there!
I love this so much, thank you so much for answering my question so thoroughly!
My favorite literature professor in college had us take a blank notebook and fill it with “connections” we found to our reading. Connections to anything- reading for other classes, our life, current societal issues, movies, news. That’s really what you’re doing here and what I think reading closely is all about. Making connections and following threads! And what I love so much is that there are SO. MANY. THREADS. that could be followed. You mentioned Anna Karenina which happens to be my next read (because it’s mentioned so much in The Gentleman in Moscow which I recently loved) so I’ll be watching for the fallen woman trope. But reading the House of Mirth could just as quickly lead me to The Great Gatsby, The Awakening, or to a gilded age movie marathon or thousands of other directions! Reading is magic and these connections are everything. It’s also interesting to analyze which threads I am most compelled to follow, because they inevitably speak to something going on in my head and heart.
I’m not quite finished with the novel, but I hope the final post includes your thoughts on movie adaptations because I’ll definitely be watching one or more!
“Lily renounces the project of being believed or even heard, progressively isolating herself.” OUCH. This is so heartbreaking, infuriating, and relatable.
One of my favorite sentences: “Lily smiled faintly at the injunction to take her tea strong. It was the temptation she was always struggling to resist. Her craving for the keen stimulant was forever conflicting with that other craving for sleep—the midnight craving which only the little phial in her hand could still.” I feel like this mirrors the pull of Lily’s opposing social desires. She desires “rest,” —perhaps the ease that would be afforded to her by doing what is expected of her, marrying for money and easing her financial stresses. Yet she continuously stimulates conflict by refusing that path, resenting its pressures, falling into scandal & disfavor and evading marriage at every proposal.
And one more: “so suffused and immersed in the light of her full gaze that he found himself being drawn into strange depths of intimacy. He who had had to subsist on mere fugitive glances, looks winged in flight and swiftly lost under covert, now found her eyes settling on him with a brooding intensity that fairly dazzled him.”
She really is such a master of sentences!