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

Lilys Choice in The dramaturgy of pleasure Near the beginning of The House of Mirth, Wharton establishes t get into Lily would non indeed have cared to attach a man who was merely rich she was secretly ashamed of her m another(prenominal)s blunt passion for notes (38). Lily, like the affluent world she loves, has a unnamed relationship with money. She needs money to buy the type of life she has been raised(a) to live, and her relative poverty depicts her situation precarious. Unfortunately, Lily has not been trained to obtain money through a wide variety of methods. Whartons wealthy socialites do not all procure money in the same way money can be inherited, earned working in a hat shop, won at cards, traded scandalously between married men and divorced women, or speculated for in the stock market. For Lily, the world of monetary transactions presents impressive difficulties she was born, in a sense, to marry into money, and she cannot seem to come to it any o ther way. She is incapable of mastering the world of economic transactions, to the point that a go exchange is repulsive to her highly specialized nature. Finally, these exchanges and the obstacles they present prove to be the end 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 pick 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, figure and Morality in the Work of a Novelist. Norman University of Oklahoma Press, 1959. Miller, Mandy. Edith Wharton Page. 19 Nov. 2002 <http//www.Kutztown.edu/fac ulty/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. Climbing 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) New York Signet,. 1998.