Naturalistic philosophy in Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth”

2018 ◽  
pp. 126-131
Author(s):  
Х. В. Білинська
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Leisure Class ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Naturalistic Philosophy ◽  
American Naturalism ◽  
Strict Protocol ◽  
The House Of Mirth

The article is dedicated to the issue of naturalistic philosophy in Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth”. The influence of heredity and environment on the protagonists’ development and behaviour has been stated. Edith Wharton emphasizes the heredity of two characters — Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden. She portrays how the qualities inherited from the parents and further intensified by upbringing affect their future welfare. The protagonists are under total control of their environment — the New York leisure-class society. It determines their motives and actions, as well as has overwhelming effect on their personal lives, ensured by means of gossip and public censure. Edith Wharton has been proved to use repetition of the same actions and habits in order to achieve the effect of stuckness in one place. Incessant social events of the American elite, held in accordance with a strict protocol, lead to thingification of people. The society itself turns into a fetish. As a result, the typical naturalistic notions of “life as suffering” and “life as a prison” are achieved. After a thorough investigation, it has been summarized that Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” should be considered as a representative of the optimistic and idealistic stream of American naturalism.

Edith Wharton's American Beauty Rose

1973 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert McIlvaine
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
American Beauty ◽  
Entire Society ◽  
The House Of Mirth

Edith Wharton frequently likens Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth (1905), to a flower. Her name is ‘Lily’; when she kisses Lawrence Selden ‘her face turned to him with the soft motion of a flower’ in her privileged station in life she is an ‘orchid basking in its artificially created atmosphere’; and, in sum, she is‘ the fine flower and complete expression ’ of the ideals of beauty and social grace held by the old New York aristocracy. Most significant, however, is Mrs Wharton's use of rose imagery when describing Lily. For example, when Lily came to her friend Gerty Farish after having narrowly escaped the unwelcome advances of Gus Trenor, Gerty reflected that everything about Lily was ‘warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose’. Indeed, the entire society of which Lily is ‘the fine flower’ diffuses a ‘rosy glow’. Those who stroll these ‘rosy shores of pleasure’, such as Judy Trenor, have complexions of ‘rosy blondness’. The fastest rising star in the economic and social firmament is Simon Rosedale, ‘a plump, rosy man of the blond Jewish type …’

Book Reviews

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Gutelius ◽  
Janet Gibson ◽  
Dhan Zunino Singh ◽  
Steven J. Gold ◽  
Alexandra Portmann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Freight Transportation ◽  
Shipping Container ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Early Modern Theater ◽  
World Class ◽  
Asian Migration

Matthew Heins, The Globalization of American Infrastructure: The Shipping Container and Freight Transportation (New York: Routledge, 2016), 222 pp., $145 (hardback)Lesley Murray and Susan Robertson, eds., Intergenerational Mobilities: Relationality, Age and Lifecourse (London: Routledge, 2017), 194 pp., 14 illustrations, $145 (hardback)Sebastián Ureta, Assembling Policy: Transantiago, Human Devices, and the Dream of a World-Class Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 224 pp., 22 illustrations, $39 (hardback)Yuk Wah Chan, David Haines, and Jonathan H. X. Lee, eds., The Age of Asian Migration: Continuity, Diversity, and Susceptibility, vol. 1 (Newcastle on Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 450 pp., £54.99Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson, eds., Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) 320 pp., 22 illustrations, $117 (hardback)Ruth Oldenziel and Helmuth Trischler, eds., Cycling and Recycling: Histories of Sustainable Practices (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016), 256 pp., 18 illustrations, £67 (hardback)Margo T. Oge, Driving the Future: Combating Climate Change with Cleaner, Smarter Cars (New York: Arcade, 2015), xv + 351 pp., $25.99 (hardback)Thomas Birtchnell, Satya Savitzky, and John Urry, eds., Cargomobilities: Moving Materials in a Global Age (New York: Routledge, 2015), 236 pp., 16 illustrations, $148 (hardback)Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, Snowpiercer 1: The Escape, trans. Virginie Sélavy (London: Titan Comics, 2014), 110 pp., $19 (hardback)

scholarly journals ‘A Construction in the Void’, Formal Architecture in the Novels of Edith Wharton

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Isabel Parker
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Great War ◽  
Interior Architecture ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The House Of Mirth ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

<p>Edith Wharton has been persistently framed as an author detached from the ‘modern’ twentieth century literary world she inhabited. Intellectually compromised by critical conceptions of her as the “last Victorian”, and Henry James’s “heiress”, Wharton’s attentiveness to modernism’s fractured worldview and her original employment of literary form to redress this perspective have been largely overlooked. This thesis seeks to re-evaluate Wharton’s ‘old-fashioned’ authorial persona. Instead of reading her commitment to a past perspective as evidence of her literary obsolescence, this thesis argues that her adherence to a bygone worldview serves as a means of managing the disorientation and disorder of the modern, incomprehensible present. Following Wharton’s evolving conception of stylised aesthetic form across pre-war and post-war worlds, I suggest that Wharton’s literature evidences a tension between two opposing literary aspirations. On the one hand, her texts reveal a desire to abandon aesthetic enclosures and realise an unbounded, authentic interior reality. Yet on the other hand, Wharton’s works underscore the poignant sense of fulfillment acquired within a life bound by such aesthetic architecture. Chapter One outlines Wharton’s critical stance in relation to both realism and modernism. It discusses the way in which the outbreak of the Great War motivated Wharton’s implementation of a critical ‘interior architecture’, in which a modernist interiority is held in play alongside an encompassing realist reality. Chapter Two assesses the stunted nature of stylised aesthetic forms in the pre-war world as evinced in The House of Mirth (1905). There, Wharton demonstrates how a lack of grounding in reality renders such aesthetics devoid of an internal anchorage that clarifies their purposeful relation to the world around them. Vacant of real-world relation, such forms abstract, disintegrating into formlessness. In Chapter Three, I reveal how Wharton moves from scorning to celebrating the artificial nature of aesthetic form in the wake of the Great War. In The Age of Innocence (1920), aesthetic forms deemed arbitrary and artificial in The House of Mirth are reevaluated and revealed as possessing an invisible, intrinsic real-world purpose. From denying realism, stylised aesthetics are redeemed in their attempt to frame individuals in relation to a formless world. Though such forms are inherently fictitious, Wharton asserts that their provision of an illusion of structure aids in the preservation of interpersonal and intergenerational connection. These forms thus cultivate an interior architecture within which society can shelter against an intrinsically unstable reality.</p>

Establishing New York State Anti-Suffrage Organizations, 1895–1911

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Goodier
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York State ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
National Government ◽  
The State ◽  
York State ◽  
National Organization ◽  
Social Events ◽  
State Organization ◽  
College Educated

This chapter illustrates the nascent attempts of anti-suffragists to prevent their enfranchisement. The most prominent and effective anti-suffrage organizations that developed in New York State between 1895 and 1911 deliberately excluded men. Certainly, anti-suffragists were married to or related to some of the most politically powerful men in state and national government. However, a significant portion of college-educated, professional, and self-supporting women opposed suffrage. Once the antis established their organizations, they became a force powerful enough to help prolong the battle for woman suffrage in the state. The New York State organization provided speakers for lectures at clubs and social events in and outside the state, spreading their influence broadly. By the end of the period, New York antis had established a national organization.

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