Legality, although often intertwined with morality, is not to be confused with it. In Hrafnkel’s Saga, Hrafnkel is a chieftain who makes an oath to slay anyone who rides his beloved Freyfaxi. He generously provides Einar with a job, only asking that he not ride...
Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, is understood from chapter 1 to be a female of remarkable beauty. Throughout the novel she is classified as uniquely attractive, a woman to be desired by men and subtly threatening to women. But...
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton offers a multidimensional and fluid analysis of social class. Initially, Lily attempts to belong to the upper class. However, through a series of unfortunate decisions, we witness Lily’s inevitable descent into dinginess, poverty, and death. Towards the end,...
Near the beginning of The House of Mirth, Wharton establishes that Lily would not indeed have cared to marry a man who was merely rich: “she was secretly ashamed of her mothers crude passion for money” (38). Lily, like the affluent world she loves, has...
The relationship between the ideal and the reality is many times pictured in black and white. The ideal can be defined as a conception of something in its perfection, whereas reality is defined as something that exists independently of ideas concerning it. In The House...
Nature, whether in the form of the arctic tundra of the North Pole or the busy street-life of Manhattan, was viewed by Naturalist writers as a phenomena which necessarily challenged individual survival; a phenomena, moreover, which operated on Darwin’s maxim of the “survival of the...
Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth presents an interesting study of the social construction of subjectivity. The Victorian society which Wharton’s characters inhabit is defined by a rigid structure of morals and manners in which one’s identity is determined by apparent conformity with or transgression...
One of the tragedies in The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is that Lily Bart is unable to marry Laurence Selden and thereby secure a safe position in society. Their relationship fluctuates from casual intimacy to outright love depending on how and where Selden...
Commonly called “a novel of manners” because of the way characters are shown thinking and speaking about how people in society ought to conduct themselves, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton focuses chiefly on Lily Bart, a woman whose social decline and fall is...
Which of the domestic palaces in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth claims itself as the titular source of the tragic novel? Each offers strong evidence in its own favor. There is the bucolic decadence of the Trenor’s Bellomont; the old money severity of Mrs....
In Edith Wharton’s The House Of Mirth, money is the most evident and most basic value held by the characters who populate the author’s turn-of-the-century New York. Essentially, money is valued for only one reason – it provides the means by which those in possession...
In her novel Hope Leslie, Catharine Maria Sedgwick explores the influence laws arising from religion, nature, and society have on the development of a new nation. Specifically, her historical romance analyzes the culture created by seventeenth-century Puritans who left England behind to settle in the...
The past acts as a tabernacle for experiences and memories. The past not only lives in Henry but also makes up Henry’s very nature. Henry is his past. Life’s faded memories shape choices. Author Jamie Ford builds the relationship between experience and conscience through Henry,...
As a historical novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet[1] alludes to many occurrences, people, places, government acts, and organizations confirming the novel’s veracity by employing history. The book covers the period 1941-1986, a period of over forty years. During this time, Henry...
Courage is not the absence of fear, but the will to overcome it. Jamie Ford’s novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet shows this characteristic as a central element of its narrative. Henry is a Chinese boy who is living during World War...
In the play Hippolytus, Euripides depicts characters in a realistic fashion by displaying their warring emotions in the wake of dramatic events, as well as their deceit in achieving their objectives. A prime example of such tactics is the character Phaedra, who is content to...
Ovid and Horace, Roman poets in the age of Augustus, collectively captured a very broad range of sentiments and atmosphere in the empire at this time. Horace wrote odes, satires, and epistles that glorify Augustus himself and his reforms and intentions for Rome. Ovid, on...
Saul Bellow’s Herzog is a complicated and multifaceted novel. Moses Herzog, the protagonist, has a powerful though meandering intellect which does not seem to discriminate much in its choice of object. These myriad reflections can make the novel appear chaotic and undirected, a patchwork of...
While Moses Herzog sits in the Chicago police station after he has crashed his rental car, the narrator of Saul Bellow’s work exclaims angrily, “See Moses? We don’t know one another” (299). This is the lone moment in the book where the narrator explicitly suggests...