Isobel's emotional isolation is a complex tapestry woven from the threads of her tumultuous childhood, primarily shaped by her mother, Ms. Callaghan. The profound impact of Ms. Callaghan’s cruel and sadistic behavior forced Isobel to retreat into herself, ultimately leading her to develop a defensive...
For a large portion of the novel, Isobel drifts through life believing intensely that the key to her happiness is belonging- that if she is a part of a crowd, if she is accepted, she will be “normal,” and it is this goal on which...
Fiction
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The presumption of a benevolent and omnipotent God makes the existence of evil problematic. This dilemma, known as theodicy, is often used to prove the lack of a God. The Book of Job as well as the South Park episode “Cartmanland” explore this theme, but...
“Hunters in the snow” is the story about three friends named Tub, Kenny and Frank. They are friends and they decide to go hunting outside Spokane, Washington. The fail to get any game and Kenny shoots a dog that belongs to an old farmer. Kenney...
“A sex symbol’s currency lies in her youth, her curves, in the suggestion that a sexual encounter lurks around the next corner.” (Sharon Krum, The Guardian) The power struggle between genders in society is something that can be seen every day, particularly in the media....
In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton uses weather in a variety of ways that provide symbolic significance along with a vivid setting. Wharton uses weather, climate, and the change of seasons to foreshadow events in the immediate future and to reflect Lily’s emotional state...
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson portrays the life of its narrator, Ruthie, alongside her sister Lucille as the two grow from mere children to young women while being surrounded by the confusion of shifting guardians, as well as the influence of transiency. Once the final guardian...
Everyone has his or her own idea of literature and what separates a work of literary fiction from a work of popular fiction. Generally speaking, a work must adhere to literary traditions, convey a deeper meaning, and present conventional themes in order to be recognized...
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,...
House of Mirth
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In Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth, the beautiful but helpless Lily Bart is never able to escape from the follies and superficialities of the society that she is born into. According to a verse in Ecclesiastics which the novel was titled after- “The...
Edith Wharton’s IThe House of Mirth] tells the story of Lily Bart’s fall from the upper reaches of the social spectrum to the lowly depths of the working class. The characters in the novel represent all levels of society, from the urban poor to the...
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...
In The House of Mirth, Percy Gryce is a rich young eligible bachelor upon whom Lily, one of Wharton’s central characters, sets eyes on. Gryce is used by Wharton as a vehicle to convey the shallowness and brutality of the New York high society, often...
In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, the cold and unforgiving world of New York’s high society never favors the perspective of the outsider, or the looker-on. But the author seems to award a great deal of credit to those characters who adapt to this...
The Gilded Age of the late 19th century saw the rise of extravagant hats, hairstyles, and high society. Subsequently, the Gilded Age was also host to an increasingly treacherous gap between the rich and the poor and stifling social restrictions against women as suffocating as...
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...