House of Mirth Essays

House of Mirth

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...

House of Mirth

Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth creates a subtle, ironic, and superbly crafted picture of the social operation of turn-of-the-century New York. In her harsh expression of community, she succeeds in portraying a world of calculation operating...

House of Mirth

The society in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth is immersed in an economy of risk. The men work as businessmen, trading on the fluctuating stock market; the women spend their time at the bridge table wagering their family savings. Wharton makes a...

House of Mirth

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...

House of Mirth

You are Ibsen. Review House of Mirth.

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...

House of Mirth

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...

House of Mirth

The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton, chronicles the tragic life of Lily Bart in New York's fashionable high society. Exquisitely beautiful, Lily was trained to think of herself not as a woman capable of defining her own goals and making emotional...

House of Mirth

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...

House of Mirth

According to the Marxist theoretician Louis Althusser, society's class structure and gender roles depend primarily not on economics, but on the power of attitudes and ideas. In Edith Wharton's classic work, The House of Mirth, characters show...

House of Mirth

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...

12th Grade

House of Mirth

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...

College

House of Mirth

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...

College

House of Mirth

In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton introduces us to the opulent society of New York during the Gilded Age. The entire novel unravels a tedious model of social etiquette in which every person’s action is either criticized or judged by their...