The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 19 September 2001
by Edith Wharton
In the upper class of Gilded Age New York society, severe, rigid social rules were of utmost importance. Emotion, disorder, love were not high on anyone's priorities. Lily Bart is a creature of this world. She was brought up not particularly rich, but with a high appreciation of the trappings of wealth and genteel society. She is elegant and well-mannered. She has a taste for the jewels and the clothes and the life of leisure that money affords. She is, however, not independently wealthy. Her craving for this society can only be satisfied by an advantageous marriage to a wealthy and socially acceptable man. Lily, however, can see the emptiness of such aspirations. She toys with the rules of the society so that she is repeatedly defeated in working out a scheme for her future. Society and its rules punish her for any deviation from the norms of courtship. As a result, Lily slowly falls in social status. She becomes poorer, and falls victim to a scheming man and an unfaithful woman. Lily descends through the ossified social strata of the day. People whisper about her, and in her pride, she will not play such sneaky games, even if they'd result in the coveted material dream she has always lived with. Along the way, a voice of conscience, Lawrence Selden, appears here and there to remind Lily that she knows she is above such vacuous aspirations. Yet, she is ambivalent, knowing that in any other milieu, she would wither. This book is a brilliant depiction of social and sexual mores at the turn of the 20th century. Wharton's writing is intricate and beautiful. Her story is dark and sad. Lily is at the mercy of a woman's position in society, and her yearning for independence is repeatedly crushed. Yet Wharton also seems ambivalent, drawing beautiful pictures of the leisure life of which she herself was a product. Wharton, too, seems to be yearning for a balance between empty leisure rules and personal independence. Quite a story.
This novel was first published in 1905. In just a few years, Wharton herself, and many women in general, would find society more accepting of personal independence. Yet, has genteel wealthy American aristocracy ever completely rid itself of its rigid structure?
Also by Wharton: [Summer] [Ethan Frome] [The Age of Innocence]
See Also: [Edith Wharton by Louis Auchincloss]