House Of Mirth Dbq Essay
Edith Wharton’s, The House of Mirth published in 1905 was definitely letting us know that women of that time period were expected to act of a certain way and be of a certain social standing. They were also expected to be married. I feel that Lilly Bart resented the fact that women had to be up to society’s standards. Throughout the novel Lilly must change herself as if she were a chameleon. Always trying to please the people she was around, or adapt to the places or circumstances that she created for herself. Lilly Bart had to be a number of people and could never really be herself. she was always on a quest to get farther up the social ladder. Thus losing herself all along.
Title: Wharton 's The House of Mirth
Author(s): Daniel Manheim
Source: The Explicator. 60.2 (Winter 2002): p81. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay …show more content…
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
Copyright : COPYRIGHT 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/00144940.asp Full Text:
In her article "Reading Mrs. Lloyd," Judith Fryer uses the tableaux vivants scene in The House of Mirth as a vehicle to discuss Lily 's efforts to make art of her body, suggesting that she must submit to the conventions of her time and place to demonstrate her own power of invention. Wharton, Fryer points out, was always torn between being conservative and being rebellious; this novel poises her between the two. However, the scene 's significance goes beyond the debate over whether the novel proposes a "radical revisioning of society" (Fryer 27) or an "ambivalent conservatism" (28). For Lily Bart 's actions are circumscribed not only by social forces embodied in "the way in which woman is seen as commodity, object, Other, to the observing male," and Lily circumvents this enclosure not only by "watching [herself] being looked at" to become "the primary surveyor in the scene she creates" (45).
The problem that Lily herself feels beleaguered by throughout the novel is inherent in naturalist novels: How can action have meaning if all one 's acts are conditioned, whether by inescapable convention or universal necessity? The times that Lily most feels her incapacity to act, she sees her primary adversary not as society but as fate itself. She is given to "fits of rebellion against fate" (Wharton 40), and she resents "the laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations" (29). It is not, of course, that she is left out of the universe 's calculations so much as that the universe 's calculations are so heedless of her own. Her will is irrelevant insofar as it doesn 't coincide with the universal will that drives her existence. Near the end, she sees herself "swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years" and as a "mere spindrift of the whirling surface of existence" (336). Though she feels "no real intimacy with nature" (66), she repeatedly must acknowle dge that she is inseparable from the general current of existence. The novel 's frequent coincidences, a staple of naturalist fiction, serve to emphasize that Lily 's readings and motives are thwarted and that her agency is circumscribed by larger forces.
As Fryer suggests, Lily 's body is her primary vehicle for self-definition--hence the aptness of a "living picture." Her tableau is different from all the rest in the spectacle. The other presenters are "subdued to the scene they [figure] in." Lily, however, can "embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself" (Fryer 141-42). Her tableau succeeds because she effectively embodies someone else 's work and someone else 's identity: she acts. To act is to play a role inscribed by someone else, with someone else 's words; but it is also to demonstrate one 's own skill, one 's power to make oneself vanish. When the audience gasps at Lily 's artifice, they respond not to the painting and not to Lily, but to what, through her power, the painting has become: Where the others become mere vehicles of the original artist and the presenter of the tableau, Lily is seen as active in her own spectacle. She steps "not out of, but into, Reynolds ' canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her livin g grace" (Wharton 142). This capacity to give immediate power to the antecedent drama is, in some sense, the only way out of the deterministic dilemma she faces. Near the end of the novel, she sees herself as "a screw or a cog in the great machine [...] called life"--something that can "hardly be said to have an independent existence" (Wharton 324). Like Emily Dickinson 's "Drop, that wrestles in the Sea," she has to struggle to conceive of herself as distinct from the flood of existence itself (Dickinson 275). This, perhaps, is why, near the end of her life, she takes out the dress she had worn the evening of the tableau. In the tableau she, in effect, becomes a cog that vivifies the machine itself: Although she remains utterly inseparable from the representation, she is visible as an animate energy, a will. As the inveterate aesthete Selden sees it, Lily catches "a moment of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part" (Wharton 142).
Not only is this genre a suitable vehicle for her, but so is the particular painting she chooses to enact. Joshua Reynolds represents Mrs. Lloyd carving her name on a tree. Thus Lily places herself in a natural scene that foregrounds how she has "no real intimacy with nature," even as she is inseparably a part of it. Reynolds 's tree is a natural part of the represented world, and when the figure carves her name upon the tree, she does nothing to alter its natural processes within that represented world. Yet the name stays, becoming at once a part of that natural object, and a recognizable, socially constructed identity outside of it. By enacting Mrs. Lloyd, Lily can momentarily, if not suspend the flood of existence, at least create an image of her singular identity rising out of it: an arresting moment in the continual flood--a name engraved on an incessantly growing organism--a living picture.
This image of a figure carving on a tree, as Nicholas Penny notes, was a conventional one, going back to Italian baroque painting (275). However, it was not conventional for a marriage portrait. The House of Mirth is a novel about marriage, or rather, about how marriage might circumscribe what Lily would make of herself. As she concedes in her first encounter with Selden in The Benedick, marriage is her "vocation" (9), something to which she is called from beyond herself: "if I were shabby, no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like" (12). Just as she has no identity without her clothes, she has none without the objective of marrying--it is what she is called to do. Thus an undefined part of her, unassimilated to the cultural frames that define her, resists marriage precisely because in all its plausible forms it threatens to fix in her the very sorts of conventional actions that make her feel most like a cog in a m achine. Joanna Leigh, the woman whose marriage is commemorated in Reynolds 's Mrs. Lloyd, had probably just married when she posed for her commemorative portrait. (1) Instead of being shown with her husband, as in such famous marriage portraits as Rubens 's, The Garden of Love, she stands alone, her husband displaced by her own carving of his name. What Reynolds commemorates, in other words, is not so much a happy marriage as Leigh 's willing adoption of a conventional identity. What Leigh does with the convention of marriage and what Reynolds does with a conventional pose Lily does with the genre of the tableau. The tableau is suitable because she has chosen a "type so like her own" (141) and because the subject of marriage underscores Lily 's own apparent necessity. But more important, the tableau is suitable because it demonstrates how Lily inserts her will into a conventional role in a way that leaves her own identity intact.
The presence of active will within a conventional frame is crucial. Richard Poirier, after Emerson, finds in all reflection something "antagonistic" to "the course of nature"--the same antagonism, the same "backward motion," that Frost saw in the little wave in his "West-Running Brook"--part of the water yet somehow against it (172). (2) In the person of Joanna Leigh, Lily carves into the bark of the tree an institutional identity--not her own name, but an arbitrarily adopted one. In one sense, this suggests that there is something natural, hence inevitable, for women in the artificial name and the artificial institution. At the same time, if marriage is part of the unbroken flood of existence in which Lily is fixed, then inscribing her name in the tree is a way of introducing her will into the material of her existence--not as an alien thing that could somehow separate herself from the fluency of all that exists, but as a form of willful resistance from within that very flood.
NOTES
(1.) Joanna Leigh 's first marriage took place the year before the painting was exhibited in 1776, and Reynolds seems to have been still touching it up in 1777.
(2.) According to Richard Poirier in The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections, the scene, in effect, replays her fateful conversation with Lawrence Selden at Bellomont, in which their dialogue enacts what Emerson calls "perpetual inchoation"--a condition of constant disequilibrium that creates a constant sense of possibility" (Poirier 172).
WORKS CITED
Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Variorum ed. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1998.
Fryer, Judith. "Reading Mrs. Lloyd." Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Ed. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland, 1992,
Penny, Nicholas, ed. Reynolds. London: Royal Academy of Arts in association with Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1986.
Poirier, Richard. The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections. New Haven: Random House, 1987.
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York: Library of America,
1985.
Manheim, Daniel
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Manheim, Daniel. "Wharton 's The House of Mirth." The Explicator 60.2 (2002): 81+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Dec. 2013.
Document URL http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA85068308&v=2.1&u=viva2_vccs&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w&asid=983c1d448d9f2dc9859d184dbcfda9f5 Gale Document Number: GALE|A85068308
Title: Wharton 's The House of Mirth
Author(s): Daniel Manheim
Source: The Explicator. 60.2 (Winter 2002): p81. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay …show more content…
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
Copyright : COPYRIGHT 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/00144940.asp Full Text:
In her article "Reading Mrs. Lloyd," Judith Fryer uses the tableaux vivants scene in The House of Mirth as a vehicle to discuss Lily 's efforts to make art of her body, suggesting that she must submit to the conventions of her time and place to demonstrate her own power of invention. Wharton, Fryer points out, was always torn between being conservative and being rebellious; this novel poises her between the two. However, the scene 's significance goes beyond the debate over whether the novel proposes a "radical revisioning of society" (Fryer 27) or an "ambivalent conservatism" (28). For Lily Bart 's actions are circumscribed not only by social forces embodied in "the way in which woman is seen as commodity, object, Other, to the observing male," and Lily circumvents this enclosure not only by "watching [herself] being looked at" to become "the primary surveyor in the scene she creates" (45).
The problem that Lily herself feels beleaguered by throughout the novel is inherent in naturalist novels: How can action have meaning if all one 's acts are conditioned, whether by inescapable convention or universal necessity? The times that Lily most feels her incapacity to act, she sees her primary adversary not as society but as fate itself. She is given to "fits of rebellion against fate" (Wharton 40), and she resents "the laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations" (29). It is not, of course, that she is left out of the universe 's calculations so much as that the universe 's calculations are so heedless of her own. Her will is irrelevant insofar as it doesn 't coincide with the universal will that drives her existence. Near the end, she sees herself "swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years" and as a "mere spindrift of the whirling surface of existence" (336). Though she feels "no real intimacy with nature" (66), she repeatedly must acknowle dge that she is inseparable from the general current of existence. The novel 's frequent coincidences, a staple of naturalist fiction, serve to emphasize that Lily 's readings and motives are thwarted and that her agency is circumscribed by larger forces.
As Fryer suggests, Lily 's body is her primary vehicle for self-definition--hence the aptness of a "living picture." Her tableau is different from all the rest in the spectacle. The other presenters are "subdued to the scene they [figure] in." Lily, however, can "embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself" (Fryer 141-42). Her tableau succeeds because she effectively embodies someone else 's work and someone else 's identity: she acts. To act is to play a role inscribed by someone else, with someone else 's words; but it is also to demonstrate one 's own skill, one 's power to make oneself vanish. When the audience gasps at Lily 's artifice, they respond not to the painting and not to Lily, but to what, through her power, the painting has become: Where the others become mere vehicles of the original artist and the presenter of the tableau, Lily is seen as active in her own spectacle. She steps "not out of, but into, Reynolds ' canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her livin g grace" (Wharton 142). This capacity to give immediate power to the antecedent drama is, in some sense, the only way out of the deterministic dilemma she faces. Near the end of the novel, she sees herself as "a screw or a cog in the great machine [...] called life"--something that can "hardly be said to have an independent existence" (Wharton 324). Like Emily Dickinson 's "Drop, that wrestles in the Sea," she has to struggle to conceive of herself as distinct from the flood of existence itself (Dickinson 275). This, perhaps, is why, near the end of her life, she takes out the dress she had worn the evening of the tableau. In the tableau she, in effect, becomes a cog that vivifies the machine itself: Although she remains utterly inseparable from the representation, she is visible as an animate energy, a will. As the inveterate aesthete Selden sees it, Lily catches "a moment of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part" (Wharton 142).
Not only is this genre a suitable vehicle for her, but so is the particular painting she chooses to enact. Joshua Reynolds represents Mrs. Lloyd carving her name on a tree. Thus Lily places herself in a natural scene that foregrounds how she has "no real intimacy with nature," even as she is inseparably a part of it. Reynolds 's tree is a natural part of the represented world, and when the figure carves her name upon the tree, she does nothing to alter its natural processes within that represented world. Yet the name stays, becoming at once a part of that natural object, and a recognizable, socially constructed identity outside of it. By enacting Mrs. Lloyd, Lily can momentarily, if not suspend the flood of existence, at least create an image of her singular identity rising out of it: an arresting moment in the continual flood--a name engraved on an incessantly growing organism--a living picture.
This image of a figure carving on a tree, as Nicholas Penny notes, was a conventional one, going back to Italian baroque painting (275). However, it was not conventional for a marriage portrait. The House of Mirth is a novel about marriage, or rather, about how marriage might circumscribe what Lily would make of herself. As she concedes in her first encounter with Selden in The Benedick, marriage is her "vocation" (9), something to which she is called from beyond herself: "if I were shabby, no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like" (12). Just as she has no identity without her clothes, she has none without the objective of marrying--it is what she is called to do. Thus an undefined part of her, unassimilated to the cultural frames that define her, resists marriage precisely because in all its plausible forms it threatens to fix in her the very sorts of conventional actions that make her feel most like a cog in a m achine. Joanna Leigh, the woman whose marriage is commemorated in Reynolds 's Mrs. Lloyd, had probably just married when she posed for her commemorative portrait. (1) Instead of being shown with her husband, as in such famous marriage portraits as Rubens 's, The Garden of Love, she stands alone, her husband displaced by her own carving of his name. What Reynolds commemorates, in other words, is not so much a happy marriage as Leigh 's willing adoption of a conventional identity. What Leigh does with the convention of marriage and what Reynolds does with a conventional pose Lily does with the genre of the tableau. The tableau is suitable because she has chosen a "type so like her own" (141) and because the subject of marriage underscores Lily 's own apparent necessity. But more important, the tableau is suitable because it demonstrates how Lily inserts her will into a conventional role in a way that leaves her own identity intact.
The presence of active will within a conventional frame is crucial. Richard Poirier, after Emerson, finds in all reflection something "antagonistic" to "the course of nature"--the same antagonism, the same "backward motion," that Frost saw in the little wave in his "West-Running Brook"--part of the water yet somehow against it (172). (2) In the person of Joanna Leigh, Lily carves into the bark of the tree an institutional identity--not her own name, but an arbitrarily adopted one. In one sense, this suggests that there is something natural, hence inevitable, for women in the artificial name and the artificial institution. At the same time, if marriage is part of the unbroken flood of existence in which Lily is fixed, then inscribing her name in the tree is a way of introducing her will into the material of her existence--not as an alien thing that could somehow separate herself from the fluency of all that exists, but as a form of willful resistance from within that very flood.
NOTES
(1.) Joanna Leigh 's first marriage took place the year before the painting was exhibited in 1776, and Reynolds seems to have been still touching it up in 1777.
(2.) According to Richard Poirier in The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections, the scene, in effect, replays her fateful conversation with Lawrence Selden at Bellomont, in which their dialogue enacts what Emerson calls "perpetual inchoation"--a condition of constant disequilibrium that creates a constant sense of possibility" (Poirier 172).
WORKS CITED
Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Variorum ed. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1998.
Fryer, Judith. "Reading Mrs. Lloyd." Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Ed. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland, 1992,
Penny, Nicholas, ed. Reynolds. London: Royal Academy of Arts in association with Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1986.
Poirier, Richard. The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections. New Haven: Random House, 1987.
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York: Library of America,
1985.
Manheim, Daniel
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Manheim, Daniel. "Wharton 's The House of Mirth." The Explicator 60.2 (2002): 81+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Dec. 2013.
Document URL http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA85068308&v=2.1&u=viva2_vccs&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w&asid=983c1d448d9f2dc9859d184dbcfda9f5 Gale Document Number: GALE|A85068308