The House of Mirth

by Edith Wharton at Discount

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Named as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the century, as chosen by the editorial board of the Modern Library.
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The most compelling aspect of The House of Mirth is watching Lily Bart descend the social ladder, changing from an alluring, fashionable decoration at lavish country estates to a wild-eyed, dishevelled woman living in a shabby hotel, addicted to tea and sleeping drops. The most frightening aspect of the book is that the progress seems somehow both inevitable and avoidable at nearly every turn. Here is a physically beautiful and psychologically complex woman who has become or been made into an object for consumption by a society that values the material world exclusively. As Lily approaches thirty, still unmarried, and without financial resources, her value - in this society - declines. Part of the responsibility for her fate can be placed on her lack of a maternal influence, on her own irresolution, on the weakness of her primary suitor, on the viciousness of the other rich women in the novel, but the ultimate blame has to fall on a society that made her "so evidently the victim of the civilization that produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate." Nearly a century after its publication, this novel is chillingly accurate in its remorseless critique of a society willing to sacrifice any and all who do not conform to its expectations.

 

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