The House of Mirth

"So this is Wharton’s second novel, and was extremely – really remarkably – successful on publication. It’s a novel about the culture of the Gilded Age and, as far as I’m aware, one of the first major novels about New York society at that time. It traces the extraordinary descent – literally and figuratively – of a woman, Lily Bart, in the social scene. One of the things I love about The House of Mirth is the way the entire novel is encoded in the form of the opening scene, in which Lily ascends and descends a flight of stairs, and in doing so accidentally sets in motion the accumulation of rumor and misfortune that will eventually destroy her. The novel is constantly moving through these accretive images of exquisite beauty and wealth, which themselves then also complicate or degrade Lily’s social standing in the moment of their perception. So, to give you an example, at the heart of the novel is a party where Lily appears in a tableaux vivant ; she’s posed as a Joshua Reynolds painting. And this appearance, which is apparently so amazing that it elicits a gasp from the audience, is the moment at which Lily’s beauty is publicly crystallized, but the fixing of that beauty in a shape – an “outline” as one character calls it – also has the effect of rendering her body completely present, and thus also less reputable. This is the novel in miniature – everyone worships an abstract idea of beauty, one that is secured by wealth, but when the materialities of body and money are put on public display, everyone turns away, because their complicity is suddenly visible to them. In many ways, this story is played out again and again in the 20th-century American novel – no one wants to see the gears grinding underneath, to see what goes into constructing the tableaux . They’re prepared to let people die to maintain it."

"The House of Mirth doesn’t take place entirely in New York but it begins and ends there. Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth , was born on a higher rung of the social ladder than where she ends up. She is a compelling and tragic figure. The novel was very much concerned with the high society of the day, which was centred in New York – the famous 400 who fit in Mrs Astor’s ballroom. But even though it is concerned with a caste system that no longer exactly exists, The House of Mirth still resonates with readers. Americans are always fascinated with the wealthy. It’s a bit of an illusion to imagine ours to be a classless society, as novelists like Wharton made brilliantly clear."