The Role Of Women In The House Of Mirth

Edith Wharton once stated that she “ . . . [doesn’t] know if [she] should care for a man who made life easy; [she] should want someone who made it interesting,” showing how Edith reflects Lily Bart, an unwed woman living in the midst of the elite society of New York, who struggles to find a suitable husband and live in the elite society that leads to her inevitable demise, in Edith's novel The House of Mirth (CITATION). Although many of the characters in the novel were in an elite and prominent society, they were possibly the most morally corrupt people since women married men for their wealth, and men expected women to constantly act proper and sophisticated. Edith Wharton’s modern novel The House of Mirth demonstrates why people in the

This time period marked the ending of the Victorian Age, when women were usually considered the caretakers of the family and stayed at home to do tasks like raising their children, entertaining guests, and decorating the house, but the home gradually became the concern of both women and men. For example, male doctors and educators published manuals that gave advice on childbirth and parenting, subjects that before were exclusively studied by women. Also, both single and married women were also beginning to work at jobs that tended to reflect the domestic roles that women traditionally adopted; in The House of Mirth, Lily Bart is given a job in a hat-making shop with the help of her friends. The number of American women working almost doubled from about fifteen percent to almost thirty percent of the workforce between 1880 and 1910 (Moss and

When later visiting Laurence Selden, Lily tells him, “I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person . . . I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else” (296; ch. 12). Lily now realizes how difficult it is to live unwed and without money, having to work without ever being taught the important skills needed to be self-sufficient. She recognizes that she had been just a small part of the elite society of New York, and when this society shunned her, Lily could not fit in elsewhere. The irony in The House of Mirth is that Lily dies believing that she has no marriage suitors and no possible way to rejoin the elite society of New York, but the day after her death, Laurence, a member of the elite society, visits Lily with the intention of professing his love for