Lily Bart must choose between her desire for a husband with wealth and standing, and her desire for respect and love. After rejecting several offers of marriage, she ultimately betrays her heart and destroys her reputation. With “The House of Mirth,” Wharton transforms the novel of manners into an incisive and disturbing portrait of the strictures imposed upon women in the upper class of 1890’s New York society.
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
House of Mirth
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INTRODUCTION
The train, meanwhile, had scarcely slackened speed-life whizzed on with a deafening rattle and roar, in which one traveller at least found a welcome refuge from her own thoughts.
(The House of Mirth, 1905)
Before ten minutes had passed, the old familiar unpleasant sensation of being in a hurry took possession of my mind.
(Eliot Gregory, 'A Nation in a Hurry', Atlantic Monthly, 85, May 1900)
The House of Mirth comes out of a nation in a hurry. It is possessed by change, by mobility of all kinds. Everyone seems to be in rapid transit; one century seems to be swirling into the next. As we read, we begin to feel that we are in many different worlds at once, encountering carriages and motor cars, candles and electric light, telephone calls and notes sealed with wax, coexisting even within a single page. Edith Wharton's novels often contain an immense array of objects which help us understand the culture that produced them, but here they take us into a society where it is hard to get one's bearings; the map alters even as we look at it. The moment-to-moment narration of the story sustains the effect of an ever-shifting scene, most obviously in the pace and swift cutting of the episodes, but, too, in many of the images that shape what we see: 'the whole scene slipped by as if with the turn of a stereopticon' (I. xiv); 'this glimpse of the ever-revolving wheels of the great social machine' (II. viii); 'now a new vista of peril opened before her' (II. x).
The novel's heroine, Lily Bart, moves from one house to another, from group to group, and class to class, and her tracks cross and recross those of other socially fluid characters-divorced, Jewish, newly rich and newly poor-as they try to make their way in established New York society. Its geography sketches the shadowy journeys of incomers 'from the West', who try out their wealth in the margins of fashionable New York, consolidate it in houses in the 'versatile thoroughfare' of Fifth Avenue, settle it in the building plots of country estates on Long Island, and find in the Riviera and England 'new kingdoms' to display it. En route, a narrative aside comments that, 'Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty' (I. viii). Although the world of the very poor is almost beyond the novel's own imagination, we travel a vast social distance within its hierarchies, in a vertiginous journey downwards from the 'little illuminated circle' of the immensely rich, to the 'dreary limbo of dinginess' (I. xiv) that supports it. At the same time, the narrative spirals inwards; as we see Lily in multiple settings, we also become caught up in a restless inquiry about what she is, what has made her, and what she might become. In this whirling journey into the self, the novel throws out questions about subjective and social identity, asking how these are related and what happens to them at times of breathless change.
*
The opening sentences of the novel face us with the scurry of the contemporary. For readers, in 1905 at least, the afternoon rush at Grand Central Station was the epitome of haste. Cultural historians have reconstructed for us turn-of-the-century perceptions of what these great terminals were like and what they stood for. Alan Trachtenberg suggests that they signified the shape of the future:
Their multiple functions represented travel, interconnection, coordination, the spatial form of placelessness, of being neither here nor there, but on the way.... Like a giant clock seated in the city's midst, the terminal represented regulation, system, obedience to schedule. By necessity, its spaces were provisional: not habitations or places of continuous labor but sites of coming and going.
(Trachtenberg, p. 120)
His view is confirmed by John R. Stilgoe who retrieves for us the laments of city-dwellers like Eliot Gregory:
Our transit from dock to hotel was like the visit to a new circle in the Inferno, where trains rumble eternally overhead, and cable-cars glide and block around a pale-faced throng of the 'damned,' who, in expiation of their sins, are driven forever forward, toward an unreachable goal.
('A Nation in a Hurry', quoted in Stilgoe, p. 23)
This Eliot's New York City sounds like a later Eliot's Waste Land. No wonder Americans believed that modern civilization played directly on the nerves. The widely read American Nervousness (1881), by George M. Beard, had helped them understand that their systems were under pressure from the pace of modern life. The human organism was a machine itself, like Edison's electric generator, under strain from outside forces. 'Modern nervousness,' Beard explained, was 'the cry of the system struggling with its environment' (see Trachtenberg, pp. 47-8). New means of transport and communication, not least the railroad's imposition of nationwide 'standard time' in 1883, were placing individuals under near-intolerable stress. At the same time, as Alan Trachtenberg emphasizes, it was only the sensitive elite of America who were under threat. The 'lower orders' were less finely tuned. For the more select, beyond the fears of the machine lay fears of social challenge by the restive underclasses of the city. But whether caused by cultural disturbance or by technology, these currents of modern change passed directly into the currents of the self.
By the end of The House of Mirth, the heroine has become a victim. The narrative removes her from the shelter of the leisure classes, to subject her to change after change, driving her by degrees deeper into the modern working city. Cut off from a future in her aunt's unchanging home in Fifth Avenue, she enters the 'express train' of the Gormers' society (II. v), and the 'limbo' (II. ix) of the hotel world and others beyond. Lily's final lodging is the drab workers' boarding-house, approached 'through the degradation of a New York street in the last stages of decline from fashion to commerce' (II. x); she hates 'the intimate domestic noises of the house and the cries and rumblings of the street' (II. xi). For Lily, for other characters, and for the novel as a whole, this is, indeed, a decline into the circles of the damned:
[Rosedale] glanced at the dirty and unpropitious corner on which they stood, with the shriek of the 'elevated' and the tumult of trams and waggons contending hideously in their ears ... A cup of tea in quiet, somewhere out of the noise and ugliness, seemed for the moment the one solace [Lily] could bear.
(II. x)
These terms-noise, ugliness, dirt, glare and their variants-are repeated over and over throughout the narrative as the mark of everything Lily fears and has tried to keep at bay. In the final chapters, they saturate her environment and, at last, in her dreadful insomnia, invade her consciousness: 'as soon as she had lain down every nerve started once more into separate wakefulness. It was as though a great blaze of electric light had been turned on in her head, and her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered in it, without knowing where to take refuge' (II. xiii). It is a terrifying image, which the ambiguous peace of Lily's death cannot really lay to rest. Too much of the novel lies behind it.
In her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), Edith Wharton commented that her last page was always 'latent' in her first; and The House of Mirth, it is true, introduces at the very beginning all the terms which accumulate into the nightmare of the end. From the start, we see Lily defined in opposition to the forces that finally overwhelm her. We meet her, as we eventually leave her, through the vision of Lawrence Selden. As an observer, Selden shapes Lily to his own interests, and his view of her becomes one element in what destroys her. Here, however, it is difficult for us not to see Lily as he sees her, as an expensive and polished work of art, a product of social processes Selden cannot quite grasp, because he is another beneficiary: 'He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her' (I. i). In Grand Central Station, she arrests the eye because she is separate from the rush, and distinct from the crowd. Radiant, vivid, an image of leisure, luxury and superiority, she is distinguished in every way from the scene that sets her off: 'Was it possible that she belonged to the same race?' (I. i).
These opening paragraphs quickly produce the motifs that the novel clusters together as the fearful realm of 'dinginess', travelling on to colour the narrative, even when Selden's eye is withdrawn: lack of taste (the 'preposterous hats' and 'palm-leaf fans'), hurry, discomfort, ugliness, sallow faces, dullness, routine, the struggle with petty practicalities, the anonymity of the throng. Whatever shapes these take in the text, from the smell of cooking in a drawing-room, to the unpleasantly shining scalp of a charwoman, they emanate from the sphere of work and subsistence and signal the mechanics of living, which the gracious rich can ignore. Lily 'resented the smell of beeswax and brown soap, and behaved as though she thought a house ought to keep clean of itself, without extraneous assistance' (I. ix); in the boarding-house at the end, she 'yearned for that other luxurious world, whose machinery is so carefully concealed that one scene flows into another without perceptible agency' (II. xi).
But as well as coding class, they mark gender: all the forms of dinginess that terrify Lily are female. One of the casualties of the dingy, we learn, is Lily's own mother, whose 'worst reproach to her husband was to ask him if he expected her to “live like a pig”' (I. iii), and his financial failure is her collapse; her death-bed adjuration to Lily to escape stays with her daughter throughout the novel. The mother's voice is strong, but the fear goes beyond either Lily or Mrs Bart. In its shifting fortunes, the novel consistently p... --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
The train, meanwhile, had scarcely slackened speed-life whizzed on with a deafening rattle and roar, in which one traveller at least found a welcome refuge from her own thoughts.
(The House of Mirth, 1905)
Before ten minutes had passed, the old familiar unpleasant sensation of being in a hurry took possession of my mind.
(Eliot Gregory, 'A Nation in a Hurry', Atlantic Monthly, 85, May 1900)
The House of Mirth comes out of a nation in a hurry. It is possessed by change, by mobility of all kinds. Everyone seems to be in rapid transit; one century seems to be swirling into the next. As we read, we begin to feel that we are in many different worlds at once, encountering carriages and motor cars, candles and electric light, telephone calls and notes sealed with wax, coexisting even within a single page. Edith Wharton's novels often contain an immense array of objects which help us understand the culture that produced them, but here they take us into a society where it is hard to get one's bearings; the map alters even as we look at it. The moment-to-moment narration of the story sustains the effect of an ever-shifting scene, most obviously in the pace and swift cutting of the episodes, but, too, in many of the images that shape what we see: 'the whole scene slipped by as if with the turn of a stereopticon' (I. xiv); 'this glimpse of the ever-revolving wheels of the great social machine' (II. viii); 'now a new vista of peril opened before her' (II. x).
The novel's heroine, Lily Bart, moves from one house to another, from group to group, and class to class, and her tracks cross and recross those of other socially fluid characters-divorced, Jewish, newly rich and newly poor-as they try to make their way in established New York society. Its geography sketches the shadowy journeys of incomers 'from the West', who try out their wealth in the margins of fashionable New York, consolidate it in houses in the 'versatile thoroughfare' of Fifth Avenue, settle it in the building plots of country estates on Long Island, and find in the Riviera and England 'new kingdoms' to display it. En route, a narrative aside comments that, 'Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty' (I. viii). Although the world of the very poor is almost beyond the novel's own imagination, we travel a vast social distance within its hierarchies, in a vertiginous journey downwards from the 'little illuminated circle' of the immensely rich, to the 'dreary limbo of dinginess' (I. xiv) that supports it. At the same time, the narrative spirals inwards; as we see Lily in multiple settings, we also become caught up in a restless inquiry about what she is, what has made her, and what she might become. In this whirling journey into the self, the novel throws out questions about subjective and social identity, asking how these are related and what happens to them at times of breathless change.
*
The opening sentences of the novel face us with the scurry of the contemporary. For readers, in 1905 at least, the afternoon rush at Grand Central Station was the epitome of haste. Cultural historians have reconstructed for us turn-of-the-century perceptions of what these great terminals were like and what they stood for. Alan Trachtenberg suggests that they signified the shape of the future:
Their multiple functions represented travel, interconnection, coordination, the spatial form of placelessness, of being neither here nor there, but on the way.... Like a giant clock seated in the city's midst, the terminal represented regulation, system, obedience to schedule. By necessity, its spaces were provisional: not habitations or places of continuous labor but sites of coming and going.
(Trachtenberg, p. 120)
His view is confirmed by John R. Stilgoe who retrieves for us the laments of city-dwellers like Eliot Gregory:
Our transit from dock to hotel was like the visit to a new circle in the Inferno, where trains rumble eternally overhead, and cable-cars glide and block around a pale-faced throng of the 'damned,' who, in expiation of their sins, are driven forever forward, toward an unreachable goal.
('A Nation in a Hurry', quoted in Stilgoe, p. 23)
This Eliot's New York City sounds like a later Eliot's Waste Land. No wonder Americans believed that modern civilization played directly on the nerves. The widely read American Nervousness (1881), by George M. Beard, had helped them understand that their systems were under pressure from the pace of modern life. The human organism was a machine itself, like Edison's electric generator, under strain from outside forces. 'Modern nervousness,' Beard explained, was 'the cry of the system struggling with its environment' (see Trachtenberg, pp. 47-8). New means of transport and communication, not least the railroad's imposition of nationwide 'standard time' in 1883, were placing individuals under near-intolerable stress. At the same time, as Alan Trachtenberg emphasizes, it was only the sensitive elite of America who were under threat. The 'lower orders' were less finely tuned. For the more select, beyond the fears of the machine lay fears of social challenge by the restive underclasses of the city. But whether caused by cultural disturbance or by technology, these currents of modern change passed directly into the currents of the self.
By the end of The House of Mirth, the heroine has become a victim. The narrative removes her from the shelter of the leisure classes, to subject her to change after change, driving her by degrees deeper into the modern working city. Cut off from a future in her aunt's unchanging home in Fifth Avenue, she enters the 'express train' of the Gormers' society (II. v), and the 'limbo' (II. ix) of the hotel world and others beyond. Lily's final lodging is the drab workers' boarding-house, approached 'through the degradation of a New York street in the last stages of decline from fashion to commerce' (II. x); she hates 'the intimate domestic noises of the house and the cries and rumblings of the street' (II. xi). For Lily, for other characters, and for the novel as a whole, this is, indeed, a decline into the circles of the damned:
[Rosedale] glanced at the dirty and unpropitious corner on which they stood, with the shriek of the 'elevated' and the tumult of trams and waggons contending hideously in their ears ... A cup of tea in quiet, somewhere out of the noise and ugliness, seemed for the moment the one solace [Lily] could bear.
(II. x)
These terms-noise, ugliness, dirt, glare and their variants-are repeated over and over throughout the narrative as the mark of everything Lily fears and has tried to keep at bay. In the final chapters, they saturate her environment and, at last, in her dreadful insomnia, invade her consciousness: 'as soon as she had lain down every nerve started once more into separate wakefulness. It was as though a great blaze of electric light had been turned on in her head, and her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered in it, without knowing where to take refuge' (II. xiii). It is a terrifying image, which the ambiguous peace of Lily's death cannot really lay to rest. Too much of the novel lies behind it.
In her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), Edith Wharton commented that her last page was always 'latent' in her first; and The House of Mirth, it is true, introduces at the very beginning all the terms which accumulate into the nightmare of the end. From the start, we see Lily defined in opposition to the forces that finally overwhelm her. We meet her, as we eventually leave her, through the vision of Lawrence Selden. As an observer, Selden shapes Lily to his own interests, and his view of her becomes one element in what destroys her. Here, however, it is difficult for us not to see Lily as he sees her, as an expensive and polished work of art, a product of social processes Selden cannot quite grasp, because he is another beneficiary: 'He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her' (I. i). In Grand Central Station, she arrests the eye because she is separate from the rush, and distinct from the crowd. Radiant, vivid, an image of leisure, luxury and superiority, she is distinguished in every way from the scene that sets her off: 'Was it possible that she belonged to the same race?' (I. i).
These opening paragraphs quickly produce the motifs that the novel clusters together as the fearful realm of 'dinginess', travelling on to colour the narrative, even when Selden's eye is withdrawn: lack of taste (the 'preposterous hats' and 'palm-leaf fans'), hurry, discomfort, ugliness, sallow faces, dullness, routine, the struggle with petty practicalities, the anonymity of the throng. Whatever shapes these take in the text, from the smell of cooking in a drawing-room, to the unpleasantly shining scalp of a charwoman, they emanate from the sphere of work and subsistence and signal the mechanics of living, which the gracious rich can ignore. Lily 'resented the smell of beeswax and brown soap, and behaved as though she thought a house ought to keep clean of itself, without extraneous assistance' (I. ix); in the boarding-house at the end, she 'yearned for that other luxurious world, whose machinery is so carefully concealed that one scene flows into another without perceptible agency' (II. xi).
But as well as coding class, they mark gender: all the forms of dinginess that terrify Lily are female. One of the casualties of the dingy, we learn, is Lily's own mother, whose 'worst reproach to her husband was to ask him if he expected her to “live like a pig”' (I. iii), and his financial failure is her collapse; her death-bed adjuration to Lily to escape stays with her daughter throughout the novel. The mother's voice is strong, but the fear goes beyond either Lily or Mrs Bart. In its shifting fortunes, the novel consistently p... --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
Revue de presse
“A tragedy of our modern life, in which the relentlessness of what men used to call Fate and esteem…. is as vividly set forth as ever it was by Aeschylus or Shakespeare.”
—The New York Times
“Uniquely authentic among American novels of manners.”
—Louis Auchincloss
“Brilliant….[Lily Bart] is a grand tragic heroine, fit to take center stage with Manon or Emma Bovary, Gwendolen Harleth or Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Anna Karenina or Isabel Archer.”
—Hermione Lee --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
—The New York Times
“Uniquely authentic among American novels of manners.”
—Louis Auchincloss
“Brilliant….[Lily Bart] is a grand tragic heroine, fit to take center stage with Manon or Emma Bovary, Gwendolen Harleth or Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Anna Karenina or Isabel Archer.”
—Hermione Lee --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
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2 internautes sur 2 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile
Format:Broché
Reading The House of Mirth today, it's easy to overlook the obvious: that it was not written as a "period piece," but as a modern novel. Readers can get so caught up in the early 20th Century details (the Edwardian-era clothing, the carriages, both horseless and horse-drawn, the elaborate social rituals), that they tend to forget that for Wharton and her first readers this story had all the timeliness of, say, Sex and the City, a book which will probably seem just as dated as Wharton's by the 22nd Century, and less well written.
What Wharton set out to do, and did so effectively in the final analysis, was to present a picture of a then "modern woman," one endowed with beauty and intelligence, placed in a privileged yet precarious position, and to show how a tragic combination of character and circumstance could lead her from the promise of a glittering future to her ultimate degradation and destruction.
Lily Bart, the woman at the center of the novel, was modern in the sense that she was a product of both her era and her social class when the novel was published in 1905. Born and raised on the fringes of upper-class New York society before the turn of the last century, yet orphaned young without inherited wealth, she was expected and prepared to be the wife of a wealthy gentleman. Though refined in the moral as well the esthetic sense, she was prized by her society primarily as an ornament. A beautiful ornament, it's true, but so long as she remained unmarried her "mission" in life could never be considered fulfilled, despite her numerous and varied attributes.
Lily is 29 at the novel's start, and in that era dangerously close to becoming an old maid. The longer a woman in such a situation remained unwed, the more exposed she was to unfavorable or even vicious comments from those whom she most needed to ingratiate herself with in order to maintain a place in their charmed circles and to marry well. A woman in Lily's circumstances could ill afford to be considered too independent, or too careless of her reputation, as she belatedly discovered.
When, through a series of costly reversals, brought about either by accident (Wharton's novel is filled with momentous chance encounters), or due to her own proclivity to sabotage the advances of her prosperous suitors, Lily is cast out of "polite society" and ultimately forced to earn a living through manual labor, she discovers how unprepared she is for what she considers the "dingy" side of life. And not mere dinginess and toil, but the prospect of poverty and abject humiliation are what she faces as the novel nears its conclusion.
A sharp descent indeed for someone who started out so near the pinnacle of worldly success, and was so intimately received by those that had already achieved it.
When today's readers encounter Lily and her plight in Wharton's novel, there may be an urge to dismiss this story as unrelated to our modern society, where social rules are not so inflexible, and women (in most cases) are routinely expected to be able to earn their own living. But Wharton was not a reporter, she was a gifted novelist, and her tale of a character trapped in an infernal machine from which she can find no escape still has the power to move us deeply. Beyond the period details, The House of Mirth offers us a believable story in which a character struggles to survive a catastrophe partly of her own making, and partly of others'. Such a tragic tale, so skillfully narrated, is timeless.
What Wharton set out to do, and did so effectively in the final analysis, was to present a picture of a then "modern woman," one endowed with beauty and intelligence, placed in a privileged yet precarious position, and to show how a tragic combination of character and circumstance could lead her from the promise of a glittering future to her ultimate degradation and destruction.
Lily Bart, the woman at the center of the novel, was modern in the sense that she was a product of both her era and her social class when the novel was published in 1905. Born and raised on the fringes of upper-class New York society before the turn of the last century, yet orphaned young without inherited wealth, she was expected and prepared to be the wife of a wealthy gentleman. Though refined in the moral as well the esthetic sense, she was prized by her society primarily as an ornament. A beautiful ornament, it's true, but so long as she remained unmarried her "mission" in life could never be considered fulfilled, despite her numerous and varied attributes.
Lily is 29 at the novel's start, and in that era dangerously close to becoming an old maid. The longer a woman in such a situation remained unwed, the more exposed she was to unfavorable or even vicious comments from those whom she most needed to ingratiate herself with in order to maintain a place in their charmed circles and to marry well. A woman in Lily's circumstances could ill afford to be considered too independent, or too careless of her reputation, as she belatedly discovered.
When, through a series of costly reversals, brought about either by accident (Wharton's novel is filled with momentous chance encounters), or due to her own proclivity to sabotage the advances of her prosperous suitors, Lily is cast out of "polite society" and ultimately forced to earn a living through manual labor, she discovers how unprepared she is for what she considers the "dingy" side of life. And not mere dinginess and toil, but the prospect of poverty and abject humiliation are what she faces as the novel nears its conclusion.
A sharp descent indeed for someone who started out so near the pinnacle of worldly success, and was so intimately received by those that had already achieved it.
When today's readers encounter Lily and her plight in Wharton's novel, there may be an urge to dismiss this story as unrelated to our modern society, where social rules are not so inflexible, and women (in most cases) are routinely expected to be able to earn their own living. But Wharton was not a reporter, she was a gifted novelist, and her tale of a character trapped in an infernal machine from which she can find no escape still has the power to move us deeply. Beyond the period details, The House of Mirth offers us a believable story in which a character struggles to survive a catastrophe partly of her own making, and partly of others'. Such a tragic tale, so skillfully narrated, is timeless.
1 internautes sur 1 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile
Par LECLAIR
Format:Broché
Un grand classique de la littérature américaine. Voire de la littérature tout court.
Un très beau portrait de femme, libre, indépendante, la description d'une société sclérosée. De la grande littérature, non pas pompeuse et ennuyeuse, mais vivante. Sans compter que le récit, le ton, sont d'une étonnante modernité.
Un "must read".
Un très beau portrait de femme, libre, indépendante, la description d'une société sclérosée. De la grande littérature, non pas pompeuse et ennuyeuse, mais vivante. Sans compter que le récit, le ton, sont d'une étonnante modernité.
Un "must read".
Par Jacques Salmona
Format:Broché|Achat authentifié par Amazon
Ce roman a été un succès de librairie lors de sa sortie en 1905. Il dépeint la grande bourgeoisie New Yorkaise sans pitié pour leurs défauts: la paresse, la vanité, la fausseté, leur goût de l'argent et leur manque de parole. L'héroïne, une jeune fille de 28 ans, élevée par une mère inconséquente dans une famille riche puis ruinée à son adolescence, n'est pas mariée malgré son exceptionnelle beauté. Elle veut rester dans le milieu qu'elle a connu petite fille mais manque de moyens. Son manque d'expérience lui fait commettre de nombreuses erreurs qui ruinent sa réputation, ce qui fait fuir les partis possibles et en particulier un homme un peu meilleur que les autres, le seul dont elle soit amoureuse. Elle se suicide enfin et meurt dans la misère et l'isolement. Celui qu'elle aime vient alors assurer sa veillée funèbre, ce que j'ai trouvé choquant. Il aurait mieux fait de s'occuper d'elle de son vivant, car il en est vaguement amoureux. C'est un livre amer qui montre que la beauté n'est pas tout pour une femme et qu'il est dangereux de fréquenter un milieu de gens qui ne partagent pas vos aspirations. C'est un roman intéressant. On y sent l'influence de Henry James mais les analyses psychologique n'ont pas la même profondeur. Il se lit néanmoins avec plaisir.
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