Edith Wharton′s
“The House of Mirth” as a Portrait of the City

by

Julia Oesterreich and Nicole Schindler

Universität Potsdam
Anglistik / Amerikanistik
HS: Zwischen “White City” und „Slum Fiction“ – 
Die Großstadt in der amerikanischen Literatur am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts
SS 2005

Overview

Overview  2

1. Introduction: Edith Wharton and New York City  3

2. The American City in Novels  6

3. Social Customs of the Wealthy  8

4. Edith Wharton’s Qualification to write about New York Society  10

5. Architecture  12

6. Luxury  15

7. Rites and Rituals  16

8. New Money – New Rules  18

9. Conclusion  20

10. Sources  21

1. Introduction: Edith Wharton and New York City

In this paper we will describe the ambivalent relationship between American novelist Edith Wharton and the American city. Edith Wharton was born into a very well established family of the New Yorker upper class¹ and her ties to the city remained strong throughout her life. Her biographer Louis Auchincloss sums up Wharton′s deeply rooted relation to the topic at hand: "She had been brought up in the city and had married there. She had experienced its social life, in greater doses than she had wanted. She knew its men and women of property; she knew their history and origins, their prejudices and ideals, the source of their money and how they spent their summers. This knowledge, of course, was to fade with her continued residence abroad, but the ten years that preceded the war were actually the years when her American impressions were at their most vivid and when she was doing her strongest work." (Auchincloss 33-34) The work he refers to are her novels "The House of Mirth", "The Custom of the Country", and "The Age of Innocence". In all three of them, Wharton is concerned with the lives of a rather closed set of people, namely the so called "old families" of New York.

New York was at that time the de facto capital of the nation. It was the North American centre of commerce, finance, and the arts. Industrial revolution had not only brought about new inventions like the telephone, the electric light, or elevators, it further had changed the way production was organised. Steam driven "El Lines" (El = elevated) now made it possible for workers to commute from their homes on the outskirts of the city to their workplaces in down-town New York. Traditional stasis in small town home employment gave way to movement and flexibility. Rapid industrial growth in America′s Gilded Age could absorb the immense influx of immigrant workers and those who left their rural backgrounds to become genuine city-dwellers. New York′s population grew from 123,000 in 1820 to over 3 million by the end of the century. The city′s face was changing just as New York itself changed its inhabitants. (see Heideking 201)

Naturalist authors like Theodore Dreiser or Stephen Crane drew attention to the workings of this transformation. They were among the first who regarded the city as a conglomerate of diverse structures that directly influence people and their lives.

Both authors′ interests lay foremost in the description of working-class people. They wrote about the lure, the threat, the possibilities as well as the unrealistic dreams the city(′s image) provided for those who were marvelling at it from the margins. Their texts gave insight into the fates of originally poor men and women who got themselves entangled in the complex urban web of modernity in their striving for survival and ultimately success (which here stands for material acquisitions). For those authors the upward and downward spirals this entailed were already imminent in the machinery of the city (and the structures of modern capitalism that lay behind the image of the city).

Edith Wharton came from a different background, both personally and literary, and she had a different perspective. In Wharton′s works, the world of the working poor is an invisible one. Although employees, servants, and maids were constantly present in and around the houses of the so called leisure class, they do not gain an independent voice, their struggle is being left untold. Nonetheless, the author is aware of the trappings of a materialistic society. "The fact that Mrs. Wharton′s characters are trapped in gilded drawing-rooms, whereas Dreiser′s are often imprisoned in the slum, is of minor significance in an over-all appraisal." (Rubin, cited in Kornetta 192) Her characters are often women, who, at that time, had very little rights concerning property, inheritance and personal freedom regardless of their personal wealth. Women born into middle or higher classes were dependent on the goodwill of friends and family for their survival and sustenance in the group; marriage to a reliable and reliably wealthy man often was their only chance for material security. This situation was naturally precarious as were the limited rights and little money ′the other half′ had. "(...) she [Wharton] recognised that, when women gained worldly understanding, they had no power to change whatever they found amiss. Only painful disillusionment and resigned acceptance result from enlightenment (...)." (McDowell, cited in Kornetta 87) Wharton is interested in how the people she understood best, the families who inhabited society′s highest valued spots, managed their situation. What effect had the modern city life on the best established class? How were the customs and modalities of these people affected by the tremendous developments around them? And how did (gendered) individuals react to the entrance wish of the newly rich into their inner circles? In other words, the way in which in- and exclusion from a certain group worked, how these were executed and what the potentiality of a change in status meant for the mind of the involved characters is Edith Wharton′s central concern.

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1 As there are no official “classes” in the United States, we use this term to describe the distinct qualities of the environment Wharton grew up in and the special relation this set of people had to their city.