Reading “The House of Mirth” by Edith Wharton

“The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth," (Ecclesiastes 7:4) The title sets the sober mood of the novel. However, before I learned the

meaning of the title, I thought the book would be about some mundane happiness.

The first time I heard of this book was during my second year at Hunter College. This book was required for an American Prose course, taught by a good-hearted adjunct professor, whose name was too complicated for me to spell out even now. Thanks to his good-heartedness, I skipped reading the book because of my busy schedule. I tried to read it afterwards, but the beginning of the book, the episode where Lily Bart meets Lawrence Selden at Grand Central, bored me. I could not even finish reading the first few pages.

I started to “listen to” the book when I found a cassette audio book, an abridged version of “The House of Mirth” at the library in Midtown Manhattan. I still worked at Worth By Design and I listened to the cassette tapes one night as a means of helping me fall asleep. I was unable to sleep that night when I listened to the story. Tears ran down my cheeks and my nose stuffed up because of my crying. I was so touched and saddened by Lily’s tragic fate. It was the first time Edith Wharton’s name carved a place in my mind.

After that, I also listened to Wharton’s book “The Age of Innocence.” It touches my soul, every bit of it.

This summer, I discovered an unabridged version of the entire audio book of “The House of Mirth” from the same library. I have listened to every chapter a few times since.

Every time I listened to the narratives, I thought, what makes the depictions of the people and scenes so uniquely touching and striking?

It was the universal human nature and its universal tragic fate. The unchanged human fate across land, ocean and time touches me and many other readers as normal human beings. Edith Wharton reveals things that dominate our lives everlastingly, but that we fail to see.

Just as Mr. Chi, my graduate advisor, had commented in the 1990s, “The way youth date each other today has not moved a half step ahead compared with our time.” People’s fates are not much better off nowadays compared with 1905, the historical setting of the book. Technology and science have improved tremendously; livelihood has become much easier for many people especially women. However, people are the same. The difficulty of making a decent living and becoming a dignified human being is still huge.

Lily Bart struggles to make a living by depending upon her rich but unloving aunt. Then, she loses her aunt’s sponsorship and her share of the inheritance when the aunt dies. Then, she loses her rich benefactors because she refuses to play along with their foul tricks. Consequently, she loses her popular status in New York’s high society and has to make a meager living as a worker in a hat-knitting factory. She finally dies from an overdose of sleeping liquid.

I feel that Lily is abandoned by Lawrence Selden, her idol in life; rather than she giving up on him, as the critics comment, because he could not afford her ideal lifestyle. Lawrence has largely given up on her because of all kinds of misunderstandings, or, because of the smallness of his heart. He cannot accept whom he assumes she is and cruelly leaves her alone to fight against the misery. Every meeting of theirs makes my heart ache. I watch Lily Bart drown in the ocean of a brutal society little by little, without being able to offer her any possible resolution even in my imagination. She is doomed.

We are all doomed. But I am still here, and she died a hundred years ago in the same city where I live now. That may be the difference. Society has improved a little bit so that women have some options now in terms of survival. But livelihood is never an easy business. Often I feel that we are just wasting our lives, albeit in a less desperate way, moving toward the same meaningless end.