The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton’s House of Mirth

Abstract

Abstract At The Beginning of Edith Wharton’s first great novel, The House of Mirth (1905), the heroine, Lily Bart, is twenty-nine, the dazzlingly well-preserved veteran of eleven years in the New York marriage market. By the end of the novel, she is past thirty and dead of an overdose of chloral. Like Edna Pontellier, Kate Chopin’s heroine in The Awakening (1899), who celebrates her twenty-ninth birthday by taking a lover, Lily Bart belongs to a genre we might call “the novel of the woman of thirty,” a genre that emerged appropriately enough in American women’s literature at the turn of the century. These novels pose the problem of female maturation in narrative terms: What can happen to the heroine as she grows up? What plots, transformations, and endings are imaginable for her? Is she capable of change at all? As the nineteenth-century feminist activist and novelist Elizabeth Oakes Smith noted in her diary, “How few women have any history after the age of thirty!” Telling the history of women past thirty was part of the challenge Wharton faced as a writer looking to the twentieth century. The threshold of thirty established for women by nineteenth century conventions of “girlhood” and marriageability continued in the twentieth century as a psychological observation about the formation of feminine identity.