| Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is a very productive and versatile American woman writer at the turn of the ninetieth century into the twentieth century. Her voluminous works cover a great variety of literary genres: twenty-five novels and novellas, eighty-six short stories, three books of poetry, an autobiography, a book on the theory of fiction, eleven books or pamphlets of nonfiction, and scores of articles, reviews and translations. Among them her novels have particularly won her great fame. Now she is generally viewed as one of the major writers in the American literary realm. This M.A. thesis is centered on her first important novel The House of Mirth (1905), which marks the turning point from an amateur into a professional according to her own memoir. This novel is also the first of her series of works set in the old New York society. Wharton's ironic representation of the upper class in her youth has often won her the title of "a novelist of manners," which leads to critics' excessive comments on her social themes. However Edith Wharton is a writer not only of manners but also of morals if we view her in her wide reading background of literal, religious and philosophical works in her youth. She is an untiring explorer who searches for the moral and spiritual meaning in life and hi art. Therefore this thesis is an attempt to study the moral significance in this novel. It is divided into six parts.The opening part is a brief introduction to the main ideas presented in this thesis, which introduces Edith Wharton's fame and her major status in the American literary history, and her emphasis on the moral concerns in her works. At the end of this introduction, a gist of the thesis is given.The first chapter dwells upon Wharton's life and literary career, which take the form of a spiritual quest. As the daughter of an old New York family, she struggled to become a professional writer in spite of the restrictions upon women and the indifference to the authorship in the upper class at that time. Young Edith developed a life-long interest in making up stories before she could read. Her wide reading of the religious, philosophical as well as literary works in her youth has provided a rich background for interpreting her works in a moral sense. She also made acquaintance with a lot of intellectual friends who shared her interest in books. Among them, Henry James was the most distinguished one to whom she was often compared. In contrast to the conventional views of her as a Jamesian disciple or a chronicler of narrow, upper-class interests, Wharton drew upon her wide reading original materials for her creative writing about the universal meaning of moral and spiritual quest in a frivolous material world.The second chapter deals with the story and its social background of The House of Mirth. Lily Bart, a beautiful girl who lost her parents early in her youth and left in themercy of her stem aunt. She has to fight for her social footing in the upper world where she was brought up by marrying herself to a rich husband. She might have married more than once if something in her spirit had not made her recoil from the final compromise to the debasing material concerns, which is in conflict with her noble instincts. In order to preserve her integrity, she finally sacrifices all that she has been taught to think of as having the most worth: wealth, social position and a life of ease, and died of an overdose of chloral in absolute poverty. The story is set in the Progressive Era after the American Civil War at the turn of the nineteenth century, a time contemporary with its composition. Along with the material prosperity, this era is also a flourishing age of Darwinian Evolutionary Theory, which challenged the religious beliefs and spiritual ideals in the pre-Civil War world. In addition, the rum of the nineteenth century also witnessed the second wave of the American Women's Movement. In spite of her remark of disapproval of the movement in her memoir, actually Wharton was not against the movement itself, rather she... |
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