Herewith is Laura's update on this month's reading group on Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, which was nearly two weeks ago, but I've been a little slow lately:

Wow - what an evening! We had a pretty big turnout (14 people, all "regulars") and a discussion that didn't want to end even after 9:00. The surprising thing was that only one person disliked this book and yet we had one of the most lively discussions ever. There was a lot of discussion about Lily's character - some liked her, some didn't, some didn't like her but sympathized with her and/or found her to be noble at core. We debated whether her death was intentional or accidental. We compared Wharton to Austen. We discussed Seldon and how he really wasn't a good friend (most of us didn't like him - with emotions ranging from dismissiveness to significant dislike). We talked about Bertha's motivations for working to destroy Lily, including jealousy over her relationship with Seldon, her role as confidante for Bertha's husband, and her success in Europe. We talked about whether Lily really had options along the way and why she made wrong moves along the way (were they obviously wrong at the time or just in hindsight?). It was such a long and full discussion that I can't even begin to capture all of it here!

I wasn't feeling that well and didn't have much to contribute to the conversation anyway, since this book is about half over before it really gets going, but I think once you're finished with it you can really appreciate Wharton's craft and how she is basically perfect in terms of pacing and plotting. But the reading group doesn't talk about that sort of thing, they focus on characters, who's good, who's bad, what this character probably really thought regarding that incident or that character, some of it insightful but much of it extrapolated without specific citations to back it up. But that's okay, its still a fun time, I think in this case it served to denote just how strong and complex a character Lily Bart is.



The point I tried to make was that Lily is a fish out of water, comfortable in the system but not necessarily that comfortable with it, such that she has these occasional bursts of pushing the envelope that would border on naughtiness in a less rigid society but here are grounds for expulsion and disinheritance. I think its how she proves to herself that she has free will, that there is something significant to existing. I first read this book at NU as part of the Middle American Lit class with that Marxist feminist literature professor I can't remember the name of, and of course this was right up her alley (plus Kate Chopin's The Awakening). Having read a lot more of this kind of book (fin de siecle, that is, not feminist) since then, it has trouble rising above the herd not because of Lily and her various mishaps, but because everyone else in the book is kind of forgettable. I'd like to see the movie, though, can't imagine Gillian Anderson in the part.