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New Essays on The House of Mirth ed. by Deborah Esch

2002; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.2002.0020

1913-4835

Brenda Austin-Smith,

Themes in Literature Analysis

ESC 28, 2002 Deborah Esch, ed. New Essays on The House of Mirth. Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 162. $49.95 (U.S.) cloth. W ith the release of the film version of Edith W harton’s The House of M irth providing fresh opportunity for discussion of the novel in the light of new critical work, this volume could not have appeared at a better time. It suffers much, however, in comparison with others in the New Essays series such as The Portrait of a Lady, edited by Joel Porte, or The American, edited by M artha Banta. Of the four essays collected here, one is outstanding, a second useful as a survey essay, a third of limited use to undergraduate readers, and the last of doubtful value to either student or scholar. Deborah Esch’s introduction to the volume is clear and ca­ pable, but very short. Providing a useful history of the novel’s composition in the context of W harton’s tempering experiences as a writer, and then an overview of M irth's popular and crit­ ical reception, Esch, who pursues the topic of Lily B art’s self­ division for less than four whole pages before she waves the reader on to the essays that follow, warms to her subject only briefly. As a mark of an editor’s personal take on a novel selected for critical treatm ent, the introduction is a disappointment; it provides, for example, scant information on the details of schol­ arly debates about the novel, and none at all about where in this critical territory the essays gathered here take up their position. The lead piece, by R uth Bernard Yeazell, is a reprint of “The Conspicuous W asting of Lily Bart,” an article published in English Literary History in 1992. In this, the best essay in the collection, Yeazell deftly connects Mirth to Thorstein Veblen ’s The Theory of the Leisure Class by reading Lily Bart as the hum an m aterial conspicuously displayed and wasted in upper-class New York’s society of “conspicuous consumption.” Yeazell expands and sharpens Veblen’s critique of patriarchy by emphasizing the paradox of Lily’s vulnerability to scrutiny as the only means by which she might escape scrutiny: she must be observed as an attractive object in order to gain access to the (limited) subject-hood promised by marriage. Yeazell also ties W harton’s portrait of high society to the enunciatory technolo­ gies of urban modernity — newspapers, photo spreads, and the 758 REVIEWS cinema — that serve its desire for display. Though not new, it is a fine essay that I appreciate having in such a convenient form. The second essay, “Determining Influences: Resistance and M entorship in The House of Mirth and the Anglo-American Realist Tradition,” is by Mary Nyquist. Nyquist discusses a handful of novels forming a loose tradition in which a male character serves as mentor to a resistant female character. The essay focusses on The House of M irth, Daniel Deronda, and Em ma, but spends considerable time on Sir Charles Grandison as well as on Sense and Sensibility and The Portrait of a Lady and, thus, is most valuable to those teaching or taking survey courses. While the readings of these novels and their inter-textual relations are often insightful (especially the read­ ing of willful female characters as a type of “rake”), for the reader seeking in-depth treatm ent of Mirth the essay is a long read. Surprising too are several typos, including the misspelling of Elinor Dashwood in the epigraph (43), of Box Hill (67), and of Mary Wollstonecraft in the final note (105), as well as wayward italics (100). Also odd is the last endnote itself, which indicates th at the essay, first written in 1987, has not been substantially revised or updated since then. Thomas Loebel’s essay “Beyond Her Self” treats the novel as one of Lily B art’s self-discovery, a reading influenced by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s theory of ethical obligation to the “other,” figured by Loebel as the soul. An undergraduate reader of Mirth encountering Loebel’s metaphor- and jargonpacked sentences would have...