GREAT LITERARY LADY: Lily Bart
Valerie Nye, a reader of The Lady, suggested Wharton’s breakthrough novel of 1905. This tells the story of Lily, an upper-class 1890s New Yorker, who is reluctant to follow convention and choose a loveless marriage that will continue her easy, financially sumptuous life. Instead, she desires a passionate meeting of minds and has moral scruples into the bargain. However, this is not a comic love story and unlike Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, she doesn’t find both in the same man – rather the novel ends in tragedy after Lily’s descent on the social ladder.
After rejecting several suitable proposals of marriage, Lily’s reputation is first sullied when the husband of a friend gives her money and society tongues start to wag as to what it was for. Fleeing abroad, her reputation is then ruined when her supposed friend, Bertha Dorset, lies to say that Lily has had an affair with Bertha’s husband George. Deprived of her inheritance, she ends up an outcast, working in a milliner’s and dies eventually of a possibly accidental overdose.
The tragedy of Lily Bart lies in the double standards and the coldly calculating obsession with money and class of ultraconventional high society, to which the independent, rebellious Lily refuses to conform.
This controversial novel caused uproar in polite society when it was published, as it was felt – correctly – that Wharton was lambasting her peers in New York’s social elite.
After rejecting several suitable proposals of marriage, Lily’s reputation is first sullied when the husband of a friend gives her money and society tongues start to wag as to what it was for. Fleeing abroad, her reputation is then ruined when her supposed friend, Bertha Dorset, lies to say that Lily has had an affair with Bertha’s husband George. Deprived of her inheritance, she ends up an outcast, working in a milliner’s and dies eventually of a possibly accidental overdose.
The tragedy of Lily Bart lies in the double standards and the coldly calculating obsession with money and class of ultraconventional high society, to which the independent, rebellious Lily refuses to conform.
This controversial novel caused uproar in polite society when it was published, as it was felt – correctly – that Wharton was lambasting her peers in New York’s social elite.