Mrs. Peniston and the House of Mirth

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is filled with wonderful dry wit and insight into the lives of rich and nervous individuals based in a young New York City. It takes a determined reader to mine their way through Wharton's regal prose and the subtle plot shifts involving rich socialites, philanderers, and aging wealth all conforming to Victorian era social norms and expectations of women. One of the benefits of the novel is to experience numerous well-worded descriptions and wry comments about the characters, just a taste of which I have listed below:


Lily: "There is no one, I mean, to tell me about the republic of the spirit."
Seldon: "There never is -- it's a country one has to find the way to one's self."

"Mrs. Peniston was a small plump woman, with a colourless skin lined with trivial wrinkles. Her grey hair was arranged with precision, and her clothes looked excessively new and yet slightly old-fashioned. They were always black and tightly fitting, with an expensive glitter: she was the kind of woman who wore jet at breakfast. Lily had never seen her when she was not cuirassed in shining black, with small tight boots, and an air of being packed and ready to start; yet she never started."

"Mrs. Peniston always sat on a chair, never in it."

"Did you ever watch Trenor eat? If you did, you'd wonder why he's alive; I suppose he's leather inside too."

"It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness."

"The modern fastness appeared synonymous with immorality, and the mere idea of immorality was as offensive to Mrs. Peniston as a smell of cooking in the drawing-room."

"'Ah,' said Mrs. Peniston, shutting her lips with the snap of a purse closing against a beggar."

The lead protagonist of the novel is Lily Bart, who is desperate to live a lifestyle of opulence even when she is virtually broke. It is an interesting counter-point to Germinal, where the main characters are poor and searching for material gain in a world where they see hardly any wealth first-hand. In Mirth, Lily is surrounded by the lavish class of New York and is driven to personal extremes to make sure she stays there. Both novels give insight into what people will do to improve their personal circumstances, regardless of where their starting point is.