The relationship between the ideal and the reality is many times pictured in black and white. The ideal can be defined as a conception of something in its perfection, whereas reality is defined as something that exists independently of ideas...

In Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth, the beautiful but helpless Lily Bart is never able to escape from the follies and superficialities of the society that she is born into. According to a verse in Ecclesiastics which the novel was titled...

The Gilded Age of the late 19th century saw the rise of extravagant hats, hairstyles, and high society. Subsequently, the Gilded Age was also host to an increasingly treacherous gap between the rich and the poor and stifling social restrictions...

Commonly called “a novel of manners” because of the way characters are shown thinking and speaking about how people in society ought to conduct themselves, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton focuses chiefly on Lily Bart, a woman whose social...

In The House of Mirth, Percy Gryce is a rich young eligible bachelor upon whom Lily, one of Wharton's central characters, sets eyes on. Gryce is used by Wharton as a vehicle to convey the shallowness and brutality of the New York high society,...

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton offers a multidimensional and fluid analysis of social class. Initially, Lily attempts to belong to the upper class. However, through a series of unfortunate decisions, we witness Lily’s inevitable descent into...

In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton uses weather in a variety of ways that provide symbolic significance along with a vivid setting. Wharton uses weather, climate, and the change of seasons to foreshadow events in the immediate future and to...

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) is a novel of society and manners, following two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, in their bids for love and marriage. Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905) focuses on New York’s high society and...

In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton introduces us to the opulent society of New York during the Gilded Age. The entire novel unravels a tedious model of social etiquette in which every person’s action is either criticized or judged by their...

Edith Wharton is perhaps the most preeminent female Gothic writer in all of American history. What made her career so unique, besides the fact that she was a woman in a traditionally male dominated field, was that she was not writing for money,...

In Luce Irigaray’s “Women on the Market,” she argues that, in patriarchal societies, women are essentially reduced from human beings to commodities whose exchange is controlled by men. According to Irigaray, this exploitation of women is so...

Throughout Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever,” Mrs. Alida Slade experiences the consequences of an inflated ego as she fails to fully understand her companion, Mrs. Grace Ansley. She is consumed with egocentric priorities, like superiority, deception,...

Edith Wharton challenges the notion of knowledge and understanding, even of one’s own personal experience, in her short story “Roman Fever.” The application of Jackie Royster’s scenic analysis to Wharton’s “Roman Fever” perpetuates the idea that...

Published in 1904, Edith Wharton’s "The Other Two" explores the infancy of divorce within New York’s middle-class society by utilizing the concept of the futile struggle to escape social forces that are out of one’s control. In addition to that,...

Edith Wharton published an enticing tale of two older women looking back on their pasts titled “Roman Fever” in 1936, only a year prior to her own death. The short story took place in Rome with both women looking out onto what is called “Memento...

In the short story, “Roman Fever,” Edith Wharton portrays a daily life situation between two wealthy middle-aged women talking in Rome. The morals and struggle of upper-class women to succeed and stand out at that time period are revealed in the...