So... It Comes to This: Chapters 13 & 14 (The House of Mirth)

The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton

*WARNING* I will not take responsibility for leaking any spoilers in this blog post.  If you have not finished the novel and desire to go in fresh, read at your own risk.

Now that this ordeal is over, I shall end this round of blogging as I began: with judgment.

Overall, I had no qualms with Wharton's writing style.  I appreciated that, even though she wrote the novel over 100 years ago, the diction was not so advanced as to be incomprehensible. My favorite aspect of Wharton's style was how she utilized sentence structure to reflect the personalities of the characters.  Passages concerning Lily contained long, complex sentences designed to deduce the motives of the surroundings from observations of the smallest details while passages concerning Selden or Gerty tended to be more simplistic and free of overbearing thought.  However, one aspect of her style I enjoyed less was the frequent use of metaphors.  Although many of the metaphors helped clarify concepts, I felt that too many were featured in dialogue.  But perhaps the frequent metaphors added an intended loftiness to the characters' speech.

Now for my judgment on the story line which deals more specifically with the last section.  Overall, I felt the story was boring.  There were few conflicts to pique my interest and those few conflicts were usually tacit and escalated indirectly.  It took almost the entire book for the conflict involving Lily's attempts to escape her debts and loneliness to come to a tangible conclusion: Lily's death.  However, I enjoyed the connection of the modern reader's probable boredom to Lily's anguish at the hands of the from which Wharton herself desired to escape; as the reader suffered through the petty squabbles of high society, Lily herself suffered its cruelty and pettiness. For both the reader and the characters, Lily's story came to an abrupt and unsatisfying end for which the cruelty of the upper class can be blamed.

One consistency in the symbolism offered a pinch of positive to turn this from plain tragic to bitter-sweet.  As Selden unsuspectingly went to visit Lily, he noticed that "it was inevitable that he should connect her with the one touch of beauty in the dingy scene" (Wharton, 264).  Selden noticed this unique quality of Lily at the beginning of the story which was strengthened with the connection to the storm that relieved the mugginess of the city.  But, just like the storm, Lily's refreshing qualities left as suddenly as they appeared.

One question remains: what was the word?