The House of Mirth Book 2, Chapters 3 and 4

The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton

This section of the novel really encompassed Wharton's writing style and displayed some beautiful and very well-written passages.  I often enjoy her writing of individual parts, so I want to take some time to focus on her style as a female writer in the early 1900's.  Chapter III begins with very long, complex sentences and long paragraphs, describing the thoughts of both Lawrence Selden and Lily Bart.  This variation of syntax allows Wharton to give us many details and present the streams of conscience of both the hero and heroine. Her narrative writing is characteristically beautiful in these two chapters, yet she still jumps around a bit from scene to scene.  Since that is obviously a major component of her style, I will not complain any more and will try to focus instead on her diction and the flow of individual paragraphs.  She adds to the descriptions of events many important analogies: on page 171, "like a dangerous lunatic who has been drugged" and "wash his hands of the sequel."  More often though, are Wharton's little bits of beautiful diction throughout her writing.  Just a few from this section of the novel include: "a labyrinth of courses" (Wharton, page 174), "apoplectic majesty" (Wharton, page 175), "struggling misery of her face" (Wharton, page 177), "like some deposed princess moving tranquilly to exile" (Wharton, page 177), "a well-kept family vault, in which the last corpse had just been decently deposited" (Wharton, page 181), and "the full height of her slender majesty, towering like some dark angel of defiance above the troubled Gerty" (Wharton, page 182).  The list goes on and on from there.  Other details include an oxymoron on page 174, "showy dullness of conversation," which plays the dual role of explaining society's behavior and Lily's opinion of it. 
      I also want to take back what I previously said about Miss Bart because I realize I was kind of harsh on her; I'll never truly understand her predicament and I probably would feel the same pressures she did if I experienced her situation.  I really did feel bad for Lily when she did not get the inheritance she was expecting from her Aunt Julia because although she made a few mistakes, she did deserve what she had been promised for probably many years.  [And that's another thing.  We did not know Mrs. Peniston died for about for or five paragraphs at the start of Chapter 4, which annoyed me, but that's a part of her style, I guess.  I need to adjust me reading to fit her style because this is a classic and others look past this flaw and get to the storyline.