Survival Versus Thriving: Social Mobility in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Edna Ferber’s So Big

Abstract

One of the most productive ways to engage today’s students with Wharton’s fiction is to have them focus on the theme of survival versus thriving in hostile social environments, an issue which helps them see the relevance of Wharton’s work to contemporary American society. This approach works best when Wharton is taught in a comparative context with other novels by American women writers of the Progressive Era, such as Edna Ferber, Jesse Redmon Fauset, or Zora Neale Hurston. This chapter focuses on teaching Wharton’s The House of Mirth alongside Ferber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, So Big. Guiding students through a series of scaffolded assignments, reading the texts simultaneously in serial form to facilitate direct comparison, and building small-group Venn diagrams help them engage the philosophy of social Darwinism in Progressive Era literature and understand issues of social mobility and resilience in their own lives.