The House of Mirth and the Question of Women

Abstract

In 1912 Wilbur Cross, the editor of the Yale Review, wrote to Edith Wharton, asking her for an essay on the Woman Question.¹ He had read her novels with care and was right to believe that no one could probe beneath the surface of the social issue more subtly and clearly than she. Although he had chosen his essayist wisely, Wharton declined the offer, explaining that she did not feel prepared to address the question of women. The analysis Cross sought in discursive form had already been written, as he must have known, in her fiction. The central issue in her first novel about American society, The House of Mirth (1905), is the Woman Question. Exploring the social and economic conditions of turn-of-the-century women, like those analyzed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Women and Economics (1899), Wharton created a novel about the possibilities for female stories. As Vernon Lee put it in her review of Gilman’s book: “We do not really know what women are.” Wharton turns that declaration into a question, the one central to women of her day. If a woman chooses to discard the usual plot of marriage and her subsequent economic dependence on a man, then what? Exactly who is she? In more practical terms, how is she to earn her own way?

We do not really know what women are.

— Vernon Lee, Review of Women and Economics

On his table lay the note: Lily had sent it to his rooms. He knew what was in it before he broke the seal — a grey seal with Beyond! beneath a flying ship. Ah, he would take her beyond — beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of the soul —

— Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth