Illusions of Wealth and Self: Escapist and Imprisoned Sentiments in "The House of Mirth"

Edith Wharton, in her novel "The House of Mirth" creates a vision of wealth that is simultaneously painfully vapid and heartbreakingly complex.  That is to say, as objective outsiders, we readers see the aloof idleness of Wharton's upper class New York elite at an altitude: the realities of their shallow cliques and menial gossip are too trivial to be real to our more modern gaze.  However, when we become privy to this world of idle wealth through the personal lens of Wharton's main character, Lily Bart, we are able to glimpse the very real complexities of the pressures and performative expectations that someone like Lily, who lacks necessary financial means, experiences in trying to keep-up with her cohorts.

Wharton's dichotomous contrast between objective scrutiny of wealth and class and subjective sympathy for Lily is somewhat of a revelation of the novel's contents.  Like the dualities we readers experience in our perspectives of the novel's themes and ethos, the contrast between the desire to be wealthy and the desire to be free plagues Lily Bart's sense of self throughout the text.  For Lily, wealth represents a freedom from creditors and the stress of trying to act above her means.  At the same time, the calculating nature of her "friends" and their predatory gossip appalls her on a deeply personal level. She sees the "world" of wealth as a "cage" and the world beyond this cage as "alluring" (Wharton, 55).  As much as she needs money, she sees the idle, conformist nature of her wealthy companions.  Their relationships are guised and inauthentic and fraught with quick, eager, self-serving malice.  As someone just beyond the outer limits of this class from a financial standpoint, Lily recognizes the more genuine, honest world that exists outside the pressures of wealth for someone like Lawrence Seldon.  While Lily needs money to soothe her material desires, her emotional sense of self, the self that is not a performance, desires Seldon's world of honest contemplation and forgiven, detached non-conformity. 

Conversely however (and I find this antithesis ironic), Lily often finds herself drawn to the tempting glamour of wealth in a way that is not just remediate but veritably desirable, albeit materialistic.  When looking at Gwen Van Osburgh Stepney's wedding jewels, "the glow of the stones warmed Lily's veins like wine.  More completely than any other expression of wealth they symbolized the life she longed to lead" (Wharton, 89).  Lily, like an indecisive magpie, sees freedom beyond the bars of her cage and yet is drawn to the glittering bars themselves as well.  It is this soul-splitting indecision that I believe ultimately incarcerates Lily, who cannot reconcile her material desires to resurrect her childhood class with her adult aspirations to find the space to be herself. Thus, wealth (and the renunciation of wealth as well for that matter) is both an escape and a trap for Lily who seeks both financial and intellectual/ emotional freedom in a social realm where having both is not only impossible but taboo.

A Titular Twist in Howell's "The Rise of Silas Lapham"

To be perfectly candid, I have to admit that I feel like a bit of an asshole.  After finishing "The Rise of Silas Lapham" last night, I could not help but feel that the title was ironic: Silas Lapham doesn't rise, he falls!  However, after today's discussion, I realize that my myopic conclusions about the text in relation to the novel's title overlook the possibility that "rises" are not limited to the monetary sort.  Silas Lapham, and many of the novel's other characters, experience a moral uplift at the end of the story in the face of great material loss (and thus loss of class status as well) which is indeed a "rise" on its own accord.  Not only do I feel somewhat materialistic for being blind to this possibility, I have to admit that my resolutions about the ending of the novel have greatly improved since our class discussion.

Ultimately, I am more satisfied by the novel now knowing that while Silas Lapham lost what money he had earned, the experience left him and his family vastly wealthier from a moral standpoint. To see Silas Lapham's fate as a tragedy is to deny his capacity for tenacity, vigor, and strength--faculties we know he possesses not only in the realm of business but at home in a more personal sphere as well.  At first I saw Silas Lapham's return to his Lapham paint farm as a pitiable downgrade--Silas is right back at that proverbial square one after years of hard work and sacrifice.  However, Silas's journey is anything but a futile failure.  While he does return to his humble roots, it is not without immense personal growth and the recognition that the upper class, while seemingly glamorous is a morally debunk caste of exclusivity and wasted potential.  Silas no longer can afford the luxuries he and his family had become used to, but his recognition of true morality and honest values is a triumph far more endearing and permanent than anything money can buy.

William Dean Howell's "The Rise of Silas Lapham" I

During our class discussion of Howell's "The Rise of Silas Lapham" yesterday, I started thinking about the fierce duality that is "old money" and "new money".  I think that for many people, rich is rich, and to an extent, that's certainly true in comparison to those without.  However, I also think that many people, particularly those who are wealthy, make the distinction between wealthy based on the origins and age of the said wealth, much in the same way that we see the Corey's do in Silas Lapham.  For the old money Anna Corey and her daughters, the thought of her only son Tom condescending himself to marry into a family only recently rich is a travesty.

As a modern reader, it's almost comical to witness the women essentially freaking out over a situation that is truly insipid in comparison to large scale world issues like hunger, poverty, violence, etc.  However, despite the superficiality of the Corey's plight, this schism between new money and old money is very much alive in the United States today.

Having grown up in New England, I've met a number of people who are relatively (relatively because, as we've established, the United States is by no means an "old" country) old-money wealthy, and these people tend to look-down on those only more recently wealthy in a way that is guised and tacit yet still totally present.  HOWEVER, what I'm wondering is, is this elitist phenomenon unique to the more historic New England states as opposed to the rest of the United States??

Recently I was visiting my extremely wealthy aunt in California who happens to be dating a guy even wealthier than she is and made all of his money founding a very large software company.  Im not going to name names because you can totally google both of them, but the jist is, both are self-made, and have worked hard for their "new" money.  And yet, new money didn't really seem to exist as a category out in California, at least from what I saw.  Many people in the Silicon Valley area where they live have made their money on technology, an obviously more nascent industry, and hence, wealth only transcends a couple generations at best.  Granted, I'm not from California, so I probably didn't get a fully nuanced perspective, but this is something I observed while out there, but it just made me question the subjectivity of this categorical exclusion based on wealth and time and see just how shallow this type of classification truly is.

Jacob Riis' "How the Other Half Lives"

Jacob Riis' "How the Other Half Lives" is a New Historicist, journalistic piece that chronicles the immigrant, tenement lifestyle that Stephen Crane uses as his setting in "Maggie".  Where Crane takes a distanced, objective view in his narrative voice, Riis goes even beyond that, using a language that is almost legal sounding in its account of the horrific conditions immigrants were forced to endure in New York City.  While Riis' piece is not a descriptive narrative like Crane's, it does offer a lot of insight into "Maggie" which I found to be very insightful and exegetical.  For example, in Riis' second chapter, "The Awakening," he writes of tenement dwellers, "The tenements had bred their Nemesis, a proletariat ready and able to avenge the wrongs of their crowds" (Riis).  I found this observation to be fully applicable to Crane's characters, particularly Jimmie, who scorn law and landlord alike.  While Maggie's family is forced to endure the exploitation and poverty that characterized life in the tenements for immigrant family's, this very lifestyle hardens them into a community distrustful of anyone from the outside world.  Because they know of nothing else, the tenements offer Maggie's family, and others, one of the few comforts they have: predictability.  

Yet where Crane's characters come from a specifically Irish background, Riis' more lofty, objectively journalistic style offers a more all encompassing view of the ethnicities that comprised particularly the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the heyday of immigration in the United States.  However, that is not to say that Riis is fair and forgiving of all these groups.  In fact, he ironically ethnicizes the abject lives of immigrants in poverty while superficially appearing to try and defeat it.  I was struck by his adherence to ethnic stereotypes and his penchant for superiority in his attitudes towards areas like Chinatown and Little Italy.  As we've discussed in class, America is a nation of immigrants, regardless of when and wherever we have come from, and for Riis to come off as "more American" simply because he has been in the United States longer than some of his subjects is ironically hypocritical.  Ultimately, despite my weariness of Riis' tone, I found his piece to be an illuminating portrayal of the immigrant plight in the United States.  I have to imagine that his stereotyping, while inexcusable, was probably tame for the time period, and at the very least, Riis gives necessary exposure to a group of people otherwise marginalized and forgotten by society.  And of course, I have to mention his photographs-- more expository than any piece of writing, Riis' photos capture his subjects in the realest of forms. 

Stephen Crane's "Maggie" II

When I was in seventh grade, my parents took my brother and I to Ellis Island off New York City to see my mom's grandfather's name, Andrew Nortagiacomo, inscribed on the wall outside of the building.  The wall is famous; it carries the name of all the immigrants who passed through Ellis Island on the way to the United States, and as a thirteen year old just beginning to appreciate my heritage, seeing his name was akin to seeing the origins of my family's beginnings as Americans.  Looking back, the experience was both enlightening and uplifting, but it was also ironic.  All the names on the wall are inscribed uniformly, all in the same font, same size and with the same lack of further information beyond first and last name.  And yet, the experiences of those who passed through the walls of Ellis Island, the immigrant experience, was anything but uniform.  Andrew came from Naples, Italy, but the names above him, below him, and on either side may have been from anywhere.  The people his names has come to share a space with may have never even seen Italy, or him for that matter, and in this way, the wall seems to alphabetize the immigrant journey rather than honor it. Regardless, the wall is a wonderful testimonial to the immigrant experience of a vast array of cultures all funneling into the same arena all at once, and of course, it would be impossible to honor the lives of every immigrant individually, but what the wall ultimately does not reveal is the inevitable chaos that occured with the mixing of so many ethnicities, cultural practices, and ideologies.

Stephen Crane, in his novella "Maggie," works to capture some of this chaos as he describes the lives of immigrants living in New York City after they have come into the United States.  When immigrants first entered New York Harbor, they were greeted by the statuesque beacon, the Statue of Liberty, but what they could not see were the far-from-glamorous realities that lay beyond the picturesque city-scape.  For Crane's characters, the city, and more specifically, the tenement community, is an insular world of violence, ignorance, and hopelessness.  As baby Tommie and Maggie fall victim to untimely deaths, Crane's objective and journalistic narrative voice, moreover, creates a sense of regularity to this morbid mortality.  In fact, Crane discusses tenants' suicides as if they are an escape from a nightmare rather than an untimely tragedy.  Ultimately, Crane's imagination of the tenement community becomes a vision of hopelessness and dead ends: with the inevitability of an early death or prolonged misery in life, we readers come to see beyond the facade of possibility that famous emblems like the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island have come to represent and see the dark underbelly of America's rich past.

Mark Twain's "The $30,000 Bequest" II

After reading Melanie's post referencing the Time Magazine article about wealth in respect to happiness, I thought she posed some provoking questions regarding how this principle applies (or doesn't apply) to Twain's characters Aleck and Sally in his story "The $30,000 Dollar Bequest".  While the Time article applies to the present day, and thus the salary in question, $75,000, is not what it would have been in Twain's day, I think the premise is very much still applicable to Twain's short story.

As Melanie pointed out, the Time article claims that an average income of $75,000 correlates to a person's peak level of satisfaction, and after that, his or her happiness plateaus regardless of whether or not his or her income (and therefore standard of living) increases.  In her post, Melanie questions whether or not this same premise works to describe Aleck and Sally's financial situation, and I too can see the ambiguous nature of her query.  I think the majority of the differences between the Time article and Twain's story stem from the fact that, for Aleck and Sally, the money is never real.  For them, wealth is a limitless fantasy that allows them to imagine a life they do not yet have but believe they will.  In the Time article, a certain level of income and standard of living has presumably already been achieved, and thus the actual manifestations of wealth on the person's happiness is measurable and actualized.

At the same time, Aleck and Sally experience the same sort of moral decay that many people who actually are wealthy experience in both today's society as well as in the past.  Testifying to the unfettered nature of greed and desire, Aleck and Sally, despite never having any money at all, begin to break important traditions to them such as observing the Sabbath and ignore each other's and their daughters' needs in favor of managing and imagining their wealth.  Ultimately, while their wealth is never real, the effect of money on Aleck and Sally is very much a reality as it would be for someone who genuinely did have too much money.  Pedigree becomes more important than personality, and Aleck and Sally, believing themselves to be royally wealthy, forget the influence and importance of humanity on their family and on their daughters' futures in a way that is very much in line with the Time article's assertion that wealth cannot, in fact, buy happiness.  In this sense, I think that Twain's story is highly effective because, although the wealth is never real, his characters' limitless desire is very much so, illuminating the universally insidious and corrupting nature of greed in the realms of both reality and fantasy.

Stephen Crane's "Maggie" I

Like Twain, Stephen Crane, in his novella "Maggie," uses over-dramatization to imagine the dark underbelly of the immigrant lifestyle in early 20th century New York City.  Using a journalistic style, Crane moves from a position of sympathy with Maggie to a more distanced, universalist depiction of reality.  While Crane, in his use of over-dramatization, creates an attitude that is somewhat humorous in it's depiction of tenement living, "Maggie" is a profoundly dark illustration of marginalization and poverty.

Using dialect and dialogue, I think Crane effectively constructs characters that are flat yet nonetheless work to enact a vision of decadence and hopelessness.  Ultimately, I found that I wasn't particularly engaged in the lives of the characters in "Maggie"; the distance Crane establishes between his narrative voice and Maggie's family's life is too great to feel any real attachment to.  That said, I think that this lack of emotional solidarity made me see Maggie, Pete, Jimmie as more allegorical figures who in aggregate, create a more objective vision of the immigrant plight as a whole.  That is to say, while I couldn't find common emotional ground with Crane's characters, I thought that they were effective in forcing me to recognize just how truly abject the lives of immigrants were in New York.

Moreover, I thought the characters' penchant for swift and unthinking violence also helped to effectively represent the absence of legal aid and recourse for these immigrants.  In seeing the lawlessness of the tenement community, it becomes apparent for we readers just how closed-off these tenements were from the workings of wealthy society.  It is as if the tenements were a society unto themselves totally beyond the scope of the legal system (or the healthcare system and education system as well for that matter).  In any case, I thought that Crane's use of characterization, although totally allegorical and distanced, was successful in forcing me to see clearly the lives of immigrants and their horrific living conditions in a way that has altered my understanding of poverty both past and present.

Mark Twain's "The $30,000 Bequest" I

After reading Mark Twain's "The $30,000 Bequest" last spring in Paula's Twain class, it was interesting to return to this short story with a more content based focus.  Last year, we approached the piece with a critical lens on Twain's use of literary devices such as inversion, irony, names, etc.  With that previous discussion in mind, it was especially interesting to re-examine "The $30,000 Bequest"with our attention more on the dynamics of wealth and fantasy in the story and how thematically, Twain's representation's of wealth and desire are significant to the underlying ethos of the story.

One thing that I was confused about in our class discussions, and in my second reading of the story, was Twain's inversion of gender roles. Last semester, we discussed Twain's use of inversion in general, and how his surprising twists work to force we readers to question the story we are reading and examine it with a more awake, critical eye.  In this more specific context however, (i.e. not in the context of Twain's body of work as a whole) I wondered, and still wonder, what his inversion of gender roles says about his readers' expectations of wealth management and female agency.  Are we supposed to scoff at the notion of a financially savvy female, Aleck, and see her husband, Sally, as pathetically emasculated?  In a thematic context, that is, regarding the general theme of wealth and fantasy, I have a hard time understanding why an inversion of gender roles serves to make us question the illusory and adulterating nature of wealth as happiness.  Why is a woman in control so unrealistic? Let me also say that I do not mean to sound rhetorical in my questioning of Twain's device.  I recognize that at the time, society did perceive women less capable and more dependent; I'm just still unsure how this inversion, in this case, is effective in it's critique of wealth's corrupting potency.

Regardless of my uncertainty, I think Twain's inversion of reality and fantasy is a highly effective technique that works to expose the warped and degrading nature of incessant greed and desire.  That in the end of the story we realize that Aleck and Sally's grand plans and assured visions were mere illusions is kind of a mind-fuck (for lack of a better expression).  The form of the story, a constant mounting tension used to describe the build up of wealth, is a sort of "form as a revelation of content" technique in that in the end, we realize that the story never happened just as wealth never happened for Aleck and Sally.  Ultimately, Twain's use of illusion and reality works to expose the all-consuming nature of greed and desire and how blinding this desire is in the face of reality, morality, and veritable happiness.