Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth is torn. She doesn't have much money but she does have class and charm and beauty, and a strong sense that she belongs in the only world she has ever known: the capital-S Society of calling cards and country estates and professional leisure.
Unable to sustain this lifestyle on the strength of her own means, she has two options. The long-term solution is to marry a wealthy dullard and install herself in permanent comfort. The short-term fix is to trade on the grace and allure that (she hopes) make her indispensable to the friends who tote her around to exotic destinations and prestigious gatherings.
The hypothetical reader I am about to take issue with might see Lily Bart's struggle as antiquated, and take it as an opportunity to gloat, as a twenty-first century woman, about how we've been liberated from the petty concerns of a society that offered women only men as rungs on achievment's laddr. This reader might deem the choice Lily agonizes over an illusion, declaring that either marrying or charming men out of their money amount to the same thing: a genteel form of prostitution.
But I couldn't refrain from gasping with recognition as I walked down Fifth Avenue with her and lay awake listening to her worries at night. Lily Bart is not just caught between marriage and destitution, status and shame, but between pragmatic compromise and idealistic daring. She can rise by swearing love to someone she does not and sacrificing a piece of herself in the bargain, or she can fall on her own terms, in her own skin, alone. The only thing she cannot do is avoid the choice.
A very modern predicament, indeed.
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