Twentieth Century American

Literature

Survey Course Instructor:

Mihai Mîndra
 Social Realism and Middle Class:
Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt (1922)

Modern Darwinism and the Novel of

Manners: Edith Wharton’s The
House of Mirth (1905)
Social Realism and Middle Class:
Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt (1922)

realistic portrayals of life

in art or literature

Purpose?

To make a social or political point

Edith Wharton: Modern Darwinism

Nineteenth-
century
Evolutionism 
Determinism

Edith Wharton’s
Modern Darwinism

Socially instilled
habits
Forces of inertia
Edith Wharton: Novel of Manners

Detailed Of a certain
Description
social group
of customs,
behaviors,
at a specific
habits time and place

spirit as
genuine love
suppressed by
social norm
assuring social
and economic security
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
 ten – to - fourteen years older than
the bitter Lost Generation
 writers more contemporary with him
had produced the best of their work
during the first two decades of the
century:
 Theodore Dreiser
 Willa Cather.
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
 Influenced by the late nineteenth
century spirit of Utopian idealism
 E.g: Edward Bellamy’s immensely
popular Looking Backward, 2000-1887
[1888]
 depiction of an ideal socialistic society in
the year 2000
 inspired the formation of many socialistic
clubs and the Progressive political heritage
of the turn of the century when Lewis was
coming to maturity.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
 Mirrors the confusion of formerly Midwest agricultural
frontier little town whose traditional local values are
being converted to the industrial/city/progressive
standards in the post-Reconstruction Progressive era
(1890 – 1920) of rapid economical growth
 Reconstruction: 1865 – 1877

 his native Midwest: Sauk Center, Minnesota: an

economy of scarcity is changed into one of abundance

 Ensuing problem: how to integrate the pastoral into

the urban.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
 GENERAL CULTURAL THEMES

 Little town middle class (also Main

Street, 1920)
 middle class characters - the Good Citizen's
League in Zenith:
 real estate brokers, a physician, a banker, a
coal merchant, a company executive, a
mattress manufacturer, newspaper owner.
 American business enterprise.
 Commercial culture.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
 “The state of Winnemac is bounded by
Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, and
like them it is half Eastern, half Midwestern.
There is a feeling of New England in its
brick and sycamore villages, its stable
industries, and a tradition which goes back
to the Revolutionary War. Zenith, the
largest city in the state, was founded in
1792. But Winnemac is Midwestern in its
fields of corn and wheat, its red barns and
silos, and despite the immense antiquity of
Zenith, many counties were not settled
until 1860”. Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)

A Map of Sinclair Lewis' United States as It Appears in His Novels

George Annand, Illustrator
New York, Doubleday, Doran, 1934
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
 1920s North American mentality:
 urge toward “normalcy” and “business as usual”
 fear of socialists, “Reds”, labor unrest
 suspicion of foreigners and “radical” ideas
 the suppression and denial of non-WASP culture:
 mid-20th century, the term referred to white
Anglo-Saxon Protestants, became a common
designation for Americans of British heritage.
 American writers often equated WASPs with the
dominant class in the United States.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
 the appeal of bohemianism
 the lure of nature
 the hypocrisy of Prohibition
 following the ratification of the 18th
Amendment to the Constitution of the United
States in 1919
 ended in 1933 when the 18th Amendment was
repealed.
 the influence of the mass media and advertising
in shaping public desires
 the replacement of religion by science and
technology
 the conformity of the Solid Citizen
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
 Babbitt’s drama:
 his wish for idealism
 not able to understand/spot the
former/latent spirit of pioneering and
reform stifled by middle-class conformity
and corrupt political ambition
 reveals an ambivalent, divided self:
idealism and wish for genuine values vs.
conformism.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
 Underlying Babbitt’s conformism:
 some genuine idealism and wish for
change materialized in:
 his failed love affair
 political orientation
 and almost breakaway from the Zenith
community.
 the end of the novel: his new, redeemed
perception of truth.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
 “I've never done a single thing I've wanted to in
my whole life! I don't know 's I've accomplished
anything except just get along. I figure out I've
made about a quarter of an inch out of a
possible hundred rods. Well, maybe you'll carry
things on further. I don't know. But I do get a
kind of sneaking pleasure out of the fact that
you knew what you wanted to do and did it.
Well, those folks in there will try to bully you,
and tame you down. Tell 'em to go to the devil!
I'll back you. Take your factory job, if you want
to. Don't be scared of the family. No, nor all of
Zenith. Nor of yourself, the way I've been. Go
ahead, old man! The world is yours!"
Babbitt (1922) & the Critics
 Lewis in letter to critic Carl Van Doren
(November, 1920):
 planning the story of “an Average Business
Man…in a city of …four hundred thousand people
[like] (…Minneapolis or Seattle…)with its
enormous industrial power…and menacing
heresy hunt…crushing of anything threatening
its commercial oligarchy”
 Similar to:
 London’s Iron Heel [1908]
 Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here [1935]: imagining
capitalism as fascism.
Babbitt (1922) & the Critics
 H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
 American journalist, critic, and essayist
 perceptive and often controversial analyses of
American life and letters
 one of the most influential critics of the 1920s and
1930s.
 on Babbitt:
 A criticism of America’s conformist Puritanism,
commercialism, moralism.
 The real America > Lewis the first really
national/American novelist, Babbitt the archetypal
Yankee.
 Popular success proved by the coining of “Babbitt”
and “Babbittry” as synonyms of middlebrow
conformist/m.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt/Babbittry
 dictionary definition of Babbitt/Babbittry
 A problem of reception > superficial
public/canonic perception:
 The Random House Dictionary of the English
Language: College Edition, ed. Laurence Urdang,
New York: Random House, 1968, 97:
 “A self-satisfied person who conforms readily to
middle-class attitudes and ideals […]”
 Actually Babbitt is the second character (in
a mass of middle class conformism), after
Paul Riesling, who dangerously rebels
against the Good Citizen's League
mentality.
Babbitt (1922) & Realism
 objective representation of contemporary social reality

 Realism in the preliminary research method used by

Lewis before writing Babbitt > full familiarization with
the field and the setting of the book:
 through carefully recorded interviews
 reading
 listening to speeches
 attending conventions
 preparing full summaries of the plot and structure of
the story
 drawing maps of the imaginary Zenith and the floor
plan for Babbitt’s house.
Babbitt (1922) & Realism
 Critics called Lewis a literary sociologist of
American life:
 Keen analytic description of social setting (e.g.
the Athletic Club description) and character (e.g.
Conrad Lyte, real estate speculator).
 Similar to the radical sociology of Thorstein
Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899):
 Conspicuous consumption
 relation between status, money, and social
competition.
Babbitt (1922) & Realism
 Social realism: qualities set forth by William
Dean Howells (in his 1891 collection of
critical essays Criticism and Fiction):
 Stories drawn from contemporary everyday life
 full accounting and depiction of middle-
American life in the 1920s (Babbitt’s milieu:
family, company, club).
 Familiar settings
 remarkable detail; Lewis described by critics as
a notable photographer.
Babbitt (1922) & Realism
 Believable characters
 Ordinary, everyday, colloquial English
 faithful recorder of American speech sounds,
patterns, and rhythms
 Much dialogue as a means of self-revealing
characters (no omniscient narrators)
 everyday conversation as a revelation of
relationships and class
 Limited point of view
 There is authorial intrusion in Babbit
 ironically critical: highlights middle class
hypocrisy.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
 Babbittry; American middleclass regimentation:
 “Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of
the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the
Presbyterian Church determined his every religious
belief and the senators who controlled the Republican
Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington
what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and
Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the
surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his
individuality. These standard advertised wares--
toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous
hot-water heaters--were his symbols and proofs of
excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for
joy and passion and wisdom”.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
 Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE;
also often known as the Elks Lodge or simply The
Elks), is an American fraternal order and social club
founded in 1868. It is one of the leading fraternal
orders in the U.S., claiming over one million
members.
 Booster club: an organization that is formed to
contribute money to an associated club, sports
team, or organization. Booster clubs are popular
in American schools at the high school and
university level.
 Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
 American middle class kitschy, degraded
dream/romanticism satirized as undermined or
taken over by harsh technological economics
realism:
 “For years the fairy child had come to him. Where
others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned
gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness
beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could
slip away from the crowded house he darted to her.
His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but
he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they
crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was
so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was
gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that
they would sail--Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
 (continued) Babbitt moaned; turned over;
struggled back toward his dream. He could see
only her face now, beyond misty waters. The
furnace-man slammed the basement door. A
dog barked in the next yard. As Babbitt sank
blissfully into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier
went by whistling, and the rolled-up Advocate
thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his
stomach constricted with alarm. As he relaxed,
he was pierced by the familiar and irritating
rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah,
snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah”.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
 “To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous
citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and
tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his
pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion
ashore”.
 “To them, the Romantic Hero was no longer the
knight, the wandering poet, the cowpuncher, the
aviator, nor the brave young district attorney,
but the great sales-manager, who had an
Analysis of Merchandizing Problems on his glass-
topped desk, whose title of nobility was "Go-
getter," and who devoted himself and all his
young samurai to the cosmic purpose of
Selling--not of selling anything in particular, for
or to anybody in particular, but pure Selling”.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
 ADVERTISING as bogus/faker of
reality:
 Parody of the degraded,
business/pragmatic vulgarized version of
education and intellectual values in
newspaper advertising (next slide):
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
 “He snatched from the back of his geometry half a
hundred advertisements of those home-study
courses which the energy and foresight of American
commerce have contributed to the science of
education. The first displayed the portrait of a young
man with a pure brow, an iron jaw, silk socks, and
hair like patent leather. Standing with one hand in
his trousers-pocket and the other extended with
chiding forefinger, he was bewitching an audience of
men with gray beards, paunches, bald heads, and
every other sign of wisdom and prosperity. Above the
picture was an inspiring educational symbol--no
antiquated lamp or torch or owl of Minerva, but a row
of dollar signs. The text ran:
 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
 POWER AND PROSPERITY IN PUBLIC SPEAKING”
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
 Parody of literary art as advertising in
commercialized America: the “poetry of
industrialism”:
 (…) the poetry of industrialism, now there's a
literary line where you got to open up new
territory. Do you know the fellow who's really
THE American genius? The fellow who you don't
know his name and I don't either, but his work
ought to be preserved so's future generations
can judge our American thought and originality
to-day? Why, the fellow that writes the Prince
Albert Tobacco ads!”
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
 ORATORY as PUBLIC LIFE:
 Parody of public oratory as insubstantial
and nationalistic (Americanness) as
public life itself. Nativism and demagogy:
 Babbit – Chamber of Commerce dinner
annual address: (next slide)
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
 "'In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot
of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze
and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or
picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other
decent business man; and I, for one, am only too
glad that the man who has the rare skill to season his
message with interesting reading matter and who
shows both purpose and pep in handling his literary
wares has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand
bucks a year, to mingle with the biggest executives
on terms of perfect equality, and to show as big a
house and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry!
But, mind you, it's the appreciation of the Regular
Guy who I have been depicting which has made this
possible, and you got to hand as much credit to him
as to the authors themselves.”
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
 Parody of degraded religious middlebrow
oratory:
 see novel for:
 Mike Monday’s speech
 “Intellectual” oratory: Reverend John Dennison
Drew’s speech
 alternative “New Thought” oratory: Mrs. Opal
Emerson Mudge’s sermon
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and
Romance
 greatness of the novel:
 not just a satire approaching critically social
types, but also an existential examination of
Babbitt’s inner life marking his change and the
insertion of drama with Paul Riesling’s tragic,
violent breakaway from the Zenith society.
 a technologically highly developed city:
 people do not communicate with technology and
each other;
 alienated from romance/idealism/pioneer-
adventurer-frontiersman nostalgia. Babbitt’s
nostalgia due to such loss (next slide):
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and
Romance
 alienated from
romance/idealism/pioneer-adventurer-
frontiersman nostalgia. Babbitt’s
nostalgia due to such loss (next slide):
 “Wish I’d been a pioneer same as my
grand-dad. But then, wouldn’t have a
house like this”
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and
Romance
 Romance and business:
 “Know what I wanted to do as a kid? Know what I
wanted to do? Wanted to be a big chemist. Tha's
what I wanted to do. But Dad chased me out on the
road selling kitchenware, and here I'm settled down--
settled for LIFE--not a chance!”
 “Know what I could 've been? I could 've been a Gene
Field or a James Whitcomb Riley. Maybe a
Stevenson. I could 've. Whimsies. 'Magination.
Lissen. Lissen to this. Just made it up:
Glittering summery meadowy noise
Of beetles and bums and respectable boys.
Hear that? Whimzh--whimsy. I made that up. I don't know
what it means! Beginning good verse. Chile's Garden
Verses. And whadi write? Tripe! Cheer-up poems. All
tripe! Could have written--Too late!"
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and
Romance
 Power and energy for business; no
spiritual pathos (churches) or pioneer
romance (citadels)
 Zenith > the heroic city:
 “THE towers of Zenith aspired above the
morning mist; austere towers of steel and
cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and
delicate as silver rods. They were neither
citadels nor churches, but frankly and
beautifully office-buildings.”
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and
Romance
 Babbitt’s ways of escape:
 into the past American tradition and
present > nature (Thoreauvian
Transcendental)
 bohemian (the Roaring ‘20s)
 liberal Seneca Doane’s (Progressive)
 fail.
 A chastened rebel (like Carol
Kennicott in Main Street).
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

The Mount,
Edith
Wharton's
House &
Gardens
The House of Mirth (1905)
 Wharton – born into the post–Civil War
Victorian era
 inherited a domestic, often sentimental, literary
tradition from her female predecessors:
 Harriet Beecher Stowe
 Louisa May Alcott
 Sarah Orne Jewett.
 Acknowledged her debt to them but rejected the
“rose-coloured” lenses through which some of
these writers saw the world (Backward, NW,
1002)
 aimed instead for moral depth and ambiguity
(more associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne).
The House of Mirth (1905)
 helped to transform nineteenth-century
romantic literature into a twentieth-century
realism
 confronted directly and critically the pressing
issues facing men and women at the turn of the
century
 Her realism is:
 more uncompromising than William Dean
Howells's
 more rooted in physical passion than James's.
The House of Mirth (1905)
 Wharton takes special interest in
women:
 In novels as different as The House of
Mirth and The Custom of the Country,
she documents:
 the effects of an increasingly consumer-
based culture
 shifting sexual relations
 changing urban & rural demographics on
women of all classes.
The House of Mirth (1905)
 portraits of people negotiating the
requirements of place and custom
  tradition of the novel of manners
  original contributions to the school of
literary naturalism.
 characters, like those in Theodore Dreiser's
and Frank Norris's fictions, are often
trapped by biology or
circumstance.
The House of Mirth (1905)
 Wharton’s major theme:
 the dispossession of the old New York
aristocracy by the vulgar new rich (The
Custom of the Country, 1913; The Age of
Innocence, 1920)
 the action of The House of Mirth occurs in
the first years of the 20th century, a few
decades beyond the dispossession of old
New York.
 distant offshoots of NY aristocracy, already
tainted by the vulgarity of the new
bourgeoisie, yet contemptuous of it.
The House of Mirth (1905)
 Lily Bart descends from the
hereditary nonmercantile society
to that of the new investors
(moneymaking climbers).
 The financial ruin of her father when she
is 19 leaves her with one way of making
a living: a useful companion to women of
wealth.
 Next possibility: make a suitable
marriage for money
The House of Mirth (1905)
 Social steps in Lily’s decline:
 The Trenors – pretense of styles and values they
actually violate
 The Dorsets – lower rung: no longer pretend to
care about traditional styles and values.
 Carrie Fisher – frankly materialistic, a guide for
the arrivistes ready to pay for social acceptance.
 The Wellington Brys – rich and feverishly on the
make.
 The Gormers – also on the rise
 Norma Hatch – wealthy adventuress, not socially
highly integrated
 The milliner’s workshop
The House of Mirth (1905)
 defies the principles that give force to the
two most famous narrative traditions that
secure other American classics:
 the twin faiths in:
 the ability to control one's rise to riches and
social success (Benjamin Franklin's
contribution)
 to attain self-sufficiency (the legacy of Ralph
Waldo Emerson).
 In contrast Wharton's plot traces Lily Bart's
wavering course toward poverty,
loneliness, and death.
The House of Mirth (1905)
 Dual meanings of 'success‘: Seldon’s v. Lily
Barth’s:
 "Success?" She hesitated. "Why, to get as much
as one can out of life, I suppose. It's a relative
quality, after all. Isn't that your idea of it?“ "My
idea of it? God forbid!" He sat up with sudden
energy, resting his elbows on his knees and
staring out upon the mellow fields. "My idea of
success," he said, "is personal freedom.“
"Freedom? Freedom from worries?“ "From
everything--from money, from poverty, from
ease and anxiety, from all the material
accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the
spirit--that's what I call success."
The House of Mirth (1905)
 The hypothesis proposed by Selden that
'personal freedom' is the only true
'success'.
 Selden defines freedom for Lily as breaking
away from 'all material accidents'--all of
society's stringent demands--in order to enter
into 'the republic of the spirit'.
 commodification of young women in the
marriage market: the full impact of late
capitalism upon the lives of women
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern
Darwinism
 Three layers of language:
 discourse of nineteenth-century evolutionists
whose paradigm of physical determinism still
held sway.
 up-to-the-moment metaphors suggestive of the
forces of inertia:
 fascinated quasi-scientific historians like Henry
Adams, who borrowed his vocabulary for the
depletion of mental energy from Kelvin's Second
Law of Thermodynamics.
 words descriptive of socially instilled habits >
influence of:
 sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists
such as Émile Durkheim, William James, John
Dewey.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern
Darwinism
 Wharton on the Darwinist causes for Lily
Bart's 'ineffectiveness":
 “…she was perhaps less to blame than she
believed. Inherited tendencies had combined
with early training to make her the highly
specialized produce she was: an organism as
helpless out of its narrow range as the sea
anemone torn from the rock. She had been
fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other
end does nature round the rose-leaf and paint
the hummingbird's breast?” (301)
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern
Darwinism
 Lily's inertia, her capitulation to the
supersensual forces of entropy  erasure
of the distinctions between the conscious
state and the sedative pull of chloral:
 “But gradually the sense of complete
subjugation came over her, and she wondered
languidly what had made her feel so uneasy and
excited. She saw now that there was nothing to
be excited about--she had returned to her
normal view of life.” (323)
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern
Darwinism
 the forces of habit:
 socially imposed impulses that direct one's
actions for good (Gus Trenor does not rape Lily)
and for ill (Selden's self-assurance that he is no
slave to habit and thus free to tell his love to
Lily, belied by the ease with which he falls back
into old patterns of doubt instilled in him by his
class and by his role as a male):
 “To her surprise, Trenor answered the look with
a speechless stare. With his last gust of words
the flame had died out, leaving him chill and
humbled. . . . Old habits, old restraints, the
hand of inherited order, plucked back the
bewildered mind which passion had jolted from
its ruts.” (147)
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern
Darwinism
 L.B.’s social involution:
 determined by the conflicting crisscrossing of her moral
evolution:
 started by her love for Selden and the consequent
assimilation of his “republic of the spirit” principles
 and the social rules of her environment.
 What she lacks: the capacity to tear herself away from
the comfort and hedonic aspects of this environment
that traps and suffocates her through aesthetic and
social addiction.
 Thus: the way towards a new/authentic identity stops
wavering in intentional accident.
 Wharton provides this diversity of signals about the
source and nature of forces that appear cruelly to limit, if
not to crush, faith in one's unfettered freedom of the will
 Naturalism.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern
Darwinism
 The Independent at the time when the novel
appeared:
 questioned whether there should even be novels
like Wharton's that suggest that 'environment' is
the reason her characters participate in society's
'refined ferocities, its sensual extravagances . . .
the tragedies which underlie its outward
appearance of mirth and prosperity'.
 this review notes perceptively that the fatalism
Wharton projects in 1905 is different from the
fatalism practiced in 'the old days in Greece'.
Never has 'fatalism been so emphasized as it is
now, particularly in fiction. The difference is that
we lack pagan cheerfulness.'
The House of Mirth (1905) – Realism
& Verisimilitude
 Questioning the verisimilitude of The
House of Mirth:
 readers in 1905, telling the truth in the
case of The House of Mirth:
 the accuracy with which Wharton brought
into single focus the relations that linked
Lily's character, Lily's socially constituted
conduct, and Lily's fate.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Realism
& Verisimilitude
 some reviews never moved beyond fretting
over the degree of 'realism' Wharton
conveys by being:
 'pleasant' or 'unpleasant', 'ethical' or 'unethical',
'didactically preachy' or impersonally
'impressionistic' in the treatment of her material.
 the San Francisco Chronicle noted perceptively
that Wharton had romanticized her story since in
'real life' Lily would become the mistress of a
man she loathed but eventually tolerated.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Realism
& Verisimilitude
 contemporaries of Wharton on 'truth-
telling‘:
 Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labor:
sociology of 'parasitism'.
 deplorable social condition causes the
'prostitution' of the 'fine lady' who--'clad in
fine raiment, the work of others' fingers'--is
recognizable as Lily Bart on the brink of
becoming either 'kept wife [or] kept
mistress'.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Realism
& Verisimilitude
 Paul Bourget -- preface he prepared for the 1908
French edition of The House of Mirth
 Frenchman who had travelled in the United States
during the mid 1890s while gathering notes for
Outre-Mer
 He observes that Americans like to think theirs is a
classless society, one based on principles of complete
equality for all citizens.
 this is not the case. Masked by the look of
democracy, the United States consists of two worlds
in conflict: that of the aristocrats of great wealth and
that of the general populace which labours without
guarantees of economic or social equality
 through Wharton's depiction of Lily's life as a 'social
pageant', she breaks through the masks to the truth
regarding America.
Novel of Manners
 novel that describes in detail the customs,
behaviors, habits, and expectations of a
certain social group at a specific time and
place.
 Usually these conventions shape the
behavior of the main characters, and
sometimes even stifle or repress them.
 struggle to fit into high society: proper and
improper ways of acting / behaving
Novel of Manners
 tradition developed in England (17th
century & continued throughout the
19th):
 Walter Scott, Jane Austen, George Eliot,
Henry James etc
 the place of women in society and the
social effect of marriage
 America: Hannah Foster's The Coquette,
Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s novels, and
even Kate Chopin's The Awakening
Novel of Manners
 specific conventions in the 19th century:
 protagonist is usually a single woman looking to
get married
 socio-economic class as a factor in marriage
 proper and improper way of acting within
high society
 differences and relations between classes
 The end of the novel: either marriage or death of
the female protagonist
The House of Mirth (1905)
 There were questions with regard to the
possibility/ adequacy of such a genre:
 In America, there were no official social classes
 Wharton adapted the form:
 to better suit the New York society:
 different kind of aristocracy -- elegant New York.
 Class mobility as an important factor.
 Lily Bart: lower-class world v. her upper-class
sensibilities
 Wharton: spirit as genuine love suppressed
by social norm assuring social and economic
security.