CRITICAL QUOTES Flashcards
(20 cards)
Lily as a commodity
Lori Merish [Lily] is marked quite plainly as a commodity
money’s role in the novel
Lori Merish the market figures in that text as an impersonal power
Lily’s tableau moment; artist / objet d’art paradox
Michael Gorra the moment at which she is most herself is also the one in which she most becomes a things, an object consumed by the eyes
natural selection makes Lily unfit
Michael Gorra her very fineness has made her unfit, like a bird whose elegant beak can no longer crack open the seeds she needs to survive
Lily and Selden as having an artistic relationship
Marilyn McEntyre failure of the imagination that drives him [Selden] to renounce his vision
women as dependent on marriage
Charlotte Perkins Gilman young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain
Mrs Peniston and social conservatism
Beer, Nolan and Knight with an imagination shrouded in dust sheets, Mrs Peniston embodies her society at its most rigid
determinism
Beer, Nolan and Knight Like Freud, Wharton is interested in motivations and choices that lie beneath consciousness, often buried in childhood.
Lily’s death and choice of suicide
Roxanna Robinson if her death occurs by chance … the tragedy is drained of much of its power
Wharton views new money vs old money
Susan Mizruchi Wharton’s ideal is an inherent nobility and traditionalism set against the indiscriminate logic of market forces.
matriarchal aspects of the novel
Wai Chee Dimock [despite men having economic power] the actual wielders of power in the book are often not men but women
performative femininity, Selden’s male gaze of Lily
Cynthia Griffin Wolff Lily has been formed to accept a definition of femininity of which men like Selden are the supreme evaluators
Lily’s social decline and loss of money
Mary Moss [Lily is] too poor to keep up with the set in which she moves … [yet] unfortunately too radically snobbish to cut free from it
Lily and Selden’s relationship as non-romantic
Johanna Wagner The simile comparing Lily and Selden to children … seems less appropriate for lovers than friends
Wharton as giving an old money view on social status in America becoming more dependent on money than birth
Wai Chee Dimock Wharton’s critique of the marketplace is essentially an aristocratic critique
Wharton’s use of naturalism (perhaps to contrast how artistically they are usually portrayed- by themselves and by others)
Janet Beer [Wharton makes use of] a store of metaphor and language from natural science in order to depict the leisure-class woman of the late nineteenth century
Lily as being an endangered ideal for Wharton
Jennie A. Kassanoff Lily articulates [through her own position as an upper-class wasp] a central set of early-twentieth-century patrician anxieties: that the ill-bred, the foreign, and the poor would overwhelm the native elite
Edith Wharton as having exclusive class insights
Carol J Singley Edith Wharton had reached a middle-class audience eager for insights into glamorous upper-class life, made all the more interesting by her willingness to expose society’s flaws.
nature of marriage in the novel
Maureen Howard In Austen, marriage is an institution within a stable world […] In Lily Bart’s unstable society, marriage has already become at best a flimsy institution in which to house one’s ambitions.
performance in the novel
Katherine Joslin [Wharton’s novel is] a study of performances that mark gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality.
