![]() ![]() ![]() 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. He then plays a mind game on her, walking past her to see if she greets him or tries to hide from him. In a train station, Selden carefully analyzes Lily with the intent of determining why she is there. 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. The House of Mirth s opening chapters provide a great example of how the novel pays attention to behavioral details. The movie will seem slow to some viewers, unless they are alert to the raging emotions, the cruel unfairness and the desperation that are masked by the measured and polite words of the characters. ![]() The central issue in her first novel about American society, The House of Mirth (1905), is the Woman Question. The analysis Cross sought in discursive form had already been written, as he must have known, in her fiction. Although he had chosen his essayist wisely, Wharton declined the offer, explaining that she did not feel prepared to address the question of women. 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. In 1912 Wilbur Cross, the editor of the Yale Review, wrote to Edith Wharton, asking her for an essay on the Woman Question. ![]()
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