1. “The vast mysterious Wall Street world of ‘tips’ and ‘deals’ – might she not find in it the
means to escape her dreary predicament? She had often heard of women making money
in this way through their friends: she had no more notion than most of her sex of the
exact nature of the transaction, and its vagueness seemed to diminish its indelicacy” (81)
2. “In sending her the cheque, Tenor had explained that he had made five thousand for her
out of Rosedale’s ‘tip’, and had put four thousand back in the same venture, as there was
the promise of another ‘big rise’; she understood therefore that he was now speculating
with her own money, and that she consequently owed him no more than the gratitude
which such a trifling service demanded” (86)
3. “There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic
form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have
recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the
productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and
entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of
commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches
itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which
is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” –Karl Marx “Fetishism”
4. “There was in Lily a vein of sentiment, perhaps transmitted from this source, which gave
an idealizing touch to her most prosaic purposes. […] She was fond of pictures and
flowers, and of sentimental fiction, and she could not help thinking that the possession
of such tastes ennobled her desire for world advantage. She would not indeed have cared
to marry a man who were merely rich: she was secretly ashamed of her mother’s crude
passion for money. Lily’s preference would have been for an English nobleman with
political ambitions and vast estates” (36)
5.
“In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel the whole tragedy of her
life. It was as though her beauty, thus detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it,
had held out supplicant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once met
for a moment, and where he felt an overmastering longing to be with her again. He was
roused by the pressure of ecstatic fingers. […] “It makes her look like the real Lily – the
Lily I know.’ He met Gerty Ferish’s brimming gaze. ‘The Lily we know,’ he corrected”
(133)
6. “It was true, then, that she had taken money from Trenor; but true also, as the contents
that the obligation had been intolerable to her, and that at the first opportunity she had
freed herself from it, though the act left her face to face with bare unmitigated poverty
[…] He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in
the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear” (320)
7. “Lily’s drifting [is] not the mere desiccated fruit of a heartless capitalist system reducing
all human relations of exchange, thus the clear counterpoint to an ideal domestic
stability, but rather as a serious form of seeking, to which an older ideal of feminine
fulfillment can no longer offer an adequate response […] We must insist that the only
two options are the sentimental ones we confront at House’s end, between meaningless
rootlessness and hearth and home, when in fact Lily’s earlier oscillations were predicted
on the attempt to imagine a possibility not reducible to either side” (Jennifer Fleissner,
197-8)
English 213 – Week 7
Naturalism Ctd. The House of Mirth
Fleissner argues that naturalism is largely read as a masculine genre. “Naturalism is seen as either
fatalistic or nostalgic in the face of modern life. If fatalistic, it depicts modern men bereft of
agency or vitality, dwarfed by a cityscape of soulless mechanical dynamos spiraling steadily
downward in ‘plots of decline’ […] If nostalgic, the reverse is true: naturalism grows along with a
renewal of the strenuous life, returning masculine power and adventure to a vitiated modernity
by rediscovering the freedoms and struggles associated with a still wide-open, untarnished
natural landscape.” In contrast, Fleissner argues that naturalism “is marked by neither the steep
arc of decline nor that of triumph, but rather by an ongoing, nonlinear, repetitive motion – back
and forth, around and around, on and on – that has the distinctive effect of seeming also like a
stuckness in place.” She concludes that “If we consider the women’s stories in these novels in
tandem with the men’s, we can see that the very motor that drives the male fall actually helps
bring forward, in the women’s case, a truly new kind of narrative”
– Jennifer Fleissner Women, Compulsion, Modernity (2004)
“The naturalist author often describes his characters as though they are conditioned and
controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he also suggests a compensating
humanistic value in his characters or their fates, which affirms the significance of the individual
and of his life. The tension here is that between the naturalist's desire to represent in fiction the
new, discomfiting truths which he has found in the ideas and life of his late nineteenth-century
world, and also his desire to find some meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the
human enterprise.”
– Donald Pizer The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism (1993)
Naturalism reflects both “the bourgeoisie’s doubts of its own hegemony and its fears of a rising
working class, of immigration and the populations of the colonies, of the overwhelming
competition from the other imperial nation-states, and finally of its own inner loss of nerve.
What stands at the center of the naturalist narrative paradigm is the perspective of the
bourgeoisie and its vision of the other (lower) classes. Nor is this a purely epistemological matter:
for included in this collective ‘point of view’ is a desperate fear, that of declassement, of slipping
down the painfully climbed slope of class position and business or monetary success, of falling
back into the petty bourgeoisie and thence on into working class misery itself” (149)
– Fredric Jameson The Antinomies of Realism (2013)