Money And Glory In LilyÒ'S Life

Relva Caroline de Sousa Silva

Professor Almeida

Literature and Film

November 2007

Money and Glory in Lily's life

"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth"

Ecclesiastes 7:4

In this paper will be analyzed some issues present in the novel The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton, and in the film by the same title, directed by Terence Davies. What I propose is the analysis of what was the cause of Lily's ruin and how the desire of being rich and usufruct the glory of money disordered her life. I intend to show how this is presented in the novel as well as in the film.

The adaptation of the novel can be classified, according to Wagner, as Transposition in which a novel is "directly given on screen" (222). In this way, there are many arguments that support this classification. The narrative is the same in both medias, focusing on Lily Bart's life the third person and omniscient narrator tells us the story that is told by the camera in the film; this effect of changing the narrator to the camera is given, when the camera goes to one character to the next, "conveying narrative information to the spectator from many sources" (53). The main characters are faithfully transposed in adaptation, however in the book they are more than in the film; this condensation of characters is expected, as the book is very much longer than the film. In spite of this, the characters that are present in both medias have the same personality, not making the plot different.. The novel and the film are set mainly in the New York and a few parts in Bellomont and Monte Carlo; the story takes place over a period of two years, from 1905 to 1907.

As a "novel of manners", the story portrays the American aristocracy's way of life at the beginning of twentieth century. According to Sparknotes website in an article called "The Novel of Manners, "is a novel that stresses each aspect of a person's social behavior, because each detail has an implication" (par. 2) We can even notice in both book and film a kind of realism influenced by Darwinism that in terms of literature means "interest in creating portrayals of society and human interaction governed by the principle that only some members of society are cut out for success, while others are doomed to failure and extinction", as pointed in Sparknotes' "Context" (par. 4). From this we note people that just worry about money and influence, doing whatever to get what they want, even harm somebody to provide something.

In this context lives Lily Bart, an unmarried twenty-nine year old woman who was born in the social circles of the old rich in New York and saw her father being ruined financially when she was nineteen; her parents soon died and she started to live with her aunt, Mrs. Peninston. Now Ms. Bart wants to guarantee her financial stability and place in the high New York society; and to get this, she has to marry a wealthy man. In this way, she can not marry the man that she really loves, Lawrence Selden, because despite being a lawyer and a high society's frequenter, he is not wealthy, as he has to work to live. It is important to strike that Lily's past is not shown in the film, what creates a different feeling in the audience about her defeat.

As I told before, the society in which Ms. Bart was inserted is one of vice and Lily is one of the only virtuous person; according to Wasserman, "Lily Bart follows the consequences of her refusal of dealing with the imposed conditions by her situation and of her insistence in imposing it a sentimental structure - insistence that resulted in an inappropriate way of acting" (my translation from Portuguese). Also according to Ouzgane, "much of the novel's power derives from Lily's unwillingness to realize the future she seems so clearly destined for; as one of the story's perceptive characters puts it, "she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing the seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic" (189)" (par 2). Despite that, she will be judged as if she were one of the unvirtuous ones, even though we know that she never breaks in her morality. She refuses to play the game unfairly. This happens because Lily is too "naпve" to deal with this kind of people. An example of her innocence is when she explains to Mrs. Peninston the reason why she plays cards:

"I have never really cared for cards, but a girl hates to be though priggish and superior, and one drifts into doing what the others do" (200).

Not only this, but all the others Lily's characteristics are transported to the film and showed through Gillian Anderson's interpretation, making the filmic adaptation incorporate the essence of the novel. In spite of this, some subtleties are difficult to be transposed from text to image, so they are more resonant in the novel. For example, in book II chapter twelve when Lawrence is talking to Lily in front of the fire:

"As he did so, he noticed how thin her hands looked against the rising light of the flames. He saw too, under the loose lines of her dress, how the curves of her figure had shrunk to angularity; he remembered long afterward how the red play of the flame sharpened the depression of her nostrils, from her cheekbones to her eyes" (306/361).

Another characteristic responsible for Lily's defeat in her attempts to be rich is her love for Lawrence. She tries to fight against this felling but she can not stand living without Selden and disorder her life to meet him; as happened in Bellomont when she missed an opportunity to meet Percy Grace, Lily's wealthy suitor, to spend all the afternoon with Lawrence. She gives the excuse to Mrs. Trenor: "I only took a day off - I though he meant to stay on all this week, and I knew Mr. Selden was leaving this morning" (88). Moreover, Lily was not able to blackmail Mrs. Dorset because her love for Selden. Instead of this, she threw away the letters that condemned him on the fire:

"When she rose he fancied that he saw her draw something from her dress and drop it into the fire; but he hardly noticed the gesture at the time" (361).

According to Sanford in the Rotten Tomatoes website, the write-director Terence DavieÒ's adaptation of The House of Mirth rarely deviates from the source and takes most of its dialogues straight from WartonÒ's pages. However, the absence of her past (parentsÒ'