Style

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Chapters 15 & 1

"She was realising for the first time that a woman's dignity may cost more to keep up then her carriage; and that the maintenance of a moral attribute should be dependent on dollars and cents made the world appear a more sordid place than she had conceived it" (Wharton, page 138).

The progression from Book 1 to Book 2 was a giant leap. The intentions of the splitting of the novel seem to leave mystery in the story. Information from the three months is crutial to understand the relationships between the characters. Lily seems to have a better understand of her society before she leaves to Europe and I hope she uses that to her advantage further into the second book. I have noticed while I was reading that Wharton has a tendency to jump into the action and explain the circumstances and reasoning later. I have had many times where I was utterly confused while reading a dialogue. I would attempt to re-read a section of dialogue and nothing more would come to me. By trudging through, more details and facts are revealed to make the dialogue make sense. In this way, I sometimes have to reference myself back to previous passages in order to get a full understanding of the situation. This is all especially true at the beginning of each of the books in the novel. 

My favorite book of her's!

From chapter to chapter, I have noticed another type of style. The first half of the chapter tends to be a lot of description. Sometimes I find the description unnecessary and excessive but other times, I am given an idea of what the outcome of the following scene will be. This might seen contradictory to my previous statement about her style, but Wharton tends to be jumpy in the dialogue where it can be hard to follow but very through in her descriptions. 

Towards the end of Book 1 and what I have read in Book 2, Wharton has reminded me of my favorite author of all time, Jodi Picoult. Wharton and Picoult both use a technique where each chapter is from the point of view of a different character. Picoult writes each character in first person while Wharton switches third person between Lily and Selden a few times in this span of the book. This is by far my favorite aspect of Wharton's writing that I like because I like seeing all of the pieces of the story come together in the novel.