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Extinction, Taxidermy, Tableaux Vivants: Staging Race and Class in The House of Mirth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jennie A. Kassanoff
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Abstract

Edith Wharton's 1905 novel The House of Mirth documents a twenty-nine-year-old debutante's disinheritance—from money, family, power, love, and social position. On a more profound level, however, the novel pursues the opposite end. Although Lily Bart is plainly vulnerable to the whims of what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called the “sexuo-economic relation,” she is nonetheless dramatically resistant to the attritional ravages of racial disintegration. This paper argues that race in The House of Mirth is an essentialist—if deeply problematic—answer to the cultural slippages of class and gender. By locating the novel within the diverse range of cultural phenomena that contributed to its racialized logic, this essay connects Wharton's fears of class mobility, mass production, immigration, and “race suicide” to the taxidermic aesthetic of racialized stasis. Part of a rare and endangered species, Lily becomes Wharton's decadent specimen of racial permanence.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 115 , Issue 1: Special Topic: Rereading Class , January 2000 , pp. 60 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2000

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