Last night, C and I talked about my work for a change. Rather than discuss the job market for art historians, I said, "I want to talk about what I did today." So I started talking about two characters from two different novels that I'm writing on. One of my chapters is on Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, but I also want to discuss The Age of Innocence. My discussion of The House of Mirth focuses on Lily's longing for home and how this longing conflicts with her refusal to marry. I argue that Lily places herself in an interstitial space as she is neither able to accept her societal position and marry for money nor is she able to reject her position and support herself. Lily wants both the financial security that marriage can provide and personal freedom, which marriage doesn't guarantee. Her only viable option to escape her interstitial existence is to make her own money, an endeavor at which she repeatedly fails. Her refusal to come to terms with the circumstances of her class and her life trap her in an interstitial existence. Unable to transgress the interstitial spaces (both physical and metaphoric) in which she lives, she is unable to achieve what she really wants: a home and an identity of her own.
I've thought for a long time that Lily and Ellen Olenska, of The Age of Innocence, are a lot a like. Both live in interstitial spaces, and like Lily, Ellen has the means to escape hers, but actively chooses not to. But Ellen is not as doomed as Lily, and it has taken me a while to figure out why. Last night as I was telling C that I wasn't sure I could discuss these two novels in the same chapter, which bothered me because I think it makes more sense to discuss both Wharton novels in the same chapter, I suddenly realized that Ellen has been married. She has experienced the life that Lily has so ardently avoided. Her knowledge of marriage and its failings allows her to support herself in a way that Lily cannot. Granted, Ellen supports herself by convincing her grandmother to give her an allowance not by working, but Ellen doesn't compromise herself in the ways that Lily does. I haven't completely figured it out, but my hunch is that Ellen's first hand knowledge of marriage and the fact that she's been rejected by New York society enable her to embrace her interstitiality rather than fight against it as Lily does.
So I'm feeling better about work, and I'm beginning to feel inspired again.
1 comment:
Nice work. It's always more of a pleasure to listen next time if you're listened to sometimes too!
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