Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton - Frances L. Restuccia (essay date summer 1987)


The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton - Frances L. Restuccia (essay date summer 1987)

Frances L. Restuccia (essay date summer 1987)

SOURCE: Restuccia, Frances L. “The Name of the Lily: Edith Wharton's Feminism(s).” Contemporary Literature 28, no. 2 (summer 1987): 223-38.

[In the following essay, Restuccia argues that part of Wharton's feminist position in The House of Mirth resembles later “humanist feminism” in its emphasis on the positive effects of femininity.]

“Lily … returned from her expedition with a sense of the powerlessness of beauty and charm against the unfeeling processes of the law.”

—Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Writing, space of dispersion of desire, where Law is dismissed.”

—Roland Barthes, Image Music Text

“This is to call for, then, a decentered vision (theoria) but a centered action that will not result in a renewed invisibility.”

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