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The idea of seeing Lily Bart and her milieu come to life on screen is certainly appealing, and Davies’s choice of actors—many familiar from their leading roles on television—was daring, though largely unsuccessful. Gillian Anderson, best known for her role as an icy FBI agent on The X-Files, is an attractive Lily Bart, but she fails to see that Wharton’s heroine is not an irreproachable goddess. Eric Stoltz, of Chicago Hope fame, is a not-so-dashing Lawrence Selden. Dan Aykroyd, whose name became almost a household word based on his work on Saturday Night Live and such films as Ghost Busters, is too good-natured a fellow to be convincing as the duplicitous Gus Trenor. Laura Linney, the nice girl of the Tales of the City television miniseries, is not nearly mean enough in her role as the conniving socialite Bertha Dorset. It’s hard enough to accept the rigid social conventions that dictate the action of the novel, and harder still to believe that these icons of popular culture are denizens of a stagnant and unrelenting social stratum. One successful piece of casting is Eleanor Bron, who played neurotic ice queens in such 1960s hits as Bedazzled, Alfie, Two for the Road, and Women in Love; she is sufficiently dour and judgmental as Julia Peniston, the aunt who withdraws the legacy that could have saved Lily.

The darkly lit The House of Mirth is beautifully photographed by Remi Adefarasin, who received an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography for his work in Elizabeth (1998). And it must be said that director Davies demonstrates a fine eye for the details, right down to the gloves, corsets, and parasols, surrounding New York City high society at the dawn of the twentieth century. Davies’s cinematic style—often described as static, with his shots fixed and close, his pace slow—is in evidence in The House of Mirth, providing a strong contrast with the sweeping visual approach of another Wharton adaptation, Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. Davies’s pacing and his static presentation create a stagnant atmosphere that is a fitting background for Lily Bart’s introspection and the immobility that can result from living within such an unforgiving social setting. Davies has a penchant for tragedy, too: His darkly lit production succeeds in poignantly dramatizing Lily’s reversal of fortune.

Right up to the gruesome end, though, it’s hard to accept Lily’s plight. We want Lily to adhere to today’s standards and be a gutsy gal, to march into those stuffy drawing rooms and slap a few faces and give those stiffs a piece of her mind—which may only go to show that Wharton’s novel belongs so much to a particular age that it will never translate to celluloid.

COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

THE INDEPENDENT

Mrs. Wharton’s new novel is a story of society life, its refined ferocities, its sensual extravagances, its delicate immoralities and, above all, the tragedies which underlie its outward appearance of mirth and prosperity. Society, indeed, is the coming field in fiction for the author who knows how to reap his literary wheat from the tares that are sowed there. And we ought not to complain: These books are missionary efforts of a sensational kind, made in behalf of what is the most corrupt class of people in the world, if we are to take seriously the representations of writers like Mrs. Wharton and Robert Grant.

But there is a curious thing about the dogma upon which these stories are founded. It is that old-fashioned