Lily Bart vs. Edna Pontellier

As I completed Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, I drew more and more parallels between the protagonist Lily Bart and Edna Pontellier, the protagonist of The Awakening. While Edna is a married woman established in her social milieu and Lily is in a sense trying to obtain what Edna already has, these two female characters have a lot in common.
For one, it is notable that both have lost their mother at an early age, and in this way have had to fend for themselves, forcing them to become aware of their own role in their surroundings, and what they must do to keep afloat (no pun intended...although that's a pretty nasty one). More importantly, both heroines, members of the upper class, are portrayed to have their own thoughts and desires, and, perhaps because they are aware of the strict social norms that surround them, are both unsatisfied and feel constricted due to their womanhood, or womaness.
Indeed, these two characters are tied to stereotypical female roles associate with the home: mother, wife, and housekeeper. They cannot dream of being anything else.
Of course, what brings the two women even closer to each other is their death, or suicide. While it is never clear if Lily actually commits suicide, I think it hard to see it otherwise. Everything Edna has ever strived for, a husband, good social standing, and wealth, seem by the end of the novel completely unattainable for her.
By contrast, Edna feels as though she cannot abide to, nor survive the strict social norms she must follow, and drowning is for her her only means of escape.
In both cases, it seems as though death is to both characters a mode in which they can find their own feminine space, a space not affected by masculine doctrines and imposed social codes. This is a space they can inhabit, that they can defy, and in which they can define themselves. While Edna's death is much more symbolic in that she kills herself by drowning (the water stands as an important symbol of femininity) that fact that Lily dies by "overdose" also insinuates slumber: an escape in a world that is not this one. For both women, then, death is not an end to their life, but rather enables the commencement of a new one, a better one...a life in which they can reinvent themselves.

The Fall of Silas Lapham

I think it's interesting that the novel is not called The Rise and Fall of Silas Lapham but rather The Rise of Silas Lapham. In this manner, Howells valorizes the moral rise of Lapham (and that of his family) over the monetary and social downfall they experience.

Before his fall, Silas believes his money makes him superior to the Coreys, and that this can give him access to high-society. His house, the dinner party, these are all signs of his own blindness into thinking he can fit in...even though we as readers are aware of the opposite.

Towards the end of the book, however, Silas realizes that without his money he would be no-one in the social world (in Contrast to the Coreys, who have less money than Lapham but have social status because they were born into the "upper crust" and understand its workings and values).

But it's when Silas and his family move back to their "land of origin" that we see how much less superfluous and superficial the Laphams are once they go back to their roots (and quite literally). The Lapham family even seems much happier and ceases to be consumed by the worrying of belonging or fitting in a specific group. As I said in my last post, Silas regains his title of "colonel" (or at least the narrator states that the title is now more fitting), which shows that only then, when he regains the ranks of the working class he is most at ease and in his place.

But interestingly, the Laphams do not seem bitter or even regretful of their monetary downfall, instead, Silas morally rises and, in some way, "redeems" himself: he doesn't trample on others to regain his material possessions and instead accepts the situation and moves on. Furthermore, we learn that Silas has been supporting the daughter of a man who took a bullet for him during the war which also augments our own view of him as a responsible and moral man.

Silas, La Femme?

I know this is pretty far stretched, but bear with me for a little bit.
French being my first language, I have the tendency to speak to myself in French (yes, I speak to myself ALL the time). So when I picked up a copy of The Rise of Silas Lapham, this is what inside my head sounded like: "Oh, ze rise of Seelah La Femme."

So for a while I went around calling the book that, which in French means "The Woman".
And "The Woman" was for me a really cool book, except its protagonist happened to be, well, a man. So subconsciously, while I knew Lapham was a man all along, I sort of identified him as woman...

and bizarrely, things sort of made sense that way.

What I mean is, socially Lapham is the equivalent of "the woman" in the room (yes I tried to make a pun there by substituting elephant with woman). In a patriarchal society, men lead have dominant and active roles. To put it bluntly, men are always at the top, while the women (passive and docile) can never fit in where men belong. And that's what Lapham and his family try to achieve, the top, the "upper class"... to be part of the elite. But no matter what he does, Lapham can't fit in. Not because he doesn't try enough (he does plenty of times and ends up making a fool of himself), but because his origins have not prepped him for "the ways" of society, because his blood, his biological beginnings "hinder" his image and his acceptance in society...wait, sounds like women's problems all along, no?

So in a way, high society is an effeminating factor for Lapham. As Howells expresses at the very end of the book, only when Lapham loses his house and moves away does his title of "colonel" apply to him again. Howells writes, "The colonel...was more the Colonel in those hills than he could ever have been on the Back Bay" (339). It seems that once Lapham displaces himself from high society he regains his masculinity. But in high-society, Lapham is emasculated and takes on socially constructed traits that women are supposed to possess: They are not good conversationalists (how could they, they have no brains), are obsessed with aesthetics (Lapham is obsessed witht he way his house looks), and of course, they are good house-keepers -- they normally cannot obtain any high positions, that is, they cannot be more than what they are.

So while La Femme and Lapham have probably nothing in common, I thought that phonetically (for a Frenchie!), the relationship was pretty interesting...

Our other half

It's hard to imagine just how poor this country was (and still is in many parts). But looking at Riis' photographs, I don't think I've ever seen this poverty echoed anywhere else in NY. Children are described as homeless and struggling to feed themselves. In fact, in Riis' day, approximately 100,000 children lived on the streets. That's just not something you see today.

It was fascinating, and extremely heart-breaking at the same time, to read about these conditions and understand them as a non-fictional account. When reading something, even a newspaper article, I can often brush it to the side as just a story, not really part of my reality, not really true...

Riis' "How the Other Half Lives" really hit me though, perhaps in part due to the photographs. As Riis writes, "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives." Indeed, this resonates with the Great Gatsby and the disparity between the two Eggs and the Valley of Ashes, and even the Grapes of Wrath with the workers and the big corporations. It seems it often cut in two halves, with extremes on both sides.