CRITICAL QUOTES

Question 1

Lily as a commodity

Answer 1

Lori Merish [Lily] is marked quite plainly as a commodity

Question 2

money’s role in the novel

Answer 2

Lori Merish the market figures in that text as an impersonal power

Question 3

Lily’s tableau moment; artist / objet d’art paradox

Answer 3

Michael Gorra the moment at which she is most herself is also the one in which she most becomes a things, an object consumed by the eyes

Question 4

natural selection makes Lily unfit

Answer 4

Michael Gorra her very fineness has made her unfit, like a bird whose elegant beak can no longer crack open the seeds she needs to survive

Question 5

Lily and Selden as having an artistic relationship

Answer 5

Marilyn McEntyre failure of the imagination that drives him [Selden] to renounce his vision

Question 6

women as dependent on marriage

Answer 6

Charlotte Perkins Gilman young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain

Question 7

Mrs Peniston and social conservatism

Answer 7

Beer, Nolan and Knight with an imagination shrouded in dust sheets, Mrs Peniston embodies her society at its most rigid

Question 8

determinism

Answer 8

Beer, Nolan and Knight Like Freud, Wharton is interested in motivations and choices that lie beneath consciousness, often buried in childhood.

Question 9

Lily’s death and choice of suicide

Answer 9

Roxanna Robinson if her death occurs by chance … the tragedy is drained of much of its power

Question 10

Wharton views new money vs old money

Answer 10

Susan Mizruchi Wharton’s ideal is an inherent nobility and traditionalism set against the indiscriminate logic of market forces.

Question 11

matriarchal aspects of the novel

Answer 11

Wai Chee Dimock [despite men having economic power] the actual wielders of power in the book are often not men but women

Question 12

performative femininity, Selden’s male gaze of Lily

Answer 12

Cynthia Griffin Wolff Lily has been formed to accept a definition of femininity of which men like Selden are the supreme evaluators

Question 13

Lily’s social decline and loss of money

Answer 13

Mary Moss [Lily is] too poor to keep up with the set in which she moves … [yet] unfortunately too radically snobbish to cut free from it

Question 14

Lily and Selden’s relationship as non-romantic

Answer 14

Johanna Wagner The simile comparing Lily and Selden to children … seems less appropriate for lovers than friends

Question 15

Wharton as giving an old money view on social status in America becoming more dependent on money than birth

Answer 15

Wai Chee Dimock Wharton’s critique of the marketplace is essentially an aristocratic critique

Question 16

Wharton’s use of naturalism (perhaps to contrast how artistically they are usually portrayed- by themselves and by others)

Answer 16

Janet Beer [Wharton makes use of] a store of metaphor and language from natural science in order to depict the leisure-class woman of the late nineteenth century

Question 17

Lily as being an endangered ideal for Wharton

Answer 17

Jennie A. Kassanoff Lily articulates [through her own position as an upper-class wasp] a central set of early-twentieth-century patrician anxieties: that the ill-bred, the foreign, and the poor would overwhelm the native elite

Question 18

Edith Wharton as having exclusive class insights

Answer 18

Carol J Singley Edith Wharton had reached a middle-class audience eager for insights into glamorous upper-class life, made all the more interesting by her willingness to expose society’s flaws.

Question 19

nature of marriage in the novel

Answer 19

Maureen Howard In Austen, marriage is an institution within a stable world […] In Lily Bart’s unstable society, marriage has already become at best a flimsy institution in which to house one’s ambitions.

Question 20

performance in the novel

Answer 20

Katherine Joslin [Wharton’s novel is] a study of performances that mark gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality.