Summary In The House Of Mirth

A metaphor I find interesting and vivid in The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is portrayed in, “[Selden] had preserved a certain social detachment, a happy air of viewing the show objectively, of having points of contact outside the great gilt cage in which they were all huddled for the mob to gape at” (Wharton, 54). In this quote, Wharton used the gilt cage as a metaphor for the social trap created by New York City’s high society. The novel was set in the Gilded Age, an era in which the economic divide widened as the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. During this period, high society’s excessive and wasteful materialism was in stark contrast to the lower class’s dire living circumstances. Edith Wharton disparagingly explored the “gilt cage” which the highest social class had created for itself. …show more content…
Her parents raised Lily with no professional skills which she could have used to be self-supporting. They taught her to use her beauty and social skills to gain access to a rich husband who could support her in a lifestyle her parents deemed suitable for her. However, the author firmly conveyed her disapproval of this mindset by contrasting Lily’s emotional imprisonment in this “gilded cage,” against Lily’s moral counterparts, Lawrence Seldon and Gerty Farish who were able to break free from the social ploys of of high society. Both Seldon and Farish, were not obsessed with living among the wealthy. They were not poisoned by the superficial values of the upper crust, and lived more unconstrained and contented lives than did trapped social climbers such as Lily Bart. Furthermore, in this quotation the author depicted those trapped within the “gilt cage” depicting them as “huddled for the mob to gape at.” By portraying the high society characters this way, the author depicted them like animals caged in a zoo, rather than humans living in a democratic