Poverty,gender and literary criticism Reassessing Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth

Abstract

Attention to the neglected theme of poverty in The House of Mirth offers a perspective on Edith Wharton that contravenes the leisure-class ethos in which critics tend to place her. Wharton's novel refigures a turn-of-the-century sociological discourse of poverty and dependence to undermine the absolute class ideologies pervading contemporary philanthropic writing about poor and working women. By defining poverty as a psychological condition that can operate across traditional class boundaries, Wharton develops a dynamic sense of gender consciousness founded not in cultural abstractions but in socioeconomic conditions that trap women between financial dependence on men and the impoverished alternative of the world of work.