SOURCE: Pizer, Donald. “The Naturalism of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.” Twentieth Century Literature 41, no. 2 (summer 1995): 241-48.

In the following essay, Pizer examines The House of Mirth for its elements of literary naturalism as well as Wharton's apparent ambivalence to this possible interpretation at the end of the novel.

Edith Wharton's effort in The House of Mirth to excoriate the nexus between sex and money in turn-of-the-century upper-class New York life and to reveal the tragic effects of a society of this kind upon a sensitive young woman has been recognized from the publication of the novel in 1905. Criticism of the day, however, and indeed for the next half-century, shied away from an identification of these themes with literary naturalism. The fictional worlds of Norris, Crane, and Dreiser, the naturalists of Wharton's generation, appeared so distant from those of Wharton that the almost inevitable tendency of the...