Broken marriage in aristocratic societies in Edith Wharton's selected novels

Abstract

Family is a bridge between individual and society. In my paper, I will survey broken marriage and individual dissatisfaction in two novels by Edith Wharton. The novels in question are The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920). Edith Wharton portrays her concern by the conflict between the individuals and the social groups which they live in there. Her treatment of the family is always in association with the bourgeois society, with the ambitious stock brokers from the west. This conflict can be seen in their attitudes to love, marriage, divorce, and remarriage. In the novels, Marriage, as an indissoluble matter and even an invariable failure, is main concept and sex outside marriage is meaningless. Wharton shows divorce in aristocratic societies in an old-fashioned lifestyle.