The Carnivalesque Spirit In The House Of Mirth

This essay attempts to interpret Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth in light of Bakhtin's poetics of carnivalization and hopefully to establish a theoretical connection between the novel and the poetics of carnivalesque.In Lily Bart's quest for self-realization, disguised as her search for a rich husband to improve her financial conditions, she meets various carnival characters representing two main contradictory forces which play the significant role toward her self-realization. At the same time, as a young woman of enormous beauty, intelligence and aspiration living in a frivolous society, Lily always has her subversive real self in a dialogic relationship to her conventional "ought self. Then Lily experiences ups and downs in her searching for love and wealth and there is gay relativity of everything around her. It is through the process of symbolized rituals of crownings\decrownings, Lily gradually awakens to her real self that she actually expects more from life rather than money itself, and she finally comes to live (die) by new standards as what her real self requires.The House of Mirth is fraught with the carnival sense of the world, and in this sense, the protagonist's journey of self-searching is no longer a traditional tragedy, but a serio-comical in that the theme of quest for real self is serious but the whole process is comical. Lily Bart's plight exposes the destructive power of the frivolous patriarchal society at the turn of the twentieth century, in which women were deprived of self-realization and ambitions.