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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third in a 14-week sequence on the American novel. It concerns The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. We discuss the changing fortunes of Wharton’s literary reputation and status in the American canon in her lifetime and afterward and her theory of the novel as a synthesis of British social realism and French psychological realism. We assess The House of Mirth as a tragic study of one woman’s downfall as the aesthetic ornament of a declining aristocracy in an ever-more-more capitalist turn-of-the-century America. Ultimately, we survey the sometimes confusing co-existence in the novel’s vision of naturalism and Romanticism as Wharton negotiates the tumult of a changing society, at once sympathetic to an aristocratic transcendence of market society’s baseness and allured by capitalism’s ethic of risk and enterprise. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall: