An Open Letter to Lily Bart

Dear Miss Bart,

Having just watched the chronicle of your life, "House of Mirth" as told by Mrs. Wharton and made for the screen by someone whose name I can't remember, I have a few things to say to you.

You have more resources than you know. It's true that it appears you have as your only assets your tenuous standing in Society and your marriageability. And yet you squander the former and refuse to spend the latter.

Firstly, my dear, you should never have given your heart to that man about town (and a lawyer), Lawrence Selden. Especially when you found out he was doing the nasty with your BFF, Bertha, who was a married woman. You should have married him and put your foot down. If you need instructions, I refer you to May in 'The Age of Innocence'. Iron hand, velvet glove, you get the picture.

Secondly, you should have gone to church with Percy Gryce. Yes, he looked like he had a potato stuck up his butt, but he had money and could have been cajoled nicely to spend more of it.

Thirdly, you should have married Sim Rosedale. You and he were of exactly matched minds and temperaments. But you let your upbringing interfere at the cost of your life and would not condescend to marry a Jew.

I have a hundred years of feminism to back me up. I have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of novels depicting plucky heroines in wretched circumstances. Of course, they were not depressed and addicted to chloral.

There were many choices available to you, even at that terribly dire moment before you drank that entire bottle of chloral.

You could have borrowed from Sim Rosedale, moved to a smaller city out west and set yourself up as a modiste, taking with you your dressmaker's best assistant. (I'd have Lawrence look over the contract, first.)

You could have gone to an up-and-coming city like Denver and taught the women there who were hoping to enter Society how to go about it.

You could have signed up to be a teacher in the Territories.

You could have gone into mission work and died a martyr's death in China or Africa, which, horrible as it would be, is still better than dying a suicide in a squalid boarding house.

Even within the confines of your own society, you could have done better than you did. You could have given Bertha a swift kick in the ass with those racy letters she wrote to that dawg, Lawrence Selden.

You could have contested Aunt Julia's will.

You should have married Bertha's very fine husband.

In other words - and I hate to agree with that Selden creep - you didn't have to do this.

Sympathetically,
Becs

Suffering For My Art

I am moving along nicely on the "Had she been beautiful" thing. Still, early days yet. I guess I'm twenty pages into it and half of it is backstory, the dreaded Expository Lump.

I watched "The Age of Innocence" the other day, on VHS from the library. Oh, how I wish I'd seen this at the movies. And a couple of years later, I really don't get the big deal over Daniel Day Lewis's and Michelle Pfeiffer's performances. The real stars of the show were the art director and set decorator. I think I need to re-read the book.

But nothing on earth can entice me to re-read "The House of Mirth". It was one of the first books-on-tape I listened to and the impact it had on me was stunning. It threw me into a depression that it took me years to climb out of. Actually, Edith threw me down the hole and a variety of natives from the Indian sub-continent kept chucking other things down on top of me while I was there.

So. I did order it from Netflix. It's here. It's sitting on the bookcase next to the TV. Can you hear it? Ticktickticktick.

Knowing that there would likely be emotional repercussions from 'House of Mirth', the next on my Netflix list is 'Harry and Kumar Go to the White Castle'. It should be here tomorrow.

Do I dare watch the movie without emotional backup?

Hm. I think I should go for it. If it gets too bad, I can always throw 'Dave' in the DVD. That always cheers me up.