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