Edith Wharton and René Girard’s Sacrificial Crisis in The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country

Abstract

“Social and Cultural Crisis in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country” is a work based on René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. Recent critical works have demonstrated a renewed interest in the works of Edith Wharton, focusing on varied aspects of her works, and trying to rehabilitate her place in the literary ground. In the hope of adding to this rehabilitation, this work is centred on a very specific subject, which is the mimetic desire, and the sacrificial crisis advocated and explained by René Girard in his works Violence and the Sacred., Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Self and Other in Literary Structure. Edith Wharton wrote at a critical period of change in the American society, and her works, especially The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country, reflect the aspects and consequences of this change. In this work, I tried to show that the sacrificial crisis as advocated by René Girard exists in these two novels, I divided the work into four chapters, the first one containing a social, cultural and literary background, the second dealing with the social aspect of the novels and the form of the sacrificial crisis in the social groups and their relationships. The third chapter deals with the cultural aspect of the novels and the crisis in the cultural order described by the author. In both second and third chapters, I showed the different cases of mimetic desire and the results it leads to, as I described the situation prior to the sacrifice, namely the sacrificial crisis itself. In the last chapter, I dealt with the aspects of violence that characterise the society described by Wharton and the ultimate step in the crisis which is the sacrifice of the victim held to be the V cause of all the chaos and violence which prevail in the society. In the same chapter, I tried to give a literary analysis, and show the link between Wharton’s subject matter and the literary genre she uses in her novels, such as the novel of manners, realism, and some aspects of naturalism. Finally, I concluded the work with an assessment of the applicability of Girard’s theory of mimetic desire to the two selected novels, and gave a small comparison between my readings of the same.