One of the most widely read American novelists of the early years of the 20th century was the incredible Edith Wharton, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature. Like other great novelists, her books all have similar themes that trace to her own biography. She was highborn, well-educated, extensively traveled, and lived through a time of tremendous upheaval. She was a keen observer of her time and had a passion to defend the rights of individuals in all times.
The subject she covers is society and the navigation of its cultural hierarchies and the rewards and cruelties associated with it. Wharton’s background is steeped in old money but, more importantly, deep learning and careful cultivation. She made America her home and was witness to the rise of a monied class of social elites who had none of her background and rarified taste.
What was called Society—back when the United States had something that could be legitimately called the Upper Class—in those days we know as the thin layer of elites who ruled the day by virtue of their influence over just about everything, from media to finance to universities to government. Their homes were in New York and Boston, but the real action took place seasonally in places such as Newport, Rhode Island; Nantucket, Massachusetts; and other luxurious outposts.
Here is where the mating rituals took place. As with other literature of the time, she focuses often on the concerns of rich men looking for suitable wives with good reputations in society so they could move up the hierarchy. There are also daughters of rich families in society seeking eligible males who would ensure their daughter’s continued status within society.
Regardless of the particulars of the circumstances, the game always involved maintaining one’s membership in the exclusive club. The worst possible nightmare was falling out, being cut off from one’s family inheritance, landing among the professional or working class, and then finally confronting the worst possible fate, which is dire poverty. All anxiety concerned that possible fate, which is worse than death, and everyone in their private darkest moments knew this was possible.
To Wharton, this system deployed unrelenting but subtle forms of cruelty that warred against the basic exercise of human volition and freedom. So in America, she noted a deep irony at that time. The country was all about freedom, which is precisely what gave rise to the astonishing wealth of the period. But this very freedom was denied to the highest levels of society, where conformism, compliance, obedience, and fear ruled the day.
At some point, an on-the-make money man offers to handle her finances, and she agrees, only to hear reports of having made sudden fortunes in the stock markets. Confident of her newfound wealth, she gambles away her gains only to discover that they were nothing like what she hoped and then faced a grim debt, which amounts to about $300,000 in today’s dollars.
She pleads with her aunt for a bailout and is refused on the grounds that she needs to learn a lesson. The third party who approached her offers to pay off her debt in exchange for sexual favors but she refuses on principle. The money-bags investor offers her marriage provided she undertakes a blackmail operation to get back in the good graces of society. She refuses that too.
In short, despite her one small mistake with a big price tag, she is a woman of solid principle and moral courage and refuses to give that up merely to retain her social standing. She would not play the game. She is mostly disinherited upon her aunt’s death, and her aunt’s niece refuses to countenance any favors. She goes to work as a private secretary within society until her bad reputation catches up to her and she is terminated.
Poor and deeply in debt, she sets out to find a job with some wages to pay her nominal rent and finds a position in a hat-maker’s shop. But there is one problem: She doesn’t really know how to sew or do much of anything. She is then dismissed from that position too and faces the worst possible fate. When a check finally arrives from her aunt’s estate, a small payout compared to the whole, she signs it over to her creditor and takes a potion to end her life.
Society, despite its appearance as civilized and genteel, chewed her up, spat her out, and finally killed her. That’s the book, and that’s what Edith Wharton decried: the displacement of moral courage for money-grubbing and social climbing, with the result that those who make it relinquish all volition and vision. It sickened her.
She also despised the privilege of birth that comes with not knowing anything or being capable of doing anything, which she found particularly dangerous for women because it doomed them always into a position of dependency.
There is this moment when the lead character in “The House of Mirth,” having been fired by the milliner’s shop, says with defeat: “I’m completely useless.” That is precisely what Wharton opposed, people who had no real occupation, skills, purpose, or drive and were forever fated to curry favor with the system that created and protects them.
The days of Wharton are long gone, including the visibly rigid social hierarchies of the time. Class mobility grew over time so people could take more risks up and down the social ladder, sometimes poor and sometimes rich, and let the next generation take matters into their own hands in a spirit of freedom and tolerance.
Or so they say. Perhaps that ideal world emerged following World War II and lasted for some decades.
These days, however, there is every indication that extreme stratification of the 1890s and 1910s has come roaring back. In 2020, governments around the country divided the workforce between essential and nonessential. The former category was a strange one: it included high-end professionals and those who serve them. The latter category was essentially everyone else, the people who are considered dispensable.
Think of the milliners. They were the dispensable ones in 1906. Today, they are nail salon employees, pastors, hair cutters, small business employees, bowling alley attendants, restaurant servers, and so on, people who actually do stuff for the middle layer of society that we used to call the bourgeoisie. To our masters and commanders, the new Upper Class, all these people are on hold, keepable or not depending on circumstances of time and place.
The great fear in 1906 among the upper classes was that some rumor would start to circulate that would kick them out of the top tier, some indication that a person was out of compliance, not fully on board with the group, slightly deviating from expectations. It was the fear of the consequences that kept people in line.
And today, class mobility has become boggy again, if not frozen. You either go to the right schools or you do not. You are from the right neighborhoods or you are not. You have the credentials or you do not. Once you cross that invisible line into class and income security, one holds on to it for dear life, fearing the consequences of falling out. As in “The House of Mirth,” the fall could be dramatic and unending all the way to the bottom.
The social safety net, by which I mean not the welfare state but free enterprise and economic opportunity, has become so tattered and insecure. One does really wonder if there is any hope post-cancellation, post-termination, or post-disgrace, even if based on complete fabrications, as it so often is. This is terrifying for vast numbers of people in the professional world today and precisely why so many people in the upper strata of society are so easily controlled.
This insight—drawn from a book written 120 years ago—explains so much about the past four years and so much about the politics of our time. For example, how does it come to be that large swaths of a demographic that would be most harmed by the loss of freedom are nonetheless rallying in favor of that very thing?
