Feminism, Dialogism and the (In)Definable Woman in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth

In the area of feminist readings of Wharton studies, critical debate has often
focused on the issue of “marketing” the female in the nineteenth century of Old New York society and the way in which the novel presents Lily to allow herself to be used as an object. Drawing on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and feminist readings of Elizabeth Bronfen and Judi M. Roller, this article focuses on the complexity of the novel’s narrative in which we can observe the multiplicity of competing discourses on marriage and the woman question and the contradictory depictions of the heroine, thus drawing attention to Lily’s unfolding awareness of her status as an “object” and her gradual path toward death as a manifestation of her struggle for agency.