Carrie Bradshaw's BFF

Finished The House of Mirth audiobook. I’ve read that novel at least ten times and listened to it once now. Its ending always makes me cry.

This is quite the testament to Edith Wharton’s writing abilities since, on the whole, Lily Bart—venally motivated, entirely self-involved—is not a particularly sympathetic character. She gets hers in the end! Where’s the tragedy in that?

The tragedy exists, I suppose, because Lily cannot help being what she is. She is entirely a creation of the times in which she lived. Wharton’s remarkable ability to narrate Lily’s interior monologue makes it impossible not to identify with Lily.

(Keep in mind here that The House of Mirth is pre-modernism. Modernism’s contributions to the narrative bag of tricks include multiple streamlined methods of making the writing of interior POVs eaZy/peZy. Wharton did not have access to them.

And at the same time Wharton is doing a deep dive into Lily, she is also describing the foibles of Gilded Age society from an ironic, omniscient POV. Quite the narrative triumph to be able to pull off these points of view simultaneously.)

The world Lily lives in is a commodities market, and women like Lily are the ultimate luxury good.

The irony is that a hundred years later, Lily Bart would have been Carrie Bradshaw’s BFF.





Anyway, yesterday was another perfect day weather-wise.

I Remunerated all morning, gardened all afternoon, and ate pesto in the evening—this time on a morsel of salmon.

Today, Loraine and I are going up to Montgomery Place.

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Montgomery Place is another old Livingston Mansion. It was built in 1806 by Janet Livingston Montgomery, the original Livingston battleax.

Montgomery Place’s vast farming operations, run according to the plantation model, are one of the reasons why Dutchess County voted against manumission: European immigrants didn’t want to work there since the reason they’d immigrated was so they wouldn’t have to till the local lordling’s estate. Thus, Montgomery Place’s farming operations depended entirely upon slave labor.

I’ve thought of setting one of the Livingston ghost cycle stories at Montgomery Place.

But the obvious plotline would be a Benito Cereno pastiche.

And Benito Cereno’s implications for the 21st century are very, very different from Benito Cereno’s implications when Herman Melville wrote it in 1855.

I’m just not a good enough writer to pull that one off.