Comparative Analysis of the Film and Novel Versions of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay explores how Terence Davies’s The House of Mirth (2000) decodes femininity through encoding Edith Wharton’s character Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (1905). Applying the notion of “the feminine soul,” which Carl Jung named anima taken from the Latin, “soul,” this essay aims to show how Davies’s filmic representation twists the novel’s thematic concerns by miscoding the unpopular but powerful truth that Wharton expressed in Lily’s innate power of femininity through her quest for soul. The film follows the major plot line, but it fails to represent the psychological task of the redemption of the femininity that Lily experiences. The film presents Lily as Wharton originally intended: a heroine who “fails” in her traditional role. Wharton refused to have Lily fulfill the role of the traditional novels’ protagonist who is brave, decisive, strong, and accomplished. Wharton set up Lily to fail and to suffer, blocking her at every point in her efforts to realize the social ambitions for which she strives. Wharton, however, made it clear that Lily does not want a conventional notion of success, and it is her very “failure” in the social game that makes Lily a heroine.

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