Mirth -- 3-2-1-stop!

In finishing up this last bit of House of Mirth something dawned on me. Throughout the book I've noticed that Wharton always spells out the emotion and tact behind the dialogue
that is going on. At first I just thought that this was bad form. Well, I'm not necessarily convinced now that it's not. But, regardless of that, if it is intentional and not just bad writing, the reason is that she is trying to say something about the calculation and lack of humanity that the elite class of this time have to take care to preserve. We saw the same thing with Austen, except Austen didn't spell it out; she left it up to the reader to figure out. Wharton is always describing the pause that one person takes when someone says something shocking. Or she points out the composure that people like Lily keep given the same event. All of this is important to the image that Wharton is trying to create of these people. There's a lot more to be done with that, especially in the way that each character slips in and out of maintaining this custom but it's not worth getting into because if I give it much more credit for being a valid literary tool then I'll feel that somehow I'm encouraging more writers to add in dozens of unnecessary pages to books that are already to long and pointless. It's detail that comes at the expense of much-needed brevity.