Foreground Nostalgia and Psychological Spaces in Wharton's the House of Mirth
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research New York City College of Technology 2010 Going No Place?: Foreground Nostalgia and Psychological Spaces in Wharton's The House of Mirth Sean Scanlan CUNY New York City College of Technology How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ny_pubs/112 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] New Psychologies and Modern. ~sessments http://www.style.niu.edu/ \I II Style invites submissions that address questions of style, stylistics, and poetics-as before. sty(e These submissions may include research and theory in discourse analysis, literary and Volume 44, Spring/Summer 201 C nonliterary genres, narrative, figuration, metrics, and rhetorical analysis. 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KNAPP Introduction I 1 Part One: Family Systems as Literary Theory BRIAN EDWARDS The Inhibited Temperament in Sons and Lovers I 62 c. M. GILL Martyring Veda: Mildred Pierce and Family Systems Theory I 81 BETH McFARLAND The Hobson Family System in Richard Powers's WILSON Prisoner's Dilemma I 99 BENJAMIN OPIPARI Shhhhhhame: Silencing the Family Secret in Sam Shepard's Buried Child I 123 PIOTR SADOWSKI Androgyny and (near) Perfect Marriage: A Systems View of the Genders of Leopold and Molly Bloom I 139 Part Two: Empirical Analyses, Rio-Evolutionary Criticisms, and Cognitive Constructions JOSEPH CARROLL Quantifying Tonal Analysis in The Mayor of Caster JoHN A. JoHNSON bridge I 164 JONA THAN GoTTSCHALL DANIEL J. KRuGER, AND STELIOS GEORGIADES RICHARD J. GERRIG AND The Bushwhacked Piano and the Bushwhacked GrovANNA Eorm Reader: The Willing Construction of Disbelief I 189 1 SEAN ScANLAN Going No Place?: Foregrounding Nostalgia and Psychological Spaces in Wharton's The House ofMirth I 207 JOSEPH CARROLL Intentional Meaning in Hamlet: An Evolutio~~ry Persp~ctive I 230 KENNETH WOMACK ''Nothing's going to change my world": Narrating Memory and Selfhood with the Beatles I 261 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS I 282 ABSTRACTS I 286 BOOKS RECEIVED I 289 an, Steven A. "The Empirical Case for Two Systems of Reasoning." >sychological Bulletin 119 (1996): 3-22. Print. Sean Scanlan University of Iowa "Two Systems of Reasoning." Heuristics and biases. Eds. Thomas Gilovich, )ale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002, 379- '6. Print. Going No Place?: Foreground Nostalgia and ~vich, Keith E., and Richard F. West. "Individual Differences in Reasoning: Psychological Spaces in Wharton's mplications fnr the Rationality Debate." Behavioral and Brain Science~ 23 The House ofMirth 2000): 645-65. Print. Soyoung, and Tom Trabasso. "Inferences During Reading: Converging Introduction: Siting Lily Bart's Family System ~vidence from Discourse Analysis, Talk-Aloud Protocols, and Recognition Edith Wharton is well known for her ability to illuminate class and gender 'riming." Journal of Memory and Language 32 (1993): 279-300. Print. consciousness in her penetrating accounts of New York City elite society in novels ein, Cass R. (2005). "Moral Heuristics." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 such as The Custom of the Country ( 1913), The Age of Innocence ( 1920), Old 2005): 531-42. Print. New York (1924}, The Mother's Recompense (1925), and Twilight Sleep (1927). But her most successful novel of the changing shape of urban desire and identity Lsso, Tom and Jennifer Wiley. "Goal Plans of Action and Inferences During focused through domestic tragedy is The House of Mirth (1905). It is, abo~e all, ~omprehension of Narratives." Discourse Processes, 39 (2005): 129-64. a family tragedy. 'rint. The heroine of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth is Lily Bart, a young :ky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. "Extensional Versus Intuitive Reasoning: woman raised to embody the specific virtues of the wealthy and fashionable class ['he Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment. Psychological Review 90 in tum-of-the-century New York City. 1 These virtues are beauty, pliability, and 1983): 293-315. Print". dissimulation. Lily's tragedy is that she begins to understand that these virtues are actually trade qualities in the marriage market for which she has been groomed. ~urn, Dexter. Thomas McGuane. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991. Print. But her realization comes too late for her to adapt to the changing ideals of family, environmental. and socioeconomic systems. Her final self-reflections set her marriage pro~lems in relief, against a backdrop of her two primary problems: her lack of a stable home and a supporting family. 2 What makes this novel so extraordinary is the complexity ofheremerging understanding that her idea, and her ideal, ofhorne and family disable her forward movement. Lily is in constant motion between various temporary homes, yet she never feels at home. Througllout the novel, her inability to adapt, to commit, or to change is structured by these three interlocking systems: family, environmental, and socioeconomic. Lily Bart's slide from riches to rags can be tracked through a close attention to the novel's vivid