What Would Eedi Do?

A Bachelor degree, a Master degree, no, a Doctorates will do. A fast car, a speedy bike, an Uber ride, all three will fill the suit. At least two cards to fuel our life of American express, discovery, and just one more to shush our master called, “Cultured Society.” A job that summons you till 6:00PM, while a child needs you by 5:00PM. These are some of the things that determine today’s class. 

Many of us have become accustomed to a world where having a college degree has become more important than learning, and marriage and kids can only be something you can have once you are at least 30 years of age, but never mind that you can’t want to be a loving wife and mother as your life’s purpose without being looked down on. Today if I want to stay in the area in which I grew up in I am told that I must go into more debt in order to get a higher degree so that I can get a higher paying job that will allow me to afford a room in a mediocre apartment with my three other adult roommates, or else I must move to a “less desirable” area, as if this were my only option. Today if I don’t want to wait until my special someone and I have a full-blown career, a six-figure salary between at least the two of us, or at least four more years of schooling past both of our undergraduate careers to be married, then I must be deemed “unrealistic.” Because I aspire to one day live on acres of land, with five children, with a husband who is happy to let me be home with the children, and I don’t have a desire to get a higher degree, a job with a fancy title, or a brand new car, I have been referred to as “old” or “old-fashioned,” as if my aspirations are not multifaceted enough to fit into the Silicon Valley. 

I am confident in myself to generate a lot of money for myself and for whoever else I want to without having to go back to school, or climb a profession ladder, or without having to marry someone who is already established. I am also confident that I can live wherever I want to and with the family I aspire to hopefully soon one day meet. Yet, when a colleague, associate, friend, or even family member asks me, “what do I want to do after I graduate,” “what do you want to do in life,” and “where do you see yourself in five years,” I always choke up and give the same pitiful answer along the lines of, “oh, I’m pursuing a career in government—It’s secure,” or “yes, of course I’ve thought about getting a Master degree, but maybe after a couple of years of working full-time.”

This fearfulness of looking estranged by the people within the classes of society along with reading several short stories and a novel by Edith Wharton has brought me to question: What would Edith Wharton do? What would Edith Wharton do or say about the class system of the year 2016? Wharton herself grew up in a society greatly concerned of manners, and fear of change from habit. An unhealthy habit of the society of her time was the perception of goals for women to be limited only to getting married. This meant that for Wharton to become the great American and woman writer that she is must have been difficult and discouraging. Today, women are not discouraged to pursue more than one major goal as the case seemed in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, yet the issue of class structure and the habits in which people believe must belong in each rank still seems relevant. The more I think about it the more similarities the topic of class surfaces between Wharton and our time. Similarities such as judgement and keeping up with class culture can be found in Wharton’s work, “The House of Mirth.”

“Younger and plainer girls had been married off by dozens, and she was nine-and-twenty, and still Miss Bart.” (Chapter 4)

Nowadays it can be often found that if a person or a couple are in their late teens to early twenties, or even their mid-twenties, and they want to be married or encourage the idea of marrying young, then they are negatively judged and looked down upon. In Wharton’s novel it is clear that the women of her time are looked down upon if they wait till past their mid-twenties to wed, whereas now it is the norm and encouraged. Same negative judgements, just different numerical figures. 

“[…] she longed to drop out of the race and make an independent life for herself.” (Chapter 4)

It’s a rat race the society we live in today. We try to keep up with the more positively publicized classes by constantly having our attention be split by too many thoughts or things to be attended to. We need a new car, new clothes, new phones, more this, more that, just to keep up with the appearances of the human-made class system. Wharton herself was familiar with this high societal world from her own childhood, and through marriage in which her husband was born into. Robert Armitage of the New York Public Library provides more detail of Wharton’s life in the article, Edith Wharton, A Writing Life: Marriage. Here he provides us with a glimpse into what seems to be an expensive leisurely life: “Like many men of his [Wharton’s husband] class, he had no real job but lived on a trust fund. His time was his own, and he filled it with sports, fishing, riding, and camping.”  

Poor Lily from “The House of Mirth,” struggles with being able to afford such a materialistic and consumeristic class, in which the classes of our society today still are so consumed by materialism. It seems that it would be far less stressful to simply “drop out of the race,” but I suppose it is our fears that hold us all back, both past and present. 

“[…] republic of the spirit […]” (Chapter 6)

Oh, Lawrence Selden, you dashing character you. According to Selden, it is a success if one can understand their self; not their society, not their own agendas, not their society’s agenda, but their own self, which grants a “personal freedom.” We don’t need a Selden in our life to convince us that our perceptions of the classes of society are changeable and controllable. Edith Wharton knows it. We know it. It is for us to decide when to take a turn at the sign: “Republic of the Spirit”

 

What are your fears regarding our class system holding you back from?