The House Of Mir And Howards End Essay

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In The House of Mirth and Howards End, modern society was viewed with much tension and unease – being labeled as a place of noise, worldliness, and ambition –; while both novels have an acute uneasiness about the growing modern world, shown in the treatment of scenes containing symbols of modernity, The House reveals more tension and anxiety about modernity. Both novels depict harsh depictions of the modern world, incorporating criticisms of the problems and issues in this new emerging life: for example, the treatment of the poor and gap between wealth and working class, “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet” (Howards End 142). The women of these novels are also presented with a greater independence than before, which is both accepted and disapproved of in these two novels – Lily, as a result of economic freedom, accumulates debt, perpetuating a social isolation, and this as well as her personal freedom in the …show more content…
In Howards, there is a relationship or implicit comparison between the country life – symbolizing England before modernism – and the city life – symbolizing England during the modernism time –, which expresses both tension and peace: the country is equated with backwardness, ignorance, peace, virtue, and limitation; while the city is associated with learning, communication, light, class consciousness, and inequality. Within The House of Mirth, the symbols of the modern world are associated with loud and polluted machinery, debts, gambling, and the growing women freedom – freedom due to the greater opportunities of economic and personal liberty and
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