The Gilded Age of the late 19th century saw the rise of extravagant hats, hairstyles, and high society. Subsequently, the Gilded Age also saw an increasingly treacherous divide between rich and poor and stifling social restrictions against women as suffocating as their hourglass corsets. Lily Bart of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth is tragically caught between two worlds: the pompous social elite and the immobile underclass. Lily teeters on the threshold of the sweet life she believes she deserves and teeters on the edge of the abyss of a life of "sleaze." Because of her precarious position as an unmarried Gilded Age woman with no ability to provide for herself, Lily is offered several opportunities to save herself from an intolerable fate of hardship and self-loathing. Yet her insurmountable pride and arrogance force her to align herself with a moral code inconsistent with both the social expectations of the time and her personal agenda. This acute indecision is the key to Lily's eventual death. Ultimately, Lily's inevitable descent is the product of her inability to sacrifice long-held pride or personal morality in exchange for a restored social standing during her downward spiral, whether in the form of marriage to Lawrence Selden or revenge against Bertha Dorset. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Lily's story begins with her social stature quite intact, her vivid dream of a life beyond terrible inadequacy just a mere proposition away. Ten years earlier, the deaths of Lily's father and mother had been preceded by a complete disregard for Lily's poor lifestyle and promotion of Lily's beauty as a ticket out of poverty. These rapid and monumental events in Lily's life quickly reshape her "view of the universe" and adapt her to a precise and extreme social niche. Wharton describes her this way: “[Mrs. Bart] was especially careful to avoid her old friends and scenes of her previous success. Being poor seemed to her such a confession of failure as to amount to a disgrace; and noticed a note of condescension in the friendliest advances. Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of Lily's beauty,” (26). Lily's mind is indeed modeled on Golden Age superficiality, but she lacks the money or husband to live such a lifestyle. In essence, Lily's only option is to use her only vital resources, her beauty and her social skills, to acquire the opulent dream she was denied at nineteen. Lily vehemently seeks money and social advancement rather than the well-being of everyone around her, even at the cost of her own contentment. This relentless affinity for a life of wealth and generosity pushes the boundaries of Lily's morality. As a result of her well-behaved upbringing, Lily's moral compass is damaged and erratic, a conflicting blend of genuine scruples and insatiable lust for money, the key to her freedom. She is repeatedly forced to decide between luxury through deception and happiness through sacrifice. Lily, hopelessly trapped, bounces between the two as she falls from one rung of the social ladder to the next. The most attractive prospect of escape for Lily was marriage to her beloved Selden, but her inability to tolerate a life that does not measure up to great opulence and wealth drags her down. from Selden. Lily's resistance to her true feelings for Selden visibly erodes and crumbles as Lily's social situation worsens. However, the looming fear of dissatisfaction does.