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Gerty Farish
Lily Bart’s mother dies when Lily is in her early twenties. Mrs. Bart has a strong influence on Lily’s attitude toward life, as she convinces her daughter that she will succeed in becoming rich by using her beauty to find a rich husband. Mrs. Bart’s ideology and spending habits instill in Lily a conviction that she belongs to no other class than the upper class, that money brings happiness and moral worth, and that it is also an inherently unstable possession, meant to bring alternate feelings of elation and worry. However, Lily differs from her mother in a crucial respect: her aversion to marrying a rich man for the sake of money alone.
Mrs. Bart Quotes in The House of Mirth
The The House of Mirth quotes below are all either spoken by Mrs. Bart or refer to Mrs. Bart. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Book 1: Chapter 3 Quotes
She knew that she hated dinginess as much as her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she meant to fight against it, dragging herself up again and again above its flood till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented such a slippery surface to her clutch.
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Overwhelmed by financial troubles, Lily begins to feel that her life of ceaseless spending and indebtedness is too much to bear. However, Lily also knows that the values she inherited from her mother associate poverty with moral decrepitude, and that she could never accept to live a lower life than the one she is living now. Lily thus sees her life of reckless spending as a potentially tragic, never-ending series of problems (since even success itself is “a slippery surface”), but—precisely because of its dangerous nature—also as a heroic endeavor against a terrible threat: “dinginess.” Lily’s vision of her life Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam of
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Mrs. Bart Character Timeline in The House of Mirth
The timeline below shows where the character Mrs. Bart appears in The House of Mirth. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Book 1: Chapter 3
...he is clearly interested in marrying her. Imagining being married to Mr. Gryce, Lily remembers her mother ’s vengeful tone when she foreshadowed Lily getting all their money back thanks to the...
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When Lily and her mother lacked money to sustain their expensive lifestyle, Lily’s father, whom she almost never saw and...
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...bankrupt. This confession led to his slow death and, while Lily felt sorry for him, Mrs. Bart was angry at her husband’s failure. The two women were forced to live in a...
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Despite their dire situation, Mrs. Bart trusted in Lily’s beauty and the consequent ease with which she would one day find...
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...dreams of adventure, Lily concludes that they were childish. Two years after Lily’s father’s death, her mother died, telling her daughter that she must escape the “dinginess” they lived in, otherwise she...
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