Handout 5

READING LIST:

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905);

Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922).

Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

1. THE towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement
and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor
churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings. The mist took pity on the fretted
structures of earlier generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red
brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden
tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers
were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining new
houses, homesthey seemedfor laughter and tranquillity. Over a concrete bridge fled a
limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless engine. These people in evening clothes were
returning from an all-night rehearsal of a Little Theater play, an artistic adventure
considerably illuminated by champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of green
and crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty lines of polished steel
leaped into the glare. In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing
down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades after a night of
talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building crawled the scrubwomen, yawning, their
old shoes slapping. The dawn mist spun away. Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward
the immensity of new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where five
thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares that would be sold up
the Euphrates and across the veldt. The whistles rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as
the April dawn; the song of labor in a city builtit seemedfor giants.
2. There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was beginning to awaken on the
sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house in that residential district of Zenith known as Floral
Heights. His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and
he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the
calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his
wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was
exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon
the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and
unromantic; and altogether unromantic appeared this sleeping-porch, which looked on one
sizable elm, two respectable grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet
Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a
silver sea. For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she
discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at
last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends,
sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a
shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that
she would wait for him, that they would sail Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)
3. SELDEN PAUSED in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had
been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart. It was a Monday in early September, and he was
returning to his work from a hurried dip into the country; but what was Miss Bart doing in
town at that season? If she had appeared to be catching a train, he might have inferred that
he had come on her in the act of transition between one and another of the country-houses

which disputed her presence after the close of the Newport season; but her desultory air
perplexed him. She stood apart from the crowd, letting it drift by her to the platform or the
street, and wearing an air of irresolution which might, as he surmised, be the mask of a very
definite purpose. It struck him at once that she was waiting for some one, but he hardly knew
why the idea arrested him. There was nothing new about Lily Bart, yet he could never see her
without a faint movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she always roused
speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions.
An impulse of curiosity made him turn out of his direct line to the door, and stroll past her. He
knew that if she did not wish to be seen she would contrive to elude him; and it amused him
to think of putting her skill to the test.
"Mr. Selden--what good luck!"
She came forward smiling, eager almost, in her resolve to intercept him. One or two persons,
in brushing past them, lingered to look; for Miss Bart was a figure to arrest even the suburban
traveller rushing to his last train.
Selden had never seen her more radiant. Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the
crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a ball-room, and under her dark hat and veil she
regained the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven
years of late hours and indefatigable dancing. Was it really eleven years, Selden found
himself wondering, and had she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which
her rivals credited her?
"What luck!" she repeated. "How nice of you to come to my rescue!"
He responded joyfully that to do so was his mission in life, and asked what form the rescue
was to take.
"Oh, almost any--even to sitting on a bench and talking to me. One sits out a cotillion--why
not sit out a train? It isn't a bit hotter here than in Mrs. Van Osburgh's conservatory--and some
of the women are not a bit uglier." She broke off, laughing, to explain that she had come up to
town from Tuxedo, on her way to the Gus Trenors' at Bellomont, and had missed the threefifteen train to Rhinebeck. "And there isn't another till half-past five." She consulted the little
jewelled watch among her laces. "Just two hours to wait. And I don't know what to do with
myself. My maid came up this morning to do some shopping for me, and was to go on to
Bellomont at one o'clock, and my aunt's house is closed, and I don't know a soul in town." She
glanced plaintively about the station. "It is hotter than Mrs. Van Osburgh's, after all. If you can
spare the time, do take me somewhere for a breath of air."

4. She lay very still, waiting with a sensuous pleasure for the first effects of the soporific. She
knew in advance what form they would takethe gradual cessation of the inner throb, the
soft approach of passiveness, as though an invisible hand made magic passes over her in the
darkness. The very slowness and hesitancy of the effect increased its fascination: it was
delicious to lean over and look down into the dim abysses of unconsciousness. Tonight the
drug seemed to work more slowly than usual: each passionate pulse had to be stilled in turn,
and it was long before she felt them dropping into abeyance, like sentinels falling asleep at
their posts. But gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her, and she
wondered languidly what had made her feel so uneasy and excited. She saw now that there
was nothing to be excited aboutshe had returned to her normal view of life. Tomorrow would
not be so difficult after all: she felt sure that she would have the strength to meet it. She did
not quite remember what it was that she had been afraid to meet, but the uncertainty no

longer troubled her. She had been unhappy, and now she was happyshe had felt herself
alone, and now the sense of loneliness had vanished.
She stirred once, and turned on her side, and as she did so, she suddenly understood why she
did not feel herself alone. It was oddbut Nettie Struther's child was lying on her arm: she felt
the pressure of its little head against her shoulder. She did not know how it had come there, but
she felt no great surprise at the fact, only a gentle penetrating thrill of warmth and pleasure. She
settled herself into an easier position, hollowing her arm to pillow the round downy head, and
holding her breath lest a sound should disturb the sleeping child.