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Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth presents an interesting study of the social construction of subjectivity. The Victorian society which Wharton's characters inhabit is defined by a rigid structure of morals and manners in which one's identity is determined by apparent conformity with or transgression of social norms. What is conspicuous about this brand of social identification is its decidedly linguistic nature. In this context, behaviors themselves are rendered as text, and the incessant social …

…say that they would not have the desired effect if Lily chose to use them, as her simple, veracious explanation to Rosedale would have been successful to dispel his impression. Rather, I mean to indicate the novel's implicit privileging of behavior as authoritative, "live" text over its less powerful, "dead" written alternative. In a world governed by a behavioral grammar, the written text seems in certain sense, inadmissible, mere scrawl and not communicative at all.