In Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, the protagonist Lily Bart is on a search for happiness. In her case, happiness embodied in the image of marriage with a rich and indulgent husband and, subsequently, in the ability to behave as a woman appropriate to society and culture should be. However, when she attempts to lure this type of husband into her traps, she is betrayed by high society and forced to reevaluate the value of herself as a woman. Similarly, in The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane's character, Henry Fleming, also strives to fulfill an idealized gender role - that of the brave and valiant soldier - only to realize that the virility required by the role does not it's just the kind he imagined. . Both characters face disillusionment and surprising insights into the nature of their society on their respective paths to self-realization. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The reader is introduced to Lily in the midst of her search for a husband. She laments her advanced age, noting that "the youngest and plainest girls had been married by the score, and she was twenty-nine, and still Miss Bart" (Wharton). Lily blames her failure to secure a husband on her inability to emulate society's idealized woman. He asks himself: had he shown undue enthusiasm for the victory? Had she lacked patience, compliance and dissimulation? Whether he blamed himself for these defects or absolved himself of them made no difference in the sum total of his failure (Wharton). At no point in this scolding does Lily stop to consider that perhaps it is society's expectations of her place and not her shortcomings that are responsible for her current discontent. Her desire to secure a place within it prevents her from making any kind of negative criticism of the society that expects her to be content with a life of marriage, parties and gossip. Indeed, for a woman of moderate means like Lily, the need to keep up appearances in her desired circle pushes her into a world of financial and emotional uncertainty. By borrowing money from a wealthy man, Lily inadvertently invites social gossip about the motivation behind her generosity and realizes “[…] for the first time that maintaining a woman's dignity may cost more than her bearing; and that the maintenance of a moral attribute should depend on dollars and cents made the world seem a more sordid place than she had conceived it to be” (Wharton). She slowly becomes more cynical about her social environment, but it is the only world she knows how to function in and as such is difficult to abandon completely. Lily has occasional urges to distance herself from such a demanding social system. At a certain point "she began to have fits of angry rebellion against fate, when she wanted to abandon the race and make an independent life", but even these small resistances are of no use, because after them Lily still resists the break with the his established lifestyle and rejects his extravagant idea of ​​an independent life by unhappily wondering, "[but] what kind of life would that be?" (Wharton). Lily's inability to align her impulses toward independence and freedom with the societal notion that all a woman should want is to be married and supported by a wealthy man ultimately leads her to the depths of humiliation. and poverty. In a conversation with Lawrence Selden reveals that after speaking with him about freedom.