Issue date: 4/22/09 Section: Editor Columns

Gossip-we're all guilty of it-intentionally or not. While in real life, gossiping can be hurtful, let's face it-it's also addictively fun. But the characters on my favorite TV show, Gossip Girl, take talking about each other to a whole new level, and I have to admit, I love every second of it.

Sure, you may laugh at my obsession with this overdramatic teen show, which airs Monday nights at 8 p.m. on the CW. Yet the characters are portrayed so perfectly as privileged, spoiled New Yorkers, and the dialogue between them is so sharp and witty, that I wish I were a member of their Upper East Side world.

If that's not enough to convince you to take Gossip Girl seriously, this just might: After reading The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton's classic novel about New York's high society in the late 1800s for one of my classes this semester, the parallels between this book and Gossip Girl seem endless.

For starters, one of the main characters on Gossip Girl is Lily, who was married to a millionaire named Bart. And the heroine of The House of Mirth is named Lily Bart-coincidence? I think not. I'm also not the first person to make this discovery.

"Serena's mother is named Lily, and she is engaged to a billionaire named Bart, a sly reference to Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth, who is socially ruined by, among others, her manipulative BFF Bertha Dorset," writes Alessandra Stanley in her review of Gossip Girl for The New York Times last May.

Just as Bertha Dorset, that "manipulative BFF" of Lily Bart's ruins Lily socially, Blair Waldorf (played by Leighton Meester) plots to ruin the reputation of any girl who stands in the way of her "Queen Bee" status-friend or not. Meester is so convincing as the conniving and cunning Blair that I can't help but root for her.

"Do you know how hard it is to get revenge when your enemy is changing every five minutes?" Blair asks in "The Age of Dissonance," a play on Wharton's other classic novel about New York's upper class, The Age of Innocence.

And it just so happens that in this episode, the high school students are putting on a performance of The Age of Innocence.

The characters on Gossip Girl have many more tools at their disposal than did the characters in The House of Mirth, making it even easier for them to ruin reputations. The show is named after a Web site where the characters can post any juicy information-regardless of the validity-about others. Once they make a post, text messages with the information gets sent to everyone.

Continued...

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