A House of Mirrors
Although I have been arguing for psychological rather than social determinants in The House of Mirth, the book clearly has a social dimension. This lies in its challenge to the common assumptions that marriage is the only destiny for a woman and that adornment is her main function. Accepting these assumptions, Lily Bart measures herself by her ornamental value. For such a woman, identity derives from admiration reflected in the eyes of others. This is indeed a socially constructed female role, one particularly significant for Wharton because her mother had played it so well and because she herself still felt drawn to it. Had cultural constraints been the core of the novel, it might have had an ironic ending, as in The Custom of the Country . But as an example of a cultural phenomenon, Lily's case is exaggerated.
In the course of her downhill slide through society, Lily sees many ways in which women of her time functioned within their social system. Many of them structured their lives without making themselves into ornamental objects for sale on the marriage market. Gerty Farish is an unmarried, self-supporting social worker. Carry Fisher, a divorced mother, manages to make her own living as a social facilitator. Women own and manage shops, make hats, work in factories. Class assumptions about women's roles do limit Lily's thinking, but the presence of these alternatives in The House of Mirth weakens the commonly accepted idea that she was destroyed entirely by external forces.
Lily's definition of herself as one condemned to be "a moment's ornament" (the original title of the book) is intensified by narcissism stemming from maternal deprivation. She had grown up thinking she had to earn her place by pleasing others, and her beauty seemed the likeliest way to accomplish this. Wharton tossed us a red herring when she treated The House of Mirth as a realistic social novel. She asked rhetorically how "a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers [could] be said to have ... any deeper bearing than the people composing such a society could guess? The answer was that a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals. The answer, in short, was my heroine, Lily Bart" (Backward Glance, 207). Wharton's own statement that society destroyed Lily Bart helped establish Wharton as a social critic and novelist of manners, an impression reinforced by her distinct talent for social satire.
Accepting this view in No Man's Land (1989), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar treat Lily's story as "determinedly and deterministically sociological," written by a "cultural determinist in the mode of Thorstein Veblen," who was bent on proving that women are forced into enslavement as either prisoners of sex" or "sex parasites." Believing that Wharton's plots were driven by "an impassioned disgust with the laws governing the world that Veblen described," Gilbert and Gubar tend to regard the "individual adventures" of Wharton's heroines as representative of women of their time and class.[12]
Only rarely has this conception been challenged. In a pioneering article, Joan Lidoff wrote in 1980 that The House of Mirth "purports to be a novel of social realism" but is really a "romance of identity . . . controlled by a deeper dynamic."[13] She argued that Wharton's "confounding of realism with romance" led to a structural flaw in the novel.[14]
Wharton's capacity to criticize her inherited social world
may have been limited by the same paradoxical affection that she identified in Proust:
His greatness lay in his art, his incredible littleness in the quality of his social admirations. But in this, after all, he merely exemplified the tendency not infrequent in novelists of manners—Balzac and Thackeray among them—to be dazzled by contact with the very society they satirize. If it is true that pour comprendre il faut aimer this seeming inconsistency may, in some, be a deep necessity of the creative imagination.
(Backward Glance, 325)
Like Proust, Edith Wharton remained dazzled by the society whose limitations she was uniquely positioned to recognize.
Lily's defeat is not wholly the result of social determinants, nor is her death a capitulation to sentimental literary conventions. Both are direct results of her inability to move beyond narcissistic enjoyment of her own beauty into sharing it fully with another. She dies on the threshold of female sexuality, unable to cross over.
When Lily realizes at the end of chapter 3 that she cannot attain the independent life that other women have forged, she resigns herself to her narcissistic pursuit. "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 until she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented such a slippery surface to her clutch" (61).
This passion for beauty helps explain why readers love and identify with such a narcissistic heroine as Lily Bart. Wharton manages to give Lily's yearning for admiration and luxury the status of a much nobler quest—the quest for secure possession of beauty. Sharing Wharton's love of beauty, but being herself a work of art rather than a creator of it, Lily is as ephemeral as mortal beauty, traditionally symbolized by a flower. The transience of beauty is part of her pathos. Her passion to sustain and perpetuate it enlarges her endeavors. The sympathy with which Wharton depicts Lily's yearning
differentiates her from other narcissistic heroines of literature such as Becky Sharp and Scarlett O'Hara, but most particularly from Lily's own obverse image, Undine Spragg of The Custom of the Country .
To enhance her value on the marriage market, Lily makes herself into an exquisite visual object, the Perfect Lady always displayed to advantage. She displays her radiant beauty against dark backgrounds—trees and shadows as well as the drabness of the everyday world. We first see Lily through the eyes of Lawrence Selden, in the heat and tumult of Grand Central Station: "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" (4).
The piquancy of transience also sets off Lily's radiance. Both Lily and Selden are aware that she is twenty-nine years old, almost thirty, when ladies are expected to have faded into matrons. Selden is just connoisseur enough to appreciate the moment of transition, to enjoy watching Lily's games on this temporal boundary. Wharton presents this encounter entirely in visual terms, with Selden as spectator and Lily as the object of his almost detached speculation.
It is a game they play together. Lily controls the angle and the lighting by which she will be seen. She knows how to adjust background and gestures to the tastes of her viewer—idealistic but seductive for Lawrence Selden, virginal and pious for Percy Gryce. She directs her most deceptive wiles toward Gryce, for whom she has little respect. She presents her finer self to the connoisseur Selden, who is her ideal audience, the one who misses few nuances of her behavior. He is the chosen witness of Lily's best self—of her moral as well as her aesthetic performances.
She is so pleasing an aesthetic object that she has learned to experience herself only insofar as she is reflected in the eyes of others. Lily relishes her own beauty by seeing it through Selden's eyes. She seems an extreme version of a trait that one theorist attributes to women in general, a tendency to be split between being a visual object and seeing herself as a visual
object. Says John Berger: "The woman must continually watch herself . . . While she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping . . . The surveyor of woman in herself is male; the surveyed female."[15]
Always author, director, manager, and star of her own theatrical production, Lily also incorporates the audience, or viewer, so that she can imagine herself as perceived by the other. With the aid of this double perspective, Lily masters the art of dress and the languages of gesture, tone, light, and setting. This division of herself into subject and object enables her to manipulate the impression she makes on men. Although a degree of self-objectification is a normal part of the mating game, Lily's extreme investment in herself as object reduces her capacity for subjective wholeness.
Having lacked empathic mirroring in her childhood, Lily is always seeking and constructing her own reflection. She cannot resist her mirrored image, whether it be to admire it or to study it for signs of aging. She also seeks her reflection in the good and bad, flattering or warped, mirrors of other people's perceptions. Her identity diminishes to the insubstantiality of a reflected image.
She becomes very uneasy when left alone. On a solitary forest walk near Bellomont, Lily finds that "the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips.... [She felt] an inner desolation deeper than the loneliness about her" (97). "She was not accustomed to the joys of solitude except in company" (97). When Lily shows signs of aging, and her reflected image declines in value, she loses her hold on life. So closely related to mirrors is Lily's existence that the mirror above her vanity table shows empty following her death. Selden, surveying her few last effects in her dingy boarding-house room, shrinks "from the blank surface of the toilet-mirror" (528).
In making a spectacle of herself—in making herself into an object of speculation—for all to interpret, Lily can awe and impress, but she cannot fully control audience response. She
can manage her effects on certain receptive men, but not, alas, on other women. As she exits from her innocent but imprudent visit to Lawrence Selden's apartment, she comes under the merciless gaze of his charwoman. Lily tries with elegant hauteur to subdue the woman's bold appraisal. Unable to do this, she realizes that the stout, red-fisted charwoman's "persistent gaze implied a groping among past associations, "that is, she is placing Lily among loose women who visit men's apartments. Lily's fine clothes and hauteur serve only to intensify the scrubwoman's speculations.
Virtually all circumstances in The House of Mirth conspire to focus sexual speculation about the person of Lily Bart, a woman who is unable to face her own sexuality, much less to act on it. Despite her skill at manipulating her image, she is almost invariably seen under compromising conditions that suggest that she is a "fast" woman if not a loose one. Her own unconscious or that of Edith Wharton inevitably places her in the spotlight of unacknowledged desire, causing her to lose control of the situations that matter most to her.
She cannot control the perceptions of Simon Rosedale, the one man who is her potential match. He sees her coming out of Lawrence Selden's apartment building and immediately sees through her fib about visiting her dressmaker. Rosedale turns up regularly, aware of Lily's every false move and indiscretion and deducting these from her current value on the marriage market.[16] Underestimating his shrewdness, she thinks of him as her last resource, someone she can marry if all else fails. But when, at the nadir of her fortunes, she tries to draw on this resource, she learns that Rosedale will marry her only on condition that she recover her value as a social asset. He demands that she use her possession of Bertha Dorset's love letters to Selden as a form of blackmail that will ensure their joint social dominance over Bertha. To her credit, Lily refuses to stoop to such means.[17]
Simon Rosedale is an almost omniscient observer. He alone of the important male spectators of Lily Bart's life reads her accurately. Percy Gryce was deceived for a while and might
have remained so had Lily been able to control her behavior. Gus Trenor has the wrong script. And Lawrence Selden, relying on his habitual detachment, misreads her because he does not understand himself.
Wharton attributes paradoxical qualities to Rosedale, the Jewish man of business who is socially "impossible" in Lily's set. His very name, an anglicization of Rosenthal, suggests his determination to pass into a social world that would reject a Jew. The author's implication is ambivalent when she says that he has "his race's accuracy in the appraisal of values." Indeed, Rosedale combines the very qualities on which Wharton prided herself, "artistic sensibility and business astuteness" (23–24)—the ability to appreciate quality and the lucidity to appraise its proper value. Although not verbally sophisticated like Lawrence Selden, another connoisseur, Rosedale can recognize the best article on the market, calculate its value to himself at any given moment, control his sexual feelings when they interfere with his long-range goals, yet act to seize what he really wants. He is masterful in practical matters and a connoisseur in aesthetic ones.
Although hampered socially by what Wharton calls his "race," he is wealthy enough to pamper Lily's luxurious tastes and looks forward to doing so. He is genuinely kind, as we know from his gentleness with Carry Fisher's little girl when no one is present to observe it. Simon Rosedale understands himself. He can be generous to others but has no intention of undermining his social ambitions by acting with sentimental folly. In many ways, Rosedale is a man to reckon with, and one after Edith Wharton's heart.
That this despised Jew should be the man best fitted to provide for Lily because of his accurate and unsentimental appraisal of her is very much related to the strange sexual behavior of Lily Bart and the psychosexual development of her creator. Although the book may seem to be a failed pas de deux between Lily and Selden, her idealized love, the synchronized movements between Lily and Rosedale—the movements from attraction to aversion to affinity—shadow and
finally control the stage-front actions. The fateful dance and the most significant one is the subtle ballet between the Lily and the Rose.
Rosedale is the spectre of the incestuous figure who haunts Wharton's imagination, the provider or father surrogate, sometimes labeled a Levantine, who both entices the heroine and appalls her.[18] We shall track a circuitous route before we see that this figure ultimately stands for Wharton's unresolved feelings about her father, neither Levantine nor Americanized Jew, but the tabooed "other" of Wharton's early years.