2—
On the Threshold

To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.
The House of Mirth

Despite a splendid income and a series of grand and beautifully decorated houses, Edith Wharton felt herself insecurely anchored in the world. The poignant words above convey her irremediable sense of expatriation—her longing for a home that would be an extension of parental protection, a shelter for the vulnerable self. Ceaselessly, she sought the place that would feel to her like a true home. First in America and then in France she decorated houses with great zest and then restlessly moved on to others. In her late fifties, after years of exhausting work on behalf of people dispossessed by war,^[1] she would acquire two final estates that she inhabited alternately according to the season. These country houses, one in the suburbs of Paris, the other at Hyéres in southern France, allowed her to renew her passion for gardening.

The purchase of Ste. Claire, a winter home in the temperate Riviera climate of Hyéres, was a satisfying move, one that she experienced as coming home for the first time. She analogized the acquisition of a home to marriage: "I feel as if I were going to get married—to the right man at last!"^[2] Her pleasure in Ste. Claire was modified, however, by her inability to share a

home with anyone other than servants or to fill it with a family.

In The House of Mirth, published in 1905, Wharton isolates and intensifies her own variety of alienation. Here she magnifies her sense of maternal deprivation into Lily Bart's orphanhood. Lily's inner reality, like Wharton's, consists of ravenous hungers—insatiable needs for physical comfort, for security, for approbation. Lily also exhibits a variant of Wharton's own sexual inhibition and confusion, both particularly acute during the writing of this book. In Lily, Edith Wharton confronted the immature, narcissistic part of herself, but cast it into the body of the beautiful woman she longed to be. This chapter investigates what part of Wharton's sensibility was the "internal arena" that produced the doomed Lily Bart.^[3]

Sexual Sabotage: The House of Mirth

The title of The House of Mirth points toward its metaphorical nexus. Words representative of home—walls, shelter, refuge, nest—are linked here to the concept of love. The novel depicts the homeless heart and rootless existence of Lily Bart, a dazzlingly beautiful woman who cannot find a place for herself in the world. Lacking maternal sponsorship and financial resources, Lily desperately and ineffectually seeks marriage as a refuge for her frail selfhood.

The union of heart and home is the goal of most fictional marriage plots, in which a heroine meets both needs by finding a husband. For Lily Bart, as for Gwendolyn Harleth in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, this classic expectation of novel readers is firmly denied. Both women love men who mirror their ideal selves (Selden and Deronda) but look to other men whom they do not love to provide the material foundation of their lives. Although Gwendolyn makes the kind of grand marriage that Lily seeks, this loveless choice proves a bitter disappointment and does not, in the long run provide either luxury or social position. Indeed, the two novels share

so many similarities in character and situation that their differences highlight Wharton's radical loneliness. Eliot's glittering heroine ends up drab and solitary, but she lives and learns, and Daniel Deronda, her ideal love, marries in a way that connects his future to his past. Even though Gwendolyn's project fails, Deronda's marriage and hopeful prospects conclude the novel with affirmation. Wharton's heroine, on the other hand, attains a momentary vision of the continuity of human life, but dies, leaving the arc of her own life abruptly truncated, and Lawrence Selden remains what he always was, a bachelor-observer.^[4]

Although language in The House of Mirth inextricably links heart and home, the plot cannot bring the two together. For example, Lily knows that "Selden's love could not be her ultimate refuge; only it would be so sweet to take a moment's shelter there" (280). Gerty Farish imagines herself "at home" in Lawrence Selden's heart, but cannot secure it for herself. Only Nettie Struther, a poor working girl who had been in trouble, was empowered by love "to gather up the fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them" (517). A major split in The House of Mirth comes from the fact that Lily expects a husband to provide the sheltering walls, but not intimacy. Such intimacy as she finds is entirely mental and with a confirmed bachelor. When she seeks physical comfort, it is from motherly working-class women. In the soul of Lily Bart, and very probably in that of her creator, heart and home are tragically sundered.

Existentially as well as factually, Lily Bart is an orphan. Both of her parents die before she is twenty-one, leaving her impoverished and under the reluctant protection of an aunt with whom she is temperamentally incompatible. She has to struggle to keep afloat in a treacherous, competitive social milieu without financial ballast or effective guidance into the harbor of matrimony. Observing that a devoted and vigilant mother was able to arrange prosperous marriages for the dull, homely Van Osburgh girls, Lily concludes that the proper

social placement of a young woman can be accomplished only by a dedicated mother:

Ah, lucky girls who grow up in the shelter of a mother's love, a mother who knows how to contrive opportunities without conceding favours . . . The cleverest girl may miscalculate where her own interests are concerned, may yield too much at one moment and withdraw too far at the next; it takes a mother's unerring vigilance and foresight to land her daughters safely in the arms of wealth and suitability.
(146)

Never having been "sheltered" in a mother's love, the beautiful Lily will never be sheltered in that of a husband.

Even before she lost her parents, Lily's family life had been unstable. "Ruling the turbulent element called home was the vigorous and determined figure of a mother still young enough to dance her ball-dresses to rags" and completely focused on her own social position. Their chaotic home was managed by an ever-changing series of nurses, maids, and footmen, "while the hazy outline of a neutral-tinted father filled an intermediate space between the butler and the man who came to wind the clocks" (45). This "effaced and silent" father is generally absent, either working late or left behind during the mother's frequent travels to fashionable watering places or on precipitate dashes to Paris to order trunks full of gowns.

Mr. Bart is of interest to his wife only so long as he is a provider. He exists to ensure that she has magnificent clothes and can afford to move in the right social circles. Otherwise she would be like ordinary people who, she says, "live like pigs." After Mr. Bart's financial ruin, she coldly awaits his death. "To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased to fulfill his purpose; and she sat at his side with the provisional air of a traveler who waits for a belated train to start" (51). With the provider gone, Mrs. Bart expects Lily to repair her fortunes and relies on her daughter's beauty as if it were so much cash in the bank.

Lily's persistent confusion of sex with money is deeply rooted in her vision of family affairs. Just as Lily had seen her father exploited by her mother, she later saw Gus Trenor and George Dorset exploited by their wives, and she fully expects to exploit her husband when she lands one. Treated as a commodity herself, she rarely questions her intention to use others in the same way if necessary.^[5]

Lily is so calculating about the marriage market that she is just as ready to use men as financial objects as they are to use her as a sexual object. About her value as an item of exchange she has learned to be remarkably clearheaded, thinking very much like a merchant needing to unload at the best possible price a self-destructing artifact. In view of this, her vagueness about real money is surprising. Not only does she spend her little income frivolously, she tries to recoup her follies by gambling at cards and loses even more. Too "feminine" to inquire just how Gus Trenor parlayed her small investment into a large sum, she never asks about how or when he ought to be reimbursed. She may think in market metaphors but knows nothing about money as an economic reality. It is just the magic something she needs to keep her luxuries flowing. And it comes from men.

The Bart family style and values caricature those of the Jones family—a stylish, socially obsessed mother with never quite enough money for her extravagant tastes, and a dim, compliant father who has a shy fondness for poetry. Clearly, Wharton is depicting her own family constellation, but with a crucial difference. Her memoir, we recall, opens with the dressed-up little Edith strolling with her handsome, loving father. His image dominates her picture of early family life, whereas at that stage her mother seemed dim and vague. Wharton regarded her father's admiration as the foundation of her feminine self, the origin of her pride in self-adornment.

Reliable love from her father and nanny had saved young Edith from complete depersonalization, whereas Lily Bart had insufficient contact with her father and had experienced a changing series of nursemaids. In a reversal of Wharton's

family imagery, Lily's mother dominates the scene, leaving her father as only a vague absence. Because he worked such long hours that she rarely saw him, he could not provide for Lily the attention that might have compensated for maternal neglect. Wharton sets the decline of the Bart family's fortunes when Lily was nineteen, the author's age when her father's health failed.

Lacking a constant figure to whom she could attach herself, Lily fails to develop a viable core to her personality. Incessantly she seeks out mirrors to check on the continuity of her existence. Wharton's extreme closeness to her father may have retarded her sexual development, but Lily's deprivation of paternal contact seems to have left her incapable of attaining sexual maturity.

What raises Lily above her grasping mother is that her father's fondness for poetry inspires an artistic purpose that dilutes the family's crass mercantile objectives. Although Lily adopts her mother's values, she elevates them with a saving poetic sensibility, so that wealth becomes a means to enjoyment of beauty rather than mere materialism. She had "a vein of sentiment, perhaps transmitted from this source, which gave an idealizing touch to her most prosaic purposes . . . She would not have cared to marry a man who was merely rich; she was secretly ashamed of her mother's crude passion for money" (54–55).

Lily's father-derived artistry is never developed by education or training. She can envision no material external to herself on which to exercise her innate artistry. With her own time-bound flesh as her only medium of expression, her matrimonial project requires youth and beauty. At the opening of The House of Mirth, Lily is almost thirty years old, has been too long on the marriage market, and has insufficient income to keep up her wardrobe. She recognizes that the commodity that she has become even to herself could grow stale on the shelf. She would then be unable to attract the wealthy husband whose function would be to sustain her self-image.^[6]

Unable to visualize herself in any way of life less elegant

than high society (a social decline would mean, by her mother's values, living "like a pig"), she assumes that she must marry for wealth even if that means taking a dull husband. She has dichotomized her alternatives—she must be a permanently pampered beauty or else decline into piggery. The first is impossible, the second unthinkable.

Lily cannot mediate between the radical alternatives through which she perceives reality; she is unable to compromise or adapt. Incapable of imagining a middle state, such as living on a moderate income with a loving husband, Lily must achieve riches or die. We soon perceive that she herself unconsciously blocks off the avenues to riches, and after sliding rapidly down the social scale, she does die, presumably through suicide.

Lily is intrinsically and essentially a displaced person, one unfitted for the actualities of life. Homeless and rootless, she yearns to build around herself an environment that will protect and reflect her selfhood. Nothing in her aunt's tastelessly furnished home responds to her sensibilities or is really hers. She is "expatriate everywhere," a temporary sojourner in the homes of others. Jokingly but meaningfully, she tells Selden that she must marry in order to have a parlor of her own to furnish. For Lily, home is an extreme version of what it is for most women, an externalization of the self, a validation of the substantiality as well as the personality of that self. But Lily seems psychologically barred from attaining a durable home.

Whenever marital opportunity knocks, Lily turns inattentive. Ten years prior to the opening of the story, an Italian prince had wanted to marry her, but, as her match-making friend Carry Fisher shrewdly observes, "just at the critical moment a good-looking step-son turned up, and Lily was silly enough to flirt with him while her marriage-settlements were being drawn up.... That's Lily all over, you know; she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic" (302–3). This telling vignette diagnoses the pattern of Lily's sexual behavior—flirtation with

the wrong man, often selected unconsciously to stir up oedipal rivalry, under the wrong circumstances, resulting in the loss of genuine marital opportunities.

Even as she approaches the critical age of thirty, Lily continues to sabotage her marriage possibilities. She has kept her sexuality split off from her marital ambitions and misdirected her marital project into destructive flirtations with unobtainable men—confirmed bachelors or the husbands of her friends. By some fatality, Lily habitually situates herself within dangerous oedipal triangles. Every such error reduces her marriageability by generating gossip about her morals and alienating her women friends. When she has virtually secured a proposal from the wealthy Percy Gryce, she loses it by violating his conventional pieties through smoking, gambling, and missing church services. Because Lawrence Selden, the man she loves, has only a modest income, she refuses even to consider marrying him.

The scarcely interrogated barrier between Lily and Selden is a curious donnée of the novel. Lily cannot think of compromising her demand for wealth or even enter into her calculus the fact that as her Aunt Peniston's designated heir, she can afford to marry Selden. Indeed, marriage to a respectable gentleman like Selden would have served to secure Lily's inheritance. She loses it because of her own careless indiscretions, by gambling and by allowing herself to become the object of gossip.

We are left with the implication that this marriage, like all others, is barred to Lily not by malignant social conditions but by unconscious forces carried over from her creator. The lady is not for marrying, but the novel refuses to examine this premise, or even to state it. Lily is stuck on the verge of sexual adulthood, unable to cross this threshold or to remain any longer on it.

Whereas Wharton protects Lily's sexual inhibitions from ready detection by camouflaging them with financial motives, she enjoys exposing Selden's resistance to marriage by means of continuous innuendo. He seems almost asexual, de-

spite the plot mechanism of his prior love affair with Bertha Dorset. A resident of an apartment house called The Benedick and always relieved when his approaches to Lily are rebuffed with the "insufficient funds" argument, he seems to be one of the confirmed bachelors that Wharton first came to know in the person of Walter Berry.

Lily approaches the marital project in ignorance of its personal and sexual dimension. With flirtation and wedlock split off from sexuality, she understands marriage only in terms of property, never of desire. She dismisses too easily the promptings of desire that she feels for Selden because they fail to connect to property and hence to security. When she decides that she must accept Rosedale,

she did not indeed let her imagination range beyond the day of plighting; after that everything faded into a haze of material well-being, in which the personality of her benefactor remained mercifully vague. She had learned . . . that there were certain things not good to think of, certain midnight images that must at any cost be exorcised—and one of these was the image of herself as Rosedale's wife.
(400)

Lily's expressed misgivings about Rosedale's "race" may obscure the implication of these exorcised midnight images, surely visions of the marriage bed, which seem to be carried over from Wharton's own nightmares.

Almost inevitably, Lily is perceived as the obverse of Undine Spragg, the equally beautiful heroine of The Custom of the Country (1913). Whereas Lily, the perfect lady, sabotages all attempts to achieve her goals, the emotionally and verbally crude Undine attains success at every endeavor, marrying first into New York society and then into French nobility. Whereas Lily never achieves marriage, Undine Spragg Moffatt Marvell de Chelles Moffatt (to list all the surnames she acquires in the course of the book) does so repeatedly. Undine captures every husband she targets as well as every luxury, yet is perpetually dissatisfied.

Both women share the motto "Beyond!", which is the word

inscribed on Lily's seal. Undine recognizes that she is driven to seek always for the desire that is beyond her present attainment: "There was something still better beyond, then—more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her ... it was always her fate to find out just too late about the something beyond" (54).

This longing for the unattained is probably the mark of the artist in both of them, but in Undine it represents, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff emphasizes, the state of being driven by unfocused, infantile desire. To desire "everything," as Undine does, is to desire nothing in particular. Drive without an object is probably the supreme form of restlessness, and, as Wolff clearly recognizes, Wharton endowed Undine with her own unmanageable energy.^[7]

One heroine is passive, the other relentlessly driven, one slides downhill, whereas the other climbs, but both lack the capacity for sexual intimacy. Although The Custom of the Country is a novel of the imperious self demanding its rights, fulfillment of sexual desire is not among these demands.^[8] In marriage, Undine "regarded intimacy as a pretext for escaping from [social] forms into a total absence of expression" (151). Her sexual response was "remote and Ariel-like, suggesting from the first, not so much of the recoil of ignorance as the coolness of the element from which she took her name" (152).

Lily Bart's innocence in flirting with the husbands of her friends comes from a radical ignorance of the connections between biology and social institutions. She suffers from an acquired ignorance similar to the kind that caused Edith Wharton to enter marriage unprepared. Denying the fact of male as well as female desire, Lily misjudges the consequences of displaying her thinly clad body at the tableau vivante and assumes that the event had been all triumph. When she complies with her friends' requests to divert the attention of their husbands, she fails to recognize the dangers of the game as well as the provocative signals that she has been sending to the husbands.

Lily misreads social cues such as Gus Trenor's sincere be-

lief that he has earned her sexual favors. The exhibition of her body at the tableau leads Gus to think that if she is thus accessible to every man, he, who has lent her money, should be the first to collect. When he tries to trap her into paying up, Lily is forced to confront raw sexual reality. She tries to deny this by disingenuously interpreting Gus's demand as a request for repayment of money, and when she realizes that Gus considers her favors already bought and paid for, she is horrified.

This is a pivotal moment in the novel. Lily has had an artistic triumph in the tableau, but her friends are beginning to mock her. After gossip columnists make sly insinuations about the way she has exposed herself, cousin Jack dissociates himself by pretending shock at "a girl standing up there as if she was up at auction." He thinks she had better marry quickly, even to so unlikely a partner as the Jew Rosedale, because "in Lily's circumstances it's a mistake to have too high a standard" (254–55).

Feeling that Lily's behavior has been misunderstood, Selden is moved to rescue her by marriage. At this point she could either lose her marginal place in the world or gain a firm one. She can still make or mar her fortunes, but she cannot continue in the same track. At this juncture, her sudden confrontation with Gus Trenor's raw sexuality determines Lily's downward course. Because Lawrence Selden happens accidentally to witness her departure from Gus's house when he knows that Gus's wife is away, he concludes that Lily is incorrigibly careless of her reputation. In disgust he leaves town without proposing marriage or explaining his sudden departure. What appears to be unfortunate coincidence or just another instance of Lily's bad luck is actually an irony critical to the underlying structure of this novel: without having committed or desired adultery, Lily must pay the price of it .

The failed seduction scene is, as critic Joan Lidoff noted, "written entirely in the rising and completed rhythms of sexual climax."^[9] To Gus's touch and his "puffing face" Lily reacts with accelerated pulses, limpness, and other physiological reactions common to sexual arousal, but experienced by Lily as

terror. The focus of her terror is Gus's hand, which "grew formidable" as he drew closer (235). (Her reaction to this swelling appendage accords with considerable other textual evidence that Wharton regarded the hand as something of a sexual organ.) Lily's terror and contempt deflate Gus's ardor, allowing her to flee his house physically intact, but in emotional chaos.

She is devastated not by anger at her close encounter with rape, but by shame and guilt. She feels defiled by a catastrophic revelation, hunted by the Furies, "alone in a place of darkness and pollution" (239). Turning up distraught at the home of Gerty Farish, Lily declares that she is "bad—a bad girl—all my thoughts are bad.... There are bad girls in your slums. Tell me—do they ever pick themselves up? Ever forget, and feel as they did before?" (266). She now feels less honorable than these whores: "I've sunk lower than the lowest, for I've taken what they take and not paid as they pay" (268–69).

Why does she feel shame instead of anger, and why such extreme self-degradation? Why should Gus Trenor's readily foiled sexual approaches make this inviolable woman feel defiled? Why does she transfer to herself, the victim of a crude attempt at seduction, so much shame that her final act in life is to send her desperately needed inheritance check to Gus, who never sought return of the money? The nature of Lily's response and its extremity break through the social envelope of the novel, taking us back to the arena of the author's sexual confusion, straight to young Edith's tendency to feel polluted by even her unuttered thoughts, her need to atone for any thoughts that were "not nice," that is, sexual.

Lily Bart, by playing up to her close friends' husbands in the hope of being cared for financially, has been playing with oedipal fire. The very women who encourage her to do this in order to distract their husbands' attention from their own flirtations turn against her as if she had been seeking to displace them. Without even desiring her friends' husbands, she is treated as a sexual rival and suffers consequences appropriate to such a role. Indeed, in blaming herself for Gus's seduc-

tion attempt, Lily Bart acts and feels very much like many victims of incest, who tend to assume moral responsibility for their own abuse. Rather than blame their fathers or brothers, they assume that their own guilty thoughts provoke the assaults, and they react with self-loathing.^[10]

Following the sexual threat, Lily's view of herself and the world is radically altered. She feels herself pursued by Furies, with nowhere to hide. Feeling polluted by her first exposure to frank sexuality, she is unable to return to the immaculate home of her aunt. In her own social world, "drawing rooms are always tidy" and unmarried girls always chaste; to find acceptance she must drop into the world of the working class.

Despite the late hour she feels driven to the only door where she can find rest and comfort. And that door belongs to Gerty Farish, Lawrence Selden's drab cousin—a simple, loving woman who works for a living. Constructed as a negation of Lily's narcissism, this social worker seems to have no self of her own. To all appearances, she lives only for others, and most especially for her idealized Lily, whom she yearns to protect.

These two young women in polar opposition (both in love with Selden) have special meaning for each other and for the structure of the novel. They represent a division of femininity into drab usefulness and useless ornamentation, neither of these extremes being efficacious in the biological world of sexual competition. Within the novel, neither will be selected to mate. Representing Lily's feared negative identity of a drab, constricted life, Gerty can offer comfort in a crisis but not a model of capable womanhood. She is without power in Lily's social world, very much like a nanny.

And it is as a nanny-equivalent that Gerty functions in The House of Mirth . It is to Gerty that Lily flees when terrified by irrational fears. She knows that regardless of Gerty's own needs the door will open to her even in the middle of the night. On this particular night, Lily's midnight visit is not really welcome because Gerty has just begun to thrill to the hope that Lawrence Selden may possibly love her. Usually

selfless, Gerty has developed hopes of a life of her own, rather than one of service to others. Just as she is awakening to the claims of her own desires, she is forced to recognize that Selden prefers Lily. For a brief moment, she hates Lily for being her rival. But as a social worker and professional caretaker, Gerty has learned to discipline her emotions. She puts them aside and calmly cares for the distraught woman who needs her.

Lily needs to be held together physically and emotionally. She craves "the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence that is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath" (240). She wants to be warmed by Gerty, held by Gerty, even to sleep in Gerty's narrow bed.

"Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things," she moaned; and Gerty silently slipped an arm under her, pillowing her head into its hollow as a mother makes a nest for a tossing child. In the warm hollow Lily lay still and her breathing grew low and regular. Her hand still clung to Gerty's as if to ward off evil dreams, but the hold of her fingers relaxed, her head sank deeper into its shelter, and Gerty felt that she slept.
(270)

Gerty's body becomes a nest, a shelter, a home for this fitful, childlike woman. Lily relies on Gerty like a child on its nanny, oblivious to the possibility that Nanny may have concerns or interests of her own. The child has needs and the professional nurturer fills them.

In the course of the novel Lily passes through a steadily declining series of maternal surrogates until she reaches the bottom of the social ladder. After her worldly, trivial mother and a sanctimonious, wealthy aunt, and socialite friends Judy Trenor and Bertha Dorset, she slips down to lower levels of the nouveau riche. With these false mothers she is usually trapped into costly entanglements with the husbands, leading to banishment from their homes. With each banishment she has to step down to meaner and drabber living quarters. After losing her wealthy protectors she tries, with little success, to work for a living. At the end of the series, in a kind of fortunate

fall, she basks in the kindly warmth of Nettie Struther, a working-class woman.

There are good mother-figures in The House of Mirth, and though insufficient for Lily's needs they try to move her toward the resolution of her severe identity problems. Gerty Farish offers succor and protection that for snobbish reasons Lily cannot completely accept. Carry Fisher, a divorcée operating on the margins of good society, behaves with almost disinterested maternal concern in sharing opportunities with Lily and trying to arrange a realistic marriage for her. Each fulfills some aspect of a mother's role, but they do not suffice.

All the mother-figures are way stations in Lily's slide to her final encounter at the bottom of the social ladder. Here, totally exhausted and destitute, she finds Nettie Struther, a former recipient of public charity, now married and mother of an infant daughter. Nettie's life has been moving in the opposite direction from Lily's—upward from despair.

Nettie's experience with sex had been genuinely distressing; it resulted in an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. But instead of writing herself off as a polluted woman, she made pragmatic choices and reconstructed her life. She has married a man who can accept her child, and she is building a home for herself and her baby. This home is humble but sufficient to shelter life and sustain continuity: "It had the frail, audacious permanence of a bird's nest built on the edge of a cliff—a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss" (517). For Nettie, home and heart unite to form a structure that, however fragile, can be trusted.

Although sophisticated critics may view the poor but courageous Nettie Struther and her baby as refugees from a sentimental novel, the pair are tied into the deeper themes of The House of Mirth . Nettie's frail shelter is built from womanly courage, adaptability, and the capacity for love. Her self-image allows for accommodation and regeneration, capacities that the beautiful Lily Bart lacks. Whereas Nettie could make a home for her illegitimate child, Lily becomes emotion-

ally fragmented by an easily foiled attempt at seduction. Wharton may have cast into Lily Bart the sexual fears of her young womanhood, but at this time in her life she could imagine other options for women. Lily is out of touch with her desires, but Nettie and the adulterous Bertha Dorset are not.

The exchange of benefits between Nettie and Lily reflects the difference between narcissism and altruism. Lily, to make herself feel good, had visited a women's club and donated some spare cash to send Nettie to a tuberculosis sanitarium. Having been motivated more by vanity than charity, Lily scarcely even remembers the recipient of her benefactions. But Nettie has used the idealized memory of Lily's help to enhance her own self-worth. She has used it to re-attach herself to life, and she seeks an opportunity to pass back the gift to her former benefactress.

She babies Lily, taking her into the warm kitchen and feeding her. Considering the social difference, one might have expected Nettie to bring her elegant guest into the parlor. But parlors symbolize the social world that has failed Lily. In Nettie's shabby but warm working-class kitchen, Lily can experience the "continuity of life" just before her own extinction.

Into Lily's arms Nettie places her baby, whom she had named "Marry-Anto'nette" after the role played by an actress who reminded her of Lily. The baby's name and its acceptance of her nurturance gently bring Lily into the chain of human generation. Holding this new life somehow named in her honor clarifies for her the great arc of her existence, the relationship of her past to her present and of both past and present to her future prospects. She has for the first time a "vision of the solidarity of life" (516).

But the facts of Lily's existence cannot sustain this sense of beatitude. Back in her solitary room she feels the "reaction of a deeper loneliness" (511).

It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper empoverishment—of an inner destitution compared to which outward conditions dwindled into insignificance . . . It

was the clutch of solitude at her heart . . . the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked back she saw that there had never been a time when she had any real relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless . . . without any personal existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts. She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than another . . . [She had no connection] to all the mighty sum of human striving.
(515–16)

In her drab boardinghouse room she reviews her lovely gowns, relics of past triumphs, settles her accounts, and generally puts her affairs in order. After taking a sleeping draught she falls into a sensuous slumber, imagining that Nettie's baby is lying on her arm.

Suddenly she understood why she did not feel herself alone . . . 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.
(517)

Lily offers the baby precisely what she herself had received from Gerty Farish when shivering with terror in the middle of the night—warmth and gentle, empathic holding. The two parallel episodes are described in almost the same words. Having found her way back to the peace and satisfaction of infancy through identification with the infant that she herself has nurtured, Lily is ready to return to death, the great mother.

Gerty's kindness following Lily's sexual fright anticipates Nettie's nurturant acts.^[11] Gerty had provided the kind of one-way comfort of which Lily had been deprived in childhood. In contrast, Nettie's kindness extends nurturance into a linked chain of human care. Having formerly received benefits from Lily, Nettie welcomes an opportunity to reciprocate. By in-

cluding Lily in the act of mothering an infant, Nettie enables her to reach beyond narcissism into imagining an "other" and nurturing it. Both Gerty and Nettie are working women, but with the difference that Gerty, as a well-connected social worker, bridges two social classes, whereas Nettie, fully of and from the working class, is able to place Lily in connection to "the mighty sum of human striving" (516).

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.