force of destruction, “some weapon she had slowly fashioned for her vengeance” against the society that did not accord her enough respect because of her lack of great wealth. Although Lily also recognized her unique physical attraction, she “liked to think of her beauty as a power for good, as giving her the opportunity to attain a position where she should make her influence felt in the vague diffusion of refinement and good taste.” Unfortunately, Mrs. Bart’s belief system reflected that of the world around her; since her debut at the age of eighteen, Lily had several chances to wed wealth, but as she reveals to Selden, a marriage such as her mother envisioned is, at its very core, “disagreeable.”

The novel introduces Lily to a series of men whom she might marry, none of whom are Lily’s moral equal but all of whom carry far more weight in society. Lily, however, cannot bring herself to make such a marriage. Lily recognizes the inadequacies of the men: the dull Percy Gryce, who wants to collect a beautiful wife the same way he collects Americana; the frank-talking Simon Rose-dale, who wants a wife with social standing who will move him up the New York social ladder; and the pathetic George Dorset, who allows himself to be bullied and cuckolded by his wife. Even Laurence Selden, as summarized by Linda Wagner-Martin in her study The House of Mirth, has “a history of affairs with married women, a love of rhetorical games and flirtations, a tendency to make pronouncements and give orders, and a history of running away from confrontation.” Indeed, Selden, whom Lily believes to be her one chance at love matched with happiness, shows little true regard for her happiness or even fundamental welfare.

Lily cannot marry any of these men, or such types of men—which is all society offers her— because she holds a power that is rendered useless by her shallow society: the power to make superior moral judgments. She is unable to ignore this quiet, ever-present inner voice, which alerts her to the banality, tedium, or downright distastefulness of these men and all that they offer. At Bellomont, after practically guaranteeing herself a wedding proposal from Percy Gryce, Lily suddenly looks at these people who would forever populate her world in a different light: “That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities; . . . [now] Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement.” Lily blames Selden for forcing her to acknowledge the ugliness of her marital intentions. “Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me?” she asks him at Bellomont. In truth, she functions as her own moral arbiter, for it is only Selden who is confident that wealth and social standing are the only things Lily cares for. Lily’s actions—or her inaction when it comes to men—show that for all her talk, she cannot simply marry to reach those goals.

Because Lily aspires to a higher value, even though she fails to acknowledge it consciously, she sacrifices her other form of power: the power over other’s reputations. Despite her lack of wealth or social standing, Lily holds power over Bertha Dorset in two ways, through Bertha’s love letters to Laurence Selden and through knowledge of the affair that Bertha engaged in aboard the Dorset’s yacht. These love letters are key to Lily’s ability to dethrone Bertha and take her place in society by marrying George Dorset, or at the least, force her former “friend” to stop the malicious slander that has caused everyone in their circle to forsake Lily. Yet, Lily refuses to use either of these tools to unmask Bertha.

Many people encourage Lily to stoop to Bertha’s level of blackmail and malicious talk. George Dorset pleads with Lily to save him from his loveless, miserable marriage: “‘you’re the only person’—his voice dropped to a whisper—‘the only person who knows. . . . I want to be free, and you can free me.’” Carry Fisher, who becomes one of Lily’s closest friends by the end of the novel, urges Lily to take up George’s plan, provide the proof that Bertha was unfaithful so he can divorce and then become his wife. “He wouldn’t stay with her ten minutes if he knew,” Carry says. Lily lies to both George and Carry, claiming she knows nothing, thus preserving Bertha’s reputation and extending the opportunity for Bertha to cause more damage to Lily’s reputation. Simon Rosedale also knows that Lily has Bertha’s letters. His words to Lily, “I know how completely she’s in your power,” emphasize that by taking up the devious tactics employed by others in their New York circle, Lily will assure herself a place within it. He proposes that Lily use the letters to force Bertha to let her back in society, and then he will marry her.

Such encounters make Lily comprehend that she actually holds power. George’s pathetic demeanor and his obvious desire to divorce Bertha make it clear to Lily that it is within her power to marry him. Such ability, however, is hardly very far removed from the power that her beauty afforded her in the days before she was ousted from society, when she could have married Percy Gryce. Much more importantly, Lily’s knowledge gives her the power to enact “revenge” against Bertha and attain “rehabilitation” into society. Although “there was something dazzling in the completeness of the opportunity,” Lily refuses to follow such a course of action, even though holding on to such high standards holds no value in New York. Indeed, as Lily acknowledges in thinking over Rosedale’s offer of marriage, “What debt did she owe to a social order which had condemned and banished her without trial?” It is no coincidence that Lily dies the night she burns Bertha’s love letters. She deprives herself of the last material representation of power and her primary means to regain a place in society. That evening, she takes a few extra drops of her sleeping draught, and as it takes effect, as “gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her,” she gives up her will to live and sinks into her final sleep.

Source: Rena Korb, Critical Essay on The House of Mirth, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2002. Korb has a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers.

In the past decade, feminist critics have done much to restore Edith Wharton to her proper rank among American novelists and to shed light on many aspects of her work previous critics had overlooked. Scholars such as Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Elizabeth Ammons, Judith Fetterley, and recently Wai-Chee Dimock have changed the understanding of Wharton’s work through their perceptive analyses, focusing particularly on Wharton’s insights into the social structures of the early part of this century and the ways in which these structures influenced and limited women’s lives.

Yet the work of these feminist critics also raises issues of the limitations, or perhaps blindspots, of current feminist literary criticism, issues which go beyond their application to Wharton and her work. For instance, most feminist critics seem to imply that Wharton, though never one to ally herself with the feminist movements of her day, was a kind of inherent feminist, someone who both fought for and attained her rightful place as a novelist in a period when the novel was dominated by male authors and when upper-class women were taught, as Wharton was, to be more ornamental than intellectual. Moreover, these critics point out, Wharton protested the treatment of women through her portrayals of women caught in the inescapable bonds of social constructs. These points are fundamentally correct; Wharton was and did all these things. Yet in focusing only on these aspects of her life and career feminist critics overlook the Edith Wharton who, despite her mature anger over the random education her parents gave her, wrote that

I have lingered over these details [describing the cooking she enjoyed as a child and young woman] because they formed a part—a most important and honourable part—of that ancient curriculum of house-keeping which . . . was so soon to be swept aside by the “monstrous regiment” of the emancipated: young women taught by their elders to despise the kitchen and the linen room, and to substitute the acquiring of University degrees for the more complex art of civilized living . . . I mourn more than ever the extinction of the household arts. Cold storage, deplorable as it is, has done less harm to the home than the Higher Education.

One point where feminist criticism seems particularly weak is in its treatment of the men in Wharton’s fiction. This is particularly true in criticism of The House of Mirth, probably the bestknown as well as the most astutely criticized of Wharton’s novels. Judith Fetterley has claimed that in Wharton’s novels, social waste is female; when one uses this as the guiding principle in reading The House of Mirth, the novel becomes the story of a young woman’s destruction by a social system that maintains that upper-class women are meant to be ornamental, even while it forces them to prostitute themselves on the marriage market. A woman like Lily, Fetterley argues, has to accept her status as “a piece of property available for purchase by the highest bidder.” Elizabeth Ammons joins Fetterley in arguing that power in the novel is patriarchal, pointing out that men are the makers of money in the novel and, thus, as the novel focuses on the economics of marriage, the source of all power. These points are important and undeniably true and help to explain the social structure in which Lily moves.

But a re-examination of Wharton’s fiction in general, and of The House of Mirth, in particular, demonstrates that the social structures of Wharton’s fictional world cause male waste as much as female. As Dimock has noted, “the actual wielders of power in the book are often not men but women,” indeed, women like Bertha Dorset and Judy Trenor are hardly subservient to their husbands, despite their economic dependence on them; both of these women seem to have more freedom and power than their spouses. At no point does Wharton suggest that they warrant pity nor that they are victims of the system in the way Lily is. Lily herself is eager to grasp the money that could make her as great a social force as either of her friends, as is implied by her successive evaluations of the personal and economic attractions of men as different as Percy Gryce, Sim Rosedale, and Lawrence Selden. Women in this novel spend at least as much time assessing men as men do evaluating women. Despite the weakness of Wharton’s males—a weakness that has become almost proverbial among Wharton critics—Wharton presents her male characters as meriting as much (or perhaps almost as much) sympathy as her female characters.

Three of the men most important to this novel, Gus Trenor, George Dorset, and Lawrence Selden, have been pretty much dismissed as a brute, a spineless coward, and a coward who should have known better, who should, in fact, have come to Lily’s “rescue.” Yet to re-examine these characters within the social context that Wharton so carefully establishes is to see that they cannot be judged quite so simply. Gus Trenor, despite his attempt to rape Lily as a way of making her “pay up” for the money he has given her, verges on the pathetic at moments. Not only is he ugly in a society which, as Wharton says in her autobiography, had “an almost pagan worship of physical beauty,” but he is aware that his wife uses him as a pawn in the socio-economic system. Indeed, Judy Trenor values him only for his wealth while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge the costs of running a household or building a ballroom. Although Gus’ violence in demanding that Lily “pay up” is in no way excusable, it is perhaps understandable in the context of a social system that views him primarily as a workhorse.

George Dorset may be Wharton’s most pointed example of a man diminished by the social system. Early in the novel Judy Trenor remarks to Lily that the dyspeptic George “is not as dismal as you think. If Bertha [his wife] didn’t worry him he would be quite different.” As the novel develops Wharton reveals the uneven nature of the Dorsets’ marriage: Bertha, “out of a job” when her affair with Selden ends, takes up with Ned Silverton, while George becomes increasingly dismayed. Rather than accusing Bertha of unfaithfulness and demanding her fidelity or, alternately, divorcing her, George allows Bertha to blackmail him into silence. At the same time he begs Lily to help him, telling her that she is the only one who can “save” him. When Lily refuses even to acknowledge that she could help George, he sinks into apathy. That Lily feels she cannot help George makes a double point: that the system of marriage wastes male potential as it does female, and that the Dorset marriage, although it continues, is a failure from every point of view except that of Bertha, who happily goes on spending George’s income. Moreover, Lily’s inability to “save” Dorset also has important implications for Lily’s own need to be “saved.”

While George Dorset and Gus Trenor have received their share of critical scorn, Lawrence Selden has received the brunt of critical wrath. Claiming that Lily is solely “victim” within the system, many critics have argued that Lawrence Selden, despite his relative moral attractions, is to be condemned for his failure to “save” Lily. Though not necessarily someone who would identify himself as a feminist, R. W. B. Lewis established the normative view of Selden in his biography of Wharton. Selden, Lewis argues, “is the one human being who might have supplied” a “viable alternative life for Lily.” Lewis continues, “Selden himself, as she [Wharton] told Sara Norton, was ‘a negative hero,’ a sterile and subtly fraudulent figure whose ideas were not much to be trusted.” Cynthia Griffin Wolff claims that “far from being Wharton’s spokesman, Selden is the final object of her sweeping social satire.” Similarly, Wai-chee Dimock believes that Selden “remains, to the end, a closet speculator . . . The ‘republic of the spirit’ turns out to be less a republic than a refined replica of the social marketplace, of which Selden is a full participating member.” Three fundamentally faulty assumptions about Wharton’s novel underlie such judgments of Selden. First, readers assume that Selden could have “saved” Lily and thus is culpable for not having done so; second, they judge Selden by a standard far harsher than that they use to judge Lily; and third, their expectations that Selden “save” Lily at all are problematic in terms of the novel as a whole.

First of all, readers and critics alike cannot assume fairly that Selden could have saved Lily. Whatever the limitations of Selden’s heroism, Lily herself hardly makes the path to complete rescue an easy one. Selden, after all, proposes to her repeatedly in the novel, but she is as imbued with the idea of marriage for money and power as Selden is with the notion of romantic love. In addition, her inability to govern her own life stems from a fundamental indecisiveness, the result of the values inculcated in her by her culture, that prevents her from developing either a firm friendship or a love relationship with Selden. Finally, Wharton stresses repeatedly the social indoctrination that has made it almost impossible for either Lily or Selden to break through their carefully-cultivated emotional reserves. It is extremely problematic to fault Selden for not “saving” Lily; she will not permit herself to be saved.

Second, it is important not to set up a reverse double standard for judging Selden. While feminist critics see Lily generally, and correctly, as a product and a victim of society, they conveniently ignore Wharton’s hint that “in a different way, [Selden] was, as much as Lily, the victim of his environment.” They somehow expect Selden to transcend the codes of his class and place. It is generally understood that Lily’s reluctance to wed is an expression of her “repugnance toward a relationship in which a woman is powerless” and a result of her examination of the hatred and hypocrisy in the marriages of her friends; yet the same considerations and observations are somehow supposed not to concern Selden. There may, indeed, be some grounds for judging Selden by standards different from those used for Lily: the stakes are different for the two of them. Because of her extreme specialization, Lily must “go into partnership”—that is, marry—in order not to “drop”; by comparison Selden’s implied return to books and his law practice looks fairly comfortable. Nevertheless, these disparities do not justify condemning Selden for the same responses that are respected in Lily.

The novel as a whole reveals that such condemnations are in themselves wanting. Despite their efforts to live independent of the standards of their class, both Selden and Lily are limited by these standards: Lily cannot teach herself an independent existence, and Selden, although he is somewhat independent of others, cannot see the system in which both live as wholly as readers can. Readers, after all, have the advantage of Wharton’s narration and of extended exposure to Lily’s consciousness; by comparison, Selden’s knowledge is extremely limited. Moreover, moral cowardice—of which both Selden and Lily have their share—is hardly a disgrace in Wharton’s novel. It would take an almost superhuman effort to break out of a system so rigid and yet so flexible that it can, for instance, maintain with perfect equanimity that marriage is a romantic connection while demonstrating over and over that it is an economic relation. Irving Howe’s relatively early (pre-feminist, one might say) remark on Wharton’s work may still stand among the most perceptive summaries of her stance toward such characters as Lily and Selden:

Mrs. Wharton understands how large is the price, how endless the nagging pain, that must be paid for a personal assertion against the familiar ways of the world, and she believes, simply, that most of us lack the strength to pay.

Lily finally manages to “pay up” her debt to Trenor, but this payment robs her of any further strength. In spite of his relative independence of social standards, Selden as well “lack[s] the strength to pay” for his release from the social system. Wharton’s point is not that Lily is victim, Selden victimizer, but that in spite of their different standings within the system, both are pitiable in their entrapment.

In planning her novel, Wharton wrote that the most difficult obstacle to overcome was determining how to give “a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers” the “typical human significance which is the story-teller’s reason for telling one story rather than another.” The solution, she discovered,

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.

It is with such remarks in mind that feminist critics have claimed, as Fetterley has, that “social waste is female” in The House of Mirth. But in context, Wharton’s remark is almost synecdochic: Lily Bart represents not just herself, not even her sex, but the whole group of women and men destroyed by a grappling and vicious social system which they are intelligent enough to understand but too weak to change.

In this way, Lily herself—along with Ned Silverton, who once aspired to writing epics, and Lawrence Selden, with his passion for the beautiful—can be seen as failed Edith Whartons: all fail to find a channel into which they can direct their creative energies productively. Wharton’s portrayal of Lily’s defeat and death suggests not only Wharton’s appreciation of the binding force of social norms, but perhaps as well—and more disturbingly—a certain acceptance of these norms.

Indeed, if one accepts the notion that Selden as well as Lily may be a sympathetic character, one faces once again the problem of interpreting the novel’s conclusion. It is entirely possible that Wharton intended the conclusion to be read as it is written—that, in fact, “in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.” As much as Wharton regrets the waste implied in Lily’s life and death, she may reconcile herself to it as well. For Wharton constructs her novel to imply the impossibility of one individual saving, or even helping, another; this is clearest in Selden’s failure to help Lily but is reinforced as well by Lily’s refusal to save George Dorset by supplying him with the information he needs to divorce Bertha.

Wharton may in fact have accepted her status as what Adrienne Rich has described as a “token” or “special” woman. Speaking to a group of women at the Modern Language Association, Rich noted that she, like Virginia Woolf addressing a women’s college, was

aware of the women who are not with us here because they are washing the dishes and looking after the children . . . We seem to be special women here, we have liked to think of ourselves as special, and we have known that men would tolerate, even romanticize us as special, as long as our words and actions didn’t threaten their privilege of tolerating or rejecting us and our work according to their ideas of what a special woman ought to be.

Surrounded by Henry James and a host of other admiring men, Wharton was clearly in the situation that Rich describes, that of the special woman who accepts her own success as something due to her, something she has earned. Wharton saw herself as someone who had made it on her own, through hard work and will power, and who—despite her compassion for those like Lily Bart—seems fundamentally to accept the failure of others as the natural result of social Darwinism. Other women, she implies, should not bother to educate themselves, much less write; they should instead learn the arts of household management. Despite her gratitude to those (all men) who helped her develop her intellect and her skill as a writer, Wharton prefers to ignore the possibility that women could benefit from systematic education or the cultivation of their potential as artists, as full human beings. Her attitude toward others seems, in short, to be a version of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” approach, one which most feminists now find somewhat wanting, given that society may leave some individuals with bootstraps that are very short, or even non-existent.

Yet this view of Wharton, too, is limited. Like both Woolf and Rich, Wharton was aware of the women who were in fact “washing the dishes and looking after the children.” In The House of Mirth, Wharton portrays not only the Olympian heights of social glitter but also the wrong side of the “social tapestry”, the lives of the numerous women who suffer that a few might be wealthy: charwomen, girls working long hours at an overheated and underlit milliner’s shop. Wharton herself is something of an enigma when it comes to issues both of class and of self-perception. The professional writer every morning, she emerged meticulously, fashionably coiffed and clad, every noon to take over the role of the perfect hostess. Nor, apparently, did she see any contradiction between these roles, nor between the little girl who early experienced a love of fine clothing and admiration and the society that so long kept that girl from attaining her potential as a thinker and a writer. Similarly, Wharton was reputed to be unusually kind to her servants—a trait she passes on to Lily Bart—and she worked long hours to help relocate refugees from Belgium during World War I. Yet it appears that she never questioned her right to ask a dozen individuals to run her household. She was, perhaps, aristocratic (“special” in Rich’s terms) in the way that Woolf was as well: She saw no problem in preventing others from developing their potential so that she might develop her own. At the bottom of this is a certain classism that is, or so one would hope, inimical to feminism in the 1980s.

Edith Wharton’s challenge to feminist criticism is the challenge created by historical distance and by shifting definitions of feminism itself. Many feminist critics seem to have expected Wharton to be fifty years ahead of her time; further, they have shaped a Wharton who conforms to such expectations. In doing so they have oversimplified the complexities of Wharton’s personality and times; they have brilliantly represented and respected a part of her genius, but they have detached it from the woman as a whole.

Source: Julie Olin-Ammentorp, “Edith Wharton’s Challenge to Feminist Criticism,” in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 16, No. 2, Autumn 1988, pp. 237–44.

Almost inevitably, critics of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth focus their comments on the “moral” vitality of its social criticisms. Clearly, the novel’s scenic art and the author’s pointed intrusions into her narrative justify this critical emphasis. It is true, as Irving Howe asserts, that “the meanings of the book emerge through a series of contrasts between a fixed scale of social place and an evolving measure of moral value.” In one of the most original essays on the novel that I have encountered, Diana Trilling ends up by seeing the heroine’s fate in socio-moral terms: “Like the old Bolshevik who confesses to uncommitted crimes in attestation of the superior moral authority of the state, Lily affirms the absolute power of society over the life of the individual by her demonstration that she is finally incapable of effective action on her own behalf.” Though he dwells primarily on the “naturalistic” aspects of the novel, Blake Nevius describes its theme as “the victimizing effect of a particular environment on one of its more helplessly characteristic products.” Even Richard Poirier, whose brilliant analysis of The House of Mirth is almost a last word, finally traces Lily’s doom to the absence in her society of “an ordering principle for her good impulses.”

I believe that in the curiously didactic last chapters of the novel, Mrs. Wharton reached beyond her immediate social concerns toward a larger, perhaps ultimately philosophical vision. She permits her two sympathetic characters, Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden, to come into triumphant possession of a secret that reconciles Lily to death and Selden to life. This secret, contained in a “word” never divulged by the author, endows the seeming absurdity of existence with sanctity and ultimate grace. It affirms that a force of mysterious origin and sanction is to be found at the center of all life. Because Lily and Selden hear and finally respond to this word, their lost opportunities result in discovery rather than in waste and futility. Lily makes her clarifying discovery of the word on her deathbed. What might appear to be the tragic consequence of a misguided life is suddenly transformed into self-fulfillment. Her last struggle begins as a crisis of hope:

As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered vague and luminous on the far edge of thought—she was afraid of not remembering it when she woke; and if she could only remember it and say it to him, she felt that everything would be well.

For a moment, the thought of the word fades and she relapses into terror and loneliness. Then, the word becomes flesh as she feels a baby lying in her arms. Once again, she suffers misery and shock as she loses “her hold of the child.” In her dying seconds, however, “the recovered warmth flowed through her once more, she yielded to it, sank into it, and slept.”

In the last chapter of the novel, the word that consoles Lily is almost mystically transmitted to Selden. In a setting romantically appropriate to his mood, he acts with a kind of morning vigor and a spontaneous disregard for social ritual. Hurrying to see Lily at an unconventionally early hour, he is liberated and excited because “he had found the word he meant to say to her, and it could not wait another moment to be said.” Amazed that he has not spoken it sooner, he now regards it as proclaiming a new day, as establishing a new order. Joyfully, he treats the word as if it were revelatory and revitalizing: “It was not a word for twilight, but for the morning.” Although his commitment to the word is checked by Lily’s death and by a brief resurgence of cynicism, he struggles past doubts into an enduring faith in it. The novel concludes, not with the naturalistic or moral harshness usually imputed to it, but with the serenity of a religious affirmation: “He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.”

None of the critics I have mentioned appear to take the ending of The House of Mirth seriously. None of them ask what the redemptive word is, and, finally, none of them try to determine the extent to which it attenuates Lily’s tragedy. It seems advisable, then, to begin a critical quest for the meaning of Mrs. Wharton’s novel with a search for the word and its implications.

The quest can appropriately begin with a look at the society in which Lily Bart schemes for success. Uninspired by the “word,” the social circle derisively pictured in The House of Mirth rarely rises above elegance and comfort and often descends into sordid conniving and petty Grundyism. Money assures privilege, but privilege, too cheaply construed, dissipates into an expense of spirit and a waste of shame. Mrs. Wharton’s smart set and its wealthy hangerson are curiously mindless and soulless, and those seeking entrance into the charmed circle wish to be assimilated into an expensive but not very expansive culture. The few old families not drawn into luxurious frivolities and vices derive their immunity from narrow imaginations and pinched spirits.

Mrs. Wharton exhibits her world in all its negative indifference to thought and idealism. She shows Lily’s nascent hope blighted and Selden’s life in the “republic of the spirit” reduced to a sterile posture. The calculating Bertha Dorset holds on to her fortune and her cowed husband, and the Brys and Rosedale are ready to pump their new-made millions into the perpetuation of a system that cruelly snubbed them. Goodness and the freedom to achieve it are commodities too fragile to survive in such a civilized social state; indeed, if one disregards the crucial last chapter of The House of Mirth, one may feel that the author is attempting to expose the existence of a social conspiracy against creative and moral impulses.

Nevertheless, despite her lively perception of human stupidity and weakness, Mrs. Wharton does not intend her novel to be misanthropic or merely satirical. Her theme, instead, insists that personal integrity represents an act of faith in a spiritual order beyond the of the world of appearance. In other words, Lily’s worldly mistakes are disguised blessings: her final inability to marry Percy Gryce, after all her preparations have been seductively made, stems from an innate trust in something less musty than a moneyed imbecile. In addition, in refusing to be self-serving by helping herself to Bertha Dorset’s husband or Rosedale’s fortune, she actually serves a higher concept of self. In spite of her banalities and excesses, Lily finds it impossible to commit a final act of self-desecration. She renounces the prizes she was trained to seek and hearkens to Selden’s timid confidences about the republic of the spirit. She knows that she cannot be saved by a society which in one way or another, can only destroy as it gratifies: to be a Judy Trenor is to be a comfortable lost soul, to be a Bertha Dorset is to be a desperate one. To initiate the newly-rich into society’s inner sphere as Carrie Fisher does, is to live as a parasite in a wellfurnished vacuum. Though Lily shares the vices and follies of all these women, she differs from them in possessing a vision, at first disquieting but ultimately consoling. Her apparent social descent is—besides being the frightful thing that haunts the critics of the book—largely a subconscious search for meanings fixed beyond the flux of wealth and social status.

What permanent truth embodied in what “word,” it might be asked, does Lily discover? I cannot agree with Mrs. Trilling that Edith Wharton intends her heroine to acknowledge the tyrannous primacy of the “state.” Indeed, Mrs. Wharton seems to be saying that from a spiritual perspective, society, considered as the supreme lawgiver, is an illusion or a downright fiction. It is an arena of distraction, a kind of Vanity Fair. What The House of Mirth asserts is that no life possesses spiritual vitality until it is motivated by belief in its own significance. Obviously, the enigmatic and revelatory word that Lily does not achieve until the end of her life is “faith”. Only with it can a successful quest be pursued against all the equivocating counter-claims and inducements of society, against the ostensible absurdity of life itself. Lily’s persistent problem is that she lacks conscious faith even while she evades evil: of course, she resists grossness, but she is on good terms with the spiritual compromises that grow into horrors. In short, she will not allow her spiritual possibilities to be more than a polite conversation piece between herself and Selden. The shock of Gus Trenor’s abortive sexual assault awakens her to the ugly possibilities of life: “Yes, the Furies might sometimes sleep, but they were there, always in the dark corner, and now they were awake and the iron dang of their wings was in her brain.” Even the visitation of the Furies and her loss of Selden, however, do not significantly change her life: she soon invites disaster by slipping all too easily into an arrangement to distract George Dorset’s attention from one of his wife’s infidelities. Lily’s major weakness, then, is the weakness of Denis Peyton in Sanctuary, of Glennard in The Touchstone, and of so many other characters in Mrs. Wharton’s novels—a lack of faith in the “reality” and fundamental necessity of the spiritual life.

Faith, as Edith Wharton defines it, is no generalized and temperamental optimism; it is, instead, an almost mystical assurance that only moral action can save the ever-threatened continuity of human existence. Beset by dangers inherent in social arrangements, man clings to survival by the thread of his moral instincts; he is, at his best motivated by what Mrs. Wharton calls, in Sanctuary, “this passion of charity for the race.” In other words, goodness is useful, and men and women must, under pain of extinction, bequeath it to their children. At one of her “grandest” moments, for example, Kate Orme in Sanctury is overwhelmed by “mysterious primal influences” and by a “passion of spiritual motherhood that made her long to fling herself between the unborn child and its fate.” Although Lily never worries about future generations, her casual generosity to Nettie Struther saves the “poor working girl” and enables her to marry and have a child which—almost as an unmerited reward or rather a visitation of grace—teaches Lily “the central truth of existence.” After holding the baby in her arms, Lily sees the courage and primal trust in Nettie’s precarious new life: “It was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but 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.”

For Edith Wharton, the abyss is an everlasting peril, and the “frail audacious permanence” at times seems merely frail and futile. The “noble” act, in Lily’s case a renunciation of personal advantage, does not conspicuously alter the way of the world: the Trenors, Dorsets, and Brys—with the addition of Rosedale, the Gormers, and “Mrs. Norma Hatch, Emporium Hotel”—will continue their anarchic existence in an atmosphere of gold dust. Yet, Nettie Struther’s and Lily’s affirmations make a difference because they spring from depths of “faith,” the first and most important of all words. After everything else has been said, Mrs. Wharton declares, it is necessary to believe in the meaning and utility of spiritual action. In Sanctuary, Kate Orme attains the vision of the continuity of life in a “mystic climax of effacement”; engulfed by an anguish which is also joy, she experiences a “surge of liberating faith in life, the old credo quia absurdum which is the secret cry of all supreme endeavour.” Lily, too, stares into the absurdity and the abyss, and she is forced to acknowledge that she had not risen to the occasions when “Selden had twice been ready to stake his faith on Lily Bart.” She has not attained the faith of Nettie’s husband, who knowing of the girl’s premarital freedoms, had nevertheless believed in her essential goodness. As Lily recalls Nettie’s happiness, she struggles toward her own credo: “Her husband’s faith in her had made her renewal possible.”

The “word” that reverberates through the last two chapters of The House of Mirth cannot be anything but faith. It is the word that keeps Lily from the abyss; it is the word Selden must discover and treasure. In spite of her comparatively favorable portrait of Selden, Mrs. Wharton does not minimize his lack of faith, his timidity and subjection to appearances. All too ready to accuse Lily of selfinterest, he suffers from a sort of moral snobbishness and aloofness that turn his republic of the spirit into an exclusive island for dilettantes. Even after he prides himself on having found out the “essential” Lily, he mistakenly assumes that she has made a clandestine visit to Gus Trenor’s house. During her last conversation with him she tells him, “I needed the help of your belief in me”; yet, he cannot act because his “faculties seemed tranced, and he was still groping for the word to break the spell.” For all his intelligence and discrimination, Selden cannot be simple enough to surrender to faith; he cannot rely on naive trust (which, for Mrs. Wharton, may be the highest perception) to clear the debris of suspicion and fear from his mind. The word itself evaporates as, in Lily’s death chamber, he finds her compromising check made out to Gus Trenor. Only with an effort, perhaps like that of Kate Orme, can he reject the ambiguous appearances that induce cynicism. When faith returns to him, however, he sees that “though all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart,” he can rejoice that he had come to her “willing to stake his future on his faith in her.”

The House of Mirth, it should be added, does not conclude with sentimental éclat , Lily’s search for the knowledge contained in the word is built into the structure of the novel. All of her disappointments lead, however painfully, to a clarification of her baffling inconsistencies, her aversions, and her tortured waverings. It takes her a whole ambivalent life to evolve and possess a belief that dissolves the omnipresent and clamorous absurdity of her own, and the human, condition. But she does finally arrive at the credo quia absurdum that, for Mrs. Wharton, inspires all supreme endeavor.

Source: James W. Gargano, “The House of Mirth: Social Futility and Faith,” in American Literature, Vol. 44, No. 1, March 1972, pp. 137–43.