SOURCE: Gerard, Bonnie Lynn. “From Tea to Chloral: Raising the Dead Lily Bart.” Twentieth Century Literature 44, no. 4 (winter 1998): 409-27.

[In the following essay, Gerard argues that Lily's death provides a break from Wharton's naturalism throughout The House of Mirth to allow for a moment of individual self-determination.]

“Gad! what a study might be made of the tyranny of the stomach—”

—The House of Mirth (309)

Much has been made of the “square envelopes” fashionable society “showered” upon the “hall-table” of young Lily Bart's New York home (44). Much has also been made of the consequent “oblong envelopes”—constant reminders of the price of fashion—that were “allowed to gather dust in the depth of a bronze jar” (44).¹ But the invitation and the bill are not the only envelopes tyrannizing Lily's society. Fashionable New York is equally subject to the “tyranny of the stomach,” if less conspicuously so (309). Wharton's New York society in The House of Mirth is, without doubt, a consuming society, both figuratively and literally. As Ruth Bernard Yeazell and Elizabeth Ammons, among others, have noted, America's turn-of-the-century leisured class displayed its incomparable wealth by engaging in what Thorstein Veblen terms the “conspicuous consumption” of material goods (75). Appropriately, Wharton would have us imagine her consuming materialists through metaphors of food and digestion: George Dorset's “mournful dyspeptic” temper; Gus Trenor's “carnivorous head”; Carry Fisher's “general air of embodying a ‘spicy paragraph’”; and Ned Silverton's tendency to be “critical of truffles” (85-87). Silverton even observes, with “Titanic pessimism” (we might add “naturalism”), that “a sluggish liver or insufficient gastric juices might affect the whole course of the universe” (309). As it happens, his off-hand prediction rings true for Lily Bart, as Dorset's gastric distress signifies his more threatening marital distress, a distress whose ultimate relief requires that “a woman's life”—her own—be “ruined” (309).

From Dorset's troubled marriage to Lily's struggle in the marriage market, The House of Mirth depicts characters whose psychological and physiological lives are consumed by a society with a voracious appetite for status. Lily Bart's pursuit of social status as an empowered consumer presents her with a paradox: in order to become a consumer she must first present herself as an item to be consumed. For Lily, this paradox becomes a seesaw of conflicting social and psychological needs that seem opposed to such a degree of inevitability that one begins to wonder about the role of literary naturalism in the novel.² Indeed, recent years have seen renewed interest in the influences of American and German naturalism on Wharton's writing. Donald Pizer observes that “it is now common” to view The House of Mirth in particular as “in the naturalistic camp” (“The Naturalism” 242). While he notes that studies of literary naturalism have in the past almost entirely neglected Wharton's novels, largely because she was not male and did not often write about the lower classes, he affirms those who have initiated the “rediscovery” of Wharton as a naturalist novelist (“American Naturalism” 127).³ This rediscovery, in the case of The House of Mirth, has been based on abundant textual evidence suggesting that Wharton, fully conversant with the tenets and tropes of naturalistic philosophy and fiction, consciously depicted Lily Bart as a victim of her social environment. The naturalistic “language of imprisonment” is so pervasive, in fact, that in his most recent comments on the novel Pizer has offered only two exceptions to its seemingly ubiquitous law of social determinism—Nettie Struther and Lawrence Selden—one triumphing over her environment through pure strength of will, the other transcending it through faith, albeit unsubstantiated, in human possibility (“The Naturalism” 244-46).⁴

But even those who find Wharton modifying conventional naturalism by offering occasional exceptions to the rule of social determinism might nonetheless pronounce Lily Bart's life and death clearly naturalistic.⁵ After all, she dies a victim of her own lack of moral courage, which is to say, a victim of the social environment that created in her such a lack. The self-conscious irony of Wharton's naturalism, however, makes such a reading of Lily's death problematic. Taking naturalism to figurative extremes, Wharton expends considerable creative effort throughout the novel to construct a pattern of imagery and behavior, both overt and implied, that suggests on the surface the merely animalistic nature of the society in which Lily moves. A product of that environment, Lily herself responds to environmental stimuli often with the same motivation for self-preservation (“how on earth am I to keep myself alive?” [430]) that a scientific naturalist might have observed in the wild. Despite such social conditioning in a most “debasing” environment, however, Lily emerges capable of committing an independent act of will, nearly indistinguishable though it is from an act of unwilling submission (Wharton, A Backward Glance 207). Wharton insists that we notice her heroine's act of will, even if it is the most “inconspicuous” act in the novel, because it betrays the peculiar romanticism distinguishing The House of Mirth from other naturalist novels (Yeazell 713). Few readers will be willing to make this distinction. Yeazell concludes that Lily's act of burning Bertha Dorset's letters is no more than “the faltering pulse of resistance” (731). Dale Bauer, likewise, finds only in Wharton's later fiction a reconsideration of anthropological theories she had earlier “endorsed” (31). But if The House of Mirth endorses naturalism, it does so hesitatingly and incompletely. Lily's struggle for subjectivity beyond the limits imposed on human experience by a naturalistic environment represents an early indication of what would later become Wharton's ambivalence toward strict Darwinian theories of social determinism. If a naturalistic universe results from, as Paul Civello suggests, “the collapse of humanity's conception of an order in the material world, an order that had formerly imbued the world with meaning” (2), then Lily's act of will gestures towards an alternative epistemology, making her dying moment something akin to a Kantian moment of sublime transcendence, wherein “the surface is broken, the discourse breaks down, and the faculties are checked or suspended: a discontinuity opens between what can be grasped and what is felt to be meaningful” (Weiskel 21).⁶

Early in the novel, Wharton suggests that for Lily, there is a “discontinuity” between “what can be grasped”—materially, rationally—and “what is felt to be meaningful” through some more elusive means of apprehension. Ironically, Lily imagines this discontinuity to be a matter of heredity and environment, as she reflects that she has inherited from her parents two opposing natures. She attributes her practical, materialistic nature to her mother, whose “own fastidiousness had its eye fixed on the world” (48). A “wonderful manager” of funds, whose worst fear was that she should be forced to “live like a pig” (46, 47), Mrs. Bart was of the opinion that her husband “had wasted his evenings in what she vaguely described as ‘reading poetry,’” and “there was in Lily a vein of sentiment, perhaps transmitted from this source” (54). Lily has at least romantic, if not Romantic, tendencies. The tension generated by this conflict between Lily's romanticism and her materialism indicates the tension animating most of the human conflicts in Wharton's novels. In The Fruit of the Tree, written just two years after The House of Mirth, John Amherst concludes that “the love he and Justine had felt for each other was like some rare organism which could maintain life only in its special element; and that element was neither passion nor sentiment, but truth” (609). The language of Amherst's metaphoric construction, both organic and spiritual, reflecting the novel's framework of opposing forces, evokes the neoplatonic realms of the material and the spiritual. Here, material circumstances ranging from genetics to social conventions, practical work, and the mundane threaten to extinguish the human expression of passion and will, idealistic commitment, the extraordinary, and, in Darwinian terms, the individual as opposed to the race.⁷ Wharton finds these categories useful in describing the many biological and social circumstances preventing her characters from achieving spiritual fulfillment through truly meaningful relationships. Amherst's metaphor of the organism surviving only in its proper element suggests a curious collusion between naturalism and romanticism that allows the rift between material and spiritual demands to be mystically, if only fleetingly, repaired. Though the moment of intellectual and spiritual union between Amherst and Justine, like the transplanted organism, fades under the pressures of material being, it nonetheless points to a transcendent realm of belief and moral action in which Wharton's characters can respond to their environment in more than just animalistic ways.⁸

Admittedly, the materialistic influences of Lily's environment have the effect of perverting her early tendencies towards romantic idealism into “the vague diffusion of refinement and good taste,” a fondness for “pictures and flowers” and “sentimental fiction,” and a love of “lost causes” (54-55). It would seem that in Lily, Wharton has created a character with the imaginative potential for transcendence, but whose outlets of individual expression have been so limited by her materialistic upbringing and environment that she has become shallow, inconsistent, and self-centered. One might say, she has become almost entirely contained within the phenomenal world.⁹ The challenge in place for Lily, then, is to transcend her desire for status as a social object by attaining subjectivity through means other than material. In an environment so clearly naturalistic, with laws, standards, and conventional behaviors that show little regard for the individual, such a challenge may, in fact, be too great. As Wharton indicates, all factors side against Lily from the start, even so much as to make her severely doubt her capacity to be more than a “cog in the great machine” (498). Indeed, “there had been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength” (422). But we are wrong to accept Lily's repeated estimations of herself, for she is continually acting in ways that belie them. To chart Lily's gradual departure from a way of life that would deterministically dehumanize her, we must first explore the ways in which Wharton manipulates metaphors of material consumption in depicting Lily Bart as in many ways a naturalistic heroine—one who, through the natural laws of chance and circumstance, falls victim to her social environment. Many scholars have pointed out the ways in which Lily is consumed as a visual object throughout the novel, whether on display for Lawrence Selden's intellectual curiosity, or displaying herself in the tableaux vivants, or even obliquely as a figurative decoration at Judy Trenor's, and for that matter Percy Gryce's, table. Clearly, this pattern of visual commodification suggests the extent to which Lily is objectified by her society. But it is to patterns of alimentary consumption—literal, figurative, and implied—that I would like to turn, because more than just exposing, watching, observing, and scrutinizing Lily Bart, New York society devours her. Perhaps it is Wharton's naturalistic humor that finds New York society's eating rituals so rich in metaphoric possibility. From elaborate ceremonial dinners, like Judy Trenor's, to the ceremonial taking of tea, Wharton's upper-class New Yorkers have ritualized material consumption in dehumanizing ways.

Wharton begins by showing how rituals of material consumption force Lily to display herself as a socially valuable, and therefore socially vulnerable, object.¹⁰ Indeed, Lily's favorite “lost cause” becomes herself, as she learns to marshal social “arts” to transform the “raw material” of her beauty into material “success” (54). The result is that Lily becomes obsessed with aesthetics—that is, with the outward appearance of a situation rather than its true substance. In the child pleading for a fresh “bunch of lilies-of-the-valley” to adorn the center of her breakfast table, we see the grown Lily “always keeping herself fresh and exquisite and amusing” around the dinner tables of her social circle (49, 429; emphasis added).¹¹ While having tea with Lawrence Selden early in the novel, Lily displays herself to advantage: she “had the art of blushing at the right time” (8); she “leaned back in the luxury of discontent” (9); she “smiled at him across the tea-pot which she was holding up to be filled” (11); and she “leaned back, sipping her tea with an air … enchantingly judicial” (12). Certainly, the activity of “measur[ing] out the tea into a little tea-pot of green glaze” allows her to display her “hand, polished as a bit of old ivory, with its slender pink nails, and the sapphire bracelet slipping over her wrist” (10). Wharton's depiction of Lily as “so hot and thirsty,” even “dying for tea,” casts into relief the fact that the tea ceremony provides an opportunity for material, no less than social, consumption (6, 7). Likewise, on the train to Bellomont, Percy Gryce watches Lily “in silent fascination while her hands flitted above the tray, looking miraculously fine and slender in contrast to the coarse china and lumpy bread” (28). Lily acts as mistress of the occasion: she manipulates appearances as she manipulates the tea cups. Hungry for the power of Gryce's millions, she

resolved to impart a gently domestic air to the scene, in the hope that her companion, instead of feeling that he was doing something reckless or unusual, would merely be led to dwell on the advantage of always having a companion to make one's tea in the train.

(29)

For Gryce, Lily's tea-table elegance translates into the feeling that he is “secure in the shelter of her conspicuousness” (28). Using Lily as bait to catch up and contain the public's threateningly hungry gaze, Gryce can safely drink his “railway brew” as if it were “nectar” (28-29).

But if Lily has been trained to control the tea ritual to her own advantage, her “slender” hands manipulating its implements as well as its social opportunities, she begins to see that others can manipulate those implements just as opportunistically—even to her peril. This is because, in a naturalistic environment, the laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest show little concern for the individual. As Lily comes to understand the danger of being “devoured” by her society, she realizes that the mouths agape—the gossips who would devour her reputation—are the ones she fears the most (Lubbock 49). Reeling from Gus Trenor's near assault, she imagines that the tea tables that once supported her social climb now host gossip mongers who would prey on her disgrace: the “winged furies” plaguing her consciousness have become “prowling gossips who dropped in on each other for tea” (273). And if Lily once desired conspicuousness as a commodity on the table, she suddenly realizes that those who would consume her have voracious appetites. Trenor rationalizes his attempt to rape Lily, claiming that “the man who pays for the dinner is generally allowed to have a seat at table” (233). But like Veblen's “predatory” man of the “industrial” age, he has foregone the more vigorous prowling of the hunt, only to indulge in the more civilized, though no less brutal, prowling of the drawing room (Yeazell 716).

Trenor's attempted rape signals the relentlessness with which New York society will devour Lily Bart, as if in accordance with an implacable natural law that dictates the victimization of those who threaten the power of others. The inevitability of her demise seems at every turn socially determined, as even those who might come to her rescue betray the predisposition toward consuming her physical beauty and perfected social skills. Bertha Dorset offers her the sanctuary of her Mediterranean yacht, only to use her as a distraction for George while she pursues an affair with young Ned Silverton. When Lily's careless conspicuousness with Dorset results in a “crash” with Bertha, Lily falls from the graces of the Sabrina, as Bertha, “in full command of her usual attenuated elegance, sat dispensing tea” before finally dispensing with Lily altogether (330). Her fall lands her in the questionable company of a procession of social climbers, the Gormers and Mrs. Norma Hatch, whose “elephantine sofas” swallow Lily up in the “purely physical satisfaction” of a life “lapped and folded” in “ease” (449, 440). As a member of their rapidly “rising” social group, Lily is subjected to “dut[ies]” for her hostess, even while she is “of no more account among them than an expensive toy in the hands of a spoiled child” (388-89). Dorset himself approaches Lily with an appeal to friendship while she is on Long Island with the Gormers; but it is only too clear that his friendship is conditional on her willingness to let him use her knowledge about Bertha's affairs to help him gain revenge against his wife. Lily is “the only person who knows,” and her knowledge makes her a perfect implement to feed Dorset's craving for domestic revenge (393). Rosedale, as well, offers to indulge Lily's material needs, but while he offers Lily the social power she craves, he savors the crumbs of her failed social feast only to satisfy his own craving for acceptance into high society. What he wants, he tells her, is “a woman who'll hold her head higher the more diamonds [he puts] on it” (284).

The larger suggestion at work in these depictions of Lily as devoured object is the very paradox at the heart of Wharton's social determinism: the capacities that Lily must use to succeed in her world are also the ones that cause her to be consumed by it. In fact, Lily is so conditioned to pursue financial success that it becomes nearly impossible to imagine that she can act in ways that would be detrimental to her pursuit. Lily's sense of her own predetermined materialistic fate manifests itself in “a fatalistic sense of being drawn from one wrong turning to another, without ever perceiving the right road till it was too late to take it” (205). But careful scrutiny of Wharton's depictions of Lily when she temporarily gratifies her need for material sustenance reveals an impulse that causes her to feel dissatisfied in moments when she should feel satisfied the most. Safely accommodated by the material luxuries of the Sabrina, for example, Lily pursues her material desires in social fields that are ripe for harvest. Her appetite for material security—that is, for her own inexhaustible bank account—finds her working “like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed” with various marital prospects (303). But Carry Fisher observes that Lily seems ambivalent in her marital pursuits: “the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic” (303). For a survivalist in a materialistic environment, missing the meal is certainly not in one's best interest. But it is becoming clear that Lily, after all, “despises the things she's trying for” (303). Even when her material prospects look their bleakest, and Lily is offered the opportunity to save her hide, figuratively and literally, she refuses. This is the case with Dorset and with Rosedale after Lily's Mediterranean disgrace. Dorset's offer to befriend her if she would only help him serve up his wife's reputation to the public hunger for scandal meets with a staunch refusal (“Goodbye—I'm sorry; there's nothing in the world that I can do”) despite the obvious fact that “revenge and rehabilitation might be hers at a stroke” (394). There might have been “something dazzling in the completeness of the opportunity,” but Lily resists. With Rosedale, resistance is just as difficult, but just as sure. When he urges Lily to exchange Bertha Dorset's letters for her support through blackmail, Lily seems at first captivated by the idea: her “tired mind was fascinated by this escape from fluctuating ethical estimates into a region of concrete weights and measures” (417). But in the concrete, material “region” she seems surprisingly out of place, for she soon comes to realize that “the essential baseness of the act lay in its freedom from risk” (419). The confused Lily then exclaims to Rosedale, “you are mistaken—quite mistaken—both in the facts and in what you infer from them” (419).

To interpret such moments of resistance as acts of moral courage, however, would be a mistake. It is clear that Lily's morality amounts to little more than a sense of social propriety, in which right action is made possible by “instinctive resistances, of taste, of training, of blind inherited scruples” (168). Wharton reflects in A Backward Glance that New York society's frivolity becomes interesting only in its “power of debasing people and ideas” (207). Lily's capacity for moral ideas in the context of that society seems, accordingly, debased, reduced to instinctive responses to material circumstances. But if “she could not breathe long on the heights” of social “indignation,” her dilemma is precisely that “it was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region” (421, 422). Other regions do exist, of course, but for Lily they have not as yet proved habitable. On more than one occasion, Selden suggests his willingness to “take her beyond—beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of the soul—” (249). Such an escape, indeed, may satisfy the one need that seems to humanize Lily: her need for human intimacy. She occasionally remarks, with translucent flippancy, that what she wants more than a suitor “is a friend” (12). But to travel with Selden into his “republic of the spirit” requires that Lily suppress her longings for the society of the material in which she has been brought up to seek her place. Wharton is clear about Lily's reasons for resisting Selden: Lily admits unreservedly that she is “horribly poor—and very expensive” (4). That Lily has been raised to view money as life's one true necessity surprises no one who reads the novel as naturalistic. It is Lily's social environment, her “bringing-up” (278) among extravagant people, that must be blamed for forming in Lily such a need for luxurious living. Even the “promise of rescue in [Selden's] love” must only be “a moment's shelter” and not her “ultimate refuge” (280). When Lily finally feels desperate enough to turn to Selden's love as “her only hope,” the chance circumstance (also a convention of naturalism) of his having seen her leaving Trenor's house the night before causes him to leave town, leaving her stranded and alone.¹²

Lily cannot inhabit Selden's “republic of the spirit” or, for that matter, Gerty Farish's “poor slit of a room,” because of its lack of funds (271). As Gerty puts it, “Lily might be incapable of marrying for money, but she was equally incapable of living without it” (261). And in Wharton's depiction, such an incapacity seems far from a matter of will; it is an environmentally cultivated “physical distaste” (271). Lily feels a “growing distaste for her task” once reduced to the status of a working-class hat trimmer at Mme. Regina's (462). Social status and physical status become inseparable to Lily, as “perhaps from increasing physical weariness” she begins “to feel acutely the ugliness and discomfort of her surroundings” (464). Curiously, though, at this point neither can she inhabit the world of the Gormers and Mrs. Hatch—for the opposite reason. While with them, she basks in the “renewed habit of luxury—the daily waking to an assured absence of care and presence of material ease” (381). But material ease in itself seems not to be enough, for it “gradually blunted her appreciation of these values, and left her more conscious of the void they could not fill” (381). Lily's feeling of “pure physical satisfaction,” no less than the opposite feeling of physical discomfort, leaves her feeling “the long disgust of her days” (445).

Lily's disgust resonates with that of her mother, who “died of a deep disgust,” leaving the reader with an uncanny sense of the circularity of the novel's naturalistic trajectory (55). But Wharton's choice of a gustatory phrase to describe Lily's feeling of social alienation points both to the naturalistic patterns governing the novel's social determinism and to the ways in which Wharton struggles to negotiate a romantic ending out of a tenaciously naturalistic narrative. The irony of the novel's naturalism materializes in Lily's downward spiral of drug use. If rituals of material consumption serve only to satisfy the basest of appetites in a status-hungry society, Wharton would have those very rituals consume those who most rigorously observe them. Lily's self-destructive consumption, first of tea and finally of chloral, ends by consuming her physically and emotionally, betokening her social failure. Her increasing dependence on substances begins with a dramatic shift in her tea-taking habits following her rejection of Rosedale's second offer. No longer the center of attention at the tea table (“society … simply drifted by, preoccupied and inattentive” [422]), Lily seeks refuge among Gerty Farish's humble tea cups. But instead of her usual elegance and grace, she appears wildly out of control, “starting up with a vehemence that threatened destruction to Miss Farish's fragile tea-table” (427). Socially distraught, Lily cannot maintain her physical composure. And while tea itself seemed before to supply only an excuse for self-display, it now comes to be desired for its physical effects. Suffering from sleeplessness, Lily pleads with Gerty for more tea: “another, and stronger, please; if I don't keep awake now I shall see horrors tonight—perfect horrors!” (427). Out of discomfort and anxiety, Lily feels too weary to face the day—better to sleep, except that if she sleeps during the day she cannot sleep at night. Rather than face the “horrors” when “everything stands by the bed and stares,” Lily takes the tea (265). Despite Gerty's warning that the horrors will “be worse if you drink too much tea,” Lily “imperiously” demands it—“give it to me”—with a “dangerous edge” to her voice (428). Caffeine is not the only drug available for Lily's consumption. But if Lily admits to Miss Kilroy that she is “not particularly well,” she knows only too well that her real “headache” will not go away if she were only to “try orangeine” (463).

Even the chloral Lily begins consuming provides only a temporary respite from physical exhaustion. She takes the drug as a sleep agent: “the mere touch of the packet thrilled her tired nerves with the delicious promise of a night of sleep” (466). As is appropriate in a novel endorsing social determinism, Lily's failed pursuit of social happiness leaves her in withdrawals, with the “dark spirit of fatigue and loneliness crouched upon her breast,” hardly distinguishable in nature from the physical sensation of drug dependence (479). Indeed, for the thoroughgoing naturalist, the human being is simply “one material phenomenon in a universe of material phenomena,” whose actions, both rational and emotional, can be reduced to scientifically observable chemical reactions (Civello 2, 9). Lily's drug use, in this light, seems only natural, as does her last-ditch effort to use her relationship with Rosedale to regain a social foothold. But both of these efforts fail, and the reason seems to be the insurgent impulse within her to satisfy that elusive other need that is not material. When she passes by “a little restaurant in Fifty-ninth Street” and observes a crowd of “women and girls, all too much engaged in the rapid absorption of tea and pie to remark her entrance,” she is “not hungry,” nor is she concerned that these busy crowds have no status to offer her; instead she is “craving a responsive glance, some sign of an intuition of her trouble” (488). In between their “hurried gulps of tea,” Lily feels “a sudden pang of profound loneliness” (488-89).

Wharton insists that it is the “sense of loneliness” that pursues Lily until her death (475). Such a social stranding as Lily's is not unfamiliar in the wasteland territory of the modern. T. S. Eliot's familiar depiction of Prufrock's alienation would have seemed apt to Wharton. Prufrock, as his antecedent Lily Bart might have, can only think “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” and therefore “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” (lines 79-80). The crisis—that of risking human intimacy—is always evaded, the opportunity thwarted, by compelling social realities both authors represent as rituals of material consumption, whether of Michelangelo or of tea. Prufrock begins as if “etherized” (3) and ends not daring to “eat a peach” (122), while Lily begins by daring to claim her seat at the table, only to find herself alone in the end with a bottle of chloral. She ends where Prufrock begins, having dared to desire the very social status he discerns to have ultimately stifled his desire. For both authors, the rituals of socialites come to represent not the promise of social harmony but the insurmountability of human isolation in the impersonal modern age. But if Prufrock is always painfully conscious of his failure to construct a moment of intimacy, Lily becomes aware of her failure only at the last minute, just in time to cast her story in the light of a romantic tragedy. While Prufrock's romantic vision of “drown[ing]” in a “sea” of “human voices” can be read as a pathetic failure of inspiration (129-31), Lily Bart's “bath of oblivion” in chloral comes in the aftermath of her one moment of inspired transcendence (520).

Lily's immediate response to the pang of loneliness outside the Fifty-ninth Street restaurant may be the sudden absorption of “several cups of tea” followed by the decision to blackmail Bertha Dorset (489). But the feeling that such a move will make her happy is merely an “illusion” of meaningful activity that sets the stage for her climactic break with the cycle of materialism over the tea table of Lawrence Selden (489). Selden and Lily have had talks like this before, but the language here is altogether different. Their talk at Bellomont, not unlike the one Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska will have in The Age of Innocence 15 years later, had been of escape to “a country” in which spiritual freedom is not hampered by social demands (108). They had talked of money as an environment, outside of which Lily might “squirm and gasp” as if for oxygen to breathe (111). Resigned, now, to marry Rosedale for money and status, Lily speaks again of “escape,” but this time it is through a language of the divided self that she constructs her escape (497). Selden's love for her—his “belief” in her (498)—has made it impossible that she sell herself entirely; her vague sense of her potential for moral depravity causes her to imagine that she can effectively divide herself into two parts, the material and the spiritual, and that she can act on the former while protecting the latter from implication. She says to Selden:

There is some one I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you—we are sure to see each other again—but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you—I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you—and she'll be no trouble, she'll take up no room.

(499-500)

Such a rhetoric of division is convenient for Lily, except that only a few moments prior she had decided she must “make him understand that she had saved herself whole from the seeming ruin of her life,” and that “he must see her wholly for once before they parted” (497). Nowhere in the novel is the undercurrent of romantic neoplatonism as powerful as in this moment of Lily's final struggle for an undivided self.¹³ Animating neoplatonist writing from Plotinus to Hegel to Wordsworth is the tension between division, the defining quality of material existence, and wholeness, the spiritual state of undifferentiated unity. Lily wants Selden to see her wholly, but the problem is that she cannot see herself wholly in the first place. This is because, in appropriately romantic terms, to see herself wholly requires that Lily see herself as a being capable of love—not of being loved, but of loving. To love is of paramount significance for Wordsworth, who dedicates The Prelude to love: “To fear and love, / To love as prime and chief, for there fear ends, / Be this ascribed” (14.162-164). The moment in which Lily becomes suddenly aware of her love for Selden—“something lived between them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame: it was the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his”—is the first time Lily truly knows herself in the novel (500). Consequently, the divided self is no longer possible: “that self” that she has discovered “must indeed live on in [Selden's] presence, but it must still continue to be hers” (500). The moment is even figuratively sublime, for Lily intuits the truth of her feelings as if in the presence of a “light” around which “everything else dwindled and fell away from her” (500).

To reinforce the sublimity of the moment, Wharton continues in the Pauline vein when she describes the effect of Lily's transformation on Selden: “he felt it only as one of those rare moments which lift the veil from their faces as they pass” (501).¹⁴ The veil as symbol has a rich and varied history in literature and in literary criticism, and Wharton's use of it here is no less rich and complex. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest a possible antecedent when they discuss the image of the veil in George Eliot's fiction, which Wharton read, as a suggestion of Eliot's indebtedness to the Romantics. For Eliot, they argue, the romantic symbol of the veil is misogynistic, designating woman as mysterious other to the male ego (462, 471). For Wharton, too, the veil betokens an elusive alterity, the inscrutability of which may well be envisioned by Selden in feminine guise, much as Conrad's Jim, in another emblematically modern instance, imagines that “in the short moment of his last proud unflinching glance, he had beheld the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern bride, had come veiled to his face” (253). Jim's moment of romantic transcendence is not only feminized but orientalized as well, in a gesture that seems to undercut his romantic heroism by revealing an atavistic, selfish desire for possession of some radiant Other. For Wharton, the veil is similarly lifted to reveal a moment, but here it is a moment of intuited truth between Selden and Lily that is not only sublime but also mutual and sustaining. The moment seems more like the one Paul, whose language of conversion seems so salient here, describes in his second letter to the Corinthians. In perhaps one of the earliest instances in the history of the veil as symbol, Paul alludes to the veil covering the face, not of a literal or even figurative woman but of Moses after his experience on Mount Sinai receiving the Covenant. For Paul, the importance of the veil derives from its use to protect from public consumption the glory of God that “passeth” from Moses's face (Exod. 33:22). New Testament Christians, Paul explains, could know the truth of God through the mirror, an emblem of self-knowledge that replaces the veil, as Paul appropriates the notion of the passing moment to suggest that the moment of the Old Law has passed (2 Cor. 3:14-18). Thus for Wharton, the lifted veil reveals the achievement of self-knowledge in a moment of sublime transcendence for both Lily and Selden, and as the old way of knowing passes, Selden is enabled to say of his rekindled love for Lily, “Things may change—but they don't pass” (501).

The moment itself does pass, however, but for Lily it has been enough to “save herself whole” from an utterly naturalistic fate (497). Although the plot of the novel continues in its naturalistic trajectory, Lily's responses to her environment have changed. The changes can best be explored in the scene in which Lily visits Nettie Struther's kitchen. Here, the languages of material sustenance and spiritual fulfillment overlap in suggestive ways. Lily is welcomed into Nettie's “warm kitchen” during feeding time and offered “some of baby's fresh milk” (507-08). She watches Nettie “readjust the bottle to the child's bubbling mouth” while exclaiming “don't you be in too much of a hurry! Was it mad with mommer for getting its supper so late?” (508). Incidentally, the child's name is “Marry Anto'nette,” whose infamously sarcastic offer of cake to the Parisian working class suggests obliquely the incongruities of status hunger and physical hunger (508). Here, the “influences of digestion” are “soothing,” both literally to Nettie's child and figuratively to Lily, whose “old life-hunger” has come to represent the “happiness” of belonging to an intimate human community (510, 518). When Lily takes the child into her arms, she feels “as though the child entered into her and became a part of herself” (510). Such imaginative empathy and communion is new to Lily, and it replaces altogether her former distaste for working-class people and scenes. The result is a “surprised sense of human fellowship” that “took the mortal chill from her heart” (511).

But rather than embrace the experience of community, Lily ends by “resisting Mrs. Struther's anxious offer of companionship” (511).¹⁵ The tension Lily experiences between her desire to become a part of the unified community she sees in Nettie Struther's kitchen and her seeming resistance to that community recalls Kant's belief in the constant tension between the noumenal world of the spirit and the phenomenal world of “instinctual and sensual drives” and “the laws of strict causal necessity” (Abrams 199). Through Kant, then, romanticism is made to assort nicely with naturalism, so that Wharton's heroine can experience subjectivity, even if all she has become free to realize is that she will never have the fulfillment of belonging to an intimate human community. Reflecting upon the image of Nettie's “nest” hung “safely over the abyss,” a nest built out of “the fragments of her life,” Lily realizes that “there had never been a time when she had had any real relation to life” (516, 517). Lily's vision of her lonely future has overtones of naturalism, but gestures beyond:

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 indeed miserable to be poor. … But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years.

(515)

Certainly, this image of the futility of human will in the deterministic context of time and chance may be powerful enough to endorse an entirely naturalistic reading of the novel. But Lily is not just any uprooted growth: she is “some rare flower grown for exhibition” (512)—a materialistic perversion of Kant's integration of the state of nature and the state of art (Abrams 206). Such a creature as Lily has no roots in the real soil of human relatedness, because she was never grown in that soil to begin with. But Lily's romantic “sense of deeper empoverishment,” made possible by her one brief moment of sublime transcendence, points at least to a vision of potential human relatedness, so that in her final chloral-induced hallucination, her sense of belonging—“she had felt herself alone, and now the sense of loneliness had vanished”—though merely imaginative, is no less real for being so (522).

That such an elusive medium as imagination should prove so powerful a force in Wharton's novel should come as no surprise, even to those who read it as thoroughly naturalistic. Wharton reflects that in the very process of writing the serial parts of The House of Mirth, she had tried to follow “Tyndall's brooding phrase, trying to ‘look into it till it became luminous’” (A Backward Glance 206). The mysticism of the phrase seems odd coming from Tyndall, a proponent of the scientific agnosticism of Darwinians Huxley and Spencer. But then, one of the great influences on the agnostic thinkers of the late nineteenth century was, of course, Immanuel Kant. So perhaps it is the desire to find something romantically luminous, a vestige of tragedy in what was becoming the sordidness of modern life, that results in the final moments of the novel, in which Selden believes that he can “now read into that farewell all that his heart craved to find there; he could even draw from it courage not to accuse himself for having failed to reach the height of his opportunity” (532). Like E. M. Forster's Margaret Schlegel at the death of the “downtrodden” Leonard Bast,¹⁶ Selden, able to appropriate Lily's own language of wholeness only because she had once involved him in the “spell” that validated it (502), can at least imagine that “if the moment had been fated to pass from them before they could seize it … it had been saved whole out of the ruin of their lives” (532). If Margaret can pronounce the victory publicly and dramatically—“Let Squalor be turned into Tragedy, whose eyes are the stars, and whose hands hold the sunset and the dawn” (328)—Selden can affirm privately, less confidently and yet with a more profound sense of intimacy, that it has been “this moment of love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which had kept them from atrophy and extinction” (532). The passage echoes Wordsworth, who praises the power of love to redeem the spirit from death:

By love subsists
All lasting grandeur, by pervading love;
That gone, we are as dust.

(14.168-170)

Lily may be dust, but her sacrifice enables Selden to become the triumphant constructing subject, whose “meaningful jargon of ultimacy” enables him to narrate Lily's death in terms that suggest that for him, at least, “the world is being understood rhetorically, at second remove” (Weiskel 36). And thus for Wharton, literary naturalism becomes not an end but a means through which rhetorically to construct a moment of romantic resistance to materialistic culture. Even though Wharton appears to submit Lily to a predetermined doom throughout the novel, she ultimately redeems her heroine from an utterly naturalistic fate. For Wharton, the possibility exists for human beings to become more than social animals—to become, that is, self-aware. And in The House of Mirth, the individual triumphs, if only for a moment, affirming the power of the human imagination to construct its own redemption in a modern world whose often dehumanizing systems of social and material existence have long since lost the capacity to redeem.

Notes

1. Critical discussion of the economics of class in The House of Mirth overlap with studies of its economics of gender. For a thorough account of the former, see Yeazell, “The Conspicuous Wasting of Lily Bart.” Also see Wolff's discussion of Lily as a commodity in A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. For feminist/social approaches to the novel, see Showalter, “The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton's House of Mirth”; Ammons, Edith Wharton's Argument with America; Lindberg, Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners; and Benert, “The Geography of Gender in The House of Mirth.”

2. Like the novels of more affirmed naturalists—Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser—Wharton's novels address the fate of the individual in what Paul Civello refers to as the “central post-Darwinian crisis”: “the collapse of humanity's conception of an order in the material world, an order that had formerly imbued the world with meaning” (2). Depicting a world devoid of meaning, naturalist novelists often “subscribe[d] to a strict determinism” in which the human being “was just one material phenomenon in a universe of material phenomena” (Civello 2). In the naturalist's world, individuals often struggle to assert their personal will in opposition to forces beyond their control.

3. Pizer explains that literary naturalism has been considered largely the “province of male authors.” Further, he suggests that Wharton's novels do not fit the mold, in that they are set not in society's lower but in its upper classes. Notable exceptions include Wharton's Summer (1917) and her smaller novel Ethan Frome (1911), both of which depict those outside the city's leisure class in arguably naturalistic settings. Pizer goes on to say that, beyond the issue of class, naturalism in its mature stage focused on the “theme of constraint” as it appears in even the highest levels of society (132).

4. However, as I will argue in the case of Selden, the moment of “transcendence” he experiences at the end is made possible only in a rhetorical sense, and only because he has remained too trapped in the clayey mold of the material to recognize the sacrifice Lily has made for him before she actually gives her life.

5. Pizer does allow that Lily's hallucinatory moment in which she imagines that Nettie Struther's baby is lying beside her represents a triumph “achieved in the imagination” (“The Naturalism” [245]). But this does not seem to represent for Pizer ultimate transcendence, since Lily does not escape her fate of death. As I will argue, Lily does indeed transcend in other ways.

6. The influence of Immanuel Kant on Wharton's conception of Lily's fate can be traced most meaningfully here through the influence of his neoplatonic philosophy on the nineteenth-century agnostics, whose works Wharton read with enthusiasm when they were introduced to her by her friend Egerton Winthrop (A Backward Glance 94). M. H. Abrams, in Natural Supernaturalism, to which I will refer later, traces the line of influence from the early pagan neoplatonists through Kant, Hegel, and Schiller to the romantic poets.

7. See The Prelude, book 12, in which Wordsworth expresses his chief aim in neoplatonic terms:

   This Narrative, my Friend, hath chiefly told
   Of intellectual power, fostering love,
   Dispensing truth, and over men and things,
   Where reason yet might hesitate, diffusing
   Prophetic sympathies of genial faith.

   (44-48)

   Here and elsewhere, Wordsworth points to a transcendent realm of truth, love, and faith that has the power to unite things that have fallen into division and multiplicity in the material world.

8. In their essay “The House of Mirth and Edith Wharton's ‘Beyond!” Janet Gabler-Hover and Kathleen Plate find one source of Wharton's belief in the possibility of human transcendence in her admiration of Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, in which he urges man to live beyond “herd animal Morality” (305). One need only recall the current of ideas flowing among German and English romantic poets and philosophers to see how Wharton, through her reading, was as profoundly influenced by romanticism as she evidently was by the more contemporary scientific and literary naturalism.

9. I defer to Abrams, who explains Kant's belief that to be civilized involves a continuous tension, which can never be completely resolved, between the categorical demands of the noumenal ego, or moral will, which assumes absolute freedom, and the inescapable limitations of the phenomenal ego, or man as a part of nature, and therefore subject both to his instinctual and sensual drives and to the laws of strict causal necessity (Abrams 199-200).

10. Elizabeth Ammons insists on Lily's objectification through the tea ritual, pointing out that, more than just art, Lily's social skill is work: “Lily is hard at work using the skills of her trade—charm, sex appeal, solicitude—to entertain and give pleasure to other people … and it is work in Wharton's opinion, however degrading” (31).

11. As Cynthia Griffin Wolff explains, “Lily's mother nurtures Lily's beauty—first as the visible sign of the family's station … and finally as its one remaining asset. Lily is trained to become a decorative object” (116).

12. That Selden's motives for loving Lily are elementally patriarchal is arguable, and this argument adds to my point that Lily's society devours her from all sides. It is something quite primal, quite animalistic in Selden that causes him to reject Lily like “the last drop of poison from his blood” (307). The moment of passing in the dark street in front of Trenor's house forces Selden to confront the raw reality of Lily's sexuality, when his previous appreciation of her had been based on intellectual appraisal and aesthetic idealization. Gabler-Hover and Plate argue that, rather than overcome his “bondage to social convention” (360) by accepting the truth about Lily's circumstance, Selden tries once again to regain his view of her “merely as a social instance” (House of Mirth 305).

13. To be sure, Lily is “an artist” when it comes to her outward, material identity (105), but her spiritual self must be constructed by means with which she is not as deft.

14. Paul's second letter to the Corinthians contains his best-known use of the veil as a metaphor for human inability to comprehend truth (see especially 3:11-18). Later Christian writers, influenced by Plotinus (AD 205-70) and subsequent pagan neoplatonists, neoplatonized early Christian teachings, so that Paul's “the vail shall be taken away” and similar “for now we see as through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” (2 Cor. 13:16; 1 Cor. 13:12), have become associated with nineteenth-century romantic neoplatonism in both Christian and not necessarily Christian ways.

15. Elaine Showalter points out that Lily's moment of change in Nettie Struther's kitchen suggests that “real change … must come from outside the dominant class structures” (16). She argues that the “most radical theme” in the novel is Lily's “growing awareness and, finally, her merger with a community of working women” (17). In my reading, Lily's immediate resistance to that community suggests that she cannot, in effect, merge with the working class.

16. See May 54. For a discussion of Margaret's pronouncement as pragmatic redescription of modern “Squalor” into “Tragedy,” see May's third chapter, “Neoliberalism in Rorty and Forster,” 53-71.

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