[In the following essay, Michelson observes the influence on The House of Mirth of the “well-made play.”]

It happens that in the unfolding of Edith Wharton's career, she wrote The House of Mirth in the midst of several ventures into stagecraft. In 1902 Edith Wharton published a thoughtful, competent translation of a play called Es Lebe das Leben by the then-fashionable Ibsenite Herman Sudermann, a play now faulted for mixing pat naturalism with trite histrionics. While she spoke of this translation (which sold well for a number of years) as a mere exercise, the text itself reveals that she took pains to cater to an American audience, and she showed great interest in the mounting of the play for its brief, poorly received Broadway run.¹ In 1906, while The House of Mirth still held its own as a national best-seller, Edith Wharton joined forces with Clyde Fitch, the master of well-crafted stage hits, to transform her novel into a highly emotional drama, a venture which fared no better than The Joy of Living, as she called her translation of Sudermann's play.² Her special interest in the stage goes back somewhat further: R. W. B. Lewis notes that she was busy with two or three plays of her own, and with writing drama criticism, as early as 1900 and 1901.³ These were sideline excursions in Edith Wharton's career, and they do not suggest that she was, like Henry James, a devotee of Ibsen or in any real sense a playwright manqué. But this much they do suggest: that The House of Mirth was built by a mind with a wide apprenticeship in literature and culture, a mind with special interests in the problems and possibilities of theatre, and that there are especially good reasons for reading the book as the best works of Henry James and Joseph Conrad and her other famous contemporaries are commonly read, as responding not just to a particular social circumstance but also to large-scale aesthetic and moral questions of the time. Edith Wharton's fiction has yet to receive thorough treatment of this sort, and discussions of her best work are only beginning to recognize those moments when her novels approach problems of such complexity and scope. Considering how often James, Conrad, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser are hailed for their awareness of intellectual and cultural ferment, one wonders whether this side of Edith Wharton would have been recognized sooner had she not been a woman as well as a novelist. Only in the last dozen years has she emerged from the pigeonhole of the society author who responded to little more than James, her mother, her marriage, her self-education in interior design, her small dogs, and, of course, her place in a class system which kept her unhappy, entrapped, and on top.

Edith Wharton's education, especially in Continental literature, in popular drama, and in critical theory, was deep and wide-ranging; her letters and her non-fiction prose demonstrate how aware she was of the changing, self-questioning artistic and idealogical world she grew up in. In the last decade some connections between that world and Wharton's fiction have begun to appear: the problem at the moment is to locate the large, fundamental concerns behind these various echoes. Cynthia Griffin Wolff makes a persuasive case for The House of Mirth as a treatment of a major crisis in the decorative arts;⁴ taking a cue from the Sudermann translation, Richard Lawson speculates on the moral significance of the resemblances between the novel and major themes in Es Lebe das Leben.⁵ And looking at The House of Mirth as a piece of social criticism, readers have long spoken of the book in naturalistic terms, observing Lily's dependence on the social and economic greenhouse that sustains her and ultimately casts her out and the theme of human vulnerability to the cold winds of nurture and finance.⁶ One very large issue remains unexplored: the presence of stage drama in the novel, the design behind its generous helping of stagey effects, the confrontations, the displays of valor and hypocrisy, the intrigues, close-guarded secrets, lovers' interludes, the successive woes of the Harassed Female. The texture, the structure, and even the major props and “stage directions” of The House of Mirth all derive from the conventions of the “well-made play,” that highly contrived, enduringly popular outgrowth of Romantic drama. All these borrowings and variations are important in The House of Mirth because the novel is in a basic way about drama, about play-acting, about life lived on an unbounded and perpetual stage-set, and about the problem of understanding, either as a personage in the action or as an observing artist, where the stage-world and the posturings of daily existence end and where the real world and the real self begin. By observing this strong theme in the novel, and recognizing the structure which so handsomely sustains it, one gets a clearer sense of how other ideas and allusions in the book are reconciled with one another: the naturalistic leanings; the manifest concern with the arts (both dramatic and otherwise); the mordancy of the social satire; the wistfulness of the book as a meditation on what it means to be human in a modern world. It is a general response to an age when the place and purpose of literature, as both an aesthetic and a moral force, were being called into question from all sides.

To talk about The House of Mirth as a drama, and as a novel about drama, will lead of course into paradox: well-made plays characteristically moralize in obvious ways, yet this novel achieves, at crucial moments, a moral self-effacement and impartiality in its narrative stance, a neutrality much more reminiscent of Ibsen and naturalistic drama, which are commonly understood as rejecting the form and the pieties of the well-made play. It can be said, of course, that Ibsen and Shaw, like Sudermann, made extensive use of some stage clichés even as they attacked others and that no naturalistic work could possibly be free of the trappings of the well-made play. But the question will not go away because the problem of point of view is at the very heart of the novel. The House of Mirth is at once sentimental and naturalistic, conventional as well as radical in its structure, because it stresses the impossibility of devising any system, any “ism,” any scientific or moral or aesthetic approach to social reality or to the problem of locating or creating a genuine self, which means, consequently, the impossibility of creating a genuinely mimetic fiction. The House of Mirth, in other words, aspires to a “realism” of the rarest, highest order. By drawing upon both the realistic and the naturalistic modes, as well as upon the dramatic conventions which realists and naturalists of Wharton's time both scorned and borrowed, this novel opens up the full complexity of the problem of realism. Not simply in everyday social activity, but in human intimacy, in moments of self-awareness, in ideas of guilt and innocence, of love, even of literature itself as an interpretive and a moral act, The House of Mirth deeply and seriously questions the nature of the real.

Gassner and Quinn list concisely the major characteristics of the well-made play as it was raised to a perfect craft by Scribe and Sardou:

These features are (1) a plot based on a withheld secret that, revealed at the climax of the action, turns the tide in the hero's favor; (2) initial exposition that summarizes the story up to the raising of the curtain and slowly accelerating action and suspense sustained by such contrivances as precisely timed entrances and exits, letters which miscarry, mistaken identity, and qui pro quos (in which two or more characters, by unwittingly misinterpreting a situation in different ways, become hopelessly entangled); (3) a series of ups and downs, or gambits, in a battle of wits between two adversaries, suspense being initiated by the planting of clues to imminent events and by the withholding of information from certain characters; (4) a reversal in the action followed by a climactic, “obligatory” scene (termed the scène à faire by the critic Francisque Sarcey), representing, respectively, the nadir and the zenith of the hero's fortunes (the scène à faire is effected by the disclosing of the withheld secret); (5) a logical, credible denouement; and (6) a microcosmic repetition of the overall structural pattern in each act. … In the scène à faire some moral judgment is always implied, however trivial. That is, the characters are judged according to the standards of right and wrong acceptable to the audience.⁷

Reviewing The House of Mirth for some of these identifying traits, one can assemble a substantial list without much trouble. To begin with, the plot of the novel does revolve around a commonplace quid pro quo, the bundle of love letters from Bertha Dorset to Lawrence Selden, letters which Lily acquires through a case of mistaken identity, guards through good times and bad, keeps secret even from Selden until the very end, and finally casts into the fire of the very man to whom they belong, that scène à faire in which all this intrigue and noble silence culminate. And like many of their cousins in the well-made play, these letters, as a kind of fulcrum in the plot, require an extra measure of disbelief. How Lawrence Selden, with his unwavering disdain for superficial, greedy, aggressive people, could ever have managed an affair with the likes of Bertha Dorset is a question that the novel does not begin to answer, nor perhaps should it try to. Like Tosca's dropped handkerchief, the borrowed dagger of Patrie!, the thrice-stolen locket of Rosedale (the most durable and popular American well-made play of Edith Wharton's youth),⁸ or for that matter the packet of old love letters in Es Lebe das Leben, Bertha's letters must be taken for granted for to doubt their possibility is to refuse to enter the odd stage-like “reality” that surrounds Lily and which the novel presents as a basic problem of modern life.

The other self-evident borrowings from this kind of drama, and from the Romantic stage in general, give similar clues that the world of The House of Mirth is a world with an extra measure of stagecraft about it. Bertha herself, as Lily's scheming nemesis, turns up regularly to dash Lily's designs and drive her away from happiness; Gus Trenor and Sim Rosedale inflict other well-foreshadowed miseries on Lily as the Harassed Female: like Scarpia in Tosca, Gus tries to exploit Lily's desperation and finally corners her in his mansion; later on, facing social as well as financial ruin, Lily must meet Rosedale again, a sleek, engaging Mephistopheles, proposing an unholy alliance which would, as he declares at one point, “put you where you could wipe your feet on 'em.”⁹ But there is so much more: false accusations, bad-luck coincidences (the worst being Selden's discovery of Lily leaving the Trenor mansion alone, and in the small hours of the morning), star-crossed love, the outcast heroine wandering around in bad weather; even, finally, a death in a garret, capped at the last moment by a communion of spirit between the leading man, apparently chastened and wiser now, and the dead leading lady, who has sunk to the depths in fortune but mounted high in his esteem. None of these clichés comes exclusively from the nineteenth-century drama; they also flourish in works of Balzac, Victor Hugo, the Dumas; there is plenty of evidence that Edith Wharton was well read in French fiction. But these general resemblances between The House of Mirth and popular drama only point the way to a closer kinship of a more important kind.

To see how deftly The House of Mirth explores the intrusion of drama into daily life, one should recognize that the novel was divided into homogeneous “acts” well before Edith Wharton considered allying herself with Clyde Fitch to bring a play to New York. The book separates itself into four act-like episodes, each opening with a new, elaborately-detailed setting, each building steadily towards an emotional climax—in every case, a catastrophe for Lily—just before the implicit drop of the curtain and a shift to a new scene. This structure had nothing to do with the serialization of the novel; only one of the eleven installments published in Scribner's Magazine in 1905 breaks off at the same point as one of these episodes. The major setting of the opening “act,” the first eight chapters, is Bellomont; the subject is Lily as she sees herself, and as Selden sees her—as mistress of her fate, composed gameswoman in a world of gambits—and virtually all of the subsequent action reveals what an illusion this mastery is. Indeed, there is not much that Lily does right in these opening chapters. Caught coming out of Selden's bachelor flat by two people who will exploit that coincidence later, she lies awkwardly to Rosedale and deepens his suspicion of her integrity. On a railroad journey with a crowd of acquaintances, she makes ill-timed overtures to Percy Gryce, leaving herself wide open to Bertha Dorset, who happens along just when she can spoil everything. Lily oversleeps, misses church, offends the judgmental man she is scheming to marry; she caps it all by taking a long Sunday stroll with Selden (who is the fouth person in this episode to turn up at the worst possible time), making herself a prime target for gossip. Percy Gryce's engagement to one of the colorless Van Osburgh girls, the revealed secret of this first act, comes in the closing lines of Chapter VIII; the next page over, the second act opens with an abrupt shift in scene, characters, and action.

Lively, pastoral Bellomont gives way to the solemnities of Aunt Julia's New York townhouse, but the story which unfolds here is still one of coincidence, misunderstanding, and moral peril, the difference being that Lily's woes have lost their comic edge. Four times in the next five chapters Lily finds herself cornered, first by the charwoman demanding money for Bertha's letters, soon after by Gus Trenor in the depths of his mansion. Pursued by the “Furies,” as Lily, with her dramatic instincts, calls her own miseries, she spends the night in hiding with Gerty Farish, after which she returns home to face yet another Fury, in the shape of Aunt Julia herself, who has found out about Lily's gambling debts. This second act is nearly over, but the heroine has one more “perilous moment,” as Wharton herself calls it, to survive. Rosedale's insulting offer of cash in exchange for helping him climb to social heights—those same heights while Lily herself is in grave danger of losing—boggles her once more and shows her again the tenuousness of the world and the reputation she has taken for granted.

The act has opened with some urbane jokes (apparently from a point of view that Edith Wharton shares with Lily) at the expense of Aunt Julia and her quaint Victorian sentimentalities: the bronze cliché of the Dying Gladiator in the downstairs window, the preposterous theatrics of the seasonal housecleaning:

She “went through” the linen and blankets in the precise spirit of the penitent exploring the inner folds of conscience; she sought for moths as the stricken soul seeks for lurking infirmities. The topmost shelf of every closet was made to yield up its secret, cellar and coal-bin were probed to their darkest depths and, as a final stage in the lustral rites, the entire house was swathed in penitential white and deluged with expiatory soapsuds.

(p. 98)

By the end of this section, however, as a desperate, penitential Lily thinks of Selden as her one way to salvation, the narration has dropped its bemused mockery of extravagant emotional display. The hyperbole here is apparently straight:

But now his love was her only hope, and as she sat alone with her wretchedness the thought of confiding in him became as seductive as the river's flow to the suicide. The first plunge would be terrible—but afterward, what blessedness might come! She remembered Gerty's words: “I know him; he will help you”; and her mind clung to them as a sick person might cling to a healing relic. Oh, if he really understood—if he would help her to gather up her broken life, and put it together in some new semblance in which no trace of the past should remain.

(pp. 173-74)

All of this sets up the final blow of the episode, which also comes in the shape of a coincidence. In the last few paragraphs of Chapter XV, Lily happens to look at just the right sentence in the daily paper and sees that Selden has, without any warning, sailed off to the Caribbean. Another parting shock; another curtain drop; another jump to a different world.

In the longer third episode, set partly on the Riviera, partly in America, the repeating action changes qualitatively once more, from harassment to outright expulsion. Having drifted into the trap of serving as Bertha's patsy, Lily is barred from returning to the Dorset yacht, disgraced in the only world she has been bred to survive in. After humiliation, disinheritance, she returns home to the staggering news that Aunt Julia has changed her will and left her barely enough to cover her debt to Gus Trenor. The Gormers, good-natured arrivistes, provide refuge for a while until the return of the ever-dangerous Bertha routs Lily again. In the meantime, other people have their chance to reject Lily. Grace Stepney refuses her a loan against her inheritance, and soon after, when Lily finds herself driven to accept what she believes is Rosedale's standing marriage proposal, he flatly tells her that he is no longer interested, that she has lost her special appeal. Yet again the most painful rejection of all is held back until the very last page of the “act.” In Selden, Lily has hoped at least for compassion, if not salvation, but what she finds in his manner is nothing but the spectator's cool detachment:

The very apprehensions he aroused hardened her against him; she had been on the alert for the note of personal sympathy, for any sign of recovered power over him; and his attitude of sober impartiality, the absence of all response to her appeal, turned her hurt pride to blind resentment of his interference. The conviction that he had been sent by Gerty, and that, whatever straits he conceived her to be in, he would never voluntarily have come to her aid, strengthened her resolve not to admit him a hair's breadth farther into her confidence. However doubtful she might feel her situation to be, she would rather persist in darkness than owe her enlightenment to Selden.

(p. 281)

And so the scene closes with the essential misunderstanding intact, with Lily and Selden turning away from each other, with Selden presenting what Lily takes as an “impenetrable front” and Lily declaring, at the very last, “Don't give me up; I may still do credit to my training” to close an episode in which everyone in the only world that matters to her has already given her up. On the next page, the final act opens in a sweat shop.

The story of Lily's tawdry last days is mercifully brief because once Lily has been cast out of her world she is doomed, not merely by any prescription of realism or naturalism, but also by the rules of the well-made play. With the kind of structure adopted and enforced in the novel, it simply cannot close with any hint that a pragmatic, manipulative Lily can make some accommodation to life in lower regions. After her last, exquisite scène à faire, burning the letters in Selden's own fire, the novel ends quickly, with the book's second handsome and traditional tableau. The dead Lily does as fine a job playing Atala, or Charlotte Temple, or any other dead-but-exalted sentimental heroine, as the living Lily did in calling up the Mrs. Lloyd of the Reynolds portrait. Selden, as the lover-rescuer who has come too late, kneels by Lily's deathbed, “draining their last moment to the lees” and offering his final moral judgments about Lily Bart, himself, the hand of fate, and their own final “fleeting victory over themselves.”

It should be clear that The House of Mirth recalls the well-made play in its essential structure as well as in the shape and the atmosphere of its important scenes. But the mystery which must be faced, and which is in fact underscored in these very closing lines, is whether all of these familiar strains and all of this commonplace stage-drama make the novel a sentimental drama itself, a mockery of one, or something else altogether. This last scene is a prime example of Wharton's careful, cryptic narrative stance: Selden's elegy for Lily Bart is exquisitely ambiguous. It could be his final recognition of the truth; it could be the crowning rationalization of a selfish man with an unfailingly self-serving view of the world. Knowing nothing to the end of the letters that Lily has rescued for his sake, Selden takes final measure of his beloved in an oddly modern way, by going through her chequebook. He bases his last judgment of her on the indication that she has paid her debt to Gus Trenor:

That was all he knew—all he could hope to unravel of the story. The mute lips on the pillow refused him more than this—unless indeed they told him the rest in the kiss they had left upon his forehead. Yes, he could 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.

He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart; since his very detachment from the external influences which swayed her had increased his spiritual fastidiousness, and made it more difficult for him to live and love uncritically. But at least he had loved her—had been willing to stake his future on his faith in her—and if that moment had been fated to pass from them before they could seize it, he saw now that, for both, it had been saved whole out of the ruin of their lives.

(p. 329)

It is a little peculiar that Selden, who has preached to Lily all along about the triumph of character over circumstance, should now blame fate for all of their trouble, forgive himself for his own conduct, and conclude that “the moment” of their spiritual communion is somehow genuine and everlasting. Surely a cloud hangs over Lily Bart's apotheosis, but it cannot be said for certain that this passage, or any of a number of others like it in the novel, is fundamentally sardonic. If the “quintessence of Ibsenism” is indeed what Shaw described it to be, the power to present life without imposing a moral structure upon it, to offer webs of motives both obvious and obscure, consequences that are capricious as well as inexorable, and to avoid false models of guilt and innocence, fate and freedom,¹⁰ it is worth noting that in her own scrupulous silence on the moral problem in her own novel, Wharton's stance here is more suggestive of Ibsen, or perhaps of Balzac in fiction, than it is of her realist and naturalist contemporaries in Britain and America—Henry James included—whose moral presence in fiction is commonly much less oblique. The House of Mirth presents Lily through her own eyes and through Selden's, Selden through his own and Lily's, but rarely does the book comment on either of them, explicitly or otherwise, from anything like an omniscient stance. Wharton's few moral intrusions into her own narrative, in fact, come quite early, in Chapter X of Book I, for example, and even here her comments from on high are confined to Lily's tactical blunders, her underestimation of first Rosedale and then Gus Trenor:

Though usually adroit enough where her own interests were concerned, she made the mistake, not uncommon to persons in whom the social habits are instinctive, of supposing that the inability to acquire them quickly implies a general dulness. Because a blue-bottle bangs irrationally against a window-pane, the drawing-room naturalist may forget that under less artificial conditions it is capable of measuring distances and drawing conclusions with all the accuracy needful to its welfare; and the fact that Mr. Rosedale's drawing-room manner lacked perspective made Lily class him with Trenor and other dull men she knew, and assume that a little flattery, and the occasional acceptance of his hospitality, would suffice to render him innocuous.

(p. 115)

A page or so later there are a few similarly unassigned comments on Lily's insensitivity to Gus Trenor's evolving impatience; but thereafter the forthright observations of Wharton as Wharton all but vanish from the novel. Her intrusions from here on out are largely confined to describing settings or moving personages from scene to scene; and the story of Lily's undoing is told almost entirely through the eyes of Selden and Lily herself.

To understand Wharton's special kind of realism, and what this apparent moral silence and these borrowings from drama have to do with it, one must look closely at these two characters as characters in a realistic novel, as characters in a drama, as play-actors in the stage-world of “real life.” It makes sense to begin with Selden because his detached air and his constant presence in the story suggest the sort of moral center one might expect in either a drama or a conventional modern novel, and, more importantly, because he actually embodies that uncertain, transitional, drama-ridden world Lily Bart has such trouble understanding, and which Edith Wharton sought to represent so completely in translating it into fiction.

To Selden, of course, goes the award for sustaining the most pervasive metaphor in The House of Mirth, a metaphor which seems inevitable, given the social scene and the basic structure of the novel. Wedded as he is to the idea that all the world's a stage, that the duty of the very rich is to “live up to their calling as stage-managers” (p. 131), that Lily Bart is the most skillful of actresses and he himself one of the “critics on the fence” (p. 70), Selden's pose as a spectator at the stage drama of social life has brought him mixed fortune at the hands of the novel's critics. Praised by some as Wharton's ideal, déclassé man, the kind of self-possessed savior that she herself may have yearned after, he has elsewhere been grouped with those ineffectual males who drive women to misery and decisive action in some of Wharton's well-crafted early tales. Most recently, Selden has had some treatment as a genuine villain, reprehensibly obtuse about Lily's predicament, and doing great damage to her with a kind of criminal negligence.¹¹ The question of Selden's depravity can be argued either way, as the argument about Gregers Werle, whose more strident “claims of the ideal” work grosser mischief in Ibsen's The Wild Duck can be carried on as long as one likes. The source of this confusion about Selden seems to be this: that his response to Lily and to his world is varied but it is not profound; that he is not just the spectator he fancies himself but a dedicated follower of intellectual fashion, assuming a scientific, aesthetic, romantic, or naturalistic approach to life depending on his mood at the moment and depending on which stance will best keep the world at the emotional distance he insists on. In the hilltop scene, when Lily reveals herself to him with disarming candor and passion, Selden is forced out of his connoisseur's response to the fine actress; he resorts then not to the role of the lover or the confidant but to that of the scientist observing the frenzy of a human specimen:

Hitherto he had found, in her presence and her talk, the aesthetic amusement which a reflective man is apt to seek in desultory intercourse with pretty women. His attitude had been one of admiring spectatorship, and he would have been almost sorry to detect in her any emotional weakness which should interfere with the fulfillment of her aims. But now the hint of this weakness had become the most interesting thing about her. … It was the danger-point of their intercourse that he could not doubt the spontaneity of her liking. From whatever angle he viewed their dawning intimacy, he could not see it as part of her scheme of life; and to be the unforseen element in a career so accurately planned was stimulating even to a man who had renounced sentimental experiments.

(pp. 68-69)

A moment later, when Lily has recovered her own composure and has made a jaded remark about the corruption of young Ned Silverton, she finds herself faced with Selden the Romantic:

“Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths? Isn't it a sufficient condemnation of society to find one's self accepting such phraseology? I very nearly acquired the jargon at Silverton's age, and I know how names can alter the colour of beliefs.”

She had never heard him speak with such energy of affirmation. His habitual touch was that of the eclectic, who lightly turns over and compares; and she was moved by this sudden glimpse into the laboratory where his faiths were formed.

(pp. 70-71)

A glimpse is all that either she or the reader ever gets. “Eclectic” to the point of inscrutability, even incoherence, Selden's assessments of Lily, of society, of life, are always au courant, even if they do not add up, and however much one might suspect that he chooses every stance as an assurance of his own emotional defenses, as another excuse for doing nothing for anyone else, there is no way of knowing even generally where the poses leave off. His stirring speech on the “republic of the spirit,” a splendid piece of Victorian idealism, deftly ignores Lily's helplessness to follow him through the portals to this perfect territory. These could be the words of a sadist, or of an uncompromising romantic, or of a fool. The hilltop scene ends in a puzzle as to which Selden is the real one:

“Were you serious?” she asked, with an odd thrill of gaiety which she might have caught up, in haste, from a heap of stock inflections, without having time to select the just note.

Selden's voice was under better control. “Why not?” he returned. “You see I took no risks in being so.” And as she continued to stand before him, a little pale under the retort, he added quickly: “Let us go down.”

(p. 74)

Perhaps Selden's “republic” lecture and his love overtures have been an emotional lark at the expense of a desperate woman; or perhaps he has been showing too much of his true nature and must affect this cynicism in order to make good his escape from the consequences. Nothing that comes later in the novel will resolve the question either way. Selden keeps the exasperating habit of withdrawing into cool, abstract study whenever Lily is most in need of compassion, but eventually he does come to question his own coolness, to see that the jargon really does alter the color of the belief:

Every step she took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where, once or twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment; and the recognition of this fact, when its first pang had been surmounted, produced in him a sense of negative relief. It was much simpler for him to judge Miss Bart by her habitual conduct than by the rare deviations from it which had thrown her so disturbingly in his way; and every act of hers which made the recurrence of such deviations more unlikely, confirmed the sense of relief with which he returned to the conventional view of her.

But Gerty Farish's words had sufficed to make him see how little this view was really his, and how impossible it was for him to live quietly with the thought of Lily Bart.

(p. 272)

This is Selden's one moment of intense self-awareness. Not long after, the man who has chosen one detached pose after another for the observation of Lily kneels by her deathbed and wraps their fated love in a romantic shroud. Star-crossed lover in a sentimental tale, detached observer in a naturalistic fable, Selden is neither right nor wrong for either part; nor can one say that his incoherence undercuts his realization as a character. If anything, the opposite is true. An eerily modern creature, Selden does not know what to be, what to do. He is unaware even of his own confusion. His republic of the spirit is an ideological anarchy, for neither Selden himself nor Lily nor anyone else in the novel can locate, among all the timely poses and pronouncements, the genuine sentiments and motives of the man. His affair with Bertha Dorset, in this light, begins to make a kind of sense, if only as one more incongruity to go with all the others, in the personality of Lily's moral guide and best hope. Seen in such a way, the portrait of Selden does begin to resemble some other fictional men of his time: the literature of the eighties and nineties abounds with incoherent, irresolute males (Angel Clare, Winterbourne, Merton Densher, Marchbanks) whose failure to see themselves clearly is a danger to the women who love them. But as the self-styled spectator of The House of Mirth, Selden does much more than reveal a kinship to characters like these, or reaffirm, in his regular appearances and commentaries, that Lily Bart is trapped in a world of performance, a world with no apparent boundaries between the affectation and the truth. Selden is also in the thick of the drama as well as on the edge of it, and his refusal to stay either “on the fence” or in the show complicates not just Lily's life and her attempts to make sense of her life but the whole structure and meaning of the novel. Moving back and forth as he does between the role of the lover and the role of the observer, always shifting the ideological groundwork of his detachment, Selden creates a blur in the center of the book. He is an indistinct place-holder in the vacant spot where either the sentimental hero or the center of consciousness ought to appear. Constantly moving between sentimental involvement and ironic or scientific or aesthetic detachment, between loving, acting, spectating, Selden confounds the emergence in The House of Mirth of either a true sentimental drama or of any coherent “realistic” viewpoint, any morality more ethical or sensible than the empty one which Lily knows, any standards (rather than poses) by which she might finally be measured, any way of discerning a better, or simply a truer, world beyond the footlights of her own.

Lily is a much steadier performer in this stage-play world, but her luck with her interpreters has varied even more radically than Selden's. Having been read for years as a pitiable victim of circumstance, Lily is now understood, in a transformed social and political climate, as a clever and practical strategist who sees her world steadily and whole and who dies defying the servitude which it demands of her. Lily is undone, so the new reading goes, because she will not bow down to a dull, rich husband, and her rejection of Rosedale, Trenor, George Dorset, and even Selden are all taken as variations on the same gesture, all signs of a stubborn, noble resistance to compromise.¹² Whether or not there is a workable reading of Lily, the interpretive problem is still a large one: to sort out the essential Lily Bart from her various masks, to decide how well she understands herself and her own circumstances. Playing roles is, after all, Lily's profession, her life. Her extraordinary gift, as Selden points out to her, is her ability “to produce premeditated effects spontaneously.” With or without Selden's dubious help as a judge of character, telling the spontaneous from the premeditated Lily, the personality from the performance, is no easy task. Perhaps it cannot be done at all; perhaps one can only observe that Lily is an actress who spends her adult life creating without a self, an Invisible Woman.

Lily is well aware of her own shape-shifting to suit present company (Gryce, Gus Trenor, Aunt Julia, Bertha Dorset, and so on) and it is apparent that even in tight spots, when faced by ruinous humiliation, her instincts as an actress, for the hard and soft spots in her audience, do not desert her. These “perilous moments,” however, underscore the question. Gus Trenor confronts Lily in the empty house, accusing her of talking “stage-rot” to evade his demands. Gus is no drama critic, but what he means by “stage-rot” is fairly clear: Lily has been playing the sentimental heroine, the woman of virtue rising to grand indignation when propositioned by the villain. Brushing the pose aside, Gus lays out his expectations and drives Lily to one last desperate attempt to escape by trying what looks like one more bit of stage-rot. What is profoundly ambiguous here is the tone of the narration, a tone which becomes suddenly, breathlessly sentimental:

She stood silent, frozen to her place. The words—the words were worse than the touch! Her heart was beating all over her body—in her throat, her limbs, her helpless, useless hands. Her eyes travelled despairingly about the room—they lit on the bell, and she remembered that help was in call. Yes, but scandal with it—a hideous mustering of tongues. No, she must fight her way out alone. It was enough that the servants knew her to be in the house with Trenor—there must be nothing to excite conjecture in her way of leaving it.

She raised her head and achieved a last clear look at him.

“I am here alone with you,” she said. “What more have you to say?”

(p. 147)

This is a perfectly complex moment. When Lily falls out of the safer, lighter sort of costume drama, she falls straight into sentimental drama; for the actress herself, beyond the theatrical poses of the one world lie only the poses and premeditated effects of another. Much like Lily, the passionate narrative voice is itself a study in premeditated spontaneity, for Wharton has not lost her head, has not lost track of her emotional distance from her heroine. At moments like this, Wharton foregoes it, wipes out the distinction between Lily's perceptions and her own, raises her narration to a histrionic pitch because the double question at the heart of this scene must remain unanswerable, the question of where, in Lily's life, there is any respite from role-playing, an end to the stage-rot of social circumstance.

Lily's performance is desperate here, but performance it is nonetheless. What she has at stake, in fact, is the actress's role itself, the social pose which means everything to her. But even when that pose can no longer be hers, when Lily's costume-play is finally over and she is free to put performance aside, what comes from her is a sentimental tour de force. For sheer theatre, the impoverished Lily, in Selden's chambers for the last time, puts her show in the Trenor's house to shame:

“I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole? One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap!”

She paused again, trying to transmit to her voice the steadiness of her recovered smile. “There is some one I must say good-bye 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.”

(pp. 308-09)

Familiar as he is with Lily's performances, Selden is somewhat moved as the would-be lover, but as the critic on the fence, his suspicions are as usual aroused. On the first page of the novel he took Lily's hesitation as the “mask of a definite purpose”; now, in the midst of their scène à faire, he wonders “what was it she was planning now?” Neither in this encounter nor in Lily's supremely theatrical gesture of burning the letters on the hearth of the man whose honor she has saved does the narrative voice offer any help in sorting out the essential Lily from the instincts of the actress. Again the emotional distance from Lily is foregone for a moment, and the voice leaps, with apparent guilelessness, into full-blown sentimentality; but in the midst of all this high feeling, Lily comes upon an instant of genuine self-awareness. Having bid farewell to the social persona she has spent her whole life sustaining, Lily recognizes that the role is not so easily set aside:

She laid her other hand on his, and they looked at each other with a kind of solemnity, as though they stood in the presence of death. Something in truth lay dead between them—the love she had killed in him and could no longer call to life. But 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.

In its light, everything else dwindled and fell away from her. She understood now, that she could not go forth and leave her old self with him: that self must indeed live on in his presence, but it must still continue to be hers.

(p. 309)

If Selden's love is dead and gone now, one must ask when it was most alive, most intense. The answer is clear: it was in that splendid moment when Lily was caught up in playing someone else besides Lily Bart. Her tableau vivant recreation of Mrs. Lloyd is her moment of triumph in this book, at least as far as Selden is concerned. He suddenly sees before him “the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part” (p. 135). Lily is most Lily when she is Mrs. Lloyd, and not as Mrs. Lloyd really was but as transformed by an artist of the grand style. In the paradoxical world of The House of Mirth, an illusion of an illusion may be a breakthrough into truth:

In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel the whole tragedy of her life. It was as though her beauty, thus detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once met for a moment, and where he felt an overmastering longing to be with her again.

(p. 135)

There is no touch of irony in Selden's voice as he declares to Gerty that this Lily is “The Lily we know.” Neither Selden nor the narrative voice nor even the arrangement of events in the novel allows Lily to appear in a consistently sentimental or ironic or naturalistic light, which is precisely why words like “egoless” or “invisible,” words which may have their use in discussing characters in a simpler fiction, will not work in describing Lily Bart. Romantic drama and anti-romantic ironies take turns chasing each other through this novel; all those expressions of amused contempt (from Lily, from Selden, from any source) for contriance, for theatrics, for sentimental clichés only set the stage themselves for scenes which are very close to romantic drama and not the least bit satiric.

Rosedale's late observation about the interplay of theatre and life, that “there's a lot of truth in some of those old gags,” could be a motto for The House of Mirth, but Rosedale is no more help than anyone else in showing where the old gags leave off and the truth begins. The Wellington Bry house looks to Selden so much like a preposterous mise en scène that “one had to touch the marble columns to learn they were not of cardboard” (p. 132), but in it Lily has her finest hour. In its garden they share their most intense expressions of love, and the narration drifts, without a shred of irony, into stage directions which all but summon Oberon and Titania out of the wings:

Gravel grated beneath their feet, and about them was the transparent dimness of a midsummer night. Hanging lights made emerald caverns in the depths of foliage, and whitened the spray of a fountain falling among lilies. The magic place was deserted: there was no sound but the plash of water on the lilypads, and a distant drift of music that might have been blown across a sleeping lake.

Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together.

(p. 137)

To suggest that in posing its question about reality and realistic art, The House of Mirth both mocks and makes earnest use of conventional theatre is not to have any last word on the novel's complex narration. The point is to recognize just how intricate and urgently thoughtful this novel really is. As a book about the loss of the real, the loss of the self in a world of poses and sustained fictions, about the elaborate deceptions, self-delusions, personal and social rituals of modern life which blur and obscure their own limits, The House of Mirth deserves a place among the most ambitious American experiments in realism. Its structure embodies the most basic problem in the book, the same problem which confounds and destroys its major character. When the real world which other “realists” take for granted proves to be a world suffused with stage trickery, bewildered by its own stage-inspired conduct, when the people of real life see themselves as characters in a drama, take plays and play-acting as metaphors for experience and even try to make the experience fit the metaphors, then at some point major realistic fiction has a rendezvous with dramatic convention. It is to Edith Wharton's lasting credit that she led the way to that rendezvous. One stubborn accusation against her, that she failed to see the possibility of life beyond that affected world which she inhabited and despised, will never perhaps be put to rest. But this much is clear: The House of Mirth is very much about that failure of consciousness. The dilemma of “reality” itself, the problem of finding a way through all the pretenses of modern living, of finding a way even to the essential self, is woven deftly into the fabric of one of America's most genuinely ambitious modern novels.

Notes

1. See, for example, R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 171-72. See also Richard H. Lawson, Edith Wharton and German Literature (Bonn: Grundmann Verlag, 1974), pp. 16-18.

2. The text of the play, with a useful description of the Wharton-Fitch collaboration, is now available in The Play of the Novel The House of Mirth, ed. Glenn Long (East Brunswick: Associated University Presses, 1981).

3. Lewis, pp. 95-96, 109-10.

4. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 112-13.

5. Lawson, pp. 22-29.

6. See for example Blake Nevius, Edith Wharton (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1953), pp. 56-58.

7. John Gassner and Edward Quinn, Readers' Encyclopedia of World Drama (New York: Crowell, 1969), p. 911.

8. Rosedale played frequently in New York for nearly thirty years as the favorite property of the Lester Wallack theater company. Aside from the locket, the play involves disguises, wandering gypsies, attempted murders, and a missing heir. There is no resemblance between Simon Rosedale and anyone in the play, and no reason to believe that when Wharton borrowed the name for her character there was any special point to the allusion.

9. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Scribner's, 1933), p. 300. All subsequent references are to this widely available edition of the novel.

10. George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (Boston: Tucker, 1981), pp. 135-36.

11. See for example Wolff's argument for a vain, aesthetic Selden as the “final object” of Wharton's “sweeping social satire” (Wolff, pp. 124-32).

12. The strongest recent discussion of Lily as a woman defying her fate is Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton's Argument with America (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1980).