[In the following essay, Riegel points out anti-Semitism in The House of Mirth, but notes that Wharton herself does not take an explicit stance in the novel.]

Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth deals with the complex clash of old New York society, with all its inherent traditions and conventions, with the fast emerging and very wealthy new capitalist society. The new society, which Wharton termed the “invaders,” aspired to social acceptance by old New York. Although the old society resisted the incursion of this new society, “in a dollar world the biggest bank balance was bound to win.”¹ Together with large amounts of money, a man needed the right woman to complete his move into the leisure class of late nineteenth-century America: “unless the rich man also accumulate[d] a woman, all his money and property and power d[id] not extend beyond the narrow mercantile world into the social realm, into the society at large. Therefore for a rich man, ownership of a woman [was] not a luxury, but a necessity.”²

Lily Bart, the central character in the novel, has many of the complementary qualities that would allow a man to move into the realm of the highest level of New York society. In Rosedale's words, it takes two things to move up in society properly: “money, and the right woman to spend it.”³ Previous social position matters less than the amount of money a person has. As a result, a newcomer such as Rosedale is in a position literally to buy himself a wife with the right social standing, and so elevate himself to her status.

Despite the familiarity of this game, its players were subject to disdain and contempt from members of the society they aspired to join. The contempt came not from the prostitution of women (as Ammons notes, “marriage as a patriarchal institution [was] designed to aggrandize men at the expense of women” and was a normal practice, the only option for women who wished to maintain their social standing⁴), but from the intrusion of mercantile values into a leisure society. Rosedale, as a complete newcomer and outsider, is the object of much scorn in The House of Mirth. Some of the contempt for him can simply be attributed to the general dislike for the brash up-and-comers; it is also clear that a significant amount of dislike for Rosedale as a figure is based on his racial background. Through his business accomplishments, Rosedale manages to rise rapidly in the world of New York. Nonetheless, class transcendence meets with particular opposition, in the form of anti-Semitism, when the person moving upwards is Jewish. If anti-Semitism is an important contributing factor in old New York's dislike of Rosedale, however, that does not fix Wharton's authorial position on the question of anti-Semitism. Mary Ellis Gibson notes Wharton's ambivalent position on the conflict between different social levels, arguing that all “groups are subject to Wharton's critical scrutiny, though none has monopoly on evil or good.”⁵ As a result, it becomes possible to put Wharton in the category of the “many Americans [who] were both pro- and anti-Jewish at the same time.”⁶

An archaeological metaphor from Wharton's autobiography indicates her concern for her changing New York: “what I could not guess, was that this little low-studded rectangular New York … would fifty years later be as much a vanished city as Atlantis or the lowest layer of Schliemann's Troy, or that the social organization which that prosaic setting had slowly secreted would have been swept to oblivion with the rest.”⁷ Here as in her fiction, Wharton “balances the sweep to oblivion against deadly uniformity, irrevocable change against the slow ‘secretion’ of social organization.”⁸ In The House of Mirth, Wharton presents the conflict between the old and the new, within which Lily finds herself caught in similarly archaeological or ethnographic terms.

Gibson uses the term “ethnologist” to describe the role of Wharton in her New York novels, noting “the complexity of Wharton's understanding of social symbolism” manifested in her presentation of social conflict.⁹ Appropriating the language of anthropologist Mary Douglas, Gibson compares Wharton's fast-rising capitalists to what Douglas calls the “strong grid” form of social organization, exemplified by the

“Big Man” system of New Guinea. In this type of social environment, “each man has to muster support ad hoc for every venture”; “success breeds,” and the leader finds his influence increase with each success; eventually he may become a law unto himself and in the process the old “lineages and ancestral shrines” become less meaningful to others.¹⁰

Wharton's “Big Men” play the stock market; through their vast newly acquired wealth they are able to encroach upon the older established element of New York society. “A complex dynamic of social change” is created as Wharton “brings these two systems—or two cosmos—into conflict with each other. The aristocrats of yore give way before the Big Men (and, to some extent, the big women) of the new America.”¹¹

Some characters, like Gus Trenor, straddle these two categories. “Not a parvenu, to be sure, but a man who runs his establishment on speculation rather than on the proceeds from a settled income,” Trenor exemplifies the leech-like, or parasitical, relationship between those members of society that are relatively well established and those that are on the rise.¹² In exchange for tips on the stock market, established members give up-and-comers access to society. As Trenor says about Rosedale, “The man is mad to know the people who don't want to know him. … The people who are clever enough to be civil to him now will make a mighty good thing of it” (p. 65). Although his reference to “giving away half-a-million tip[s] for a dinner” (p. 65) may be an exaggeration on Trenor's part, it illustrates the interdependence of these two groups. As Trenor complains to Lily, “‘The women all think—I mean Judy thinks—I've nothing to do but to go down town once a month and cut off coupons, but the truth is it takes a devilish lot of hard work to keep the machinery running’” (p. 65). To Trenor, Rosedale literally becomes “a chap that it pays to be decent to” (p. 74).

Other characters use the up-and-comers in this fashion; Jack Stepney takes Rosedale to “the fashionable restaurants,” giving him exposure to the upper level of New York society, but “Rosedale undoubtedly paid for the dinners” (p. 16). The narrator makes it clear that this kind of reciprocal behavior is an integral part of the maintenance of social standing in New York. Up-and-comer Welly Bry, like Rosedale, passes on tips to get the upper crust to dine with him: “the duchess added with her noble candour: ‘Mr. Bry has promised him [Lord Hubert] a tip, and he says if we go he'll pass it on to us’” (p. 161). Duchesses and lords, certified aristocrats, should not need to play at this game, but this mutual leeching constitutes upper-level society. To know people such as Welly Bry and Rosedale, who are performing the miracle “of growing richer at a time when most people's investments are shrinking” (p. 95), is to be in “possession of … [a] precious commodity” (p. 65), as Lily reflects in the novel's indirect discourse.

Rosedale figures most prominently in the game of reciprocal leeching. Wharton characterizes him in terms typically applied to Jews in late nineteenth-century American history. Jews, in popular stereotype, “represented both the capitalist virtues and the capitalist vices. On the favorable side, the Jew symbolized an admirable keenness and resourcefulness in trade. In this sense his economic energy seemed very American.”¹³ These characterizations apply not only to the capitalist Jew, but also to the gentile American capitalist, like Welly Bry. Yet it is Rosedale who is the target of their derogatory force.

From Lily's perspective, in Chapter 1, Rosedale is described as a “glossy-looking man” (p. 13), and elsewhere, by Gus Trenor, as being “fat and shiny” and having a “shoppy manner” (p. 65). Lily feels a “repugnance” towards him when he speaks to her at Jack Stepney's wedding; when she hears the name Sim Rosedale it “obtrudes itself on [her] thoughts like a leer” (p. 46). Gerty Farish displays a strong dislike for him when she wishes that “Lily were not so nice to Mr. Rosedale,” even though he has just shown that he can be generous by his donation of a thousand dollars to her Girls' Club (p. 105). Furthermore, the narrator's ironic contrast in describing his “smart London clothes” that fit “him like upholstery” (p. 13) clearly devalues Rosedale. In this same passage, Rosedale is again belittled as having “small sidelong eyes which gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac” (p. 13).

Racial stereotypes to describe Rosedale are used most heavily at the beginning of the novel, where he is described as “a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type” (p. 13); where Lily thinks of him as having “his race's accuracy in the appraisal of values” (p. 15); and where he is described as possessing the “mixture of artistic sensibility and business astuteness which characterizes his race” (p. 16). When Mrs. Trenor declares that Rosedale is the “same little Jew who had been served up and rejected at the social board a dozen times within her memory” (p. 16), there is little doubt that he has been passed up by the social board primarily because of his racial status. When the thought of the possibility of marriage with Rosedale crosses Lily's mind, she feels an “intuitive repugnance” for him despite years of “social discipline” with which she would under normal conditions, at the very least, have given him a fair “trial” (p. 16). When he does ask her to marry him and is rejected, Rosedale is described as being “disciplined by the tradition of his blood to accept what was conceded” (p. 141)—another reference to his racial background.

Wharton presents Rosedale as he would have been perceived by her contemporaries. Americans at that time often equated keenness in a capitalist with cunning in a Jew, and enterprise in a Jew was often seen as straying into the realm of avarice.¹⁴ The derogatory remarks by characters in The House of Mirth pass on the double standard of seeing things as virtues in Gentiles and vices in Jews. Without presenting a strong moral countervoice to the derogatory remarks of her characters, Wharton leaves herself open to charges of racism.

The interaction between Rosedale and Lily suggests that his image in the eyes of other characters is not necessarily a true representation of who he is. Through the gradual change in her situation, Lily is forced to reappraise her original position on Rosedale. In Chapter 5 of Book Two Lily feels that she “no longer absolutely despised him” (p. 188), and indirectly admits at another point that she really does not know him very well: “the personality of her benefactor remained mercifully vague” (p. 194). Although it may appear merciful to Lily at the time that she knows little about his personality, as she discovers more about him he becomes a more endearing figure. When she sees him playing with Mrs. Fisher's daughter, Lily cannot help “but notice a quality of homely goodness in his advances to the child … something in his attitude made him seem a simple and kindly being compared to the small critical creature who endured his homage” (p. 195). Although a large part of her renewed interest in Rosedale is due to her altered social status, an important factor is that of his “gradually attaining his object in life. … Already his wealth, and the masterly use he had made of it, were giving him an enviable prominence in the world of affairs, and placing Wall Street under obligations only Fifth Avenue could repay” (p. 188).

That Rosedale has managed to attain such a high level of acceptance in society, without the aid of a well placed wife, is a sign that he is being perceived in a different light. His place in society seems to be solidifying, making him appear more respectable. Close to the end of the novel, in their last meeting, Lily begins to perceive “mitigating qualities … of a certain gross kindliness, [and] a rather helpless fidelity of sentiment” in Rosedale. Lily realizes that there is something underneath “the hard surface of his material ambitions” (p. 234).

The question remains as to whether Wharton can be considered guilty of fostering anti-Semitism in The House of Mirth. The key to evaluating this question lies in placing Rosedale in the larger context of the novel's social conflicts. His role as an up-and-comer, a Big Man, grasps the contradictions and the social symbolism of this group of society as a whole. In this context, one can ascribe anti-Semitic tendencies to some of Wharton's characters, but not with any certainty to Wharton herself.

Notes

1. Louis Auchincloss, Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Novelists (New York: Dell, 1965), p. 25.

2. Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton's Argument with America (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 33.

3. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, ed. Elizabeth Ammons, (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 139. Hereafter, page references to this edition will appear in the text.

4. Ammons, Wharton's Argument, p. 26.

5. Mary Ellis Gibson, “Edith Wharton and the Ethnography of Old New York,” SAF, 13 (1985), 60.

6. John Higham, Send These To Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984), p. 101.

7. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933), p. 55.

8. Gibson, p. 57.

9. Gibson, p. 58.

10. Gibson, p. 59; see Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 89-91.

11. Gibson, p. 60.

12. Gibson, p. 60.

13. Higham, p. 100.

14. Higham, p. 101.