SOURCE: Orr, Elaine N. “Contractual Law, Relational Whisper: A Reading of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.” Modern Language Quarterly 52, no. 1 (March 1991): 53-70.

[In the following essay, Orr discusses the world of The House of Mirth as a contractual milieu.]

“But you belittle me, don't you, … in being so sure.”

—Lily Bart¹

“Must the multiple nature of female desire and language be understood as the fragmentary, scattered remains of a raped or denied sexuality? This is not an easy question to answer.”

—Luce Irigaray²

While most critics agree that Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth is a novel about negotiation, about bargaining and compromise, interest and disinterest, exchange and profit, few have commented upon this thematics except as a thoroughly negative one, reflecting the author's political “bleakness of vision” in regard to “a totalizing system” (the marketplace) from which there is no escape.³ Indeed, Wai-Chee Dimock argues that “the power of the marketplace” in Wharton's novel

resides … in its ability to reproduce itself, in its ability to assimilate everything else into its domain. As a controlling logic, a mode of human conduct and human association, the marketplace is everywhere and nowhere, ubiquitous and invisible. Under its shadow even the most private affairs take on the essence of business transactions, for the realm of human relations is fully contained within an all-encompassing business ethic.

(p. 783; italics mine)

Many readings of Wharton's masterpiece are similar in their suggestion that what the author portrays is a totalizing or all-encompassing system that is reinscribed through the presentation of a heroine who has no choice but self-destruction (either through capitulation or through resistance). No disruption of the dominant is possible, these readings seem to argue, because in the ruthless marketplace Lily Bart inhabits, she is doomed to become either the buyer or the seller. Thus, according to Roslyn Dixon, “Lily's choices are reduced to absolutes: she can survive by compromising the ideal, or she can honor the ideal by sacrificing herself.” Along similar lines, Robin Beaty writes that Wharton “could not bear to see [Lily] compromise by choosing only one of the prizes to which she aspired,” and Nancy Topping Brazin writes that “as in all money-centered, nonandrogynous societies, every choice offered Lily requires that she compromise her dignity and self-respect.” Finally, Elizabeth Ammons claims that in the end “Lily has been forced … to give up all ambition for independence; the social system has triumphed.”⁴

Such readings echo the critical notion that human beings are caged in the “prisonhouse of language,” constructed by the Law of the Father (a linguistic and spiritual condition that feminists argue is more constricting for women than for men). The most we can do is to deconstruct the text, the Law, by pointing to its own moments of weakness, that is, to the ruptures and breaks in the text that threaten its apparent seamlessness. Such a critical approach leads, as Theodore B. Leinwand argues, to a preoccupation with literary subversions (and their containment).⁵ But “power is mobile, vulnerable, and incomplete” (Leinwand, p. 478), and characters who negotiate may bring about needed or desired change by engaging with power, not merely by subverting it. “This program is obviously not flamboyant,” Leinwand (p. 480) admits, but it allows us to see agency where we thought we had seen only oppression (and perhaps had hoped for rebellion).

For example, while Lily thinks of herself as existing within a “great gilt cage” (p. 51), and while the bulk of the text confirms Dimock's analysis of the operations of power in the marketplace, it is important for us to notice, as Lily does, that the cage is open, if only slightly ajar. The conflicts in which she is engaged may not be as fated or predetermined as previous readings have suggested. Thus, to conclude that “the house of mirth has no exit” (Dimock, p. 791) or that the novel presents only the alternatives of insurrection or quietism is to overlook a significant detail of the novel. I want to offer a reading that pays attention both to the cage and to the possibility of negotiation with/in the open door.⁶ As Selden correctly notes, “So many alternative readings [of Lily and her situation] were possible” (pp. 202-3).⁷ In my reading, the image of the cage does evoke the overwhelmingly contractual world Wharton creates. Her characters are caught in the system of exchange and profit and in the web of written law and language in which open negotiation, which could actually alter the rules and change the “game,” is a mere sham. But the novel also sketches an open space (not an escape but a means of imaginative coming and going), a “dreamed-of” or “whispered” space of relational and empathetic problem solving, where the equivocal language of question and discovery is spoken and people negotiate “closely” (that is, in close physical proximity) with one another to make change.⁸

Indeed, in my reading of character negotiations in Wharton's novel, I find that the model of open negotiation—negotiation as exploration and interrelation rather than as bargain, trade, and profit—helps us understand the novel's enigmatic ending.

Contractual negotiation dominates in the monetary world that Wharton creates. Here human interaction is adversarial, competitive, and self-interested, and negotiations are undertaken by opponents in the hope of securing a gain at the least possible cost. The metaphor of the marketplace dominates, and the buyer-seller relationship appears to be the model of human communication. Money is the compelling symbol of human transactions, survival of self is paramount, and a model of scarcity (for example, Lily's dwindling field of eligible men) instills fear in the characters.⁹ Participants in these business transactions avoid compromise until the last (consider Lily's final “willingness” to marry Rosedale). One's own point of view is righteously guarded; indeed, one views oneself as a consistent and “closed” subject (here Selden is a good example), who is sure of one's position while highly critical of any others. In the end, Lily learns that, in truth, she was closed off from negotiations from the moment she voiced her doubts and differences. As Catharine A. MacKinnon remarks, “Only women who are most like the male norm are advanced or [admitted]” as equals in the marketplace.¹⁰ Finally, Lily is a negotiated object, not a negotiator in the male-dominated field she seeks to enter.

Relational or empathetic problem solving, on the other hand, is the alternative pattern of negotiation whispered in Wharton's novel through Lily's desire for friendship and her dawning awareness of the need for emotional, and not merely monetary, connections. An authorial comment on Carrie Fisher, one of a few female friends who do not desert Lily, illustrates this other economy, which challenges the efficacy of a purely self-interested negotiating practice. “While she actively gleaned her own stores from the fields of affluence, her real sympathies,” we are told, “were on the other side—with the unlucky, the unpopular, the unsuccessful, with all her hungry fellow-toilers in the shorn stubble of success” (p. 239). Within the text, “nearness” (sometimes physical holding and sometimes a mental awareness of identification with others) and “openings” (open doors, relaxed boundaries, questions, and invitations) evoke this different way of relating. Unlike models of scarcity, the model of empathetic negotiating assumes that many possibilities are inherent in thinking creatively about new alignments of needs with resources. Participants are more prone to view themselves (as Lily does) as being influenced by their context and as changing through dialogue with others.¹¹ Luce Irigaray's account of female sexuality is useful in describing the difference Wharton whispers: “It is really a question of another economy which diverts the linearity of a project, undermines the target-object of a desire, explodes the polarization of desire on only one pleasure, and disconcerts fidelity to only one discourse” (p. 104). In this economy, we learn to examine the subtleties of complex issues through recognizing differences and speaking about them.¹²

Now the apparent conflict in The House of Mirth is the mere existence of a beautiful unmarried woman or, more precisely, the refusal of such a woman to marry. According to the commodifying nature of the marketplace, Lily must create herself as a woman-to-be-married and then as a married-woman. As she herself complains in the first chapter of the book: “‘Ah, there's the difference—a girl must [marry], a man may if he chooses’” (p. 10). At twenty-nine, she has become a burden to her friends, and as her means of support outside marriage have dwindled, she has felt smartly the need to attach herself to money. Selden's response to her observation introduces the conflation of monetary and matrimonial negotiations in the novel. Alluding to Lily's visit to Bellomont, he remarks, “‘Ah, well, there must be plenty of capital on the lookout for such an investment’” (p. 10). What is expected and apparently necessary is that Lily barter with eligible men (and with the women related to them) to secure a marriage in which she gets the most for her investment—her investment being merely and monumentally herself, her body, her beauty. The contract, once sealed will be permanent. Lily's problems will be solved, her situation “fixed.”¹³

Throughout the novel, Lily reveals her own participation in the practice of adversarial or self-interested negotiation. For example, in pondering a marriage with Percy Gryce, she thinks of “her beauty itself … not [as] the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence” (p. 46; italics mine). Thus Lily appreciates fixity and boundaries in the beginning (since she imagines herself an insider, an “experienced” negotiator) and wants to “lord it” with her friends (p. 47) once she makes a good marriage. And she appreciates a scarcity model, inasmuch as her incomparable beauty makes her a rare item worthy of a great price.

Unfortunately, adversarial thinking makes the participants enemies, since both Lily and the men with whom she negotiates hope to gain as much as possible while trading off as little as they can get away with.¹⁴ In this suspicious give-and-take, participants remain distant, cajoling others into believing that they are getting a bargain. Thus Lily must always be trying to marry while trying to pretend that she is not. And Selden must not alert her to his admiration but instead convince her of her moral inferiority, so that she will need him (though her neediness is also what makes her morally inferior from his point of view).

Indeed, adversarial negotiating is the primary structuring principle in Lily's world, making personal relationships, like business ones, a matter of investments, costs, and payoffs, of capital, calculation, and concession. Inherent in it, however, is a great contradiction for Lily Bart. For in negotiating with men in this way (and with women who represent men's interests) she will ultimately have to give (up) everything, most significantly her dimly perceived desire for nearness and for acceptance by others of her contradictory and blemished self. Indeed, she fails to create herself as a married-woman because she is still a “life-to-be-mothered”¹⁵ whose relational needs have not been perceived at all by those around her, least of all by her own mother, who prepared her for life by molding her into a consumable object. “In this race for power, [Lily] loses the uniqueness of her [multiple] pleasure” and identity (Irigaray, p. 104).

We see Lily's dawning awareness as she moves from her attempt at seducing Gryce to a more complex desire in her relationship to Selden. She knows that if she marries Gryce, she will be “the one possession in which he took sufficient pride to spend money on” (p. 46). Hoping to turn the system to her advantage, she plans “so to identify herself with her husband's vanity that to gratify her wishes would be to him the most exquisite form of self-indulgence” (p. 46). Wearing the jewels he purchases, Lily's body will reflect Gryce back to himself. She will be his mirror so as to preserve her inner core behind it. Her trick will be to appear to be his (to appear to be him). Though at first “the system might … necessitate a resort to some of the expedients from which she intended it should free her … she felt sure that in a short time she would be able to play the game in her own way” (p. 46; italics mine). In any case, it is only by playing the adversarial negotiating game that she can hope to “gain … the bright pinnacles of success” (p. 36). Here Lily is clearly one who bargains out of self-interest, since she has no real intention of caring about or for her future husband.

Lily, however, begins to realize the deadly costs of “playing” as she is about to close the deal, that is, just as she is on the verge of achieving her conquest by gaining a marriage proposal and then a marriage contract. At dinner on the evening that Selden arrives at Bellomont, she imagines her life with Gryce as “a long white road without dip or turning” (p. 52), an image suggestive of “writtenness” and closure. Frightened, she breaks her dates with Gryce the next day and walks with Selden up into the hills above Bellomont. During their conversation, several realizations come upon Lily at once. She becomes aware of desiring friendship and dialogue and of longing to go beyond the boundaries. Far from offering her these alternatives, she recognizes, Selden simply offers her the same solution all of her friends do: marriage, but in this case without money.¹⁶ The walk that takes them away from “the high-road” to a “path [that] wound across a meadow” (p. 60) first leads Lily to perceive, if dimly, something beyond the game of marriage negotiations in which she is engaged, but in the end simply returns her to it, that is, to the long white road. During their talk, Selden, who presents himself as a harmoniously whole self, unfettered and outside the contractual system, is actually revealed as exclusive and “closed.” He is, after all, a lawyer; he represents written rules and finalizing statements, and he reinscribes a system that requires Lily to deny her contradictory needs and impulses. His address to (not conversation with) Lily appears designed to force her to capitulate. She, on the other hand, briefly shows herself to be grasping after something else, a subject decentered and shifting, aware of her duplicity.

Under Selden's “admiring spectatorship” (p. 65), Lily first expresses her need as a need for success, to get “as much as one can out of life” (p. 64). But Selden immediately points out the paucity of this definition; for him, success “is personal freedom” (p. 64). Lily's response is both questioning and riddling. She wonders how one finds her way to this freedom and how one can be free from money without having “a great deal of it” (p. 65). Furthermore, she wonders if one might not have a great deal of money and use it differently.

But Selden's categories are fixed and pure. “Freedom” is not freedom to think creatively about money but is rather freedom from—“from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents” (p. 64), in other words, freedom from need. His thinking is exclusive. As Lily remarks, his republic of the spirit “is a close [read closed] corporation,” and he “create[s] arbitrary objections in order to keep people out” (p. 67). Selden bargains with her by creating distance and boundaries and by offering absolute terms. His success will be measured by the degree to which he silences her equivocal voice. No mixing of categories or overstepping of his moral boundaries is permissible. Feebly, Lily continues to resist: “‘But you belittle me, don't you … in being so sure [that the things I have chosen] are the only things I care for’” (p. 68).

Since Lily is not educated and can hardly hope to make a living on her own, Selden offers only the purity of her capitulation to obscurity and economic helplessness. He leaves little room for questioning and experimentation or for taking different opinions seriously.¹⁷ For while he moves back and forth between Bellomont and the more humble circumstances of his law practice, he never confuses his truth with the “ignoble” or “contaminated” truths of the well-to-do and of those who desire their life (Lily). Imagining that all of Lily's freshness and impulse are in actuality calculated, he leaves no room to think about what she might actually be saying if he took her at her word, if he trusted her. While she is profoundly aware of her duplicitous engagement in two systems of value—she candidly admits desiring the securities of money and spiritual freedom—Selden claims immunity from the human situation of multiple, even conflicting, desires and needs. Wharton indicates Lily's multiple nature in her first name, inasmuch as the lily, the flower of Lilith, can be traced to the triple goddess and the three-lobed lily or fleur-de-lis. And she clues us to Lily's conflicting character by juxtaposing Lily with Bart, the first name evoking the generous love of the goddess, of Mary, even of mother's milk, the second clearly suggesting calculated trade and barter. But the author's clues are lost on Selden, who reads only Lily's last name—surely a masculine confusion, since most women know that the only name that is truly theirs is the “given” name.¹⁸ When, earlier, Lily suggests that “what [she] want[s] is a friend” (p. 7), Selden apparently cannot imagine what such an arrangement would be: women are lovers or cousins, either goddesses or whores. Though she repeats herself—“You don't know how much I need … a friend” (p. 7)—he “calculate[s]” one or two replies but “reject[s] them in favor of the simple question: ‘Well, why don't you [marry]?’” (p. 8). In this negotiation, the door is closed.

The most crass examples of negotiation between Lily and her “suitors” occur, of course, with Rosedale and Trenor. Early on, the narrator muses (in a way that causes us to see Lily as a valuable object in her own thinking) that “Miss Lily Bart would have been money in [Rosedale's] pocket” (p. 15). Rosedale is more candid than Gryce or Selden about what he is after, telling Lily in his proposal: “I've got more [money] than I know how to invest; and now the money doesn't seem to be of any account unless I can spend it on the right woman. That's what I want to do with it: I want my wife to make all the other women feel small. I'd never grudge a dollar that was spent on that” (p. 169). Acknowledging that he knows Lily is not in love with him, Rosedale goes on, undaunted: “I'm just giving you a plain business statement of the consequences” (p. 169)—the consequences, Lily realizes later, not merely of what will occur if she marries him but also of what is likely to happen if she does not.

Rosedale actually puts himself on the same side of the table (metaphorically speaking) as Lily, a point I will come back to. He certainly wants to negotiate a marriage with her. She will bring beauty and class to the arrangement; he will bring the money. But what he really wants is to enter a contract with Lily that will allow them as allies to negotiate adversarially with the social world. He imagines that as they rise, others will fall. There is limited room at the top, both at the top of the capitalist market and at the top of the social ladder. Scarcity is the principle at work in Rosedale's mind as he imagines other women getting smaller and more distant as Lily becomes larger and more set apart, like a rare and perfect diamond.

If Selden's idea of success is the pure renunciation of money, Rosedale's idea depends on a full embrace of it. Both agree, however, that Lily's chief function is to reflect their own settled views. Between each of these men and this woman, negotiation is a cynical playing out of predetermined ends. At the point of a solution (the moment a marriage contract is signed), her voice is consumed in his. Indeed, the law of marriage is female silence. Lily becomes the unblemished sign (of wealth or of masculine morality).

Lily's relationship with Trenor most clearly exemplifies her participation as merchandise in the contractual negotiations of the novel. Desperate for money, she flatters him into rescuing her by investing her small allowance. She does not understand exactly how Wall Street works, but she also does not question Trenor when he sends her first one-thousand-dollar dividend. She simply believes that the asset of her beauty playfully bestowed in a friendly smile or soft word will keep Trenor at bay. Lily has not yet realized that more will be required of her; her body fully and sexually given is the equivalent, in this case, to Trenor's favor.

When Trenor finally confronts Lily in an attempted rape, she and we become wholly familiar with the negotiated terms. Declaring that he “didn't begin this business,” Trenor continues: “It was too easy for you—you got reckless—thought you could turn me inside out, and chuck me in the gutter like an empty purse. But … that's dodging the rules of the game … you've got to pay up” (p. 140). Trenor does not want payment in kind. Lily's money is not equal to the debt she owes him. Only her sexual surrender (given or taken) is equal to the investment of male capital. This is the “exact nature of the transaction” (p. 111). What Lily does not understand or understands only now, when payment is demanded, is that all of her negotiations lead exactly to this climax, with its objectification of her totally compromised self and its conflation of all of her needs into a masculine erotics in which sex and money are the same thing. In the setting of the dining room or the garden, Lily may safely move behind the man's adoring gaze (at himself). But alone with a man who requires that she pay up, she becomes frozen in the one image he assigns her. Her equivocal, fluctuating self, which can “follow … an undercurrent of thought while … appear[ing] to … sail … on the surface of conversation” (p. 20), is wholly silenced and commodified.¹⁹

Throughout the novel Lily runs from her own objectification through contractual exchange. Within Wharton's text, the negotiated game of marriage is worse for women than for men, but men too are horribly compromised. As we have seen, no character's needs are honestly understood by anyone else. Perhaps the only character to voice the plethora of needs that we recognize as human—the needs for touch and nearness, for affection, for being of real use, for questioning, for community—is Lily. Indeed, she resists the silencing of her needs until the end and in so doing is herself an open door, an avenue for rereading.

Early on, Lily appears to believe that Selden knows the way out, but, as we have seen, his in and out are the same where she is concerned. Later, she perceives, if incoherently and vaguely, that there is a way out even for her, but more significantly a way out for all of them (for us), in other words, a different way of being and relating. Her choice in regard to Bertha's letters is a practice of this different way of negotiating. Destroying them, she opens a window onto another world. Her action, often understood as a self-sacrificial gesture undertaken on Selden's behalf, I read as her most creative and self-sustaining action in the novel. Since the letters, like money, come between people, transforming human beings into exchange values, Lily's action (destroying them) re-creates Bertha, Selden, and herself as people who might care about each other, however imperfectly. Destroying the incriminating written word, Lily opens the possibility of dialogue, becoming the text's whisper for community. In contrast with Dale Bauer, then, who suggests that Lily is unable to incorporate “dangerous speech” (gossip) into her language, I find that her actions and half-spoken desires (with Selden and Gerty, for instance) open a space for readers' dangerous “misreadings” of the novel, for our expanding the open model of negotiation that her almost-silenced voice whispers.²⁰ What Lily has the audacity to believe and what a feminist reading can recuperate is her belief that one can negotiate openly, admitting one's real needs, as well as confessing one's blemishes or shortcomings to others.

Even in Lily's death we can begin to read something besides containment. It is true that her moral choice to burn Bertha's letters is totally lost on Selden, so that within the novel itself it appears that there is no trace of her resistance and thus that the marketplace triumphs. But, of course, there are traces, and these are left upon readers. Only if the text is imagined as finished, rather than as remaining open to readers' negotiations (and hence to the process of its own invention),²¹ can one argue that there is no escape or that the novel “closes” upon Lily. But we need not privilege the dominant, the loud, the large. If instead we look closely, we may discover that an opening remains even in the end.

Wharton's multiplication of Lily's needs, for example, like Lily's equivocal voice and her contradictory names, is one way in which she hints at another pattern of relating. Beginning in chapter 1, Lily shows herself to be one who needs to be free of her studied self; she wants to be spontaneous and to risk. In the same chapter, she speaks of her need for a “room of her own.” And on the outing with Selden, she reveals her need to be heard, her need for conversation. Throughout the novel, but especially after she is disowned by her aunt, she needs a home, a place where she is expected and welcomed. Finally, toward the end, the narrator tells us that “to be of use was what she honestly wanted” (p. 200). Thus to read Lily as simply caught in a nonnegotiable struggle between spiritual and monetary goals is to overlook (as most of the other characters do) the many other needs and desires that she voices in the novel. Indeed, we might say that Lily's equivocation throughout the narrative is an attempt to make others (other characters, ourselves as readers) accept her imperfections, in other words, see her as human and as incomplete, unfinished.

Lily, for example, needs “holding,” a term I borrow from Sara Ruddick, who defines it as “a characterological protectiveness.” By holding, one seeks to “reconcile differences rather than to sharply accentuate them. Holding is a way of seeing with an eye toward maintaining the minimal harmony, material resources, and skills necessary for sustaining a child in safety” (Ruddick, pp. 78-79). While some may suggest that what Lily needs is to mature, to become independent—indeed, many readings of the novel suggest that Lily's failure is precisely that she does not become autonomous—empathetic negotiation assumes that the need for holding and closeness is not a need we outgrow. To be near another is to think of her or him as intricately and intimately bound up with oneself. And yet it is to see the other not as a mirror of one's own needs and desires but as an other self. Irigaray describes “nearness” as “so close that any identification of one or the other, and therefore any form of property, is impossible. Woman enjoys a closeness with the other that is so near she cannot possess it, any more than she can possess herself” (pp. 104-5). Without accepting Irigaray's fairly essentialist categories (man and woman), I borrow her notion of nearness as a state of being that resists ownership or commodification. The experience of close identification is, I think, what Lily really wants when she tells Selden she needs a friend. Unfortunately, just as she begins to reveal her needs, Selden sees her “definitely divided from him by [her] choice” (p. 205) to stay with the Dorsets, and Bertha Dorset herself cuts Lily off.

Earlier, near the end of book 2, Lily runs to Gerty in desperation after escaping from Trenor. Confessing her duplicitousness to her friend, she also turns to Gerty that night in bed and asks her friend to hold her. “Gerty silently slipped an arm under her, pillowing her head in its hollow as a mother makes a nest for a tossing child” (p. 160). Later in the novel, the memory of Lily's request evokes empathy again in Gerty, suggesting that expressions of need can lead to care rather than to exploitation and that nearness does not lead to the loss of one in the other:

She had not forgotten the night of emotion when she and Lily had lain in each others' arms, and she had seemed to feel her very heart's blood passing into her friend … what had passed in the secrecy of her own breast seemed to resolve itself, when the mist of the struggle cleared, into a breaking down of the bounds of self, a deflecting of the wasted personal emotion into the general current of human understanding.

(pp. 257-58; italics mine)

While it would be hard to argue that Lily and Gerty's relationship ever becomes mutually empathetic and caring, the embrace and Lily's need for nearness cannot be lost on us. The embrace, imagistically described as “heart's blood” passing from one to another, suggests that a prerequisite to human problem solving is an awareness of similar needs. Unlike the male gaze that frames Lily from afar and reveals only surface appearances, Gerty's holding of Lily allows a contact between them that is deeply intimate. In this holding, Lily is known distinctly in her struggle, and she is known to be like the one who holds her. The embrace, unlike the gaze, is an opening of two people to each other and a window into the other world that Wharton's novel evokes. Gerty, then, learns from her intimate contact with Lily that Selden could show his sympathy in “other ways” (p. 258). Indeed, if we follow Gerty, who now sees Lily as needing friendship and an “open” hearing, we will not, like Selden, “return … to the conventional view of her” (p. 260).

As Lily toils in the workroom, sewing spangles on hats, the gossip that she overhears from the other women offers an underworld view of the marketplace above. There is little sympathy here except when Miss Kilroy touches Lily on the arm and suggests that she go home and get some rest. That touch and the kindness communicated are compared with Gerty's: “It was a long time since real kindness had looked at [Lily] from any eyes but [hers]” (p. 275).

Perhaps the strongest whispering of Lily's need to negotiate differently and the most critical “opening” in the novel comes at the very end, in scenes that critics have long found problematic. These are the moments when Lily discovers “human fellowship” (p. 304), first when she holds Nettie's baby (p. 304) and later when she imagines the child beside her (p. 310). Most readers have found these passages weak, a compromise on Wharton's part in which Lily's complexities are simplified and the situation of the working class is unconvincingly grasped as the only alternative to the glamorous world that Lily has lost (Beaty, for example, suggests that Lily is “reduc[ed] to a sentimental heroine” [p. 272] and wonders if Wharton has not “compromised her usual commitment to ‘high art’” [p. 274]).

But these moments are weak only if we view Wharton's novel as successful because of an unswerving commitment to realism.²² Its seemingly traditional sentimentality clashes disconcertingly with the strongly ironic tone of many passages. Wharton's sudden “femininity” appears out of character, revealing our own assumptions about the writer and her “masculine” or Jamesian style. But these moments deserve rereading. The image of mother and child—twice evoked when the writer compares the human mother with the bird whose “nest [is] built on the edge of a cliff” (p. 307)—is a complex, contradictory, and heavily freighted one for most readers and certainly for most feminists. Wharton could not have been unaware of the risk of employing it as the last salient image of her narrative. Perhaps the move away from a careful modernist blending of genres to heavy-handed sentimentalism is itself an invitation to dialogue, to difference.

For it is the contradiction, the double-voicedness of the image, the daring overwriting of the beautiful Lily, aloof and exotic, with the heavy material child—of Lily with child—that invites reflection. Our uneasiness with this final image, I suggest, has much to do with our own desire to avoid a double-voiced, equivocal, and shifting play of genres and conventions. Rather than simplify our reading with this sentimental ending, Wharton complicates it. Catherine Belsey has written that “the unconsciousness of the work … is constructed in the moment of its entry into literary form, in the gap between the ideological project and the specifically literary form. Thus the text is no more a transcendent unity than the human subject.”²³ Through discord between “the conscious project and … the disruptive unconscious,” “a new process of production of meaning by the reader” is possible (Belsey, p. 57). The sentimental disruption of the realistic is such an opportunity or opening for a new production of meaning by readers, just as Nettie's invitation to Lily to hold the child and Lily's request that Gerty hold her are invitations among the characters for knowing something besides what is dominant in their world, for embodied knowledges.²⁴ The mother-child embrace invites us to reconceive Lily Bart as Edith Wharton's whispered knowledge.

In the literal moment of holding the baby, “the burden in [Lily's] arms seemed as light as a cloud … but as she continued to hold it the weight increased, sinking deeper, and penetrating her with a strange sense of weakness, as though the child entered into her and became a part of herself” (p. 304). Clearly, individual boundaries are overstepped here, as they are when Gerty “enter[s] into” Lily and becomes part of her. Lily apprehends the child's “weakness,” its need, as a sensual fact. Later that evening, she dreams of “Nettie's child … lying on her arm: she felt the pressure of its little head against her shoulder. She did not know how it had come there, but she felt no great surprise at the fact, only a gentle penetrating thrill of warmth and pleasure. She … hollow[ed] her arm to pillow the round downy head” (p. 310). She awakens once, afraid she has lost the child, “but … she was mistaken—the tender pressure of its body was still close to hers: the recovered warmth flowed through her once more” (p. 311). In this second passage, the heaviness is gone; indeed, the description, especially at the end, is more romantic.

Leaving Nettie's house, Lily is “surprised [by the] sense of human fellowship” (p. 304). In her friend's kitchen, holding dominates, not simply in the mother's relationship to her child, in her cooing mother's talk—“You precious. … Was it mad with mommer for getting its supper so late?” (p. 302)—but in the network of community relationships momentarily glimpsed. When Nettie first finds Lily in the park, she encourages her to come home with her, since “it's [her] husband's night-shift … and the friend [she] leave[s] the baby with has to step upstairs to get her husband's supper” (p. 301). Lily, too, has been engaged in a fundamental struggle to make a living, but without a network of intimate friends.

Both passages that show Lily with the baby are remarkable for their sexual suggestiveness in a novel that almost entirely avoids sexuality. Only here, in the female-female alignment of woman and girl-child, does Wharton introduce the “thrill of warmth and pleasure.” Twice the child's body is described as “penetrating” Lily's.

The passage is a complex sign for our reading, not a simple one, as has been assumed. In deconstructing the male-female duality that generally structures the thinking of the novel and our thinking about human sexuality, the text points to a more refracted reading of its structural, thematic, and character negotiations. The allusion to the female friend who stands in for Nettie in relation to her child likewise whispers a fundamental relationship beyond the gender principle.

Holding the child, Lily feels safer than she has felt throughout the novel. Indeed, this is only the second “holding” in a narrative that depicts men and women as radically separate creatures who meet only to exchange money, information, or sex. The people we have met are frighteningly unattached to one another's bodies.²⁵ Instead, attachments are distanced by money, based on the paradigm of buyer and seller. Employing bodies in embrace, mixing the image of mother and child with the language of sexuality at the end of the novel, Wharton opens the cage door and invites us to overstep the boundaries of author/reader, realistic/romantic, law/space, male/female, ending/beginning.

While Cynthia Griffin Wolff reads Wharton's ending as entirely ironic,²⁶ I choose to read the mother-child image sentimentally (which Beaty recommends) in order to take seriously the moral possibilities that Wharton's imbalance, her (embarrassed?) whisperings of nurturance and nearness, makes possible. If Nettie's relationships (with child, spouse, friend) are read as potential sites for a re-creation of society, then “the transactions of the marketplace seem peripheral.”²⁷ Here Lily does “conceive … the possibility of revolving about a different centre” (p. 251).

I agree with Patricia Meyer Spacks, who suggests that “the constant process of speculation” within Wharton's novel produces many “misinterpretation[s].”²⁸ While Spacks does not engage in a reinterpretation of the infant scenes, she does appear to recommend rereading the novel from the perspective of a paradigm other than the marketplace. Wharton invites, I think, no less than a paradigm shift at the end (now a multivocal beginning) of the novel through the blending of genre expectations. The image of Lily with child shatters the holistic claim of the marketplace (breaks the “law” of the realistic genre) and requires the reader to imagine the space between mother and child (the space of the sentimental, where likeness is preferred to difference, closeness to separateness, popular to rarified) as the barely whispered of the text. The care implied by this space is what we may read here: the world consists not of discrete individuals and objects but of relationship. Lily with child reflects the human need to be needed, not in exchange but in embrace, in other words, the need to be “held” in one's weakness and not in one's strength. Suddenly, Wharton's “weak” ending reverberates with new possibilities, since in the dialogue between marketplace and mothering metaphors, both images (and the characters associated with them) are changed. We might, for example, reread Carrie Fisher (a mother in the marketplace) as occupying a more central position in the novel than she has been thought to before. While she pays attention to boundaries, she knows they are fictions and moves back and forth from old money to new. Her flexibility and the care she shows in attempting to find a place for Lily suggest that the marketplace can be entered and revised according to values other than capitalist ones. We might even reconsider Rosedale, who, as I noted above, does see himself as sitting on the same side of the table as Lily and who continually embarrasses her by wanting to be near her. He admits his “goneness” on her and expresses his desire so effusively that he often looks ridiculous. He cannot help making love to Lily, he says, and thus concedes his own human “weakness” or Lily's touch upon him.

Rather than reinscribe Lily's death in our reading, we might speak the multivalenced word that she longed to speak to Selden but could not, and that is the word of friendship, the word pointing to the space of holding, where negotiation is an embrace of difference and problem solving is gracious intercourse in which people hear each other into being and thus come into being themselves. In this reading, Lily is not a character who “lives” (and dies) in the house of mirth but emerges instead as the opening offered to readers to imagine back upon and beyond the text. We can “now read into that farewell all that [our] hearts craved to find there” (pp. 316-17), in its manifold complexity.

Notes

1. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Bantam, 1986), p. 68. All quotations from the novel are from this edition.

2. “The Sex Which Is not One,” in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), p. 104.

3. Wai-Chee Dimock, “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth,” PMLA, 100 (1985): 783.

4. Dixon, “Reflecting Vision in The House of Mirth,” Twentieth Century Literature, 33 (1987): 218; Beaty, “Lilies That Fester: Sentimentality in The House of Mirth,” College Literature, 14 (1987): 271; Brazin, “The Destruction of Lily Bart: Capitalism, Christianity, and Male Chauvinism,” Denver Quarterly, 17 (Winter 1983): 97; Ammons, Edith Wharton's Argument with America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 37.

5. “Negotiation and New Historicism,” PMLA, 105 (1990): 477-90.

6. My method is akin to Patricia Yaeger's in her book (Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988]), since her purpose is to argue that women's lexicon has not been completely restricted by male writers (said differently, language has not had the power absolutely to restrict women's identities). Women writing as women have not been entirely silenced. Yaeger proposes that as we read key metaphors in women's texts, we will learn about women's productivity in language, that is, about how women have opened the cage and used language inventively and in emancipatory ways.

7. Or as Beaty notes, “The evidence of the novel suggests several options” (p. 271).

8. The distinction that I make between adversarial negotiation and empathetic problem solving and that I develop more fully below is similarly made by feminist lawyer Carrie J. Menkel-Meadow. “Toward Another View of Legal Negotiation: The Structure of Problem Solving,” UCLA Law Review, 31 (1984): 754-842; “Exploring a Research Agenda of the Feminization of the Legal Profession: Theories of Gender and Social Change,” Law and Social Inquiry: Journal of the American Bar Foundation, 14 (1989): 289-319.

9. Menkel-Meadow observes that, in what she calls “adversarial” negotiation, “it is assumed that the parties must be in conflict and since they are presumed to be bargaining for the same ‘scarce’ items, negotiators assume that any solution is predicated upon division of the goods. In the language of game theorists, economists, and psychologists, such negotiations become ‘zero-sum’ games and the bargaining engaged in is ‘distributive’ bargaining. Simply put, in the pure adversarial case, each party wants as much as he can get of the thing bargained for, and the more one party receives, the less the other party receives. There is a ‘winner’ in the negotiation, determined by which party got more” (“The Structure of Problem Solving,” p. 765).

10. Ellen C. DuBois, Mary C. Dunlap, Carol J. Gilligan, Catharine A. MacKinnon, and Carrie J. Menkel-Meadow, “Feminist Discourse, Moral Values, and the Law—A Conversation,” Buffalo Law Review, 34 (1985): 23.

11. “The inclusion of two voices in moral discourse, in thinking about conflicts, and in making choices, transforms the discourse” and the participants (Gilligan, in DuBois et al., p. 45).

12. Menkel-Meadow writes that “more flexible forms of dispute resolution, such as mediation, provide the opportunity for greater party participation, more flexible solutions, and more contingent arrangements in the case of long-term relationships. Proceedings that recognize both the multiplicity of parties and the subtleties of complex issues characterizing many legal matters today might be structured in totally different ways” (“Feminization of the Legal Profession,” p. 315).

13. While Lily certainly negotiates with women as well as men in the novel, her “exchanges” with them are primarily over marriage and thus merely reflect her negotiations with men. Her relationships with Gerty and Nettie, and to some extent with Carrie, are the only exceptions. I discuss these below.

14. According to Dimock, the very rich learn to obtain their goals without giving up anything. Thus, within the logic of contractual negotiation, as with collegiate and professional sports, the winner may take all. As Menkel-Meadow writes, in adversarial negotiations “there are only two possible and mutually exclusive outcomes for each party—victory or defeat” (“The Structure of Problem Solving,” p. 765 n. 34).

15. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon, 1989), p. 51.

16. Selden does acknowledge that he has nothing else (nothing apart from marriage to a wealthy man) to offer her. However, his lack of empathy remains; he expects Lily stoically to accept his advice without offering her his friendship. Since he cannot be her husband, he feels that he can give her nothing.

17. As Menkel-Meadow notes, “Adversarial negotiation processes are frequently characterized by arguments and statements rather than questions and searches for new information” (“The Structure of Problem Solving,” p. 778).

18. Barbara Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), pp. 542-43.

19. As Catharine MacKinnon has written, “If one enters a world in which the standard is already constructed according to an implicit but suppressed male referent, you have a marketplace structured according to a male biology, a male-based series of social expectations” (p. 23).

20. See Bauer's chapter on Wharton in Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), esp. p. 119.

21. Wolfgang Iser argues that the process of coming to meaning in reading occurs at those points, or “gaps,” in the narrative where the reader must make a connection or fill out a relationship. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). For a theoretical discussion of this move in relation to feminist theory see Patrocinio P. Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading,” in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 31-62.

22. Carol Miller suggests, as I do, that Wharton mixes styles and genres in the novel. “‘Natural Magic’: Irony as Unifying Strategy in The House of Mirth,” South Central Review, 4 (1987): 82-91.

23. “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text,” in Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture, ed. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 56.

24. For feminist discussions of knowledge, knower, and known, all of which reflect upon women's knowing in terms of embodiment, see Mary Field Belenky et al., Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Carol Christ, “Embodied Thinking: Reflections on Feminist Theological Methodology,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 5 (1989): 7-15; and Mary E. Hawkesworth, “Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth,” Signs, 14 (1989): 533-57.

25. Carol J. Gilligan's studies (reported in In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982]) have shown that women find pictures of people in isolation more frightening than pictures of people in close physical proximity; men, on the other hand, find pictures of embrace and close physical proximity more threatening. Thus my reading of the distance between people in the novel as frightening may be a gendered response.

26. A Feast of Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

27. Virginia Held, “Feminism and Moral Theory,” in Women and Moral Theory, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987), p. 116.

28. Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985), p. 178.