SOURCE: Restuccia, Frances L. “The Name of the Lily: Edith Wharton's Feminism(s).” Contemporary Literature 28, no. 2 (summer 1987): 223-38.

[In the following essay, Restuccia argues that part of Wharton's feminist position in The House of Mirth resembles later “humanist feminism” in its emphasis on the positive effects of femininity.]

“Lily … returned from her expedition with a sense of the powerlessness of beauty and charm against the unfeeling processes of the law.”

—Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Writing, space of dispersion of desire, where Law is dismissed.”

—Roland Barthes, Image Music Text

“This is to call for, then, a decentered vision (theoria) but a centered action that will not result in a renewed invisibility.”

—Nancy K. Miller, “The Text's Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions”

Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth is a feminist novel comprising—perhaps by definition—at least two feminisms.¹ The story may be read as a social fable that indicts fashionable, fin-de-siècle New York society for producing human feminine ornaments that it has no qualms about crushing. “In the first Donnée Book,” Cynthia Griffin Wolff informs us, “The House of Mirth went by the title ‘A Moment's Ornament’”; and Wolff herself pinpoints a “pernicious form of femininity”—“femininity as the art of ‘being’”—“as the subject of … The House of Mirth.”² Wharton's novel conveys the feminist social message that women bred to be frilly decorations run risks of various sorts of death. But even as Wharton puts forward this position, she seems to participate in the view that a firm position is unattractively masterful, and not female (or feminine), and that the suppleness even of indecision is preferable to the phallogocentrism demonstrated in The House of Mirth by one male suitor after another who attempts to capture, crystallize, or define Lily Bart. While femininity in the first reading is a liability, in the second it metamorphoses into a strength: “Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.”³

Wharton's feminism, then, reflects a tension very much alive in contemporary feminist theory: the apparent incommensurability of a social, humanist feminism that advances a position (in this case, women who yield to “‘the temptation to be a beautiful object’ … [are] destroyed by the consequences of that temptation,” as Judith Fetterley writes),⁴ and a more literary feminism that refuses definable positions for their masterliness, wishing to maintain perpetual openness and inaccessibility. Just slightly altering—perhaps generalizing—the terms, Peggy Kamuf states in “Replacing Feminist Criticism” that “feminist thought has yet to decide where to situate itself on the map of the known world's divisions—either in a canonical mainstream with its centers of learning and culture, or in an outlying and unexplored region.”⁵ And so one must beware of the inadequacy of even “feminist” readings of Lily Bart that stress single-mindedly her ontology as an art object, as they resemble tellingly (disturbingly) the Lily Bart perceived by Lawrence Selden—practitioner of the law. Like The House of Mirth itself, Lily Bart is duplicitous (that is, double), if not multiple (hence cannot be reduced to an art object); beyond this, Wharton identifies Lily's multiplicity, her complexity, as feminine, and inscribes such femininity in her writing.

In an early book on Wharton, Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction, Blake Nevius sets up a curious opposition, though one I wish at least provisionally to uphold: he reads Lily as the product of her environment (a common enough reading), and has trouble with her vacillation. He can't take it seriously: “Her vacillation between the claims of the spirit represented by Selden and the prospect of a wealthy marriage is never quite convincing.”⁶ To retain his image of Lily as a helpless, victimized product of her society, Nevius must discount her movement, her oscillation, which, even in dismissing it, he deprecates as “vacillation.” Like Selden, in my view, Nevius reduces Lily to “an essentially lightweight and static protagonist … [whose] fate, if not tragic according to any satisfactory definition of the term, at least impresses us with the sense of infinite and avoidable waste.”⁷ (Avoidable by society, not by Lily.) But her oscillation, which he certainly recognizes, threatens such an interpretation; hence Nevius must dismiss it.

Yet the first page of the novel reveals that Lily Bart is not constituted by, but stands “behind” (as Barthes says of the “Text”), “the limit of the doxa”: “Taking the word literally, it may be said that [Lily] is always paradoxical.”⁸ In the opening scene of The House of Mirth, Selden (like Nevius) is disoriented by Lily. He cannot fix her: “what was Miss Bart doing in town at that season? If she had appeared to be catching a train, he might have inferred that he had come on her in the act of transition between one and another of the country-houses which disputed her presence after the close of the Newport season; but her desultory air perplexed him” (3). Through a series of paradoxical perceptions, Selden apprehends Lily's disquieting duplicity: “She stood apart from the crowd, … wearing an air of irresolution which might, as he surmised, be the mask of a very definite purpose” (3); “There was nothing new about Lily Bart, yet he could never see her without a faint movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions” (3); “He knew that if she did not wish to be seen she would contrive to elude him” (3). Selden perceives Lily both as being moved about by others and as self-propelled.

But as soon as he finds himself by Lily's lithe side, strolling easily along Madison Avenue, Selden (like Nevius) lapses into regarding her as a one-dimensional artistic product of her social milieu: he takes “a luxurious pleasure … in the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair—was it ever so slightly brightened by art?—and the thick planting of her straight black lashes. … He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must … have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay” (5; my emphasis). (He then changes his mind, though not his basic conception, deciding that the “material” must have been “fine” in the first place.) Once Lily and Selden enter and settle into his dark, cheerful library, Selden articulates the theme that Blake Nevius considers to be uppermost: “She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate” (7). Are the remaining three hundred pages of the novel merely a dramatic unfolding of this early assessment of Lily? For one thing, that Selden makes it, and so readily, calls this possibility into question.

Two matters need focusing here. First: as early as chapter one, Lily has a feminist moment of lucidity and verbal expression. She makes plain her awareness of the sexism of her society by spelling out the difference between an insufficiently rich man and an insufficiently rich woman at that time: “‘Ah, there's the difference—a girl must [marry], a man may if he chooses.’” A man's shabby coat won't lose him a dinner invitation, but “‘a woman [Lily understands perfectly] is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself’” (12). We must note well: these are Lily's, not just Wharton's, words. If Lily is victimized, she is intelligent about it.

But, second, the question of Lily's victimization seems to me to represent a reductive approach. Wharton offers a proliferation of clues that Lily eludes triumphantly her male observers' attempted encapsulizations of her. Beginning and ending with scenes of Lily in the library, the novel encourages us to see Lily as possessing a literary consciousness or sensibility (“Lily, who prided herself on her broad-minded recognition of literature, … always carried an Omar Khayyám in her travelling-bag” [65])—as being literary, and therefore resistant to encapsulizations. (If there is irony in the Omar Khayyám reference, at least Lily's tastes tend toward the literature of pleasure.) Like a piece of fiction, she blends—by virtue of her capacity for doubleness—the natural and the artificial: she “had the art of blushing at the right time” (6); there is a “streak of sylvan freedom in her nature that lent such savour to her artificiality” (13); “Miss Bart … gave to the encounter the touch of naturalness which she could impart to the most strained situations” (228). White lies trickle from her lips: at the onset of the book, she fibs to Rosedale about visiting her dressmaker; she lies to Gryce on the train about finding the porter to order tea; and throughout the novel, she deceives consistently in subtle ways. Being literary, “Miss Bart had the gift of following an undercurrent of thought while she appeared to be sailing on the surface of conversation” (21). In a late tête-à-tête with Rosedale, during which she attempts to revive his marriage proposal and fails (Rosedale clears this up with his unequivocal “‘I had really no intention of renewing it’”), Lily comments, “‘I have no one but myself to blame if I gave you the impression that my decision was final’” (Lily's decisions are never final); and the narrator explains Rosedale's “puzzled silence” by remarking that “Her word-play was always too quick for him” (254). Likewise: “Her sense of irony never quite deserted her” (262). Wharton invites us to view Lily as an analogue of art, but we must take care in constructing the parallel, avoiding the legalistic tendency to ascribe clear, single meanings to things, to wash away their ambiguity—in this case to read Lily as an art object, or, in yet other words, as a work rather than a text.⁹

Perhaps Wharton best identifies her—or a female—version of Barthes's “work” in a climactic conversation between Gerty and Lily just after Lily is disinherited by her Aunt Peniston, at a time when Lily's reputation appears to have been sullied by rumors of her flirting too ambitiously with George Dorset. With altruistic intentions, naïve Gerty wishes to squeeze the truth out of Miss Bart: “‘The important thing—’ Gerty paused, and then continued firmly: ‘The important thing is that you should clear yourself—should tell your friends the whole truth’” (225). Lily's initial impulse in responding to Gerty is to point out that with women, “truth” takes a special form: the form of gossip, a reductive story, “an object that can be computed.”¹⁰ “‘The whole truth?’ Miss Bart laughed. ‘What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe. In this case it's a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset's story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it's convenient to be on good terms with her’” (226). (Lily's shrewdness extends to knowing that the credibility of gossip hinges on money and power.)

Determined to get beyond this impasse, Gerty inquires tenaciously: “‘But what is your story, Lily? I don't believe any one knows it yet’” (226). This is a conundrum for Lily herself. But Gerty persists: “‘I want you to tell me exactly what happened from the beginning’” (226). Being unable to articulate her origin, and equally unable to explain the impossibility of such an articulation, Lily's visceral response is to mock Gerty: “‘From the beginning?’ Miss Bart gently mimicked her. ‘Dear Gerty, how little imagination you good people have!’” (226). Lily's story, as they refer to it, and as Lily seems instinctively to comprehend, is an irreducible one. “Good people,” however, to do good, to make the necessary social corrections, must take firm positions, acknowledge specific truths, certain moral rights and wrongs, which, to Lily's way of thinking, results in the shrinking of a more “imaginative” (to borrow her term) apprehension of what constitutes an origin, a cause, an account of a person's life. Good people are merely gossips with more elevating reductions.

Kamuf translates Lily's thoughts into the terminology of feminist theory: “If … the empirical rectification of an empirical error can only result in yet another form of that error which is the possibility of a totalizing reference to an object—whether masculine, feminine or somehow both—then what is put in question … is perhaps the idea that feminist criticism can seek to define its object and still practice an effective critique of power structures.”¹¹ Lily resists Gerty's urge to totalize; and Wharton, it seems to me, shares Lily's complex vision of (female) self-identity, having in large part written The House of Mirth to counterpose gossip and the law, the female and male versions of reductive storytelling, with a textual rendering of Lily Bart's life. Unlike gossips and lawyers, Wharton refuses to produce another penetrable story of a woman's experience.

And unlike Selden and even Gerty, at least one character in the book shows an appreciation of Lily's doubleness, multiplicity, elusiveness. Carrie Fisher recounts, to Selden, Lily's experience with an Italian Prince—“‘rich and the real thing, [he] wanted to marry her; but just at the critical moment a good-looking step-son turned up, and Lily was silly enough to flirt with him while her marriage-settlements with the step-father were being drawn up’” (189)—to illustrate the general principle about Lily that “‘she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic’” (189). Lily, of course, not only slips away from the fixity of marriage with this Italian Prince, but with Selden, Dorset, and Rosedale. She seems dedicated to a certain freedom from definition: Paul Morpeth “had been immensely struck by Lily's plastic possibilities” (237); “It was her exquisite inaccessibleness, the sense of distance she could convey … that made it most difficult for [Rosedale] to give her up” (254). Perhaps, as Judith Fetterley suggests, “she cannot project herself as a wife, she cannot imagine life after the plunge because she cannot finally face the price she would have to pay for it: acceptance of a system which makes of her an object and treats her as a possession.”¹² Lily's elusive behavior gives rise to questions such as Kamuf's about the value of working within already existing patriarchal institutions: “If feminist theory can be content to propose cosmetic modifications on the face of humanism and its institutions [in this case marriage], will it have done anything more than reproduce the structure of woman's exclusion in the same code which has been extended to include her?”¹³ Carrie Fisher too seems to position herself within this feminist dilemma. Unlike Blake Nevius, she takes pleasure in Lily's oscillation, which keeps her free. Carrie attempts to offer Selden a less phallogocentric conception of Lily: “‘Sometimes, … I think it's just flightiness—and sometimes I think it's because, at heart, she despises the things she's trying for. And it's the difficulty of deciding that makes her such an interesting study’” (189).

But Selden takes no cues from Carrie Fisher, even though his own experience with Lily corroborates Carrie's sense of Lily's irreducibility. Engaged in his own “particular study of Miss Bart” at dinner on the Riviera, he characterizes her as “matchless,” undoubtedly oblivious to the aptness of his pun. At this point in their jaded relationship, “he could give his admiration the freer play because so little personal feeling remained in it” (215-16). The more emotionally involved Selden is with Lily, the more he tries to mold her into his romantic ideal; the less involved, the more he allows Lily a freer play as cause and corollary of the free play of his admiration. He is throughout the novel striving to be “on her traces” (213)—she wonders that “he should have traced her to so unlikely a place” as the world of Mrs. Hatch, where he locates Lily “in the wilderness of pink damask” (277)—without ever realizing that the traces are all he has. At the final moment of his encounter with Lily at Mrs. Hatch's Hotel, where Lily herself grows “more aware of a certain ambiguity in her situation” (276), Selden seeks “a break in the impenetrable front she presented” (282).

He never finds the fantasy figure he desires, but resorts to forging it. Lily resents the “strange … authority” he attempts to wield over her at Mrs. Hatch's residence (he insists that she leave immediately) (279), an authority with which Selden tries to smother Lily once she is dead and unable, in a sense, to resist. Just before discovering her corpse, he recalls “the word he meant to say to her” (324; my emphasis), as if he might solve everything with a single word—Selden's transcendental signifier. (I concede that, just before dying, Lily “said to herself that there was something she must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life clear between them.” But she struggles “to repeat the word, which lingered vague and luminous on the far edge of thought” and dies “afraid of not remembering it when she woke.” Unlike Selden's word, Lily's remains unobtainable: “Slowly the thought of the word faded, and sleep began to enfold her” [323].) This is the stifling, maudlin note on which the novel ends: “He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear” (329).

But we must understand that Selden's conception of his final communication with Lily is a “reading” of that moment, and a limited, romanticized one at that. Wharton makes this unmistakable; Selden has already done a reading of himself with Lily: “Yes, he could now read into that farewell [the day before, when she kissed his forehead] all that his heart craved to find there” (329; my emphasis). From the start, Selden has been straining to assemble a picture of Lily as a perfectly virtuous object—the only way, playboy that he is, he can accept her—and now that she is dead, his reading of Lily—as a “work”—can harden. He deludes himself into believing that “all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart,” that “the moment had been fated to pass from them before they could seize it” (329; my emphasis). In Cynthia Griffin Wolff's words, “The ‘real’ Lily—the only Lily he can tolerate—is the beautiful idealized memory he carries of her, the most superb piece in his collection.”¹⁴

Incorrigible sentimentalist, Selden interprets Lily's story as a romantic tragedy. His concentration on the theme of fate signifies his false effort to supply an explanation, a cause, a beginning for Lily's downfall. Advocate of the law, he wishes to make transparent what remains opaque.

But Wharton goes to great lengths to undermine Selden's theme of fate. Fate—or metaphysical law, a concept to mollify a lawyer's desire for lawfulness—must do battle in the novel with a much more arbitrary, playful force, that of luck. It may be wrong, in fact, to conceive of luck as a “force” at all; for the concept gravitates in the direction of “chance,” which means that it is invoked for events that cannot be exactly predicted or controlled. On the other hand, fate is a force, and the term gravitates in the direction of “doom.” Thus the terms begin by looking like synonyms, upon consideration seem as antonymous as omnipotent law and free will, and end by appearing as hopelessly antithetical as death and life. So Selden's emphasis on fate is merely one provisional focal point within a fluctuating perspective manifest in The House of Mirth from beginning to end. But Wharton's attempt to keep Lily alive in spirit and free from society's determination to predict omnisciently and control omnipotently—to read the world, including Lily, as work and not as text—takes the form of a conceptual oscillation between fate and luck that opposes Selden's simple fatalism. Selden appears to have taken no special note of Lily's first words to him in the novel—“‘Mr. Selden—what good luck!’” (3)—despite the fact that he repeats her sentiment upon meeting her at the Van Osburgh wedding: “‘This is luck,’ he said smiling” (94). Lily reiterates the motif immediately: “‘What luck!’ she repeated” (4). Although in the face of Lily's luck motif Selden introduces the fate motif—“‘Perhaps you'll meet your fate to-night at the Trenors'’” (12)—Rosedale reimposes the theme of luck. His first words to Lily are “‘Miss Bart? Well—of all people! This is luck’” (14).

Fate and luck are batted around as explanations for events in The House of Mirth to the point where it becomes evident that Wharton seeks to expose the invalidity of Selden's final legalistic position. Her inconsistency may also be attempting to dissolve the opposition between Gerty and Lily, who adumbrate the division in feminist politics roughly seven decades later between what we might term, for brevity's sake, social and literary feminisms. Fate, according to this reading of the fate-luck antinomy, would point to the social feminist idea that women groomed to be ladies are doomed to stunted growth or stagnation, if not to death. Oddly enough, social feminists converge here with Nevius and Selden: law is fate, and society is its agent. Social feminists acknowledge the law that they wish to change. Luck, on the other hand, stands in for literary feminism as it subverts pattern or position, refusing to be pinned down.

And it turns out that Lily, oscillating in imitation of her creator, is the chief dismantler of the fate-luck antithesis. Early on, not only does she take bumping into Selden to be “good luck,” but she thinks of “having [Gryce] to herself in the train” as “luck” (17); to Lily's literary mind, a stroke of luck even links her fortuitous encounters with the two men: “The ‘points’ [on Americana] she had had the presence of mind to glean from Selden, in anticipation of this very contingency [of meeting Gryce], were serving her to such good purpose that she began to think her visit to him had been the luckiest incident of the day” (20). But the cheeriness that upholds Lily's faith in luck dwindles as she grows bored with Gryce. Her philosophical view based on happy contingencies begins to mix with a gloomier outlook: she swings from the thought that she “must submit to more boredom … on the bare chance that [Gryce] might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life” to the conclusion that that “was a hateful fate” (25). Even before her luck at cards and the stock market goes sour (luck, of course, enters the novel's philosophical field in a big way through the activities of bridge and Wall Street),¹⁵ Lily develops an “anger against fate” (33) that surfaces periodically: “She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate, when she longed to drop out of the race and make an independent life for herself” (39). Here her “fate” is presumably allied with the immediate world of aristocratic New York and its beauty and marriage contests; Lily feels fated to lose.

To blame fate, however, is to be inconsistent, though on this subject Lily seems unable to avoid contradictoriness, as the narrator notes: “She was not above the inconsistency of charging fate, rather than herself, with her own misfortunes” (34). All it takes is an upward turn of her life for Fortuna to replace the Fates in her imagination. She receives a dividend check from Trenor with a renewed faith in luck: “The world was not so stupid and blundering after all: now and then a stroke of luck came to the unluckiest. At the thought her spirits began to rise: it was characteristic of her that one trifling piece of good fortune should give wings to all her hopes” (92). Only three pages later, Lily again shifts philosophical ground: “It seemed to her her fate to appear at her worst to Selden” (95). And when Mrs. Haffen offers Bertha Dorset's letters to Lily, both chance and fate are invoked: “Bertha Dorset's letters were nothing to her—they might go where the current of chance carried them! But Selden was inextricably involved in their fate” (105).

Lily's vertiginous movement from fate to luck and back again never flags. Toward the close of the novel, on the evening of her ambiguous death, “In the mysterious nocturnal separation from all outward signs of life, [Lily] felt herself more strangely confronted with her fate” (321); she leaves us, nevertheless, with chance as a last explanation for her death: “If sleep came at all, it might be a sleep without waking. But after all that was but one chance in a hundred” (322). I say “last” and not “final” since I see no reason to privilege chance over fate as the reason for Lily's death. That we accept both alternatives is one point of Lily's book-long oscillation.

While Lily refuses positions of stability, Selden, faithful to his profession, locates them where they are nonexistent. Selden must transform ambiguity to clarity, as he does in his reading of Lily's story. We might expect, consequently, that, given the instability—the constitutive ambiguity—of language, Selden would shy away from writing. (Barthes pronounces that “The spoken word is ‘clear’; the banishment of polysemy [such banishment being the definition of ‘clarity’] serves the Law—all speech is on the side of the Law.”)¹⁶ Needing to locate Lily to stave off the eruption of something terrible and irrevocable surrounding the Dorset-Lily affair, Selden “almost decided on the unsatisfactory alternative of writing, when the ceaseless diorama of the square suddenly unrolled before him the figures of Lord Hubert and Mrs. Bry” (214; my emphasis). He typically prefers to speak rather than to write; subtlety is lost on Selden, as it is on Rosedale: when Lily says to Rosedale, during their tea together at the Longworth, “‘You know Mrs. Hatch, I think? Well, perhaps you can understand that she might make things too easy for one’” (291), “Rosedale [again] looked faintly puzzled, and she remembered that allusiveness was lost on him” (291).

In contrast, Wharton not only associates Lily and Carrie Fisher with subtlety, with literariness, but even Bertha Dorset seems a member of the novel's literary guild (Wharton may wish to save female gossips from self-incarceration in reductive stories). Bertha's membership, in addition, is established in a way that aligns femininity and writing. To Bécassin's, for the dinner honoring the Duchess, Bertha wears the most striking piece of clothing in the novel—a dress in “the literary style.” Though it is Selden who recognizes the gown's literariness, he predictably ends up being troubled by the freedom it lends to Bertha: Mrs. Dorset's gown, “in particular, challenged all the wealth of Mr. Dabham's [the Riviera Notes's journalist's] vocabulary: it had surprises and subtleties worthy of what he would have called ‘the literary style.’ At first, as Selden had noticed, it had been almost too preoccupying to its wearer; but now she was in full command of it, and was even producing her effects with unwonted freedom. Was she not, indeed, too free, too fluent, for perfect naturalness?” (216).

This identification of an elegant gown—or feminity—with writing is no fluke. In her last dwelling place, Lily takes out her dresses and reads them as if they were musty autobiographical novels: “The remaining dresses, though they had lost their freshness, still kept the long unerring lines, the sweep and amplitude of the great artist's stroke, and as she spread them out on the bed the scenes in which they had been worn rose vividly before her. An association lurked in every fold: each fall of lace and gleam of embroidery was like a letter in the record of her past” (317). Lily draws forth the white Reynolds dress from her trunk last of all: its “long flexible folds” record her romantic evening next to “the flower-edged fountain [“falling among lilies”] where she had stood with Lawrence Selden” (317). A curious shift then takes place that dramatizes the conflation of femininity—as represented by multiplicitous, irreducible Lily—and Wharton's writing. Other former “ghosts” (besides Selden) of Lily's past haunt the scene, but their presences are alluded to through linguistic play, specifically puns: Lily “put back the dresses one by one, laying away with each some gleam of light, some note of laughter, some stray waft from the rosy shores of pleasure. She was still in a state of highly-wrought impressionability, and every hint of the past sent a lingering tremor along her nerves” (317; my emphases). As Rosedale and Trenor are conjured up, Wharton's writing takes over paronomastically from Lily's dresses the task of enfolding her past. The doubleness of Lily, epitome of femininity, is mirrored in the doubleness of Wharton's prose.¹⁷ The two—Lily/femininity and Wharton's writing/writing—are again conflated in what is perhaps the most eerie and moving scene of the book: on the evening of her death, after Lily wraps up her bank business, “she continued to sit at [her writing-desk], sorting her papers and writing, till the intense silence of the house reminded her of the lateness of the hour” (321). What is she writing? It is as if Wharton momentarily slips into Lily's body here and takes up her pen, to express again the kinship of femininity and written words.¹⁸

At this stage some unravelling must be done. I have suggested that Wharton's writing is textual, rather than naturalistic, that it may be aligned with femininity, or play, or luck, rather than with the law or fate. In arguing that Wharton represents in The House of Mirth the very tension underlying her novel between social and literary loyalties—since her representation takes the form of an oscillating motion throughout the book—it would seem that I am upholding the position that Wharton prefers a posthumanistic feminism that insists on the instability of all ground, that, in Nancy Miller's conception, “rethink[s] the very locations of the center and the periphery, and within that fragile topology, the stability of the subject.”¹⁹ But this is just half of Miller's proposal, as it is half (or one) of Wharton's feminism(s). Wharton, like Miller, values simultaneously the idea that “we must live out (the hortatory always returns) a practical politics within the institution.”²⁰ Wharton doesn't present the oscillation between fate (that is, to return to the perspective of social feminism, the idea that women bred to be ladies or frilly or silly ornaments are destined to some sort of death) and luck (that is, to recall literary feminism, the idea that no firm ground should be allowed to solidify but “plurivocality” should be defended) as itself an example of plurivocality. If she had, the oscillation would then have to be taken as a triumph of the literary dimension of the book at the expense of the social, and the oscillation would paradoxically negate itself. But Wharton does not offer a merely “textual” synthesis of “text” and “work,” as if the social aspect of the novel could finally be incorporated into a greater textuality. For we have a woman's death on our hands—a sort of ultimate stability of the subject and triumph of the institution.

It is not exactly that Lily's elusiveness, her refusal ever to take a stand, causes death. Instead, her demise is the result of her being born into a male world in which a women is pinned down, transmogrified into a static art object if she is beautiful, and has to be married, as Lily complains, in any case. Lily cannot survive, far less flourish, in this world of frozen identities. The society of The House of Mirth either forces women into its limited slots or rejects them. Lily's suppleness, her indefiniteness, protects her from being forced in, so she is tossed out. But while we may take pleasure and pride in the purity of Lily's rebellion against masterliness, death is obviously an exorbitant price to pay.

As a way of balancing Lily's literariness, which causes her to resist definition to the point of annihilation, Wharton has drawn a couple of female characters in The House of Mirth who, to use Cixous's trope, “wear sensible shoes.”²¹ Gerty Farish, of course, with her philanthropic work for young women, surely springs to mind. And there is a second, perhaps similarly unattractive, that is, uninteresting, heroine who certainly wears sensible shoes: Nettie Struther. I have been treating Lily as an ex-centric character who emblematizes ex-centricity: “She [in fact] had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others” (319). Put this way, more from a domestic than a philosophical vantage point, however, the loss entailed in Lily's literariness becomes apparent. In Nettie Struther's kitchen toward the end of the novel, a drained, jaundiced Lily samples her first taste of a humanly centered existence: “All the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance: her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening in Nettie Struther's kitchen” (319). Lily takes her vision of Nettie's ostensibly blissful domestic setting even one step higher: “The poor little working-girl … seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence” (319). What happened, we may wonder, to the sophisticated, skeptical Lily educating Gerty in the impossibility of truth-telling, especially for women?²²

Yet I am almost as unsatisfied with the idea of Nettie Struther's household expressing a “central truth of existence” as I am with Selden's romantic tragedy. Wharton offers hope in Nettie's domestic arrangement even as she revokes it through the sentimentality of the scene. Temporarily, Wharton allows The House of Mirth to come into focus as a “work” rather than a “text,” when Gerty and Nettie's heroinism emerges, thus urging us to acknowledge the beneficence of “good people.” These young women, unlike Lily, after all, will continue the progressive efforts of women even if they are bound by male laws and power structures. But socially crucial as Gerty and Nettie may be, it cannot be ignored that they are at the same time intellectually unappealing.

At the end of “The Text's Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions,” Miller proposes that “What we might wish for … is a female materialism attentive to the needs of the body as well as the luxuries of the mind. Can we imagine, or should we, a position that speaks in tropes and walks in sensible shoes?”²³ Or, I would add, one that speaks practically and walks stylishly? Wharton shares this double wish for women, as she realizes that literary feminism needs the real-world action of a sociopolitical feminism, while a sociopolitical feminism needs the intellectual vitality of literary feminism that results in protection from the existent patriarchal structure and values (actually, of course, both sides are political).

The fatal error is to treat these feminisms as exclusive poles. A sociopolitical feminism alone, working for improvement within the law, would kill off the dazzling multiplicity of a Lily, turning her into a drab Gerty (quoting Judith Fetterley, “One might wish Lily to follow Gerty's example, … but she could do so only at the cost of being a lily”²⁴—floating free). A sociopolitical feminism alone might destroy Lily as effectively as the sociopolitical structure it condemns, the sole difference being that the death she would be condemned to would be a death-in-life. Of course, social feminists are apt not to be as impressed as literary feminists with the importance of keeping a dazzling Lily in full bloom; the point Wharton makes to them by locating the law within Lawrence Selden and art within Lily Bart is that it is lawfulness itself, not any particular set of laws, that is antipathetic to Lily, and the literary alone that can vivify her. Indeed, Lily continues to live for us only because Wharton's literary presentation of her is more supple than Selden's legalistic interpretations, whether they happen to condemn or justify her. That is, even improved laws, even laws that would find Lily innocent, could kill her.

But Lily is murdered one way or the other. In point of fact, it is one particular set of laws that condemns and destroys Lily, which is the inevitable result of her trying to step outside it. Textuality may be revolutionary when planted within the law; outside it, merely juxtaposed with it, creating a binary pair literature/law, it is entirely weak. “The need,” Barthes writes at the end of Image Music Text, “is to work at patiently tracing out a pure form, that of a floating (the very form of the signifier); a floating which would not destroy anything but would be content simply to disorientate the Law.”²⁵ Lily floats with the very form of the signifier—but the law does not thereby suffer a perceivable disorientation, for the law is nothing if not hostile to textuality. Until the utopia of textualized law, whatever that would be like, feminism has no choice but doubleness—a double life in the world of law and the world of letters—a doubleness that will be destructive to feminism, a source merely of endless interfeminist disputation, until its necessity is taken for granted.

Notes

1. I have written “perhaps by definition” because feminism often identifies itself as resisting a single definition, as embracing multiple views at once. This essay is part of a broader study in progress on various ways in which feminism adopts oscillating perspectives—on the way that feminist positions imply, and require, their “opposites.” See my article on Virginia Woolf, in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 4 (1985): 253-64, for a rereading of A Room of One's Own as a case for female difference and androgyny simultaneously.

2. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford UP, 1977) 109.

3. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905) 36. All subsequent references are to this edition and will be included parenthetically in the text.

4. Judith Fetterley, “‘The Temptation To Be A Beautiful Object’: Double Standard and Double Bind in The House of Mirth,” Studies in American Fiction 5 (1977): 200.

5. Peggy Kamuf, “Replacing Feminist Criticism,” Diacritics 12 (1982): 46.

6. Blake Nevius, Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction (Berkeley: U of California P, 1953) 56-57.

7. Nevius 55.

8. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 157-58. I have replaced Barthes's “the Text” with “Lily.”

9. Here I follow the distinction between “work” and “text” that Barthes elaborates in “From Work to Text” 155-64.

10. Barthes says of the “Text” that it “is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed” (156).

11. Kamuf 44.

12. Fetterley 205.

13. Kamuf 45.

14. Wolff 131-32. Selden and Gerty are certain that “the real Lily” emerges as Lily poses for the tableau at the Welly Brys' (135). In the final chapter, Selden debates with himself who the real Lily is: “That it [the corpse] was her real self, every pulse in him ardently denied. Her real self had lain warm on his heart but a few hours earlier” (325). Because Selden has a preconceived sense of Lily's identity, he (like Nevius) is constantly ignoring aspects of her character—even other identities within her—that would challenge that conception.

15. Lily's participation in cards and the stock market is put explicitly in terms of luck: “Tonight the luck had been persistently bad, and the little gold purse … was almost empty” (27); Lily associates Rosedale “with her lucky speculations” (113); Rosedale inquires, “How's your luck been going in Wall Street, by the way?” and Lily replies, “as it happened, I made a lucky ‘turn’” (114).

16. Barthes, “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” in Image Music Text 191.

17. Such puns, especially on Lily's suitors' names, permeate the novel.

18. Judith Wilt pointed out to me the relevance of Lily's mysterious writing to my argument.

19. Nancy K. Miller, “The Text's Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions,” Diacritics 12 (1982): 53.

20. Miller 53.

21. In “The Text's Heroine,” Miller sees the opposition, also named by Elaine Marks, between “the American, empirical and social science model of Women's Studies [and] the French ludic endeavor emerging from the more speculative operations of ‘les sciences de l'homme’ engaged in by decentered subjects of the ‘feminine’ (rather than ‘feminist’) persuasion” as a “problematic that can be understood in relation to shoes: as in the sturdy, sensible sort worn by American feminists, and the more elegant sort worn by [Hélène] Cixous.” Miller is making reference to an informal presentation at Barnard in 1979, in which Cixous used this shoe paradigm “to make a point about difference and recuperation.” See Miller 48-49.

22. Lily has a similar moment of antiliterariness, antitextuality, in her final encounter with Selden: “In her strange state of extra-lucidity,” she finds it “incredible” that Selden “linger[s] in the conventional outskirts of word-play and evasion.” Actually, Selden had merely used a “light tone” that now grates on Lily's frazzled nerves, in an “effort to bridge over an awkward moment.” “Word-play” is a misnomer here for Selden's conventionality. (So he remains consistent.) But Lily expresses at this desperate time a “passionate desire to be understood” (305-6). Under heavy stress, Lily may wish to escape the complexity, the opacity, the ironic invisibility of her plight and identity, in order to get help. In “The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton's House of Mirth,” Elaine Showalter notices what she calls Lily's “inability to rise above the ‘word-play and evasion’ … that restrict her conversations with Selden and to tell her own story”; to Showalter, Lily “can only speak in parables [Selden] is totally unable to comprehend.” But we must strive to comprehend the parables that surpass Selden's understanding. (Representations 9 [1985]: 136.)

23. Miller 53.

24. Fetterley 203.

25. Barthes 215. Barthes's ideas on “floating,” it should be noted, grow out of, and conclude, his discussion of teaching.