SOURCE: Clubbe, John. “Interiors and the Interior Life in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.” Studies in the Novel 28, no. 4 (winter 1996): 543-64.

[In the following essay, Clubbe draws upon Wharton's interest in interior design to discuss her correlation in The House of Mirth between Lily's interior physical environments and the struggling development of her inner life.]

No American author has written with more understanding and artistry about the interplay among character, social history, and domestic esthetics than has Edith Wharton. In 1897 she established herself as an authority on interiors with The Decoration of Houses, written with the noted Gilded Age designer Ogden Codman, Jr. From that time forward Wharton's fine-tuned readings of interior space became a signature aspect of her writings. Edmund Wilson once called her, rightly, “not only one of the great pioneers, but also the poet, of interior decoration.”¹ It is in The House of Mirth (1905) that her genius in this area is most compelling. Part of the triumph of The House of Mirth results from the pains Wharton took to correlate the character of the clearly beautiful and clearly flawed Lily Bart to her environment, an environment that consists chiefly of a sequence of interiors.²

The House of Mirth chronicles the efforts of Lily Bart, single, poor, and twenty-nine, to move from the interiors that constrict her to the ideal but unfocused interior that haunts her dreams. That over the novel's course she fails to realize a lastingly viable interior for herself or to find herself truly at home in any interior space may seem the result of her background, financial status, and the limited scope offered women of her acquaintance, but Wharton makes it abundantly clear that in spite of it all Lily has numerous chances to take charge of her life. An analysis of Lily in relation to interior space lends support to the position that Wharton's presentation of her heroine is not unrelievedly deterministic, as many contemporary feminist critics have argued, but many-faceted, subtle, and richly ambivalent.³

That Lily shies away from both constructive awareness of herself and accurate assessment of those around her are behavioral patterns directly related to her unfocused vision of the ideal interior that would be commensurate with her being. The interior that she longs for is one of the “fancy,” not of the “imagination,” if we hold to the Coleridgean distinction. The seal on her writing paper—“Beyond! beneath a flying ship”⁴—suggests a personal trajectory away from the palpable workaday world toward the unrealizable infinite, die Ferne, the ever-receding “Beyond!” Just as no waves hinder a flying ship, so no humanly fabricated interior can fulfill her insatiable, narcissistic desires. Only in fantasy can she make herself into a queen of infinite space, and in fantasy she prefers to dwell. For this reason Lily is always restless, always moving, unable to live in a house, anyone's house, for very long. We see Lily only in transit. We first meet her in a railroad station; she has come back from Tuxedo and is on the way to Rhinebeck. She has, not coincidentally, missed her train. We bid goodbye to her in a hotel room.

What both impels and facilitates such continual changes is Lily's “faculty for adapting herself” (p. 84). Such an individual, capable of playing many roles, takes her colors, chameleon-like, from the circumstances of the moment. Byron in Don Juan terms this characteristic “mobility,” which he derives from French “mobilité.” Although Byron found mobility among “actors, artists, and romancers … speakers, bards, diplomatists, and dancers,” his prime example of mobility in Don Juan is a woman, Lady Adeline Amundeville, whose faculty for adaptation underlies her strength as a hostess but also (Byron implies) her weakness as a woman.⁵ Likewise, for Wharton, though Lily's adaptability “served her now and then in small contingencies, [it] hampered her in the decisive moments of life” (p. 84). In many ways we may regard Lily Bart as Wharton's vast and subtle elaboration of Byronic mobility.

Nothing could be more antithetical to Lily's mobility, her fluid sensibilities, and her vague vision of an ideal interior than the too-solid Victorian decor and glacial neatness of her aunt's opulent Manhattan townhouse. Here Mrs. Peniston habitually sits in a “black satin arm-chair tufted with yellow buttons, beside a bead-work table bearing a bronze box with a miniature of Beatrice Cenci in the lid” (p. 274)—this last an icon of Victorian sentimentality. From such ghastly decor Lily understandably recoils; she “felt for these objects the same distaste which the prisoner may entertain for the fittings of the court-room” (p. 274). With the windows covered by heavy brocade curtains blocking all vistas to the outside—Mrs. Peniston rages when she discovers even a ray of light peeping through (p. 172)—the drawing room is also oppressively dark.⁶ Lily not surprisingly longs for a world elsewhere but foolishly blames this interior for her own shortcomings. “If I could only do over my aunt's drawing-room,” she says at one point, “I know I should be a better woman” (p. 10).⁷

Most of all, however, at Mrs. Peniston's Lily is repulsed by the ugliness of her bedroom with its magenta “flock” wallpaper, steel engravings, and “monumental wardrobe and bedstead of black walnut [which] had migrated from Mr. Peniston's bedroom” (p. 176). Compared to the “light tints and luxurious appointments of the guest-rooms” where Lily stays in the society houses of the au courant well-to-do, her own room with its nauseous wall decor and black walnut Rococo and Renaissance Revival furniture chosen by someone else's dead husband “seemed as dreary as a prison” (p. 176).⁸ With her “artistic sensibility” Lily feels superior to so prosaic an environment and longs for a room that would serve as an appropriate backdrop for the display of her person. In such a room, which in her imagining of it remains vague and undefined, “every tint and line should combine to enhance her beauty and give distinction to her leisure!” (pp. 176-77).

Whereas Wharton reveals fundamental aspects of Lily's character and problems through her responses to Mrs. Peniston's interiors—the only space in the novel she can even remotely call “home”—it is mainly through the interiors of others that Wharton explores Lily's unrealistic aspirations, her flawed perception of herself and other people, and her final tentative efforts to take charge of her life. These interiors range from the modest domiciles of Lawrence Selden, Gerty Farish, Carry Fisher, and Nettie Struther to the sumptuously ornate Houses of Mirth occupied by the Trenors, Brys, Dorsets, and Gormans.

Of primary importance in Wharton's portrayal of Lily's opportunities to make different choices in her life are two flats—relatively new kinds of interior space in the early twentieth-century urban scene. The first belongs to Lawrence Selden, where the novel opens with a charming and, we realize later, prescient interchange between Selden and Lily. “‘Even women,’ he said, ‘have been known to enjoy the privileges of a flat’” (p. 9). He has invited Lily, whom he has encountered at Grand Central Station, to tea. Lily replies, “‘Oh, governesses—or widows. But not girls—not poor, miserable, marriageable girls!’” But Selden knows “a girl who lives in a flat,” his rather plain cousin Gerty Farish. To this seeming exception Lily ripostes: “But I said marriageable—and besides, she has a horrid little place … I should hate that, you know” (p. 10). Comfortable in Selden's domain, Lily recalls her previous discomfiture in Gerty Farish's flat, an interior in which she will later be offered affection as well as hospitality. Her initially negative response to Gerty's flat becomes more negative as the novel proceeds, but it turns out uncannily prophetic of her inability generally to “read” interiors except from the standards of her imagined “good taste.” Lily never penetrates beyond surface signs, never seeks out the deeper and ever-changing meanings of personal settings. One of Wharton's essential lessons is that failure to understand interiors in relation to those who inhabit them augurs other kinds of failure. Responding meaningfully to place is intimately tied to conceptualizing and working realistically toward a better fate for oneself: both require an imagination vigorously alive to otherness. But throughout most of the novel Lily's imagination remains passively narcissistic.

We need to consider Wharton's portrayal of Lily in terms of Selden's and Gerty's flats within the context of early twentieth-century architectural/sociological history. Flats were still at this time a relatively new phenomenon in New York as in other large American cities. Though Manhattan experienced a flurry of apartment house construction while Wharton worked on The House of Mirth, its first apartment building dated only from 1869 and its most famous—still its most famous—the grand Dakota overlooking Central Park, went up only in 1884. The idea of flats came from France, and in America as in England flats long carried connotations of dubious French mores. The middle-class and wealthy thought living horizontally in flats slightly immoral. Did not proper people live vertically in houses? In The Age of Innocence (1920) Wharton records society's shock in the 1870s when the wealthy Mrs. Manson Mingott, a venerable society dowager, instead of living on the several floors of her New York townhouse, decided to live exclusively on the ground level. Guests in her sitting-room had “the unexpected vista of a bedroom.” Living on one floor creates what Wharton, tongue-in-cheek but accurately in terms of contemporary opinion, called “the stage-setting for adultery.”⁹

By 1905, when she published The House of Mirth, many families as well as single men lived in flats. Still, when a single woman—at least a “marriageable” single woman—took a flat by herself, she risked societal disapproval. Even an independently-minded, unattached woman like Lily Bart deems it slightly improper for a woman to have her own flat. Given “the moral code of bachelors' flat-houses” (p. 20), Lily dares much even visiting Selden in his. But if she dares much, ultimately perhaps—so the overall perspective of The House of Mirth may imply—she does not dare enough.

Selden lives in a newly-built Neo-Georgian apartment house appropriately called The Benedick, after Shakespeare's wily bachelor in Much Ado About Nothing—Wharton's way of reminding her readers that he can have such a flat in good part because he is a man.¹⁰ This modestly genteel interior contains “a small library, dark but cheerful, with its walls of books” (p. 9)—a decided contrast to Lily's walls of flock wallpaper. These books—and books in general—constitute an essential element of Selden's interior space and, we sense, of his interior self. Unlike the Trenors' library (discussed below), the books that line Selden's walls exist not as a matter of decor but for him to read. While there, Lily pulls down a first edition of La Bruyère, a seventeenth-century French moralist whose tough-minded maxims offer painful but often wise counsel about life. Lily, however, lays the book aside, unopened. In putting by La Bruyère, Lily evades without realizing it one of the many opportunities afforded her to understand herself by getting inside another point of view. Her lack of interest in reading indicates early on that she and Selden will have a fundamental problem in communication. While they ostensibly speak the same language, his has a depth of reading behind it, whereas hers consists mainly of surface semantic strings of discourse that she has learned to imitate successfully. In this she resembles Rosamond in George Eliot's Middlemarch, whose future husband attributes to her greatness of soul because on the piano she has learned to echo the sonorities of her large-souled music teacher.¹¹

That Lily's lack of interest in books and libraries suggests something crucial about her character accords with Wharton's attitudes elsewhere. More than de rigueur decor, libraries and the books in them comprise throughout her writings her most significant interior spaces. The young Edith who found herself most at home in her father's library would later write compassionately about the plight of the unloved child Paul in The Custom of the Country (1913). Looking for consolation, he wanders into his parents' library only to find the bookcases locked; a servant tells him the books have too much value for him to touch. For Wharton nothing indicates more effectively the Moffatt's cultural non-existence.¹² Opposite to Paul's experience is that of Vance Weston in Hudson River Bracketed (1929) who finds a Hudson River villa whose library, reflecting a society deeply rooted in tradition, becomes his main home space. Whereas in Hudson River Bracketed the villa's library both reveals and develops positive aspects of Vance's character, in the earlier The Age of Innocence (1920) the library's metamorphoses chart Newland Archer's growth or, rather, his incapacity for meaningful growth. As a cossetted bachelor in the 1870s, Archer has a “Gothic library with glazed black-walnut bookcases and finial-topped chairs”; after he marries and establishes a new residence, his library acquires “‘sincere’ Eastlake furniture, and the plain new book-cases without glass doors.” Later (by 1907) his son redoes his library with “English mezzotints, Chippendale cabinets, bits of chosen blue-and-white, and pleasantly shaded electric lamps.”¹³ The decor changes with the stylistic seasons, as does Newland, and charts his gradual capitulation to societal pressures. He comes to have as little interest in books for themselves as does Lily. Fundamental change is not, for him or for her, in the will or in the stars.

In addition to the extensive collection of books, Selden's accouterments also include “a pleasantly faded Turkey rug, a littered desk,” and a tea tray sitting on a low table. A breeze comes through the open window, “bringing a fresh scent of mignonette and petunias from the flower-box on the balcony” (p. 9). Selden's decor verges, but does not tip over into, a parody of an 1890s Aesthetic interior; only his undoubted taste and moral sensibility redeem its somewhat affected and studied neglect. In any case, it won't do for Lily. Although she enjoys relaxing in Selden's shabby leather chair, she dreams of herself ensconced in far grander settings.

That Lily imagines her ideal self being admired in a large public room and not, for example, sitting by a cozy fireside surrounded by loved books and objects (as does Selden), correlates to her emotionally arrested nature, her absence of center.¹⁴ Objects in semi-public drawing-rooms exist for guests to look at, but not to handle or to settle into, and several times Wharton points out that the flower-like Lily dislikes being “caressed” (p. 269) or even touched (p. 437). As with a flower, so with Lily: contact bruises.

Lily, we gradually realize, has set up a limited personal space for receiving love. Selden, like George Eliot's Lydgate, is at first much attracted to a beautiful woman's surface, but in time he finds no one “at home”—and therefore no one capable of creating a true home. Because Lily “could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume” (p. 161), she disdains the shabby-genteel quality of Selden's flat almost as much as she scorns the expensive grossness of her aunt's interior. Lily perceives herself, not as an affectionate domestic helpmate, but rather as a self-willed objet d'art.

Like Selden's apartment decor, Lily's name plays off 1890s Aestheticism; lilies, symbols of innocence, were the ultimate Aesthetic flower. As there were (and are) many varieties of lilies, so Lily may metamorphose into her “Lily” of choice for the day. Combined with her mobility, the moral and psychological perils associated with this changing self-objectification reveal themselves in the esthetically confused and superficial settings wherein she seeks to place herself.

Early in the novel Lily and Selden find themselves both guests at “Bellomont,” the Trenors' estate near Rhinebeck in the Hudson River valley. Bellomont, whose interiors Lily greatly admires, consists chiefly of costly but undistinguished new wings. Of the old manor-house only the library survives. The books in it date to earlier times; to them “subsequent Trenors had made no perceptible additions” (pp. 93-94). Unlike those in Selden's flat, the books here never leave the shelves; Judy Trenor, in fact, speaks of “rubbishy old books” (p. 71). Books at Selden's indicate values, and Lily's failure to become interested in them indicates her intellectual poverty. But having a real library as the Trenors do, and not using it, Wharton regards as worse still. The unread books reveal as much about the Trenors' household as do the uncut volumes about Jay Gatsby's.

Wharton's repugnance for the misuse of libraries partakes of an ethics of architecture, a moralizing of exterior and interior space, whose chief British spokesman was John Ruskin; and to this extent, if not in all others, Wharton adheres to Ruskinian precepts. In conceptualizing her thinking about interiors and how people relate to them she also draws extensively upon the ideas of Andrew Jackson Downing. Downing, mid-nineteenth-century arbiter of American domestic taste, insisted in his widely popular Architecture of Country Houses (1850) that architecture contains a significant ethical dimension. Therefore architecture, interiors as well as the houses themselves, reflects character—to such an extent that vile people who move into a perfectly well-designed, well-built house will turn it into a shabby, ugly place.¹⁵

The architectural ethic advocated by Ruskin and Downing applies nicely to the Trenors. Wharton speaks subsequently of “the large tumultuous disorder of the life at Bellomont”; it was a place “where no one seemed to have time to observe any one else, and private aims and personal interests were swept along unheeded in the rush of collective activities” (pp. 368-69). Such a rush obliterates possibilities for reflection as well as for cultivation of the inner life. A house where no one has time for inward thought or outward concern for others becomes a house devoid of meaningful human relationships. “Collective activities” are of course what Lily enjoys most. She seems to have a horror of solitude. A maxim in La Bruyère, whose Characters Lily takes up but does not open at Selden's, would have informed her that “all our troubles come from our not being able to be alone.”¹⁶ Inability to accept solitude limits one's options as much as not wishing to read. The state of Bellomont's library tells us of Judy Trenor's vacancy; it comes as no surprise that she “could not sustain life except in a crowd” (p. 63). Gus Trenor, we learn subsequently, is more than vacant: the “large tumultuous disorder” of his house mirrors his own. The Trenors—shallow, inconsiderate, vengeful, uninformed—have made over Bellomont in their own image.

Because of this, the crucial conversation between Selden and Lily on the “republic of the spirit” (p. 108) must take place outside the pretentious hodge-podge that constitutes Bellomont's interiors. On the golden hills overlooking the Hudson, where one may have a spiritual as well as a physical vista, Selden speaks to Lily of the need, amidst societal crassness, to foster an independent perspective on life. Lily would like to join this republic and become, what George Eliot called a half-century before, a “free spirit.” But freedom from societal pressures requires not only imagination and thought, i.e., the kind of thought that a person can develop through reading and reflection, but also a stronger will than Lily possesses. It also requires security; and such security, Lily feels, derives entirely from money—of which she never has enough. Furthermore, membership in the republic of the spirit can only become possible for someone who has successfully homesteaded interior space, someone like Selden or Gerty Farish who has moved a piece of furniture or at least hung a picture, as Lily never has. Instead she becomes a picture in someone else's interior and thereby—however fleetingly—comes closest to realizing her own conception of self.

Lily Bart's finest hour apparently occurs when she appears in a tableau vivant at the Fifth Avenue mansion of the nouveau riche but socially obscure Wellington Brys. They have built their vast mansion to impress others, not to live in themselves. Whereas the Trenors' country house possesses in its ill-used library at least partial antiquity, the Brys' mansion possesses none at all. Though as crass as the Trenors, the Brys are new money, not old. Within, they have created a Venetian palace; without, “a copy of the Trianon” (p. 258). Their mansion typifies the ostentatious palazzi constructed during the Gilded Age, a period architectural historians have sometimes designated, without irony, as “the American Renaissance.”¹⁷ The Brys' vulgar taste in their palazzo appears even more glaring in light of Wharton's observations in The Decoration of Houses. “Good decoration,” she insists there, “is only interior architecture.”¹⁸ Therefore, according to Wharton, architects should not mix styles within a house; also, interior and exterior must work harmoniously together. For the Brys to juxtapose a Venetian Renaissance interior with a French Neo-classical exterior constitutes, in Wharton's view, a colossal violation of taste. The qualities she regards as appropriate—proportion, harmony, logic, simplicity—nowhere appear in their mansion. Ned Van Alstyne, an “Old New York” society warhorse, wittily makes the correlation between architecture and character in a nutshell when he notes how cleverly the architect has taken “his client's measure! He has put the whole of Mrs. Bry in his use of the composite order” (p. 258).¹⁹

The Brys' main interior consists of an enormous ballroom that Gerty Farish, with unconscious astuteness, evaluates as “wonderfully becoming” (p. 213). So theatrical does the whole mise en scène appear, Wharton comments, that “one had to touch the marble columns to learn they were not of cardboard” (p. 212). Eager to show off their ballroom, the Brys propose a sequence of tableaux vivants, a then-fashionable pastime among the wealthy, in which young and beautiful women recreate scenes in famous and recognizable Old Master paintings by such as Goya, Titian, Botticelli, Angelica Kauffmann, and Reynolds. In the evening's final tableau vivant Lily Bart offers herself as Reynolds's “Mrs. Lloyd.” Simply attired in a full-length, diaphanous-seeming dress that gives the illusion of clinging gauze enveloping voluptuous curves, Lily projects a seductive image of tantalizing womanhood. A stark but compelling contrast to the glittering guests assembled within the garish neo-Venetian ballroom, she has never appeared more beautiful. The admiring crowd gasps out a “unanimous ‘Oh!’” (p. 216).²⁰ Lily has triumphed, though how equivocal a triumph she never learns. Displaying her thinly-clad body to the multitude, as Ned Van Alstyne's cynical praise indicates (p. 217), raises eyebrows as well as pulses. Lily becomes a living painting. People admire her as an objet d'art in her own right. Briefly, she has realized an ideal self in a vulgarly-appointed room where ironically, in keeping with her earlier image, “every tint and line should combine to enhance her beauty” (pp. 176-77).

In the Brys' conservatory later that evening, Lily, seeing Selden approaching, “moved away a step, so that her white-robed slimness was outlined against the dusk of the branches” (p. 221). Wharton has chosen the setting as carefully as her heroine: Lily, true to her name, here poses as a hot-house plant. Selden, fully conscious of her artistry, has indeed long recognized it: “Your taking a walk with me,” he had told her at Bellomont, “is only another way of making use of your material. You are an artist and I happen to be the bit of colour you are using today” (p. 105). But Selden errs: Lily is no more and no less an artist than Rosamond in Middlemarch. She can only create herself, and that only momentarily: art of a kind, no doubt, but more the art of craft than of creation. Lily Bart's use of Selden also becomes increasingly how others use her. Lily, would-be artist as well as objet d'art, has learned to regard social situations as scenes in which to act or pose; interiors are not places to be created or sustained by her but places that exist solely for her to manipulate before she moves on to the next. A consummate (if occasionally forgetful) actress, Lily feels herself on show “for the mob to gape at” (p. 86) and, like the master of mobility she makes herself into, she plays her parts well. Although cognizant of the falseness and artificiality of the House of Mirth, she nonetheless yearns for residence within it, not simply because it simulates the falseness and artificiality within her own being but because it constitutes the only House in which she thinks she can live.

Art objects are static; human beings, organic. Human beings whom society comes to regard chiefly as art objects run risks. Selden, meeting Lily again in France, finds her suspended in time, as if “the warm fluidity of youth [were] chilled into its final shape” (p. 307). He reveals more prescience than he realizes. A few more misadventures, and Lily begins to display “a hard glaze of indifference” (p. 378). The lovely painting that constitutes Lily, now with its coat of varnish, appears ready for hanging on the wall, for others to admire (momentarily)—and then forget. But while Lily's surface appears hard and fixed, her inner state, we gradually learn, does not become as static as a museum artifact. That it does not contributes to her ultimate failure in the elegant drawing-room world—a failure no amount of mobility can prevent.

Nowhere does Lily's gift for mobility find greater scope than on the Dorsets' yacht cruising the Mediterranean. A moving boat, never twice in the same place, seems to suit Lily perfectly. But with all her wonderful fluidity, “the interesting Miss Bart”—as she likes to hear herself referred to—lacks a developed inner core. The early scene at Selden's flat reveals that Lily neither appreciates nor responds to books. Now Bertha Dorset describes her, harshly but fairly, as “dead as a stone to art and poetry—the light never was on sea or land for her!” (p. 309). The allusion to Wordsworth's “Elegiac Stanzas” on Peele Castle only accentuates our realization that Lily is a manipulator of surfaces only, not a true artist, that deeper levels of imaginative response to art and literature (and nature) remain as closed to her as the deeper meanings of the interiors she sails through. An artist truly creates; something new emerges out of her efforts, whereas a chameleon-artist, by definition, can only simulate. Lily values art not for its educational or spiritual value but as a backdrop to set off her beauty. Although poetry—Theocritus by moonlight, say—touches her vaguely (p. 314), her real joy lies in societal affirmation of her surface person.

Therefore she encourages the House of Mirth, singly and collectively, to put her on display. After Bellomont, the Brys' mansion, and the Dorsets' yacht, Lily attempts to ply her mobility and her idea of self as art object in the Gormer household. But very soon she realizes that theirs is “only a flamboyant copy of her own world” (p. 376). Next, a further step down, comes the gilded hotel suite of the several-times divorced Mrs. Norma Hatch, whom Lily briefly serves as social secretary. “Lily found her seated in a blaze of electric light, impartially projected from various ornamental excrescences on a vast concavity of pink damask and gilding, from which she rose like Venus from her shell” (p. 441). Of uncertain social standing, Mrs. Hatch in her unreal existence blurs time and space and morality. Her convoluted interiors mirror her convoluted life. Confused, Lily stumbles forth again. The interior space of each House of Mirth through which she passes in her downward spiral not only represents, in Wharton's (and Downing's) ethical views on interiors, an increasingly corrupt moral setting, but it also correlates to a lesser Lily.

In contrast to the grotesque opulence or imitation of it in the residences of the wealthy is a modest interior that offers Lily succor on her descending societal trajectory. Gerty Farish's flat, the very interior scorned early in the novel, reveals her character even more significantly than Selden's flat reveals his. Gerty's flat is much smaller and in a more modest building than The Benedick. Whereas his flat has a balcony onto the outside world and on balmy days admits fragrant currents of air, hers looks upon a blank wall and offers no possibility of good air circulation. Unlike Selden (who enjoys his view) and Mrs. Peniston (who blocks hers), Gerty has no vista to speak of. To understand the extent to which interiors may change according to the people who live in them, the people who visit them, and the chemistry between host and guest, we may contrast the visit that Selden pays his cousin with Lily's two visits.

As Selden, flush with undeclared love for Lily, enters Gerty's little sitting-room, it “sparkled with welcome” (p. 249). (He has just received a note from Lily sealed with “Beyond!”) Gerty has not transformed or improved her flat since Lily first saw and hated it. But Selden, unlike Lily, brings to it a sympathetic eye and a generous heart and responds to those qualities in Gerty. In a corollary to Downing's maxim that vile people can turn a good house into a shabby ugly place, Wharton here argues that good people can transform a meager setting quite wonderfully: “it is surprising how little narrow walls and a low ceiling matter,” she comments, “when the roof of the soul has suddenly been raised” (p. 249). With both Selden and Gerty “up” for the occasion, the ceiling rises too. Gerty has paid attention to her interior spaces, just as she has paid attention to the young women who need homes during periods of unemployment and for whose welfare she labors. Though nothing can make a tiny flat facing a blank wall luxurious, Gerty's sensitive taste, the skill with which she makes-do in her limited space, and the warmth of her welcome go far toward countering her flat's physical limitations. Making-do, i.e., creating, stamps her as more truly an artist than Lily, even if the solipsistic Lily refuses to recognize that artistry. Though Wharton depicts Gerty's flat as even more emotionally comfortable than Selden's, Lily Bart—her eyes fixed on “Beyond!”—will never appreciate its ambience.

Selden for all his detachment and aloofness does respond sensitively to interiors. Because he has made a home for himself in his rumpled yet genteel flat, he can appreciate the interior of someone who had made a comparable effort even though the economic accidents differ. Thus Selden evinces “an extraordinary interest” in how Gerty has organized her household and compliments “her on the ingenuity with which she had utilized every inch of her small quarters” (p. 250). To him Gerty appears as an active creator, as an ingenious artist. Between them, Gerty and Selden bring the cramped flat to life; in the sitting-room they “fitted as snugly as bits in a puzzle”—Wharton's simile emphasizing their interlocking characters. As Gerty “brewed the coffee, and poured it into her grandmother's egg-shell cups” (p. 250), we sense a harmony between being and interior. Selden appreciates this tasteful environment rooted in the past as exemplified by the egg-shell cups. With a flat as unspectacular as her person, Gerty yet makes the best of things and goes about quietly doing good. The domesticity she and Selden create exists apart from romance or parenthood, which neither is likely to experience. But the interiors of both flats, conveying as they do an illusion of serenity, express the attempt of their occupants, by making a home, to hold a moment in time, a moment quite unlike that which Lily creates at the tableau vivant as Mrs. Lloyd: a positive stasis as opposed to a negative. Whereas Lily seeks to realize the illusion of “Beyond!” Gerty and Selden stop time by the repeated and repeatable rituals and ceremonies of home. In fact, Gerty's homesteading of interior space as well as her indifference to what people think qualify her for membership in Selden's republic of the spirit.

When, however, Lily comes to Gerty's not long after Selden's visit, she undergoes no such positive experience as he had. Her learning late one evening that Gus Trenor, from whom she has received money, expects sexual favors in return, stuns Lily. Unable to go back to her soulless room at Mrs. Peniston's, she decides to go to Gerty's. The narrow bedroom has only one bed, which the two women share, uneasy and unhappy bedmates, neither sleeping comfortably. The next morning Lily awakes “unutterably tired” (p. 271). Peering out the window, she sees “the cold slant of light reflected from the back wall of a neighbouring building.” She looks out, “beyond,” not, as Selden had, inwardly. When she looks in, she sees only artifacts of her frivolous life, “her evening dress and opera cloak lying in a tawdry heap on a chair” (pp. 270-71).

But Lily is even more disgusted by the normal sights, sounds, and smells of Gerty's urban apartment—stale air, the banging of the steam pipes, cooking odors—and thus undergoes “a renewal of physical distaste” (p. 271). She who will dissimulate so well on the Dorsets' yacht makes no effort here to respond to Gerty's cozy interiors. The ambience doesn't “touch” her, both because she believes that she deserves far better environments and because, figuratively and literally, she doesn't like being touched. Thus she cannot confide her trauma to Gerty, and a possible scene between Lily and Gerty of human warmth and emotional consolation never occurs. Unable to love anyone but herself, Lily has made herself impervious to an environment created by love and to people who extend love to others.

Gerty, by contrast, is habitually giving to others. She works to raise money for Girls' Homes, a “struggling charity” that provides lodgings “where young women of the class employed in down town offices might find a home when out of work” (p. 179). Secretarial work for women was at this time relatively new, males having until recently held nearly all such jobs. Lily, though “bored” by Gerty's charity, nonetheless with “her quick dramatizing fancy” or mobility seizes upon the parallels between her own situation and that of young women not unlike her and, momentarily flush with Trenor's money, offers her support. She soon becomes aware of “dramatic contrasts” (p. 242), contrasts she has hitherto accepted as natural and normal, between the idle rich and the working poor. But her perceptions do not raise her moral consciousness. She fails to draw the appropriate conclusions: that to live idly requires money and that until she gets some she runs the risk of joining the poor. For her, helping Gerty partakes of picturesque slumming. Unable to get outside of herself, Lily lacks sufficient imagination to empathize with others; she had “not come to listen to the woes of other people” (p. 424). Once again, Lily Bart's vision does not penetrate past surfaces. She cannot assess the significance of what she sees.

This is most painfully apparent in that Lily becomes even more negative about Gerty Farish's apartment after her own standing in society has plummeted and the gilded drawing room stages have become closed to her. She feels herself haunted by the Furies, whom the narrator (somewhat awkwardly) introduces at intervals, but unlike Orestes' suffering in Aeschylus' Libation-Bearers, hers does not bring knowledge. Both The Libation-Bearers and The House of Mirth work as domestic tales, but whereas Orestes realizes he has to go home, Lily does not. Walking up Fifth Avenue, she peers longingly into superbly-appointed carriages, the ambulatory vestibules of the rich, and becomes “more than ever conscious of the steepness and narrowness of Gerty's stairs, and of the cramped blind-alley of life to which they led” (p. 424). She perceives the flat primarily in relation to the difficulty of climbing the stairs, the blank wall across the alley, the constrained life within. But stairs, however difficult, and alleys, even constricted, are passages—paths not taken in her case—that could lead to positive transformations as well as to the negative outcomes she fears. The life-affirming possibilities offered by Gerty in her flat and in her work for others elude Lily completely.

Despite the miserable night Lily spends at Gerty's flat, not long afterward she finds herself taking tea with Gerty. An impetuous movement by her (and a lovely touch by Wharton) nearly upsets the now quasi-symbolic cups of Gerty's grandmother. “I'd forgotten there was no room to dash about in,” Lily apologizes, “—how beautifully one does have to behave in a small flat!” (p. 427). Real space constricts her. She can transcend it only by dreaming on a divan or posing as a framed painting.

One encompassing sentence earlier in The House of Mirth suggests the potential consolation that Gerty's interior could have provided Lily as well as the reason why, even in her extreme need, she remains incapable of receiving it: “To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere” (pp. 239-40).²¹ The final pages of The House of Mirth remind us of one reason why Lily has become such an expatriate, why no interior space can comfort her. Winds of fashion had blown her rootless parents “hither and thither … without any personal existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts.” Never themselves having acquired a sense of place, the Barts bequeath their rootlessness to their child who “had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than another.” Lily has not known either “the concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or … the conception of the house not built with hands, but made up of inherited passions and loyalties” (p. 516). Wharton herself had come to maturity with her sense of visual tradition and passionate loyalties acutely developed and had found in Downing and others an affirmation of her own belief in the moral connection between interiors and their inhabitants.²² But without having had loving parents or a literal home, much less a figural one of “passions and loyalties,” Lily Bart grows up a stunted being, emotionally arrested, imperceptive of others as well as of the meaning of place, and incapable of valuing interiors except as stages for her ego.

We may grant that Lily's genes, her upbringing, and her lack of money have helped shape her destiny. If we believe that character is destiny, then Lily is doomed early. But Wharton, while allowing that sociological factors are at work on Lily's character, introduces them less to exculpate her behavior than to enlarge our own sympathies and self-reflection. In spite of all that might weight in against Lily's (or our) making responsible moral choices, or growing emotionally and intellectually, Wharton nevertheless holds Lily responsible for her actions and gives her frequent opportunities to change. Of course Wharton uses Lily to comment on the status of women; Lily herself, in the stages of her descent, even becomes a social commentator of sorts. But neither in her own voice nor through Lily does Wharton advocate societal change. Basically, she says, we cannot remake the world to our liking. Granted that Wharton had the money that Lily did not, she yet relished immensely her own tussle with life and consistently surmounted her contretemps, which were many, with aplomb. All accounts testify to Wharton's buoyancy and energy, her capacity for joy and for laughter. The trick, she seems to say in The House of Mirth, is for us to learn to survive in the world without losing our moral sense. For this to happen some compromise and some flexibility are necessary. Lily does not master this art of survival, moral or otherwise, but in The House of Mirth Wharton does include one character who both survives and retains her moral sense. To her we now turn.

The other modest dwelling of a single-woman Lily experiences—the house, not flat, that the divorcée Carry Fisher rents for a season in Tuxedo—does bring Lily a glimmer of awareness of what an interior space can become. Whereas Lily cannot feel comfortable in the tiny “home” Gerty offers to provide for her, she does respond positively to Carry's. With impressive social skills, limited income, and even greater mobility than Lily, Carry Fisher has survived in the House of Mirth by serving as cicerone to various aspirants trying to crack high society. Always ready to compromise, aware of the main chance, switching allegiances and households with ease and usually with success, Carry Fisher somehow remains true to herself. She appears first as a mere social climber, shrewder than most. That her “latest hobby was municipal reform” (p. 74) indicates her volatility but also—almost alone among the characters in The House of Mirth—her interest in a wider world. Gradually, Wharton allows Carry Fisher's powers of perception to appear to advantage. She has surveyed her surroundings, made essential if unillusioned deductions about them, and figured out how to survive. No one judges Lily Bart more acutely than she. Lily, she thinks, “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” (p. 303). Sympathetic to Lily's plight, Carry Fisher tries on several occasions to help her, but to no avail.

Arriving at Carry Fisher's “small silent house” with its “firelit quiet,” Lily feels “a sense of peace and familiarity.” In contrast to the chaotic Gormer milieu from which she has come, “there was an air of repose and stability in the very placing of the furniture, and in the quiet competence of the parlour-maid who led her up to her room” (p. 401). Carry Fisher, for all her traveling and her juggling of clients, succeeds in creating an interior that provides material comfort as well as spiritual comforts. And in this household, unlike those of Selden and Gerty Farish, a prospect of futurity resides with Carry's daughter, whom we now first hear about and to whom Carry is “expansively maternal” (p. 403). Like Gerty Farish, she creates homes for others, though in Carry's dwell the nouveau riche and socially gauche. Lily Bart does respond to Carry's home, even if it is temporary, as she does not to Gerty Farish's flat. Watching Sim Rosedale playing with Carry's daughter before the drawing-room hearth gives Lily an inkling, as Elaine Showalter puts it, that human relatedness, not surface appearance, constitutes “the central meaning of life.”²³ Marrying Rosedale, once a possibility for Lily, one of many she has had and thrown away, would have offered her a way out, but in this as in other matters she has evaded decision.

Nearing the bottom of her descent, Lily would rather eke out an existence in a miserable West Side hotel than accept Gerty's kind offer to share her flat. Prior to succumbing to her fate, Lily decides to confront Bertha Dorset with the love letters she had earlier written to Selden and that have come into Lily's hands. On impulse she abruptly decides to visit Selden again in his flat. As during the first visit, Lily responds favorably to the ambience Selden has created. “The library looked as she had pictured it. The green-shaded lamps made tranquil circles of light in the gathering dusk, a little fire flickered on the hearth.” Whereas the intervening months have immeasurably altered Lily Bart's existence, they have not altered Selden's flat. For Lily “the scene was unchanged”; she sees the packed shelves and recalls “the worn arm of the chair” (p. 492). During the first visit, the “wide September light had filled the room, making it seem a part of the outer world: now the shaded lamps and the warm hearth, detaching it from the gathering darkness of the street, gave it a sweeter touch of intimacy” (p. 493). This flat does not, as Edmund Wilson has well said, reflect “money values.”²⁴ It reflects instead intimacy and books and the thoughts that books can evoke. The insistent references to light, artificial and natural, shaded and unshaded, remind us that light, no less than thought or intimacy, is the product of intangibles. Selden brings Lily to the glowing hearth, offers hospitality, offers tea, but remains tongue-tied and constrained, unable to declare to her his love. But Lily, ill and depressed, cannot speak clearly either. Thus Selden, though sympathetic, does not quite understand her. The flat's intimacy heightens the sense of their own incomplete intimacy. Whereas Selden cannot bring himself to include Lily in the intimacy he has established, neither can Lily share the flat's intimacy, in part because she has not cultivated the values it represents. But when she realizes that she has values other than those of the House of Mirth, her moral growth advances a step. She therefore alters her destination and drops into the fire the letters incriminating Selden and Bertha Dorset.

Lily continues to grow emotionally after this episode. If seeing Rosedale play with Carry Fisher's daughter marks the first step in her awakening to her humanity, the second, taking place in Selden's flat, awakens her to a sense of herself as a moral being. A third occurs after her leaving Selden's, as she sits wearily on a bench in Bryant Park. There Nettie Struther, a young woman Lily had earlier helped when involved with Gerty Farish's Girls' Homes, finds her. Together they return to Nettie's tenement dwelling, to sit in the warm kitchen, one “extraordinarily small and almost miraculously clean” (p. 507).²⁵ Since she had last seen Lily, Nettie has picked up the shards of her broken life and created a home with husband and child. Holding Nettie's baby to her breast, Lily feels communion with it; “the surprised sense of human fellowship took the mortal chill from her heart” (p. 511). Finally touched physically by another being, her heart at last begins to warm to others.

But Lily's moral growth is not enough to save her. Once again an interior mirrors her failing condition. A shabby West Side hotel becomes Lily's last residence. People who live in hotels usually do not wish to root themselves, and in American life at this time living and boarding in a hotel was common enough. To get to her hotel Lily has to cross 6th Avenue, a route that takes her “through the degradation of a New York street in the last stages of decline from fashion to commerce” (p. 464). For Wharton, residence on the unfashionable West Side always bodes downward mobility. At this hotel, hardly more than a working-class boardinghouse and squalid within and without, Lily can afford only a “cheerless” hall-bedroom, with “blotched wall-paper and shabby paint” (p. 464). There a concerned Rosedale seeks her out. “The peacock-blue parlour” in which Lily receives him has “bunches of dried pampas grass, and discoloured steel engravings of sentimental episodes.” Rosedale, staring around “with unconcealed disgust,” lays “his hat distrustfully on the dusty console adorned with a Rogers statuette” (pp. 481-82). Throughout the novel, Rosedale has embodied vulgar taste; if these artifacts appall him, they can appall us. They suggest the nadir of decor. Indeed, the garish peacock blue and the dried pampas grass, further vestiges of 1890s Aestheticism, indicate taste badly outdated. The Rogers statuette, once a common adornment in middle-class Victorian homes and now even more passé than the pampas grass, brings to mind the bedside bronze Lily hated at Mrs. Peniston's; the steel engravings likewise evoke those she abhorred on the walls in her room. Lily seems in this context somehow farther from herself than in her relation to any other interior of the novel. She is as uprooted, as lacking in life, as out of her element, as the pampas grass. But maybe the incongruity is only apparent.

Wharton delays a detailed description of Lily's hotel room until after her death. Though apparently unsatisfactory as an environment, the room helps focus Lily's new growth, for living in it gives her insight regarding true poverty; now “she had a sense of deeper impoverishment—of an inner destitution compared to which outward conditions dwindled into insignificance” (p. 515). However miserable her present state, “there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years” (p. 515). To such a harbor has her flying ship with “Beyond!” now brought her. She finally realizes what true solitude means, the solitude she had all her life taken pains to evade in favor of “collective activities,” and, more important still, she realizes what a person without place has missed. She feels herself “being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them” (pp. 515-16).²⁶ Ironically, the marine imagery upon which she had earlier floated, in fantasy “Beyond! beneath a flying ship” and in reality on the Dorsets' yacht, now accompanies her in death as, like flotsam and jetsam, she finally sinks beneath the waves. She dies from an overdose of chloral, having only begun to make for herself a place.²⁷

Through Selden's eyes, as he looks about the morning after her death, we first see Lily's hotel room in detail. The particulars Wharton gives present a Lily pared to essentials. She has stamped her personality on the room “in the scrupulous neatness of the scant articles of furniture: a washing-stand, two chairs, a small writing-desk, and the little table near the bed” (p. 529). Previously, we had not attributed neatness to Lily Bart. The maid, not she, kept tidy her room at Mrs. Peniston's. But the “scrupulous neatness” of this miserable hotel room, her last interior, indicates that Lily has finally learned something not only about the House of Mirth but also about herself. Before dying, she had put all her papers in order, regulated her accounts, and paid her bills. She dies out of debt at last. More important, she has also gained some insight into herself and some awareness of better, more humane values and of herself as an emotional being. Her ship sets sail toward an unknown “beyond” with dignity.

Interiors, Wharton implies, function as waiting-rooms before the inevitability of death. For her, how we conceive and fix up our waiting-room says much about us; it may even determine the course of our life's journey. Selden and Gerty Farish in different ways make a tolerable job of creating an interior; Carry Fisher, with her daughter, does better still; Nettie Struther, with supportive husband as well as baby, does best of all. They have created, as Lily has not, perhaps cannot, a loved place in which to ground themselves and others. But the interiors in the House of Mirth possess neither taste nor allow true domesticity. They lack character because their owners have none. Rich in material cost, they are spiritually without soul. Lily, who knows what she dislikes, yearns for the luxury they embody, but gradually realizes that they may not, after all, satisfy her. Slow, belated, and incomplete is her education in life, but by the end of The House of Mirth it has begun and begun well in an interior—ordered and tidy—that reveals clear-eyed acceptance of responsibility for her own life.

Notes

1. “Justice to Edith Wharton,” reprinted in Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays, Irving Howe, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962), p. 23.

2. “Characters and scenic detail are in fact one to the novelist who has fully assimilated his material,” she observes in The Writing of Fiction ([New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925], p. 84). Interiors, in fact, play so central a role in Wharton's fiction that we may regard her work as an ongoing commentary on interiors even more than on architecture. Her preoccupation with interiors reflects her distaste for the seamier side of modern American urban life that writers began to explore after 1890—the year Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives. In the ‘90s a new generation of writers—Crane, Dreiser, O. Henry—responded to the streets as well as to life within doors and, by confronting the kaleidoscopic variety of New York's urban life, fulfilled the encompassing democratic vision of the city that Walt Whitman had projected in Leaves of Grass. But Wharton, like James in Washington Square (1880) and Howells in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), avoids the bustle without by retreating within. Rather than cope with the noisy unpredictable world of the streets, she presents the city almost entirely via interiors.

3. This essay, based closely on the particulars of Wharton's text, distances itself from most recent interpretations of The House of Mirth, for example, those collected in Elizabeth Ammons's Norton Critical edition (New York: Norton, 1990). Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Elaine Showalter, and Ammons herself discuss Lily Bart almost exclusively as a victim of oppressive (male) society and dominant (male) capitalism. This approach also envelops the 1994 student text of The House of Mirth, Shari Benstock, ed. (Boston and New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press). In the “Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism” series under the editorship of Ross C. Murfin, this volume offers essays purportedly representative of cultural criticism, Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, deconstruction, and psychoanalytic criticism. But (as Benstock twice cheerfully admits) all five essays fly under the feminist banner (pp. vii, 319) and thus read Lily as “debased and destroyed by society” (p. 319). Granted that Wharton herself in old age, thirty years after writing The House of Mirth, gave in A Backward Glance some justification for seeing Lily as victim, the tale itself tells something quite different. In only the broadest sense can Wharton be called a feminist and she certainly was not opposed to capitalism. Essays by critics proudly fixed “in our contemporary moment” and professedly reluctant to catapult themselves “into the historical past” (p. 323 of Benstock) ultimately reveal more of their authors than of Wharton. Editions that largely omit historical annotation (Ammons annotates the text lightly, chiefly at the beginning; Benstock, not at all) ill serve students curious about earlier manners and mores. In avoiding such formerly traditional women's interests as interiors, feminist critics do Wharton and her art great injustice.

4. The House of Mirth (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905), p. 249. Subsequent references to this edition given parenthetically.

5. Don Juan, canto 16, stanzas 97 and 98 and (Byron's) note to 97.

6. Occasionally, using a mirror positioned in an upper window, she will peer out, like a wizened Lady of Shalott, upon a world too complex world for her to deal with.

7. Behind the portrait of Mrs. Peniston and her home lie clear recollections of Wharton's mother and of the New York brownstone in which Edith grew up. In her late autobiography, A Backward Glance (1964), Wharton makes no bones about her detestation of “the intolerable ugliness of New York, of its untended streets and the narrow houses so lacking in external dignity, so crammed with smug and suffocating upholstery” (1934; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), pp. 54-55. Wharton's experience was in no way unusual among her social class. A decade later, Mabel Dodge Luhan grew up in similar circumstances in Victorian Buffalo (Lois Palken Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds [Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1984], p. 33). Edith's mother, remembered by her daughter as an incorrigible shopper, filled the drawing room with bric-a-brac and stuffed the gilded cabinets with old lace and painted fans. When the eleven-year-old Edith wrote a tale that began with an untidy drawing-room, her mother commented, “Drawing rooms are always tidy” (cited from Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time [New York: Viking, 1971], p. 28).

8. Wharton uses black walnut furniture to indicate mindset. The mother of Percy Gryce, the vapid young collector of Americana whom Lily initially sets her cap for, also possesses “an appalling house, all brown stone without and black walnut within” (p. 33).

9. The Age of Innocence (1920; New York: D. Appleton, 1921), p. 26.

10. Since Shakespeare's Benedick does eventually marry, perhaps Wharton wishes to imply that Selden is potentially marriageable. Beatrice in Much Ado, however, unlike Lily Bart, has an outwardly engaged imagination and acts decisively on the basis of her moral convictions.

11. “I never met anybody who understood George Eliot better or admired her more than Edith,” Charles Du Bos recalled (cited in Percy Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton [New York and London: D. Appleton-Century, 1947], p. 102).

12. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913, pp. 578-79. Elsewhere in The House of Mirth Wharton nicely encapsulates the possessive, unloving character of Percy Gryce by giving him a “fire-proof annex that looked like a mausoleum” in which to store his valuable collection of Americana (p. 33).

13. The Age of Innocence, pp. 2, 70, 350.

14. Again, Lily reminds readers of Eliot's Rosamond, who prior to her marriage “imagined herself in the drawing-room in her favourite house with various styles of furniture” (chap. 27).

15. The Architecture of Country Houses (1850; New York: Dover Publications, 1969), especially the preface (p. xix) and first section (pp. 22-25). Besides Ruskin, Downing draws heavily upon J. C. Loudon's Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture (1833), which, as the title suggests, concerns itself as much with furniture and interiors as with landscape. That architecture contains a significant ethical dimension finds striking reflection also in Orson S. Fowler, A Home for All, or the Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building (1853). For good brief discussion of Downing and Fowler, see Jan Cohn, The Palace or the Poorhouse: The American House as a Cultural Symbol (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1979).

    T. J. Jackson Lears argues that The Decoration of Interiors “descended directly” from Downing's various tomes (“Interior Riches in a Little Room: the Interior Scenes of Modernist Culture,” Modulus, 18 [1987]: 2-27, esp. p. 14). In my view, however, Wharton works both within and without the Downing tradition: within, in her correlation between architecture (including interiors) and character; without, in her stressing the eye—the visual impact—in the design of interiors, even at the expense of materials and the moral sense. In other words, the interior must first work visually; as long as the effect and the line are achieved, it matters less if the materials chosen are “insincere.” See The Decoration of Houses (1897; New York and London: Norton, 1978), pp. 38-39. In Wharton the relationship between architectural ideas and Downing's canonization of the Italianate style extends even to the title of Hudson River Bracketed. We may note that “Bellomont” would normally be spelled “Bellamont” (“beautiful mountain”), or whittled to “Belmont,” but Wharton, by deliberately subverting Italian “a” into “o,” coarsens the name (in English as in Italian) to suggest the cacophony within both house and owner.

    The best overall discussion of “space” in Wharton remains Judith Fryer's superb Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (Chapel Hill and London: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986), especially (for The House of Mirth) chapter 4. I am also indebted to Richard Guy Wilson, “Edith and Ogden: Writing, Decoration, and Architecture,” in Ogden Codman and the Decoration of Houses, Pauline C. Metcalf, ed. (Boston: David R. Godine, for the Boston Athenaeum, 1988), pp. 133-84. Sarah Allaback long ago pointed out to me the connection between Downing and Wharton and gave an earlier draft of this essay a vigorous reading, as did Beverly K. Brandt. My colleague, Joan Blythe, in her various critiques of the manuscript, has bettered its argument with a myriad of stimulating insights.

16. “Tout notre mal vient de ne pouvoir être seuls.” Les caractères, Gaston Cayrou, ed. (Paris: Didier, 1950), p. 416 (chap. 11, “De l'homme”; my translation). Poe loosely cites La Bruyère's maxim (“ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir etre seul”) as the motto for “The Man of the Crowd.”

17. By Richard Guy Wilson and others. See The American Renaissance 1876-1917 (New York: Pantheon Books, for the Brooklyn Museum, 1979). Intimately aware of the evolution of New York society, Wharton here distantly alludes to the Neo-Renaissance palace that Richard Morris Hunt, the most celebrated “society” architect of the later nineteenth century, designed in 1883 for William K. and Alva Vanderbilt at 52nd and Fifth Avenue. The extravagant ball Alva gave that year succeeded in placing the upstart Vanderbilts as social co-equals with the old-money Astors, whose house and annual January ball had hitherto reigned supreme. Thus did New York society accommodate itself, as it often did in years to come, to the new plutocracy. For a summary account of this incident see Oliver Allen, New York, New York (New York: Atheneum, 1990), pp. 211-13.

    Even more specifically, the Brys' mansion (“a copy of the Trianon”) alludes directly to the spectacular Vanderbilt palaces of the 90s at Newport, among them, Marble House (1888-1892) and “The Breakers” (1893-1895), both designed by Hunt as gigantesque redoings of the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Wharton's language in The House of Mirth—“every marble house with gilt furniture is thought to be a copy of the Trianon” (p. 258)—unsubtly brings home her point. Rosecliff (1901-1902) by Stanford White, for Mrs. Herman Oelrichs, draws somewhat more tastefully upon the Grand Trianon. Wharton, who lived in Newport from 1885 to 1893 and who summered there for years afterward, eventually abandoned its moist air for the dryer Lenox in the Berkshires, there to build her own house, “The Mount,” one whose English country house facade, French Neo-classical interiors, French forecourt, Italianate terrace, and eclectic gardens emerged largely from her own designs. The creation of her house and grounds interacted closely with The House of Mirth, which Wharton wrote at The Mount. She draws upon The Mount and its gardens (as well as upon other houses and gardens) for various settings in her novel. The gardens at Bellomont, for example, reflect the view from her bedroom window (Richard Guy Wilson, op. cit., p. 172). That Wharton herself mixed diverse styles, as (famously) did Richard Morris Hunt, does not invalidate her criticism of the Brys' mansion: some mixes display taste, others do not. Contemporary observers invariably praised Wharton's faultless taste in interiors, which harmoniously blended diverse influences into a whole.

    Wilson notes that “a theme of The Decoration of Houses would be that wealth did not guarantee good taste” (op. cit., p. 149) and cites a letter in which Wharton speaks of the Vanderbilts “entrenched in a sort of thermopylae of bad taste” (ibid.). “Old New York” regarded the ostentatious Vanderbilts, though a long-established family, as crass. (Wharton called the first wave of nouveau riche millionaires that swept over old new York society in the 1880s the “invaders”; they often came from the midwest or far west. A second more puissant wave followed in the ‘90s.) Wharton herself came from New York's old aristocracy, represented in The House of Mirth chiefly by Mrs. Peniston and Selden.

18. The Decoration of Houses, p. 10. For Wharton, who knew more about architecture and interiors than most professional scholars today, interiors of houses form an intrinsic part of architecture. In The Decoration of Houses she chooses her models chiefly from French Neo-classicism but also, though less frequently, from the Italian Renaissance and Baroque, and from Georgian England.

19. Such taste as the Brys represent, however horrendous to an architectural purist like Wharton, did not overly jar within the prevailing architectural eclecticism of the time. Her views regarding good taste, we should note, were in 1905 very much in the minority.

    The “composite order” constitutes one of the five classical orders. To the Greek Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian (the Tuscan presumably having come from the Etruscans), the Romans added the Composite. The capital of a Composite column combines the volutes of the Ionic with the foliage (usually modelled upon acanthus leaves) of the Corinthian. It is the largest and most elaborate of the orders and the one that admits the most variations. For big buildings Renaissance architects favored huge Composite columns. But Composite columns for interiors were usually out of place as well as out of scale. In a garishly-designed “Venetian Renaissance” ballroom they would indeed nicely capture “the whole of Mrs. Bry.” “Composite order” is one of many such matters that, in their recent editions of The House of Mirth (cited in note 2), Elizabeth Ammons and Shari Benstock do not annotate.

20. For a color reproduction of “Mrs. Lloyd,” see Reynolds, Nicholas Penny, ed. (London: Royal Academy of Arts/Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 133 (commentary pp. 275-76). The artist catches Mrs. Lloyd in the act of carving her husband's name on a convenient tree; Lily of course has no husband and presumably no true love whose name she can carve on a tree. Elizabeth Ammons in the Norton Critical House of Mirth reproduces on p. 304, not the Reynolds painting, but a tableau vivant of The Dying Gladiator, which figures in the text only as a bronze that is part of the decor at Mrs. Peniston's (p. 157). Students wishing to understand the significance of Lily's tableau vivant as “Mrs. Lloyd” would benefit from looking at the Reynolds.

21. Once again, as so often in this novel, one senses George Eliot (here as the author of “Janet's Repentance”) looking over Wharton's shoulder as she writes these words.

22. “For everyone,” Václav Havel has written recently, “home is a basic existential experience. What a person perceives as his home (in the philosophic sense of the word) can be compared to a series of concentric circles, with his ‘I’ at the center.” “On Home,” New York Review of Books, December 5, 1991, p. 49. Even in the only interior space Lily can call “home” she undergoes violation of space: her room at Mrs. Peniston's no more belongs to her than the objects in it. Her tenure lasts only as long as Mrs. Peniston. After her aunt's death, she has to leave, a transient once again.

23. “The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton's House of Mirth,” reprinted in The House of Mirth, ed. Ammons, p. 368.

24. “Justice to Edith Wharton,” reprinted in Edith Wharton, ed. Howe, p. 21.

25. Nettie inhabits a working-class tenement flat rather than a flat intended for a middle-class or upper-class clientele. Interestingly, the physical layout of Gerty Farish's flat, with its lack of space and view, appears closer to Nettie's than to Selden's. No mention is made of any view from Nettie's.

26. Another Eliotean echo—here of Maggie and Tom swept away in the flood that ends The Mill on the Floss.

27. Lily stumbles into death: “She did not, in truth, consider the question very closely” (p. 521). I read Lily's death, not as deliberate suicide, but as accidental, another instance of failure in her responsibility toward herself, the last of the many matters she had not considered “very closely.”