SOURCE: Ammentorp, Julie Olin. “Edith Wharton's Challenge to Feminist Criticism.” Studies in American Fiction 16, no. 2 (autumn 1988): 237-44.

[In the following essay, Ammentorp finds that Wharton's male characters in The House of Mirth suffer nearly as much as the women because of their society's expectations.]

In the past decade, feminist critics have done much to restore Edith Wharton to her proper rank among American novelists and to shed light on many aspects of her work previous critics had overlooked. Scholars such as Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Elizabeth Ammons, Judith Fetterley, and recently Wai-Chee Dimock have changed the understanding of Wharton's work through their perceptive analyses, focusing particularly on Wharton's insights into the social structures of the early part of this century and the ways in which these structures influenced and limited women's lives.

Yet the work of these feminist critics also raises issues of the limitations, or perhaps blind-spots, of current feminist literary criticism, issues which go beyond their application to Wharton and her work. For instance, most feminist critics seem to imply that Wharton, though never one to ally herself with the feminist movements of her day, was a kind of inherent feminist, someone who both fought for and attained her rightful place as a novelist in a period when the novel was dominated by male authors and when upper-class women were taught, as Wharton was, to be more ornamental than intellectual. Moreover, these critics point out, Wharton protested the treatment of women through her portrayals of women caught in the inescapable bonds of social constructs. These points are fundamentally correct; Wharton was and did all these things. Yet in focusing only on these aspects of her life and career feminist critics overlook the Edith Wharton who, despite her mature anger over the random education her parents gave her, wrote that

I have lingered over these details [describing the cooking she enjoyed as a child and young woman] because they formed a part—a most important and honourable part—of that ancient curriculum of housekeeping which … was so soon to be swept aside by the “monstrous regiment” of the emancipated: young women taught by their elders to despise the kitchen and the linen room, and to substitute the acquiring of University degrees for the more complex art of civilized living. … I mourn more than ever the extinction of the household arts. Cold storage, deplorable as it is, has done less harm to the home than the Higher Education.¹

One point where feminist criticism seems particularly weak is in its treatment of the men in Wharton's fiction. This is particularly true in criticism of The House of Mirth, probably the best-known as well as the most astutely criticized of Wharton's novels. Judith Fetterley has claimed that in Wharton's novels, social waste is female;² when one uses this as the guiding principle in reading The House of Mirth, the novel becomes the story of a young woman's destruction by a social system that maintains that upper-class women are meant to be ornamental, even while it forces them to prostitute themselves on the marriage market. A woman like Lily, Fetterley argues, has to accept her status as “a piece of property available for purchase by the highest bidder.”³ Elizabeth Ammons joins Fetterley in arguing that power in the novel is patriarchal, pointing out that men are the makers of money in the novel and, thus, as the novel focuses on the economics of marriage, the source of all power. These points are important and undeniably true and help to explain the social structure in which Lily moves.

But a re-examination of Wharton's fiction in general, and of The House of Mirth in particular, demonstrates that the social structures of Wharton's fictional world cause male waste as much as female. As Dimock has noted, “the actual wielders of power in the book are often not men but women.”⁴ Indeed, women like Bertha Dorset and Judy Trenor are hardly subservient to their husbands, despite their economic dependence on them; both of these women seem to have more freedom and power than their spouses. At no point does Wharton suggest that they warrant pity nor that they are victims of the system in the way Lily is. Lily herself is eager to grasp the money that could make her as great a social force as either of her friends, as is implied by her successive evaluations of the personal and economic attractions of men as different as Percy Gryce, Sim Rosedale, and Lawrence Selden. Women in this novel spend at least as much time assessing men as men do evaluating women. Despite the weakness of Wharton's males—a weakness that has become almost proverbial among Wharton critics—Wharton presents her male characters as meriting as much (or perhaps almost as much) sympathy as her female characters.

Three of the men most important to this novel, Gus Trenor, George Dorset, and Lawrence Selden, have been pretty much dismissed as a brute, a spineless coward, and a coward who should have known better, who should, in fact, have come to Lily's “rescue.” Yet to re-examine these characters within the social context that Wharton so carefully establishes is to see that they cannot be judged quite so simply. Gus Trenor, despite his attempt to rape Lily as a way of making her “pay up” for the money he has given her, verges on the pathetic at moments. Not only is he ugly in a society which, as Wharton says in her autobiography, had “an almost pagan worship of physical beauty,”⁵ but he is aware that his wife uses him as a pawn in the socio-economic system. Indeed, Judy Trenor values him only for his wealth while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge the costs of running a household⁶ or building a ballroom (p. 160). Although Gus' violence in demanding that Lily “pay up” (pp. 145-47) is in no way excusable, it is perhaps understandable in the context of a social system that views him primarily as a workhorse.⁷

George Dorset may be Wharton's most pointed example of a man diminished by the social system. Early in the novel Judy Trenor remarks to Lily that the dyspeptic George “is not as dismal as you think. If Bertha [his wife] didn't worry him he would be quite different” (p. 44). As the novel develops Wharton reveals the uneven nature of the Dorsets' marriage: Bertha, “out of a job” (p. 43) when her affair with Selden ends, takes up with Ned Silverton, while George becomes increasingly dismayed.⁸ Rather than accusing Bertha of unfaithfulness and demanding her fidelity or, alternately, divorcing her, George allows Bertha to blackmail him into silence. At the same time he begs Lily to help him, telling her that she is the only one who can “save” him (pp. 244-45, 248). When Lily refuses even to acknowledge that she could help George, he sinks into apathy. That Lily feels she cannot help George makes a double point: that the system of marriage wastes male potential as it does female, and that the Dorset marriage, although it continues, is a failure from every point of view except that of Bertha, who happily goes on spending George's income. Moreover, Lily's inability to “save” Dorset also has important implications for Lily's own need to be “saved.”

While George Dorset and Gus Trenor have received their share of critical scorn, Lawrence Selden has received the brunt of critical wrath. Claiming that Lily is solely “victim” within the system, many critics have argued that Lawrence Selden, despite his relative moral attractions, is to be condemned for his failure to “save” Lily. Though not necessarily someone who would identify himself as a feminist, R. W. B. Lewis established the normative view of Selden in his biography of Wharton. Selden, Lewis argues, “is the one human being who might have supplied” a “viable alternative life for Lily.” Lewis continues, “Selden himself, as she [Wharton] told Sara Norton, was ‘a negative hero,’ a sterile and subtly fraudulent figure whose ideas were not much to be trusted.”⁹ Cynthia Griffin Wolff claims that “far from being Wharton's spokesman, Selden is the final object of her sweeping social satire.”¹⁰ Similarly, Wai-chee Dimock believes that Selden “remains, to the end, a closet speculator. … The ‘republic of the spirit’ turns out to be less a republic than a refined replica of the social marketplace, of which Selden is a full participating member.”¹¹ Three fundamentally faulty assumptions about Wharton's novel underlie such judgments of Selden. First, readers assume that Selden could have “saved” Lily and thus is culpable for not having done so; second, they judge Selden by a standard far harsher than that they use to judge Lily; and third, their expectations that Selden “save” Lily at all are problematic in terms of the novel as a whole.

First of all, readers and critics alike cannot assume fairly that Selden could have saved Lily. Whatever the limitations of Selden's heroism, Lily herself hardly makes the path to complete rescue an easy one. Selden, after all, proposes to her repeatedly in the novel, but she is as imbued with the idea of marriage for money and power as Selden is with the notion of romantic love. In addition, her inability to govern her own life stems from a fundamental indecisiveness, the result of the values inculcated in her by her culture, that prevents her from developing either a firm friendship or a love relationship with Selden. Finally, Wharton stresses repeatedly the social indoctrination that has made it almost impossible for either Lily or Selden to break through their carefully-cultivated emotional reserves. It is extremely problematic to fault Selden for not “saving” Lily; she will not permit herself to be saved.

Second, it is important not to set up a reverse double standard for judging Selden. While feminist critics see Lily generally, and correctly, as a product and a victim of society, they conveniently ignore Wharton's hint that “in a different way, [Selden] was, as much as Lily, the victim of his environment”¹² (pp. 151-52). They somehow expect Selden to transcend the codes of his class and place. It is generally understood that Lily's reluctance to wed is an expression of her “repugnance toward a relationship in which a woman is powerless”¹³ and a result of her examination of the hatred and hypocrisy in the marriages of her friends; yet the same considerations and observations are somehow supposed not to concern Selden. There may, indeed, be some grounds for judging Selden by standards different from those used for Lily: the stakes are different for the two of them. Because of her extreme specialization, Lily must “go into partnership”—that is, marry—in order not to “drop”; by comparison Selden's implied return to books and his law practice looks fairly comfortable. Nevertheless, these disparities do not justify condemning Selden for the same responses that are respected in Lily.

The novel as a whole reveals that such condemnations are in themselves wanting. Despite their efforts to live independent of the standards of their class, both Selden and Lily are limited by these standards: Lily cannot teach herself an independent existence, and Selden, although he is somewhat independent of others, cannot see the system in which both live as wholly as readers can. Readers, after all, have the advantage of Wharton's narration and of extended exposure to Lily's consciousness; by comparison, Selden's knowledge is extremely limited. Moreover, moral cowardice—of which both Selden and Lily have their share—is hardly a disgrace in Wharton's novel. It would take an almost superhuman effort to break out of a system so rigid and yet so flexible that it can, for instance, maintain with perfect equanimity that marriage is a romantic connection while demonstrating over and over that it is an economic relation. Irving Howe's relatively early (pre-feminist, one might say) remark on Wharton's work may still stand among the most perceptive summaries of her stance toward such characters as Lily and Selden:

Mrs. Wharton understands how large is the price, how endless the nagging pain, that must be paid for a personal assertion against the familiar ways of the world, and she believes, simply, that most of us lack the strength to pay.¹⁴

Lily finally manages to “pay up” her debt to Trenor, but this payment robs her of any further strength. In spite of his relative independence of social standards, Selden as well “lack[s] the strength to pay” for his release from the social system. Wharton's point is not that Lily is victim, Selden victimizer, but that in spite of their different standings within the system, both are pitiable in their entrapment.

In planning her novel, Wharton wrote that the most difficult obstacle to overcome was determining how to give “a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers” the “typical human significance which is the story-teller's reason for telling one story rather than another.” The solution, she discovered,

was that a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals. The answer, in short, was my heroine, Lily Bart.¹⁵

It is with such remarks in mind that feminist critics have claimed, as Fetterley has, that “social waste is female” in The House of Mirth. But in context, Wharton's remark is almost synecdochic: Lily Bart represents not just herself, not even her sex, but the whole group of women and men destroyed by a grappling and vicious social system which they are intelligent enough to understand but too weak to change.

In this way, Lily herself—along with Ned Silverton, who once aspired to writing epics, and Lawrence Selden, with his passion for the beautiful—can be seen as failed Edith Whartons: all fail to find a channel into which they can direct their creative energies productively.¹⁶ Wharton's portrayal of Lily's defeat and death suggests not only Wharton's appreciation of the binding force of social norms, but perhaps as well—and more disturbingly—a certain acceptance of these norms.

Indeed, if one accepts the notion that Selden as well as Lily may be a sympathetic character, one faces once again the problem of interpreting the novel's conclusion. It is entirely possible that Wharton intended the conclusion to be read as it is written—that, in fact, “in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear” (p. 329). As much as Wharton regrets the waste implied in Lily's life and death, she may reconcile herself to it as well. For Wharton constructs her novel to imply the impossibility of one individual saving, or even helping, another; this is clearest in Selden's failure to help Lily but is reinforced as well by Lily's refusal to save George Dorset by supplying him with the information he needs to divorce Bertha.

Wharton may in fact have accepted her status as what Adrienne Rich has described as a “token” or “special” woman. Speaking to a group of women at the Modern Language Association, Rich noted that she, like Virginia Woolf addressing a women's college, was

aware of the women who are not with us here because they are washing the dishes and looking after the children. … We seem to be special women here, we have liked to think of ourselves as special, and we have known that men would tolerate, even romanticize us as special, as long as our words and actions didn't threaten their privilege of tolerating or rejecting us and our work according to their ideas of what a special woman ought to be.¹⁷

Surrounded by Henry James and a host of other admiring men, Wharton was clearly in the situation that Rich describes, that of the special woman who accepts her own success as something due to her, something she has earned. Wharton saw herself as someone who had made it on her own, through hard work and will power, and who—despite her compassion for those like Lily Bart—seems fundamentally to accept the failure of others as the natural result of social Darwinism. Other women, she implies, should not bother to educate themselves, much less write; they should instead learn the arts of household management. Despite her gratitude to those (all men) who helped her develop her intellect and her skill as a writer, Wharton prefers to ignore the possibility that women could benefit from systematic education or the cultivation of their potential as artists, as full human beings. Her attitude toward others seems, in short, to be a version of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” approach, one which most feminists now find somewhat wanting, given that society may leave some individuals with bootstraps that are very short, or even non-existent.

Yet this view of Wharton, too, is limited. Like both Woolf and Rich, Wharton was aware of the women who were in fact “washing the dishes and looking after the children.” In The House of Mirth, Wharton portrays not only the Olympian heights of social glitter but also the wrong side of the “social tapestry” (p. 276), the lives of the numerous women who suffer that a few might be wealthy: charwomen, girls working long hours at an overheated and underlit milliner's shop. Wharton herself is something of an enigma when it comes to issues both of class and of self-perception. The professional writer every morning, she emerged meticulously, fashionably coiffed and clad, every noon to take over the role of the perfect hostess. Nor, apparently, did she see any contradiction between these roles, nor between the little girl who early experienced a love of fine clothing and admiration and the society that so long kept that girl from attaining her potential as a thinker and a writer. Similarly, Wharton was reputed to be unusually kind to her servants—a trait she passes on to Lily Bart—and she worked long hours to help relocate refugees from Belgium during World War I.¹⁸ Yet it appears that she never questioned her right to ask a dozen individuals to run her household. She was, perhaps, aristocratic (“special” in Rich's terms) in the way that Woolf was as well: She saw no problem in preventing others from developing their potential so that she might develop her own. At the bottom of this is a certain classism that is, or so one would hope, inimical to feminism in the 1980s.

Edith Wharton's challenge to feminist criticism is the challenge created by historical distance and by shifting definitions of feminism itself. Many feminist critics seems to have expected Wharton to be fifty years ahead of her time; further, they have shaped a Wharton who conforms to such expectations. In doing so they have oversimplified the complexities of Wharton's personality and times; they have brilliantly represented and respected a part of her genius, but they have detached it from the woman as a whole.

Notes

1. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Scribner's, 1933), pp. 59-60.

2. Judith Fetterley, “The Temptation to Be a Beautiful Object: Double Standard and Double Bind in The House of Mirth,” SAF, 5 (1977), 200.

3. Fetterley, p. 201.

4. Wai-Chee Dimock, “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth,” PMLA, 100 (1985), 784.

5. A Backward Glance, p. 96. I am indebted for this insight to Margot Norris, now at the University of California, Irvine.

6. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Scribner's, 1905), p. 81. All further references to this edition will be made in the text.

7. Gus' violence toward Lily is, to some degree, understandable, but it is also important to understand why he directs his anger toward Lily rather than toward its proper object, his wife, Judy, or, more exactly, the socio-economic system as a whole. Trenor turns his anger toward Lily because she is more vulnerable than either his wife or an impersonal and well-established system; moreover, as rumors have circulated about Lily, her “market value” has dropped. She is thus increasingly available to him as an object of his desire. He has “bought” her through his gifts of money, disguised as “tips”; since he has “paid” for her, he wonders, why should he not enjoy her?

8. Though it also illustrates the sexual double standards of their society, the situation of Ned Silverton serves as another example of the social exploitation of a male. Lily herself acknowledges this when she looks down a dinner table at Ned and sees him as the young man who “had meant to live on proof-reading and write an epic, and who now lived on his friends and had become critical of truffles” (p. 55). The novel traces not only Lily's decline but Ned's reduction to a plaything for Bertha Dorset.

9. R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 155.

10. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), p. 132.

11. Dimock, p. 787.

12. Different critics read this line differently: some place it in Selden's conciousness, other in Wharton's narration. Those who condemn Selden may see this line as only his unjustified self-pity. I would argue, however, that Selden's perspective often merges with the narrator's and that this is one of those instances; further, the novel as a whole supports this vision, regardless of its source within the narration.

13. Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton's Argument with America (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 35.

14. Irving Howe, “Introduction: The Achievement of Edith Wharton,” in Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 17.

15. Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 207.

16. In “‘The Blank Page’ and Issues of Female Creativity,” Susan Gubar argues that Lily is a practicing artist—practicing on herself—and that she “kills herself into art” at the novel's conclusion (p. 81). Gubar's argument is certainly valid, but the point here is to stress the fundamental difference between artists like Lily, whose art is ultimately self-destructive, and productive artists like Wharton.

17. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 38.

18. Lewis, pp. 370-72.