[In the following essay, Howard discusses The House of Mirth as a turning point in Wharton's artistic and intellectual development.]

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature!

—Charles Darwin

It is just over ninety years since Edith Wharton made her agreement with Scribner's Magazine to finish and publish in serial form a work which she had found troubling. The House of Mirth is a novel of New York Society, the world she never completely discarded though she declared she had given it up. Henry James, while praising the historical reenactments and Italian setting of Wharton's first novel, The Valley of Decision, crisply advised her “in favor of an American subject.” The Master proposed that she “Do New York,” and Mrs. Wharton proceeded to deal it out to a society she understood to be a narrow slice of the American scene. From Lawrence Selden's opening encounter with Miss Lily Bart in Grand Central Station, we anticipate that the novel will occupy the familiar territory of custom and constraint that amused and angered Wharton. But the precision of Selden's view of Lily Bart “as wearing a mask of irresolution which might … be the mask of a very definite purpose,” and Lily's shrewd use of him—“What luck!. … How nice of you to come to my rescue!”—sets in motion a game of hide-and-seek that these two will play to the bitter, open end. The House of Mirth is a novel of concealment and revelation, of what is presumed socially and must be discovered morally and emotionally by both of its principals, and of what remains unknowable to them.

The novel also displays Wharton in the act of discovery, distancing herself from Lily Bart's portrayal of the social creature the author was once destined to be. Both Lily and her maker were women in transition: Wharton consciously evolving from a literary notoriety to a novelist of the first rank, Lily failing as an ornament of the privileged class, fumbling toward an imagined view of herself in a larger society. If Wharton was troubled when she went back to the novel, she may from the start have understood that her heroine could not be dismissed as the tarnished beauty in a comedy of manners, nor would pure melodrama serve for her demise. In The House of Mirth, she made use of both genres and then, with growing artistic confidence, moved on to the unlikely territory of American naturalism that would deepen this, her best work. Wharton did not accept the social Darwinism of the naturalists, but she found, in writing this novel, a Darwinian view that supported her belief in individual adaptation. Lily Bart's death, which follows close upon the revelation that one may choose to live with purpose, is clumsy, wasteful, blundering—unwilled. The novelist's moves are chosen, productive, skillful—a triumph of her will.

It is as a privileged guide that Wharton first presents herself in The House of Mirth, knowing that the exact details of the trivial society in which she displayed her irresolute heroine had enormous appeal to the uninvited, not only to the masses who so relished scandal and excess in high places, but to the more discreet readers of Scribner's as well. Beginning with the serialization in 1905 and the publication of the novel, she found a large audience who enjoyed such disclosures by the ultimate insider and who were to find it in The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, Old New York, and in many of her finest stories, like “The Other Two,” “The Long Run,” and “Autre Temps.”

The House of Mirth was a contemporary work scoring off the new entrepreneurial society of the new century, a society of getting and spending and then getting more. What Wharton knew with surprising assurance from her beginnings as a writer of social satire was the importance of particulars, the need for every amusing detail to carry more than its apparent weight. Thus, the inappropriateness of an unmarried woman like Lily taking tea with a man at Sherry's leads Selden to invite her to his rooms. Her acceptance of his invitation is Lily's first risk. And as she looks over his bookshelves it is “the ripe tints of good tooling and old morocco” that her eyes linger on, “with the pleasure in agreeable tones and textures that was one of her inmost susceptibilities.” Surfaces, decor, will attract or repel her throughout the novel. Looking down upon the sumptuous hall at Bellomont, she finds her spirit restored: “There were moments when such scenes delighted Lily, when they gratified her sense of beauty and her craving for the external finish of life; there were others when they gave a sharper edge to the meagerness of her own opportunities.” Though her manner is grand, her sense of her own worth is so frail that all settings in the novel, even the warm domesticity of Nettie Struther's tenement kitchen, enrich or diminish her; and she is ever conscious of her own decorative value, estimating the inevitably dwindling capital of her face and figure.

That she is between trains at the outset of her story is appropriate, for Lily is eminently transient, without a setting of her own. In the cozy surroundings of Selden's bachelor digs, she connects the freedom of having one's own place with the possibility of goodness: “If I could only do over my aunt's drawing-room I know I should be a better woman.” However casually delivered, the line is an admission of her rootlessness and her self-doubt. If the wit as well as the moral confusion of this statement is not unrecognized by her, neither is it fully understood. She will not speak plainly, with insight and direction, until her next visit to Selden's library, at the end of the novel. It should be noted that Edith Wharton had recently done over her mother's stuffed and stuffy parlors, not literally but in writing (with Ogden Codman) The Decoration of Houses. The novelist, who continued to be much concerned with the esthetics of her domestic life, was yet quite able to distinguish between interior decoration and social values: her heroine, homeless to the end, finds personal and social enlightenment on the city streets and in a boarding house in this very housey novel.

As she leaves Selden's apartment for the next exhausting social venture, Lily encounters Mr. Rosedale: “‘The Benedick?’ She looked gently puzzled. ‘Is that the name of this building?’ ‘Yes, that's the name: I believe it's an old word for bachelor, isn't it? I happen to own the building—that's the way I know.’”

Wharton, who felt that she'd got hold of what it was to write a novel in writing this one, an early work yet her finest, understood that simply having Lily break the rules was not enough, nor was it enough for her readers to gasp when she is discovered coming from Selden's rooms, nor enough to catch Lily out in a lie. The allusion to Benedick, the confirmed bachelor of Shakespeare's Much Ado, was not lost on the Scribner's audience, nor is it lost on Lily. That she is “gently puzzled” has to do with her mere concealment of fact—she had noted the name of the Benedick—and with her manipulation of Rosedale. For all her expertise—she is worldly in the ways of women of her class—there will be much she doesn't know; specifics about money and property lead the list, dollar-and-cents facts dealt with by the men of her class, expertly dealt with by Mr. Rosedale. Her puzzlement though feigned is also moral. She has, indeed, been to a forbidden place. Might there be consequences? Rosedale asking her to verify the literary reference tops this exchange. She is Miss Lily Bart possessed of culture. That Simon Rosedale knows “it's an old word for bachelor” only because he owns the building is a clever introduction to the theme of cultural possession—the getting of rare books, paintings, jewels, boxes at the opera, houses and horses—all for display. And also the getting of beautiful women, for as we watch Lily display herself we understand that she is intended for further exhibition as cultural artifact/wife. But the uncaring act of cultural possession has already been addressed in the matter of Americana which Lily is curious about. Selden informs her that those who can afford to collect rare books of American history, the likes of Percy Gryce, don't personally savor them, while he collects books he is fond of. It is a first edition of La Bruyère, who recorded the manners of his day with scathing accuracy in portraits and maxims, that Lily returns to the shelf where the novelist placed it.

When one comes to the last page of The House of Mirth, it is as instructive to reread its opening chapter as it is, say, to turn back to the first pages of Emma or The Great Gatsby, both novels of manners, more or less. More than novels of manners is what we believe these works to be, as though they must satisfy us by transcending the amusements and comforts of that genre, as indeed they do with a breadth of implications in their first pages: Emma's managerial deployment of servants and friends, Nick Carraway's lofty dissertation on his heritage and class. The brightness with which Lily and Selden play against each other was, to Wharton and her audience, recognizable drawing-room comedy, but if we listen carefully, their repartee has as dark an undertow as the immensely clever exchanges in Oscar Wilde—brittle words. Their speech is mannered, fluent, flirtatious to an end that is self-defining, determinedly unphysical, protective.

The heavy hand of melodrama, that pop Victorian genre, is parodied in Lily's meetings with, first, the charwoman whom she finds physically distasteful, and then Mr. Rosedale, the landlord of the Benedick. The plight of the underclasses and the power of the landlord was abundantly noted in penny dreadfuls and stage thrillers of the day. For a moment, as Lily takes leave of the first chapter, it is as though our heroine, practiced in verbal maneuvers and social calculations, finds herself within the wrong script. She does, in fact, stammer as she extricates herself from Rosedale. That faltering is essential to our understanding that there may be more to Lily than meets Selden's (or Rosedale's) eye and that Wharton, writing what she understood to be her first serious novel, found that she could not depend on formulaic moves.

What we may also note in the extraordinarily intricate and deft opening of the novel, are the chance meetings—there are three; the risks—Lily's innocent adventure in going to Selden's rooms; and the shame—slight, passing—of her obvious, self-incriminating lie. Wharton plays with melodramatic prescriptions in depicting Lily Bart playing at melodrama, for in being buffeted by the hoi polloi in Grand Central she is a maiden in blatantly minor distress. She is delighted to be rescued by Selden, who will be incapable of rescuing her when she is truly in need. Yet as she springs into a hansom to catch the next train to the next social obligation, she feels herself rescued from Rosedale, a man who is willing to help her in the end. Our expectations of a real save, the reward of melodrama, have been disappointed long before the end of the novel, when Lily dreams herself to death.

So much is suggested in mock melodrama as the curtain goes up on the drama of the poor little rich girl, whose maid has gone ahead to the Trenor's estate up the Hudson, that we are lured, like the readers of Scribner's, to the pleasant complications of the next installment, the weekend at Bellomont, then the next, the Van Osburgh wedding, and so on. The tone of the old cliff-hangers allows Wharton to imply the bald question at the end of each installment—whatever will become of our heroine?

Lily's opening line—“Mr. Selden—what good luck!” launches the imagery of chance, risk, fate, gambling, calculation, and miscalculation which runs throughout the novel and will connect thematically to Edith Wharton's turn upon an evolutionary theme in which destiny is not fully determined by heritage. Fate, as in the old one-reelers (or nineteenth-century melodrama) appears with sensational rescues, telegrams, letters, checks, chance meetings, the deal of a hand. Whether Lily loses or wins at cards, she understands that she must play the social game. That she plays cards for money becomes one of her aunt's main complaints against her. She wins on the stock market, a game she does not understand and which leads to a debt to Gus Trenor, her financial savior and would-be seducer, yet another man to be rescued from.

The ingenue of melodrama must be unsullied and young, but Lily Bart lives at the edge of permissible age and permissible behavior. A great calculator of her advantages, she is hardly an innocent. Her fate would not concern us if she were. The House of Mirth becomes a forceful moral tale because Wharton reveals Lily as conventionally corrupt, jaded, snobbish, aging, yet an exceptionally beautiful and quirky product of her society. A sport of nature, she is just unconventional enough in her self-awareness, and her contempt for the pleasurable life she is addicted to, not to consolidate her gains, consistently revealing her flaw of irresolution. Lily Bart is unwise and uncertain in estimating her worth, investing heavily in the ornamental woman she was fated to be, given the accident of her birth, and placing little value on the useful woman she might have, against the odds, chosen to be.

The quest for Lily's character, and for her own status as more than a momentary literary success, drew Wharton away from the formulaic solutions of melodrama and the elegant endgames of social comedy. Perhaps that is why Henry James found The House of Mirth to be “two novels and too confused.” But if we understand that the novel is purposely rent in two, the confusion, if there is any, can be seen as the insoluble dilemma of Lily Bart. She is in transit, literally—between trains, house parties, friends and false friends, high life and low life. Wharton was also on the move, professionally speaking, and in writing The House of Mirth she found that there was no prefab house of fiction, no format of social satire or deterministic naturalism, that would accommodate Lily, a modern heroine. I read Wharton's novel as a modernist work which denies the comforts of genre and its available views. In fact, it denies the assumptions of genre twice, for after abandoning the novel of manners and melodramatic effects, Wharton turns away from the predetermined closure of naturalism to the romantic and ambiguous death of Lily and the mock-romantic spectacle of Selden at her bier.

The two works that best inform us in reading the novel and, I believe, informed Wharton in the writing, are Jane Austen's Emma and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. We can turn again to the opening chapter of The House of Mirth to discover the wit of a novel of manners in the broad play of Selden and Lily's banter and an initial glimpse of the naturalistic in the “dull tints of the crowd,” the teeming masses of Grand Central, and, of course, in Gertie Farish's good works and Lily's uncharitable condescension to Mrs. Haffen, the charwoman.

Wharton's debt to Austen has often been noted. Emma, in particular, haunts the pages of The House of Mirth. Emma Woodhouse, appealing and willful, can be seen as a nearly antipodean model for Lily Bart. In the first sentence of Emma, Austen's heroine is “handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition” and has lived nearly “twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” The dissimilarity to Wharton's heroine is suggestive: Lily, though handsome and clever enough, is impoverished, homeless, twenty-nine, and, though it is passed off lightly at first, somewhat vexed. In both novels money and marriage are on the table. For Austen, marriage is an institution within a stable world. Unwed, Emma Woodhouse has power, delights in it, misuses it. She does not need marriage until she discovers that love's advantage may be in having no predictable advantage. In Lily Bart's unstable society, marriage has become, at best, a flimsy institution in which to house one's ambitions. The House of Mirth may be read as a perverse marriage novel, for if we track Lily's business, the business of getting married, she is, at twenty-nine, a failure. And, what is most evident, she has no inner desire to be wed. The pressures are all external. While she understands the material advantages of marriage, the comfort zone, she is never interested in the power of marriage, though she observes the use of that power by her friend, Judy Trenor, and her adversary, Bertha Dorset. The more her financial and social circumstances demand marriage, any marriage—to George Dorset, to Simon Rosedale—the less responsive Lily is to any such prospect. At times she is careless to the point of self-destruction; as she misses catching Percy Gryce or listens to the marital woes of George Dorset, Lily seems not to fancy the scene she finds herself in, feeling her position in regard to these men absurd, even morally repellent. It is not fate, after all, but a fastidious irresolution: she defaults in the marriage game finding it insufficient, much as Edith Wharton did in abandoning the smart comedy of manners, but the novelist's move was a clear choice, a testing of her strength as a serious writer.

Austen and Wharton share the skills of good gossips. The forward movement of Emma depends largely on the propagation of gossip and conjecture, the uses and misuses of information. In The House of Mirth we understand that chatter is self-serving and destructive. The reader is privy to what is said of Lily Bart before the compromising news reaches her, a stage-worn device that co-opts us, makes us seemingly wiser. But Wharton is up to a more engaged use of Lily's reputation: Selden's first assessment of Lily is in the nature of gossip. Throughout their story, in so far as it is ever their story, he will allow his estimate of her conduct to be adjusted by what is said of her. His tracking of events—“had she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her?”—is gossip, cutely retold, second-hand. The rhetorical question does not let him off the hook: what people say matters to Selden. A woman may be victimized by prattle, but a man may not. It is Selden who let on to the readers of the first installment in Scribner's that “there is nothing new about Lily Bart,” a comment not on her age, but on her as news, old news. In the last scene of the novel, as he views her in death, he is, for a moment, ready to accuse her of “the old hints and rumors” that she had taken money from Gus Trenor. Sad as that scene may be, the final irony, even the final smile given the reader, is his admission that he must come up with explanations about Lily's settling of accounts “out of the very insinuations he had feared to probe.” It might be said that Selden is left behind in the novel of manners which Wharton abandoned, more a victim of his heritage than Lily Bart.

Wharton was critical of the later James for copping out on his characters' backgrounds. Whence their money? What place have his travelers left? The novelist who had come alive in Wharton understood that the family histories of Lily and Selden, both orphans, would weigh heavily in the first chapter as rationale. She is careful to give us the heritage at some delay, for a time concealing Lily's bitter, ambitious mother who sees her daughter as the “last asset of their fortunes,” and the feckless father whose financial ruin precipitates a “slow and difficult dying.” “To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased to fulfill his purpose.” Lily's mother, a devil's chaplain of Darwin's note on the cruelty of nature, discards the weak husband and selects her daughter's beauty as the dominant strain for survival.

Selden's heritage is not revealed until we are well into the plotting of Lily's fall from society's grace. It is in one of his moments of belief in her, even in a passing thought of love beyond the sentimental, that we learn of his mother's “values.” The quotation marks are Wharton's. Selden has inherited “the stoic's carelessness of material things, combined with the Epicurean's pleasure in them … and nowhere was the blending of the two ingredients so essential as in the character of a pretty woman.” What does that make Lily? An esthetic object of desire. Selden constantly estheticizes his view of Lily at the expense of her humanity and his. Lily exists for his contemplated pleasure, for her mother's gain.

Wharton suggests more problematic questions of heritage that had already become a major concern in her work. In the extraordinary opening chapters of The House of Mirth she presented a specimen case of evolutionary metaphors. About the matter of Lily's costly breeding, Selden senses “how highly specialized she was.” We soon learn that Rosedale is “still at a stage in his social ascent.” Percy Gryce, the rich mama's boy, feels in Lily's ministrations “the confused titillation with which the lower organisms welcome the gratification of their needs.” At Bellomont she glimpses the “laboratory where Selden's faiths are born” on the very morning when she chooses not to go to church. Selden, ever vigilant as counselor in his own defense, does not doubt the “spontaneity of her liking,” but cannot see himself as “the unforeseen element in a career so accurately planned [that it] was stimulating even to a man who had renounced sentimental experiments.” These allusions toy with the evolutionary concerns of the day. As we read The House of Mirth we must always allow for Wharton's wit. Her readers were familiar with the popularized versions of Herbert Spencer's adaptation of Darwinian theory to philosophical and social thought. Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in America still stands as the most useful discussion of Spencer's lectures in America in 1882 and his influence on American thought before the Gilded Age and into the first decade of the twentieth century. Spencer's evolutionary theory accommodated both theist and atheist and was clearly and simply tied to progress, an upbeat notion tailor-made for the colossal figures of American industry, the new and old millionaires of Wharton's New York. Andrew Carnegie was one of Spencer's chief supporters, but then so was Henry Ward Beecher. Half-read or misread, his obliging view of evolutionary theory was in the common domain.

Writing in A Backward Glance many years later, of her introduction to “the various popular exponents of the great evolutionary movement,” Wallace, Spencer, and Huxley among them, Wharton speaks of “the first overwhelming sense of cosmic vastness which such ‘magic casements’ let into our little geocentric universe.” In the 1890s Wharton copied into her daybook passages from Spencer's First Principles and Principles of Ethics. By 1903, when she was plotting the doomed life of Lily Bart, a reductionist genetics was a familiar theme in the work of William Dean Howells and Theodore Dreiser and in manifestos by Frank Norris. Couched in terms of a simple social Darwinism, heredity was taken to be destiny—a sort of life in a test tube. Wharton was playful in her use of the evolutionary metaphor in her fiction, yet also seriously committed to an understanding of its complex relation to individual hereditary development and choice. By the time she came to write The House of Mirth, William James had been lecturing for years at Harvard against Spencer's vague all-accommodating views, finding them passive, mechanistic. Gerald Myers conveys James's tone, often one of dismissive mockery, in dealing with Spencer: “He [James] could accept apes as ancestors, but he could not abide dogmatic extensions of Darwinism which denied free will, the efficacy of consciousness, or the value of the individual.” We may be certain that Wharton's youthful encounter with the popularizers of evolutionary theory had been updated. She had already alluded to scientific fashion with high irony in a volume of stories just published, The Descent of Man (1904). In the title story a scientist sells out, lets his writing be vulgarized, lends himself to celebrity. It's a variant on the idea of scientist turned entertainer—perhaps glancing at Oliver Wendell Holmes, eminent doctor, lecturer, and author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, or the Harvard professors Edward Youmans and John Fiske, who made an industry of Spencer.

Wharton, whose productivity must give us pause, had recently published Sanctuary (1903), a programmatic novella with a deflated happy end, in which a woman marries a weak man so that his child will not “be born with some hidden physical taint,” as though her “vision of protecting maternity” may genetically block any unfortunate hereditary trait. Before and after writing The House of Mirth, Wharton was obsessed with problems of intellectual and artistic honesty. It would remain one of her compelling themes, but the poor little rich girl doing her New York felt the pressure of her own heritage as she developed Lily Bart. In writing she transgressed, invited herself into the gentlemen's library where she would do more than admire bindings. In her earliest work—the anecdotal and often heavily melodramatic stories, the travel books, her work on Italian gardens and interior decoration (one of her inner susceptibilities as well as Lily's), the dutifully researched “romantic chronicle,” The Valley of Decision—she hid behind writerly scrims. In A Backward Glance she acknowledged that she had become a professional, a dangerous word for a writer, a term that can be seen to encompass her magazine fiction, potboilers and serious efforts alike. For all her fluency, the role of professional writer was consciously willed in Wharton, and she constantly reworked themes of artistic integrity. She had forged her identity as a writer, but she still felt that it was not her natural inheritance. Her concern with heritage, its imprint or possible erasure, can be seen most clearly in her finest work. Summer, in particular, deals with the painful recognition of parentage. Charity Royall has much in common with Lily Bart, who reviews her family history one final time before her death. The imprint of the overcivilized life Lily had been made for, one of transient exhibition, is as defining as the degraded scene of Charity's birth. Historical, even genetic facts are inescapable, but not the final determinant of human possibility.

.....

The challenge for Edith Wharton in writing The House of Mirth was to write beyond the brightly stated themes in the opening installments, which from the start of reworking the book implied a sober intention beyond doing her New York. What, for instance, might she manage with types like the spinster, Gerty Farish, with her dowdy good works, or the grotesque of Mrs. Haffen, the charwoman, or her caricature of Rosedale the millionaire Jew? Having saddled her American subject with themes of the new century—Selden's spurious freedom, Lily's hereditary baggage, greed and social responsibility—how was Wharton to mine the evolutionary lode so that her readers might see Lily with her disadvantageous variations—her useless hands, the contempt she has for her own species, her flaw of irresolution? (It might be said that she is made to die prematurely, not to breed unto the next generation.) And how to make it clear that Selden's “republic of the spirit” is glib, tag-end romanticism, a place of such idealized freedom that he admits no like soul? And, we may well ask as we observe his exquisite moral choices, freedom for what? How was the novelist, hitting her stride, to move her readers beyond laughter at Lily's affectations and disapproval of her overrefined taste, to pity and even terror as the impoverished, aging girl embraced her fate? Above all, how were the joyless spectacles of the Gormers' rise, Bertha Dorset's further infidelities, Rosedale's step up the social ladder, to play with the gritty background of naturalism which Wharton discovered to be suitable for Lily's descent?

She came upon a device to arrest the giddy action in the scene of tableaux vivants in which Lily poses as Sir Joshua Reynolds's portrait of Mrs. Lloyd. Life imitates art in the living picture which must be voiceless, still. As an art form, tableau vivant is at once naive and decadent—pageant-posing of The Nativity, or Washington Crossing the Delaware. In the later nineteenth century it was a staple of the entr'acte in popular French theater. Tableau vivant both devaluates human gesture and, in the frozen stance, reduces the historic or painted moment to childish iconography, an obliteration of the brush-stroke of artistic achievement. Wharton instructs her readers: “To unfurnished minds they remain, in spite of every enchantment of art, only a superior kind of wax works; but to the responsive fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination. Selden's mind was of this order: he could yield to vision-making influences as completely as a child to the spell of fairy tale.”

We must catch the novelist's tone. She is sending up the whole frivolous enterprise of the evening's entertainment while placing Selden, who constantly frames and distances experience: “for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of the eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part.” On the other hand, Lily understands that the unanimous OH! of the spectators has been called forth “by herself, and not the picture she impersonated.” In playing the parlor game she has given life to the lifeless medium and is “intoxicated,” senses her “recovered power.” Posing as Mrs. Lloyd is the culmination of her training in self-presentation. Her triumph is as transitory as the reaction to tableau vivant: the thrill of a moment.

In that exemplary first chapter, Selden sees Lily as “a captured dryad” and reflects “that it was the same streak of sylvan freedom in her nature that lent such savour to her artificiality.” It is a sentiment that might run as a caption to the Reynolds portrait. Mrs. Lloyd is an inspired choice on the part of novelist and heroine. It is one of his classically costumed portraits of a lady posed in a stagy natural setting. Lily, we recall from her Bellomont tryst with Selden, “had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations.” What is not acknowledged in the novel is that Mrs. Lloyd is carving the name of her future husband on a tree—as lovers were wont to do in Tasso, in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, often a subject in Italian baroque, and, of course, in As You Like It, Orlando being the young gentleman who “abuses our young plants by carving Rosalind on their barks, hangs odes upon Hawthornes, and elegies upon brambles.” Lily Bart has no husband, no lover. The letters inscribed on nature in the portrait must be unwritten by Wharton so that every man at the entertainment may carve his initials in. Promiscuity as well as idealization is in the eyes of the beholder. In Bodyworks: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, Peter Brooks says that Emma Bovary has no body of her own. “Her body is the social and phantasmatic construction of the men who look at her.” Unlike Madame Bovary, Lily constructs herself; she wants to be viewed, framed as a society woman in staged nature. She underestimates the risk.

In the Reynolds portrait, the sculptural bust is cut off from the animated lower body. The head is stiff as a cameo profile, a reference to classical art and cultural artifacts much in vogue. Collectors of the eighteenth century were buying up the revered culture of a revered past, much as the newly rich of Wharton's novel were buying up Renaissance masters. Mrs. Lloyd's bust is half-shadowed, but her inner thighs are illuminated by a bold triangular shaft of light. The focus is an erotic choice, not as dramatic as mannerist lighting of partial bodies, nor as shocking as Courbet's Origin of the World or Magritte's Representation, but in its early Royal Academy way Mrs. Lloyd is startling. We cannot know what lighting effects were available in 1904 at the Wellington Brys', but Lily Bart, a foolish virgin in confused innocence, surely drew attention to her sexuality. She seems to have read the Reynolds painting, not as bisected woman, but as a neoclassic unity, for after all, Mrs. Lloyd has one hand on nature, one on the man-made plinth.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff reads Wharton's title, The Age of Innocence, drawn from the famous Reynolds portrait of a little girl, as establishing in her most Jamesian novel a private pun upon herself as novice and the Master's Portrait of a Lady. But her first use of a Reynolds, in The House of Mirth, seems more significant: it is a reification of James's title. Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady is never painted. She marries disastrously. Like Emma and other Austen heroines, she is valued for her mind; Lily Bart is not. It is interesting what Wharton made of her heroine's mind: Lily fears introspection, which becomes unavoidable as life closes in on her. It must have amused the readers of Scribner's in 1904 that Lily always traveled with her Rubaiyat, and when she feels pursued by the Furies, Wharton makes it clear that she has just read Euripides in a volume found on a guest room shelf. The mindbody problem, the draw to surfaces rather than meaning, is suggested by Lily's appropriate yet unwitting choice of Mrs. Lloyd, and by Wharton's use of the painting: I will give you my portrait of a lady, of what it means to be a lady in this society, says Edith Wharton to Henry James. The audience at the de Brys' would have known the Reynolds, and so would many of Wharton's readers, not perhaps as readily as they would know The Age of Innocence, but reproductions were part of the culture of culture. Cheap mezzotints and lithographs hung in every parlor; “great art” was poorly reproduced in the toney monthly magazines. The guessing game of tableau vivant can only be played through reenactments. In her appropriation of that entertainment and further appropriation of Mrs. Lloyd, Wharton was setting her readers up for a conditioned response. Like Manet in his repaintings of Watteau and in his theatrical rendering of costumed models, Wharton expected her audience (both within and without the novel) to partake of a prepared vision that she then refocused in order that we may experience the danger and triumph of Lily's artistic moment.

.....

I was drawn to reread The House of Mirth some years ago while doing research on the Chicago Exposition of 1894. In Scribner's, along with an admiring editorial on The Great White Way, there appeared in that year an early sonnet by Edith Wharton, “Life/Art” (that dichotomy again), and an article “Working Girls' Clubs” by Sarah Sidney Davidge. “The clubs are drawn from those employed in trades and business,” Mrs. Davidge wrote, “the groups so aggregated and gathered, not by any extraneous force or influence, but by a system of natural selection.” The article goes on to report that women of privilege have established proper living quarters for working girls where improving talks are given—“Should women be allowed to vote?” “How to tell a real lady.” The final illustration shows young women being instructed in trimming hats. That's Lily Bart, I said, who, down and out, in need of work, could not sew a spangle. Wharton must have seen this illustration along with the many articles in the very magazines she wrote for, that concerned themselves with working women. Alva Vanderbilt, who gave a costume ball far grander that the Wellington Brys' in the nineties, declared that she knew “of no profession, art, or trade that women are working in today as taxing on mental resources as being a leader of society.” Divorced and remarried as Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, she transformed herself utterly in the early years of the new century, carrying the banner for the Equal Suffrage League of New York City down Fifth Avenue. Grace Dodge, a railroad heiress of Wharton's New York society, devoted her life to working women's centers. Gerty Farish, therefore, was more than a virtuous counter to Lily, a do-good maiden lady who would have been in the audience when Jane Addams lectured, making a point of the social responsibility which must be assumed by the fortunate. This is the very point that Wharton makes in a letter to the Boston biographer and historian, William Roscoe Taylor: “I must protest, & emphatically, against the suggestion that I have ‘stripped’ New York society … the little corner of its garment that I lifted was meant to show only that little atrophied organ—the group of the idle & dull people … & if, as I believe, it is more harmful in its influence, it is because fewer responsibilities attach to money with us than in any other societies.”

The serious theme of social responsibility, as Wharton developed it in The House of Mirth, did not adjust easily to her satire. Gerty, Mrs. Haffen, and Rosedale could no longer function as pawns in a narrative game. They are the outsiders who connect Lily to an urban reality. Wharton gave them dimension. Gerty, unmarriageable, childless, becomes the mother figure for Lily in distress. The scene in which Gerty cradles Lily like a child prefigures the death scene in which Lily feels that Nettie Struthers' infant is in her arms, also supposing that she is responsible for this child, whom her single act of charity has begot. Coming of age as a novelist, Wharton drew her minor characters to great effect. We must note that even as Mrs. Haffen proposes to blackmail Lily, she declares herself to be a good Christian woman.

Rosedale would not have been a problem for most of the readers of the serialized novel in Scribner's, but we ourselves are troubled by Judy Trenor's declaration that “he was the same little Jew who had been served up and rejected at the social board a dozen times within her memory.” Mrs. Trenor speaks with the unforgivable prejudice of her class. It is more troubling that Wharton in her narrative voice refers to traits of Rosedale's race, but we should not overlook her skill in opposing Rosedale's realistic evaluations of Lily Bart's worth to Lawrence Selden's self-serving, partial assessments. Simon Rosedale is the only man who deals honestly with Lily, the one who, from the first installment to his last chance meeting with her on the street, talks straight to her. He is shown to be no fool, and is the closest thing to a sympathetic male in the novel.

We have come to think of Edith Wharton as a self-styled intellectual, an identity hard won, and from her letters we know that she continued to cultivate it eagerly and extensively throughout her life. While she flipped the pages of the popular monthly journals, she was also reading Pater and William James, Proust and Baudelaire. In her unpublished commonplace book she copied out passages from Seneca, Donne, Shakespeare, La Bruyère, Goethe, Flaubert's letters, Bernard Shaw, Whitman, and, as she began work on what was to become The House of Mirth, from Dante, the passage from The Inferno that concerns the goddess Fortuna, whose “changes have no respite.” In one sentence, the depiction of the goddess might seem to be Lily: “This is she who is so reviled by the very men that should give her praise, laying on her wrongful blame and ill repute.” In the daybook of 1903 all of Poe's To Helen appears, a poem in which the woman is, to a degree that amazes, an esthetic object:

Lo, in your brilliant window-niche,
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand—

Selden, were he not an untalented dilettante, might have written something along those lines about Lily in her classical garb as Mrs. Lloyd.

Wharton took from her reading what could help her to write Lily's story, turning, most particularly, to Dreiser's Sister Carrie, which had been published in 1900. She admired the American naturalists, and in her darker work it is evident that she believed, as they did, that natural selection was not benevolent when applied to social and environmental circumstances. Though Lily Bart, transformed to Mrs. Lloyd, displays herself to a selected audience of high and aspiring society, her performance recalls the striking scene in which Carrie—upon the stage, in melodrama—transcends her provincial, working-class heritage. Untrained, unskilled Carrie Meeber, who has wandered the city looking for work (one job she turns away from is the trimming of hats), becomes the desirable Carrie Madenda, an actress. Unlike the beginning of Lily's descent in tableau vivant, Carrie's performance at the Chicago Elks launches her career. “Hurstwood realized he was seeing something extraordinarily good. It was heightened for him by the applause of the audience as the curtain descended and the fact that it was Carrie. He thought now that she was beautiful. She had done something which was above his sphere. He felt a keen delight in realizing that she was his.” Hurstwood recognizes that Carrie is performing, while Selden, believing he sees “the real Lily Bart,” buys the illusion of tableau vivant. Both men presume upon a visual possession, but those presumptions are pathetically wrong, for in their theatrical appearances, Carrie and Lily are removed from their ordinary lives in which they may be possessed by men. Their freedom, problematic to be sure, is won by disguise and concealment. Carrie finds herself in seeming something she is not. Acting is her work, what is destined to be her life/art. Lily's transcendent moment in which she has power over her audience cannot be sustained beyond the evening's entertainment; no matter how successful her impersonation of Mrs. Lloyd, it is not a possible line of work. Edith Wharton's own work was still suspect to her New York, as she wrote The House of Mirth.

At the end of Sister Carrie, Hurstwood's suicide is a determined act. How carefully he tucks his coat and vest along the crack under the rooming-house door! How brief his moment of hesitation before he turns on the gas! In Dreiser's mechanistic system, Hurstwood is weak. Mrs. Wharton's heroine does not say “What's the use?” We are told that the action of the drug chloral, a “magic formula” which Lily takes, is “capricious and incalculable.” She is far from the calculations that initiated her story. Increasing the dose, “she knew she took a slight risk in doing so—she remembered the chemist's warning. If sleep came at all, it might be a sleep without waking. But after all that was but one chance in a hundred: the action of the drug was incalculable, and the addition of a few drops to the regular dose would probably do no more than procure for her the rest she so desperately needed. …”

“She did not, in truth, consider the question very closely—” Lily, it would seem, is at last in the hands of fate. What moves us about her death is that it is not a suicide. And she has so fully departed from the world that produced her that she has come to recognize her “deeper empoverishment.” As she wanders with the multitudes through an unknown New York, all that has been concealed by the narrowness of her society is now disclosed to her. Lily, homeless, has seen the child and hearth of Nettie Struthers, the poor little “work girl.” It is a primal vision of kinship from which the poor little rich girl is no longer closed out. Their chance meeting in Bryant Park is one of the last melodramatic strokes in the novel; to be followed by the final arrival of a letter bearing a check, her inheritance. Money may save the heroine of melodrama (it had saved Nettie), but it cannot save Lily, who is beyond the solution of that genre. She dies of a last miscalculated dose of chloral, yet another mistake in the long list of bad risks, misunderstandings, and irresolutions which make her story.

Lily Bart is socially unfit, a weak strain, though morally she proves to be a rare subspecies, ultimately an individual, superior to the world that produced her. Fate may dole out the extra dram of chloral, but she has paid her debts, chosen to be good. Lily dies searching for a word she had meant to say to Selden—the man she has idealized, perhaps her fatal mistake—searching for a word, just as he searched for a word to say to her at their last meeting when Lily spoke clearly without “the conventional outskirts of word-play and evasion.” The novelist does not reveal these lost words. After all of Lily's accounts are settled, literally—the literal is a form of wit in The House of Mirth—and all motives, both the bachelor's and the maiden's, revealed, there is a final concealment. As Selden kneels beside the dead Lily Bart he is somewhat self-aware, though still self-dramatizing. He is, at last, mute, but he meditates grandly:

It was this moment of love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which had kept them from atrophy and extinction; which, in her, had reached out to him in every struggle against the influence of her surroundings, and in him, had kept alive the faith that now drew him penitent and reconciled to her side.

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.

It is a scene fit for salon painting, or for a tableau vivant: Lover at the Bier. It has not kept Lily from atrophy. She is dead. It is Selden's dramatic last moment, not hers. This ending beyond Lily Bart's death scene once again lays open the problems of true feeling against the postured or calculated moment, artifice opposed to authenticity, with which the novel began.

Turning back to the passages up to and including Lily's death, we will not find the unuttered word, for it is unknowable. Wharton rejects an easy, transfigured realism. The novelist will not provide for Lily or Selden or her reader the kind of sentimental passage back to belief from the unknown by which American disciples of Spencer attempted to escape the constraints of determinism. Lily's memory of her rootlessness, her deprivation of “visual memories,” “the blind motions of her mating-instincts,” and her new understanding that individual existence may attach to “the mighty sum of human striving,” is not Spencer, pure and simple. Wharton freed herself from the rigidities of social Darwinism and from Spencerian vagaries by throwing her heroine into a world of chance, a chance which implies choice. Lily retains the capacity not only to choose goodness, to connect, however slightly, to social responsibility, but to act against her own interests, which brings Wharton more in line with William James's argument for individual free will. In fact, Wharton rejects not only a passive determinism, but also the romantic obverse of that notion which floats through Lily's head: “If only life could end now—end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost possibilities, which gave her a sense of kinship with all the loving and foregoing world!” If only the arguments which connected an acceptable evolutionary theory to a popular American idealism were not easily refutable: if only Wharton were writing a lesser novel than The House of Mirth.

In 1898, long before she faced the problems of creating Lily Bart, she copied out a passage from a letter to J. S. Mill published in Principles of Ethics, in which Spencer speaks of “nervous modifications, which by continued transmission & accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition—certain emotional responding to right & wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility.” “Nervous modifications” and “moral intuition” are fudging phrases—vague, unscientific—but the underlining is the novelist's and may be read as a note toward the creation of Lily Bart, who was to be both useless and in the end uselessly good.

Edith Wharton, who had just settled into The Mount, the country house which she built in the Berkshires, came to understand that in writing of her New York, no matter how amusing or how cutting her attitudes, her novel would be run of the Scribner's mill unless she dispossessed herself and took to the streets with Lily. She added a postscript to her letter to William Roscoe Taylor, “I wish you felt a little more kindly toward poor Lily!” James had directed her to the American subject and she obeyed to a degree. “It is vain to write on chosen themes,” Thoreau tells us in his journals. “We must wait until they have kindled a flame in our minds. There must be the copulating and generating force of love behind every effort destined to be successful. The cold resolve gives birth to, begets, nothing. The theme seeks me, not I it. The poet's relation to his theme is the relation of love.” Mrs. Wharton loved the themes of fate and free will, of nature and artifice, of the greedy and generous spirits, large American themes suggested by her discarded New York and further discovered in the city streets, finding the novel's broad view in a rooming house and a New York tenement. At Lily's accidental death, the irresolute overdose produces the flush of loneliness and terror, but her last sensation is that of flesh, the warmth of the “work girl's” child flowing through her. Lily's body lies between the baby in her arms, a fantasy, and the bachelor who is unworthy to claim her in death.

Yet Lily's end is surely preferable to Carrie Meeber's, though Carrie Madenda's name lights up Broadway: “In your rocking chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.” But then Wharton, unlike Dreiser, loved her poor heroine from the first exemplary installment to the last, as Jane Austen loved the arrogant Emma and redeemed her with patience and humor. It was the creation of Lily Bart, complex and perverse and irresolute, the vision of Lily exiled from the drawing room and adrift in the other New York of Howells and Dreiser, which enabled Edith Wharton to rise from her pretty French desk in the library at Lenox, slough off the succès d'estime of her early work, and march right into the untidy democratic hall of American letters.

James was right, as he most always was. The House of Mirth is two novels, much like Cather's The Professor's House, which interrupts a family story to tell a necessary history, or, like Woolf's Between the Acts, which alternates between drawing-room comedy and historical panorama. But these extraordinary novels are not confused in their ingenious assault on structure. Nor is The House of Mirth confused, though it is bravely flawed, for in the story of Lily's descent which is not her downfall, Wharton mixed modes in a risky melodramatic rescue—manners and morals, stylish Scribner's and serious stuff—depriving her readers of a conditioned sorrow at the death of a beautiful, blameless woman so as to elicit a fresh and complicated response. It is the best book she ever wrote, and in Lily's elegiac final passages, in which she understands that heritage—hers and Edith Wharton's—need not be destiny, the novelist delivered her sermon from The Mount.